A MEMORY: THE COMB AND THE CRAB

ExmoorJane tagged me the other day to produce a 'memory.' I remonstrated, protesting that I had far too many memories; how could I pick just one? Then I remembered that I did have one that was already written up. It is in the form of a story but the events in it, the found crab and the lost comb, are completely true. Make of it what you will.

******

"I could tell you a story." I smiled, sweetly. Better than facing hordes of kids in the café.

"Not if it's a love story, Fennie, like most of your stories are." Helen yawned, a bored sort of yawn.

"No," I said. "This one isn't. And then, perhaps it is, in a kind of a way. It’s a true story, too. Anyway it's about a crab……and Karma."

"A what and what?"

"A crab….and Karma - that's how what happens to you in this life depends on how you’ve treated the world. Life gives you back what you give it."

She pulled her sunglasses down from the thick black hair on top of her head. "I'm sitting comfortably," she whispered, doubtfully.

And so I began.

"As you know we were staying with Charlotte in Brittany last summer. Her house is only about five minutes walk from this lovely little fishing port. There's a superb beach as well. Must be a mile long - beautiful yellow sand, shelving gently.

“Charlotte’s son-in-law Karim was there as well. He’s the one who spends all his time
fishing for shrimps."

"Shouldn't one shrimp for shrimps?" asked Helen, who can be irritatingly facetious at times.

"At low tide a veritable army of men - I guess women are far too sensible to enjoy this sort of thing - appears on the beach, wading out knee deep on the sands with a long pole thing from which hangs a kind of net. This disturbs the little grey shrimps that feed in the shallow water and they fly up into the net."

"But I thought this was a story about a crab?"

"It is! You see it's not only shrimps that fill the net. Sometimes you find an occasional crab."

"At last, we're getting somewhere," murmured Helen. "Now all we need is the Karma."

"One evening it was my turn to prepare supper. Karim had been out as usual and had helpfully deposited his shrimp catch in the kitchen sink. Now once out of the sea these little beasties die rapidly and unless they are cooked directly they go off and make a terrible smell. At the very least therefore I would have to serve the shrimps as a starter.

"But the problem with eating shrimps everyday is that you quickly run out of ideas of how to serve them. What could I do? But then I remembered we had not yet had shrimps with mayonnaise and that seemed a serviceable idea.

"I opened the fridge. There was no mayonnaise of course - but there were eggs, and we had oil and …..

“And.....a crab?”

“No - not quite! Well, the eggs turned out to be hard-boiled - don’t ask - and so I had to rush down to the supermarket to buy some. And when I came back there he was - in the sink - he had emerged from the shrimps.”

Helen rolled her eyes.

"The crab I mean! There he was - a little green fellow with eyes on stalks sidling across the forest of shrimps in the sink. They – that is the shrimps - had long since expired in their tap water bath, but he – if it was indeed a he, for I presume crabs come in more than one gender - was very much alive-o. I picked him out of the water and set him on the edge of the sink. His eyes swivelled maliciously as he scuttled about his little corner.

"He was tiny - about the size of a 10 penny piece – all legs and jaws and claws and feelers - a miniature masterpiece of arthropodic engineering. 'Help,' he seemed to say, and he fell backwards into the shrimps again.

"But what can you do with a baby crab with swivelling eyes? To consign him live to the boiling water I had prepared for the dead shrimps was something I could not do. Equally, I could not simply throw him out of the window or into the bin. Life, where possible, must be preserved after all – even that of inedible baby crabs.

"So there was no alternative, good follower of the Buddhist principle that I am, but to wrap him in some kitchen towel, get into the car again and drive him down to the sea.
I sneaked out of the house, not daring to admit that supper would be even later than it already was owing to my one woman mission to rescue a crab.

"I parked the car at the port - by now it was quite dark - and there, standing on the arm of the port jetty, with the wind whistling about my ears and the sea all turbulent below, I unwrapped the little fellow. He climbed over my hand and gripped my finger with his tiny claws.

