THE GUERILLA NAPPY-ER UP

We watched the last episode of Midsomer Murders this week - at least the last to star John Nettles - there may be others starring someone else. I don’t normally watch the programme, but it seemed the end of en era and therefore that made it interesting even if the programme itself wasn’t.

The show makes me realise that we are, in this locality, somewhat 'murder light.' You see, my neighbour is a retired detective inspector. Just the sort of person around whom murderers ought to be flocking, their dastardly deeds requiring just the agile mind of a retired sleuth to untangle. But then we can't compete I suppose with that homicidal hell-hole of Midsomer.

In fact the last murder in Cowbridge, so far as I can recall, took place about a dozen years ago when some drug-crazed hoodlum crashed into our local jewellers and demanded money with menaces in the shape of a carving knife. The jeweller, being an honourable if somewhat foolhardy man, told him to get lost. Whereupon tragedy struck. The hoodlum ran off, was rugby tackled by a stout member of the public and is now serving life at Her Majesty's pleasure. Plenty of sad pointlessness, grief and bewilderment, but not much of a plot for the little grey cells. Fortunately, this sort of thing doesn't happen often, I thought. Or does it and am I worried?

What prompted these reflections was the local county crime survey dropping through the letterbox yesterday morning, promising me the chance to win £100 in Argos vouchers if I filled it in and nobody nabbed the vouchers in the meantime. How do I feel about crime, the anonymous statistician wanted to know?

"Has crime gone up or down, in the past year," it asked matter-of-factly. "Or has it stayed the same." Fortunately, we live in one of the greener and pleasanter spots of this land and so crime is not something I think about very much. My car was broken into twenty years ago and about ten years ago someone stole a bicycle from the garden shed, but that (touch wood) is about it.

The interrogation continued through five more pages though fortunately a tick box on the survey form allowed me to say, "Never, really thought abaht it, guv" - or words to that effect. The survey also solicited my views about the offences to which the police should be paying more attention. Here I found myself ticking the anti-social behaviour box rather a lot - not that there is, again, too much of it here.

But what these surveys fail to ask you (indeed I wonder whether the politicians are aware either) is the newspaper and elephant question. You know, when the eccentric is asked why he is out in the garden at midnight, reading the newspaper. He replies that he does so to keep the elephants at bay. "But there aren't any elephants in Godalming," protests his interlocutor. "Precisely so," says your man.

I'd even put up with a bit more anti-social behaviour if I knew that the police were engaged on preventing more important crimes like murder, assault, robberies and so on. It is true I do find the noise and loutish behaviour of the drunken Cowbridge demi-monde on a Saturday night a matter of distaste and concern, but, by being concerned, may I not be helping to divert resources away from more serious uses of police time. In the good old days the police locked up drunks for the night and fined them 25 shillings in the morning. Today’s equivalent (perhaps £50) might be a useful source of revenue to our cash strapped government and a formidable deterrent to boot.

The survey concluded inevitably by asking intrusive details about the type of citizen you were, whence you came and what you usually got up to in the privacy of the back stalls at the Odeon cinema. Sadly by this point the option of ticking the "Never, really thought abaht it, guv" box had run out.

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For Kathryn Eastman who writes at ‘The Nut Press’ (see the sideline to this blog): a picture. This is ‘Badger the Otter’ - a delightful door stop that I thought at first was a Badger but who turned out later to be an Otter. Why else would he be wearing a fisherman’s gilet and sporting a creel with a fish sticking out of it? So he’s an Otter named Badger. And he gives me writing advice, sometimes.

He’s feeling a little undignified at the moment; for he’s wearing a nappy. Young grandchild Theo, who is two tomorrow, has been wandering the house nappy-ing up all the soft toys he can find, including a penguin. Thank you, Theo! So far Gus the Gorilla has escaped this indignity. He lives on a tall shelf. Now I wonder whether guerrilla nappy-ing up of soft toys counts as a crime?

STRANGER IN THE MIRROR

Have you ever wondered how ‘they’ know that so many millions watched a television programme? I’d never thought about it much myself; I suppose if I thought anything I imagined some earnest student with a clipboard, knocking on a few doors here and there and asking the direct question. But it’s all a lot more sophisticated than that.

