The dancing devils of '87

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.

Saturday night super heroes

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.

Protesting the truth

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.

21st Century Fog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter babies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Happy Easter.

Mind the gaffe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music for the bees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rascally Robert and some honey from the bees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


The photograph of Shurland Hall was taken by Sherry Wildish

Goodbye to all that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garden well

I was surprised at the weight of the ashes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Census and sensibility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Coffee morning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Sunday

A gentle, soft Sunday spent daydreaming and napping.

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

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

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

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

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

The art of bathing

I was born a water baby and remain one still, albeit a 40 year old version with more hair and wrinkles in different places.

One of my earliest memories is of clinging onto the green and cream polyester straps of my mother’s 1970s swimming costume, porpoise like and blinking on her back as she pushed through the water with a hearty breast stroke. I loved it when she’d launch us from the edge of the pool, bow wave rippling around us and sending the splashing wake crashing over me. At some point I graduated to fluorescent orange arm bands. That they pinched my upper arms and rubbed the sides of my little girl chest was a small exchange for buoyancy. I was captivated by my floating and thrilled when allowed to venture into the forbidden deep end. The mass of the body of water bore me up and I kicked my legs, exalting in their dangling freedom at what seemed like miles above the bottom of the pool.

My father bought me a tiny snorkel and mask when he started learning to scuba dive in the mid-70s. I’d watch them training in the diving pit at the open air swimming baths, peering through the chlorine and trailing my hands through the stream of bubbles as their compressed air rose to the surface in search of its own freedom. My mother sat at the kitchen table throughout the endlessly long hot summer of 1976, patiently and nimbly gluing together the pieces of his wet suit ordered in kit form. I sat on my chair reading the Beano and watched her work, nose full of the heady smell of viscous neoprene gum. When my father died two years later, my mother passed his kit onto the diving club so we didn’t have to see the pale blue aqua lung he left behind in the conservatory. It was, in any event, too big for a nine year old.

Swimming lessons at school followed, full of obsession with rubber verruca socks and communal showers and the sticky feeling of scratchy uniform on not-quite-properly-dry skin. My black nylon costume gaped at the legs when on the beige tiled pool side and my long hair would never quite fit into the swimming cap the way that it did for the neater girls. But in the water I was at one, in my element, whilst they fussed with their hair clips and clung to the side.

Swimming club came next, twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I learnt how to breathe properly in front crawl, slowly perfecting the real time-and-motion that is uni-lateral or bi-lateral breathing in the heartbeat space created by your own wave rhythm. I bought a pair of black tinted goggles that made the water look like the Mediterranean does on postcards (minus the parasols) and my first Speedo costume with red white and blue stripes. My endurance grew with my body and at 13 I took on the local 10,000 metre record challenge. My mother threw me glucose sweets from the side as I ploughed up and down the lanes, abiding to the rules of not touching the sides to turn.

Around this time, a few of us started to be coached by Bill Ludgrove whose daughter had swum in the Olympics. I’d get off the school bus and run to my Gran’s house for tomato soup and crackers with cheese before returning to the pool. My already fair hair was bleached almost white by immersion in chlorine six days a week and the tips of my finger nails glowed. Bill was tough on us, made us swim a mile or more just for warm up, scold us for cruising or for resting. We became super fast and super strong, and we had a lot of fun. I was surprised, in spite of never having run before in my life or having any more exalted footwear than a pair of black plimsolls, that I came second in the cross country race at school.

My adolescence had been dawning for quite some time when I was asked if I wanted to learn how to be a lifeguard. It was a thrilling moment, a water baby’s rite of passage to the sophisticated world of rope coiling, chin towing and resuscitation techniques. I spent the three seasons from 1982 as a volunteer lifeguard on the beach at Sheerness, leaping onto my blue racing bicycle early on Saturday and Sunday mornings and peddling furiously down to the hut. We patrolled up and down the promenade, small groups of teenagers in the universal red and yellow uniform watching out for holidaymakers in trouble in the cold and dark sea. I rescued a boy once, grabbed his flailing arms where he’d been pushed in high spirits off the jetty and hauled him back up to the air.

