DELIVERIES MAY BE DISTRACTING

I suppose it started when I missed my dentist appointment last Friday. I who never miss appointments! I was here at my desk, beavering away, when the telephone rang asking politely why I was not at that moment in Mr Page’s recliner, my mouth full of dental impedimenta.

They were very understanding in a gentle Joyce Grenfell sort of way. “Oh you just forgot, did you?” to which I could only explain limply that I was expecting my first grandchild and my mind was on other things.

At the time I thought this a whopping lie. Not insofar as my Younger Daughter is expecting a baby. That is true enough. In fact she has been expecting now for almost a week, with false alarms necessitating urgent dashes to the hospital birthing unit every couple of days. No, the real reason, or so I thought, was that I had just been too idle to consult my diary that morning.

Still, they were compassionate and let me off without charging the punitive ‘fees for missed appointments’ spelt out prominently in big letters around the surgery walls. They fitted me in. Apparently, they are not very busy: the recession has taken its toll. Bankers and accountants are no longer smiling, they say. It matters not therefore what their teeth look like.

This made me think of another mitigating plea that I had once similarly rejected as whopping untruth, years ago. On this occasion I had joined a Civil Service colleague for a lunch-time drink, stayed rather too long and returned to the office slightly the worse for wear. Subsequently, I was called in by the boss and rightly upbraided.

He then said that he had heard that my mother had died very recently. How he knew I do not know, but there it was. I replied that I couldn’t, in honesty, claim that as an excuse. But he was a wise man and I escaped the retribution that I felt I deserved.

With the passage of time I think he was right; my mother’s death was almost certainly disturbing me more than I realised. She had died unexpectedly. Yes, she had been ill; certainly she was in hospital. But she was only 54 and one moment was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette and the next she had turned her face to the wall, as it were, no doubt muttering her usual cry in times of adversity “Oh God! Oh Montreal!” The family were left still gathering belongings for a London dash. Still, that was all a very long time ago.

In the meantime, between Younger Daughter’s false alarms, life goes on. We decided to celebrate surviving the double whammy of the end of January tax bill plus a hefty repayment of business mortgage by making a visit to IKEA to buy a rather fetching armchair.

Actually, I had understood we would be buying two armchairs to replace the green two-seater sofa that Younger Daughter had said would fit very comfortably in her house.
This was not quite what J had understood, which was that we would be getting shot of both our existing two seater sofas and buying a new sofa and one armchair in replacement.

I wanted the two armchairs as I knew that J would undoubtedly take ownership of a single one. I didn’t want the two-seater sofa because that would be less comfortable and more difficult to manoeuvre. Besides, I didn’t see much wrong with our pink sofa which had done noble service for over a quarter of a century. It does sag a bit, but it also has a welcoming, sat-on, feel that all good sofas should have.

Having taken the difficult decision to purchase we found ourselves perplexed and slightly cross and so tested the comfort of IKEA’s Ektorp brand, in its lively shade of scarlet corduroy, by having a seemingly insoluble argument about what exactly we should buy.

We might have been there still had we not suddenly realised - the revelation being like awakening from an anxiety dream - that the whole question was anyway academic.

For you can’t actually import new furniture without first removing the old. If we ordered today, the stuff might be delivered early next morning (when you do want something it always takes a fortnight, but this cannot be relied on). That, at the very least, would be an embarrassment.

Only then we remembered our original plan. YD’s partner (who conveniently owns a long wheelbase transit used for ferrying his circus kit) was to remove the existing sofa(s) and to collect their replacements in one seamless loop of collection and delivery. But of course YD’s partner has other deliveries in his mind, just now, besides sofas. There is a natural order in these matters and babies come before furnishings.

So we retreated from IKEA with nothing more to show for our labours than a set of nifty recycling boxes, wondering however we could have contemplated buying new furniture before arranging to get rid of the old. Both of us had clearly taken leave of our senses.

But then, I suppose, poor dears, our minds are distracted. We are in a mental limbo pending baby’s arrival. This is not the time to expect straight thinking or the keeping of appointments in this household.

WHY I TRAMP THE STREETS IN SEARCH OF RUBBER BANDS

The kind men and women who in all weathers deliver our daily post, wrap it in bundles with pink rubber bands. They probably do this elsewhere as well. Twenty or thirty letters and brochures held together ready to drop through the letterboxes of this or that cluster of houses. Maybe it’s even done by postcode, I don’t know.