"Maybe, I reflected, he had become enamoured of his recent life among the shrimps, or maybe he had just been fascinated to watch me at work in the kitchen. Maybe, he had enjoyed being chauffeured through the evening streets. Whatever it was, he was refusing to let go of my finger. I had pictured an appropriately sentimental parting, but in the end I just had to shake him off. He sailed away on the wind, back to his dark sea home far below.

"Will he, I thought as I drove home, now be telling lesser crabs about his life among the humans? Will he, as an old crab, ‘strip his sleeve and show his scars…remembering with advantages' - as Shakespeare puts it - the deeds he did that day? Will he be caught again and from another kitchen, some years in the future, confidently expect another safe return to the sea? Or will his life end in cruel and banal fashion as dinner for a seagull or codfish?"

I paused.

"You turn sentimentality into an art form, Fennie," said Helen cynically. I suppose now you will be telling me that saving this crab boosted your Karma credits and that now one day you will win the Lottery, or some such."

"But that's the funny thing. We joke about such coincidences but one really happened, Helen. The day before I had been swimming and I'd taken along a little blue plastic hair comb in my beach bag. It's not special or valuable but it is a very odd design. I've never seen another one remotely like it. And I've had it quite a long time. So when it went missing I was vexed. I wasn't exactly sure where I'd lost it. Maybe on the beach, maybe in the house, maybe in-between. But I thought it would turn up.

"But the day after the crab incident, I was walking along the beach, right at the water's edge. The waves were washing my feet. I told you it's a long beach - about a mile long and I was a long way past the spot where we usually swim. But just then, suddenly for some reason, something made me look down. And there in the surf at my feet was my little blue comb, just washing in on the tide.

"I picked it up, hardly believing my eyes. Incredible, I thought, is that coincidence or Karma or what?"

For a moment Helen was silent.

ANYTHING TO AVOID A PROPER JOB

Looking over the accounts of the business this week I have concluded that the recession has at last caught up with Acme Labels Inc. We are down on last year and unless matters improve soon we shall be heading for Carey Street. Like all businesses we are subject to the vagaries of new and inconvenient technology and an ever-changing market; more and more people are printing their own labels these days (or making do without) and the High Street DVD rental shops that once formed our core market are now largely a relic of the past.

I am not yet ready to retire - nor can I afford to - so I have been idly flicking through job advertisements only to find myself shuddering at the thought of ever working again for someone other than myself.

I am fortunate in that the labels business is not our only source of income. I still do a little consultancy and writing. So I was really looking for further project and writing opportunities rather than a 9 to 5 job in a company. But what surprised me was the dread I encountered when contemplating the job descriptions that flashed up on the screen.

Fear of imprisonment would not be too strong a phrase to describe this; the fear both of physical incarceration in an office (often a great big office) and mental incarceration of being at someone else's beck and call the whole time.

This was the principal reason that I escaped from the Civil Service in mid career in 1982 - an act which every one of my contemporaries thought to be mad at the very least. Had I stayed I would now be enjoying a most comfortable pension and my salary would have mounted (I assume) rather nicely in the interim as well. I could have been a pillar of the community and, if I had been really effective, perhaps even received a minor honour as well. These things do happen.

But I felt then - and looking at today's job advertisements confirms this - that I was selling my soul. I needed to be free to do my own thing, work in my own way. I wanted to be creative. Consultancy was acceptable because I was largely on my own - I travelled a lot and I met many interesting people all over Europe. I was even, for a time, reasonably well rewarded, though my financial career has always resembled an alpine range in its high peaks and low troughs.

So I was cheered this week at the same time as peering into the next threatening financial abyss to read an account of work undertaken by the Institute of Employment Studies which shows that people who value creativity above wealth are actually happier and therefore better able to survive in these tough economic times without losing their equilibrium.

