The Factoid Homework

Zoe and Cowgirl have zapped me. Seven handy and useful factoids about myself? Haven’t I told people everything? Is there anything handy left - let alone useful? You don’t really want anything from the dim and distant past do you, girls? Like coming top in needlework at the age of 7 at my village primary school and then obviously quitting while ahead. Apart from the occasional button or running repair I’ve never picked up a needle since. So what then?

I know some people are confused about my provenance. Well, I am a bit of a mongrel. Born in Scotland, I grew up in England and now live in Wales. I may go to live in France in the future. Having lived in Wales for 30 years I have a playing qualification should they ever need new blood in the tiddlywinks team. But as my four grandparents were born, respectively, in England, India, Ireland and Scotland I could play for any of those countries as well. I am told I could even qualify for status as a non-resident Indian, should I need to open a factory in Bombay. About as likely, I feel, as my joining the Welsh tiddlywinks team.

My favourite flower is the nasturtium. I just love the colours and trumpet shapes of the flowers and the big leaves that sensibly have the stem in the middle; and I love the way nasturtiums produce lots of seeds that you can keep and sow next year. My favourite vegetable is the potato, but as that is boring, I had better opt for leeks in winter and globe artichokes in summer.

I would opt for tomatoes but they, of course, are a fruit. I love tomatoes as much as ChrisH detests them. I won the family accolade of ‘Cook of the World’ for my tomato salad, which I make from fresh sun-ripened beefsteak tomatoes, sliced and drizzled with walnut oil and garnished with basil, feta, finely chopped garlic, olives and seasoning.

Maybe it’s the tomatoes, though, that give me surreal experiences. What was I doing, for instance ‘in charge’ of the Cuban vice-minister of Agriculture in a dried flower warehouse in Bridgend? Or how did I come to be playing snow hockey for a Danish team (Jutland) in Norway? After all, none of my ancestors have come from Denmark, at least not since the last beserker finished up on the rape and pillage detail and returned to his longship). Still there must be Viking genes in there somewhere for my blood group is A negative - characteristic of hairy gentlemen with horns on their head. (Now that I think of it, Cowgirl, perhaps this is why my avatar is horned and hairy).

Surreal though is not psychic: I have to tell you that I am not good with ghosts or the paranormal. I can’t made crystals turn, or dowsing rods vibrate. I can’t sense spirits or weedle messages from ouija boards. I am a complete failure, really, in that department. It’s always disappointed me. To compensate I try to imagine that I’m the reincarnation of some historical character. Rosemary Stewart was so convinced that she was the living embodiment of James IVth of Scotland that she even wrote his autobiography. I have it on my shelf. I have tagged the remainder of the Stuart dynasty, but thus far they show no sign of doing their homework.

On the other hand I have had an‘out-of-body’ experience, floating over myself aged about 12, sitting on a beach in a fetching aqua cozzy. It was like a film, except that I could actually feel myself being in two places at once. Seriously bizarre! I have also ‘heard voices,’ as when a good friend died and I was alone beside the coffin. He just started to talk to me. I could not have made up what he said or reproduced his accent. Much, much more than imagination.

And talking of dying you either loved the late Princess Diana or you loathed her. I loved her. I went to the funeral, watched everything in Hyde Park and cried all day. I was still crying, I remember, at the Severn Bridge on the way home. I wrote a cheesy poem of condolence that reversed the famous Dylan Thomas sentiments and ended ‘Go now, gentle, into that good night. A star eclipsed that once did burn so bright.’

As you will have seen from the last paragraph I am also part of that persuasion within the Purple Coo community that believes that if you start a paragraph, or even a sentence, with ‘and,’ your head will not fall off.

Is that seven? I have lost count. Who would believe that I actually passed Physics ‘A’ Level? As with the needlework example, further temptations in that direction have been easily resisted.

(I am not going to tag anyone, because I’m sure everyone must have been tagged already by others. With 7 tagged at a time, the 50 or so active members of this community can all be reached in a chain of two. Nevertheless if there is someone out there feeling lonely and unloved, like the small boy outside the sweetshop, do let me know and I’ll do a special hand-embroidered Fennie tag, just for you).

Budgets

I don’t know about you but I am always bewildered by budgets. Indeed I wonder why they attract the attention they do. Being self-employed I am never very sure how much money I earn - it rises and falls like the tides - so I can never tell from the tables whether we are better off and if so by how much. In any case it doesn’t seem to matter very much - a couple of hundred pounds over the course of a year is neither here not there these days and with everything from Council Tax to dental charges rising at astronomic speeds I doubt very much whether any of us will benefit in the slightest from Mr Darling’s ministry of the public purse.

