Let me count the ways…

It is not generally considered flattering to be compared to a snail, nor indeed to that other unloved member of the mollusc clan, the slug.

Both are slimy and have somewhat ambivalent private lives. ("Hermaphrodite? Huh! I reckon you’re just commitment phobic.") They are inclined to pop up unpredictably at inconvenient moments and in unwanted places. They eat more food more quickly than one would think possible. Their toiletry habits leave a lot to be desired. They have a herd mentality, being either entirely absent from the scene or present only in slowly swarming creeping hoards. They live in mobile homes or have no fixed abode - and in either event prefer to squat in yours without paying rent. They devour one's obsessively nurtured and cosseted seedlings overnight without even touching the weeds. They are rather spineless and retreat into themselves at the first signs of confrontation. Describing oneself as having snail-like (slow, shy, short-sighted) or slug-like (creepy, slothful, hiding under paving slabs) tendencies is unlikely to land one a dream job.

No, on the face of it, slugs and snails don't have an awful lot going for them.

But hold your boot before you next stand on one, for you are standing on a relative. New research has shown that humans and snails share some genetic material. And whilst we have probably all met a few people for whom this was readily apparent without the slightest need for a microscope, it is actually readily apparent in all of us.

Unless you do actually resemble one of Picasso's studio models (as I do in the mornings and on occasional late nights), the chances are that your face and your body are quite symmetrical. Most of us have most of our features and limbs arranged in more or less matching opposite pairs. Eyes, hands, knees, arms, legs, ears, fingers, thumbs, elbows, ankles, toes. Those elements of which we have only one - noses, necks, belly buttons, mouths and such - are conveniently lined up down the middle in a sort of peace-keeping middle line shared pretty much equally between left and right.

But it's a whole different story on the inside. Safely hidden away from the judgemental eye of the external beholder, our bodies are a riot of lopsidedness, unilateral decision-making and idiosyncratic location selection. Your stomach tends to the left, your liver to the right; your heart to the left, your appendix to the right. Being the ego-centric organ it is, your brain occupies both sides of your skull but divides its labours in a partly bilateral fashion whilst also choosing to take responsibility for the operational control of the opposite side of the body.

Apparently, this seemingly haphazard blue print is essential for our well-being and not just a case of the universal architects and builders having got the plans muddled up. And it is in the asymmetry at the genetic level that snails are indeed our relatives. Should you care to look closely, some species of snails have shells that coil to the left, others to the right; even though we have no shells other than those of our own making, it is this tendency to asymmetry that unites us.

As our last common ancestor lived about 600,000,000 years ago there's probably no pressing need for rolling out the banners and throwing a big welcome home party. But maybe a reason to think a little more kindly about the slimy squatters in your flower bed?

If you want to find out more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/15/genetics-embryos-and-stem-cells

We've come a long way, baby

I found Spring this morning, sitting in the formal garden at the Mansion House smoking cigarettes and drinking hot chocolate. No coat, just the sun on my face and a butterfly for company; a Tortoiseshell I think, drawn not to me but to the prolific proud lilac tulips with perfect petals offered up to the sky.

The butterfly's metamorphosis from egg to grub to chrysalis to adult is a treacherous journey travelled with no known compass to help navigate the obstacles of inquisitive beaks, unpredicted frosts, attentive groundskeepers and a thousand and one other perils. But he - or she - had made it, had survived the dangers, had emerged the other side, stretched out her wings and leapt into the air. Her mid-morning snack of nectar was well deserved.

Our own transformation is no less dramatic. From pin head sized egg to squabblesome toddler, from skulking teenager to strapping five or six footer. But what of the more personal metamorphosis we sometimes undergo, the subtle shifts in being that we experience as adults?

This time last year, my good friend Liz was about to celebrate her 40th birthday. Liz is an attractive, witty and generous woman, great company and a wonderful companion. We'd supported each other through the traumas of our coincidentally simultaneous break-ups with our long-term partners. Ridden the rollercoasters of raw emotion in a fortuitously synchronised fashion such that when one of us was careering to the bottom of the dip, the other was at the top of the slope, ready to haul and cajole and hand-hold the other back up again.

Looking over my shoulder twelve months on, I can see that when we set out to celebrate that milestone birthday we'd already survived the worst but had, in the process, retreated into our own chrysalises. If our metaphorical wings were perhaps not still broken they were not quite fully mended either. We had an inkling of this at the time, of course, but perhaps not as clearly as we have now when we reflect on it.

It is notoriously difficult after the event to recapture the true feelings that one has at the time, and it is quite rightly no longer a topic on which Liz and I dwell. So it was with quite a shock that I came across something that I wrote almost exactly a year ago to the day. I'm reproducing it here not because I think it's in any way good as a piece of writing - which it's not - but because it captures so precisely the raw nature of the feelings I had then - and in doing so enables me to appreciate how far along the journey of that personal metamorphosis I've come since.

The all day drinkers

The all day drinkers sit on benches
and squall with each other
heads and flushed faces below the casting lines of
the fishermen who lace their creels
with boxes of maggots and horizon stuck eyes

The old boys leaning on knotty sticks
with knotted brows and heads full of war glories
glance at the stay-at-home mums pushing
sticky-faced toddlers in four wheeled flotillas
as the wind whips their voices away on the current
to the ears of the school-dodging teens
sucking cigarettes and flinging cans at the gulls

The waves crash and foam
dragging shingle and flotsam from the depths of the ocean
a thousand messages
in empty bottles bleached by the sun.
I drop my stone heavy heart into the water
whisper goodbye to the wind
in hope it will reach your ears
one day

Happy birthday for Saturday, Liz. We've come a long way, baby.

A case of mistaken identity?

Gerry stood at the front of the lecture room and tapped the laminated wall chart with his index finger.

"Now, where exactly do you think the mind is located?" he asked. "Can anybody tell me?"

We peered at the diagram, a room full of psychology students, mostly teenaged, mostly with backcombed hair, mostly dressed in army surplus shirts, most of which had tiny German or Danish* flags sewn on them. There was no gender in evidence in the life-sized picture, nor any skin or hair, but plenty of muscles, veins, tendons, organs and a delicate web of scarlet capillaries set inside a human shaped outline. We peered a bit more.

"Er, in the brain?" a tentative voice piped from the back of the room.

"Ah," said Gerry, "yes, that's what we think, don't we? But we don't actually know for sure. There is no 'mind' organ that we've found, not as such, not yet" he continued, "so it could just as easily be found here. Or here." he said, vigorously tapping a foot and a forearm. "We just don't really know."

I've thought about this many times on and off during the twenty or so years since this lecture, and I've certainly met my fair share of folks whose minds indeed seem to be located in bodily areas quite far removed from the brain. But even if my foot is occasionally to be found in my mouth, I'm fairly sure my mind is usually in my brain.

(In fact, I can tell you where exactly. If you imagine my brain as a boiled egg standing on its round end and sliced in half from top to bottom and then in half again from side to side, it's in the top quarter above the nose. The bit that also contains eyeballs. That's where the me-ness of me lives, in a little section at the top of my head like the periscope shaft on a submarine. How about you?)

