Moving Back, Moving On

A month on the wild side (part 2)

2010-06-05T23:12:00.005+01:00

Zolfo Springs is about two hours and a thousand light years away from the razzle dazzle and big dippers of theme-park Orlando. The multi-coloured arc lights faded to sodium yellow, then to the occasional illuminated window of a road-side diner or drive-through pharmacy, and then dwindled almost to nothing but the moon and the stars as we pushed our way south and west across Florida that first night.

Our hosts had warned us that the intern house had been empty for a month or so and that there'd not be any food there for us when we arrived. I used our one stop, at a McDonald's, to buy a small bottle of milk. When we arrived, the little house was cold and its emptiness seemed to somehow be emphasised by the artificial Christmas tree that still stood rather rejectedly in the corner of the living room. Tea bags, milk and a packet of cigarettes has been for many years my own personal survival kit. I made us a cup of tea before jet lag overwhelmed us and we fell into our bunk beds.

Waking early the next morning, I tip toed to the kitchen as quietly as I could so as not to wake Tatiana. She was Brazilian, and at 21 very much younger than me - the same age as my own daughter in fact. But we'd got on well the previous evening in the back of the car on the long drive down here and was optimistic that the age gap would not be a problem; I'm pleased to say that it never was.

Cup of tea in hand and cigarettes in my pocket, I wandered out into the cold Florida sunshine that first morning. There was frost on the grass and a hazy mist hung over the fields that surrounded the intern house. My breath puffed little white clouds into the bright blue sky. I sipped my drink and felt immensely happy and relieved. Whatever lay ahead, whatever the next four weeks had to offer, I was here and determined to make the most of it. I went back in, made some more tea, and sat down on the frosty steps to watch and wait as the first morning of my Florida adventure unfolded.

Photo of the intern house

A month on the wild side (part 1)

2010-06-02T22:48:00.006+01:00

It had been a decision quickly made over my birthday weekend in early December, signed and sealed before the still-hot melting wax of thought had time to cool and dither and faff. Yes, there had been last minute nerves mixed in with all the excitement, and as I looked down from the jet's cold metal belly at the mounds of snow encrusting the runway I tried as hard as I could not to even attempt to picture what lay ahead. Not just yet, anyway.

It is probably to overstate the case to say that I'm afraid of flying, but I've always understood why some pre-flight passengers might dose themselves with alcohol or tranquilisers; comfortably numb could well be a most commendable flight path. The cups of tea and fizzy water I'd had during my long wait in the snow-bound airport were very small beer by comparison, necessitating only loo trips rather than sweet oblivion. But no matter; the plane was only half full and I had the block of three whole seats to myself by way of some compensation. The staff busy themselves with the ritual of take-off - bolting the doors; closing the overhead lockers; the safety talk; the seat belt check; the first small movements; that slow-growing rumble that turns into a growl that becomes the powerful roar of the engines that thrusts you back into your seat and has your brain muttering half-remembered prayers whilst seeking religious conversion.

There had been times in the five weeks between my decision to go and actually reaching 35,000 feet that I really thought it might not happen at all. Britain had been enduring its coldest, snowiest winter in more than three decades. All the airports had been forced to shut several times, including up to a day before my own departure. It had also been a very tight time squeeze to get a whole three-jab course of rabies vaccinations done at the travel clinic. But cruising now, relaxing high above the clouds amid brilliant jewel blue skies, miniature plastic glass of Diet Coke in one hand and in-flight meal on the fold down table in front, all that was left behind.

All that lay ahead was the ocean, America, and a month in the middle of nowhere surrounded on all sides by wild animals. Grinning, I finished my drink, folded the table away, tucked myself up under the bright red blankets and fell asleep. Next stop: Florida.

Ah... Now where was I?

2010-06-01T19:39:00.010+01:00

Hmmm. Eleven months. Nearly a year. That's a slightly longer detour into the foyer than I anticipated. Did you save me some popcorn?? Hope our ice creams haven't melted...

The seasonal cogs have cranked almost a full circle and the early summer has jostled into my little back garden again, trailing birds and bugs and buds in its path. The determined snails have munched my two tiny courgette plants into oblivious stumps; the nettles are untouched, needless to say. The lackey moth caterpillars are back, festooning the blackthorn tree outside my front window. The dog is curled up in a tiny tight ball by the door. Everything's the same as it was a year ago.

And everything's different too. The barn finally sold last autumn after two years of trying. I've taken a good long spell off work - 7 months to be exact - every day of which has been delightful. My daughter Roo has celebrated her 21st birthday. I bought a proper camera. We've welcomed my sister's beautiful new baby boy to our family. I spent a month in Florida working as a volunteer at an exotic animal refuge. And I've got a new job - 3 days a week - which I started today.

More of all of this (and other stuff) to follow. But just for now to peep round the corner back into the world of blog and say hello again. Did I miss much? Do tell me, please...

Stained glass window at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London

A little less conversation...

2009-06-30T23:12:00.003+01:00

... 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

2009-06-28T01:25:00.003+01:00

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

2009-06-26T22:23:00.008+01:00

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

2009-06-25T23:36:00.007+01:00

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

2009-06-24T22:38:00.009+01:00

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

2009-06-23T23:26:00.009+01:00

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...

2009-06-22T20:31:00.018+01:00

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

2009-06-21T23:11:00.007+01:00

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

2009-06-20T22:51:00.013+01:00

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

2009-06-19T22:43:00.010+01:00

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...

2009-06-17T23:48:00.006+01:00

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

2009-06-16T22:35:00.006+01:00

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...

2009-06-16T01:16:00.010+01:00

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

2009-06-14T15:25:00.007+01:00

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

2009-06-12T22:59:00.008+01:00

"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

2009-06-10T23:36:00.007+01:00

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

2009-06-09T23:09:00.011+01:00

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

2009-06-08T23:08:00.006+01:00

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

2009-06-06T23:46:00.004+01:00

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

2009-06-06T11:22:00.008+01:00

“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

2009-06-04T23:51:00.012+01:00

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

2009-06-03T20:14:00.005+01:00

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.

Sunday lunch at the Neptune Cafe

2009-05-31T23:22:00.010+01:00

"It's Whit Sunday, you know" my mother said, pausing to look at me meaningfully over the top of her glasses before dropping her eyes to examine the black leatherette menu once more. Quite why she bothers to read the menu is unclear; it never changes and she always orders the same thing anyway. Quite why she also bothered to remind me it was Whit Sunday I'm not sure either. It's a long time since I went to Sunday School.

We were sitting opposite each other in Bill's Neptune Cafe in the High Street. It's a Sunday lunchtime ritual we've fallen into some time over the last year or so, meeting up after she's been to church to chat and enjoy some food served on white oval plates at tables covered with colourful checked plastic cloths. The chairs are spindly with red rubber stoppers on the end of each thin metal leg, their backs and seats upholstered in beige vinyl. A huge old brass gas lamp, with white gauze mantle just waiting to be lit, hangs from the ceiling among the fluorescent lights. The walls are decorated in cream wallpaper with small pink diamonds, the outline of the woodwork of door and window frames fuzzy and blurred by archaeological layers of raspberry gloss paint. Each table is laid with laminated place mats showing photocopied scenes of the Island in days gone by. If one of the smartly dressed Sunday-suited families pictured eternally strolling along the promenade taking the sea air were to step out of their photograph and walk into Bill's, they'd feel right at home.

The Neptune Cafe is one of a tiny handful of traditional seaside cafes that's left in the country. No fancy cappuccino machine here, no rotisserie chicken hopelessly circling, no pre-packed Italian biscuits, no triangular ready-to-go sandwich packs, no bucket-sized paper cups, no artfully mis-matched sofa groupings, no pot pourri'd bathroom with tinny piped music, no over-heated prices. Just a small, narrow time-travelling cafe serving home made dinners and puddings with custard.

Tracey brings us our mugs of tea (one with one sugar, one without) and asks my mother if she'd like her usual. Of course she does, with chips too please, she adds just in case Tracey might have forgotten this essential ingredient. She tucks the small notebook into the pocket of her navy blue tabbard and retreats to the kitchen, weaving through checked tartan shopping trolleys as she passes tables full of pensioners.

Reassured that our food's on its way (cheese and mushroom omlette with salad for me, roast lamb and vegetables - with chips - for mum) we fall into our habitual exchange of news. B's worried about her son because he can't find a job; she gave L a lift to church this morning; K took the sermon - you know, that wonderful reading about the dry bones; she's been clearing out the garage; C took away that old water tank and some rubbish; will the old pots of paint and motor car oil still be ok to use; do I still want to go up to Ikea for her birthday; Roo was on the phone last night chatting about her exams. And then our food arrives and we stop talking for a while.

When we're done, Tracey takes our empty plates and our pudding orders and brings us two more piping hot mugs of strong tea. Our bowls, when they arrive, are brimming with bright yellow custard. Eventually, our spoons rest in the bottom of the empty white dishes and we drain the last of our tea. I go to the counter to pay Tracey, tell her we'll see her next week, and step out into the dazzling breezy bright sunlight of a seaside Whit Sunday afternoon.

