IN WHICH I RESCUE A POT PLANT

The other day we were discussing how the recession was affecting businesses. Our own little label business, now nearing its year end, looks as if it will come in about on budget, which is to say slightly down on the year before. But then labels are a declining industry.

Label firms seem to be dropping like flies and catalogues of their redundant equipment, for sale at knock down prices, drop through the letterbox with increasing regularity. Why we no longer need labels when ‘labelling’ seems to be the new found craze of government is another one of life’s impenetrable mysteries.

For us, therefore, managing the decline, is what it is all about. We don’t mind declining slowly. It’s sudden jolts we worry about. A bit like ageing really. We are, though, at the small and simple end of the market, contracting out anything difficult or complex. Operating from home we don’t carry the heavy overheads that are what seem to push so many businesses to the wall. Those and finance costs, of course. So it looks like we shall be battling on into another year.

But sadly, not all businesses will fare so well. In the town one or two have already gone under, including our most handy - and therefore useful - Garden Centre, just off the High Street, and nestling beside the river and its willows. In normal times this would have been full over the Easter weekend with eager gardeners looking to fill their hanging baskets and herbaceous borders.

A couple of months ago the Centre closed suddenly and unexpectedly. No one knew why exactly for it had always seemed a thriving business. There is talk that the landlord may have wanted more money for the lease, or maybe wanted the land for ‘development.’ But who knows what to believe? Maybe competing with the B and Q’s of this world for an industrial supply of petunias and nasturtiums is a mug’s game.

Anyway, the fact remains that this thriving and bustling hub of town activity, where you would meet neighbours between the Vietnamese ceramics or over the rails of clematis, where you would rush down on a Sunday afternoon to buy an extra trellis or set of bamboo canes, has gone the way of all things mortal. Now it is just a sad and empty yard, full of decaying pallets, litter and collapsing sheds. All the plants have gone, the stock of fertilisers and watering cans, likewise. It all looks very woebegone.

Wandering home a couple of evenings ago, on my way back from my daily trip to the Post Office to despatch parcels of labels, something made me divert along the path that runs past the old place. Past the little gate which fiercely said ‘No Entry’ - you were supposed to go in via the shop part which has now been leased to the Antiques Centre - which was not barred but in fact wide open. So I went in and had one of those idle moments of wandering around vacantly trying to remember all I had bought there in happier times.

Yes, here was where they kept the trees, here the climbers, here the water plants and those pond liners, here the stand of rubbishy rhubarb. Not a long wander: I was half-conscious that some uniformed (or even non-uniformed) jobsworth might turn up to enquire what I thought I was doing and automatically suspect that as I was clutching my now empty parcel bag, I must be someone clearly up to no good.

So driven by a mounting feeling of illicitness growing vaguely in my nether regions, I turned around to wander out again. I suppose I had been looking for some souvenir, something to remember the place by. Two months ago perhaps, had I been alert, there might have been any number of discarded bargains to be had; but today all that remained were plastic pots, polythene and broken pallets. Or so it seemed. For then I saw something - a pot with something still in it - lying on its side in a heap of rubbish that had been swept into a corner. Whatever the something was it looked pretty dead.

It still had its label: Pennisetum, it said, with instructions in half a dozen languages; dwarf tufted grass producing pretty colourful (well, whitish) tufts of something or other in the summer. Would it ever do so again, I wondered? For the whole thing looked pretty dead. As if the pot had lain on its side all winter and the plant had shrivelled from drought. Just dead grass, wasn’t it?

Nevertheless I thought I detected a small green shoot - a patch of greenness anyway - so I scooped it up and brought it home. Ever since, at a young age, I learned the parable of the lost sheep, things rescued have always had a particular place in my affections. Into the parcel bag it went and home it came.

It was pot bound, of course, and looked way past its sell by date: a dense thicket of straws in a small pot. But I have since re-potted it and may even plant it out on the lawn. It may be my imagination but I think it’s looking happier.

BARCELONA MONDAY

This week has been one of rich experiences. For as part of my voluntary UNESCO work I had the opportunity the visit Barcelona to talk to colleagues there and as part of that visit I also had the opportunity of a private tour of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral.



Gaudi’s great Catalan edifice, excites strong emotions. Like the translucent Barcelona light it cannot be ignored: can never become merely another townscape. It demands urgent attention, regardless whether you prefer your Cathedrals much as the medieval builders of the high perpendicular left them: light transfixed in an echoing perfection, with spires that claw at the sky.



