MAGIC WAND

Here's a little story I wrote for a competition in the autumn. Needless to say it didn't win. So my loss is your gain as it were. Excuse the stories at the moment, real life just seems rather tedious and devoid of that facetious veneer that makes for interesting reading. Hope you like the story more.Happy New Year.

If you looked at Mary Holloway you would never think she was a witch. She seemed like a perfectly normal old lady. Her hair was grey, her face wrinkled - but she had kind blue eyes that twinkled and she always wore a pink cardigan and walked slowly with a long black walking stick with a carved handle in the shape of an otter. Ever since she had come to live in Middleton she had looked like this. She had always been helpful at the Harvest Festival and in baking cakes for the stall at the Women's Institute Market on Fridays. Everyone liked her.

She lived by herself in a little terraced house in the centre of town. True, no-one knew where she had come from, or who her family were; but she had lived so long in Middleton that nobody bothered to ask such questions any longer. True, also, that she had a black cat, but there must have been a hundred black cats in Middleton. She called it Fred, which wasn’t really the sort of name you might give to a witch’s cat, either. So, all in all, no-one suspected that she was a witch. But she was......

As the years went by Mary, sadly, grew frailer and frailer. She started to forget things. She could no longer remember who people were. She forgot their names. She would go shopping and forget what she had come out for. She would even forget whether she had had breakfast that morning.
Sometimes her friendly neighbour, Mrs Baker, would find her eating a second or even a third breakfast, for once Mary had eaten and then washed up and cleared away the things she couldn’t remember whether she had eaten or not.

Then one day Mary went shopping and Mrs Baker noticed, when she called around later that day, that she hadn’t returned home. She’d gone out in the morning and by tea-time there still wasn’t any sign of her. Mrs Baker began to be worried. “I’m going to call the police,” she said.

The police station agreed to send out a panda car to look for Mary Holloway. They looked in the shopping centre and they looked at the railway station and they looked on the buses and they asked lots of people. But they couldn’t find her and no-one remembered seeing her. Still they didn’t give up but went on looking.

At last they found her on a bench in the park, huddled in her pink cardigan. Mary was sitting with her head in her hands and she was crying. She’d been crying for quite some time. She had forgotten where she lived!

Well, after that, Mrs Baker had a quiet word with a Nice Woman that she knew who worked for the Council; the doctor was involved as well and he consulted a psychiatrist who came and asked Mary all sorts of difficult questions. At the end they all decided that it would be best if Mary left her little terraced house and moved somewhere called a ‘Home,’ where there would be friendly people to look after her and make sure that whenever she forgot something there would be someone close by to help.

Mary wasn’t quite sure whether she liked the sound of leaving her house.

There was only one problem: she wouldn’t be able to take Fred with her. Cats weren’t allowed in Homes, they said. And that’s when the trouble started.

“We’ll take Fred and find a lovely new home for him,” said the Nice Woman from the Council. “A new family will take care of him, feed him and look after him.”

But Mary would have none of it. She felt frightened at the thought of losing Fred (who had always looked after her even though he was only a cat), and because she was frightened and angry she started to wave her walking stick about her head. She also said some very bad things to the Nice Woman from the Council and used words which I’m afraid I can’t repeat in this story, words that nobody had ever heard her use before. The Nice Woman was shocked and felt very sad at this because she was really only trying to do her best for Mary and, of course, for Fred too. Mary might forget to feed him.

Then still waving her walking stick with the carved otter handle Mary began to shout strange things that the Nice Woman couldn’t understand and called to Fred who came up very close to Mary and wrapped himself around her frail old legs and then, all of a sudden, there was a big flash and a great puff of dirty smoke filled the room.

When it cleared, which took quite a few minutes, Mary saw that the Nice Woman from the Council had completely disappeared.

All she could see was the briefcase which the Nice Woman had carried (full of lots of papers and reports from the doctors) and the Nice Woman’s coat hanging over the back of her chair.

But where was the Nice Woman? Mary peered at the chair through her spectacles. Fred had also taken a sudden interest, too. For, on the chair, where the Nice Woman had been sitting a moment ago, Fred could now see a little dormouse.

“Oh dear!” said Mary.

Fred was about to spring on to the chair and if Mary hadn’t acted swiftly I think Fred would have caught the dormouse in his claws and eaten her all up and however then would Mary explain the situation to the doctor and the psychiatrist?

And not only the doctors! She imagined the whole Council, the Mayor and the Aldermen and all the Councillors in their robes and chains of office knocking on her door and demanding their Nice Woman back again. What was she to do?

The dormouse seemed quite tame, though it was chattering furiously and stamping its tiny feet as though it were quite vexed. Mary picked it up and put it in an empty shoebox for protection. Then she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea and, in-between sips, she pondered her dilemma.

You see among the many things that Mary had forgotten was that she was a witch. True, she had only been a white witch: she had only done good; she’d been a kind of fairy godmother if you like. In her younger days she had woven all sorts of spells to help people in difficulties and especially to help children. She had never in her whole life done anything bad and certainly she had never turned anyone into a dormouse before.

That was the blackest of black magic and she knew that black magic was very, very wrong.

But sometimes when people get old not only do they forget things but they become changed and especially they become cross in a way in which they never would have dreamed of doing before. They forget the person they are; they forget their good manners, they forget even to be polite and kind. Not all the time, but just some of the time. When they are tired, for instance, or stressed or angry.

And this is what had happened to Mary. She had quite forgotten that she was not supposed to be a witch anymore, even a good witch. She had quite forgotten that she had handed in her pointed hat and her broomstick when she first came to Middleton thirty years ago. Since then she hadn’t cast a single spell.

But now, with all this upset and the doctors and the Nice Woman telling her she would have to leave her lovely home and that she wouldn’t see Mrs Baker anymore either and, above all, that Fred would have to go to some strange family, all of this had made her so angry, so angry, that she had forgotten she was not supposed to be a witch anymore. In her agitation she had whirled her walking stick about, quite overlooking how easy it is for sticks to become magic wands.

So suddenly there was no Nice Woman from the Council, but only a puff of smoke and a dormouse.

“Oh dear!” she thought. “That’s what comes of forgetting. Oh dearie me! Whatever can I do?”

Now spells can be reversed, but Mary had quite forgotten how to reverse spells. Nor did she have a single book on witchcraft to consult. And of course reversing spells is not something you can look up on the internet, even if you have a computer, which Mary sadly didn’t.

She began to cry into her cup of tea.

Fred tried to comfort her. He miaowed and he purred and he brushed his soft fur against her legs. And then she remembered that she hadn’t fed him!

That made her think of something else. Something was now coming back to her. What was it? Something about feeding the witch’s cat. Two lumps can transform a spell provided it is done quickly - yes, she remembered, it was something like that that.

Yes, but two lumps of what? Not sugar, surely? Cats didn’t like sugar. Two lumps - what did the memory mean by two lumps? Could it be two lumps of anything? Maybe.

She found the tin of cat food and carefully spooned out two distinct lumps of meat into Fred’s dish. She put the dish down and waited expectantly.

Fred circled the dish (as if the lumps of cat food were actually two dormice!) and he miaowed strangely and hissed. And then he pounced upon the food and began to gobble it all up!

And at that very moment, there came a cry from the sitting room; it was the voice of the Nice Woman from the Council.

“I must have fainted,” she said. “I came over all funny. I’m so, so sorry. Please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, would you have such a thing as a cup of tea?”

Mary went back into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Fred had disappeared. “I wonder where he went,” she thought.

But just then came a knock at the door and it was Mrs Baker from next door. She was holding Fred in her arms and she’d come to give Mary some good news. So Mary made her a cup of tea as well.

When they were all sat down again Mrs Baker addressed herself to the Nice Woman from the Council. She said she had heard that they were proposing to put Mary into a Home for the elderly and how she would have to be parted from Fred.

Well, she and her husband, Mr Baker, had decided that it would be a better idea altogether if Mary moved next door to live with them and then Fred could come too and they could look after both of them and make sure that Mary didn’t forget anything anymore. And they’d make especially sure, she said, that Mary didn’t cook herself two breakfasts because she had forgotten that she’d already eaten the first one.

The Nice Woman from the Council listened carefully. And then she said that would be a Very Good Idea. Mary thought so too and thanked Mrs Baker and so everyone was happy.

And as for the spell and turning the Nice Woman into a dormouse, well, that will just have to be our secret, won’t it? Because Mary Holloway has quite forgotten that it ever occurred.

And no-one else ever knew, did they?

