Music for the bees

Gardening is perhaps a little like housework I think, in that it's not really possible to show what's no longer there in the same way that nobody really notices a dog hair free carpet or a sparkling basin. But boy, do you feel the muscle burn in your arms and back. Reduced to a couple of photos from a mobile phone, my two raised flower beds here don't even seem much to show for a week's work. But - and you can only take my word for it I know, so please trust me on this one - this is an enormous transformation of my little back garden.

My little house by the seaside had been empty and close to derelict for about 4 years before Roo, the dog and I moved here in August 2007. Prior to that, the garden itself had been more or less untouched for the best part of 40 years. My great grandmother had always loved her little garden, planted it with bluebells, scrubbed the brick red cobble stones and kept it neat and tidy, but all that stopped when she died in 1966. Her son, my great Uncle Roy, left behind in the house after his mother's death, was not really one for the keeping of gardens any more than he was one for the keeping of much company beyond cricket, Proust, Kafka and Tchaikovsky.

How he loved his books and music. As a childhood visitor here, I'd blow the dust from one of the huge Bakelite 78rpm records and put it carefully on the old dark wooden gramophone, lowering the fat needle carefully onto its edge and cranking the handle round and round and round to spin the turntable. Uncle Roy would watch with amused delight from behind a folded copy of The Daily Telegraph as the crackly sounds of a long-dead orchestra rose to the command of a ghostly conductor and filled the room with the most beautiful music. Outside, the sun might have been shining on the seaside visitors, the gulls circling waiting patiently for sticky toddler fingers to let slip their ice cream cones. But inside, in the dark coolness of the front room, the little house was temporally transformed into a Baroque concert hall, the shabby curtains replaced with lush velvet drapes and the battered brown armchair with a sumptuously carved chaise longue as the maestro stepped up to the podium and wielded his baton to let the magic fly, just one more time.

Forty-odd years of debris takes a lot to undo, and at some point the general jungle-ness of the yard had been added to by the collapse of the rear wall and the influx of dumped rubbish from who knows where. Broken mirrors, shards of glass, bricks, tiles, plastic sacks full of women's clothes, crockery, all had conspired to submerge the garden and bury Grandma's cobbles under feet of soil and detritus. I lost count of how many sacks of rubble and rubbish and soil I've dug out by hand, bagged up and taken in my little car to the municipal tip.

But at last, after a week or so of excavation and general shovelling around, the red brick cobbles are exposed once more and the garden looks more like a garden and less like a landfill site. I created two raised flower beds about two feet tall, one made entirely of the whole bricks I found in the yard, and one from huge wooden sleepers from the timber merchant a few miles away. Today, Roo and I went to our local garden centre and chose a selection of plants that we hope will grow and creep and climb and attract the bees and the birds. We planted climbing ivy, forsythia, anemones, pansies, lavender, clematis, honeysuckle, foxgloves, jasmine, a couple of tall grasses and several more things besides. At the weekend, I'll add some wildflower seeds and some summer-flowering bulbs.

At the top left of the first picture, you might also be able to pick out the little round bee house I bought at Flynn's Bee Farm the other day, a device full of thin cardboard tubes especially to attract solitary mason bees. For once, I hope it rains and rains and rains for the next few days, to wash the remains of the mud from the cobbles and to water the plants as they settle into their new home. Come summer, I hope that our little garden is filled with the heavy heady scents of the flowers and that it once more throbs and dances to the music of the bees.

Sunshine on a Monday

I celebrated my penultimate day of freedom with a late night’s reading and a later morning’s rising before scuttling bath-damp and bleary eyed to the hairdresser just in time to take up the chair for 9 o’clock.

As a hairdresser, Shelly suits me perfectly. She never chastises me for split ends, does not look at me as if I’m deranged for not using straighteners, doesn’t try to persuade me into a different hair style than the one I’ve chosen, and, best and most prized of all, doesn’t mind if I don’t engage in conversation beyond the perfunctory sentences necessary to be certain that we’re both heading towards the same hirsute goal. I take off my glasses as I sit in her chair and the world and my brain swim out of focus for the next two and half hours as she goes about her professional ministrations of foils, colours and sharp sharp scissors.

She hands me a batch of magazines to read whilst the colours are taking and disappears to tend to the set of a fragile looking curly white-haired woman at an adjacent mirror. I’d meant to bring with my book with me, carry on where I’d left off last night, but I forgot in my rush and I’m grateful for the magazines. I don’t read women’s magazines often; somehow at some time in the long past I just lost the habit. The selection she’s given me are enthralling entertaining in a slightly voyeuristic manner, relaying as they do stories of wedding day punch ups, lost children and faithless lovers. I feel quite breathless at the intrigue of it all and am sorry when I’m called to the sink to be rinsed off and shampooed by the salon’s junior. But her hands are deliciously firm on my scalp and the warm water and massaging of my head send me near to the edge of a trance.

Back once more to the chair and Shelly snips and shapes expertly with her scissors. The short fine hairs slide down the black nylon gown and collect in my lap and I wonder fleetingly if a skilled person could spin this into a yarn and knit something with it. But I cannot knit and I’d feel foolish asking, so I look in the mirror when Shelly asks me to and thank her for doing a great job. When I go to put my glasses on, I find that the unguent she’s used has stuck some of my hair to my face and I have to peel it away to allow the arms of my specs access to the top of my ears.

My sister has sent me strict instructions to call into the bakery on the way past to buy a fresh cream Belgian bun, and I add to this a selection of cakes to take home for Roo, my mother and niece. The greengrocer next door has a special offer on blood oranges. I buy sixteen of them, and two pounds of tomatoes, to even out the weight from the bag full of cakes in more ways than one. Roo’s alarm clock is peeping when I get to the house and I call up the stairs to her as I have done for as long as I can remember. She calls back and shuffles into the shower in her dressing gown. I listen to the water gurgling down the pipes as she washes and smile with pleasure that she’s home for a few weeks.

We’ve arranged to meet them at the Neptune Café at 12.30 and they are waiting for us when we arrive. Tracey, the café’s owner, has placed an extra chair at the table set for four so that the five of us can sit together. Roo sits next to her Grandma on one side, my sister next to her toddler daughter on the other, and I sit in between my wonderful family of girls on the spare chair at the end of the table.

It’s two o’clock by the time we’ve finished eating and the sun is bright on our faces as we make our way back to my little house. Milky coffees with sugar, tea, cakes and biscuits accompany an afternoon of chatting and laughing. The dog is wary of the toddler, squashes himself next to my legs in an attempt to look invisible. My niece is inevitably drawn to him as a moth to a flame, and the two three year olds advance and retreat from each other in an elaborately choreographed inter-species quadrille. She climbs the stairs to use the bathroom and comes back down naked in the way of toddlers the world over. It takes bribery and fuzzy felts to make her put her clothes back on.

The sun is till shining when they leave and I sit outside smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of tea. Tomorrow will be my last day of leisure before starting my new job on Wednesday and I hope to spend it outside once more in a last day’s work in the garden before it’s ready for planting. I hope the sun will come out for me again whilst I do so. Whether or not it does I know I’ll enjoy the day.

A closet geek goes shopping

Being something of a closet geek (yes, I was the one in your class who actually liked maths), I always rather enjoy it when the newspapers run stories based on maths or statistics.

Sometimes such articles are predictably backwards-facing “in my day” types, written along the lines of ‘how much easier public examinations are now than…’ - the ‘than’ in question being whenever the author happened to be at school - and are often followed by an example from a recent exam paper so that you can test yourself. I have two Pavlovian responses to these features: to try out the test in question; and to disagree wholeheartedly with the writer. In my world view, any student who sits and passes a public examination deserves praise for the achievement regardless of the decade it took place in; whether or not the article’s author is a genuine card-carrying genius or still carrying the long-cold remains of a school days chip is a moot point.

