PEANUTS

Fennie Dove After Hawk Attack

‘PEACE MISSIONS!  Bloody peace missions!  They are to doves what jury service is to people: sometimes interesting, but always a bloody nuisance.  People think they’re simple: fly to so-and-so, pick up an olive branch, on to the war zone, deposit the branch, fly home.  Easy-peasy!  You pick up a whole shedload of karma points and an extra helping of peanuts. Even a medal if you’re really lucky. After all it’s what you’re made for, isn’t it? Elephants roll logs, doves fly peace missions.

‘Well, there I was: called up. “Fly here,” they said. “Where?” I said. “There,” they said.  “Blimey,” I said, “that’s a long way! Dangerous, too.”  “If you’d rather not, Fennie,........” they said. “If you’re feeling off colour......”

‘Of course I’d bloody well rather not! But you’d never live with yourself, would you, after that?  I mean that’s your self-respect gone for a Burton.  Yellow? You might as well be a canary!  So ‘OK,’ I said.  They gave me a big bowl of peanuts and told me to take an early night.  It’s lonely work flying peace missions; like reconnaissance, you always fly alone. In the cold and lonely sky.  Best not to start long books.

‘Crack of dawn next day I’m off, out of the loft and flying high over the fields.  I climb as high as I can for there’s always the risk of some crackpot shooter. What is it about boys with guns? I’m a dove, fella.  But I always say that if you see even the flash of a man before you get properly upstairs, then dive.  Dive!  Shooters always expect birds to climb, you see. So if you dive they fire over the top of you. Dive and the worst you’ll get is an outfield pellet through one of your primaries. Might twinge a bit if it hits the spline, but you’ll be OK. If you’re lucky someone will imp it out for you.

‘I got a pellet up the bum once. That was painful I can tell you.  Thankfully,  just the one. Almost out of range; lodged under the skin. Still there, too.  I get a tweak sometimes sitting on a nest. And another thing, if you do get hit, keep flying, that’s the rule: there’s probably a dog on the ground.

‘Where was I? Oh, yes!  Peace missions.  Well, we don’t set out with our olive branches, not that we have too many olive branches here anyway.  Fortunately, most wars these days seem to occur where they grow olives - have you noticed? Funny that. My solution to the problems in the Middle East - cut down the olive trees!  Ha-ha! No? My little joke!

‘So you fly down to the war zone in the morning, sneak into an olive grove,  all the while watching for trainee belligerents with their 12 bores, pick up a likely branch and then follow your nose fast and low towards the smell of cordite, hedgehopping all the way.  You find some dusty market square in the middle of the tanks and artillery, leave your olive calling card, and get the hell out even faster than you came in, praying that no-one has time to take a bead on you. If you hear a gun, then corkscrew, corkscrew!  Who cares about a few bashed wing tips? The only good thing about a war zone is that most people don’t use shotguns.

‘I know you want to get upstairs to safety as fast as possible but until you make 3,000 feet you’re just a target and a dove hit by a piece of 37mm shrapnel just isn’t a pretty sight.  So fly low through the lanes and alleys. If you’re cornered dodge into a building, there’s always a way out the back.  It’s only when you can’t hear the guns anymore that you pull back on the old stick and reach for the safety of clouds.

‘Well, I made it that time - or I wouldn’t be here now.  And they told me later I’d scored a bullseye. Cease-fire, exchange of prisoners, amnesties, peace treaties - the lot.  Not a bad day’s work for one little dove and a bag of peanuts.  They gave me a medal,  too. I’m proud of that.

‘But I won’t be flying any more missions. No more olive branches for me!  Ha! Wounded coming home, you see.  I tell you: never, ever, get demob happy.  Never relax your concentration, not for one millisecond.  I relaxed for a minute or two and I paid the price.  Right on the bloody doorstep!  ‘There I was, high in the sky, dreaming of a little nest of sticks and a couple of eggs under me and the gangly, squawky squabs hatching -  it’s about all I’m good for these days, but it’s remarkable how peaceful just sitting on a nest can be.  You can even feel the vibrations of the squabs inside the eggs, did you know? That’s real peace for you. That’s when you feel the sun on your back.

