King John Was Not A Good Man

To make sense of the blog I was about to write you really need to understand a little background to Max, the Jackdaw that took up forced residence in our shed while sorting out a little problem with his port wing. So I've dug this out from last September. I do hope Matron won't complain about all the regurgitation on the Corner Cupboard site. I promise I've left nothing on the floor. Besides I did behave myself (again) at the Purple Party (sigh!) and went to bed quite early. Must be getting old, I suppose. On the other hand this blog shows yet further evidence of my madness in addressing the animal kingdom on equal terms.Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble......

I looked into the shed on Friday morning to be greeted by Max, our resident but invalid Jackdaw, who shot me a dirty look.

"And where were you yesterday?" he seemed to be saying with his bright blue eyes.

I noted that his recovery must be progressing for he was hopping around the shed in a manner bordering on energetic.

"I went to Stratford," I explained as I changed his water and took yet another IKEA meatball out of the freezer to defrost for him, "to see King John."

To which remark I added, "caw! " And then as the bird made no response, "caw-caw!"

Max was sitting on the handle of the garden strimmer. He turned his head and looked at me pathetically. OK, so maybe Jackdaw impressions are not my forte but ever since Max entered our shed two weeks ago he has uttered not one cheep or croak or whatever sound it is that Jackdaws make. I am making all the communication attempts while he just glares at me. In the face of this ingratitude I feel like asking whether he would have preferred me to have left him to the cats: certainly I would have had a cleaner shed without a litter of half-eaten crusts and bird droppings everywhere. But I desisted.

"Quite brilliant," I explained instead. "The play, I mean. The RSC do these shows so incredibly well that one never begrudges the ticket price. Indeed it is rather pleasing to think that, with all the Arts subsidies, the Government are probably paying as much for the ticket as you are. You are getting double value really.

If Max agreed he showed no sign of divulging the fact.

"King John is rarely performed," I continued to Max. "Nevertheless it is a racy, pacy play; full of excellent characters. History takes a bit of a backseat to drama of course, but then it always does."

Max appeared completely without interest in either history or drama, or even in my tale of the goings on of his fellow avians, the flocks of Canada geese that careered about the river Avon waking the whole town with their honking and disturbing our picnic arrangements on the river bank.

So I left the shed and closed the door. As I did so I could hear him scrabbling about on the other side, no doubt finishing his breakfast of sweet biscuit and meatball.

And then...what was that? Did I did detect a murmur from within, or was I imagining the sound?

Yes, from deep within the shed I heard a Jackdaw pecking at a digestive biscuit and muttering angrily to himself....."King John was not a Good Man, he had his little ways. And sometimes no-one spoke to him, for days and days and days."

Oh, come on Max, it was only twenty-four hours. But Fennie did feel guilty for leaving him alone so long!

PHILOSOPHY IS ALL VERY WELL, BUT ONLY MAGIC WILL PRODUCE THE PERFECT LUNCHEON

By the desk lamp on the table in my office, the little pile of election literature is growing. With the elections less than a week away more of the stuff tumbles through my letter box everyday. As if I hadn't enough to read. Nevertheless I keep it all.

It is destined for the Political Archive at the National Library of Wales who keep a record of these devious, misleading and blatant falsehoods, printed these days in glossy colour, the better to grab our attention in the few seconds it normally takes to consign them to the bin.

Twenty years ago I did play some minor role in the ferment of Welsh politics, which is why the Library now ask me for the collection favour. I know what it is to knock on doors and to write those same leaflets. Mind you, I like to think, as we all do I suppose, that things ain't what they used to be. Summers were brighter and leaflets less insulting to the intelligence in the hazy days of yore.

Short of libel, it seems you can say, or more particularly omit, anything you like these days. If you said 'Blair's Government has debased the Moon by turning it into Green Cheese.' I don't suppose anyone would complain - or even notice. And if they did some apparatchik would produce something said in private at three in the morning as evidence that it was true.

