A DAY IN THE LIFE OF......FENNIE

I roll out of bed, usually between 6.30 and 7. I like to be down in the kitchen anyway to listen to the 7 o’clock news while I am making my tea, and breakfast of porridge, followed by Activia Yoghurt flavoured with a spoon of Bonne Mamam Apricot Jam. Keeping one ear open for any radio interest, I catch up on yesterday’s paper and read a column or two. I like Jane Shilling especially who turns up in Times2 most Fridays. Then it’s back to bed I’m afraid.

If I have an article to write - which is about once a week - I will sit cross-legged in the bed sketching something out in longhand, but on other days I will chant for 20 minutes ‘Nam Mho Renge Kyo.’ This is a Buddhist chant I learned some years ago. I suppose its a form of meditation really. The words are medieval Japanese and are supposed to refer to the Universal Law of Cause and Effect - or in slightly other words: what goes around comes around.

Chanting is supposed to stir up the innermost recesses of the brain like the mud at the bottom of the pond and when it settles again it settles in a pattern slightly better than previously. And thus you progress onwards and upwards by little steps towards your own enlightenment.

I have no idea whether I am any more enlightened than when I started - but it is quite easy to use this time to let ideas come into your head about what I want to be doing later or how I might approach a problem. So it is not entirely a self-indulgence. And I miss it when I can’t do it.

Now it’s time to go to work. I work from home and commute from one end of the house to the other. To make this a more interesting journey however I take a turn outdoors around the block, which takes ten minutes provided I don’t get side-tracked into a long conversation by neighbours, walking dogs or running errands.

Although I write a few articles and sit on a UNESCO Committee, relics really of my previous existence in the world of matters ‘European,’ my main work is the little family labels business that we ‘inherited’ from my sister and brother in law. We sell stock labels and do some of our own printing, sub-contracting the more complicated jobs. J, my partner, does most of the actual printing as well as the packing and despatching, while I run the office, dealing with the orders, quotes and queries, the invoices and the bills and generally trying to balance the books. A lot of business is done on the telephone and of course these days by email.

We hold a stock of about 5 million labels, which sounds a lot, and we sell about 350,000 in an average month. Our labels go all over Britain and occasionally to Ireland, all to businesses and shops. But they are not going to make our fortune. Nor is it a business that is growing. Still it provides a living for the two of us and we are our own bosses.

Our warehouse is the garage which we converted to two rooms for J’s Mother in Law when she came to live with us towards the end of her life. Unfortunately we have also had to relinquish the dining room, though as we rarely used this anyway it was no great loss. No matter we have a large and friendly kitchen.

Half way through the morning I force myself to do ten minutes of exercising - stretches and sit-ups and some running. I have done these for years and they keep me supple. Mid-morning however is the only time I feel I have sufficient energy to do them.

Lunch is usually taken on the run as my to-do list will be lengthening: some scrambled egg, perhaps, and a piece of fruit. Then quickly back to the grindstone. At four o’clock we label up all the parcels and one of us takes them down to the Post Office - a 500 yard walk away. Usually this is me and it’s an opportunity to shop for any odds and ends we need at the same time.

Then it’s back to the desk, finishing off the day, checking emails again,and carrying out the end of day routines. I try to finish by 6.30, to allow time for a little bit of evening chanting and then to prepare a quick supper and a welcome glass of wine. Again we take turns to do this.

Sometimes in the evenings we go out, drive into Cardiff to see a film perhaps. Or I may have a committee meeting of some sort. If I’m in a play - for I belong to the local drama group - then I’m out rehearsing 7.30 to 10. Occasionally, if we are very busy, then I will do an evening shift on the printer or even go back to the office. I rarely watch television apart from the 10 o’clock news. It’s not great news but the pictures are valuable.