The other kind of statistical newspaper feature that piques and quivers my maths geek antennae is one that attempts to compare how we live now with previous generations. There is no doubt that this comparison is a hard one to make and not least because things fluctuate in both actual and relative cost. It is also something that we have observed it in our own lifetimes. Just as a personal for instance, I can recall as an 8 year old buying a packet of crisps for 7p at the corner shop. When I bought a pack last week to go with my lunch, it was 54p. That’s close on an 8-fold increase in price over 32 years. But in personal real terms, the 7p packet of crisps in 1977 was a much larger proportion of my weekly disposable income (pocket money of 25p) than it is now. I might moan about my pay, but it’s certainly more than £4.32. Although admittedly, it doesn’t always feel like it, but that’s a different story…

Fortunately, the Office of National Statistics takes a somewhat more scientific approach to the concept than relying on memory and the pocket money of 8 year olds to make this calculation. In the spring of every year, the ONS takes a notional ‘shopping basket’ of 650 items to represent what the average British household spends in a month, and, using some fiendishly complex weighting and calculation, comes out with figures for the level of annual inflation – the Retail Prices Index (RPI) and the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) .

What’s interesting to me about this, though, is not so much the maths (admirable though that no doubt is) but the contents of the notional basket and what it says about us. For instance, when the RPI was first measured in 1914, the basket included candles, mangles, back-lacing corsets, tram fares and shirt collars. It’s probably fair to say that most people’s monthly shopping no longer includes most of these items, and so the ONS has to attempt to maintain a kind of consistency between the shopping baskets from year to year, adding or removing items to try to keep it representative of real life.

And the list of what gets added into the basket and what gets removed each year is fascinating stuff. This year saw the addition of rosé wine, hot rotisserie chicken and internet-based DVD rental subscriptions, whilst MP3 players and rentals from real-life DVD hire shops were removed. In came Freeview boxes and MP4 players. Out went wine boxes and shag pile carpets; in came hardwood flooring, Parmesan cheese, double cream and free-range eggs. Last year, CD singles and 35mm camera film joined tram fares and shirt collars in the great historical shopping basket in the sky.

Apart from the cheese, cream and free-range eggs, I have never bought any of these items. My shopping basket regularly brims over with candles, corsets and mangles though...

Rascally Robert and some honey from the bees

I welcomed this rainy, blowsy Saturday with good spirits and a proper decadent lie-in. Specifically, a few cigarettes, several cups of tea and a bowl of cereal taken sitting in bed with my laptop on my knee and the dog curled up the floor beside me. Bliss. But warm spirits not withstanding, winter has returned temporarily and when I left the house to meet my mother I wished I was wearing my dog walking hat.

I'd just about warmed up in the car by the time we picked up my sister and her little girl before travelling the short distance to Eastchurch for a public open day at Shurland Hall.

Shurland Hall gets its name from the De Shurland family who were granted the land and first built on it in the 12th Century. According to local legend, the 14th century Sir Robert De Shurland was a bad lot. Rich, arrogant and generally a thoroughly dislikeable man, he took the law into his own hands after a trivial falling out and killed a monk. Fearing retribution – divine or otherwise – the reprobate Sir Robert decided to ask the King for a pardon and the opportunity to do so presented itself when the King’s ship happened to be anchored nearby some time in the late 1320s.

Royal pardon granted, the rascally Sir Robert somehow got into an argument with a witch on the ride back home. She was furious with him, cursed him them and there, saying that his favourite horse, Grey Dolphin, would be the death of him. He laughed in her face and scoffed at her curse, but those were superstitious times and even the haughty Sir Robert was concerned. As soon as he got home he killed Grey Dolphin and cut off his head. There was no way, he thought, that a dead horse could be the cause of his demise.

Curse and pardon both long forgotten, Sir Robert was walking on the beach a year later when he tripped and fell over something on the shore, stabbing his foot as he did so and dying soon afterwards from blood poisoning. What had caused Sir Robert to stumble? Why, nothing other than the skull of the faithful and blameless Grey Dolphin of course.

Although probably not cursed, the current Shurland Hall has stood derelict for many years. This Hall was originally built a couple of hundred years after Sir Robert met his fate. It was constructed during the reign of Henry VIII and was visited by the King and his short-lived new bride, Anne Boleyn, during their honeymoon in 1532. 450 years later, my mother was a teacher at the nearby Eastchurch Primary School and I can remember my sister and me scrambling up the crumbling walls and climbing through the holes where the windows should have been when we were children. In fact the Hall was in such a poor state of repair that it has been on English Heritage’s “Buildings at Risk Register” for a long time.

Happily, the stunning house is in the process of being restored using traditional methods and materials, and it was fabulous to see the progress that’s been made. We climbed the beautiful oak spiral staircase right up onto the roof – complete with turrets – and were rewarded with magnificent views right around the tip of the island. Boy, was it breezy up there. The restoration project is well underway but still some distance from completion, and aspects of what we saw today (stacks of plaster board, joists, laths, sawdust, rolls of lead and such) reminded me of the work we carried out at the barn. I had wondered if the restored house was going to be lived in or run as a visitor attraction; I was delighted to find that Shurland Hall will return to domestic use and will be sold as a 5-bedroom house when the work is finished later this year. What a place to live that would be. I’d better start buying those lottery tickets…

After all of that climbing and general admiration of a wonderful piece of history that’s being restored to life, we were all feeling a bit peckish and decided to visit the nearby Flynn’s Bee Farm for some sustenance of a sweet kind. The farm itself not only produces honey but makes all kinds of hive-related health and beauty products for skin problems and such which it ships all over the world. We had a lovely cream tea in the tiny tea rooms and spent a happy hour or so browsing the crafts and wildlife-related stuff that was on show. I bought loads of things, needless to say, mostly edible and including a jar of authentic Sheppey honey. No bees around today at the bee farm though; they’re sensibly tucked up in their hives waiting for proper spring to return.


You can read more about the history of Shurland Hall here: http://www.eastchurchpc.kentparishes.gov.uk/default.cfm?pid=2886

Flynn’s Bee Farm – www.flynnsbeefarm.co.uk


The photograph of Shurland Hall was taken by Sherry Wildish

All the smalls things

Gentlemen, ladies of noble breeding and persons of a sensitive disposition, please look away now; I’m fresh out of smelling salts and really am not equipped with the appropriate manner to deal with attacks of the vapours or unscheduled swooning.

Just as civilisation is built on drains and wise men’s houses upon the rock, so is the comfort of the female of the species founded on undergarments. Pants, knickers, drawers, pantaloons, shorts, briefs, knickerbockers, skids, camiknickers, underwear, g-strings, silkies, French knickers, thongs, essentials, foundation garments, tangas, bikinis, hi-legs, hipsters, pantygirdles, unmentionables, bloomers, frillies, seamless, undies, lingerie, panties, fripperies, knick-knocks, smalls.

That there are so many words to describe such a small item just goes to underline how huge their importance is. Why, aside from gender-specific parts of the human physiology, I cannot think of many other individual things that have quite so many names. (Well, ok, it’s said that the Inuit peoples have 26 words for snow but that chilly climatic preoccupation is thoroughly understandable when living in the Arctic Circle.)

And of course we need so many words because there is no such thing as a standard pant. Colours, patterns, fabrics, the cut, the leg height, the waist height, the buttock girth, the holding-in-of-the-tum-ability, visible panty line considerations, communal changing area modesty… Essential variables one and all. Yes, choosing one’s undergarments is a serious business and not one to be done in a hurry or under undue influence of doughnuts.

Of these criteria, I personally find it to be the cut that’s the clincher. Or rather, careful selection can avoid one’s knick-knocks actually becoming the clincher if you get my drift. We may, as women, sometimes like to persuade ourselves that we are a little less, er, ample than we actually are, but it is a foolish woman indeed who deludes herself size-wise in the undergarment department. For that way doth trouser tugging and buttock pinching lie.

Although, gentlemen of tender years, do take heed (for it is not covered by the trade descriptions act nor any textbook that I have ever encountered); most women do not, and I repeat, do not habitually wear only flimsy pieces of lacy gossamer. Those are strictly for special occasions, most of us preferring solid cotton comfort on a daily basis. (Vis. Bridget Jones’s Diary; there was a reason why that film was so popular with women and it wasn’t just Mr Darcy.)

