In between days

Years ago when I was a student studying psychology, we spent a few weeks examining the nature of constructs. It seems to be one of the ways in which our minds capture and box concepts of things up for us, labelled carefully in our best handwriting so that we can recognise them again later. This means we can, for instance, identify the table-ness of a uniquely unfamiliar one as long as it has a flat surface, say; the number of legs it has or the fact it is small enough for only a singular ant to sit at is quite irrelevant to our concept.

Being the smart machines they are, our brains don’t just reserve this ability for the real stuff we can touch but apply this boxing and labelling approach to more abstract areas of the world around us. Emotions, relationships, obligations, altruism, ambition – you name it, your mind’s got a construct for it. And because we love to label things so much, because it’s one of our addictions, our minds will stretch and stretch our established definition to accommodate the new criteria we’ve stumbled across. Call it economy of mental storage if you like (or laziness if you’re being blunt) but we do generally seem to prefer to adapt an existing concept rather than go to the bother of constructing a whole new different one.

Which is fine for the most part.

Except when it’s not.

The first thing that sent my brain into a whirl of construct burrowing this morning was the weather. Being English of course, the weather is always a topic of conversation. Being weather, it’s equally always there to be talked about. It’s a confusing picture right now: sunny one moment, dull and grey the next; mild in a way but bone gnawing cold round the next corner; buds starting to appear on the trees but prone any morning to be nipped off by the frost. Not hard winter but not yet spring, it’s kind of in between somewhere, a seasonal transition. Nearly-but-not-quite-spring-but-not-really-still-winter-either is pretty useless as a definition and doesn’t really cut the construct mustard. Not least as that’s possibly the clumsiest label you’ll come across.

The second thing to jump on the construct bandwagon was thinking about the nature of relationships. Not romantic ones necessarily (a topic on which I am just about as far from being an expert as it is possible to get) but friendships. I’ve always taken a kind of archery target-shaped mentality towards the nature of friendships. In the central gold circle, the inner ring if you like, are your very best friends and closest family members, the people that you feel comfortable and safe with, in whom you confide, upon on whose shoulder you cry, whose triumphs and disasters you feel as keenly as if they were your own. Experience has shown me that friends of this type are pretty much immune to the vagaries of proximity or frequency of meeting; when the bond is this strong, it is almost immune from severance.

The next circle out might contain good friends and perhaps a few colleagues, those with whom you share and do some things but always with an awareness of an invisible line of familiarity and level of engagement that shouldn’t be crossed. Beyond that lie acquaintances, most workmates and perhaps some distant rarely seen relatives that you have a fondness for but not to the extent that you’ll make extreme efforts to meet up with or see them. There may be some ebb and flow, some exchange of places in this zone, and people may be promoted or relegated through the passage of time and circumstance. Outside the three circles is the white square around the target. As an arrow shot here won’t count in an archery tournament, folk who reside here don’t usually place much burden upon the consciousness.

But what about the friends that I haven’t actually met in real life at all? I guess my essentially stone age brain is attempting to grapple with the huge significance of friends that one makes through the ether, via websites and blogs and e-mails and such. We may not yet have met (and in most cases probably never will) but these friends touch my life and enrich it just as surely as if we’d spent the afternoon sitting next to the fire in a country pub drinking warm ale and talking toffee.

Which seems a very good motivation to create a new construct on an in-betweeny Friday afternoon.

‘In Between Days’ is a song from the 1985 album “The Head on the Door” by The Cure. It’s one of my all time favourites.

Food music

Sue unplugged the portable radio, forcing the bent telescopic aerial to retract with a little more emphasis than was strictly necessary. The black and white bankers’ box had slowly filled with stuff throughout the morning as she went about the business of decanting her desk. I watched her as she balanced up the probability of being able to squeeze this last item in, decided against it, jammed the lid on the box and plonked the radio down hard on top.

“You won’t miss this, will you?” she asked me, gesturing at the small silver stereo now resting quietly at a jaunty angle. I didn’t really know what to say. It’s not that I dislike music – far from it – but I was probably a student avoiding essay deadlines the last time I listened to it regularly while working. When singing along in my car, out for the evening or at a gig, yes, absolutely, and the louder the better. But when I’m working, lyrics zap my concentration away and I flounder even to put one word in front of another.

Quite why Sue had left it to her last day in the office to ask me whether I liked music on or not was probably down to her (accurate) assessment that I didn’t. And in the spirit of never asking a question to which you don’t actually want to hear the answer, she’d not asked throughout the entire six months that we’d sat opposite one another. And now she had asked, I wasn’t going to answer anyway. Instead, I parried it with the deflective counter strike of enquiring if she’d decided yet where she wanted to go for lunch.

I’d never been to the Fruiterers’ Arms before. Located out in the sticks a few miles from the office, Rodmersham is home to a scattering of attractive houses and a fenced off village pond filled with green water. The unmistakable aroma of damp wafted out as we pushed the pub door open, something the presence of an impressive open fire hadn’t quite managed to disguise. We chose a table next to the hearth and sipped our drinks as we pondered over the menu and placed our orders. Aside from an elderly couple supping soup at the bar and two women at the table adjacent to ours, the three of us were the sole customers.

A thin shelf up above head height ran all the way round the walls, providing an exhibition place for hundreds of china plates decorated with patterns and hunting scenes. Spindly mock mahogany tables and chairs grew on top of the dark brown carpet that seamlessly hugged the floor in all directions. In the background, the same song played over and over again, almost hypnotic in its repetition. I was sitting facing the window and some movement in the road outside made me look up from our conversation. A small crowd of perhaps twenty people were peering in. Seconds later, the door opened. A column of grey haired men and women dressed in green and red anoraks and walking boots filed across the room, some carrying walking sticks or staffs.

The food when it came was roasting hot and delicious. Having something of a wolf-like appetite, I ordered a sultana pudding with custard to follow. I couldn’t help but overhear the barmaid explaining the pub’s discount system to the hiking group, now sitting de-sticked and de-anoraked and enjoying half pints of real ale at most of the remaining tables.

It’s always strange when you leave a job. You realise that you might never again walk into what was your office and sit at your desk or see some of the people whom you sat within feet of and passed eight or so hours with every day. You always promise that you'll keep in touch, that you'll pop back to see how things are going. You never do. I helped Sue carry the bankers’ box down to her car and put it in the boot. She placed the portable radio snugly against it. We hugged each other goodbye and I wished her well for her new job that starts on Monday.

Sticky toffee

Quiet as the tomb here at the barn tonight, except for occasional blood-curdling screams from rabbits being eaten by foxes and the sound of my tooth enamel dissolving after an onslaught of treacle toffees.

I saw this advertisement poster at London Bridge Station today, and it really made me laugh. Hugh Grant's never going to be allowed to forget that night is he? I make no apologies for the photo being wonky either.

Cold calling

The man sat with his back to the window painting a picture of the Dalai Lama from a photograph on his laptop screen. I stood outside the studio shop front, staring in, the eyes in the face in the portrait gazing back, slightly through and over my head to the other side of the road. The artist sat between us, insulated from the traffic and the cold by toughened glass and his concentration.

The wind zipped funnel like down the wide street, whipping my body heat away through my suit, and I thought longingly of the winter coat that I’d hung to dry last night over the Rayburn in the kitchen at the barn. The directions had suggested that the walk from London Bridge Station would take 5 minutes. Quarter of an hour in and my feet were tingling with cold numbness from the pavement through the soles of my court shoes. My fingers were a delicate shade of mottled whitish purple blue by the time I spotted building number 241.

In this part of London, the streets are not so much paved with gold as littered with flyers advertising language schools and credit card sized handouts giving details of how to make cheap phone calls home to loved ones left behind in exotically named places. Lanky male students in leather jackets and over-long jeans stand around in groups smoking, slouchingly engaging in animated conversations in languages I do not recognise.

I took shelter from the cold in a fortuitously placed Starbucks and regained feeling in my extremities over a bucket of Americano (milk, lots of sugar). The tall paper cup had a plastic lid on top with a hole in it. I’ve often seen sharp city types supping their drinks through these whilst walking briskly and with mesmerised determination as if summoned by the Morlochs from the Time Machine. I don’t trust them not to tip scalding coffee down my front; the lids are a bit dodgy too, so I took mine off and put it on the table.