What I do know is that these are very fine rubber bands, and of a durability and elasticity reminiscent of the days when windows of railway carriages were opened with a leather strap. I imagine a little factory, somewhere like Leeds or Dumbarton, deep anyway in the British hinterland, where son has followed father in this traditional manufacture - supported by the same, government contract, rolled over year by year.

The postal folk rushing around on their deliveries, on foot or bicycle, at the regulation so many miles-per-hour, remove the bands before delivering the mail, placing them carefully on a handlebar or in a pocket so that they may be used again. Inevitably a few bands are dropped.

Now I value these rubber bands. They come in two sizes. The larger ones are exactly the right size for closing a roll of labels wound on a three inch diameter core. The smaller ones are exactly the right size for a one inch core. So when I find one lying on the pavement - as I did this morning - I pick it up eagerly. This gives me a double pleasure: I believe I am tidying the streets and the atavistic instincts of my hunter-gatherer nature are satisfied. Rarely a day goes by when I do not manage to pick up at least one and bear it proudly home. It’s a sort of Sarah Palin feeling, I suppose, without the need for gunfire.

I mentioned this the other day to Delphine, our ultra-efficient and helpful assistant in the Post Office where I go each afternoon carrying a Marks and Spencer shopping bag containing packets of labels to be despatched urgently hither and thither.

Unfortunately, she said, she had no rubber bands to give me. However, if some came her way she would, set them aside. At that point Sam, who was pursuing some post office business of his own at the next window, intervened. “I’ve got a bucketful” he said. “I’d be glad to get rid of them.”

Sam runs a superior travel agency in town. Not only that but he has a habit of collecting honorary consulships like other people collect stamps. An impressively royal coat of arms outside his office proclaims that it is here that distressed Norwegians in search of a friendly hand should repair. Assuming, that is, that the place isn’t full of distressed Tunisians seeking the same thing.

I know Sam not so much through our occasional coincidental encounters at the Post Office but from the bi-annual receptions that the European Commission hold in Cardiff for those involved in some way with European affairs. When I am not selling labels I write articles about Europe and for a short time last year was the part-time UK representative on a sadly terminated European communications project. I think, anyway, that is why they invite me.

Labels and Europe are two activities just about as distant in the occupational spectrum as it is possible to get. I arrive at the Post Office, tired and dishevelled, frequently in jeans and sweater, with a bulging and inelegant bag of parcels, my conversation limited to rubber bands and recorded deliveries, only subsequently to reappear groomed and talking with something that could passably be taken for erudition about the threats and opportunities to Britain of joining the euro. This perplexes Sam. Me too, sometimes, when people ask innocently, “what do you do?”

Never mind! I am still, if you remember, looking for those robust and elastic pink Post Office rubber bands. So Sam invites me to drop into his agency the next day and collect his small surplus, the postmen clearly delivering several each day with the agency’s mail. This, in great expectation, I do, only to find that the fabled ‘bucketful’ is nowhere to be found. The staff confirmed that although once such a bucketful did indeed exist, sadly someone must have ‘tidied up.’ My disappointment was palpable.

So I am back tramping the streets again, looking for these little circles of pink rubber. Meanwhile I have to put up with the inferior products of stationery suppliers who trade only in products made in some Asian fastness. Never the correct size, nor very elastic, they break with a twang at the slightest provocation, zapping your fingers in the process. Oh! If only I could find that factory in Leeds or Dumbarton that made the rubber bands which held the Empire together!

MANDALAY AGAIN

My email box pinged and there, under the capitalised title ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR,’ was an email from my eldest half-sister, the one who has nine children and lives somewhere deep in the South of France. She is an erratic correspondent but surfaces at odd moments with some breathless message, hammered out in capitals. This time it was “JUST THOUGHT YOU WOULD LOVE TO KNOW AS YOU LOVED THE HOUSE SO MUCH THAT BARNARDS CLOSE IS UP FOR SALE.”

‘Barnards’, as we called it - the ‘Close’ only being added when formality demanded - was the house in which we both grew up, she seven years behind me. We all left for a short lived life in Jersey in the winter of 1965, the last of my childhood world piled into the back of an old Commer van that bounced and rumbled away for ever down Barnards’ long, dark, potholed drive.

