DOG DAYS

Life this Easter is disrupted: we are dog-sitting Elder Daughter’s Labradoodle puppy and the experience has served to remind me why I decided not to have another dog when Samson, the second of our two Newfies, died fourteen years ago.

    She’s not a puppy puppy this Daisy, more an obstreperous teenager, foisted on unsuspecting grandparents.  Her weapon of choice is the bark and her preferred game is ‘can’t catch me.’  She also refuses to mount the stairs.  Now I know plenty of people who would think this an excellent quality in a dog if it stopped them parading through the bedrooms and bathrooms and so it would be in Daisy, but the trouble is she doesn’t like being left and so when you go upstairs she stands at the foot of the staircase and barks until you come down again.  As a result I am writing this on the kitchen table where Daisy can keep an eye on me rather than in my study upstairs. Peace is anyway reigning, but I suspect she will come and nuzzle me soon enough demanding a game of chase in the garden where she has found that I don’t like her chewing the young Medlar tree; she knows this will make me chase her away, which is why she does it. No doubt she will grow up into something sage and docile as most teenagers do, but such maturity cannot come soon enough.  At half-past six on a cold morning with an icy wind lifting the corners of your dressing gown, the dog undoubtedly gets rather more pleasure from the game than you do.

Apart from the dog Easter otherwise threatens to be peaceful, and as a bonus the sun is shining. That means I shall give the grass both here and at the theatre its first cut of the year.  I went yesterday to buy petrol which cost me almost £6.  I reflected that when I learned to drive petrol in France was 7/6 a gallon - 37.5p in new money - and that that had seemed outrageous.  In Britain the cost was still only five shillings a gallon (25p) and everyone then thought that prohibitive.  I can’t remember the price of oil but it would be served by a garageman from a little pump into a sort of jug labelled 'Castrol' and then he would pour a pint or a quart of it into the engine - an elaborate business now lost in the mists of time.


Yesterday I went to two parties: a children’s Easter Egg hunt in a neighbour's garden took place in the afternoon.  Usually when my kind neighbour puts on a children’s event I am accompanied by Theo, my grandson, who is four, but while Elder Daughter is living the high life in Amsterdam this Easter (and we are living the low life with the dog) Younger Daughter has whisked the grandchildren off to West Wales.  Most inconsiderate!  It feels quite odd to be attending a children’s party sans child, though there are always plenty of adults and suitably adult refreshments to while away the afternoon.  With a glass of cold Cava I heard an explanation - something else from the mists of time - of why Easter should be populated by Rabbits and Eggs, rabbits not laying eggs ,obviously.  My fellow guest said that the origin lay in the hares that disputed their territories by boxing around Easter time.  These territories tended to be fields in which plovers had laid their eggs.  By some process of zoological metamorphosis the hares became rabbits and the plovers’ eggs, the exorbitantly priced chocolate confections we know so well.  

The second party was a friend's 70th and was a most jolly affair marred only by our wondering continually in what state our home might be after two or three hours of depredation by the dog.  This didn't prevent us meeting some old and some new friends and from eating what must be the best birthday cake I have ever tasted.  It was a fruit cake, rich and moist and baked to perfection, wonderfully marzipanned - which triggered an incidental conversation with an Indian doctor about almond trees in central India - and with a plaster-perfect thick layer of white icing.  For adornment the cake boasted not candles but a marzipan blackboard on which had been written e = mc2, along with a figure wearing long shorts (Ilian had been a physics teacher, in Bermuda).

Sadly there has been no word from Ken whose rest I shall have to disturb again after the break.  We shall shortly be having an Estonian visitor who is coming to improve her English.  The idea is that in return for such instruction and her board, lodging and modest entertainment she will help us paint the house.  I do feel that to keep our end up with the Estonians we shall need a bath with working taps.  It isn't just something to keep the coal in.

