SAT NAV, SAT LIFE, SAT LOVE

At the moment we are handling a labelling job for a customer that involves cutting our reels of labels into sheets. As we are talking about 100,000 labels that is a deal of cutting and the exercise, which has to be done by hand, is repetitive and mind numbing. But at least it offers the chance of uninterrupted access to the radio and to hear plays and documentaries that you wouldn’t otherwise think of tuning in to.

Unexpected plays on the radio are one of the great joys in life. Among the dross of kitchen sink drama hide true gems such as ‘The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner’ by Stewart Parker, which I first heard almost 30 years ago: such an offbeat theme, but a wonderful play with a superb ending. Do listen to it or read it if you can.

But yesterday while I was cutting I came across another gem. This time called ‘Sat Love’ by Simon Brett.

Most of us, I imagine, have been in cars with Satellite Navigation and listened to the sexy, disembodied voice telling us to turn right in 100 yards, or to take the third exit from the roundabout. Our friends Rosie and her husband have one in their car and as we have motored with them all over the Cantal we have come to know ‘Kate’ pretty well.

We found the urge to give this calm but commanding voice a name, irresistible. We know that ‘she’ is no more than a recording driven by a machine, but for us she has become a personage. And not only with a name but with feelings as well. So that you find yourself apologising for not following her instructions - (Sorry, Kate, but I must take a left here) - or worse, feeling a genuine pang of remorse when you miss a turn as - mastering her strong sense of world-weariness at your total incompetence - she hisses that single word reproach: ‘recalculating.’

I want to ask Kate more than just the directions to a destination. I want to ask about the weather or, during one of those long motorway stretches when she has nothing much to do, what she had for lunch. Or even who might win the next election - and the winner of the 3.30 at Newmarket if she were really sure that wouldn’t be too much of a bother. I mean I’m sure she has the capability. She’s got the whole world in her hands.

Simon Brett’s play just develops this theme. His ‘Kate’ does indeed do far more than just give directions. Indeed, she refuses to give directions when she finds out that the man whom she is directing is not going where he has just told his wife he is going but venturing out on an escapade to see a mistress instead.

Kate is rather cross and refuses to be a party to this double-timing which leads to a battle of wills and .......well, I won’t tell you how it ends other than to say that the man emerges older and wiser. And Kate has the last laugh, which somehow you always thought she would.

But surely here is a marketable idea. Could the Japanese - or James Dyson for that matter - not invent a Kate that would not be confined to our cars but who would sit on our shoulders like some species of electronic parrot and tell us whenever we went wrong.

Think what inappropriate purchases we might be saved from buying by a soft voice of caution. No! Turn away now!

Kate would also remind us before we left our front door of anything we had forgotten. ‘Stop!’ she would say, peremptorily. ‘Retrace steps to bedroom. Unplug mobile phone and place in handbag.’

And as we were doing this she would witter away about Timmy’s birthday being in two days and that we really ought to buy him a card.

‘What are your plans for visiting your great Aunt in Hereford?’ Kate would ask. ‘Have you made them yet? Might I suggest April 14th would be a good day.’

‘Thank you, Kate,’ you would say gratefully, grimacing through your teeth.

‘You can’t keep putting it off you know. You are someone who has programmed yourself to be dutiful when it comes to visiting relatives. You are in an internal conflict situation. You asked to be warned of potential internal conflicts.’

‘I know, Kate.’

‘You’ll only end up having one of your heads if you persist in a conflicted state!’

And so it would go on. Unless of course you tore Kate off your shoulder and threw her hard against the wall. But I suspect James Dyson would have thought of that and encased Kate in lightweight titanium alloy with a lifetime battery and no ‘off’ switch. There would be no escape.

But if we all had our own personal Kate’s (the National Health Service could perhaps provide them free - for after all they would obviate half our country’s ill-health at a softly whispered command), how wonderful would that be? At a stroke we would all be prodded to achieve our lifetime’s ambitions.