Not for nothing, then, that Gaudi’s defining creation, still unfinished after one hundred and twenty seven years, should have been created a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Our busy and ephemeral age will leave few monuments behind when finally it crumbles into dust. Apart from massive concrete accretions there will be little enough to remind future generations that our epoch can boast those who have striven to weave beauty and complexity from stone and light and who, too, have reached toward the heavens.



The Sagrada Familia - the name means Holy Family in Catalan - has already survived great turbulence. War, fire, political apathy, poverty are only some of the ills which its creators have fought since work on the cathedral commenced in 1882. Now at last, with its World Heritage status and annual visits surpassing the 3 million mark, the great work is finally in sight of completion.



Gaudi himself died in 1926 with little more than the great carved facade with its four iconic bell towers completed. That was a shock to a project struggling for funds, though not as great as the disaster of July 1936. Two days after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War almost every church in Barcelona fell victim to anti-clerical rioters. The Sagrada Familia did not escape. The works were burned. Gaudi’s studio with all his drawings and the complex geometrical models from which his works took shape went up in flames. Building work halted for a generation.



We ascended nearly seventy metres above the Barcelona streets and moved like so many Quasimodos among the skeletons of the high Cathedral architecture where the immense sculptured finials of fruit and flowers are reminiscent of some far off Aztec vision. Still far above us the mighty decorated bell towers soared against the blue Mediterranean sky. It as a long way up and a long way down.



The work proceeds from models recreated from pieces of the originals, burnt and smashed by fire. Gaudi’s obsession with geometry makes it possible to recreate a whole section from the smallest part. The new models, still on Gaudi’s one to ten scale are fitted around the fragments of the original and so manage to look like plants regenerated from from a small piece of rhizome. The work has been a triumph of detection, a fitting tribute to the conquering nature of faith and human dedication.



Yet the Cathedral faces one last challenge. What has survived war and destruction to become a World Heritage site risks now being, quite literally, undermined. For a long time there have been plans to build a transportation tunnel underneath Barcelona that will pass within two metres of the Cathedral’s Foundations.



The ground on which the Cathedral stands is not good. It is feared that if the tunnel excavations do not give rise to subsidence, then years of vibration will one day cause the great bell towers of Sagrada Famila to collapse.



Many species of engineer have looked at the threat and have given their opinion. Some are re-assuring. Others take a more sombre view. But to re-route the tunnel would be costly for work has already started. The tunnel is at the outskirts of Barcelona itself. Only high politics can now halt or deflect its relentless advance.

FLOURS AND FLOWERS

I am pushing Aged Mother around Waitrose again. She, in her wheelchair, attentively scans the aisles as we go up and down looking at the whiskies and the toilet rolls, the yoghurts and the shampoos.

I have written about Aged Mother before. She is 87 and is sadly now feeling the effects of age in her knee and memory departments. “I know I have seen something that I want,” she says, as we go patiently back and forth, her eyes alighting eagerly on some scrap of coloured packaging only to dismiss it with a “No, it wasn’t that! What was it?”

Being an even-tempered and long-suffering sort of person I resist the urge to mutter, “I don’t know you haven’t told me,” but can’t help thinking it all the same. I mean it is not even as if this was my mother, though everyone of course thinks she is. She is actually Helen’s mother, but I have been brought along as, so often on these shopping expeditions that J and Helen organise, I am thought ‘good’ with Aged Mothers. (I use the plural because Helen has two: her own and her husband’s with a combined age of 185) Helen and J each have each a trolley. I am the safe pair of hands on the wheel chair.

Actually I don’t mind at all. Aged Mother, in her own way, is quite fun, and the whole quasi-Buddhist exercise of subjugating the self leaves one quite serene. I may very well be in the same helpless state myself in only a handful of years. If so I want to know I have credits in the Karma bank.

In small doses the very old and the very young are no different. All that is required is the ability to remain unembarrassed and an aptitude for one-sided conversations on Joyce Grenfell lines for which shopping provides splendid opportunities.

“Let’s look at the orange juice, shall we? Mmm, what sort shall we buy? Do you like orange juice? It can be rather acid, don’t you think, though mixed with olive oil it is supposed to be good for the bones, or rather the joints. Does that make a difference? I mean if it were good for the bones could one expect that it would be good for the joints as well?”

