A little less conversation...

... a little more action please, as Elvis might have put it. With or without a rhinestone studded wing-collared jumpsuit.

Unlike Elvis, I cannot sing nor have I left the building. But I am going to be taking a short break from blogging for a while. I've also got the whole week off work so am planning to take a few days of r 'n' r to enjoy the fabulous sunshine and to do a few other things that I've been thinking about for a while but have been putting off.

So more of an interlude than a departure really. Do take the opportunity to grab a drink and an ice cream from the foyer. I'll be back soon. In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine.

Cocoa weekend

If it is the possession of clever thumbs, a smart-wired brain and walking on two feet that defined homo sapiens in an evolutionary sense, it's storytelling that makes us human. The telling and sharing of stories is of such universal importance that it is among the handful of characteristics that all peoples have had in common since the dawn of time.

Whether set in far away places full of mythical creatures, amid the colourful pageantry of times gone by, or in the work-a-day real world of the here and now, stories serve to unite and to educate, to share tribal traits and beliefs, to warn, to question received wisdom, to show novel ways of thinking and to capture new ideas, to pass on skills and techniques, to place the current day in the context of the past, and - above all perhaps - to entertain.

Many books that you read in a lifetime will change the way you think about the world, but arguably none more so than those that your read (or hear) in your very earliest years. The magic contained in the books you read (or which are read to you) as a child is so spellbinding that it can remain with you all your days. Those talented, clever people who write children's books have an almighty burden upon their shoulders: for their words - and the worlds they create with them - are quite literally capable of shaping young minds. Paradoxically, of course, a child might not remember all the details of the carefully crafted characters within a story - nor even who the book was by or what it was called - but he or she may take away the essence of the story and make it part of his or her own human fibre.

One such for me was a story that was first read to me and then read by me when I was able to do so. At one point in it, the little girl puts on her Sunday-best dress, packs up her tiny brown suitcase and goes to stay with some neighbours, the Cocoas, for a few days. This thrilling event is called a Cocoa weekend. So of course all my life, my mother, my sister and I have always referred to a few days away as being a Cocoa weekend. I can't for the life of me remember what book it was in. I wish I could. But no matter, the essence has remained even if the title is lost now to my childhood memory.

And so it is that the dog and I are about to embark on our latest Cocoa weekend. I'm off in the morning to Lancaster to collect Roo from university, to drop her belongings into storage for the duration and to bring her back home for the long summer holidays - a Cocoa vacation perhaps? Meanwhile, Kaos has gone to stay with my mother in a canine version of the same thing, except with a lead and collar and tins of dog food rather than a pile of suitcases and a car full of computer equipment. Roo and I should be back home again on Monday evening.

And whilst I'm enjoying my Cocoa weekend, I will try my best to retrieve from the dark dusty corners of my brain what the name of that wonderful book was.

The British Isles: from Mercator's 'Atlas or Meditations of a Cosmographer on the Creation of the World and on the Form of Created Matter' 1595.

The heartbreaking persistence of nature

Perfect sultry day, air thick as honey. A day for lying on the grass folded in the arms of a lover. For stroking damp hair from a sweated forehead. For cool crisp white wine and soft summer fruits dipped in sugar. For watching leavening clouds growing dense as charcoal. For laughing as slow swollen rain drops explode on the skin and running for cover under newspaper umbrellas. For ice creams, choc ices, kiss-me-quick hats and long cotton skirts. For barefooted footsteps, flip flops and wriggling scarlet varnished toes in the sand.

A crow stands on a chimney pot, king of all he surveys. Ragged jet wings and glistening beak full of discarded sandwich crusts. He feeds his young as tenderly as the gentlest cow nuzzles her calf, then arches his wings and leaps into the air in an act of faith as old as time. To us earth-stuck creatures, who can gaze only with envious eyes as he soars and swoops with a natural grace, his flight is a miracle.

In the high street, engines grind and rumble as cars and lorries inch their way towards the end of the work week. Office workers run lunch time errands, hair slick with sweat and make-up melting on burning cheeks. Music seeps through open windows, snatches of conversation, of badly tuned radios and exotic languages. Pigeons squabble over market remains on the edge of the pavement. Fresh black graffiti on the face of a white painted building, mismatched curtains hang limp at its dusty windows. A man chews his nails as his van waits to turn at the lights, his mind fixed on the long cold beer and the quick hot kiss to welcome him home.

Sunset on the beach and the hazy mist of night time heat blurs an invisible line between sea and sky. Herring gulls strut and peck on the shingle bank picking out oysters and winkling crabs. It is quite quite still; even the incoming ocean raises barely a ripple in the storm heavy air. Swifts chase overhead darting on the trails of hazy insects and the bulging vapours of mesmeric midges. Oystercatchers call to each other from the hem of the tide among the driftwood and the bladder wrack. The pink orange sun erupts through a rift in the clouds, its colour staining the sky as it starts its final descent. A giant blazing disc dropped with infinite slowness into a timeless slot machine by unseen hands.

We make our way back through the gathering twilight. The dogs have spent their effervescence and trot contentedly side by side, chewing sticks and stopping to sniff at the promenade news. The gulls are still fishing out of sight in the darkness, still calling to one another, still prising open shells. Groups of boys show off tricks on skateboards and bicycles, the nearby girls pretend not to notice as they talk and giggle just a little too loudly over cans of flat Coke. We say goodbye to our beach walking companions, then home once more in the quiet still evening. A moth scuttles up the window pane and the dog snores his contentment from the cave of his bed. A night at the end of a perfect summer day.

Picture: Surf City Sally's Sea Shell Emporium by Richard Cardona http://www.richardcardona.com/blog.html

Cautionary tales from old ma Pythagoras

Should you ever find yourself plummeting towards a certain death whilst trapped inside a tiny tinny lift, just jump up and down as fast as you can. This simple act will save you from being scooped out of the bottom of the shaft on a shovel whilst also cocking a snook to the always-trying-to-prove-itself force of gravity. It is unclear whether the presence of muzak enhances or detracts from this manoeuvre.

Never walk underneath a ladder propped against a wall. It's bad luck. That's because the gods hate trying to work out the square of the hypotenuse enough as it is without you trundling along and bisecting the base line measurement with your silly shoes. It'd also be pretty grim having to spend eternity in damnation just because of a geometrical mishap.

Don't put food in your mouth using a knife. It'll make you look as if you missed out on the 1966 casting session for One Million Years BC (whether or not you resemble Raquel Welch) and may give any younger siblings in the vicinity the urge to accidentally jog your elbow. And forked tongues only look good on snakes.

Birds of a feather flock together. Except when they don't.

Never accept lifts from strangers. Aunty Barbara did that once in the seventies and she's never been the same since, what with the tattoos and the piercings and the CND posters. At what point an acquaintance ceases to be a stranger is a moot point: a decade sharing a house and / or bed is usually enough, but you can never be too careful.

If you wash your face in the dew at dawn on the first of May, you'll be beautiful all year round. If you get up early enough, don't stand on the dog in the dark and once you've got rid of the grass stems and ants from your hair.