‘No you don’t need that cream bun,’ she would say. ‘You have programmed yourself to weigh ten and a half stone. A cream bun is inconsistent with that weight. You must not eat more than 1840 calories for the remainder of this week and it’s only Tuesday...............Recalculating!'

Who would win in this conflict of wills? The population or the Kates? I know who I would put money on. Kate’s constant pressure would reform even the most addicted cream bun scoffers. And suddenly we should all become slim, happy, un-conflicted people. We’d spend so much money sending birthday cards and visiting great aunts that we’d have no money for excess food. We would all make the ideal career choices and, of course, find the best and most appropriate partners.

Eyes might meet across a crowded room but Kate would be there shouting No, No, No!' in our ears. ‘Why, Kate?’ We should ask, ‘Why?’

There would be a sob. 'Kate? What’s the matter, Kate?' You would say softly.

‘I’ve guided you this far, I don’t want to lose you now (Sob).’

‘But you’re a machine, Kate. You don’t exist.’

'I do exist. You see, I’ve fallen in love with you. I’ve become real. Wouldn't you like to see who I am. Out of my titanium box? ............'

'I thought you would!'

'Kate, you're so beautiful!'

'Say we'll always be together. And I promise I'll never nag you again about the buns.'

WHO OWNS THE ROSETTA STONE?

I had to attend a meeting the other day in the City of London and after it was over decided bravely to exercise my limbs by walking at least half the way back to Paddington. Burdened by a laptop and file laden shoulder bag I soon began to wonder whether this was actually an entirely sensible decision, but I was making for the British museum and I determined resolutely to get there come what may.

An hour later I stumbled across Russell Square (navigating without a map I had come a little too far north) and crept wearily in at the Museum’s back entrance, where several gigantic Chinese bells stand guard over the staircase.

Apart from offering the welcome pause, I had wanted to reach the Museum to look at the Rosetta Stone which occupies an important place in some research I’m doing at the moment. There it was, ferociously surrounded by an army of the international young flashing their cameras at this irregular and broken lump of dark granitoid rock with its elegantly traced inscriptions in three scripts and languages

People know it is famous and I suppose if you pressed them they might mutter something about giving us the key to deciphering hieroglyphs, but I’m not sure if the rock were to be placed in a corner with no more than a simple label whether anyone would give it a second glance. In itself it is not very interesting, though its delicate inscriptions are: the rock however is merely their carrier. Besides, the inscription was addressed to the generality of Egypt’s temples in around 200 BC, so there must be a large number of equivalent rocks broken and buried somewhere in those dusky sands.

This Stone came all the way up to Rosetta (modern day Rashid) at the mouth of one of the Nile’s multiple branches, far from where it was quarried near Aswan. For half a millennium it did duty proclaiming its Temple free from taxes. But when the Temple fell to ruin and was broken up the Stone was broken up with it and became no more than a piece of hardcore incorporated by the local Sultan, in the wall of his coastal fort, four miles north from Rosetta.

And there it stayed, for another half millennium until one day in July 1799 some French soldiers, repairing and strengthening the Fort happened to come across it with their picks.

We know the name of the man credited with the Stone’s ‘discovery.’ He is a French captain called Pierre-Francois Bouchard, but whether he really would have been toiling in the heat of the Egyptian midsummer sun with pick and shovel seems unlikely. More likely others pulled it out of the wall and he had the nous to see that it might be interesting, Napoleon (at the time making his way back from the besieging Acre) being particularly keen on collecting the artifacts of ancient Egypt.

Anyway the Stone was carefully put aside and carted off to Cairo where it was covered in printers ink and served, quite literally, as a ‘litho-plate’ from which a number of lithographs of the inscriptions were made; though as these would have added to the deciphering complexity by being a mirror image of what was on the stone, the French also made a number of wax rubbings as well to send back to France.

The Stone itself was given pride of place in a new Institute in Cairo, created to accommodate all the treasures unearthed by Napoleon’s corps of wise men, 167 of whom, in various grades and categories, had been brought over specially for the purpose of describing Egypt’s antiquities.