The only trouble that I've found with my mind's occupation of this lofty penthouse suite is that it sometimes neglects to take into account that it is forced to lug around a person-sized body with it wherever it goes. And that the form it is accompanied with on all appointments is recognisable to others beyond just a set of sometimes blue sometimes greenish-tinted eyes and a splodge of travelling grey matter. Thus requiring my mind to remind my hands to attempt to brush my hair and to apply mascara, shoes and appropriate clothing to the outlying districts.

In the last week, two people that I've met for the first time have remarked to me that I bear a striking resemblance to their cousin, in one case, and a good friend in the other. I didn't think at the time to ask if the similarity was in appearance, gesture, manner, stature, voice, age, colouring, temperament, type or whatever else it is that makes us perceive same-nesses, although I'm assuming that my unknown others are both female. Maybe I've got a doppelganger or two long-lost twins out there somewhere. Or maybe my mind has been lending out my body whilst I'm not looking. I'd probably never notice if it had.

*Even in the two decades since, I've never managed to work out why that was; one can only suppose that the soldiers of those two nations were more careful with their garments than their quartermasters had predicted.

Of kicking cats and Mondays

Just another day of kicking cats* and chasing vapour.
Of listening to egos clash and empty platitudes placed like bandages.
Of digging nails into palms beneath the desk top and trying not to yawn.
Of watching rain roll down the windows and the drip drip drip of seconds falling from the clock.
Of drinking institutional coffee and dunking soft stale biscuits.
Of eating floppy sandwiches and wishing it was steak.
Of hearing the nervous tic of unnecessary throat clearing from the office next to mine.
Of recognising stress in another but not knowing what to say.
Or how to say it.
Or if.
Of wishing that I could tell her it’s only work.
Of telling her that other things matter more than what others think.
Of understanding that's something you have to work out for yourself.
Of folding and unfolding an umbrella and walking in puddles.
Of wearing purple high heeled shoes and matching lilac sweater.
Of spotting two unmet colleagues and guessing they were my 2 o’clock.
Of remembering their names.
Of finding them both charming and both aged 51.
Of one of them not looking it.
Of driving through the driving rain to bring me home.
Of finding the dog waiting in a patient ball behind the door.
Of changing into a green sweatshirt and soft warm socks.
Of feeling glad that work day Monday’s over.
Of being happy just being.
Of knowing I am very lucky.




* no animals were harmed in the making of this blog

Washing fine

Sunday afternoon and I’m watching the washing blowing on the line. It’s a strange anomaly for me, this liking of washing, standing like a rocky outcrop in among the desert of my detestation of domestic tasks. I observe other people’s washing lines as some wear white gloves and run their fingers along the top of door frames to catch the dust the duster missed in its slack application to its duties. No challenge to be found there in my house; the dust is quite visible and requires no subterfuge or tip toed teetering.

Putting up a washing line yesterday marked too another step towards the completion of my overhaul of the back garden. In the nearly two years since we moved here I’ve had to make do with drying the clothes and sheets on the sturdy wall-mounted handrail left behind as a marker of the house’s previous incarnation as home to my great Uncle Roy. Installed by the council, its purpose was to steady his step as he made his way to or from the front door. That he hadn’t placed a foot outside in a decade and a half was beside the point. The handrail’s position just above a radiator was a fortuitous happenstance, for I might not have otherwise spotted its garment drying potential.

But why the fascination with washing lines? I don’t know, although I do know that a sensibly modern rotary device full of stiff wires with blue nylon rope strung between the spokes like a skeletal upturned umbrella was not what I wanted. I’d had one of these before, space saving and neatly placed by the back door after we moved into the barn. But the hanging of my washing in a triangular circle, whilst satisfactory for drying, did not meet my observational expectations. And great expectations they are indeed, of sheets billowing yards above the ground as a ship at full sail, but with socks and pants and pillow cases run up the main brace rather than the blue ensign.

I worked with a man once who occupied his whole days at the Centre with drawing pictures of washing up. His clinical depression had locked him away from taking part in most conversation, but he was happy to sit and smile shyly beneath his fringe, scratching plates and cups and spoons onto paper as others around him chatted and played cards. I don’t draw the washing on the line and nor am I depressed, but I have been known to comment in admiring tones at a particularly well-strung line of shirts or sheets.

So what constitutes a good line of washing in my view?

Items hung taughtly with no sag at the top between pegs. Batches of clothes in colour co-ordinated tones as one might sort the wash – blues with blues, pinks with reds, blacks with browns with greens. A neat start with hanging progression from one end to the other; I always choose to start at the far end and work back to the house, but am open to the opposite habit among other aficionados. Lofty line height is an admirable trait, as is the use of wooden pegs. I like natural tones and the artificial jollity of the plastic variety somewhat mars the view with its scattering of colour to disrupt the flow of the spectrum.

And of course, most importantly (as I don’t iron anything) the line-dried garment bears no crease. Simply un-peg, fold carefully into the washing basket and place in a drawer. Ready to wear and with an inbuilt dose of sunshine and good fresh air to make your skin smile even on the cloudiest day.

Silver screening

Andy sat back in his swivel chair and steepled his palms together on the desk, index fingers pointing forward as if about to shoot an imaginary laser gun. It was his ideas signature move; if he’d been a cartoon character instead of our boss, a little light bulb would have pinged and flashed in a cloud above his head.
“It’d be great if we could get the local MP or someone to officially open the Foyer for us,” he said, “get the paper in, maybe radio too. Even television. The youngsters would love it. And youth homelessness is right in the news at the moment.” he continued, warming to the theme. “Whaddaya think?”
We nodded. He made the call.

It took us a few weeks to find out exactly how far that call had got. The game of political Chinese Whispers that started with a message on the answerphone of the part-time secretary of the constituency’s MP had somehow tunnelled its way through Ministers and flunkeys and White Hall Mandarins all the way to Number 10 Downing Street. All the way to the top man himself, the big chief, the grand fromage, in fact. The Prime Minister was coming.

The 2001 General Election was just a few days away by the morning of the event and the building throbbed and hummed with palpable anxiety. A couple of days beforehand the first of the spooks had arrived too, stern faced silent men in dark suits and glistening shoes who poked and prodded and spoke in hushed tones into mobile phones. Their organisation of the event was, unsurprisingly perhaps, military in its precision. Access roads were cordoned off for streets around, the housing estate thick with Police cars and crackling with static from walkie talkies. The Foyer itself, polished and buffed and vacuumed to within an inch of its life, was bristling with camera crews. Snake-like electrical cables coiled everywhere. Unmarked white vans with satellite dishes on top were parked outside; equipped to transmit, receive or eaves drop I’m not sure. A small group of protesters, permitted access in a good spirited show of fair play, stood across the road and chanted and waved home made banners from behind steely waist high crash barriers that had been hastily erected overnight by men in hi-vis jackets.

