FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

I was in France at New Year and,  thanks to the foul weather that made walking almost impossible, found that I had spare time on my hands; so  I wrote a short and romantic story to send off to the Choc-Lit short story competition where they were soliciting stories in which chocolate featured as a central theme. 

I came to know a little about Choc-Lit from Chris Stovell whose compelling debut novel Turning the Tide they published last year.  Choc-Lit writers also publish an Authors Corner blog in which they talk, sometimes about their books and sometimes about other entertaining matters of relevance.

In another life, Chris may have been a sheep dog, for she has been assiduous in rounding up her friends and pointing them in the direction of the Author's Corner, encouraging them to leave comments.  Being of a sheep like disposition I dutifully responded to her instructions and, in what seemed an eye blink, found that a comment I had left (about mice, as it turned out) had won me a book.

If I could win a book for a comment then who knows what I might win for a short romantic New Year story about a lugubrious Russian, (I think it right to stress the 'might' for I have never ever had any success with such competitions, but they are fun to enter all the same), with a practical fondness for chocolate.

The lugubrious Russian in my story was not the person in the picture, though he might well have possessed similar good looks;  I am sure anyway that Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, the great Russian poet, whose picture* it is, wouldn't really mind.  He is quite handsome after all, don't you think? (and the story is a romantic one), though if it were left to me I should be inclined to advise him to shave the whiskers.  Anyway they like sharing pictures of handsome young men on the Choc-Lit blog to whom I offer the image if ever there should be a lack of hot talent from the present era.

As well as being handsome Pushkin was a romantic.  Indeed, he becomes even more romantic when you know that he was fiercely addicted to duels. For he was both a duellist and a poet.  I put the duellist first because he almost fought more duels - twenty-nine in all - than he wrote poems.  Most of the time he was lucky (I daresay he was a very good duellist) but one hundred and seventy five years ago - almost to this very day (10 February 1837 to be precise) - his luck deserted him and he was killed by the French officer he had challenged, leaving literature bereft because, if he was a good duellist, then he was certainly an even better poet and writing the poems and plays and novels which he turned out seemingly without effort from his St Petersburg desk is a more rewarding activity than duelling (and getting yourself killed). 

As a teenager I was as lugubrious and full of depression as the Russian in my story, wrote a deal of very bad abstract poetry and consoled myself by reading the great Russian authors - Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the like.  Then, when we were told that we could only spend two thirds of our school time studying for 'A' Levels and we had to spend the rest being 'educated,' I opted for a Russian class.  They threw us in at the deep end and we found ourselves translating, before even mastering the Cyrillic alphabet, Pushkin's famous poem that begins 'I Loved You.'

                I loved you; even now I must confess,

                       Some embers of my love their fire retain;

                       But do not let it cause you more distress,

                      I do not want to sadden you again.

                     Hopeless and tongue-tied, yet I loved you dearly

                    With pangs the jealous and the timid only know;

                     So tenderly I love you, so sincerely,

                   I pray God grant another love you so.

I regret I do not know who translated this; certainly it wasn't me for I stumbled badly in that class and left it after a term, thinking that Russians were much better when rendered in English by competent persons.  But I went on loving this poem and keeping a nostalgic and romantic perspective on nineteenth century Russia, reinforced, of course, just at the time when it might have been waning by the absurdly romantic film of  Dr Zhivago.

I happened to be in Germany when that film came out and watched it, dubbed into German, in Hannover.  Then I caught a train that rumbled across Europe to catch a midnight boat from Calais, disgorging its weary and sleep deprived passengers on to the Victoria station concourse early the following morning. I breakfasted with someone I had met on the train and as Dr Zhivago was playing opposite the station and both of us had a few hours to kill, saw the film again.  It all seemed remarkably romantic at the time. 

*The picture of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin painted by Vasily Tropinin is courtesy of Wikipedia.

BEG PARDON?

My hearing is deteriorating. I can no longer hear the telephone ringing in another room; and I miss a lot of dialogue from the TV or radio. I suspect I need a hearing aid.  So I rang the surgery for a referral to the hearing clinic.  The woman I spoke to asked whether I had had my ears syringed.  I said ‘no,’  She said that if I were to be kind enough to drop olive oil into my ears for a week she would make an appointment with the nurse for next Wednesday.