Whitsun (or Pentecost) is celebrated seven weeks - or 49 days - after Easter Sunday. It's also related to the Jewish festival of Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the ten commandments at Mount Sinai. But it's not just a religious celebration. According to Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, legend has it that King Arthur always gathered all of his knights at the Round Table for a feast on this day.

I think that the old King could have done worse than to have brought his men to the Neptune Cafe.

Gambling on the books

2009-05-30T22:56:00.003+01:00

Being well aware that one day I will wake up dead, I try hard not to build up too much of a backlog of things I want to do but haven’t done yet. It’s not that I’ve got anything against the dead, you understand; simply that even our broad equality laws seem to stop short of governing the actions of the deceased. Thus one might not, for instance, expect to receive such a warm welcome at a race track if accompanied by pall bearers and dressed in a coffin. It might frighten the horses for a start.

So perilous finances and the law notwithstanding, I attempt within the threadbare means at my disposal to take the opportunity to do stuff that takes my fancy when the chance arises. I also try hard not to continue to do the stuff that makes me unhappy, restless or fed up. Admittedly, this latter trait may lead to accusations of being faddy or having the attention span of a gnat. But I digress.

High on my short personal list of things to do whilst I can still remember my name is to go and play poker in a casino. Where that casino might be or who I’d be playing with doesn’t really matter. But the game must be poker and played, according to the picture in my mind, in a proper smoke-filled casino like in the films. So a location where both gambling and indoor smoking are allowed would seem a good place to start. Whether or not I’m wearing a glamorous red evening dress and am accompanied by a handsome chap in a black suit and bow tie is a moot point; not absolutely essential but I wouldn’t complain either.

I can, I should explain, play poker adequately if not brilliantly. I taught myself how a few years ago spurred on by several boozy hours playing around the dining table one Christmas, and played on-line for a while in one of my faddish phases. Through reading about the game in particular (I’d highly recommend Anthony Holden’s Big Deal) and the history of gambling in general (try Gambling by Mike Atherton), though, I’ve also learned quite a lot about the nature of gamblers. Whilst gamblers come from many backgrounds and from all social classes, the one thing that most of the successful ones have in common is that they each have an identifiable leak.

In gambling parlance, a leak means a weakness, a small chink in the armour, the irresistible pull to fritter away winnings earned through games of skill (like poker) on games of chance (like roulette). But I think this concept of a leak applies to a much wider cross section of the world than just professional poker players. It applies, perhaps, to the hardworking family man who simply must have the latest mobile phone, i-Pod, huge plasma TV set or other piece of high-tech kit. It applies to the otherwise conservative career woman who stockpiles pairs of new shoes and secretes clandestine bags of designer clothes in the back of her wardrobe.

My leak is buying books. That I’ve only recently realised this just goes to demonstrate the truth of how our own leaks are invisible to us whilst forehead-slappingly obvious to everyone else. Admittedly, buying books is not as glamorous a leak as playing roulette. But like roulette, there is a chance that every book you read could be a winner; I shrug off the disappointing volumes and turn immediately to the next in the same way that the losing punter slips his chips from black to red for the next spin of the wheel.

So in grateful thanks that I did not wake up dead this morning, I again turned my attention to reading my way through the shelf full of new books that I’ve bought over the last couple of weeks. I even sat outside in the sunshine whilst I did so. And if my trip to that smoke filled casino is still some way off, at least I hope I’m lowering my own odds about getting there one day.

Russian dolls

2009-05-30T00:20:00.005+01:00

It has been a strange old week this one, as full of the foreboding thunder heads of introspection on the inside as the rain and the sun have battled it out for the upper hand on the outside. A week when my internal monologue has been quite at odds with my external conviviality. A week when the gnarled hand of my inner hermit threatens to reach out and pull the hood of disengagement over my eyes at the same time as I’m laughing.

That this contradiction is part of my nature I know only too well. Maybe it’s part of all people’s natures to simultaneously wish to be at the centre of things and a thousand miles away. To be with others and yet to be alone in the company of creatures that don’t speak in words. To exist only in the way that the elements exist: timeless, free-floating, flowing and rippling like a warm summer breeze through endless uninterrupted acres of corn.

It seems to be hard-wired into our human circuitry to search for certainty, to look for our security and our freedom through the presence of boundaries. We define ourselves and our sense of belonging, from the minor to the major, like life-sized Russian dolls stacked one inside the other: me, my mind, my ego, my body, my home, my family, my street, my town, my county, my country, and so on until we reach the outer shell, my world. We like these anchors and we feel lost without them, misplaced and homeless like a stray dog.

We like too to think of our position in the bigger jigsaw and seek out our own boundaries in relation to other people, both those we know – friends, family, colleagues – and those we don’t but who nevertheless have a bearing on us; politicians, say, or people we admire for their talents or achievements. As life itself provides us with only two actual certainties - birth and death - we spend our days in active pursuit of a range of others to take our minds off the dread of the unknowable and the unpredictable. And so we weave a complex pattern of commitments, relationships, promises, beliefs and obligations – deadlines, if you like, to take our minds off our own dead line.

But it is in the nature of the only two certainties we have as humans that we have our proper connection with the world. All living things, from amoebae and plankton to queens and presidents, share this common bond, this golden thread that unites us and everything. How ironic that we are the only species that knows this and yet try our best to deny what everything else on the planet takes for granted. How peculiar that we attempt to capture and contain and measure the time that passes when it passes just the same if we ignore it. How very human.

So yes, a strange old week, spent not feeling sad or melancholy but simply pondering.

Seasonal seaside

2009-05-28T23:24:00.009+01:00

For most of the year Kaos and I have the beach to ourselves.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. The beach teems with bird life all year round: three types of gull (black headed, lesser black backed, herring); common terns (or sea swallows as they’re sometimes known on account of their long white tail feathers and dazzling aerobatic displays); two different kinds of plover (ringed plover and little ringed plover); little egrets, small bright white members of the heron family; shiny clever crows; and the universal feral pigeons. And my personal favourites, the wonderful oystercatchers. Beautiful comical birds, all black and white and with long thin orange pipe-like beaks and matching eyes, they look a little like elongated puffins as they pick and wade among the winkles and the oysters lying on the hem of the tide. Their call is one of the most life-affirming sounds you will hear, a cheery piping A-peep! A-peep! as they chatter to each other or fly overhead.

The stretch of the beach where you’ll spot most of this bird crowd is nearly always deserted, save for the occasional dog walker and solitary fisherman. Dog owners on the whole are a friendly type, usually calling out a greeting or raising a hand in distant acknowledgement, but the anglers, like the gulls, pay no heed to human presence. I guess that fishing is not a sport that attracts the gregarious kind.

But for around three months, from now through to about September, we – the dog walkers, the fishermen, the birds – are joined by the summer beach goers. The instant barbequers; the pushchairs with grubby faced toddlers; the younger teenagers turning tricks on the skateboard ramp whilst the older ones rev up their cars in the car park; the families skimming stones into the water and collecting bucketfuls of shells; the romantic couples strolling arm in arm eating chips. A few days ago, a smiling laughing family wearing saris and smart suits stopped Kaos and me to take our photograph as we walked along the promenade.

It’s not just the number of human visitors that rises in the summer either. Lured by plentiful seaside insects in the warmer months, the regular cast of birds is joined by elegant mute swans, swooping swallows, pied wagtails, starlings, sparrows, and several species of ducks and geese. If you’re very lucky you’ll occasionally see a kestrel overhead, intuitively drawn from his arable hunting grounds a few miles away, hovering and diving and searching for rich pickings among the startled pigeons. You might catch the flash of a turquoise kingfisher darting along the banks of the fresh water culvert that runs parallel to the sea. Or, if you’re eagle-eyed, see a huge glossy cormorant diving and fishing out among the waves. When he’s finished, he’ll perch on the gantry that juts out from the docks and spread his wings to dry. With his wings wide in the dazzling golden light of summer, he looks just like the standard from Imperial Rome. My bird book says he shouldn’t be in this part of the country, shouldn’t be anywhere near this beach. He obviously hadn’t read the book.

There is plenty of room for all of us on the beach, of course. There’s a part of me that wishes that more people would come out and enjoy it even when the weather’s cold and dark and wet. But there's a little secret part of me too that loves having the beach all to myself. Just me, the dog, and a thousand thousand birds.

Photo of a foxglove in my little back garden, taken this afternoon on my mobile phone

Doodle day

2009-05-27T23:43:00.011+01:00

There is something in the dynamic of sitting at a meeting table that induces in me a kind of fugue state, like a bear making his final snoozy pre-hibernation preparations but wearing a suit and a necklace rather than a fur jacket. Where the bear is lucky is that he can roll with his instinct by curling up in a ball and nodding off. If I were to slip from my chair and lie down on the floor underneath the table with my eyes shut, I suspect even the most self-absorbed colleagues might detect my lack of interest.

And so I have devised over the years a small raft of personal meeting survival suits; they're a bit like whole-body life jackets, only invisible rather than orange and with no inflatable pipe to blow into.