My pale skin turned golden at being outside for all those months and had a constant salty sheen. Occasionally, the coast guards would come by for a cup of tea, drawing up on the promenade in their Land Rovers with the hugely powerful ribs towed behind. We lifeguards did a joint sea safety demonstration with them each summer. They’d scramble the bright yellow air-sea rescue helicopter for us, the pilot holding just above the water and whipping up the waves to hysteria with the down-draft from the rotors. Afterwards we’d sit on the steps outside the hut and eat burgers with fried onions and tomato sauce and listen to Relax on somebody’s radio.

But those long summer days couldn’t last and at 16 I started sixth form at a school some distance from home. Homework and records and friends and boys took the place of swimming club and I gradually drifted away like a renegade inflatable on an irresistible sea current. When my daughter was born a few years later I took her swimming at the Victoria baths in Portsmouth where I was a university student, enjoying our mother time in between lectures and nursery and library visits. The toddler would leap from the side into my arms, laughing and throwing her head back in delight as she crashed into the water.

I started learning to scuba dive about a year ago fired up with inspiration from the ‘try dives’ I’d had on my first visit to Egypt. Diving is as far removed from swimming as can be whilst still getting wet and my biggest challenge was learning how to slow down. Strapping on a pair of fins after all those years of pool training was like fixing an outboard motor to my legs and turning the throttle up to max. But diving is the art of slow personified and I try consciously to control my unconscious long-ago-learned speed. When it was time for my first open water dive in a lake last summer, my instructor was one of the founder members of the local diving club. I think he was quite lost for words when he realised that he’d also taken my father for his first open water dive more than three decades earlier.

I ran myself a bath this morning. It’s the first one I’ve had in nearly two months; I never felt quite at home enough during my stay back at the barn to do more than shower. I lay there in the perfectly hot water, eyes closed, just the tip of my nose poking up like a snorkel. The dog stuck his head over the side of the bath and snuffled up some bubbles that made him sneeze. I towelled off and readied myself for the day as the water glugged away down the plug hole. It was a very good feeling for a 40 year old water baby.

Mad driving

I stuck my head out of the window and waved until my arms ached and my mother and little sister became specks on the platform. The early April day was gentle, the train warm, but there was no way I was going to risk another passenger pinching my black suede bikers’ jacket with its swanky red sateen lining from the overhead luggage rack. No way. No way Jose. I slumped down on the mottled blue velour seat, propping my pointy-toed boots on the edge of the bench opposite, and slid a cassette into my knock-off Walkman.

The red-lipsticked woman on the other side of the carriage crinkled her forehead and stared disapprovingly at my feet on the seat. I paid her no attention. After all, she was at least 30 and so old she was practically dead, and what did she know? I shut my eyes and settled back to listen to another play-through of Bauhaus’s Greatest Hits Volume 1 (1979-1983) that I’d taped carefully from the vinyl on my second hand stereo deck last night. Just my stupid luck that I’d been born a bit too late to have been old enough to go and see them play live at that last gig in Paris before they split.

It was 1986, I was 17 and a third, I was on the way to Scotland for two weeks, I was on my own, I had a rucksack full of tapes and books and pens and stripy tights, and everything in my world was a rockin’ and a rollin’ just mighty fine. Mighty fine and dandy, thank you, ma’m.

It was dark by the time I reached Dunfermline and I was starving. I had been to Uncle George’s house before, hundreds of years ago when I was about 12 or something, but I still had to ask the bus conductor where to get off.
“Where does that lovely accent come from, my bonnie lassie?” he smiled, in reply to my question.
Bonnie lassie? Couldn’t he see my black suede jacket, my black silk shirt, my black leggings, my backcombed hair? That’s the trouble with old people, no sense of cool. “Er, Kent?”. Derrr.

I was vaguely aware of Uncle George’s two grandsons staring at me from the other side of the table as I ate my pie and chips. They hadn’t taken their eyes off me from the moment I’d arrived and they watched me now, buttering a slice of white bread, arranging my chips inside it, folding it in half and taking a great big bite. They copied at once, grabbing slices from the bread bag, smearing them with margarine and stuffing them with tomato sauce-smothered chips. Mouths agape for the first bite, an almighty roar came from the kitchen door that stopped the little boys dead.
“What do you think you’re doing?” bellowed Uncle George, whisky tumbler in hand, “I already told you. No. Chip. Sandwiches.”.
The boys’ heads sank to the table top along with the forbidden treats as Uncle George glowered ferociously through slightly pink slightly out of focus eyes. I was puzzled. Surely everyone knew that these were called chip butties?

