DRAGONS IN THE DARK

There’s a lot of hanging about in plays. Waiting to come on, as it were. You wait to exit the real world and enter the world of make-believe. From 74 to 47 and back again. Actually I’m not 74, as anyone paying attention would know, but nor am I 47 either. I just look like that.

So the question arises what do you do? While you are waiting. In the dark. You sit there in the wings or in the bar. You can’t talk for fear of disturbing the actors on stage. And reading is difficult (even if the lights weren't out!) because you are so full of adrenalin that it is coming out of your ears. Someone might run you through with a sword and you wouldn’t notice. I guess it must be like that in a battle. There you are fighting away and suddenly you notice that there seems to be a lot of blood around and then you fancy a sit down and before you know it you are dead.

I suppose it’s the same if you're eaten by wild animals. I doubt if you’d actually feel very much. I used to have a dream as a child in which I was lost in the jungle and a tiger appeared just as I had sat down to eat my sandwiches. Now, I knew that I could run, was a very good runner in fact, but the problem was I had inconveniently forgotten how. Which leg goes first? What? You take both legs off the ground at the same time? Without falling over?

This dream used to terrify me. The only comforting thing was that the tiger seemed to have forgetten how to run too. And so it just hung there in mid spring, as it were, terrifying the living daylights out of paralysed me until I woke up. Which I always did, covered in sweat.

One day I said to myself that, as an experiment, I wouldn’t try to run but would let the tiger catch me to see what it felt like. But the tiger then just refused to play and I had another dream instead. Perhaps I was older because this one involved stealing cars.

One moment I would be admiring a car and the next I would be driving it down the road. Or rather, since I was too young to drive, being in the uncomfortable position of sitting in the driving seat of a moving car of uncertain provenance with legs too short to reach the pedals and about to crash and of course the certainty of being arrested by policemen all with loud shoutey voices and truncheons. But of course I woke up. First.

You think of these things, waiting to go on. In the darkness. Reaching back into the memory I remembered last week I had blogged about a donkey called Pegasus, the original winged horse. Now winged horses are one of only two families of land animals with six limbs - if you don’t count insects, or spiders, or any arthropod come to that. Winged horses are beautiful but apart from Disney films there’s not much evidence that they existed at all. I have a suspicion that someone with imagination may have been telling fibs. It’s the feathers and hair on the same beast that give the game away.

So if there aren’t any winged horses that just leaves dragons, for which evidence is plentiful. In fact it seems as though the six limbed dragon (four legs, two wings) only died out in recent times. Still, owing to the beast's ability to bury itself in the ground and hibernate for excessively long periods you never know, one may yet come to light yet.

Most of what we know about dragons comes from the discovery of the remains of a whole family of dragons in a collapsed limestone cave at Llancofi in Carmarthenshire in 1882. Perfectly preserved and mummified. Examination of the stomach contents showed the beasts to be entirely vegetarian, contrary to popular suspicion that they would go a long way for a succulent morsel of young damsel. No, entirely vegetarian was your dragon but their digestive system was primitive and they produced a lot of methane (or so the researchers concluded) which the animal then belched out of its mouth.

So it seems likely that this is the origin of the fire-breathing legend, particularly as the dragons’ teeth were not made of calcium orthophosphate like those of other animals but of the iron compound, haematite. Such teeth were rather primitive but fast growing. They were also quite soft so dragons tended to get stones and grit stuck between their teeth. This was a noted feature of all the adult dragons found in the Llancofi cave.

Now if a dragon bit on a stone, the haematite would spark. If at the same time the dragon were belching methane, it would ignite. The researchers at Llancofi found distinctive scorch marks and thickening of the skin on the older dragons' noses.

As a defence mechanism this flame throwing ability would have been matchless and probably accounts for the dragon surviving so long down the evolutionary tree.