Just as it is said that one can never be too rich or too thin, I’d like to add that one can never have too many drawers. Not least as it’d mean I’d get one tick on that list. And so it was last night that I went to the giant 24-hour Tesco supermarket not far from my little house with a shopping list that included pineapple, dog food, cereal and pants. It still bemuses me that one can occasionally buy knickers in the same place as blue cheese, say, or mayonnaise. But I digress.

And there they were, a whole aisle full of them in all the colours of the spectrum and more besides. Patterned, plain, in individual pairs or multi-packs of five and encouragingly labelled in a euphemistically female-friendly fashion from XS to XL. Not only that, but they were doing a special offer of buy-two-pairs-get-one-free. How could I resist? Six pairs of knickers and two packs of pyjamas later, I staggered home with my pineapple and fed the dog.

And the only thing better than buying new pants? Wearing them. And so today, I am.

(Black and white patterned cotton, since you ask.)

And then there were none

Even under normal circumstances I’m not keen on making a big splash when I leave a job. I’m not saying it’s wrong to do so by any means; it’s just not my way. After all, under normal circumstances, you’ve taken a conscious decision to leave the job you’re in and move to another because for some reason the job you’ve got just doesn’t fit you properly any more. Under normal circumstances.

I guess redundancy is not really normal circumstances. That it might be common circumstances at the moment is certainly helpful and reassuring in the shoring-up of self-confidence dimension but otherwise - at an individual level - doesn’t really cut the mustard. I should say that I’m not remotely bothered about leaving this job; the only thing that had concerned me was finding another before my somewhat fragile finances fell down the gap in between like the TV remote control accidentally falling down the back of the sofa. You know you’ll find it again, just will it be quickly enough to catch the documentary you really want to watch before it turns into a cardboard soap opera.

But I have –luckily – found a new job that starts next week and have already shaken the dust from my feet of this one. So my reluctance to have any kind of leaving do was even more heightened than normal. Nevertheless people had asked me if we were having a final get together, and so a few weeks ago I’d invited our little team along for a lunch at the Tudor Rose pub in Sittingbourne. After all, it would give us all a chance to say goodbye to each other for the last time, and any excuse for a pub lunch is good to go as far as I’m concerned.

The first previously accepted apology came on Tuesday. A colleague would be elsewhere, in another part of the county, she said, and couldn’t cancel. Perhaps we could catch up another time? Of course, I said, yes, we’d catch up another time, gave her my personal number too, and know full well I’ll never hear from her again. It’s a polite end of work charade that suits all parties I’ve found and I’m happy to play it. The next apology was brought along by another colleague upon arriving at the pub. A washing machine problem, apparently, so he wouldn’t be able to join us lest the water ran into the flat below. And, added my news-bearing colleague with a flourish, he said his household insurance has just run out. My absent colleague does clearly not read as much detective fiction as me, otherwise he’d know the surest way to spot a fib is one that’s dressed up in a fur coat and diamonds and way too much detail. The final apology didn’t actually arrive at all; or rather the colleague who’d confirmed he was coming along just didn’t show up. Which is at least as blunt and as honest as one could wish for.

So in the end our final get together was four of us, sitting round a rectangular table in the large square conservatory at the back of the pub. One chose not to eat, electing instead to sip Diet Coke and watch as we three shovelled forkfuls of delicious pub grub and made conversation in between. As she stood up to go, another colleague also got to her feet pleading pressure of work, wished us well and put a tenner on the table for her food. The two of them left together, making telephone gestures with their hands and mouthing ‘keep in touch’ through the window as they walked to their cars.

The two of us looked at each other and asked for the bill, which we settled in cash and walked outside into the early afternoon sunshine. She starts her new job the day before me and we’ve grown quite close over these last few months. When she said she’d keep in touch, I have the feeling that she actually might. I watched her get into her car and drive off to collect her young children from her parents’ house.

I stood there for a moment longer in the car park, alone and smoking a cigarette, then I too got into my car and drove off. And then there really were none.

Digging up the past

The barn was around 200 years old when we bought it and already in an advanced state of decay. Sometimes during the long hard process of converting it into a house I’d stop and wonder what its original builders would have thought of the idea.

The barn had been built to house cattle; this much we knew from the large wooden manger that was still clinging on at one end of one of the gables. At some point, the full double height building had also been divided horizontally into two. We took a guess that the new upper level had been used to store grain in an attempt to make it just that little bit harder for the rats to get at it. The floor boards on the top storey were reinforced with iron strips to help deal with the loading. That part had worked, although the presence of deep and multi-generational rats’ nests in the walls confirmed that only rodents with vertigo had been deterred by the effort.

The long since abandoned rats’ nests and the manger were not the only signs of previous habitation. Tucked here and there behind rafters or floorboards were more human signs; rusty tobacco tins and ancient empty bottles, irregularly shaped of thick green tinted glass and with a marble caught in the throat, showed us where weary farm hands had taken their ginger beer and rested after a day’s hard labour. When we excavated the floors downstairs to cast a more stable concrete slab, we unearthed tens of thousands of shards of broken glass and hundreds of pieces of clay tobacco pipes.

Excavating the floors was the toughest job of the whole conversion in my mind. Because the rest of the still somewhat unsteady building was standing over our heads, it was much too risky to use machinery and so we dug by hand. For three months, night after night after night and illuminated by a harsh electric spotlight, we excavated the whole area down to the depth of more than one yard. It was exhausting work and carried out with no greater sophistication of tools than the original farm labourers would have used when they built the place more than two centuries before. Even on the coldest evenings of winter, the physical effort of digging the thick London clay would have sweat coursing down my face and dripping off the tip of my nose within minutes. It was much like going to some kind of intensive hard labour boot camp gym for hours every night; needless to say, we grew very strong and very fit.

Near the end of our digging and with the finishing line in sight, we made a remarkable discovery. What had seemed at first to be a piece of particularly stubborn buried brickwork turned out to be the remains of an ancient forge. We gradually and carefully unearthed what was left of the structure; some standing remains, complete with ashes, of a forge that long pre-dated the rest of the barn even. It was impossible to remove it from its centuries-old resting place, so when the time came to lay the sub-floor insulation and cast the new slab, we made sure that the forge was completely shielded from the liquid cement. Maybe one day, some time in the distant future, somebody else will come along and reveal it to the light once more.

I was out working in my little garden again today, clearing more rubble and digging through the soil to lower the ground levels and create a couple of raised beds. I didn’t unearth any real treasures, just a few rusty pieces of ironmongery, empty snail shells and hundreds of startled earthworms. One more day of digging perhaps and then I’ll be able to turn my attention to the nicer parts of gardening: making a gate, choosing plants and planting bulbs and seeds and such. Time enough for a treasure to turn up yet though, I guess.



This wonderful photograph of greenfinches was taken by John Mullin - just announced as this year's winner of the RSPB 'Big Garden Bird Watch' photographic competition.

Goodbye to all that

Some of the guidelines our parents issue us when we’re little don’t translate well to the adult world of work.

‘Don’t talk to strangers’, repeated sternly and mantra-like from the lips of our feverishly worried mother as she buttons up our straight-jacket itchy duffle coat and wipes our face with a damp and slightly smelly hankie as we prepare to embark on the perilous journey to the corner shop for a bag of penny chews, for example. It makes perfect sense in her adult-to-child paranoia transaction because it is logical and it will keep us safe from harm; our mother has forgotten that all adults look alike to our child’s eyes and that a stranger isn’t strange once he or she has smiled and said hello. Except for old Mr Smith of course who can’t smile any more because something happened after the war and whom we can’t help but find a little bit sinister in ways we don’t yet have the vocabulary for, but who isn’t in any event a proper stranger – although he certainly is strange – because he runs the corner shop with his portly wife who wears only stained beige cardigans…

Roll the time dice forward by a few decades or so and we might in fact find that we earn a good chunk of our monthly pay cheque precisely by our ability to talk to strangers and to talk strangers into things. Indeed, some of us might even earn our keep by talking to very strange strangers in close quarters and without the protective armoury of tightly-fitting winter outer wear or spit-cleansed faces.