Good things come to he who waits. If your good thing hasn't arrived yet, you've just not been waiting long enough or you gave the wrong address when you were ordering the good thing. Don't forget that patience is a virtue. Virtues are good things too. See, now your good thing has arrived already even without it being the actual good thing that you expected.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. As proved repeatedly using ducking stools during the witch trials of the middle ages, a witch who drowned was innocent all along. Thus being both strong and dead. Or in other words, what will be, will be. If you allow fate to take its course, then that is the course you were always fated to take; if you make a conscious act or a change of direction, then that is the course you were always fated to take... Ok, you're always on a winning streak with the fate thing.

Rain before seven, fine by eleven. Unless you're very unlucky and the storm lasts longer than four hours. Quite what climatic calamity would be unleashed for the next forty days by rain before seven and after eleven on St Swithin's Day (July 15th) is anyone's guess. So be prepared and take an umbrella.

The pit of Apocalypto

I was perhaps a slightly reluctant cinema goer when I went along to see Mel Gibson's 2006 epic, Apocalypto. The trailers and the general pre-release hype around the film - set in Central America during the declining period of the Mayan civilisation - didn't really grab me and its subject matter - a tribesman who must escape imprisonment and human sacrifice after the capture of his village - didn't appeal either. And it is fair to say that, over all, I found the film rather too long and rather too 'boyish' for my tastes.

*** Plot spoiler alert***

if you haven't seen Apocalypto, don't read
any further

But several years on from my one and only viewing, some of its scenes and themes remain with me in spite of my misgivings. As our hero Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is led away from the sacked and burning remains of his tribe's home, we know that he has hidden his heavily pregnant wife, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), and young son, Turtles Run, in the empty shaft of a deep sink hole. As the captives are herded to their unknown fate, one of their number spots the trailing vine that Jaguar Paw has left for his wife to enable her to climb out of the pit. Suspicious, he severs it and cuts off her only means of escape.

So whilst the main (and lengthy) action of the film now switches to the tribesmen and the gory horrors they endure at the hands of their captors, my female attention is wholly with Seven and her predicament at the bottom of the shaft; I am far less concerned with the fate of Jaguar Paw and his comrades, even though it is they that occupy screen for most of the rest of the film.

I cannot know whether a male viewer of Apocalypto would have the same preoccupation with the destiny of Seven as me or if the (undoubtedly stirring) derring-do of our band of conquered heroes, locked in mortal combat with their foes, takes precedent. I suspect the latter, because for all its sixteenth century setting, it is as fast a paced non-stop action-thriller as, say, The Bourne Identity.

If that is the case, then the film has perhaps 'not worked' for female audience members: what, in the male-eyed view, is very much a sub-plot delivering a useful slice of motivation (the fate of Seven) is, for women, the main focus. For me, no matter how many poisoned arrows are slung or heads gruesomely removed from shoulders on the top of the temple, I am still at the bottom of that sink hole with the pregnant woman.

Several years on and I still from time to time close my eyes and try to imagine how I would escape such a predicament. There I am, stuck at the bottom of a hole not of my own making or choosing. How can I claw my way out of it to the sun?

Of course, in the film, Jaguar Paw eventually escapes his captors and arrives to rescue Seven and Turtles Run (and the new baby which has been born in the meanwhile) in just the nick of time. But real life is rarely like that. Whether the pit we are in is one we have inadvertently dug ourselves or have accidentally stumbled into whilst our attention was occupied elsewhere, ninety nine times out of a hundred it will be only ourselves that we have to rely on to haul us back out again. So how do we do it?

One step at a time, one foot after another, one word following the next, and with our eyes fixed unwaveringly on the blazing light just up ahead at the end of the tunnel.

Tumbleweed Tuesday

I have tumbleweed blowing around where my brain should be and my fingers are conspiring with one another to type only gobbledygook. Well, a little more gobbledygook than usual anyway...

So before I quit flogging this dead horse for today, I'd just like to add another to my occasional series of mobile phone snaps of interesting bathrooms in historic settings.

This picture was taken from the 3rd floor of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich: specifically, from the prised-open sash window within the ladies' convenience therein upon the occasion of a meeting this morning at the aforementioned building.

A World Heritage Site and 'the baroque masterpiece of English architecture', the Old Royal Naval College was planned by Sir Christopher Wren during the first half of the eighteenth century and is one of London's most famous riverside landmarks. The buildings are simply stunning: however many times I see them they just take my breath away.

And as bathrooms go, that sure is one heck of a loo with a view.

Normal gobbledygook service will resume shortly. In the meantime, here's a link to the website of the Old Royal Naval College: http://www.oldroyalnavalcollege.org/

I got chills...

No make up. No tights. No stockings. No short skirts. No trousers. No hair dye. No rocking rolling devil music. And, most certainly, no boys. Just tell the truth, shame the Devil, cross your legs and say no. Ah, those Carmelite nuns knew how to party though, simpering bashfully beneath their wimples when the jagged jaw of the parish priest came a calling. Rock on Sister, for you are indeed the bride of Christ Himself and the blessed one turns her eyes only heavenward as the fires of desire stoke the flames in your soul.

To a tall, flush-faced, be-plaited, be-ribboned, satchel-clutching ten year old Prossie* the finer aspects of the reign of Catholic fire and brimstone were as much a mystery as hieroglyphics. Pretty to look at, sometimes alarming in the telling, but as mortally unknowable as the activities with which unbaptised persons might occupy themselves whilst in God's eternal waiting room, Limbo being a concept that doesn't feature highly at a work-a-day down-town Methodist Sunday School. Oh, and the giddying heady heavenly scent of it. The incense, the holy smoke, the lithe writhing of the bright licking flames of the pure white candles in their jet black sconces. And the priest, listening hard to feverish whispering confession of sins in thought and deed, offering hoarse spoken words of absolution from behind delicate fretwork panels to juvenile knees.

I came unprovisioned, unprepared, into this Convent school world of saints and martyrs as my own adolescence was just beginning to bloom. 1979, Mrs Thatcher not long anointed as the bouffant haired latter-day Bismarck steering her iron-clad course into history. And I, on my first day, in brown felt hat, striped golden tie and coarse pleated skirt, stood wide eyed and craven in awe of the sheer power of it all. I was yet to learn the Hail Mary, mouthed nonsense words from half-closed lips, fiddled awkwardly with my tie at the moments in the chapel of genuflection and crossing. Make me an instrument of thy peace, Saint Augustine, and don't let Sister Philomena catch me doodling in the hymn book.

Five years on, I was an old hand. Could recite the prayers: English, French, Latin, knew the stations of the cross, ate fish on Fridays and passed unseen beneath the radar of my outsiderness. And then one day the priest must have called by unexpected, for the lunchtime corridors were deserted of sisters and their secular counterparts. Dun painted classrooms, playgrounds, tennis courts, quadrangles, we had the place to ourselves. The Devil he makes works for idle hands and our teenage hands itched with mischief. Some climbed upon the brown curtained stage, powered up the stereo, plucked from the ether a smuggled cassette tape and cranked up the volume. All that long lunchtime of bliss we tucked our skirts in our pants and danced and turned cartwheels to the Devil's very best tunes.

