Let's Hear it for the Rat

You know that you are treading the foothills of late middle age when you find that events you thought took place last summer actually took place a year or two before. Time seems to telescope as one gets older, the pace to quicken, so that one has barely time to get out of bed on a Monday morning before finding that it is Friday again and the weekend is upon you.

True, very occasionally, time does seem to slow down instead of speeding up: as, for example, when you are trapped on a ferryboat with six or more hours to pass. Each hour then seems stuffed with at least 120 minutes. By contrast each hour during the morning rush is slimmed by some sidereal process to no longer than 30 - and that on a good day.

Sometimes you notice both these effects at once. We have already passed the summer solstice; the days are drawing in, and yet it seems no time at all since Christmas. Yesterday I discovered the loop of string on which we hang our Christmas cards still in place on the bookcase having escaped the usual Twelfth Night decoration depredations. Time has flown and I have neither cleaned nor noticed.

Yet the day when I first and ever so hesitantly signed up to becoming a Country Living blogger now seems an age away. It must have been late February I suppose - but it could equally have been years ago. So much seems to have happened in the interim - in blogland at least.

One of the first posts I made, in that long ago age, was a piece I called 'The Tale of Mrs Tittle-Rat.' This was the story of a rat that had invaded our untidy compost heap. She had dug out a nest, and then for some unaccountable reason chewed a hole in the side of the garden shed and deposited through it all the spoil dug out of the compost heap. A mammoth task with no tools but your paws, you might have thought, even if you weren't pregnant at the time.

Anyone brought up on Beatrix Potter will remember her tale of Mrs Tittlemouse - the obsessively houseproud, middle-aged mouse who was always spring cleaning, but whose beautiful little home was invaded one day by a wet and dirty toad called Mr Jackson.

With her obvious unwillingness simply to leave a spoil heap outside her front door, I imagined that my rat must have had the same kind of 'wash-behind-the-ears' upbringing. And so I christened her Tittle-Rat and left her in peace to raise her little family of Tittle - Offspring, who all are by now no doubt grown-up and leading polite, well-groomed lives in the rat world.

Since then I have acquired one of those great plastic wash-tubs that the Council offer for the purpose of making compost in more business like fashion than simple throwing all the garden waste on a large pile under the conifer. So it was time to clean up the remains of the heap, which took several hours last weekend. The compost is now spread over my little garden in inky black patches, like oil from some stricken vessel washing up on the beach.

During these operations I came across the deserted former home of Mrs Tittle-Rat. As you might expect, the inside seemed to be constructed from soft hair and pieces of felt, but the outside - and here I gasped in amazement at her über intelligence - was made from polythene bags, presumably as a species of damp proof course.

Polythene bags and babies don't sit well together, of course. But Mrs Tittle-Rat obviously needed none of the usual chiding from minatory government officials bent on health and safety; she had taken the precaution of shredding each one into strips wide enough to offer protection against damp but narrow enough to let the air through.

I am so glad I didn't rush to call in the pest control people (as no doubt those same officials would have had me do). I am probably a delinquent in need of an ASBO - 'don't I know how dangerous rats are?' Well, they can be I suppose - but then so can many other things - dogs for instance. Sometimes, we do get into a tizz about nature.

The real problem is that rats get an almost uniquely bad press (despite my efforts in the reverse direction!). Whereas mice tend to be portrayed in literature as nice, little helpful and above all female rodents, keeping clean houses and sewing up cherry-coloured waistcoats, rats are portrayed as male and loutish. The big fat lazy Samuel Whiskers is a case in point.

Even Roland Rat, the saviour of ITV's breakfast television, had a slightly sinister, louche element. So let's hear it for that gentle and intelligent creature that survives despite our persecution. Yerrrrrrrr!

