Corner Cupboard

MAGIC OF SHAKESPEARE

2012-01-28T20:57:00.002Z

James Reynard and Claire Tucker

Leafing through the paper the other day I found an interesting graph showing how the country's economic growth has risen and fallen over the last few years. It bears no relation whatsoever to what has happened in our business apart from the fact that the general trend in both cases is in a southerly direction. This month in particular has been slow, the sort of 'feathers through treacle' slowness that makes you think seriously of staying under the duvet with the coverlet pulled firmly about your ears. Orders have slowed to a trickle and you wonder whether you are still going to be here a year from now. Then on Friday the cheering news of a large order from the Library Service of one of the bigger London Boroughs.

From a brief perusal of recent newspaper headlines you might be forgiven for thinking that there weren't any libraries left, certainly in places like London, or if there were some left then certainly that they wouldn't have any money; and if by some fluke they did have some money then it would be reserved for some core project rather than additional supplies of labels. But of course you would be wrong and this order was proof. Along with a couple of other orders that emerged like beetles from the woodwork, the month ended on a somewhat happier note.

Now, you might be enquiring which London Borough this might be in case they happened to be in the market for your goods and services too. Well, I am not at liberty to say but I shall give you a clue (which of course might be wrong for boundaries change over time) but I think it was the same borough that once housed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. If this seems a recondite sort of a clue, then I admit it is, but along with the febrile state of the British economy Shakespeare has been much on my mind this week.

You see it was our little theatre group's AGM on Friday and I had invited a couple of actors (James and Claire - see above) to try out an adult version of a show they have developed to introduce Shakespeare to children, called The Magic of Shakespeare. As they had to travel all the way from Gloucester, and were partly doing us a favour, a suitably sized audience to show our appreciation was indeed required. But for a variety of reasons - some possibly economic - I was beginning to worry that we should not have one.

Friends that usually come along to our shows wrung their hands and said that they couldn't come along to this one. Excuse followed on excuse and apology on apology. I wasn't even sure we'd have more than the apocryphal two men and a dog turning up to the AGM. Even our esteemed Chairman found that he had to attend a wedding in Inverness. The Secretary and Patron Secretary also sent apologies. Regulars regretted that this or that had intervened. I was biting my nails.

But in the event something turned up and it was a respectable audience. My fears went thankfully unrealised, as fears so often do. The show proceeded and most excellent it was too. And educational to boot. I learned, for instance - because this was an 'introduction' to Shakespeare's work - that the Globe Theatre had no lighting. That sounds obvious - of course the Elizabethans had no stage lights, they had no electricity; the best they could do would have been the occasional candle, or perhaps a couple of burning brands. So plays took place mostly in broad daylight.

Yet many of Shakespeare's best known scenes take place 'in the foul womb of night' and if you read those lines closely you will learn that Shakespeare tells you (and then tells you again in case you might have been asleep) that a scene is occurring in darkness. Take, for instance, the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, the word 'night' occurs fourteen times - just in case, in the sunshine of the Globe Theatre, you might be tempted to think it was day.

So the AGM and the show passed felicitously and afterwards we had some champagne because the two actors, James and Claire, who wrote and presented the Magic of Shakespeare, recently became engaged and are to be married in April, perhaps even on Shakespeare's birthday, and it just so happened that it was also the 53rd wedding anniversary of Rosie and Jim. So we all had a little theatre supper and a few bubbles to celebrate, and a happy time was had by all.

LA BONNE ANNEE

2012-01-22T18:43:00.001Z

Annie and M, who were our kind hosts for New Year when we visited Tharon Plage, came over yesterday evening. For dinner, yes, but principally to watch the Claude Lelouch film La Bonne Année, which dates from 1973 and is one of my favourite films. (Poor Lelouch, he always gets panned by the critics but I think his films are inventive, memorable and fun - sheer entertainment, which is what I go to the cinema for). Anyway at Tharon - over New Year - (the title of the film - La Bonne Année means - literally - The Happy New Year) we sat down to watch the film but the DVD player expired after the first five minutes. Hence, my offer to show the film on our DVD player at a suitable time when we got home again. Which occasion was last night.

And very good it was to see the old film (which hasn't much dated) with its blend of comedy, romance and philosophy. Question: 'what is a woman?' she asks. 'A man that cries a little,' he replies. Later she asks him what a man is and he replies that a man is someone who goes right to the end. Which may or may not advance the price of eggs but is interesting and makes you think. The film is about a jewel robbery, incidentally, in the south of France and it stars Lino Ventura and Francoise Fabian.

Having written last week about the chocolate mousse that Mireille Guiliano recommends I thought I would try making it. And so I did. But something went wrong with my beating of the egg white, which refused to stiffen, I suspect because I got cream on the beaters so the mousse ended up rather solid but none the less very tasty and silky smooth and pretty enough in a little ramekin with a half strawberry on top. The recipe (or rather the ingredients) are on the blog below this and should anyone be interested I can also send you the 'method.'

To start with I had made what has become my current signature dish 'Gambas a l'aillo' or prawns in garlic with spice. This is really very simple to make and most tasty. You really need fresh prawns (shrimps are even better) though. Frozen ones will do but frozen prawns always seem to contain loads of water and this rubbery (just right if you are Chinese says M) instead of being crisp and firm.

Just heat a pan of olive oil - enough to cover the shrimps - and add to it cayenne pepper or tabasco or finely chopped chilis, or a mixture. You need quite a bit. Don't worry, the dish won't end up tasting like a Vindaloo! To the hot oil you add several large cloves of garlic finely chopped and let the garlic infuse into the hot oil until it starts to brown. Now add the prawns (peeled if they are prawns - entire if they are shrimps). Bring the oil back to its former temperature and then they are done. Scoop out the prawns and serve on a warm plate. Delicious. Hot and spicy and garlicky but all rather a gentle and rounded flavour.

So we made a good meal which was washed down with a 20 year old bottle of red Saumur from the cellar at Tharon. Twenty years is really pushing it for a Saumur and the wine was suffering a bit but still drinkable and robust enough to take the flavour of the spicy prawns and some excellent mature Brie that we ate afterwards (before the chocolate mousse). Not an enormous quantity of washing up either.

THE ART OF SAVOIR FAIRE

2012-01-14T11:58:00.000Z

Mireille Guiliano: The Art of Savoir-Faire

These days a year seems ridiculously short within which both to make and achieve a resolution. And if we only begin in January, don't get underway until February, have a break at Easter then plan the summer holidays, autumn will be rushing towards us before we've really got into any sort of stride at all. Moreover, by then we probably will have forgotten why we resolved what we did and what we intended to do about it. The resolution will have proved no more than a good intention - a bit like a Government target - rather than a clear plan for action and delivery.

I was brooding on this very point as a matter of fact on 22nd December. (I don't know about you but I am given to brooding on dark mornings over my porridge and am often still brooding when I arrive at my desk and open up my trusty laptop: my own personal alchemical window on the world through which I scry the comings and goings of my friends. Not only friends either, for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker all clamour for my attention).

My friend Amazon is particularly efficient in this regard. She writes first thing every morning with an amazing offer. (I call her 'she' because, first, she is big and mighty and, second, because I am not sure that any Amazons were men, which raises the interesting question of how the race was perpetuated; Reader if you happen to know perhaps you could leave a comment.)

So Amazon wrote on 22nd December beseeching me that 2012 would be a very different sort of a year, and boundlessly more prosperous, if only I clicked on the right hand side of the page and they deducted £9 and some pennies from my account. In return (though not before Christmas if I was so parsimonious as to insist on the free 'super-saver' delivery) they would send me a new book, just out, by Mireille Guiliano - the renowned author of 'French Women Don't Get Fat.'

Those that know me know that I have been a fan of this tome ever since it appeared a few years back and have indeed personally accomplished the 'magical leek diet,' surviving a whole forty eight hours on leek broth. Ever since reading it I have been leaving half bananas about the kitchen and watching (but sometimes only watching) my portion sizes.

Now retired from her position as CEO of the American end of the Champagne House Veuve Cliquot Mireille calls her new book 'Women, Work and the Art of Savoir-Faire,' and she describes it as...

"........the sort of book I wish I had been given when starting out in the working world and had at hand along the way.......you'll find advice on getting ahead and getting promoted....but more than that, you'll find advice on being happy and living a good life, even while you are making the biggest contribution you can in the workplace. That's why I dare to talk about style and clothes and food and wine and entertaining and life in a business book."

How could I resist? I clicked on Super-Saver Delivery and my friend Amazon must have taken pity for the book slid through my letterbox on Christmas Eve. I read it almost at once.

There is a mountain of sensible information here: set yourself achievable objectives; spend less time on trivia and more on planning and preparation; work out what is making you stressed, identify the elements and then attack each one in turn; invest in a good haircut. The lifestyle and coping strategies are exciting, the pages on entertaining and preparing for business dinner parties at home could become a bible. My only gripe is that she seems to overdo the chocolate - her first business menu, for instance, comprises Soup with Chocolate, Duck with Chocolate and then, as if that weren't enough, comes this glorious confection: Mousse Au Chocolat with Ginger with the following ingredients (for 4 people).

12 ounces dark chocolate

8.5 ounces of heavy cream

2 ounces butter

2 egg whites

2 tablespoons sugar

2 ounces ginger confit, thinly minced.

(I worry that it might be a tad fattening, especially with chocolate in the two courses before. I am trying to calculate how long one would need to live on leek broth to compensate).

Still - a remarkable book and illustrated by a personal anecdote. As a young woman, just about to embark on a career, Mireille took a travelling holiday before commencing a dream job at the Council for Europe. In Greece she met an American and fell in love with him (it helped they spoke each others languages). After a very short time he returned to America while she was due to start at the Council of Europe. He asked her to join him in New York. Classic dilemma - job or man? How many of us would have refused to be diverted, chosen the job, not believed that a holiday romance would work? What would our friends have advised? But she chose the man and is still married to him, while starting a new career, from scratch in a new City and language, and on a new Continent.

If she had been following the advice in her book she might have asked herself 'what's the downside?' She could have always come home. But you have to hand it to her, choices like that are what constitute style and 'savoir-faire.' I believe Amazon will happily supply you, too, with a copy of her book. Meanwhile my resolution is to re-read it and to celebrate losing a stone by making Mousse Au Chocolat with Ginger.

AN INDOMITABLE LADY

2012-01-07T10:34:00.001Z

We were at the restaurant

For three years from 1941 Marie* received a visit from the postman on Saturday, but the letters she received were not ordinary letters. They contained news about the Resistance: scribbled reports of actions and details of the occupying German forces. It was her job to turn these manuscripts into a newsletter and then to take the typewriter from beneath her bed and to type them onto a stencil. This she put in an envelope and delivered on Sunday evening.

In all other respects she was a model citizen. Born in 1920, she worked in a bakery and ever since France had fallen and the seaside town where she had grown up had been invaded, she had seethed with resentment. She joined La Résistance.

Her work went on, week in week out, for three years. Then, in the spring of 1944, the Gestapo came knocking. Her little cell had been betrayed. She was carted away roughly, her hands bound, and thrown into the interrogation prison.

She learned her contacts had been arrested too. As she had no information Marie was released after a few days to a French prison where life was austere, but bearable. She wrote a letter home to her parents. A letter which she still has.

Then came D-Day and the decision to remove all Resistance prisoners to camps in the east. The Germans put her, and thousands of others, on overcrowded trains that rattled north and east. No-one knew where they were going.

After an eternity they arrived in Berlin. The station signs said so. She could see German civilians on the platforms, waiting for their trains. But no guard came to unlock the doors. Seeing her behind the bars of her carriage, a youth drew his finger across his throat and smiled. She was still only 23.

Eventually they arrived in a camp in Czechoslovakia, a camp infinitely worse than her French prison. A camp into which inmates were supposed to walk but from which they were not supposed to return. Rations were designed to keep a fit person alive only for nine months. Being small, Marie survived ten.

She lost her name and became a number: 384450.   Marie had to learn to say her number in German and to understand commands, but she resolved never to accept the German language, never to speak it.

After a few weeks an orderly issued the prisoners with pencils, paper, envelopes. They could write home, he said. Of course, she fell to with a will, letting her parents know she was alive and would someday return. She handed the letter to the grey-clad orderly with thanks in her eyes.

A month went by, two months, then Marie and a few other prisoners were called out to stand in the prison yard in the drizzling rain, shivering in their thin prison rags. Eventually the commandant came out on a balcony. “I have good news for you” he said. “We have received a delivery of mail.”

The joy she felt could be imagined. But it was short-lived.   The letter she was given seemed familiar. It was the one she herself had written two months before, which had never been posted. The Germans had played a trick. “To undermine our morale, make us give-up,” she said.

Then it was winter, cold and grim in the heart of the Continent. Marie became emaciated, but somehow she survived the starvation rations. The days lengthened, the grass grew again, leaves appeared on the trees - and then, suddenly, she and her fellow prisoners saw the Germans had left. No helmets sat behind the guns in the watchtowers.

Hours later a jeep pulled up at the gates. She heard American voices. She rushed forward and threw open her arms. She wanted to speak, to speak in French again, or even to say ‘Hallo’ in English. But no words came. Her throat, her mind, seized. As though the Germans wanted to leave her with one last humiliation the only sound she could make was the hated German word ‘Wilkommen.’

She was speaking to me in French and as the memory came flooding back as vivid today as that day 67 years ago, a tear rolled down her ninety-one year old face. “J’étais très vexée,” she said. I was very cross with myself.

I laid my hand on hers and we resumed our meal in the restaurant by the sea. She had just consumed a large plate of ‘fruits de mer,’ as vigorously as a woman half her age, and now had embarked on an enormous confection of dessert.

“You may be small,” I said, “but you have an indomitable soul.”

I was a guest at a family party and we sat looking out across the beach and to the sea and the rocks beyond. I had eaten the best sea bass I had ever tasted and was now eating profiteroles, filled with ice cream, and covered with a lush sauce of dark chocolate.   Marie’s experience in the starvation camp heightened my appreciation of the food.

“I did what I did for love,” she said later. “Love of my country, love of freedom. I was lucky. I returned.” And afterwards she gave me the kisses and the bear hug that only someone who knows that she is lucky can really give.

*I have changed her name.

HOW TO CHANGE A TYRE

2011-12-24T10:26:00.001Z

Di turned up, aged Mother in tow, on an expedition to Waitrose. J decided to join them. I saw them into the car which had, I noticed, a flat tyre. Not an auspicious start, I thought.

Now changing tyres is one of the few things I can do. Ten minutes, I said. I asked Di to pull the car forward and off the road. Unfortunately, off the road was on a slight slope.

We helped aged Mother, a week short of her ninetieth birthday, into the house. “Would you prefer a cup of tea or a glass of wine,” I asked her. “Whatever is easier for you, Pet,” she replies. She is the only person in the world that calls me ‘pet.’ Aged Mother hails from Cullercoats.

I poured the glass of wine and gave her a mince pie, apologising for its ramshackle appearance. I change tyres better - or so I thought.

Outside it began to rain. I put on a coat and loosened the wheel bolts. One was a locking nut, necessitating a fruitless search for a tool. Eventually Di called her husband and we discovered that the locking nut thingy lay in a glove box between the seats. I undid the locking nut and removed it completely.

I then screwed up the jack. The car rose. All was going well when there was a crunch and the car subsided the jack now impossibly wedged under the car. “I’ll get another jack,” I said.

Now I was sure that in the the garden shed could be found two jacks with a third in our own car. Rummaging in the shed produced no jacks.

I looked in the maintenance book for our car. Find the jack under the boot lid it said. But when I pulled up the boot carpet, which appeared as though not designed to be pulled up, there was no secret jack compartment. The rain fell faster.

I reported my failure to Aged Mother who was now on her second glass of wine. “I’m enjoying myself, Pet,” was all she said.

It was time to call the professionals. This required another call to Di’s husband to dig out the relevant insurance. I think he was watching some needle match. Anyway he gave the impression of regretting the disturbance. Aged Mother commenced a third mince pie.

The garageman rang to say he would be half an hour. I wondered what that might mean in mince pies. Then he said he wouldn’t fit the spare unless it were correctly inflated. Health and Safety, didn’t I know? He rang off.

But what is the correct pressure, we asked? Aged Mother didn’t know, but wouldn’t mind another glass of wine.

Di rang a third time. Eventually (when no doubt two vital goals and a penalty had been scored) came the news that 30 pounds might be reasonable. We loaded the greasy tyre into my car and went to see Mr Jay at the petrol station.

Jay’s air pump demanded 50p. Neither Di nor I had 50p. But Mrs Jay changed a pound in the middle of a helpful conversation about Bombay Mix. The 50p inserted, the airpump clattered into reluctant life.

Nothing happened. Very little air came out of the pump: I could hold my finger over the valve with no problem. The scale on the inflator wasn’t budging. I went in search of Jay. The pump died.

Jay, dear man that he is, has just has a kidney transplant. “It is the cold weather,” he explained “you have to hit the inflator very hard against the wall. Then it will work.” I pointed out that the pump had stopped. “You need another 50p,” he said.

“It isn’t a fast pump. It is a slow pump.” Di looked incredulously at the beaten-against-the-wall-gauge: it had now moved from 10 to 12 pounds. “You see!” said Jay, disappearing.
The gauge crept ever so slowly up. It was a very slow pump.

Back home we found the garageman fuming on the doorstep and about to go. He had arrived - in a vehicle that looked too small to accommodate his bulk let along his tools - in 20 minutes, not half an hour. If looks could kill we would have been toast.

“There’s a nut missing,” he spat out. Luckily I had put the locking nut where it could be found easily. “Never jack a vehicle in a hill,” he added, doing just that. Di has a good line with angry men. “I expect you’re very busy,” she smiled. “Flat out” he grunted in the first vaguely civil words to pass his lips. “Could do you a cup of tea,” I ventured. But he had finished. Not in ten minutes but in two. He raced away to his next job.

Aged Mother professed that she had had a most satisfactory afternoon, but J never got to Waitrose.

SO WHY NOT TURN CHRISTMAS ROUND?

2011-12-17T13:48:00.002Z

'Tis the season to be jolly, as the old song has it. Well, no, not really. 'Tis the season to be stressed would be more like it. Still help is at hand for I hear the BBC has discovered a group of researchers who have carefully plotted the development of pre-Christmas stress and, most importantly, have calculated when it ends. According to Radio 4, this is when the presents have been unwrapped and the dinner has been eaten: a time which occurs, so the researchers say, in the average household around five minutes to two o'clock on Christmas Day.

There is something in that precision, isn't there, that makes one instantly suspect that the researchers do not inhabit the same world as you or I? I suppose there may be some super-efficient households in which everything is finished by five minutes to two; where the paper-hatted family falls contentedly into a stress-free sleep wearing their new slippers and smelling strongly of the less expensive offerings of the parfumiers (for I doubt those who finish their Christmas lunch at 1.55pm precisely, are in the habit of lashing out £241.95 for a 30ml bottle of Channel No 5), but I have never known any.

My own pre Christmas stress has been building up quite nicely as it happens and is now safely in the red area of intolerable pressure. Somehow we have enjoyed five dinner parties in eight days, four of which have been given by ourselves involving considerable moving and rearranging of furniture and equipment. The dishwasher and the cooker, both of about twenty years vintage, sigh almost audibly as they receive another load. Bless them!

As if this wasn't enough it has been Christmas card week and present ordering week and the week the car went in for its MoT. It has been a week of thunder and hail and the week when the telephone crashed. The car failed its test (it needs a new windscreen, the garage said helpfully) while the telephone needed, it turned out, a new junction box, the previous one having melted in the storm; both required me to be early on parade waiting for the requisite engineers to make a house call. Meanwhile, our label customers have merrily been demanding ever more complicated jobs in ever shorter timescales 'before Christmas' so that we have been winding labels literally between the wineglasses and candlesticks.

With a week still to go I am nicely frazzled, with a sore tummy, and the irritating feeling of guilt you get when you receive a card from someone you have previously overlooked. There is still much to do: the car to be given another go at its MoT, and fourteen boxes to be shipped out in the direction of the sunny Seychelles.

If the government wanted to do something useful it could employ me to give Christmas a makeover for the purpose of reducing stress levels in the population. At the moment we all want to fit everything in 'before Christmas.' That includes present buying, card posting, cake making, party giving, tree decorating, relative visiting and so on. Everything has to be done at once and the result is the nation drowns in stress. No wonder a sea of alcohol is required to survive the ordeal.

But then, after Christmas, nothing happens apart from the New Year hiccup. Time is spare. If only those empty hours could be moved into the 'before Christmas' slot.

So why not turn Christmas around? Recently, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' have become ever more a reality. So what if we moved Christmas back to the Feast of the Epiphany - from the first to the twelfth day of Christmas? Christmas, the religious festival, could of course remain on 25 December, but 'The Big Day' would then be at the end of the holiday rather than at the beginning. All the Christmas paraphernalia could be done in the holiday period itself thus ensuring that December's productivity and our collective sanity don't suffer as they usually do.

In our drama group it has become a tradition to celebrate Twelfth Night with some sort of festivity and a handsome frangipane Galette des Rois. This year the Rain or Shine Theatre Company are bringing their winter show Top Hats and Tinsel to Cowbridge.

The Twelfth Night tradition is one well worth reviving. Interestingly I see in this week's Spectator magazine an article by Melanie MacDonagh recounting how women used to gather in the West of Ireland to celebrate the Epiphany with cakes and gossip in a celebration called Nollaig Beag - or Little Christmas. These days though, she says, the custom is 'an opportunity for well-to-do urban women to meet up and drink in a hotel or a pub........a self-conscious kind of Celtic version of International Women's Day.'

Well - it's an excuse to bring out the Chanel I suppose, and it likes me better (to use a Shakespearean idiom) as a stress-buster than finishing the show by five minutes to two on Christmas Day.

A STORY FOR THEO - WATCH OUT FOR SEAL HOLES

2011-12-10T11:14:00.001Z

A Seal Hole - with a Mole (I mean a Seal)

Christmas is coming. Our little grandson, Theo, came into the house yesterday and looked down the long hall into the sitting room where the newly decorated Christmas tree twinkled under a thousand and one lights and let out an excited 'Oooooooh'! His face lit up like a Christmas sparkler.