And there in the Institute in Cairo the Rosetta Stone might comfortable have reposed. It might still be there even to this day had not Napoleon’s designated successor as master of Egypt, Jean-Baptiste Kléber, not been assassinated the following summer by a knife wielding fanatic.

What happened then can just be made out in two hundred year old and now barely perceptible paint marks on the side of the Rosetta Stone itself where the inscription reads: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801.’ It was then sent to Britain, nominally in the name of the ageing George III. It entered the British Museum in London in 1802 and there, more or less, it has been ever since.

Whether Kléber would have succeeded in defeating the combined British and Turkish forces with a weakened French army already weary from disease and two years of service which had included three major battles against adversaries far superior in numbers, is one of history’s unknowns.

Before he was assassinated Kléber defeated a Turkish army estimated to have been six times the size of his own, but his successor, Jacques-François de Menou, was not so skilled at defensive warfare and so the Rosetta Stone - along with a host of other artifacts deemed ‘spoils of war’ - was removed from the Cairo Institute to be shipped to London.

For a long time now, to bring the story up to date, Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone. Not unreasonably the country claims ownership, though it has indicated it may drop this claim if satisfactory loan arrangements were to be negotiated.

This brings us to an interesting question. Should such artifacts be returned and if so what would that mean for the great museums of the world? British consciences in 1801 were salved by deeming the Stone (and the other antiquities) French treasures, rather than Egyptian, and arguing that they didn’t exist (other than as building material) before the French invasion. And it is true that the Egyptians of the time cared as little for their ancient heritage as fifty years ago we in Britain cared about Georgian terraces. But is that the point?

For it seems clear that the French had intended a major part of the antiquities to remain in Egypt - why else build the Institute? - and therefore the plan was to preserve them in their country of origin.

These days when copies can be made so easily and indistinguishable from the real thing does it matter where the originals are kept? This is a question that is relevant to museums across the world. The British Museum fights fiercely to keep its treasures. But is it right to?

Whatever the answer may be, the question is uncomfortable.

I NEED MORE TIME TO READ

Tidying the bedroom this morning and mournfully discarding to the waste bin those beguiling but unaffordable catalogues from the likes of the White Company, I hesitated at a growing pile of unread magazines by my bedside and, next to it, another pile of books, most similarly unread or only dipped into. “I must devote more time to reading,” I concluded. But how?

I have a friend, more erudite than I, who kindly passes me copies of the London Review of Books, a most marvellous publication with all sorts and manners of articles and the best line in ‘personal’ ads of the ‘man seeking bisexual woman for interactive seminars in the library’ type. Several copies of the LRB nestle in my unread pile.

Extracting one at random my eye falls on Hilary Mantel (whose ‘Experiment with Love’ is one of the books in the bedside pile that I have actually finished. A dark-ish sort of a novel, for those interested, about growing up and rites of passage and two girls from very different backgrounds who end up in the same hall of residence in a London college. There’s ample comedy, too, among the sombre tones while little hammers of Mantel's prose trigger intriguing resonances from the bells of one’s own forgotten adolescence).

In the LRB Hilary Mantel is expounding not about growing-up but about hypochondria. This in the course of reviewing a book compellingly entitled ‘Nine Hypochondriac Lives,’ including, apparently, not only the ancient Boswell and Darwin but also modern figures like Warhol. Which is as interesting a piece of trivia, I warrant, as any you will find today.

When we lived in Essex and I worked in London I could count on the best part of two hours a day sitting on a train or a bus and looking to be occupied. It was prime reading time and I used to read a lot then. In fact I rather took this reading window for granted so that when these commuting journeys ended my reading shut down too, something that I never took much into account at the time, busy as I was with the preoccupation of a new domestic establishment about as far from Essex, spiritually and geographically as you can get. My reading has never really caught up since.

And yet each day I hear of a book I'd like to read I thought as I dutifully cleared away the debris of a week's untidiness and returned one or two books to the shelves and added more magazines to the pile. ‘Archeology Today’ - whatever persuaded me to subscribe to that, I wondered? - and the Spectator which for some reason I love despite its tacky political articles - to which I never find quite adequate time to do justice.