Refuge number one is, of course, doodling. Doodles are often thought to be representations of the subconscious mind and, like dreams, involve a kind of picture language. Also like dreams, attempts are often made to place an interpretation on both the content and the placing of the drawing and even the pressure with which it is drawn. My doodles usually start on the left and travel to the right, which apparently means they're related to the workings of the subconscious. Doodles that start on the right and move the other way are more based on logic. There's reams of stuff too about what different doodles mean; research has even shown that doodling significantly helps a person's memory.

Amusingly, though, when thinking about it in the work context, the eighteenth century verb to doodle meant 'to swindle or make a fool of'; the modern meaning emerged in the 1930s either from that or from the earlier verb to dawdle (which since the seventeenth century has had the meaning of wasting time or being lazy).

Colleague: You lazy, time-wasting doodler you; you're making a fool out of me.

Me: No, I'm improving my memory and unlocking the doors to my subconscious.

However, there are times at which doodling can make one feel a little self-conscious - in as much as they give an obvious signal to the rest of the world that drawing intricate swirls, triangles, curls, boxes, anvils and such is far more interesting than listening to what's going on. Which it is, of course, but one has to be more subtle sometimes. When subtlety is called for, my best weapon is to appear to be taking copious notes of the proceedings. Only someone reading it through afterwards would appreciate that I'd been writing something very different indeed. (In fact, my blog post earlier this month about protesters and my walk around central London was written entirely during an afternoon session of 'note taking'.)

If I feel there's the remotest chance that someone might randomly ask me a question, then I'll occasionally resort to writing down some of the interesting (for which read work jargon) phrases that colleagues come out with. A good example of which today was the five minute debate on whether the word flip should be substituted for by move in the records of the previous meeting. Flip, presumably, just seemed too, er, flippant.

If the meeting drags on longer, then I often have to resort to emergency distress flare manoeuvres. Anything but subtle, these can combine any and all of making a cup of tea, dunking biscuits, leaving the room to go to the loo, and, in extremis, manufacturing a non-existent appointment that I simply must leave the meeting for to get to in time.

All of which pursuits are substitutes for either actually falling asleep or telling the chairman that what they're saying is boring, pointless or a waste of time. Or in fact simply politely declining the meeting invitation in the first place. Hmmm... Now there's a revolutionary option...

Picture: This doodle, by the tenor Simon Keenlyside, was auctioned for the 2007 National Doodle Day in aid of Epilepsy Action and the Neurofibromatosis Association.

The dancing devils of '87

2009-05-26T23:41:00.009+01:00

Being British, I ought to remember if the summer of 1987 was a good one weather-wise. But I don’t and it might have rained every single day for all I cared. Because I was 18, I’d just left school, the ink was still wet on my pink paper driving licence, I had the keys to my mother’s rusty old brown Renault 12, a pocket full of cash from working in a bar and the coolest cool black suede jacket this side of James Dean. Oh yeah, baby, coolest cool long hot summer of '87.

And if Bryan Adams didn’t think it was his duty to write a song about it too, then that was his loss. In any case, there was The Cure, Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, Depeche Mode, lyrical poets to a black hair-dyed man who sang directly to my adolescent soul, visions too of male perfection in anatomical leather trousers to speed my pulse and quicken my heart. I’d shaken the dust of childhood from my pointy-booted feet and made my pact with the dancing devil; there was no going back.

Days, weeks, months stretched ahead of me, open and rolling like the Arizona desert. At the far end, university beckoned, vague and shimmering like an oasis in a dreamscape, tantalising and unknown. But the keys to that kingdom were still some way off and I was in no hurry. One last summer of friendships closer than blood and stronger than steel, one last pause before the final ascent on the summit, one last summer of fun before the jaws of adulthood gobbled me up and made me pay my taxes.

Madeline was the only one from our friendship group not to be going on to higher education. She was perfectly able to do so, but had chosen instead to join the world of work. That four letter word was so abstract in its concept to us in those days that her choice seemed more exotic than if she’d run away with a moustachio'd lion tamer and was spending her days dressed in a spangly thong and hanging upside down on a trapeze whilst juggling penguins. If school was out for her too, then commuting was in, on the daily train from her little village up to the big bad city of London. More precisely, to the offices of the Metropolitan Police in Pimlico.

Where she was a few weeks later when we went, en masse, to meet her after work one afternoon. In those less paranoid times, we were perfectly able to stroll into her open plan high rise office without filling in twenty eight forms in triplicate. And so it was that we found her at her desk that day, dressed in her 1980s work gear and wearing proper grown up make up and bouffant hair, sitting typing in front of a tiny brown screen with square green writing on it. Her job – in fact that of the whole office – was dealing with unpaid parking tickets. Well, that’s what they were paid for anyway, but the office had a wonderful atmosphere and not just because of the smoke from the cigarettes that people could still enjoy at their desks. No, its cause was much more human and was sitting opposite Madeline in a dark shiny suit.

Of course, we all fell instantly in love with David. He was tall, handsome, funny, skinny as a thin stick and quite the most glamorous man that we’d ever encountered. He was 19, too, so sophisticated beyond our years. David soon became a regular part of our group, joining us for wild nights out where he soon proved to be by far the best dancer that we’d ever seen. For day trips down to Margate in his old maroon Morris Marina to make ourselves sick with fear on the roller coaster and to drink white cider on the yellow sand. To while away the wee small hours talking toffee in the cavernous canteen of the motorway service station over pots of stewed tea. To dance in the moonlight by the light of a bonfire on top of the ancient long barrow at Cauldron Stones. To shriek with terror as we crept through the thick dark woods to the old mausoleum in the grounds of Cobham Hall.

I never thought that summer would end. I don’t think any of us did really, not in our hearts. But time passes whether you wish it to or not, and it was with a deeply instinctive feeling that, when I said goodbye to my friends and drove off for university in my little yellow car, I knew nothing would ever be quite the same again. That coolest cool long hot summer had been magical, but the butterfly had flown away for good.

Or nearly. Twenty two years on, and I’m pleased to report that David is as charming and as funny and as delightful as he ever was. I spent Saturday evening with him, and his partner, and Liz, celebrating his 41st birthday over a wonderful meal in a restaurant in Gravesend. He’s the Vice Principal of a prestigious school in London now, a job that he loves, and I’d bet my shirt that he’s the most popular guy in the staffroom. I don’t really know what our 18 or 19 year old selves would make of us now if we met them down that long long time tunnel. But for all our middle aged clothes and shoes and glasses, we know that the dancing devils of '87 will always be with us in spirit.

The joy of unexpected consequences

2009-05-25T19:11:00.005+01:00

A world in which we knew all of the consequences of our actions before we took them would be a dull one indeed. So whilst I’d admit that it’s vital to know that, say, the dentist is only going to give you a filling and not a full set of falsies or that the road you live in will still be in the same place you left it when you get back after a holiday or day’s work, it’s the little spontaneous details that add the sweet spoonful of interest to life. The unexpected invitation to an event, the al fresco beer and swimming session on the beach, the e-mail from a long-lost school friend, the impromptu conversation with an amusing stranger on a train – these are the kinds of things that taste so delicious simply because we didn’t know they were coming.

But because life generally likes to find a balance in all things, if we relish these small joyful surprises we may only do so in the full and certain knowledge that we must simultaneously accept the presence of their opposite numbers: the unpredicted little bad things that parachute in to prick our personal bubbles of happiness. Waking up with the raging toothache, pulling out a filing whilst eating a treacle toffee, getting a speeding ticket because we weren’t paying attention to the speed limit changing, our train being cancelled, falling asleep in the cinema just as the film gets going, that sort of thing.

If there really is some kind of cosmic see saw at work, then we accept that for all we prefer to be at the up-in-the-air-legs-dangling-look-at-me end, we have to take our turn being the one with the unglamorous bump on the behind as it hits the ground. Up is only possible because of down. Spending our life riding only the middle of the see saw at its pivotal point of equilibrium is no fun at all simply because nothing unexpected – good or bad – ever happens. So, much as we may wish from time to time for life to be all plain sailing and calm untroubled seas, what’s the point if we can never enjoy the adrenaline rush of riding the swell of a huge wave or crashing laughing and soaked into the sand?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as part of considering the nature of happiness. Happiness is a difficult construct to define; ask a hundred people what happiness is and I’d bet you’d get a hundred answers. All of them would be quite correct for the individual concerned, but not necessarily for the other 99. As we have no one core hypothesis of what happiness is then it’s quite natural that we should each see it in our own way. I’d also say that happiness is positively more than the absence of sadness, its opposite number in the great song and dance routine of life. Whether it is possible to experience the pinnacles of great joy without ever experiencing the depths of great distress is unclear; to some extent, I feel that if you accept the possibility of the one then you also accept the potential for the other.

So back then to my own little unexpected consequences that set me off on this meandering thought train. When I was renovating my tiny garden a couple of months back, I deliberately chose plants and flowers that would attract wildlife. Coaxed on by a warm and wet spring, the plants are growing as I look at them and the insects and birds are coming too. Except… I hadn’t really thought through precisely what insects might come, or in what quantity. And so I have become (or the blackthorn tree in the garden has, anyway) home to a huge small creeping army of brightly coloured hairy caterpillars. A little investigation has shown that these are the larvae of the Lackey Moth – so called because the striped colours resemble the livery lace worn by Victorian servants (or lackeys). There will be a spectacular fly past when these babies spread their wings come July or August. But for now, there are huge swathes of twitching caterpillars in and around the canopies of nest-web that they’ve spun in the branches of the tree outside my front window. Which is by the day growing more and more full of the birds that nest there too and feed on these bugs and others that are now coming to the garden.

