SO WHY NOT TURN CHRISTMAS ROUND?

'Tis the season to be jolly, as the old song has it.  Well, no, not really.  'Tis the season to be stressed would be more like it.  Still help is at hand for I hear the BBC has discovered a group of researchers who have carefully plotted the development of pre-Christmas stress and, most importantly, have calculated when it ends.  According to Radio 4, this is when the presents have been unwrapped and the dinner has been eaten: a time which occurs, so the researchers say, in the average household around five minutes to two o'clock on Christmas Day.

There is something in that precision, isn't there, that makes one instantly suspect that the researchers do not inhabit the same world as you or I?  I suppose there may be some super-efficient households in which everything is finished by five minutes to two; where the paper-hatted family falls contentedly into a stress-free sleep wearing their new slippers and smelling strongly of the less expensive offerings of the parfumiers (for I doubt those who finish their Christmas lunch at 1.55pm precisely, are in the habit of lashing out £241.95 for a 30ml bottle of Channel No 5), but I have never known any.

My own pre Christmas stress has been building up quite nicely as it happens and is now safely in the red area of intolerable pressure.   Somehow we have enjoyed five dinner parties in eight days, four of which have been given by ourselves involving considerable moving and rearranging of furniture and equipment.  The dishwasher and the cooker, both of about twenty years vintage, sigh almost audibly as they receive another load. Bless them!

As if this wasn't enough it has been Christmas card week and present ordering week and the week the car went in for its MoT.  It has been a week of thunder and hail and the week when the telephone crashed.  The car failed its test (it needs a new windscreen, the garage said helpfully) while the telephone needed, it turned out, a new junction box, the previous one having melted in the storm; both required me to be early on parade waiting for the requisite engineers to make a house call.   Meanwhile, our label customers have merrily been demanding ever more complicated jobs in ever shorter timescales 'before Christmas' so that we have been winding labels literally between the wineglasses and candlesticks.

With a week still to go I am nicely frazzled, with a sore tummy, and the irritating feeling of guilt you get when you receive a card from someone you have previously overlooked. There is still much to do: the car to be given another go at its MoT, and fourteen boxes to be shipped out in the direction of the sunny Seychelles. 

If the government wanted to do something useful it could employ me to give Christmas a makeover for the purpose of reducing stress levels in the population.  At the moment we all want to fit everything in 'before Christmas.'  That includes present buying, card posting, cake making, party giving, tree decorating, relative visiting and so on.  Everything has to be done at once and the result is the nation drowns in stress.  No wonder a sea of alcohol is required to survive the ordeal.

But then, after Christmas, nothing happens apart from the New Year hiccup.  Time is spare.  If only those empty hours could be moved into the 'before Christmas' slot.

So why not turn Christmas around? Recently, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas' have become ever more a reality.  So what if we moved Christmas back to the Feast of the Epiphany - from the first to the twelfth day of Christmas?  Christmas, the religious festival, could of course remain on 25 December, but 'The Big Day' would then be at the end of the holiday rather than at the beginning.  All the Christmas paraphernalia could be done in the holiday period itself thus ensuring that December's productivity and our collective sanity don't suffer as they usually do.

In our drama group it has become a tradition to celebrate Twelfth Night with some sort of festivity and a handsome frangipane Galette des Rois. This year the Rain or Shine Theatre Company are bringing their winter show Top Hats and Tinsel to Cowbridge.

The Twelfth Night tradition is one well worth reviving.  Interestingly I see in this week's Spectator magazine an article by Melanie MacDonagh recounting how women used to gather in the West of Ireland to celebrate the Epiphany with cakes and gossip in a celebration called Nollaig Beag - or Little Christmas.  These days though, she says, the custom is 'an opportunity for well-to-do urban women to meet up and drink in a hotel or a pub........a self-conscious kind of Celtic version of International Women's Day.'

Well - it's an excuse to bring out the Chanel I suppose, and it likes me better (to use a Shakespearean idiom) as a stress-buster than finishing the show by five minutes to two on Christmas Day.