The drinks in these places are supernaturally hot. It took a full 25 minutes to reach the dregs of ultra sugared coffee at the bottom, a unit of time I shall henceforth think of as a Starbuck. I haven’t worn a watch since I was 18, one consequence of which being that I’m pretty accurate at guessing. Admittedly this gets thrown out a bit when I’m in a different time zone, but at home here I’m usually there or thereabouts. This is good enough on most occasions but not when you’ve got a job interview, so I got my mobile out of my handbag for reassurance.

There had been a short young guy in a smart grey suit ahead of me in the coffee queue when I came in, and I recognised him when he returned ten minutes later because he’d ordered the same drink as me. Even from my table by the window I could hear him complaining in a whiny voice about how the assistant must have put the lid on his cup incorrectly and now it was all down his jacket. He paused for breath, and then continued saying, as if to seal the deal, that he had to give a presentation in a minute and now the coffee had ruined his suit. It’s a shame as it turned out that he hadn’t paused sooner, as the young woman towards whom he’d directed his tirade clearly hadn’t understood a word. She summoned her three colleagues over as he repeated his complaint. Finally comprehending, a statuesque blonde took the cup from his hand and replaced the plastic lid with a new one before giving it back to him. Which may or may not have been what Mr Suit expected.

In between Starbucks and number 241 stands an ornately porticoed handsomely proportioned building with white arched windows and a glossy iron set of railings. I stood looking up at it while smoking a last pre-interview cigarette. Empty, abandoned and disused, it was once a post office, the holes in the stone facade where the mail slots were now bolted over with metal sheets. It occurred to me (not for the first time) how cavalier we are sometimes with our old buildings, and I was sad to see this one closed and inaccessible to be used or enjoyed by anyone.

After the interview, I retraced my steps to the station. A young man with a knotty beard and rainbow striped jumper handed me an international calls discount card valid for countries where I know no-one. I dropped it in the rubbish bin outside a pub and went and caught my train.

I took this photo on London Bridge Station. The sign's made up of little light bulbs.

The answer is 42, give or take

Big questions come in all sizes. Puzzling over whether to have French mustard with your chicken ‘n’ chips ‘n’ salad, say, can sometimes cause you to temporarily stop and ponderously scratch your chin just as much as thinking about if there is life after death.

The big question I took away to Egypt with me was should I make the move back to the barn a permanent one. The trial period of living here had gone well - much better than I expected in fact - and I had more or less made up my mind to say yes before I even set foot on the plane. But I still held the decision pending, wanting to have the opportunity of time and distance (both physical and metaphorical) to reflect. After all, 18 months and a whole lot of trauma on from the break up, opting to move back to live separately and independently from but alongside and under the same roofs as the ex was not something to be decided on the toss of a coin.

Whilst in Egypt, I didn’t think about it much at all or not consciously anyway. I was content to let my mind-scape scene shifters shuffle about in the background doing their thing and to present me with their recommendation when it was ready. A bit like the giant monolithic mega-computer, Deep Thought, in the Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, except hopefully more usefully conclusive than the answer 42.

And the micro-chaps in white mini boiler suits that tunnel through my neurons and synapses and buff up my grey matter didn’t let me down. I have my answer, and the answer is yes. All I need to do now is sort out the practical stuff to make it so.

I left work early this afternoon and drove over to my little house by the seaside to pick up my post. The approach road to the island is a wide black dual carriageway. It cuts across the salt flats like a fat string of liquorice before soaring up and over the elegantly curved bridge that spans the strip of water that separates the island from the mainland. The marshes are covered with tufts of coarse grasses upon which benevolent cows and sheep graze sleepily and eke out a sufficient if meagre diet. There are numerous informal lakes and ditches that come and go with the rain, home to tens of thousands of wading and water dwelling birds. That this landscape is as rare and precious as the rainforests probably escapes their notice as they feed and breed and squabble and groom.

I spotted something as I joined this main road. A bright red metallic helium balloon was bobbing up and down at the edge of one of the fields. It was heart-shaped, perhaps a Valentine gift from a shiny-eyed lover or an escapee from a birthday celebration. Its string must have slipped through someone’s fingers in a moment of clumsiness and was now snagged in the rough hedge. Perhaps whoever it was had watched the balloon float up out of reach until it disappeared away into the sky. Maybe they’d stood on tip toe or jumped up and down in an attempt to save it and bring it back to earth. But helium is lighter than air and so the balloon had no choice but to rise up and away and out of their grasp forever.

There was nothing in my mail box as it turned out, except for an appeal from the RSPCA and a catalogue of clothes for women of a certain age that my mum must have ordered. I added them to the recycling pile and picked up some clean bed sheets and my vacuum cleaner before driving back to the barn. My little house by the seaside is starting to feel less like my home now as my stuff gradually migrates. By the end of next month, I’ll have moved out completely; later on, someone else will move in and make it their place. For them and for me, I hope it’s the right decision.

A trivial wind

Sometimes it seems that the sole function of the brain is as a repository of trivia. Those little sliced-and-diced snippets that are individually interesting but that amount, en masse, to a personal landfill site in a head-shaped capsule.

The recollection of these factoids is like the nugget dispensed from one of those mesmerising penny-a-go sweet machines that dazzle small children (and we more suggestible adults) with their mechanical mystery and promise of good things to come. You can’t help but drop a coin into the impossibly fiddly slot before cranking the stiff metal handle two thirds of the way round amid the sound of ominous grinding of cogs and gears. But much like the recall of trivia, you’re never quite sure what’s going to roll out of the slot at the bottom and rather hope it’s going to be bubble gum and not a dead mouse.

Today’s allocation of useless fact was from my untidy brain filing cabinet drawer of geography (ice age section). Specifically, how the path of the River Thames came to be in its current (more-or-less west to east) orientation as a result of being re-located by a glacial ice sheet. Before that chilly intervention, it apparently ran north to south; I guess it sort of pivoted through 90 degrees like a clock hand changing its mind about moving into the next day and dropping back from midnight to nine pm.

All of which was, I felt, an unnecessarily detailed intrusion into my morning contemplation of the view from my bedroom window at the barn. To be slightly fair to my brain, I can see the Thames from here, off to my left beyond the hedgerows and the trees and the electricity pylons that march in single rank across the acres of fields that lie between here and the water. On an unusually clear sunny day, I can also see the River Medway to the right if I stand on tip toe and peer squinty eyed. A couple of miles further down, the two huge rivers collide, lingering for a while in an estuary before surging on and taking their place in the forbidding and dark North Sea.

The wind was blowing hard from the west and the Thames today as well. The ex and I struggled two or three times to get a fire going in the old Rayburn in the kitchen. The wind was having none of it, forcing the smoke back down the flue into the barn and filling the rooms with a fug of charred wood. The fumes were eye-wateringly acrid, forcing us to open up the doors and windows to vent the place and let in some breathable air. Luckily, it’s still mild today and the temperature inside remained bearable in spite of the lack of heating.

Rather like a glamorous woman who has overdone it with her scent (only far less alluring), the smell of wood smoke clings to one’s garments when this happens and infuses the fibres with its distinctive aroma. Most of the time I am completely oblivious to this. I was today. Until I got in the car with my ex’s nephew who crinkled up his nose and asked if we’d been having a bonfire. Which I suppose we had, in a way.

New shoots

My life-long companion insomnia visited me last night and I woke up early feeling rattled. So I took the dog for a long walk, at least as much for my benefit as his.

A beautiful morning, no-one around except the pigeons wheeling away from the bird scarers in the fields and four horses munching lazily on a pile of hay. The sky was brightest spring blue, the first waking shoots of the crops starting to push through the earth towards the light. The hazy optical illusion of the mud and the baby crops is as if the whole landscape was of brown taffeta shot through with brilliant green.