Cosmic balance? Unexpected creepy crawly consequence? Or just nature doing its thing? I’m not sure and it doesn’t really matter in a way, but it has given me (and the birds) lots of food for thought.

Photos:

Top: Lackey Moth caterpillars by Steve Bennett

Middle: Adult Lackey Moth by Nick Greatorex-Davies

Bottom: A gathering of Lackey Moth caterpillars (like those on my tree) by Nicholas Harrison

Book review: The Philosopher and the Wolf

2009-05-24T14:40:00.007+01:00

During the course of our lives, if we are lucky – or unlucky depending on your own view – we will undergo a number of life-changing experiences. That the details of these experiences and their impact on us are unique to us and us only is not in dispute. What is curious about these personally seismic events, though, is the strange phenomenon that we are only able to recognise the full implications of such experiences long after they have happened; when we have shaken the dust from our allegorical feet and thrown a backwards glance over our metaphorical shoulder.

As it is with all of us, so it was for Mark Rowlands. When he picked up that local newspaper on a hot summer day in Alabama and decided, on impulse, to buy a six week old wolf cub, I’m pretty sure that he had no concept that the consequences of his actions were going to change the rest of his life. His only worry was whether he had enough money in his bank account to pay for it. And so begins a remarkable story of how this young British professor of philosophy came to share the next eleven years with Brenin the wolf.

At one level, The Philosopher and The Wolf is a highly amusing and deeply moving memoir of the life and times of one man and his wolf. As both grow and mature and change - jobs, homes, continents, girlfriends - they provide, for each other, the only constants in each other’s lives. We watch Brenin as he grows from fluffy cub into 150lb adult; we observe his training and his interactions with dogs and other people; we prowl with the wolf as he hunts rabbits and chases birds as much as we see his human companion hunt jobs and chase girls.

If The Philosopher and the Wolf were just a memoir of a man’s life with a wolf, it would still be a great book. But what raises it to brilliance is what it shows us about what it is to be human. Or as Mark Rowlands describes it, the “certain thoughts that can only emerge in the space between a wolf and a man”. The philosopher holds a mirror up to himself and sees the reflection of the avaricious, deceitful ape standing beside the raw and honourable furry embodiment of the natural world. The author does not try to dodge the unflattering bullets of this comparison and never strays into the territory of anthropomorphism; indeed, I believe Mark would regard that as an unforgivable and insulting betrayal to the fundamental nature of what Brenin is. So the book is also uncomfortable at times in what it tells us about what we are; our own, very human, nature does not always look good in this glaring spotlight that misses no detail of our defects.

It is a rare book that keeps me compelled to keep on reading until the dawn chorus reminds me that it’s morning. Rarer still, perhaps, is a book on philosophy that delights, entertains, amuses and educates in such a way. If this book’s grand theme is that of evolution and how we came to be what we are, it is also a road map of one man’s personal evolution from what he was then and how he became what he is now. All the lessons that Mark learned about love, death and happiness were taught to him by his wolf, and I don’t mind admitting that I was in tears for most of the last quarter of the book. Ultimately, this book has moved me beyond measure; reading it really has been a life changing experience.

If you are examining any of the big questions in your own life, if you are looking to take a peep around the curtains at the machinery that lies behind why we act as we do, if you have a deep and non-sentimental regard for nature and creatures, this book could change your life too.

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness is published by Granta (2009)

Mark Rowlands is now professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. His website is

www.markrowlandsauthor.com

The half year review

2009-05-21T20:35:00.007+01:00

It's almost six months since my fortieth birthday, so it seemed appropriate to sit and rest a while and observe the vista from atop the early gentle foothills of middle age. Or middle youth. Or Middle Earth. Or whatever we like to call this large expanse of green and beige crimplene that lies in front of us when our twenties and thirties are left behind.

Some observations then from the watch tower half a year in to the second act:

Watching the birds, thinking, monitoring the progress of the new plants in my little garden, revelling in the natural world more joyfully with each day that passes - and the continued enjoyment of my constant companion nicotine - seem to have replaced in my mind the space previously occupied by preoccupations of a more earthy kind. Whether that is to do with being 40 or with being single for nearly two years or a combination of both is a moot point. This doesn't concern me; I know that if the setting and the situation and the person were right, the old Eve would reassert herself. What I do wonder, though, is whether she can happily coexist with these other natural pleasures.

Having a complete absence of concern relating to what some might call status is by no means a new arrival on my shores but is more pronounced now in its presence. I care not for work, but I don't loathe it either, and perhaps on my better days have attained a Swiss-like neutrality about the whole concept. Work - and the workplace - are funny strange chimeras, occupying so much time and space in the emotions of those in their thrall that they can drive out almost everything else. And I do feel ok about saying that because I've been there myself in the past and like all reformed addicts can see the effects quite plainly in others whilst they remain oblivious. This is probably enhanced by observing the red teeth and claws of others and feeling overwhelmingly free by comparison. A delightful feeling, as is - at last - having mastered the art of relaxation.

Thinking about what I might do next has also been much on my mind recently, the next in my terms being the immediate future and the slightly more distant afterwards when the barn has sold and I'm free of those financial obligations. I am planning - this long bank holiday weekend in fact - to apply for a place on a part-time MA course at a local university. If I'm lucky enough to be offered a place, then two years of part-time study lies ahead with all of the excitement and learning that would offer. Quite by chance, that two years of study would conclude at the exact same moment as the contract for my current job ends. It might also - fingers crossed - include the time period during which the barn sells. So my landscape two years from now could look significantly different.

On the family front, it's nearing the end of the first academic year that Roo has been at university and the first time that I've lived completely on my own - ever - as an adult. In some ways, Roo turning twenty last month was more significant than me turning 40 and I think, not for the first time, about how time really does fly. Tempus fugit. Yes indeed, with bells and whistles on.

I also seem to have inadvertently performed major brain surgery on my computer this evening. Serves me right for following the primrose path of procrastination and random meanderings when I should be working on those assessments.

Photo of an Arctic Tern chick taken last year on the Farne Islands, Northumberland.

Bring me sunshine...

2009-05-18T22:07:00.014+01:00

Family gatherings have a habit of throwing up odd confessions, odder relations and rattling the deep-set bones of cupboard-dwelling skeletons. But I have to admit that my mother's revelation that she liked the music of grunge-rock gods Nirvana was more unexpected than finding a Methodist minister playing poker and drinking moonshine in an all night strip club.

The three of us - mum, Roo and me - were munching our way through delightful homemade organic burgers in the Wibbly Wobbly cafe on campus late on Friday night when the first melancholic minor harmonics of Come As You Are rolled over us like aural surf. She stopped, Luscious Lamb Burger poised in hand, cocked her head to one side and listened intently.
"I like this song. Who's it by?" she asked Roo.

And so was set in motion the little tableau that followed on Saturday morning, the three of us - in Roo's student halls of residence room this time - listening to The Best of Nirvana on CD for a full hour or more, Roo and I lounging at either end of her single bed and mum in the armless armchair drinking tea. Eventually prising ourselves away from the sounds and stories of Kurt Cobain, we trundled off campus and drove the few miles into Lancaster itself.

The city is set on a hill and radiates with a subtle golden glow from the soft yellow sandstone of the houses, shops and offices. We parked at the bottom and walked slowly up through the stalls of the open market that runs up and down the spine of the high street: breads, cheeses, game, sausages, curries, doughnuts, fresh English strawberries and a hundred and one other delights to choose and buy direct from the producers. We had no mission in mind other to look, buy and enjoy, and - in my case - to visit a bookshop.

Lancaster is well provided with bookshops and I had, late the previous evening, stood and lingered outside the university branch of Waterstones willing it to open especially for me as Roo took us on a tour of the campus. A couple of hours and a few shops later we staggered out of the high street with our purchases into the beery embrace of a local pub serving food and football played out on a range of giant screens. None of us being football fans, we had no clue what the big game of the day was except it ended in a huge trophy and much swapping of stripy shirts.

Striped shirts, as it turned out, might have been rather more appropriate attire than we realised for our next stop at Lancaster Castle. Picking up the brown visitor attraction signs as we left the car park, we circled and dipped around the city's compact one-way system in search of the fortifications that we could see up on top of the hill. For a while it seemed that whichever way we took we just couldn't get any closer. Along the river bank we went, past beautiful waterfront apartments and a recently engineered harmonic arching bridge painted the palest sky blue. Down a country lane next to the canal full of ducks and coots and reeds. Through twined streets, up precipitous slopes, across cobbles until we began to think we'd imagined it. And then, suddenly, the castle was in front of us. Curiously quiet and deserted of visitors, we pulled up on the steep forecourt and peered at the huge wooden door studded with square headed bolts. Her Majesty's Prison, Lancaster Castle, read the stern navy blue sign. Lancaster Castle is a prison, as it turned out, not a tourist attraction. Now that would explain the lack of directions.