Interestingly the young dragons did not appear to have this fire-breathing capability. There was no evidence of scorching on their noses. The young unusually were also covered in hair as opposed to the scales of the older beasts. Their wings were larger in proportion and so they would have been able to fly, unlike the older dragons which, being heavier and covered with thick scales could probably not have got off the ground. The researchers concluded that this change from hair to scales and the almost complete loss of aerial ability occurred around the age of 40.

The most likely reason for the dragons’ eventual demise would have been its great destructive power, particularly in dry weather when it must accidentally have set ablaze whole fields of carefully cultivated crops. So almost certainly the beasts were hunted to extinction by man to protect their livelihoods.

The remains at Llancofi were dated to approximately 600 AD. They would therefore have been some of the last dragons to have lived in this remote corner of Wales.

I’d tell you more about dragons and what they found at Llancofi but I am already hearing my cue lines and so I’d better go on. If you have been, thanks for sharing this wait in the darkness.


Picture shows a sculpture of a dragon based on the remains of a larger dragon found at Llancofi. Note the relatively small size and scaly wings which in older dragons were useless for flight.

PEGASUS

It was mention of the dog-cart that attracted Edward. The idea of big wheels bouncing over the rutted lanes, the sun on his back and some docile equine trotting silkily along in front.

I suppose he had been reading too many Victoria novels, though he himself was in no sense Victorian. Rather the reverse. His profession of architect drove him to design buildings that would come to define the age and he tried to look to the future. Perhaps that was why he hankered so much to live in the past.

This year he had persuaded Sarah to rent an isolated farmhouse somewhere in West Cork for their August holiday. The children would love it, he said. Far from the madding crowd. The beauties of Bantry Bay. Edward could see it now. Walking in fields filled with wildflowers, bounded by extravagant fuchsia hedges. Fly-fishing for trout in the nearby lake (he would take his expensive greenheart rod). Some hill climbing perhaps. Trips in the dog cart.

The advertisement even mentioned the docile equine by name - Pegasus - which reinforced Edward’s idea of flying along the lanes. The advertisement didn’t mention that Pegasus was a donkey.

Still, he trotted over attentively when Edward and Sarah finally arrived at their holiday farmhouse in the late afternoon. Inevitably it was raining - a thin misty rain that seemed to drench them more than a downpour.

They called his name and the children tried to stroke him, but Pegasus’ long white ears just twitched in the rain and he turned away with a little kick of his heels. Already Pegasus was losing some of his allure. Edward made a mental note to buy carrots.

The next day Edward found the dog cart in the barn together with the collar and harness. He had made specific enquiries from the owners of the farmhouse and had been assured that nothing could be simpler. That no skill at all was needed to harness Pegasus - a sweet and mild-tempered beast, the owner had insisted - to the cart. “Just slip the collar on him and you’ll see where the shafts go and the harness buckles. Sure, a child of six could do it and then you’ll be flying along the lanes and above the hedge tops and the whole family will have a whale of a time.” Edward noted the word ‘flying’.

It was, in truth, a pretty little cart of an uncertain age, painted blue with yellow trimmings. Nevertheless it appeared sound. The wheels had all their spokes and the leather seats were still filled with horsehair. All seemed sound and serviceable.You mounted, Edward noted, with an the aid of an iron step.

The children asked persistent questions about the harness and about steering and braking, questions that Edward felt quite inadequate to answer. He’d never really considered the braking question before. But managing a cart couldn’t be difficult. He’d give it a try. Be trotting around the farmyard by lunch-time and they could go for their first drive en famille in the afternoon.

“Best put the halter on,” the owner had said. Edward now advanced across the field, calling ‘Pegasus, in a confident, bright and optimistic tone.’ Obediently, the animal left its browsing preoccupations and came towards him. Ten feet away Pegasus halted and sniffed. Then he turned and hawed and with the same little kick of his heels ran off across the field.

“Sure he’ll come if you call him,” the owner had said. Nothing he likes better now than a good run with the cart. If you want you can offer him a carrot but that shouldn’t be necessary at all.”