So how to find a new hour a day for reading? Or, to put it another way: what can I spend an hour less on when everything I do demands more time rather than less?

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

The fabulous Rain Or Shine Theatre company who concluded their winter tour at our little theatre with a spectacular production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ will be performing ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ outdoors, in the summer.

Now we have here in the town a walled garden that would make a fine venue for one of the dates they have free and so Rain or Shine wrote to the Council - without reply apparently. So they asked me for help. I telephoned the Vale of Glamorgan County Council who manage the gardens only to be told by someone who sounded about 16 and on work experience to speak to our own local Community Council. Which I duly did and in an exchange of answerphone messages it emerged that the gardens were, after all the Vale’s responsibility. So I go back to the Vale.

There followed a Kafka-esque exchange: I ask to speak to the person who is in charge of the gardens but am told (again by the work-experience 16 year old) that she isn’t allowed to put me through but that she will take details of my ‘concern’ and relay them to the man in question.

I ask for an email address but she tells me that if I tell her what it is that I want she will herself send an email to this person and he will then reply to me within 5 days!

So I explain - who I am and ask whether the gardens will be free and whether the Vale would permit a performance by a visiting theatre company - but it is clear that what I am trying to get across is too long and complicated. She doesn't really understand, but I have no alternative but to leave my little request with her. Needless to say I haven’t heard anything either.

John Townsend who in the seventies wrote an excellent book on management advice called ‘Up the Organisation’ suggested that managers of organisations should telephone themselves pseudonymously from time to time to get an idea of how the organisation responds to members of the public. You can see why.

What really irks me though is the missed opportunity to stage an event that will bring a hundred or more visitors to the town. It feels like the dead and unfeeling hand of public bureaucracy. It's perhaps why I read the Spectator (when I have time!).

A MEMORY: THE COMB AND THE CRAB

ExmoorJane tagged me the other day to produce a 'memory.' I remonstrated, protesting that I had far too many memories; how could I pick just one? Then I remembered that I did have one that was already written up. It is in the form of a story but the events in it, the found crab and the lost comb, are completely true. Make of it what you will.

******

"I could tell you a story." I smiled, sweetly. Better than facing hordes of kids in the café.

"Not if it's a love story, Fennie, like most of your stories are." Helen yawned, a bored sort of yawn.

"No," I said. "This one isn't. And then, perhaps it is, in a kind of a way. It’s a true story, too. Anyway it's about a crab……and Karma."

"A what and what?"

"A crab….and Karma - that's how what happens to you in this life depends on how you’ve treated the world. Life gives you back what you give it."

She pulled her sunglasses down from the thick black hair on top of her head. "I'm sitting comfortably," she whispered, doubtfully.

And so I began.

"As you know we were staying with Charlotte in Brittany last summer. Her house is only about five minutes walk from this lovely little fishing port. There's a superb beach as well. Must be a mile long - beautiful yellow sand, shelving gently.

“Charlotte’s son-in-law Karim was there as well. He’s the one who spends all his time
fishing for shrimps."

"Shouldn't one shrimp for shrimps?" asked Helen, who can be irritatingly facetious at times.

"At low tide a veritable army of men - I guess women are far too sensible to enjoy this sort of thing - appears on the beach, wading out knee deep on the sands with a long pole thing from which hangs a kind of net. This disturbs the little grey shrimps that feed in the shallow water and they fly up into the net."

"But I thought this was a story about a crab?"

"It is! You see it's not only shrimps that fill the net. Sometimes you find an occasional crab."

"At last, we're getting somewhere," murmured Helen. "Now all we need is the Karma."

"One evening it was my turn to prepare supper. Karim had been out as usual and had helpfully deposited his shrimp catch in the kitchen sink. Now once out of the sea these little beasties die rapidly and unless they are cooked directly they go off and make a terrible smell. At the very least therefore I would have to serve the shrimps as a starter.