“Respect your elders” is another one. It is perfectly right, proper, fitting and appropriate that our childhood should be passed in a slightly heightened state of free-floating anxiety lest we have accidentally omitted to call the lady whom we know to be Lillian by her given adult-to-child name of Mrs Jones. The terror that can be induced in us by inadvertently finding out the first name of one of our teachers at primary school and daring to say it out loud when we’re busting for the loo and can’t prise her attention away from the picture window is probably listed somewhere as a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Respecting one’s elders does work in the adult world too as a general rule, with the exception on some occasions of the workplace where the elders in question are behaving with all the logic of a hormone-crazed baboon set loose from a winter of solitary confinement into a compound of fecund and spring-ready fellow primates.

One saying, though, that I think holds good for both child and adult is to do with the weather. Specifically the observation that “March roars in like a lion and leaves like a lamb”. Imminent climate catastrophe not withstanding, this phrase is as true now as it was when I was little and counting the days until my Easter eggs arrived and I could stop giving up whatever it was that I’d given up for Lent encouraged by the peer pressure of Sunday School. (Probably chocolate at a rough guess)

I no longer give up chocolate for Lent (or go to Sunday School for that matter; being 40 and all I think I’d stand out a bit). But March as a month sure is changeable. The beach this morning was pure balaclava weather, forcing me to keep my lips tightly sealed to stop the freezing wind from setting off all of my dental nerves like a miniature in-mouth firework display of synaptic activity. Yet by the time I reached the office building, the sun was shining, the grass glowing with growth and the sky full of cawing rooks carrying singular twigs to their nests high in the bare tree tops.

It was not Easter either, but it was the end of my own personal Lent; for today was the final time that I shall set foot in that office building. My last remaining colleague and I met with our director and the chairman of our charity and went up to the café to have a cup of tea and a doughnut. We talked, we laughed, we got sugar over our fingers and around our lips and at last the pretence of the previous few months was over and we said our goodbyes. We embraced, we pecked each other on the cheek in that slightly clumsy British way and we wished each other well as we departed in our four directions.

In keeping with the nature of the month that draws soon to a close, I took one last look around our old office and slipped away quietly into history like a lamb.

Recycling propaganda for the credit crunch generation

Advertising and propaganda – two words to describe the same thing? Yes and no.

Both have the purpose of persuasion. Both wish to bring about a change in the behaviour of the viewer or listener. Both seek to inform and to provide information. Both convey a message in simple, memorable terms. Both aim to move the observer to a better place. Both convey one central message at a time.

Yes, both almost exactly the same in every way. The one and only major difference between advertising and propaganda as far as I can tell is this:

Advertising is for commercial purposes with a concrete outcome of some sort and requires the flow of money from us (the consumer) to them (the producer or seller) – buy this product or that service or use this facility or visit that location to meet ambition or need or desire or aspiration X,Y or Z. Propaganda by contrast has an ideological or political intention and does not ask us to pay with money; instead it makes its appeal directly to the heart or the soul and asks us to make the larger investment of aligning (or re-aligning) our belief systems. In that sense, propaganda is both more powerful and rather more abstract.

I’m not an especially political person but propaganda fascinates me. If you are able to step outside the ideological milieu that has produced the propaganda in question (and it is a big if I know) and look objectively at the message being conveyed I think you can uncover some of the most powerful use of words or imagery that our minds can produce.

At the mildest end of the propaganda spectrum perhaps lies public information, short pithy messages that are provided for our own benefit.

Eat less salt. Smoking kills. Don’t drink and drive. Think once, think, twice, think bike. Stop, look and listen. Clunk click every trip. Go to work on an egg. Know your limits.

There’s certainly a fine line for any government between promoting, say, public health and being considered to be a busy body no fun know it all. I was standing waiting to cross a busy road a couple of years ago when three double decker buses drove past me. On the side of each one was a different public information message. It was almost enough to make me rush out and eat as much salt as I possibly could whilst washing it down with vats of white rum and smoking fistfuls of cigarettes. But I digress.

At the other end of the propaganda spectrum is the purely political or ideological message. The medium (a picture or photograph, say) might be simple; the message behind it is anything but. If we retain our objectivity as a viewer, we are able to recognise and admire, for example, the raw and powerful imagery of propaganda posters from Soviet era Russia; recognising the artistry does not require us to align ourselves with that ideology if we remain objective. In the same way, if we retain our objective eyes we can observe and identify the purpose behind the specific selection of the photograph of a modern-day adversary that is being used as the backdrop to coverage of a conflict on our own television news broadcasts.

For obvious reasons, wars and conflicts act to generate the most powerful propaganda of this kind. The Imperial war Museum in London has a wonderful collection of war time posters and postcards and I bought half a dozen or so on my most recent visit there last year. But examples do turn up in all sorts of places.

A few years ago, Stuart and Mary Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland came across a WWII poster neatly folder inside a large box of dusty old books that they’d bought at auction. They liked it so much they had it framed and mounted it in the window of their second hand book shop. It quickly caught the attention of customers and passers by so they decided to do some research into the poster’s origins. They found that the poster had been designed as the third in a set of three back in the spring on 1939, but had been intended to be publicly distributed only in the event of crisis or invasion. As this never happened the poster was never distributed and had remained unseen for fifty years until the random copy turned up in that box of old books.

The popularity of Stuart and Mary’s poster led them to print and sell facsimile editions of it, and that’s how I came across the story in the newspaper the other day. It’s a great poster and a wonderful piece of British wartime propaganda. But I also felt it had a good deal of resonance right now, albeit in a different way, seventy years after the event. So I ordered a copy and it arrived this morning. I shall have it framed and hang it on my wall.

I guess it’s truly a piece of propaganda fit for the credit crunch generation.

If you want to buy your own copy, here’s the link to Barter Books: http://www.barterbooks.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=32036. There is also much more information about the poster on their website if you’re interested.

Not quite 10:15 Saturday Night

If I said “7 o’clock, Saturday night” to you in a slightly longer-winded version of the perennial deep-and-meaningless-but-great-fun word association game, what would leap to your mind?

Let me take a wild guess that “browsing the generous selection of reduced price oven-ready meals in the chiller aisle of the Co-op in Sheerness High Street” would not be the phrase that fell first from your lips. Or probably even fifty third. Or one hundred and twelfth for that matter.

I’d arrived back home around 6 feeling peckish and a little tired having spent the day at the third instalment of my yoga foundation course. The course is run at a school hall in Sandwich, about 50 miles from here. It’s an ancient and pretty little seaside town in itself, although I feel its postcard appeal is somewhat diminished by the presence of three giant grey concrete cooling towers and the mega chemical works that festers and bubbles just a heartbeat away from the high street. It's also a place I can never quite get my bearings of. I always manage to find my way into Sandwich without a hitch; it’s the getting back out again that’s the rub. I have a suspicion that the seemingly benign inhabitants move the roads around whilst we’re OM-ing and stretching away in the school hall; in any event, even on this - my fourth - visit I still managed to find yet another unfamiliar route home without even trying.

And so it was that I was standing there in the Co-op, tummy rumbling and a little weary after a day of yoga and driving, weighing up the pros and cons of discounted cottage pie against spinach and ricotta cannelloni, when I was accosted by a tall fair haired gentleman about my age.
“Hello Katy!” he grinningly bellowed from four feet away, before proceeding to examine the contents of my basket with great scrutiny. His hand alighted upon a small packet of baby new potatoes, which he frowningly picked up out of my basket and held up at shoulder height.
“You see these potatoes? You could have bought a packet like this for the same price.” he said, grabbing a larger pack of spuds from his own basket and holding the two bags up together so that I could truly appreciate the difference in size. “Bigger bag, you see, but the same price; better value.”
“Oh. I, err…”
“Great to see you Katy!” he smiled, walking off for two paces before spinning round and kissing the palms of both his hands, blowing the kisses at me, shouting “Love you! Love you!” and disappearing around the two-for-one price promotion on cat food at the top of the aisle.