I pause for the response: “I don’t really know, dear - but orange juice, yes! Did I ever tell you my grandfather was the Mayor of Harrogate......” This is the signal for rapid intervention. The Harrogate story lasts ten minutes and is recited faithfully on each and every occasion we meet and sometimes more than once). I plunge in heavily to effect a diversion.

“Ah yes, Harrogate,” I say. “Beautiful town. But I wonder whether they drank orange juice there. At the mayoral meetings, I mean. You know, to wash down the toffee? Did your grandfather eat toffee, and if so how were his teeth?....” and so we go on.

If all else fails I recite Shakespeare to her: though to mutter ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of king’s........,’ can serve to raise the eyebrows amongst the unwary.

Written down like this it all sounds horribly patronising, but it does work. She doesn’t know what we are talking about, but then neither do I really. But we both are, on the face of it, having an intelligent afternoon’s conversation. I ask her to hold a random carton of orange juice while we beetle off in search of J’s or Helen’s trolley to put it in.

We are having a similar conversation about bread flour which I tell her I need. “There’s flour here,” she says observantly from her position two feet away from where I park the wheelchair to browse. Indeed, she is right! Bags and bags of it. What a surprise! But this is Waitrose after all. I am looking for a special flour, I tell her confidentially, one that has grains in it. I ask her opinion of granary flours. She considers the matter gravely and confesses she can’t tell, or doesn’t know, or has forgotten. But she says this most positively and we are both satisfied that this is a valid exchange.

We are joined at this point by a young woman holding a bunch of flowers in search of some Canadian extra strong, reinforced gluten, flour in a black bag with a red maple leaf, which happens at that point to be directly behind Aged Mother’s wheelchair.

“Look at these lovely flowers,” she says to Aged Mother, her attention temporarily diverted from flours to flowers. She thrusts them under Aged Mother’s nose. “I couldn’t resist them.”

“Oh those are nice!” says Aged Mother beaming. I move the wheelchair to one side and tell her we are looking for a flour with grains in. She replies not to me but to Aged Mother (which makes me want to complain that it’s the people in wheelchairs that are supposed to be invisible not their hardworking pushers) telling her that the aforementioned Canadian flour is excellent because the strong gluten prevents pumpkin seeds with their sharp edges from cutting through the dough and ending up at the bottom of the loaf.

We are rapidly bordering surrealist territory. Aged Mother enters the spirit of things by nodding sagely and opining helpfully, “Of course it does.”

“I suppose you’ve done a lot of cooking?” ventures the young woman wistfully, on the basis of those four words which have now elevated Aged Mother to the status of a sage to be deferred to on all matters of baking.

I will say this for Aged Mother, she knows how to milk a situation. She stretches out an arm and says in a stage whisper. “I used to bake for Lord and Lady Fermoy, you know, Princess Diana’s grandparents.” And indeed she did when she was a girl in her teens and before she ran away at the outbreak of war to become an aircraft fitter, leaving the Fermoy kitchens bereft of her culinary talents.

But the Fermoy story and how she first introduced the name of Diana to the household is another well-scratched record. Luckily, at this point, fate intervened in the shape of the young woman’s husband. Grabbing a bag of flour, we executed a hand-brake turn and sped off to the safer pastures of jellies and jams.

THE CHAIN SAW IS REAL

The car I picked up at Edinburgh Airport was a hideous shade of slime green. Why anyone would want to drive a car that colour, I don’t know. Still, it was a sporty little number - two doors and a petrol engine. Touch the accelerator and the car shot forward. And it was as nimble as a go-cart. The Europcar people said it was a SEAT Ibiza - so there!

Dave (otherwise Happy Snaper) had given me directions. But first I had to get out of the carpark, which wasn’t easy. True, there were no shortage of signs saying ‘exit,’ but these led into fences, or else nowhere. It was Kafkaesque. I was about to admit defeat when I spotted, under the red banners of the rival Avis concern, a tiny road to freedom. We were off, the car and I, to visit the Cowarts Academy far away among the snow covered hills.

First the M9 and then the A84: names, half-remembered from the mists of time came rolling back. Stirling, of course, and then Callander, Strathyre, Lochearnhead, all the while following the signs for Crianlarich - the Capel Curig of Scotland as I remember it - whose presence on the map is almost more important than its presence on the ground.

Half way up Glen Ogle, just as the evening darkness had closed in, the traffic came to a halt amidst a welter of flashing blue and amber lights. A car had gone over the parapet and plunged down into the valley below. A recovery operation was under way. Foot by foot the winches were dragging it up.