‘Sun on your back!  I’ve told you it was a long way.  Well, I’d been flying all day. Used up more adrenaline than an entire football team and I was tired as only a bird that has flown through a war zone can be.  That’s bloody tired, I can tell you.  I thought at first I wouldn’t get home and would have to put down in someone’s garden and beg for crusts, hoping they would have the sense to read the rings on my legs and make a telephone call. That’s an indignity, I can tell you, having your rings read.  But luckily the wind must have been behind me, I looked down and suddenly there was home: the river and the railway line and the two ‘L’ shaped roofs of the cote. Never have moss-clad tiles looked so good.

‘Now, normally, I would do a circuit to check all’s well, but I just wanted to get on the ground and fill my crop with peanuts.  Some cool water from the bird bath wouldn’t go amiss either, I thought to myself.  So, like a fool, I just dropped, didn’t I?  Wiggly-waggly, swish-swish, falling through the air - a disgrace to the whole avian persuasion; but after facing 37mm artillery who cares? I came in from the west with the late afternoon sun behind me....

‘I must have been about two hundred feet when zoom - thunk!  Suddenly, my neck was on fire, I had a searing pain around the clavicle, port wing suddenly useless.  Hawk!  Bloody, bastard hawk.

‘I thought my time had come: it had me fast in its talons and we were hurtling to earth.  All that successful artillery dodging and now this.  I was a goner.

‘The ground was rushing up, the air shrieking past. The hawk had been diving when he took me,  from above and straight out of the sun.  In seconds we would hit the deck.

‘But then a miracle: because I’d been side-slipping, wishy-washing, the hawk hadn’t been able to make a clean strike.  The way he had hold meant that I was tipping him forward, making him dive more.  He couldn’t straighten up.  He couldn’t pull out of the dive. In another second he would take us both into the ground.  He just couldn’t get his tail down, you see. If nothing else he would break his legs. “Good!” I thought.

‘“Let me go,” I yelled, but he just clung on, talons digging deeper.  His great black wings were desperately clawing the air, but at that angle they simply wouldn’t bite. If I was a goner, then so was he. The ground must have been feet away, when at last and with a great squawk of rage, he dropped me. I hit the floor and bounced. 

‘He got his tail down then but so great was his downward momentum that his feathers brushed me on the ground as he flattened out. He shot forward quite out of control. Well, every story has its funny side. Out of control? The hawk flew thwack into a great bunch of tall thistles.  He crashed through them, of course, big heavy bird that he was, but the prickles must have hurt.

‘I could see him climbing lazily away as I lay on the grass, the breath knocked out of me.  He’d be round again in an instant. Could I move before he came back? I had blood running down my neck. My port wing dragged, the muscles in spasm from the hawk’s talons.  I have to say that he’d probably have had me if it hadn’t been for the lovely woman who cares for us coming out of her house at that very moment rattling the peanut tin. Saved! Never has a fortnight’s confinement in the hospital hutch seemed quite such an unalloyed pleasure. 

 ‘Anyway, nice to meet you.  Good luck!  Always best to corkscrew left, what?’



A friend of mine who keeps doves was kind enough to name one of them for me.  A fine strong dove that would fly away during the day and come back at night.  Then one day the dove appeared as you see in the picture - the victim of a hawk strike. Well, I wondered what the dove did during the day and that formed the basis of the story.

BORAYA AND A TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT

Interior of Mari Vanna Restaurant, London

 Last Sunday I went up to London to meet a Russian friend, who I had last bumped into at a wedding in Brittany. She told me then the 'famous' (well, at least in our family) Russian hedgehog joke.  "A hedgehog was crossing the road one day.  All was well when it set out but when it reached the middle of the road, it rolled over and died."

That's it.  No follow-up, no punchline. A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma as Churchill might have said.  Anyway, I have only met two people (apart from my friend) who thought this remotely funny and one of them was me - but there we were last Sunday, several years on and the conversation rattling away as though the intervening time had been a minor interruption.

