WHY WASTE NOT, WANT NOT IS FENNIE'S MOTTO

When I was very young I treasured a beautiful and inventive book of black and white drawings of ancient railways in various states of cartoon dilapidation. If memory serves me right, which these days it does rarely, the book was called 'Heath Robinson's Railway Ribaldry' and on those dull, wet and otherwise empty afternoons that seem to be the endless lot of the only child, I spent happy hours pouring over its pages.

In due course I ceased to be an only child but not before one picture in particular had become deeply imprinted on my young brain. This showed an engine driver braving the displeasure of his passengers to halt his express for the purpose of retrieving an egg that just happened to have been left on the railway line.

The justification for this heinous offence against the railway timetable appeared in large letters at the bottom: "Waste Not, Want Not" is the Driver's Motto," it said.

Such sensible sentiments - the world would be a deal better off, I feel, if only we could be persuaded to adopt its precept en masse - are certainly not to be trifled with. Indeed, they were drilled into me it by looming figures in authority at every turn. Being a child, most authority figures seemed to loom in those days, in particular my grandmother.

"What will the dustbin men say?" she used to entreat sternly when she noticed a few scrapings of unappetizing egg-white left behind in the shell of my boiled egg. She had a reason of course: this was the time of post-war austerity when eggs were rationed and treated as a precious resource. It was also the age before we taught hens the sensible feat of laying eggs in the winter months. If we wanted eggs in December they would come dubiously pickled in isinglass.

Quite what my grandmother would have made of the finding that apparently we now throw away a quarter of all the food we purchase, I cannot think. She had never heard of the word sustainability and yet she begrudged throwing anything in the bin that could possibly be eaten, mended or used again in some way.

As a result I grew up believing that wasting anything was wrong and wasting food a kind of moral sin for which I would be found out (no doubt by those bogie dustbin men) and subjected to some long and humiliating chastisement.

I carry this mental baggage with me still almost sixty years later. I still hate throwing food away and go on wearing clothes far longer than practicality dictates. True, I have never quite reached the stage of turning my old carpets into hats - which is, so I learn from Andrew Marr's helpful histories, what we were urged to do in those austere times. But conjuring a decent meal from a few manky and improbable remnants in the vegetable rack or refrigerator has become my speciality.

Last evening my skills in this useful compartment of human knowledge were again put to the test. I had purchased earlier in the day some splendid pork sausages made locally from free-range beasts that are actually allowed to wallow in the mud. But sausages demand accompaniment and accompaniment seemed in short supply.

If Mother Hubbard's cupboard was not exactly bare, that was only because Mother Hubbard had been too lazy to clean it out. Indeed, it was a wonder that the contents had not walked out under their own steam in search of more congenial accommodation on the compost heap.

I counted one red onion of venerable vintage, one large courgette, going soft at one end, one large box of mushrooms, reduced for quick sale and bought a week ago with the optimistic idea of making soup; a half bottle of passata first opened goodness knows when, half a tub of cream ditto, and a small bowl of cooked rice of uncertain provenance.

Still, waste not, want not! Into a roasting dish went the sliced onion, courgette and some garlic. On these I laid the sausages, liberally sprinkled with olive oil, salt and a little tabasco. These I covered these with a deluge of mushrooms left whole, emptied the bottle of passata and the tub of cream over the mixture, dusted the whole liberally with oregano and added the rice as an improbable species of topping. Then into the hot oven it went for the best part of an hour.

Though I say it myself, this gastronomic cacophony turned out remarkably well: the sausages lush, the vegetables wonderfully tasty. And though it might astonish the health and safety folk brimming with all those injunctions about sell by dates and what have you, we are still here to tell the tale.

UNREST AT FENNIE'S HOUSE

Now here's a conundrum. How should one entertain house-guests? It ought to be a simple matter - people, let's hope they are friends, come to stay for a few days. Then they depart, without, it's to be hoped, taken overmuch of the family silver with them. In between you 'entertain' them and perhaps also 'feed' them. Various folk are kind enough to offer me board and lodging and from time to time I reciprocate. What is my problem?