I can’t remember now how the invitation came - maybe someone with a clipboard came knocking on our door - anyway a couple of years ago we joined BARB’s Viewing Panel. BARB (the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) have constructed an elaborate checkerboard of homes where you will find represented every social and demographic condition, all carefully weighted so that from the actions of the few one can deduce the viewing patterns of the many. Apparently we were just the people they were looking for, they said, despite neither of us being television addicts.

A friendly soul called Jason came to install equipment which records what we have viewed and then telephones, via some hidden wireless apparatus, what we have watched. When we turn on the television a little box flashes telling us to record - by pressing buttons on an extra handset - who is there and, should there be guests, their age and gender.

In return for this intrusion on our viewing habits we receive points, which can be cashed in for vouchers. This week, not having claimed anything for at least eighteen months, they sent me £50 in book tokens.

Eschewing the desire to buy an Amazon Kindle - the novelty of which, I have a feeling, might soon wear off - I ordered three books from our local bookshop: Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling, Any Human Heart by William Boyd and Reach for the Ground by Jeffrey Bernard, and am still comfortably in credit for a new season of reading later in the year. Any Human Heart is a recommended Book Club read. The others are both idiosyncratic and slightly depressing choices.

Jane Shilling’s book is described as a narrative of middle age (oh dear!), while Jeffrey Bernard’s columns have been described as the longest suicide note in history. Around both authors' lives hangs Eeyore’s universal lament, “We can’t all and some of us don’t.” Yet out of the damp fireworks come verbal pyrotechnics.

Jane Shilling is horribly introspective, but then so am I. Yet she does describe her introspections beautifully. “I have no confidence in my ability to seize an opportunity. I imagine them as hard, glittering objects; golden apples that hurtle unexpectedly towards you, like the ball in school rounders games that looms out of the air and inflicts a sharp, insulting blow when you are standing in the outfield thinking about something else.”

I thought this morning how accurately this description applied to me, particularly the insulting blow of reality when you are thinking of something else. Having purchased newspaper and milk I was half way home before realising I'd left the milk on the shop counter.

Had I been a contemporary of Jane’s and at school with her I suspect we might have become friends, isolated in the outfield and comforting each other’s absent-mindedness. Though now I come to think of it I was always contemptuous of people who were timid and shy like myself and so I lived in a delusional world in which I imagined myself very differently.

Had I been at school with him I would undoubtedly have sought out Jeffrey Bernard who in his early years was also sensitive and shy, but who compensated by a racy addiction to drinking, gambling and sex. I would have been rebuffed of course, as usually happens when one follows one's delusions.

Interestingly enough the question ‘who am I?’ came into sharp relief this week when renewing my car insurance. I used to be a ‘consultant’ - indeed still do occasional bits of unpaid consultancy. I write, too, but in a desultory and equally unpaid fashion. And then I run a labels business which I thought I should mention to the broker, thereby unleashing a Pandora’s box of trouble.

“Did I carry labels in the car? Well, occasionally, like shopping,” I said. But this was commercial ‘Carriage of Goods’ and I was therefore, said my insurer, a ‘sales executive.’ The premium shot up by £160. It took three days to convince them that I was not a sales executive calling on businesses with my car loaded with samples. But thanks to dear Rachel, the broker, I have now been reassigned. Today I am a company director of an office supplies company and the premium has gone down by £25.

It is not only the opportunities, Jane, that hurtle unexpectedly towards you when you are thinking of something else.

DENTAL REFLECTIONS

“Mm, you’ve got a bit of decay starting under that inlay. Perhaps I can fix that now. Save you coming back. It’s only just started, only take ten minutes. What do you think?”

Now the last time young Mike said this to me half my wisdom tooth disappeared ground to fragments underneath his drill. Rotted from the inside, he had told me. I looked at the ceiling and pondered my habit of eating digestive biscuits at three in the morning as a cure for night starvation and then falling asleep again before I could clean my teeth.

“Do it without anaesthetic shall we? Very small! If it hurts stick your hand up.

Still, I told him to go ahead and to be fair I was genuinely surprised at how little he found to drill. All the same I stuck up my hand.

“It’s not the drill,” I said. “It’s the mirror.” Which, stuck at an awkward angle was doing its best to separate my cheek from my jaw. Mike recommenced.