A STORY FOR THEO - WATCH OUT FOR SEAL HOLES

A Seal Hole - with a Mole (I mean a Seal)

Christmas is coming. Our little grandson, Theo, came into the house yesterday and looked down the long hall into the sitting room where the newly decorated Christmas tree twinkled under a thousand and one lights and let out an excited 'Oooooooh'! His face lit up like a Christmas sparkler.

How wonderful to be not yet three and this  the first Christmas you remember.  something you really are seeing for the first time: trees and presents and candles and general festivity! He took the tree baubles in his hands, squeezing each gently.  I think he expected them to be balloons or tiny footballs.  Whatever was this wonder chez les grandfolk?

Still the excitement may have been too much for shortly afterwards he curled up in the big red armchair with his favourite soft toy - a Penguin.  The poor lad has not been terribly well, laid low by a bug, and has been hot and fretful with a hacking cough.  Yesterday he was better but exhausted.

So I sat with him on the arm of the chair and made up a story about Penguin, while he went in search of the land of nod.  As far as I remember it went like this. 

One wild Antarctic day, when the wind howled and the snow blew all around, Penguin was trudging home across the ice after a day’s fishing.  Slish, slosh, slish he went, for parts of the ice were melting.  Penguin hadn’t been very successful with his fishing: he’d fished all day and hadn’t caught a single herring for his tea.  He was sure to be scolded when he returned home. But the fact was that the herring were becoming fewer and fewer and the ones that remained had all grown devilish shy.
 
So his creel was empty, poor Penguin, at least empty of fish.  For with his fishing net (which all clever Penguins carry in their fur) he had caught some shrimpy little things, which can be quite delicious, but which are not the sort of thing to fill up a family on a cold, damp and windy evening.

Anyway, there he was, splish sploshing along through the snow and the ice and looking up at the sky and wondering whether he might have better luck tomorrow when suddenly, CRASH! and Gurgle! and Bbbb-otheration! He found himself up to his armpits (or rather his flipperpits) in seawater.  He had fallen into a seal hole. 

If I had been a rabbit, he thought to himself crossly as he struggled to crawl out of the water, I might have tripped over a molehill.  Moles and seals both travel around under the ground, though out on the ice, there isn’t any ground, if you follow me, and the seals have to make do with water.  But like moles they like to pop up now and again to take a good breath of fresh air.  So seals make holes in the ice into which respectable folk, minding their own business and not looking too closely where they are going, occasionally fall.  Bother! thought the Penguin again as he splashed water from his feathers.

He started again to waddle wearily homewards, looking down in case another seal hole should leap out at him unexpectedly, when he heard a cry behind him.  It was his friend William, who had also been fishing out on the ice. 

When Penguin turned around he saw that William was waving to him.  “Watch out for the seal hole!” Penguin cried.

   “What seal hole?” answered William.  But it was too late. There came a loud splosh and William’s dumpy little body disappeared from view.

    Penguin ran back to the seal hole just as fast as his little legs would carry him. He grabbed hold of William’s flippers and pulled and pulled, but William seemed quite stuck. Then suddenly, ‘pop!’ William shot out of the hole like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

    But what was this?  William was covered in fish!  There were fish in his creel, fish in his clothes, fish in his boots (William always wore thick waterproof boots). No wonder Penguin could hardly pull him out of the hole!  When he fell in he must have landed smack in the middle of a shoal of herring and when Penguin pulled him out the fish must have got trapped around him. Wasn’t that lucky?

    So to thank Penguin for saving him and rescuing him from the seal hole, William said Penguin could have some of the herring.  In fact there were more than enough fish for the two of them so in return Penguin gave William some of the little shrimpy like things, for Penguin always believed in sharing, and the two friends then walked home across the ice to the shelter of the mountain, singing fishing sort of songs and telling stories and meanwhile, KEEPING A GOOD LOOK OUT FOR SEAL HOLES!