 Well, after a week of dripping oil into my ears (sometimes the oil seemed to be running in one ear and out the other) I thought that, just possibly, my hearing was improving, but not by very much, and so I went along at half past two to see Nurse Harji in Consulting Room 6.  Nurse Harji smiled broadly and sat me down and then, with the medical instrument that you use for peering into ears, looked first into the one and then into the other. I had expected she would tell me they were full of oil, or maybe fluff, certainly full of wax,  but after some careful looking she said she couldn't see any wax at all and  concluded therefore that I didn't need any syringing, which was all a bit of a let down as I had steeled myself for the operation.

As it seemed we now had time on our hands she asked me if she might take my blood pressure about which I was dubious. My blood pressure is at best disobliging and has a habit of rocketing unexpectedly. But on this occasion all was well - indeed super well. One hundred and fifteen over eighty, she told me; and I said it hadn't been that low since I had been a carefree travelling student and had given blood for the princely sum of £25 at a clinic in Athens in 1966.

Nevertheless, she thought I should see the doctor anyway who could advise whether I should be referred to the hearing clinic for assessment and possible fitting of a digital hearing device. No appointments today, she regretted, looking at her computer screen, but there would be one tomorrow at four thirty. 'I am sorry to have to ask you to come back,' she said, apologetically.  I said not to worry, that tomorrow at four thirty would suit just fine, so she wrote me a card and then dismissed me with a kind, caring and professional smile.

So back I went to the surgery the next day,  five deferential minutes early and I sat and waited and as I waited picked up  Good Housekeeping (February 2011 edition).  We must be an honest lot down here for this edition, despite being a year old, still had all its freebies intact. There was some fetching lotion or other in a little sachet glued inside - I think it was just plain body milk, but anyway it had a fancy name - and I wondered whether I might be entitled - as compensation for the wait which was fast becoming prolonged - to remove it.  In the end I decided that I wasn't and didn't, but afterwards felt a little disappointed with myself for being timid. 

There's a  telescreen in the waiting area which summons patients to their doctors and in between broadcasts health ‘advice’ to  the halt, the sick and the lame waiting for their appointments. Advice about falls seemed to figure prominently on the endless loop (which seemed to have some kink in it for parts of the message played upside down). 'Wear sensible shoes,' the telescreen advised. 'Eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day' it beseeched,  which made me want to ask: do nuts count? The screen said nothing about nuts and of course you can't ask it a question.

At last, after three-quarters of an hour, I got to see my lovely doctor looking much as though she could use a well-made gin and tonic.  I told her that maybe the olive oil was working for the previous night I had managed to hear, and more or less understand, an episode of Midsomer Murders (or at least half an episode, for a whole episode might have damaged my sanity, what with headless horsewomen and folk colliding with tree trunks and gargoyles) and with the TV at normal volume.

She then peered into my ears and said that nurse Harji had been quite right and my ears were indeed devoid of wax. "But what I think we ought to do", she continued quickly in a loud voice, just in case I had other ideas, is to discount the temporary amelioration that you report "and send you for a Hearing Assessment." And with that she typed a word or two into the keyboard and then asked in a determined and a 'can't you see what the time is' sort of voice, whether there was anything else she might do for me. There wasn't. Or at least we should have been there until midnight if we had started on the details of my crumbling organs.

And so we said goodbye and I went out into the freezing cold and found that my sugar levels had in the meantime dropped to zero and that I had to purchase digestive biscuits in order to fuel myself for the gentle climb up the hill to home.  Now that I remember it, one of the Good Housekeeping articles suggested you should always keep a tin of almonds in your handbag to avert just such problem. So maybe there was some sense in the magazine after all, almonds I am sure being better for you than digestive biscuits even though I am still no wiser as to whether they count towards your five a day. I should have asked, I suppose. Anyway, I still think I should have purloined the sachet of body milk.

MAGIC OF SHAKESPEARE

James Reynard and Claire Tucker

Leafing through the paper the other day I found an interesting graph showing how the country's economic growth has risen and fallen over the last few years.  It bears no relation whatsoever to what has happened in our business apart from the fact that the general trend in both cases is in a southerly direction.  This month in particular has been slow, the sort of 'feathers through treacle' slowness that makes you think seriously of staying under the duvet with the coverlet pulled firmly about your ears. Orders have slowed to a trickle and you wonder whether you are still going to be here a year from now. Then on Friday the cheering news of a large order from the Library Service of one of the bigger London Boroughs.

From a brief perusal of recent newspaper headlines you might be forgiven for thinking that there weren't any libraries left, certainly in places like London, or if there were some left then certainly that they wouldn't have any money; and if by some fluke they did have some money then it would be reserved for some core project rather than additional supplies of labels.  But of course you would be wrong and this order was proof.  Along with a couple of other orders that emerged like beetles from the woodwork, the month ended on a somewhat happier note.

