Friday Fling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seasonal seaside

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

A closet geek goes shopping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not my bag?

Five cherry stones lay at the bottom of the winter white glazed bowl amid the dregs of single cream that had evaded the attentions of my spoon in spite of my best efforts.

When the new chef had arrived full of divine menu ideas a couple of months back, I’d ordered the brownie served as he decided, topped with cooked cherries and cherry sauce. It was everything a woman would want from a dessert: oven fresh warm, hypnotically chocolately, mysteriously firm but simultaneously soft and meltingly moist, and in a slab about the size of a broadsheet newspaper sudoku puzzle. But my tastebuds had refused to score it a perfect ten. Nine and a half, maybe? I knew, like an evolutionary pudding scientist a hair’s breadth from uncovering the secret of the perfect crème brulee, what the missing link was. So I ordered it this time with cream. The miniature white jug of heaven. Hallelujah.

I’d arranged to meet Liz for lunch thanks to the fortuitous happenstance of having to drop off a big box of vegetable seeds to one of our projects nearby. It was the first time I’d seen her since we came back from Egypt two weeks ago and we caught up on our news over ham, egg and chips and a pot of tea at her local pub, The Ship. But puddings demand one’s full sensory attentions in the way that savouries rarely do, and we’d lapsed into companionable reverie at our sunny table by the window.

I looked again at the cherry stones in my bowl. What was that old playground rhyme? Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Five stones. Hmm, that’d mean… Rich man. That’s an intriguing thought, finding a rich man. But rich in what way? Generous in spirit? Rich in life experience? Giving with time and attention? Fluent with emotion? Intellectually accomplished? Open hearted? Kind in disposition? Gregarious by nature? Quietly confident? Rib-hurtingly, floor rollingly, eye streamingly funny? Should I be in the mood to be looking, just a few of those attributes would be wonderful to find. Rich in wealth or material possessions concerns me little, and less and less so as I get older.

At the table next to ours, three men and two women sat making quiet conversation. They were uniformly dressed in smart black outfits and I wondered if they were taking a sup of courage before going to a funeral. As I watched, they stood up, fastening coats and jackets as they made to go. The tallest of the men led the way, picking up a white handbag from the wooden table top as he passed. His four companions laughed as he swung it to and fro between his finger tips, elbow bent at a right angle in a masculine interpretation of how a woman might carry such an exotic item. One of the group caught my eye and smiled, calling out “he’s got the matching frock, you know!” as they processed, laughing and pantomime-like, to the pub door.

I smiled as they left and arranged the five cherry stones inside my bowl with my spoon. Liz finished her treacle sponge and custard and we ordered some more tea.

Playing poker by proxy

I’ve just started reading Anthony Holden’s “Bigger Deal – a year on the new poker circuit". It’s a follow up to his “Big Deal", written 20 years ago, in which Holden describes the year he spent trying to make his living as a professional poker player in the late 1980s. The new book chronicles how the poker scene has changed beyond recognition in those two decades, thanks mostly to the game’s worldwide internet boom and attendant ‘new breed’ of players, but also partly because of its unlikely success on television. In the intervening years, a significant number of other changes have also happened to or around Holden: he’s divorced; he’s now in his late 50s; his children have grown up and moved away; and many of the old familiar faces of the poker circuit have gone too, replaced by a much younger internet-playing generation sitting at the gaming tables with baseball caps and I-Pods.

This book might sound an odd choice for a forty year old woman I know (even if it does fulfil one item from my resolution pages list). But then I do enjoy playing poker, and the previous book was delightfully enthralling – full of the life and the colour and the characters of the professional circuit as it was, all narrated against the constant clack of gaming chips. That I should select this book to put in my handbag and start reading on the train up to London today was, however, possibly more subliminal.

We had called an informal meeting of our board of trustees. The purpose of this was to pass on the news of the significant funding changes that are afoot so that, by the time of the next proper board meeting in four weeks, they could have started planning how (or even if) they wish to proceed from here. Trustees were concerned and sympathetic about the situation and reacted with consummate professionalism. What occurred to me, though, whilst sitting there with the conversation going on around me in the hotel bar, was that we were all playing a kind of poker game.

And the more I thought about that – with Anthony Holden’s book glowing away in the handbag at my feet – the more I started thinking about how many things at work are like a poker game. According to the type of player you are and your level of confidence in your game, you might bluff (or play it straight); might accurately read the ‘tells’ of your opponents (or miss them); might up the ante (or fold); might go all in (or play it tight). Ultimately, as in poker, you are in control of if and when you choose to show your cards; if you plan each hand in advance, there is always a strategy available to you which means you can keep your hand unseen, leaving others to only speculate on the cards you might have had. And much as playing your cards close to your chest is sometimes the right strategy, so showing your hand can be as well.

If Anthony Holden had been at the meeting, I wonder what sort of poker player he’d have categorised us each as? I continued reading Bigger Deal on the train back; and then again at home this evening where I washed my chips down with diet lemonade.

Chip shop chips, that is, not poker ones.