Picture which shows sections of a brain with Alzheimers and a healthy brain is courtesy of Wikipedia. If you like the story you might send a bob or two to the Alzheimers Society who one day might know the answer to what rots our brains like this.

HOW THE TUDORS CAME TO WALES

Someone posted some cruel pictures the other day of icicles hanging by a Northumbrian wall, just waiting to fall. Like vertical and down-pointing javelins. But they also seemed to look like the bars to a prison. Which triggered a sketch for a story.



"She was locked away for 1000 years by the ice queen, imprisoned in a cage made of icicles. There she waited for a handsome prince to breathe fire over the ice, to free her and melt her heart"

But if a prince wasn't up to it she'd be happy to settle for a dragon, which is what she did. A passing dragon, on a trade mission from Wales, spotted her entwined in her icicles and blew her a fiery kiss. The icicles melted and the princess was free at last.

But the ice queen was enraged at being tricked by the dragon. She summoned the prince (whose name was George) and told him to slay the dragon and she would make him patron saint of all England and give him a flag as well.

George, was flattered by this and accordingly gave battle; the dragon was sad at the prospect for he didn't like fighting that much; so was the princess, because she was becoming quite fond of the dragon and looking forward to living in Carmarthen where the dragon had a home. He told the princess that it had two doors and that if she came home and married him she would be a two door princess too and her sons would be two door princes and famous and would build lots of buildings with dragons on them to remind people how important dragons were.

But George had a long, sharp and pointy lance. And a horse. He pierced the dragon with his lance so his fiery breath came out of his side and not his mouth. The wound was very painful and so the dragon had to give up and crawl sadly away. George whisked the princess away and promised to marry her the next day. "This is worse than being in the ice castle" thought the princess and told George he really should at least take a shower.

That night it was very cold and snow tumbled out of the sky. The princess shivered. She was even colder than she'd been in the ice castle. Especially as her heart was frozen. And her bed had a lump in it.

The next day dawned. Sadly, she looked out of the window. Suddenly her heart leapt! For there in the sky she could see three dragons breathing fire, their wings beating and causing a great wind. The princess could feel the thaw when the dragons' fire swept over them and then everything froze once more. George rushed out of the Palace (it had lots of doors) and jumped on his horse. He grabbed his lance but in his hurry he had forgotten his helmet. In the Palace the princess could see that a long icicle had grown beneath her window. Now she hacked at it with a poker. She heard it crack and the icicle fell like an arrow. It fell and fell and went straight into the top of George's head. "I think he's dead!" said someone.

Hurrah! shouted the dragons. Hurrah! went the princess. One of the dragons came close to her window. She climbed on its back and they flew away over the border to Wales ('where there are no icicles,' said the dragon, 'and all the houses have two doors'.

And so they went in through one of them and lived happily ever after."

DRAGONS IN THE DARK

There’s a lot of hanging about in plays. Waiting to come on, as it were. You wait to exit the real world and enter the world of make-believe. From 74 to 47 and back again. Actually I’m not 74, as anyone paying attention would know, but nor am I 47 either. I just look like that.

So the question arises what do you do? While you are waiting. In the dark. You sit there in the wings or in the bar. You can’t talk for fear of disturbing the actors on stage. And reading is difficult (even if the lights weren't out!) because you are so full of adrenalin that it is coming out of your ears. Someone might run you through with a sword and you wouldn’t notice. I guess it must be like that in a battle. There you are fighting away and suddenly you notice that there seems to be a lot of blood around and then you fancy a sit down and before you know it you are dead.

I suppose it’s the same if you're eaten by wild animals. I doubt if you’d actually feel very much. I used to have a dream as a child in which I was lost in the jungle and a tiger appeared just as I had sat down to eat my sandwiches. Now, I knew that I could run, was a very good runner in fact, but the problem was I had inconveniently forgotten how. Which leg goes first? What? You take both legs off the ground at the same time? Without falling over?

This dream used to terrify me. The only comforting thing was that the tiger seemed to have forgetten how to run too. And so it just hung there in mid spring, as it were, terrifying the living daylights out of paralysed me until I woke up. Which I always did, covered in sweat.

One day I said to myself that, as an experiment, I wouldn’t try to run but would let the tiger catch me to see what it felt like. But the tiger then just refused to play and I had another dream instead. Perhaps I was older because this one involved stealing cars.

One moment I would be admiring a car and the next I would be driving it down the road. Or rather, since I was too young to drive, being in the uncomfortable position of sitting in the driving seat of a moving car of uncertain provenance with legs too short to reach the pedals and about to crash and of course the certainty of being arrested by policemen all with loud shoutey voices and truncheons. But of course I woke up. First.

You think of these things, waiting to go on. In the darkness. Reaching back into the memory I remembered last week I had blogged about a donkey called Pegasus, the original winged horse. Now winged horses are one of only two families of land animals with six limbs - if you don’t count insects, or spiders, or any arthropod come to that. Winged horses are beautiful but apart from Disney films there’s not much evidence that they existed at all. I have a suspicion that someone with imagination may have been telling fibs. It’s the feathers and hair on the same beast that give the game away.

So if there aren’t any winged horses that just leaves dragons, for which evidence is plentiful. In fact it seems as though the six limbed dragon (four legs, two wings) only died out in recent times. Still, owing to the beast's ability to bury itself in the ground and hibernate for excessively long periods you never know, one may yet come to light yet.

Most of what we know about dragons comes from the discovery of the remains of a whole family of dragons in a collapsed limestone cave at Llancofi in Carmarthenshire in 1882. Perfectly preserved and mummified. Examination of the stomach contents showed the beasts to be entirely vegetarian, contrary to popular suspicion that they would go a long way for a succulent morsel of young damsel. No, entirely vegetarian was your dragon but their digestive system was primitive and they produced a lot of methane (or so the researchers concluded) which the animal then belched out of its mouth.

So it seems likely that this is the origin of the fire-breathing legend, particularly as the dragons’ teeth were not made of calcium orthophosphate like those of other animals but of the iron compound, haematite. Such teeth were rather primitive but fast growing. They were also quite soft so dragons tended to get stones and grit stuck between their teeth. This was a noted feature of all the adult dragons found in the Llancofi cave.

Now if a dragon bit on a stone, the haematite would spark. If at the same time the dragon were belching methane, it would ignite. The researchers at Llancofi found distinctive scorch marks and thickening of the skin on the older dragons' noses.

As a defence mechanism this flame throwing ability would have been matchless and probably accounts for the dragon surviving so long down the evolutionary tree.

Interestingly the young dragons did not appear to have this fire-breathing capability. There was no evidence of scorching on their noses. The young unusually were also covered in hair as opposed to the scales of the older beasts. Their wings were larger in proportion and so they would have been able to fly, unlike the older dragons which, being heavier and covered with thick scales could probably not have got off the ground. The researchers concluded that this change from hair to scales and the almost complete loss of aerial ability occurred around the age of 40.

The most likely reason for the dragons’ eventual demise would have been its great destructive power, particularly in dry weather when it must accidentally have set ablaze whole fields of carefully cultivated crops. So almost certainly the beasts were hunted to extinction by man to protect their livelihoods.

The remains at Llancofi were dated to approximately 600 AD. They would therefore have been some of the last dragons to have lived in this remote corner of Wales.

I’d tell you more about dragons and what they found at Llancofi but I am already hearing my cue lines and so I’d better go on. If you have been, thanks for sharing this wait in the darkness.


Picture shows a sculpture of a dragon based on the remains of a larger dragon found at Llancofi. Note the relatively small size and scaly wings which in older dragons were useless for flight.

PEGASUS

It was mention of the dog-cart that attracted Edward. The idea of big wheels bouncing over the rutted lanes, the sun on his back and some docile equine trotting silkily along in front.

I suppose he had been reading too many Victoria novels, though he himself was in no sense Victorian. Rather the reverse. His profession of architect drove him to design buildings that would come to define the age and he tried to look to the future. Perhaps that was why he hankered so much to live in the past.

This year he had persuaded Sarah to rent an isolated farmhouse somewhere in West Cork for their August holiday. The children would love it, he said. Far from the madding crowd. The beauties of Bantry Bay. Edward could see it now. Walking in fields filled with wildflowers, bounded by extravagant fuchsia hedges. Fly-fishing for trout in the nearby lake (he would take his expensive greenheart rod). Some hill climbing perhaps. Trips in the dog cart.

The advertisement even mentioned the docile equine by name - Pegasus - which reinforced Edward’s idea of flying along the lanes. The advertisement didn’t mention that Pegasus was a donkey.

Still, he trotted over attentively when Edward and Sarah finally arrived at their holiday farmhouse in the late afternoon. Inevitably it was raining - a thin misty rain that seemed to drench them more than a downpour.