I have no idea who the chap was, but, I reflected to myself on the walk home, it’s never a bad thing to have a handsome(ish) mystery admirer. And it’s even better to know that I’m not the only forty year old who was spending their Saturday evening shopping in the Co-op.



Post script: The occasional pedestrian-slash-domestic Saturday night is not solely the preserve of those living in Sheerness it would seem. The Cure even wrote a song about it: 10:15 Saturday Night was the opening track on their 1979 debut album Three Imaginary Boys. If you’re not a Cure aficionado, here’s the first verse to prove that I’m not making it up…

10.15
Saturday night
And the tap drips
under the strip light
And i'm sitting
in the kitchen sink
And the tap drips
drip drip drip drip drip drip drip...

Garden well

I was surprised at the weight of the ashes.

The funeral parlour had given them to me in an understated but nevertheless attractive cardboard purple bag with lilac swirls and matching silk cord handles. The canister itself was inside a further maroon plastic bag and, as I peeped in surreptitiously in the checkout queue at the Co-op, I was thankful for their discretion. After all, it's quite possible that some shoppers might have been put off by the thought of standing next to the cremated remains of my deceased great uncle as they paid for their packets of cheese and tea and milk and eggs.

By the time my late uncle and I arrived home the silk cord handles were digging into my palm and I was glad to put the bag containing his ashes down. The previous day, the funeral parlour had called my mother to ask her to come and pick Roy up. If she preferred not to, they said, no problem; he could be taken with the other uncollected remains and laid to rest in a communal grave. She in her turn had phoned me and now here we were, back in the little house by the seaside where Roy had moved with his own mother in 1940 and I had gratefully moved with Roo a month or so previously after the ex and I split up.

Uncles Roy's mother had died in 1966, a few months short of my own mother's wedding, and I knew that mum had always been very sad that her beloved Grandma wasn't able to be there in person to see her get married. Roy himself had continued to live in the house, alone, until he died in April 2004. Three and a half years after his death he was back in the house, but this time with me, the dog and a teenager for company.

I didn't really know what to do with the ashes, truth be told. I put them on the kitchen worktop, made a cup of tea and stood outside in the late summer sunshine pondering the question and having a smoke. Roy had loved this house, had lived here since he was twenty years old until time and illness caught up with him and carried him off at 84. A lifelong cricket devotee and one time top class umpire, he'd have smiled in his reticent way and declared that wasn't such a bad innings.

He'd have laughed with joy too at being back at the house again. He'd never wanted to leave it, always resisted the kindly-meant persuasion of health care professionals when they'd tried to convince him to relocate to a retirement flat or, later, a nursing home. Roy had been ill for a long time when he died, perhaps 14 or 15 years, but he always said no and they always went away frowning and puzzled at his refusal of their offer. They didn't know him well, didn't know that he, like the liking of olives or blue cheese, had never really acquired a taste for the company of others.

A few cups of tea and several cigarettes later I placed the urn of ashes in a little space on the floor beneath the boiler and to the left of the sink in the kitchen. And there they have remained, still in their handsome purple bag, for the last eighteen months. Until today.

I had decided some time back that, in keeping with Uncle Roy's wishes never to leave his little house by the seaside, I'd bury the urn and the ashes in the back garden. The house was built before running water on tap was a standard feature of the homes of working people and as such came complete with a well in the back garden. My mother, who spent some of her childhood living here, can just about remember when the well was still in use, although more as a novelty to amuse a child in the early 1950s than as a necessity.

At some point the well in the yard had been capped off. When I was renovating the house prior to moving in back in August of 2007, I'd uncovered the well. I'd always known it was there but had never actually seen it before. I'd removed and discarded the ill-fitting cover, leaving a round hole in the ground perhaps eighteen inches in diameter and the same in depth to the top of the concrete capping. Other than the dog losing his rubber bone and tennis ball in the hole on any number of occasions, the partly uncovered well had not caused any problems. And now it also provided a solution.

I'd put aside today for garden renovation and my first job was to set Uncle Roy to rest in a slightly more fitting place than under the sink next to the dog's bowl. I cleared debris and a few fallen bricks out of the well, levelled off the surface, and placed the urn inside. It was the first time too that I'd taken the urn of ashes right out of the funeral parlour bag. I was surprised to see it was maroon, made of plastic with a screw on lid, and with an ornate label on the front giving Roy's name and the date of his cremation - 7th April 2004. Almost five years to the day.

I carried buckets full of top soil from the end of the garden and filled the well right up until it was almost level with the rest of the yard. I raked it off smooth when I'd finished and sat down on the doorstep next to the well to have a cup of tea and a smoke. I'm going to buy a plant to go on top, perhaps a rose bush or a low-growing shrub or something of that kind. But I'm going to wait a week or so until the earth has settled in case I need to add more soil.

I don't think Uncle Roy will mind waiting for a bit; he's not going to leave his beloved little house again in any event.

Storm in a brain cup

Trigger Thumb and White Finger are the central protagonists in the post-modern spaghetti western script I’m writing in which my main characters are loosely connected by the theme of repetitive stress injury and puzzle addiction.

One young, handsome and idealistic, the other older, wrinkled and a little sardonic, the unlikely duo are drawn together by their shared secret love for sudoku and their dislike of ball sports and being called mate by people they loathe. Initially reticent to approach each other because of the rigorously observed hierarchy prevalent in the milieu of the works canteen, circumstances throw them together one evening when they independently volunteer for an overtime shift that takes place during the third round group match for the World Cup.

As the night progresses, initial stilted talk of wives and girlfriends and reality TV shows soon gives way to a little light joint crossword solving as they start to test the common ground that lies between them. By the time the first orange streaks of sunlight appear in the sky, the camera pans back to reveal our two heroes snoring gently with a folded newspaper on the table between them. Accompanied by the sounds of the dawn chorus and the clink of bottles from the whirring electric milk float outside, the shot closes in to reveal half full mugs of cold tea and a completed ‘fiendish’ sudoku grid.

Personally, I think it’s got legs as a premise.

And it’s also part of my investigation into the question that’s bugging me at the moment: can a brain suffer from repetitive stress injury? Sure, I know that repeated physical actions (like typing or using a pneumatic drill) can lead to RSI and all of its unpleasant associated symptoms – pain, tingling, numbness, random loss of sensation. But can the same thing happen to a brain, what with it not really moving about much and all?

I ask this because I think my brain’s got RSI. Unlike my artfully created and not at all stereotyped protagonists, I make no secret of the fact that I like doing puzzles. Call me a sad geek if you like (no, please do if you feel the need – I really can’t hear you) but there’s something intrinsically satisfying about pitting my wits against an unknown combatant, especially when it comes in grid form. It started off innocently enough - as all addictions do - with word search puzzles when I was a child. From there, I graduated to number search and onto straight crosswords, code breakers, ‘skeletons’, quiz words, track words, and cryptic crosswords. For many years I thought that mind-bending logic puzzles represented my personal puzzle nirvana.

And then along came sudoku. Oh how I love thee. (Especially, it has to be said, the interactive online versions). If I’m feeling stressed, frazzled or in any way discombobulated, I can lose myself for hours playing game after game after game until my eyes throb. Something about narrowing down one’s world view until it’s just your brain, your eyes, a little 81 square grid and the numbers 1 to 9 soothes my restless soul and frees my mind.

Which is all well and good until you start dreaming about them. I close my eyes and the grid’s there, pristine and inviting me in with its perfect black and white symmetry. My mind’s even started inventing a new version with letters rather than numbers. I found this occupying my conscious brain today when my body was actually attending a rather grave and poker-faced work meeting. I’m pretty sure I got away with it though, my colleagues no doubt assuming that my frowns and grimaces were connected with what we were discussing. Nothing of the sort; I was tussling with how one might locate a collection of intersecting nine letter words without a tedious trudge through my rather battered dictionary.

Sudoku addiction? RSI of the brain? Or ground breaking research into the creation of new 81 letter puzzles? Hmmm, let me ponder that over a cup of tea and just a quick little peep at an online sudoku. Just the one. I promise I’ll be right back…

The evolution of procrastination

If multi-tasking is considered to be the modern-day specialism of the female of the species, then I guess that spatial orientation – the ability to see and manipulate things in 3 dimensions – is typically the preserve of the male.