She had very kindly agreed to help me with the novel, which some of you may know I am writing.  I have always wanted to write but have always been very bad at it - bad at the technical stuff, let alone the creative bit - but gradually all that is becoming easier.  On the internet, on social networking sites and so on I find that many of those whom I have come to regard as old and dear friends are writers of one sort or another and I suppose we inspire and encourage one another, though sometimes I think that I have the best of the bargain.  Having written some 85,000 words now I can talk about 'my novel' for it undoubtedly exists.  It isn't finished yet but what remains - some stirring stuff that includes a car (or rather lorry) chase, a death, a birth, and a  marriage, is all outlined and should be complete before Christmas when the real work of editing will start.

 'Boraya' is about a chocolate factory and is set mainly in St Petersburg in the late 1990's.  It is a romance but also a story of what happens to people whose lives are overwhelmed by external events.  I suppose I was inspired subconsciously by that great volume of Russian literature which becomes addictive when you are a languid and forlorn teenager.  I remember my biology teacher complaining that I was reading surreptitiously during a tedious lesson and having my book shown to all the class much to their amusement. It was a paperback edition of 'Seven Short Novels by Chekhov.'  The book had cost me seven shillings and sixpence and I still have it on my bookshelves, though I suppose decades have passed since I looked at it.

Yet if you write a novel set in a country that you have never visited and in a well-known city, you have to try and get the details reasonably correct.  Interviewed at the Hay Literary Festival this summer William Boyd confessed that he had written a book set in the Philippines and afterwards he had been complimented by the country's tourist office, all without ever going there. He said he just used a guide book and his imagination - so it can be done. Nevertheless mere mortals like me need help.

It isn't just what the protagonists might see around the city;  that can be derived from guidebooks.  No, it is everything else. I wrote down on the train a couple of dozen questions to ask my friend.  Food figured largely among them and it helped that we were eating in a traditional Russian restaurant - the 'Mari Vanna,' so Russian that everyone, staff and customers, spoke that language,  and I was forced out of politeness to say 'Spasibo' to the waiter.  It was a good introduction to Russian food and Russian interiors, this one more like a set decorated for one of Chekhov's plays than a London restaurant.

We spent a long time eating the excellent food - I tried the Siberian Pelmeni, which are a kind of dumpling - while discussing what Russians call each other.  When you would use the ultra-formal equivalent of 'Mr' or 'Mrs,'  for instance, and when you would use the patronymic - that is your addressee's father's name - as in, perhaps, Mikail Sergeievitch, or when you would just use a first name?  But what happens if you are a foreigner?  Under what name would you book a table at a restaurant? What happens even if you don't have an official father (well, you can always invent!).   The name of the restaurant itself is a first name and a patronymic, for the name is a contraction of Maria Ivanovna - a very common name, apparently, in Russia and one that is contracted in speech to 'Mari Vanna.'

Almost everywhere I turn in the story I find a different world.  I am now an expert on the botulinum toxin (nothing to do with the restaurant I hasten to add) for that figures in the story too, as of course does the terrible history of St Petersburg.  As the story unfolds the experience is more like reading a book than writing one in that my characters keep on surprising me. They keep me entertained at least and I hope one day they will entertain you too.

*****

On a completely different topic there has been much discussion in the course of the recent American Presidential Election of that country's trillion dollar deficit.  That figure always worried me.  Surely that can't mean that the US Government spends a trillion dollars more than it receives in taxes?  But then I thought of our own deficit - about £160 billion.  Express that in dollars and we have around $250 billion, which is of course a quarter of a trillion.  If we say that the US economy is about four times the size of the British economy then their deficit really isn't any worse than ours.   Trillion dollars it is.  What an amazing amount of money!  We are all living on tick to an absurd degree.  Easy to say but knowing what to do about it is another matter.

The photograph of the Mari Vanna interior is taken from the internet. I am unsure to whom the credit is due but offer thanks in advance.

CHIPS AND FISH

Atlantic Salmon Migrating Upstream

Yesterday we arrived early at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which really  is in a Camelot sort of spot beside the dark tumbling river Tummel and in the shadow of the lowering hills.  The sun shone but we took limited advantage as we were soon entombed in the entrails of the theatre with a guide showing us that hidden land beyond the proscenium arch, all the wizardry and gadgetry, the levers, pulleys, trucks, lights and rooms hidden deep in the earth, which all the same manage to have windows looking out across the river.