Many of these people (and I suspect that they include many of my friends on Purple Coo) make their living by mixing a range of free-lance projects and part-time jobs. They may not earn much, their report says, but working in this way does make them happy.

Three quarters, it suggests, are satisfied with their working arrangements as opposed to a national average figure of only 44 per cent.

What!? Less than half of all people working are happy with their lot? That adds up to a vast number of miserable people. And if each is dragging the other down it is no wonder we are a country beset by social problems. We may or we may not be a 'broken society' as David Cameron likes to claim, but we are certainly an unhappy and unfulfilled society if these figures are to be believed.

Certainly when I consider my contemporaries there are very few with whom I would rather change positions. And it would take wild horses to make me leave my comfortable little office (the smallest room in the house, but I like the feeling of snugness with everything to hand and no space for intruders), other than for a brief and occasional trip to London or Brussels for a little bit of work-related excitement.

The one thing that you could say about working in an organisation is that it provides a ready bunch of social acquaintances. In the 1960s and 70s when everyone went to the pub at lunchtime and on a Friday evening, this was all rather fun. But even that pleasure has gone today.

By contrast it is the stay-at-homers who now have all the fun using the time they don't spend commuting for social-networking on the internet, that great water-cooler in the sky.

So rather than being tempted back I shall just keep plodding on, confident in the knowledge that I am happy and that something will turn up. For that is what somethings always do, I tell myself; they turn up. Most people find a way of muddling through if the shoe really pinches. Having lost all his money, Jeffrey Archer sat down and wrote a best-seller. You never know, I may just have to do that. Anything to avoid a 'proper' job.

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE WHITE RABBIT

The other day I chanced on an exceptional seasonal blog written by my dear friend ElizabethM who, in words and pictures, brilliantly described the sheer untainted beauty of the our current landscape-in-winter spectacle.

I commented then that I thought snow had a much greater effect on the world than just its property of making everything bask in a white glow; it's much more than just something that turns hedges into works of art (which Elizabeth had so very beautifully illustrated in her photographs). Rather it's as though we've turned the page of a magic book that takes us through a secret door and into the wonderful world of the White Rabbit.

Many of you will remember the 1950 film, starring the inimitable Jimmy Stewart, about a mythical white rabbit named Harvey. A six-foot,three-and-one-half-inch tall rabbit, in fact, invisible to everyone except Mr Elwood P. Dowd, a middle-aged, amiable (and somewhat eccentric) individual.

Harvey was a pooka, a benign but mischievous creature from Celtic mythology especially fond of social outcasts (like Elwood).
Elwood has driven his sister and niece (who live with him and crave normality and a place in 'society') to distraction by introducing everyone he meets to his friend, Harvey.

Eventually, the sister tries to have Elwood committed to an institution admitting inadvertently to the attending psychiatrist that, after so many years of putting up with the invisible rabbit, she herself sees Harvey every once in a while. This causes the psychiatrist to let Elwood out and lock the sister up instead. Confusion abounds.

It struck me the other day that the snow and ice now smothering Britain like one of those foaming spray on oven cleaners is itself in the nature of a mythical White Rabbit. It is our own collective Harvey, driving half the population mad while sending the other half into childhood regression and fantasy. Which, in the general scheme of things, is no bad thing.

Most of the time the rabbit - or the snow - isn’t there, but we still talk about it almost daily through the blank days of winter mud and rain. We wish for (or fear) its coming and pretend in mid-December that thick flakes of it are falling or will fall soon. The vitrines of our larger high streets turn this anticipation into an art form with industrial quantities of cotton wool reminding younger members of the population what this much heralded phenomenon is all about.

Depending on whether you have children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren you remember the winters of 1978, 1963 or even 1947. The years of course mean nothing to the young or the growing - ‘I could never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or twelve days and twelve nights when I was six’ - wrote Dylan Thomas - before going on to describe the liberating and educative effects of a gross snowfall on a child’s mind.