Dentists - and hygienists too - do like to talk in my experience. Perhaps it’s because they know that with your mouth full of their paraphernalia you can’t talk back. You can only look at the ceiling and listen to the various sounds and wonder whether the ultra-violet light gun will burn a hole in your cheek.

When all is done and the chair lowered and you rinse and clamber out, you are so pleased to be free that you don’t have time to say what you had thought of earlier.

So I thought I’d put it in a blog. What I might have said to Mike or to Jennie had I had the opportunity.

Why (I would have begun) do those engaged in medical practice today now wear an ugly design of uniform that first appeared on the space travellers and people of the future in childrens comics of the fifties and sixties? When they were not wearing space helmets the inhabitants of the Dan Dare - Pilot of the Future - column wore exactly the same outfits as today’s caring professionals. Maybe, I wondered, you travel space when you leave the surgery?

Maybe it is why there are no mirrors in hospitals, have you noticed? Or very few anyway. No matter whether you are a nurse or a dentist or a technician today you wear some species of baggy nylon tunic top and trousers whose putrid pastel shades must be designed designed to frighten the patients into wellness. And on your feet you wear trainers, which may be comfortable, but at which the matrons of yesteryear must turn in their graves.

No wonder the NHS is in a mess, though to be fair even private establishments seem to have thrown over the white, fitted collar-buttoning jacket and dark trousers (for the men) and the recognisably smart and confidence boosting rig for nurses (who used to looked like nurses and could never in a million years be mistaken for anything else), with their capes and sashes and upside down watches pinned to their pinafores.

There is a small problem of what to do with male nurses. But still men can wear capes and look dashing with it. No, I suspect, as in so much else, we have been influenced by developments across the Pond. Dress has become more casual and we have casualised the so-called caring professions. Even the consultants have exchanged the top hat and morning dress in favour of the casual suit - some of the time at least.

The white collar-buttoning jacket I suppose was too restrictive. And always there was the danger of being confused with a chef, a waiter or an admiral in Mediterranean dress. There’s a restaurant in Brussels where all the waiters are dressed as admirals, complete with gold braid and epaulettes on their white coats. Very good waiters they are, too, who know what eating and serving food should be about.

But there was no-one to say all this to as I made my way down to the reception desk, clutching my card and fearful of the depredations about to be made to my bank account. One of the receptionists there has been there as long as I have been going to that practice and that’s more than thirty years. Amazingly, she hasn’t changed a bit in that time. Her classic almond face and beautiful hair have not aged by a day and she still wore the same neat dark navy suit.

I thought of saying that she must have discovered the secret of eternal youth. But as time has not been quite so forgiving to her colleague I thought better of it and simply smiled as I handed over my money and walked out into the morning sunshine.

A PREGNANCY OF POSSIBILITIES

Ever since meeting Rose Tremain by accident in the hospitality tent at the Hay Literary Festival and finding myself persistently engaged in a conversation that I had not sought to initiate, I have become an avid fan of her novels. I had at the time read 'Sacred Country' but because the publishers had not graced the cover with her picture I had no idea what she looked like and the person therefore who talked to me beneath the billowing folds of white taffeta that June day in the Welsh Marches did not let on that she was an author, or even that she came from Norfolk.

She certainly didn't look like an author - whatever authors look like - but then I suppose I don't look like whatever it is that I am either, come to that, and it isn't everyday that one sits sipping Cava waiting for a Minister who doesn't arrive. In fact the whole experience became so surreal that it might almost have come from one of her novels, which, I suspect, is maybe what occurred to her as well. Life imitating art.

I've just finished both 'Restoration'- which I think her finest book - and a radio play by her called 'Temporary Shelter,' an acted version of which we may well stage at our thespian AGM in a couple of weeks. I won't try to describe what 'Restoration' is about; for one thing I can't say I'm really sure. The novel is so inventive that when the main character - originally a fop by the name of Merivel - slips away at the end of the book you aren't quite sure whether he is dreaming (and if so whether he is awake or asleep); or in a delirium or whether in fact he is quite well and about to step forward into the pages of another book - each ending being a new beginning.