They called his name and the children tried to stroke him, but Pegasus’ long white ears just twitched in the rain and he turned away with a little kick of his heels. Already Pegasus was losing some of his allure. Edward made a mental note to buy carrots.

The next day Edward found the dog cart in the barn together with the collar and harness. He had made specific enquiries from the owners of the farmhouse and had been assured that nothing could be simpler. That no skill at all was needed to harness Pegasus - a sweet and mild-tempered beast, the owner had insisted - to the cart. “Just slip the collar on him and you’ll see where the shafts go and the harness buckles. Sure, a child of six could do it and then you’ll be flying along the lanes and above the hedge tops and the whole family will have a whale of a time.” Edward noted the word ‘flying’.

It was, in truth, a pretty little cart of an uncertain age, painted blue with yellow trimmings. Nevertheless it appeared sound. The wheels had all their spokes and the leather seats were still filled with horsehair. All seemed sound and serviceable.You mounted, Edward noted, with an the aid of an iron step.

The children asked persistent questions about the harness and about steering and braking, questions that Edward felt quite inadequate to answer. He’d never really considered the braking question before. But managing a cart couldn’t be difficult. He’d give it a try. Be trotting around the farmyard by lunch-time and they could go for their first drive en famille in the afternoon.

“Best put the halter on,” the owner had said. Edward now advanced across the field, calling ‘Pegasus, in a confident, bright and optimistic tone.’ Obediently, the animal left its browsing preoccupations and came towards him. Ten feet away Pegasus halted and sniffed. Then he turned and hawed and with the same little kick of his heels ran off across the field.

“Sure he’ll come if you call him,” the owner had said. Nothing he likes better now than a good run with the cart. If you want you can offer him a carrot but that shouldn’t be necessary at all.”

Indeed, it was necessary. For the next three hours Edward and Pegasus, both of whom possessed similarly stubborn character traits, engaged in a battle of wills that involved not only carrots but all manner of other comestibles as well. Edward devised a way of hiding the halter behind his back; Pegasus a way of taking the offered inducement while keeping safely beyond Edward’s darting reach.

Finally the donkey’s yearning for sugar lumps outweighed his hatred of being shackled. He yielded to the halter to be led, a prisoner, to the blue and yellow cart. Now for the harness. Far from being something a child of six could understand, the tangled and random collection of leather straps and brass buckles, of loops and eyes that now needed to be deployed to attach the donkey to the shafts of the cart seemed impossible to fathom. With Sarah’s help, however, Edward fixed the collar and buckled the shafts in what he hoped, without much conviction, might approach the correct way. Pegasus, his eyes closed, gave every appearance of slumber.

At last the task was completed. Edward put his foot in the iron step and swung himself into the driving seat, holding the reins as though he were at the helm of a battleship. These he now shook, an action he had seen actors do in cowboy films when the stagecoach left town. Of course nothing happened.

He shook the reins again and shouted, but Pegasus took absolutely no notice at all. Defeated, he climbed down again, intending to lead the animal but Pegasus, sensing the cart now had no driver, deemed this a satisfactory moment to wake up.

With a tremendous spring the donkey leapt forward. Unfortunately, the cart didn’t. Instead, to the accompaniment of loud tearing as the harness ripped apart, the donkey cantered happily off leaving the forlorn cart behind. Various bits of harness remained attached to both parties.

“I’m not sure that the dog cart was a very good idea” said Sarah when they had finally managed to persuade Pegasus to surrender his half of the harness in exchange for an exorbitant ransom of sugar and carrots. “Goodness know how much it will cost to repair.”

And to make sure that Edward wouldn’t involve him in any more holiday plans, Pegasus wandered into the barn one night and ate his fishing rod.

This is a first attempt at a 'Friday Fiction' a 1000 word short story, written on a Friday.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

LONDON TIMES

I am fortunate that I have never been entirely desk bound. Even today I still have occasion to make the occasional foray to London or elsewhere and so it was this week. I’d been at a meeting in one of those elegant houses just off The Mall, where Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone lived in his hey day 150 years ago. He would cross St James Park on the brief walk to Downing Street and this week I found myself retracing his habitual steps only realising afterwards - when I saw his portrait - that this is what I had been doing.

It had been a good meeting as meetings go. Mostly they are tedious and boring and the only sensible work gets done anyway in what these days are called ‘the margins’ in private and informal conversations as you take your coffee or put on your coat to go home. So I was in buoyant mood descending the great steps to the Mall and crossing into St James Park which looked as fine as ever I had seen it, thronged with exotic vegetation and waterfowl.

Early in my career I used to work here - not in the Park, though I must have brought papers out, I suppose, now and again, and sat in the sun eating my lunch - but in the Old Admiralty Building that forms one side of Horseguards Parade.

Shortly after I arrived there new telephones were installed and I was delighted to find I had been given extension number 3. This caused endless amusement. I used to say that extension 1 was the Prime Minister (Edward Heath at the time); extension 2 was the Head of the Civil Service and extension 3 was the next most important person in the government.

Anyway important or not they let me park my car on occasions on Horseguards Parade and for several years after I had moved down to Wales whenever I drove up to town I would park on Horseguards and slip into the office where the girls would write out a permit for me. And then I could park all day in the middle of Central London without a penny to pay.

My mistake was not doing this sufficiently often. For one day they twigged that I no longer actually worked in the building. Security was of course becoming a lot tighter and the easy-come-easy-go days fast becoming a memory.

Today the whole of Horseguards Parade is cordoned off: protected by large steel bollards against, I suppose, lorries packed with explosives. How sad. Nevertheless the bollards are painted a tasteful dark green and outlined in gold and do look as though they belong.

As I didn’t have a car - I can’t remember the last time I ever drove into Central London - the bollards weren’t a problem, so I strolled across the Parade ground and through the archway past an extremely young looking trooper trying to remain motionless as a throng of tourists clicked and snapped in the semi-darkness.

He was dressed of course as for the battle of Waterloo. We have a fascination for that late Georgian period. The time of Pitt and Napoleon, of Talleyrand and Mad King George. The Queen lives in an eighteenth century palace, rides in an eighteenth century coach, escorted by eighteenth century soldiers to the accompaniment of eighteenth century music and along boulevards laid out in the eighteenth century. The French do much the same thing. Indeed swop the troops at the Elysée Palace for those at Horseguards and I doubt anyone would notice the difference.

In my day there were fewer tourists and (possibly the two are correlated) fewer pigeons. The visitors scrummed around the two mounted guards on their shining black horses. Above and behind the horses is the old Admiralty Boardroom with its famous table, a concave segment cut out to accommodate one particularly fat Sea Lord and across the way is Great Scotland Yard, once home to the Metropolitan Police, where the IRA exploded a car bomb in the early seventies. It always was a dingy backstreet and not the romantic sort of place portrayed in police thrillers. I am wondering whether the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris is equally forlorn.

With an hour to kill before leaving to catch my train I crossed Trafalgar Square, up past the statue of Edith Cavell, executed for treason in 1915 by the occupying German forces in Brussels, to the National Portrait Gallery.

I hadn’t been there for years and what a fascinating place it is. Here are Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen, Disraeli and Gladstone, Churchill and Queen Anne. Yet what struck me looking at the miscellany of faces was how the men were all recognisable. Take a modern man and stick him in an absurd wig and costume, let him pose for the artist and you will have an eighteenth century portrait. Not so the women. The women’s faces are bland, without character and mostly with charm. They are not so much real faces as an imagination of a face. Why?

Is it because most of the artists were men; or did women really carry that far away ‘lights-on-but-no-one-at-home look?’ A modern woman’s face would fit oddly on the shoulders of Queen Anne, say, or the Duchess of Devonshire, or even of Queen Elizabeth. And she was most certainly ‘at home’ even when the lights were off. Is this a general perception or is this just me? Compare Queen Anne with the photograph of Edith Cavell.


Main Picture is of Horseguards Parade.

THE OLD MONEY

I loved the old money and my weekly half-crown pocket money - a big heavy silver coin that almost seemed too perfect to spend. In those days some of the coins, and the florins and shillings had real silver in them and so they wore down and became quite smooth. It was comforting to see the different designs and to trace the kings and queens - Victoria, Edward, George, George again and then Elizabeth.