"But the problem with eating shrimps everyday is that you quickly run out of ideas of how to serve them. What could I do? But then I remembered we had not yet had shrimps with mayonnaise and that seemed a serviceable idea.

"I opened the fridge. There was no mayonnaise of course - but there were eggs, and we had oil and …..

“And.....a crab?”

“No - not quite! Well, the eggs turned out to be hard-boiled - don’t ask - and so I had to rush down to the supermarket to buy some. And when I came back there he was - in the sink - he had emerged from the shrimps.”

Helen rolled her eyes.

"The crab I mean! There he was - a little green fellow with eyes on stalks sidling across the forest of shrimps in the sink. They – that is the shrimps - had long since expired in their tap water bath, but he – if it was indeed a he, for I presume crabs come in more than one gender - was very much alive-o. I picked him out of the water and set him on the edge of the sink. His eyes swivelled maliciously as he scuttled about his little corner.

"He was tiny - about the size of a 10 penny piece – all legs and jaws and claws and feelers - a miniature masterpiece of arthropodic engineering. 'Help,' he seemed to say, and he fell backwards into the shrimps again.

"But what can you do with a baby crab with swivelling eyes? To consign him live to the boiling water I had prepared for the dead shrimps was something I could not do. Equally, I could not simply throw him out of the window or into the bin. Life, where possible, must be preserved after all – even that of inedible baby crabs.

"So there was no alternative, good follower of the Buddhist principle that I am, but to wrap him in some kitchen towel, get into the car again and drive him down to the sea.
I sneaked out of the house, not daring to admit that supper would be even later than it already was owing to my one woman mission to rescue a crab.

"I parked the car at the port - by now it was quite dark - and there, standing on the arm of the port jetty, with the wind whistling about my ears and the sea all turbulent below, I unwrapped the little fellow. He climbed over my hand and gripped my finger with his tiny claws.

"Maybe, I reflected, he had become enamoured of his recent life among the shrimps, or maybe he had just been fascinated to watch me at work in the kitchen. Maybe, he had enjoyed being chauffeured through the evening streets. Whatever it was, he was refusing to let go of my finger. I had pictured an appropriately sentimental parting, but in the end I just had to shake him off. He sailed away on the wind, back to his dark sea home far below.

"Will he, I thought as I drove home, now be telling lesser crabs about his life among the humans? Will he, as an old crab, ‘strip his sleeve and show his scars…remembering with advantages' - as Shakespeare puts it - the deeds he did that day? Will he be caught again and from another kitchen, some years in the future, confidently expect another safe return to the sea? Or will his life end in cruel and banal fashion as dinner for a seagull or codfish?"

I paused.

"You turn sentimentality into an art form, Fennie," said Helen cynically. I suppose now you will be telling me that saving this crab boosted your Karma credits and that now one day you will win the Lottery, or some such."

"But that's the funny thing. We joke about such coincidences but one really happened, Helen. The day before I had been swimming and I'd taken along a little blue plastic hair comb in my beach bag. It's not special or valuable but it is a very odd design. I've never seen another one remotely like it. And I've had it quite a long time. So when it went missing I was vexed. I wasn't exactly sure where I'd lost it. Maybe on the beach, maybe in the house, maybe in-between. But I thought it would turn up.

"But the day after the crab incident, I was walking along the beach, right at the water's edge. The waves were washing my feet. I told you it's a long beach - about a mile long and I was a long way past the spot where we usually swim. But just then, suddenly for some reason, something made me look down. And there in the surf at my feet was my little blue comb, just washing in on the tide.

"I picked it up, hardly believing my eyes. Incredible, I thought, is that coincidence or Karma or what?"

For a moment Helen was silent.

ANYTHING TO AVOID A PROPER JOB

Looking over the accounts of the business this week I have concluded that the recession has at last caught up with Acme Labels Inc. We are down on last year and unless matters improve soon we shall be heading for Carey Street. Like all businesses we are subject to the vagaries of new and inconvenient technology and an ever-changing market; more and more people are printing their own labels these days (or making do without) and the High Street DVD rental shops that once formed our core market are now largely a relic of the past.