So it’s a question of - in the delicate Eton phraseolgy of the late Alan Clark - ‘Heads down, bully and shove.’

Quite what this means I am never quite sure - having not had the benefit of siblings who attended that estimable establishment. I suppose it to mean much the same as Churchill’s dark injunction to ‘Keep Buggering On,’ which I am told that he shortened to avoid giving overt offence to sensitive souls to KBO.

But back to Mr Darling and his somewhat unimaginative budget. What I found sad in my limited perusal of the headlines was the lack of any creative spark, a tiny rabbit pulled out the financial hat, that would liberate some group or other from the grimy clutches of the Revenue and Customs, thus proving to us all how far-sighted and sensible the man was.

After all one would like to think that his name was not entirely a piece of baptismal bluff. Wouldn’t it be nice to imagine that in response to a sagacious piece of generosity, some group of pensioners, or garret-living artists, or carers, or state servants of the more useful sort, would be even now running up grateful headlines that spoke glowingly of ‘The Darling Mr Darling! with a illustration of the man smiling with eyebrows - the like of which we haven’t witnessed since Denis Healey haunted the despatch box - raised elegantly in appreciation?

If Mr Darling has helped some group in this way, then I plead ignorance and laziness in reading the paper. I do find these matters bore me. I am more interested in the amber contents of the tumbler the Chancellor knocks back during the Budget speech than in the content of his proposals as such. Though I suppose that these days the practice of Chancellors ‘refreshing’ themselves during budgets has been discontinued for fear of corrupting the youth. Still 55p on my patent remedy for the common cold is almost enough to make me turn up at the doctor’s surgery out of spite.

Perhaps I get this attitude from my doughty old great aunt whom the Inland Revenue, as it then was, used perennially to try to make complete a tax return. She happened to be very poor and quite without assets and lived in a bed-sit, so quite what the Revenue hope to extract I am not sure. Nevertheless, she objected to their forms. Her habit was to write across them in bold letters ‘I DO NOT PAY INCOME TAX’ and return the form whence it came. Nothing ever seemed to happen - that is until the following year when the procedure was repeated.

But here’s an interesting snippet for the next time the conversation around the dinner table shows a tiresome desire to depart in the direction of money in general and tax in particular. Do you know why the tax year ends on 5 April? Apparently the reason is that rents and taxes always used to be collected on Lady Day - the 25th March - and this, until 1752, was effectively the end of one tax year and the beginning of the next.

In 1752 however, the calendar was changed to bring us in line with the Continental (Gregorian) calendar that had been in use since 1582. Britain, as we know, has a traditional hesitancy in joining European initiatives and with Queen Elizabeth in charge of matters we determined to stick with our old ways. But after 170 years not only were we 11 days adrift from the rest of Europe, but the summer and winter solstices no longer occurred when the calendar decreed.

So after a lot of fuss the calendar was changed. Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday 14 September 1752. The move was not popular of course. The cry of “give us back our 11 days” preceded no end of grumbling.

The Inland Revenue - canny folk that they are - were not so easily to be diddled out of 11 days worth of cash. So, in effect, they refused to countenance the calendar change. The tax year may begin on what we know as 6 April but to the Inland Revenue it is still really 25 March.

TEAPOT

I’m a little Teapot, short and stout,
Here’s my handle, here’s my spout,
When I see the teacups, hear me shout
‘Pick me up, and pour me out.’

This was one of my children’s favourite ditties. Indeed, we sang it together making handle and spout gestures as I bounced them on my knee. As they grew up whole nations of imaginary people, whole armies of toys were made to drink imaginary tea from a little silver teapot. By the time the children had outgrown these ceremonies, affection for the handy and useful teapot had already passed seamlessly to the next generation.

I suppose it’s always been like this. After all teapots haven’t changed much through the ages. They plod on, thankfully, as teapots. They cannot be electrified or equipped with light emitting diodes. They continue to be made of china or a species of silver, not plastic or tin. They don’t emit steam, or work under pressure. Since time immemorial a teapot has just been a teapot.

Last Saturday I purchased one that would have been instantly recognisable to my great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents. The same elegant Georgian shape, the same creamy earthenware, the same type of lid with the little knob on it.