The money was very heavy of course and the poor conductors on the buses used to carry a weighty satchel full of 'coppers.' I used to take the bus from the station to get me to school and I would ask for 'a penny-halfpenny half' - in those days children used to get half-fare until the age of fourteen. The farthing (quarter penny) had gone by the time I started to spend money - as had the silver threepenny bit - but there were still plenty about. I remember in Glasgow offering two farthings for a half-penny when we were short of change to buy some potato scones, but the shop woman wouldn't accept them. They had ceased to be legal tender as had the silver threepennies some time before. So we had the 12 sided yellow coin with daisies on it, or later a portcullis, instead.

I lived near a railway and we loved putting these old coins on the line and letting the massive steam locomotives run over them so that they were flattened and rolled out like pastry. Pennies were all right but the railwaymen used to get very cross with us for trying to flatten threepenny bits. (I don't know why they were called 'bits,' nothing else was - except, I suppose, in America where they talked about cheap things as being 'two-bit;' but I never knew what that meant either) Apparently threepenny bits damaged the locomotive's 'tyres.' Now I didn't know that a locomotive had tyres but I suppose it is logical. They must wear and if you didn't take the outside of the wheel off occasionally and replace it with a new one then the engine would be running on the spokes of its wheels. Or so anyway I reasoned. So we didn't put threepenny bits on the line and we were too poor to afford to waste silver coins in this way.

Bank notes were far bigger than they are today. They really were bank notes then and you felt proud to own one. A pound note was the size of a business envelope and the five pound note the size of a small flag. Neither carried the Queen's head (or even the King's head when the King was alive. He smoked heavily and died of cancer but it didn't stop me or anyone else smoking when I was young. Even my great aunt smoked occasionally, insisting on a cigarette called 'Passing Clouds' - made by Wills, I think, like the Woodbines, whereas my step-mother, who didn't like smoking but did so to be fashionable, smoked du Maurier after the novelist, but only at parties. My father smoked cheroots, but not very often. My aunt made me buy him a packet every Christmas. They sounded very sophisticated. But I didn't smoke any of these when I grew up. I think they had gone out of fashion by then, like the money).

You could buy a great many cheroots for £5 in those days but the Bank of England dispensed with the old £5 note because it was so easy to forge, even with all its lovely black swirly writing which made it look more like a letter or contract than a banknote. Something big, blue and square with a picture of Britannia took its place. And the £1 note was similar but in green and then there was a ten shilling note (that was half a pound) in a reddish-brown sort of colour. The notes became smaller as the money lost its value and the design changed. That's when they put the Queen's head on it - as if that might stop the money losing its value. Then the notes disappeared altogether. First the ten shillings and then the pound and today's five pound note will disappear very soon as well I imagine.

Money has lost a lot of value. When I first went to France more than 50 years ago you could get 14 francs to the pound. That would be more than 2 euros. You could get 10 deutsche marks to the pound - that would be about 5 euros and you could get 2 dollars and 80 cents if you wanted American money. I know this figure because it was fixed. Fixed that is until the pound was devalued and the figure became 2 dollars 40 cents.

I still have a collection of the old money and some of the old notes and I suppose everyone thinks wistfully of the pounds shillings and pence that we used to think so logical and which so bemused visitors from overseas. We had a lot of visitors when I was young and I felt so sad for them when a shopkeeper would demand 'three and sevenpence ha'penny' They hadn't a clue what this meant and would just hand over a note or a purse full of change and invite the shopkeeper to take whatever she wanted. So in some ways things have improved. Though the money isn't what it used to be. In any way at all.

NONE NICER THAN NUNNEY

We had gone to stay with Elder Daughter whose husband had taken himself off to the London Film Festival as he does every year, he being a bit of a film buff. So the rest of the family moved in. Like mice. There was then a question about what we might do.

To tell the truth I didn't feel much like doing anything for I was ill, feeling really off colour and with little appetite. The dreaded stomach lurgi doing the rounds had stopped at my door. Still, one must battle on. Fly the flag, especially when there are those around whose health is far less robust, even if at the time I did wonder whether my own ailment might be the beginning of some mortal malady, you know the type of thing at which the black frock-coated gentlemen shake their heads and advise against the commencement of long books. Having just read Phillippa Gregory's 'The White Queen' I recognised my symptoms as just the ones that carried off King Edward IV, and he considerably younger than me, too.

Well, I thought, as I lay half awake a little before six in the morning that being the hour my grandson Theo deems appropriate for life to commence, I may just have time to finish the biography of Talleyrand that I am reading. He and I will then succumb - for the biography ends as most biographies do with his death - he and I will succumb together, but I shall never get round to reading 'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain, which I had bought at the Cowbridge Bookshop when I had gone in to ask whether they might take some copies of Chris's 'Turning the Tide.' I had wanted to buy this book anyway so it wasn't a special purchase and it was the same price as Amazon and no delivery charges and a good conversation with the bookseller thrown in. So why do we insist on buying from Amazon? That is one of life's little imponderables, I thought.

Still even when one is ill and on the point of thinking about putting one's affairs in order, Elder Daughter still wants to know where to go. She's not going to have us hanging about the house all day; we need to mount an expedition. "We'll go to the Castle," I say, thinking this a fool-proof option, only to be told that Frome - the pleasant little market town in jolly Somerset where she lives - doesn't run to a castle.
"Why not?" I asked. "Everywhere else has a castle. There must be a castle if you look hard enough." But there wasn't - or isn't.

So eventually we settled for Nunney castle - a mile or two down the road and as charming a little castle as you might ever hope to find this side of the English Channel. I say this side of the English Channel because Nunney Castle is French. It is as though it has been dug up and transplanted like London Bridge from the sunny folds of the Loire valley to this quaintly named chocolate box village in Somersetshire.


It is a small castle - almost a miniature or Doll's House (Doll's Castle?) castle. Just four pepperpot towers which once carried conical roofs. And with a beautiful regular square moat around it in which to view the shimmering reflection of its stones. One could easily fall in love with such a place and indeed many who lived there can't have done anything else. For it looks not really like a military castle at all, but a gentle-little-fairy-tale-Rapunzel-holding-princess-and-the-pea-sleeping-family-residence-of-a-minor-Baron-probably-called-Ludwig castle.

You can hear harps in the building and if you're really quiet, the fish calling to each other in the moat as you gaze on the far hills from those broad picture windows and imagine children and young folk chasing each other up and down the staircases and hiding behind turrets and shooting arrows at the villagers' pumpkins.


Nunney Castle was built in 1373 and would today be as good as new, but for Oliver Cromwell and his (sadly not at all merry) men who decided that the castle was altogether too blessed with sweetness and light and therefore that it was in need of a good ruination.

So he ruined it - pulling off the conical roofs - and turfing the young folk off the staircases and out into the country lanes. Then he bombarded the four towers with cannon - not altogether successfully for you can see where the cannonballs bounced off - before deciding it might be easier just to blow up the connecting walls with gunpowder. Which he did - gunpowder not being in short supply in 1646 - and, like Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.

Still, that didn't stop the castle being as charming and welcoming as a Dowager Duchess short of visitors. Cross the little wooden footbridge over the moat (surely jumpable if you were any sort of athlete) and you are welcomed into the central hall into which the sunlight is already streaming and where you can imagine yourself sitting down to dinner in Elizabethan robes with Gloriana herself, the Virgin Queen descending the great staircase and muttering about Spaniards.

Ah well, that was all a very long time ago.


I was still feeling ill when we left Nunney to go to Laycock, another bit of the Cotswolds that remains pickled in aspic and costume drama. There Elder Daughter bought me a lunch which sadly I couldn't eat but we sat first under a Eucalyptus and then under a strange tree like a magical walnut (except it wasn't a walnut). Some say it's a lilac but do lilacs - even Persian ones - bear nuts in green cases? A woman was selling apples at £1 a bag from a wheelbarrow in the street and put the money please through the letterbox. I ate an apple and immediately began to feel better.

I leave you with an image of little Theo literally (though on his elders' part quite unforgivably) dancing on the grave of some noble Laycock antecedent. Still, if the apple doesn't work, and I'm not here next week, I hereby give permission to infants under the age of two to dance on my grave to their hearts' content. There isn't much, after all, that one can do for the young when one is six feet under.

VENGEANCE OF THE WATER GODS

Before leaving the Mill I took a last wander down to the fairy pool where the river turns sharply north and flows deep under an overhanging and ivy-covered crag. It is where the silver salmon would lie, if there were salmon in the Célé, which perhaps there were once. It’s a magical place, where dappled sunlight shines and where the fairies congregate: the water nymphs and the tree nymphs, the elves and the pixies.