The next morning, Uncle George made me two boiled eggs and introduced me to his car. I couldn’t wait to learn to drive and his old green Morris Marina surely was my key to the gateway of the kingdom of highway freedom. We started off, heading for an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. After an eternity of listening to him blethering on about, oh I dunno, biting points and clutches and mirrors and blah blah blah blah blah, he pulled over and got out of the car.
“Go on then, Katy Jane, your turn”

It stalled immediately of course. And the next time. And the time after that. Accelerator, clutch, foot brake, handbrake, steering wheel, mirrors, indicators, how on earth were you supposed to do this stuff, like, all at the same time? I mean, if even really, really old people like Uncle George and Aunty Betty in Birkenhead could drive a car, it couldn’t be that difficult, could it?

By the end of our first lesson, my palms were sweaty and Uncle George and I were hardly speaking to each other. I had (finally) managed to move the car away from the kerb, force it into second gear and fly down the middle of the road. I daringly moved my eyes away from the windscreen just for a nanosecond. Fifteen miles an hour. It felt like I was flying. We changed seats again and drove back to his house in silence. I think I heard him open a bottle in the kitchen during the hissing prelude to the tape through my headphones.

We established a routine over the next two weeks. Two boiled eggs, two cups of tea, two hours driving and a stop at the local Co-op on the way home to buy some pies and a bottle and a newspaper. He sometimes went out in the afternoons and left me in the house on my own. I turned his stereo up loud and sang along to The Cure or David Bowie or Depeche Mode and phoned my friends at home from his white telephone in the hallway. In the evenings, we sat and watched the telly, me reading or doodling in my jotter, him drinking whisky until he fell asleep with the half-full glass in his hand and the newspaper open in his lap. A couple of times, he went upstairs to the bathroom and came back down playing a full sized accordion.

By the time the fortnight had passed and it was time to say goodbye, I think we’d reached a mutual understanding of non-comprehension but a level of liking all the same. He let me drive all the way to the station up and down Dunfermline’s hills without wincing once. I gave him some toffees that I’d bought on my day out in Edinburgh. The box had a picture of the castle and a piper in a kilt on it. I’d bought some more headphones in Edinburgh too, the very cool brand new ones that fitted right into your ears. I wedged them in as the train pulled out and settled back to enjoy a melodic journey back down south.


My mother sent Uncle George some money for the phone bill a few weeks after I got home. I did pass my driving test, with thanks to a knitting needle and a couple of bricks, the following year. But perhaps that’s a story for another day.

War carrots

My mother had already celebrated her 10th birthday by the time sugar came off the ration in 1953. Bruised, battered and nearly bankrupted by two World Wars in quick succession, Britain’s wounds were by then slowly starting to heal (in thanks partly to the Marshall Aid Plan from the USA).

But my ten year old mother was appropriately childishly oblivious to this. All that mattered was that the lids to the magical jars of toffees, bon bons, liquorice allsorts, dolly mixtures, aniseed balls and barley sugars were hurled to the four winds and that their contents could pour forth, unceasing and cornucopia like, to be crunched, munched and chewed as long as there were hours in the day.

A few years earlier, Pathe news reels had captured the scenes of celebration outside Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square on VE Day. Tens of thousands of exhausted soldiers, airmen, marines, submariners and sailors thronged the streets and threw their arms around each other and the glamorously coiffed women in smart shift dresses that had joined the party. And now, eight years on, the streets throbbed to the sounds of hundreds of pairs of tiny feet stampeding to their local grocery shop, captivated by this early 1950s sugar rush.

My mother waited as patiently as impatience would allow in the queue in the sweet shop, holding her own mother’s hand and eyeing up the rows of jars on the shelf. It seemed as if each transaction took an eternity, and she fidgeted and squirmed as one by one children slipped past proudly bearing paper bags full of delights. Entire civilisations had been born and faded into oblivion in the time it took to be her turn, or so it seemed. When the moment came, voice squeezed to a reed by excitement, my mother made her request. Flying saucers, gob stoppers, midget gems, pink sugar mice, sherbet and lemon drops tipped onto the scales and were scooped into tiny paper bags, each swung expertly between the nimble fingers of the shopkeeper to ensure not one drop of sweetness fell to the floor.

