THE MAIDEN'S REVENGE

I think Balthazaar looked something like this

Why - or rather what - is she looking at?  In the early morning light from her house on the hill?  And, of course, why is she up so early? 

Maybe she is revising for an exam - an early medical student perhaps, though I'm not sure why she keeps a hat beside her.  At any rate it will fall off the dressing table soon.  Maybe she has just picked it up and has now perched herself on her stool again, one leg tucked neatly under her bottom to see if what she saw really was what she thought she saw; before she finds her slippers and goes out over the wet grass to discover the beast for herself.

But she's a little wary.  She's a medical student, as we have established, and she is still in her calico nightdress and she fears that it may have been over-zealousness towards her studies that has made her see things.  So she looks again.

Yes, there he is.  And he looks so dazzlingly white. And he is wearing a golden chain around his powerful neck. His mane is swishing in the light breeze and his rump looks powerful and muscular where the sun catches it.  He is stamping his four black hooves, which shine in the dewey sunlight.

Delicate feet, she thinks. But it is his horn by which her gaze is transfixed. That long tapering and spirally grooved horn of white ivory, as long as her arm.  She has never seen such a horn, or such a beast.  No wonder that she can't decide whether to fetch her slippers. 

The unicorn is caught, its feet entangled in brambles.  Should she run to help it? Or call others?  But if she went to help, might she not be caught too?  Not by the brambles, perhaps, but by the horn. She could become impaled and left dying on the dew while the beast snorted and flew off into the sky. She supposed a unicorn could sprout wings - or maybe it didn’t need wings - at all.  Her medical textbook was silent on this point.

No, of course,  the beast wouldn't impale her, but would instead go down on one knee, bowing its head and showing its golden chain. Perhaps it would neigh softly.  She would talk to it and give it sweet dandelions and plat its mane with daisies in the morning sun.  It might even tell her its name.  Balthazaar! 

She had always fancied Balthazaar as a name for a unicorn  She would laugh and, holding her hat, would kiss the beast's nose, enticed by its rich, leathery and equine smell.  Then, knowing her mother would scold her, she would abandon caution and clamber on the beast's back and all at once it would rear up and she would clutch at the golden chain and grip tightly with her knees lest she tumble into the brambles and close her eyes and the next moment they would be far away up in the sky heading for a different land, the wind whistling about her ears and the beast stretched out, the horn a compass needle to a future world.  She would awake, and he would lay her down gently, in the sand, somewhere to the south of Samarkand, beside a merchant selling silk and spice.

In this way have many potential female doctors been lost to science and many young women been enticed into the spice trade.  But wait!

When she came to her senses she noticed there were actually quite a few unicorns about the merchants' enclosure, most with their heads stuck in nosebags. Whatever they were eating it wasn't dandelions, nor probably oats either.   Nor were the unicorns any more a dazzling white but a kind of dusty grey.  Moreover,  their golden chains, she thought - unless she were very much mistaken - were in reality just a species of brass. 

A few hours ago she had been struggling to remember the anatomy of the gall bladder.  Now the choice seemed to be whether she should try walking back to Berkshire in her nightdress, or stay and become part of the merchant’s Samarkand entourage.  She looked to the Unicorn for inspiration.  But Balthazaar merely winked.  

Could one stow away on a unicorn? she wondered.  The exams were, after all, terribly important.  And the Samarkand desert wasn’t renowned for its sweet daisies and dandelions.  The vets were better too, she whispered into Balthazaar’s ear, as the darkness closed around them.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

I was in France at New Year and,  thanks to the foul weather that made walking almost impossible, found that I had spare time on my hands; so  I wrote a short and romantic story to send off to the Choc-Lit short story competition where they were soliciting stories in which chocolate featured as a central theme. 

I came to know a little about Choc-Lit from Chris Stovell whose compelling debut novel Turning the Tide they published last year.  Choc-Lit writers also publish an Authors Corner blog in which they talk, sometimes about their books and sometimes about other entertaining matters of relevance.

In another life, Chris may have been a sheep dog, for she has been assiduous in rounding up her friends and pointing them in the direction of the Author's Corner, encouraging them to leave comments.  Being of a sheep like disposition I dutifully responded to her instructions and, in what seemed an eye blink, found that a comment I had left (about mice, as it turned out) had won me a book.

If I could win a book for a comment then who knows what I might win for a short romantic New Year story about a lugubrious Russian, (I think it right to stress the 'might' for I have never ever had any success with such competitions, but they are fun to enter all the same), with a practical fondness for chocolate.

The lugubrious Russian in my story was not the person in the picture, though he might well have possessed similar good looks;  I am sure anyway that Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the great Russian poet, whose picture* it is, wouldn't really mind.  He is quite handsome after all, don't you think? (and the story is a romantic one), though if it were left to me I should be inclined to advise him to shave the whiskers.  Anyway they like sharing pictures of handsome young men on the Choc-Lit blog to whom I offer the image if ever there should be a lack of hot talent from the present era.

As well as being handsome Pushkin was a romantic.  Indeed, he becomes even more romantic when you know that he was fiercely addicted to duels. For he was both a duellist and a poet.  I put the duellist first because he almost fought more duels - twenty-nine in all - than he wrote poems.  Most of the time he was lucky (I daresay he was a very good duellist) but one hundred and seventy five years ago - almost to this very day (10 February 1837 to be precise) - his luck deserted him and he was killed by the French officer he had challenged, leaving literature bereft because, if he was a good duellist, then he was certainly an even better poet and writing the poems and plays and novels which he turned out seemingly without effort from his St Petersburg desk is a more rewarding activity than duelling (and getting yourself killed). 