We staff, the young people who were the Foyer’s residents, and all the local MPs and civic dignitaries that could be mustered stood and waited and talked together in nervous chattering clusters. An hour to go. Forty five minutes. Thirty minutes. Fifteen minutes. Five, four… And then suddenly the Prime Minister’s gleaming black windowed coaches swept round the corner like gigantic metallic locusts. Radios crackled into frantic life. Flash bulbs exploded like fireworks. Cameras on hydraulic platforms rose up from the ground like land-locked sea serpents and opened their glass-lensed eyes to take in the scene. The protestors roared and shook their fists, moving as one body now and pounding on the side of the buses as they slowed. “Tony, Tony, Tony! Out! Out! Out!” they screamed, in an echo of the phrase coined nearly two decades earlier for Margaret Thatcher.

Dressed in a spotless suit and a cloud of charisma, Tony Blair stepped onto the pavement, paused for a heartbeat as he raised a hand to the protestors, and leapt up the Foyer steps followed by his wife Cherrie. They were led upstairs to the communal lounge to have a cup of tea and talk to the young people for half an hour or so. Once they’d gone up, we bustled about making sure that all of the ‘silver surfers’ – the older people’s computer group - were ready at their terminals to greet the Prime Minister when he came down to the community training room.

I’d been tasked with standing at the front doors to show the older people in and also to stop anyone else coming inside during the visit who wasn’t meant to. Quite how I was supposed to know who really was or wasn’t to come in I wasn’t sure, so amused myself for ten minutes or so imagining myself saying ‘Friend or Foe?’ in an actorly voice like they do in the films. And then a grey haired man in a gold buttoned blue jacket and cream slacks climbed up the front steps towards me and the main entrance to the building. He was late middle age, early sixties or so I estimated, and I could see he’d made an effort with his outfit for the special occasion.
“Are you with the silver surfers?” I asked him in my sweetest voice, hand on door.
“No madam. I’m with the security services” he replied.
He didn’t smile. I thought it only fair to let him pass.

***

I was reminded of this episode today by reports in the press of a spate of terrible anti-social behaviour at a cinema in Leicester. Queue jumping, pushing and shoving, being rude to ushers, pinching sweeties… Typical young person behaviour, right? Wrong. The culprits are all members of the ‘Silver Screeners’ who meet at the Odeon cinema every Wednesday afternoon for special OAP film shows. There had been so many complaints about ‘unacceptable conduct’ that the cinema’s management handed out a letter at this week’s film asking patrons to mend their ways. Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

[Here’s the full report: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1173207/Cinema-ban-silver-screen-pensioners-bullying-queue-jumping-stealing-biscuits.html?ITO=1490]

Which of course in turn reminded me of Jenny Joseph’s wonderful poem, “Warning”:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick the flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Warning by Jenny Joseph

The Ministry of Paperclips

Dear Jargon,

Of all the euphemisms in all the world, you had to walk into mine.

Words cannot express how surprised I was to see you today. If I'd known you were coming, I'd have realigned my facial expressions to standard neutral (Authorised Version 0.2) lest you detected from the furrow of my brow the rather negative way in which I internally framed your presence. The chair person, my co-workers and the facilitator seemed barely to notice your ambulation to a seated posture in the beige chair placed at an non-threatening and power-neutral position at the round table. But I have been out of the loop for some time and as such I suspect I missed the option to take up my place on the language refinement and obfuscation panel.

To do you credit, you were orally restrained for an undetermined period of time before vocalising your opposition to the continuation of the use of a designated phrase within one of our governing instruments. Specifically, constitutional document subsection 5 paragraph 3.2 in which are described the needs of persons of male, female or no gender to whom we may lawfully provide our services. I'm sorry that I exhibited an inappropriate and audible response when you suggested that we should exchange a clear expression for a neologism; I just thought you were making a jocular aside at the manner in which there is a growing tendency to obscure the truth by using such vague words and circumlocutions that nobody actually understands what on earth is really being said.

As such, you were almost certainly correct to reprimand me for suggesting making this change was to draw a parallel with the use of the expressions friendly fire, collateral damage, or reputational injury. I am sure that many people would entirely understand what you mean when you refer to someone as having issues with their affective well-being. It simply serves to illustrate that I don't think far enough outside the box, push the envelope or stare at the blue sky often enough. And I simply cannot even remember the last time I lined up my ducks.

Please convey my sincere and deeply held apologies to the Ministry of Paperclips and reassure them that I will put myself forward as a candidate for the experimental language re-programming experience at the soonest possible opportunity.

Yours neutrally,

412068-000-K-J-J

Rooks and apple blossom

The weather gods had colluded today to deliver the first day of summer. That it was a Monday too seemed appropriate; perhaps they too work a regular jobbing week. Gone were the weekend's chilly winds and misty outriders, shunted into the sidings by bright sunshine and skies with train-chuffed clouds drawn straight from a child's paintings.

A few brave early blossoms on the twiggy cooking apple tree in my little garden were just starting to uncurl as I left the house this morning. Several more spindly green shoots from the wild flower seeds I sowed a couple of weeks ago and another frond of clematis too, a slender waving tendril seeking anchor from the wall. But the honeysuckle is proving so far to be the champion of this chase to the sun; it grows taller and bushier each time I look at it.

The students were back at full strength on campus today, eyes blinking at the unaccustomed morning light after a few weeks of sleeping until afternoon if Roo is anything to go by. Some of them were towing huge suitcases on wheels and working like columns of cheerfully chattering ants as they helped each other across the grass with bags and boxes of belongings and into their flats. At mid morning, I went down to the campus shop in search of muesli and a change of scene. I'm trying to be virtuous after those three weeks of over indulgence so was pleased with myself for managing to forgo a bar of chocolate, although an ice cream wouldn't have looked out of place among all the colourful tee-shirts.

Lunchtime provided the perfect opportunity to saunter to the post box and then to sit in the park for three quarters of an hour. It's the first time I've had the chance and the weather to venture there and I can see that plenty of exploring of the seemingly endless green space lies in front of me. For today, though, I was content to find a bench and read and watch the world go by as I crunched Polos and smoked a couple of cigarettes. Not far from where I was sitting was the remains of a maze. It had been made of straw and the inner spiral was still intact, the outer parts now straw-less but carved into the grass nonetheless from the length of time it had been there. A year? Two perhaps? Temporary entertainment certainly but long enough to leave a bare grey-brown trace in the turf.

From the variety of mature trees I'd guess maybe that this had originally been planted as a specimen garden when the mansion house was still just that and in private ownership. The mansion retains its indoor 'winter garden', a huge domed green house bursting with tropical species to the extent that large fleshy leaves press up against the windows and the glass runs continually with condensation. Outside, rooks have set up nests high in the tallest of the trees and were pecking around importantly in the grass as I watched them.

And then suddenly, from nowhere, an unrecognisable squawking caused rooks and me both to look up startled. A small flock of parakeets were flying over, pausing for a moment for a rest and to be admired among the tree tops before continuing their journey. I have seen parakeets (and even, once, a huge blue parrot) flying freely before in this country, but they somehow seemed even more incongruous in south east London. Perhaps the proximity of the tropical hot house lured them in. Who knows?