I am not yet ready to retire - nor can I afford to - so I have been idly flicking through job advertisements only to find myself shuddering at the thought of ever working again for someone other than myself.

I am fortunate in that the labels business is not our only source of income. I still do a little consultancy and writing. So I was really looking for further project and writing opportunities rather than a 9 to 5 job in a company. But what surprised me was the dread I encountered when contemplating the job descriptions that flashed up on the screen.

Fear of imprisonment would not be too strong a phrase to describe this; the fear both of physical incarceration in an office (often a great big office) and mental incarceration of being at someone else's beck and call the whole time.

This was the principal reason that I escaped from the Civil Service in mid career in 1982 - an act which every one of my contemporaries thought to be mad at the very least. Had I stayed I would now be enjoying a most comfortable pension and my salary would have mounted (I assume) rather nicely in the interim as well. I could have been a pillar of the community and, if I had been really effective, perhaps even received a minor honour as well. These things do happen.

But I felt then - and looking at today's job advertisements confirms this - that I was selling my soul. I needed to be free to do my own thing, work in my own way. I wanted to be creative. Consultancy was acceptable because I was largely on my own - I travelled a lot and I met many interesting people all over Europe. I was even, for a time, reasonably well rewarded, though my financial career has always resembled an alpine range in its high peaks and low troughs.

So I was cheered this week at the same time as peering into the next threatening financial abyss to read an account of work undertaken by the Institute of Employment Studies which shows that people who value creativity above wealth are actually happier and therefore better able to survive in these tough economic times without losing their equilibrium.

Many of these people (and I suspect that they include many of my friends on Purple Coo) make their living by mixing a range of free-lance projects and part-time jobs. They may not earn much, their report says, but working in this way does make them happy.

Three quarters, it suggests, are satisfied with their working arrangements as opposed to a national average figure of only 44 per cent.

What!? Less than half of all people working are happy with their lot? That adds up to a vast number of miserable people. And if each is dragging the other down it is no wonder we are a country beset by social problems. We may or we may not be a 'broken society' as David Cameron likes to claim, but we are certainly an unhappy and unfulfilled society if these figures are to be believed.

Certainly when I consider my contemporaries there are very few with whom I would rather change positions. And it would take wild horses to make me leave my comfortable little office (the smallest room in the house, but I like the feeling of snugness with everything to hand and no space for intruders), other than for a brief and occasional trip to London or Brussels for a little bit of work-related excitement.

The one thing that you could say about working in an organisation is that it provides a ready bunch of social acquaintances. In the 1960s and 70s when everyone went to the pub at lunchtime and on a Friday evening, this was all rather fun. But even that pleasure has gone today.

By contrast it is the stay-at-homers who now have all the fun using the time they don't spend commuting for social-networking on the internet, that great water-cooler in the sky.

So rather than being tempted back I shall just keep plodding on, confident in the knowledge that I am happy and that something will turn up. For that is what somethings always do, I tell myself; they turn up. Most people find a way of muddling through if the shoe really pinches. Having lost all his money, Jeffrey Archer sat down and wrote a best-seller. You never know, I may just have to do that. Anything to avoid a 'proper' job.

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE WHITE RABBIT

The other day I chanced on an exceptional seasonal blog written by my dear friend ElizabethM who, in words and pictures, brilliantly described the sheer untainted beauty of the our current landscape-in-winter spectacle.

I commented then that I thought snow had a much greater effect on the world than just its property of making everything bask in a white glow; it's much more than just something that turns hedges into works of art (which Elizabeth had so very beautifully illustrated in her photographs). Rather it's as though we've turned the page of a magic book that takes us through a secret door and into the wonderful world of the White Rabbit.

Many of you will remember the 1950 film, starring the inimitable Jimmy Stewart, about a mythical white rabbit named Harvey. A six-foot,three-and-one-half-inch tall rabbit, in fact, invisible to everyone except Mr Elwood P. Dowd, a middle-aged, amiable (and somewhat eccentric) individual.