TAPS AND SERVICE

I rang Ken our builder on his mobile.  It rang and rang and eventually the answerphone kicked in.
I should have insisted that he fixed the taps in the bathroom when he was here last autumn but he was anxious to move on to another job and by mutual consent we agreed the bathroom taps could wait.  But now the taps can wait no longer:  they have expired.  You turn the handle but water flows there none, if you see what I mean. The plastic widget that holds the metal splines of the tap has worn smooth rendering the tap useless.  The only thing we can be thankful for is that the tap expired in the off position rather than the on.

Now I don't know whether you've ever had anything to do with taps, but they are a conspiracy on humankind.  Not only do the manufacturers contrive continually to change their designs, thus making it quite impossible to replace like with like, but they are hideously expensive to buy.  Nor is that all, for you cannot buy the little plastic widget, worth about 3p without buying a whole new tap.  I don't call it a conspiracy for nothing.

 There are goods that you buy - mobile phones for instance - which make you wonder how anything so complex can be made so cheaply.  With taps it is the reverse.  We have had taps since Roman times and though they are simple devices involving no complicated technology they still lag behind in the value for money stakes by a mile.  Which might be understandable if taps were rare, but most people have at the very least half a dozen in their houses and some many more.  Why then are taps so expensive?  It's a question to put to the government; it might take their minds off the deficit. Think of all the taps there must be in government offices!

Anyway, there we are, or rather there Ken isn't, so I set off down to the Post Office through the rain and sleet to post a parcel consoling myself that I would pop into Waitrose afterwards for a free regular cappuccino to which my little green loyalty card entitles me daily.  Though I have my laptop with me I find - or in this case fail to find - my reading glasses.  Luckily I can go over the road to our newly refurbished and ultra-efficient local library and pick up a most excellent pair of reading glasses, gold rimmed, half moon, in a cigar type metal holder for only £4.99, which seems to me to be another piece of incredible value, besides which the purveyors of taps should bow their heads in shame. 

So there I am sitting in Waitrose, with my coffee and new reading glasses, and tapping away at the front end of Boraya - which, in case you were wondering, isn't a car but a novel with an overly long introduction from which I have to remove at least 10,000 words of carefully crafted and much sweated over prose.  This makes me weep almost as much as the taps.  Still it has to be done, but it makes me worried and anxious.

Now Waitrose staff (or Partners as they prefer to be called) are programmed to respond to worried and anxious looking customers and so, before long, Julia makes her smiling appearance beside me.  I reassure her that my troubled brow has nothing to do with my inability to choose the right brand of olive oil or a possible absence from the store of Duchy Originals, and that on the contrary I am exceeding content with everything apart from the problem of the front end of my book.  Not to waste a conversation with a customer Julia then produces a card and invites me to email a cordial sentence to Waitrose encapsulating my experience in the store that day, for which, she implies, there is a prize of £500. 

Now £500 for one sentence isn't bad going.  It's about £20 a word. Exeter Writers are running a short story competition with a £500 prize, but for that you have to write 3,000 words, or thereabouts,  a mere 20p a word.  I intend to enter it.  I have a story written.  But £500 for one sentence beats this hollow and so when I got home I thought I would compose a particularly soupy paeon of praise to Waitrose customer service in general, and Julia in particular, and I duly ventured into the website to post it.  I may have had to wade through a number of survey questions about my grocery shopping, but hopefully my telling observations about customers and staff being one happy partnership have been properly recorded.

In the middle of this I see the answerphone blinking.  It is Ken, asking me to ring him back.  I do and we make contact. 'I'm in Cornwall,' he says.  'On holiday.  I'll ring you next week.'  If he's in Cornwall, I think, it will be a bit of a busman's holiday for him what with landslips and houses collapsing.  I hope he has taken his tools with him.  So, our taps will have to wait.   The grandchildren who look forward to splashing in the bath will be seriously put out and we ourselves will have to make do with showers.  Meanwhile I live in hope that Ken's bill for installing new taps in the bathroom will be matched by a timely voucher from Waitrose or a cheque from Exeter, but I am not holding my breath.