She mentioned an estate agent which I looked up and there, in a sort of ‘last night I dreamed I went to Mandalay again’ moment, was the proud bow-windowed house looking smart and well-kept, its lawns suspiciously verdant: seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, an acre of land, asking price £1,150,000, which is about a hundred times what we sold it for.

It is true I did love the house, which always seemed to be a mitigation of my unhappy childhood. I thought we should have kept it despite our impecuniosity: the roof that leaked copiously, the rotten window frames, the draughts and the precarious heating.

I loved the space most of all. Outside there were then seven acres of gardens and fields and paddocks that ran all the way down to the Thames. Next the house a walled kitchen garden, a stable block, a triple garage, an apple store, a heated greenhouse - even a non-conformist chapel built for the village by a previous owner - provided ample opportunity for a shy child to run and hide and fantasise.

You reached the house via a drive, eighty yards long and flanked on each side with mature horse chestnuts under which a flood of aconites bloomed each spring. This opened on a lawn, the shape of a tear drop, on which stood a mighty lime tree. Around this lawn we raced on bicycles, or sometimes horses. It was one of four lawns all of which it fell to me to cut with a small two-stroke Atco mower. Up and down, up and down.

At various times we accommodated in these grounds an eclectic mixture of animals. We started with a small pig farm and some poultry, the chapel being converted to deep litter. We sold eggs to Thames Valley, the only ecclesiastically raised eggs in Britain probably.

I also remember goats, ducks, geese, dogs, cats and horses on which untaught (except by falling off) I learned to ride. Sadly the pigs all contracted swine fever and had to be slaughtered; some other disaster put paid to the chickens. My father turned to teaching, while step-mother embarked on the more profitable enterprise of farming students.

Barnards was one of those houses in which you could never quite manage to count all the rooms. Someone had begun the construction deep in the mists of time and each succeeding generation had added something to it. Parts of the house were undoubtedly Tudor, but other parts were Victorian, the most recent additions being made in the thirties. This gave it a higgledy-piggledy feel, compounded by its deliciously having two staircases. Upstairs you could count six separate levels of floor and downstairs three. It did contain, however, at least ten rooms that at a pinch could be called bedrooms and most of these were large enough for multiple occupation.

So the house was always full of young people: birds of passage from as young as a tearful six year old. Mostly they came from abroad, many from Africa, sent to us by some species of agency. We fed and housed them, taught them English, sent them to boarding school in term time and arranged sightseeing trips and parties in the holidays.

One of the first was a young French water-skiing champion called Jacqueline who came to attend a language course at Oxford, a short hop away on the railway line. To my pale Cinderella-like personage she seemed impossibly glamorous and exotic, all tailored blazers and silk scarves. Jaqueline lent her name to the most Tudor of Barnards’ Tudor bedrooms, a name it retained long after her departure.

She was with us for her twenty-second birthday and my father, more than a little enamoured by her looks, placed candles in the gathering twilight all around the back lawn, while we consumed cake and, I believe, a bottle of champagne; which seemed, in those dim days of the 1950s, almost as exotic as a French water skier.

All these memories of my childhood Mandalay flooded back as I looked at the pictures. The rooms, not surprisingly, seem smaller than I remembered, the hall narrower, the sitting room inglenook only a half inglenook. Outside the lawns appear mostly the same, though the great lime tree seems to have gone.

But seven acres have become one acre. The fields have been sold and all around the house land has been sold for building. The weeping ash beside the chapel under whose green summer canopy I crammed for my physics ‘A’ Level, has long since been flattened beneath a bevy of executive homes built in the Rose Garden. More new houses cover the front field where the piggeries stood. I doubt that the great triple garage has survived either.

Time has moved on. Like Mandalay, the old Barnards has gone, just as much as if it, too had, been burned to the ground.

TWELFTH NIGHT CALCULATIONS

This morning I was listening idly to the ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 while munching away on my buttered toast, when someone, whose name I didn’t catch, came on to say that he had written a new batch of Winnie-the-Pooh stories that would be published in the autumn under the title of ‘Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.’