How wonderful to be not yet three and this the first Christmas you remember. something you really are seeing for the first time: trees and presents and candles and general festivity! He took the tree baubles in his hands, squeezing each gently. I think he expected them to be balloons or tiny footballs. Whatever was this wonder chez les grandfolk?

Still the excitement may have been too much for shortly afterwards he curled up in the big red armchair with his favourite soft toy - a Penguin. The poor lad has not been terribly well, laid low by a bug, and has been hot and fretful with a hacking cough. Yesterday he was better but exhausted.

So I sat with him on the arm of the chair and made up a story about Penguin, while he went in search of the land of nod. As far as I remember it went like this.

One wild Antarctic day, when the wind howled and the snow blew all around, Penguin was trudging home across the ice after a day’s fishing. Slish, slosh, slish he went, for parts of the ice were melting. Penguin hadn’t been very successful with his fishing: he’d fished all day and hadn’t caught a single herring for his tea. He was sure to be scolded when he returned home. But the fact was that the herring were becoming fewer and fewer and the ones that remained had all grown devilish shy.

So his creel was empty, poor Penguin, at least empty of fish. For with his fishing net (which all clever Penguins carry in their fur) he had caught some shrimpy little things, which can be quite delicious, but which are not the sort of thing to fill up a family on a cold, damp and windy evening.

Anyway, there he was, splish sploshing along through the snow and the ice and looking up at the sky and wondering whether he might have better luck tomorrow when suddenly, CRASH! and Gurgle! and Bbbb-otheration! He found himself up to his armpits (or rather his flipperpits) in seawater. He had fallen into a seal hole.

If I had been a rabbit, he thought to himself crossly as he struggled to crawl out of the water, I might have tripped over a molehill. Moles and seals both travel around under the ground, though out on the ice, there isn’t any ground, if you follow me, and the seals have to make do with water. But like moles they like to pop up now and again to take a good breath of fresh air. So seals make holes in the ice into which respectable folk, minding their own business and not looking too closely where they are going, occasionally fall. Bother! thought the Penguin again as he splashed water from his feathers.

He started again to waddle wearily homewards, looking down in case another seal hole should leap out at him unexpectedly, when he heard a cry behind him. It was his friend William, who had also been fishing out on the ice.

When Penguin turned around he saw that William was waving to him. “Watch out for the seal hole!” Penguin cried.

   “What seal hole?” answered William. But it was too late. There came a loud splosh and William’s dumpy little body disappeared from view.

    Penguin ran back to the seal hole just as fast as his little legs would carry him. He grabbed hold of William’s flippers and pulled and pulled, but William seemed quite stuck. Then suddenly, ‘pop!’ William shot out of the hole like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

    But what was this? William was covered in fish! There were fish in his creel, fish in his clothes, fish in his boots (William always wore thick waterproof boots). No wonder Penguin could hardly pull him out of the hole! When he fell in he must have landed smack in the middle of a shoal of herring and when Penguin pulled him out the fish must have got trapped around him. Wasn’t that lucky?

    So to thank Penguin for saving him and rescuing him from the seal hole, William said Penguin could have some of the herring. In fact there were more than enough fish for the two of them so in return Penguin gave William some of the little shrimpy like things, for Penguin always believed in sharing, and the two friends then walked home across the ice to the shelter of the mountain, singing fishing sort of songs and telling stories and meanwhile, KEEPING A GOOD LOOK OUT FOR SEAL HOLES!

(The photograph of the seal by the hole is from dougs-antartic-adventure.blogspot.com via Google's Images for Seal Holes. Use is acknowledged with thanks).

YES, BUT WHY REINDEER?

2011-12-03T10:34:00.001Z

My good friend Frances, who hails from New York and often comments on this blog, regularly posts beautifully illustrated accounts of the great parades that march through that city. These mark this national day, or that liberation or so and so's hard won rights.

In our little town this side of the Pond our parading is more limited. We don't have a Mardi Gras or a Carnival. Britain lacks an independence day or a liberation day (never having been either dependent or liberated) and we probably think we have enough civil rights to be going along with. Neither are we terribly diverse either ethnically or sexually or any other 'lly,' and in any case we are a pretty tolerant bunch; at least we like to think we are.

While our parading may thus be limited it isn't non-existent. Each year at the end of November we hold the Reindeer Parade when Father Christmas, regaled in splendour in a four-wheeled sled, is pulled through the town by reindeer, showering, over all the children en route, largesse to be delivered on Christmas Eve via parental intervention, or so one hopes. The scarlet gentleman is accompanied by a great flock of elves and pixies of varying ages and variously convincing appearance. Brass bands of uncertain proficiency accompany the ensemble and the reindeer plod in a rather half-hearted manner from one end of the town to the other and back again, with everyone following in their wake.

The reindeer, in case you were wondering, are shipped all the way from Scotland at great expense and return to their farm after the event. I don't know about you but I have always thought reindeer singularly unprepossessing animals. They have a moth-eaten and downtrodden appearance, as if they know that their sole purpose in life is to be eaten by wolves. Joie de vivre is a feeling quite unknown to them.

Moreover, they are actually much smaller than one imagines they should be and I think this lack of physicality must be a tremendous disappointment to children used to seeing cartoons of magnificent beasts the size of carthorses with noses flashing like a demented fire alarm.

Which makes me wonder who it was that decided that St Nicholas, or Santa Claus, should use these - of all creatures - as a propulsive force. Horses would be much more energetic and, of course, considerably more visual. Somehow I think the reindeer got the part without auditioning.

For instance, if you are beguiled by the thought of an animal from the cold snowy wastes, how about the moose? With a little imagination you could visualise a gift-laden sled pulled through the sky by a giant moose whose antlers flapped like Dumbo's ears. Indeed elephants might be even more majestic and you'd think, now that the world's population had reach nine billion, Santa could use some extra traction. Or, to revert to the North Pole again and being ecological at the same time, a couple of polar bears would be most impressive with red scarves around their necks.

But Reindeer! Well - fine for trudging through the snow and living on moss and providing hides for moccasins and tents - even acceptable for the occasional dish of stringy stew - but for racing across the heavens with names like Donner and Blitzen, surely not. Reindeer are just not cut out for the part, I'm sorry.

Still, there we are. Like it or not reindeer have cornered the Santa sled pulling market and are not about to be displaced, despite the generations of disappointed children whom I am absolutely sure would far prefer polar bears and elephants. (In fact left to themselves children would invent a far superior myth in which there were a whole family of Santas - one for each continent maybe - with superhero vehicles - why would you want a sled in Africa? - pulled by a whole zoological garden of different creatures).

Anyway we have digressed as we usually do. The Reindeer came to Cowbridge last Sunday with Santa in tow and into the town flocked thousands upon thousands of people. Cars were parked up to a mile out of town. In every roadway a steady stream of buggies, babies, Mums, Dads and excited children streamed down the hillsides into the valley bottom in the hope of seeing the reindeer and receiving a species of papal blessing from the man in the scarlet coat and a chance to remind him to bring the Nintendo rather than the X Box - if that wouldn't be too much of a bother - and please could an elf be sure to take out a pencil and write down the request to avoid bringing the wrong thing as happened last year which meant that Mummy and Daddy had to take Santa's present back to a shop and try to exchange it all at great expense.

Our little town houses about 5,000 souls. Adding a further 25,000 and, what's more, cramming them into the centre creates something that is a cross between a rugby scrum and the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, Frances, you will excuse me if I say I didn't attend this year's parade. Instead I walked away from town and up to the Tump, there on a sunny morning to contemplate the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond. I was quite alone with my visions of Moose and Elephants, Horses and Polar Bears and the parade they made in my mind was infinitely superior to the one below.

Then I had a very fine lunch in Loch Fyne's restaurant with theatre friends and forgot, thankfully, all about the reindeer, while the 25,000 and, we hope, their satisfied children, trudged up the hill back to their cars.

(The picture showing Santa, a couple of bemused children, an Elf and an Elfette and, if you look very closely, a sprig of reindeer horn (I told you they were unprepossessing) is courtesy of the website of our very fine local paper, the Cowbridge Gem, which, if you Google it, will tell you all practical details about the parade and why it is counted such a success).

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

2011-11-26T11:53:00.001Z

A similar Bobble. You'll have to imagine this in orange

We are a month away from Christmas. I know this because various members of the family start whispering about whether you have any ideas about what ‘x’ would like to find in their stocking, which leads inevitably on to what you would like to find in your stocking. I am hopeless at answering. What I would really like is either ridiculously expensive or completely inappropriate, or probably both. Otherwise my wants are small, at least in the present department.

Some people are instinctive present choosers. Without a great deal of thought or effort they go into a shop and buy a present both useful and a surprise. Probably inexpensive as well for which, I think, you should get bonus points. Any fool can be a success at present buying if money is no object.

My eldest sister is one such person. She once bought me a woollen bobble hat - she was living in Shetland at the time - and the hat, though improbably knitted in orange and brown, was clearly modelled on the hats worn by the local fishermen and fitted snugly around the ears. It was crowned with a large orange bobble and I remember it also had a flap around the base which could be pulled down during a severe inclemency so that the hat would cover everything north of the mouth.

That it then covered the eyes would not have mattered. You can’t really see anything anyway in a Shetland gale; it is hard enough to stand up, all you can do is to cower against the elemental forces of nature. Anyway, your hat wouldn’t blow away.

Living then as I did in the docile atmosphere of the home counties I was still glad to own such a garment and wore it almost daily. In that game you play if you can’t sleep, where you rank your chattels in order so that if ever your house catches fire you know what to take first, it found a high place.

The hat wore out, of course, as all things do. The first casualty was the bobble. Mind you, I wasn’t sorry for I thought the bobble an unnecessary frivolity, particularly when coloured orange. I suppose it might have been useful had I been engulfed by an avalanche, but that wasn't likely in Essex.

Minus bobble, the hat went on for a very long time before finally succumbing to moths. I have a new one now but this doesn’t quite match the practicality of the old hand-knitted version. It is also a light grey, which, while a tad less disreputable, is an unfortunate colour in the event of an avalanche.

Someone else once gave me a pair of Timberland gloves, fleece lined on the inside, tough without ever being bulky and made of leather, soft as a second skin. The sort of gloves that pilots used in the days before cockpit heating and when the dress code called for sheepskin jackets. They, too, were a most effective present and worn till they fell apart.

But to revert to the pilots a moment. Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen a pilot wearing insulated headgear. Why? You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a pilot in a very cold plane (I am talking of fifty, even a hundred years ago) might need to wear something warm as a bearskin?

Yet if I remember correctly from those early films such as the one of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic with his plane covered in ice, he wore no headgear at all, or just perhaps a leather helmet. I’m sure a bobble hat would have been useful.

When did Lindbergh fly from New York to Paris? Was it 1929? Or 1927? Or 1925? It is the sort of question that might well have cropped up at the Great Annual Rotary Quiz that took place in the Town Hall here last Saturday and to which le tout Cowbridge turns out. The questions this year were harder than last and were full of such silly forced-choice questions which do not suit my mental mechanics at all. CADS - our drama society - usually put in two teams. Last year we came fourth. This year we came tenth, equal with the other CADS team. Actors don’t like forced choices, you see.

Still the annual late November quiz reminds you that Christmas is on its way and to turn your attention to serious present buying. If in doubt I can recommend a hand-knitted bobble hat from Shetland and a pair of soft Timberland gloves, regardless of whether you are buying for old or young, male or female, town or country mouse. You may be thought an old miser but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of your affection will be warm this winter and probably safe in an avalanche as well.

(The picture shows a Shetland type Bobble Hat made by Barbour, courtesy of Sadler and Co. For those desperate to know Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927.)

SAUSAGES, GREEN CHEESE AND THE BIG BANG

2011-11-18T10:16:00.001Z

A simulated detection of the Higgs Boson particle

The moon, we learn, is made of green cheese - though what ‘green cheese’ might be is somehow never explained. I suppose it is cheese that is green, but you never know. Chinese seaweed is not seaweed at all but a kind of cabbage, or so they tell me, so green cheese might be a kind of rock. But that aside what is everything else made of?

When we stay at the Mill, down in the Auvergne, it gets dark at night. Proper dark. Can’t see your hand in front of your face dark. But look up and what you see are uncountable stars stretching in a dimly glowing carpet from one side of the heavens to the other. Millions upon billions of tiny pricks of light.

And in this vast uncountable universe what we can see is multiplied a million fold by what we can’t: those stars in galaxies and nebulae that have travelled already too far and whose light no longer reaches us and whose presence can only be detected by radio beams.

Yet this vastness of stars and galaxies and planets and rocks represents less than one part in two- hundred-and-fifty of what is in the universe. If, like the moon, everything we can see is made of green cheese, then that represents only what is left out upon the counter. There remains a whole greater kitchen of comestibles locked away out of sight in cupboards and pantries.

Dark matter makes up three-quarters of the universe and dark energy a further quarter. What are these two behemoths which take up whole store-cupboards of space? Well, that is at least as good a question as the one about the green cheese, for no-one seems to know. We know dark matter exists and roughly where it is, but we don’t yet know what it is. For all I know it may be made of green cheese too. Or even blue, yellow or purple cheese.

The man who prompted these sudden reflections is Lyn Evans, who hails from just up the road in Aberdare in South Wales and is billed as the builder of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just outside Geneva. Possibly you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for it has been much in the news. It is a giant circular tunnel 27 kilometres long through which sub-atomic particles are accelerated with the aid of magnets to impossible speeds and then crashed into each other in the hope that they will break apart and so we shall be able to learn more about what you and I (and the green cheese) are made of.

Lyn Evans was giving the Anniversary Lecture at the Welsh Centre of International Affairs in Cardiff this week. He spoke in a listed pseudo-Egyptian monstrosity of a building known as the Temple of Peace and Health that boasts some of the worst acoustics in the world. Still, what he was saying was so fascinating that you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.

We are not made, he told us, of sugar and spice and all things nice, but of a whole family of creatures, fabulous as unicorns, fantastical as griffins with names like gluons, muons, quarks, hadrons, neutrons, photons, variously possessing mass, energy or electrical charge and sometimes none of these at all. Out of such energised and vibrating soup come the paintings of Leonardo, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart.

One particle however is missing: the Higgs Boson particle. Like the dark matter (or perhaps the green cheese) we know - or we think we know - it exists and that without it all the gluons and muons and photons and quarks would simply fall apart. It has been called the ‘God’ particle because without it there could be no matter or any living thing created. Yet like God himself no-one has yet found it. The scientists have trod the path to Mount Olympus only to find Zeus and his tribe departed.

Hence the need to build this 27 kilometre tunnel and to collide hadrons in the hope that after the bang of the collisions scientists will be able to find Higgs Boson particles among the wreckage standing by the roadside, as it were, and scratching their heads.

What Lyn Evans will do then he didn’t say. Presumably the things will be weighed and measured and then - because we have to return whence we started to the discussion of what the universe is made of - then the boffins can get to work again on how it all began: how exactly the Big Bang.....er....banged, all that time ago.

Rather disappointingly he didn’t touch on what happened before the Big Bang - which has always seemed to me the more important question. Something surely must have been frying in the pan before ‘sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, one went ‘bang.’’ Was our Big Bang a unique event? Oh dear - you’ve got me worried now.

CLAZZAKIN'S CARPET

2011-11-11T11:11:00.001Z


Clazzakin's Carpet

Thanks to all the good folk who sent welcome and heartfelt wishes last week for my recovery. I am mended I am glad to say and no longer feel as though your man with the scythe is out there in the vicinity searching for my address. I have given up reading articles on medical catastrophes and am back in the land of the hale and the hearty, though my knees, inexplicably, have begun to hurt and I am sure a hypochondriac must be able to make something of that.

Despite those of you who urged me to abstain from whisky or aspirin, and certainly from both at the same time, I have to say that this combination seems about the most effective remedy known to medical science. Of course, I don’t take much of either. A glass, or at the very most two modest glasses, of whisky and then with water and no more than a couple of dispersible aspirin - and the aspirin before the whisky - is all it needs to feel well again, for a few hours at least.

It doesn’t help however to find yourself as I did last weekend being invited to lunch and dinner parties on the same day by generous friends with restricted calendars when I didn’t feel like eating very much more than some light scrambled egg on toast. Especially aggravating as well when I am trying to lose some of the pounds that I added on holiday before Christmas and the New Year put them back on again. We have an invitation to spend New Year in France, which, if the past is anything to go by, will mean a splendid party of oysters and champagne and pretty much non stop eating from seven until eleven.

Over Christmas it will be my turn to provide the grub for family and various guests who won’t be content, either, with scrambled egg. I’ve just been given what sounds a magnificent recipe for a soup called Pho by a blogging friend who lives in Seattle. A beef broth with slices of beef and spiced up with ginger and cinnamon and chilies. Onions and other vegetables come into it too. I might well try it on them; I’m intrigued by the name ‘Pho.’

By Christmas, too, I hope to have finished and printed a children’s story that presently goes under the working title of Clazzakin’s Carpet. It is a story about flying carpets and where they come from (Persia); and why they fly and what they carry on them when they do (Persian cats - obviously - but not Kings or Camels); and one little girl’s effort to make her grandmother’s carpet take to the air.

The story has been superbly illustrated by another blogging friend and I am now putting it together in the software offered by the people at BLURB, who will print the book and in colour too. But the job of fitting illustrations and text together and assembling both within page borders; of getting the paragraphing and spacing correct is both tedious and time-consuming. It is work that must go on for every illustrated book that is ‘designed,’ but which few of us, I suspect, ever think about. Writing the story is infinitely easier and in future I think I shall stick to that.

Another friend emailed this week inviting me to a talk by a clerical gentleman who gives spiritual advice to various official bodies In Wales and whom I have met on other occasions. The talk - or rather sermon for such it was - unfolded in the town's magnificently restored early nineteenth century Baptist Chapel into which previously I had never set foot. A most beautiful building full of theatrical potential with its boxed pews and balconies. ‘We are all migrants,’ he said soulfully, his hands clasped together, ‘though some of us are more recent than others.’ True enough, though whether the sentiment helps the price of eggs, I know not.

I don’t normally attend sermons in chapels (indeed, this was a lifetime first) but such events are all part of life’s rich tapestry and my presence there might even have given me valuable Karma points in the event that my present feeling of well-being proves no more than a remission. Pascal’s bet and all that.

Which French philosopher reminds me that last night I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’ - a most wonderful film about a young American in Paris with a nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia becomes reality when he travels in a 1920’s Peugeot ninety years back in time to meet Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter and Gertrude Stein (among others). About as believable, of course, as flying carpets, but hugely enjoyable. Philosophic too, and very funny. I’ve always enjoyed Woody Allen.

GRIM REAPING

2011-11-05T12:13:00.002Z

I have been pretty much ill all week with one of those sicknesses that come on so gradually so you don’t realise that you are ill at all, until you start to feel better. I blame the aeroplane on which we flew back from Rodez after our visit to Le Moulin du Clout two weeks ago. They are always full of bugs which incubate for a week or ten days before breaking out into something international.

I begin to know that I am ill when half way through my afternoon's work I feel a compelling urge to pour a glass of whisky and perhaps take a couple of aspirin for good measure. That makes me feel better in the short and the long term but not in the medium term for the whisky (and aspirin too) ravage my febrile stomach and liver which is ‘le point faible’ of my anatomy and the place for which any bugs that may be circulating head directly and without passing ‘go.’

In this state therefore of more or less perpetual indigestion and general wretchedness, I happened a day or two ago to read an article on the cheerful subject of pancreatic cancer, much in the news recently as the slayer of poor Steve Jobs on the keyboard of one of whose beautiful products I am even now typing .

Apparently, if you get pancreatic cancer, there isn’t much that can be done and you had better start putting your affairs in order and not embark on any long books. The trouble is that you don’t know that you’ve got it - because the symptoms aren’t obvious - until it has got too much of a hold for anything worthwhile to be done. This is clear from the survival rates which haven’t improved at all over the years. The good news is that it is a rare form of cancer and makes up only 3 per cent of all cancers. Statistics are on your side, even though they didn’t help Mr Jobs.

As it happens my dear Mother died of pancreatic cancer. I was going to write ‘dear old,’ but she wasn’t old at all, being only 54 when she died. According to the article this isn’t helpful to her offspring for the disease runs in families. This constituted, said the article, one formal indicator that I, too, might succumb. It then listed five further indicators: to my horror three of these five might well be said to apply to me. Oh dear!

Which is why, of course, if you are a hypochondriac like yours truly, you shouldn’t read about these things as you only end up depressing yourself. Fortunately, while you can’t do anything about your family, most of the other warning indicators can be avoided or corrected by living and eating in a sensible way and in my case not eating foods and drinking liquids that irritate the nether regions, wonderful though the taste and effect of a glass or two of cold white wine may be on a summer’s day - though surely, I tell myself, one must be able to make the occasional exception - otherwise one simply gives up on life.

In any case, I remind myself, what really did for Mama was not pancreatic cancer out of the blue but a cancer that just happened to be looking for a home and chose the pancreas faute de mieux. For unhappy reasons, best known to herself, she developed in the later stages of her life a powerful addiction to alcohol, tobacco, strong coffee and Alka-Seltzer, together with a powerful resistance to exercise and looking after herself. Living with a ferocious and belligerent Siamese cat called Ohio (one half of Baltimore and Ohio - she had an absurd tendency to name her cats after American Railroads) didn’t help either.

Nor did the Grim Reaper have to wait too long on the doorstep. In fact she was sitting up in bed, quite merrily, smoking a cigarette only half an hour before she died, leaving me and most of her family half a day’s journey short of wishing her well.

Still, in the midst of death we are in life, for it is confidently reported that young Theo has a sibling on the way. Just as he was Topaz before he arrived, so the parcel in the post, as it were, has been called variously Peanut and Butterbean. Maybe it will turn out to be twins, though I suspect in these days of acute medical advance that we should have known were that to be so. Grandparents can’t obtain contraception against grandchildren, can they? Or some other form of home protection and sanity insurance?