As a teenager I was as lugubrious and full of depression as the Russian in my story, wrote a deal of very bad abstract poetry and consoled myself by reading the great Russian authors - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the like.  Then, when we were told that we could only spend two thirds of our school time studying for 'A' Levels and we had to spend the rest being 'educated,' I opted for a Russian class.  They threw us in at the deep end and we found ourselves translating, before even mastering the Cyrillic alphabet, Pushkin's famous poem that begins 'I Loved You.'

                I loved you; even now I must confess,

                       Some embers of my love their fire retain;

                       But do not let it cause you more distress,

                      I do not want to sadden you again.

                     Hopeless and tongue-tied, yet I loved you dearly

                    With pangs the jealous and the timid only know;

                     So tenderly I love you, so sincerely,

                   I pray God grant another love you so.

I regret I do not know who translated this; certainly it wasn't me for I stumbled badly in that class and left it after a term, thinking that Russians were much better when rendered in English by competent persons.  But I went on loving this poem and keeping a nostalgic and romantic perspective on nineteenth century Russia, reinforced, of course, just at the time when it might have been waning by the absurdly romantic film of  Dr Zhivago.

I happened to be in Germany when that film came out and watched it, dubbed into German, in Hannover.  Then I caught a train that rumbled across Europe to catch a midnight boat from Calais, disgorging its weary and sleep deprived passengers on to the Victoria station concourse early the following morning. I breakfasted with someone I had met on the train and as Dr Zhivago was playing opposite the station and both of us had a few hours to kill, saw the film again.  It all seemed remarkably romantic at the time. 

*The picture of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin painted by Vasily Tropinin is courtesy of Wikipedia.

BEG PARDON?

My hearing is deteriorating. I can no longer hear the telephone ringing in another room; and I miss a lot of dialogue from the TV or radio. I suspect I need a hearing aid.  So I rang the surgery for a referral to the hearing clinic.  The woman I spoke to asked whether I had had my ears syringed.  I said ‘no,’  She said that if I were to be kind enough to drop olive oil into my ears for a week she would make an appointment with the nurse for next Wednesday.

 Well, after a week of dripping oil into my ears (sometimes the oil seemed to be running in one ear and out the other) I thought that, just possibly, my hearing was improving, but not by very much, and so I went along at half past two to see Nurse Harji in Consulting Room 6.  Nurse Harji smiled broadly and sat me down and then, with the medical instrument that you use for peering into ears, looked first into the one and then into the other. I had expected she would tell me they were full of oil, or maybe fluff, certainly full of wax,  but after some careful looking she said she couldn't see any wax at all and  concluded therefore that I didn't need any syringing, which was all a bit of a let down as I had steeled myself for the operation.

As it seemed we now had time on our hands she asked me if she might take my blood pressure about which I was dubious. My blood pressure is at best disobliging and has a habit of rocketing unexpectedly. But on this occasion all was well - indeed super well. One hundred and fifteen over eighty, she told me; and I said it hadn't been that low since I had been a carefree travelling student and had given blood for the princely sum of £25 at a clinic in Athens in 1966.

Nevertheless, she thought I should see the doctor anyway who could advise whether I should be referred to the hearing clinic for assessment and possible fitting of a digital hearing device. No appointments today, she regretted, looking at her computer screen, but there would be one tomorrow at four thirty. 'I am sorry to have to ask you to come back,' she said, apologetically.  I said not to worry, that tomorrow at four thirty would suit just fine, so she wrote me a card and then dismissed me with a kind, caring and professional smile.

So back I went to the surgery the next day,  five deferential minutes early and I sat and waited and as I waited picked up  Good Housekeeping (February 2011 edition).  We must be an honest lot down here for this edition, despite being a year old, still had all its freebies intact. There was some fetching lotion or other in a little sachet glued inside - I think it was just plain body milk, but anyway it had a fancy name - and I wondered whether I might be entitled - as compensation for the wait which was fast becoming prolonged - to remove it.  In the end I decided that I wasn't and didn't, but afterwards felt a little disappointed with myself for being timid. 

There's a  telescreen in the waiting area which summons patients to their doctors and in between broadcasts health ‘advice’ to  the halt, the sick and the lame waiting for their appointments. Advice about falls seemed to figure prominently on the endless loop (which seemed to have some kink in it for parts of the message played upside down). 'Wear sensible shoes,' the telescreen advised. 'Eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day' it beseeched,  which made me want to ask: do nuts count? The screen said nothing about nuts and of course you can't ask it a question.

At last, after three-quarters of an hour, I got to see my lovely doctor looking much as though she could use a well-made gin and tonic.  I told her that maybe the olive oil was working for the previous night I had managed to hear, and more or less understand, an episode of Midsomer Murders (or at least half an episode, for a whole episode might have damaged my sanity, what with headless horsewomen and folk colliding with tree trunks and gargoyles) and with the TV at normal volume.

She then peered into my ears and said that nurse Harji had been quite right and my ears were indeed devoid of wax. "But what I think we ought to do", she continued quickly in a loud voice, just in case I had other ideas, is to discount the temporary amelioration that you report "and send you for a Hearing Assessment." And with that she typed a word or two into the keyboard and then asked in a determined and a 'can't you see what the time is' sort of voice, whether there was anything else she might do for me. There wasn't. Or at least we should have been there until midnight if we had started on the details of my crumbling organs.

And so we said goodbye and I went out into the freezing cold and found that my sugar levels had in the meantime dropped to zero and that I had to purchase digestive biscuits in order to fuel myself for the gentle climb up the hill to home.  Now that I remember it, one of the Good Housekeeping articles suggested you should always keep a tin of almonds in your handbag to avert just such problem. So maybe there was some sense in the magazine after all, almonds I am sure being better for you than digestive biscuits even though I am still no wiser as to whether they count towards your five a day. I should have asked, I suppose. Anyway, I still think I should have purloined the sachet of body milk.