Indeed, it was necessary. For the next three hours Edward and Pegasus, both of whom possessed similarly stubborn character traits, engaged in a battle of wills that involved not only carrots but all manner of other comestibles as well. Edward devised a way of hiding the halter behind his back; Pegasus a way of taking the offered inducement while keeping safely beyond Edward’s darting reach.

Finally the donkey’s yearning for sugar lumps outweighed his hatred of being shackled. He yielded to the halter to be led, a prisoner, to the blue and yellow cart. Now for the harness. Far from being something a child of six could understand, the tangled and random collection of leather straps and brass buckles, of loops and eyes that now needed to be deployed to attach the donkey to the shafts of the cart seemed impossible to fathom. With Sarah’s help, however, Edward fixed the collar and buckled the shafts in what he hoped, without much conviction, might approach the correct way. Pegasus, his eyes closed, gave every appearance of slumber.

At last the task was completed. Edward put his foot in the iron step and swung himself into the driving seat, holding the reins as though he were at the helm of a battleship. These he now shook, an action he had seen actors do in cowboy films when the stagecoach left town. Of course nothing happened.

He shook the reins again and shouted, but Pegasus took absolutely no notice at all. Defeated, he climbed down again, intending to lead the animal but Pegasus, sensing the cart now had no driver, deemed this a satisfactory moment to wake up.

With a tremendous spring the donkey leapt forward. Unfortunately, the cart didn’t. Instead, to the accompaniment of loud tearing as the harness ripped apart, the donkey cantered happily off leaving the forlorn cart behind. Various bits of harness remained attached to both parties.

“I’m not sure that the dog cart was a very good idea” said Sarah when they had finally managed to persuade Pegasus to surrender his half of the harness in exchange for an exorbitant ransom of sugar and carrots. “Goodness know how much it will cost to repair.”

And to make sure that Edward wouldn’t involve him in any more holiday plans, Pegasus wandered into the barn one night and ate his fishing rod.

This is a first attempt at a 'Friday Fiction' a 1000 word short story, written on a Friday.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

LONDON TIMES

I am fortunate that I have never been entirely desk bound. Even today I still have occasion to make the occasional foray to London or elsewhere and so it was this week. I’d been at a meeting in one of those elegant houses just off The Mall, where Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone lived in his hey day 150 years ago. He would cross St James Park on the brief walk to Downing Street and this week I found myself retracing his habitual steps only realising afterwards - when I saw his portrait - that this is what I had been doing.

It had been a good meeting as meetings go. Mostly they are tedious and boring and the only sensible work gets done anyway in what these days are called ‘the margins’ in private and informal conversations as you take your coffee or put on your coat to go home. So I was in buoyant mood descending the great steps to the Mall and crossing into St James Park which looked as fine as ever I had seen it, thronged with exotic vegetation and waterfowl.

Early in my career I used to work here - not in the Park, though I must have brought papers out, I suppose, now and again, and sat in the sun eating my lunch - but in the Old Admiralty Building that forms one side of Horseguards Parade.

Shortly after I arrived there new telephones were installed and I was delighted to find I had been given extension number 3. This caused endless amusement. I used to say that extension 1 was the Prime Minister (Edward Heath at the time); extension 2 was the Head of the Civil Service and extension 3 was the next most important person in the government.

Anyway important or not they let me park my car on occasions on Horseguards Parade and for several years after I had moved down to Wales whenever I drove up to town I would park on Horseguards and slip into the office where the girls would write out a permit for me. And then I could park all day in the middle of Central London without a penny to pay.

My mistake was not doing this sufficiently often. For one day they twigged that I no longer actually worked in the building. Security was of course becoming a lot tighter and the easy-come-easy-go days fast becoming a memory.

Today the whole of Horseguards Parade is cordoned off: protected by large steel bollards against, I suppose, lorries packed with explosives. How sad. Nevertheless the bollards are painted a tasteful dark green and outlined in gold and do look as though they belong.