Still laughing at ourselves and our castle gaffe, Roo suggested we drive the few miles out to the seaside town of Morcambe. Like many British seaside resorts, its grandeur and glamour has perhaps faded a little in recent years in the luring headlamps of package holidays abroad. But if tourists don't flock here in quite the numbers they once did, the town is making a huge and visible effort to tempt them back again with refurbishments and street artworks. The beach is gentle and sandy and curves against the promenade in a welcoming crescent of soft-breaking waves and thousands of seabirds. The horizon is made up of a stunning vista of the hills of the Lake District.

But perhaps the town's most dazzling possession is its glorious tribute to its favourite son, Eric Morcambe, born here and one half of the much loved comedy duo Morcambe and Wise. The life-size bronze statue of Eric, complete with signature glasses, captures him in his heyday doing the steps to their classic show-closing number, Bring Me Sunshine. The nation mourned when he died at a premature 58 years of age in 1984. The memorial to this national treasure, built in 1999 and 15 years after his death, was unveiled by The Queen. A memorial too to gentle comedy for gentler days perhaps.

Bring Me Sunshine - the theme tune of Morcambe and Wise

Bring me Sunshine, in your smile
Bring me Laughter, all the while
In this world where we live, there should be more happiness
So much joy you can give, to each brand new bright tomorrow

Make me happy, through the years
Never bring me, any tears
Let your arms be as warm as the sun from up above
Bring me fun, bring me sunshine, bring me love.

Bring me Sunshine, in your eyes
Bring me rainbows, from the skies
Life's too short to be spent having anything but fun
We can be so content, if we gather little sunbeams

Be light-hearted, all day long
Keep me singing, happy songs
Let your arms be as warm as the sun from up above
Bring me fun, bring me sunshine, bring me love.

Words - Sylvia Dee, Music - Arthur Kent

Photographs: At the top - mum, Eric Morcambe and Roo. In the middle - bronze seagull from Eric's memorial garden. At the bottom - Roo

The sandwich tray of Fate

2009-05-14T22:28:00.006+01:00

I’ve never been one to turn up my nose at the accidental largesse that Dame Fortune strews in the haphazard pathway of my life. Indeed, I’d go as far as to say it is my honour-bound duty to make the most of Fate’s fickle bounty when I stumble upon it. For what else is a weed but a wildflower in the wrong place?

And so it was that the ethereal warps and wefts from which the tapestry of life is woven did conspire, at just the very moment when I was feeling late afternoon hungry, to procure for me a tray of abandoned sandwiches. Like the streamers and ten-penny blow horns littering the pavement in the bow wave of the carnival parade, the guests had sated their lunch time appetites and departed leaving behind piles of untouched food and dull-looking documents in their wake.

There is in my experience a strange primeval cloud that descends upon the modern brain in moments such as this, an urge so strong and so instinctive that it blots out in a micro-second ten thousand years of civilisation. And in that flicker of intuitive logic does the Stone Age cave man, skin deep within us all, cast off his modern cares and clothing and stride forward in his primitive glory. Would that ancient straggle-haired ancestor have paused for more than a heartbeat before consuming the food he found by chance in front of him? No. And nor did I.

A couple of dainty triangles of chicken and pesto on tomato bread and a mug of tea later and I could feel the rumbles dying away like yesterday’s echoes. But there were still piles of sandwiches left and it seemed criminal, to my inner cave woman self, to leave them there to be trodden by flies and thrown away in the bin. And so, with deft application of kitchen towels and a pristine plastic bag, I secreted the rest of the tray away to bring home for later.

The dog and I dined well tonight, sharing our supper of chicken and tuna and egg standing in the kitchen. I’ll throw the crusts that I removed (and the water cress he delicately rejected) out for the birds in the morning. The dog’s fast asleep at my feet now, just as his own ancestors would once have been in a Stone Age dwelling not so far removed in essence from the house we share. Neither of us will need to go hunting with Fate again, for a few more hours at least.

***

I’m off to visit Roo at Lancaster for a long weekend, setting off tomorrow morning and returning late on Sunday night. Can’t wait to see her, and my mother’s coming with me as well on her first trip to Roo’s university. We’re staying in some guest accommodation on campus – the first time I’ve done that in, oh gosh, a long time.

***

Luckily, Kaos is quite a lean dog so his scoffing of the sandwiches this evening doesn’t really qualify as a dieting disaster - unlike some of the animals in this little gallery from today’s newspaper. George the hedgehog (that’s his picture up there, next to a regular-size friend) was "placed on a crash diet after he weighed in at 2.2kg - four times the weight of a normal hedgehog. Staff at the Wildlife Aid animal sanctuary placed him on a strictly-controlled cat food diet."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/gallery/2009/may/13/overweight-pets-animals

Celebrating success and an unexpected visitor

2009-05-13T19:46:00.006+01:00

Fingers worn to bloodied stumps? Check
Eyeballs tinted with permanent pink glaze? Check
Typing inaccurately at speed with resultant copy full of favourite finger slip misspellings? Check (‘thnaks’ anyone, or is that just me??)
Surreptitiously eating chocolate covered raisins whilst on the phone? Check
Perfecting the art of silent cigarette lighting? Check

In that case, it must be assessment time again. I’m one of a number of freelance assessors for a grant-making organisation, a role that I took on when I was self-employed and have continued with now that I’m not. Part of the assessment process is an interview by telephone with every applicant, following which I write up and submit a report. The work’s enjoyable and I’m endlessly delighted to learn more about some of the wonderful projects that organisations up and down the country provide for disadvantaged children and young people.

But there is one downside. As I’m currently in a normal job (if such a thing exists), I have to fit the whole thing – preparation, interviews, report writing etc – around and about the day job. Which means an awful lot of frantic typing and general eye-propping and late-night oil burning for me in order to meet the deadlines.

Although I did grant myself the evening off to go over to my scuba diving club’s regular Tuesday night pub meeting. Super time (and away from the computer too), two health-giving glasses of beardy ale, some great conversation, a bag of chips on the way home and… It’s official! I am now a BSAC qualified Ocean Diver. Couldn’t resist taking a photo of my certificate (that's it ^^up there^^).

And then when I arrived home this evening and carried out my essential pre-assessment-interview ‘comfort stop’, I found a cat in the bathroom. Light ginger and sitting quite happily on top of a posh purple silk box of bubble bath that my mother gave me for Christmas. He must have snuck in somehow past Kaos, who was lying in a dog-day coma on the living room floor. One can only hope the dog might be a little more of a deterrent to real cat burglars…

Right, that’s my half hour tea break over so back to writing the assessments. If you see a plume of smoke hanging over my little house at midnight, please don’t worry – it’ll just be my smouldering finger stumps fusing to the melting keyboard.

Celebrities and other aliens

2009-05-11T23:11:00.008+01:00

I've no idea if newspaper folk actually ever say things like Stop Press! or Hold the front page! outside the covers of fiction and films*, but if they do so, they certainly will be tonight. For one of the most devastating news stories of the year has just broken.

No, it's not the story that MPs of all party colours have been fiddling their expenses (buying manure at the tax payers' expense anyone? Doth not irony already have a name...). Nor that the Prime Minister has appeared on YouTube gurning like a 1950s Granddad at a holiday camp's funny faces competition. Nor that bankers have taken reckless gambles with other people's money (an old news story by now, surely?). Nor even that the Government was so out of touch with public opinion that it didn't realise how outraged British people would be at the suggestion that Gurkha soldiers - who had fought and risked their lives for this country - should be denied residence here and was thus voted down by both the Opposition and its own MPs in the House of Commons.

No, none of those things, but something much, much worse. Glamour model Katie Price (aka Jordan) and her pop star husband of five years, Peter Andre, have split up. A true symbol of our times, the couple met on the set of a celebrity reality TV show in 2004 and married the following year. They lived out their courtship and married lives in a blur of stories in publications ranging from the red topped tabloids to the pages of the glossies, from TV-centric gossip mags to their own reality TV shows. Every row, every breast augmentation, every pregnancy, every tattoo, house move, pastime, 'autobiography', clothing line, pop single or interview has been intricately documented in the full-beam headlights of public view.

Now, it's easy to have a little private unkind laugh at the expense of those who choose to live their lives so grotesquely in public, and I'm sure there will be many who feel that the marriage of these two people was itself a publicity-related construct. That may or may not be the case and I'm not really bothered either way.

What I am curious about, though, is how celebrity relationships are quite different from those that regular folk like you (guessing here) and me have. Or 'civilians' as Elizabeth Hurley famously put it.

You see, I reckon in the world of celebrity that everything just moves one heck of a lot faster. The getting together, courtship, house hunting, marriage, pregnancy announcements, joyful expressions of parental fulfillment, rumours of infidelity, battles with addictions to drugs / drink / cosmetic surgery, trial separations, divorce - well, the whole gamut just takes place quicker. The cycle cycles faster. The metronome ticks in double time.

If I were a gambling person, I'd bet that the first pictures of Katie or Peter with a new significant other in tow will appear in just a few weeks from now. Yet here am I, almost two years on from splitting up with my ex and only just about ready to countenance even thinking about dating again. If I was a celebrity, I'd probably not only have dated again, but married too and be heading up to my next high-profile divorce.