Well, it is this. Simply put, I seem to expend a great deal more angst over my guests than they do over me. I don't wish to expend angst - but it sort of takes me over, if you know what I mean.

Before they come I am rushing around doing this and fixing that as if I were being subject to a species of inspection. When they are here I feel I have to spend every minute entertaining them, cooking for them, plying them with drinks, taking them on trips. And when they go it takes me a week to get the house back into its normal comfortably dishevelled state and to catch up on all the chores I didn't do when they were here. What is worse, all of us seem fit for collapse after a couple of days of the Fennie hectic schedule first class visiting experience.

By contrast, when I go to visit other people they seem remarkably laid back. If they prepare a hectic schedule then I don't notice it. I have arrived at houses as far apart as Brussels and Suffolk to find them in total darkness and my hosts fast asleep. I have blundered in the dark, tripping over cats and wrestling with unfamiliar latches while trying to remember where the bathroom lay when last I visited.

In Cuba, staying with a diplomatic relative, I awoke to find my hosts departed and a small army of servants eager to do my bidding - the only problem being that never a word of the English language had passed their lips. I can only say it is quite remarkable how quickly one seems to learn a language when breakfast depends on it.

I should say that personally I am relaxed about being treated in this cavalier style and left to my own devices. It doesn't worry me. Why then would I sooner die (well almost) than leave my own guests in a similar position, not that, you understand, I keep a small army of servants, or even one servant or even (may he rest in peace) a Loic.

To my sister the idea that she should entertain me would seem outrageous. Should I be so minded she will do me the kindness of letting me accompany her on the forty-five minute route march she makes each morning and evening with the dogs. But otherwise I should amuse myself. There are plenty of books to be read if it's wet, and, if it's dry, farm animals in various sizes to attend to, most of whom relish their backs being scratched by idle visitors and an occasional sugar lump with which to pass the time. If I feel energetic I can throw a Frisby for the sheepdog to retrieve. That is it.

When I visit friends in France, we may make a short trip here or there but in the main we sit in the house and talk and read. I have the impression that no great preparations are ever made, I come and go almost ethereally, like a mouse or spider.

Whence therefore comes my atavistic desire to grind my guests into the ground by filling their day with one experience after another. The diary planned, if not quite to the minute, then certainly to the nearest hour, and as if one set of guests were not enough, why do I feel the compunction to invite other friends to a dinner party as well?

It occurred to me the other day after our Normandy friends had left that I really must stop being so attentive if only for the sake of global warming. The dishwasher and washing machine, the freezer, vacuum cleaner, car all were working overtime. The washing up that six people can generate over three or four courses with a couple of different wines and water is nobody's business. I don't complain if I just get given one glass, or one plate for that matter.

I suppose I must feel that as far as guests are concerned they like bicycles - only able to stay on the premises, as it were, if kept moving and 'entertained.' But the more I think about it the more I realise that other people do not do this and the guests seem not to complain. I conclude I am trying too hard. That really people would rather have too little to do than too much.

Come to think of it the only woman who resembled me in this respect was an elderly aunt by marriage who lived in Ottawa and ricocheted around the house ticking off the minutes. "If you can finish that toast in the next three minutes we can be downstairs by 9.15. It will take us seven minutes to get to the museum where you can stay for a hour an a half which will give us 42 minutes to get up country to the lake etc…."

So I have made a resolution. No more Aunt Louise-ing! In the future I shall make no special effort for guests. They can take pot-luck and entertain themselves. As this involves doing absolutely nothing, it should be easy to adhere to. However, something tells me that it won't and that I shall still be driving my guests to despair long into the future. Any tips you may have to avoid this sorry obsession will be gratefully received.

OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

I have just finished writing a fairly dull piece about an arcane aspect of Europana, enlivened only by a reference to Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. I am not sure what my transcontinental readers will make of this. Can one quote Treasure Island in serious articles? I'll have to wait to see my editor's reactions. But she is used at least to my little idiosyncrasies and is usually obliging when it comes to indulging them.

I suspect that fifty years ago there wouldn't have been a problem. Everyone knew Treasure Island - the story was fed into you along with mother's milk, or if not mother's milk exactly then certainly by the time you had graduated to jelly and peanut butter sandwiches.

My mother used to claim that she re-read Treasure Island once a year. I think she exaggerated somewhat. It's easy to do. If someone asked me I would probably say the same thing. Certainly, I read a part of Treasure Island every year even if I don't read all of it, prompted by the half memory of some phrase that breaks loose deep within the subconscious and comes bubbling to the surface.

There are just so many wonderful lines. "Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese, toasted mostly," says the maroon, Ben Gunn. "It was a master-surgeon, him that ampytated me - Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle," says Silver. "Pieces of Eight," shrieks Captain Flint, the parrot. The book is a triumph of language, of characterisation, of adventure.

But these days we seem to have sunk to the depressing belief that all that rests in a book is a story which you can see as well or better on film, with real people, islands, ships, gold. For all its millions, Pirates of the Caribbean is simply dull. The language is missing and so is the imagination and anyway the film characters are plastic and trite.

How many film lines can you remember? When I've done 'Play it, Sam' and 'Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn,' I'm scratching my head.

Times2 this week carried a report of a survey of parents by MyVoice, which suggested that 40 per cent of parents aged 30 and under with young children can no longer recite a single popular nursery rhyme all the way through. By contrast only 13 per cent of parents over the age of 65 failed the same task. Younger parents have, so the pollster's Mr Ian Davidson told The Times, taken to singing pop songs and television theme tunes instead.

This is all intensely depressing - a sign that the process of de-civilisation is well under way. The Times did not have to wheel out Dr Janine Spencer from Brunel University to tell us that nursery rhymes can help children develop communication, memory, language and reading skills and can also teach a bit of history, though even for the most precocious toddler, the latter is surely stretching a point.

A reader wrote in to say that Humpty Dumpty, which we all thought was some species of egg, was actually a cannon mounted on the ramparts of Colchester by the Royalist Army when the town was besieged by Parliamentarians during the Civil War. The Parliamentarians fired at the wall beneath the cannon apparently and down Humpty Dumpty duly fell, whereupon all the King Charles' horses and all the King's men……well, you get the picture.

Certainly I learnt all my nursery rhymes, before moving rapidly on to the general corpus of Beatrix Potter, AA Milne, and Edward Lear, represented in my ever childlike mind by Squirrel Nutkin, Winnie-the-Pooh and the Pobble who had no toes.

Later there was Lewis Carroll - curiouser and curiouser - and then the hurly-burly of Enid Blyton. My children cut their reading teeth on a similar diet and if either or both of them ever oblige me with the odd grandchild I shall ensure that he or she is similarly launched on the world.

Because what Dr Spencer did not mention in her lament is the commonality that such a corpus of literature gives us. We all need to feel part of society and what better way than by rehearsing what we have all, rich and poor, learnt together as children?

There is not much point in my mentioning Treasure Island if the majority of readers haven't a clue what I am talking about. As we get older we all develop different interests, different sorts of entertainment appeal: books, films, sports and so forth. But as children we are more or less in the same boat. You may have no interest in soft puddings; I may have no interest in cricket or racing - but maybe both of us remember 'Fifteen men on a dead man's chest - yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.'

Once this commonality was provided by religion - at one time we all knew our Bibles. And the people of Shakespeare's day, for instance, were certainly sufficiently familiar with the characters and stories from Greek and Roman legend for him to be able to populate his works with references that today require an extensive footnote followed by a cup of tea and a long delve in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

But all this has long gone and now it seems that children's literature is going the same way. The written word, is being shorn of its references to childhood, like one of Bo Peep's lost flock. It's all rather sad and we - and our children - are the poorer for it.