In this nether world, carefully stacked and parked, we saw the sets of the play we had seen the day before and more bits of set belonging to the play we would see today. We saw the actors' dressing rooms, the costume rooms, the wig rooms (full of wigs, naturally) and the green room, called that for a reason long lost in the mists of time. We learned that the actors work up to 13 and a half hour days for two months learning three or more plays at the same time and rehearsing over and over so that they can then appear in them for our benefit eight times a week. I think such practices are medieval and should be banned.  After all with most of the acting profession 'resting' why make one man or woman do the work of three.  But I suppose that would increase the price of tickets.  Still did they not say something like that about the cost of cleaning chimneys?

It's exhausting enough doing one play, but to finish a matinée and then go straight into something else requires a stamina that has long since passed me by - but then these actors, I suppose, don't have to lead normal lives, don't have to shop or run businesses or write books. Yet even if I didn't have to do these things I very much doubt I could do their job even if I were blessed with a modicum of acting talent.

We are here in the Highlands on holiday with Rosie and Jim, this land of mountain, river and lake and we also took good advantage of these aquatics, for conveniently the theatre is located next to a hydro-electric plant so if ever you are bored with the mechanics of putting on a show you can wander along the riverbank for five minutes to watch the salmon climbing the salmon ladder.  So far this year 5,163 salmon have passed through the 15 metre ladder. The season is from April (Spring fish) to October (Grilse and Stragglers) and the average is 5,400 fish (salmon) in the season, so this is likely to be a below average year, yet more evidence of the inexorable decline of the world's most beautiful fish.  We saw only a trout of some unknown persuasion in the observation chamber, but you never know what you are going to see there for suddenly out of the darkness will come a black shape,streaked with silver and vivid in the brown water. It will fix you with its beady eye and hooked beak, snarling almost in its rush to find the gravel redds in which it will spawn and then to limp back, spent and flattened to the reviving waters of the sea.  Only one in ten salmon make it back to the sea but among those 5,000 salmon that return each year five will have returned three times, or so I have always supposed and so perhaps be candidates for the 49 and three quarter pound monster, a plaster cast of which hangs on the wall of the power station. These in the picture are not so large, but convey the image of something looming out of the water, like silver spotlights in a theatre.

HOMEOPATHY AND BILL

Samuel Hahnemann, Founder of Homeopathy

My daughter suggested I go to see the homeopath who she had gone to see when little Theo had a recalcitrant cough that proved resistant to normal medicine. The homeopath (Bill) gave her some tablets which worked wonders and so she had great faith in him and told me to go along in turn instead of complaining endlessly about my own digestion, a malady which for decades now has baffled medical science and kept me uncomfortably awake at nights.

Of course I was sceptical.  But Bill said he welcomed sceptics and I have to confess that the consultation was most interesting and proved a valuable experience. We talked for almost an hour and a half while Bill made copious notes.  Later I felt that just talking about the problem had been therapeutic for I then began to see that all my symptoms seemed to be connected to some underlying nervous or emotional reaction.  Stress in other words.  And driving and striving, too hard. I must learn to be calmer, I concluded, though Bill didn't say this himself.  The world is quite capable of getting on without me.

At the end of the session he gave me three minute white pills to take, then and there, which would, he said, 'reset' my digestive system. They tasted like sugar.  He said the active ingredient in them belonged to the same plant family whose fossilised remains make up the South Wales coal field.  And he invited me back in six weeks to see whether anything has changed.

While I found the consultation therapeutic in some psychological sense,  I simply cannot believe the claims that highly dilute medicines work.  We are talking of dilutions as weak as a pinch of salt in the Atlantic ocean in some cases, according to the research I have looked at.  Still, I'd rather have three little pills that last six weeks than to have take half a dozen prescription medicines everyday - a separate medicine for each symptomatic condition - whose effects on each other in combination have never been tested.  Maybe that is the reason why homeopathic remedies are so dilute - just so they won't (can't) do you any harm.  Meanwhile you benefit from a sympathetic ear and a chance to relate all the symptoms to one another and to your lifestyle.