Received wisdom suggests that this trait came about because men were the hunter-gatherers back in Stone Age times. If starvation was the price paid for being a lousy shot with a sling or spear, say, or for setting up your trap the wrong way round, then it would make sense. And so it follows from that particular line of enquiry that men ran about all day waving sticks and clubs, hiding from each other and making a lot of noise whilst women stayed behind back at the cave ranch, looking after the children, boiling up bones and assembling attractive throws made of woolly mammoth hides. Thus one also sees the evolutionary importance of soft furnishings.

But there must, even then, have been men and women who defied their pre-ordained gender roles. Men who were, for instance, much better with children, mushroom collecting and stew-making than they were with sabre-toothed tiger hunting and trap setting. I’d bet, too, that some girls and women went out on the hunt and flung their spears with as much accuracy and beat their bosoms with as much glee as their men folk.

I think that because I’ve come to the conclusion that my distant female Stone Age relations were spear slingers and not stew stirrers. (This is not to say that I’m any good whatsoever at throwing things because I’m not; just ask the dog where his ball or stick lands up when I chuck it for him. I am quite a good shot with a rifle though, come to think of it; if we’re at a fairground, I’m the one to ask to win you that giant green plush stuffed dolphin with luminous pink eyes). My (some might say flimsy) evidence for this?

a) I’m dust, grime and other domestic chores blind
b) I’m good at seeing stuff in 3-D

The ability to see things as they could be and not as they actually were was certainly an asset when it came to converting the pile of rotten tumble-down old sticks that the barn was when we first bought it. I had no problem at all in visualising room divisions, stair cases, kitchens, bathrooms, plumbing, drains and all the rest when there was nothing more to it than a few mouldy old rafters and a hundred heaps of rats’ nests. It was also an asset when we were trying to solve ways of tackling some of the construction work without the whole lot crashing down on our heads.

But there is a downside I have found to this spatial awareness lark; because I can visualise something as it could be, my brain leaps to the conclusion that that is how it is already. And thus my garden (ok, yard – it’s tiny) in my mind’s eye is a blossoming, blooming, buzzing, chirping place full of flowers, fruits, shrubs, miniature trees, tasteful shaded seating arrangements and colourful pots of good things. When in actual fact it looks more like a piece of derelict waste ground that just happens to be outside my back door and surrounded by a dog-proof fence.

I know in reality that just thinking about how it could be is useful; but it’s not really quite as useful as actually picking up a spade and rake and getting on with it, is it? One can only assume that the trait of procrastination must come as a buy-one-get-one-free side order to the whole 3-D seeing spear slinging gene. So can I say, just for the record, that on Friday – yes, this Friday – I am going to devote the whole day to digging in and getting started with the renovation of the back garden.

You have my permission to fling a spear at me if I don’t, ok?


Talking of procrastination...

My sister sent me this photo of Roo (on the right) and I from her mobile phone to put on my blog page. It was taken at my sister's house just before Roo went back to university in January this year.

Census and sensibility

The first major national census in Britain was carried out in 1841* (although there are a few that were taken here and there and survive in isolation earlier than that) and they have been taken every ten years since with the exception of 1941 during WWII. Census data itself is considered ‘classified’ by the Public Records Office; general access to the information is only allowed 100 years after the date of the census.

When it’s taken in two years time, the 2011 Census will be the fifth in which I have a mention. It will also be the third one that I can actively remember and the second in which – if nothing changes between now and then – I’ll be listed as ‘head of household’. Scary thoughts.

Now I’m really no historian of any sort whatsoever, so quite why I started thinking about the census I don’t know. Maybe what triggered it off was thinking about my little house by the seaside. It was built around the mid 1880s-early 1890s, one in a little terrace row of which seven still remain. I had a quick peep at the online records of the 1891 and 1901 census; the house has been built by the time of the former but was seemingly unoccupied on census day itself, something that had changed next time round ten years later.

It could have been that, yes. Or it could have been thinking about how we seem, as a species, to love to collect and classify data of all kinds. From counting bricks and mortar, bees and cows, fields and flowers and forests, to labelling people as this type or as a member of that group or of whatever inclination; with this set of personality attributes, that range of traits or of XYZ level of attainment or intellect, and so on.

But whether it’s concrete or abstract in nature, officially sanctioned or individually conjured, consciously or unconsciously collected, at a personal level we tend to use the data for one main purpose: to work out where and what we are in comparison to others and in the process to find out who we are. This constant process of comparing and analysing may act as a reassurance and a buffer, or perhaps as a motivation and a spur; maybe occasionally, for some, it makes us feel down, inadequate or depressed. In any event it provides us with an anchor of a kind, a root of some sort in our community – whatever and wherever and however fluid that community may be. Fundamentally, it helps us to answer the question “who am I?”

By the time we reach adulthood, we assume that our personalities, tastes, attributes, whatever, are fixed somehow. Or again, at least I did. But in this last year or two I observe in myself some distinct shifts and reworkings. Some – like my change from being logic-driven to emotionally propelled – I have mentioned before. Others, like discovering a hitherto non-existent sweet tooth – and the intense sugar cravings it brings with it – are just plain amusing to observe.

Over the weekend, I had cause to think of these things prompted by a previously unknown (to me) reaction to something that happened in a social situation. Subsequently, I think I may be in the midst of carrying out my own personal census survey without realising it. I may report back on my findings at a later date but perhaps - I hope - a little bit sooner than 100 years from now.



*Of course, there are other types of records that go back much further than the national census. Town and Parish records of births, marriages and deaths; land, agricultural and livestock surveys; records collected for tax purposes, including at one time the number of windows a property had; and a hundred and one other ways of attempting to record, collate and generally analyse the population, its assets and its doings. I’m sure this has probably gone on for as long as people have lived in settled groups or communities of one kind or another.

The famous Doomsday Book was commissioned in 1085 by William the Conqueror following his invasion of England in 1066. The first draft (1086) contained records for nearly 13,500 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time). It contains records of landowners, their tenants, the numbers of villagers, smallholders, freemen and slaves that lived on their land, details about woodlands, meadows, animals, buildings, churches, castles and mills. Some entries even make reference to land disputes and dues that had to be paid to the king.

Coffee morning

Maggie and I share a birthday, early December, two Christmas babies. This amuses her no end and she reminds me of it each time I see her. She did this morning as I joined my mother and little niece for the monthly coffee morning in the church hall, turning round to me and asking me if I knew she’d be 80 next year.

She doesn’t look it. Or perhaps more accurately, she does look it but she doesn’t act it, retaining as she does an infectious sense of joie de vivre and a set of sparkling mischievous eyes that I suspect have been her life long companions. We fell to chatting of this and that and nothing over home made bread pudding and strong tea served in mismatching mugs. Behind us on the wall hung a poster and a range of church notices. One of them was a photograph of a group of children and young people from a school in Kenya whom the small congregation support through their fundraising efforts.

It tickled me enormously to see that a couple of tall and gangly boys at the back of the group were holding up a hand made paper banner that said ‘Thank you Sheerness Methodist Church.’ It’s hard to imagine two places further removed from each other than these, and yet in spite of the distance and a multitude of differences – from language to lifestyle and everything in between – the two groups have forged a connection that enriches the lives of both. We were talking about the Kenyan project when I spotted Irene come into the hall. Dressed in a green anorak and matching headscarf and pushing a large tartan shopping trolley, Irene’s tiny frame was swamped in the confusion of fabrics as she made her way over to us.

Irene was clearly upset when she sat down. Her shaky hands poured three sachets of sugar into her cup and some of the tea slopped into the saucer as she stirred with a spoon and much agitation. As she took a few sips from her cup and her heartbeat steadied, I looked at Irene’s face. Her eyes were red rimmed and misty yellow, the skin on her cheeks flecked with pigment and drawn down to the bone beneath, her lips pale and slightly purple tinted. At last she took a breath. “I couldn’t find this place. Oh it’s so hard to find isn’t it? Why have they moved here?”