Sweet sorrow

A burger. He's always got a burger in his hand, or the olive from a drink, or the wrapper from a burger and a drink. Did you notice? Brad Pitt, I mean, playing the part of Rusty in Ocean's Eleven*; he's always eating, or drinking (or both) whenever he's on screen. Jake and Elwood order up fried chickens and white bread when they call at Aretha Franklin's fabulous Soul Food Cafe in the Blues Brothers. Kojak spent the entire1970s sucking on a lollipop; one can only hope that Telly Savalas liked them too.

Well that's been Roo and I for the last three weeks. Not surrounded by glamorous American actors (although Brad, if you're reading, you're always welcome to drop by) but continually eating. Curries, cakes, chocolate, crackers, cheeses, chips, chicken kebabs, cereals, yogurts, grapes, spaghetti Bolognese, cauliflower cheese, bread, butter, boiled eggs mixed with mayonnaise, tortellini, pasta bakes, blood oranges, bananas, mini-pizzas, fish pie, steak pie, braising steak, baked jam roll, ice cream, custard, roast beef, turkey, cheesecake, apple crumble, naan bread, rice, fruity suet pudding...

Well, you get the picture. There's something about being in each other's company that seems to compel us to consume our body weight in food on a daily basis. Almost like one of those demented eating competitions where entrants have to devour sixteen pounds of jellied eels in thirty seconds or something for no reason whatsoever except the prize of a cheap t-shirt and a bottle of indigestion tablets. Which is delightful (eels aside) and fine to a point - that point being when one's clothes start to feel a little tight in places that they aren't meant to or didn't only a few days before.

And so it was today that, in a lull-before-the-cake-free-storm fashion, I polished off the last of the Easter chocolate and re-stocked my fridge with things of a duller but more virtuous nature. Admittedly, after our feast-a-thon of the last few weeks it wasn't really a challenge to find slightly less decadent foodstuffs. No, my challenge now after polishing my sweet tooth to a high glossy burnish is to try and convince it that yogurt and fruit really is as tantalising as cake and custard.

Hmmm... One can but try.

And I am going out for lunch on Tuesday.

And Wednesday.

And dinner on Friday evening...

*Rusty was probably doing the same in Ocean's Twelve and Thirteen but I couldn't bear to sit through either more than once. Unlike the first installment which I've enjoyed many times.

Roo's return

I’d been woken the first time by the leaping around of the dog like an Irish dancer burling to the relentless tattoo of the window cleaner knocking at the front door. The second time by snuffing a fat brown moth up my right nostril. And now by the demented cricket-like metallic chirping from Roo’s alarm clock.

The dog went through his repertoire of morning stretches as Roo herself appeared at my bedroom door, hair tousled and eyes small and sleep-full. I put my arms around her, both of us still soft and warm from our beds and silently aware that this would be her last time waking up at home for several months. Last night, we’d celebrated her 20th birthday a few days in advance of the event with a wonderful evening of food and conversation at my sister’s. Broccoli and cauliflower cheese, meltingly rich and deliciously savoury and accompanied by golden crispy roast new potatoes, all made with great skill by my sister’s husband and followed by a tray of fresh cream cakes.

We’d brought home three cream cakes left over from the feast and ate them now standing in the kitchen in our pyjamas as the dog tucked into his own - admittedly less exotic - breakfast. Roo scuttled back upstairs to dress and finish packing while I faffed around, filling the sink with too much hot water until the bubbles frothed right over the top and threatened to engulf half the room. Luckily I was rescued from the actual doing of the washing up at Roo’s request for me to go with her to the computer shop in the High Street to buy some essential piece of shiny technology. Back home once more and she somehow squeezed the new kit into her suitcase along with three wedges of cheese from the fridge (Red Leicester, Cheshire and Feta) and several de-packaged Easter eggs.

Too too soon it was time for the two of us to make our way to the station. It’s a walk of only a few minutes from our little house, skirting along the bottom of the ancient public green known as Beachfields Park that gives a home to trees and birds and red-cheeked children all year round and to the dazzling travelling funfair in August and November. Roo’s not travelling light back to university this time following our shopping trips and wants to practice wheeling both cases by herself. The suitcases trundle obediently along behind her, full of clothes and books and shoes, her new computer gadgets and several pounds of dairy goods.

And then we’re at the station itself, full of people wrapped up against the brisk wind that chills in spite of the pin sharp sunshine. We huddle close together on the platform and I know she’s nervous about the journey ahead as she fiddles with her bag straps and pulls her hands in and out of her pockets. The train arrives in slow motion and hisses and sighs as the doors open to disgorge a hundred passengers in hastily retrieved winter coats and scarves. I board with her for a moment, lifting one of the cases as she stows the other, and then step back out of the door and onto the platform.

We stand like that for a few minutes, her on the inside, me inches away on the windy concourse, saying our goodbyes. The train starts to rev and rumble, the huge engine and the hydraulic doors powering up in anticipation of departure and we embrace each other for the last time. And then the doors slide shut and I watch Roo mouthing goodbye through the window as she takes her seat and the train hauls away. I start to walk, trot, run beside the moving train, waving and calling out until its speed outpaces me and I’m left alone on the platform. Hot pricks of tears jab my eyes and I turn to make my way home from the now deserted station.

The dog’s waiting for me curled up behind the door when I let myself in.

Clothes maketh the mood

As non atmospheric barometers go, clothes are a pretty reliable gauge of a whole spectrum of stuff from the weather to mood to the economic climate.

Whilst it might not take an effort of staggering genius to work out that a crowd wearing Wellingtons and holding umbrellas means rain is forecast, who would have thought that the colour of one’s clothing relates directly to the financial health of one’s nation? Apparently – and somewhat counter-intuitively I think – the more prosperous the times that we live in, the more likely we are to dress in sombre colours. When things are looking particularly good on the pocket, we wear black. But when we go about our business dressed in the bright springtime colours of the spectrum, beware – for the economic cloth is indeed wearing thinner than a socialite’s waist line.

Of course it’s not just what we wear that makes a difference, but how we wear it. Some people – my little sister, my good friend David, for instance – have an affinity for style that is woven into the very same warp and weft of their DNA as their eye colour and the distribution of moles upon their person. It’s true that both have correspondingly bulging wardrobes, but to write their stylistic talents off as an accidental by-product simply of volume is to make the same error as to subscribe the works of Shakespeare to a typing pool full of monkeys; a reassuringly equitable comforter to the rest of us that is actually complete nonsense.

No, people like my sister and David have a genius gene for fashion. They will always select the right outfit for the right occasion; will co-ordinate colours and fabrics with military precision; will have spotless matching un-scuffed and mud-free shoes; will arrive shining and immaculate in spite of journey trauma; and will artfully accessorise with a seemingly throw-away casualness that belies the real skill behind it. As a consequence, it doesn’t matter how much my sister might protest that she’s feeling fine when she’s laid up with a virus; if she’s still wearing toning satin nightwear in her sick bed I know she’s ok. But better reach for that telephone in double quick time if she’s got her husband’s football club pyjama bottoms and a pair of holey socks on.