(The photograph of the seal by the hole is from dougs-antartic-adventure.blogspot.com  via Google's Images for Seal Holes.  Use is acknowledged with thanks).

YES, BUT WHY REINDEER?

My good friend Frances, who hails from New York and often comments on this blog, regularly posts beautifully illustrated accounts of the great parades that march through that city.  These mark this national day, or that liberation or so and so's hard won rights.

In our little town this side of the Pond our parading is more limited. We don't have a Mardi Gras or a Carnival.  Britain lacks an independence day or a liberation day (never having been either dependent or liberated) and we probably think we have enough civil rights to be going along with.  Neither are we terribly diverse either ethnically or sexually or any other 'lly,' and in any case we are a pretty tolerant bunch; at least we like to think we are.

While our parading may thus be limited it isn't non-existent.  Each year at the end of November we hold the Reindeer Parade when Father Christmas, regaled in splendour in a four-wheeled sled, is pulled through the town by reindeer, showering, over all the children en route, largesse to be delivered on Christmas Eve via parental intervention, or so one hopes.  The scarlet gentleman is accompanied by a great flock of elves and pixies of varying ages and variously convincing appearance.  Brass bands of uncertain proficiency accompany the ensemble and the reindeer plod in a rather half-hearted manner from one end of the town to the other and back again, with everyone following in their wake.

The reindeer, in case you were wondering, are shipped all the way from Scotland at great expense and return to their farm after the event.  I don't know about you but I have always thought reindeer singularly unprepossessing animals.  They have a moth-eaten and downtrodden appearance, as if they know that their sole purpose in life is to be eaten by wolves.  Joie de vivre is a feeling quite unknown to them.

Moreover, they are actually much smaller than one imagines they should be and I think this lack of physicality must be a tremendous disappointment to children used to seeing cartoons of magnificent beasts the size of carthorses with noses flashing like a demented fire alarm.

Which makes me wonder who it was that decided that St Nicholas, or Santa Claus, should use these - of all creatures - as a propulsive force.  Horses would be much more energetic and, of course, considerably more visual.  Somehow I think the reindeer got the part without auditioning.

For instance, if you are beguiled by the thought of an animal from the cold snowy wastes, how about the moose?  With a little imagination you could visualise a gift-laden sled pulled through the sky by a giant moose whose antlers flapped like Dumbo's ears.  Indeed elephants might be even more majestic and you'd think,  now that the world's population had reach nine billion,  Santa could use some extra traction.  Or, to revert to the North Pole again and being ecological at the same time, a couple of polar bears would be most impressive with red scarves around their necks.

But Reindeer!  Well - fine for trudging through the snow and living on moss and providing hides for moccasins and tents - even acceptable for the occasional dish of stringy stew - but for racing across the heavens with names like Donner and Blitzen, surely not.  Reindeer are just not cut out for the part, I'm sorry.

Still, there we are.  Like it or not reindeer have cornered the Santa sled pulling market and are not about to be displaced, despite the generations of disappointed children whom I am absolutely sure would far prefer polar bears and elephants. (In fact left to themselves children would invent a far superior myth in which there were a whole family of Santas - one for each continent maybe - with superhero vehicles - why would you want a sled in Africa? - pulled by a whole zoological garden of different creatures).

Anyway we have digressed as we usually do.  The Reindeer came to Cowbridge last Sunday with Santa in tow and into the town flocked thousands upon thousands of people.  Cars were parked up to a mile out of town. In every roadway a steady stream of buggies, babies, Mums, Dads and excited children streamed down the hillsides into the valley bottom in the hope of seeing the reindeer and receiving a species of papal blessing from the man in the scarlet coat and a chance to remind him to bring the Nintendo rather than the X Box - if that wouldn't be too much of a bother - and please could an elf be sure to take out a pencil and write down the request to avoid bringing the wrong thing as happened last year which meant that Mummy and Daddy had to take Santa's present back to a shop and try to exchange it all at great expense.