The King of Peru

The King of Peru
(Who was Emperor too)
Had a sort of a rhyme
Which was useful to know,
If he felt very shy
When a stranger came by,
Or they asked him the time
When his watch didn't go;

Or supposing he fell
(By mistake) down a well,
Or he tumbled when skating
And sat on his hat,
Or perhaps wasn't told,
Till his porridge was cold -
That his breakfast was waiting -
Or something like that;

Oh, whenever the Emperor
Got into a temper, or
Felt himself sulky or sad,
He would murmur and murmur
Until he felt firmer,
This curious rhyme which he had:

Eight eights are sixty-four,
Multiply by seven.
When it's done,
Carry one
And take away eleven.
Nine nines are eighty-one
Multiply by three.
If it's more
Carry four,
And then it's time for tea.

As you may know I have been 'tagged' (by UPL) to write something on beating the blues. Five little somethings in fact. A bit like desert island discs, I suppose. Not records in this case but homespun remedies for shooting the 'black dog' that I might take along as a luxury, perhaps, to accompany the Bible and Shakespeare.

As a child I suffered badly from depression - or sulking - as it was known then. I'm afraid I was a tearful, wilful child constantly in hock to my moods and always ready to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Maybe I was moody because I was (or thought I was) unloved and perhaps even unlovable. I felt a natural affinity for sad, lonely, romantic nonsense; Cinderella and Ugly Duckling stories, tales of orphans and animals with broken legs. I was negative Eeyore, down to my shoelaces: "We can't all and some of us don't!"

I can't actually remember whether AA Milne's little ditty about the Emperor made me feel any firmer. But reading such rhymes, both then and now, lifts the spirit no matter how disobliging one's mood.. Nonsense verse, even the sad nonsense verse of Edward Lear, is a great cheerer-upper. Especially if you bother learn it by heart.

I do of course still get depressed, though now I know what it is and how to handle it. But as a child it just seemed that the bottom had fallen out of my world and that those around me loathed me for reasons that seemed to me pretty obvious. Being acutely self-conscious, even I loathed me as well and took both fright and umbrage when accidentally I found a mirror in front of me. Luckily, those days are long gone.

Luckily then I was quite good at sport. A spot of vigorous exercise soon alters any overly Byronic tendencies. Physical exhaustion shakes the brain into self-preservation mode; makes you forget your angst and reminds you that you ought to buy great-Aunt a card for her birthday instead. Exercise therefore would be my second choice for mood lifting.

At University, I did student trauma like a professional. But by now I was starting to get a little fed up with feeling depressed and wanted to fight back. I discovered that one happy way to banish the blues was to eschew company, buy yourself the best bottle of wine you could afford and to drink this slowly by an open fire in the company of a good novel - something stirring and emotional.

If course it's escapism - but what's wrong with that? As an alternative there was the cinema - something romantic or philosophical for choice - feeling conspicuous and vulnerable in the cloaking darkness while being utterly transported by the flickering lights.

Once into the world of work I tried to learn more about myself and became a great fan of Eric Berne - the psychotherapist who wrote books like 'Games People Play' and 'What do you Say after you Say Hello?' I learned a lot from Berne about why I often became depressed though, sadly, he didn't seem, certainly at the time, to be offering a way out. He told me how to take the machinery to bits, but not how to fix it, and I was too poor, too shy and too afraid, I have to confess, of what my parents might think to contemplate seeking professional help. Besides, I was tough. There was nothing wrong with me! Ha!

So books on psychotherapy, while fascinating, I am not sure that I would recommend as mood lifters. Bit of a blind that one.

I think it was raising a family that actually helped with the next stage. I tried to teach my children - successfully so they now tell me - that you can learn to control your feelings.
I used to tell them that if they broke a favourite toy - that was a sad event - but the breakage was in the past. Feeling sad would not mend the toy. They didn't have to feel sad. They could choose any emotion they liked. They could be in control. We played games sometimes when they practised putting on an emotion.