This did not relieve my state of apprehension as I approached Cowarts. One’s first day at school is always pretty nerve-wracking. And I am a lot older now, less malleable. What would I find over the brow of the hill and down the other side - look out for a wooden sign and a track, Dave had said.

Look out? It was dark and the sign was brown. I hurtled past and then, sensing something out of the corner of my eye, reversed and there it was ‘Wester Lix’ carved into a pine plank above a track that led into the black fastness.

Bump, bump, bump went car and I over the potholes. ‘Go as far as you can,’ Dave had said. ‘And then stop and toot.’ Bump, bump - a house here, a house there, all dark, a cluster of houses, a cluster of cars, no obvious end to the track - but no obvious continuation either. My heart raced as I tooted. Was all this wise?

Nothing. No lights - had I missed a turning? I got out of the car and approached the nearest house. There was a bell. A bell-type bell. Not something you pushed or pulled, but something into which you put your hand and waggled the toggle and out suddenly came a mighty and far too loud a clang and immediately there were lights and a pounding of feet, the door thrown open, and there was Headmistress herself, summoning her new pupil across the threshold.

Why had I been ridiculously apprehensive? The encounter with Gill and Dave was more like a home-coming. There are many houses into which I go where I say to myself ‘how odd’ and where you feel that you could never settle. But here was a house in which I felt instantly at home. A great whoosh of warmth and comfort, dogs demanding attention, a big glass of wine (ditto), a great bowl of nuts, laughter, charm and a conversation as almost if we had been cousins of many years standing. How do you classify a blend of intelligence and creativity, of caring and understanding, of laughter amidst sadness, of tidy and polished chaos and a welcome as big as the hills? I felt instantly at home.

A great meat stew bubbled on the hob and we ate and drank and swopped stories until it was time for bed. Sadly this was the most fleeting of visits as the next morning I had to return the slime green car to the airport and get myself into the centre of Edinburgh for a meeting with our Scottish UNESCO counterparts. But I got to stay in one of Westerwitch’s lovely cottages and in a bed big enough to sleep a whole family. And in the morning I snapped these pictures out of the window.





I wanted to take a picture of the red squirrels, but the Nutkin family were disobliging. Only one squirrel (was it Nutkin himself?) came racing across the lawn. I imagined I could hear him singing:

“The man in the wilderness said to me,
‘How many strawberries grow in the sea?’
I answered him as I thought good -
‘As many red herrings as grow in the wood.’”

Downstairs, Westwitch admits to having three studies. (I suppose it depends how bad you have been as to which one you are summoned). But in the one by the door lives Cyd Fishus, the shy, one-eyed Piranha with scales that glow orange and golden below his dark silver back. He is a most handsome fish, if a touch scary. Not something, however cuddly he might look, you would really want to put in your bath.

We were going to have walked out to see the sheep, Bam-Bam and Pebbles but the rain was falling by now and making their acquaintance had therefore to be foregone.

The dogs are wonderfully lovely. I especially liked Sassie, the Collie, so calm and patient, just enjoying having her ears fondled, chin tickled or head stroked. But then Arnie, the Jack Russell was lovely too.

But then it was time to go. Great purple hugs abounded, despite the fine rain, I turned to car around, waved out of the window and bounced away down the potholes and towards the road that would take me to the airport.

LONDON REFLEXIONS

I am sitting in a large room in one of those elegant terraces sandwiched between St James’s Park and Pall Mall. In former times this must have been a dining room, or even a small ballroom; the elegant townhouse of some Regency grandee no doubt Now it is just a meeting room in the alliterative Institute for Materials, Minerals and Mining, and I am meeting.

On one side of me sits an executive from the BBC. On the other a kindly and vivacious woman who used to be a member of the European Parliament. We are here on UNESCO business. Through the tall windows I can see the bare tops of the trees on the Mall. This might be London; but it could equally be a great house anywhere.

Four and a half hours earlier I had hauled myself out of bed at some ungodly hour to be here, but the pain of early rising is worth the trouble for the hours it adds to the day. The meeting ends, as usual, without conclusion and I have time to cut away, up through St James’s, to where I am meeting my brother in a café on Piccadilly.