I bought it in Monmouth, to which we had repaired for a change of shopping scenery, in a delightful emporium called ‘Salt and Pepper,’ which sells all things culinary with the exception (unless I am much mistaken) of salt or pepper itself, which oversight might, I would have thought, render them prosecutable under the Trades Descriptions Acts.

Anyway, on the shelf with the Bridgewater pottery, I saw this teapot and at once I wanted to buy it for it had all the characteristics of a good teapot, which I shall proceed to enumerate, and few of the bad. Besides this, its £35 price tag seemed trifling.

Coming from that generation that grew up before the arrival of the tea bag I feel compelled to have one mug of tea every day brewed with loose tea in a proper tea pot. True, I have other teapots, but since my favourite blue teapot, became cracked, chipped and stained and its replacement having failed dismally against the shortly to be enumerated list of teapot characteristics I needed a new one.

Today tea comes in neat packets, but I remember as a child myself being taken off to the market by my Great Aunt, clutching at her hand or at her skirts. As a child I had a terror of becoming ‘lost’ and we always had to rehearse an elaborate procedure of what I was going to do and not do if we became detached and where I was to go and stand until I should be found and if all this failed to ask a policeman of which species, in those dim and distant days before panda cars and form filing, a specimen, broad breasted and moustachoed, was always standing on every corner.

At the grocer’s stand big wooden tea chests, freshly opened and brimming with delicious smelling tea leaves, fresh from the drying rooms of the Orient would offer a fancy range of choice with a little scoop in each to fill a paper bag with a quarter pound.

Even the chests themselves were wonderful. Everyone had at least one in their attic. - Probably they didn’t change much between 1750 and 1950, between the days of the American Revolution and the Boston Tea Party; between the great tea clippers like the Cutty Sark and the modern age.

Anyway I have digressed: I was about to enumerate the desiderata of a good teapot. First, it must have a spout with a good lip so that the tea does not drip. You would think that after a couple of hundred years and putting men on the moon, mankind would have mastered the simple art of contriving to make a teapot whose spout did not leave damp stains all over your finest damask. Half the world’s teapots ought to be consigned to some dark oubliette on that account alone.

Next, comes the necessity for a coarse filter at the base of the spout so that when the pot is drained the leaves stay in the pot and don’t run out into the sink. later to form and impenetrable lattice in your drain with the fat from your greasy washing up water.

The lid needs a knob so you can easily pick it up, even if it is wet and your fingers greasy, or, if the lid is hot, so you can’t grip it tightly. The lid also needs to be big enough to insert a spoon to stir the tea when it’s brewing and for scooping out the tea leaves when you’re done.

Last it should look attractive. I can recommend Bridgewater’s Toast and Marmalade collection.

THOUGHTS FROM A RECLAMATION YARD

Elder Daughter phones to have a grumble. Turns out that hubby has dropped a ceramic soap dispenser, leaving a large circular and leaky crack in the bathroom basin. “Come over at the weekend,” she commands, “we’ll buy a new one from the reclamation yard. You can help me choose.”

So that is how I came to be somewhere next to Frome railway station staring at a row of red telephone boxes, none of which stood properly upright. The sign says Frome Reclamation, though its colloquial title - Frome Wreck - sounds better and is more descriptive. Below hangs a notice: ‘Children risk being impounded or recycled.’

“Adults too,” I thought. For this is a collectors’ paradise, full of architectural gems torn from stately homes and humble cottages or, in the case of the telephone boxes, village high streets too. Fanlights, beams, studded doors, great gates of wrought iron, stone slates, fireplaces, domesticity from long ago thrown together here, hugger-mugger.

You could tell the stuff belonged to another age just from its size. In one bay lay several giant baths of cast iron enamel - the sort of bath in which you can imagine Winston Churchill reposing. You could tell they were old because they didn’t have overflows but instead those clever lighthouse thingies in place of bath plugs. If the water level rises above a certain point then it pours into the top of the lighthouse and so down the plug hole. What is more, by lifting the lighthouse top, your maid or manservant could empty your bath without wetting their sleeves. All very Gosford Park.

Next to the baths sat an array of impressively floral lavatory pans, some looking for all the world like pieces of blue Delft and big enough to take a small elephant. Rest your posterior on one of these and you really could believe you were sitting on a throne. How sadly unenterprising we are these days with our rationed portions of earthenware in pastel tints.