As I didn’t have a car - I can’t remember the last time I ever drove into Central London - the bollards weren’t a problem, so I strolled across the Parade ground and through the archway past an extremely young looking trooper trying to remain motionless as a throng of tourists clicked and snapped in the semi-darkness.

He was dressed of course as for the battle of Waterloo. We have a fascination for that late Georgian period. The time of Pitt and Napoleon, of Talleyrand and Mad King George. The Queen lives in an eighteenth century palace, rides in an eighteenth century coach, escorted by eighteenth century soldiers to the accompaniment of eighteenth century music and along boulevards laid out in the eighteenth century. The French do much the same thing. Indeed swop the troops at the Elysée Palace for those at Horseguards and I doubt anyone would notice the difference.

In my day there were fewer tourists and (possibly the two are correlated) fewer pigeons. The visitors scrummed around the two mounted guards on their shining black horses. Above and behind the horses is the old Admiralty Boardroom with its famous table, a concave segment cut out to accommodate one particularly fat Sea Lord and across the way is Great Scotland Yard, once home to the Metropolitan Police, where the IRA exploded a car bomb in the early seventies. It always was a dingy backstreet and not the romantic sort of place portrayed in police thrillers. I am wondering whether the Quai des Orfèvres in Paris is equally forlorn.

With an hour to kill before leaving to catch my train I crossed Trafalgar Square, up past the statue of Edith Cavell, executed for treason in 1915 by the occupying German forces in Brussels, to the National Portrait Gallery.

I hadn’t been there for years and what a fascinating place it is. Here are Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen, Disraeli and Gladstone, Churchill and Queen Anne. Yet what struck me looking at the miscellany of faces was how the men were all recognisable. Take a modern man and stick him in an absurd wig and costume, let him pose for the artist and you will have an eighteenth century portrait. Not so the women. The women’s faces are bland, without character and mostly with charm. They are not so much real faces as an imagination of a face. Why?

Is it because most of the artists were men; or did women really carry that far away ‘lights-on-but-no-one-at-home look?’ A modern woman’s face would fit oddly on the shoulders of Queen Anne, say, or the Duchess of Devonshire, or even of Queen Elizabeth. And she was most certainly ‘at home’ even when the lights were off. Is this a general perception or is this just me? Compare Queen Anne with the photograph of Edith Cavell.


Main Picture is of Horseguards Parade.

THE OLD MONEY

I loved the old money and my weekly half-crown pocket money - a big heavy silver coin that almost seemed too perfect to spend. In those days some of the coins, and the florins and shillings had real silver in them and so they wore down and became quite smooth. It was comforting to see the different designs and to trace the kings and queens - Victoria, Edward, George, George again and then Elizabeth.

The money was very heavy of course and the poor conductors on the buses used to carry a weighty satchel full of 'coppers.' I used to take the bus from the station to get me to school and I would ask for 'a penny-halfpenny half' - in those days children used to get half-fare until the age of fourteen. The farthing (quarter penny) had gone by the time I started to spend money - as had the silver threepenny bit - but there were still plenty about. I remember in Glasgow offering two farthings for a half-penny when we were short of change to buy some potato scones, but the shop woman wouldn't accept them. They had ceased to be legal tender as had the silver threepennies some time before. So we had the 12 sided yellow coin with daisies on it, or later a portcullis, instead.

I lived near a railway and we loved putting these old coins on the line and letting the massive steam locomotives run over them so that they were flattened and rolled out like pastry. Pennies were all right but the railwaymen used to get very cross with us for trying to flatten threepenny bits. (I don't know why they were called 'bits,' nothing else was - except, I suppose, in America where they talked about cheap things as being 'two-bit;' but I never knew what that meant either) Apparently threepenny bits damaged the locomotive's 'tyres.' Now I didn't know that a locomotive had tyres but I suppose it is logical. They must wear and if you didn't take the outside of the wheel off occasionally and replace it with a new one then the engine would be running on the spokes of its wheels. Or so anyway I reasoned. So we didn't put threepenny bits on the line and we were too poor to afford to waste silver coins in this way.