Now, you might be enquiring which London Borough this might be in case they happened to be in the market for your goods and services too.  Well, I am not at liberty to say but I shall give you a clue (which of course might be wrong for boundaries change over time) but I think it was the same borough that once housed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.  If this seems a recondite sort of a clue, then I admit it is, but along with the febrile state of the British economy Shakespeare has been much on my mind this week.

You see it was our little theatre group's AGM on Friday and I had invited a couple of actors (James and Claire - see above) to try out an adult version of a show they have developed to introduce Shakespeare to children, called The Magic of Shakespeare. As they had to travel all the way from Gloucester, and were partly doing us a favour,  a suitably sized audience to show our appreciation was indeed required.  But for a variety of reasons - some possibly economic - I was beginning to worry that we should not have one.

Friends that usually come along to our shows wrung their hands and said that they couldn't come along to this one.  Excuse followed on excuse and apology on apology.  I wasn't even sure we'd have more than the apocryphal two men and a dog turning up to the AGM.  Even our esteemed Chairman found that he had to attend a wedding in Inverness.  The Secretary and Patron Secretary also sent apologies.  Regulars regretted that this or that had intervened. I was biting my nails.

But in the event something turned up and it was a respectable audience.  My fears went thankfully unrealised,  as fears so often do. The show proceeded and most excellent it was too.  And educational to boot.   I learned, for instance - because this was an 'introduction' to Shakespeare's work - that the Globe Theatre had no lighting.  That sounds obvious - of course the Elizabethans had no stage lights, they had no electricity; the best they could do would have been the occasional candle, or perhaps a couple of burning brands.   So plays took place mostly in broad daylight.

Yet many of Shakespeare's best known scenes take place 'in the foul womb of night' and if you read those lines closely you will learn that Shakespeare tells you (and then tells you again in case you might have been asleep) that a scene is occurring in darkness.  Take, for instance, the famous balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, the word 'night' occurs fourteen times - just in case, in the sunshine of the Globe Theatre,  you might be tempted to think it was day. 

So the AGM and the show passed felicitously and afterwards we had some champagne because the two actors, James and Claire, who wrote and presented the Magic of Shakespeare,  recently became engaged and are to be married in April, perhaps even on Shakespeare's birthday, and it just so happened that it was also the 53rd wedding anniversary of Rosie and Jim.  So we all had a little theatre supper and a few bubbles to celebrate, and a happy time was had by all.

LA BONNE ANNEE

Annie and M, who were our kind hosts for New Year when we visited Tharon Plage, came over yesterday evening. For dinner, yes, but principally to watch the Claude Lelouch film La Bonne Année, which dates from 1973 and is one of my favourite films.  (Poor Lelouch, he always gets panned by the critics but I think his films are inventive, memorable and fun - sheer entertainment, which is what I go to the cinema for).  Anyway at Tharon - over New Year - (the title of the film - La Bonne Année means - literally - The Happy New Year) we sat down to watch the film but the DVD player expired after the first five minutes.  Hence, my offer to show the film on our DVD player at a suitable time when we got home again.   Which occasion was last night.

And very good it was to see the old film (which hasn't much dated) with its blend of comedy, romance and philosophy. Question: 'what is a woman?' she asks. 'A man that cries a little,' he replies.  Later she asks him what a man is and he replies that a man is someone who goes right to the end. Which may or may not advance the price of eggs but is interesting and makes you think.  The film is about a jewel robbery, incidentally, in the south of France and it stars Lino Ventura and Francoise Fabian. 

Having written last week about the chocolate mousse that Mireille Guiliano recommends I thought I would try making it.  And so I did. But something went wrong with my beating of the egg white, which refused to stiffen, I suspect because I got cream on the beaters so the mousse ended up rather solid but none the less very tasty and silky smooth and pretty enough in a little ramekin with a half strawberry on top. The recipe (or rather the ingredients) are on the blog below this and should anyone be interested I can also send you the 'method.'  

To start with I had made what has become my current signature dish 'Gambas a l'aillo' or prawns in garlic with spice. This is really very simple to make and most tasty.  You really need fresh prawns (shrimps are even better) though.  Frozen ones will do but frozen prawns always seem to contain loads of water and this rubbery (just right if you are Chinese says M) instead of being crisp and firm.