We leave him anyway with a place to visit and a sense of purpose and a young daughter called Margaret after the main character's mother. My mother too come to think of it, though neither of my daughters have inherited the name. And a horse called Danseuse, who pines.

In 'Temporary Shelter' the action takes place more than three hundred years later and on a campsite but the people haven't changed much. The main characters in both novel and play are ones who have been humbled by circumstance. In the first case the cause the humbling is by the King; in the play it occurs thanks to EC Farming regulations. But both are finding redemption in a new life, trying to make themselves useful and to recover their dignities.

In 'Temporary Shelter'- the play - the main character is called Larry and his wife is Marje. But a different, or reworked, or reformed Larry appears in another of Rose's novels written about the same time and called 'The Swimming Pool Season' which I would regard as perhaps her second finest book after 'Restoration' - but then it's a hard choice for all are most excellent and way better than most. All fizz with the same pyrotechnics of the imagination.

The Larry in the 'The Swimming Pool Season' is more philosophical, cultured, softer; he has fewer hard edges, he has less to learn. He, too, has been humbled, by business failure this time in the eponymous swimming pool trade. His wife is called Miriam and she paints, which is something, one feels that the other Larry's Marje would never do - or at least not while Larry was around to demand coffee or wine or soup. Marje would look at the stars, perhaps and like Merivel in 'Restoration' feel a subdued hankering to paint colour. Unlike Merivel, however, any resulting efforts would be simple and elusive.

The one Larry drives a Granada; the Larry in the play, salesman and ex-pig farmer Larry, drives a Cortina. There's a nice ranking of the characters for you. In neither case, one suspects were their wives consulted. Had Merivel had a car I suspect it would have been an Aston Martin. At least he would have saved money on oats. But then Merivel had no wife: or not one that would have been entirely comfortable with Miriam and Marje. She wasn't even comfortable with Merivel come to that.

And now Younger Daughter has delivered to me 'Trespass' - her (that is Rose's) latest novel with barbed wire across the cover. I heard some discussion about the book the other day. Rose herself may have been speaking. I am inclined to think she was. I believe the story is to do with some land dispute or heritage in a family; the ferocious laws of French inheritance. I will let you know. Between the hard covers lies a pregnancy of possibilities

WEIGHT-WISE I WISH I WERE IN MAMARONECK

There's someone I know who lives in the village of Mamaroneck in the suburbs of New York City, from where the train rushes you, in a steely clatter and in next to no time, to the great cathedral of Grand Central Station. Unlike the names of so many public buildings, this one is absolutely accurate. Grand Central Station, for anyone who has never been there, is grand, central and a station: it does what it says on the tin, as the advertisement has it. And it is a lovely place with a high domed ceiling covered in stars as though it were some eastern or renaissance monument.

Nevertheless there is a problem. Grand Central Station is not designed for tourists; it is strictly a utility. You are not supposed to have time to stand and stare, whether at the ceiling or the walls, or the offices or the throng of people going about their business. If you stop moving for a second people bump into you. As most of them are moving very fast, they bump into you quite hard and swear. Not nice. All the same, you don't 'make-it' in New York by standing still, you see.

Anyway, back to my friend and Mamaroneck: she has in her bathroom something very special. They are a pair of bathroom scales - ordinary looking old fashioned scales that don't need a battery and don't have a digital display. They don't look expensive and I think they are pink; some friendly but unmemorable colour anyway. The needle points to zero as you contemplate whether you dare step on to them, bloated and jet-lagged from too much to eat and too little sleep and your digestive system having anyway gone into lockdown mode, which in my case it always does whenever I venture further than the end of the road.

I'm not sure that others suffer this same design fault. My genes obviously reflect the time before carriages and railways were provided with 'conveniences' or 'rest rooms.' Provided I am travelling, my alimentary system decrees that nothing shall pass bar the days. Voyaging once as a student from London to Athens it took me a week to get as far as modern Serbia when something inside me rebelled and I had to seek urgent comfort in a field of cabbages.

But I digress, let's go back forty five years and, courtesy of Virgin Atlantic, reach Mamaroneck again, although, just quickly in passing, I have to say that I used to dream about New York long before I actually ever got there in person. The airline of choice then was PanAm with its blue and white logo.