You’ll have to imagine it, I’m afraid, for to take its picture would steal some of the magic, but anyway this is the spot to which I always go to say goodbye. It had rained a deal in the night and the river was running high and coloured, swirling in foamy anger. In truth, had I a golden coin in my pocket I might have cast it into the pool and made a wish, for I was in one of those moods that afflict us all, I suppose, from time to time: reflecting mournfully on what remains to be done in life and the short time left to do it.

If I had made a wish it would have been to secure for myself that warm and instantly recognisable blend of charm, elegance and confidence that some of us have but most of us don’t. If charm, elegance and confidence come on a scale then, despite a lifetime of trying, I am way down at the bottom end. But I hadn’t a golden coin, or even a golden edged euro, and so had to content myself with throwing into the water some elderly and much crumpled receipt, the only thing left in my pocket.

But first I tore it into two halves, one about twice the size of the other and cast both wantonly into the water, where they hardly moved at all. I found that I had thrown them into slack water and began to feel silly. Yet, bit by bit, the current started to drag at them, first backwards towards the angle of the bend and then forwards into the flow. The smaller piece moved fastest, as if in a hurry, but then it was sucked under by a vortex. It surfaced a couple of times like a drowning man and then disappeared for good.

The larger piece seemed to take a more circumspect course and travelled far across the stream to within inches of the overhanging rocks. It, too, was sucked under from time to time but it came up again, no worse for wear and I watched it bobbing down the river, heading into the turbulent distance and the far off sea carrying my thoughts and dreams. Adieu, I muttered to myself, before turning to head towards the far off airport and my even farther off home.

Standing later in the security queue I remove bits of metal from about my person. It is a long queue so I have plenty of time to remove everything. You may think me unduly self-deprecating when I say I am at the bottom end of the charm, elegance and confidence scale. But you have only to watch a group of people at an airport who have been through security to know where on the scale they are placed.

You have, don’t you, a bag, hurriedly over-packed, from which you have removed your computer and your toiletries in their luminous yellow bag, taken off your jacket or coat together with your broad miscellany of jewellery, cards, keys, belts, phone, watch and the like. It's the same for everyone.

Then suddenly you are at the end of the line, in a confined space and a press of people, trying to assemble all this paraphernalia again into a semblance of tidiness. Elegant people can do this in a few seconds - deftly slipping this or that into a commodious handbag with an insouciance bordering on the miraculous.

I’m still fumbling five minutes later. Moreover, it seems my earlier prayers to the water gods to substitute my habitual maladroitness for a kind of effortless head girl competence have gone sadly unanswered.

Worse is to come. As I sit down with my book - The Glass Room, as you ask, lent to me kindly by Rosie and a most excellent read - I reach for my glasses. That’s when I find that in my confusion I have put my watch in the same pocket. The glasses hook on the strap and my watch sails out in an arc to burst into pieces on the marble floor of the departure lounge.

Perhaps it’s not that bad. The back has come off and the battery has sprung out, but I manage to reassemble the components. To my surprise the watch still works. Then the back springs off again. Something has warped.

Did I commit the crime of lèse-majesté by throwing a crumpled till receipt to the water gods? For now the heavens open and we have to struggle to the plane in a downpour. Then as we sit in the plane, wet, cribb’d and confin’d, with a loud party of ten year old school girls for company, comes the announcement that take-off is delayed for an hour an a half. Insult is piled on injury.

The next day, back at home, I fall out of the loft, landing painfully on my back and wondering, for a moment, whether I should ever walk again. Was this more water god vengeance? But of course one never knows, does one, whether it was really the displeased water gods tipping me out of the loft, or whether, having fallen through my own clumsiness, it was their little wings and flippers bearing me up that ensured I received no more than a painful bruise. Or, then again, it might have been my Guardian Angel, who has saved me from even worse fates before. Why don’t the gods leave calling cards? Or even till receipts?

And on that philosophical note I shall leave you to ponder.

Picture is ‘The Guardian Angel by Pietro Cortona 1656. Courtesy of Wikipedia. However, her wings look rather small. More like flippers don't you think?

A BUSY WEEK

We’ve been exceptional busy with the labels these last few days. It’s as though a dam has burst and the slow flow of orders over the summer has been replaced by a monsoon. My writing has had to go to the wall and we’ve been working from first thing in the morning to late evening. Part of the problem has been an order for 50,000 labels to be reeled into rolls of 1,000 from big jumbo rolls. We’ve been saying for ages that we need a rewinding machine but we can’t really justify the investment. Instead we do it all by hand down the long central corridor of the house. At least it’s exercise.

It didn’t help that I had to lose half a day attending the launch of the ‘Size of Wales’ project at the National Botanic Centre near Carmarthen. This initiative, sponsored by the Prince of Wales, is part of the ‘Start’ programme and has as its object for Wales to take responsibility for an area of rainforest in Africa the ‘size of Wales’. ‘Start’ is all about sustainability and embraces a variety of projects designed - as the Prince said - to end the stage of talking about climate change and to start doing something about it.

The launch event took place in the Great Glasshouse designed by Norman Foster, the largest single span glasshouse in Britain, well worth a visit, though as a location to launch anything it has its drawbacks. The cavernous space, populated with plants, simply soaks up sound, so it was hard to hear any of the speakers despite the microphones. Then there were the sparrows. Whole flocks of sparrows that had got into the glasshouse and bred, presumably feeding on visitors’ crumbs and plant seeds. They were completely tame, flying inches from my nose and would have fed from my hand, I judged. But like all sparrows they chattered incessantly, whenever a speaker tried to raise his voice in competition.

While we were waiting for HRH to speak (he decided to avoid the sparrows and speak outside), I rehearsed my pet hobby horse: the Government should simply install solar panels here, there and everywhere, I suggested, knowing the energy generated would in the long run more than pay for the investment and therefore help reduce the deficit. An affable gentleman responded that this was already being done; if not by the government then by companies like his. He gave me his card.

If my roof was suitable he said, he would rent it and install solar panels, give me free electricity, and sell the remainder to the government at 49p a unit - which is the regulated price. It’s so high because it is underpinned by the renewables levy we all pay on our electricity bills. 'Where’s the catch?' I asked. 'There’s no catch,' he said. Everyone wins. I am eagerly awaiting his call.

I’ve been dipping in to the extracts from Tony Blair’s memoirs in the papers. At one point he talks of using alcohol as a prop: a stiff whisky or a gin and tonic and a couple of glasses of wine in the evening. John Reid, the bluff Glaswegian former Home Secretary, commented sourly that where he came from you wouldn’t give that to a budgie! I’m not impartial myself to an occasional whisky so taking a leaf from Tony’s book I helped myself to a stiff one to see me through another batch of reeling.

Sadly every now and then the effect of whisky is to cause a delayed gastric spasm. I don’t really feel the effect of this until the next day when I wake up feeling as though I haven’t been to bed. My sleep does me no good whatsoever. It’s not the alcohol (for the quantity was really quite modest) but the reaction it sets off.

Anyhow, the result was that last night I slept like the proverbial log, so deeply in fact that I managed to trap my arm which, too, ‘went to sleep.’ I must have tried to turn over but the arm, being useless, couldn’t support me and I fell out of bed with a thump, banging my ear on the dressing table. I sat on the floor laughing at myself and thinking that it must be fifty years since I last managed to fall out of bed.

Still the label feast is more likely to be a blip than a sustained season and I’ll be able to get back again to writing. I’m trying to assemble some of my stories into a text with a view to putting something on the Completely Novel website. I’m learning how to edit, paragraph and typeset so that the text looks professional. What is remarkable is how different words can look when they are set in the correct font, spacing and width. They’re somehow much easier to read, the eye skims through them easily, like a dancer gliding across a polished floor. No wonder Winston Churchill insisted on having his work typeset in draft before making final corrections.

Photograph shows Mr Tom Jones OBE, Vice President Wales Council Voluntary Action, welcoming the participants.

LEEKS AND MORE LEEKS

A couple of years ago, when I was going through one of my periodic and futile attempts to lose weight, I came across a little book which appeared to offer hope. It was ‘French Women Don’t Get Fat’ by Mireille Guilano, sub-titled even more beguilingly, ‘The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.’

It is one of those lovely composite books, part memoir, part recipe book, part a philosophy of all things French. The author is head of the Veuve Cliquot Company’s New York operation. She has lived many years in the United States and the book is the result of trying to teach American women the French way of eating and staying slim.

Sadly for anyone hoping to lose weight there isn’t anything here that any reasonably intelligent person cannot guess for themselves. Losing weight, she says, is all about eating sensibly, cutting out those fattening foods, like bread, that one eats to excess and eating half measures - half a glass of wine, half a banana. For the pleasure is always in the first half of something, she suggests, rather than in the second. Apart from that, if you want to weigh ten stone then just eat like someone who weighs ten stone and not like someone who weighs 28 pounds more.