APPLES AND TROUT

2011-10-29T11:02:00.000+01:00

The Tumbrel - Pour Encourager Les Autres

I’ve been gardening and feel quite proud. Yesterday I made six apple grafts taking cuttings that I had made from trees at the Mill and sticking them into stubs of branches on the apple trees here. I watched a little video on YouTube that showed you how to do it. Mind you, like so much else, seeing an expert cut, slice and bind with all the right tools and knowing exactly what he is doing, is one thing; doing it yourself without the correct equipment is another. But still I have six grafts: five on apple trees and one on a pear for I had taken a quince cutting and read somewhere that pears are grown on quince root stocks - so why not vice versa?

Anyway the whole exercise was an experiment, a bit of fun. I am not overly worried if they grow or not. For good measure I brought home a quince sucker and that should grow and if it doesn’t produce quinces at some future date I had always graft pears on to it.

It has been so wet that I haven’t had a chance to get on with this grafting job and my cuttings have sat embedded respectively in an apple and a quince since leaving the Mill last Sunday. At least one had expired, or maybe it was dead before I started; so when the sun came out yesterday I hurried outside to do the job.

Of course I had no suitable grafting goo with which you protect the graft after you have made it. So I used the first thing that came to hand which was Polycell flexible and waterproof filler, specially for bathrooms. Apart from being white rather than black it has exactly the same rubbery, gooey look of the stuff in the YouTube film. It can’t be poisonous, can it? if you use it in bathrooms? Anyway we shall see come the spring.

An Apple Graft - Perhaps Not a Good One

I blame Rosie for my enthusiasm, plus a restless desire to experiment inherited from long hours alone and unsupervised as a child. I once tried making cider but found, as you do, that it is remarkably hard to extract juice from an apple unless you first cut it into small pieces, which is hard unless you have some sort of mechanical device like a great stone wheel in a trough and a horse to pull it.

I must have been about twelve. Cutting the apples with a knife was boring. But then I had the wonderful idea of simply squashing the apples that had already fermented and gone brown of which there were a great many in the apple store. What I produced looked like rough cider in every way. It even tasted like a species of cider. But it was of course undrinkable, being acid to a degree.

Down in the Cantal they produce with their mountain of apples something that looks very similar to my effort - a muddy, grey, brown brew which tastes infinitely better than it looks and is served in plastic juice bottles at one euro a litre. They give you a wrap of roasted chestnuts with it as well at no extra cost - chestnuts being another commodity of which nature has delivered an abundance. The cider isn’t particularly alcoholic and at the little cider festival we attended the hardened drinkers at the bar were all drinking beer. But you don’t want anything to make you legless when you are sitting out in the sun enjoying the scenery, do you.

The real trouble with going to France of course is that I put on weight at the rate of a quarter of a pound a day. I have more appetite than at home and of course the food is better. On this recent holiday I had the best trout I had ever tasted at a little hotel not far from Maurs. Outside, in the sunshine, stood a tumbrel, looking as though it had just conveyed Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Inside the trout were cooking, or maybe even being caught for the hotel Patronne said she kept the fish in a pond. Certainly, they tasted fresher than daisies. Whether they had been grilled, baked, or deep fried, I wasn’t sure, but anyway they came covered with garlic and cooked to perfection.

I asked the Patronne how she made the loose bones crumble and melt, but she wasn’t telling. ‘It’s an old Auvergnat recipe.’ she said, smiling mysteriously.

Anyway, whatever she did I don’t think it involved apples. If my grafts take we shall have here at least some of the dozen or more varieties of apple at the Mill. And maybe even a Quince too. We shall need to wait for spring for a result.

D'ARTAGNAN AND THE AUTUMN COLOURS

2011-10-26T11:37:00.000+01:00

D'Artagnan's Birthplace near Lupiac (Gers)

'J'adore' said Caro waving her arms, 'les couleurs d'automne.' We were sitting at table in her great and almost medieval hall, restored to great beauty and perfection and which doubles (or triples or quadruples) as kitchen, dining room, living room and study, all in one elegant space.

We had in fact just come in from the west facing balcony beyond which the sun had set far away over the misty hills leaving the sky filled with the same golden autumn colours as the leaves that tumbled all around. Even the champagne seemed to take on an autumn hue.

Caro was by now stirring the most wonderful soup. 'It's a universal phrase', she said. 'Whenever you are in difficulty, or don't understand something, you can always reply - with suitable gestures - that you simply love the autumn colours.' As always, I thought, the phrase seems to lose something in translation.

Well, there we were. We had just arrived that very afternoon from the grey cloudiness of Britain into the warm autumn sunshine of the Cantal - somewhere, incidentally, that is a little larger than Norfolk but with only 149,000 people, despite having its own respectable ski resort at Le Lioran and being only a couple of fast hours driving from the Mediterranean. Moreover, the Departemental capital, Aurilliac, even has more sun than Toulouse, according to the weather statistics. Despite this, the Cantal ranks with the Creuse and the Lozère as one of the three most depopulated French Departements.

And it was once English around six hundred years ago. That anyway was the point I hesitantly put to Den who is Caro's other half. (The two of them together are a walking encyclopaedia). In the boom years for the English Raj in France, after Henry V had done the business at Agincourt.

There's a castle just down the road - just a ruin now - that changed hands, amicably, too, according to Den, with one side marching out and the other side marching in. But whether it was the French who were quitting or the English, Den didn't know. For certainly it didn't remain English very long and in a few short years during the disastrous reign of the mad Henry VI all English France was lost (apart from Calais). The hundred years war won, only promptly to be lost and the loss then triggering the Wars of the Roses.

What you learn from Shakespeare and Phillipa Gregory! Whose latest fiction 'The Lady of the Rivers' is, to my mind, a great read, particularly if you have Wikipedia beside you. The book is a fictional life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Mother of Elizabeth Woodville ('The White Queen') and great-grand-mother of Henry VIII.

For some reason Den and Caro advise me also to enter the realm of historical fiction, cutting my teeth, as it were, by translating Alexandre Dumas' novel, 'The Three Musketeers,' which was last translated into English, apparently, 150 years ago and therefore needs reworking for our text speak age. I have always counted this a wild project but something seems to be telling me it isn't.

You see we visited my other sister, during this stay, who also lives down in the Gers in south west France (where it is not so sunny as in the Cantal). In fact it rained on only the second day we were there.

'I know,' Sarah said brightly. 'Why don't you go off and visit the D'Artagnan Museum, it's only ten minutes away in Lupiac.' And so we did.

D'Artagnan must be one of the few people in history to be more famous for his fictional exploits than his real ones. But yes, he was the Captain General of the King's Musketeers and he did arrest and guard the rogue Finance Minister, Nicolas Fouquet - who some think was the man behind, or rather inside, the Iron Mask, and he did die at the siege of Maastricht in course of a rather unnecessary bit of heroics. And yes, he was born in a little manor house just outside Lupiac, though sadly this is now privately owned.

The Lupiac museum is in a chapel in the town and is full of film posters and book editions. The audio commentary is a bit hit or miss, switching alarmingly from one subject to the next. But still worth seeing on a wet afternoon. I now have background should the translation ever get off the ground.

Nor was this the last time I met him. For it seems the man is ubiquitous. Opening the Spectator on returning home, I see a picture of Milla Jovovich dressed as Milady de Winter. Yes, yet another remake of The Three Musketeers is out and showing at cinemas nationwide. This time it includes airships. Deborah Ross' review is scathing: 'All for one, one for all, but, mostly, one to skip.'

I do wonder whether the world really needs a new translation, with or without airships. 'J'adore les couleurs d'automne,' as D"Artagnan might himself have said pensively.

HYDRAULIC EXPERIMENTS

2011-10-01T10:53:00.001+01:00

A Happy Theo and Sand Castle Building Bucket

You know it is autumn, don’t you, when you come out of your front door, or through a garden gate, and blunder straight into a spider’s web. It only seems to happen at this time of the year and both spiders and webs seem different to those you find at other times. The webs are finer and only catch the light when it reflects obliquely off their gossamer threads They look like proper spider’s webs too - as though designed in some Disney studio - and the spiders are brown and camouflaged, not black.

Our grandson Theo, now past two and a half, has a mortal fear not of spiders but of their webs and spots little threads here there and everywhere that have to be removed before he will venture anywhere near. This can make progress around the garden - or even parts of the home - rather slow.

What he does like are the adventures of Shaun the Sheep, one of Aardman’s comic creations for children. In one episode Shaun is dancing an Irish jig on top of a washing machine for a reason that need not detain us here. Theo is fascinated and has been attempting to emulate Shaun on top of the ottoman. To encourage him I showed him a video clip of Riverdance. Michael Flatley would be a revelation, I thought, and so much more agile than me. Alas not so. Young Theo prefers the plasticine sheep while I have become, unlikely as it may seem, a teacher of Irish dancing. It must be my grandmother’s genes.

The Indian summer has been so beautiful that when I took Theo to the beach yesterday the atmosphere was quite Mediterranean. The same dry wind, warm light, and featherdown softness to the air, not however set against the parched pines, sand dunes and purple hills of the south of France, but against a peculiarly British backdrop of grassy hills in a new flush of greenery and the magnificent autumn colours of oak and ash leaves.

The sun hangs low now, even in the afternoon, which makes it seem as though this were the evening and we would be shortly returning for a later supper rather than a five o’clock tea. All most confusing. Not that it bothered Theo who engaged himself in numerous hydraulic experiments around sandcastles and the power of the incoming tide. Unfortunately, they are lost to posterity for I left my camera at home.

Watching the waves crashing on the rocks and the tide racing up the channel I cannot help wondering why the powers that be stick turbines in the thin air on the tops of our moorlands, where from time to time they stand idle and becalmed and even when the wind is blowing don’t generate much electricity anyway. Why not put the turbines in the sea? Obviously not the same turbines, but the tide in this channel is heavy and fierce and above all predictable. A few marine turbines could generate more renewable energy than all the white stalked monsters that disfigure our landscape. And, would do so invisibly, too.

The hot weather also means that we haven’t yet had a chance to experiment properly with the new heating system, kindly installed by British Gas recently. In addition to the central heating we have an open fire in the sitting room which we have never used much because the room promptly fills with smoke.

When we were in Gascony last week my sister told me of the various stratagems she had employed to stop her big open kitchen fire from smoking. The answer, it seemed, was to eschew grates and large logs and instead to build the fire directly on the floor. Our fireplace is a minnow compared to her great whale of a beast but the idea seemed worth trying and two friends invited for dinner provided a reasonable excuse to despatch the grate and light a fire directly against the fireback. And yes, it worked.

The papers are full of the collapsing euro and how lucky we are not to have joined the single currency, but I am not sure if this isn’t a question of beams and motes. Buying euros for our trip I couldn’t help noticing that the external value of sterling has declined by over 20 per cent since the euro’s launch, while our level of inflation is running at twice that of countries like France and Germany. Personally I’d rather we were in the euro than out of it - it would make Gascony a lot cheaper for one thing - but the indignity is that whereas once we would have been welcomed with open arms, now we should need a very long period indeed to get ourselves back to that position. This doesn’t seem like making the right decision (to stay out) to me.

VISIT TO GASCONY

2011-09-24T12:24:00.001+01:00

The House

When we stepped out on the tarmac at Toulouse, the heat almost knocked us backwards. I had dressed as for a damp, autumnal weekend in Wales, my bag filled with warm clothing suddenly it seemed ‘de trop.’

A text arrived from my sister: she had, like some Carthaginian general, just ‘entered’ Toulouse and would arrive shortly. I collected some euros from the dispenser - in my experience, the cheapest way of buying small amounts of currency - and sat down to wait. The airport is thankfully well-air conditioned.

Soon we were bowling along country roads, west and south towards the afternoon sun and, as the roads became narrower and the turnings off more frequent, finally arrived at our destination, a journey of nearly 1000 miles accomplished between a late breakfast and an early tea.

Compare this with the mid-eighteenth century when Talleyrand was journeying from Perigord to Paris on the Bordeaux stage coach. In his memoirs he says the journey took 17 days - but as this works out at a travelling speed of only 4 miles an hour - it seems unlikely. No doubt it seemed like 17 days though; the EasyJet flight seemed like 17 hours at times.

The Upstairs Gallery running from the back of the house to the front

My sister lives in a French country house of infinite charm and beauty. But the house is a work in progress, indeed has been a work in progress for the last four hundred years. It has grown like topsy from a small farmhouse to resemble the enormous pile of the Mas Lunel, depicted in Rose Tremain’s novel ‘Trespass.’ And of course as soon as one bit is done up another bit falls down.

In the days when it was built people hadn’t heard of bathrooms. Even the Palace of Versailles wasn’t built with bathrooms and guests answered calls of nature in any convenient cupboard or landing. With luck the servants might clean up. So getting to the state rooms entailed the negotiation of what was in effect an indoor farmyard.

This being the twentieth century, my sister’s house of course does have a bathroom but the previous owner (who only used the house in the summer), built the bathroom in an annex on the far side of the barn through which - in an echo of Versailles - it is now necessary to traipse avoiding the detritus from pigeons above your head and ducks around your feet.

Lucky it wasn’t winter, I thought to myself, when the snow apparently blows in through the roof tiles and lies thick inside. Still plans are afoot to change all this. And if not, well, they say suffering is good for the soul.

But sitting outside in the September sunshine, with the poultry happily milling about, with four pigs in the wood (carefully named Ham, Pork, Bacon and Sausages, lest anyone become too fond of them) and a pair of cows in the meadow (named less carefully Daisy and Bubble though they too are destined for the freezer at some point), I feel only the warmth on my face and bucolic bliss hanging like the famous gardens of Babylon about me.

This is Gascony and Gascony is famous for being a place where you eat largely and well. The kitchen is big enough to take a table for twelve and we were nine when we sat down to lunch on Saturday, the guest of honour being a retired Brussels interpreter with a fund of amusing anecdotes about language.

The Kitchen

Later he told me there was a statue in the next village of Tossaint Louverture, the former Domincan slave who first led one of the few successful slave revolts in history and later became a general in Napoleon’s army. We went to see it. History oozes from the villages of France as from the pores of a wet sponge.

On our way there or perhaps to somewhere else, we met the old woman to whom my sister takes her excess of ducks, which breed in the Gascon sunshine with astonishing rapidity and nest in the trees. She charges 2 euros a duck to do all the nasty work of killing, drawing, feathering etc and even has a little stun machine so that the duck doesn’t know what is happening until it finds itself full of sage and onion.

She asked me, in a broad midi-accent, whether ‘I was in France?’ I think she meant did I live in France, but for some reason I could only answer her literally. So I told her I really didn’t know; it could be Bulgaria.

It wasn’t very funny then - indeed it was incomprehensible, neither she nor my sister knew what I was talking about - and it seems even less funny still when written down. Bear with me.

And then, hardly before we had arrived we were off again and whizzing home where, inevitably, it was pouring with rain.

A METAPHYSICAL SANDWICH

2011-09-14T21:09:00.000+01:00

As it was a special day, an anniversary, I put my red gilet over my scarlet pullover and sauntered out into the sunshine for my daily ten minute circumnavigation of the neighbourhood. It's my usual prelude to starting work. Immediately, an old man in a white sun hat hailed me. I see this man frequently, usually with a long train of Yorkshire terrier behind him. He pointed to the sun.

To be fair it was visible, which has not been the case for quite a time. I like to think that as the day was special it had decided to put in an appearance, as a young lad might saunter into the back of a catering tent in the hope of picking up a cream bun. It sat there smiling against the blue autumnal sky.

"Is this summer?" my man asked to no-one in particular. The Yorkie having no answer proceeded to water a pile of fallen leaves on the pavement. The fallen leaves suggested a negative answer. I felt I should hedge my bets. "You never know," I said.

It wasn't exactly a witty discourse. We both must think of something more original to say. But it's not always easy at that time of the morning when I would be quite content not to speak to anyone. Some enterprising soul could perhaps make a name by producing a phrase book which gave people a set of handy opening gambits and suitable responses.

I was thinking of this when later this fine day I was sitting on the bench at the top of the Tump looking out over the flat land that stretches to the sea, beyond which rise the hills of Exmoor. Above these in turn a line of white clouds floated.

One of those days when you could see everything, when the light is crystal clear - Porlock, Minehead - hard to believe they are further away from me than Calais is from Dover.

The Tump is a copse, I suppose. Beech trees this side, sycamores and chestnuts the other. None very old - a hundred years perhaps at the most. The leaves are already turning. As I come up here almost every other day I ask myself when did this happen? But then autumn comes upon you sneakily, don't you find? I mean as someone said once: one week you are pottering in the garden until nine o'clock and the next it's dark at seven. One week the leaves are pristine and green, the next they are shrivelled and brown and being shredded in the breeze.

Who planted these trees and why? My guess is there have always been trees here for thousands and thousands of years. A sacred place, a mystical place a junction of Neolithic tracks. A place to get ones bearing and to eat ones sandwiches - which presumably the Neolithic people ate, too. Bread and autumn jam and perhaps even butter too. Not much changes in the basic culinary world.

As I sit on the bench, still in my scarlet gilet, I eat my own metaphorical sandwich which turns out to be not so much metaphorical as metaphysical. I am struck with the thought that there seems to be a lot more going on in my mind that is observed by my consciousness and, what's more, the window provided by this consciousness seems to be getting smaller all the time.

It's been a troubling time lately: there's been a death in the family and a lot of stress. I can consciously feel this stress; I know it is there. If my consciousness were wider I might indeed see it. Or so I think.

Years ago I could listen to the radio and read the newspaper, but now I can only do one or the other - my consciousness isn't wide enough to embrace both. And then there's the supernatural - always strong in a place like this, which my consciousness, limited as it is, can't grasp at all. Yet I can sense this is exactly the sort of place to set pendulums swinging; where you might find a ghost of some fine member of the fairy folk flitting in and out of the beech trees in the gloaming. Where a rainbow might end and where you might bury your own crock of gold.

There is much we don't see - or some of us don't see. The mayor told me she once saw a whole group of men dressed in eighteenth century clothes crossing the road, not so far away. She stopped the car for them to cross, believing them to be actors out for a night's pantomime. But then they just vanished. Boom! There are more things in heaven and earth than are told of in your philosophy, Horatio.

The picture shows the north (inland) side of the Tump. You'd need to look to your right from where the photographer is taking the picture to see the sea. He seems more interested in the communications masts. But you can see also the old Neolithic trackway which continues in a straight line almost to Port Talbot in one direction and Llantrithyd in the other. I fear the communications masts with their high energy radiations would drive away any passing fairy folk.

WALKING TO MOSCOW

2011-09-03T12:33:00.001+01:00

Grave of Jacques Danois at Varengeville

On one of the graves lay a bouquet of fresh flowers, carnations mainly, still in their florists’ wrapping of cellophane. The card gave the sender’s name as ‘La Légion d’Honneur,’ the French order established by Napoleon in 1802 and still extant, at which time the man inside the tomb would still have been a young man of twenty-two.

He is now a ‘Chevalier’- the lowest rank of the order but still reflecting great merit and he died, so the inscription said, on 20 August. The flowers had no doubt been left that day as they would have been left most years since Jacques Antoine Danois succumbed to the ravages of time back in 1857. In 154 years that is quite a lot of carnations.

We were in the graveyard of the church at Varengeville-sur-Mer, a sturdy medieval edifice at the edge of the gigantic line of limestone cliffs that forms the coast of northern Normandy. The cliffs are unstable, so we are told, and are eroding at the rate of a metre a year. By the 200th anniversary of his death, therefore, Danois may have fallen into the sea, taking his carnations with him.

He wouldn’t fall alone either for a great many other respectable folk are buried in this graveyard, including the painter, Georges Braque. Indeed, there are so many painters, poets, musicians, writers, soldiers here that the place is beginning to resemble a mini Piere La Chaise, the great Parisian cemetery of the famous. All it lacks is some idol of the modern age, consumed by excess at some pitifully early age.

Danois certainly didn’t die young, though it was hardly for want of trying. In fact he was 77 before he finally packed it all in. Which considering that he walked all the way to Moscow in the heat and disease of a Russian summer and then all the way back again in the cold and starvation of the Russian winter, is surprising. Not only that but he hacked his way as an infantry man through many of Napoleon’s greatest victories as well as some of the awful stand-offs and defeats like Borodino and Leipzig. By rights he should have been dead many times over, sliced in two by a cavalry sabre or blown to pieces by an artillery piece, starved or drowned or frozen or diseased.

But somehow he cheated death for 14 years after which he appears to had enough of the business of laying waste to Prussia, Austria and Russia. No doubt he thought that he had tempted fate enough. Having finally been raised to the rank of sub-lieutenant and granted everlasting status as a ‘Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur,’ he packed it in and became, because I suppose he had to do something, a tax inspector, back in Varengeville, his home town.

How very French, I thought, looking down at the tomb. I don’t suppose that in Britain even the Duke of Wellington still gets flowers on his anniversary. If he does, I don’t know of it.

But what I really struggle to comprehend, standing there in the sunshine with the blue sea beyond, is the idea of walking to Moscow, carrying your tent and belongings, firearm, cartridges, clean underwear and sandwiches with you. The distance - to Moscow and back to Paris - is over 3,000 miles. That’s like walking from Land’s End to John o’ Groats five times back to back.

Today if you walked from Paris to Moscow, even in relative comfort putting up in bed and breakfasts and with sufficient money to eat a decent cooked meal once a day, you would become a minor celebrity and be invited to appear on Big Brother. Channel 4 might even give you a documentary. But to do it as a soldier? Imagine the number of times his boots must have needed repairing! Incredible! Danois deserves his flowers, I thought, as I took his picture. He’s the sort of thing I listen too on Radio 4 while printing labels, but brought to life here and weirder than fiction.

This bank holiday escape from printing and labels to an old university friend in Le Havre continued to Veules-sur-Mer, the next town along the coast and home to the shortest fleuve in all France - all 1,194 metres of it. (Une fleuve flows into the sea, whereas une rivière flows into a fleuve, my friends tell me). In this short one kilometre length, engineers managed to build five water mills though only four remain today, none of which are working. To build five mills in a kilometre of river seems almost as incredible as walking to Moscow, if you ask me.

Of course, I may have been dreaming. For we passed a Statue of Liberty in the middle of a roundabout at Ourville-en-Caux It was painted sky blue. Somehow it seemed more improbable still.