We also spent a little time discussing something that has always interested me: the difference between a living and a dead body. What happens at death? What changes biochemically? One moment the life force is there; the next it isn't.  One moment a person or animal is patently alive, the next it is dead.  So what changes? What has happened? And couldn't whatever has happened be reversed before the body begins to rot?  This life force, Bill reckons, courses through us all and through every part of us; sometimes, and in some places, it is stronger than others. Sometimes it becomes blocked or obstructed. Sometimes it requires re-setting. This, he reckoned, he had just done.

I am not persuaded.  I feel rather that he has allowed me to see for myself what I need to do to change things - although I am not at all sure that I know what I should be doing, moment by moment, to make this change.  I agree with him about the idea of a life force and of this becoming obstructed.  I think this is the basis of several healing methods.  And, as is well known, certain people, whatever kind of medicine they practice, are just 'healers:' that is they have a beneficial effect on sick people just by being with them. How this works I cannot even begin to guess.  But I should describe Bill as one of those 'healers.'

I should call him, he said, should there be any sudden changes, but I suspect there won't be.  I cannot imagine how one can have an allergic reaction to a homeopathic medicine.  But I do feel that he achieved something and that if I can only remember the feeling of calmness that he was able to engender then I shall improve. I was pleased anyway when I wrote the cheque for his fee for I thought it money well spent.

The test will come in six weeks time. Whether by then I will have learned to divert a part of my life force towards my liver and away from silly and stressful things, I do not know.  Is writing a blog stressful? Am I holding up my hand and shouting 'me too!' in a vain attempt to find some echo in the ether that tells me I exist and that I am important?  I am sure that was the case once.  Now, well, I think I can honestly say that I am writing this for myself. If anyone is amused by what I write that is fine.  If not, no matter.  It is not time wasted.  The sun is shining and I shall enjoy the day.  Light a candle, smile and enjoy a glass of wine.  Eat a square of dark chocolate and look at some flowers and do whatever work requires to be done today.

The picture, courtesy of Wikipedia is of Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), the acknowledged founder of homeopathy. As he lived to the ripe old age of 88 at a time when most people were lucky to live half that time, the proof of his pudding can be seen perhaps in his longevity. 

KALINKA

The Snowberry

Some of you may know that my alter ego is writing a novel about the Boraya Chocolate Factory in St Petersburg - or Leningrad as it used to be. The novel has various historical flashbacks to the 1941-1944 siege of Leningrad when three-quarters of a million of its citizens starved to death. The encircling German forces were held just 15 kilometres from the city centre and across no man's land in temperatures of minus thirty degrees the opposing lines of soldiers would sing to each other. One German soldier, called Hockenjos, was so impressed with the Russian song 'Kalinka,' drifting on the night wind across the snowy ruins, that he memorised it and later wrote it down. An example of how music bridges even the most bitterly opposed cultures.

 There's a YouTube version of Kalinka performed in Leningrad - or rather St Petersburg - by the choir of the Red Army, assisted by some unlikely types known as the 'Leningrad Cowboys.'  I don't know quite what either the haircuts or the shoes of the Cowboys signify but close your eyes and you can imagine how, with a few vodkas, such singing could have kept the cold - and the enemy- at bay. Na Zdrowie! 

Despite the majesty of the rhythm and the catchiness of the tune, Kalinka, is more or less a nonsense song about the little snowberry - Symphoricarpos.  Wikipedia provides the picture of the snowberry above and also translates the Russian lyrics of Kalinka as

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, under the pine, the green one,
Lay me down to sleep,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Lay me down to sleep.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, little pine, little green one,
Don't rustle above me,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Don't rustle above me.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!

Ah, you beauty, pretty maiden,
Take a fancy to me,
Rock-a-bye, baby, rock-a-bye, baby,
Take a fancy to me.

Little snowberry, snowberry, snowberry of mine!
Little raspberry in the garden, my little raspberry!