Although my sister and I are close and share many similarities, this passion for fashion is not one of them. It’s not exactly that I don’t like clothes; more that I can’t usually be bothered with all the faffing around that goes with it all and would much rather spend an extra hour in bed in the mornings ignoring the alarm clock than wrestle with straighteners and the ironing board. That my sister’s immaculate and magnificently groomed appearance makes me look like a bag lady on a bad day is neither here nor there.

However, I do seem to have accidentally boarded the zeitgeist of the current gloomy economic fashion barometer by purchasing four hooded sweatshirts in a dazzlingly colourful array from daffodil yellow to emerald green. I wonder if my sister’s noticed how stylishly on the money I am?

A big yellow envelope from Tom Champagne*

A few years ago, there was an advertisement on the television that invited inventors to send in their designs to a company who would, so they claimed, turn the ideas into global gold. The ad was so enticing, so compelling with its swirling black screens, fluorescent colours and liberal application of exclamation marks that it free-wired directly from the screen to your frontal cortex and sent you scurrying to the crumb-filled cracks in the back of the sofa lest you’d accidentally dropped that handbag sized solar powered toothbrush-cum-car-wash device you’d been working on. So insistent was the advert that it made you feel guilty to watch it and not have a world saving multi-purpose gadget to feverishly cram into the post box at the next possible opportunity.

“You worthless fool! You earthworm!” ran the subtext, “so many people are inventing so much life changing stuff every minute of every day that we’re advertising for it! On the telly! With Twilight Zone type music and too much punctuation and everything! Your next door neighbour is doing it! Your mother is too! Heck, even your dog’s in on the inventing act! So what kind of invertebrate does that make you if you haven’t got anything to send us! Stop being coy! Send it send it send it!”

There was a part of me too that appreciated the universal embrace of an advert that liked to suggest that inventing useful stuff was something that anybody could do. That the whole thing turned out to be a scam (surely not…?) and was pulled from further transmission a few months later is neither here nor there; I liked the principle. Beyond the conversion of a few kitchen implements into makeshift gardening tools and the essential female prerequisite of using the blade of a knife as a screwdriver, I’ve never invented anything. But I like the idea that I could.

I also like the idea that I could win the Reader’s Digest prize draw. Oh yes I do, and the big yellow envelope on my desk knows that too. Indeed, such a level of awareness does this envelope have of the impact it makes that it boasts six different stickers on its front (including a printed stamp that substitutes a partial Pegasus for the Queen’s head) and eight on the back (seven of which dedicate themselves to showing me where to open it and reassuring me that yes, it has been secured). I haven’t read all the way through the seven pages of contents yet, but I have so far gathered that I could win a lot of money or a car or possibly both. Which would be great; all I have to do is…

Well I’m not quite sure yet. But someone has to win and I don’t think I have to invent anything.


*NB – sadly, the RD prize draw letter doesn’t come from Tom Champagne any longer. I do miss the old fella. It's not the same without him.

21st Century Fog

Something evil this way comes. Or at least a strange and unseasonably foggy evening, descended from who knows where after a day of sunny interludes and mild April briskness.

I could hear the fog horns blasting from out on the shipping lanes before I even left the house and decided to deviate my dog walking route to first take in a High Street stroll. There were a few people about determined to squeeze every last second out of the last hours of the last day of the wonderful four part weekend that is Easter. A small gaggle of men in jeans and football shirts stood outside The Goat smoking and drinking cold pints of lager as their more colourfully clad girlfriends reapplied lipstick to their reflections in the curved glass window. The four men from the Turkish kebab house lounged against the fruit machine in their chefs’ whites and waved and smiled cheerily as we passed. Excellent neighbours, who have, I think, unofficially adopted Kaos as their mascot since they present me sometimes with left over meat for him to enjoy.

A bit further on and the dog stops to sniff a section of pavement with great intent. We’re in no hurry and I loiter too, reading the handwritten adverts on postcards in the window of the newsagent. A sturdy woman of about my own age passes us. She’s deep in conversation on her mobile phone and rather incongruously dressed as a school girl complete with blonde hair tied in high bunches, drawn-on freckles, short pleated gym skirt and over-knee socks. The loosely knotted tie around her neck doesn’t quite disguise the straining gapes between the buttons of her white shirt. But then maybe that’s the point.

We loop right round the High Street and reach the beach by way of the access slope next to the Catholic church. It is still light but the fog is thickening fast and I can only just make out the edge of the sea from where we are on the promenade. Rather unhelpfully, my subconscious decides to conjure up a memory of a film called The Fog. Based on James Herbert’s horror story of the same name, the finer details are lost to me except the parts that relate to long-undead sailors mysteriously coming murderously to life during, well, thick fog. This recollection is not helped by a number of spectral silhouettes that I can just make out down on one of the big sandbanks that’s been exposed by the tide. That they’re young people larking about at the water’s edge is neither here nor there.

For all it diminishes the ability to see, fog definitely enhances the sense of hearing. Although the teenagers on the sandbank are several hundred yards away from us now as we walk along, I can hear them as if they were just over my shoulder. This amplification effect is clearly also true for the dog’s hearing as his big ears keep twitching radar-like, his head turning, to find where the sound is coming from.

We walk further and leave behind the illuminated part of the promenade for the more remote section that ends at the docks. This part of the beach teems with bird life although tends to be populated only by dog walkers and fishermen in human terms so I let the dog off his lead and he charges down to the water’s edge. Splashing and crashing around in the shallows he gallops along the shingle and disappears completely some way off in the distance. The foghorns are deafening now, their regularity increasing as the weather worsens, and I – subconsciously perhaps – lengthen my stride and quicken my pace. Suddenly, the dog comes running towards me, looming out of the fog bank like some sort of demonic wolf. Just for a heartbeat I am Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, battling for his life on the treacherous misty moors in the wonderful 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

I call the dog to heel and he trots towards me wagging his tail, panting and wet through from the sea. I clip his lead on and we turn briskly for home. Enough imagined filmic terrors for one day I think.

Picture of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in 'The Hound of The Baskervilles' (1939) - 20th Century Fox

Easter babies

I fidgeted with the zip of my anorak, its metal teeth pinching at the tender skin under my chin as the little car rattled and jolted and picked its way down the rutted farm track. Bounded on either side by a tall and untidy tangle of elder, brambles and stunted elms, the narrow lane stretched ahead and behind us with nothing above but the bright April sky. Around us, the air was filled with the twitters and calls of unseen birds as they went about their spring business of nesting and feeding grubs to broods of gangly grey and pink skinned hatchlings.