Blue Statue of Liberty at Ourville

REVOLVING HEELS

2011-08-24T14:15:00.003+01:00

I discovered the other day that the man who began the company that became Norwich Union Insurance - and later Aviva - developed an idea for shoes with revolving heels.

Or maybe they were boots with revolving heels. I’m not sure. Anyway I gather the idea didn’t catch on, though I am not sure why. Heels are always the most vulnerable part of the shoe and if the heel could rotate, well it might wear down evenly across its surface, though eventually, presumably, leaving a protruding pin in the middle of the heel which might do serious damage to a polished floor.

Since those very early days I’m not sure that any more work has been done on heels though a cobbler could perhaps rapidly put me right on that. Whether work has or hasn’t been done, heels still seem to wear down apace and that is without any serious walking.

And when I think of serious walking I think not of people in boots with trousers tucked into their socks, striding upwards over the Brecon Beacons, but of William Gladstone who thought nothing of a twelve mile hike from Chester to Hawarden carrying a suitcase or more probably one of those large bags that bear his name. His shoes must have worn out quickly and I suppose the cobbling trade in those parts must have been profitable.

Three or four times a week I trudge up the local hill above the town here in pursuit of exercise and it is on such treks that my brain, let off its humdrum leash, begins to rehearse such thoughts. Are they valuable? I don’t know. They seem to be the counterpoint to the ‘useless’ knowledge that schools used to try to drum into the heads of sixth formers whose minds were otherwise engaged with ‘A’ levels and university entrance papers. The phrase ‘Useless Knowledge’ (or something very similar) figures prominently in Alan Bennett’s play ‘The History Boys.’

Is 'Useless Knowledge' - useful? After all, it seems to be a question that many people in and out of education have spent a long time worrying about. The fact that you can’t define useless or useful seems no hindrance to the debate. Nor in fact does the fact that the useful versus useless dimension is but one aspect of the question. I’d prefer to pose the question: is useless knowledge fun? Does it contribute to human happiness? That seems a more relevant line to debate.

Had I been a cobbler I could perhaps have written a technical blog about mending heels, which I doubt would have interested anyone outside the cobbling fraternity; and I would look silly learning about such technical aspects and trying to regurgitate them if I weren’t a cobbler. But anyone can write about revolving heels and can imagine the eccentricities of direction they might imply. That seems infinitely more fun and in these days of economic drift - someone suggested we might be in this mess for the next twenty years - fun is perhaps all we have left.

THEATRE THOUGHTS

2011-08-18T11:37:00.006+01:00

Some of you may know that I adapted (with her very kind permission) one of Rose Tremain’s award winning radio plays recently and we put Temporary Shelter on the stage here at our little theatre in July.

I am pleased to say that it was a success. We had full or almost full houses and the feedback was excellent. For that credit must go to the original author who created a great show. Nevertheless, the amount of work that went into the adaptation was considerable, writing and re-writing lines and juggling their positions (is it better if he says this before she says that?) Moreover, moving from a radio to a stage show involved creating a whole complex choreography.

Even after the play had been performed I knew I would have to do another re-write: certain things work in performance and other bits don’t. When you hear lines spoken and actions acted, you look at what you’ve written anew. So you polish and improve - or anyway try to. At least I do

The Drama Committee have now asked if I would do another Rose Tremain adaptation next summer and I have been giving some thought to this. All depends on finding something suitable and.......she giving her permission.

The work that kept bouncing before my eyes was ‘Restoration’ perhaps her best known novel which won a variety of prizes when it first appeared in 1989 and was short-listed for the Booker prize. Restoration is a wonderfully creative and inventive novel - a theatrical creation if ever there was one. I knew it had been made into a film....but a play?

All the same as I turned it over in my mind, wondering how I might put this scene on the stage, or that; mulling over what characters I would need, how the action might divide into acts....and so on. I realised it would be difficult with our small and ageing group of actors and the limited resources of our stage and theatre. (The novel embraces a mental institution and the Great Fire of London - but, what ho! - playwrights like a challenge!). I had inner doubts (was I being wise even to think about it?) but, floating in my brain, remained a burning desire to try.

Part of the reason, I knew, was my feeling for (and indeed identification with) Merivel, the seventeenth century physician and fop, who is the main protagonist of the novel. For in many incidental details - to do with our mothers, our education, our early professional lives, the parallels between this literary creation and myself, despite three intervening centuries, seem uncanny.

I won’t go into all that here now but let me give you another, which I have only just realised. The surname I use as a nom de plume is Somerville - you will see that word has Merivel embedded in it, and practically in plain, too; while my email address - fensomerville (@hotmail etc) - is an anagram of ‘Lens of Merivel.’ (The Fens also happen to be where Merivel is exiled). Is this serendipity or what?

Of course, all this means nothing at all. It is pure coincidence and would not lead me to write a better or a worse play. All the same it is interesting don’t you think? Besides I know I am not in any way really the same character as Merivel. I cannot, for instance, as he can, fart at will. Not that I have seriously ever wanted to, you understand.

Still I learned yesterday that Restoration has in fact already been adapted for the stage, and professionally too - so probably a lot better than I would ever be able to do it. So that avenue is closed. At first this disappointed me - but then I knew I was relieved. A great burden of making elegant bricks without much in the way of straw had been taken from my shoulders. Thank you Francis Matthews and the Salisbury Playhouse

Old Merivel, however, refuses to go away. He is sitting in the back of my mind having sneaky ideas. Farting, too, probably.

Picture shows the Chapel at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a building familiar both to Merivel and Me

THE HOUSE WHERE THEY PROMOTED DISQUE BLEU

2011-08-09T13:53:00.006+01:00

The imagination plays tricks, does it not? There is more going on inside the brain than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio! Even inside a tired old box of grey matter like mine.

My sister has been married forty-years and her children had kindly organised a surprise party for her to take place in what is now the family home of her eldest daughter. We were invited too and last week we stayed chez our eldest daughter in Frome en route across England to the fastness of East Anglia. Sleeping on the sofa bed I dreamed a dream of being taken in a bouncy small bronze-coloured car to see the place 'where they promoted Disque Bleu' - that being a brand of French cigarette common about forty years ago. Why I was being taken there I was not told: dreams don't always provide much by way of explanation.

So there I was sitting on the leather back seat of this car while in front rode a man and a woman with thick black hair. We drove down an avenue lined with plane trees, the sun shining and hot, the road dusty and eventually we came past a tall red brick house at the end of a row. It looked like the house of some mid-nineteenth century industrialist, imposing but in a rather grim sort of a way, with a great bay window and next to it a forbidding black front door towering above broad stone steps.

Although mainly built of brick, and therefore red, the architect had specified stone facings and mullions for the windows. At some point it had also been divided into two - 'the place where they promoted Disque Bleu' being thus semi-detached. Only one half of the house thus boasted a confectionery of advertising slogans, none, this being the modern age, had anything to do with tobacco.

Le voilà shouted my companions as we sped past looking now for somewhere to park; but I knew as soon as I had seen the house that I had been there long before. I had visited this very house. I could describe to you what lay beyond those stone steps and forbidding front door; what you could see inside that bay window.

I knew that the interior, as that of so many French houses of the period, would be dark and gloomy and smelling of that mixture of garlic, coffee and black tobacco so typical of France. Inside the room with the bay window, a large enough ‘salle de jour’ incidentally, was, and perhaps would still be, a café-style bar taking up much of the space. Someone had tried to reproduce a café in this front room.

When I had been there before I’d taken a beer and sat down on one of the nondescript chairs at a small table and lit a cigarette: Disque Bleu in all probability for it had been at the time that everyone smoked. I remember no other visitors, the bar had been empty except for the gruff man with an apron who had poured me my beer and who appeared to be ‘le patron.’

I had been there some minutes when from somewhere in the interior arrived a sharp-suited fellow with a little attaché case. He too had been smoking and he talked fast and quickly to the ‘patron,’ occasionally looking round and lowering his voice as though he were discussing business of a kind that visitors shouldn’t hear. He drank pastis, I seem to remember, and wore a Trilby, and looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant.

Someone even then had told me then that this was the house from which the entire marketing operation for the cigarette company was run - it seemed unlikely, but looking round the walls I could see faded photographs and certificates that looked, I supposed like those you might expect to find in some under used board room, faded photographs and the odd curling and yellowed certificate. Perhaps I had arrived in the town and someone had said I could buy a drink there and I suppose I had gone in the hope, if not the expectation, of some largesse of cigarettes. But none was to be forthcoming. I left and forgot the episode. Maybe I had been about eighteen or twenty at the time.

But now the memory came back with a start as the driver found a parking slot and skidded the car deftly into it. I got out. The man and woman talked animatedly, but not to me, but I followed them back down the hot and empty road with the light dust blowing on the wind. Looking up, I saw a paper sign high on a gable end, black and white. It read LOT . I wondered if that was where we were. But the letters might simply have been the first three or the last three letters of a longer word. I didn't know and it didn't seem to matter.

And I was never to learn either. For at that point I woke up.

Now I was back in England and time had rolled forward to the present. We were off to my niece's house in Suffolk which had once belonged to my brother-in-law's parents. I had, it is true, once been there briefly during the time it had been left unoccupied and semi-derelict, its steps and terraces overgrown with weeds, its timbers ravaged by rot; That had been perhaps about twenty years before. I had forgotten completely what it looked like other than we approached it via an avenue of trees. Still this is an imposing house. Built around 1850 - the same age as my French house - and it is built of red brick. Moreover the mullions around the windows are stone and there are steps up to the door.

But if my conscious brain had forgotten this house, my unconscious brain clearly hadn't. Indeed, it had remembered it on cue and bolted it into my dream. I was even being driven, too, for younger daughter, who has dark brown hair, was driving. It is all uncanny and spooky. But who was the fellow in the Trilby that looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant? And where is the woman with the thick black hair?

BROKEN PLATES

2011-07-30T13:19:00.003+01:00

I heard a sad tale the other day from a friend whose collection of fine pottery had vanished in a thousand shards when the dresser shelves of her new kitchen collapsed. Apparently each shelf fell in turn on the one below, triggering what I now know to be called a 'progressive collapse.' A clean break you might mend with glue but something shattered is beyond repair and yet larger shards still have the ability to trigger memories and associations. But who keeps broken and irreparable pottery? Well, I suppose some people do, but my friend didn't and its despatch to the dustbin became an occasion of great woe.

She told me that her perception of the world had retreated into slow-motion as the progressive collapse was taking place and I can well imagine the feeling for something similar happened to me once, too. My pottery was Bridgewater, rather than the antique Swansea pottery of her case and only one shelf figured in my story: a sorry account of an attempt to repair hairline cracks in the kitchen plaster during the course of which I had leaned - lightly of course - on this display shelf with its cargo of collectables; one end then became detached and the entire contents slid off the shelf one after the other smashing to smithereens on the tiled kitchen floor. Like lemmings leaping off a cliff I thought later.

You might ask why I did not spring from my ladder on which I was perched and rescue some of the finer pieces. But I was afflicted by the same slow-motion paralysis and could only watch dumbstruck.

What is this slow-motion effect that you get when watching a disaster unfold. What triggers it? Is it a surge of adrenalin? Or what other mechanism? I've never seen this discussed. But it is quite common. I must have experienced the effect several times in my life but I remember it most notably during the one occasion when I rolled a car, a manoeuvre that involved climbing a bank and then executing a sort of barrel roll before finding myself back on the road again and the right way up having executed a perfect 360 degree flip.

This must have taken no more than a second, two at the most. Yet I can remember the radio playing until the car was upside down and then cutting out. The battery, I thought, correctly as it turned out. Two seconds seemed to stretch into two minutes and then I was back again where I had started. And so was time.

I should add that the accident was entirely the fault of a lack of maintenance by South Glamorgan County Council, as it then was, who presented me with a cheque on the basis that we both maintained the fiction that it came from the goodness of their hearts, rather than a collapse in the roadway the size of a horse trough.

Wikepedia says "that during accidents, our brain receives massive amounts of data to process and it alters the way we perceive time. It is a mechanism developed by our brain during evolution to increase chances of survival so that a person undergoing an accident can get enough time to make a decision and react appropriately," which may be the case, though to me it seems unlikely. My own experience of this slow-motion effect is accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness. In so far as one reacts at all one reacts instinctively. And when I do suffer an overload of information - an opaque report for instance - rather than getting me more time, my brain sends me to sleep.

Anyway, slow motion effects aside, the original sad tale caused me to dig up the history of the Swansea pottery whose days of glory matched pretty well those of Napoleon. Its trade mark back stamp is a half horseshoe with the name 'Dillwyn' indented inside it after its owner - Lewis Weston Dillwyn - a remarkable man who combined his pottery with being a naturalist credited with the identification of various new species of algae and a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot with being an MP and Mayor of Swansea. Despite the name, his father had been a Pennsylvanian Quaker from Philadelphia who had returned to England during the American War of Independence.
Such is the knowledge that comes from broken plates.

Temporary Shelter - the End

2011-07-23T10:27:00.007+01:00

You will know that all theatres have ghosts. It is something to do with bringing characters to life. An energy goes out into the ether; it clings to the walls and the set, so that even long after the final curtain comes down the characters tend to sit around on stage chatting between themselves. In this case Trist (the ex-actor) Larry (the ex-salesman), Marje (his wife) Jean-Louis (the French poet) and Annette (his Polish muse). When I went down to the theatre last Sunday morning they were all talking avidly - their last breakfast together. This is what I heard.

Trist By the time Larry and Marje emerged blearily from their tents. I'd already been up for a couple of hours, helping with the clearing up from the 'Grand Bal des Roses.' Claus, the baker and badminton freak, was up, too, to bake the bread. Larry, however, seemed different. He went off to buy his baguette without being prompted and nor did he seem to care anymore what JL and Annette were getting up to in their tent.

Marje Nescafé, dear?

Larry Good show, Marje! Last night. Got it right for once.

Marje Good audiences - we were full weren't we? Everynight I'd say.

Larry Almost every night, dear. Unheard of I’d say. My suit, you see, girl. They liked my suit.

Marje I wonder why they did come? I mean, it's not as though we got it all right did we?

Larry They still laughed though Marje. And Trist told me that people came up to him afterwards to say how good they thought it had been.

Marje Do you think it was the play then, dear?

JL and Annette emerge from their tent

Anne Bonjour, Marje! Most excellent breakfasting to you! This after the show day, I mean.

Marje Come and join us, Annette dear! We've got to celebrate.

Jean Did Marje sleep OK, Larry?

Larry As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily of the valley she lay beside me in the dawn.....

Jean Well remembered, Larry. I see you are a changed man. A poet.

Anne (with Polish feeling)It is his inside heart.

Marje Let me pour us some Nescafé.

Jean No, have some of ours. You should learn to drink French coffee, Larry!

Marje So, were they pleased? Do you think?

Larry Who, Marje?

Marje Well the Director, you know, the crew?

Larry Sold a lot of tickets, Marje. Made a lot of money no doubt. So I’d say they were very pleased.

Jean You can’t judge a show by the money it makes, Larry. It’s an artistic endeavour.

Larry Good selling job though. Couldn’t have done better myself.

Marje Who’d have thought so many people wanting to see us? And in an eighties play.

Anne If they are ever doing it again I would be watching it myself, I am telling you.

Larry No accounting for taste, Marje. Mind you it was an eighties sort of audience. Took them back no doubt to their own camping days.

Marje We went wrong occasionally, though didn’t we? Got several pages in the wrong order. Do you think they noticed?

Larry Audiences never notice, Marje.

Marje Lucky for the Director then.

Anne Especially with the very experienced actors.

Trist The Director told me afterwards that Annette had never acted in a production before, though you would never have known it. And as for experience, the lighting engineer was a beginner as were the sound engineer and the stage manager. Moreover, one of the actors only became available three days before the play opened and the director had to play one of the parts; while the position of the tent meant that an actor had to open and close the curtain. They also had only in seven weeks to put the show on.

Marje Oh the poor director!

Larry Salesman's pressures, Marje. Now you know why I smoke.

Anne Sounds worse than Warsaw on a Friday. Why then are they doing it?

Jean Louis They are doing it for love. To renew themselves. To reach new understandings. To begin again.

Larry And do you know Marje, I’m beginning to understand what he means. When we return now to Bressingham St Mary........

Marje Your coffee will be cold, dear.

An stage adaptation of Temporary Shelter, an award winning radio play from 1984, by Rose Tremain, was performed by Cowbridge Amateur Dramatic Society last week. Photo shows Lloyd Lee as Larry

PASSING THE BOOKSHOP

2011-07-12T11:51:00.006+01:00

Along the road there's a little red post box that hangs on a telegraph pole. I wander down to it in the afternoons when I have a parcel of labels to post, or other mail for that matter. The parcel has to be small or it won't fit through the narrow slot with its overhang cleverly designed to keep the rain away. So then I have to prolong my posting excursion by walking down to the Post Office in town. I don't mind this at all. The sun shines, the folk are friendly. I can look about and observe. And the folk observe me, I suppose.

I see people I know or even that I don't know. They come up and smile, or wave to me from cars and I wave back to them, return the salute without having very much idea who they are. Still, I am content. It isn't troubling.

I conclude from this that I am becoming 'known,' but haven't altogether made up my mind whether I like this for in truth I am a very private person, content to let the world drift by beyond me. In another life, I might even make a good spirit, for I am happy now, at this stage of my life, just to watch and observe.

One of the advantages of growing old is that one is no longer compelled to rise to every occasion, answer every slight, join every competition, seek the glittering prizes. Sunshine and the dappled light through the trees, a flowing brook, a few friends, a chilled glass of white wine, an entertaining story, plenty of sleep - these are the real prizes with the extra benefit that there isn't any need to reach for them.

Didn't someone say that the past is a foreign country? I believe it was LP Hartley in 'The Go-Between' that lovely, savage book that I must have had in my sub-conscious mind writing the previous paragraph. Or maybe not for I missed the cricket altogether. Thwack. The dull-sharp crack of leather on willow that is inimitable and which seems to say 'don't hurry.' Don't sweat! Or anyway not the small stuff.

Certainly Leslie Poles Hartley knew what he was about when penning his famous quote. The past really is a foreign country. We know it exists, we even have the faded souvenir of our journey - a 'journey without maps,' perhaps. But have we the remotest understanding of what happened, or why, or why we behaved as we did? Do we? I know I don't.

For instance in the past there were plenty of times when I wanted to be 'known,' principally when I used to fight elections, but of course I wasn't, even though my photograph was pushed through everyone's front door. The punters still didn't recognise me or greet me or even want to hear how my party would liberate them from all their travails. It was a source of constant annoyance.

But today I have no understanding as to why I ever became involved in politics at all, gave up a good civil service job even, to chase a will 'o' the wisp. "And I say again to you today, that the future lies, not in the past, but in the present. In the strength of our families, our friends, our colleagues, which we must draw upon if we are to be bold and deliver a better life for all in the next millennium." Such vacuity! I didn't really believe it all even then.

The things one does in one's youth! A far away foreign country indeed of which we know little no matter how much of it we may remember. The idea of fighting an election today is such anathema that I'm not sure I wouldn't really rather buy a single ticket to Zurich. If ever there were an activity 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing,' it is fighting elections. We should perhaps be more grateful to those who do it for a living.

But now, as I have said, when I walk to the Post Office people I don't know wave and greet me. I suppose the reason is the theatre; or it may be the talks I have given; or it may even be the politics of long ago. Of course, others are far better known - and better liked. But I just find it remarkable that the public, even in this small, forgotten town, should notice me at all.

In truth the reason that people are coming up to me just now is because of the theatre and the play I am directing and when the curtain goes up tomorrow night it will be like the opening of a ballot box. How many votes? How many punters? Since last night another dozen tickets have gone. It's looking good. Had there been this level of response thirty of forty years ago I might even have been elected!

So I muse as I saunter along, my parcels in a big leather bag. I am passing the bookshop where sometimes I buy books and I wave at the proprietor inside. He waves back. He has our poster in his window. The sun is shining. I am content.

STRUTTING AND FRETTING

2011-06-03T09:33:00.008+01:00

This is going to be a blog about the trials and tribulations of the theatre in general and our little theatre in particular. I shan't be in the least offended if you turn away now, for I ask myself constantly, "why am I doing this?" - by which I don't mean writing a weekly blog, though I suppose the same question could be just as usefully put in relation to Corner-Cupboard as to the Market Theatre. 'Why, O why?'

When I am acting, forcing myself to learn the lines and then forcing myself again at the end of a hard and long day to remember them on stage while simultaneously trying to remember what the director wants me to do, I say to myself - 'acting is the hardest job in the world.'

My brain positively throbs with this imposed activity. If someone were to cut out a slice it would glow red and yellow with all the neurones firing off at the same time, as I struggle through those lines. My heart goes thump, thump, thump, like a rabbit startled at the approach of a farmer. I strut and fret (oh how Shakespeare put it well).

Of course it gets easier. At some point you know the lines and the movements and how to say what you have to do in a way that holds the audience's attention and doesn't send them to sleep. Or so you hope. It can even be enjoyable then as you slip comfortably into the skin of a villain, a monarch, a witty raconteur, a lover or whatever is called for.

But through those long weeks of rehearsal I feel like Winnie the Pooh who, if you remember, was dragged backwards down the stairs by one leg each morning and thereby hit his head on each successive step - thump, thump, thump. 'There must be a better way,' he said to himself 'if only the thumping would stop long enough for me to think of it.'

And of course there is. And it is to be a director. You miss out on the congratulations at the end of the show, on the adulation - no-one notices the director until you get to the Hall or Spielberg level - you can sink quietly into anonymity. But this is a small price to pay for power without responsibility. The director never has to face dying on stage.

Rather than strutting and fretting yourself you let others strut and fret while you sit in the stalls with your feet up, making occasional notes and encouraging noises. Easy and relaxing. That, anyway, is how it seems to the poor fretting actor.

I last directed a proper play about seven years ago. And just as you forget your lines after a performance so you forget just what a horror directing really is. It is like trying to organise a battle and finding half your troops have better things to do.

So you rush around in desperate Red Hen mode running yourself ragged to find people to cast and do all the other jobs - lights, sound, stage management, props, prompt, costumes, design, front of house, bar. There are tickets to sell and publicity to organise and the theatre to clean and theatre suppers to arrange and all this away and beyond the direction of the actors and the choreography of the play.