A WALL OF 'POST-IT'S

    Following my last post here I can say that the Mill is now sold, which is a relief to its owner but sad for us.  So I won’t write any more about the Mill although no doubt bits and pieces from our many visits there will find their way into stories I may write in the future.
    Surprisingly, perhaps, now that I think of it, there’s nothing about the Mill in Boraya - or at least nothing that I can remember.  The second draft of Boraya is coming on apace.  I’m averaging about 4,000 words a day of editing - which is really rather more than plain editing:  there’s an awful lot of verbal garbage to be removed, but also new material to be inserted.  I read an article a couple of months ago about the hundreds of rotting wooden churches in Russia, many built in the eighteenth century and now in an advanced stage of collapse.  The pictures of these churches looked so romantic and beautiful with their spires and their onion domes and their bell towers leaning at odd angles, that I had to put a fictional one into Boraya.
    My fictional church, built in 1745, remains standing despite wind, rain and heavy snow.  It is dedicated it to Saint Demetrius, a Greek saint from Thessalonica, and it stands in a clearing where the ground rises a little near the village of Kokkoila whence on November 8 (the Saint’s anniversary according to the Orthodox calendar) some of the older villagers bring icons and try to enter the building despite the chained and padlocked doors and the signs that indicate mortal peril from falling timbers: a very practical case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    The temperature is minus twelve on the night that Elizabeth and Vladimir visit the church of Saint Demetrius.  They are on horseback and the ground is covered in snow; a full moon is shining, silhouetting the church black against the sky and the horses have to plough through drifts of white, sparkling powder. 
     But characters are a bit like young children: you can only control them so far.  I had intended that Elizabeth and Vladimir should just ride to this church, but Elizabeth, of course, has to dismount and then find a fragment of rotted wood from the church to put in her pocket.   She wants, she decides (nothing to with me, guv!) to have something to drop into the coffin of the gardener at Casa Malinka, who used to visit this church long ago, for it was his death that was largely responsible for bringing the couple together.   So now I have to extend the funeral scene too.  And so it goes on, words are trimmed out and bits of story put back in.
     We were invited out to dinner by some actor friends the other evening and they showed me a book in which various well-known writers had been asked to submit a picture of their working spaces and to describe how they wrote.  One photograph stood out: it was of Will Self’s study which showed an entire wall covered with ‘post-it’ notes, each with a jotting about the piece he was working on.
     I was intrigued. What a wonderful idea! Because I find one problem with writing a novel  (Boraya is the first I have attempted) is that you can only see a small part of it at any one time.  An artist who paints a picture can see the whole work at once; so can a sculptor or your average poet. But a novelist can only see about a page at a time.  Not enough.  By putting ‘post-it’s’ on a wall you can get some reminder of what is happening.
      I will try that when I finished this second draft. There is some re-shuffling to do, particularly at the beginning.  And then I will read the whole thing out loud.  After that it should be finished: I hope in about six months.
    Still not a lot will happen today: the grandchildren are here, Theo and Isla.  I have already pushed Isla (10 months) twice around the block in her pushchair with the object of getting her to fall asleep. We are going out now to ‘Bijou’ - a play centre with a tall tower full of ropes and nets and slides where 4 year old Theo likes to romp while I drink a coffee and remember what it was like to be four years old.  I can remember it in fact very well.  It seemed like yesterday.   But how would you feel if you were suddenly four years old again and without memories and experience?  Almost naked, I would think, and certainly scared. Who am I? Who are you?  Who are all those people?

The picture by the way is courtesy of Google Images. I trust no one will mind my using it. If anyone does then I apologise.  If you go to this website http://www.richarddavies.co.uk/woodenchurches/ you will find plenty more and if this helps to promote action to save some of these wonderful structures, then it will all have been worthwhile.