For many years, I realise now, I operated chiefly from the logical reasoning side of my brain. The process of pulling the pieces of my psyche back together in the wake of the break up with D has resulted in my brain re-wiring itself it seems. The result is that I am now primarily driven (and sometimes buffeted) by emotion rather than reason. If these emotional antennae are new to the world like the tender crop shoots, they are equally sensitive to climate.

My feeling is that something has happened; some subtle shift in dynamic has taken place. I don’t know what it is or why – perhaps it is the re-opening of my heart which I acknowledged in Egypt? In any event and whatever it is, it is, I think, the source of my rattled feeling. I also know that I just have to roll with it, let time reveal it when the moment is right. For someone who had always been governed by logic, always sought practical solutions, that’s a big ask.

I find myself driving to a quiet place, a location that held great significance for me in a long-ago relationship. I haven’t been here for many years but I find it unchanged.

A strange thing happens to me in places with strong emotional attachments. I always have the most compelling feeling that if I just looked quickly enough I’d catch a glimpse of the ‘me’ that occupied that space or place in the past. I’m not sure what I’d say to the younger version of myself if I had the chance. Keep believing in time travel and understand that the palette containing shades of grey is the most colourful and surprising in the spectrum, perhaps?

I sit in the car, eating jelly beans and smoking and looking at the magnificent view until the rattle subsides.

Friday faffing

Q: What do you call a lorry with wheels of treacle and a cargo of sloths driven by a somnambulant?

A: The vehicle that’s always in front of me when I’m late.

Which does make me ponder the question as to whether:

a) There’s a conspiracy among the timely to make the tardy even later than they expected to be, which is exercised by precision dispatch of lumbering behemoths onto the municipal highway to positions just ahead of the pants-seat wannabe time traveller

or

b) There are plenty of slow-moving vehicles around all the time and you just notice them more pointedly when you’re late

Being of a somewhat tardy disposition, I’ve wasted enough time - and smoked too many cigarettes - in this situation over the years to actually think about it. Naturally, conspiracy theory gets my vote. Otherwise I’d be forced into a personal purgatory of having to take more responsibility for my own actions and habits; primarily the conscious reduction of essential faffing time (with a side order of forethought).

The goody two shoes smug always-on-timers really pulled a coup de grace today though, for which I am forced to admit a small degree of admiration. No sooner had I escaped being stuck behind an almost backwards-moving Polish juggernaut than up popped a fork-lift truck to trap me once more. To be straight on the issue, it didn’t actually pop up out of the road surface like a highly detailed 3-D animated metallic character from an origami manual. But it did slip cat-like and cunning from an industrial park road before I could exercise avoidance manoeuvres, which is similar (if less creative) in reality.

When one is in this situation it is pointless getting worked up over it, for that way lies steering-wheel thumping, excessive engine revving and inappropriate horn / swear word usage. No. Fundamentally you have to accept that the real reason you’re late is because of your own incompetence and / or over-optimistic journey time estimation. In any event, time that has passed can never be recaptured no matter how many red lights you jump.

However, today the conspiracy spheres had aligned themselves in such a way as to allow me to witness a wonderful event. I was moving at about 0.5mph and idly gazing out of the passenger window of the car. Being pushed along the pavement towards me was a wheelbarrow with a three seater settee balanced on top. The steering of the barrow was in the hands of a most joyous-looking man who was chatting in highly animated conversation with his wife and three children. They were clearly delighted at their find, and rightly so; the pavement emporium is strewn with gifts of this sort if you have eyes for a bargain. Looking back at them as they passed by, I saw that there was also a large fluffy sheepskin rug atop the sofa.

When I eventually arrived at the pub where I was joining my colleagues for a pre-emptive goodbye-to-the-nearly-departed-from-the-organisation lunch, everybody else had already ordered their food. I flicked through the menu and then squinted up at the specials board before confirming my choice. There, chalked on the blackboard, was the offer of the most surprising menu item I’ve ever seen: Oven Baked Loin of God.

On reflection, it might have said cod. But I ordered chicken and chips to be on the safe side. I didn’t want to add yet another string to the bow of the journey saboteurs.

Plane sight

I doubt that “Beverley Hills Chihuahua” would have been my film of choice. But then in-flight movie selection was always a mysterious art.

Lacking headphones, I could only guess at the plot. It had lots of talking dogs in it (including a German shepherd, the double of Kaos) and was the second film on the trot on the aeroplane to feature crumbling Aztec ruins. I think I grasped the gist.

Strangely, I was sitting in the same seat on the way home as I did on the outbound trip – seat 32D. It was one of those fabulous ones by the emergency exits; so long as the monkey monster thing from the Twilight Zone doesn’t come along and wrench the door open, there’s plenty of leg room. My silent children’s film watching was only interrupted by being whacked on the elbow by the finely-turned bottom of a rather rotund air stewardess as she busied herself in the cabin. I thought she resembled Victoria Wood – but in appearance only, not demeanour. Thus I also thought it best to keep that observation to myself

Goodbye Egypt & thanks for a great time

We checked out of the hotel after breakfast, settling up via the convoluted route of currency converted from Egyptian pounds via Euros to US Dollars. A new influx of arrivals had come in last night and most of them – it seemed – were queuing at the dive centre.

The dive centre is set apart from the hotel at the top of the strip of sand that runs between the grounds and the bay. It has a central dome, smooth rendered and indistinguishable from the many others around from outside. But standing inside looking up is like being in a cool bread oven. The bricks of the dome are unplastered and exposed and set in palest pink lime mortar. At the pinnacle of the dome, a perfect circle is open to the desert sky; when it rains, if it ever does here, it must fall inside too.

I slid my crate of borrowed gear under the hatch in the wooden counter on the ground at the base of the heart of the dome. When I paid I was presented with a “Coraya Divers” membership card and a fan of multi-coloured car stickers. I’m going to send one to Rhona - along with the book I bought her at the airport - to be a little piece of Egypt in the middle of Lancaster.

We made our way to the beach and set up our accustomed enclave next to the sea. The four of us spent our last few hours in Egypt in companionable quietness, exchanging only a few words now and then on our regular refreshment trips to the beach-side cafe. I’ve been concentrating on absorbing in minute detail how the heat of the sun feels on my skin as I lie here. It will be many months before I feel that again and I wish I could bottle the sensation for uncorking on the cold and dreary remnants of the winter days that wait for me at home.

Liz and I took one last stroll down the jetty. As we walked, I described to her the fish I’d seen when snorkelling yesterday. I was especially struck by the parrot fish I’d seen grazing on the reef and was telling her about it when one swam into view in the shallow water above the coral under the jetty. As if he’d known we’d wanted him to appear, he stayed in our sight for several minutes, even turning on his side momentarily so Liz could get a proper look at his spectrum of colours.

She and I also took to reflecting on ourselves and what might happen next to us. At a personal level, I know that I’m in a different place emotionally than this time last year when I first visited Egypt. The emotional tsunami that still gripped me at that time has passed; now only a few small waves remain. I think I’ve just about closed that chapter; a few intimate insights I’ve had here give me encouragement that a new one is starting to open. If I do come here again, not only will I be able to claim my very welcome Coraya Divers discount but – with luck and an open heart – I’ll be reading from the lines of that as yet unwritten script. That is a most encouraging souvenir to take home from a wonderful holiday in Egypt.

Float like an Egyptian

Back into the Red Sea today - this time snorkelling on the house reef. The on-shore breeze was strong, whipping the water in the bay into white horses and sending spume crashing over the jetty. Maybe not ideal snorkelling conditions, but this is our last full day and I want to see the fishes again before we leave.

At about 100 yards out into the bay, the wooden jetty splits in two. Straight ahead is the disembarkation point for divers and the three motor boats that ferry scuba trips to off-shore sites. The L-shaped spur to the left is for snorkellers and leads to a canopied pontoon that in turn gives way to an iron staircase and ladder that drop directly into the water and onto the reef.

The fish cluster around as if at the edge of an infinite ornamental lake and I am not disappointed. Shoals of white fish with luminous eyes look to be swimming upside down and are everywhere just beneath the surface. Further down the face of the reef a huge parrot fish is grazing, his rainbow colours flashing in the sunlight. At the very bottom two stone fish skulk invisibly on the white sand. In between, a hundred thousand fish of all colours and shapes and sizes swarm and wriggle and dance, chasing each other or feeding in companionable oblivion.

