MEME or ME-ME-ME

I have been tagged by Jane to write about myself - hence I presume the word ‘meme’ (Me-Me!). As usual I have written too much. I’ve tagged a few others below. I’ve included for fun a couple of husband and wife pairs.

What are your current obsessions?

In days gone by, no variety performance was complete without the man who put dinner plates on a high vertical wire and spun them around. The gyroscopic effect enabled them to defy gravity; the plate thus stayed balanced on the wire. Or not as the case may be. Clearly the object was to see just how many plates and wires could be erected, the performer continually having to rush around rescuing the early plates as they slowed and began to wobble, giving them a deft flick, that would ensure another minute or two of life.

Being self-employed, running a business, house and garden and with a variety of voluntary interests like UNESCO and acting, my life often resembles that sea of plates. I am governed by a long to-do list and its complement of unremitting deadlines. In the background is the constant need to manage cash - will there be enough in the bank to pay for the stock orders this month? By how much will expenditure increase next year? How much do I need to earn from writing? What can be fitted into the day? When can I learn my lines? Let’s move this to the evening - do that on the train; get up early to do the other. And so on. Those plates are my obsessions.

What are you listening to?

Radio 4, when I’m not doing something that requires concentration. I love the midnight news. Classic FM, if I’m reading in the evenings.

Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?

If the government really wanted to reduce carbon emissions, and to generate employment, they would give me a grant towards replacing my 20 year old central heating boiler such that the fuel savings would pay the net cost within a couple of years or so. They could reclaim the money afterwards by charging me more tax - which they will do anyway - but presumably my ongoing fuel savings would be enough to pay this. We should all then benefit: me, the climate and the government.

As it is I can’t afford the investment to raise the efficiency of my boiler from 60 per cent to 90 per cent. So I have to reduce my heating and wear more clothes, which brings us to my most worn wardrobe garment. Which is a padded gilet: my Christmas charity shop present from Younger Daughter in 2007. I still wear it almost every day. It cost £5 and the cost per wear must have been reduced by now to about twopence.

First spring thing?

I’ve always been a country person. Though born in a city I grew up on a small farm. Ever since I never been really happy unless I can walk on grass; over moors and hills certainly, but mainly just through fields.

So for me spring is that eruption of new grass that begins in mid-April. The field grass grows three inches in a week and the insects buzz around the early wildflowers. Sit on the bough of a low tree and you can survey a scene that must have been repeated year by year ever since farming began: the rolling grass-covered hills, bursting with spring life. It always fills me with energy and hope.

What's for dinner?

Probably a salad starter, rocket, olives, feta cheese, followed maybe by pasta or some such and after some fruit or cheese or rhubarb from the garden

Planning to travel to next?

Thanks to our dear friends Rosie and her husband we are off again to France next month to stay once more at ‘The Mill,’ with its walnut trees, deep down in the Auverne. Spring will have long arrived there. The chestnuts will be in full leaf. Even the walnuts, the latest of trees, will be bursting into leaf.

I have always loved France and quite frankly would be content if I never travelled anywhere else. I was semi-offered a trip to the Smithsonian Festival in Washington DC this summer, though it now looks as though I won’t be going. I am not the slightest dismayed. The thought of jet lag (from which being a bad sleeper at the best of times I suffer greatly) compounded by a hot, humid and crowded city outweighs the attraction of novelty. I prefer the shady comforts of an outdoor lunch in an Auverne village and to walk in solitude over the fields of Wales.

Best thing you ate or drank lately?

Having been raised on a pig farm I grew up with a great fondness for pigs. They are the most intelligent of animals and generally diligent, clean and respectful folk. If only pigs could learn to grow soft coats, to remain the size of piglets and above all to procure padded feet rather than pointed trotters, I am sure we should never have started to eat them.

Indeed, for many years in fact I didn’t, cringing at the conditions in which these wonderful animals were raised. Then came the movement for outdoor-reared, organic pork and I confess I have succumbed. Last night I feasted on organic pork sausages, bought in the farmers’ market, and made with prime meat flavoured with chives. With them went a most unusual and flavoursome country wine from the deep south of France, which some kind guest must have left as a calling card. Mas des Deux Frères it called itself.