There was an article in the newspaper last week about animals and the way we regard them, not written so much from an animal welfare point of view but a philosophical and ethical one. The central point of the discussion looked at the differences between humans and animals without straying into the territory of anthropomorphism or taking the currently modish viewpoint that there are no differences at all. Or as the philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it so succinctly, "The question is not can they talk. Nor can they reason. But can they suffer?"

So my philosophical question is this then: what is the relationship time difference between celebrities and the rest of us civilians?

*Fram - can you enlighten me please?

"We should care because animals and humans are different", The Guardian, 8th May 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/may/08/animal-welfare-ethics

NB - as a consequence of this newspaper article, I'm going to buy a copy of The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands (Granta Books, November 2008). Rowlands, Professor of philosophy at Miami University, lived with a companion wolf called Brenin for eleven years. He believes that a deeper understanding of what it is to be human and the different kinds of intelligence both posses can emerge from "somewhere between the wolf and the philosopher".

Saturday night super heroes

2009-05-09T23:31:00.007+01:00

Quite why there was a group of young people dressed as super heroes on the beach this evening is anyone’s guess. No flying in evidence, but plenty of wigs and capes and health-giving swigs from communal bottles of kryptonite.

An hour earlier, a teenager in a sunny yellow tee-shirt had pleaded with me outside the corner shop to go in and buy him cigarettes and vodka as I passed by. I gently declined, not as much on the grounds that he was under 18 but because I’m a regular at the shop and generally buy nothing stronger than Diet Coke (or Perrier if I’m really living it up). My friends behind the counter would have been in no doubt that the cheap cigarettes and unbranded spirits were not for me.

It brought back into my mind being asked for ID when I bought cigarettes in a 24-hour shop off Times Square. I would like to flatter myself that the cashier thought I was under 21, but even my (then 36 year old) ego wasn't buying that as I flashed my passport; more likely that in New York the shop assistants just ask everyone.

A bit further along from the gathering of unlikely super heroes was a group of three men. Polish I think and standing looking out to sea with beer cans in their hands as the sun turned the sky a brilliant burning orange. They raised their drinks in amiable greeting as Kaos and I walked by, the dog more intent on sniffing out foxes from along the banks of the fresh water culvert that runs parallel to the shore than in returning their salute. I smiled and nodded my hello as we headed towards the docks and into the sunset.

By the time we retraced our steps, the three men had gone and the group of Saturday night super heroes were swapping wigs with each other. Someone had lit a bonfire from driftwood on the beach and was standing willing it into flickering life as the last of the light drained out of the sky. A couple of teenagers in hoodies and trainers turned tricks on the floodlit skateboard ramp as we walked across the park to our little house. Kaos picked up an empty oyster shell in his mouth and carried it home, leaving it outside as the front door closed behind us with a click.

Talking of spiders

2009-05-09T00:00:00.011+01:00

I talked to spiders a lot as a child. My mother says how she would often find me holding one in my little girl hand, chatting away and telling it stories. A conversation with a spider is necessarily a one-sided affair, the lack of reply compensated for by their great hanging around listening abilities. Somewhere along the line between nappies, ankle socks, gingham summer dresses, hair ribbons and high heels I stopped the monologue for some reason. Reason itself, probably.

A lot of people are terrified of spiders and, for them, just to have one in the room is a sickening experience. I’ve never developed a real deep dread of spiders and enjoy watching them going about their spidery business, although I certainly don’t like them sharing my duvet or hitching a ride upon my person. Psychological research seems to suggest that the fear of spiders (and snakes) may be innate if not omnipresent. If this (presumed) survival mechanism is instinctive and in-born, does the child observing Mummy standing on a stool shrieking in terror at the sight of one have any impact at all on whether we too will be afraid of spiders in our turn? Or would we be bound to have inherited her fear – or not – through our own individual genetic blueprint anyway? The spider fear conundrum perhaps.

There was a spider that lived in a small drill hole in the wall outside the front door of our old house in Gillingham. She would sit there, head poking out and her four front legs poised on the threshold of her den. It seemed an unlikely and un-nourishing place to set up home, but then I’ve never seen a spider-orientated house makeover programme and she lived there for a long time happily enough as far as we could tell. She became so much part of our personal landscape that Roo and I would go and check to see if she was there each morning when we picked the milk bottles off the doorstep and each evening after school and work. We still looked for her out of habit for a long time after she died.

But like them or loathe them, we do have an endless fascination with spiders and their habits. Their random scuttling, their lurking in dark corners, their turning up out of nowhere, their ability to create a complex web from nothing, their sometimes venomous fangs, their weird eyes, their possession of too many hairy stocking-ed legs... They just seem so alien to us, so repellent and yet so fascinating at the same time that it’s no wonder they occupy such a prominent place in myth and fairy tale and even everyday language with its webs of deceit, intrigue and sinister shady doings.

There is an allegorical element too I think of the relationships between male and female in our thoughts and stories about spiders. The infamously venomous and otherwise solitary black widow who sometimes kills and eats her mate after he has served his reproductive purpose. Or many variations of the legendary spider, always female, the man cast as the hapless fly lured into her exotic web by her beguiling beauty and trapped there, powerless, helpless and enchanted. It’s not my fault, pouts the petulant foot-stamping boy inside his handsome hairy man-suit. She made me do it.

How strange then that you can nowadays, if you so wish, find yourself a mate - should you choose to do so - by using the world wide web. Just tread carefully if you do.

The Spider And The Fly (1829) by Mary Howitt (1799 – 1888)

Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly,

'Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

And I've a many curious things to shew when you are there."

Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "to ask me is in vain,

For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."

"I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high;

Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the Spider to the Fly.

"There are pretty curtains drawn around; the sheets are fine and thin,

And if you like to rest awhile, I'll snugly tuck you in!"

Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "for I've often heard it said,

They never, never wake again, who sleep upon your bed!"

Said the cunning Spider to the Fly,

"Dear friend what can I do,

To prove the warm affection I 've always felt for you?

I have within my pantry, good store of all that's nice;

I'm sure you're very welcome -- will you please to take a slice?"

"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "kind Sir, that cannot be,

I've heard what's in your pantry, and I do not wish to see!"

"Sweet creature!" said the Spider, "you're witty and you're wise,

How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes!

I've a little looking-glass upon my parlour shelf,

If you'll step in one moment, dear, you shall behold yourself."

"I thank you, gentle sir," she said, "for what you 're pleased to say,

And bidding you good morning now, I'll call another day."

The Spider turned him round about, and went into his den,

For well he knew the silly Fly would soon come back again:

So he wove a subtle web, in a little corner sly,

And set his table ready, to dine upon the Fly.

Then he came out to his door again, and merrily did sing,

"Come hither, hither, pretty Fly, with the pearl and silver wing;

Your robes are green and purple -- there's a crest upon your head;

Your eyes are like the diamond bright, but mine are dull as lead!"

Alas, alas! how very soon this silly little Fly,

Hearing his wily, flattering words, came slowly flitting by;

With buzzing wings she hung aloft, then near and nearer drew,

Thinking only of her brilliant eyes, and green and purple hue --

Thinking only of her crested head -- poor foolish thing! At last,

Up jumped the cunning Spider, and fiercely held her fast.

He dragged her up his winding stair, into his dismal den,

Within his little parlour -- but she ne'er came out again!

And now dear little children, who may this story read,

To idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne'er give heed:

Unto an evil counsellor, close heart and ear and eye,

And take a lesson from this tale, of the Spider and the Fly.

Picture of female Black Widow Spider by George Grall from National Geographic

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/bugs/black-widow-spider.html

Protesting the truth

2009-05-08T00:19:00.021+01:00

The two policemen scan us as we jostle past them on the footbridge to the London-bound platform, searching perhaps for the spark of recognition in our faces. There's a little part of me that wishes it was me they were looking for, in a kind of Bond-esque way where they'd transport me under discrete escort to the head of MI5 who'd beg me to crack codes and infiltrate a ring of golden-toothed baddies. Quite why the spooks would seek out a trivia-writing, sometime sudoku and crossword devotee with rudimentary French is not clear. But I'm ready and willing just in case. Queen and country, James, Queen and country.

Instead of which I pass them without as much as a glance from under their hat brimmed eyes and take up my seat on the opposite side. A few minutes later, they walk by arm in arm with a young woman in a pink sweatshirt and jogging pants. Somehow I don't think she got the part of the Bond girl either.

The walk from Victoria Station to my meeting place in Great George Street takes about twenty minutes in heels and I'm beginning to regret my optimistic spring morning notion of leaving home without a coat. But I soon forget about the brisk wind and numb toes when I climb up the steps into the home of the Institution of Civil Engineers. The Grand Hall on the first floor is simply breathtaking, dominated by two huge crystal chandeliers and a painted ceiling perhaps 30 feet above our heads. I'm supposed to be looking at the exhibits before the conference starts but I sip my tea and stare at the glorious rich wooden panelling and the painted frescoes for the fifteen minutes before the gong goes and sends the shuffling crowd into the lecture theatre.