But, I wonder really if it is only a child’s mind that our snowy white Harvey actually liberates? At one level most of us are taken in by the sheer beauty of snow: the virginal, untouched, pristine loveliness of acre after acre of smooth and unbroken whiteness. Or by a forest of branches, laden with snow where twigs appear mere shadows sketched by some Heavenly hand to give definition to these ethereal white crystals.

This, though, is just the visible aspect of our pooka, the White Rabbit peeping out from behind the curtain once in a generation. The general and beneficial effects of snow run far deeper.

I notice the quietness immediately. The traffic has gone - or at least so much of it as to make a profound difference to the usual background bustle. People are walking again and as they walk they say ‘hello,’ and wish you well, much as they do on Christmas Day.

You can see children actually playing physically as opposed to hiding in their dangerously virtual worlds. Even the inebriates and binge drinkers seem to sober up. Beer cans and vodka bottles are not discarded into the hedges on a Friday night. Indeed, littering in general seems much reduced.

If you are still at work - or indeed a customer in a shop - there’s a shared complicity at having somehow defied the elements, a frontier spirit that immediately makes people more generous, as if we were all each others uncles and aunts with a family duty to support each other in adversity.

For people are simply nicer when it snows. And more philosophical, reflective. They have seen the White Rabbit and he has changed their perception of the world. Suddenly the hectic bustle of the January return to work, the winter heads-down of dark and busy days as we head towards the sunny uplands of Easter, has eased. With deep slow lying in most places, nothing seems quite so important. Snow metamorphoses into slow.

We think of others and of animals, too. The blackbird eating the berries of the Christmas wreath on the front door, excites sympathy more than anger, and concern for its welfare.

We can afford to be tolerant, self-indulgent; our White Rabbit is handing out excuses for days off and extra hours in a warm bed, while reminding us to provide unfrozen water and plenty of grain for the birds and to take extra care on the ice.

If, like the Eskimos we were permitted 64 words for snow, I’d make sure that the word for a large scale and enduring blanket of whiteness - a six-foot-three-and-one-half-inch rabbit that makes us a calmer and more gentle race - was ‘Harvey’.

THE RATTLE IN THE LETTERBOX

I have just looked out and re-written a couple stories for the BBC’s My Story competition and realised afterwards that they were both about paranormal experiences for which there appeared to no provision in the table of categories.

Now I am not normally someone that has much to do with the paranormal. I can’t make tables levitate (as, allegedly, could my great aunt); nor, so far as I know, do I have a ‘follower’ like my daughter who found herself shackled to a ghostly presence while doing charity work in Africa. She even sought help from someone who dealt in these sort of occult matters who diagnosed a young family member who couldn’t ‘rest’ properly.

And, yes, it was true. A Roman Catholic illegitimacy in a distant part of the family and an unbaptised child who had died and been refused burial on consecrated ground. No wonder the child felt aggrieved, it wasn’t her fault after all. But this was an untold and hushed up story, which my daughter knew nothing about.

Nor again do I have the ability to sense ‘presences,’ which my old father used to do regularly, especially when egged on by his third wife, Ella, who could practically relate the history of a building from sensing the cosmic vibrations coming through the walls and ceiling.

In fact you could say they made a rather spooky pair. She died shortly after him and at short notice. Her death, and the way in which she announced it in a telephone call to me quite out of the blue one morning in a voice still strong, bright and optimistic: ‘I’m sorry to be troubling you at work but I just thought I ought to tell you that I probably won’t be here much beyond next week,’ seemed to parallel exactly that of Laura in Saki’s eponymous story:

“I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

“But today is Saturday; this is serious!” gasps her friend Amanda.

“I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” Laura replies.

Laura tells her friend that she can be optimistic because she is not actually going to die, just presumably leave off being Laura; and this is indeed what happens, Laura resurfaces as a succession of verminous beasts that play havoc in the poultry pens of family members she had detested in this life.