The snorkelling zone is roughly marked out by a string of buoys and slime-covered ropes that bob up and down in the waves. The current is driving on-shore and swimming against it is both exhausting and pointless. Holding onto the marker ropes gives me a fantastic view of the reef life below, and I float there ebbing and flowing as the water rises and falls. The stillness of the perpetual motion of ocean and creatures and plants allows my brain to snuff out one by one its constant threads of internal chatter and narration. Eventually all that is left is my body floating in the sea and just the one direct feed from eye to brain. Complete sensory immersion; I think this must be what meditation is like.

An hour or so later, Liz meets me as I'm walking back along the jetty, flippers and mask in hand. She fetches some coffee while I change out of my wet suit and the four of us sit on the beach drinking our drinks as the sun starts to go down. We head into the hotel's health centre and spend a quiet hour in the spa pool and steam room. By the time we come out, the sky is blazing red and the call to prayer drifts to us, carried on the breeze from the other side of the bay.

Fly like an Egyptian

We watched a magnificent sea eagle hunting above the bay this morning.

It was joined by two or three smaller kestrel-like raptors, taking it in turns to dive down into the sea before soaring up again and circling, searching, eating. There are other more familar birds here too - the ubiquitous sparrows and doves of course, but also - surprisingly to me - pied wagtails going about their business in much the same way as they do 2,500 miles away at home.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 6)

The Red Sea is what draws people to this part of Egypt.

Well, that and the climate - now in mid-February the days are sunny and almost cloudless, the temperature perhaps in the late twenties Celcius. De-salination operates on an immense scale here. The water produced irrigates the tropical planting around the resort through an endless series of hose pipes and ditches. Outside this artifical oasis it is utterly arid, dust and sand and rocks and mountains the only natural features.

Juxtaposed and bounded by this barren landscape, the Red Sea could not shine any more jewel-like than if it were composed entirely of sapphires. The sand on the beach is coarse, the particles a beige collection of grit and gravel right around the bay. At its heart the sea rolls lazily up and down, huge breakers crashing some way off outside the inlet. The reef eco-system is a delicately balanced thing; careless tourists with clumsy fingers and feet have the potential to cause substantial damage. To protect the fragile marine equilibrium, the shore is protected by a line of posts with chains strung in between. You may not casually launch a swimming or snorkelling trip from the beach, only from the jetty that juts 100 yards or more out into the bay. One consequence of this is that the sea is people-free; the fishes and the coral go about their business undisturbed by shell collectors, curious toddlers or shrieking teenagers.

The beach is studded with woven willow parasols that collectively resemble giant Mexican hats perched on top of 6 foot poles. Or perhaps they are a squadron of flying saucers, hovering slightly above the sand, in benevolent formation as a prelude to miniature global domination. In any event, along with the co-ordinating half-moon shaped wind breaks, they provide great shelter from the sun and on-shore breeze alike.

Sing like an Egyptian

By unseen cue and at random intervals throughout the day, loud music erupts from the swimming pool.

It's not just that the music is unexpected; it's that the tracks played are, how shall I say, eclectic in their selection. Drawn from the palette of Euro / Brit pop, the one thing that the tunes do have in common is a dominating bass line and a worm-like catchiness that crawls into your ears uninvited and buries itself deep in your brain, infesting your grey cells and forcing you to clap or hum along entirely against your will. A bit like auditory LSD or the experiment that Pavlov might have carried out had he been on holiday at the time and lacking dogs to hand.

There must be a strange kind of filter at work here for the songs are not taken from any one year or any specific nation. Rick Astley brushes shoulders with Ace of Bass and is on nodding terms with a euro-synth remix of Madonna's 'Holiday' (rearranged to the extent that only the word holiday and the shape of the chorus riff remains from the original). The one song that I do long to hear here is 'Walk Like an Egyptian', of course. It runs unbidden through my head at various points of the day, usually completely apropos of nothing.

Except this morning.

I was loading up our order at the beach cafe fizzy drinks station when, through conspiracy of breeze and light-weight plastic glasses, managed to pour half a pint of diet Pepsi over the teenage girl next to me. That she was wearing her best beach-side glamour outfit - of baby pink halter top and black ruffled ra-ra skirt - for the purposes of flirtatious ensnarement of the male cast of the 'Animation' entertainment team did not help. Luckily - for I am 40 and she about 14 - it was she who was embarassed about my clumsiness, enough for the two of us, and thus my thrice repeated sorries in various intonations were quite superflouous. Whilst she flapped at her clothes and a waiter mopped the floor, I completed the drinks run and wandered back to today's beach base.

I couldn't help but hum on my way: "You drop your drinks and they bring you more". The Bangles truly have a lot to answer for.

Dive like an Egyptian (part 2)

Second dive of the holiday, today to Marsa Mubarak, a site that needed a 15 minute trip by mini-bus to the port at Al Ghrahib. From there a hard boat (with a RIB in tow) guided us out twenty minutes into the Red Sea and curled along the coast to the south and the reef. The boat was double decked - the upper deck strewn with comfortable cushions - and we took our shoes off as we boarded.

I was buddied with Barbara from Germany today, our compliment of 8 divers split into 2 groups of four: David, Stephen, Barbara and me led by our wonderful Karim. The dive site itself was cluttered with pillars of coral and decorated with beautiful fronds of fire coral; one, at about 15 metres, was swarming with tiny orange and silver fishes all the way up its height and into the sun above like a still from a big screen film. A great highlight of today was seeing a huge sea turtle, swimming fast high above our heads, and an enormous Lion Fish hovering over the reef oblivious to the fact it just looks impossibly constructed - like a cartoon come to life.

From a 'diving practice' point of view, today's dive - my 7th open water dive so far - was both good and bad. Good, in that I managed the 20 metre (well, 20.4m to be exact) depth that is the maximum allowed with my BSAC Ocean Diver qualification card, and that the dive was 50 minutes long and quite a distance too. Bad, in that once again I needed to share Karim's tank via his octopus (alternative air source) for a short while to get me back safely, even though this time I'd taken the precaution of requesting a 15 litre tank. I'm still clearly using too much air - this will get better with experience I know, but for now perhaps I need to stick to shorter, quicker dives. Or just breathe less.

Balloon like an Egyptian

I appear to be developing a case of the Egyptian Balloon. Either that or all the trousers I packed have mysteriously shrunk in transit.

The food here is delicious, plentiful and in constant supply. A dangerous combination. In the restaurant, at the poolside bar, in the beach front cafe, one is never more than a short waddle from piles of pastries and all manner of savoury delights. A small domestic army continually patrols collecting up glasses, plates and cups the second they are empty. A further unseen regiment returns one's room to pristine order whilst one is engaged in hard core poolside lounging or scoffing. The beds are pressed and adorned with a towel sculpture covered in hibiscus petals by the time you get back for a post-lunch pre-dinner nap.

After only a few days, I have entered into that holiday fugue state with complete loss of all sense of time or responsibility. My guess is you'd be hopelessly irredemably institutionalised if you stayed here for a month. Well, that and very fat: a proper Egyptian Balloon.

Dive like an Egyptian

The Red Sea is enchanting. I know this from my 1st trip to Egypt this time last year; it was the two 'try dives' I did then that inspired me to learn how to do it properly. I joined Swale Sub Aqua Club when I got home and have been training with them since.

My most recent dives were a few months back at the end of November - a Club weekender to Portland in Dorset. The sea water temperature was 10 degrees and we surfaced to sleet. The Red Sea at Marsa Uum Gerifat today was a much more pleasing 22 C - with a wet suit on it felt like a warm bath. My try dive instructor last year was a young Egyptian guy called Karim. He'd been kind and patient and held my hand as I tried to overcome my brain's underwater evacuation manoeuvres. So it was great that he was our guide again today on our house reef orientation dive.

I know from the more experienced divers in my club that a degree of anxiety before a dive is to be expected. Even though I am much more familiar now with what to expect, those first few minutes are spent trying to wrestle brain control from the sub-conscious automatic to the manual over-ride that is needed to enable it to accept that - kitted up - you can indeed breathe underwater. We jump from the wooden jetty, our faith contained in neoprene and compresed air.