In fact there's another, instrumental version of the song played on by three young women with violins which is also very catchy.   And not only musically catchy.  For the trouble I find in trying, as a complete tyro, to write a novel is that the characters begin to take over.  There's this troublesome girl called Olga who works in the chocolate shop, who first demanded a friend and then a job in London and now she's telling me that I ought to have known that she also played the violin. Well, what can you do?  Another character, sent me to eBay to buy a silver 1866 Napoleon III coin which is his lucky charm and a third just saunters into the picture as a kind of Russian eminence grise.  He is actually, he tells me, the economic planning chief of St Petersburg who sits behind an enormous empty desk in a very large office in a fictional part of the Mariinsky Palace which I call the Prefecture.  I tried to model him on the Communist mayor of Calais who I met once when I was trying to help a British company build a new factory there, but as usual he has become his own man - at least he has tried to.  You reach his office by a 1930s lift which is very small and slow and full of carved wood and delicately engraved mirrors.  This actually comes from Barcelona.  It wasn't very practical but was very beautiful and riding it you almost regret that Mr Otis (if ever there was a Mr Otis) had been allowed to dominate the world's elevating industry.

Despite the references to the Leningrad siege, this is actually a love story surrounded by chocolate, or at least a chocolate factory, presided over by Ludmilla the elderly matriarch, who with her roller pin arms, wispy grey hair, liver spots and her Leningrad defence medals is all the wise and aged grandmothers you have ever known.  Her problem is that she will never stop working or stop fighting.

The main protagonists, though are Vladimir and Beth (who know each other as Lenin and Elizabeth). It is pretty obvious from the start that they will fall in love because this is a love story, but where will love's path take them?  They are like corks bobbing around on the turbulent river Neva and having met Beth briefly at a New Year party, Lenin now finds himself showing her the sights of St Petersburg on a cold snowy January day (which isn't exactly the best time to see the city).  Anyhow, here is a part of their journey.  (I have a feeling that he should be humming Kalinka and she joining in with the bouncy bits - you see how the characters dictate what they should be doing?)

They had reached the river now, and were standing on the abutment looking out across the river at the rushing torrent of black water with its cargo of ice blocks.  “Look down there, Elizabeth,” said Lenin, raising his voice a little against the tumult below and pointing vaguely in the direction of the water beneath them.   Beth tried to follow. 

“No no!  There!"  Again he held her arm and she experienced a frisson of delight.  She looked at him, the wind lifting the flaps of his fur hat.  His arm pointed at the grey granite of the abutment wall.
She could see now a  ledge about ten feet above the river where a little snow had collected.  On it nestled a shape.  “Is that meant to be a bird?” she asked, peering beneath her.

“It’s a statue of a siskin,” replied Lenin softly.  “A type of finch with colourful yellow and green feathers.  Very common here in summer.”   

“But it’s tiny!” exclaimed Beth.  “What does it signify?”

“The smallest statue in St Petersburg.  Only 11 centimetres tall,” answered Lenin, holding one hand approximately this distance above the other.   Too cold to stand still, they walked on as he talked. “The little siskin commemorates the old Imperial Legal Academy which stood just by here.  You know the students at the academy had to wear gowns of yellow and green so they became known as ‘siskins or Chizhik Pyzhik.’  I think there must have been some other statue or model at one time because we say that Chizhik Pyzhik helps students with their love affairs, especially when they don’t go too well.”

And so that little statue was Chizhik Pyzhik?” asked Beth, wincing at her memory.

“Well a new Chizhik Pyzhik” said Lenin.  "Because it was only put there a year or two ago.  I don’t know quite what happened to the old one.  In fact I think there are now several Chizhik Pyzhik for people keep stealing them.  They are supposed to help Russian students to travel around the city without paying on the buses or the metro!  Though I don’t know how!”  Lenin's face was straight though Beth could see the corners of his mouth involuntarily turning upwards.  "It's true! Really!" he protested.