These put me in mind of the great double commode in Kew Palace on which Mr and Mrs King, aka George III and Queen Charlotte, would sit side by side of a morning chatting away merrily over their morning eliminations and watched over, no doubt, by the ladies and gentlemen of the bedchamber. This, I think, would be much better way to test the provenance of a putative princess than putting a pea under the mattress. If you could manage to remain dignified in such circumstances then you really must have blood of the deepest blue.

Anyway, these lavatorial ruminations were cut short by Elder Daughter announcing that she had found what she was looking for - a bathroom basin circa 1930 to match the rest of her between-the-wars house - and would I please help her shift it.

Our way led past a fetching cast-iron fireback, dated 1659, propped up against a pillar box. It exhibited a heraldic device, full of fleurs de lys, and thus looked as if it had just been torn from the bowels of Chateau Loufoque. That would fit nicely in my fireplace, I thought.

Idly, I asked the price, trying not to appear too interested. “£225 plus Vat,” came the reply. Suddenly I developed a close interest in the ground between my shoes. Even if I had a spare £225 (plus Vat) how can one ever be sure that a fireback is genuine? I mean they turn these things out ten dozen at a time in the back alleys of Shanghai, don’t they? Short of some species of forensic analysis of Home Office complexity, how do you know that today’s nicely distressed seventeenth century fireback wasn’t three months ago a manhole cover belonging to Network Rail?

And yet, does it matter? What difference does it make, beyond simple antique snobbery, if the fireback has come from Chateau Shanghai rather than the Frome equivalent of Blandings Castle? After all, a lump of iron is a lump or iron. Nevertheless, £225 plus VAT seems a lot to pay for a manhole cover, though thinking about it that is probably what Network Rail pay for theirs.

When I got home I wondered just what the salvage men would rescue from my home in the unlikely event of it being pulled down to make way for a new Tesco’s. Precious little, I concluded sadly, at least precious little modern stuff. The furniture, pictures, books that have lasted a century or more already all look as though they could take another hundred years in their stride. But I have grave doubts about anything made in my lifetime. Except maybe the ceramics. Will our modern fittings, the bathrooms, the staircase, the kitchen last? I doubt it. Or if they do last I can’t imagine anyone thinking they would be worth salvaging.

MOST OF THE THINGS WE WORRY ABOUT NEVER HAPPEN

"I'll give you two weeks," he said. "Otherwise I'll have to cut it off."

"But that will mean a new crown! Mike, that's £400!"

"Something like that," he replied airily, with that studied indifference professionals are apt to adopt towards their patients' bank accounts. "I can't leave it like that," he added, just in case I might be having second thoughts. Uh-huh? Since when did my teeth become his teeth, I wondered.

Fresh from the agony of having an implant fitted a few months back - the agony being not so much the physical discomfort as the hole it left in my spending money - here I was knocking on Mike's door again for more of the same.

Mike is relatively new at the practice. He is a fresh-faced earnest, sporty young man who wears trainers and a sort of athletic blue uniform that one imagines dentists might wear in North Korea - that is if they have dentists in North Korea.

He sits me in his chair while I explain that one of my crowns is loose and the tooth underneath objects violently whenever I chew on something harder than a boiled egg. "Has the crown actually come off?" he asks. "Not exactly," I reply opaquely. “Half-off perhaps.”

So Mike tries to remove the half-off crown, using a weird instrument called a 'crown puller' which fits under the rim of the crown. Mike then flicks a brass weight whose momentum is supposed to act as a species of hammer. No joy! He tries heaving with various levers but these don’s shift the crown either. After a quarter of an hour Mike gives up and sends me home to experiment. Which is where we came into this tale.

You can imagine that knowing that it would cost me at least £400 if I failed, my motivation to unstick the sticking cown was high. A series of improbable and dangerous implements began to grace my dressing table. Thread, wire, knives, skewers and needles of various descriptions, pliers and finally a plumbers wrench. But the only success I had was in giving myself toothache.

So in the end I had to confess defeat and resign myself to £400 going down the drain as Mike's electric grinder cut through the dental gold. I was angry at myself and apprehensive at the inevitable pain of the dental operation. I wondered if Mike had forceps? I put the plumbers wrench in my handbag just in case.

So now we're back in the surgery, trying to be positive. "It's much, much looser," I say cheerily. "And you'll save me a ton of money if you can just grab it with forceps and pull."

"Let's give it a last go," says Mike, who I feel at last is on my side.

In case anybody is wondering why the crown would not come off the answer lies in my wisdom teeth. While the rest of me crumbles towards senility, my wisdom teeth are still green and growing. Thirty years ago this one on the lower left was a little tooth bud barely breaking the gum. Now it is a half grown tooth and trying to make room for itself by shoving all the other teeth down the bus, as it were. It had grown over my crown by just enough to stop it coming off.