In Ella’s case the optimism came from the prospect of being released from her current state of inconvenient separation from my father and so she embraced her ending with almost indecent haste.

The funeral took place in a little village church in Gloucestershire for reasons that I never fully understood, their religious persuasions being questionable to say the least. The Vicar was a jolly fellow, well briefed on their psychic history, and so was not in the least fazed when during his eulogy the heavy oak door of the church creaked open and no-one, visible at least to the rational eye, came in.

Someone shut the door and sat down. The vicar resumed and the door creaked opened again. That this was my father descended to collect Ella and to have a spot of mischievous fun seemed obvious to anyone that knew them. Again the door was closed and this time, bolted. Ghosts are so bad about shutting doors after them.

But this Christmas-tide I did experience a psychic phenomenon of my own and I suppose it was that that pushed me into submitting my paranormal tales to the BBC. (If ever they are published I shall no doubt not hesitate to tell you about them. If they are not published then I may recycle them and inflict them upon you anyway).

Our last Newfoundland dog, Sampson, died in the house where we live now about ten years ago. He used to lie beside the front door, curled up on the wide doormat and when he got up he stood so tall that his big head would rattle the interior flap of the letter box.

We still hear the letter box rattling from time to time. Usually just a single rattle - the flap lifting and falling shut. You'd swear the post had arrived but when you run to look - nothing. And it isn't the wind or a door being opened; we’ve checked that. It doesn’t happen very often and we think nothing of it.

But early the other morning about 5 am, in fact, I was going downstairs to the kitchen. I had reached the bottom of the stairs when the letterbox gave a tremendous and multiple rattle - flap, flap, flap - as though a postman with a parcel had found the doorbell inoperative and wanted to attract our attention. Exactly, in fact as though I had disturbed the sleeping dog and he had jumped up smartly and so rattled the flap.

But of course there was nothing or no-one there and the air was otherwise quite still. I suppose I felt slightly scared. What might be coming next? This is after all the season of clanking chains.

Nothing further happened. Friends said it must have been the presence of the dog. But why at that time? Why such insistence? Was this an omen?

We found then that we had to cancel a proposed trip to France for New Year. Was it this? And then a blogging friend, someone who had, last year, been due to visit us, died tragically and unexpectedly in hospital, just when we had had all expected an excellent recovery. Was it that?
Or is it something yet to come?

Or is it absolutely not an omen at all - just a random event, signifying nothing?

In the words of Thomas Crown watching the supposed fake Rembrandt burning on the fire: “we shall never know, shall we?” But of one thing I am quite sure, this was a real event even if one without an obvious cause.

Another case of there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.


Well, not long ago actually. As Winnie the Pooh might have said - about last Tuesday - but the rest of the quotation is true enough. And if the wind outside the theatre wasn’t actually moaning at the time then there were plenty in the second and third rows of the audience to make up for it. ‘Moan!’ cried the Gentleman in the top hat and riding boots, and they moaned to chill even the thickest blood.

Rain or Shine Theatre - a company reputed for its happy and burlesque productions of the classics of English theatre in the fragrant softness of the British summer - had decided, ‘times being what they are,’ to attempt a winter and indoor tour. And what better classic to start what may be a run of such tours than ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, the second best, or so the top-hatted gentleman said, Christmas story ever told.

And what better time and place to end such a tour than ‘The Market Theatre’ in Cowbridge, just before Christmas. Weather permitting that was.

The problem with the weather is that it always over acts. Never do you watch a film and see drizzle. It always rains stair rods, however inappropriate or inconvenient this may be. So the weather chose to join us for the final night with an array of snow, ice and plummeting temperatures. ‘Bah Humbug!’ it probably said, ‘to the prospect of theatrical productions!’