LESSON FOR A WET MIDSUMMER'S DAY: HOW TO SAVOUR A ROSE

Aged Mother held the pink rose and inhaled deeply, her withered face broadening into an impish smile. I had, as it were, been teaching granny to suck eggs - or rather, I had been teaching Friend Helen's Aged Mother to smell roses; this being a natural enough thing to do when one finds oneself in a seaside rose park on a Saturday afternoon with temporary responsibility for Aged Mother's amusement and perambulation.

Of course one shouldn't really pick roses in parks, but the old do have a certain licence as well as a frequent difficulty when it comes to bending down to enjoy a fragrance. If Aged Mother can't come to the rose then the rose must come to Aged Mother, thought I, sneekily plucking a bloom from the rear of the bush. She sniffed at it somewhat hesitantly as though she thought it might suddenly turn into a species of biting rodent.

When it comes to smelling roses I am not completely without form. Many years ago I was taught the proper way to appreciate that special floral fragrance by an extravagant Frenchman called Jean-Pierre Garot, on whose improbably luxuriant moustaches the Magic Roundabout character of Zebedee was modelled.

When he was not smelling roses or attending to his livestock in our twin town of Clisson, Jean-Pierre worked in an art studio, out of whose collective imagination the fairy tale of La Manège Enchantée was sprung on an unsuspecting world.

On one of our very first town twinning trips, somewhere no doubt in the valley of the Sevre, we stopped for a breather at some celebrated rose garden. Thinking that as I was outside the inhibiting confines of Britain I could safely be a trifle adventurous, I took a bloom delicately between thumb and forefinger and sniffed gently.

"Mais non! Madame Fennie, Mais non!, came this deep voice from behind a black forest of handlebar moustache. "That is not how to appreciate a rose. You must fill your lungs, imbibe its fragrance."

And freely wrapping a strong Gallic arm about my person in a way that only the handsome nature of his moustaches could possibly have excused, he whisked me off to some particularly well-upholstered rosebush, teeming with yellow blossoms.

I should run out of space if I listed all his instructions, prodigiously demonstrated, as to the correct fashion in which to savour a rose. Both he and I were exhilarated, I suspect, by the effects of a Muscadet fuelled lunch. Nevertheless what followed was a pedagogical experience of rare quality.

We had, first, the necessary mental attitude (this no doubt to stop me giggling!) followed by: addressing yourself to the rose; the expulsion of air from the lungs; the bow to the bloom; the long and slow inhalation to fill the body with scent; the closing of the eyes; the peaceful exhalation; the blissful smile; the repetition of the process.

"There, Madame Fennie," (which is how he unfailingly addressed me), that is how you are to smell roses in the future. That is the French way."

He was, as I have said, an extravagant character and seemed quite unperturbed that if this really was the French way then it hadn't spread much beyond our own 'petit coin' of the rose garden.

Maybe I alone was deemed worthy to be initiated into this secret while the rest of the party kept their olfactory talents hidden from the noses of 'Les Anglais.' Indeed, maybe I was his first successful pupil - shy and eager to please that I am, but given to occasional bouts of exuberance when I think no-one is watching.

And thus it was in the park on Saturday afternoon that I in turn became dashing Jean-Pierre, educating a bemused and arthritic mid-eighty year old into the art of savouring roses, while the worried citizens of Barry hurried by, their eyes averted from this unlikely spectacle.

But just as I had been entranced all those years before, so was she now; and still keeps the remains of the rose, a little shrivelled by now Helen says, by her bedside.

Scribbling in the Rain: Reflections on Umbrellas

In my last post I talked about scribbling when one ought to be doing other things; here is an example of what I mean. I wrote it yesterday on the back of an email.

It is pouring with rain and so dark that I've had to switch the light on. Not that there's much of that; the bulb is one of those energy efficient whats-its that take half an hour to come out of hibernation, so I'm writing this in semi-darkness. What ever happened to flaming June?

A girl has just walked past outside, oblivious to the rain. Even the girls these days are macho; coats being something created uniquely for old folk and wimps. They have no embarassment at turning up somewhere drenched to the skin, their garments transparent with wetness. Another example of our retreat from civilisation, I suppose.