Just heat a pan of olive oil - enough to cover the shrimps - and add to it cayenne pepper or tabasco or finely chopped chilis, or a mixture.  You need quite a bit.  Don't worry, the dish won't end up tasting like a Vindaloo!  To the hot oil you add several large cloves of garlic finely chopped and let the garlic infuse into the hot oil until it starts to brown.  Now add the prawns (peeled if they are prawns - entire if they are shrimps).  Bring the oil back to its former temperature and then they are done.  Scoop out the prawns and serve on a warm plate.  Delicious.  Hot and spicy and garlicky but all rather a gentle and rounded flavour. 

So we made a good meal which was washed down with a 20 year old bottle of red Saumur from the cellar at Tharon.  Twenty years is really pushing it for a Saumur and the wine was suffering a bit but still drinkable and robust enough to take the flavour of the spicy prawns and some excellent mature Brie that we ate afterwards (before the chocolate mousse).  Not an enormous quantity of washing up either.

THE ART OF SAVOIR FAIRE

Mireille Guiliano: The Art of Savoir-Faire

  These days a year seems ridiculously short within which both to make and achieve a resolution.  And if we only begin in January, don't get underway until February, have a break at Easter then plan the summer holidays, autumn will be rushing towards us before we've really got into any sort of stride at all.  Moreover, by then we probably will have forgotten why we resolved what we did and what we intended to do about it.  The resolution will have proved no more than a good intention - a bit like a Government target - rather than a clear plan for action and delivery.

    I was brooding on this very point as a matter of fact on 22nd December.  (I don't know about you but I am given to brooding on dark mornings over my porridge and am often still brooding when I arrive at my desk and open up my trusty laptop:  my own personal alchemical window on the world through which I scry the comings and goings of my friends.  Not only friends either, for the butcher, baker and candlestick maker all clamour for my attention).

My friend Amazon is particularly efficient in this regard.  She writes first thing every morning with an amazing offer. (I call her 'she' because, first, she is big and mighty and, second, because I am not sure that any Amazons were men, which raises the interesting question of how the race was perpetuated; Reader if you happen to know perhaps you could leave a comment.) 

So Amazon wrote on 22nd December beseeching me that 2012 would be a very different sort of a year, and boundlessly more prosperous, if only I clicked on the right hand side of the page and they  deducted £9 and some pennies from my account.  In return (though not before Christmas if I was so parsimonious as to insist on the free 'super-saver' delivery) they would send me a new book, just out, by Mireille Guiliano - the renowned author of 'French Women Don't Get Fat.'

Those that know me know that I have been a fan of this tome ever since it appeared a few years back and have indeed personally accomplished the 'magical leek diet,' surviving a whole forty eight hours on leek broth.  Ever since reading it I have been leaving half bananas about the kitchen and watching (but sometimes only watching) my portion sizes.

Now retired from her position as CEO of the American end of the Champagne House Veuve Cliquot Mireille calls her new book 'Women, Work and the Art of Savoir-Faire,'  and she describes it as...

"........the sort of book I wish I had been given when starting out in the working world and had at hand along the way.......you'll find advice on getting ahead and getting promoted....but more than that, you'll find advice on being happy and living a good life, even while you are making the biggest contribution you can in the workplace.  That's why I dare to talk about style and clothes and food and wine and entertaining and life in a business book."

 How could I resist?  I clicked on Super-Saver Delivery and my friend Amazon must have taken pity for the book slid through my letterbox on Christmas Eve.  I read it almost at once.

There is a mountain of sensible information here:  set yourself achievable objectives; spend less time on trivia and more on planning and preparation; work out what is making you stressed, identify the elements and then attack each one in turn; invest in a good haircut.  The lifestyle and coping strategies are exciting, the pages on entertaining and preparing for business dinner parties at home could become a bible.  My only gripe is that she seems to overdo the chocolate - her first business menu, for instance, comprises Soup with Chocolate, Duck with Chocolate and then, as if that weren't enough, comes this glorious confection: Mousse Au Chocolat with Ginger with the following ingredients (for 4 people). 

12 ounces dark chocolate

8.5 ounces of heavy cream

2 ounces butter

2 egg whites

2 tablespoons sugar

2 ounces ginger confit, thinly minced.

(I worry that it might be a tad fattening, especially with chocolate in the two courses before.  I am trying to calculate how long one would need to live on leek broth to compensate).

