FENG SHUI, OR THE STRANGE TALE OF THE KITCHEN DRAWERS

The Phantom Opening Drawers



And the Feng Shui Solution


I HAVE GOOD reason to be thankful to what I saw referred to with admirable brevity on someone’s post the other day as ‘members of The Coo’. Very good at solving problems are members of the Coo. ‘How do I de-mist my double-glazed windows,’ I asked once, ‘without buying new ones, that is?’

‘Drill a tiny hole on the inside,’ came Countrymousie’s almost instantaneous response. I am sure this is just the thing to do but as, lazily, I haven’t yet got around to finding a drill to make tiny holes in thick glass, I can’t report the result, either to you, or to Mousie herself, who fearing perhaps that my window might shatter, seems to be hibernating deep in her country mouse hole. Or perhaps she is listening: if you are, Mousie, it is only a matter of time. The wheels in the Somerville household may grind slow, but they grind very small. I shall get around to it.

There was another matter on which I wanted Coo advice, but I didn’t quite know how to put the question. I wasn’t asking something personally embarrassing - like how I might rid myself of carbuncles, or how I should address a visiting bishop. No, it was the ultra simple question of how might I ensure that the drawers beside my kitchen sink stayed shut when I shut them and didn’t slowly open again of their own accord, as if they had become apprentice extras in a horror movie.

I have tried magnetic strips and repositioning the contents of the drawers without success; the only thing that worked seemed to be a piece of kitchen roll folded and wedged hard in the drawer top. Even this didn’t work always. After ten minutes the drawer would slowly open, as if pushed from inside by an unseen hand.

Nonetheless, unlikely as it may seem, the Coo, (our Jane in this case) have solved the problem. All that was involved was a little elementary Feng Shui.

Jane, as you doubtless know, is an expert in these dark arts. She has written an absolutely brilliant book on this and other things to do with transforming your untidy and cluttered lump of hollow brick and concrete into a home.

One of the things she says is that you should learn to talk to your house. If you do this correctly your house will talk back to you. Being a rational being, not on medication, with no tendency to imagine that I am Don Quixote, I was sceptical of this advice. It sounded like playing the ouija board, but without the mock solemnity and dim lighting.

Imagine my surprise therefore when the house began to talk back to me - and not in the sort of belligerent male voice that I had been expecting, ‘Why have you been neglecting me? What do you care?’ But in a rather pleasant, refined but humble, maid of all work sort of voice - a cross between Cinderella and Honeysuckle Weeks. Rather than complaining about my general household neglect, the house instead was eager to please and sorry that she didn’t look smarter. When I mentioned new paint she practically fainted in anticipation.

This may have been a mistake! For she jabbers at me now in the manner of a three-year old that has been promised an unspecified trip to the zoo. Nevertheless, she is not tiresome, and is friendly to animals. She realises that paint is rarely the first item in a rejuvenation process. There are de-cluttering operations and cleaning operations and repairing operations to be undertaken first, including getting the mist out of the windows.

Now Jane’s book also pointed out that you don’t get very far, Feng Shui wise, in a house with missing corners and it soon became obvious that the house was missing two corners - corresponding to the marriage and the knowledge areas of my life. Book in hand, this I have set out to rectify.

Jane suggests that a quick ‘cure’ for such a deficit is a plant in a big solid tub strategically placed where the corner should be. With the knowledge corner, this is proving hard. Quite an area of house is missing. The spot where the corner ought to be is occupied by the car.

Moving the car and placing an isolated pot in the middle of the tarmac drive just looks silly. In any case, judging from the quantity of books we have quite enough knowledge to stock a shop. So I have compromised and half-moved the car and half-filled in the corner. Whether this will make me half-witted remains to be seen.

But the missing marriage corner, on the inside of which coincidentally are to be found the annoying self-opening drawers, was easy to complete. I dragged a pot of yellow wallflowers into the spot - just to see how it would look. ‘Grand,’ said J.