And so it was that the first time I heard the spine-tingling, hair-raising, pulse-throbbing, ear-addicting, blood-pumping sound of the (then banned) Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was dancing with my knickers on show with a room full of 15 year old girls in the hallowed hall of a Convent school. Over and over and over again, the windows shivering with unholy volume until the room was a spinning, sweating, swaying sea of singing young women on the very tip of the brink of the precipice of adulthood moving only in the ways that ten thousand thousand years of instinct compelled.

Some people know exactly where they were and what they were doing the moment JFK was assassinated. On the moment of the first moon landing, I was still a babe in arms. But there are some very special moments plucked from a lifetime of memories that condense, coalesce and stand still as if time itself has halted. That afternoon in 1984 was one of them. Relax. Oh yeah.


I was reminded of this today when I went to visit Fram's blog (>>>Sort of San Franscico Fan Club>>>) and found he had posted Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard that too: 2002, late September, driving across endless eternal beautiful red rocks in the Mid West USA. A lifetime of listening to music but some has the power to raise a tingle from nape to soul and stop the heart on vey first hearing. Another piece too like this, just the other day at the event of music and words. This time, Country Life by folk band Show of Hands, played and sung to perfection by Maria's husband Bob.

And if you're wondering, yes I did sing along. But not, this time, with my skirt tucked in my knickers.

* Prossie = Protestant

http://www.last.fm/music/Show+of+Hands/_/Country+Life

Flying solo

A couple of weeks ago, Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker wrote a piece about pets. Or rather, the deliberate choice he's made of not having a pet. His decision was based not on a dislike of animals, nor on the costs of looking after them, nor on the concerns about allergies that some people have, nor even on worries about leaving an animal alone at home during the working day. No, Charlie's reasons for not having a pet were more philosophical: because animals have short life spans and they die too soon.

It's an interesting viewpoint and one that I understand. Like most pet owners, I sometimes have to pull myself up short at dwelling too much or too often on the morbid thought that it's more likely than not that my own companion animal will die before I do. Charlie acknowledged this opposite number in his article too: that pet owners feel that the joy an animal brings into one's life far outweighs the grief at its passing. I've always had animals and I'd concur with that wholeheartedly.

It's something that Mark Rowlands touches on in his book The Philosopher and the Wolf. In essence, that we humans are alone (as far as we know) among all other living things on earth in that we have an awareness and foresight of our own mortality. This is the price we pay for our human kind of intelligence, the devil's bargain if you like, like Dr Faustus. At some point in evolution, our species traded its delicate bloom of immortal ignorance for the abilities that we posses and that make us what we are: language, invention, adaptability, abstract thought and so on. But the price we pay, if not with our actual Faustian souls, is a high one. We live out our lives against the backdrop of the ticking of the clock, the beat of the metronome, the pulse of our hearts in the sure and certain knowledge that one day there will only be a deafening silence. We don't know when that one day is precisely, but we do know, with every day that passes, that it's one day closer.

The other animals, unburdened with the knowledge of their own demise, are free to just live and be and take each day as they find it. We are rarely content to just be. Instead, we rush and push and strive like a swimmer against the current, looking to acquire, to develop, to achieve, to be better than we are in whatever way our personal paths and circumstances dictate, be it wealth or status or possessions or even spiritual enlightenment. This behaviour is in and of our nature and is perhaps not wholly because we have an awareness that our time is limited, but I'm sure that is a (sometimes subconscious) contributing factor. Or another way of putting it, maybe, is that all of us living things are time travellers, but it's only we humans that know it.

It was finding my injured seagull on the beach last night that put this back at the forefront of my mind. I managed to feed him a few shrimps and water using a spoon, and by this morning he was much perkier than he had been when I'd found him - as judged by the rate at which he tried to peck and bite me anyway. But he still couldn't stand or spread his wings and I was concerned, after speaking to the vet, that he might be in pain and that by keeping him alive I might be causing him suffering - I have no idea how to tell if a bird is in pain when it has no obvious wounds. I had, I knew, interfered in a well-intentioned but nevertheless perhaps inappropriate and clumsy human way to change the course of natural events.

So in the end I made the very difficult decision of taking him to the vet. Wildlife is notoriously difficult to rehabilitate, and I am fairly sure that the journey in the car with me will have been his last. But, terribly sad though I was to do this, I did at least have the slightly reassuring knowledge that of the two of us travelling through time in my little car today, I was the only one aware of it.

Ignorance is like a delicate fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone - Oscar Wilde

Charlie Brooker's article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/15/charlie-brooker-pets-death

Solstice, sonnets, singing and seagulls

The morning sun on the eve of the solstice blazed dazzling fresh through the curtains long before the dog or I had even properly opened our eyes.

The summer solstice has of course been celebrated by people of many beliefs for as long as anyone knows. For example, the oldest of the ancient Druid stones at Stonehenge were placed there nearly 5,000 years ago: as the sun rises on 21st June, it shines directly on the Heel Stone. It is also the only day in the year when people are allowed to go right into the stone circle to commune and mingle and celebrate the dawn of summer with the spirits of their long-ago ancestors.Tomorrow, for one glorious day, the sun will appear to stand still: its path north (or south) comes to a stop before reversing its direction. So today also marks the penultimate day before the days reach their longest and turn to track the long descent into the mean cold light of winter.

But as I'm not heading off to welcome the coming of summer at Avebury or Stonehenge this year, what better way to celebrate than by enjoying a day of fabulous talents a bit closer to home.

I'd been invited by my friend, Maria McCarthy, to an event of words and music on the theme of All You Need is Love. Maria's a writer and poet and her work has been broadcast on the BBC as well as included in several anthologies and a couple of her own publications. Maria read out some of her own wonderfully evocative poetry and prose as well as from the works of others, interspersed with great folk music - played on acoustic guitar - and singing from her husband Bob Carling. There was an open mic session afterwards for poets too, and it was extremely moving to hear so many different voices and poems from people of all ages. The event was the first of its kind at the delightfully welcoming and cosy Teynham Library: I'm sure its success will mean it'll be the first of many.

I met up with my mother again later in the afternoon to look at an exhibition of crafts and art in Trinity Church here in Sheerness. The pieces on show had been made by people right across the age spectrum and included everything from paintings, photographs and lace making to clay models, tapestries, quilting and beautiful silk trinket boxes. And if the crafts were delightful, then the cream teas in the church hall next door were divine.

By the time it was the evening hour for for walking the dog, I didn't really think the day had much more in store other than a quiet stroll along the prom and perhaps meeting up with a couple of Kaos's canine chums. And we did indeed bump into Chris (and his brindle Staffordshire Bull Terrier, George) and Stewart (with his exuberant little white dog, Buddy), our regular walking companions. But by then I'd managed to acquire an injured herring gull which I was also carrying in the crook of my arm.

I wonder what the two policemen on patrol thought as we three humans, three dogs and a seagull walked past them?

***

Ancient legend has it that a rose picked on Midsummer's Eve (23rd June) will keep fresh until Christmas. At midnight on Midsummer's Eve, young women should scatter rose petals and say

Rose leave, rose leaves,

Rose leaves I strew

He that will love me

Come after me now

Their true love will then visit the next day

***

Maria McCarthy's website is at http://www.medwaymaria.co.uk/

The dog's breakfast

There’s nothing like a dead mouse to get one’s blood flowing in the morning. So I've felt guilty for the rest of the day that Kaos and I inadvertently interrupted a kestrel’s breakfast on the promenade. My fault, watching the terns as I was and leaving the dog to snuffle at the end of his long lead, the extent of which took him nose to talons with the raptor, who – perhaps unsurprisingly – flew off in a huff. Leaving behind a small grey carcase with dishevelled hair, sticky-out teeth and a rather startled expression.