But what indeed is truth? Does truth exist? Is there one truth or are there many truths?
Was Oscar Wilde correct when he memorably said 'The truth is never pure and rarely simple?'

As it happens I toddled along this week to the village Philosophical Society, which meets a speaker once a month in the pub in the hope of philosophic or ethical challenge. Once Stanley Johnson came to visit, he being the block from which the tousled haired Boris is not so much chipped as budded, so like is the father to the son; an occasion marked, not so much by philosophy, as by the copious quantities of wine. Still, in vino veritas, as they say.

This time we were in for a religious treatise, but owing to unspecified maternal complications, the speaker had to withdraw. Thrown back on our own resources we plunged, appropriately enough for election time, into a discussion about truth.

This, I have to say, is very much a male argument, the men making far more noise than the women among us. I tried to keep my end up, though my tendency is to want to see things in the practical rather than the abstract.

How can you be sure the refrigerator light truly goes out when you close the door, I ask? And how, unless you look, can you truly know there isn't a troll in your understairs cupboard waiting to pounce on you when you blunder down in the morning for your caffeine fix?

Of course you assume there isn't - we live our life on assumptions - but, I argued, you can't truly know for certain.

But the men were having no truck with the possibility of trolls under staircases, or even that there might be many truths, and went on disputing; I've forgotten quite what about. I became bored and so plunged in again with one of those interventions in which you don't really know what you are going to say until you've said it.

"Why can't we discuss the philosophy of cooking a good beurre blanc?" I found I had asked.

Momentary silence!

"But why should anyone want to discuss that? That's not interesting," said the most argumentative of the men.

I regret the sisters did not rush immediately to my aid and with Fennie having been suitably put in her place, no doubt beside the troll in the stair cupboard, the conversation resumed over whether you could ever truly say that A had killed B.

A long time later we retired to Helen's house and a cup of late-night cocoa. Aged Mother sat in the corner with her stick, beaming at everyone and waiting for a suitable moment to launch, yet again, into her saving the Canadian airman story.

"Why ever did you mention beurre blanc?" asked Helen.

"I was thinking of the very ordinary Station Hotel in Clisson," I replied. "And how they once magically served 80 portions of fresh Loire Zander in the most perfect beurre blanc with the same ease and insouciance that you'd expect to receive three portions of egg 'n' chips. Though I was there I still find it as hard to believe as an election leaflet."

"Maybe your troll was under their stairs," said Helen.

"Don't let's start another abstruse discussion," I replied. "The real truth is that philosophy is all very well, but only magic will produce the perfect luncheon."

THROUGH A PLUM TREE DARKLY

This is a blog, but written up as a story with just a touch of elaboration. I had it on file (it dates from last summer) and prompted by SuffolkMum's lovely piece today I thought I'd share it. Aged Mother occurs in several of my blogs (most recently in the piece of about coincidences). Even the fruit tree - the wretched greengage that had the one piece of blossom this year - appeared in a recent blog. Several of you offered welcome horticultural advice of which the tree shows no sign of taking notice.

The only problem with the wartime story is that it is the only one that Aged Mother remembers and being a trifle demented and forgetful I get the story repeated to me (her version of it at least) every hour on the hour as it were. I think if I hear it again I shall scream! But I try to remember to smile. Won't be long before I shall be in much the same position, I remind myself.

THROUGH A PLUM TREE DARKLY

"Of course, I used to fly Airspeed Oxfords during the war," came this voice through the leaves of the fruit tree.

Helen had deposited her Aged Mother with a glass of wine at Fennie's garden table, while she busied herself with more important preoccupations, like checking on lunch.

"I was a cook," said Aged Mother, but when war came I wanted to do something more useful than making plum puddings. So I volunteered for the Royal Air Force.

"Didn't they want you to cook, too?" asked Fennie, parting the verdant foliage. After all, those pilots must have got awfully hungry on extended missions over enemy territory. "Although maybe if people are shooting at you for several hours at a time, you could be excused for being off your food."