At last the track gave into a gravel covered open courtyard and the car stopped. I got out and wiggled my toes as best I could inside the too tight Wellingtons. One leg of my polyester trousers had escaped from the top of the boot in spite of my mother’s vigorous tucking and the other was threatening to do so, content for now instead with ballooning around my knee in a nylon approximation of plus fours. A huge brown cow with soft shiny eyes thrust her head over the top of a wall nearby and stared at us, grass and spittle at the edges of her lips as she rhythmically ground her jaws.
“Come on girls. Stop dawdling.” Mike locked his car and strode away, the cow still staring and chewing as the three of us scuttled after his back up the path to the farm house.

“Now girls, what you’ve got to do is keep them together,” Cathy boomed as she issued us each with a pale wooden crook. “We need to bring the lambs and their mothers from that field,” she said pointing off into the distance with her staff, “into this one. Walk behind them, but not too close, like this. You see?” she said, shepherding an invisible sheep and her offspring in front of her through the calf high wet grass. We nodded in unison, three little girls in anoraks and scarves and hand knitted gloves. “John’s out there already with the dogs. He’ll show you the ones we need”. And with that she set off, taking long strides in her muddy green boots over the tufts and hillocks.

I watched from the edge of the field. The black and white sheep dog ran quickly, head down and crouched low to the ground as she circled closer and closer to the raggedy gathering of ewes and lambs. John stood some way off, long green coat and crook silhouetted against the natural rise of the land. The dog moved with silent practised precision, sometimes dropping completely to the ground and never close enough to the flock to cause alarm but urging them forward slowly all the same in response to the farmer’s whistled commands. My job was to get the stragglers to follow. I got behind the first group, a ewe and her twin lambs, and tried to recreate the action that Cathy had shown us. Perhaps sensing inexperience or a fellow youngster, the rotund sheep rolled her eyes gently and did as she was asked, her two babies jumping and trotting on uncertain legs behind her.

We became a little more efficient as the morning wore on and eventually all the sheep and lambs that had been out of sight were now gathered in the field near the farm house. Mike poured us all a cup of orangey tea from a thermos flask as Cathy described the next part to us. She would, she explained, be going around with this little machine to put a tight yellow band around each lamb’s tail. It didn’t hurt the lamb, she told us, but it would make the tail fall off in a few days. Our job was to hold each lamb steady near its mother whilst she snapped the band on near the rump with a gadget that looked like a pair of pliers.

The three of us girls spread out into the small field and carefully captured our first lambs. My lamb was standing quietly next to its mother as she nibbled gently on the grass at her feet. I had taken my woollen gloves off and could feel the little one’s heart beating steadily through my fingers, her body firm with muscle beneath the soft and tightly curled fleece. I needed to hug this tiny lamb and knelt down in the wet grass and drew her close to my face, burying my nose in her coat and breathing in deeply. She smelt warmly of grass and wool and fresh air and milk in that universal aroma of new babies. She opened her small mouth and bleated softly to her mother and I could see her tiny pink tongue. I spoke soothing words to her as Cathy came over and deftly clipped the band around her tail with expert hands before stroking her and letting her go. She bounced up on her front legs, kicking her little hooves out behind her, once, twice, shaking her tail as she nudged her mother’s udder.

Finally, when all the little tails had been bound, it was time for our last task of the day. The three of us trooped after Mike, Cathy and John across the wet grassy field until we came to a long semi-circular structure.

“This is the poly tunnel,” Cathy told us, “it’s where the ewes wait to have their babies. We’ll need to be very quiet now; some of these sheep will be giving birth to their lambs.”
She pushed the door open and in we went, silent now and breath hushed with awe that we might see a lamb being born. It was warm inside. Deep straw lay on the ground and the air was filled with the heavy sweet scent of grass and sheep and new life. We walked behind the adults up the central aisle, stopping in line as they stopped to examine the ewes.
“Here,” said John, “come here. This one’s about to give birth.”
And so the three of us knelt down in the straw behind the ewe who was half standing and half lying down. Before our eyes, a white veiny sac appeared, followed by two hooves and two thin legs, a head, and then the whole lamb lay on the straw. John put his fingers into the new born’s mouth, cleared her throat, rubbed her firmly with a handful of yellow straw as the ewe turned round and started to lick her baby. The lamb, still partly covered in her white birth veil, now struggled to her feet, spindly legs wobbling and slipping on the straw. She stood, fell, stood again, swayed, and took her first steps as John guided her to her mother’s milk. We watched our new lamb for a long time, crouched there in the straw. When it was time to go, we said our goodbyes and closed the door of the poly tunnel softly behind us.

“Come on,” said Cathy, “I’ve got one more thing to show you before you go home.” So we followed her into the farm house, down the long dark corridor and into the kitchen. The kitchen itself was huge and square, a massive wooden framed picture window looking out over the field where we’d just been. One wall of the room was filled with a long cast iron range, and Cathy went to this now and opened one of the bottom doors.

“Look.” She said, so we did, three pairs of little girl eyes were met with a stare from inside, a tiny lamb curled up on a blanket. Cathy lifted a teated bottle from on top of the range and hoisted the lamb and blanket onto her knee. The lamb grabbed hungrily at the milk, gasping and slurping and swallowing as hard as she could.
“This lamb’s mother died when she was born so I need to feed her milk until she’s old enough to go out into the field.” Cathy explained, the lamb sucking at her knuckle as she topped up the warm milk from a saucepan. “Would you like to feed her?” And so the tiny lamb was passed to us one by one, complete with bottle and blanket until all the milk was gone and the lamb had fallen asleep. Cathy carefully placed the lamb back into the gentle warmth of the range and left the door open so we could crouch down and look and stroke her.

We left the farm house and followed Mike back to his car. A mallard stretched her wings and refolded them neatly as she ducked her head under a fence, sauntering and swaying from foot to foot as her clutch of yellow and black chicks scampered and squabbled behind her. Tired and hungry and very very happy, we made our way home.


Happy Easter.

Mind the gaffe

It was hot. So hot that for a few feet the air above the concrete promenade rippled and shimmied, causing the bare legs of slowly strolling flip-flop clad day trippers to look as if they were refracted through a fun fair mirror. I sat in the shade on the steps of the lifeguard hut eating a hamburger and wearing a knock-off Frankie Says… tee shirt that I’d bought for a pound in the market. A piece of fried onion escaped from the clammy stale bun and landed in a greasy coil on the turquoise capital F to the right of my chest. I picked it off between my fingers and flicked it onto the ground.

It was August 1984 and I was 15. We’d not long returned from an hour or so of canoe patrol along the sea front and our lifejackets hung dripping over the blue painted railings behind me. The hairs on my arms were salty tipped and bristled in the sunlight above the sticky wind burned skin that stuck out from sleeves that I’d rolled up to my shoulders. Later this afternoon I knew we’d be practising the exhausting half mile open sea swim from the jetty to the hut. But all that was yet to come. Right now it was time to rest.

I shooed a wasp away from my open can of Coke and took a swig of the warm flat sugary drink. It was foul. The door to the hut behind me opened, sending a waft of frying onions and a collection of teenagers out onto the steps. Inside, Relax was playing on the crackly radio as it had done every six or so records for the past few months, the interference not quite strong enough to dilute the insistence of the throbbing bass line. Dressed now in a white tee shirt, rolled up jeans and rope-bottomed espadrilles, Paul sauntered down the steps, hands in pockets and Ray-Bans perched on his shoulder length highlighted hair.