Much like me (in so many more ways than one), the late mouse, it would seem, was not a morning creature either.

Most days, I claw my way to consciousness through the delicious thick air of slumber by means of multiple snooze button pauses on the alarm. Each time you press it, a delicate ten minute slice of warm treacly reprieve is served. But the alarm is remorseless and will continue trilling (I've found) for well over an hour. Some particularly Frankenstein-esque mornings it really does feel as if a big jolting zap of electricity is the only thing that will haul me out of bed. But lacking jump leads, I tend instead to rely on the good old fashioned remedy of what (thanks to Gimme Gimme Gimme) is known as a full English breakfast: a cup of tea and a fag.

Today though, perhaps because it is Friday (that most succulent of days) or perhaps because I'd gone to bed early-ish for once, I actually woke up before the alarm. A quick pull on of clothes and slooshing of the teeth later and Kaos and I were striding along the beach quite alone in the sunshine with the seabirds and the hungry kestrel. Blissful. Which is not precisely the description I'd apply to my next task of the day - the putting together of a huge spreadsheet.

Still, as I was working at home, I rewarded myself for finishing it with a Snickers bar and a cup of tea in the garden. And the hope that the kestrel had gone back for his breakfast mouse.



Picture of rescued kestrel chicks from the BBC

Always the tortoise...

Posterity fails to record whether the hare added the taking of shortcuts to his repertoire of foolish behaviours on his ego-crushing rout at the hands of the smug tortoise. But the wise money says odds on that he did. For there is no more sure-fire way to be even later than you expected than by taking the quick way.

Nothing ahead but stationary tail lights. Nothing to hear but grinding engines and drifts of deaf-wishing music from the rolled down windows of cars with metallic finishes. Nothing to read but number plates and those peculiar symbols on the backs of lorries that should make some sort of sense but never do. Nothing to pass except the ticking of the clock and the shrivelling seconds of your carefully planned journey time. And then, hallelujah, praise the knees of the bees, for there to the left is an unexpected slip road offering the by-way of enlightenment and the diesel fugged entrance to clear driving nirvana.

Gripped by indecision, your brain cramps with the effort of juggling conflicting odds. You know this route but it's gridded more firmly than a crossword. You haven't gone precisely the other way before but... You know it's foolish, you know it's reckless, but it might - might! - just get you there in time. Your foot hovers over the clutch, leaden with the choice of diversion aversion. The traffic's creeping forward inch by inch, the open gateway of highway freedom growing smaller second by second. Take your chance or take the wait: your call. Oh the heady heady seduction of it all.

You stamp on the clutch, bullet the accelerator, yank the wheel through ninety degrees just as the last white chevrons of the slip road are disappearing under your feverish tyres and off you go. Your choice is made, the die is cast. This time, captain, it might just work...

Of course, it never does. Shortcuts rarely do. You've simply swapped a jam on the road that you know for one on a road that you don't, thus creating a fruity concoction of congestion with a side order of navigation. Blase now, you follow your nose and hurl the car randomly at what you think is (more or less) the right direction. Forty five minutes later, you find yourself approaching a familiar road bridge but at a novel oblique angle. When you arrive, as surely you must eventually, you will be thirty minutes late.

You will also find that the unfeasibly thin and somewhat scatty minded white haired professor who set off at the same time and from the same place as you has been sitting in a comfortable chair eating sandwiches from the communal lunch time buffet for half an hour.

Rocks and pebbles

My parents gave me a stone tumbler when I was about seven or eight years old. A thick cylinder of orangey-brown plastic with removable white caps at either end, it was maybe a little larger in diameter than a piece of drain pipe and sat on top of a small bronze coloured motor. The stone tumbler would magically turn my handful of dirty sharp pebbles into gleaming polished gems. Irresistible.

I selected my first stones with care: purples and mauves and pink glass-veined quartz, mysterious dark brown pieces and some that were as inky and as timeless as the night sky. Added fine charcoal grey grit. Poured in some water. Switched on the electricity to make the fan belt driven motor run. And waited. And waited. And waited. The little stone tumbler ran hour after hour, day after day after day. I kept stopping it, of course, to see how the gems were doing. Were they done yet? Was my little plastic tube now full of sparkling jewels?

No matter how often I looked, there never seemed to be any difference. One day, after looking for signs of progress and - of course - finding none, I must have forgotten to switch the motor back on. Perhaps I was just impatient. Or maybe I'd decided, in my seven or eight year old way, that it must somehow be a trick like the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, for I never did turn it on again.

More than three decades on, my little stone tumbler popped back into my mind today after some fascinating comments from Fram and Roo that followed a book review that I wrote a few days ago. Specifically, it got me to thinking about if we change with age - and if so, how those changes manifest themselves.

So some personal reflections on change as a by-product of age:

I no longer burn to have the answer, only the answers that I need to the questions I choose to ask. I select the questions I want to ask with great care. I will have fresh questions to ask for as long as I have a heartbeat. I believe that, when it comes to others, a person will reveal as much (or as little) of him- or herself as they choose to at any given moment. Pushing, prodding, prying for a premature revelation achieves no more than backing a lion into a corner: he or she can now move only one way, and the outcome will be good for neither of us.

I sat by a large pond in a sunny quadrangle today. Golden carp wriggled and splashed within the deep green water. On the grass, three baby coots followed the neatly picked steps of their elegant red-beaked mother as she pecked and foraged for insects and sandwich crumbs. For carp and coots alike, this pond, this quad, is their whole universe. They were born here, will live, breed, nurture, grow old and die here.

To look at the quad as a prison, though, is to look with wrong eyes: from the outside. From the inside, this is their world, their home, their life and their refuge. It is our paradoxical, unique human tragedy that we are rarely satisfied with our own quadrangle, however beautiful, bountious or peaceful it may be. We shin up the walls and peep out of the compound. Exotic equals good, we think, familiar equals bad, or dull at the very least. We cannot help ourselves. It is as much in our restless, relentless genes as to roll and thunder and crash with foam is the way of the ocean. This is not to imply that ambition or the desire for change, for self-improvement, are bad things. Far from it. Rather to say that the rest we take at the end of the day is as valid and as vital as the labours constrained within it. This, in particular, took me a very long time to learn.

A tiny money spider has been exploring the back of my hand as I've been writing. My hand, my arm, the hem of my skirt, are temporarily part of his world; and he is part of mine. For some of us, the concept of home is as clearly defined as the four walls of the quad are to the carp and the coots: any elsewhere is alien. For others of us, the walls of our quad encompass the four corners of the earth. One view is not better than another. Just different.

There is no doubt that age continues to knock the rough edges off me just as the relentless oceans polish the sharpest of granites to smooth round pebbles. The same way that my stone tumbler would have done if I had had the patience to let it.

Clickety click...

Life is full of things that you'll never know if you like until you try.