Indeed the punters who had booked the theatre the previous night had cried off en bloc, whispering down the telephone windy noises about the roads being ‘treacherous’ and the lanes ‘lethal.’ And this was before they set eyes on the car park!

So would we have an audience? We weren’t entirely sure that we were even going to have players. The radio had announced closures of both Severn Bridges during the day and we knew that the Rain or Shine Theatre Company hailed from snowy Gloucester on the other side of them.

But of course the show must go on. In the event both actors and audience (well, most of them) made it to the theatre, some even from as far afield as Yorkshire, thereby incurring financial and geographical inconvenience to add to the meteorological inconvenience that was our lot this Christmas-tide.

The players arrived in a Tardis-like van, crunching across the ice, and only slightly behind their time. But soon they were bustling: lights were hung, curtains draped, a set erected, furniture placed.

Gradually, drawn by promises of mulled wine and mince pies, the audience joined them. drifting out of the Dickensian weather and towards the Dickensian show. Both show and audience readied itself. The Gentleman in top hat and riding boots (born 1840, still going strong) strode about issuing instructions. A Cranford bonneted lady in bombazine black moved among the expectant throng selling programmes.

Eventually we were ready. The Cranford bonnet (Jane Lloyd) disappeared. An expectant hush began to descend. The last boozers struggled out of the bar and into their seats. The top-hatted figure whispered a mysterious message about disappearing and reappearing which ended obliquely: ‘when you see me the second time douse the lights!’ He then disappeared. Brows furrowed in a tangle of perplexity.

But all was well. The top-hatted gentleman, (James Reynard) effected his second coming; our lights went down, their lights came up and the magic of theatre began.

Well, sort of! You see there are many bricks to make and little straw. In the case of Christmas Carol there is not only the wind to make moan, but festive merriment to arrange, there are chains to rattle and ghostly wailing to effect, above all there is a clock that has to chime as an old Dickensian clock that has seen much wear is wont to chime - irregularly! More than this, members of the audience needed to speak at critical stages. Oh yes, we the audience were not just passive spectators: we were, or so it seemed, half the show! An equity card in every programme!

But, once briefed (and suitably mulled wined), we were away like an express ghost train, clanking chains, wailing furiously, festive merriment and all. Was there no stopping us?

Bah Humbug! Craig Roger’s Scrooge managed to look both mean and fierce, instantly recognisable as the man who knows the value of nothing but the price of everything. He soon put a stop to our mirth as he terrorised poor little Bob Cratchit, (Tom Jordan) shivering in his fingerless-glove corner.

One characteristic of Rain and Shine performances however is that no actor remains playing a single character for very long. Miniscule Bob became a towering whitened spirit. Indeed, one might say that never in the field of comic theatre have so many parts been played by so few actors. Flimsy barriers of age and gender are swept aside with just passing assistance from a wig, costume or hat.

Queen of this genre is Pippa Meekings who moves effortlessly between Fred, Scrooge’s nephew and every bit the young about town gentleman to the homely poor Mrs Cratchit all bosomy and flowing locks as she serves up a tennis ball sized Christmas Pudding to feed all the Cratchits including the waving Tiny Tim. Even the top hatted gentleman donned wigs and shawls to become this or that.

With the exception of the anchoring Scrooge himself, all the actors floated between characters and spirits to tell their tale. And it is an important tale. Not just about how Scrooge is redeemed. But of how people are reduced by unnecessary ignorance and undeserving want. How at Christmas there is the opportunity to see a bigger picture. Thus when Jane Lloyd, in one of her many guises as the Cranford bonneted charity collector to whom Scrooge finally yields a mountain of ‘back payments,’ rattles her tin, she rattles it at all of us.

Three curtain calls and the folk troop happily homewards into the night, well pleased with this slick, witty, inventive and superbly costumed show. We may know the tale, but there is much pleasure in a new and fizzingly acted telling. There is also much satisfaction in seeing so much delivered from a set that appears to be so insubstantial yet from which the mighty ghost of Christmas yet to come rose majestically towards the roof. ‘How on earth did they do that? The departing audience wondered as, arm in arm, they struggled out across the icy waste.