Then its almost time for bed - a catch up with the paper perhaps - a snack of an oatcake and a little bit of butter and then up to glorious bed to read - if I’m not too exhausted - until turning the light out, ideally by 11.30, though it’s frequently later. I’m reading Helen Mirren’s entertaining autobiography at the moment.

A TOUCH OF THE BLUES

After last week’s frustrating affair of the bathroom tap*, I am left a trifle curmudgeonly towards the world and its works this morning. “You are feeling vexed and sad,” I said as I lay in a post-alarm snooze preparing to haul myself from the womb-like embrace of the duvet. “Do something about it!”

But now that I have had time to reflect, ‘doing something about it’ is indeed at least part of the problem. I have been trying to ‘do something about it’ ever since January 1st - though the ‘it’ that I am trying to do something about now comes in more guises than an oriental genie.

Such new found determination would be commendable if one were actually succeeding in the doing department, but as often as not by the mid-January start of the Islamic new year I am left contemplating a sorry wreckage of abandoned good intentions, made in haste and now being forgotten, if not repented of, at leisure.

That waist line which I promised myself would in a few short weeks be again svelte and elegant, (once, I remind myself incredulously, I had a 26 inch waist) stubbornly refuses to pay any attention to scientific efforts to change my eating habits, while my time discipline - the promise to find an hour for reading, relaxation, exercise, cooking and what not, is already a broken casualty of the unexpected. The more I push, the more it seems the world pushes back. Vexing indeed, and enough to send even the brightest souls in search of the chemical happiness of a St John’s Wort tablet.

Having agreed, for instance, in a misplaced spirit of festive generosity to provide house room for my friend Helen’s elderly and incontinent bitch while she herself was on holiday, I spent the first few days cleaning up not only the inevitable damp patch, but full blown puddles as well. Avoiding further mishaps necessitated a work-interrupting trek into the garden mud every few hours, which left me momentarily debating whether puddle or mud damage was easiest to clear from the carpet. My brisk New Year Resolution to become a better housekeeper with a prettier, more comfortable house, lies in tatters.

My newly pledged bedtime reading is looking equally forsaken. Instead of happily reading for half an hour before lights out, I don a thick coat and boots and parade up and down in the cold rain on the soaking night-time grass until the wretched animal has ‘performed’ and I can retreat safely to the welcoming lights of civilisation.

As if this wasn’t vexing enough I had another touch of the blues when Helen’s son arrived to collect the dog after her ‘holiday’. I should have been happy that, this time, once the carpets had been dysoned they would stay dysoned, at least for a few days, and that I would at last be able to make serious progress in catching up with those improving literary periodicals like the Spectator and the London Review of Books.

But with typically female contrariness I found that I was not happy at all. With no dog to wind herself around my legs and halt uncannily in whichever doorway I intended to pass through forcing me to buffet her aside with my knee while trying not to spill hot tea along her back, the house suddenly seemed curiously empty.

There was no big-eyed canine face peering eagerly out of the darkness when I came down to the kitchen each the morning. No dark shape looming behind the glass of the door when I returned from the shops. No rough coat to reach out and stroke, no back to scratch. No one to follow me, thump, thump, up the stairs and down.

Perhaps it is a fancy to pretend that we can accommodate such unexpected events while keeping our Resolutions. Maybe next year there should be no more resolutions, though I suspect that is easier said than done. What after all is one to do in the guilt-tinged euphoria of an otherwise grey year end?

Not all is gloom and doom however, for I was taken to the cinema the other evening by a family friend. “£10.10 for the two,” he said, as I profferred some money for my ticket. And then by way of explanation: “You see I got a concession.”

“You could have got one for me as well”, I said grumpily.

“Mmm,” he mused. “But I never think of you, Fennie, as a concession, you always seem so young.”

“Flatterer!” I thought. Yet isn’t it nice when someone makes your day?

*For those attentive readers agog to know the sequel to my obsolete bathroom tap, I did try Araldite and so far (touches forest!) it is working still.