Usually we pass like ships in the night, my brother and I, bumping into each other, sometimes quite literally, on a London street. In fact, now that I come to think about it, I have encountered both my brother and my sister quite randomly on London streets. The chance of this must be akin to winning the lottery I would have thought. Still, this time we planned to meet.

As I arrived he was talking business to someone whose circular features and vaguely foreign tones reminded me of the sad-faced Peter Lorre - one of the ‘usual suspects’ who seemed to come as a job lot with Bogart on 1940s films like ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and ‘Casablanca.’ When the round-faced gentleman confirmed he was leaving that very afternoon for a destination in the Caucasus, the pigeon hole into which I had momentarily placed him was complete. Somehow this seemed normal.

Whenever I am in London I always think that here is a city that might be run far better by the Parisian authorities, or those of New York even. There is an element of unfortunate chaos to it. Few things seem to work as they should. Yet there is a charm and a richness here that can perhaps only exist alongside the chaos. The diversity is much greater than you would see on the streets of Cardiff let alone its hinterland. This is not only a diversity of origin and culture, but of wealth and dress, of occupation, of language.

As I walked through Bond Street it was Russian I heard on the air as elegant men and women in clothes that looked to cost the average of a month’s salary browsed insouciantly in the shop windows. On the tube it was French: everywhere I went. As if Sarkozy had sent an advance guard to succeed where Napoleon had failed.

I am struck by how odd the temperature feels in London. The city is usually a couple of degrees warmer than anywhere else and the buildings are of course heated to hospital incubator levels. The idea of pullovers being garments designed to keep one warm has clearly been long forgotten by their designers. But London also has its cold and shivering spots. Something perhaps to do with it being an eastern city and dry to boot. Stand still and rapidly the cold enters your bones. It is impossible, I find to dress comfortably for, unless you hurry, mouse-like, from building to building, which is a shame.

For one of the advantages of central London is its surprising compactness. You can walk to most places in less than half an hour. And you see so much more of interest than taking the underground. I meandered (the word being appropriate for I found I had strayed too far north and not far enough east) towards the British Museum, always full of treasures and a convenient spot to open the computer and collect emails.

The exhibition on the famous Persian Shah Abbas, I confess, I found disappointing, on balance. It seemed as much full of large pieces of Chinese porcelain as of anything else, its only connection with the fabled sixteenth century Persian ruler being that he donated it to religious foundations. It is there, of course, because at the time it was very expensive (even though the style seems to me appalling reminiscent of Victorian lavatories) and Shah Abbas, being a holy as well as a ruthless ruler, gave a lot of it away to the shrines, slides of which illuminated the walls.

These prompted me to ask why are these decorated mosques - all blue? There are touches of yellow, black, gold, white - but the predominant colour is blue. Yet the stone is a very pretty golden Bath stone. Would the buildings look even more beautiful undecorated, I wondered? And if they were decorated surely the odd red shrine would not come amiss. I am sure that sixteenth century Persians didn’t all support Chelsea.

There were carpets, of course - very pretty if you like that sort of thing and no doubt, if you know your carpets, very impressive - but they did look like the worn rugs you see in even the most average stately home. Most impressive was the beautiful Arabian calligraphy including a translation that read: ‘eat less, speak less, sleep less, learn more.’ Was this directed at teenagers, I wanted to ask?

But why so few pictures or portraits? (Though there were some.) Why so few trinkets, swords, armour and domestic artefacts, clothes even - even if they were copies?

After this there was just time for a dash around the galleries of pre-history. The iron age is well represented - but there is almost nothing Neolithic. I know that the Neolithics didn’t leave much in the way of portable artefacts - but considering this was the first European civilisation enduring for some four thousand years and stretching the length of the Atlantic seaboard from Scandinavia to Iberia - you’d think the Museum might do more. I live in expectation.

Then a hurry back to the station, this time on the underground, flashing my oyster card, which I am still not quite used to. I open the wallet place the card on the key pad and wait, not realising that the portal has already opened. Seasoned travellers flash their card and pass through the portal without breaking step. Still, I’ve only had my card since last summer and I don’t visit London much.

Maybe it’s just age. I feel increasingly unco-ordinated when, at the station, I try to manage paper, tickets, bags and so on. I have the frantic air of the irregular traveller. At Paddington I put a ticket into the gate machine. It doesn’t work. I’ve put the seat reservation ticket in. How can you tell? They all look the same. But the ticket man, neatly dressed and sitting five yards away can manage it. How? The flesh is willing, but the brain is weak.