The fishes and the coral are so brightly coloured here it is as if someone has run riot with all the colours from a child's paintbox. Purple with yellow spots? Check. Orange, white and black stripes? Certainly sir. Egyptian law prevents the wearing of diving gloves to help minimise damage to this natural underwater theme park - it is strictly 'look but don't touch' down here. It's a mutual stand-off that suits both parties; the coral is left undamaged by enquiring hands; and the diver remains unburnt / stung / poisoned by the self-defence mechanisms of the creatures & plants in the sub aqua zoo.

Diving really is the art of slow personified. There really is nothing to rush for, just observation of the fishes doing their fishy thing and the coral growing as inperceptibly as a glacier does on land. Karim - also my 'buddy' on this dive - leads us along at a sedate pace as we follow the gentle slope of the sea bed downwards. Around us the coral towers cathedral-like and massive, its imposing size in contradiction to its fragility. Karim guides us through a natural underwater canyon and we dive low and slow, passing among arches and loops in the coral. It is amazing and terrifying in equal measure. I notice I'm running low on air so for a while I breathe in tandem with Karim, sharing his tank via the octopus - the spare regulator that all divers carry for the purpose.

Down here normal means of communication are useless, so the international diving community operates a series of universal hand signals. Underwater, I 'hear' a running commentary in my head consisting of my buddy's signals and intentions and my own thoughts about what I'm feeling and seeing. The seascape is in constant motion. Glance up and shoal of silver fish flash life knife blades in the sun. Look ahead, there's a jellyfish, an octopus, a clown fish, a thousand and one living things going about their business unpeturbed and undisturbed by us in our ungainly kit. This is their world and they pay us no more attention than if we were shadows.

Too soon we're back at the landing stage and killing the 3 minute safety stop by watching yellow parrot fish watching each other. Up the steps and back on the jetty once more, nose running with snot and throat full of phlegm as the crew help us remove our tanks until we stand leaden and weighty on our own feet once more. We've been underwater for 50 minutes - it feels like seconds. David's signed up for a night dive this evening. After only six open water dives so far, I'm not ready for that dark mysterious water just yet.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 5)

Holidays to Aunty Nan and Uncle Doug were altogether more restrained affairs.

There existed between my Gran and Aunty Nan a palpable female rivalry. Nan was the youngest of the 13 children of their Scottish mineworking family and still - at that time in her 50s - clung to the notion of herself as the baby. She was small and thin and sharp, and I instinctively knew that she needled my Gran's usually even temperament. Unlce Doug was a man from whom disappointment and condascention hung like a mantle. He sneered, he burped, he was pompous, and - there is no doubt to me looking back now with adult eyes - he was desparately sad and trapped inside a small boxed-in life he had built around himself. That they lived in a tiny immaculate bungalow with precise grass is perhaps no surprise. If Aunty Betty represented freedom of a kind, then Nan and Doug embodied conservatism with both a big and a small C.

Because I was a child, of course I enjoyed my holidays with them just the same, although perhaps not as much as those with Aunty Betty. Certainly their location near Tenby in south Wales had more to offer, and I always went home cluttered with Welsh dragons and spoons with my name burnt into them.

Those holidays came to an abrupt halt when my Grandad died in 1982. Jim, Nan and Doug followed him during the 1990s, as did Gran two years ago - outliving her husband by some quarter of a century. Only Aunty Betty remains, her shadow living out its last days in a nursing home in the Wirral. Mum and I went to visit her last summer. She didn't recognise us.

If holidays now bear no resemblance to those of my childhood, it is I think because the world of vacationing in the homes of relations has passed away with its protagonists. It would, I also think, have been beyond my grandparents' recognition to have countenanced a week spent in a foreign country sitting beside a swimming pool helping yourself to tea or coffee or cakes as freely as you wished (not of course that one is superior to the other in itself). It's not so much that their field of vision was narrow; rather that the parameters by which they conducted their lives were different.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 4)

In the days before alcoholism (and later dementia) had gripped Aunty Betty between the teeth, spending time with her and Uncle Jim was always my favourite holiday choice.

She was great fun for one thing. Never having had any children of her own, Aunty Betty combined in my child-like eyes an embodiment of grown-up glamour with a dangerously thrilling edge. She dressed in trousers (slacks, as she called them) with brightly coloured revealing tops; she wore high heels to take us shopping by bus to Birkenhead market; she drank whisky and smoked cigarettes; she taught me card games and how to place bets with two pees and Swan Vestas. I felt grown up and priviledged to join her and Uncle Jim, my grandparents and old Mr Bridger at the dining room table, turned after completion of the evening meal into a card table littered with whisky glasses and overflowing ashtrays.

They taught me rummy and patience, and - thrillingly - 5 card stud and pontoon (black jack). All hands accompanied by precision betting and no prisoners taken on account of age (or lack of). The gambling was serioulsy approached, and winning a hand genuinely admired - and not in that patronising adult-to-child way to which I was more accustomed. The smoking and drinking and card playing would continue for hours, interupted perhaps around 10pm for some cream crackers and cheese.

By the time I introduced Aunty Betty to the ex years later, she was alcohol raddled and in the first tentative grasp of the dark shadow of dementia. It was hard to reconcile the slurring stumbling old lady with the vivacious and dangerously exciting woman of my childhood. When she vomited and fell off her chair during Christmas dinner one year, I knew my Aunty Betty was no more. The husk left behind did not do her justice.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 3)

This is such a different experience of holiday from those of my childhood. Back then, holiday meant a week spent in a meltingly hot mobile home or a threadbare seaside B&B with obligatory perma-grouch landlady who tutted loudly at any sound or sign that you might linger in your room beyond 9am every day.

But those were unusal holidays. More typical were the fortnights spent with Aunty Betty & Uncle Jim or Aunty Nan & Uncle Doug in Birkenhead or Wales respectively. Whatever the final destination, the journey always consisted of hours spent in the back of my grandparents' car, the atmosphere literally growing thicker by the mile as Grandad puffed continually on his untipped Players with the windows hermetically sealed. No seatbelts in the back of the car, your legs fused to the vinyl seats as you restlessly alternated between singing 'travelling songs' and eating pappy sandwiches made with tasteless cheese and cheap white bread.

My Gran, who could not read maps, was invariably in charge of navigation. My Grandad, who could, equally invariably drove faster and faster and puffed more and more furiously the more lost we became. Eventually, when the mischevious gods of 1970s travel had their fun with us, we would miraculously pitch up at our destination. To have survived the journey - let alone to have arrived at the correct place - did indeed seem a miracle, and this habitually became the only topic of conversation among the adults for the next few days. Well, that and the oft repeated surprise at how much my little sister and I had grown - as if this was to somehow fly in the face of the natural order of things for two children.

Blog like an Egyptian (part 2)

Holiday reading is such an important matter isn't it? Not being sure that the 8 books I'd packed into my luggage would offer sufficient variety, I bought another 4 books in WH Smith at Gatwick airport.

Today I'm reading "Sway: the irresistible pull of irrational behaviour" by Ori & Rom Brafman. Very much in the model of Gladwell's "Blink", or indeed "Freakonomics", the book examines, in essence, how we are well equipped to make 2+2=4 but sometimes opt to answer 5 instead. The book is interesting too on a personal level, examining how we often choose to make irrational (or downright stupid) choices, diregarding information - that is glaringly spellbindingly death-defyingly obvious but not what we want to believe - in the process. Of course the book never calls our irrational choices stupid. It's far too politely scientific for that - although that is what it means.

Poolside conversations inevitably turn to a critical examination of one's fellow holidaymakers. The variety of body shapes and sizes available for perusal - not to mention the eclectic selection of tattoos, piercings and swimwear - make this a sport with great entertainment potential. One's overly harsh observations, however, tend to be a little reined in by the sure and certain knowledge that others are considering you in exactly the same way. My ego does not probably want to hear the analysis of a 40 year old blonde woman with badly shaved legs and wonkily painted toes who alternates between scribbling in a pink paged notebook and reading a lime green book on economics & philosophy whilst sitting next to a swimming pool drinking endless coffee.