Bank notes were far bigger than they are today. They really were bank notes then and you felt proud to own one. A pound note was the size of a business envelope and the five pound note the size of a small flag. Neither carried the Queen's head (or even the King's head when the King was alive. He smoked heavily and died of cancer but it didn't stop me or anyone else smoking when I was young. Even my great aunt smoked occasionally, insisting on a cigarette called 'Passing Clouds' - made by Wills, I think, like the Woodbines, whereas my step-mother, who didn't like smoking but did so to be fashionable, smoked du Maurier after the novelist, but only at parties. My father smoked cheroots, but not very often. My aunt made me buy him a packet every Christmas. They sounded very sophisticated. But I didn't smoke any of these when I grew up. I think they had gone out of fashion by then, like the money).

You could buy a great many cheroots for £5 in those days but the Bank of England dispensed with the old £5 note because it was so easy to forge, even with all its lovely black swirly writing which made it look more like a letter or contract than a banknote. Something big, blue and square with a picture of Britannia took its place. And the £1 note was similar but in green and then there was a ten shilling note (that was half a pound) in a reddish-brown sort of colour. The notes became smaller as the money lost its value and the design changed. That's when they put the Queen's head on it - as if that might stop the money losing its value. Then the notes disappeared altogether. First the ten shillings and then the pound and today's five pound note will disappear very soon as well I imagine.

Money has lost a lot of value. When I first went to France more than 50 years ago you could get 14 francs to the pound. That would be more than 2 euros. You could get 10 deutsche marks to the pound - that would be about 5 euros and you could get 2 dollars and 80 cents if you wanted American money. I know this figure because it was fixed. Fixed that is until the pound was devalued and the figure became 2 dollars 40 cents.

I still have a collection of the old money and some of the old notes and I suppose everyone thinks wistfully of the pounds shillings and pence that we used to think so logical and which so bemused visitors from overseas. We had a lot of visitors when I was young and I felt so sad for them when a shopkeeper would demand 'three and sevenpence ha'penny' They hadn't a clue what this meant and would just hand over a note or a purse full of change and invite the shopkeeper to take whatever she wanted. So in some ways things have improved. Though the money isn't what it used to be. In any way at all.

NONE NICER THAN NUNNEY

We had gone to stay with Elder Daughter whose husband had taken himself off to the London Film Festival as he does every year, he being a bit of a film buff. So the rest of the family moved in. Like mice. There was then a question about what we might do.

To tell the truth I didn't feel much like doing anything for I was ill, feeling really off colour and with little appetite. The dreaded stomach lurgi doing the rounds had stopped at my door. Still, one must battle on. Fly the flag, especially when there are those around whose health is far less robust, even if at the time I did wonder whether my own ailment might be the beginning of some mortal malady, you know the type of thing at which the black frock-coated gentlemen shake their heads and advise against the commencement of long books. Having just read Phillippa Gregory's 'The White Queen' I recognised my symptoms as just the ones that carried off King Edward IV, and he considerably younger than me, too.

Well, I thought, as I lay half awake a little before six in the morning that being the hour my grandson Theo deems appropriate for life to commence, I may just have time to finish the biography of Talleyrand that I am reading. He and I will then succumb - for the biography ends as most biographies do with his death - he and I will succumb together, but I shall never get round to reading 'The Road Home' by Rose Tremain, which I had bought at the Cowbridge Bookshop when I had gone in to ask whether they might take some copies of Chris's 'Turning the Tide.' I had wanted to buy this book anyway so it wasn't a special purchase and it was the same price as Amazon and no delivery charges and a good conversation with the bookseller thrown in. So why do we insist on buying from Amazon? That is one of life's little imponderables, I thought.