Mike had another go with his crown puller with no more joy than on the first occasion. Then he filed the side of the wisdom tooth with an emery board. Then he called in Gareth who used to be my dentist thirty years ago and who is now seriously eminent. Pound signs flashed before my eyes.

Gareth dons latex gloves, whereupon the crown - clearly realising that with two dentists at work further resistance would be hopeless - gave up its barnacle operation and popped off, smiling with a sort of 'oh is that what you wanted?’ look.

What lay beneath was a large area of rotten tooth, which he proceeded to drill and fill with the usual dental gusto. But having just saved £400 - Mike upped the ante now by telling me now it would have been £500 - I was so pleased as not to care about the filling, the frozen mouth, the horrid after taste and all that. And at the end - when the girls gave me the bill - I was practically laughing.

Having been prepared for at least two appointments and £400 plus debited to my plastic, I rejoiced to receive something that demanded (only) £130.

Poor Mike did his best to console himself and his loss of business. "Of course, there's just a chance that the tooth may die and then you may need a root canal filling," he said cheerfully. But it should be OK!”

DRAMA IN DRAMATICS

Happen there have been rumblings down at our little Theatre Club this week. Drama in the dramatics if you will. Our leading man who has come to us (don’t ask how) via Los Angeles and Las Vegas has departed, suddenly, like a prima donna in a huff, half way through the production, complaining that the director had dictatorial tendencies. Ouch!

Poor dear! The director in question, (not me) I hasten to add, has never so much as had a dictatorial tendency in his life and the rest of the cast are a fine and happy bunch. I suspect that the leading man, thinking himself indispensable, is sitting by the telephone even now, waiting for it to ring. Well, he better lay in provisions for he will be waiting a long time. In truth everyone is glad to see the back of him.

I know all this as they asked me to read in the part while casting around for a suitable person of the male gender to take over the role. Putting on my deepest voice, therefore, complete with cod Swiss accent, I became Captain Bluntschli, Bernard Shaw’s anti-hero in ‘Arms and the Man.’ If you don’t know the play you will remember Bluntschli as the ‘Chocolate Cream Soldier’ - the man who sensibly keeps a bar of Dairy Milk in his cartridge pouch on the basis that chocolate is of considerably more use to mankind than bullets. A man after my own heart, clearly.

Written against a background of the Balkan wars of a century ago (which differed only in their armaments from the Balkan Wars of our generation) Shaw’s play is a satire on fighting, war and ‘higher love.’ It is still an excellent, timeless piece, full of humour and lightness. Bluntschli loses his war, but of course wins Raina from the dashing, but otherwise stupid, cavalry hero. Meanwhile, Raina is talked out of her noble attitudes by someone who for once doesn’t patronise her with romantic nonsense.

Anyway, they have found someone so I am no longer required and can revert to my duties for this play of being in charge of publicity (a thankless task) interspersed with occasional tea-making. I am being ‘rested,’ or so current fashionable theory has it, so that I may direct the summer production, which I think will be ‘Lettice and Lovage,’ a brilliant play by Peter Shaffer (author of Amadeus) and allegedly produced as a showpiece for the copious talents of Maggie Smith.

I say ‘think will be’ because although the director has the choice of play in practice it does depend on who is available and when and if I can’t find the right people I may have to revise my aspirations.

‘Lettice and Lovage’ is about a tour guide who gets bored with her job and sets about ‘improving’ the history she is given. This, of course, was standard fare for Shakespeare and just about every writer since, but poor Lettice finds herself unceremoniously sacked for this lese-majesté, though not without something of a fight.

The play appeals to me because ‘improving’ history was a fault to which my own father fell particularly prone. The merest possibility of an occurrence became quickly in his eyes proven fact. If good Queen Bess was known to have rested somewhere in the vicinity, then it was in our house that she and her entourage had stayed and been entertained. And if the tale got a second outing, it would no doubt include an offer to show you the room in which she signed Raleigh’s death warrant as well.

Never mind that the records showed that the house wasn’t built at the time. These he would dismiss by saying that ‘of course’ there must have been an earlier house on the site, pulled down no doubt after a disastrous fire started by adherents of the Pilgrimage of Grace of which the locality, he had just learned, had been a hotbed. And so it would go on.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Peter Shaffer had actually met my father and gleaned some of this absurdly extravagant tendency to historical romancing from him. Indeed were he still alive, my father would have been quite capable of claiming that he had, with just a sufficient degree of veracity and attention to detail to make you wonder whether this really was truth or yet another fiction.