Blog like an Egyptian

We arrived at 6.30pm and were embraced at once by the warmth of the desert night. Marsa Alam airport is made up of a number of brightly lit cubes set down - - it appears - completely at random at the edge of the desert. In thinking through their approach to tourism here, the authorities really have opted for a 'win-win' philosophy. Tourists are attracted to the resort hotels by the magnificent Red Sea and delightful climate. And yet, whilst benfitting from the influx of tourist cash, the real Egypt is kept insulated and immune from the pollution of the side effects of tourism by the simple expedient of the hours of desert that so effectively provide a buffer.

There really is quite literally nothing here except the thin string of upmarket hotel resorts, innoculated from harm on the one side by the sea and on the other by the desert. The hotel itself is low strung and curved around the swimming pools terracing down amid semi-tropical gardens, and, at its open side, facing the sea. The Red Sea here co-operatively channels into a horseshoe-shaped bay, so that viewed from above the whole resort looks like two C shapes set at 90degrees to eachg other. Beyon the arterial service road lies only desert, here in the early morning revealed as a series of mountains.

We arrived last night in time for dinner, retiring for early doors two hibiscus teas later. A bit of personal grooming was in order in preparation for unaccustomed pool-side flesh baring. When I looked again this morning, it appeared that my toenails had been painted by a 5 year old. No matter; I don't think anyone's likely to inspect them.

Egyptian test card

Open plan offices are such an appealing idea. Communication flows uninterrupted; mission statements activated; corporate bonding bonded; in-fighting eliminated; goodwill promoted; tea making shared. In theory.

In practice, all my visits to our open plan office in Croydon inevitably mean me taking up squatters’ rights on somebody else’s desk and sitting with my back to everyone whilst somewhere ‘Flashdance’ plays continually and almost (but not quite) inaudibly on a badly tuned radio. I’m never here frequently enough to remember most people’s names either, so spend my day endlessly circling in meandering circumlocutions and elaborate routines of gestures and grimaces in order to avoid actually having to use them. Needless to say, I never answer the phone.

On the upside, I am at least on facial recognition terms with most of my colleagues’ children / spouses / pets and can take a random stab at the point at which each lost interest in their own job (judged accurately I feel by the extent to which the memos and e-mails surrounding the desk are out of date). The uplifting mottos and prayers on my co-workers’ desks are usually enlightening and encouraging (St Francis De Sales today) and I sometimes copy them down into my diary to ponder at a later date. The café over the road serves delightful soul-replenishing greasy food at maroon Formica tables. I can pay for the car park using my card instead of a mountain of small change. And there is a cracking view of the Croydon flyover from the 5th floor.

It is probably superfluous to admit that I find actually working in the open plan office completely impossible because this seems to be equally applicable to everyone else as well, even the habitués. A surreptitious inventory at any given moment will reveal small clusters of gossiping (that drops to whispering at juicy bits), a bit of random texting, a pinch of net surfing, a lot of window staring, extensive fag break taking and a surfeit of long and unnecessarily detailed telephone calls. Of actual work there is not much sign, although there is - naturally - a mutually unspoken agreement to collude in the pretence that you are dreadfully busy. Which of course you are, in a way – just not with work.

However, even the dark mutterings of the office security guard, the inappropriate comments of the drunk outside the newsagent and the endless queues of traffic going nowhere could not dent my joie de vivre. For tomorrow I am going on holiday. To Egypt.

The mission is a simple one: enjoy the company of my wonderful friends Liz, David & Stephen; eat lots of fabulous food; read loads of books; go diving in the beautiful Red Sea; stare at the sun; sleep.

Repeat for a week.

I will be back...

Time travelling junk

The funny thing about time travel is that we all do it all of the time. Or until we're dead at any rate. It's the ultimate eco-friendly mode of transport: no machinery required (just one more-or-less functioning mind each); only a modest daily calorific allowance needed (wholly from renewable sources of energy); and all contained within a human-shaped capsule (with self-healing properties and infinite variation). Yep, pretty much perfect.

Except our uniquely designed personal time machines each have one big Achilles heel; we can only travel forwards. Assuming that we're not all about to be issued with a manufacturer's recall notice from the great garage in the, um, wherever, we learn to live with this fault. By age six, say, we start to accept that we have an annual ration of one birthday. At age seventeen, we cringingly appreciate that we cannot take back that declaration of enduring love made by text message. We know it's a waste of our thirties to wish we had done things differently. No, by means of whatever particular lessons it takes - whether through osmosis or simply by observation - we find ourselves knowing that our own personal time machine does not come with reverse fitted as standard.

Or at least most of us do. For within every generalisation lies an exception. My mum is one such.

Thirty years ago mum bought a house. The house has seen its share of comings and goings and undergone its own gradual shifts of layout, decor and furnishings in the three decades that have passed since. The one and only constant during that time - the datum point if you like for the scientifically-minded - is my mum. Or more accurately, my mum and her ever expanding strata of junk.

Now yes, I'm well aware that junk is often perceived as a pejorative term; and yes, that one (wo)man's trash is another (wo)man's treasure. Walk into my mum's house on any day at any time in any year and every surface in your eye line (as well as those below it) will be piled high with interesting things. In her accumulation of stuff, my mum is ruthlessly Marxist - everything truly is equal in her eyes. Thus broken lampshades, threadbare school uniforms and mouse-eaten Easter bonnets are treated just the same as her wedding dress, my late father's stamp collection or the small pile of rare first editions. Family photographs jostle for space with the Radio Times from last Christmas; her newly-bought clothes with those that fitted the infant me at the tail end of the 60s; handmade English slipware china made just for her by a potter friend with plastic union jack flags and bunting from the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

The trouble is, I think, is that to my mum it is not junk around her but a means of re-living the past and of breathing life into her memories. She does not see the same old heap of tat that I do when I walk into her bedroom; she sees the faces of my little sister and I as children; she smells the smells of her own mother cooking; she hears the laugh of her late husband. Thinking about it, it's maybe not so much that the things around her enable her to put her personal time machine into reverse as such (although I think she'd like them to); it's perhaps more that the objects enable the past to come with her into the present.

Mum is, needless to say, also exceptionally reluctant to throw anything away. It is as if the items contain a little of the essence of the person that owned them, rather like people were once afraid of having their photograph taken because they thought it would steal their soul away. Over the years, I've got used to how mum is. I appreciate too to a large extent it is also none of my business if she chooses to fill her house with all manner of ephemera, even if that means that no living soul has actually sighted her bed in the last six years. Except of course when she needs some help shifting it, as she did today in anticipation of the men coming to fit her new central heating tomorrow

I have to be honest and say that I was not looking forward to it. I knew the day would consist, in large part, of me saying "let's chuck this old thing out" and her being all wild eyed and defensive and snatching the item from my hands as if I was suggesting throwing a real baby out of the window. Repeat ad nauseam until both of us were sweaty and hot and irritated and bad tempered with each other.

However today, for the first time in a long time, I detected a different force at work. Yes, she put up a token gesture of reluctance when it came to me throwing into the recycling three large boxes of my old school exercise books, for example. But a token gesture is what I mean, not the anger that has been present on similar occasions before. So as a result of which, with valiant help in emptying the attic from my brother-in-law, we got enough cleared for the plumbers to get access where they need it in about half the time I had anticipated. I was even able to take a whole car load down to the municipal dump, an unprecedented move.

Afterwards, when we were at my sister's house waiting for dinner, I thought it was right to say to mum how impressed I was with how relatively easily she'd been able to 'let things go', that it made me think that she must have been actively disengaging from some of the stuff in advance. I think she was pleased that I'd noticed but didn't really say much by way of response. But it did make me wonder if it really has taken until now for her to accept that her personal time machine does not have a reverse gear. I guess only time will tell.

And relax...

"So Katy, what do you do to relax?"

