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...

Bees beside the seaside

If you come out of the front door of my little house by the seaside and turn right you will find yourself walking down a narrow road with an avenue of trees on either side.

I can remember when this was a through-road, but at some point when I was living away it was cut into two unequal segments by the placing of some bollards. The four posts are slim and handsomely shaped cast iron, as if on a quay side but painted bright blue, and they march in single file from one side to the other. The span between is enough to let a bicycle, motorbike, pushchair or supermarket trolley pass but no larger vehicle than that. So the road is a quiet one, with nothing on the north side except a strip of parkland hemmed by ancient hedgerows and only the sea beyond.

Skeletal and dormant at the moment, the avenue of lime trees throbs with life for the warmer six or so months of the year. Their brilliant green leaves are large and felty, perhaps the size of a man’s hand, and an imperceptible unguent oozes from them leaving any cars parked beneath covered in a sticky film. Sparrows and doves and pigeons and starlings squabble with magpies, crows and three types of gull for foraging rights, food scraps and larvae and the chance to dine on a thousand and one kinds of flying, creeping and crawling insects.

When I first moved here some nineteen months ago I was overwhelmed with delight to find a colony of bees living underground in the loam on the slope outside my front window. They are a bumblebee species of some kind, but small and beige-ish brown, not the big bright black and yellow striped sort of children’s books. I uncovered them – literally – quite by chance whilst raking away debris that had accumulated during the years the house had stood empty. An angry squadron streamed up from the ground, intent on chasing away whatever unwelcome vandal had torn the roof from their home. I stood back, absolutely motionless, rake still in hand, watching them as they swirled and massed above the ground for twenty minutes or more. Once satisfied that the danger had passed, they one by one returned to their underground bunker until buried invisibility shielded them once more.

I didn’t tell anybody the bees were there, afraid that someone pleading sting allergy or some other latter-day intolerance would ring the council to have the nest destroyed. Their secret home outside my own seaside sanctuary lay safe and undisturbed and I watched them all that summer until late autumn came and the colony fell silent. I was very sad when they didn’t return last year. Maybe this spring will bring the bees back again.

At the far end of the road and hard up against the sea wall is the town’s sports’ centre and I went there this evening for my yoga class. Warm and loose after an hour of stretching, it was dark by the time I made my way back down the dimly lit road to my home. A group of teenage boys were gathered around the bottom of one of the lime trees, one of their companions having climbed up into the branches. They were peering on tip toe over the rear wall of one of the houses of a small row that backs onto the road, using the feeble lights from the screens of their mobile phones as torches.
“Sshhh! Don’t tell anyone!” the boy in the tree top called, seeing me walk past.
“Why? What’s up?” I threw back, sensing their good spirits even in the dark. At that moment, another boy popped up from behind the wall, grinning, and jumped down into the road beside his friends who greeted him with great jubilation.
“His mum locked him in and threw his keys in the sea!”

I laughed with them and continued on my way, smiling to myself. I thought it might spoil the party to ask how he was going to get back into his home later.

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.