I have never tried jellied eels. Frogs legs. Tripe. Novels written by models. Sportsmen's autobiographies. Potholing. Morris dancing. Bungee jumping. There's nothing wrong with any of these things and it could well be that if I tried them, I'd love them. Thus I accept that I may be missing out.

Playing bingo had never appealed to me either and it's quite likely I'd have gone to my grave without hearing one and one: legs eleven delivered by a cheery voice over a crackling public address system if I hadn't, a few years ago, worked with a woman who had previously worked in a bingo hall. She was great company, so when she arranged an evening out for a group of us at her former place of employment, I was delighted to go along.

I'd expected an evening of great frivolity and chatter, so of course was completely unprepared for the seriousness with which the games proceeded. Talking during the calling of the numbers was highly frowned upon and the overall atmosphere was one of enormous concentration. Indeed, adept players had as many as half a dozen numbered sheets in front of them for each game. The numbers fell from the caller's lips faster than rain from a dripping down-pipe; I had trouble scanning my one singular card for a number before the next fell into my ears like the urgent two toned sirens of a fire engine. I simply have no idea how they managed to keep up; I guess that's skill and practice for you.

The evening was fun but not an experience I'd rush to repeat. However, one thing learned from bingo lingo came in handy today when I was writing my mother's birthday card. She's sixty six. What on earth, I thought, can I write about being 66? It's not a milestone birthday like any of the zero ones, or even a significant one like last year's 65 which marks 'official' retirement age. It's not really old enough to be considered an achievement in itself - like being 84 or 91, say - and nor is it young enough to cause remark: double digits, teenager at last, key to the door and so on. And then it struck me. In bingo lingo, which associates something with each number called, 66 would be clickety-click, sixty six. So that's' what I put on the card:

Happy clickety-click birthday - still two little ducks until two fat ladies.

Clickety-click (66)

Plus

Two little ducks (22)

Equals

Two fat ladies (88)

It made me chuckle anyway. Maths jokes always do.

I'm not sure my mother was that impressed to be honest. Maybe next year I'll just stick with writing happy birthday.

Book review: Case Histories

It’s a long hot summer in Cambridge in the early Noughties. And the 1970s. And the mid 1990s. As the sun beats down and the earth crinkles and splits, so the industrious ants pick up their bundles of eggs and larvae and scuttle for cover in the deep dark cracks, never to be seen again. But beneath our feet, beneath our skins, these buried secrets grow and swell and multiply: what happened to those three lost girls? Where did they go?

Jackson Brodie, ex police inspector turned private eye, has no idea. Neither does he have the stomach to face the living, pulsing grief carried for decades in the hearts of those left behind; for one thing, he’s already got more than his fair share of misfortune and tragedy to live with. But it is to Jackson that the survivors turn. He is their last hope for healing those long-festering wounds, their last shot at peace of mind, their one-time-only chance for resolution. Jackson carries in his mind an accounting sheet - the lost on the left, the found on the right – and the two never seem to balance however much he wants them to. So it is with some reluctance that Jackson, the last good man standing, picks up the threads of these long ago events and tries to knit together a bandage of truth.

Case Histories is a detective story, but it’s far more than a whodunit. Kate Atkinson skilfully weaves together a patchwork of seemingly disparate strands: of dysfunctional families, of sudden inexplicable loss, of parental and marital love pushed to the lip of the precipice and beyond, of adult lives still shaped and haunted by long-ago shadowy events. In that regard, as the cast of characters and their quirks unfolds, Case Histories is far more a whydunnit than anything else. Generously shot through with the shimmering golden thread of humour that has you laughing out loud in places, the book grabs the reader by the collar from the very first scene and never lets up.

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread Prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, in 1995. In this, her fifth book and the first starring the lovably flawed Jackson Brodie, Kate accomplishes a completely fresh take on the detective story; in some ways, the crime elements are almost incidental. Never gruesome but always gripping, Case Histories throws the reader around on a roller coaster ride that blurs time and genre and casts an eagle-eyed observation on the quirks and foibles that define the human condition.

Fresh, funny, compelling, complex and thrilling by turn, Case Histories is a fabulous treat of a read. If you enjoy crime fiction, you’ll love it. If you don’t usually read crime fiction, you’ll love it too. I started this book on Saturday afternoon and didn’t put it down until I’d finished. Luckily, two further books featuring Jackson Brodie are also now available: One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News?


Case Histories by Kate Atkinson was published in 2004.

The birthday surprise

"I thought 'are we going to the zoo?' " my mother says, peering round at me from the passenger seat of the car, "and then I thought 'no we can't be; it's too late' "

I can't quite make out my sister's face. In fact, from where I'm sitting in the rear of her smart red Mini Clubman, I can only really see the back of her left arm, a tuft of hair and one elongated triangular black leg of her sunglasses.

"Would you have liked to have gone to the zoo, then?" my sister asks.

"Well no, not really. Well, yes I suppose I would, but only if T and W were coming. Spend an afternoon looking at the animals..."

It would seem that my sister and I are not considered satisfactory zoo companions. Given that the zoo is not where we're going, that's quite ok.

A small pause while she ponders and my sister takes the coast-bound slip road of the A2, the car ringing its way round an almost full 360 degrees before straightening once more and heading on down the dual carriageway. It's about 6 o'clock and the sky is June blue. Open fields of matte beige corn and zingy zesty yellow rapeseed pass us by, studded here and there by thick dark felt-leafed islands of oak and ash. Some white bleached hulks of long dead elms are among them too, the scarred and twisted remains left behind by the fatal kiss of Dutch Elm Disease.

My mother interrupts her own pause. "Morris dancing? Are we going to a display of morris dancing then?"

"Morris dancing?" My sister's voice manages to pass through several registers of incredulity in just two words. I can feel her eyebrows arching through the back of her head. I laugh.

"Morris dancing? Blimey no. You'd be on your own there I think" and we all chuckle as we individually try to picture ourselves watching infinite numbers of folk dressed in peculiar white outfits with bells around their knees clonking ribbon-covered sticks and shouting hey nonny, nonny nonny no whilst a band of no discernible talent whatsoever plays a never-ending chorus of discordant tunes.

"No," says my sister finally, "we're not going to see morris dancing".

And so the guessing game continues all the way to Canterbury. All the way into the foyer of the Gulbenkian Theatre. All the way to our table in the cafe. When my sister had suggested this treat for our mother's birthday, I thought it was a great idea. I am also exceedingly impressed that my sister has managed to arrange it all without revealing to her where we're going or what we're seeing. Mum's still guessing, squinting now at the show posters hung in huge glass frames around the walls.

Her eyes alight on one with writing big enough to read from our table. "Ah! Is it the Mikado?"

"No, it's not the Mikado. Shall I show you the tickets now?" says my sister, pulling out and unfolding the concertina of paper from her handbag and handing them to mum. Mum delves in her soft sage leather bag and puts on her specs. "Germaine Greer! Wonderful!"

And so it is that we take up our plush red seats in the auditorium half an hour later, a couple of hundred women (and a few brave men) to spend an hour and a half in the company of a living legend. When Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch she'd have been about 30 years old. Now aged 70, Professor Greer walks onto the stage in a black dress and silver flat soled shoes to tumultuous applause. She's here, as part of the Theatre's 40th anniversary celebrations, to deliver a talk entitled 40 years of feminism and fun.