Giddy with delight and salivating with anticipation, my mother turned and walked to the door of the shop grasping the treasure to her heart. “Wait a minute" called the shopkeeper to my mother’s retreating back, "you haven’t paid yet". The shopkeeper winked at my grandmother, sharing a conspiratorial adult smile above the head of my mother, now struck dumb and gaping in shock. For all of her ten years, the little girl had watched her mother as she exchanged ration coupons for meat, sugar, eggs; that she still had to pay for her goodies now that the sweet ration was as dead as the Wicked Witch of the West had never crossed her mind.

A couple of nights ago, I was urgently hungry and in need of convenience food. I put a shop-made shepherd’s pie in the oven and found two small tins of carrots in the cupboard to go with it. But a can opener was nowhere to be seen so I opened the tins with a sharp kitchen knife. I laughed out loud to myself and the dog as I did this, and sent my sister a text message to reassure her that no blood had been spilled. “Tinned carrots?” my sister replied a little later, “there’s not a war on you know!”

Like the distinctive taste of coffee from a Thermos flask or how a curry tastes so much better the day after it’s been made, I like tinned carrots. They’re not the same as fresh ones – which I love too – but they have a strange texture all their own and a wonderful bright orange colour that I think nature never intended.

Bananas followed sugar off the ration in 1954. Britain finished repaying the USA for the Marshall Aid plan a few years ago. My mother still loves sweeties. And I think she still likes tinned carrots too.


Tin of carrots opened with a knife. I've now bought a can opener.

A trivial wind

Sometimes it seems that the sole function of the brain is as a repository of trivia. Those little sliced-and-diced snippets that are individually interesting but that amount, en masse, to a personal landfill site in a head-shaped capsule.

The recollection of these factoids is like the nugget dispensed from one of those mesmerising penny-a-go sweet machines that dazzle small children (and we more suggestible adults) with their mechanical mystery and promise of good things to come. You can’t help but drop a coin into the impossibly fiddly slot before cranking the stiff metal handle two thirds of the way round amid the sound of ominous grinding of cogs and gears. But much like the recall of trivia, you’re never quite sure what’s going to roll out of the slot at the bottom and rather hope it’s going to be bubble gum and not a dead mouse.

Today’s allocation of useless fact was from my untidy brain filing cabinet drawer of geography (ice age section). Specifically, how the path of the River Thames came to be in its current (more-or-less west to east) orientation as a result of being re-located by a glacial ice sheet. Before that chilly intervention, it apparently ran north to south; I guess it sort of pivoted through 90 degrees like a clock hand changing its mind about moving into the next day and dropping back from midnight to nine pm.

All of which was, I felt, an unnecessarily detailed intrusion into my morning contemplation of the view from my bedroom window at the barn. To be slightly fair to my brain, I can see the Thames from here, off to my left beyond the hedgerows and the trees and the electricity pylons that march in single rank across the acres of fields that lie between here and the water. On an unusually clear sunny day, I can also see the River Medway to the right if I stand on tip toe and peer squinty eyed. A couple of miles further down, the two huge rivers collide, lingering for a while in an estuary before surging on and taking their place in the forbidding and dark North Sea.

The wind was blowing hard from the west and the Thames today as well. The ex and I struggled two or three times to get a fire going in the old Rayburn in the kitchen. The wind was having none of it, forcing the smoke back down the flue into the barn and filling the rooms with a fug of charred wood. The fumes were eye-wateringly acrid, forcing us to open up the doors and windows to vent the place and let in some breathable air. Luckily, it’s still mild today and the temperature inside remained bearable in spite of the lack of heating.

Rather like a glamorous woman who has overdone it with her scent (only far less alluring), the smell of wood smoke clings to one’s garments when this happens and infuses the fibres with its distinctive aroma. Most of the time I am completely oblivious to this. I was today. Until I got in the car with my ex’s nephew who crinkled up his nose and asked if we’d been having a bonfire. Which I suppose we had, in a way.