Photo shows Jane Lloyd as Jacob Marley and Craig Rogers as Scrooge

HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, ESPECIALLY MICE

A post this morning in the Purple Coo Common Room raised the awkward question of what to do about mice; whether they were really the pests they are made out to be and, if so, how to get rid of them.

I suppose the obvious answer is 'get a cat' which answer comes in much the same vein as that made to Queen Victoria who allegedly was bothered by the quantity of fractious sparrows nesting around the bedroom windows in one of her ivy covered palaces and sought advice from her equerry, or maybe it was the Prime Minister - Disraeli or Gladstone, perhaps. To which the answer came 'Try sparrow-hawks, Ma'am.'

We do not know whether this suggestion amused our late Queen or merely aggravated her. (She was always being aggravated by her Prime Ministers and in particular by Gladstone, who used to talk to her - she complained - as if she were a public meeting, instead of a tiny, intrepid old lady bothered by pestilent and quarrelsome beasties). It is a moot point, I suppose, whether sparrows come above mice in the pecking order of pestilent and quarrelsome beasties, but as the point is of absolutely no relevance either to bird or beast we may as well leave it there.

Now it is of course Christmas-tide. This being 'the weekend before' we are officially embarked on the fortnight of saturnalia. We have detached the painter and pushed the festival boat out into the river where we shall float downstream - definitely downstream - on a high tide of excess and ill-will, the season of goodwill seemingly forgotten in a haze of alcohol.

Which is why it is good, occasionally, to remember another side of Christmas, the magical and mysterious side, when strange happenings are afoot and to this end I would urge you all (if you are bothered by household invaders) to re-read one of the most magical of all Christmas books - The Tailor of Gloucester, which coincidentally and happily for the introduction to this piece (which would otherwise be left hanging without any article body to support it) is also about mice and what happens when you treat them nicely for once.

I am not going to rehearse the story here. You will either know it or if you don't then I suggest you acquire a copy of the book rapidly (Amazon can still deliver in time for Christmas) and read it at least three times before lunch.

For I do believe that everyone can be improved by this wonderfully redemptive tale and by Beatrix Potter's heart-warming illustrations from a century ago.

Personally, I have always been intrigued by the old legend - arising I suppose from the Nativity and the animals in the stable all grumbling furiously about having their sleep disrupted by the doleful cries of a mother giving inconvenient and painful birth - that in the hour before midnight on Christmas Eve, animals can talk to each other in a language that we cannot understand. The bigger animals look sadly at us, shaking their great heads and muttering things like 'after all it's not us that's destroying the earth' and 'God didn't have to send his Son to save us.'

Meanwhile, the little creatures - mice and sparrows - flitting about after the crumbs and too young for sober reflection, whisper cheekily to each other, 'I hope it's a stable relationship!'

Anyway Beatrix Potter's tale turns on this idea that inter-animal communication can be harnessed to achieve a great task - in this case to sew up an elaborate frock-coat and embroidered waistcoat - for the Mayor of Gloucester who is determined to marry on Christmas morning, thereby thoughtfully perhaps saving his future wife the labour of cooking at least one family Christmas lunch.

I have always been intrigued by this outfit - the elaborate tailoring details are described in detail in the book. Certainly it would have been a most excellently fine coat, a wonderful coat which makes me wonder why, when we have every labour saving device to make coats and waistcoats even more elaborate than in those days, we have given up on wearing such wonderful clothes. It all seems a waste of technology.