I felt the heat rise to my already wind chaffed face as I watched him scan the beach, eyes screwed up against the sun. A year older than me and effortlessly sophisticated, Paul was the absolute epitome of glamour in my eyes and I had a planet sized crush on him. I scraped back my damp sea-frizzy hair with one hand in what I hoped was a convincing display of nonchalance and feigned riveted interest in something slightly out of focus over my right shoulder.
“Hi Kate. You ok?” he said, turning and sitting down next to me on the steps.
“Ummm. Errr. Oh, err, hello Paul. Err, yes, fine, err, thanks.” I replied, as if I’d been snatched from some distant reverie and was, until that very moment, quite oblivious to his presence. Closer to the truth was that my heart was thudding so fast, the blood pulsing inside my ears so hard, that I thought he must be able to hear it.

Paul had not long finished his ‘O’ Levels and was, temporarily at least, stuck in that no man’s land between sitting examinations and knowing the outcome before he could return to school and take up a place in the 6th form in the autumn. I, of course, still had another year to go, and so we started talking about school and exams and such, he fluent and humorous, me flushed and stuttering. About ten minutes in, he mentioned that he was hoping to take part in the forthcoming school talent contest with a friend. They were, he said, going to perform one of Wham!’s songs, had been practicing the dance moves already. He, he told me, was going to play the part of George Michael, the band’s front man, his friend that of the much lesser supporting role of Andrew Ridgley.

“Oh, that sounds great!” I grinned enthusiastically. “I bet you’ll be brilliant.” He smiled and nodded handsomely at an obvious truth openly acknowledged.
“Of course,” I continued, keen to keep the conversation flowing and to show off my own sophistication of the arts “I’ve seen one talent show before. Years ago when I was in the first year of middle school. There were loads of really good acts, singers and stuff. But I do remember this terrible one, really awful it was. It was this boy, dressed in a black suit that was much too big for him and doing magic tricks. He was meant to be a magician but oh, God, it was a nightmare. Dreadful. Really crap. He kept losing stuff, got water all over the stage, knocked things over, dropped the microphone…”

I could sense a stillness from Paul and turned to look at him, expecting his face to be convulsed with laughter at my witty report of a tragically misguided soul’s belief in his own non existent talent. Instead, his face was quite quite frozen.
“That was me” he said quietly.

Talk to the wall

I really should be tending to the plate of chicken chow mein congealing in front of me but I just can’t keep my eyes off the woman a couple of tables down. I try to force my gaze back to my paperback and my fork to my food, but it’s no use. Her forehead has captured me and I am trapped, transfixed and mesmerised by its silent Siren song.

I really only came down to the refectory for a change of scene and a yoghurt. Don’t get me wrong; my new office is very fine and I have a grand view from the sliding full height glass door on the third floor. If I put a foot onto the forbidden balcony and swivel my neck to the left as far as it will possibly go I can even glimpse the park that lies beyond the utilitarian yellow bricked halls of residence. But a person can only take so much solitary reading on a spiny flocked charcoal chair and I’m in need of a break.

The woman is in earnest expressive conversation with a companion sitting opposite. Or rather, most of her is. Her forehead doesn’t budge even as her arms gesticulate and her mouth mouths words that I can’t quite hear. She is certainly striking, dressed completely in black and with an impressive bouffant of wild curly hair that elevates her height by a good ten inches. From her skin tone, her lips, the slight impression of jowls just starting to melt from her jaw line, I estimate that she is maybe in her mid fifties. Except for her forehead, which, shiny and smoothly isolated in its own age zone, is just beginning to breech its early twenties.

Perhaps sensing me looking, she glances up at me and I see her eyes scan my face for a seed of recognition. I smile back, hoping that she’ll attribute my not-quite eye contact for a lazy eye or similar optical malady. Failing to find a flicker of familiarity in my face, most of her face frowns a little and she turns back to her companion. I shovel a mouthful of cold noodles and take a swig from my bottle of Diet Coke and it reminds me of that long-running tag line for fizzy orange Tango: “You know when you’ve been Tangoed”. Except in this case, I think, “You know when you’ve been Botoxed.”

I’m feeling restless so decide to mix it up a bit by taking a different flight of stairs back up to my office. To distract my mind from the effort of hauling my overly full self up the endless grey treads, I count the stairs. Six half flights of gleaming black-edged tiles with a turning point landing at each juncture, one facing into the building and one facing the modernistic gable end of occluded glass and exposed brick wall. I count, and then re-count. Eleven steps per half flight, sixty six to the top. How strange; if one uses the wider and grander main flight in the centre of the building there are seventy two to reach the same destination.

Back at my desk once more I peel three blood oranges and read the newspaper online. Snatches of dialogue from the training course running in the meeting room opposite waft in from the corridor. A crow caws noisily outside. I check my mobile phone to see if it’s home time yet. It has been something of a quiet news day I think.

I took this photo of the 'talking wallpaper' in the refectory on my mobile phone.

London's smoking

Another day, another train, this time to Euston by way of London Victoria where I step outside to have a smoke. As I light up, I notice a dreadlocked and bearded man stooping down and collecting cigarette butts from the ground. He picks them up individually, examines them – perhaps for their degree of squashed-ness or amount of remaining tobacco – and puts them in his pocket. Another form of recycling of a kind, maybe made easier since the introduction of the public smoking ban nearly two years ago.

My first experience of the smoking ban in action was not here in London but in New York. By the time I visited in November 2005, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban had been in place for two and a half years. The New Yorkers had adapted to it, had added sophisticated codes of conduct in bars, for instance, where the placing of a cardboard drink mat on top of a half full glass was a notation which meant ‘I’ve gone outside for a smoke – back soon to finish my drink’. Sometimes this led to the farcical situation of a cavernous empty bar full of hatted half drunk drinks and a clientele entirely huddled - shivering, puffing and beer-less - under a microscopic canopy out on the pavement. I guess the bar tenders learned to talk to themselves.

I’ve plenty of time so I catch the number 73 bus, a delightful ride that takes in Hyde Park, Marble Arch and the full length of Oxford Street, covered on this blustery day by a thin throng of shoppers and a fine down of white blossom from the slender trees that line each side. I get off the bus near Euston and walk the few hundred yards to the station itself.

A man with a tattooed face and a black bomber jacket snoozes in his wheelchair on the concourse outside. Around him men and women in suits and skirts flow and converse with overly loud hand gestures and exaggerated annunciation, or talk into mobile phone wires clipped to their lapels. A few feral pigeons strut and squabble over crumbs near his feet. I stand in the lea of a doorway smoking and watching the man with the tattoos. His head is rolled back onto the girdle of his shoulders and he is wearing only one shoe, his other foot strapped up in some kind of brace. He is sleeping soundly beneath the faintly illuminated Pret a Manger sign, eyes tight shut.