Our little town houses about 5,000 souls.  Adding a further 25,000 and, what's more,  cramming them into the centre creates something that is a cross between a rugby scrum and the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, Frances, you will excuse me if I say I didn't attend this year's parade.  Instead I walked away from town and up to the Tump, there on a sunny morning to contemplate the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond.  I was quite alone with my visions of Moose and Elephants, Horses and Polar Bears and the parade they made in my mind was infinitely superior to the one below.

Then I had a very fine lunch in Loch Fyne's restaurant with theatre friends and forgot, thankfully, all about the reindeer, while the 25,000 and, we hope, their satisfied children, trudged up the hill back to their cars. 

(The picture showing Santa, a couple of bemused children, an Elf and an Elfette and, if you look very closely, a sprig of reindeer horn (I told you they were unprepossessing) is courtesy of the website of our very fine local paper, the Cowbridge Gem, which, if you Google it, will tell you all practical details about the parade and why it is counted such a success).

A BOBBLE FOR CHRISTMAS

A similar Bobble.  You'll have to imagine this in orange

We are a month away from Christmas.  I know this because various members of the family start whispering about whether you have any ideas about what ‘x’ would like to find in their stocking, which leads inevitably on to what you would like to find in your stocking.  I am hopeless at answering.  What I would really like is either ridiculously expensive or completely inappropriate, or probably both.  Otherwise my wants are small, at least in the present department.

Some people are instinctive present choosers.  Without a great deal of thought or effort they go into a shop and buy a present both useful and a surprise.  Probably inexpensive as well for which, I think, you should get bonus points.  Any fool can be a success at present buying if money is no object.

My eldest sister is one such person.  She once bought me a woollen bobble hat - she was living in Shetland at the time - and the hat, though improbably knitted in orange and brown, was clearly modelled on the hats worn by the local fishermen and fitted snugly around the ears.  It was crowned with a large orange bobble and I remember it also had a flap around the base which could be pulled down during a severe inclemency so that the hat would cover everything north of the mouth. 

That it then covered the eyes would not have mattered.  You can’t really see anything anyway in a Shetland gale; it is hard enough to stand up, all you can do is to cower against the elemental forces of nature. Anyway, your hat wouldn’t blow away.

Living then as I did in the docile atmosphere of the home counties I was still glad to own such a garment and wore it almost daily.  In that game you play if you can’t sleep, where you rank your chattels in order so that if ever your house catches fire you know what to take first, it found a high place.

The hat wore out, of course,  as all things do.  The first casualty was the bobble. Mind you, I wasn’t sorry for I thought the bobble an unnecessary frivolity, particularly when coloured orange.  I suppose it might have been useful had I been engulfed by an avalanche, but that wasn't likely in Essex.

Minus bobble, the hat went on for a very long time before finally succumbing to moths.  I have a new one now but this doesn’t quite match the practicality of the old hand-knitted version.  It is also a light grey, which, while a tad less disreputable, is an unfortunate colour in the event of an avalanche.

Someone else once gave me a pair of Timberland gloves, fleece lined on the inside, tough without ever being bulky and made of leather,  soft as a second skin.  The sort of gloves that pilots used in the days before cockpit heating and when the dress code called for sheepskin jackets.  They, too, were a most effective present and worn till they fell apart.

But to revert to the pilots a moment.  Now that I come to think of it, I have never seen a pilot wearing  insulated headgear.  Why? You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that a pilot in a very cold plane (I am talking of fifty, even a hundred years ago) might need to wear something warm as a bearskin?

Yet if I remember correctly from those early films such as the one of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic with his plane covered in ice, he wore no headgear at all, or just perhaps a leather helmet.  I’m sure a bobble hat would have been useful.