Beth laughed and then she laughed again full and hearty against the wind.  “If ever I am sad, just say Chizhik Pyzhik to me and I shall remember the little statue and I shall smile a big smile” She beamed and without really being conscious of what she was doing she leaned against him slightly.  Lenin was now laughing too.  Despite the cold and the wind both felt calm and easy with one another, as though love had already arrived without either of them noticing or ever thinking that it might be remarkable;  and of course they would have denied its arrival, even to themselves.  

Lenin began to hum Kalinka.

HEARING LOSS

I was due at the hospital one morning this week for a hearing test, when someone rang saying that the consultant was unavailable so could I come in the afternoon instead as a vacancy had unexpectedly occurred.  As hearing loss is pretty much irredeemable I hoped I wasn't filling 'dead mens shoes.'  Still, as it had been five months,  I went and handed in my letter to an unwelcoming receptionist  who said to wait in the waiting area.  I had brought a book.

Not knowing whether I was deaf or not I thought she might have spoken with ex-agg-er-at-ed em-ph-as-is.  I suppose I should have responded 'pardon?' but couldn't quite bring myself to the required level of facetiousness.  The receptionist did not look like the sort of woman who might welcome a joke.  Besides, no doubt that is what people do say to her multiple times everyday.  Perhaps that's why she looked jaded.

I had barely time to read a page of my book when someone on the far side of the room mumbled my name.  I waved, but he seemed to be short-sighted so I had to take a chance that I had heard correctly. That's my hearing problem in a nutshell: I can hear sound well enough, it's deciphering it into words that's the problem. I can hear that someone has pronounced two syllables - but which two syllables?

That's what I explained to a young and attractive lady audiologist into whose tiny green soundproof cubicle I was admitted after a further spell of waiting in a corridor. She had me explaining the whys and wherefores of my condition (such that it is) and peered into my ears, perhaps to check that they weren't full of earwigs or dead mice. They weren't.  Then she slapped some headphones on me and told me to press a button when I heard a noise. 

The noises - or rather tones - came first in one ear and then in the other. Most were very faint. Anyhow I thought I had most of them.  She wrote the results down on a chart and the result looked like our economic performance in recent years.  It seemed to be downhill all the way from the lower frequencies, although curiously enough the very high frequencies I could hear better than the ones just below them.

She told me I needed a hearing aid.  Pardon? I said.  For the fact is that I don't really want a hearing aid at all, fussing with something stuck in or behind my ear.  (In actual fact the aid that she said she would recommend contrived to be both these things, being fixed somehow behind the ear but having an eel like tube that plugged into the ear itself.)  I have to acknowledge though it would be a useful device for watching television where I find that the actors mumble so much that subtitles are an asset.  Ditto when people call me on the telephone and I cannot tell the difference between an S or an F in a postcode - or, surprisingly because they don't sound the same,  between 2 and 3.  I work on the basis of choosing whatever alternative I think it isn't and then I find I am usually correct.

I would find a device very useful in such situations I said, but she said sternly that that part-time use wasn't permitted.  I would have to wear the thing all the time.  The brain needed to learn to hear again, she said.   I didn't argue.  We'll see how things work out.  I might just forget. She gave me an envelope full of matronly advice about hearing aids and said the device would be ready for fitting in a few weeks. They would write to me again.  'Thank you,'  I said and prepared to leave - 'but you have to see the doctor', she said.  'Why?' I asked, 'what will he do?'

So I waited again and then was ushered in to see a beaming faced consultant to whom I had to go through all my previous explanations again while he tried to find something wrong with me: general health? blood pressure? heart?  I felt like saying 'seek and ye shall find:' for few bits of me seem to be working as they should, though compared with most of the inmates one finds wandering in and out of the hospital corridors I have a lot to be thankful for.  Then he looked at my hearing test results and decided that because there was a disparity between left and right ears when it came to the higher end of the spectrum this might be due to a benign growth on the auditory nerve and that this required an MRI scan.  I said I didn't suffer from claustrophobia.