I have known Irene for many years. She was one of my Grandmother’s close friends and I remember how I looked forward to her regular visits to Gran’s house, with her husband Howard, because she particularly liked caramel wafer biscuits. Gran would buy them specially and I’d help her to arrange them with the custard creams, bourbons, shortbread fingers and jammy dodgers on a plate covered with a paper doyley. The neat foil wrappers of the rectangular caramel wafers shone brightly next to the beige and brown crumbliness of the others on the white oval plate. In the contrary way of a child, I never especially cared for the taste of the caramel wafers but I loved their glamour. I loved Irene’s glamour too, since she wore gold earrings and her hair swept up into a neat chignon clasped with an exotic clip.

Howard was a quiet man as I recall, already in his late 50s or early 60s by the time he floated into my consciousness. He and Irene would come up to my Grandparents’ house every Tuesday evening. Whilst Gran and Irene sat and chatted and watched the television in the living room, Granddad and Howard would sit at the dining room table and play games. Scrabble, ultra-competitive and strict in its scoring and played in silence except for the clack of the tiles in the green letters bag, would cede to the gentler games of cribbage or mah-jong when I joined them at the table.

Granddad and Howard both died in the early 1980s and Gran a couple of years ago at the age of 89. Irene, a little younger than them at 82, has terrible problems with her short-term memory and it distresses her a great deal. I don’t see her often and hadn’t realised quite how bad the problem was until she said that she couldn’t find the church hall, a location that she must have passed literally thousands of times in the decades that she’s lived here.

It feels particularly poignant that Irene’s aware of her loss. I’d – wrongly as it turns out – assumed that the tragedy of memory loss was shielded from its unwilling host by the discrete veil of forgetfulness and the brain’s theft of its own ability to reflect inward on itself. You always hope that, should you live to see 80, that you’ll be like Maggie - still full of life, still reciting humorous poetry from memory, still baking cakes, still taking holidays, and still raring to make the most of every day. Like our own birthday date, I guess its something that we don’t have a choice about.

Utilities Friday

I woke enthused with that Friday feeling and sufficiently demented by the sound of continual dripping and gurgling from the bathroom to propel me into a pyjama-clad investigation of the toilet cistern. This of course meant that I first had to clear away everyday essentials from the lid, including a collection of rather attractive seashells, three odd earrings and a partly completed ‘buy 6 coffees get one free’ offer ticket from McDonalds.

The cistern lid was also, I have to confess, rather dusty. In general, I like to think that the thin layer of dust acts as a kind of secondary defence mechanism against intrusion by burglars. Should a ne’er-do-well manage to slip past the dog by the cunning distractive application of a fine rump steak, his incriminating traces would in any event be captured if he were to foolishly place his hand upon almost any surface. Including, as it turns out, in the bathroom. Although how dust manages to accumulate in a tiny room the size of a rug is a mystery beyond my comprehension.

I am not entirely un-used to the secret inner workings of the low-level flush having been party to the installation of several loos when the ex and I were converting the barn. However, I had not previously investigated this one and so removed the white ceramic lid with great care as one might conduct an experiment with radioactive rods in the confines of a miniature nuclear reactor; you don’t think anything will go wrong if you drop it, but probably best not to risk it lest you disappear into a great melt-down hole of your own creation and pop out wearing rubber gloves and looking startled somewhere in China.

The problem I could see at once. The one-armed floating ball-cock was not rising quite high enough after completion of the flushing cycle to shut off the in-coming water valve. The net result of which was both a continual thin trickle of water into the toilet bowl and the generation of a seed of homicidal lunacy in my brain as it failed to shut out the dripping sound. Lifting up the ball-cock did the trick in terms of stopping the trickle, but I didn’t feel that standing holding it was really a satisfactory answer to either a) how to spend the rest of my life, or b) how to actually fix the problem.

Closer inspection of the valve itself revealed a number of small white plastic screws and nuts. I tightened, I loosened, took one off and put it back again and generally fiddled around until – lo! – there was silence. Water trickled no more. Even when I flushed it three times just to check I wasn’t delusional. Even when I flushed it again, now dressed an hour later, the toilet regained a dignified and reverent hush upon completion of its necessary ablutions.

I was working (in the loosest sense of that word) at my computer a bit later when, with a small pinging sound, the whole thing shut down. The CD-ROM drawer had been spontaneously sliding in and out of the tower unit at random intervals for a few months and so at first I thought that the pc had departed to the great motherboard in the sky. But the disappearance of the green digits from the oven clock and the silence of the washing machine persuaded me that this was, in fact, a good old fashioned power cut.

The electricity was still off a couple of hours later as I walked into the high street to meet my mother for lunch at the Neptune Café. I was feeling peckish and a little bit worried that the power failure would mean the café was closed. Peering through the window from the pavement outside, the café appeared completely dark. But the door opened to my touch and I was greeted by warmth, the chatter of conversation and the smell of good home cooking.

After a morning of trouble with water and electricity, I was relieved to find that the Neptune Café was indeed cooking on gas, even if we dined in the dark.

Grandma is Gaga

A secret vice of mine is the occasional foray into reading about celebrity life. Who’s married to who, who’s divorcing who, who’s starring in this or that forthcoming film, who’s feuding with whom after being pictured wearing the same dress or holding hands with the same man, who’s checking into* rehab for this or that or other life-threatening or envy-inducing addiction.

Call it an antidote to my otherwise fairly impeccable left-on Guardian-reading credentials if you like. Or maybe I just like looking at pictures of Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey. Either way, quite what the fascination with celebrities is I cannot tell you for sure, although I can make a few stab-in-the-dark guesses. Escapism for one. Don’t we all, just sometimes, dream of a life where we are set loose from the shackles of crust-earning and free to roam when and where (and with whomsoever) the fancy takes us? Attraction for another. Not all celebrities are beautiful and glamorous in the traditional sense of that word (step up there again, Mr divinely-appealing-but-not-actually-really-handsome-as-such Spacey) but many of them possess an indefinable yet palpable charisma to the extent that it leaps out of the page or screen and into our collective cortex. Sartorial sensationalism for a third. A non-stop carnival of frocks, shoes, skirts, shirts, suits, handbags and hats to envy or scorn is never wrong.

I do also appreciate that celebrities are there to entertain us in whatever shape or form is their chosen milieu. Whether that talent is demonstrated by the ability to conjure heart squeezing emotion from us by the portrayal of a finely wrought character on the big screen or by the flashing of gussets and silicone-enhanced assets falling out of night clubs is perhaps only a means whereby we keep a running quality control tally. But entertaining us through giving their children ridiculous names seems to bring fresh new meaning to the old expression “life as art”. Especially as they’re not all primarily known as comedians. Why celebrities think it’s a Good Idea to call their children things like Gorgonzola Albert Sugar Plum is anybody’s guess. (Or Gasp to his friends).

To be fair on this score, it’s not just celebrities that burden their offspring with ridiculous names. Playgrounds, offices and workplaces the world over are, I suspect, populated with more than their complement of Geek Boys, Big Noses, Einsteins, Dopeys and Lightenings, nicknames bestowed with a kind of love upon the deserving, disarming or plain incompetently adorable. Affectionate pet names originate and are nurtured in the home too, sometimes following the bearer into nursery, school and beyond.

My own daughter, Rhona, is primarily known to herself and others by her nickname Roo. The genesis of this tallies almost completely with her arrival upon the air-breathing realm when visitors to my maternity hospital bed brought the newborn and I a present of two home-made knitted stuffed toys – Kanger and Roo from Winnie the Pooh. Katy and Rhona, Kanger and Roo? It stuck, for her anyway if not me, and Roo she is to most of the world. As Roo learned to speak, her childish tongue found Mummy with no problem but couldn’t quite get to grips with pronouncing the name of her wonderful Grandma. It came out, quite literally and to the great amusement of us all, as Gaga.

And Gaga does Grandma remain, even if by some time-travelling sleight of hand the Roo herself will be twenty next month.