Of course lots of people are involved in a production but the director is very much in the position of Owain Glyndwr who boasts in one of the Henry IVths that he can summon spirits from the 'vasty' deep. 'Of course you can', says Hotspur - 'and so can any man - but when you call them do they come?'

And that is the problem - as a director you have all the levers of power in your hand but frequently the levers are not connected to anything. People are on holiday, or won't respond to emails, or can't be fitted on the stage, or things just collapse, or actors don't know their lines, or change their minds or simply give you nightmares.

Then there is the problem of ideas. When people have ideas they assume they are good ideas by virtue of the fact that they have had them at all. It is the supreme example of 'all my geese are swans.' But, quite apart from the fact that it is not ideas that are in short supply but people to do the routine and boring jobs, most ideas that people present you with are not very good. The ratio of good ideas to bad ideas is about 1 to 20 in my opinion. Nevertheless you have to allow people to have ideas.

I don't exclude myself from the above criticism. I have more bad ideas than anyone. But in most cases conventional and boring wisdom will get you further and faster than some clever 'idea.'

So I worry and fret late into the night, wondering whether we shall sell any tickets at all. We have sold six so far out of a possible 280. Whatever possessed me to want to direct again, I say to myself, and I long for the responsibility free domain of the actor. The wheel will turn full-circle again.

Ah well it was ever thus. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Should you be wondering the play is 'Temporary Shelter,' an intelligent and imaginative comedy by the novelist Rose Tremain. Originally written as a radio play (in which format it won the Giles Cooper prize for best radio play of 1984) We have adapted it for the stage and shall be presenting it between 13 and 16 July at the Market Theatre, Cowbridge. Tickets £6. Come if you can - an evening of sparkling comedy awaits you.

IS IT VERVEINE OR CHAMPAGNE?

2011-05-28T12:32:00.007+01:00

Verveine! Or, as it's sometimes called here, Verbena, is a most unprepossesing little weed which I first met on a 'herbal walk' conducted by that eminent herbalist, Zoe Hawes. It was growing in a sandy car park, I remember, and had little purpley-pink flowers.

Now I can't live without it, for made into a tisane - a type of herbal tea - and drunk at bedtime it ensures that even insomniacs like me will have a good night's rest. There are two problems, however: first it tastes like cat's pee and secondly you can't easily buy it inexpensively in Britain.

As to the first, well it is amazing what you learn to put up with for a good night's sleep but an admixture of orange or peppermint improves the draught. And as to the second, the answer is just to buy the stuff in France where the supermarket shelves bulge with rack after rack of tisanes of every description, including half a dozen different preparations of Verveine. The cost is minimal - about €1.30 for 25 sachets.

Knowing my weaknesses, my neighbour, Annie, who is French, came back from a trip home this week not only with several boxes of Verveine tisane but a winebox as well. I suggested that an aperitif was due over an above a monetary settlement. She agreed but insisted we came to her.

There's an upside to that, for Annie always serves champagne and not only any champagne but a champagne - Denis Salomon Brut Reserve - that is not sold in shops but which she acquires mysteriously by the cellarfull. It has a wonderfully, dry biscuity taste that is so much friendlier than many similar concoctions. Anyway, in no time at all we had managed to put away two bottles and reeled home to supper full of that especial bonhomie which only champagne can bring on.

The following day we were on Theo duty - looking after our grandson of two and a quarter whose diversion of the moment is painting rather than champagne. We covered the kitchen floor with blank paper, mixed a pot of blue paint, put a brush in his hand and in no time had some thoughtful abstracts, vortexes of blue against the swirling white for which a gallery might have proposed the name 'Parental Anguish.'

We tried some hand painting, and then some foot painting; bold prints tracked across the paper.

"Why, Theo," I asked, "don't you try painting a head?" I was wondering whether he might attempt John the Baptist or whether that might be a step too far.

He contemplated the problem, stroking his cheek with the business end of the paintbrush. Then his face half-blue, he lay down on the paper and pressed cheek to canvas. A broad blue spludge resulted. Well, I had suggested head painting.

On Thursday we flipped the phone through to the mobile and headed up in the late afternoon for our first visit to the Hay Festival where Russell, an old friend and colleague and now a Professor in Cardiff, was delivering the Richard Livsey Memorial Lecture.

As it happened our host - who was also introducing the talk - had been delayed and so we were sitting there in the tent, a small but select gathering, wondering what to do. For a moment I thought that I might have to make the introduction, which indeed I was to learn later I was well placed to do. But then our host arrived, the introduction was made, and we heard a most interesting exposition on the History of the Welsh Liberal Party.

But it made me wonder whether I should perhaps be writing some of this history; certainly of the anecdotes and stories of the local and national figures that I had worked with during the eighties and nineties. I mentioned this to Russell in the sponsors' tent afterwards as we sipped an obligatory glass of Cava. "But it's all in my book," he said. "We did a two hour interview, you gave me a great deal of material. Do you not remember?"

That must have been three or four years ago, but all memory of it is wiped! Gone! Now that he had reminded me I recalled a dim trace that he was preparing something or other. So now I have to wait until September when the book comes out to see what is and what isn't in print already.

Oh dear, I am getting old. Or maybe a side effect of drinking Verveine is memory loss. One never knows quite what these innocuous herbs do - and it must be doing something to send me to sleep as it does. Then again it could be the champagne!

THREE SISTERS

2011-05-21T10:20:00.006+01:00

Each year without fail for the last sixty-five years I’ve had a birthday in this month. It always turns up, as regularly as clockwork at the time the chestnuts come into full flower. I used to think that my parents had been very clever to arrange for me to be born on the most beautiful day of the year, but the reality turned out to be somewhat different: my conception was an unintended, but not wholly unwelcome product, of the 1945 Japanese surrender. My father and mother were so impressed by the achievements of General MacArthur that they got quite carried away.

I suppose I (and later my sister) were some kind of peace treaty in their more domestic hostilities. If we were, then peace didn't last very long and both went their separate ways taking one of us each along with the furniture and the curtains and each spawned new families along the way. The families became estranged, by design rather than accident.

Once sixty-five was a fine old age a time of white hair, a lined face, a permanent stoop and nodding off in the afternoons. Today sixty-five is merely a beginning - or so I try to tell myself. What has gone before - a lifetime’s exhilarations and futilities - is just the gestation for a period of maturity and flowering, of threads being drawn together, of putting one’s duck’s in a line.

Birthdays are a particularly good place to start this renewal process. So I thought it might be a good idea this time to introduce some of my sisters to some other of my sisters who had never had the privilege of meeting before. My full sister had never met any of my half sisters (of whom I have five), nor had they met my half brother either for that matter, or his family.

As we were staying with Rosie and Jim down at their son’s Mill in the southern Auvergne, I suggested that I might hold a little party and ask the various sisters - or at least the two half-sisters who live in South-West France and the full sister who lives in Suffolk, to come. They most kindly agreed; the invitations were sent and the sisters who had never met arrived in due course.

They brought with them roast duck breasts and a magnum of champagne to show us how they live in Gascony while Rosie baked an intriguing cake most improbably out of courgettes and cocoa that made a satisfying accompaniment to the champagne. More: it played Happy Birthday, courtesy of some clever Asiatic piece of miniaturisation.

Incidentally, it was the first time I had ever to pour champagne from a Magnum bottle and by jingo you need strong wrists to control it for the bottle is heavy and you have no idea how far the liquid will gush. I spilt more than I had intended. (For a Jeroboam or Methuselah I suspect you would need some species of harness).

Several kind souls, including the former mayor, joined us from the village and also brought gifts - his speciality being a home-made concoction of raw alcohol laced with fruit flavouring. Never have I tasted anything as strong. Still if ever we should run out of petrol....

More practically, his wife brought a wonderful ‘fouace.’ This is an auvergnat bread cake shaped like a giant doughnut and exceptionally tasty. The following morning (see picture at the head of this post) we climbed up to the village for coffee and cake in the sunshine on the terrace of Dennis and Caro’s beautifully converted barn from where you can see for miles and where the rays of the midsummer sunset pass through the a special window cut into the bedrooms.

But back to the sisters: I don’t know quite what I was expecting. I suppose I had some romantic vision of sisterly love. Great embraces accompanied by oceans of tears of the sort you might find written into one of the more dreadful soap operas. But of course it wasn’t like that at all. They were strangers and strangers in mature middle age do not fall upon one another’s necks. Instead they made polite conversation about the price of ducks and enquired of each other whether one had come far.

Well at least they didn’t fight. And they did eventually did show a modicum of interest in each other and the sixteen children they share between them. If the temperature is not yet warm, at least the ice has been broken, the ducks on the same pond if not yet in line. You never know they may even meet again sometime. And we did have a splendid party. I wonder what my old father - our old father - would have made of it?

Here they are falling upon each other with excitement: from left to right: Vicky (full-sister), Sarah and Alyson (half-sisters).

FAX AND WUNDERFAX

2011-04-25T08:42:00.006+01:00

I have always been fascinated by fax machines. Too much watching Startrek, I suppose, where people go in one end and come out the other. I remember a splendid cartoon once showing someone in court with the judge looking grim and asking the prisoner at the bar whether he had anything to say before he passed sentence, whereupon the prisoner breathes into his wristwatch "Beam me up, Scottie. I'm in the s***t down here."

Oh well, yes, fax machines. But why stop at mere text is what I have always wondered. Will one day we be able to fax more than just text? I'm thinking specifically of food - or at least a Caesar Salad and croutons. You have a machine, plugged into a telephone line and linked up to a few simple containers of veggie protein, flavouring, starch, and so on - and then you would take a recipe and the machine would whirr and grind and synthesise for you an atomically perfect Caesar Salad - or Boeuf Bourginon if you'd dialled the wrong number.

You might ask why the machine could not simply concoct the Caesar Salad from resources in its own memory bank in the manner of a most marvellous coffee machine I worked with once in Spain which, when you gave it a peseta or two, ground and churned and hissed and produced a perfect cup of freshly ground coffee from starting ingredients of whole coffee beans and water?

Well, the telephone would be necessary so that the machine could check the atomic balance of its ingredients against some sort of master template - which might of course be your Mum. So you would phone up and say, 'Mum - how do I make Yorkshire Pudding?"

And Mum would say, "Put the Wunderfax on dear," and she would then scan one of her Yorkshire Puddings and send it down the phone line and in a few moments the machine in your kitchen would ping and you would open the door and there would be your beef and potato accompaniment and your husband would beam and say, "Those Yorkshires are every bit as good as your Mum's."

The invention would add to marital harmony and join the dishwasher and vacuum cleaner in the annals of domestic essentials.

So why have I put a bottle of whisky at the top of this post? Well there's a back story, which briefly is that running low on my favourite cold cure I went into our local store looking for Highland Park, my favourite malt, only to find that with the budget and VAT rise, prices had almost doubled overnight.

The price of malt whisky, incidentally, seems to fluctuate wildly for no reason at all. The bottle that is £33 today, sells for £19 tomorrow. I do not understand why. Nothing else does this. Nothing I like anyway.

Which brings me at last to the point. You see driven by these cost pressures I eschewed my normal 12 year old malt in favour of a souped-up ('with peaty, smokey malts,' the label said) version of 'Famous Grouse', called 'Black Grouse,' which was half the price.

Unfortunately, it was only half as good, at least to my taste. If you had blended raw spirit with battery acid and left it next to a bonfire you might get an idea of the taste. No doubt the makers have tried very hard but as they suggest drinking it with oranges and Coca-cola, it suggests that the flavour on its own may need disguising.

Now, when you make whisky you distill malt and then you stuff the brew away in barrels and leave it a long time to absorb the flavour and the colour of the wooden barrel. To make a good whisky you need to wait 12 years and a really good whisky, 20.

But why? When we are all constantly beseeched to improve our efficiency this must be the most inefficient industrial process going. Twelve years? It isn't even as if they move the stuff about, stir it, heat it up, mix it with platinum catalysts. No, they leave it in a warehouse.

Well, brother-in-law is an inventor and he has a theory that you can age any wine - or presumably whisky - by zapping it in a microwave oven. One zap per year. If you want to age it by twenty years you give it twenty zaps. I did try this with the Black Grouse and to be fair it did take the edge of the rawness. But you have to be careful that you don't end up with a hot drink instead of a cold one.

Surely in this modern age we could analyse what goes into a good whisky? What are those complex flavour and aromas but chemicals? So much of this, and so much of that. Couldn't we just mix the stuff?

Instead of waiting 12 years you could buy bottles of spirit distilled yesterday and then dial up on your Wunderfax - the same machine that made your Mum's Yorkshires - with a few extra ingredient compartments. There would be little sliders perhaps like those on fancy hi-fi sets - more smoke, less peat, more strawberry, less haddock, more colour, fruitier, richer - and there you would be.

Think of the savings! Think of all that whisky stored for 12 years that would no longer be needed. Think of the sherry casks and all those oak and hickory trees that would now no longer need to be cut down.

And if your father in law was in some far off land enjoying a most excellent aperitif, he could dribble a little of it over his mobile phone and it would pass down the telephone line and into your kitchen Wunderfax and out would come the same thing, same flavours, colours and all.

Of course, you'd be stuck in a power-cut.

POINT OF DEPARTURE

2011-04-16T12:05:00.004+01:00

You know what they say - don't shoot the pianist he's only doing his best. Mind you I don't know who 'they' are in this case. Anyone know from where the saying comes? Or so I have just enquired of the Purple Coo website - of which I am a longstanding member. The site has just been rebuilt and in another place causing much ruffling of feathers in the dovecote. I guess we’re getting old and change is too difficult.

My own life I keep feeling is in a rut. There’s this horrid feeling that comes sweeping over me and tells me that there is an inescapable sameness about day to day events and that I ought to sell up and head off into the setting sun on a camel - or take the Queen’s shilling, or become a foreign correspondent or whatever the modern day equivalent is for someone of my advanced age. Maybe it is to join MSF as a volunteer, or some other benevolent organisation, and be shot at for your pains.

I did try to join VSO once - when I had fallen on hard times and I thought they might welcome a pair of hands while I gathered my wits about me, but they didn’t and wouldn’t let me. Bah! Ah well, it was before the Big Society.

Still running off to sea or whatever would I tell myself be grossly irresponsible seeing as one has responsibilities in the here and now, friends, and particularly relations, who would be not one wit pleased by some poetic abandonment. Besides, I have to say I would miss them dearly as I am fortunate to enjoy tolerably good relations with my relations, if you see what I mean and I would be bereft were I not to see my little grandson who is coming to lunch tomorrow with his parents in tow. Which means I shall have to scrub the kitchen floor ready for him to deposit and smear a new quantity of comestibles over both it and the kitchen furniture.

Babies and toddlers should really be fed on dried food until the age of ten.

Well, where were we? I am afraid this may turn out to be a somewhat meandering post. So let us return to the pianist issue with which I began this ramble. Last evening I put on the radio and heard, quite by chance Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. On Classic FM. I love that piece and can recommend a listen to anyone fancying a quiet fifty minutes, curled up on the sofa with some light and not too distracting reading matter. It was the first piano concerto (and maybe even the last) to open with the piano itself. A soft chord. Beethoven played it first time round, apparently.

I think it is safe to say that he didn’t play it on a Yamaha either, which has always made me wonder why you don't you ever see a Bosendorfer motorcycle? Or a Norton organ, I suppose? I mean it is hard to think of two machines with such different purposes as a piano (or an organ) and a motorcycle with a particularly plangent and revolting whine. You don’t think they make them in the same place, do you? I suppose both machines have to be tuned. But not, I guess by the same people.

I'm going to a film preview tonight. A French film. The story of (I've forgotten - it's about some woman writer who lived 100 years ago). All top hats and petticoats. But somehow Egypt comes into it too for the blurb describes it as Indiana Jones meets Amélie. The fearless writer doing the equivalent of volunteering for MSF in 1911. A year incidentally when very little happened. Or so says James Cameron - the famous foreign correspondent responsible for preaching the then heretical doctrine that the people who lived in Vietnam at the time it was being bombed to pieces were actually human beings and cared just as deeply about their nearest and dearest as the rest of us. James Cameron was born in 1911, or so he tells us in his autobiography, and grew up in France.

One day he had rather a shock when his school teacher in a fit of heightened emotion removed his own arm and waved it above his head. It was a false arm, of course; the previous one having had an argument with an explosive projectile around 1916, but the young James Cameron hadn’t realised this. It rather put him off wars and fighting for life.

Anyway, his biography, which came out around 1967, is a very good read. It is called Point of Departure and was once available in Penguin. Not one letter of this beautifully crafted book is out of date though for all I know they all may be out of print. He was a pianist and most definitely not one to be shot at. Though of course he was. Literally and metaphorically, too.

The picture shows a most respectable looking James Cameron in India and comes via the BBC and the Guardian, whose assistance is acknowledged with thanks.

WE WILL ROCK YOU

2011-04-09T10:32:00.005+01:00

When I mentioned to a good friend that I was intending to see the ‘Queen’ musical ‘We Will Rock You,’ he told me that I never ceased to amaze him. I don’t know why. Though he and his wife have a more conventional taste in concerts - Mozart, perhaps, or a spot of Bruckner, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t be able to enjoy both pop and classics. I feel sure that Mozart, for instance, would have revelled in Queen’s fantastic creations and wanted to join in. What Bruckner’s attitude would have been I’m not so sure.

Anyway, whatever, we booked for the Wales Millennium Centre and we went despite the show having been panned by the critics for the past ten years. Had dear Freddie Mercury been buried rather than cremated the gyrations of his corpse in the grave might have rendered the search for further sources of renewable energy quite unnecessary. As long as people like me went along to see 'We Will Rock You,' that is.

We went. A big treat. A looked-forward-to occasion at the end of a big week. And I can’t begin to describe how ghastly it was. Well, I suppose I can begin for I have already begun and the proof of the pudding should be in the eating rather than the cliché. But it really was awful.

To anyone tempted by the hype I say spend the ticket money on a bottle of good wine. Buy yourself some Green and Black’s maximum strength organic chocolate and play all your Queen CD’s several times letting your imagination run wild and the tears of joy roll down your cheeks. And donate the surplus you will have saved from the tickets to AIDS research or some other socially useful charity.

So what is wrong with the show? In a word everything that you can possibly think of: the music was wrong, the volume was wrong, the set designs were wrong, the whole approach to the audience was wrong, the story was worse than wrong, the actors were wrong.

But then when you’ve stopped tearing your hair out and thinking that yes, even I, given a freehand, Queen’s music and the back of a fag-packet, could have created a better show than that, comes the awful thought, the perilous, tragic, worrisome thought that maybe, just possibly, it is I (and the critics) that are wrong - or, even worse, just old. And square and the sort of people who shouldn’t be allowed access to Queen’s music at all because it might excite them too much before their bedtime cocoa.

But banish this dreadful thought. No! No, young people! And no, Ben Elton, and the stagers of last night’s performance who I won’t embarrass by naming: no, no, no! How can you possibly so traduce the fine art of putting on a show? How can the world of popular musical theatre have possibly descended (despite its already long decline) from the wit and elegance and cadences and extravagance and charm and acting and sheer vocal skill to this: sheer brute force and cacophony and a story line that would disgrace the Beano, with absolutely no relation to the music whatsoever.

Cacophony - brute noise and ignorance - that is what it was. Never have I been so deafened. Six bars into the opening number and I was tearing the corner off an envelope to put into my mouth and chew to a maché with which to make a species of ear-plug. My other ear I plugged with my finger, taking it out when people appeared to be talking. Even with these barriers the sound was deafening. It echoed out in physical waves way beyond those levels which, in a factory, would have the Health and Safety inspectors reaching for their prosecution pads.

When the posters said ‘We Will Rock You,’ we didn’t think they meant it literally. The heavy bass grabbed the theatre and worried it like dog with a rag doll. The place will collapse if they run many more shows like that. The Cardiff earthquake of 1990 shook us less.

Apart from posing a serious long term risk to one’s hearing ability, sound at that level isn’t true. You can’t hear music at that super-volume however sophisticated the amplification. The brain shuts down. All you can hear is super-noise, with the singers screeching distorted against it.

If we ask ourselves why Queen were so great, why Freddie Mercury was such a great artist and why their live performances were so loved - the answer would surely have been because they reached out, they touched, they involved the audience, they drew you in. Last night we might have been watching a film. Protected by this wall of sound the cast stamped and shouted and screeched their way through their lines, all subtlety gone, all humour gone, all wit gone and the only possible scintilla of substance remaining, some fair to middling dancing.

We left at the interval.

The picture at the top courtesy of Wikipedia is of Queen performing on stage in 1984.

WELSH MADNESS AND BABY BOOMING

2011-03-26T12:41:00.003Z

I am besieged by official letters telling me to ‘ACT NOW!” Usually in capitals to increase the urgency and sometimes in very large envelopes - I suppose to make them seem more important. One weighed so much that I fear the spine of poor Annie, our ever cheerful post-lady, will be lop-sided ever after. Despite this she still smiled as she handed over my census form.

Incidentally, have you noticed how the majority of postmen (both male and female) are happy? Considering their lot - out in all weathers, carrying heavy loads, working to deadlines, awful management, poor pay - you’d think they'd be all as miserable as sin and only stay in the job a couple of weeks before exclaiming ‘blow this for a game of soldiers.’ But no, they go on and on. Smiling like the sun, even in the rain, and always ready to offer up those little courtesies that make life bearable.

Of course they complain - but they do so happily. Very few are sour and po-faced. So what is it about the postman’s lot? They are all very fit and I suppose that helps and seeing the rest of the world at seven o’clock in the morning must give you a comforting feeling of moral superiority.

But back to ‘ACT NOW.’ The heavyweight census form came in separate booklets in English and Welsh. Now I have nothing against the Welsh language. I even spent two years learning some of it at evening classes and I once played the Wicked Witch of the West in a performance of Snow White in some learners’ pantomime. I can still sing ‘Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go’ in Welsh (Hi Ho, Hi He, I ffordd y’r gwaith a’r ni). I have given a Welsh culture class at a school in Norway and had the students performing in Welsh and acting out a version of that great rugby song, ‘Sospan Fach.’ (Which means - and not everyone even in Wales knows this - ‘Small Saucepan’)

So I am not, you see, anti-Welsh. I have done my bit for the language. But I am certainly not up to completing my census in Welsh. Or any other form for that matter.