He then read a charming extract with Pooh saying though he had been absent for 80 years, ‘years’ were only a unit of time and it might just as well have been 80 weeks or even 80 minutes, in which later case it might just be time for a little smackerel of something in the Hundred Acre Wood.

I know shall look forward to the publication but I fear I shall be disappointed. These sequels, even if the characters are revived by the original author, never quite seem to hit the mark. Time moves on, whatever Pooh may say, in the enchanted - as well as enchanting - Hundred Acre Wood. All of which made me ask myself how big anyway was 100 acres? And spent some minutes working this out to be about a mile by 300 yards.

In idle moments I am always essaying these kinds of calculations. Last week I wrote about Jane Shilling’s memoir of learning to ride, buying a horse and then joining the local hunt - ‘A Fox in the Cupboard.’ Walking through our own very much less than 100 acre wood the next day I found myself reckoning what it all must have cost and why, as a single mum she should have incurred such great expense while still (I assume) a relatively lowly paid sub-editor. Even when she became a regular columnist and reviewer the charge of this equestrian activity on the Shilling household must have been a heavy one.

She says her horse cost £3,200. But then there’s the livery, the vet’s and farrier’s bills, hunt subscriptions, transport, both for the horse to meets, and for herself to and fro from London to deepest Kent. There is proper clothing to be bought, and riding boots, and general impedimenta; there is insurance (sure to be crippling when you think of what a horse can do with a well-aimed kick). Why when a frequent theme of her articles used to be the frugality of her existence did she embark on such a financially threatening course?

This is indeed a more interesting question and I think the answer has something to do with tribe. We all have an atavistic urge to belong to and to be accepted by a wider group of people, not necessarily that we like, but with whom we have a common purpose and who will support us if need be. Jane’s book ends like this:

“I turned and looked back on them all - the Ashford Valley, eating and drinking and flirting on Midsummer’s eve. It was dark on the road where the trees hung down and I couldn’t see their faces, only their silhouettes, but as I paused there for a moment, poised just outside the circle of light and celebration, someone waved. They’d noticed that I had gone.”

This seems her acknowledgment that at last she felt accepted into the Ashford Valley tribe, whereas before she felt an outsider.

Our tribes are distinguished by traditions, by modes of dress, by colours and by purpose. The activity that the tribes engage in, sport, riding, party politics, acting, is often incidental to the real purpose: the satisfaction that we get from belonging, from knowing the jargon and the in-jokes, the history, the anecdotes, the common language and the chance to live in a smaller, friendlier world. Though in reality a tribe’s internal politics rarely run smooth.



My own tribe is acting and we are often at cross-purposes. We cannot even agree when to hold our traditional Twelfth Night revels. Should it be the 5th or the 6th of January? It is our version of Lilliput’s Big and Little Enders.

I suppose it all depends when you start counting. Night one ought to be Christmas Eve - when, one presumes, the shepherds came down from the hills. By the time the Magi arrived on Christmas morning the messy bits were safely over and the Babe, all washed and wrapped lay smiling happily in His manger.

Incidentally, this is always depicted as a kind of trough on legs which any self-respecting ungulate would kick over before you could say Santa Claus. Real mangers are fixed to the wall at the height of a horse’s head, which would be a more sensible place to put a baby in an occupied stable. Twelfth Night would then become the 4 January. Oh dear!

Still, if like Pooh Bear you are not a slave to literalism and think the quantum of time units immaterial to a good story, then it really matters not. Besides 6 January is the feast of St Stephen (when the snow lay round about) and St Stephen has traditionally been as much a part of the end of Christmas as St Nicholas has been a part of the beginning.

So, pace modernists everywhere, I stuck to the traditional night. A great party ensued. Before midnight we commenced removing the Christmas decor, ready for the barren abstinence that stretches out deep, cold and boringly even towards Lent. Which, in these ever more troubled times, looks as though it will well live up to its name as the season of borrowing.

A FOX IN THE CUPBOARD

I don’t know about you but for me the Christmas and New Year holidays have a hologram quality, taking on a radically different manifestation according to the perspective from which you happen to view them.

Before the event, everything appears in a sort of Nigella Lawson-esque glitter, a soft-focus world of roaring fires and delighted family smiling benignly amidst oceans of discarded wrapping; sipping your best champagne and nibbling those cute little chocolate dainties whose confection will be - to quote Nigella herself - ‘the work of moments’.