Still - a remarkable book and illustrated by a personal anecdote.  As a young woman, just about to embark on a career, Mireille took a travelling holiday before commencing a dream job at the Council for Europe.  In Greece she met an American and fell in love with him (it helped they spoke each others languages).  After a very short time he returned to America while she was due to start at the Council of Europe.  He asked her to join him in New York.  Classic dilemma - job or man?  How many of us would have refused to be diverted, chosen the job, not believed that a holiday romance would work? What would our friends have advised?  But she chose the man and is still married to him, while starting a new career, from scratch in a new City and language, and on a new Continent. 

If she had been following the advice in her book she might have asked herself  'what's the downside?' She could have always come home.   But you have to hand it to her, choices like that are what constitute style and 'savoir-faire.'   I believe Amazon will happily supply you, too, with a copy of her book. Meanwhile my resolution is to re-read it and to celebrate losing a stone by making Mousse Au Chocolat with Ginger.

AN INDOMITABLE LADY

We were at the restaurant

For three years from 1941 Marie* received a visit from the postman on Saturday, but the letters she received were not ordinary letters. They contained news about the Resistance: scribbled reports of actions and details of the occupying German forces.  It was her job to turn these manuscripts into a newsletter and then to take the typewriter from beneath her bed and to type them onto a stencil.  This she put in an envelope and delivered on Sunday evening. 

In all other respects she was a model citizen.  Born in 1920, she worked in a bakery and ever since France had fallen and the seaside town where she had grown up had been invaded, she had seethed with resentment.  She joined La Résistance.

Her work went on, week in week out, for three years.  Then, in the spring of 1944, the Gestapo came knocking.  Her little cell had been betrayed.  She was carted away roughly, her hands bound, and thrown into the interrogation prison. 

She learned her contacts had been arrested too. As she had no information Marie was released after a few days to a French prison where life was austere, but bearable. She wrote a letter home to her parents.  A letter which she still has.

Then came D-Day and the decision to remove all Resistance prisoners to camps in the east.  The Germans put her, and thousands of others, on overcrowded trains that rattled north and east.  No-one knew where they were going.

After an eternity they arrived in Berlin.  The station signs said so.  She could see German civilians on the platforms, waiting for their trains. But no guard came to unlock the doors.  Seeing her behind the bars of her carriage, a youth drew his finger across his throat and smiled.  She was still only 23.

Eventually they arrived in a camp in Czechoslovakia, a camp infinitely worse than her French prison.  A camp into which inmates were supposed to walk but from which they were not supposed to return.  Rations were designed to keep a fit person alive only for nine months.  Being small, Marie survived ten.

She lost her name and became a number: 384450.   Marie had to learn to say her number in German and to understand commands, but she resolved never to accept the German language, never to speak it.

After a few weeks an orderly issued the prisoners with pencils, paper, envelopes. They could write home, he said.  Of course, she fell to with a will, letting her parents know she was alive and would someday return.  She handed the letter to the grey-clad orderly with thanks in her eyes.

A month went by, two months, then Marie and a few other prisoners were called out to stand in the prison yard in the drizzling rain, shivering in their thin prison rags.  Eventually the commandant came out on a balcony. “I have good news for you” he said. “We have received a delivery of mail.” 

The joy she felt could be imagined.  But it was short-lived.   The letter she was given seemed familiar.  It was the one she herself had written two months before, which had never been posted.  The Germans had played a trick. “To undermine our morale, make us give-up,” she said.

Then it was winter, cold and grim in the heart of the Continent.  Marie became emaciated, but somehow she survived the starvation rations. The days lengthened, the grass grew again, leaves appeared on the trees - and then, suddenly, she and her fellow prisoners saw the Germans had left.  No helmets sat behind the guns in the watchtowers.

Hours later a jeep pulled up at the gates.  She heard American voices.  She rushed forward and threw open her arms.  She wanted to speak, to speak in French again, or even to say ‘Hallo’ in English.  But no words came.  Her throat, her mind, seized. As though the Germans wanted to leave her with one last humiliation the only sound she could make was the hated German word ‘Wilkommen.’

She was speaking to me in French and as the memory came flooding back as vivid today as that day 67 years ago, a tear rolled down her ninety-one year old face. “J’étais très vexée,” she said.  I was very cross with myself.

I laid my hand on hers and we resumed our meal in the restaurant by the sea.  She had just consumed a large plate of ‘fruits de mer,’ as vigorously as a woman half her age, and now had embarked on an enormous confection of dessert.

“You may be small,” I said, “but you have an indomitable soul.”