So in all the book there is only one dish to which someone like myself who believes in Fairy Godmothers can possibly cling in the hope of some alchemical transformation. Mireille Guilano even qualifies it with the preface ‘magic.’ It is Magical Leek Soup. And there is a diet that goes with it - a 48 hour diet - which, she implies, will kick-start your life-changing regime and bring all manner of wonderful benefits to boot.

Now I’ve had a nagging temptation to try this diet ever since I bought the book. It’s very simple. You buy a kilo of leeks; trim off most of the green bits; slice the leeks into mouth-sized bites; cover these with water; and boil them for 25 minutes. After this you drain off the water into a jug.

You do this on a Friday evening and for the next 48 hours whenever you feel hungry you eat some of your boiled leeks - hot or cold according to taste - which you are allowed to drizzle with olive oil and flavour with salt and black pepper. When you are thirsty you drink the water you have poured off, which now brims with leek goodness.

And you watch the weight fall of your body, the toxins evaporate from your skin, your hair become sleek and your fingernails glossy, your muscles toned and your wrinkles smoothed. True, she doesn’t actually promise these benefits in so many words, but if you qualify a dish with the word ‘magic’ then surely expecting a few of these benefits isn’t asking too much, is it?

Well, last weekend I tried this diet. And I stuck to it even though I had a sore throat and felt quite awful.

My energy simply evaporated. All I could do was lie on a sofa and read or watch television. Having no energy means not only that you can’t move, but that you can’t think either. So writing is out, decision-making ditto. I found myself on the Saturday evening watching two back to back episodes of ‘Poirot’* (most appropriate I thought) and then half an episode of ‘Taggart.’

I ached on the inside. I’ve never had chemotherapy but, from the descriptions, the effects of 48 hours of leeks seem well on the way towards an approximation.

You wouldn’t believe what I would have given for a cup of tea, or how awful a tepid plate of leeks, even drizzled with oil, tastes at half-past seven in the morning. Despite my raging hunger I found them impossible to finish. I sat there like a child compelled to swallow some disgusting meal long after the family have departed. Then there was the abiding smell of leeks which seemed to exude from the very pores of my skin.

Determined to get to the bitter end all I could think of was the phrase that trips so happily off the tongue of my French neighbour. ‘Il faut souffrir un peu pour etre belle.’ (You have to suffer a little to be beautiful). It gave me little comfort.

And for this suffering what did I get? Well, certainly not beauty! But I did lose weight. Two and three-quarter pounds in fact. And my buoyant blood pressure fell by 15-20 points. Did I feel cleansed, de-toxed, raring to go when the whistle blew at 5 o’clock on Sunday evening and I could permit myself a cup of tea? Answer no, not really, and sadly in the few days since then my weight and blood pressure have reverted to what they were.

No magic then. But the tea did taste beautiful.

(*Poirot is the French word for Leek)

THE OLD JETTY

We went to IKEA - to buy coffee and batteries - two things that IKEA doesn’t do in flatpack but which come at a flatpack price. The quality of both is excellent. I’m an IKEA fan.

They also do pictures. Meandering through the store I stopped at a picture of an old jetty by a lake, similar to the one above.* This jetty appears to be somewhere warm and sunny; the IKEA photograph looked to be of northern Sweden.

Both pictures are evocative - who used the jetty last and why? Where did they go? Why is the jetty now ruined?

Next day I began a story, imagining what might have happened and working into the tale my own experiences of setting off in the gathering dusk from a jetty in Shetland - with the wind and swell getting up on the open sea.

Now I’ve never done much fishing - I’m unlucky. I’ve had the humiliating experience of being in a boat fishing for mackerel and catching nothing while a friend beside me pulled up three or four fish at every cast. When we changed tackle and places; I still caught nothing. I wasn’t born to fish, I concluded.

But at the time of the jetty incident I hadn’t learned this lesson. My sister in Shetland had invited me to stay. She knew a local fisherman and suggested he took me out for monkfish. This involved descending to where the voe was no longer a sheltered inlet but the Atlantic ocean proper. And it involved going at night. It all sounded rather exciting.

The fisherman was stocky with a dark, untidy beard. He was an experienced boatman and so I had no qualms as we set off from the wooden jetty, into the gathering gloom in his small wooden boat, powered by an outboard motor.

Towards the mouth of the voe, the wind picked up and the water sloshed unpredictably over the side and over us. He didn’t speak; his face was fixed on some point on the horizon. Eventually we stopped about 500 yards out. The boat bobbed like a cork. The lights of the houses seemed a very long way away.

He anchored, cast the bait, and we waited in the darkness. Nothing of course happened. I was already wondering why I had embarked on this absurd enterprise. I had at least taken the precaution of donning a waterproof anorak, but my jeans were soaked. I was shivering.

He was dressed in fisherman’s trousers of some oily cotton and an old sweater, yet seemed impervious to the wet or the cold. I started to bail some of the water; he stopped me, saying the scrape of the bailer would disturb the fish. What fish? I began to feel sick.

He started the engine and my heart leapt at the warm safe prospect of home. But to my disappointment we headed two hundred yards further out. The sea seemed even choppier. “I have my marks,” he said, squinting at the black outlines of the cliffs against the sky. “I know just where we are. This is another good spot.”

In this vast, angry, tossing swell, cold and featureless, it was hard to believe there was anything below at all.

Again we drew blank. Superstitious, like all fishermen, I knew he felt me a bad omen. He yanked viciously at the cord to start the engine again. The three pulls it took seemed like thirty.

It was now totally dark. He ran the engine very low; fearing losing traction, he said. With the water slopping mightily over the sides we only inched back towards the land.

Then the engine coughed and stopped. He pulled the cord, but it wouldn’t fire. He opened the cap on the little petrol tank on top and peered in. “Got a match,” he shouted to me over the wind.

I was fumbling in my pockets; in those days I still smoked. “Here you are,” I said.

He rounded on me. “Didn’t I know you shouldn’t look at a petrol tank with a lighted match? Did they teach me nothing at university?”

The words stung. I’m suppose he meant it as a joke. But perhaps this was my punishment for ruining his luck. Yet with a stalled engine and the wind blowing us out to sea this was no time to be second guessing his instructions. I counted he knew what he was doing.

Standing in the boat he stuck a finger in the tank. Smelt it. “We’re out of fuel,” he grunted.

I began to panic. But he was already reaching for a red can below his seat. I heard the comforting sound of petrol sloshing. He screwed the lids back and pulled the cord. Reluctantly the damp engine burst into life and we raced home again across the sea.

Never was I so happy to set foot on dry land.

*The picture is by vestraphotography.com publishers and framers of fine prints

'UH-HUH'

People say that the tones on the horn of an Inter-City 125 are set a musical fourth apart and so with a bit of electronic tinkering you could make the train play the opening bar of Beethoven’s 5th symphony as it hurtled across the countryside and through unmanned stations. Ba-ba-ba-bom!

Now I realised during an exceedingly long afternoon this week that this descending fourth was just the sound made by my little grandson, Theo, whenever he was discovered amid the wreckage of some new household disaster. After he has pulled books from the bookcases or thrown down a carefully stacked pile of labels, he stands in the middle of the carnage, holding his hands out with the palms upturned in imitation of a revered saint performing some penitential act of supplication, and sighs, ‘uh-huh,’ the ‘huh’ being a perfect fourth below the ‘uh.’ The effect is totally disarming.

Where he learned this trick - and I have to keep remembering he’s only 18 months old - I don’t quite know, but it ought to be marketable, and at a hefty premium too. If Tony Hayward, the hapless BP chief executive, held responsible by the US Senate for the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, had just greeted his inquisitors with his palms upturned and a hesitant smile and simply said, ‘uh-huh’ in a note that contrived at once to express boundless regret and also astonishment at the inexplicability of natural disasters, then he might have had an easier ride.

‘Uh-huh!’ As a substitute for an explanation, as a device for turning away wrath, the descending cadence of ‘uh-huh,’ uttered with a sigh to break a thousand hearts, reigns supreme. Especially, when one is at the height of one’s young mischief making and otherwise can’t say much more than ‘biscuit’ and ‘mine.’

Still eighteen months is a difficult age and hence my long afternoon filling in for his mum. It is hard to find constructive activities with which a toddler does not easily become bored. There’s football, of course, played down the long corridor, at which young Theo excels. Not only can he kick a ball with surprising force (and remain upright) but he can direct it too. Then there’s building towers with Lego, though as he enjoys smashing them down more than he enjoys building them up, the towers become shorter and shorter as his attention span wanders. Eventually he gives up.