Still even when one is ill and on the point of thinking about putting one's affairs in order, Elder Daughter still wants to know where to go. She's not going to have us hanging about the house all day; we need to mount an expedition. "We'll go to the Castle," I say, thinking this a fool-proof option, only to be told that Frome - the pleasant little market town in jolly Somerset where she lives - doesn't run to a castle.
"Why not?" I asked. "Everywhere else has a castle. There must be a castle if you look hard enough." But there wasn't - or isn't.

So eventually we settled for Nunney castle - a mile or two down the road and as charming a little castle as you might ever hope to find this side of the English Channel. I say this side of the English Channel because Nunney Castle is French. It is as though it has been dug up and transplanted like London Bridge from the sunny folds of the Loire valley to this quaintly named chocolate box village in Somersetshire.


It is a small castle - almost a miniature or Doll's House (Doll's Castle?) castle. Just four pepperpot towers which once carried conical roofs. And with a beautiful regular square moat around it in which to view the shimmering reflection of its stones. One could easily fall in love with such a place and indeed many who lived there can't have done anything else. For it looks not really like a military castle at all, but a gentle-little-fairy-tale-Rapunzel-holding-princess-and-the-pea-sleeping-family-residence-of-a-minor-Baron-probably-called-Ludwig castle.

You can hear harps in the building and if you're really quiet, the fish calling to each other in the moat as you gaze on the far hills from those broad picture windows and imagine children and young folk chasing each other up and down the staircases and hiding behind turrets and shooting arrows at the villagers' pumpkins.


Nunney Castle was built in 1373 and would today be as good as new, but for Oliver Cromwell and his (sadly not at all merry) men who decided that the castle was altogether too blessed with sweetness and light and therefore that it was in need of a good ruination.

So he ruined it - pulling off the conical roofs - and turfing the young folk off the staircases and out into the country lanes. Then he bombarded the four towers with cannon - not altogether successfully for you can see where the cannonballs bounced off - before deciding it might be easier just to blow up the connecting walls with gunpowder. Which he did - gunpowder not being in short supply in 1646 - and, like Jericho, the walls came tumbling down.

Still, that didn't stop the castle being as charming and welcoming as a Dowager Duchess short of visitors. Cross the little wooden footbridge over the moat (surely jumpable if you were any sort of athlete) and you are welcomed into the central hall into which the sunlight is already streaming and where you can imagine yourself sitting down to dinner in Elizabethan robes with Gloriana herself, the Virgin Queen descending the great staircase and muttering about Spaniards.

Ah well, that was all a very long time ago.


I was still feeling ill when we left Nunney to go to Laycock, another bit of the Cotswolds that remains pickled in aspic and costume drama. There Elder Daughter bought me a lunch which sadly I couldn't eat but we sat first under a Eucalyptus and then under a strange tree like a magical walnut (except it wasn't a walnut). Some say it's a lilac but do lilacs - even Persian ones - bear nuts in green cases? A woman was selling apples at £1 a bag from a wheelbarrow in the street and put the money please through the letterbox. I ate an apple and immediately began to feel better.

I leave you with an image of little Theo literally (though on his elders' part quite unforgivably) dancing on the grave of some noble Laycock antecedent. Still, if the apple doesn't work, and I'm not here next week, I hereby give permission to infants under the age of two to dance on my grave to their hearts' content. There isn't much, after all, that one can do for the young when one is six feet under.

VENGEANCE OF THE WATER GODS

Before leaving the Mill I took a last wander down to the fairy pool where the river turns sharply north and flows deep under an overhanging and ivy-covered crag. It is where the silver salmon would lie, if there were salmon in the Célé, which perhaps there were once. It’s a magical place, where dappled sunlight shines and where the fairies congregate: the water nymphs and the tree nymphs, the elves and the pixies.