Last thing you bought?

From a charity shop Monmouth: a book about how to tour vineyards.

Flower of the moment?

I would say nasturtium, for which I have a likeness almost as fond as for organic pork sausages, but, of course, they are still at the toddler stage - bravely shoving a couple of leaves above the bare earth in promise of all those vermilion trumpets to come. So I better say geranium, my next favourite flower, particularly when scarlet. I bought some a week ago in town. Already they are in full bloom.

They have a particular resonance for I remember, aged about 4, being taken by my father to paint a picture of a nearby house outside which scarlet geraniums were blossoming. My painted geraniums looked almost like the real thing, I thought. At least from a distance.

Favourite ever film?

I hate such questions. In fact I hate choosing in general. There is so much to enjoy. Besides films you enjoy at one time, you may not enjoy on another. Some have repeated watchability - Casablanca, for instance - but I have never been as thrilled by that film as by watching Jungle Book, with its elephants, rubies, tigers at the age of 7. Or so moved as by the dreamy romanticism of ‘Un Homme et Une Femme’ or Dr Zhivago, which I first watched in a cinema in Hannover, snuggled up in the darkness. Or even Lawrence of Arabia, which triggered a lifetime of admiration for Peter O’Toole and a general infatuation with camels.


Care to share some wisdom?

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever had - though I have to confess it is not always easy to apply - is to find yourself good professionals to assist you on your voyage through the high seas of life. Good doctors, good dentists, good solicitors, good accountants, good architects and so forth. Sadly, most professionals are not good. Too many are in the profession for the money, or for a career, instead of being dedicated to their client and most, in my experience, are simply not half as competent as they think they are, at least in the sense of having the common sense to see the big picture and to understand your agenda rather than what they assume automatically would be good for you.

If you were a god/goddess who would you be?

As at least part of my life is in communications I had better say Mercury; besides, I’ve always fancied those winged anklet thingies. For the greater part of my life I have laboured under the delusion that if one only concentrated one could step of the bottom of a stair and remain floating. I guess Mercury would have been able to do that with a little flutter of his heels. Unfortunate, though, if he ever got cramp.

If I were allowed a second shot, however, I would say Cybele, who appeals to my dual nature. She was one of the minor goddesses. Even so she was the mother of King Midas, and as a young and extravagant woman had the panache to drive a chariot pulled by lions. On a Turkish holiday her chariot harness broke. It was fixed by a farmer named Gordius, who had a sideline in untiable knots. In recognition of this the ever extravagant Cybele made Gordius a King (or maybe it was Prime Minister) and in another extravagant gesture liberated northern Turkey to give him something to rule over. She called the land Phyrigia: no doubt because it was very hot.

Being a timid and retiring soul, I have rather fancied Cybele’s extravagant streak and the ability to create Kings and liberate lands on the scale of an American President. And to bear a son with the incidental ability to turn things into gold, would, I have to say, come in most handy when faced with the ugly coincidence of paying the VAT bill and needing a new boiler.


Rules of the meme.

Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag 8 people. OK, I’ll tag the following (though if it’s a pain or a chore, just smile sweetly - or curse me roundly - and move on…)

Westerwitch
Happy Snaper
Faith
ElisabethM
Little Brown Dog
Un Peu Loufoque
Jackofall
Pondside
Lampworkbeader

Apologies if you have been tagged already!

EASTER, ELY AND FREUD

I had a call from Elder Daughter during the week asking whether it was I or Younger Daughter who had mischievously hidden Easter eggs in her tubs of growing potatoes.

Well, both of us had been concerned that her Easter egg hunt had turned out to be less of a chase than we expected, even allowing for the impediment of glasses of champagne consumed beforehand in the spring sunshine of her Frome garden. Not so much a hunt as a harvest we thought: well, we should give her something to hunt for and discover in a quiet moment long after the shock troops of the Easter family get-together had departed.