If it's not quite as grand as the Hall then it only lacks by comparison. All around are carved and painted the names of the heroes of civil engineering: the spirits of Myddelton, Dudley, Newton, Savery, Newcomen, Darby, Brindley, Smeaton, Brunell, Rennie, Murdock, Cort, Arkwright, Watt, Bramah surely rest in perfect peace in this perfect room, panelled like its grander neighbour above seats of plush green velvet and topped off with a great black and white glass central dome.

On the stage, someone's droning on in streams of acronyms and abbreviations and I'm doodling in my pad when half a dozen people leap onto the platform and start shouting. They're young students, perhaps Roo's age, protesting at the announcement today of stringent cuts in university funding. They unfurl a home-made banner as the power to the microphone is cut and two burly security guards jump in with what I feel is unnecessary brusqueness. The organisers try to usher delegates out as the protesters, as if on cue, sit down as a body and chant from behind the podium and wall of bodies as the room empties. Half of the people on the stage are attempting to reason with the students, half to push them out and I'm not the only one to comment to my neighbour that they should be allowed to have their say; nothing is worse to my mind than those with no opinion and surely this is part of what being a student is all about? When they finally march out of the room ten minutes later, still chanting, still waving their banners, the two of us delegates left in the lecture theatre stand on the steps and clap as they pass and I find I have tears in my eyes.

Great George Street lies just off Parliament Square and I set out after lunch to breathe in the air of politics in the shadow of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster. The stooped bronze figure of Winston Churchill, captured here for eternity in his later years, leans on a cane above a crowd of Tamils protesting at genocide in Sri Lanka. An open-fronted shelter sheathed in blue plastic sheeting flaps in the wind as half a dozen men sit hunched under brilliant white duvets. A hand-made placard tells me this is day seven of their hunger strike. Next to them, the quiet tented string of the long running peace protest; their focus: the war in Iraq and the situation in Gaza. I stand watching them from the other side of the road, leaning on some railings and smoking a cigarette with my back to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. There's a part of me that longs to see a politician of any persuasion pull up in a car and speak to the protesters who are just yards from the House, but of course it doesn't happen.

Instead I flow on down Whitehall, bristling these days with discrete security among the crowds. The magnificent ministerial buildings have closed iron shutters just visible behind the opaque white voile curtains that hang in the handsome windows, and ornate balustrades and low walls grow up out of the middle of the wide pavement. Pedestrians and school parties chatter and stream around them but there's no mistaking their purpose as crash barriers. On past the Cenotaph, strewn with poppy wreaths at its base and giving thanks To The Glorious Dead and the newer charcoal coloured polished granite memorial To The Women of WWII.

I pass the end of Downing Street. When my mother first left school and worked for the Inland Revenue in London nearly fifty years ago, she recalls that you could still walk along Downing Street and past the Prime Minister's door. The beautiful road is artificially empty now, an oasis of still in this bustling arterial thoroughfare thanks to the massive glossy iron gates at the end. Here the police are very much in evidence, armed too in this location, with pistols in hip holsters or cradling large sinister looking weapons in their arms across the body like a baby.

I keep walking, drawn along by the crowd. Two mounted policemen chat to each other in the bus lane, their horses' hooves oiled as glossy as a raven's wings. To my left, three soldiers of the Household Cavalry stand outside Horse Guards Parade dressed in their ornate uniforms of red and black and white and gold. Two are astride a pair of shimmering huge black horses who toss their heads and stomp huge impatient feet in longing for the battlefield or the gallops rather than the constant snap of cameras. The scent of the animals mingles with diesel from buses and vans and the sweet sweet smell of trees and blossom; London's signature perfume perhaps.

An advertisement outside Trafalgar Studio Theatre is offering discounted tickets for this afternoon's matinee performance of The Last Cigarette, and I am tempted. But my eyes pull me on to Trafalgar Square and I flow on again with the tourists. Dominated on one side by the National Gallery and in front by Nelson's Column punching its triumph into the sky, the whole thing is protected in the centre by four vigilant magnificent monstrous lions and girded by ever-circling traffic. Yet I feel it's diminished since my childhood. No more grain sellers and the sooty staining on the buildings' stones has been washed away by successive improvements and revamps. No more children throwing handfuls of corn and laughing with delight at the pigeons feeding from their hands. No more family photo albums capturing a delighted child with a pigeon standing on his or her head. Only a few birds remain and the fountains are empty of water today.

I walk on by, passing the National Portrait Gallery - one of my favourites - and then into Charing Cross Road. London's booksellers' row of tradition, but with space for other singular traders too - coins, stamps, medals - and run away side roads stuffed with antiquarian books and bars. I stand in the doorway of a closed down bookshop with whitewashed windows and smoke a cigarette. It's not down and out here yet for these traditional traders but I wonder how many of the booksellers will still remain in another ten years.

The cafes start to take on an oriental flavour now as I edge into China Town and the road names are bi-lingual English and Chinese. I check the time on my mobile phone, crossing over to re-trace my steps on the other side of the road. By the time I reach Downing Street again, another protest has set up opposite the gates on the other side of the road and is chanting slogans across four lanes of buses and taxis. As I stand watching, an immaculately dressed white haired man of about 60 slips out from behind the road's security cordon and joins me on the pavement. He has an open smiling face and when he asks me what they're protesting about, his eyes sparkle as much as his soft Irish accent. We peer across and can make out the words but not the cause, although the protesters are all women and accompanied by a giant stuffed bear.

By the time I reach Parliament Square again, I've been walking for an hour and a half and am grateful to sit for five minutes on a wall facing the House. Behind me, Tamil protesters are queuing for lunch at a makeshift food stall and talking in small animated clusters as they eat with plastic spoons from paper plates. I slip back into the conference with enough time to grab a cup of coffee and take my green velvet seat before the afternoon session starts. I think the idea behind the extended two hour lunch break was networking, not rambling, and the lessons intended to be taken away from the conference quite different from those I've observed. Never mind; the delegate pack has a CD-ROM of all the presentations on it just in case I feel the urge.

Photo of Winston Churchill and protesters in Parliament Square taken on my mobile phone.

Sort of a top hat day

2009-05-06T13:37:00.005+01:00

Having a bit of an inverse Irving Berlin day today involving the forced replacement of emotional seepage with a stiff upper lip.

That’s the trouble when you’ve allowed your right brain to gain the upper hand: emotional leaks and tremblesome lips. No such problem with the trusty logical left side, domain of practicality and good old British reserve. So how does one prevent a quiver from becoming a river, a little cloud of gloom from becoming a thunderhead of doom?

Step into the sunshine and take full advantage of a day working at home to spend an hour lying in a joyful red reclining chair in the bright breezy garden. Watch the wet washing billowing and flapping on the line in a most satisfactory way. Shut your eyes and observe the little pin pricks of light shining through your lids. Trace the trails of the tiny black dots as they dance and wander across the inside of the thin closed membrane. Listen to the sounds of the wings of the sparrows as they land on the bird feeder. Whirring? Purring? Laugh at their pickiness as they reject and drop discarded seeds with disdainful beaks. Pluck out some moult hairs from the dog’s haunches whilst he snores. Throw the beach-found blue rubber ball when he grumbles at you for doing so. Make a cup of tea in your favourite bone china mug with the pictures of bees on it. Smoke a few cigarettes and remember that although it’s your last pack of duty frees you haven’t paid full price for 20 since February. Pinch out a few baby weeds and hope they’re not the seedlings you’ve been nurturing. Return to the desk with a bowlful of muesli topped with yogurt and honey. Drink more tea. Continue work where you left off. Smile.

Job done.

I'm puttin' on my top hat
Tyin' up my white tie
Brushin' off my tails

I'm dudein' up my shirt front
Puttin' in the shirt studs
Polishin' my nails

I'm steppin' out, my dear
To breathe an atmosphere that simply reeks with class
And I trust that you'll excuse my dust when I step on the gas

For I'll be there
Puttin' down my top hat
Mussin' up my white tie
Dancin' in my tails

Extract from Top Hat, White Tie & Tails by Irving Berlin (1935) from the musical Top Hat (nominated for four Academy Awards)

The keeper of the family buttons

2009-05-05T23:28:00.006+01:00

The first thing that I noticed about Jackie was her necklace. It was spun from strands of fine beige yarn, three or four or more criss-crossing threads each strung with buttons and worn close to the neck choker style. Every button was a different colour from its neighbour – pale pinky pinks to sky vapour blues, soft sage greens to earth cool ochres – each round, and perhaps the size of a penny piece. Smaller than coat buttons, certainly, but larger than pearly shirt fastenings; maybe the size for the waistband of a pair of trousers or a skirt, or a child’s dress.

When I’d first met Jackie last week, she’d told me she was 51 in conversation but I think could easily pass for ten years younger. A handsome woman is how my Gran would have described her: tall, shoulder length blonde hair, bold soft smiling features and the slim strong muscular stature of someone who has been involved in sports all her life.
We sat down with our cups of coffee at a quiet table in the refectory and I admired her button necklace.
“Oh, I love buttons,” she said, “Always have. My girls tease me about it at home. Nearly all of my clothes have buttons on them somewhere.”
“I bet that you inherited your Gran’s button box.”
Jackie’s mouth opened with surprise. “How did you know that? Yes, I did inherit her button box. I loved playing with it when I was a little girl. Still do. But how did you know?”