I was a guest at a family party and we sat looking out across the beach and to the sea and the rocks beyond.  I had eaten the best sea bass I had ever tasted and was now eating profiteroles, filled with ice cream, and covered with a lush sauce of dark chocolate.   Marie’s experience in the starvation camp heightened my appreciation of the food.

“I did what I did for love,” she said later. “Love of my country, love of freedom.  I was lucky.  I returned.”  And afterwards she gave me the kisses and the bear hug that only someone who knows that she is lucky can really give.

*I have changed her name.

HOW TO CHANGE A TYRE

Di turned up, aged Mother in tow, on an expedition to Waitrose.  J decided to join them.  I saw them into the car which had, I noticed,  a flat tyre.  Not an auspicious start, I thought.

Now changing tyres is one of the few things I can do.  Ten minutes, I said.  I asked Di to pull the car forward and off the road. Unfortunately, off the road was on a slight slope.

We helped aged Mother, a week short of her ninetieth birthday, into the house.  “Would you prefer a cup of tea or a glass of wine,” I asked her.  “Whatever is easier for you, Pet,” she replies. She is the only person in the world that calls me ‘pet.’ Aged Mother hails from Cullercoats.

I poured the glass of wine and gave her a mince pie, apologising for its ramshackle appearance. I change tyres better - or so I thought.

Outside it began to rain. I put on a coat and loosened the wheel bolts.  One was a locking nut, necessitating a fruitless search for a tool.  Eventually Di called her husband and we discovered that the locking nut thingy lay in a glove box between the seats.  I undid the locking nut and removed it completely.

I then screwed up the jack.  The car rose.  All was going well when there was a crunch and the car subsided the jack now impossibly wedged under the car.  “I’ll get another jack,” I said. 

Now I was sure that in the the garden shed could be found two jacks with a third in our own car.  Rummaging in the shed produced no jacks. 

I looked in the maintenance book for our car.  Find the jack under the boot lid it said.  But when I pulled up the boot carpet, which appeared as though not designed to be pulled up, there was no secret jack compartment.  The rain fell faster.

I reported my failure to Aged Mother who was now on her second glass of wine. “I’m enjoying myself, Pet,” was all she said.

It was time to call the professionals.  This required another call to Di’s husband to dig out the relevant insurance.  I think he was watching some needle match.  Anyway he gave the impression of regretting the disturbance.  Aged Mother commenced a third mince pie.

The garageman rang to say he would be half an hour.  I wondered what that might mean in mince pies. Then he said he wouldn’t fit the spare unless it were correctly inflated.  Health and Safety, didn’t I know?  He rang off.

But what is the correct pressure, we asked? Aged Mother didn’t know, but wouldn’t mind another glass of wine.

Di rang a third time.  Eventually (when no doubt two vital goals and a penalty had been scored) came the news that 30 pounds might be reasonable.  We loaded the greasy tyre into my car and went to see Mr Jay at the petrol station. 

Jay’s air pump demanded 50p. Neither Di nor I had 50p. But Mrs Jay changed a pound in the middle of a helpful conversation about Bombay Mix.  The 50p inserted, the airpump clattered into reluctant life.

Nothing happened. Very little air came out of the pump: I could hold my finger over the valve with no problem.  The scale on the inflator wasn’t budging.  I went in search of Jay.  The pump died.

Jay, dear man that he is, has just has a kidney transplant. “It is the cold weather,” he explained  “you have to hit the inflator very hard against the wall. Then it will work.”  I pointed out that the pump had stopped.  “You need another 50p,” he said.

“It isn’t a fast pump. It is a slow pump.” Di looked incredulously at the beaten-against-the-wall-gauge:  it had now moved from 10 to 12 pounds.  “You see!” said Jay, disappearing.
The gauge crept ever so slowly up.  It was a very slow pump.

Back home we found the garageman fuming on the doorstep and about to go. He had arrived - in a vehicle that looked too small to accommodate his bulk let along his tools - in 20 minutes, not half an hour.  If looks could kill we would have been toast.

“There’s a nut missing,”  he spat out.  Luckily I had put the locking nut where it could be found easily.  “Never jack a vehicle in a hill,” he added, doing just that.  Di has a good line with angry men. “I expect you’re very busy,” she smiled.  “Flat out” he grunted in the first vaguely civil words to pass his lips. “Could do you a cup of tea,” I ventured.  But he had finished. Not in ten minutes but in two.  He raced away to his next job.

Aged Mother professed that she had had a most satisfactory afternoon, but J never got to Waitrose.