I shudder to think what it costs to send a Welsh Language census form to the ninety per cent of the population (and probably more) who will choose to respond in English. For many Welsh speakers will still choose to use the English version. More than two and a half million twenty-page booklets will go straight in the bin. All in the name of political correctness. The cost of translation into Welsh is appreciable and the cost of printing in Welsh is also elevated because most printers do not speak the language. But this is what the Welsh Language Act decrees.

It is madness. Why can we not opt how we wish to receive our government communications? When I go to a cashpoint the machine asks me, thoughtfully, in which language it should address me. Besides English and Welsh it offers other choices: French for instance, or German. So why not the government?

It would be a simple matter to register a preference. It could be done at the same time as the electoral register update? “Do you wish us to communicate with your household in: English only, Welsh only, or English and Welsh?” And we could tick the appropriate box. If there was doubt then the default position would be English and Welsh.

Still, now that I come to think of it, we might then demand another choice entirely. We might demand a form in English, properly thought through, and not in some form of hurry-up officialese.

For instance, seeing the words ‘ACT NOW’ you could be excused for filling in the form then and there and posting it off. Instead the small print says to complete the form on 28th March. But even acting on 28th March is wrong because the forms asks for details of people staying overnight on 28th March. Which means (because you never know who might turn up on your doorstep at two minutes to midnight, do you?) that it is impossible to complete the form accurately until 29th March.

Sometimes I’m glad I’m a baby-boomer and therefore on my way out. Responding to other requests to ‘ACT NOW,’ I claimed two pensions this week, one from the government (another binned booklet in Welsh) and one from a provider of ‘financial services.’ Or in my case disservices. Had I only listened to my inner self and put the money under my mattress I’m sure I couldn’t have done worse. Still I have ordered a small annuity and had it indexed. If now I can only manage to live until I'm 120 I feel sure I can extract my revenge.

SOLAR SYSTEMS

2011-03-19T15:25:00.002Z

The boy called at my house, rang the bell, it must have been about half past four and I was busy. “Yes?” I said, in what I hoped was an unfriendly tone. He took a pace back and almost fell over the doorstep, but then gathering his courage he went into his sales patter. About solar panels, this time. I relaxed. eco-freak that I am.

Eventually I said he could send someone round to ‘assess’ my house though I warned him that I really didn’t have a spare £10,000 and while I appreciated the government’s guarantee of a premium rate for electricity sold back to the grid for the next 25 years, I didn’t think I could wait seven long years until the scheme had paid for itself. “We can provide finance,” he said hopefully. “For nothing?” I asked. “No,” he said. Anyway, someone would ring. I went back to work.

In due course Wesley rang. From a mobile. Twice. I said having thought about the matter over the weekend I really didn’t think there was any chance of my proceeding, finance or no finance, unless they could offer me a deal that was financially neutral, that is to say wouldn’t cost me anything. Could he? No!

But gosh Wesley was persistent, claiming that I would be earning £1,700 a year from my investment. Or something. “There’s another problem,” I said: we live in a conservation area. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“It is not enough to think,” I said, delighted at last to have gained the upper hand, “one has to know - otherwise the planners will have you pulling the whole lot down again.” I suggested that he first called the planners and then called me back again when he had done that, if he was determined to persist in his vain quest.

While he was thinking of his next gambit, I said ‘goodbye’ and put the phone down. Thus far he hasn’t rung back. Neither Wesley, who called from a mobile, nor his doorstep friend told me the name of the establishment for whom they worked. Or if they did, not so that I remembered it. No cards, no leaflets.

I mentioned all this to a friend who is a heating engineer and who suggested that solar panels shouldn’t cost me more than about £3,000. I’m not sure whether this includes connection to the National Grid and the various boxes of electronic tricks that I suppose are necessary.

Still, I should indeed love to have a solar powered house. Moreover, I have a roof that is large and sloping and faces south-east. Ideal, I would have thought, for any number of panels, provided the conservation planners would allow it. As the panels would be at the back rather then the front of the house, there seems little reason for them to be difficult.

I wonder why the government won’t lend me the money on a kind of interest-free ‘student-loan’ basis? After all it is clearly in the government’s interest for us to have solar-powered homes. The work would create jobs and would save having to import gas or coal to burn in our power stations. The government might have to borrow funds, but the saving would more than pay for the interest. It is a ready bankable proposition; if the government were more entrepreneurial it would realise this.

There is a great difference between a £1 billion borrowed to pay for, say the NHS and £1 billion borrowed to finance solar panels which would give a return of perhaps £50 million. The borrowing wouldn’t cost more than £40 million leaving a £10 million profit for each £1 billion of expenditure and perhaps 3,000 jobs created in installation alone. I offer this wizard wheeze free to our dear leaders C and C, which now that I think of it used to be the name of a cordial company - Cantrell and Cochrane, I believe. Sounds,, rather more solid than Cameron and Clegg, if you ask me. They competed with Kia-Ora, if I remember rightly, which phrase is Maori, for good health, or so it said on my bottle of orange juice!

Anyway, we shall battle on without solar power for the moment. But the sun is shining, pushing up both grass and daisies on my lawn and the lawn in front of of little theatre, both of which I have to cut this afternoon. Our play, ‘The Benefactors’ by Michael Frayn, in which I have some sort of starring role, starts next Thursday and we have to put the premises into order. I shall practice my lines as I mow up and down. I have 261 speeches in total. Enough for an afternoon’s mowing, anyway. What do you think?

ON REACHING 100

2011-03-12T10:28:00.005Z

Ivy Kennard turned 100 this week. She’s a dear old soul, frail now, of course, and practically deaf, but still alert and enjoying life. She looks good for another 100; certainly she is fitter now than a year ago.

We first met her and her family almost thirty years ago. She lived in London then, by herself too, her husband having died another thirty years before, but she came down to Wales regularly to visit her son and daughter-in-law and her three grandsons who were then growing up in the village where we lived. I used to take the middle son on Sunday mornings to the dry ski slope; he is now a bigwig with Microsoft, somewhere in deepest Asia, and goes proper skiing in the mountains of Japan. He made a point of thanking me for those early lessons long ago, which made me feel even warmer than Ivy’s birthday champagne.

She had her card from the Queen, of course. It featured a large head-and-shoulders of the monarch, looking rather cross, as though a minion had dragged her out of bed, dolled her up and made her pose. Though the mouth half-smiled, the eyes looked livid. Or so I thought, but then I have a vivid imagination.

What I do feel though, and here I am not being facetious, is that our dear monarch should wear her crown more. Not some great coronation object, but something like the tin circlet that kings wore over their helmets during the Wars of the Roses. Made of brass probably. At least you could see who was boss.

Now that her hair is almost white and her bearing sadly no longer regal, I feel the Queen needs the visible trappings of monarchy to reinforce who she is. And so a crown, and possibly a sash too and one of those gold and silver starbursts that monarchs and high admirals used to wear could be both handy and useful. Does it matter if she looks Ruritanian? That’s what monarchy is all about if you ask me: trappings. I like my kings in epaulettes. The satirists have taken all the fun out of life. Ivy thought so too in between sips of orange juice.

More seriously, were I Queen I should issue an edict, on pain of the crime of lèse-majesté, to the effect that only I could send cards to centenarians. For poor old Queenie (as my French neighbour calls her) had to jostle on Ivy’s mantelpiece with cards from Carwyn Jones (First Minister of the Welsh Assembly Government) and Ian Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions).

Now the Queen may genuinely rejoice that one of her subjects has reached her three score and forty - and so too may Carwyn Jones. But IDS must surely be rueing the fact that people are living so long and that his department has been saddled with paying at least fifteen more years old age pension than his actuaries had allowed for; and not only that but with an unlimited liability in respect of the years to come. Maybe his card should be tested for hidden poison!

Still 100 years is a very great age. We were going into lunch when I said to Glenys who happened to be next to me and who is about my age or younger: “Ah well, Glenys, in another thirty years we shall be getting our cards from the Queen and eating our centenarian cake.” But instead of agreeing, she looked at me quite shocked.

I wondered for a moment if she had been diagnosed with some horrible illness and was about to drop dead, but no, what she said was: “I’m not that old!” She said it quite coldly, too.

And then I made the mental calculation: yes, 100 less mid-sixties is a bit more than 30. “Do I look like I’m seventy?” she added in an accusing tone.

Oh dear! I had obviously fallen into a deep pit of my own making, made worse by the fact that she had taken care to look smart and elegant for Ivy’s birthday bash.

What had happened was that I hadn’t calculated at all; I had just taken a chunk of time - 30 years - and assumed that it would be sufficient to carry us all long past our sell-by dates. Try guessing how far Penzance is from Bristol; now add a bit for good measure and you will still probably have underestimated how long England’s south-west peninsula really is. I guessed that’s all.

But I’m not sure Glenys believed me. I tried another tack. Pinned up on the wall, picked out in silver letters, was the word ‘CONGRATULATIONS.’ How many letters, Glenys, I asked quickly, are there in the word ‘Congratulations.’ A quick guess. ’11’ she answered. I was saved.

I BUY EROTICA

2011-03-05T12:45:00.006Z

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.

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

2011-02-26T14:27:00.003Z

I was having a discussion this week with an old friend from University about what constitutes success or failure in life. Both of us are on the point of retiring and this seems an opportune moment to take stock. I have just totted up the many occupations I have followed since leaving my Alma Mater: I have been variously a driver, an occupational psychologist, a civil servant, a writer, a property developer, an insurance salesman, an executive search consultant, a business planning adviser, a grants consultant, an editor, a European ‘expert,’ a seller of labels and the UK representative on a joint project between the European and the European Parliament. Thirteen different occupations that have all at various times helped me to pay the mortgage.

To these I need to add those distractions which have also occupied me without the benefit of pay. The chief of these is, or was, politics to which I became addicted at an early age. Yet I have also been an unpaid impresario, an archeologist, done voluntary work for a UN agency and I still am an amateur actor of which more in a moment.

The list is so long that when I write it down I am amazed that I have managed actually to do anything at all in the past forty years. If there ever was a scout’s badge for ‘Jack of All Trades,’ I think I must have long ago qualified for it. My threshold for boredom is obviously low, for I can’t remember ever being sacked.

What worries me is that this rich vein of experience looks like drying up unless the children carry out their threat and despatch me to a retirement home in Bulgaria. For some reason they think this would be some sort of punishment for refusing to grow old gracefully, but I think, if they could afford it, I would go. I rather like the thought of a Black Sea resort somewhere and having to learn a new language. I could perhaps also learn to sail and the Bulgarians are notoriously hospitable with their plum brandy.

Sri Lanka is another place to which I wouldn’t mind being despatched. If I sold up here I could afford a palace in the hills there with a stream through the broad grounds, an over- and an under-gardener, (the latter doubling as a butler), a cook and someone generally to run the house, which I might call Downtown Abbey. Despite the recent wars Sri Lanka is still run by Buddhists and is therefore broadly civilised. It is most beautiful too.

Both would open a new rich tap of experience but there’s not much chance of that at the moment as I am far too useful it seems looking after Theo, who interrupted this piece of writing while his mother was washing her hair, by climbing on to my knee and watching Queen videos on You Tube until he fell asleep.

He is still just turned two but yesterday he kicked a football on the volley, which I thought a very great achievement in co-ordination in someone so young and this morning (as he or his mother had managed to mislay both his socks and his shoes and he was bruising his toes) I was showing him how to kick a ball with the side of his foot to which he cottoned on quickly. And in case the child protection officers should be reading, we were playing in the house on the carpet!

But back to acting: last Saturday I was pressed into lumbering service for a ‘Murder Mystery’ evening, put on by our local Rotary Club. Together with five other members of CADS we sang not only for our supper but for everyone else's too. The audience had to guess which of us had killed a butler possessed of both criminal and amorous tendencies.

You’ll have to guess which part I played but we were an eclectic and unlikely bunch. Led by the great detective, Inspector Sherlock McClue, we included in our ranks an MP, a flapper, a society thief, a big game hunter, a nun and a French woman no better than she ought to be. We scattered clues and red herrings like confetti; somehow the great and good men and women of Rotary were supposed to guess who’d done it. They’d a one in six chance of being right.

We threw our hearts into it. Amateur became hamateur. Still, we learned later that the evening had raised the grand sum of £1,328 for local charities. This included a copious sum for the wine we had to buy at extortionate prices to fuel our performance. It was the only way to make sure we got through the hour and a half. The butler, though, had his revenge. I’ve had dyspepsia all week.

LOVES OF A TWO YEAR OLD: FOOTBALL AND POSTING

2011-02-19T11:32:00.004Z

Singing, I have just concluded, makes you happy even if you are someone, like me, who has no talent for singing whatsoever; I merely make a noise. That being the case I have a limited number of options for indulging my absence of talent but undoubtedly the best one is when I am walking down the road with two-year old Theo on my shoulders, returning, as we were this morning, from making the daily purchase of milk and periodicals.

Sometimes we sing the same song, Theo and I; but Theo’s repertoire is limited. He knows the first verse of ‘Old MacDonald’ and can turn in a fine rendition of the Grand Old Duke of York - although that sounds a bit like Italian opera as he has yet to understand what any of the words mean, Grand Dukes and York not figuring prominently in his nursery discourse. At other times I sing and he hums along behind and both of us are - in the expression of my nineteenth century-born great aunt, ‘as happy as sandboys.’

But what is (or was) a ‘sandboy’ and why should sandboys be happy? I’ve never had occasion to think about it before; possibly because I’ve never written the words before, so here’s what Brewer says on the subject:

‘An old established expression from the days when sandboys (or men) drove their donkeys through the streets hawking bags of sand usually obtained from beaches. The sand was used by people for their gardens and by builders and publicans for sanding their floors. the happiness of sandboys was due to their habit of indulging in liquor with their takings.'

As an explanation this seems to me to have more holes than a rusty colander. In the first place, I doubt you could carry much sand on a donkey; Secondly, beach sand would be no use in gardens or for mixing in cement, and what about all those pubs more than a mile or two from sandy beaches? Not everything you read in books should be trusted.

But now that I come to think of it, neither should Theo. For when he’s not singing, Theo has two other great loves: football and posting. We stand at opposite ends of the long downstairs corridor, hoofing a football between us and yesterday we discovered an even better corridor in the walled lane that runs beside the local play area. Even at two Theo can kick a ball with length and direction; I can merely kick it with length, so the ball ricochets back and forth down the lane. When it reaches him he whumps it back like an arrow. I wonder if I could get him a trial for Arsenal?

He’s not quite as good at posting. He has yet to understand that not every oubliette offers the same facilities as a letterbox. Yesterday, things suddenly went quiet for a while, always an ominous sign; then we heard repeated attempts to flush the loo. Perhaps he had finally made the profound connection between messy nappies and a preventive period of contemplation with trousers around ankles. Hopes rose.

I peered hopefully into the watery depths: a soggy mass awaited. Luck alone had prevented the day’s label invoices, all enveloped and awaiting stamping, being despatched to the sewage works. I fished them sadly out; yet I couldn't help wondering whether it would be possible to retrieve a message on the other side of the world that had been flushed down a loo; suitably protected, of course?

Having recovered from this minor calamity we set off into the cold wet afternoon hoping to have more luck at the actual Post Office, which here is embedded in our Spar supermarket. For speed I had plonked him in his buggy. I’ve done this before, yet how quickly one forgets the vast amount of space taken by grandparent and pushchair as ensemble, and how small the aisles. Turning round becomes a manoeuvre to be executed with care and trepidation. Ankles loom everywhere, like land mines.

Now this Spar thoughtfully provides a stack of small trolleys for children. Theo caught sight of them and was off immediately. ‘Oh dear,’ I said to myself using one of his own favourite expressions, for this was not a Good Idea. Now I was the supervisor of two independent wheeled vehicles in a crowded supermarket, one of which was being driven at the speed of a future football winger across the store, while the other had become stuck fast between the jam and the baked beans. I felt I needed public liability insurance with a significant number of noughts.

Eventually by an undignified snatch at the hood of his coat, the rampaging trolley was brought up short. I abandoned the buggy and made a dash for the checkout and then all suddenly became well. No catastrophe. Theo even wheeled his trolley back calmly to the trolley stack. He posted our letters, we retrieved the buggy and rode home. I think we even sang the Grand Old Duke of York with embellishments and trills!

LIFTING OF THE SPIRITS

2011-02-12T11:54:00.004Z

I am a fan of the Spectator magazine; nevertheless, my subscription fell victim to my own scythe of expenditure cuts as, with the business in the early summer doldrums of the election and the World Cup, I felt a cold need to economise.

The business has picked up somewhat since, thank heaven, and I knew I was beginning to miss the Friday morning thump of magazine on doormat when a charming man rang me out of the blue one day just after Christmas. “We’d like you back,” he said enigmatically.

Turned out he was from the Spectator’s subscription department and he promised me an offer that I couldn’t refuse if I would only proffer my card details and sign on again there and then. A year’s supply of the magazine at a bargain basement price.

“Are you sure you are who you say you are?” I asked, remembering the form of words that a customs official had used when I had tried to return to Britain from Ireland without a passport in the mistaken belief that identity wasn’t needed in those halcyon days of long ago. That situation eventually resolved itself when I found in an inner crevice of my wallet a shotgun certificate, which apparently was enough to prove my case. I suppose he thought you couldn’t make up something like that. The two labradors packed into the back of the shaky MGB must have driven out any other suspicions. Illegal immigrants don’t travel with labradors, do they? Well, maybe they should.

Still, now the boot was on the other foot. My man on the telephone - with a pleasant voice that sounded as if it might not be unfamiliar with the company of labradors - told me he knew my customer number, though as that could have been anything it didn’t get us very far. It is not a piece of information I pin to the noticeboard above my desk which is my store of easy reference.

I suggested he gave me a number and I rang him back - but by that stage I was convinced of his bona fides. In fact I would have given my card details to anyone possessed of such a knowledge of the Spectator’s book reviews and Low Life Column to which (having once played the great Jeffrey Bernard who wrote the column for a matter of decades) I am most particularly attached. I reached for my wallet.

The first delivery would be in a couple of weeks, he said. “Fine,” I replied. “I can wait.” I began to look forward again to the friendly Friday morning thud.

But then nothing happened. My account wasn’t debited and no Spectator arrived. The weeks went by; I even received a letter in the post asking me to subscribe to yet another offer this time with the inducement of a half bottle of champagne if I did so.

I had almost forgotten the episode altogether when yesterday there it was, on the doormat.

So this morning I was sitting at the kitchen table in my dressing gown leafing through the articles over my yogurt and reading a particularly sad chapter in Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life column when the door bell rang. Early, I thought for salesmen; and I wasn't expecting a delivery.

The postman carried two long box parcels - both identical, both addressed to me. The word ‘Vineyard’ figured prominently on the label; a clue to their contents. I opened one to find a half bottle of Laurent Perrier champagne. “Thank you for waiting, it’s good to have you back,” was what I imagined the message to say.

My heart leapt. I have a child’s delight in being appreciated.

***************

And my spirits do need restoration. Last evening in the drama club to which I devote far too much time I sad huddled up and morose, not speaking to anyone, like a child in a sulk. No one had done anything to offend me - it was just the black dog, which descends whenever I have to learn a big part for a play. Every time. At first you start finding other reasons for feeling down - a cold coming on, worries about finances, a row with someone. But I know the true culprit is line learning. I face a fine judgment whether to plough on and risk more depression, or to take a week off (for the effect is cumulative) before starting again.

Eventually I perked up and enjoyed a conversation about wine with someone who sells the stuff for a living and whose knowledge appeared encyclopaedic. He recommended several but sadly my battered brain this morning can remember only one and this because the name ‘Carmanière,’ is similar to ‘Carmagnole’ - a French Revolutionary ‘dance' and song that I sung once. It is a fine red and comes from Chile. I wonder if they sell it in Waitrose?

THE GUERILLA NAPPY-ER UP

2011-02-05T14:27:00.004Z

We watched the last episode of Midsomer Murders this week - at least the last to star John Nettles - there may be others starring someone else. I don’t normally watch the programme, but it seemed the end of en era and therefore that made it interesting even if the programme itself wasn’t.

The show makes me realise that we are, in this locality, somewhat 'murder light.' You see, my neighbour is a retired detective inspector. Just the sort of person around whom murderers ought to be flocking, their dastardly deeds requiring just the agile mind of a retired sleuth to untangle. But then we can't compete I suppose with that homicidal hell-hole of Midsomer.

In fact the last murder in Cowbridge, so far as I can recall, took place about a dozen years ago when some drug-crazed hoodlum crashed into our local jewellers and demanded money with menaces in the shape of a carving knife. The jeweller, being an honourable if somewhat foolhardy man, told him to get lost. Whereupon tragedy struck. The hoodlum ran off, was rugby tackled by a stout member of the public and is now serving life at Her Majesty's pleasure. Plenty of sad pointlessness, grief and bewilderment, but not much of a plot for the little grey cells. Fortunately, this sort of thing doesn't happen often, I thought. Or does it and am I worried?

What prompted these reflections was the local county crime survey dropping through the letterbox yesterday morning, promising me the chance to win £100 in Argos vouchers if I filled it in and nobody nabbed the vouchers in the meantime. How do I feel about crime, the anonymous statistician wanted to know?

"Has crime gone up or down, in the past year," it asked matter-of-factly. "Or has it stayed the same." Fortunately, we live in one of the greener and pleasanter spots of this land and so crime is not something I think about very much. My car was broken into twenty years ago and about ten years ago someone stole a bicycle from the garden shed, but that (touch wood) is about it.

The interrogation continued through five more pages though fortunately a tick box on the survey form allowed me to say, "Never, really thought abaht it, guv" - or words to that effect. The survey also solicited my views about the offences to which the police should be paying more attention. Here I found myself ticking the anti-social behaviour box rather a lot - not that there is, again, too much of it here.