Yes, definitely, the grandchild has arrived. It is a signal to pass the baton on. In my own time, of course.

CONFESSIONS OF A GRANDPARENT

This will be, unashamedly, a piece about my new grandchild, so those of you who are inclined to see such young beings as merely ‘a hole at both ends,’ can look away now and find something better to do: Sky has some excellent football coverage, I believe, and there are pressing things to fuss with in the garden.

It is all of 36 years since I last held an equally small scrap of humanity - at least one that preserved a good part of my own genome. How I managed then, I don’t know. Grandparents were noticeable by their absence, while the books seemed just too theoretical. In any case, I had quite forgotten it all. But I do remember that somehow there was nothing to learn, nature, by some miraculous process, just took over. Instinct, I suppose.

In any case, as quickly as I became expert with the new born, we were off on the helter-skelter trip down, or rather up, the ages of life: toddlerhood and talking, reading and nurseries, school and so on.This time I expect this progression will seem even faster. Young Topi is a week old already. In a few short months - by the end of the summer holidays - he will be crawling and already taking his first steps by Christmas.

I call him Topi, as no-one else seems inclined to call him anything. With great earnestness do his parents produce constant streams of names, which fade from consciousness like mayflies. We are no further forward.

Topaz was his womb nickname. Topaz was inside the ‘bump.’ At the time we did not know his gender, of course, though we might have learned from the scans. We preferred not to know. Younger Daughter, his mother, has always been endeared to having a couple of (presumably female) offspring called Topaz and Ameythyst - names which even Mrs Worthington would have been pleased to put straight on stage.

I have shortened and masculinized Topaz to Topi - or Toppy, if you prefer - but Topi sounds both more exotic and has a handsome ruggedness that comes with a gentle and caring interior. No-one, anyway, has objected and his parents seem grateful that someone is calling him something in the six week interregnum before they need to pay a visit to the registrar.

I have to confess to being reluctant to hold Topi when I first saw him. An alien, delicate and soggy piece of flesh wrapped in swaddling layers of blanket and what I regarded as a completely unecessary hat, given that the fellow already has a lot more hair of his own that many of the medical men who flitted in from time to time.

But once placed in my arms it is remarkable how quickly the parental instinct usurps such feelings. One ‘knows’ without thinking how to hold a baby, how to position his head close to your own heart and how to move with gentle rocking motions that soothe and comfort.

You forget just how easy the bonding process is and indeed the degree of interaction develops unbidden. Babies are not inert pieces of tissue, they react vigorously to this and that and even when they are content to snuggle asleep against your chest, that itself is a reaction to feeling safe and secure.

It’s been a week now and already we have our little routines. I sing or hum to little Topi while walking up and down. He seems to like the Souza march, which Monty Python took as their theme tune, but Leonard Cohen also seems to go down well. Now and then we do Mozart - at least we try. This, too is lapped up with the rest.

All of this makes me fancy that Topi will be musical - or rather is musical. I can’t remember singing in the same way to my own newborns. But there is something in this baby that demands it. The big eyes, fringed at this stage of development with blue, open and rock from side to side as they try to focus. ‘It will come, Topi,’ I say, ‘it will come, your focus.’ At the moment, trying to focus just makes the little fellow screw up his face and shake his head.

His little fingers, long and narrow, with perfectly formed (and clean) fingernails, clutch mine, with a grip that is surprisingly light, while he forgets about music and remembers the only thing that babies are really interested in when they are not asleep - food.

I give him my knuckle to suck and am initially surprised not just by the force but by the efficiency of the action. Whereas all else about baby is loose and unco-ordinated, half-formed and helpless, the sucking reflex is well-honed.

And once lips touch knuckle he draws his head back, waggles it from side to side and then lurches forward in a species of head butt. The suction starts and we have ‘lock-on.’

Disappointment clearly follows as the knuckle fails to provide anything sweet, warm and nutritious. Topi then boasts a ferocious frown. But, persistent chap that he is he tries again, jerking his head back, doing the little wiggle, and then throwing himself again forward. Thus we continue until he tires and falls asleep, still ‘locked-on’ to my finger.

Yes, all this really is a miracle. And, for it, ordinary life seems to stop, everyday priorities melting away like snow before a warm wind.