"Can't you move that plum tree, Fennie?" said Helen reappearing with some olives. "I can't see you."

It was true the tree was rather awkwardly placed with regard to the table. Helen sat down next to Aged Mother.

"It's not a plum tree, Helen. It's a greengage. And no, I can't move it. When I took out the rose tree there was a big hole and a young greengage was the only thing that would fit. And I can't move the table as that would unbalance things. You'll just have to put up with the tree. When it's a little bigger we'll cut a hole in the foliage."

"That's ridiculous!" exclaimed Helen.

"It will remind me of your mother," rejoined Fennie, "Who is never ridiculous and besides has just joined the Air Force and refused to cook."

"So they set me to work mending aeroplanes," continued Aged Mother after this interruption, and apparently unconcerned whether the tree was a plum or a gage. "You know, after they had been shot at or had been damaged in some way. I was clever, good with my hands, so they made me a fitter. That's what they call people who maintain the planes. I did the training and they made me the boss. Well, of our unit anyway. I was a fitter 2A, you know. That meant I was in charge."

"But you said you flew aeroplanes, too," said Fennie, taking an olive and passing one to Aged Mother.

"Oh we had to do that. It was for quality, you see. After you had repaired an aeroplane you had to fly it. Just to make sure it was all right. You knew that if you had to fly in it afterwards you had better make sure you did a good job. The system worked. None of the planes that I repaired crashed, and as you can see I am still here."

As Aged Mother was still hidden behind the greengage, Fennie mused that she would have to take Aged Mother's word that she did indeed have a corporeal presence and was not simply a spirit voice.

"Fennie once learnt to fly too" said Helen, who had always been slightly jealous of Fennie's long standing aerial accomplishments.

"Oh did you? I did so enjoy flying," exclaimed Aged Mother from behind the tree. "Though I was never taught. At least not as such. I had to learn on the job, you see. Usually there were others there. I would sit in the co-pilot's seat as I would have to check this or that and then they would just say to me 'Right, you take over.' I guess you pick things up quickly when you are young."

"Like father!" snorted Helen.

But Aged Mother was not to be put off by such interventions. Instead she launched into a flood of memories.

"I remember once, this Canadian pilot. He was just a boy. Still in his teens probably. His aircraft was in for repair and I went up with him on the flight test. Well, we were flying around and I was checking the nuts and bolts and instruments and so forth, when he says 'I can't go on' and collapses over the controls, weeping inconsolably.

"Well, I am left trying to fly this plane and keep track of where we are while at the same time providing a species of airborne good sister service. I start navigating a wide circuit of the airfield and begin to inquire ask him what is wrong.

"Turns out he has just learnt that his elder brother has been killed on a mission. He had bottled it up for a time - put a brave face on it - but then when we were alone together in the cockpit of that plane, he must simply have let go."

"A sympathetic female shoulder," ventured Fennie.

"I was trained to repair aeroplanes, not pilots, but I did my best."

"That wasn't"….Fennie hestitated……"Helen's Dad?"

"No, silly," said Helen. "This was just a chap who had a soft spot for Mum. Everyone had a soft spot for Mum. When a group of German prisoners were landed at the airfield and Mum guided the plane towards the hangar the first thing they said was 'Look, there's a English girl!'"

"So what happened," asked Fennie, "to the inconsolable pilot?"

"Oh, I managed to get him straight. It took about half an hour, but I said that we couldn't stay up in the sky all day. I had other planes to repair and unless my running repairs to the fuel gauges had failed already we should soon be running out of petrol, unless we landed soon. I had to get him straight, so I pretended that I didn't know how to land the plane. Said I could only take-off and fly around. Well, he believed me, and do you know, as suddenly as he had started, he simply changed back from being a weepy teenager into a pilot again. He landed the plane, dropped me off, re-fuelled and then took off into the sky. I often wonder what happened to him, whether he lived or died, whether he remembers me……."