When did Lindbergh fly from New York to Paris? Was it 1929? Or 1927? Or 1925?  It is the sort of question that might well have cropped up at the Great Annual Rotary Quiz that took place in the Town Hall here last Saturday and to which le tout Cowbridge turns out.  The questions this year were harder than last and were full of such silly forced-choice questions which do not suit my mental mechanics at all.  CADS - our drama society - usually put in two teams. Last year we came fourth.  This year we came tenth, equal with the other CADS team.  Actors don’t like forced choices, you see. 

Still the annual late November quiz reminds you that Christmas is on its way and to turn your attention to serious present buying.  If in doubt I can recommend a hand-knitted bobble hat from Shetland and a pair of soft Timberland gloves, regardless of whether you are buying for old or young, male or female, town or country mouse.  You may be thought an old miser but you will have the satisfaction of knowing that the object of your affection will be warm this winter and probably safe in an avalanche as well.

(The picture shows a Shetland type Bobble Hat made by Barbour, courtesy of Sadler and Co.  For those desperate to know Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis in 1927.)

SAUSAGES, GREEN CHEESE AND THE BIG BANG

A simulated detection of the Higgs Boson particle

The moon, we learn, is made of green cheese - though what ‘green cheese’ might be is somehow never explained.  I suppose it is cheese that is green, but you never know.  Chinese seaweed is not seaweed at all but a kind of cabbage, or so they tell me, so green cheese might be a kind of rock.  But that aside what is everything else made of? 

When we stay at the Mill, down in the Auvergne,  it gets dark at night.  Proper dark.  Can’t see your hand in front of your face dark.  But look up and what you see are uncountable stars stretching in a dimly glowing carpet from one side of the heavens to the other.  Millions upon billions of tiny pricks of light. 

And in this vast uncountable universe what we can see is multiplied a million fold by what we can’t:  those stars in galaxies and nebulae that have travelled already too far and whose light no longer reaches us and whose presence can only be detected by radio beams.

Yet this vastness of stars and galaxies and planets and rocks represents less than one part in two- hundred-and-fifty of what is in the universe.  If, like the moon, everything we can see is made of green cheese, then that represents only what is left out upon the counter.  There remains a whole greater kitchen of comestibles locked away out of sight in cupboards and pantries.

Dark matter makes up three-quarters of the universe and dark energy a further quarter.  What are these two behemoths which take up whole store-cupboards of space?  Well, that is at least as good a question as the one about the green cheese, for no-one seems to know.  We know dark matter exists and roughly where it is, but we don’t yet know what it is. For all I know it may be made of green cheese too.  Or even blue, yellow or purple cheese.

The man who prompted these sudden reflections is Lyn Evans, who hails from just up the road in Aberdare in South Wales and is billed as the builder of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN just outside Geneva. Possibly you may have heard of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for it has been much in the news.  It is a giant circular tunnel 27 kilometres long through which sub-atomic particles are accelerated with the aid of magnets to impossible speeds and then crashed into each other in the hope that they will break apart and so we shall be able to learn more about what you and I (and the green cheese) are made of.

Lyn Evans was giving the Anniversary Lecture at the Welsh Centre of International Affairs in Cardiff this week.  He spoke in a listed pseudo-Egyptian monstrosity of a building known as the Temple of Peace and Health that boasts some of the worst acoustics in the world.  Still, what he was saying was so fascinating that you could have heard a pin drop in the auditorium.

We are not made, he told us, of sugar and spice and all things nice, but of a whole family of creatures, fabulous as unicorns, fantastical as griffins with names like gluons, muons, quarks, hadrons, neutrons, photons, variously possessing mass, energy or electrical charge and sometimes none of these at all.  Out of such energised and vibrating soup come the paintings of Leonardo, the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Mozart.

One particle however is missing: the Higgs Boson particle. Like the dark matter (or perhaps the green cheese) we know - or we think we know - it exists and that without it all the gluons and muons and photons and quarks would simply fall apart.  It has been called the ‘God’ particle because without it there could be no matter or any living thing created. Yet like God himself no-one has yet found it.  The scientists have trod the path to Mount Olympus only to find Zeus and his tribe departed.