I have to say they do it better a lot better than me. But Elder Daughter tells me if she feels herself losing control she can think back to those early days and switch from negative to positive emotions.

In the same vein I used to pack the children off to school with the words 'Remember to smile at your teachers' ringing in their ears. Smiling at people and remembering to thank people for each little service are two of the most powerful things you can do to make both yourself and others happy.

So that perhaps is number three.

We are already into positive thinking I feel. Everybody knows this one. Tell yourself you are happy and you will be happy - or at least happier. Tell yourself you deserve success and you will be already on the path to success, though you may need to be prepared to make the assertion all day and everyday.

Positive thinking works because we forget that our conscious minds are really only a small part of what is inside our skulls. Consciousness is like looking round a factory in the dark with a flashlight. You see little things here and there. Most of what happens, most of our decisions, lie beyond our consciousness. It is only the superficial we notice.

The unconscious mind is starved of instructions. Most of the time, for lack of anything better to work on, it is responding to negative emotions. Start giving it some positive instructions and whoomph, the wheels start turning and success widgets start forming in the darkness.

So that's number four.

That only leaves me one suggestion - so I'm going to cheat and take two. I have to say that whenever someone says something unfortunate to me and suddenly I notice that my stomach has tightened in nauseous clamminess, my bright optimistic disposition has clouded over, when I feel my anger, or humiliation rising, when the negative tapes and sentiments start playing endlessly in my mind - I simply go to the bathroom cupboard and take a tablet of St John's Wort. Bingo, in an hour and a half I am back to normal without any of the hard slog of positive thinking.

It is cheating I suppose - like that lovely scene in one of the Indiana Jones films when this swordsman flashes a scimitar in a brilliant display of passion and Indie just shoots him with a revolver.

OK that was 5A and meant for those who think that this blog has gone on for far to long already. So what is 5B?

5B is the really helpful one. Better than all the others put together, but also more complicated than all the others. It is the whole Buddhist approach to life, which, because you are intelligent and well-read people, you no doubt already know better than me already. Basically it is the realisation that unhappiness is most frequently caused simply by wanting things, whether physical things or expectations. These can be of people, or the weather, or wanting things not to break the first time you use them or expecting not to have an accident, or not to be ill, the list is endless. Basically we expect the world to be one way when in reality it is another. We couple our happiness not to how the world is, but to how the world isn't. And of course we are disappointed.
People let us down - but then people have been letting other people down since the dawn of time. It is human nature. To expect to live in a world where everyone does what is expected would be unrealistic (and also extremely boring). As Rabbi Lionel Blue once said memorably "Times too short to expect people to change, so you'd better just learn to love them the way they are."

Ambition can be a wonderful force for good - but it can also be a real crippler of the spirit, inducing us - especially in late middle age - to wring our hands and brood upon all the opportunities missed, the 'might have beens' and the 'but fors'…..

Rather than focusing on what we have, we focus on what we haven't. It really is very silly. We look at a pile of bean cans and we think that the one on the top is more important, a better bean can, than the one on the bottom.

All the surveys of happiness show that above a very basic level money or possessions do not correlate with happiness. Happiness comes from those things that money can't buy: love, friends, family, sunshine, fresh air, the sea, the sky and above all, free time.

It comes from living life skilfully, another Buddhist concept, which compares living life to driving a car. We all know the difference between a good and bad driver. But we are expected to charge pell-mell down the great highway of life trusting in luck and hoping we don't cause too much carnage, rather than learning how to handle ourselves and our relationships with others skilfully and thoughtfully.

So that then, the Buddhist philosophy, sketched ever so inadequately above, is my 5B. I know it has helped me a great deal. Sorry UPL for writing at a very unskilful length - but I haven't time (usual excuse) to write anything shorter.