But, I remembered, water is what Theo liked best of all. So around three o’clock I had the brainwave that we should mop the kitchen floor! He could splash water and mess it around with his feet and perhaps even the mop. ‘Uh-huh,’ he would say as he created yet another puddle and the water ran everywhere, ‘Uh-huh!’

I cleared up. Naturally. Mopping up isn’t his favoured activity. For the ‘uh-huh’ absolves its utterer from any responsibility for a clear-up - another reason why Tony Hayward might have found it useful. I had to slide him around the floor on a old towel.

What else, I wondered, during the course of that exceedingly long afternoon might involve water? The garden beckoned.

We have an old watering can and Theo was about to learn that water came out of garden taps and that it could be used to fill a watering can, though in practice he found it more fun to jiggle the can about so that the water splashed on its lid and ran down his trousers. The little fellow was having such fun with this new way to wet himself that I hadn’t the heart to stop him. For the moment anyway my piles of labels were safe enough.

But now the watering can was too heavy to lift. ‘Uh-huh,’ he said helplessly, with his outstretched arms and his butter won’t melt in my mouth smile. ‘Uh-huh!’

I tipped some out. Somewhere he’d lost a shoe so he paddled in the puddle with his stockinged foot. What is the fascination that small children have for water? Did I once have this fascination, too? The thought made me wince.

We went to water the garden, Theo, humping the big watering can as best he could with me making encouraging noises from behind.

After a few steps he spotted an unassuming weed growing in a crevice between the wall and the path. He took a step back to consider it. Then drenched the weed with the entire contents of the can. The can was now empty. Theo couldn’t quite understand this. He obviously thought that somehow he had broken it for he handed it back to me and raised his outstretched hands. ‘Uh-huh,’ he sighed. ‘Uh-huh.’

It was still only four o’clock.

VERBENA

I arrived at the house of my illustrator clutching a pot of Verbena. At least I call her my illustrator, though she is not mine, nor is she an illustrator for that matter. Or not yet anyway. This might be her opportunity and if it is hers then it will be mine also. I will be her writer and she my illustrator. The pot of Verbena is irrelevant.

I didn’t know she was going to illustrate my book when she rang me on Wednesday afternoon. She’d been away and come back again as nineteen year olds sometimes do. I thought she was inter-railing around Europe. But no, she rang me up asking if I had a scanning machine. To make digital images for her portfolio, she said.

I replied that I had that very article on my desk where it shared a casing with a fax, a copier and a printer. It’s called an ‘All-in-One,’ and the fact is that the machine is not very competent at any single one of those functions. On the one occasion when I tried to make the scanning function work I wasted an hour with leads and wireless link-ups, succeeding in putting my otherwise delightfully temperamented computer into a state of high dudgeon and the ‘All-in-One’ into a fiendish sulk. If either had a voice it would have said, ‘you don’t expect me to work with that!’

So I never tried again. But then I remembered that I had a second scanning machine which has sat in a cupboard ever since my daughter moved to the West Country and passed on ten years worth of miscellaneous belongings. I didn’t know whether this worked either, but it was portable and I had a lead and a plug; the necessary drivers could be obtained via the admirable services of Google, and - I told Kitty - Bob would be her uncle.

It was then that I had the idea that she might become my illustrator. ‘Could she draw flying carpets?’ I asked, and Persian Kings upended on their bottoms? And a garden with cats and bonfires and mysterious forbidden books and charred pieces of paper with Arabic script; a house shaking in a earthquake and Granny’s best china falling off the dresser?’

‘Of course,’ she said, with the confidence of a budding Quentin Blake, for illustration is what she has always wanted to do and how many nineteen year olds get the opportunity to start their careers by illustrating a story that has as yet only been rejected once?

‘Share proceeds?’ I suggested optimistically?

‘Wonderful! I’m so grateful.’

And she was. Though whether for the opportunity of illustration, or the scanner I wasn’t sure. I would deliver both script and scanner that very evening, I said.

Kitty lives close to an Edwardian mansion, built from the proceeds of the shipping trade, and now in the ownership of the County Council. The 55 acres of gardens are open to the public and in them the Council hosts events that range from Shakespeare and opera to lesser drama such as this week’s summer evening tour of the flower beds, to which, somehow, I had been invited.

Now when it comes to gardening I am still in the nursery (if you will excuse the pun). Foxgoves and nasturtiums; geraniums and marigolds. Bright colours and plenty of them. So I wasn’t quite sure why I was joining a party of fourteen eager gardeners to study Amaranthus Aurora and Alcea Rosea Nigra and discuss the usefulness of Lysimachia as edging or Coreopsis Sunshine as infill. These long words floated over my head as serenely as the clouds in the sky.

Nevertheless, it was all rather fun, doing the tour and occasionally muttering ‘but not against a south wall, I think,’ should I be required to speak.

Then, in the herbaceous border, I found found a plant suited even to my base levels of gardening skill: a perennial sweet pea, with beautiful pink flowers, growing with bindweed vigour up a twenty foot wall.

Perennial! So none of this business of starting a handful of cripplingly expensive seeds in damp trays that clutter your windowsills. I must have expressed fierce approbation at this cross between a triffid and praying mantis for the Head Gardner immediately plunged into the border returning with four seed pods.

‘If you really want them,’ she said dubiously. ‘They’re terribly invasive.’ But I did. Oh yes, I did!

Afterwards we were all given a Verbena plant. I still haven’t understood why. Perhaps it was so that we could make our own tisanes and so be guaranteed a good night’s sleep without worrying whether Torenia Purple edging would clash with an infill of Geum Mrs Bradshaw. I must warn Kitty when she’s illustrating the book.

I appear to be taking the picture one handed. The evening sun makes me look rather large!

GREEN TEA

On my way back from the post office I called at the Health Shop. It’s a narrow little shop with a big plate glass window. Once in you can’t hide and so it’s difficult just to browse without buying anything. You have to pass the till. I'm uncomfortable in shops like that.

I wanted to buy some Green Tea. People are always telling me of its benefits. Anti-oxidants is the word they use, but it also tones up the immune system and makes you lose weight apparently. I thought it might be worth a try.

So I entered and looked around. If I couldn’t find the tea I would disappear. Perhaps they didn’t stock any. Perhaps I should have looked first in the supermarket. But there in front of me was a whole display of tea. Boxes and boxes of it - herbal teas and tisanes and fruit teas and confections of every sort.

The proprietor appeared from a back room, a small slim woman in a blue top and jeans. She gave me a pleasant smile, tilted her head to one side, and asked soothingly if she could help me.

I muttered about green tea. She smiled broadly and without the slightest hint of being patronising indicated a cmplete row of green boxes at eye level in front of me. I had discounted these because on each one was written the word ‘CLIPPER’ in large white letters, rather than ‘GREEN TEA’ which was written in smaller italic script underneath.

For good measure she pointed out more green tea on the shelf above and on the shelf below and began enthusing about how useful it was in one’s medicinal armoury.

In her eagerness and general humorous demeanour she reminded me of Felicity Kendal. She even looked like Felicity Kendal, or at least she could have been Felicity Kendal’s sister gone into the Health Food trade. I imagined her as Mrs Good and this Health Food shop her kitchen somewhere in the Surbiton suburbs.

She suggested I try white tea, which actually I did once, concluding that it spoilt the taste of the hot water. All the same I was flattered that she should have taken me for a ‘white tea’ person, surely a species of superior and more delicate being. I reached for a box of the Clipper.

‘Why don’t you try this one?’ she said, pulling out a brightly coloured green box from the shelf below. ‘It’s what I drink. It’s milder and less bitter than normal green tea, with the same quantity of anti-oxidants.’ Clearly, my ‘white tea’ personality had taken root. I needed protection from bitterness.

So I agreed and together we made the long journey of three steps to the till. ‘One eighty-nine,’ she said. I handed over a ten pound note. ‘Ah!’ she said, opening the till and letting me see that it was quite empty of change save for two pound coins nestling forlornly in a corner pocket. ‘Have you anything smaller?’

Jointly we examined my change. We found a fifty pence piece, and a few coppers. ‘Ah!’ she said again, in a Felicity Kendal tone of voice. But then playing Mrs Good, the mother of resourcefulness, she added brightly ‘but you can pay by card.’

She had a big notice on the till to say that card payments would not be taken for purchases of less than £10. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said.