Aged Mother's voice trailed off.

"I'm certain that he remembered you, Mother," said Helen. Everyone remembers you.

"And," said Fennie, "you remembered him, which is much more important! Anyway, if I am not very much mistaken, it's time for lunch."

A SPOT OF RAIN? - WELL IT'S BETTER THAN BEING BURNT AT THE STAKE

At last it's rained! It was beginning to feel as though global warming had got its feet well and truly under this end of the planetary table; that the Sahara was moving north as fast as it is moving south. Here in this part of South Wales we can't have seen rain for a month. That's why I am writing about it. I don't know when we'll see the next lot. Even so the garden looks merely dampened, not soaked; should the sun come out we'll soon be back to the half-inch gape between the sides of our great terracotta pots and the soil within.

For we haven't much gardening space. Our garden is what might best be described as 'patio' - or even, in that lovely, picturesque phrase so beloved of estate agents - 'compact and bijou,' though in this case the bijou description might be pushing things a bit, bijou after all meaning 'jewel.' Still, one can but aspire, can one not? And it is only April; the sweet peas are still, metaphorically, in short trousers.

But, unfortunately, the rain has entailed a certain depression of spirits. Instead of seeing from my window vapour trails across a bright blue sky in which a couple of buzzards wheel lazily on the thermals that rise on the valley side, I look out only on a cold greyness, reminiscent of the sea in winter. For the rain naturally brings dampness as well. So I sit here huddled over the laptop wearing a winter polo neck with the desk lights blazing as though it were 4.30 on a winter's afternoon.

Then one might reasonable look forward in expectation to tea and crumpets. But on this spring morning there can be no such anticipation. Instead I have had to resort - indeed have already resorted - to a chemical pick-me up in the shape of a tablet of St John's Wort.

I must say I find these work quite miraculously, transforming a leaden sullen perspective on the day into one of bright and carefree sunshine. Nature's Prosac they are sometimes called. Never having had to resort to proper Prosac, I can't say whether that is an apt description or not. I can only say they work for me - though they don't seem to have any effect on other people - and a few are not supposed to take them at all on account of their doing something or other to the heart, or is it the circulation?

This set me thinking for I often wonder whom it was - 'whom' being obviously a whole army of people down the generations - that discovered the physical properties of plants?

How would you discover, I wonder, that St John's Wort - not a very likely plant one would have thought - had the ability to cheer people up? The sheer impossibility of making such a finding - short of black magic - is demonstrated by our reaction to the humble lettuce, which is supposed to be mildly soporific. The saintly Beatrix Potter no less tells us so in 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit.'

Other, more scientific sources, inform us that lettuce is a source of opiates, though, of course, in minute quantities. Though if you are a rabbit…….? Maybe that is the origin of the phrase happy bunny. Not that rabbits get to eat much lettuce in these parts, at least not the wild ones. And if you are a poor caged rabbit, well, I would think you must need all the stimulation you can get.
But I digress. Though I like lettuce and salads generally I would never have connected lettuce with drowsiness in a thousand years. And if I were looking for a pick-me up I am sure I would have regained and lost, lost and regained my natural spirits ten times over before ever alighting on St John's Wort.

Moreover, this would be before you started with finding the right quantities. Even if were you told which plants did what, you would be unable to treat people without either having no effect whatsoever or, at the other extreme, poisoning them. No wonder then that countrywomen in past times were persecuted for witchcraft.

Which, with my Scottish roots makes me shudder. For nowhere were alleged witches (and it didn't take much alleging) persecuted more insanely than in bonnie (ha!) Scotland. Given my tendency of recommending herbal potions and my habit of addressing myself to animals, whether in my speak or theirs, I fear that I wouldn't have lasted very long at all in those dark sixteenth century days.

Fennie would have been lashed to the stake and fried to a cinder without the option. All of which does make me feel happy to be living in the present and really quite glad that all I have to worry about is a little grey sky.

