I BUY EROTICA

One of the glorious things about writing is that moment when you start and the page in front of you is blank. I think all writers experience this feeling, so I am not saying anything new. I am feeling it now. At least I was feeling it a moment ago because now the page is already defiled with this initial clutter of words. Moreover, the happy, go-anywhere feeling of the empty page has become a gnawing worry that this introduction may not be going anywhere and that I may have to start again.

The woman above, a respected French writer whose name I regret to say is lost in the mists of time, was voicing just that sentiment when I copied her picture. She is writing longhand and it is in longhand that the pleasure is greatest. You can’t doodle with a computer, can you? A fountain pen, some nicely woven paper, peace quiet. Even Alan Clark says so in his Diaries. I don’t think I posses a fountain pen anymore, though I can still lay my hands on a bottle of Quink.

Mention of Alan Clark reminds me of Edwina Currie, who was on the radio this morning explaining why she resigned as Health Minister after telling us that we were doomed and not to eat eggs. The discussion had something to do with universities accepting donations from Libya and other undemocratic states. When universities are seeking alliances with China left, right and centre, the current Libyan shock-horror seems false. China is just so big that we tend to pretend it is what it isn’t; though what it has to do with Mrs Currie and eggs, I’m not clear.

Nevertheless, salmonella may be coming home to roost, as it were, for Elder Daughter has announced her intention to keep chickens. Three birds, producers of brown, speckled eggs, plus designer hen coop, are due to be delivered in a few days. Elder Daughter’s husband will turn 40 at about the same time and I can’t help thinking the two events are connected. Middle age should be renamed the Poultry Period.

Otherwise it has been a thin week and I have been reduced to clearing out the drinks cupboard to keep boredom at bay. In its recesses lay all kinds of interesting bottles; I have no recollection whence they came. First up was a bottle of blackcurrant cordial which had jellified: nothing would even come out of it. Not a good start, but then I found some rum; perhaps bought for a cake, so I thought I’d have a Cuba Libré just to see whether it was still good. It was, so I had another, this time with an elderly ginger ale. It tasted foul and I needed a glass of from the encrusted Bailey’s bottle to wash away the taste.

An almost full bottle of Turkish Raki - 50 per cent proof - with a German label - also seemed to be drinkable, (however, did I acquire that?) but the trouble with these aniseed spirits is that they only work in hot and dusty places and in full sunshine. You just can’t drink it on a cold, damp evening in Wales.

Most of the bottles I threw out. All evidence of the ravages of time, which young Kitty, who acts from time to time with us in CADS, has yet to encounter. She dropped by the other day, fresh from Miami of all places, where she had been attending a springtime antiques fair with her mother. This was being held in some great Florida mall, so large that the organisers provided electric buggies so that persons, with limited mobility or just plain lazy, could get themselves around the stalls.

One older woman, ugly, gross and decrepit according to Kitty, was riding imperiously up and down the aisles on one of these things. She would have been unmissable even if she hadn’t been wearing around her grizzled neck a large sign reading ‘I Buy Erotica.’

For some reason I now can’t get this image of the large and decrepit erotica-buying lady astride an electric buggy out of my mind. But then, now that I come to think of it, sadly very little connected with erotica is actually erotic.

Meanwhile, spring has come here too. I know this because we had a referendum and I saw my first lambs this week and tame they were too on the other side of the fence. Like many animals they seem to respond best to clicking noises made with the tongue against the roof of the mouth. It seems to reassure them. But to their defiant mothers (who I imagined facetiously with a sign saying ‘I buy Erotica’ hung round their necks) I bleat. Maaair...Maaair! This works better, I find than Baa - which, followed by 'humbug,'is what I wanted to say in the polling station.