A little less conversation...

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

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

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

Cocoa weekend

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The heartbreaking persistence of nature

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got chills...

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

* Prossie = Protestant

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

Solstice, sonnets, singing and seagulls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Rose leave, rose leaves,

Rose leaves I strew

He that will love me

Come after me now

Their true love will then visit the next day

***

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

The dog's breakfast

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

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

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

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

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



Picture of rescued kestrel chicks from the BBC

Tea timed out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Sunday lunch at the Neptune Cafe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The half year review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating success and an unexpected visitor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sort of a top hat day

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

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

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

Job done.

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

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

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

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


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

Sweet sorrow

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

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

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

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

Hmmm... One can but try.

And I am going out for lunch on Tuesday.

And Wednesday.

And dinner on Friday evening...

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

Talk to the wall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London's smoking

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Lessons learned were more specifically as follows:

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

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

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

The right tool for the job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not quite 10:15 Saturday Night

If I said “7 o’clock, Saturday night” to you in a slightly longer-winded version of the perennial deep-and-meaningless-but-great-fun word association game, what would leap to your mind?

Let me take a wild guess that “browsing the generous selection of reduced price oven-ready meals in the chiller aisle of the Co-op in Sheerness High Street” would not be the phrase that fell first from your lips. Or probably even fifty third. Or one hundred and twelfth for that matter.

I’d arrived back home around 6 feeling peckish and a little tired having spent the day at the third instalment of my yoga foundation course. The course is run at a school hall in Sandwich, about 50 miles from here. It’s an ancient and pretty little seaside town in itself, although I feel its postcard appeal is somewhat diminished by the presence of three giant grey concrete cooling towers and the mega chemical works that festers and bubbles just a heartbeat away from the high street. It's also a place I can never quite get my bearings of. I always manage to find my way into Sandwich without a hitch; it’s the getting back out again that’s the rub. I have a suspicion that the seemingly benign inhabitants move the roads around whilst we’re OM-ing and stretching away in the school hall; in any event, even on this - my fourth - visit I still managed to find yet another unfamiliar route home without even trying.

And so it was that I was standing there in the Co-op, tummy rumbling and a little weary after a day of yoga and driving, weighing up the pros and cons of discounted cottage pie against spinach and ricotta cannelloni, when I was accosted by a tall fair haired gentleman about my age.
“Hello Katy!” he grinningly bellowed from four feet away, before proceeding to examine the contents of my basket with great scrutiny. His hand alighted upon a small packet of baby new potatoes, which he frowningly picked up out of my basket and held up at shoulder height.
“You see these potatoes? You could have bought a packet like this for the same price.” he said, grabbing a larger pack of spuds from his own basket and holding the two bags up together so that I could truly appreciate the difference in size. “Bigger bag, you see, but the same price; better value.”
“Oh. I, err…”
“Great to see you Katy!” he smiled, walking off for two paces before spinning round and kissing the palms of both his hands, blowing the kisses at me, shouting “Love you! Love you!” and disappearing around the two-for-one price promotion on cat food at the top of the aisle.

I have no idea who the chap was, but, I reflected to myself on the walk home, it’s never a bad thing to have a handsome(ish) mystery admirer. And it’s even better to know that I’m not the only forty year old who was spending their Saturday evening shopping in the Co-op.



Post script: The occasional pedestrian-slash-domestic Saturday night is not solely the preserve of those living in Sheerness it would seem. The Cure even wrote a song about it: 10:15 Saturday Night was the opening track on their 1979 debut album Three Imaginary Boys. If you’re not a Cure aficionado, here’s the first verse to prove that I’m not making it up…

10.15
Saturday night
And the tap drips
under the strip light
And i'm sitting
in the kitchen sink
And the tap drips
drip drip drip drip drip drip drip...

Storm in a brain cup

Trigger Thumb and White Finger are the central protagonists in the post-modern spaghetti western script I’m writing in which my main characters are loosely connected by the theme of repetitive stress injury and puzzle addiction.

One young, handsome and idealistic, the other older, wrinkled and a little sardonic, the unlikely duo are drawn together by their shared secret love for sudoku and their dislike of ball sports and being called mate by people they loathe. Initially reticent to approach each other because of the rigorously observed hierarchy prevalent in the milieu of the works canteen, circumstances throw them together one evening when they independently volunteer for an overtime shift that takes place during the third round group match for the World Cup.

As the night progresses, initial stilted talk of wives and girlfriends and reality TV shows soon gives way to a little light joint crossword solving as they start to test the common ground that lies between them. By the time the first orange streaks of sunlight appear in the sky, the camera pans back to reveal our two heroes snoring gently with a folded newspaper on the table between them. Accompanied by the sounds of the dawn chorus and the clink of bottles from the whirring electric milk float outside, the shot closes in to reveal half full mugs of cold tea and a completed ‘fiendish’ sudoku grid.

Personally, I think it’s got legs as a premise.