And most comfortable it was too, though I remember waking from one of these dreams when I realised the plane had come to a halt and the engines had been switched off and there I was in New York City. My heart leapt in anticipation. But only for a moment. For then I realised that I was still in my pyjamas. Worse, I had no money or passport or luggage, or even any shoes. I stood on the ladder like some celebrity with the whole world looking at me in my Viyella pyjamas and there was me trying to smile a relaxed comfortable smile for the cameras while meanwhile calculating how I could persuade the stewardess to let me remain aboard and ferry me back again to London in time to catch the train to school.

But with Virgin Atlantic I did arrive and with shoes, luggage, passport and money. I took a bus towards the Connecticut sticks and eventually my friend picked me up from some hotel or country club and eventually again, I ate and slept and in the morning made my way to the bathroom, bloated and water-retained as I have said, where the pink scales awaited me.

On to them I wearily climbed, expecting the needle to shoot far past the comfort zone. But it didn't! Lo and behold I was four pounds lighter than I had been when I had set out. My heart leapt.

My hostess later spoiled the effect slightly by telling me that all her guests marveled at how they lost weight on those scales. But how comforting, how warming, how welcoming! How what you need after Christmas! My own digital scales are cruel and unforgiving. Weight-wise I wish I were in Mamaroneck.

MAGIC WAND

Here's a little story I wrote for a competition in the autumn. Needless to say it didn't win. So my loss is your gain as it were. Excuse the stories at the moment, real life just seems rather tedious and devoid of that facetious veneer that makes for interesting reading. Hope you like the story more.Happy New Year.

If you looked at Mary Holloway you would never think she was a witch. She seemed like a perfectly normal old lady. Her hair was grey, her face wrinkled - but she had kind blue eyes that twinkled and she always wore a pink cardigan and walked slowly with a long black walking stick with a carved handle in the shape of an otter. Ever since she had come to live in Middleton she had looked like this. She had always been helpful at the Harvest Festival and in baking cakes for the stall at the Women's Institute Market on Fridays. Everyone liked her.

She lived by herself in a little terraced house in the centre of town. True, no-one knew where she had come from, or who her family were; but she had lived so long in Middleton that nobody bothered to ask such questions any longer. True, also, that she had a black cat, but there must have been a hundred black cats in Middleton. She called it Fred, which wasn’t really the sort of name you might give to a witch’s cat, either. So, all in all, no-one suspected that she was a witch. But she was......

As the years went by Mary, sadly, grew frailer and frailer. She started to forget things. She could no longer remember who people were. She forgot their names. She would go shopping and forget what she had come out for. She would even forget whether she had had breakfast that morning.
Sometimes her friendly neighbour, Mrs Baker, would find her eating a second or even a third breakfast, for once Mary had eaten and then washed up and cleared away the things she couldn’t remember whether she had eaten or not.

Then one day Mary went shopping and Mrs Baker noticed, when she called around later that day, that she hadn’t returned home. She’d gone out in the morning and by tea-time there still wasn’t any sign of her. Mrs Baker began to be worried. “I’m going to call the police,” she said.

The police station agreed to send out a panda car to look for Mary Holloway. They looked in the shopping centre and they looked at the railway station and they looked on the buses and they asked lots of people. But they couldn’t find her and no-one remembered seeing her. Still they didn’t give up but went on looking.

At last they found her on a bench in the park, huddled in her pink cardigan. Mary was sitting with her head in her hands and she was crying. She’d been crying for quite some time. She had forgotten where she lived!

Well, after that, Mrs Baker had a quiet word with a Nice Woman that she knew who worked for the Council; the doctor was involved as well and he consulted a psychiatrist who came and asked Mary all sorts of difficult questions. At the end they all decided that it would be best if Mary left her little terraced house and moved somewhere called a ‘Home,’ where there would be friendly people to look after her and make sure that whenever she forgot something there would be someone close by to help.

Mary wasn’t quite sure whether she liked the sound of leaving her house.

There was only one problem: she wouldn’t be able to take Fred with her. Cats weren’t allowed in Homes, they said. And that’s when the trouble started.

“We’ll take Fred and find a lovely new home for him,” said the Nice Woman from the Council. “A new family will take care of him, feed him and look after him.”