But what these surveys fail to ask you (indeed I wonder whether the politicians are aware either) is the newspaper and elephant question. You know, when the eccentric is asked why he is out in the garden at midnight, reading the newspaper. He replies that he does so to keep the elephants at bay. "But there aren't any elephants in Godalming," protests his interlocutor. "Precisely so," says your man.

I'd even put up with a bit more anti-social behaviour if I knew that the police were engaged on preventing more important crimes like murder, assault, robberies and so on. It is true I do find the noise and loutish behaviour of the drunken Cowbridge demi-monde on a Saturday night a matter of distaste and concern, but, by being concerned, may I not be helping to divert resources away from more serious uses of police time. In the good old days the police locked up drunks for the night and fined them 25 shillings in the morning. Today’s equivalent (perhaps £50) might be a useful source of revenue to our cash strapped government and a formidable deterrent to boot.

The survey concluded inevitably by asking intrusive details about the type of citizen you were, whence you came and what you usually got up to in the privacy of the back stalls at the Odeon cinema. Sadly by this point the option of ticking the "Never, really thought abaht it, guv" box had run out.

*******

For Kathryn Eastman who writes at ‘The Nut Press’ (see the sideline to this blog): a picture. This is ‘Badger the Otter’ - a delightful door stop that I thought at first was a Badger but who turned out later to be an Otter. Why else would he be wearing a fisherman’s gilet and sporting a creel with a fish sticking out of it? So he’s an Otter named Badger. And he gives me writing advice, sometimes.

He’s feeling a little undignified at the moment; for he’s wearing a nappy. Young grandchild Theo, who is two tomorrow, has been wandering the house nappy-ing up all the soft toys he can find, including a penguin. Thank you, Theo! So far Gus the Gorilla has escaped this indignity. He lives on a tall shelf. Now I wonder whether guerrilla nappy-ing up of soft toys counts as a crime?

STRANGER IN THE MIRROR

2011-01-29T11:57:00.005Z

Have you ever wondered how ‘they’ know that so many millions watched a television programme? I’d never thought about it much myself; I suppose if I thought anything I imagined some earnest student with a clipboard, knocking on a few doors here and there and asking the direct question. But it’s all a lot more sophisticated than that.

I can’t remember now how the invitation came - maybe someone with a clipboard came knocking on our door - anyway a couple of years ago we joined BARB’s Viewing Panel. BARB (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) have constructed an elaborate checkerboard of homes where you will find represented every social and demographic condition, all carefully weighted so that from the actions of the few one can deduce the viewing patterns of the many. Apparently we were just the people they were looking for, they said, despite neither of us being television addicts.

A friendly soul called Jason came to install equipment which records what we have viewed and then telephones, via some hidden wireless apparatus, what we have watched. When we turn on the television a little box flashes telling us to record - by pressing buttons on an extra handset - who is there and, should there be guests, their age and gender.

In return for this intrusion on our viewing habits we receive points, which can be cashed in for vouchers. This week, not having claimed anything for at least eighteen months, they sent me £50 in book tokens.

Eschewing the desire to buy an Amazon Kindle - the novelty of which, I have a feeling, might soon wear off - I ordered three books from our local bookshop: Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling, Any Human Heart by William Boyd and Reach for the Ground by Jeffrey Bernard, and am still comfortably in credit for a new season of reading later in the year. Any Human Heart is a recommended Book Club read. The others are both idiosyncratic and slightly depressing choices.

Jane Shilling’s book is described as a narrative of middle age (oh dear!), while Jeffrey Bernard’s columns have been described as the longest suicide note in history. Around both authors' lives hangs Eeyore’s universal lament, “We can’t all and some of us don’t.” Yet out of the damp fireworks come verbal pyrotechnics.

Jane Shilling is horribly introspective, but then so am I. Yet she does describe her introspections beautifully. “I have no confidence in my ability to seize an opportunity. I imagine them as hard, glittering objects; golden apples that hurtle unexpectedly towards you, like the ball in school rounders games that looms out of the air and inflicts a sharp, insulting blow when you are standing in the outfield thinking about something else.”

I thought this morning how accurately this description applied to me, particularly the insulting blow of reality when you are thinking of something else. Having purchased newspaper and milk I was half way home before realising I'd left the milk on the shop counter.

Had I been a contemporary of Jane’s and at school with her I suspect we might have become friends, isolated in the outfield and comforting each other’s absent-mindedness. Though now I come to think of it I was always contemptuous of people who were timid and shy like myself and so I lived in a delusional world in which I imagined myself very differently.

Had I been at school with him I would undoubtedly have sought out Jeffrey Bernard who in his early years was also sensitive and shy, but who compensated by a racy addiction to drinking, gambling and sex. I would have been rebuffed of course, as usually happens when one follows one's delusions.

Interestingly enough the question ‘who am I?’ came into sharp relief this week when renewing my car insurance. I used to be a ‘consultant’ - indeed still do occasional bits of unpaid consultancy. I write, too, but in a desultory and equally unpaid fashion. And then I run a labels business which I thought I should mention to the broker, thereby unleashing a Pandora’s box of trouble.

“Did I carry labels in the car? Well, occasionally, like shopping,” I said. But this was commercial ‘Carriage of Goods’ and I was therefore, said my insurer, a ‘sales executive.’ The premium shot up by £160. It took three days to convince them that I was not a sales executive calling on businesses with my car loaded with samples. But thanks to dear Rachel, the broker, I have now been reassigned. Today I am a company director of an office supplies company and the premium has gone down by £25.

It is not only the opportunities, Jane, that hurtle unexpectedly towards you when you are thinking of something else.

DENTAL REFLECTIONS

2011-01-22T13:03:00.002Z

“Mm, you’ve got a bit of decay starting under that inlay. Perhaps I can fix that now. Save you coming back. It’s only just started, only take ten minutes. What do you think?”

Now the last time young Mike said this to me half my wisdom tooth disappeared ground to fragments underneath his drill. Rotted from the inside, he had told me. I looked at the ceiling and pondered my habit of eating digestive biscuits at three in the morning as a cure for night starvation and then falling asleep again before I could clean my teeth.

“Do it without anaesthetic shall we? Very small! If it hurts stick your hand up.

Still, I told him to go ahead and to be fair I was genuinely surprised at how little he found to drill. All the same I stuck up my hand.

“It’s not the drill,” I said. “It’s the mirror.” Which, stuck at an awkward angle was doing its best to separate my cheek from my jaw. Mike recommenced.

Dentists - and hygienists too - do like to talk in my experience. Perhaps it’s because they know that with your mouth full of their paraphernalia you can’t talk back. You can only look at the ceiling and listen to the various sounds and wonder whether the ultra-violet light gun will burn a hole in your cheek.

When all is done and the chair lowered and you rinse and clamber out, you are so pleased to be free that you don’t have time to say what you had thought of earlier.

So I thought I’d put it in a blog. What I might have said to Mike or to Jennie had I had the opportunity.

Why (I would have begun) do those engaged in medical practice today now wear an ugly design of uniform that first appeared on the space travellers and people of the future in childrens comics of the fifties and sixties? When they were not wearing space helmets the inhabitants of the Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future - column wore exactly the same outfits as today’s caring professionals. Maybe, I wondered, you travel space when you leave the surgery?

Maybe it is why there are no mirrors in hospitals, have you noticed? Or very few anyway. No matter whether you are a nurse or a dentist or a technician today you wear some species of baggy nylon tunic top and trousers whose putrid pastel shades must be designed designed to frighten the patients into wellness. And on your feet you wear trainers, which may be comfortable, but at which the matrons of yesteryear must turn in their graves.

No wonder the NHS is in a mess, though to be fair even private establishments seem to have thrown over the white, fitted collar-buttoning jacket and dark trousers (for the men) and the recognisably smart and confidence boosting rig for nurses (who used to looked like nurses and could never in a million years be mistaken for anything else), with their capes and sashes and upside down watches pinned to their pinafores.

There is a small problem of what to do with male nurses. But still men can wear capes and look dashing with it. No, I suspect, as in so much else, we have been influenced by developments across the Pond. Dress has become more casual and we have casualised the so-called caring professions. Even the consultants have exchanged the top hat and morning dress in favour of the casual suit - some of the time at least.

The white collar-buttoning jacket I suppose was too restrictive. And always there was the danger of being confused with a chef, a waiter or an admiral in Mediterranean dress. There’s a restaurant in Brussels where all the waiters are dressed as admirals, complete with gold braid and epaulettes on their white coats. Very good waiters they are, too, who know what eating and serving food should be about.

But there was no-one to say all this to as I made my way down to the reception desk, clutching my card and fearful of the depredations about to be made to my bank account. One of the receptionists there has been there as long as I have been going to that practice and that’s more than thirty years. Amazingly, she hasn’t changed a bit in that time. Her classic almond face and beautiful hair have not aged by a day and she still wore the same neat dark navy suit.

I thought of saying that she must have discovered the secret of eternal youth. But as time has not been quite so forgiving to her colleague I thought better of it and simply smiled as I handed over my money and walked out into the morning sunshine.

A PREGNANCY OF POSSIBILITIES

2011-01-15T14:10:00.006Z

Ever since meeting Rose Tremain by accident in the hospitality tent at the Hay Literary Festival and finding myself persistently engaged in a conversation that I had not sought to initiate, I have become an avid fan of her novels. I had at the time read 'Sacred Country' but because the publishers had not graced the cover with her picture I had no idea what she looked like and the person therefore who talked to me beneath the billowing folds of white taffeta that June day in the Welsh Marches did not let on that she was an author, or even that she came from Norfolk.

She certainly didn't look like an author - whatever authors look like - but then I suppose I don't look like whatever it is that I am either, come to that, and it isn't everyday that one sits sipping Cava waiting for a Minister who doesn't arrive. In fact the whole experience became so surreal that it might almost have come from one of her novels, which, I suspect, is maybe what occurred to her as well. Life imitating art.

I've just finished both 'Restoration'- which I think her finest book - and a radio play by her called 'Temporary Shelter,' an acted version of which we may well stage at our thespian AGM in a couple of weeks. I won't try to describe what 'Restoration' is about; for one thing I can't say I'm really sure. The novel is so inventive that when the main character - originally a fop by the name of Merivel - slips away at the end of the book you aren't quite sure whether he is dreaming (and if so whether he is awake or asleep); or in a delirium or whether in fact he is quite well and about to step forward into the pages of another book - each ending being a new beginning.

We leave him anyway with a place to visit and a sense of purpose and a young daughter called Margaret after the main character's mother. My mother too come to think of it, though neither of my daughters have inherited the name. And a horse called Danseuse, who pines.

In 'Temporary Shelter' the action takes place more than three hundred years later and on a campsite but the people haven't changed much. The main characters in both novel and play are ones who have been humbled by circumstance. In the first case the cause the humbling is by the King; in the play it occurs thanks to EC Farming regulations. But both are finding redemption in a new life, trying to make themselves useful and to recover their dignities.

In 'Temporary Shelter'- the play - the main character is called Larry and his wife is Marje. But a different, or reworked, or reformed Larry appears in another of Rose's novels written about the same time and called 'The Swimming Pool Season' which I would regard as perhaps her second finest book after 'Restoration' - but then it's a hard choice for all are most excellent and way better than most. All fizz with the same pyrotechnics of the imagination.

The Larry in the 'The Swimming Pool Season' is more philosophical, cultured, softer; he has fewer hard edges, he has less to learn. He, too, has been humbled, by business failure this time in the eponymous swimming pool trade. His wife is called Miriam and she paints, which is something, one feels that the other Larry's Marje would never do - or at least not while Larry was around to demand coffee or wine or soup. Marje would look at the stars, perhaps and like Merivel in 'Restoration' feel a subdued hankering to paint colour. Unlike Merivel, however, any resulting efforts would be simple and elusive.

The one Larry drives a Granada; the Larry in the play, salesman and ex-pig farmer Larry, drives a Cortina. There's a nice ranking of the characters for you. In neither case, one suspects were their wives consulted. Had Merivel had a car I suspect it would have been an Aston Martin. At least he would have saved money on oats. But then Merivel had no wife: or not one that would have been entirely comfortable with Miriam and Marje. She wasn't even comfortable with Merivel come to that.

And now Younger Daughter has delivered to me 'Trespass' - her (that is Rose's) latest novel with barbed wire across the cover. I heard some discussion about the book the other day. Rose herself may have been speaking. I am inclined to think she was. I believe the story is to do with some land dispute or heritage in a family; the ferocious laws of French inheritance. I will let you know. Between the hard covers lies a pregnancy of possibilities

WEIGHT-WISE I WISH I WERE IN MAMARONECK

2011-01-09T13:40:00.006Z

There's someone I know who lives in the village of Mamaroneck in the suburbs of New York City, from where the train rushes you, in a steely clatter and in next to no time, to the great cathedral of Grand Central Station. Unlike the names of so many public buildings, this one is absolutely accurate. Grand Central Station, for anyone who has never been there, is grand, central and a station: it does what it says on the tin, as the advertisement has it. And it is a lovely place with a high domed ceiling covered in stars as though it were some eastern or renaissance monument.

Nevertheless there is a problem. Grand Central Station is not designed for tourists; it is strictly a utility. You are not supposed to have time to stand and stare, whether at the ceiling or the walls, or the offices or the throng of people going about their business. If you stop moving for a second people bump into you. As most of them are moving very fast, they bump into you quite hard and swear. Not nice. All the same, you don't 'make-it' in New York by standing still, you see.

Anyway, back to my friend and Mamaroneck: she has in her bathroom something very special. They are a pair of bathroom scales - ordinary looking old fashioned scales that don't need a battery and don't have a digital display. They don't look expensive and I think they are pink; some friendly but unmemorable colour anyway. The needle points to zero as you contemplate whether you dare step on to them, bloated and jet-lagged from too much to eat and too little sleep and your digestive system having anyway gone into lockdown mode, which in my case it always does whenever I venture further than the end of the road.

I'm not sure that others suffer this same design fault. My genes obviously reflect the time before carriages and railways were provided with 'conveniences' or 'rest rooms.' Provided I am travelling, my alimentary system decrees that nothing shall pass bar the days. Voyaging once as a student from London to Athens it took me a week to get as far as modern Serbia when something inside me rebelled and I had to seek urgent comfort in a field of cabbages.

But I digress, let's go back forty five years and, courtesy of Virgin Atlantic, reach Mamaroneck again, although, just quickly in passing, I have to say that I used to dream about New York long before I actually ever got there in person. The airline of choice then was PanAm with its blue and white logo.

And most comfortable it was too, though I remember waking from one of these dreams when I realised the plane had come to a halt and the engines had been switched off and there I was in New York City. My heart leapt in anticipation. But only for a moment. For then I realised that I was still in my pyjamas. Worse, I had no money or passport or luggage, or even any shoes. I stood on the ladder like some celebrity with the whole world looking at me in my Viyella pyjamas and there was me trying to smile a relaxed comfortable smile for the cameras while meanwhile calculating how I could persuade the stewardess to let me remain aboard and ferry me back again to London in time to catch the train to school.

But with Virgin Atlantic I did arrive and with shoes, luggage, passport and money. I took a bus towards the Connecticut sticks and eventually my friend picked me up from some hotel or country club and eventually again, I ate and slept and in the morning made my way to the bathroom, bloated and water-retained as I have said, where the pink scales awaited me.

On to them I wearily climbed, expecting the needle to shoot far past the comfort zone. But it didn't! Lo and behold I was four pounds lighter than I had been when I had set out. My heart leapt.

My hostess later spoiled the effect slightly by telling me that all her guests marveled at how they lost weight on those scales. But how comforting, how warming, how welcoming! How what you need after Christmas! My own digital scales are cruel and unforgiving. Weight-wise I wish I were in Mamaroneck.

MAGIC WAND

2010-12-28T18:24:00.004Z

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

2010-12-06T08:58:00.005Z

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

2010-11-27T10:51:00.003Z

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

2010-11-19T12:56:00.005Z

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

2010-10-29T11:20:00.005+01:00

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

2010-10-23T09:31:00.005+01:00

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

2010-10-19T09:08:00.010+01:00

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

2010-10-09T11:35:00.004+01:00

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

2010-09-10T10:38:00.003+01:00

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

2010-09-02T13:03:00.005+01:00

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

2010-08-27T11:29:00.003+01:00

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'

2010-08-20T09:29:00.002+01:00

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

2010-08-13T11:33:00.003+01:00

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

2010-08-06T10:48:00.003+01:00

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

2010-07-30T13:00:00.007+01:00

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

2010-07-23T12:37:00.003+01:00

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.

MOOD SWINGS

2010-07-16T12:54:00.002+01:00

The woman running the Chiropractic stall at the Frome Green Fair asked me to wait. This was disappointing; the stall was advertising free spinal examinations and I could see several people lying on couches while earnest practitioners fingered their tops and their bottoms.

At the adjacent stall I recognised the statuesque herbalist selling preparations in little brown bottles. We had met two years ago when she had led a herbal walk along the Frome river during which she so memorably described the benefits of comfrey for those with sprained ankles that I had immediately procured a root and rushed home to plant it.

I wanted to ask now whether she had anything for backs - but as I had yet to have my free examination that seemed premature. So what should it be? Did I have dark moments? A tincture for the nerves perhaps? A preparation to help me sleep? Something to tone me up? Eventually we settled on the stomach and she handed over a preparation labelled 'For the Digestion' containing a ferociously revolting mixture of Wormwood, Rosemary and Bay, one teaspoonful to be taken in water ten minutes before eating.

Our conversation about the intricacies of my digestive tract was cut short, however, by a beckoning signal from the Chiropractors. They bid me to sit, upright and sideways, on a small wooden chair, with my head up and spine straight as though I were back in the deportment class. An elderly gentleman then began to rummage in my hair feeling, he said, for depressions on the sides of my skull.

Now, I can't find any such depressions, but he managed somehow to find holes like eye sockets, as though my head had once been bolted on. “Can you feel” he said, “that these aren't level?”

Well, no, I couldn’t really. And I challenge anyone to judge whether someone else's fingers pressed somewhere behind your skull are level or not. He rummaged in my hair again and massaged my neck.

It was as he thought, he said, shaking his head. My skull, apparently, has a permanent list, for which my top neck vertebra has had to compensate by twisting in the other direction. Then he produced a disturbing replica of a human spine, the bones gleaming in white plastic with rubbery little yellow nerves emerging from every crack.

Did I feel fuzzy in the morning, wake up with a cricked neck, get occasional headaches? he asked.

“Well, yes,” I said. Though if I am honest this is not always unconnected with what I had to eat or drink the night before.

He asked me to lie down and traced his fingers along my spine until he reached my buttocks, which he shook gently. I wondered if he was going to say that they too were listing to port, but he pronounced them straight, but only because my lumbar vertebrae did a sort of ‘Z’ bend on the way down. Had I fallen out of a tree in childhood, had a riding accident; some incapacitating illness perhaps?

I told him that I probably had succumbed to most of these at one time or another. Indeed, I remembered when as children we dared each other to jump out of the high hayloft and recalled the eye-watering thud we made on hitting the ground.

His soothing voice broke through these recollections: all could be corrected by simple manipulation if I would only make an appointment. Not previously having noticed a problem with either a tilting head or listing buttocks, I said I would give the matter careful consideration.

But now as I wandered through the eclectic range of green stalls promoting everything from solar heating to justice for Palestine, I could think only of my head in perpetual tilt and a ‘Z’ bend in my spine. I started to imagine all those muscles pulling against each other to keep me upright and possibly about to cause their cavalier and feckless owner some real gyp.

That evening I went to a party. ‘Just a few friends, a few drinks’ my hostess had said. Everyone was sipping Cava, but I was tired after driving and didn’t feel like drinking. So I found a champagne flute, filled it with straw-coloured apple and elderflower and just pretended; all the while thinking morosely of the happy froth of the green fair. Then someone started a karaoke!

I retreated indoors where a few men had huddled around a small television to watch the World Cup final. But it was no use, I could feel waves of depression mounting, which the football refused to distract. So I put my glass down, found the back door and without a word slipped soundlessly out into the night. Maybe I should have bought something for my nerves, after all.

THE PRACTICE FUNERAL

2010-07-09T17:10:00.009+01:00

I'm the sort of person who always worries when the fridge door is shut whether the light inside may still be on. The other day I attended a rather dreary funeral in a rather dreary crematorium. Outside the weather was hot and sunny; inside the eulogies droned on. I could hardly make out one word: bad acoustics on the crematorium's part; bad hearing on mine. My febrile mind started to drift....... what really was in the coffin............?

“I think,” said Fiona Summers to her friend Daniella White, “that I shall have a practice funeral. The doctor doesn’t seem to think I shall live very long and in the circumstances it seems a shame to miss a good party.”

“But, Fiona, it wouldn’t be a good party - not without you - we should all be extremely sad. Besides I am quite sure that you won’t die for a long time. In fact you are looking quite well.”

“Oh I intend it to be a good party. That’s why I plan to be present,” said Fiona archly. “Funerals can be such dismal affairs and if the bereaved are not sufficiently saddened by the loss of their loved one then contemplation of the undertaker’s bill soon sets that to rights. If you are going to spend that amount of money then you might as well ensure that you are around to enjoy the party. It’s also the only time that your friends and relatives are likely to say agreeable things about you, so it would be a shame to miss it.”

“But you can’t expect your husband to organise a practice funeral for his wife, can you?” asked Fiona. “The police might get to hear of it and he might be arrested on suspicion of helping you to die or something.”

“Indeed not!” replied Fiona. “Besides James could never organise anything even himself. No, I was rather hoping you would help me. You’ve directed many amateur plays with the drama group and a funeral is just a play in three acts: the church, the internment and the wake.”

Daniella gulped. She had wondered why Fiona had been so insistent that she come to lunch that day.

“I’ll write the script, of course.” continued Fiona. “We shan’t have any of those dreary hymns. Nor any of that ‘time to be born and time to die’ nonsense. No, I want a thoroughly modern funeral, that people want to come to because it will be a good show. Not to pay respect to my dead body. Then we’ll have something to talk about afterwards at the party. I can forgive people if they don’t remember me, but not if they don’t remember my funeral. So we shall want to get it right.”

“Really, Fiona! You’re not serious!?”