CHOCOLATE! 31/3/07

This entry is all about chocolate. Any of you who may be of a strict Christian persuasion and approaching the end of a wilderness of Lenten abstinence, look away now. I wouldn't want to tempt you. For myself I confess to mild and occasional Buddhist tendencies on the well-proved principle that Heaven helps she who helps herself. God ought to be, I reason, too busy with the great tragedies of the world to concern himself with a simple changeling like me.

Like, for instance, the tragic tendency of the Aztecs, who discovered the wonders of the cocoa bean - and now their Mexican descendants - to mix chocolate with meat. For, by a mile, the greatest gastronomic cacophony I have ever been forced to eat was a cold stew of chicken and dark chocolate served up in the darkness of a Cuban power cut by the Mexican ambassador. That perhaps is a story for another day; meanwhile, on with the chocolate motley.

I blame Mireille Guiliano, myself: she being the elegant and slim-line author of 'French Women Don't Get Fat' - a book of eminently practical dietary advice, though I have yet to try her own version of the Lenten fast, which consists of eating nothing but leek soup for a whole 48 hour weekend. She deems the experience magical. This may be The Land of the Leek, but even so I remain deeply suspicious.

Her theory says that you will find your natural, youthful weight by eating, within reason, anything you like provided you don't eat too much of it and provided that what you do eat is balanced, of good quality and in season. This includes finishing your meals with a small square of dark chocolate. Whoopee!

It must have been that bulging waist-line time of New Year that I blundered upon Mireille's little book and by one of those happy coincidences our local Spar began selling Green and Black's Dark Organic 70 per cent Cocoa-solid Chocolate. This, reasoned my shamefully beguiling little brain, was the way to slim.

Three months later and with considerable sums invested in Mr Green and Black's benevolent fund, I am no slimmer. Worse, I have developed a quite insatiable addiction to the silky bitter-sweetness of dark organic chocolate.

Then the other night returning late from some rehearsal, swaying with fatigue, I collapsed on the sofa and fell asleep in front of the television. When I awoke, there was Juliet Binoche, hair beautifully coiffed and in full make-up, struggling to bring the decadence of her chocolate confections to a town from which they had hitherto been banned by the attentions of a zealous priest and the town's bigoted and misogynist mayor.

It was, of course, the film 'Chocolat,' which also starred our very own Dame Judy Dench. Watching Juliet Binoche, beaming with that smile peculiar to French women that manages to combine deference and self-assurance in equal measure, up to her alabaster elbows in melted chocolate, stirred something in Fennie's tired old brain. If she could make chocolates - so could I.
So it was that last night we were expecting a theatre friend to supper when I (who have never made a chocolate in my life) suddenly felt inspired to do so - a fancy finishing treat to serve after the plain apple pie bought in haste from the WI market.

After all, as Jane Shilling reflected in her Times2 column yesterday: there's nothing quite like baking a cake or planting a lettuce to take your mind off the imagined imperfections of your person. Making chocolates, I felt, must follow a close third.

Soon I was melting the Green and Black confection in a bowl over boiling water while simultaneously chopping the irregular lumps in our crystallised ginger jar into neat little cubes. With no time even to Google the word 'chocolate,' I just guessed at quantities, mixed them together, fished them out with great difficulty, sprinkled them with icing sugar to hide the imperfections and left them to set.

These were not chocolates, you understand, that would have won a prize in any competition open to anyone older than about three. But they were my chocolates and I felt fiercely proud and proprietorial about them. I too had become a 'Chocolatier' or maybe even a 'Chocolatière' - though as that makes me sound like a species of teapot I shall just call myself a Maker of Chocolates.

Come the denouement. The chocolates were wheeled out. Our friend carefully selected one and bit into it, chewing expressively. Fennie beamed with expectation.

"I'm sorry," he said, matter of factly, "but I don't like ginger."

The smile on Fennie's face continued to be pure Juliet Binoche, but inside her head the sound of heels drumming on the floor continued for a very long time.