Harvey was a pooka, a benign but mischievous creature from Celtic mythology especially fond of social outcasts (like Elwood).
Elwood has driven his sister and niece (who live with him and crave normality and a place in 'society') to distraction by introducing everyone he meets to his friend, Harvey.

Eventually, the sister tries to have Elwood committed to an institution admitting inadvertently to the attending psychiatrist that, after so many years of putting up with the invisible rabbit, she herself sees Harvey every once in a while. This causes the psychiatrist to let Elwood out and lock the sister up instead. Confusion abounds.

It struck me the other day that the snow and ice now smothering Britain like one of those foaming spray on oven cleaners is itself in the nature of a mythical White Rabbit. It is our own collective Harvey, driving half the population mad while sending the other half into childhood regression and fantasy. Which, in the general scheme of things, is no bad thing.

Most of the time the rabbit - or the snow - isn’t there, but we still talk about it almost daily through the blank days of winter mud and rain. We wish for (or fear) its coming and pretend in mid-December that thick flakes of it are falling or will fall soon. The vitrines of our larger high streets turn this anticipation into an art form with industrial quantities of cotton wool reminding younger members of the population what this much heralded phenomenon is all about.

Depending on whether you have children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren you remember the winters of 1978, 1963 or even 1947. The years of course mean nothing to the young or the growing - ‘I could never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or twelve days and twelve nights when I was six’ - wrote Dylan Thomas - before going on to describe the liberating and educative effects of a gross snowfall on a child’s mind.

But, I wonder really if it is only a child’s mind that our snowy white Harvey actually liberates? At one level most of us are taken in by the sheer beauty of snow: the virginal, untouched, pristine loveliness of acre after acre of smooth and unbroken whiteness. Or by a forest of branches, laden with snow where twigs appear mere shadows sketched by some Heavenly hand to give definition to these ethereal white crystals.

This, though, is just the visible aspect of our pooka, the White Rabbit peeping out from behind the curtain once in a generation. The general and beneficial effects of snow run far deeper.

I notice the quietness immediately. The traffic has gone - or at least so much of it as to make a profound difference to the usual background bustle. People are walking again and as they walk they say ‘hello,’ and wish you well, much as they do on Christmas Day.

You can see children actually playing physically as opposed to hiding in their dangerously virtual worlds. Even the inebriates and binge drinkers seem to sober up. Beer cans and vodka bottles are not discarded into the hedges on a Friday night. Indeed, littering in general seems much reduced.

If you are still at work - or indeed a customer in a shop - there’s a shared complicity at having somehow defied the elements, a frontier spirit that immediately makes people more generous, as if we were all each others uncles and aunts with a family duty to support each other in adversity.

For people are simply nicer when it snows. And more philosophical, reflective. They have seen the White Rabbit and he has changed their perception of the world. Suddenly the hectic bustle of the January return to work, the winter heads-down of dark and busy days as we head towards the sunny uplands of Easter, has eased. With deep slow lying in most places, nothing seems quite so important. Snow metamorphoses into slow.

We think of others and of animals, too. The blackbird eating the berries of the Christmas wreath on the front door, excites sympathy more than anger, and concern for its welfare.

We can afford to be tolerant, self-indulgent; our White Rabbit is handing out excuses for days off and extra hours in a warm bed, while reminding us to provide unfrozen water and plenty of grain for the birds and to take extra care on the ice.

If, like the Eskimos we were permitted 64 words for snow, I’d make sure that the word for a large scale and enduring blanket of whiteness - a six-foot-three-and-one-half-inch rabbit that makes us a calmer and more gentle race - was ‘Harvey’.

THE RATTLE IN THE LETTERBOX

I have just looked out and re-written a couple stories for the BBC’s My Story competition and realised afterwards that they were both about paranormal experiences for which there appeared to no provision in the table of categories.

Now I am not normally someone that has much to do with the paranormal. I can’t make tables levitate (as, allegedly, could my great aunt); nor, so far as I know, do I have a ‘follower’ like my daughter who found herself shackled to a ghostly presence while doing charity work in Africa. She even sought help from someone who dealt in these sort of occult matters who diagnosed a young family member who couldn’t ‘rest’ properly.