CHANGE? ALL THAT CHANGES ARE THE TAPS

CHANGE? ALL THAT CHANGES ARE THE TAPS

For someone old enough to remember hearing Bob Dylan first singing ‘The Times They Are a-Changing’ in that scratchy, strangely-pitched voice that suggested an urgent replacement of the gramophone needle or a particular sharp attack of radio atmospherics, the current political focus on ‘Change,’ the zeitgeist of our time, seems to ring rather hollow.

The word is now a mantra on both sides of the Atlantic. Private Eye caricatures Gordon Brown’s ‘Age of Change,’ while over in New Hampshire, Barak Obama tub-thumps ‘Change’ until his voice becomes almost as hoarse and ethereal as Dylan’s.

All of which leaves me at a loss. ‘Change what?’ I am prompted to ask - and in what direction? Lots of things can no doubt be improved - but changed?

Back in the sixties, of course, times really were a-changing. All sorts of revolutions were opening new vistas to us young hopefuls. Everywhere the shackles of dependence were breaking, the castles of deference tumbling down, to be replaced by a vast explosion of creativity. Anything was possible: Kennedy even promised the moon. What is more he delivered it.

The pill set women on a new path to freedom - a revolution in which men were eager and willing beneficiaries. There was another revolution in transport. The jet aeroplane and the universality of the motor car led our generation on journeys to new frontiers. Unlike all previous decades, the sixties were also, in Britain at least, a time of peace. War was something against which we protested, but with which we were not directly involved.

That was change; that was a release from what had gone before. Independence, liberation were the watchwords. The tectonic plates of the national and international consciousness were moving. The echoes of Dylan’s song, the fine aspirations of Kennedy’s inaugural address, have been ringing down the decades ever since. That was real change.

You may ask what has prompted this nostalgic exercise in sentiment. Is it the universal greyness and drizzle of a Welsh January? No, it was going yesterday into our local ironmonger in search of one of those plastic widgets that fit inside a bath tap that made me think about the superficiality of today’s ‘change.’

Now our local ironmonger is a most welcoming emporium, one of those unchanging shops that pretends heroically not to have noticed that fifty eight years have elapsed since 1950. The building is low-ceilinged and dark; in a warren of backrooms and alcoves, and in the drawers of ancient cabinets, you can no doubt still find the necessaries to repair a stagecoach.

While my bathroom tap may be elderly, it does not quite date from the stagecoach era. It is rather a fine gold plated tap, the business end of which consists of a brass spindle cut with fine grooves that engage a plastic widget that in turn engages with the external fancy part of the tap - the bit that you attempt to turn with your toes as you lie soaking in some thoughtful Christmas present.

You have spotted the weakness already! A piece of plastic engaged by two pieces of metal will not last for ever. Eventually, however much your toes may twiddle, the fancy top no longer drives the brass bottom. It’s a case of ‘Houston! We have a problem.’ So off to my kind ironmonger I trot.

You would think that such widgets would be universally obtainable - like lamp fuses. If so you would have thought wrongly. My kindly ironmonger pulled a wry face, explaining that every tapmaker inevitably produced his own widgets and only a tap-specific widget would fit. Moreover as tapmakers were as much slaves to modern fashion as anyone else, I would have to buy a whole new tap.

But this is a mixer tap for a bath and it matches the mixer tap on the basin. Do I then have to replace two expensive sets of mixer taps for the sake of a twopenny-ha’penny bit of plastic? That would amount to something on the scale of a government grant.

Sadly I turn to the internet where prices are half those in the shops. But then I suffer a pang of guilt. Haven’t I just driven another nail into the coffin of my kind ironmonger standing behind his counter installed by one of his ancestors in 1890 and where you can always find someone you know on a similar quest for domestic ancillaries?

Change it would be indeed to liberate us from such marketing tyranny. Change it would be to deliver us from the mindset that more is better. But, as we are told that is what ‘drives’ the economy, keeping us all in beer and skittles, I don’t suppose politicians will want to change that at all. Even, that is, if they could. Perhaps I shall just try Araldite instead.