It was September 2007 and we were sitting in the dark outside a pub by the river in Gravesend. Three months had passed since the ex announced that he wanted to split up and my daughter and I had moved out of the barn a few weeks previously. Until then I'd had only the vaguest of notions of what shell shock might feel like. Now, though, I knew. Or at least I knew that there was probably a name for the numbness, the gripping crushing sensation that had grabbed me and sucked all of the air out of my body, the cartwheeling spinning nauseating disorientating sense of disassociation.

I lit a cigarette, aware of David and Liz peering at me in the half light from the other side of the wooden bench. The question hung in the air above our heads along with the lazy streams of my exhaled smoke. "What do I do to relax?" I repeated Liz's enquiry, my short-circuited brain trying hard to grasp the words and the meaning contained within them. The conversations drifting from other tables, the thudding of the remains of my heart and the thrum of the remains of the day's heat vibrated between us as I tried to think. Finally, I answered truthfully. "Nothing. I don't do relax".

I was shocked by my own revelation. Over the months that followed I reflected on that statement over and over again as I slowly started to draw the shattered parts of my psyche back together. There were some very dark days indeed during that time, a time that seemed at once both endless and fleeting. And yet, although moving imperceptibly like a glacier, my personal threads did start to re-join.

Liz and I went away to stay for a few days in a beautiful spa hotel to celebrate the passing away of the fiendish year that was 2007. We sat one evening in the hotel lobby and wrote lists in our notebooks: lists of people or things to be grateful for; lists of things that we wished to let go of; lists of things that we planned to do over the coming twelve months. Then we read them to each other, as if by speaking the private words we had written out loud we would make a real pact with each other and the world to make them so. Of the three lists, it was perhaps the third one - the looking ahead one - that was most significant. In one way and another, most of the items on my list were about learning how to relax - accepting that I needed to actively work on introducing some balance.

I have never recognised that I needed anything quite so much in my life and I committed myself to this resolution with a vengeance. In doing so, I have also learned that I am somebody who relaxes by 'doing things'. Since then, I have become a regular attender at classes at the sports centre four or five times a week; learned to scuba dive; taken up riding lessons (albeit sporadically) again after a quarter of century; walked the dog here there and everywhere; and a hundred and one other things beside. Of all the classes I tried and took part in at the sports centre, it was yoga that appealed to me most. I don't know why; it just grabbed and took hold of me in a way I cannot explain.

Yesterday was the first full day of my Yoga Foundation course. It's the first step on my way to (hopefully, possibly, eventually) becoming a yoga teacher. That final goal is still perhaps three or four years away at the moment; the foundation course the building block for what will follow. I enjoyed the first session enormously, even though at the same time I recognise that I really am still very much a beginner on the nursery slopes.

It is funny that you don't recognise life changing events at the time. No fanfare, no drum roll, no swishing of big red velvet curtains to announce their arrival. But Liz's question sitting outside the pub that night 18 months ago or so completely changed my life.

Sofa, so good

Because I'm forty and single and love dogs (and like to try my hardest to conform to other dimensions suggested by that stereotype), I've got a sticker on the back of my car reminding casual observers that a dog is for life and not just for Christmas. It also makes me happy to drive around advertising to other motorists that I'm unlikely to stop abruptly and hurl a sad eyed puppy out of the window without giving them sufficient braking space.

However, at least a dog might have a chance of finding a second home should the worst happen. The same cannot be said for soft furnishings. I've observed a real spate of abandonments recently, almost to the extent that it seems as if the community has decided en masse that outside (the front gate) is the new inside (front room). Rather like those emotive mailings from homeless dog shelters that tell you there's a rush on for Staffie puppies but that no one wants to adopt Tessie the terrier because she's twelve years old and has a wonky eye, there is a similar hierarchy at work in the casting to the pavement of household items. Unscientific observation shows that television sets, armchairs, settees, and suitcases are the items we love the least. And of those, that armchairs fare the worst of all.

Which brings two questions into my mind:

One: Do people fail to notice that their homes already have the full quota of seating items and buy another by accident (rather like when you pick up a dozen eggs from the greengrocer and find when you get home that there are already 36 in the fridge)?

Two: Or do most people simply have more cash and-slash-or a greater sense of 'what's hot / what's not' in the soft furnishing department than me and grow quickly tired of their three piece ensemble?

It being an unscientific study and all, I'm not sure what the answer is. What I am sure of though is that an awful lot of apparently decent and comfortable-looking armchairs and sofas bite the bullet and end up on the pavement very frequently.

But what's a bad news story for the individual items of discarded furniture is great news for the eagle-eyed pavement emporium bargain hunter. I have certainly been the beneficiary of this largess on a number of occasions (the most timely find being a swivelling office chair in beige tweed with adjustable arms). I have also been the donor too - although I feel compelled to add that I have always attached a note to my reusable items saying (helpfully I like to think) "Please help yourself!" and describing any known defects "this TV is in full working order but never had a remote control".

My late Gran used to remark that in her long ago growing up days in Scotland, there was an 'appointed' day each week when folk up and down the close would leave outside the items they no longer needed so that others could take them if they had a use for them. This wonderful reciprocal system - proper recycling in action - must have meant that babies' cots, say, or extra dining chairs were almost endlessly reused without really ever leaving the community at all. Indeed, the flagship project my charity runs is a furniture reuse enterprise, a rather more formal version of pretty much the same thing that happened in my Gran's day. Their most popular item? Three piece suites, naturally.

Anyway, fast forward to this evening and I stepped outside the door to go to my yogalates class (see, I'm still trying with the attention to stereotype conformity). Walking along the road parallel to me were two men, laughing with great delight whilst pushing two Tesco trolleys with an armchair balanced on the top of each one. I'm quite certain that they had rescued these two homeless strays and were, at that moment, bearing them away - with justifiable glee - to their new home. But I do hope they remember that a sofa is for life, not just for Christmas.

Stalking Charlie Brooker

Once upon a time, when you were, oh, let’s say, about 13 or so for sake of argument, you probably had your very first crush. Not that you knew then what a crush was as such, or remotely why you had it. No. All that happened was that one day you were the proud owner of a whole range of feelings and sensations that you had never had before. Upon that day, everything about you changed irrevocably irreversibly and forever. You didn’t know that then either; you just thought there was something strangely compelling about Adam Ant. Especially the way he swung through the stained glass window in the video for Stand and Deliver.

As you gradually accommodated to these new sensations, your brain started to refine them. Thus you could conjure, at will, all of the words to Ant Rap without once tripping over your tongue or repeating a chorus out of rotation. You knew whether it was Marco, Merrick, Terry-Lee, Gary Tibbs or yours-tru-ly behind the painted white face stripe and gold-braided frock coat. As the young you mastered the art of adoration from a distance (even if you sat eye-bogglingly close to your TV set), your brain had a new trick up its sleeve. It unveiled it the day you went to the church youth club feeling mighty cool wearing your new three quarter length green denims and mustard granddad shirt. Then Andrew walked in and you instantly morphed into a sweaty-palmed cerise-faced version of yourself, where the lead role was played by a gibbering gibbery thing that couldn’t speak and who was trapped in an endless loop of engraving his name on your pencil case.

And so on it went for years; each time you grew accustomed to one phase of your dawning adolescence, your brain would unleash another volley of feelings and sensations for you to try out afresh. Eventually – and admittedly the detail of this next section may vary according to your own historical contents - the chances are you probably tried on a few objects of desire for size and (much like your favourite jeans) selected the one that seemed the best fit; possibly you married; possibly you didn’t; possibly you had a child or two; possibly you didn’t; possibly you bought a house or flat together; possibly a car too, or one each even. And so your life bobbed serenely along in its little ship of adultness upon the river of grown-up-hood.

Then, just when you thought your brain had long got over the dealing out of new feelings and sensations, something happened. You might have got divorced; perhaps you and your partner went your separate ways for whatever reason; possibly a crisis of some sort hit you. Maybe you cried; perhaps you howled; possibly you were relieved or elated; sometimes you were sad and then you got angry, upset, whatever. Then you got better again and started to breathe out once more.