So, I am back to re-learning nursery rhymes and finger games and how to make the legs of Pipany’s wonderful Babbit go pitter-patter, pitter-patter. I am back to looking at baby books and wondering (at times) whether the babies that they know are anything like the babies I have known. But most of all I am back to feeling that fierce, defensive pride that wants to love and protect one’s offspring; to draw out and reinforce its aptitudes, to help to link all those myriads of unformed connections in his brain that provide the basis of intelligence and to help him to grow into a sound and happy little soul.

Which is all most wonderful and perfect.

DELIVERIES MAY BE DISTRACTING

I suppose it started when I missed my dentist appointment last Friday. I who never miss appointments! I was here at my desk, beavering away, when the telephone rang asking politely why I was not at that moment in Mr Page’s recliner, my mouth full of dental impedimenta.

They were very understanding in a gentle Joyce Grenfell sort of way. “Oh you just forgot, did you?” to which I could only explain limply that I was expecting my first grandchild and my mind was on other things.

At the time I thought this a whopping lie. Not insofar as my Younger Daughter is expecting a baby. That is true enough. In fact she has been expecting now for almost a week, with false alarms necessitating urgent dashes to the hospital birthing unit every couple of days. No, the real reason, or so I thought, was that I had just been too idle to consult my diary that morning.

Still, they were compassionate and let me off without charging the punitive ‘fees for missed appointments’ spelt out prominently in big letters around the surgery walls. They fitted me in. Apparently, they are not very busy: the recession has taken its toll. Bankers and accountants are no longer smiling, they say. It matters not therefore what their teeth look like.

This made me think of another mitigating plea that I had once similarly rejected as whopping untruth, years ago. On this occasion I had joined a Civil Service colleague for a lunch-time drink, stayed rather too long and returned to the office slightly the worse for wear. Subsequently, I was called in by the boss and rightly upbraided.

He then said that he had heard that my mother had died very recently. How he knew I do not know, but there it was. I replied that I couldn’t, in honesty, claim that as an excuse. But he was a wise man and I escaped the retribution that I felt I deserved.

With the passage of time I think he was right; my mother’s death was almost certainly disturbing me more than I realised. She had died unexpectedly. Yes, she had been ill; certainly she was in hospital. But she was only 54 and one moment was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigarette and the next she had turned her face to the wall, as it were, no doubt muttering her usual cry in times of adversity “Oh God! Oh Montreal!” The family were left still gathering belongings for a London dash. Still, that was all a very long time ago.

In the meantime, between Younger Daughter’s false alarms, life goes on. We decided to celebrate surviving the double whammy of the end of January tax bill plus a hefty repayment of business mortgage by making a visit to IKEA to buy a rather fetching armchair.

Actually, I had understood we would be buying two armchairs to replace the green two-seater sofa that Younger Daughter had said would fit very comfortably in her house.
This was not quite what J had understood, which was that we would be getting shot of both our existing two seater sofas and buying a new sofa and one armchair in replacement.

I wanted the two armchairs as I knew that J would undoubtedly take ownership of a single one. I didn’t want the two-seater sofa because that would be less comfortable and more difficult to manoeuvre. Besides, I didn’t see much wrong with our pink sofa which had done noble service for over a quarter of a century. It does sag a bit, but it also has a welcoming, sat-on, feel that all good sofas should have.

Having taken the difficult decision to purchase we found ourselves perplexed and slightly cross and so tested the comfort of IKEA’s Ektorp brand, in its lively shade of scarlet corduroy, by having a seemingly insoluble argument about what exactly we should buy.

We might have been there still had we not suddenly realised - the revelation being like awakening from an anxiety dream - that the whole question was anyway academic.

For you can’t actually import new furniture without first removing the old. If we ordered today, the stuff might be delivered early next morning (when you do want something it always takes a fortnight, but this cannot be relied on). That, at the very least, would be an embarrassment.

Only then we remembered our original plan. YD’s partner (who conveniently owns a long wheelbase transit used for ferrying his circus kit) was to remove the existing sofa(s) and to collect their replacements in one seamless loop of collection and delivery. But of course YD’s partner has other deliveries in his mind, just now, besides sofas. There is a natural order in these matters and babies come before furnishings.

So we retreated from IKEA with nothing more to show for our labours than a set of nifty recycling boxes, wondering however we could have contemplated buying new furniture before arranging to get rid of the old. Both of us had clearly taken leave of our senses.

But then, I suppose, poor dears, our minds are distracted. We are in a mental limbo pending baby’s arrival. This is not the time to expect straight thinking or the keeping of appointments in this household.