GLOVES

Gloves from the National Trust

I heard a knock on the door and saw outside a dirty yellow van.  Its driver was ringing the bell.  He asked whether I was who he thought I was.  I nodded.  ‘I thought it better to ask beforehand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to have to carry it all the way back.’
    You might think we live some distance from the road but it’s only a few yards.  True we live on a hill and the slope is therefore moderately steep, something that always used to annoy my Mother-in-law.  ‘I don’t understand why they built a nice house like yours and then had to go and put a hill in front of it,’ she used to say.  I think she saw the hill, on which half the town is built, as just a bit of landscaping.
    In Britain we aren’t very inventive when it comes to hills.  In the Cantal, in France, where there are even more hills than in Wales, they tuck their houses into the hillsides so that if you approach from one side you go into the ground floor and if you come from the other you arrive on the floor above. 
    Enough of a diversion:  satisfied he had found the right address the driver hurried back to his van emerging a minute or two later with a very large box.  I told him to bring it into the house and scrawled something on his electronic box of tricks.  He hurried off and left me in possession of a Sovereign petrol lawnmower, bought as a bargain in Homebase’s late season sale for less than £100.
    Actually it’s the theatre’s mower but as I tend the thespian grass I keep it here.  The old mower could no doubt be repaired.  It’s only about five years old and has worked excellently until now.  But the last time I used it it ran slower and slower until it stopped.  There may be a fuel blockage: it’s the sort of thing that a repairer could no doubt sort out quickly.  If we had a repairer of course: the last one closed when the garden centre made way for Waitrose two years ago.  The old mower also needed a few other things including a new blade and a new handle for the starting cord.  All of which made specialist repair uneconomic.
    So the old mower has to go the way of all flesh, which makes me feel a planet wrecker and part of our irresponsible throw-away society.  We ought to repair machines and clothes but it is cheaper now - and far less time consuming - to buy new.  The mower is in my car and I shall trundle it to execution at the tip after I have written this.
    The metaphor is apt for I have just completed Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don,’ - the classic novel from a Nobel prize winner about the Cossacks before, during and after the First World War.  When it starts the story is reminiscent of Hardy, with wonderful descriptions of life and love out on the steppe.   But everything, including the writing, gets bleaker and more tragic with the outbreak of war and the infection of the Russian revolution and the outbreak of Civil War.  It ends compellingly with a mass execution of Red Guards by the Whites made even more emotional by the fact that these were men who had fought alongside each other against Germany and had lived in the same villages on the Don.  I am still trying to get the scene out of my head.  Sholokhov was applauded for ‘socialist realism,’ but he just reminds me what life in Syria must be like at the moment.
    After that I needed something to cheer me up.   So I wasn’t best pleased to receive a brown  envelope (you’d think technology might have given us a different colour by now) from our friends at the Inland Revenue, asking me why I thought I should be exempt from paying National Insurance Contributions.   They pointed out that though I might have been just a few months short of my 67th birthday when I filled in the form I was still (by a few weeks) 64 at the start of the financial year and therefore I would owe them a significant lump sum, interest and perhaps even a penalty as well.  Oh dear! Another example of the Hostile Forces of the Universe.
    I did have some good news though.  My first earnings from self-publishing have begun and amount to all of £2.91.  I celebrated with a pint of beer costing £3.15 on the grounds that there may be more next month.  As someone said ‘it’s a start’ and it means the sheet is no longer entirely blank.  And this week I finished the text of the second book - comprising my Neolithic research - which I have hurried to complete before my talk in Cambridge next month.   Some time ago I promised myself that I would update my computer as soon as I earned some money from one of my books. That hurdle has now been surmounted by the slimmest of margins, but I think I shall have to wait to see whether the Inland Revenue’s depredations leave any money in the coffers.  Maybe I should have bought shares in Royal Mail after all.
    But to conclude where we came in, as it were, I have just received another delivery, this time from the National Trust.  I have been using their gardening gloves for some time now - not for gardening, but for everything else.  They offer white (not an especially good colour for gardening) cotton-lined hide gloves for only £10.  I have already bought two pairs from them and now I have bought another two and will keep one for best.  They are only available in large but the size fits me well enough and I don’t have big hands. I can recommend them as a bargain.  The winter is set to be a cold one and if ever you need to direct traffic they will prove just the job.