I cross the jammed road to Friends House where the meeting is being held and am directed to the correct room by an older man behind a golden brown curved desk. This, the HQ of the Quaker movement in the UK, is also a convenient and central place to hire a room in London. It’s cheap too, and houses a café and a bookshop. When I come out for a smoke a couple of hours later at coffee break, the man with the tattooed face is manoeuvring his wheelchair into the small gardens and looking up at the sky.

I retrace my route to Victoria station by tube. The rush hour is brewing and there are no free seats on the underground so I cling to a handrail provided for the purpose and roll from side to side and foot to foot with the motion of the train. It’s a bit like being on a boat but without the view or the sea air; perhaps more like being stuck in the hold or the engine room for the duration. I’m standing near a family group of 7 or 8 people spanning three generations from grandfather to 6 year old. One of a pair of pre-teenage brothers accidentally brushes my bosom with his hand as he goes to grab the handrail without looking. He blushes furiously and I chuckle as his mother – about my age – smilingly apologises for his embarrassing near miss. His brother, of course, teases him mercilessly about his blushes and his clumsiness until they get off the tube at Green Park.



NB - I allowed myself a small congratulatory pat on the back for putting into practice today work-related lessons learnt the hard way from years of mistakes. Namely, that in my tunnel-visioned previous incarnation of a few years ago I’d have driven through heavy traffic into the office first for an hour of pointless hard graft before then dashing for the train and arriving at the meeting – inevitably late – in a flushed and clammy mess.

Lessons learned were more specifically as follows:

1) Life is short and work an ephemeral side show to the main feature

2) The nature of my job means that sometimes I’m being paid to go to meetings. When that’s the case, then that’s my task for the day.

And so I got up at leisure, bathed, faffed, and strolled comfortably to the train for a 10:26 departure. I arrived the best part of an hour before the meeting started at 1:30 too. No sweat.

The right tool for the job

It’s been a weekend of nature and nurture I think. Well, if you count gardening and a mother and daughter shopping expedition as part of that equation that is. But it has left me pondering this evening about the way in which some animals use tools.

It started off with me buying three strips of turf at the garden centre. Roo had mentioned when she arrived home last weekend that it would be nice to have some grass in the garden for the dog. The dog like grass for various purposes – including sunbathing – but, renovations not withstanding, the back yard is about the size of a shoe box. Nevertheless, I could see that there was a small space into which grass could be introduced and I prepared it the best I could over a couple of hours of shovelling and raking this morning before heading off in the car to buy the turf.

The first strip went down fine. The second needed to be cut to size to fit, but with what, exactly, does one cut a roll of turf? I had no idea so sat down on the stool in the garden in the sunshine with a cup of coffee and a cigarette and thought about it. The spade was too clumsy, the rake and hand trowel inappropriate, I had no saw, and I’m sure if I was a better person I’d have one of those half-moon shaped lawn-edging devices, but I’m not so I haven’t. And then a little beam from the patiently orbiting star ship lateral thinking struck me. I wandered into the kitchen, picked up the long serrated bread knife and set about slicing through the cylinder of turf as if it was a giant Swiss roll but made with soil and grass rather than chocolate sponge and jam. Perfect.

Turfing / Swiss roll cutting completed, I moved on to planting the couple of hundred summer flowering bulbs that have been hanging around for eternity. The bulbs were all rather tiny ugly-looking things, somewhat like brown fossilised iced gems but without the biscuit and with some flaky onion skin type stuff around them. The instructions on the bag said to plant them either 1 or 2 inches deep. This again sent me back to my gardening tool pondering stool; the trowel or spade would not be any good – too wide, too deep – and I haven’t got one of those dibbers or dabbers or whatever they’re called, so what to use? And then, eureka, the second lateral beam of the day sent me back to the kitchen utensil pot to select an alternative garden tool of choice, this time the porridge stirrer (or spurtle to give it its proper Scottish name). In no time, I was poking perfectly sized holes in the soil and dropping in the ugly bulbs at a rate of knots.

There are moments – and I have plenty of them, believe me – when I think how very closely we are related to the other animals that we share the planet with. Chimps and monkeys that use sticks to extract termites, collect honey or to escape from an enclosure, for instance. Or Egyptian vultures that use specially selected stones to break open ostrich eggs. Or woodpecker finches, native to the Galapagos Islands, that use cactus spines to prise ants out of holes. Or green herons that learn to use bait to go fishing. Or the laboratory-dwelling crow that learned to use a cup he’d been given as a toy to fetch water to moisturise his food.

I think next time that I’m planning to do any gardening or having folk round for some grub, I’ll make sure that I invite a variety of birds and a couple of monkeys. After all, if they can do all that with just a mossy old stick or a couple of stones, imagine what they could do with a kitchen full of tools.

Gold lame and lilies

It’s funny the things people give you. I don’t mean a sore throat or earache or the cold shoulder – which are not in the least amusing – but unexpected gifts. Like a small yellow ornamental gourd, for instance, presented to me last summer by the father of Roo’s boyfriend via a convoluted chain of delivery that led from his back garden vegetable patch to my desk top. The boyfriend is now an ex but the gourd’s still around, all golden and mellow next to the telephone.

My mother’s a great one for gifts of the unexpected. She always has a little something for me whenever I see her, but, like a slightly unconventional street conjurer, I’m never quite sure what she’s going to pull out of her bag. Sometimes it’s a fairly conventional thing, like a nice cushion for the armchair, some newspaper cuttings or a paperback book. Occasionally, it’ll be something more exotic and edible, such as a giant tin of canned prawns, delicious mozzarella-stuffed cherry peppers, or the jar of sweet pickled pumpkin cubes in brine that’s resting in my fridge at this very moment.

But if I’m very lucky, she’ll have picked me up a bargain from the eccentric-central land that is the church coffee morning or jumble sale, and then there’s simply no knowing what the bag might contain. A couple of slightly used candles, for instance, a pair of gold lame tights (last worn circa 1982), a collection of box-less films that I’ve never heard of on DVDs that came free with the Sunday papers, a seashell, or a miniature tribe of knitted woollen fairytale characters complete with beards, crowns, tunics and red capes. I am always amazed by her generosity even if it is, admittedly, sometimes more of a challenge to find an appropriate home for some things than others.

When I met Roo from the railway station on Saturday night, she’d brought home with her a beautiful bunch of lilies for me all the way from Lancaster. Lilies are my favourite flowers, so of course I was most delighted with them, but not only on that level; I was also exceedingly impressed that she’d managed to carry them through 330-odd miles on several trains (and right across London on the tube) without them coming to any harm or crumpling whatsoever. I put the lilies in a vase on the mantelpiece and have been watching the buds open all week. The smell is divine.

Roo had also brought me home a little pack of playing cards but I’m going to save those to play with until after she’s gone back to uni. I can always make up the numbers in a few hands of poker with the knitted fairytale folk; I’m pretty sure they don’t cheat too much.


I took this photo of the lilies using my mobile phone - they're much more of a vibrant orange colour than they look in the picture.