And it’s also part of my investigation into the question that’s bugging me at the moment: can a brain suffer from repetitive stress injury? Sure, I know that repeated physical actions (like typing or using a pneumatic drill) can lead to RSI and all of its unpleasant associated symptoms – pain, tingling, numbness, random loss of sensation. But can the same thing happen to a brain, what with it not really moving about much and all?

I ask this because I think my brain’s got RSI. Unlike my artfully created and not at all stereotyped protagonists, I make no secret of the fact that I like doing puzzles. Call me a sad geek if you like (no, please do if you feel the need – I really can’t hear you) but there’s something intrinsically satisfying about pitting my wits against an unknown combatant, especially when it comes in grid form. It started off innocently enough - as all addictions do - with word search puzzles when I was a child. From there, I graduated to number search and onto straight crosswords, code breakers, ‘skeletons’, quiz words, track words, and cryptic crosswords. For many years I thought that mind-bending logic puzzles represented my personal puzzle nirvana.

And then along came sudoku. Oh how I love thee. (Especially, it has to be said, the interactive online versions). If I’m feeling stressed, frazzled or in any way discombobulated, I can lose myself for hours playing game after game after game until my eyes throb. Something about narrowing down one’s world view until it’s just your brain, your eyes, a little 81 square grid and the numbers 1 to 9 soothes my restless soul and frees my mind.

Which is all well and good until you start dreaming about them. I close my eyes and the grid’s there, pristine and inviting me in with its perfect black and white symmetry. My mind’s even started inventing a new version with letters rather than numbers. I found this occupying my conscious brain today when my body was actually attending a rather grave and poker-faced work meeting. I’m pretty sure I got away with it though, my colleagues no doubt assuming that my frowns and grimaces were connected with what we were discussing. Nothing of the sort; I was tussling with how one might locate a collection of intersecting nine letter words without a tedious trudge through my rather battered dictionary.

Sudoku addiction? RSI of the brain? Or ground breaking research into the creation of new 81 letter puzzles? Hmmm, let me ponder that over a cup of tea and just a quick little peep at an online sudoku. Just the one. I promise I’ll be right back…

And relax...

"So Katy, what do you do to relax?"

It was September 2007 and we were sitting in the dark outside a pub by the river in Gravesend. Three months had passed since the ex announced that he wanted to split up and my daughter and I had moved out of the barn a few weeks previously. Until then I'd had only the vaguest of notions of what shell shock might feel like. Now, though, I knew. Or at least I knew that there was probably a name for the numbness, the gripping crushing sensation that had grabbed me and sucked all of the air out of my body, the cartwheeling spinning nauseating disorientating sense of disassociation.

I lit a cigarette, aware of David and Liz peering at me in the half light from the other side of the wooden bench. The question hung in the air above our heads along with the lazy streams of my exhaled smoke. "What do I do to relax?" I repeated Liz's enquiry, my short-circuited brain trying hard to grasp the words and the meaning contained within them. The conversations drifting from other tables, the thudding of the remains of my heart and the thrum of the remains of the day's heat vibrated between us as I tried to think. Finally, I answered truthfully. "Nothing. I don't do relax".

I was shocked by my own revelation. Over the months that followed I reflected on that statement over and over again as I slowly started to draw the shattered parts of my psyche back together. There were some very dark days indeed during that time, a time that seemed at once both endless and fleeting. And yet, although moving imperceptibly like a glacier, my personal threads did start to re-join.

Liz and I went away to stay for a few days in a beautiful spa hotel to celebrate the passing away of the fiendish year that was 2007. We sat one evening in the hotel lobby and wrote lists in our notebooks: lists of people or things to be grateful for; lists of things that we wished to let go of; lists of things that we planned to do over the coming twelve months. Then we read them to each other, as if by speaking the private words we had written out loud we would make a real pact with each other and the world to make them so. Of the three lists, it was perhaps the third one - the looking ahead one - that was most significant. In one way and another, most of the items on my list were about learning how to relax - accepting that I needed to actively work on introducing some balance.

I have never recognised that I needed anything quite so much in my life and I committed myself to this resolution with a vengeance. In doing so, I have also learned that I am somebody who relaxes by 'doing things'. Since then, I have become a regular attender at classes at the sports centre four or five times a week; learned to scuba dive; taken up riding lessons (albeit sporadically) again after a quarter of century; walked the dog here there and everywhere; and a hundred and one other things beside. Of all the classes I tried and took part in at the sports centre, it was yoga that appealed to me most. I don't know why; it just grabbed and took hold of me in a way I cannot explain.

Yesterday was the first full day of my Yoga Foundation course. It's the first step on my way to (hopefully, possibly, eventually) becoming a yoga teacher. That final goal is still perhaps three or four years away at the moment; the foundation course the building block for what will follow. I enjoyed the first session enormously, even though at the same time I recognise that I really am still very much a beginner on the nursery slopes.

It is funny that you don't recognise life changing events at the time. No fanfare, no drum roll, no swishing of big red velvet curtains to announce their arrival. But Liz's question sitting outside the pub that night 18 months ago or so completely changed my life.