I didn’t think much more about it until I realised that the kitchen drawers were no longer opening of their own accord. ‘Impossible!’ I thought, every fibre of my rational self protesting in my ear. But it was true. And they haven’t opened since - by themselves at any rate. Not only that but J and I haven’t had a cross-word since, which must be something of a record, nice people though we are. So that’s Feng Shui 1 - Rationality Nil.

And for those who read the blog I wrote some weeks ago about books tumbling out of a bookcase of their own volition I have to point out that the bookcase bears the same relation to the knowledge corner as the kitchen drawers did to the marriage corner. Whether my pot moving will stop further book falls we shall have to see.

FENG SHUI AMONG THE APRICOTS

Homework again! This time an easy response to Faith's call. This isn't the first blog I ever wrote, but it was at least one of the first pieces I entrusted to the blogosphere. And one or two people seemed to like it.

Like all such pieces it doesn't age too well. There is a reference in it to Mr Howard sacking someone. That tells you something. Mr Howard led the Conservative party at some point in the dim and distant past. Who he sacked and for what reason - clearly something to do with venturing an opinion at an inopportune moment - are lost in the mists of time. For all I know it might have been Boris Johnson though I think on reflection it may have been something to do with the man who said the Conservatives were going to cut taxes. Ha! The only other thing I know about Mr Howard is that he and his wife, having nothing better to do of an evening, watch re-runs of Brideshead Revisited, which is, in a manner of speaking, really all about terminating otherwise promising relationships in colourful settings.

By coincidence, this little piece is also about terminating a relationship in a colourful setting. In this case the relationship was with an apricot tree and the languid setting was Syon House, by the Thames in West London. Now apricots are one of my favourite fruits; I eat apricot jam every morning with my yoghurt. I fell in love with a pretty tree, but the relationship, as you will discover, was not meant to last.

My garden still lacks an apricot tree (though the faithful, but dull, blueberry continues to struggle for sun outside the kitchen window. As it happens I am reading Jane's lovely and fascinating book on Feng Shui at the moment and have just discovered that I lack a marriage corner, which, after 37 years, is a trifle disconcerting. A big plant, I suppose an apricot would do, strategically placed, might help to cover up. Perhaps, this exercise will persuade me to go and buy one.


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DON'T ASK AN APRICOT ABOUT AN AUTUMN FESTIVAL

In my experience Easter is either surpassingly mild or unreasonably cold. Sometimes it is both at once. Cold and clammy dampness suddenly gives way to merry sunshine in which birds sing and daffodils flounce thus confirming the sentiment of Robert Browning's line 'Oh to be in England now that April's there.' Or even, March, as this year the full moon determined it should be. Early or late, Easter always seems to creep out of the Spring calendar at a most inopportune and unexpected moment, but there we are.

It had so crept, I seem to remember, one Easter Sunday on the Ile de Noirmoutier where some friends had a holiday cottage. They had spent the journey - most of it passed I recall dodging in and out of thick sea fog - boasting of Noirmoutier's microclimate. Crossing the causeway to the island, they swore the sun would be there to welcome us. When it wasn't they insisted that it would be when we reached the restaurant on the other side. It still wasn't. Not only that but the restaurant was full. So, huddled in overcoats on the terrace, we ate moule-frites, stone cold, with the mist swirling about our heads, while glancing enviously at the earlier diners warm and snug inside.

This year there were neither moule-frites, nor swirling mist, but there was an Apricot Tree. We had eschewed the romanticism of La France Maritime for prosaic suburban London - the lovely Syon Park Garden Centre to be precise. And it was there that I dithered over whether to purchase an apricot tree that looked so pretty covered as it was by pyrotechnic bursts of white blossom. And as I was dithering I wondered whether we should not have a festival similar to Easter sometime in the autumn, this being another season that Britain tends to do rather well, as Mr Keats this time was wont to remind us.

Autumn festivals we have a plenty. Harvest Festival and All Saints battle it out with Bonfire Night and Halloween. And now - 200 years late - the idea of a Trafalgar Day is mooted. Could all be combined - I put it to the Apricot - into a new autumn Friday to Monday holiday called, for linguistic balance, 'Wester?' The Tree made no attempt to disagree.