If those words seem mutually exclusive in a sentence, then in real life she dazzles. She speaks for three quarters of an hour or so without notes - witty, erudite, entertaining - and then invites questions from the audience to which she gives her full attention. The microphone roams around the room as people put their hands up; I detect a frown grip Germaine's brow when a man asks a question, but she rolls on taking the audience with her and with frequent gales of laughter. The last question, from a dark-haired woman, is extremely moving. She pays tribute to Ms Greer for changing her life. Germaine is clearly moved by this, we all are, and when it's time for her to go, the applause lasts for several minutes after she's disappeared behind the stage curtain.

We file outside and my sister queues up to buy a couple of books. Mum, a few years younger than Germaine, has loved it. All three of us have. We chat all the way home, discussing the things that were said and thinking about our own experiences.

Mum's actual birthday is on Monday. We're also not going to the zoo then either.

Tea timed out

The interview had gone well. I’d instantly liked the three panel members and now, standing at the edge of the butt-strewn pavement for a gap in the traffic big enough to weave through, even the minute circling eye of my inner critic couldn’t find too many unravelled stitches to pick at. No loose ends, no dropped threads, no blind alleys chased up, no foot-in-mouth moments.

I’d been a little nervous beforehand, always am. In fact I’d go as far as to say that a little pre-emptive dose of adrenaline is the polish that my interview performance needs to shine. But those butterflies had flown early on without leaving their trace on the panel’s notes and – for better or for worse – I knew I’d done as well as I could. If I didn’t get the job, if the panel offered it to another, then it would be because that someone else was better, more suitable than me in some way, and not because I’d performed badly.

But all of that, like the ceaseless flow of vans and lorries into Croydon, was out of my hands. I fished around in my black leather interview handbag to find my cigarettes, cupped my hands to light one, exhaled a plume of smoke into the thick dieseled air, and smiled. Relax. Two double decker red buses simultaneously pulled up on opposite sides of the road with the unfathomable choreography of inner-city mass transit systems the world over. Enough collective bulk to halt the traffic. Enough time for me to scuttle across in my high heeled shoes and interview suit.

The car park was only just around the corner so I dawdled a while in the sunshine looking in shop windows as I finished my cigarette. And that was when I saw it. Nestled among the opaque windowed high rise office blocks, the steaming truckers' cafes, the newsagents, the litter strewn whitewashed blank eyed faces of empty units, was a yoga shop. I'd not long been doing yoga at that time and had never before seen such a thing. What on earth I wondered, even as my hand was pushing the door open, could be on sale in a yoga shop?

The air inside was thick with the smell of incense and rainbow bright with the shattering reflections of light refracted through a hundred hanging prisms. The walls were lined with shelves of glossy paperbacks on meditation, Buddhism, yoga. Joss sticks, candles, prayer beads, yoga mats, blocks. A few loose fitting cotton garments of various sizes hung on a rail. Posters advertising classes - for beginners, intermediates, advanced, children, older people, pregnant women - were pinned to the cork board. I looked all around the shop. Lots of things to see. Not one that I wanted to buy.

A young man wearing a thick green jumper and a beard sat reading at the pale ash counter. He hadn't looked up when I came in but even I appreciated that he was probably aware I was there. I was, after all, at that moment, the only customer. A slight pang of anxiety gripped my stomach. It's daft I know, but when I'm in a small, personally-run shop like this I always find it excruciatingly difficult to leave without buying something. Anything. I looked wildly around. Joss sticks? No, won't use them. Books on the pathway of meditation? Ditto. Crystals? Not my thing.

And then, hallelujah, I spotted them. A small display of fat-bellied china mugs with cheerful rainbow stripes on the side. As ideal for my tea as for my small shop guilt purchase. Done. I lifted one off the shelf and took it to the counter to pay. The young man put down his book and smiled at me earnestly as he wrapped it up in tissue paper. I thanked him, paid with the stash of pound coins I'd saved for the car park, pulled the door open and stepped from the aromatic cocoon of the shop onto the dusty pavement.

I was drinking tea from my new mug the following morning when I got the phone call and accepted the job. As the days passed, I grew very attached to the cup and soon promoted it to the exalted rank of my special morning tea mug, making sure I'd washed it up every night before bed so it was fresh and ready to help jump-start my sluggish brain into action. And then a couple of months ago disaster struck. My beautiful cheerful mug rolled off the drying rack and into the dog's bowl. When I picked it up, two huge chips of china were left winking behind in Kaos's water dish.

I contemplated the possibility of drilling a hole in it to convert it into a flower pot; used it for a while as a scoop to ladle dog meal out of the giant paper sack. It has sat for the past week on the kitchen draining board as I tried to work out what to do with it next. And in the end, last night, I dropped it in the bin. Sometimes, one has to recognise the moment has passed and it's time to say goodbye.

Lipstick on the mirror

Like the grand fireplace that's really the hidden entrance to a secret tunnel in an old fashioned mystery thriller, one can stumble into being a stereotype without being consciously aware.

Unlike the dashing leading man and his beautiful accomplice, real life does not call cut on the scene nor allow the opportunity of discarding our make-believe costumes. We wear our imprinted outfits from one day to the next, acquiring accessories as we go but never usually stopping to slough our skins or remove our stage make up. The personal looking glass only ever reflects what we wish to see; the real mirror is through the eyes of others.

It is probably true that to some extent the conformity to a stereotype is a necessary attribute of functioning within a collective society. No man is an island so the old saying goes, and even those who choose consciously not to conform with conventional mores conform nonetheless with the stereotype of non-conformists of one sort or another. The conventions that we adopt - from the clothes we wear and the books we read to the pastimes we enjoy and the shops we spend our money in - are a product of both our conscious choices and our unconscious drives. And in the selection of these things and habits and actions we find, somehow, our identity.

But what happens to us when we are forced to change, either through circumstance or a fundamental shift in our personal belief system? It is perhaps at that point that we realise that the things about ourselves which we thought to be unmovable bedrocks are nothing of the kind. Our psyches, if we let them, are fluid and malleable things; we encounter difficulty, anger and challenge only when we are still resisting the change. If tens of thousands of years of human evolution has shown us one thing it is that we are extremely adaptable beings. And this applies both at a personal and societal level.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, particularly about to what extent individuals recognise the range of stereotypes to which they conform. It's also probably fair to say that there are various kinds of stereotyping at work simultaneously: the stereotype which society projects onto a person related to his or her 'visible' attributes - gender, age, manner - for instance; the stereotypes that an individual subscribes to him- or herself - belief systems, ways of behaving, relationships with others, and so on.

It's always intriguing when you have that rare opportunity to find out what others assume about you and can compare that with what you think about yourself. There is often a very large gap indeed between the two, sometimes amusingly so. But neither view is really wrong or right as such - both are valid perceptions, even if we might justifiably place more weight with our own interpretation of ourselves than that of another.

But then isn't that the basis of all great drama? What would be the point of a mystery thriller if there was no tension between what the hero believes about himself and what we can see with our eyes? And even the worst of stereotypical film baddies must have something we can relate to if we are to believe in him. With or without a costume.