Her garden lies on the side of a hill and when she came to the house, three years ago, it consisted of a simple strip of unpromising lawn surrounded by brooding and sentinel-like conifers. Now the garden is transformed, the trees are gone, flowers blossom from every corner and the expanse of grass is broken up with flower and vegetable beds. Not a corner is wasted.

The hillside descends, increasingly steeply, to the river Frome - on which, so I learned this week from Radio 4 - is being mounted the biggest exercise in counting and tagging young salmon ever undertaken. Fewer and fewer salmon are returning to the fold and the scientists want to know why.

Quite how it will help to count and tag the fish I don’t know; that wasn’t fully explained. My grandfather, who fished keenly for salmon all his life, maintained that the salmon’s decline was consequent on the Danes discovering rich marine feeding grounds somewhere off Greenland: a sort of superior restaurant quarter and conference centre for salmon from all over Europe. Once discovered, at the end of the 1960s, the Danes just scooped the fish out of the water by the ton. Presumably they still do.

Once this Frome hillside was covered in artisan terraces that dated from Georgian days. They became bigger, and the houses more substantial, the higher you climbed up the valley. This was the parish of Trinity presided over by a grand church at the top. You can still see a few remnants of these terraces today, now beautifully gentrified with large cottage gardens hidden away in a maze of leafy lanes. Sadly, four fifths of the parish was swept away, like the salmon, at the end of the sixties when bulldozing became as popular as the miniskirt.

The change from one townscape to the other is abrupt and horrid. One moment you are surrounded by leaves, by gentle stone work, by pleasing curves, by buildings, which however humble, fit the Georgian ideal of proportion. The next you are precipitated into a barren world of inelegant modern houses, themselves crumbling now after only forty years, the tangled lanes replaced by wide paving, the grand trees swept away and the whole shebang a weight on the soul.

Visual elegance ought to be so easy to achieve. It ought to cost no more to build a modern house to Georgian proportions, or terraces with a frontage and set on a gentle curve. And yet we don’t. And, what is more, no one can tell me why. Unless it be that these days the supreme qualification to be an architect or town planner must be to have a visceral hatred of the visual beauty of the past. We condemn the fascists for burning books while rewarding those who bulldoze our architectural heritage with knighthoods.

Oh dear, what a sombre piece this is turning out to be. Let me enliven it by mentioning Sir Clement Freud, who sadly, has been called to give entertainment somewhere known more for its harps and song than for anarchic comedic brilliance and cooking.

I did have the good fortune to meet him once, although I cannot for now recall either what the meeting was about or why I should have been present. I can only assume that it must have been something to do with politics, he being at the time the Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely. Perhaps it was a by-election, maybe even the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985 in which I had some minor involvement. We were in the same party after all - or at least on the same side.

I have no recollection whatsoever of what was done or said. Clement was supposed to be chairing the meeting and I seemed to remember he arrived late with little idea of what was supposed to be happening, which problem he resolved by appearing larger than life and delivering a succession of funny anecdotes.

None of which took us very far as regards the serious business of winning the election (although win it we did despite all predictions to the contrary). Being something of a Young Turk in those days I remember feeling rather let down by this most unserious of politicians and concluding that if he had won the Isle of Ely constituency on a electoral whim, he would lose it in the same manner. Which sadly he did in 1987

If I had had the good fortune to win the Isle of Ely I should have made a desperate attempt to hold on to it if only for the magnificence of Ely Cathedral with its great octagonal lantern. I should have sought permission to hold constituency surgeries underneath it. A better use anyway than that of Oliver Cromwell who stabled his horses there in the Civil War.

How the lantern and the Cathedral itself remains standing on such insubstantial fenland ground is indeed a miracle. For sheer architectural glory it must remain the finest in England.

Ah, I see we have reverted again to buildings. Time to stop, I think, and plant out the scarlet geraniums that I have just bought in town. God gives us flowers and trees, I sometimes think, to disguise the visual ugliness of our present day constructions and to enhance still further the skill of those unsung architects of long ago who were determined to weave beauty from a warp of bricks and stones.