You’ll have to imagine it, I’m afraid, for to take its picture would steal some of the magic, but anyway this is the spot to which I always go to say goodbye. It had rained a deal in the night and the river was running high and coloured, swirling in foamy anger. In truth, had I a golden coin in my pocket I might have cast it into the pool and made a wish, for I was in one of those moods that afflict us all, I suppose, from time to time: reflecting mournfully on what remains to be done in life and the short time left to do it.

If I had made a wish it would have been to secure for myself that warm and instantly recognisable blend of charm, elegance and confidence that some of us have but most of us don’t. If charm, elegance and confidence come on a scale then, despite a lifetime of trying, I am way down at the bottom end. But I hadn’t a golden coin, or even a golden edged euro, and so had to content myself with throwing into the water some elderly and much crumpled receipt, the only thing left in my pocket.

But first I tore it into two halves, one about twice the size of the other and cast both wantonly into the water, where they hardly moved at all. I found that I had thrown them into slack water and began to feel silly. Yet, bit by bit, the current started to drag at them, first backwards towards the angle of the bend and then forwards into the flow. The smaller piece moved fastest, as if in a hurry, but then it was sucked under by a vortex. It surfaced a couple of times like a drowning man and then disappeared for good.

The larger piece seemed to take a more circumspect course and travelled far across the stream to within inches of the overhanging rocks. It, too, was sucked under from time to time but it came up again, no worse for wear and I watched it bobbing down the river, heading into the turbulent distance and the far off sea carrying my thoughts and dreams. Adieu, I muttered to myself, before turning to head towards the far off airport and my even farther off home.

Standing later in the security queue I remove bits of metal from about my person. It is a long queue so I have plenty of time to remove everything. You may think me unduly self-deprecating when I say I am at the bottom end of the charm, elegance and confidence scale. But you have only to watch a group of people at an airport who have been through security to know where on the scale they are placed.

You have, don’t you, a bag, hurriedly over-packed, from which you have removed your computer and your toiletries in their luminous yellow bag, taken off your jacket or coat together with your broad miscellany of jewellery, cards, keys, belts, phone, watch and the like. It's the same for everyone.

Then suddenly you are at the end of the line, in a confined space and a press of people, trying to assemble all this paraphernalia again into a semblance of tidiness. Elegant people can do this in a few seconds - deftly slipping this or that into a commodious handbag with an insouciance bordering on the miraculous.

I’m still fumbling five minutes later. Moreover, it seems my earlier prayers to the water gods to substitute my habitual maladroitness for a kind of effortless head girl competence have gone sadly unanswered.

Worse is to come. As I sit down with my book - The Glass Room, as you ask, lent to me kindly by Rosie and a most excellent read - I reach for my glasses. That’s when I find that in my confusion I have put my watch in the same pocket. The glasses hook on the strap and my watch sails out in an arc to burst into pieces on the marble floor of the departure lounge.

Perhaps it’s not that bad. The back has come off and the battery has sprung out, but I manage to reassemble the components. To my surprise the watch still works. Then the back springs off again. Something has warped.

Did I commit the crime of lèse-majesté by throwing a crumpled till receipt to the water gods? For now the heavens open and we have to struggle to the plane in a downpour. Then as we sit in the plane, wet, cribb’d and confin’d, with a loud party of ten year old school girls for company, comes the announcement that take-off is delayed for an hour an a half. Insult is piled on injury.

The next day, back at home, I fall out of the loft, landing painfully on my back and wondering, for a moment, whether I should ever walk again. Was this more water god vengeance? But of course one never knows, does one, whether it was really the displeased water gods tipping me out of the loft, or whether, having fallen through my own clumsiness, it was their little wings and flippers bearing me up that ensured I received no more than a painful bruise. Or, then again, it might have been my Guardian Angel, who has saved me from even worse fates before. Why don’t the gods leave calling cards? Or even till receipts?

And on that philosophical note I shall leave you to ponder.

Picture is ‘The Guardian Angel by Pietro Cortona 1656. Courtesy of Wikipedia. However, her wings look rather small. More like flippers don't you think?