In fact he had a history of claiming acquaintanceship with playwrights, insisting that as a child he had sat on Bernard Shaw’s knee and played with his beard. Quite what brought my father and Mr Shaw together sometime in the 1920s (my father was born in 1918 and after the 1920’s he would surely have been too old for knee-sitting) I have absolutely no idea.

As for me, I have never been able to get away with romancing. My lip trembles and there is a twinkle in my eye. All the same I am looking forward to directing ‘Lettice and Lovage’ and interpreting those characters who will invent history before us.

HINTS ON HOUSEWORK AND FOLLOWERS

EizabethM tagged me for household hints the other day. Little does she know! Housework is not my favourite activity. So, the best advice I can give is to do as little as possible. Dirt does not in modest amounts injure dignity. Provided things are relatively clean and relatively tidy there is no law that says you have to clean daily. The odd cobweb or dust thread will not bring the heavens crashing about you. It is not necessary to scrub everything with Dettol; we are provided with immune systems that cope with bacteria - or ‘germs’ - in an efficient and business like way without expensive chemical help.

I suppose I was born a Piglet who, if you remember, liked to roll in the mud, and was most disconcerted at being kidnapped by Kanga and carried home to be scrubbed in the bath. I feel like that in houses that are ultra-clean, the paint gleaming and not so much as a thread out of place. I cannot feel comfortable.

I far prefer those cluttered bohemian houses that instantly feel welcoming and where you are as likely to find something of interest (animals, books, children’s toys, a chocolate biscuit) under the furniture as on top of it.

So what would I insist on in a house? First a large kitchen in which everyone can congregate and with sufficient surfaces for people to deposit their belongings and bags and newspapers and ornaments and wine bottles and still have enough space for cooking and eating. And of course a dishwasher, for being lazy I dislike washing up.

Secondly I am a big, big fan of round tables, rather than square ones. It is amazing just how many people you can seat at a round table and how the round table helps conversation and interaction. And I am a great fan of oil cloth as well, the sort of bright, happy designs that you can find in a French supermarket or hardware store.

Unless you have a dog bent on a personal mission to bring indoors the contents of the garden, then removing one’s outdoor shoes at the door and replacing them with slippers or house shoes really does make a difference. Some people drearily insist that all visitors do the same, forcing them to wander around in cold stockinged feet. But I don’t mind visitors keeping their shoes on. I don’t really mind them smoking either, come to that. Live and let live.

Books seem to me to make a house interesting and do not necessarily have to reside neatly on bookshelves. Pictures provide colour and I have always had a thing (not everyone’s up of tea this) about antique maps. And lastly flowers make up for any amount of cleaning left undone. So here, I am very much afraid, endeth the lesson.

Ever since Faith wrote about black day dreams and Bodran posted that spooky picture of the little girl’s face I have wanted to write about the real life experience of Younger Daughter.

She was doing voluntary work in Mozambique when she started to have a sort of uncomfortable feeling. Her moods were low and she kept having bad dreams.

Nothing was serious enough to warrant the doctor - she was in a remote area of the country. But she was recommended to see a ‘spirit doctor,’ who took her hands and gazed into her eyes and muttered and incanted. ‘You have acquired ‘a follower’ she said.

The follower was apparently a young girl, recently deceased. ‘A member of the family,’ said the spirit doctor, and now a restless spirit who had attached herself to Younger Daughter in the hope of achieving something. ‘Just tell her, firmly, to go away and stop bothering you.’

Younger daughter confessed to not knowing any recently dead members of the family, old or young. But she followed the instruction and the follower duly departed.

When she got home she recounted this strange tale, whereupon we pointed out that there was in fact a distant cousin, a Roman Catholic, who had had a child which, for some reason, had never been baptised. The child died unexpectedly aged about 10. But when the family came to bury her, the priest had refused her a church burial because she hadn’t been baptised.

Younger Daughter had known nothing of this story. And you can make of my tale what you will. The bad feelings in Mozambique might have been just a touch of malaria, which she contracted. Or the poor un-properly-buried child, who is is such a phantom that even I do not know her name, might now be plaguing some other family member in search of a decent internment. But the spirit doctor’s advice was a simple, if nimby-ish, direction to begone and to plague someone else. And whatever it was, went.