But of course I did worry about it, standing there in her little emporium surrounded by all manner of goodies with a pathetic purchase of a few tea bags of Green Tea. So I did a quick whip round. A bag of Brazil nuts, some organic jumbo oats, some dried apricots, a jar of honey and my tea. I put them on the till.

‘I adore Brazils,’ she said.’They’re very good for you if you’ve got type 2 diabetes. I’m not suggesting you have type 2 diabetes, you understand, but if you have and you eat a couple of Brazil nuts then they get your metabolism going without triggering an insulin response.’

Now it was my turn to say ‘ah!’ and then I said ‘ah!’ again in a different tone of voice when she said ‘£17.44.’

I had been trying to get to around £10, taking pity on the empty till and knowing the ferocious fees charged by card companies for the privilege of taking your money.

The pot of delicious local honey, pure bottled sunlight, was £7.00, which miserly me thought a bit steep. She kindly allowed me to put the honey back.

‘I would have taken your card just for the tea,’ she said sweetly, looking out of the corner of her eyes.

‘I know you would,’ I replied in my best white tea voice.

SEX AND HORROR IN THE DOLL'S HOUSE

For reasons that needn’t detain us here I found myself last Saturday in a doll’s house shop. Inside, arranged on shelves, were numerous houses ranging from the simple and inexpensive to the complex and monumental. All with large windows - to see what goes on inside, obviously.

Some of the houses could apparently be built from boxed kits. Those, easy to construct were described as suitable for children; more challenging boxes carried the sobriquet ‘Adult Collection.’

No doubt this referred to the difficulty of making up the kit, but so much these days is labelled ‘adult’ as a limp euphemism for puerile eroticism that I wondered for a moment whether these ‘adult’ doll’s houses might be representations of Amsterdam’s Rossebuurt, where girls ply their trade from great neon-lit picture-windows, whose enticing lights reflect exotically in the dark waters of the canals below.

If so that possibly could prove a new avenue with which to spice up the rather staid conventions of the doll’s house trade, because the one terrible and frustrating conundrum about doll’s housery is finding plausible explanations for what actually goes on behind those plywood walls and in those rooms so beautifully decorated with plates and dressers and ranges and sofas and miniature fire-irons.

Beatrix Potter had a go in the Tale of Two Bad Mice who, if you remember, invade the doll’s house belonging to Lucinda and Jane and in disappointed rage smash up the plaster fish and ham, laid out on the dining table, and run off with the furniture as well.

But well-ordered houses in the 21st century are not usually infested by mice with ASBO qualities, so the problem of constructing a convincing existence for the doll’s house inhabitants remains, even for those of an imaginative disposition, as Jane Shilling regrets in her memoir, ‘The Fox in the Cupboard.’

“The doll’s-house game was a kind of rolling soap opera, except an awful lot more soap than opera..........There were no incidents in my doll’s house, no domestics, no house fires, no lost children or broken limbs. The most exciting thing they did in that house was the housework.....It was a world as tight and safe as the inside of a nutshell.”

Model the house on the charming 14th century architecture of Old Amsterdam with its canals and winding, narrow, cobbled streets; fill its windows with ladies, or indeed gentlemen, of the night and you begin to create something that could at last become more opera than soap. Certainly rather less safe than a nutshell. Something for children to grow into as they get older perhaps, rather than leaving forlorn and abandoned at the first approach of the mystic passions of teenagery.

Certainly I continue to feel a subdued hankering for doll’s house drama and seeing now in the shop those rows of dark empty windows I turned to my companion and asked, “of course, you remember the classic doll’s house tale?”

She didn’t apparently and nor, surprisingly, did the shopkeeper. They had never heard it. Which left me wondering whether this was actually something that I had made up myself. So I ask readers to let me know if you have heard a story like this somewhere before, perhaps on the radio, perhaps as you were lying in your child’s bed, blankets pulled up to your chin, the lights out, your doll’s house perched on your bedroom table, a winter wind moaning about the eaves........

“Then she heard a noise, a scraping, and a yellow light went on in the bedroom window of the doll’s house and she felt the grip of fear. She couldn’t see anyone, but someone must have been in that house for the light flickered and she could see a shadow against the internal wall. Now she discerned voices, the words at first fumbled and lost. The shadow moved against the back wall; with horror she saw an arm raised and, at its end, something sharp and pointed. A frightening odour of doom and despair filled the air. She heard a muffled scream but she could only watch, mesmerised, as the arm and its dagger rose and fell, rose and fell until the screaming stopped.

For a moment she saw him then, tall and hatted, standing silhouetted in the doll’s-house window. Then the light went out.”

That, or something like it, is the core of the story. There is no doubt a prequel, and possibly a sequel too. There may well be some interaction with reality, with the young heroine recognising the house on which her doll’s house is modelled, up for sale, and seeing in the street a tall man, dressed in black wearing a hat, standing...........

You can see where this sort of thing can easily lead. Answers on a postcard, please.


The photograph, lest anyone should get the wrong idea, is copyright free from the official City of Amsterdam website.

SIX PINT JUGS

At the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke-on Trent even the Agas are covered in polka dots. We observed this when we arrived, cakes in hand, for the Open Day and Factory Tour. As we checked in at a wooden table in the yard with everyone in summer garb, bunting and flags abounding and excited children running about, it felt more like we had arrived at a rural village fete than at a working factory in an industrial metropolis.

‘How do you spell pistachio?’ asked a lovely girl who might have been called ‘Poppy’ and who rolled her eyes in respect at the inviting green speckled meringues that Elder Daughter was presenting. Poppy was writing labels. Behind us a woman handed over a cake still in its packaging, no doubt on the principle that when in doubt go to Marks and Spencer. A young lad in a polka dot pinny laid the cakes out on a big table in front of the Agas. ‘You’re just in time for the factory tour,’ he said, calling to someone else with a floral name to escort us.

Emma Bridgewater started this enterprise 25 years ago and is intimately involved with everything that goes on. The style is relaxed, informal, polite, courteous, the staff like long lost cousins met at a wedding. Style rather than money drives the business. Of course, you could make pots more cheaply in China, but you’d be selling your soul.

So they manufacture in England, still by hand, in this old Stoke factory, solidly built of brick and iron a century or more ago. Yet such has been the success of the Bridgewater brand - the growth rate is some 20 per cent a year - that the factory is already becoming too small.

I have always loved factory tours. I enjoy seeing how things are made, stored, finished, transported. Most of the 25,000 pieces that the factory produces each week, so the factory manager told us, start life as a grey slurry of clay-in-water called ‘slip’ which they use to fill plaster of Paris moulds. Far back in the mists of time someone apparently discovered that plaster absorbs water and that if you make a depression in your plaster, and fill this with slip, then the plaster will cause the slip to solidify from the outside in. So after a time you can then pour away the liquid slip and be left with a bowl, or a mug, teapot or whatever adhering to the sides of the mould. This you remove and bake in a kiln. Simple really.

Those that made the pots all seemed to be men. They worked very fast and with great accuracy and wore, for a reason I never did discover, a kind of white surgical gown. By contrast the decorators all seemed to be women, also working with great accuracy. Some decoration is applied using lithographic transfers; some with sponges finely cut from upholstery foam and dipped in colour. It seems an odd and time-consuming process, but the results are truly unique. Each decorator puts her own mark on the underside of the piece; for some collectors will only purchase pieces decorated by the same person.

A beautiful lunch followed. And it was beautiful because perhaps only on long refectory benches can you really appreciate the crockery. We might have expected to eat our hog roast and salad from paper plates and to drink from plastic beakers laid on tables with covered with paper. But no! Style comes first. The food came on Bridgewater plates; we drank from Bridgewater mugs and the tables were covered with Bridgewater oilcloths; a cumulative effect that could only be described as magnificent.

We had just about finished when a voice behind me said, “shall I take those?” I started to stack the plates. “Oh, don’t worry about stacking them,” she said. “We’ll see to that.”

“Oh fine!” I looked up and nearly dropped the plates. It was Emma Bridgewater herself, helping to clear the dishes. Now that’s style, I thought.

After lunch we found the factory shop. I had told myself that I wouldn’t be buying anything; my funds at the moment resemble the Government’s. But I chanced upon a rack of six-pint jugs in the Black Toast range and thought to myself what magnificent pieces they were and in my mind’s eye conjured up how good one of these jugs with its lettering of ‘Daisies and Cow Parsley‘ would look full of Pimms on a summer afternoon. They were marked down to £42. A snip, I thought. And an investment too, I persuaded myself. Pity about the lack of funds. But then, weakling that I am, I kept thinking of Pimms and summer afternoons and maybe I thought, too, of Emma Bridgewater clearing the dishes, and eventually I pulled out my card.