To reassure me he said they only find something in 1 in 100 scans and when they do find something they just keep an eye on it if it is only small.   But why?  It's no wonder the NHS has no money. It isn't even that I am properly deaf. If they want to scan something I am sure my arteries or liver or appendix would give them far more interesting results than my auditory nerve.  We'll send you an appointment he said.  Afterwards I'll review the results and write to you.  'Can't you just send me an email?' I queried. 'We're not geared up to that yet.'  Again, no wonder the poor old NHS has no money: all those letters.

It so happens for the 48 hours since coming home from the hospital I have been ill and off my food, feeling totally zonked and unable to work.  I am (I hope) better now, and of course the illness may just be a coincidence but it underlines my belief that hospitals are places you go to get sick and are best avoided.

*****

Now, for you delectation and delight here are a few pictures from our summer garden show 'Wind in the Willows, which I directed last Saturday.

Here are most of the cast before the show. Toad and Rat at Extreme Left

Toad, Rat and Mole and Audience

Toad in Washerwoman's Dress and Engine Driver

THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW

The lovely Pondside has tagged me for a 'Kreative' Bogger and invited me to write ten things about myself that readers may not know.

1. Spain:  As a baby I lived in Gibraltar and had a Spanish nurse.  Like Logan Gonzales Mountstuart - the protagonist of 'Any Human Heart' - the first words I heard were therefore Spanish.  Ever since then I have collided on and off with the country and its language.  My signature dish is 'Gambas a l'Aillo' or prawns in a spicy garlic oil which I first tasted in Barcelona.  I was also privileged to tour the Sagrada Familia cathedral in that city with its (current) architect, high up among the pinnacles where workmen were installing coloured glass.  Then at another time I found myself run off the road and almost killed by the King of Spain - or rather his minders.  We'd taken a wrong route to the airport.  Not difficult in Spain.

2. Cuba:  A wonderful place with wonderful people and the only place I have ever been followed by my own spy detail.  He wasn't very good and to embarrass him we took him to lunch.  Whether because of this of no, I subsequently found myself sent the Cuban Vice-Minister for Agriculture and spent a happy day, taking him to lunch and touring dried flower establishments and growers in South Wales. In an unguarded moment I must have persuaded the Cubans of the commercial possibilities of dried flowers.

3. Europe: Growing up in the aftermath of war and as chance would have it in the company of young people from every continent I became a committed supporter of an all embracing Europe.  Nothing very exciting happened though I did write new English lyrics to the European Anthem and was on television once at the European Parliament arguing for an elected European President. 

4.  Flying:  My father was in the RAF and I grew up yearning to fly. At school I won a flying scholarship and learned to fly a plane before I learned to drive a car, going solo in under six hours at the age of 17. Sadly, I subsequently found that I didn't really care for flying after all.  I was in a plane once that was struck by lightening.  It sounded as if Thor had cracked us with his hammer and all the lights went out for a few seconds.

5. Work: I have had a multiplicity of jobs, not all of them paid: agricultural labourer, Gestetner operator, storekeeper, occupational psychologist, senior civil servant, politician, insurance salesman, European business consultant, eurocrat, journalist, recruitment consultant, editor, small business owner,  actor and UNESCO vice-chair (in Wales).  Of the 15 organisations behind these occupations, 8 went out of business either with me still on board or shortly afterwards.  I have worked for myself for the past 28 years.  Now in my mid-sixties I am embarking on the new career of novelist.

6. Sport: I have no skill with edged tools, says my horoscope with uncanny accuracy.  Nor do I have any skill in sports that involve moving balls.  The only sporting distinction that I ever achieved was to become Oxfordshire U16 full bore shooting champion.  That wasn't even a 'sitting-down' sport; it was all about lying down and keeping still.

7. Education: At college in Cambridge I was full of angst.  I had over my desk a sign which said 'I am the biggest failure of the twentieth century.'  Still I became President of the May Ball Committee and just scraped an acceptable degree. 

8. I do love challenging conventional wisdom but I have to report that mostly conventional wisdom is right.

9.  I am physically male but mentally female which is sometimes a great handicap and sometimes a great delight.  I am reputedly descended from the 'most handsome man in the Highlands' - but then, aren't we all?  If we go back far enough we are all descended from someone.

10.  I love nasturtiums and I wear red a lot.

That's enough things you didn't know!