You picture a time of celebration, of festive meals, parties, occasionally perhaps eating and drinking more than strictly wise, but forgivable in the circumstances. You imagine long walks in a frosty countryside, interspersed perhaps with a successful visit to the sales to recover some object of desire, long coveted but never hitherto affordable.

But above all my pre-Christmas perception is that the hours will slow down and that I will be left with acres of golden empty time to call my own. Freed from the insistent telephone I shall have time not only to clean, tidy, mend, shop, bake, decorate, wrap presents, entertain, and visit, but also to rest with long lie-ins and vacant evenings tucked up in front of the television with a suitably seasonal and warming beverage.

Of course the idea of empty time is just as much of a delusion as the idea that one can make a tasty plate of Nigella’s Christmas pudding truffles in ‘moments.’ The reality is morbidly different. First, the adrenalin thoughtfully provided by work deadlines and which hauls you out of bed on cold winter mornings and propels you urgently in the direction of the office, simply evaporates. In a few days, while not retiring noticeably later to bed, your getting-up time advances rapidly from 6.30 to 7.30 and then to 8.30, losing you a good two hours before you even begin.

Without adrenalin’s whip-cracking brother, the ‘to-do list,’ starred and underlined with the day’s über-priorities, I have the most appalling tendency to faff about. In consequence everything I undertake has the feeling of dragging feathers through treacle. The result is that I stagger through Christmas wondering where it all went and making guilty resolutions to do it better next time.

At least this was what I thought as I sat by the chuntering printing machine on New Year’s Day finishing off a labelling order that I should have had done by Christmas Eve, but which, missing the adrenalin which switched off promptly at 5pm on 19 December, of course I didn’t.

If this sounds like an invitation for sympathy then please put away your hankies, for in fact, once you have gulped down a good lungful of New Year air first thing on 1 January and with an agreeable little apéritif with friends to look forward to at five o’clock, then sitting by the printer, reeling and occasional changing stock or ribbon with a good book in front of you, is actually rather a pleasant way of spending the day, particularly as the book I was reading was rather special.

I am rather a fan of Jane Shilling who used to write for ‘The Times’ but who departed earlier in the year when the paper took yet another lurch downmarket. I had dropped hints that one of her books might not be unwelcome in my Christmas stocking but evidently the hints were not sufficiently heavy or well-directed for I ended up with Alan Bennett instead.

Nevertheless there is a certain guilty pleasure in buying yourself desired but unreceived presents. Santa cannot be considered infallible, I argue. You are allowed to correct his mistakes. It was in this spirit that I ordered ‘A Fox in the Cupboard’ from Amazon. It arrived two days later.

The book is basically a most wonderful if meandering account of how one thing can so easily lead to another if you are not paying attention. In Jane’s case, how to fill time one holiday, lead to riding lessons and then to the purchase of suitable clothing and then to buying a horse and then to taking-up hunting, only to find that the timing collided unhappily first with foot and mouth and later with its Parliamentary ban.

Despite being raised in the country, field sports and their adherents have always made me feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I have been sufficiently close at various times of my life to horses, dogs, guns and so on to be able to have a nuanced appreciation of what she is describing, even if my riding was self-taught and bareback and my knowledge of hunting obtained from the stories of my namesake Somerville and Ross.

Part of the fun of the book lies in its magnificent use of language. The style flows freely but only the precise word will do, even if that means you have to keep a dictionary by your side. I counted 24 words, which either I did not know at all, or of which I was dubious of giving an accurate definition...words like ‘solipsism,’ ‘adamant’ (as a noun), ‘knout,’ ‘semiotics,’ ‘shirring,’ ‘bimbling,’ ‘gravid,’ ‘scuts.’ If Jane is ever honoured it will be for services to the nation’s word power.

Still, the holiday is almost over; I ate the last of the bon-bons yesterday. Soon I shall be looking back and seeing Christmas from an altogether different perspective. In retrospect Christmas will look rose-tinted again, the horrors and excesses forgotten. It will be seen as a time of good rest, fellowship, family, feasting; a time of wonderful confections (though I say so myself) and even better reading. By 2009 the limiting resolutions will have been forgotten. It was ever thus. And I have already started dropping hints about needing a new dictionary for next Christmas.