BUT WHERE WOULD YOU HAVE PUT PURPLE COO, MR FRANKLIN

I was fascinated to see another of Ben Schott’s miscellanies in The Times the other day, this one for 2008. I adore all of Schott’s miscellanies, indeed I am a magpie when it comes to random, but interesting, bits of knowledge. I love them for the same reason that I love charity shops - you never know what you are going to find. Both are a cornucopia - to use Rumsfeld’s expression - of unknown unknowns.

I suppose I am of an age when schools considered it their job to prepare you for the unknown. The syllabus was considered merely as an irritating guide to what books to read; provided you were learning something it didn’t really matter what. Such attitudes, sadly, went by the wayside a long time ago. No longer are we educated and left to do things on our own initiative, we have to be ‘trained.’

Still, while Ben Schott continues to turn out his marvellous miscellanies the quest for random knowledge goes on. Included in his eclectic calendrical list of ‘Ephemerides’ you can find the colours that beekeepers paint Queen Bees each year to distinguish this year’s bee from last; and Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for an Ideal Day.

Now I have to confess to being a fan of Benjamin Franklin who was born poor in what then weren’t the United States. His is the classic rags to high politics story - he went on to sign the Declaration of Independence making the immortal remark - ‘Gentlemen, we must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.’ And not only politics, but science too. In his spare time he invented the lightning conductor and determined the course of the Gulf Stream.

And it was all done, not by vast intelligence, but by application and perseverance combined with a few well-thought out basic principles. Nevertheless, from his many biographies one question shrieks out: however did this man organise his time to get so much done?

Now I am someone who agonises about my time - how can I get more out of my day while still managing to remain sane and amused? I think most of us harbour a secret belief that others organise themselves better than we do. In fact trying to understand how other people run their lives is part of the fascination of blogging, or reading diaries. So to learn the Great Man’s recipe for organisation, just in time to make a New Year Resolution, seems propitious.

Benjamin Franklin’s ‘schedule’ is admirably simple. He divides the day into six periods of which two are for work, the remaining ones being morning, (pre-work); dinner, (between work); evening, (after work); and sleep. It is a fairly common pattern. We wake up, dress and have breakfast. Then we work, stop for lunch and work again. Then we finish work, eat some food, relax a bit and go to bed. But how much time do we allocate to each?

Split between these six periods my own average day looks like 2, 4, 0.5, 5, 5, 7.5. I find it hard to get from alarm clock to my office in under two hours, though this includes a morning walk and certainly some planning and newspaper reading. I work about nine hours but find it hard to manage much more than half an hour for a quick lunchtime snack. Sometimes I work a bit in the evening, but it depends on what you call ‘work.’ Certainly I do housework, like most of us I suspect.

I know I don’t read enough, relax enough, take enough exercise, but I still feel guilty about taking two hours to ‘get-up.’ On the other hand it is about the only time I get to myself.

Franklin’s schedule is interesting and reassuring. He actually takes three hours to get ready, rather than my two, filling this period with useful self-discipline such as ‘contriving the day’s business’ and ‘taking the ‘resolution of the day.’

He then works for four hours before taking a two hour lunch (or rather dinner as it was then the custom to take the main meal at midday) while reading or perusing his accounts. Then another four hours of work and he is ready (after ‘putting things away’) for ‘supper, music or diversion,’ while reviewing what he has achieved. Seven hours of sleep follows.

He acknowledges that he can’t always structure his time like this and he did have the advantage that most of his domestic arrangements were taken care of. Even so the balance of his day between work and other activities is interesting, his long lunch and three hour ‘morning’ providing all sorts of opportunities to better balance the day with ‘non-work’ tasks and reading.

Even so, can I really afford a two hour lunch? And where would he have slotted Purple Coo, I wonder?