The Photograph of Ely Cathedral is from the official Cathedral Website

IN WHICH I RESCUE A POT PLANT

The other day we were discussing how the recession was affecting businesses. Our own little label business, now nearing its year end, looks as if it will come in about on budget, which is to say slightly down on the year before. But then labels are a declining industry.

Label firms seem to be dropping like flies and catalogues of their redundant equipment, for sale at knock down prices, drop through the letterbox with increasing regularity. Why we no longer need labels when ‘labelling’ seems to be the new found craze of government is another one of life’s impenetrable mysteries.

For us, therefore, managing the decline, is what it is all about. We don’t mind declining slowly. It’s sudden jolts we worry about. A bit like ageing really. We are, though, at the small and simple end of the market, contracting out anything difficult or complex. Operating from home we don’t carry the heavy overheads that are what seem to push so many businesses to the wall. Those and finance costs, of course. So it looks like we shall be battling on into another year.

But sadly, not all businesses will fare so well. In the town one or two have already gone under, including our most handy - and therefore useful - Garden Centre, just off the High Street, and nestling beside the river and its willows. In normal times this would have been full over the Easter weekend with eager gardeners looking to fill their hanging baskets and herbaceous borders.

A couple of months ago the Centre closed suddenly and unexpectedly. No one knew why exactly for it had always seemed a thriving business. There is talk that the landlord may have wanted more money for the lease, or maybe wanted the land for ‘development.’ But who knows what to believe? Maybe competing with the B and Q’s of this world for an industrial supply of petunias and nasturtiums is a mug’s game.

Anyway, the fact remains that this thriving and bustling hub of town activity, where you would meet neighbours between the Vietnamese ceramics or over the rails of clematis, where you would rush down on a Sunday afternoon to buy an extra trellis or set of bamboo canes, has gone the way of all things mortal. Now it is just a sad and empty yard, full of decaying pallets, litter and collapsing sheds. All the plants have gone, the stock of fertilisers and watering cans, likewise. It all looks very woebegone.

Wandering home a couple of evenings ago, on my way back from my daily trip to the Post Office to despatch parcels of labels, something made me divert along the path that runs past the old place. Past the little gate which fiercely said ‘No Entry’ - you were supposed to go in via the shop part which has now been leased to the Antiques Centre - which was not barred but in fact wide open. So I went in and had one of those idle moments of wandering around vacantly trying to remember all I had bought there in happier times.

Yes, here was where they kept the trees, here the climbers, here the water plants and those pond liners, here the stand of rubbishy rhubarb. Not a long wander: I was half-conscious that some uniformed (or even non-uniformed) jobsworth might turn up to enquire what I thought I was doing and automatically suspect that as I was clutching my now empty parcel bag, I must be someone clearly up to no good.

So driven by a mounting feeling of illicitness growing vaguely in my nether regions, I turned around to wander out again. I suppose I had been looking for some souvenir, something to remember the place by. Two months ago perhaps, had I been alert, there might have been any number of discarded bargains to be had; but today all that remained were plastic pots, polythene and broken pallets. Or so it seemed. For then I saw something - a pot with something still in it - lying on its side in a heap of rubbish that had been swept into a corner. Whatever the something was it looked pretty dead.

It still had its label: Pennisetum, it said, with instructions in half a dozen languages; dwarf tufted grass producing pretty colourful (well, whitish) tufts of something or other in the summer. Would it ever do so again, I wondered? For the whole thing looked pretty dead. As if the pot had lain on its side all winter and the plant had shrivelled from drought. Just dead grass, wasn’t it?

Nevertheless I thought I detected a small green shoot - a patch of greenness anyway - so I scooped it up and brought it home. Ever since, at a young age, I learned the parable of the lost sheep, things rescued have always had a particular place in my affections. Into the parcel bag it went and home it came.

It was pot bound, of course, and looked way past its sell by date: a dense thicket of straws in a small pot. But I have since re-potted it and may even plant it out on the lawn. It may be my imagination but I think it’s looking happier.