GLOVES

Gloves from the National Trust

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

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

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.)