A BUSY WEEK

We’ve been exceptional busy with the labels these last few days. It’s as though a dam has burst and the slow flow of orders over the summer has been replaced by a monsoon. My writing has had to go to the wall and we’ve been working from first thing in the morning to late evening. Part of the problem has been an order for 50,000 labels to be reeled into rolls of 1,000 from big jumbo rolls. We’ve been saying for ages that we need a rewinding machine but we can’t really justify the investment. Instead we do it all by hand down the long central corridor of the house. At least it’s exercise.

It didn’t help that I had to lose half a day attending the launch of the ‘Size of Wales’ project at the National Botanic Centre near Carmarthen. This initiative, sponsored by the Prince of Wales, is part of the ‘Start’ programme and has as its object for Wales to take responsibility for an area of rainforest in Africa the ‘size of Wales’. ‘Start’ is all about sustainability and embraces a variety of projects designed - as the Prince said - to end the stage of talking about climate change and to start doing something about it.

The launch event took place in the Great Glasshouse designed by Norman Foster, the largest single span glasshouse in Britain, well worth a visit, though as a location to launch anything it has its drawbacks. The cavernous space, populated with plants, simply soaks up sound, so it was hard to hear any of the speakers despite the microphones. Then there were the sparrows. Whole flocks of sparrows that had got into the glasshouse and bred, presumably feeding on visitors’ crumbs and plant seeds. They were completely tame, flying inches from my nose and would have fed from my hand, I judged. But like all sparrows they chattered incessantly, whenever a speaker tried to raise his voice in competition.

While we were waiting for HRH to speak (he decided to avoid the sparrows and speak outside), I rehearsed my pet hobby horse: the Government should simply install solar panels here, there and everywhere, I suggested, knowing the energy generated would in the long run more than pay for the investment and therefore help reduce the deficit. An affable gentleman responded that this was already being done; if not by the government then by companies like his. He gave me his card.

If my roof was suitable he said, he would rent it and install solar panels, give me free electricity, and sell the remainder to the government at 49p a unit - which is the regulated price. It’s so high because it is underpinned by the renewables levy we all pay on our electricity bills. 'Where’s the catch?' I asked. 'There’s no catch,' he said. Everyone wins. I am eagerly awaiting his call.

I’ve been dipping in to the extracts from Tony Blair’s memoirs in the papers. At one point he talks of using alcohol as a prop: a stiff whisky or a gin and tonic and a couple of glasses of wine in the evening. John Reid, the bluff Glaswegian former Home Secretary, commented sourly that where he came from you wouldn’t give that to a budgie! I’m not impartial myself to an occasional whisky so taking a leaf from Tony’s book I helped myself to a stiff one to see me through another batch of reeling.

Sadly every now and then the effect of whisky is to cause a delayed gastric spasm. I don’t really feel the effect of this until the next day when I wake up feeling as though I haven’t been to bed. My sleep does me no good whatsoever. It’s not the alcohol (for the quantity was really quite modest) but the reaction it sets off.

Anyhow, the result was that last night I slept like the proverbial log, so deeply in fact that I managed to trap my arm which, too, ‘went to sleep.’ I must have tried to turn over but the arm, being useless, couldn’t support me and I fell out of bed with a thump, banging my ear on the dressing table. I sat on the floor laughing at myself and thinking that it must be fifty years since I last managed to fall out of bed.

Still the label feast is more likely to be a blip than a sustained season and I’ll be able to get back again to writing. I’m trying to assemble some of my stories into a text with a view to putting something on the Completely Novel website. I’m learning how to edit, paragraph and typeset so that the text looks professional. What is remarkable is how different words can look when they are set in the correct font, spacing and width. They’re somehow much easier to read, the eye skims through them easily, like a dancer gliding across a polished floor. No wonder Winston Churchill insisted on having his work typeset in draft before making final corrections.

Photograph shows Mr Tom Jones OBE, Vice President Wales Council Voluntary Action, welcoming the participants.