That would open the way for the more commercial aspects of Christmas to become 'Norther;' which would prompt an equivalent summer festival called 'Souther,' clearly a name with just the right sort of resonance. As in "we're spending Souther at our villa in Antibes this year." We would all know where we where and the religious among us could then celebrate their own sacred festivals at the same or different times free of disfiguring commercialism. "What?" I asked the Apricot. But reply came there none. Evidently, the tree was too pre-occupied with its pyrotechnic bursts of pretty blossom - or maybe it just didn't want to risk being sacked by Mr Howard.

One day the Apricot might have provided fresh fruit at my Souther party, but surely, I mused, that pretty blossom would not survive a long car journey and the indignity of re-potting? So I chose a blueberry instead, and now I can't shut it up.

TOWN TWINNING

One of the few compensations of having a large printing order to discharge, as we had this week, is that you get to listen to Radio 4 a lot. And want a wonderfully eclectic mix of programmes you find there! If you are an intellectual butterfly like me, vaguely interested in pretty much anything, you can find yourself listening to it more or less continuously while the thermal printer chomps away in the background.

In the last few days I have learned about midwives, prostitutes, Stanley Baldwin, a Chinook helicopter called Bravo November and how intensively reared chicken is altogether a Good Thing if the limit of your perspective is global warming. I have listened to the Archers, learned about the Burmese tragedy and and bristled at Susan Sarandon berating Hillary Clinton.

Not that the radio has had things entirely its own way. For between these printing sessions and other, more regular work, I have been assisting, as the French would say, in the biennial visit of families from Clisson, our twin town near Nantes.

They arrived on Thursday bringing with them both sunshine and their own portable loudspeaker apparatus and set up camp in our newly renovated Physic Garden, where the Committee had laid on the South Walian equivalent of a vin d’honneur. All very agreeable, you might say, but at the same time curiously transportng. For what with the bunting, the convivialité, the amplified French voices it seemed I was no longer in Wales at all but back somewhere in La France Profonde

Nor does this transporting stop with the bunting and ‘le micro.’ For the arrival of the French precipitates a rush of Gallic behaviour, even among us locals. Acquaintances that you barely nod to in the street suddenly greet you with a kiss on both cheeks. Apart from the absence of brioche and the unlikely substitution - caused I suppose by the relative strengths of the dollar and euro - of Blossom Hill Californian, for the ubiquitous Muscadet, the little reception could have been French.

It was the same with the Hog Roast last night. Trestle tables had been set out in the rugby club in three long rows. Some species of unfortunate pig roasted outside on a supersize barbecue. Pencil thin girls wafted up and down, depositing even more of the Blossom Hill on the tables. This embarrassed me as I am not a fan of wine grown in any English speaking country but our French guests affected not to notice, or if they did notice they remained unusually reticent on the subject.

The pig however refused to succumb without a struggle. I don’t mean that it started the evening oinking around on the hallowed turf of the rugby field. The butcher had done his job, but evidently the beast had proved more well-padded than expected and a great deal of the Blossom Hill disappeared while we waiting for the porcine epiphany.

This provided excuse for yet another round of cheek kissing and general amity before a local choir arrived in best Welsh tradition. After the choir a harp made its appearance, played by a woman in stovepipe hat - these were billed, after all as cultural exchanges - and the gentle rippling sounds mesmerized the audience.

After we had eaten, with the Blossom Hill, still not exhausted the choir returned and sang Myfanwy. For those who do not know it, Myfanwy is the saddest and most poignant of all love songs and the music alone evokes the longings of a young heart so beautifully that listeners are often reduced to tears.

Poor Bernadette, one of our visitors, found herself caught up with the conductor during this performance for reasons that need not detain us now. Never mind that the song was in Welsh and the music not exactly in the French idyll, she returned to her seat tears streaming from her eyes.

And so it went on. Not to be outdone the French visitors huddled to the front and sang and we banged the tables during that old happy drinking song ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde.’ Finally to shouts of ‘more,’ the choir returned and we all belted out together the national anthems - ‘Mae Hen Gwlad fy Nadau’ and the Marseillaise.