The picture is a painting by the wonderful late Beryl Cook

PS - Entirely unconnected, but this cheered me up no end: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/09/nick-griffin-bnp-pelted-eggs

60 years on

Deep in the moss-lined burrow of the communication bunker, the ticker tape machine whirs into life spewing out a stream of punch-holed encryption.

This message is long. It coils and slithers its way from the top of the make-shift desk onto the cold cold earth-set stones on the floor. I light the last remaining tallow candle and sigh. De-coding this one is going to take all night. I should make a start. But coffee first, I think. Even here, coffee first. I scrape back the orange crate and duck my head through the hole in the wall to reach the rough mounted tap. Water trickles slowly into my enamel cup, coughing and spluttering through air bubbles. The bowser must be nearly empty. Will they remember to bring a fresh one with the supplies? Will I need to go back to the old way of collecting the rainwater? Will there even be any more supplies?

The matches are damp and it takes three strikes to light one long enough for the gas to catch. When I bought this stove, it'd never crossed my mind that I'd use it for anything more than camping holidays. How things change. I pick up the green silk cushion and place it back on top of the crates. You always say that there can be no luxury in resistance, but I only deny this one simple command of yours. It's a reminder to me of why any of this this is worth doing, why this risk is worth taking. And in any case, it cushions my butt.

Even without looking up, I can see that the blue light cast from the flickering face of the monitor is still blank. No message yet from the ones on the surface. No news. How long will I leave it until I assume all hope is lost? A day? A week? A... No, stop. Stop that train of thought there. You have work to do. The pan rattles as the water boils and I pour it over the few thick brown grains of coffee in the bottom of my mug and carry it back to the desk. The dog growls gently in his sleep and turns over. I pick up the end of the ticker tape and begin my work.

***

I sat up late into the night yesterday watching the results of the European elections come in. Two members of the extremist right British National Party have been elected as MEPs, the first time ever that the country has elected fascists to any national or international parliament. There is some consolation in the fact that the other seventy MEPs are not, of course. It is democracy that must allow such odious organisations to exist - that's quite right - but why people vote for an organisation that would ultimately deny them the privilege is mystifying. It was far from being a good moment.

Today is also the 60th anniversary of the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, so apologies if I'm in a bit of a doublethink mood. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jun/08/1984-orwell-gchq-surveillance

The people collector

A month or two back, The Guardian ran a photographic competition. One of the things I like best about the online version of the newspaper is its daily 24 Hours gallery of pictures from around the world and its Week In Wildlife round-up of nature photos, both featuring the work of top class professional and amateur photographers.

But this competition itself was just for fun. In one category, readers were invited to upload pictures of their dogs engaged in "typical Guardian activities" of any kind, a gentle self-referential poke at the paper's slightly left-wing liberal values and the preoccupations of its readership. The resultant Flickr gallery was full of amusing snaps of pets helping their human companions with taking out the recycling, planting vegetables in the garden, reading the paper and so on. I entered a picture of Kaos caught red-pawed with the lid of the kitchen bin around his neck; obviously, eco-warrior dog that he is, he'd been checking I hadn't accidentally dropped some recyclable stuff in there by mistake. It's not a great photo by any means (^^as you can see^^), but it was just for fun and I thought no more about it.

And then a week or so ago I got a message from Flickr saying that someone had added me as a 'friend' and to log onto the site to confirm that I knew the person and to add them to my own 'friends list' if I wanted to. I don't know much about Flickr and didn't know it had this kind of function, but plenty of sites do (Facebook, Twitter and such) and so I clicked on the link to see who this friend might be.

What I found was not a friend but a Katy collector. Screen after screen after screen was filled with pictures linked not by their content (dogs, say) or the known-ness of the friend to the owner of the snapshots, but by the defining attribute that all of the photos belonged to Katys. Or Katies. Or Katis. Or Kateys. Or any other one of the many varieties there are of spelling my (our) name. It was, I must admit, rather a creepy experience. Harmless, yes, completely so, but a little bit weird all the same. It's not the first time something like this has happened either, as some time back a man whose name I didn't recognise sent me a Facebook 'friend' request. It wasn't Katys that filled my screen on that occasion but hundreds of thumbnail-sized pictures of women - all of whom looked and were dressed in a very similar way to my profile picture at that time.

Needless to say, I declined both invitations. But it has made me re-evaluate my concept of being a collector. I always think of collections as being full of things: theatre programmes, novelty teapots, Spiderman comics, antique furniture, paintings, antiquarian books, medals, model aeroplanes, lead soldiers, maps, jewellery, doll houses, that sort of stuff. That a person might be a collector of people had never occurred to me.

What these people collectors intended to do with their specimens I'm not sure. Exhibit them (us) perhaps, or maybe contact them to find out if any of the quite random ways in which they (we) were similar - name, appearance - threw up any further quirky commonalities. Who knows? The thought of being part of a sort of virtual human zoo didn't appeal to me, and so as I turned down the offers I guess I'll never find out. I can live quite comfortably with that.

Friday Fling

“Do I look like a middle-aged lady wearing this?” Liz asks me as she opens the door. We stand quietly for a heartbeat, stare at each other. “No, you look great. And anyway, if we do we might just as well embrace it. We are middle aged ladies.” And we laugh and hug our greetings as we always do.

Liz does indeed look great, her small and slender womanly figure wrapped in a sleeveless printed cross-over top, new jeans with a thin belt, and a pair of spotty peep-toe high heels. Her hair’s swept up and back in a soft blonde roll, the fringe just brushing her glittering blue eyes and gently sun-freckled face. She looks very glamorous. Much more so than me, dressed as I am in a black shirt, stripy jeans that I bought from the Red Cross charity shop, and my good old favourite pale tan cowboy-esque boots that I bought seven years ago in Salt Lake City.

We’ve arranged to meet to go for dinner tonight at The Ship, Liz’s local pub that also happens to serve the most wonderful food. When we push the door open, the small bar area is cramped with bodies clutching glasses and raincoats after the unseasonably chilly wet day. A few bobbing multi-coloured helium balloons, emblazoned with a four and a zero, are in the hands of a couple of children; several more balloons are dotted about on the tables when we duck under the curtain into the tiny restaurant section. But there’s one round table free, so we sit there and look at the menu as the birthday party take up their seats around us.

When the waitress comes we place our orders and raise our wine glasses (red for Liz, white for me) in a toast to each other. She’s off to Colorado on Wednesday to be matron of honour at a friend’s wedding, staying in Denver for ten days or so before moving on to see another friend in Cincinnati. We talk about the trip and Liz describes her packed itinerary which encompasses both familiar rituals (the wedding, the hair and make up, the post-nuptial celebrations) and the unfamiliar (a bachelorette party). I’m sure that she will have a wonderful time and I’m quite envious not to be going too; still, I’ve leant Liz The Philosopher and the Wolf to read on the aeroplane so a little bit of me will be travelling with her, in spirit anyway.

Our meals when they arrive are freshly cooked and searingly hot. The pieces of chicken from Liz’s fajitas sizzle among char-grilled red and green peppers on a small iron dish beside a plateful of soft floured flat breads. My creamy fish pie comes in a square white bowl, topped with mashed potato and pale orange melted cheese. I’ve had a fancy too for some chips all week so have ordered a side portion, all chunky and long and golden crispy yellow.