And you found to your great surprise that you were forty, give or take. And so were your friends. And their friends. You noticed that someone had come along and put a few lines on your forehead and inches on your hips whilst you weren’t looking. You started to enjoy things you’d have turned your nose up at a few years before; doing yoga say, or bird watching. In fact, you observed that some of your tastes had changed in all the shades of meaning of that phrase; that wearing black from head to foot maybe made you look older not cooler; that brown was not really so hideous after all; that wearing stilettos, no coat and a short skirt in a snow storm was just silly; that - in spite of what your mother told you - swearing could indeed pack a huge punch but only if you rarely did it.

And you noticed something else odd too, something that was long forgotten; that your brain had circled right back to the beginning and was making you have crushes all over again. As always, the object of your crush affection is randomly selected in a Darwinian manner. It could be a friend. It might be a work colleague or a travelling sales rep whose monthly calls make your heart race. In the time honoured tradition of the world it could be your boss or your secretary. Maybe it’s a film star or three, a politician, vicar, doctor, vet, teacher at your child’s school, the guy in the park who walks the standard poodle.

Mine is Charlie Brooker.

At least be happy for me that I no longer gibber or own a pencil case.

Snow go

Do you want a life changing experience?






As opening lines go, that one got my attention. It being the south east’s annual snow-bound-so-stay-at-home Monday, I was sitting at the kitchen table smoking and reading the small ads at the back of the London Review of Books. I’d already completed my day’s quota of snow-related experimentation:

• driving to work and managing to get the car stuck in four wheel drive mode
• staring out of the window, silently calculating exactly how many flakes it would need for me to depart without showing undue haste
• popping out at lunch time to buy some curtains for the barn kitchen – a random privacy thing
• finding the door to the office locked on my return - thanks for telling me guys...
• driving back to the barn again barely three hours after arriving at work and finding that I was one of very few fools left on the road
• hanging said curtains up whilst simultaneously coaxing the Rayburn into fire and making tea
• walking the dog around the orchard, throwing snowballs for him to fetch
• laughing when the ex slipped over in the snow and landed on his butt (divine retribution is a marvellous thing)

So the only obvious thing left to do was to sit and read. And there it was, the beguiling line at the top of a box advert from a TV production company:

Do you want a life changing
experience? We are looking for
women who have a sense of adventure and would
like to spend a month living with
a remote tribal
community.

A life changing experience. Is it even possible to plan such a thing? Surely life changing experiences are ones that come and grab your ankles when your head is happily in the clouds and you’re not looking where (or in what) your feet are treading? I mean, I know people set off travelling the world in search, of, well, whatever it is they are hoping to find – themselves, someone else, hallucinations, cheap beer, religion, freedom, a day-glow-pink Chrysler. But does anyone actually set off in search of a life changing experience, as if it is a destination in its own right like Disneyland, say, or Cheddar Gorge? Maybe. I don’t know.

The concept held a lot of appeal in any event so I downloaded the application form from the website. It was full of interesting and surprisingly challenging questions, such as: ‘what would you do if you saw a tribal practice that you deeply disagreed with?’ and ‘how would you feel about taking hallucinogens or having a piercing or tattoo?’

I sat and started to consider what my responses might be. What would I do? How would I feel? These are tough questions with no real right or wrong answers, just opinion and viewpoint accompanied by representations from your own ethical or moral code perhaps. The big question I am really asking myself, though, is would I like to be considered for this challenge? Is now the right time to be doing something like that? Is there ever really a right time? Would I cope? Would this be an example of where my stunted ability at making small talk or lack of reliably being able to integrate easily with strangers proves an insurmountable stumbling block? Could I live happily for a month without the internet or Marlboro reds?

Probably not is the answer to all of the above and I’m pretty sure I’m not going to apply. But perhaps by starting to ponder these questions and issues I may find myself having a life changing experience. Albeit one on a much smaller scale and, like today’s snow, undertaken on this occasion without the need to leave my own home.

Burning bargains

Accepted wisdom has it that if something seems to good to be true, then chances are it is too good to be true. From the astonishingly low prices of your brand of cigarettes just outside the duty free area at a foreign airport to the posh perfume for a tenner at the local high street market or the offer of a diamond bracelet for fifty quid in a pub, most of us aware - at some level - that if we accept these deals they are more than likely to turn out to be goods of questionable providence. Fakes, forgeries, counterfeits, knock-offs, grey market suppliers, untraceable supply chain, snake oil, quackery or just plain old stolen goods - more than likely what we'll get in return for our money.

And yet, like Mulder in the X-Files, we want to believe. We want to feel we've bagged a bargain, that we've made our cash work smarter not harder, that we've been canny consumers with a nose for a great deal. There's something instinctive about it I think. If it's red mist that descends when people are filled with overwhelming uncontrollable rage, then perhaps it's green mist that envelops us when offered a fantastic bargain? But yet if we later smoke those cigarettes at home and find they taste of camel dung, that the perfume strips paint at fifty paces, that the bracelet turns green in the shower, we are extremely angry. Angry that we haven't got we apparently paid for - and yet at the same time angry with ourselves because, that small voice inside tells us, we have got exactly what we paid for.

Very occasionally, though, a bargain does turn out to be just that and really is exactly as good as it seems.

About four years ago, when the ex and I were in the thick of converting the barn, he asked his plumber friend Trevor to keep an eye out just in case someone was getting rid or an old Aga or Rayburn. Either was well beyond our pockets to buy brand new; our coffers were perilously below the watermark as it was and even the ability to afford one second hand seemed highly unlikely. But D was determined that the barn should be as eco-friendly as possible and a wood-burner of some sort presented the most accessible option for us. And, after all, it cost nothing to ask.

Months passed. Then one day, Trevor rang. A very elderly gentleman had recently died, he told us, and his daughter (herself well past retirement age) had inherited the house. She'd called him in to fix and fit some new plumbing before she put the house on the market. The original kitchen, with its free standing pantry, cold room and single tap sink was to be replaced with a modern one in contemporary styling. There was no place in the new arrangement for the Rayburn that had sat in the corner since the house was built in the early 1930s (and unused since the 60s), she said; could Trevor get rid of it please?

We roped Will, my brother in law, in for the job; my sister, pregnant at the time, came along for the ride too. And there it was, built-in neatly to one corner of the kitchen and sparkling where the lady had thoughtfully polished it for us. Surrounded on three sides by walls and in front by a step made of red tiles, the old Rayburn didn't leave its home of birth without a struggle. It took us an hour to move it from its walled nest to the back door; an hour more from there to the bottom of the garden. We were nearly at the back gate, heaving the ton of solid iron with all of our collective strength, when Will saw some paving slabs were in the way of the path. He wrenched one up with his hand... before, with legs and arms spinning like a cartoon, hurling himself forward onto the grass. Where the paving slab had been just a moment before, now there yawned a huge hole in the ground. Not just any old hole in the ground either - this one had a flight of narrow steps heading down into the underworld.

Once Will's heart was back in his chest and he was safely sitting on the grass, we went up to the house to ask the owner about the hidden subterranean steps in her garden. "Oh that," she said, "I'd completely forgotten about the old bunker. It used to be an underground communications centre during the war. It was full of typewriters and all sorts of machines. For a few years afterwards, dad and some of his friends used it to tinker about with radios and such. I don't think anyone's been down there for a long time now".

After we'd peered down the stairs as best we could without a torch, the three of us somehow hauled the Rayburn up a make-shift ramp we'd made out of scaffold boards and into the Transit van we'd borrowed for the day. For the bargain price of £125 the Rayburn was ours, complete with half a dozen sacks full of coal that had also sat untouched in the garden shed for nearly 40 years and - curiously - an oil-burning Tilly lamp with a white glass shade that the lady presented to my ex with a flourish as we left.

It's freezing cold outside this evening. The wind is howling, chattering around the barn through arctic teeth and there's snow several inches deep on the ground. The Rayburn must be 70 or 80 years old now but it's happy here in the kitchen - if rather sooty from burning wood - doing the job it was made to do. The temperature gauge built onto the front of the oven door even still works. I've been sitting right in front of it for the last few hours, feet up on the rail by the hotplate, laptop on an upturned tray on my knee and tea and cigarettes within reach on a chair next to me. Sometimes, just sometimes, something that's a bargain really can be as good as it is true.