But Mary would have none of it. She felt frightened at the thought of losing Fred (who had always looked after her even though he was only a cat), and because she was frightened and angry she started to wave her walking stick about her head. She also said some very bad things to the Nice Woman from the Council and used words which I’m afraid I can’t repeat in this story, words that nobody had ever heard her use before. The Nice Woman was shocked and felt very sad at this because she was really only trying to do her best for Mary and, of course, for Fred too. Mary might forget to feed him.

Then still waving her walking stick with the carved otter handle Mary began to shout strange things that the Nice Woman couldn’t understand and called to Fred who came up very close to Mary and wrapped himself around her frail old legs and then, all of a sudden, there was a big flash and a great puff of dirty smoke filled the room.

When it cleared, which took quite a few minutes, Mary saw that the Nice Woman from the Council had completely disappeared.

All she could see was the briefcase which the Nice Woman had carried (full of lots of papers and reports from the doctors) and the Nice Woman’s coat hanging over the back of her chair.

But where was the Nice Woman? Mary peered at the chair through her spectacles. Fred had also taken a sudden interest, too. For, on the chair, where the Nice Woman had been sitting a moment ago, Fred could now see a little dormouse.

“Oh dear!” said Mary.

Fred was about to spring on to the chair and if Mary hadn’t acted swiftly I think Fred would have caught the dormouse in his claws and eaten her all up and however then would Mary explain the situation to the doctor and the psychiatrist?

And not only the doctors! She imagined the whole Council, the Mayor and the Aldermen and all the Councillors in their robes and chains of office knocking on her door and demanding their Nice Woman back again. What was she to do?

The dormouse seemed quite tame, though it was chattering furiously and stamping its tiny feet as though it were quite vexed. Mary picked it up and put it in an empty shoebox for protection. Then she went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea and, in-between sips, she pondered her dilemma.

You see among the many things that Mary had forgotten was that she was a witch. True, she had only been a white witch: she had only done good; she’d been a kind of fairy godmother if you like. In her younger days she had woven all sorts of spells to help people in difficulties and especially to help children. She had never in her whole life done anything bad and certainly she had never turned anyone into a dormouse before.

That was the blackest of black magic and she knew that black magic was very, very wrong.

But sometimes when people get old not only do they forget things but they become changed and especially they become cross in a way in which they never would have dreamed of doing before. They forget the person they are; they forget their good manners, they forget even to be polite and kind. Not all the time, but just some of the time. When they are tired, for instance, or stressed or angry.

And this is what had happened to Mary. She had quite forgotten that she was not supposed to be a witch anymore, even a good witch. She had quite forgotten that she had handed in her pointed hat and her broomstick when she first came to Middleton thirty years ago. Since then she hadn’t cast a single spell.

But now, with all this upset and the doctors and the Nice Woman telling her she would have to leave her lovely home and that she wouldn’t see Mrs Baker anymore either and, above all, that Fred would have to go to some strange family, all of this had made her so angry, so angry, that she had forgotten she was not supposed to be a witch anymore. In her agitation she had whirled her walking stick about, quite overlooking how easy it is for sticks to become magic wands.

So suddenly there was no Nice Woman from the Council, but only a puff of smoke and a dormouse.

“Oh dear!” she thought. “That’s what comes of forgetting. Oh dearie me! Whatever can I do?”

Now spells can be reversed, but Mary had quite forgotten how to reverse spells. Nor did she have a single book on witchcraft to consult. And of course reversing spells is not something you can look up on the internet, even if you have a computer, which Mary sadly didn’t.

She began to cry into her cup of tea.

Fred tried to comfort her. He miaowed and he purred and he brushed his soft fur against her legs. And then she remembered that she hadn’t fed him!

That made her think of something else. Something was now coming back to her. What was it? Something about feeding the witch’s cat. Two lumps can transform a spell provided it is done quickly - yes, she remembered, it was something like that that.

Yes, but two lumps of what? Not sugar, surely? Cats didn’t like sugar. Two lumps - what did the memory mean by two lumps? Could it be two lumps of anything? Maybe.

She found the tin of cat food and carefully spooned out two distinct lumps of meat into Fred’s dish. She put the dish down and waited expectantly.