When we’re done, Johnny the pub’s landlord finds us a table in the crowded bar and we fetch another glass of wine on the way. A solo musician strikes up at the far end. He’s got a selection of instruments – violin, banjo, guitar – and starts a rousing uproarious set of traditional Irish tunes sprinkled with a little country and a few harmonic minor tunes of more recent origin. After a few rounds of REM, The Dubliners and The Devil Went Down to Georgia, several women have kicked off their shoes, are holding up their skirts and Irish dancing. We alternate between clapping and singing along and talking in the lulls and above the wonderful infectious music until Johnny calls time.

It’s cold and damp when we get outside and we scuttle across the road rubbing our hands against goosepimpled arms. We’re nearly at Liz’s house when we remember we’ve forgotten to pay, so laughingly turn back and go in by a different door. No-one has noticed our accidental eat and run, and we settle up with the barmaid before heading outside once more. Liz and I embrace by my car and I wish her bon voyage for her holiday. I’m sure she’s going to have a ball.

Moths and buckets

The dog is enormously companionable in so many ways, but the one thing he lacks is conversational talent. This is by no means always a bad thing.

In any case, as his repertoire of wants is simple - eating, walking, running, playing, cat chasing, postie barking, loo going, snoozing - it's never too difficult to decode his desires from his body language. Quizzical eyebrows + attentive rod-backed sitting = walk; big eyes + pacing = garden; wolverine spinal hair raising + head dip = play. And so on. I can read him like a billboard sized optician's chart, and he me: his evening walk-associated time telling is a canine work of genius. Year round, light or dark, his 9pm alarm is set on perma-mode; however distracted I am by whatever it is I'm occupied with, he'll remind me it's time to go.

Canine or human, body language works just fine as a means of communication most of the time. I've always found it easy to understand, and to be understood, in countries where we have no language in common whatsoever. Gesture, posture, expression, tone of voice and a hundred and one other things translate fluently whether you speak English or Arabic. Or as Roo would put it, the universal language of nods, smiles and cigarettes. One might even go so far as to argue that words just get in the way of understanding sometimes.

However, where I do wish the dog would occasionally speak up is when I find myself faced with a dilemma and need someone to ask. Today is a good example. My tiny incumbent army of colourful creeping Lackey Moth caterpillars that arrived en masse a few weeks ago have started to begin the next phase of their life cycle. One by one, and now in increasing numbers each day, they have stopped their leaf-munching festival and have commenced cocoon production.

It's quite fascinating to watch them gradually, methodically, instinctively spin a fine web of silk around themselves. Eventually, after a day of spinning and weaving, what was the caterpillar falls motionless inside a delicate bud of the finest creamy white cotton silk yarn. Only the faintest glimmer of a darker shape inside the inch long cocoons provides the clue that there once was something else. And within a day, that dark burr too has gone. I don't know how long they'll be in their cocoons until the adults emerge, but they've been doing this since the dawn of time so I'm guessing their alarm clock, too, is pretty accurate.

Some of them - perhaps a dozen or two - have chosen to site their cocoons in the edges of the frames around the outside of my front door and windows. I'm happy for the house front to play incubator; and in any event, I'm intrigued to watch them. But here's my dilemma. I'm concerned that when the window cleaner comes, as he's sure to in the next week or so, he'll sweep them away with his bucket and cloth.

Do I hope that, in his general speedy window washing gruffness, he'll just stick to cleaning the glass and leave the frames? Or do I tape a little hand-written note on the window saying... Well, saying what? Please mind the cocoons? Please don't wake the caterpillars? Quiet please - Lackey Moths sleeping overhead? Do not disturb - metamorphosis in action? For this way I fear madness lies. Or at the very least a reputation as the eccentric moth lady at number 3.

That I had even considered discussing this with the dog is probably not a good sign either.



Picture of Lackey Moth caterpillar by Steve Bennett

Debut

As icons of modern art go, Damien Hirst’s 14 foot tiger shark in a tank of formaldehyde couldn’t have made a bigger splash if it had swum up the Thames singing show tunes and wearing a top hat. Also part of the epoch-making Sensation show at the Royal Academy five years later in 1997, Hirst was one of a vanguard of Young British Artists who helped define the Cool Britannia vibe of the 90s.

When the smiling saw-toothed Tony Blair surfed into Downing Street on a wave of popular approval that same year, the palpable mandate around his neck was to rid the country of the destructive, sleazy rule of nearly two decades of Conservative government. With their ‘no such thing as society’ proclamations, their back-to-basics victimisation of the most vulnerable, the wholesale transfer of public assets into the coffers of the unaccountable, and non-stop playing of the system that landed at least two senior Ministers in jail, the public had had enough of 18 years of Tory me-ism; the party was sentenced by the ballot box to serve a generation in the political wilderness. It’s perhaps also no surprise that the charismatic Blair invited Hirst and other artists from across the creative spectrum to join him in the victory celebrations at Number Ten.

The title of Hirst’s 1992 signature piece is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Eventually sold for $12 million to an American collector in 2004, it’s conceivable to imagine that Hirst’s work – and later, that show - fired the silent starting pistol of a decade and a half of a different kind of conspicuous consumption.

If New Labour were elected on a sweep out the old ticket, then perhaps someone forgot to look into their crystal ball to see exactly what that would mean in practice. Yes, better hospitals, shorter waiting lists, more facilities. Yes, full employment, fairer benefits, better services. Yes, education, education, education. But while the Commons was, in those early halcyon days, almost a mirror of society in all its colours, backgrounds, personal orientations, there was a big hungry shark circling just beneath the surface of the Westminster pond.

Heady with power and with an unstoppable mandate from the electorate, some of the anointed ones soon found a taste for champagne socialism. Even if not publicly acknowledged, behind closed doors the Exchequer thrived on the swollen river of cash that flowed from a highly unregulated financial market. And unlike the small-time arms dealer or petty drugs baron, the industrial washing machines at the heart of government didn’t even need to launder the money. The times they were a booming, and the small voices of dissent – against war in Iraq, compulsory ID cards, the erosion of civil liberties – were drowned out by the sound of corks popping.

At 43, Damien Hirst is no longer young. Tony Blair has left office for pastures new. No more parties for pop singers and artists enliven the stale stuffy halls of Downing Street. The collective blinkers have been lifted from the public’s eyes to show the bankers and the traders as egotistical gamblers. Politicians of all party colours have been unmasked and defrocked for their expenses folly by a beleaguered and thrift-driven electorate. Cabinet Ministers are re-shuffled like a deck of cheap playing cards in the hands of a dead man walking.

On a perfect early summer day like today, the countryside is at its most magnificent. Its beauty is simply startling. It is quite literally breathtaking. It’s impossible to imagine on a day like today - when it will be still light at 10 at night - that once again in a few months time it’ll be dark by 4 in the afternoon. It’s equally impossible to recount now how, from those heady heady days of 1997, that all that good will could have tragically poured right down the drain.

The European and local elections tomorrow are expected to land a fatal blow to the heart of the Government. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living? Quite.