Well I didn’t know it for sure, but took a guess. I think that most women of my age or more - and maybe some who are younger too - will have memories of Granny’s button box. Of rainy Saturday afternoons spent hunting for elusive matching pairs. Or stringing like with like on spindly tangled sewing cotton. Or of being given the serious task of choosing the closest match for Granddad’s fraying work shirt cuffs. Of putting on the lid and shaking the tin like a giant castanet. Of counting, sorting, plucking out fluff, removing old knots of yesterday’s yarn. Of two holes, three holes, four holes, toggles, hoops and loops, wooden, bone, plastic, metal, horn, thread balls, cloth topped and satin covered. Of picking them up in child-sized handfuls and letting the buttons cascade through the fingers like a pirate’s precious golden bounty.

Someone in every generation has to be the keeper of the family buttons. It’s just the way things are.

Looking for...

2009-05-04T18:31:00.016+01:00

Happiness, like love, is one of those things that you just can’t look for. It has to come and find you.

In the eternally paradoxical nature of such things, the more we search and strive for it – either happiness or love – the further it seems to slip away from our finger tips like the puck on an air hockey table. If we follow that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, the active pursuit of happiness could make us very miserable indeed.

But happiness is surely more than an absence of misery. So how do we define happiness? Contentment? A sense of belonging? Being healthy? Satisfaction with our life? Having enough money to meet our needs? Being loved and cherished? Being listened to? Having an audience? Losing ten pounds in weight? Eating jam doughnuts? Drinking beer on a sunny afternoon?

Well probably all of the above and more besides. What is for sure is that there are an awful lot of people out there in the world looking for it. A quick Google search on the word happiness brought up 67 million hits – or more than one website for every man, woman and child who lives in the UK. Among those millions of pages are also plenty of folk who are willing to teach us about how to be happy. Books, self-help groups, seminars, courses, weekend programmes and the like, all aimed at helping us to find a short cut to our own personal Nirvana. And I’m sure some of them do help too, in as much as they may help to demonstrate ways of reacting to situations, of framing our thoughts in a positive way and of choosing obtainable realistic goals.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Dickens gave us one definition of happiness and misery that by chance seems highly appropriate for the credit crunch generation:

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.
David Copperfield (1849)

Money certainly does not make people happy in and of itself, as Dickens also demonstrated with his creation of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. But money probably helps, to an extent anyway, in as much as it possesses the power to insulate us from the prime factors of misery – hunger, cold, thirst, preventable or curable illness and so on. Yet we may have all the things that we need to make our material lives content laid out on the table in front of us and still feel discontented. So I’m sure that happiness is not a yacht or a sports car or a rambling old mansion house in the countryside, although the possession of those things (or of books, crayons, chocolate cake, or ice cream) may contribute significantly to our personal well being.

A sense of purpose can help us to keep on driving even when the wheels fall off our particular wagon. Having a passion – whether for fish and chip suppers, bird watching, politics, high heeled shoes or organised religion – also contributes. Research on the subject seems to suggest that around 50% of our own ‘happiness measure’ is genetic and therefore something we can do nothing about. As some are said to be born lucky, we may add with some justification that others are simply born happy.

It’s the other 50% that we have some active control over and that’s the bit that we can work on. Whether the working on is fine tuning – giving ourselves permission to relax, to read, to take time out, to spend time with friends - or much more fundamental – changing career, moving continents, leaving an unfulfilling relationship – will depend on us as individuals and our own personal circumstances.

And ultimately, being happy may not take much money or effort at all. Many years ago, my mother told her primary school pupils to go home and ask their parents what they wanted most in the world. They gave their answers in class the next day.

“All my mum says she wants,” said one little boy, “is peace and quiet and a boiled egg.”

Hair of the dog

2009-05-03T09:10:00.010+01:00

There is a saying among owners of German Shepherd Dogs that they only moult once a year - all year. My socks and floors are certainly testament to that truth. But the general uncontrollable riotous abundance of spring brings a step-change as much in coat shedding as it does in blossom blooming and drifts of hair lie everywhere indoors just as the tiny petals from the blackthorn tree carpet the ground outside my window.

Dogs are not in the least self-aware and Kaos is oblivious to the tatty matted tufts that protrude from his hind quarters and look like an ill-made wig from the cash strapped props department of a repertory theatre company. He regards me only with baleful and slightly offended eyes if I pull out a clump, preferring to retain his grumbles for the attentions of the spiky grooming brush. But that brushing game is futile for the bristles and the spines soon clog with hair as the arteries of the butter lover clot with cream.

Walking on the promenade this morning, I took the opportunity to grab a few handfuls of moult whilst his attention was diverted by the remains of a plastic pot of shop-made tuna pasta mix discarded underneath a bench. The hair came out easily and tumbled away along the beach to the great fluff collector in the sky. I cannot help but wonder if nesting birds seize upon this bounty and weave it into their nests among the sticks and straws so as to welcome their chicks into the world in fully carpeted luxury. I'd like to think that somewhere an acquisitive magpie or squalling black headed gull is collecting and creating the Rolls Royce of nests, complete with flocked wallpaper and dog hair eiderdown.

For all I pluck and tweeze and brush him, the dog never appears any less hairy than he was before. No bald patches, no age-related thinning, no subtly disguised comb-over spots or architectural hair pieces. Perhaps our human grooming obsessions are the paradoxical price we pay for our own self-awareness. We colour and trim and cut and style, shampoo and condition and pamper and tease our hair to the drum beat of ever diminishing returns our whole life long. The dog, who doesn't notice, never goes bald and sails through his bad hair days without as much as a shrug.

Fowl business

2009-05-01T22:30:00.014+01:00

Except at work where it's an occupational hazard, I’m not generally bothered by the undead in the course of my daily life.

I’m unfortunately far too long in the tooth to attract the attention of darkly alluring cape swirling vampires and nowhere near hairy enough to be a worthwhile addition to the werewolf clan. I'm unpeturbed by poltergeists and if spooks or spirits or spectres do stalk my halls, they pass me by unseen. I’m pretty sure that there are no Voodoo entranced persons nearby either, although admittedly it can be hard to tell out in the High Street on an average Friday night. I no longer even read horror stories for fear of breaking my mattress through the running jump necessary to avoid the mysterious hands about to dart any second to grab my ankles from that two inch deep dark chasm beneath the bed. And the rather sweet Twilight film is the closest I’ve come to a heart-stopping horror movie in several years.

However, I was accosted by a zombie yesterday in the most unlikely of places; right here on the internet. And not just any old run-of-the-mill-can't-actually-run-can-only-shuffle-sideways-ish-with-my-mouth-open-whilst-making-a-sort-of-low-groaning-noise zombie either. No. It was, specifically, a zombie chicken. And not just any old zombie chicken either, but the zombie chicken award - the veritable Oscar statuette of the zombie chicken world. Presented to me by the marvellous TheChicGeek, I feel it my honour-bound duty to share with you my citation in full:

"The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken - excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their inspiring words.

As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all..."

I am delighted with my award and (after much faffing and general tekkie incompetence) have posted a picture of it over here >>> And if you're brave enough to click on the zombie chicken's picture >>> you'll be transported in an instant to TheChicGeek's wonderful blog too.

But beware, for as with any story of the supernatural, this award comes with a spine-chilling curse. Should you hear a pecking and a scratching and a low-sounding bock bock bocking at your door at the undead of night, then you'll know I've passed the zombie chicken award onto you.

(Cue: high pitched cackling, fading to black...)

Let me count the ways…

2009-04-30T22:40:00.017+01:00

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

2009-04-29T23:14:00.010+01:00

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?

2009-04-28T22:45:00.015+01:00

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

2009-04-27T17:33:00.005+01:00

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

2009-04-26T16:05:00.003+01:00

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

2009-04-25T17:50:00.010+01:00

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

2009-04-22T23:07:00.010+01:00

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

2009-04-20T23:33:00.017+01:00

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

2009-04-19T23:24:00.014+01:00

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

2009-04-18T22:34:00.006+01:00

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

2009-04-16T00:13:00.002+01:00

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*

2009-04-14T20:41:00.008+01:00

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

2009-04-13T21:37:00.004+01:00

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

2009-04-12T22:35:00.007+01:00

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

2009-04-11T23:30:00.005+01:00

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

2009-04-10T11:09:00.007+01:00

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

2009-04-07T20:31:00.007+01:00

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

2009-04-06T00:50:00.005+01:00

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

2009-04-02T23:41:00.007+01:00

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.

Music for the bees

2009-03-31T22:19:00.015+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunshine on a Monday

2009-03-30T23:04:00.003+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A closet geek goes shopping

2009-03-29T22:51:00.011+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rascally Robert and some honey from the bees

2009-03-28T20:01:00.008Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The photograph of Shurland Hall was taken by Sherry Wildish

All the smalls things

2009-03-27T21:08:00.003Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were none

2009-03-26T22:42:00.003Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging up the past

2009-03-25T20:47:00.005Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye to all that

2009-03-24T23:03:00.007Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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