Hence the need to build this 27 kilometre tunnel and to collide hadrons in the hope that after the bang of the collisions scientists will be able to find Higgs Boson particles among the wreckage standing by the roadside, as it were, and scratching their heads.

What Lyn Evans will do then he didn’t say.  Presumably the things will be weighed and measured and then - because we have to return whence we started to the discussion of what the universe is made of - then the boffins can get to work again on how it all began: how exactly the Big Bang.....er....banged, all that time ago.

Rather disappointingly he didn’t touch on what happened before the Big Bang - which has always seemed to me the more important question.  Something surely must have been frying in the pan before ‘sizzle, sizzle, sizzle, one went ‘bang.’’   Was our Big Bang a unique event?  Oh dear - you’ve got me worried now.

CLAZZAKIN'S CARPET

Clazzakin's Carpet

Thanks to all the good folk who sent welcome and heartfelt wishes last week for my recovery. I am mended I am glad to say and no longer feel as though your man with the scythe is out there in the vicinity searching for my address.  I have given up reading articles on medical catastrophes and am back in the land of the hale and the hearty, though my knees, inexplicably,  have begun to hurt and I am sure a hypochondriac must be able to make something of that.

Despite those of you who urged me to abstain from whisky or aspirin, and certainly from both at the same time, I have to say that this combination seems about the most effective remedy known to medical science.  Of course, I don’t take much of either.  A glass, or at the very most two modest glasses,  of whisky and then with water and no more than a couple of dispersible aspirin - and the aspirin before the whisky - is all it needs to feel well again, for a few hours at least.

It doesn’t help however to find yourself as I did last weekend being invited to lunch and dinner parties on the same day by generous friends with restricted calendars when I didn’t feel like eating very much more than some light scrambled egg on toast.  Especially aggravating as well when I am trying to lose some of the pounds that I added on holiday before Christmas and the New Year put them back on again.  We have an invitation to spend New Year in France, which, if the past is anything to go by, will mean a splendid party of oysters and champagne and pretty much non stop eating from seven until eleven.

Over Christmas it will be my turn to provide the grub for family and various guests who won’t be content, either, with scrambled egg.  I’ve just been given what sounds a magnificent recipe for a soup called Pho by a blogging friend who lives in Seattle.  A beef broth with slices of beef and spiced up with ginger and cinnamon and chilies. Onions and other vegetables come into it too. I might well try it on them; I’m intrigued by the name ‘Pho.’

By Christmas, too, I hope to have finished and printed a children’s story that presently goes under the working title of Clazzakin’s Carpet.  It is a story about flying carpets and where they come from (Persia); and why they fly and what they carry on them when they do (Persian cats - obviously - but not Kings or Camels); and one little girl’s effort to make her grandmother’s carpet take to the air.

The story has been superbly illustrated by another blogging friend and I am now putting it together in the software offered by the people at BLURB, who will print the book and in colour too.  But the job of fitting illustrations and text together and assembling both within page borders; of getting the paragraphing and spacing correct is both tedious and time-consuming. It is work that must go on for every illustrated book that is ‘designed,’ but which few of us, I suspect, ever think about. Writing the story is infinitely easier and in future I think I shall stick to that.

Another friend emailed this week inviting me to a talk by a clerical gentleman who gives spiritual advice to various official bodies In Wales and whom I have met on other occasions. The talk -  or rather sermon for such it was - unfolded in the town's magnificently restored early nineteenth century Baptist Chapel into which previously I had never set foot.  A most beautiful building full of theatrical potential with its boxed pews and balconies.  ‘We are all migrants,’ he said soulfully, his hands clasped together, ‘though some of us are more recent than others.’  True enough, though whether the sentiment helps the price of eggs, I know not.

I don’t normally attend sermons in chapels (indeed, this was a lifetime first)  but such events are all part of life’s rich tapestry and my presence there might even have given me valuable Karma points in the event that my present feeling of well-being proves no more than a remission.  Pascal’s bet and all that.