Fred circled the dish (as if the lumps of cat food were actually two dormice!) and he miaowed strangely and hissed. And then he pounced upon the food and began to gobble it all up!

And at that very moment, there came a cry from the sitting room; it was the voice of the Nice Woman from the Council.

“I must have fainted,” she said. “I came over all funny. I’m so, so sorry. Please, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, would you have such a thing as a cup of tea?”

Mary went back into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Fred had disappeared. “I wonder where he went,” she thought.

But just then came a knock at the door and it was Mrs Baker from next door. She was holding Fred in her arms and she’d come to give Mary some good news. So Mary made her a cup of tea as well.

When they were all sat down again Mrs Baker addressed herself to the Nice Woman from the Council. She said she had heard that they were proposing to put Mary into a Home for the elderly and how she would have to be parted from Fred.

Well, she and her husband, Mr Baker, had decided that it would be a better idea altogether if Mary moved next door to live with them and then Fred could come too and they could look after both of them and make sure that Mary didn’t forget anything anymore. And they’d make especially sure, she said, that Mary didn’t cook herself two breakfasts because she had forgotten that she’d already eaten the first one.

The Nice Woman from the Council listened carefully. And then she said that would be a Very Good Idea. Mary thought so too and thanked Mrs Baker and so everyone was happy.

And as for the spell and turning the Nice Woman into a dormouse, well, that will just have to be our secret, won’t it? Because Mary Holloway has quite forgotten that it ever occurred.

And no-one else ever knew, did they?

Picture which shows sections of a brain with Alzheimers and a healthy brain is courtesy of Wikipedia. If you like the story you might send a bob or two to the Alzheimers Society who one day might know the answer to what rots our brains like this.

HOW THE TUDORS CAME TO WALES

Someone posted some cruel pictures the other day of icicles hanging by a Northumbrian wall, just waiting to fall. Like vertical and down-pointing javelins. But they also seemed to look like the bars to a prison. Which triggered a sketch for a story.



"She was locked away for 1000 years by the ice queen, imprisoned in a cage made of icicles. There she waited for a handsome prince to breathe fire over the ice, to free her and melt her heart"

But if a prince wasn't up to it she'd be happy to settle for a dragon, which is what she did. A passing dragon, on a trade mission from Wales, spotted her entwined in her icicles and blew her a fiery kiss. The icicles melted and the princess was free at last.

But the ice queen was enraged at being tricked by the dragon. She summoned the prince (whose name was George) and told him to slay the dragon and she would make him patron saint of all England and give him a flag as well.

George, was flattered by this and accordingly gave battle; the dragon was sad at the prospect for he didn't like fighting that much; so was the princess, because she was becoming quite fond of the dragon and looking forward to living in Carmarthen where the dragon had a home. He told the princess that it had two doors and that if she came home and married him she would be a two door princess too and her sons would be two door princes and famous and would build lots of buildings with dragons on them to remind people how important dragons were.

But George had a long, sharp and pointy lance. And a horse. He pierced the dragon with his lance so his fiery breath came out of his side and not his mouth. The wound was very painful and so the dragon had to give up and crawl sadly away. George whisked the princess away and promised to marry her the next day. "This is worse than being in the ice castle" thought the princess and told George he really should at least take a shower.

That night it was very cold and snow tumbled out of the sky. The princess shivered. She was even colder than she'd been in the ice castle. Especially as her heart was frozen. And her bed had a lump in it.

The next day dawned. Sadly, she looked out of the window. Suddenly her heart leapt! For there in the sky she could see three dragons breathing fire, their wings beating and causing a great wind. The princess could feel the thaw when the dragons' fire swept over them and then everything froze once more. George rushed out of the Palace (it had lots of doors) and jumped on his horse. He grabbed his lance but in his hurry he had forgotten his helmet. In the Palace the princess could see that a long icicle had grown beneath her window. Now she hacked at it with a poker. She heard it crack and the icicle fell like an arrow. It fell and fell and went straight into the top of George's head. "I think he's dead!" said someone.

Hurrah! shouted the dragons. Hurrah! went the princess. One of the dragons came close to her window. She climbed on its back and they flew away over the border to Wales ('where there are no icicles,' said the dragon, 'and all the houses have two doors'.

And so they went in through one of them and lived happily ever after."