The Tailor of Gloucester, of course, had to sew by hand, half-blind, cross-legged, dawn to dusk or in the light of a few candles. No 250 stitch machines for him. But after cutting out the coat he falls ill and that's where the mice come in. Or rather out, for these are mice - evidently destined for the Gloucester Christmas Eve mouse ball for they are dressed to the nines, who have been captured and imprisoned under upturned tea-cups by the Tailor's hard-bitten cat, Simpkin. The Tailor finds them, 'this is passing extraordinary,' he says; and sets them free: and they repay him by sewing together the cut-out pieces of the Mayor's coat, so making his fortune.

And that is why I am forever hopeful that a mouse may one day do they same for me. Not perhaps sow up a coat, but leap on my laptop and write from my notes some short story or acute piece of analysis that will win me some grand literary prize.

I have not seen a mouse in the house recently but you never know. I am told they can smell the chocolate decorations on Christmas trees from 30 yards away. We do have mice in the theatre. They bring us luck, I like to think. And remind us that we have to share this planet we live on.

Happy Christmas to all then, human and animal, and especially to mice.

WATCH WHAT YOU BUY

There's a new shopping centre opened in Cardiff. St David's 2. (St David's 1 opened almost 25 years ago and so has eighties written all over it). This one is modern and futuristic; great wide malls and soaring ceilings. Influenced I guess by New York or Milan - somewhere continental anyway where space isn't at a premium.

The shops are correspondingly big - and not all are brash. Some are actually quite elegant. Like those selling jewellery and watches.

Despite this being the time of year when advertisements for expensive watches crowd the Christmas pages of every glossy magazine, I've never really paid them much attention before. Watches that is. But here I was outside some great emporium whose windows were filled with those brands beloved of the advertisers and counterfeiters - Rolex, Omega, Breitling, IWC, Tag Heuer, Patek Phillippe, Tissot, Rotary, Seiko and the rest. (If some of these brands rank themselves too exclusive to be sold in Cardiff emporia, then I apologise in advance. I really can't remember exactly what I saw except a numbing sameness).

But what really disturbed me were the prices! These are always carefully excluded from the full page glossy advertisements of John Travolta beside some racy aerobatic single-seat plane or the one of the proud father and his intimidated and gauche-looking son.

The little price tags in the window spoke of £2,000, £3,000. £4,000, £5,000! Five thousand pounds! For a watch?

You can buy a perfectly adequate watch these days for less than you'd pay for a half-good bottle of wine. Indeed you can buy timepieces in the market for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.

Now of course you get what you pay for. And I have no doubt that some of the expensive watches do a great many things with an accuracy hitherto unknown to science. But who really needs a chronometer?

There are of course occasions when people need to time things accurately. But isn't it easier to use a stopwatch? And who, apart perhaps from a round-the-world yachstman actually needs a chronometer when radio is there to give us a time check every hour, on the hour.

My electric £20 watch - gold plated, slim, tan strap - never needs winding and tells me the time to within 2 seconds each year. Who needs more?

So it isn't waterproof down to 60 metres or whatever - but then I have no plans to go scuba diving and even if I had would I really want to dive with a watch costing several thousand pounds?

So why do people buy these chunky, all singing, all dancing, ridiculously over-engineered slabs to put on their wrists? I mean it is not even as though they look attractive. The womens' versions are smaller, lighter, but even they fail to look anything but ugly, even with a coarse (and mightily expensive) facelift of diamond studding.

Where has elegance gone? Why don't Apple Macintosh make watches?

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I've had a cold most of the week. It started at the weekend and by Tuesday evening I thought I was over the worst of it. I was due to attend a meeting in London on Wednesday; my ticket was bought - it seemed wimpish to cancel. And in fact although the day itself went quite well (apart from a delayed arrival due to a 'fatality on the line') my energy levels held up and without undue coughing and sneezing. Yet I felt infectious and wondered whether I should really have stayed at home? On the other hand, sandwiched on the tube I had at least three people coughing and spluttering over me. Other people spluttered when in a spare hour I looked in at the British Museum. Can one get two colds at once, I wanted to ask myself? And if not why not?