Which French philosopher reminds me that last night I saw ‘Midnight in Paris’ - a most wonderful film about a young American in Paris with a nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia becomes reality when he travels in a 1920’s Peugeot ninety years back in time to meet Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter and Gertrude Stein (among others). About as believable, of course, as flying carpets, but hugely enjoyable.  Philosophic too, and very funny.  I’ve always enjoyed Woody Allen.

GRIM REAPING

I have been pretty much ill all week with one of those sicknesses that come on so gradually so you don’t realise that you are ill at all, until you start to feel better.  I blame the aeroplane on which we flew back from Rodez after our visit to Le Moulin du Clout two weeks ago.  They are always full of bugs which incubate for a week or ten days before breaking out into something international.

I begin to know that I am ill when half way through my afternoon's work I feel a compelling urge to pour a glass of whisky and perhaps take a couple of aspirin for good measure.  That makes me feel better in the short and the long term but not in the medium term for the whisky (and aspirin too) ravage my febrile stomach and liver which is ‘le point faible’ of my anatomy and the place for which any bugs that may be circulating head directly and without passing ‘go.’

In this state therefore of more or less perpetual indigestion and general wretchedness, I happened a day or two ago to read an article on the cheerful subject of pancreatic cancer, much in the news recently as the slayer of poor Steve Jobs on the keyboard of one of whose beautiful products I am even now typing .

Apparently, if you get pancreatic cancer, there isn’t much that can be done and you had better start putting your affairs in order and not embark on any long books.  The trouble is that you don’t know that you’ve got it - because the symptoms aren’t obvious - until it has got too much of a hold for anything worthwhile to be done.  This is clear from the survival rates which haven’t improved at all over the years.  The good news is that it is a rare form of cancer and makes up only 3 per cent of all cancers. Statistics are on your side, even though they didn’t help Mr Jobs.

As it happens my dear Mother died of pancreatic cancer.  I was going to write ‘dear old,’ but she wasn’t old at all, being only 54 when she died.  According to the article this isn’t helpful to her offspring for the disease runs in families.  This constituted, said the article, one formal indicator that I, too, might succumb.  It then listed five further indicators: to my horror three of these five might well be said to apply to me.  Oh dear! 

Which is why, of course, if you are a hypochondriac like yours truly, you shouldn’t read about these things as you only end up depressing yourself.   Fortunately, while you can’t do anything about your family, most of the other warning indicators can be avoided or corrected by living and eating in a sensible way and in my case not eating foods and drinking liquids that irritate the nether regions, wonderful though the taste and effect of a glass or two of cold white wine may be on a summer’s day - though surely, I tell myself, one must be able to make the occasional exception - otherwise one simply gives up on life. 

In any case, I remind myself, what really did for Mama was not pancreatic cancer out of the blue but a cancer that just happened to be looking for a home and chose the pancreas faute de mieux.  For unhappy reasons, best known to herself, she developed in the later stages of her life a powerful addiction to alcohol, tobacco, strong coffee and Alka-Seltzer, together with a powerful resistance to exercise and looking after herself.   Living with a ferocious and belligerent Siamese cat called Ohio (one half of Baltimore and Ohio - she had an absurd tendency to name her cats after American Railroads) didn’t help either. 

Nor did the Grim Reaper have to wait too long on the doorstep. In fact she was sitting up in bed, quite merrily, smoking a cigarette only half an hour before she died, leaving me and most of her family half a day’s journey short of wishing her well. 

Still, in the midst of death we are in life, for it is confidently reported that young Theo has a sibling on the way.  Just as he was Topaz before he arrived, so the parcel in the post, as it were, has been called variously Peanut and Butterbean.  Maybe it will turn out to be twins, though I suspect in these days of acute medical advance that we should have known were that to be so.  Grandparents can’t obtain contraception against grandchildren, can they?  Or some other form of home protection and sanity insurance?