“Oh but I am! I have always envied Ophelia her funeral. After all two young men fighting over you in the grave would certainly liven up any internment proceedings. Do you think health and safety would let us do it with swords? I could lie upon a gravestone in a flimsy white dress with waterweed in my hair and people could take photographs and make speeches. What do you think? And then I could come to life again, as it were, at the wake.”

“No priest would ever allow that sort of thing in his church. He’d think it pagan.”

“Ah, yes, they’re so terribly hidebound, aren’t they? No imagination. There’s the Bible full of miracles and resurrections, of coats of many colours and people being swallowed by whales - but all we get are grey-faced men in cassocks and an interminable succession of Sundays after Trinity. Let’s do it then in the early morning.”

“Let’s do what in the early morning, exactly?”

“The me-lying-on-a-gravestone in my floaty white dress with waterweed in my hair while folk fight over my grave.”

“Folk? How many do you envisage?”

“Well, Ophelia only had two. But I am sure you can do better than that. Couldn’t you arrange something with those battle re-enactment people? There was a half-decent Civil War battle at St Fagans - I’m sure some of that must have spilled over into the church yard. To die horribly in the midst of a Civil war re-enactment sounds rather better at the foot of one’s obituary than to be terminated by some awful medical condition.”

“But hardly peaceful,” observed Daniella doubtfully.

“Who said endings should be peaceful? That’s just a convention. So that’s settled then. We shall have all the ceremonial in the early morning. You will bring me into the church - half-drowned and we shall have some rousing music and drama - West Side Story perhaps - and in between you can even say what a bad person I was.

“Bad person?”

“Oh yes!” Why speak only good of the dead if they are not around to hear you? Might as well give them the full works. So long as folk aren’t boring, anything is permissible. I mean that’s what we do at weddings, isn’t it? The Best Man and the Father of the Bride compete to tell the guests the true nature of the partner to whom they have just become unaccountably hitched by the grey man in the white cassock now drinking your champagne. We could do the same.

"In fact I shall declare you, Daniella, my Best Man - or rather Woman - and you can slander me to your heart’s content. If I really don’t like what you say I shall drown you out at once with a rousing chorus of ‘America’ on the organ.

“And then I shall be carried out and laid in the earth, below a spreading chestnut tree and a volley of muskets fired over my head to keep the spirits away. I shall take a few things with me for the journey. Some wine and cheese would be useful and some costume jewellery and heels, just in case I meet a passing spirit on the way. Do you think there’s sex in the afterlife? After all it would be something worth knowing. Then we can all go into the nearby pub and have a rousing funeral breakfast.

“Breakfast? Aren’t funerals generally in the afternoon?”

“My funeral will be in the early morning,” announced Fiona in a tone that brooked no countermanding. “And afterwards we shall have a really great party. We shall start with an egg, bacon and black pudding fry-up and move swiftly on to champagne. I shall try to move around incognito just to check whether you are really saying nice things about me. Anyway, think about next June, if I am still around. Now I really must dash. I have to go in for chemo at two.”

Sadly, Fiona wasn’t around next June for her practice funeral for she died peacefully, if unexpectedly, on 31st May. Nevertheless, Daniella had followed her instructions to the letter and a few days later the early morning practice funeral was ready to be staged to Fiona’s own personal script.

But a question now arose as to whether to proceed with the practice funeral now that the poor soul was actually dead. Those of her friends who knew her best - and who anyway had a starring role in the bizarre proceedings - were all for keeping to the schedule on the good theatrical principle that the show must always go on. Others, who included many of Fiona’s older family, were appalled that any such thing could be contemplated and insisted on reacquainting themselves with The Rev. Solomon Dreary of the local crematorium.

“That’s not what Fiona wanted,” pleaded Daniella.

“But, it’s the proper thing and, more importantly it’s what I want,” observed Fiona’s Mother, imperiously.

Daniella could see that the Civil War re-enacters might no longer be needed. There was an incipient Civil War in the family which could turn easily enough into fisticuffs at the graveside.

“I suppose we shall just have to have the practice funeral without the deceased,” concluded Daniella to James. Everything has been booked and we can’t just not turn up now. But it will be Hamlet without the Prince.”

“Or rather Hamlet without Orphelia,” said James, who had been a doubtful supporter of the practice funeral while Fiona had been alive but who had become its most ardent supporter now that she was actually dead.

“I suppose we couldn’t just kidnap her?” he suggested enigmatically. “Kind of ‘borrow’ her for a few hours from the undertakers. They’re a large firm and I’m sure they have so many dead bodies in coffins that they wouldn’t miss one for a few hours. We could then dress her in her white and floaty robes and get her to the church in time to lay her on the gravestone.”

“But how would you move her? You couldn’t very well walk around with a coffin under your arm - or even a coffin in your little hatchback.”

John thought. “We’ll walk her”, he said suddenly. “We’ll take her out of the coffin and with you on one side and me on the other it would just look as though we were returning from a rather good party. No one notices anything anyway in the early morning. Anyone who is up is half-asleep and anyway too busy listening to the dawn chorus.”

Daniella felt that the idea of strolling nonchalantly to her funeral as though from an all night party was one that Fiona would thoroughly have approved.

“But afterwards?” she asked. “We couldn’t very well tip her into the ground and return an empty coffin.”

“Why not?” said John, a malicious twinkle in his eye. “Of course, the coffin won’t be entirely empty. I know a friendly farmer who always seems to have fallen stock that needs incinerating. He’d be very glad of a free cremation. And I’m sure that to the crematorium ovens a dead calf would be all in a days work.

And so it was arranged. On a beautiful and cloudless summer morning Fiona was liberated from her coffin and, supported by Daniella and James, brought carefully through the lych gate and into the churchyard. She was dressed in her best Ophelia frock and James had entangled strands of supermarket watercress in her hair. Her real friends - those whom she loved and who had loved her - were all waiting, crowded around, cameras clicking.

If her feet were dragging and her face were pale (despite Daniella’s best efforts with stage powder) then let it generally be known that she had fallen into the river while gathering flowers for her Prince. She even held a bunch of buttercups, hurriedly picked, in her cold fingers. Willing hands picked her up and laid her on the flat tombstone near the spreading chestnut tree, through whose branches the early sunlight fell dappled onto the grass.

In the night someone had thoughtfully dug a grave, though whether the authorities had been informed of this was doubtful.

Suddenly pandemonium erupted all around. The churchyard was filled with smoke as from all sides there seemed to come musket fire and the shouts of angry men. Someone discharged an artillery piece and clouds of white smoke obscured the mourners, if such they where, from the graveside.

John was saying his last goodbyes. Fiona’s children were weeping. At last there was hush. Daniella imagined she could hear her old friend saying, ‘Oh do just get one with it' and Fiona was bundled, a little unceremoniously, into the gaping earth. Then a sergeant in helmet and leather jerkin drew up what remained of his raggle-taggle actors and three volleys of musket fire rang out again over the grave.

Everyone applauded. Even Fiona, Daniella imagined. What a send-off!

Events had now to be concluded at a fast pace if the party were to avoid detection. Earth was bundled onto the grave, the ground levelled and turf put back. John planted Fiona’s bouquet of buttercups. Suddenly, all that was left were a few strands of watercress, which Daniella thought that she might turn into soup.

A short-time later John collected a half grown Friesian bullock calf which had conveniently succumbed the previous day and arranged it comfortably in the coffin, which he and Daniella then returned to its bier at the undertakers.

By the time they got back the party in the pub was in full swing. Though the eggs and bacon were long finished, several bottles of champagne remained. Everybody was relaxed and happy. The photographs, taken against the rising sun, looked tremendously ethereal.

All good things come to an end, however, Daniella reflected. Even Fiona. And she would need to get herself home and change. She had, she remembered, to attend the sad and dreary funeral of a bullock calf later in the day.

Story Copyright Fennie Somerville 2010

A BROKEN PLATE

2010-07-03T11:22:00.001+01:00

We had finished our staged reading of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ on the lawn of the big village garden. To the south far in front of us a full moon hung in the southern skies over the hills of Exmoor, just visible away on the horizon. The midsummer night was closing in. Some of our small audience had bidden their farewells, others were helping to clear away the tables and screens we had used for the set and with them went the elegant cups and saucers that always figure in plays of the Victorian era. It had been a good evening.

Then came a crash in the gathering gloom. Our poor chairman, who despite playing the 35 year old Jack Worthing has a problem with his knees, had slipped and one of my porcelain plates took the moment as its chance to abscond from the tray with the remnants of the cucumber sandwiches. After a short moment of joyfully turning somersaults in mid-air, retribution beckoned in the shape of the stone terrace below; and the plate was then no more. The cucumber sandwiches, fortunately, were more resilient.

Both he and his wife were mortified for this was - or rather had been - a Royal Doulton plate, all gold leaf and ultramarine. But I was unconcerned. We never actually used these pretty plates, which were really too small for anything but cucumber sandwiches cut crustless and bijou.

“It came from my mother,” I said looking at the shards, which of course was the wrong thing to say.

What I had meant was that the plate (one of a set of twelve plates and matching teacups - but sadly with no matching teapot) had been in my mother’s possession, though I can’t remember her ever using them.

They lived in the bottom of the great oak ‘court cupboard’ that her second husband had claimed as part of his own personal war reparations and brought back from Berlin in 1945. The cupboard today graces our dining room and the plates, when not needed for theatrical productions, continue to sit on its bottom shelf.

They may have come to her from my grandmother, for they belong to that far away epoch of parasols and teas on lawns; those Lady Bracknell days when one did in fact need a tea service for twelve and had a butler to serve it too. As my grandmother was born in India (thereby giving me a qualification if India should ever need another member for its tiddly-winks team) and grew up with the Raj, this is possibly whence they came.

So what I meant was that these plates were therefore just lumber that simply occupied cupboard space as decade rolled into decade. But of course my throwaway remark was taken to indicate that this was some priceless heirloom that had been lost and that as a result the whole tea service was now valueless.

I had intended to mend the broken plate with china glue. Porcelain is forgiving in this regard, though in the event a small shard was missing. So a century perhaps after its Stoke creation and a voyage to and fro around the world, I slipped the remaining pieces into a carrier bag and put them in the dustbin. I still had eleven plates, I mused, and at this rate of breakage, would still be able to provide tea for two come the next millennium.

By then fashions may have changed again for the Doulton teacups only have the capacity to satisfy (I imagine) if one were wearing a Victorian corset, laced by a particularly vindictive maid of Amazonian proportions. They hold enough tea for perhaps three or four genteel little sips, whereas I prefer my tea in a half-pint mug.

Neither were such highly decorated tea services designed for the abrasive lavage of that most essential of domestic utilities - a dishwasher, without which life today would be quite intolerable.

What can go into the dishwasher, though, is Bridgewater, whose sale started this week with a special sneak preview for members. We have Bridgewater pottery coming out of our ears, the rarer editions of which, much to our surprise, are actually quite valuable. Still I couldn’t resist buying another pasta dish and a small mug in the old Indian Hen design. Amazingly, the order had been processed and the goods picked, packed, shipped and delivered in exactly 23 hours. Which, in these days of desperate inefficiency, must be something of a record.

Yet that wasn’t our only ceramic delivery. For our Chairman and his wife called to present another - a plate to replace that which had been broken. Royal Albert, this time, about the same size and most, most lovely. A really beautiful plate and a really beautiful thought from really beautiful people.

PEST CONTROL

2010-06-26T11:30:00.004+01:00

When I left the house with my bag of parcels to post, the thermometer outside the front door was struggling to reach the temperature deemed suitable for sickrooms. ‘Chambres des Malades’ it says.

Though the thermometer was probably made in China it is modelled on a French creation. This appeals to whimsical people like me who want to know at what temperature we should keep any visitors who may fall ill, or for that matter any orange trees that might just happen to be overwintering in the conservatory. So on the advice of the thermometer I kept my pullover on, despite the afternoon sun beating down outside. Maybe it reads low. Anyway I was soon too hot.

Dave was wearing a sun-hat and shorts. His wife has a debilitating illness and he’s often about when I make this afternoon trip to town. He looks askance at the pullover.

“Cold-blooded,” I say.

“How’s business?” he asks.

“Slow,” I reply.

“Why’s that?” he inquires.

“Oooh - recession, World Cup, Wimbledon, the hot weather, anxiety over the budget. Pick any two from five.”

“Ah!” he says, knowingly. “Ah!”

“But it will pick up,” I say. “Swings and roundabouts, ups and downs.”

The next day I have exactly the same conversation with George who sits on the same Government Committee as me. We were having lunch at the excellent Deli in Marks and Spencer.

I am far more concerned for him than I am for myself. He presides over a quango whose English counterpart is in line to be axed shortly. We may both find ourselves with more time on our hands than we should like. I took a glass of Cava to arm myself against the future. “Have you thought about pest control, I asked?”

Now, I was alerted to the money-spinning potential of pest control just the other day following the latest round of complaints about mice in our theatre. It’s not a big theatre and most of the time there’s no-one there. This makes it attractive to the youth of the neighbourhood, with whom we fight an attritional war of security, and mice. Though it’s not so much the mice we object to - they are expert in removing crumbs trodden into the carpet - as the calling cards they leave behind and inevitably in the most public places.

I have often thought that a small mutation leading a mouse to bury its droppings would bring considerable evolutionary advantage to the species Mus musculus. But until that time there’s the pest control man, whose help we were persuaded to solicit just the other day.

Now I’ve had no direct experience of pest control to date but it doesn’t seem a bad business to be in. Little is required by way of start up; a van with sides decorated with suitably ferocious rodents, perhaps, and some trays in which to lay bait. You then advertise your services and wait confidently for the telephone to ring.

When it does, you walk knowledgeably around your customer’s premises looking for evidence of rodent presence. You shake your head and mutter about the dire calamities, commercial and medical, that will inevitably befall you without expert help. Finally, you make recommendations and hand out fact sheets, culled either from common sense or from the Internet.

Having thoroughly frightened your customer with visions of being closed down and hauled before the Bench with sundry polythene bags of mouse-droppings given in evidence, you suggest that such a nightmare might be conveniently be avoided by a single renewable contract, payable in advance.

Then you lay down your trays of bait, purchased from any reputable agricultural establishment and move swiftly to cash the cheque. The mice disappear - for a time anyway - and your customer recommends you for good service. The fact that everything that you have done could have been done by the customer had he stopped a moment or two to think about it, never seems to occur to him.

Such were my thoughts as I stripped ivy from the theatre wall as our recently contracted Pest Control man had suggested. A convenient let out, I thought, because it was almost impossible to get all the ivy off the wall or out of the roof. If the mice came back, as they would, then he could blame the ivy, or, in other words, me.

Of the two parts of the operation then, being the Pest Control man seemed to involve being rewarded handsomely for little actual physical work; whereas being a customer involved an afternoon of precious time hacking away in the hot sun at age old ivy, blunting your saw and secateurs and probably doing your back in at the same time, and for no money at all. Like my thermometer, something didn’t seem right somewhere.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

2010-06-24T14:21:00.006+01:00

I had walked down this leafy Wolvercote road several times with my aunt. Each time, according to my child’s memory, it had been sunny and each time the bindweed had been growing over the black granite monument on the bridge.

I suppose I must have been at that golden age that arrives with learning to read and ends with the rigor mortis of serious schooling. When you can let attentive adults attend comfortably to your wants and life is a never-ending holiday of exploration.

My stepmother, who was a bit of a tartar, described bindweed as pernicious and stripped it away with violence. I thought this rather sad, for I loved the big, white, waxy flowers. So did my aunt, who called them ‘Fairy Bells.’ We were entirely in tune, she and I, on the matter and we might have been content to live in a green space with walls papered by these sunny flowers with their drooping, arrow-shaped leaves.

We pushed away the encroaching curtain of vine stems and saw again on the plaque of black granite the ancient aeroplane that had crashed on nearby Port Meadow in 1912, killing its two pilots.

It was my father who first took me here. I expect on the way to the Trout Inn at Godstow, then a more primitive and bucolic establishment than it was later to become. Just another river pub in fact, where he and my step-mother went sometimes in the early evening, and where I became bored with my insipid orange juice and fractious at the lack of visible trout.

I doubt he took me there a second time. But when my aunt - or I should say my great aunt - started to take me out on empty Saturday afternoons I would ask her to take me to Wolvercote to see the little bridge and the granite monument and the ‘Fairy Bells.’

We’d catch the number 4 bus up the broad Woodstock Road, she demanding of the conductor in her best Edith Evans voice: “one and a half to the terminus, please.” We always sat on the upper-deck, if possible in the front seats, bouncing and swaying on top of the world. Auntie and me: off to another adventure on a maroon and green Oxford bus.

She would have been in her early sixties. And yet I cannot remember a time when she wasn’t ‘old,’ or ‘elderly’ as she preferred to describe herself; (as a child I am not sure I knew the difference), and generally we got on well. Indeed I would have preferred to have lived with her rather than my icy step-mother with whom I seemed always locked in tempestuous conflict.

With Auntie the rules of good, or at least of satisfactory, behaviour were few; neither were they difficult to learn. Besides, if you transgressed the sin was soon forgotten. I knew she welcomed my company, particularly as she lived alone. This was not the case in my step-mother's household.

So we would run up to friendly Wolvercote and then walk slowly - for in addition to being ‘old’ Auntie suffered from perpetual rheumatism - towards Godstow and its ruined abbey where the beautiful Rosamund Clifford, mistress of Henry II, lay buried.

Maybe Auntie knew this. If so she certainly would not have told me, for she never quite seemed to understand sexual lust nor would she forgive the scrapes and scandals that have befallen our incontinent Royalty down the ages.

Or maybe she did; even so she never managed to fall far enough off the impossible perch of her own high Victorian principles of ‘proper’ behaviour to lead to any sort of relationship. She never married, still less had children, leaving that unspoken-about side of life to her sister, who did marry, had one child (my father) and then died.

Auntie had then stepped in to run the bereaved household and assumed that this life would continue with her as dowager when my father transacted a succession of two hasty marriages in the heady days of wartime and its aftermath. But both wives in their turn threw her out. A little unkindly, I thought.

So now her liberal attentions turned on me. I was in any case too young for tales of kings and and mistresses and anyway far more impressed by a more vivid history of crashing aeroplanes. Perhaps it was here, on the bridge over the Thames, that I resolved to learn to fly which, after a fashion, I eventually did. But not before I built several model aeroplanes that looked like the one on the monument and which showed an equal propensity to fall suddenly and disastrously to earth.

Still, having paid our afternoon homage to piloting and bindweed, we would wander back to the sleepy village for a cornet of ice cream and maybe we would share a pot of tea. Then, there would be the bus, waiting at its terminus in the dusty lane, with the conductor shouting to us to climb aboard.

A BRUSH WITH HISTORY

2010-06-17T12:18:00.005+01:00

I read in the paper the other day that we are living through a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Uranus. What this means I am not quite sure. It is a rare event and possibly beneficial, so the paper says. It started on 8 June and ends sometime next January, so I am on the look-out. Three herons flew over the house yesterday in formation, so you never know.

What I do know is that orders for our little business are becoming slower. Instead of half a dozen parcels to ship out each day, we are lucky to have one or two. This may have something to do with the triple conjunction (though if it has we shall be broke by next January). Or it may have something to do with the rather less astral World Cup, in which case things may be back to normal a little sooner.

Anyway, these things need to pondered so I took myself off yesterday to the beautifully peaceful grounds of St Quentin’s castle, less than a mile from where we live. The past always helps to put the present in perspective

Although the Castle’s crag above the river Thaw has always been fortified, the ruins that you see today were begun some 700 years ago on the orders of Gilbert de Clare, aged then about 19 and the last male de Clare left. Well, of course you want to build castles at that age, don’t you? What’s more Gilbert even had the wherewithal to stock them with real soldiers.

How much or how little he was involved personally in the building of St Quentin’s we don’t know. (The Castle is named after the Norman Lord who had built some wooden fortifications here in the 12th century). It’s a small castle as castles go (but then there’s not a lot of room on the crag) and just the sort of castle that a nineteen year old might commission.

So, having set the building in motion, Gilbert then went off to join Edward II’s army en route to relieve Stirling Castle. But happily or unhappily, depending from which side of the border your ancestors hail, there was a little skirmish at Bannockburn during which Edward’s army was routed and poor Gilbert was killed. That was in 1314 and before he had managed to sire legitimate offspring of his own. Exit the de Clare line.

As a result they didn’t bother finishing St Quentin’s. There’s a respectable twin towered gatehouse all ready for a portcullis and a drawbridge but nothing much beyond. Still go through the gatehouse and you arrive in an elegant bailey surrounded by curtain wall 5 metres thick in some places but considerably thinner in others. The works appear to have run out of money and then been finished off as quickly and cheaply as possible.

That didn’t matter - for there is no record of the castle being attacked, or defended. It withstood no siege guns or sappers' tunnels. No Maids Marian were held in dungeons waiting to be rescued. No defenders fired blazing arrows at the attackers below or poured boiling oil on soldiers swarming up the walls. Nothing ever happened here.

In fact I’d like to be able to say that is why the place feels so restful today. With its trees and newly mown grass pristine in the evening sunshine it seems more like a park of peace than a structure of war. The lower gatehouse was used as a temporary prison in the eighteenth century but that’s about the grimmest it can muster.

And by then the castle had been ruined anyway. Not by gunfire but by builders come to steal stones in the night. Half the village was built of the dressed stone plundered from the castle.

Yet it is would be an ideal place to hold a pageant. Perhaps that of Gilbert’s mother - Joan of Acre - born to King Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, while they were on crusade in Syria. Joan had a turbulent life and was married twice - the first to Gilbert’s father; the second, scandalously to a lowly squire, Ralph de Monthermer, whom she married for love, in secret, and much to the dismay of her regal father, who then had Ralph imprisoned, I suppose for lèse-Majesté. Fortunately, he relented.

She died, supposedly in childbirth, at the age of 35, when young Gilbert was just 16. It is tempting to think he conceived the idea of this castle as a tribute to his mother and that is why it is so peaceful. She is after all supposed to be saintly. Fifty years after being interred the body was still, so the chronicle relates, in a perfect state. Indeed, when pressed with the hands her nipples ‘even rose up again.’

Goodness, whatever could she have been dreaming of? How does one put that in a pageant?

Photos are of the castle and the peaceful bailey