*Small semantics aside – besides aeroplanes and ferry terminals, what else do people “check into” apart from rehab?

Bees beside the seaside

If you come out of the front door of my little house by the seaside and turn right you will find yourself walking down a narrow road with an avenue of trees on either side.

I can remember when this was a through-road, but at some point when I was living away it was cut into two unequal segments by the placing of some bollards. The four posts are slim and handsomely shaped cast iron, as if on a quay side but painted bright blue, and they march in single file from one side to the other. The span between is enough to let a bicycle, motorbike, pushchair or supermarket trolley pass but no larger vehicle than that. So the road is a quiet one, with nothing on the north side except a strip of parkland hemmed by ancient hedgerows and only the sea beyond.

Skeletal and dormant at the moment, the avenue of lime trees throbs with life for the warmer six or so months of the year. Their brilliant green leaves are large and felty, perhaps the size of a man’s hand, and an imperceptible unguent oozes from them leaving any cars parked beneath covered in a sticky film. Sparrows and doves and pigeons and starlings squabble with magpies, crows and three types of gull for foraging rights, food scraps and larvae and the chance to dine on a thousand and one kinds of flying, creeping and crawling insects.

When I first moved here some nineteen months ago I was overwhelmed with delight to find a colony of bees living underground in the loam on the slope outside my front window. They are a bumblebee species of some kind, but small and beige-ish brown, not the big bright black and yellow striped sort of children’s books. I uncovered them – literally – quite by chance whilst raking away debris that had accumulated during the years the house had stood empty. An angry squadron streamed up from the ground, intent on chasing away whatever unwelcome vandal had torn the roof from their home. I stood back, absolutely motionless, rake still in hand, watching them as they swirled and massed above the ground for twenty minutes or more. Once satisfied that the danger had passed, they one by one returned to their underground bunker until buried invisibility shielded them once more.

I didn’t tell anybody the bees were there, afraid that someone pleading sting allergy or some other latter-day intolerance would ring the council to have the nest destroyed. Their secret home outside my own seaside sanctuary lay safe and undisturbed and I watched them all that summer until late autumn came and the colony fell silent. I was very sad when they didn’t return last year. Maybe this spring will bring the bees back again.

At the far end of the road and hard up against the sea wall is the town’s sports’ centre and I went there this evening for my yoga class. Warm and loose after an hour of stretching, it was dark by the time I made my way back down the dimly lit road to my home. A group of teenage boys were gathered around the bottom of one of the lime trees, one of their companions having climbed up into the branches. They were peering on tip toe over the rear wall of one of the houses of a small row that backs onto the road, using the feeble lights from the screens of their mobile phones as torches.
“Sshhh! Don’t tell anyone!” the boy in the tree top called, seeing me walk past.
“Why? What’s up?” I threw back, sensing their good spirits even in the dark. At that moment, another boy popped up from behind the wall, grinning, and jumped down into the road beside his friends who greeted him with great jubilation.
“His mum locked him in and threw his keys in the sea!”

I laughed with them and continued on my way, smiling to myself. I thought it might spoil the party to ask how he was going to get back into his home later.

Sunday Sunday

A gentle, soft Sunday spent daydreaming and napping.

Outside, the weather coin flipped from spring time to winter and back, blasting my windows with sleet one minute and sunshine the next. Inside, I made crispy grilled bacon and brie sandwiches and ate them at my desk reading yesterday’s newspaper.

Last night I deleted my ex’s phone number from my mobile and his e-mail address from my computer. Symbolic gestures both – there’ll need to be some sort of on-going communication, however sporadic, all the time we still jointly own the barn. But sometimes these small gestures make you feel good. And feel good I do, relieved and elated and deeply calm and content in my soul. That chapter of my life really has closed at last. It has taken a long time.

My Gran always made the Christmas pudding just as the summer holidays were drawing to a close. We’d gather at her house, take turns in stirring the thick mixture in a huge beige ceramic glazed bowl and under urgent strict instruction to make a wish whilst we did so. It puzzled me that she prepared it so far in advance of the big day itself. The days were still long and hot, the sounds of holiday makers and ice cream vans still drifting in from the beach through the open windows, Christmas still a long way off in the future. Gran knew that the pudding needed to sleep during those three or four months, that the ingredients needed to seep and mingle and marinate and mature to marry together their disparate flavours and textures until December came knocking with dark cold fingers once more.

Gran would be up before first light on Christmas morning, taking the pudding from its autumn resting place and placing it inside a giant cast iron cauldron. It would bubble and boil and steam away on the hob, wrapped in white linen and tied round with string. When the last of the plates of turkey and stuffing and Brussels sprouts had been borne away I’d go with her into the kitchen. We’d switch off the gas and carefully lift the bundle through billows of steam onto the kitchen worktop. Snip away the string, pull away the wrappings and turn out the pudding, fresh and glistening and hot, onto a special plate used only for the purpose. Pierce the top with a sprig of wild holly and drench the whole lot in brandy from a squat green bottle with a gold label. Turn the lights off, strike a match to the pudding and bear it through to expectant faces, lit up now with eerie light from the blue brandy flames. It was (and is) my favourite part of Christmas.

Last night I also started work on my book. It had been brewing for some time – a long time – and the words spilled out of my head, thousands and thousands of them. Like the Christmas pudding, I knew it would come when it was ready; there are some things that you just can’t hurry.

The duster always rings twice

There comes a moment in every woman’s life when she just has to get on and do what has to be got on and done.

Marriage. Divorce. Getting together. Splitting up. Motherhood. Partnership. Education. Career. Training. Adventure. Exploring. Learning. Romance. Love.

And then there’s housework. A juxtaposition of two of our favourite words combined into the defining attribute of the seventh ring of hell. Heck, throw in some badly tuned not-quite-inaudible lift music along with the dusters and Lucifer himself would be hot-trotting it to somewhere that the sweet little birds fly free.

My good friend Liz once described me as ‘domestically disabled’. In writing. More specifically, in writing on my personal profile on the occasion of my frankly disastrous and short-sighted foray into online dating. I was a little bit hurt. Not about the dating - concerning which I was truthfully neither here nor there – but about the slur on my femininity. That wound gaped deeply for about as long as it took me to, oh, light a cigarette and accidentally drop ash on the carpet.

Liz is, of course, quite correct in her assessment. If I won the lottery tonight and never had to do a day’s paid work again for as long as I lived, there’d still never be quite the right moment to plug in the hoover. Cobwebs would continue to provide safe haven for a bounteous group of spindly spiders who breed and multiply here and there and entirely safe from the fear of assault by feather duster. My one redeeming feature on this sorry domestic score is that I can cook. (Mostly because I like eating. A lot.) But I rarely even bother to do that these days now that my daughter’s away at university, preferring instead to eat crackers and blue cheese, cereals, shop-bought oven-ready, tinned or frozen things, bath buns, sweeties and fruits that need no preparation beyond the peeling of the skin.

But domestically blind though I may be, even I was moved to shame at the appearance of my fridge on its return from the barn this afternoon. Invisible bacteria were crowding round, pushing at the door begging to be let out of the life-sized aluminium-clad Petri dish so that they didn’t catch something. I have been engaged to be married (once so far) more often than I have cleaned my fridge (to be fair on this point I did give the ring back when we split up; I still have the fridge). Quite how remnants of coriander leaves came to be stuck all the way up the back is anybody’s guess. Whatever mysterious force that caused that to happen had also liberally sprinkled onion skins and an indefinable unpleasant trail of sticky brown gloop all over most of the rest of the inside.

There was nothing for it. Hot water, a bottle of something thick and white and ammonia-smelling, a couple of sponges and a tea towel. Much like an episode of M*A*S*H but without Hawkeye or Clinger or any sign of incoming wounded. To my great surprise, the foul goo and the leaves did start to shift, so I rested a moment with a cup of tea and a day dream by way of congratulations. Only to continue my task ten minutes later and find that the white cleansing lotion had frozen to the back of the fridge. Fearless and undaunted, I strode back to the task with renewed vigour, moving at last from cleaning inside to out.

Reader, I burnished him.