And, yes, it was true. A Roman Catholic illegitimacy in a distant part of the family and an unbaptised child who had died and been refused burial on consecrated ground. No wonder the child felt aggrieved, it wasn’t her fault after all. But this was an untold and hushed up story, which my daughter knew nothing about.

Nor again do I have the ability to sense ‘presences,’ which my old father used to do regularly, especially when egged on by his third wife, Ella, who could practically relate the history of a building from sensing the cosmic vibrations coming through the walls and ceiling.

In fact you could say they made a rather spooky pair. She died shortly after him and at short notice. Her death, and the way in which she announced it in a telephone call to me quite out of the blue one morning in a voice still strong, bright and optimistic: ‘I’m sorry to be troubling you at work but I just thought I ought to tell you that I probably won’t be here much beyond next week,’ seemed to parallel exactly that of Laura in Saki’s eponymous story:

“I have the doctor’s permission to live till Tuesday,” said Laura.

“But today is Saturday; this is serious!” gasps her friend Amanda.

“I don’t know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday,” Laura replies.

Laura tells her friend that she can be optimistic because she is not actually going to die, just presumably leave off being Laura; and this is indeed what happens, Laura resurfaces as a succession of verminous beasts that play havoc in the poultry pens of family members she had detested in this life.

In Ella’s case the optimism came from the prospect of being released from her current state of inconvenient separation from my father and so she embraced her ending with almost indecent haste.

The funeral took place in a little village church in Gloucestershire for reasons that I never fully understood, their religious persuasions being questionable to say the least. The Vicar was a jolly fellow, well briefed on their psychic history, and so was not in the least fazed when during his eulogy the heavy oak door of the church creaked open and no-one, visible at least to the rational eye, came in.

Someone shut the door and sat down. The vicar resumed and the door creaked opened again. That this was my father descended to collect Ella and to have a spot of mischievous fun seemed obvious to anyone that knew them. Again the door was closed and this time, bolted. Ghosts are so bad about shutting doors after them.

But this Christmas-tide I did experience a psychic phenomenon of my own and I suppose it was that that pushed me into submitting my paranormal tales to the BBC. (If ever they are published I shall no doubt not hesitate to tell you about them. If they are not published then I may recycle them and inflict them upon you anyway).

Our last Newfoundland dog, Sampson, died in the house where we live now about ten years ago. He used to lie beside the front door, curled up on the wide doormat and when he got up he stood so tall that his big head would rattle the interior flap of the letter box.

We still hear the letter box rattling from time to time. Usually just a single rattle - the flap lifting and falling shut. You'd swear the post had arrived but when you run to look - nothing. And it isn't the wind or a door being opened; we’ve checked that. It doesn’t happen very often and we think nothing of it.

But early the other morning about 5 am, in fact, I was going downstairs to the kitchen. I had reached the bottom of the stairs when the letterbox gave a tremendous and multiple rattle - flap, flap, flap - as though a postman with a parcel had found the doorbell inoperative and wanted to attract our attention. Exactly, in fact as though I had disturbed the sleeping dog and he had jumped up smartly and so rattled the flap.

But of course there was nothing or no-one there and the air was otherwise quite still. I suppose I felt slightly scared. What might be coming next? This is after all the season of clanking chains.

Nothing further happened. Friends said it must have been the presence of the dog. But why at that time? Why such insistence? Was this an omen?

We found then that we had to cancel a proposed trip to France for New Year. Was it this? And then a blogging friend, someone who had, last year, been due to visit us, died tragically and unexpectedly in hospital, just when we had had all expected an excellent recovery. Was it that?
Or is it something yet to come?

Or is it absolutely not an omen at all - just a random event, signifying nothing?

In the words of Thomas Crown watching the supposed fake Rembrandt burning on the fire: “we shall never know, shall we?” But of one thing I am quite sure, this was a real event even if one without an obvious cause.

Another case of there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.