And so after a final round of cheek kissing and benedictions of ‘Nos dda (Goodnight) or even more endearingly: ‘Nos dda, Cariad’ (Goodnight, little darling) we meandered home happy.

I see that the performance is to be repeated tonight, with no doubt will be another attempt to drink California dry. Dancing is to be substituted for singing this time, which will be fun as the Clissonais confess to a variety of interesting folk dances. But why in our reserved little Britain do we not do this sort of thing more often?

YEAR END

I love this time of year. Late April. The sun bursting through the clouds, the field grass growing crazily, lush shades of green everywhere you look. The dew heavy and soaking in the mornings. Elder Daughter was down and we walked together across the railway meadows in the growing dusk. Suddenly she gave a cry. ‘Slugs!’

Little bits of beige slime covered the thick grass. Everywhere. As we crossed the field there appeared to be no fewer, no less, wherever we went. I did a calculation - let’s say 30 to the square yard, 150,000 to the acre, so in this field of 10 acres, there must be 1.5 million. That’s an awful lot of slugs - all looking identical, like peas in a pod. I suppose they were recently hatched - perhaps something to do with last summer’s rain - and now were eating the damp grass. Nothing that I could see was eating them. A feast for the ducks, I thought, if there were to be any ducks.

Elder Daughter had come over as she had been offered a greenhouse if she could demolish it and take it away. That’s where I came in. Not only am I labour when it comes to demolishing greenhouses but I drive a car with a boot capacity of 2000 litres with the seats out. Enough for a couple of greenhouses.

That was last weekend. As I write this it is the end of our financial year: April 30. One of the best year ends you can have if you are self-employed for in effect you pay tax eleven months later than would be the case if your tax year ended a mere twenty-five days earlier. Nowadays I believe the Inland Revenue take a dim view of people who claim such advantageous year ends; but in my case it was genuine.

Twenty-four years ago - on 1 May 1984 - I found myself at the offices of what was then Allied Hambro for the purpose of being trained to sell life assurance, something that I came to regret almost instantly. But by then it was too late. Selling is not my forte. I would have difficulty in selling ice cream to Arabs, or sand to Esquimaux, so I found selling life assurance impossible and departed soon afterwards. Nevertheless my year end - or, to be strictly accurate, my year beginning - had been established.

Now, of course, labels are my principal work. In between came an eclectic variety of activities but always each financial year has ended on 30 April. It is the day one asks ‘how did we do?’ And I look for the headline total. Contrary to what might appear sensible from the point of tax, I always look for a successful final week and especially to a final productive day to round off the year nicely.

And what happened this year? Nothing! We did not take a single order all day. The telephone remained dead as though cut off. As though all our customers, who on other days ring demanding labels for yesterday, had departed on a slow boat to China. I was left twiddling my thumbs in frustration while gazing out of the window at the ivy and the rain.

In between these bouts of twiddling I did some unenthusiastic research for a European article I have to write. Sometimes, these articles are easy; the subject stands out, it is easy to find something to say. At other times the bricks are many and the straws few. The whole European Continent is walking on eggshells, or so it seems, until the Ireland goes to the polls on 12 June. Only in the Balkans, as ever, are there developments.

Despite the lack of orders I have two small deliveries to make. Donning an anorak I head into the pouring rain towards the post box, jiffy bags in hand. On the way I meet a distant neighbour. She has the bowed appearance of someone in their late seventies who has seen better times. Her hair is permed and steely grey. She dresses with respectable convention and looks vacant. She walks slowly with a stick. I don’t know her name, in fact before today I had not even spoken to her.

She had been caught in this downpour without coat or umbrella and, shopping bag in hand, was battling through it as best she could. I asked her if I could lend an umbrella, which was a bit silly as I did not have an umbrella on me. I could fetch one from the car I said. In a soft Highland accent that reminded me of Janet from Dr Finlay’s casebook she replied that she was much ‘obliged’ to me - what a comforting old-fashioned word that is - but she had no need of an umbrella; she lived only around the corner. And with that she proceeded on her way. I felt nevertheless that the day had not been entirely wasted.