Now the rain is driving, if not horizontally, then at 45 degrees. The girl, on her way to school presumably, stops and extracts a baby umbrella from somewhere about her person; she erects it above her head. It is so small that it looks like one of those creations that clowns carry when balancing on the high wire. Safe under its shelter she saunters out of sight.

What a curious thing is an umbrella, I reflect! A little roof that you unfold and carry above you on a stick to shade off the rain or the sun. When were umbrellas invented? I'd hazard a guess at the eighteenth century. And they still look quaint and old-fashioned even when machined from plastic and aluminium and upholstered in today's bright colours.

What other eighteenth century Heath Robinsonian inventions are left to us in daily use, I wonder? Cutlery, I suppose, and dinner plates; mirrors perhaps - but nothing surely as mechanical as an umbrella unless it be the cuckoo clock or the fan. But who uses a fan today? Whereas we would not hesitate to pull an umbrella from our handbags, to pull out a fan today at some social gathering is to invite knowing glances and sotto voce charges of eccentricity.

Unless we were showing off, of course, and pulled out one of those whirly electric contraptions whose blades spin round like a grasscutter. But how does one make eyes at someone from behind a battery operated mini-helicopter? Yet another example of technology killing
civilisation.

I see now that it has brightened up considerably. The electric light is fully charged and the sun has come out (ish). There's no longer an umbrella in sight. I shall leave my bah-humbug mood behind and get on with the work.

IF I CAN'T FILE, NEITHER CAN THEY

At times when you are feeling low it can be generously comforting to discover that those folk whom we esteem, have the same clay feet as the rest of us. That is one of the reasons I enjoy reading diaries - indeed why I enjoy blogging, I suppose. Mind you finding that other people share the idiosyncratic sentiments and silly failings that previously you thought belonged uniquely to you can be mildly disconcerting. After all one doesn't really like to entertain the possibility that the world may be run by people who are just as dippy as oneself.

I remember being fascinated the first time I opened Alan Clark's diaries. I was staying somewhere in the Cotswolds at the time, it was a summer's afternoon and I was feeling a little bored. The book with its lush green cover beckoned from the bookshelf and in no time I was transfixed, utterly transported into the Clark world - a mix of high life and low politics, of hypochondria, insecurity and sheer raciness.

Alan Clark lived in a castle in Kent and somewhat to his chagrin - for I think he imagained himself as a kind of Emperor manqué - was a junior Minister in Mrs Thatcher's government. His diaries are full of indiscretions and shenanigans, many of a sexual nature, but they are very good fun and also wonderfully well written.

It helped that I had been in government - though on the civil service side - for some of the time at least that he wrote about. From the cramped confines of the civil servants' box I too had felt the magic of the Commons Chamber, trod the corridors, been treated in the bars. Some of the characters he mentions were people I knew or at least had met.

I also knew something of politics, of writing, of the northern county of Sutherland where the Clark family had a croft. We shared some elements of a common background. And yet I must have been by far and away as different a sort of member of the human race as you might expect to meet. I had no time for his political sentiment or his whinging, his lies or his lack of feeling for others less fortunate than himself.

But it is when he is acknowledging his temptations and weaknesses that you realise that he has the same clay feet as other people. When, for instance, he writes conspiratorially about making a diary entry in a meeting, of recording his thoughts rather than the substance of the discussion, I am an instant collaborator. 'People assume you are making notes, ' he writes - and this is true. How often have I done this myself?

Or when, as on 8 September 1983 he writes about his paperwork 'I am at my desk…..absolutely drowning in estate papers. Filing piles and Immediate piles and Pending piles are stacked haphazard on top of each other. I try to differentiate by stacking them criss-cross, like bricks, but I caught some that were sticking out with my sleeve and the whole Pisa-like tower collapsed, cascading the private and personal papers all over the floor.' I know exactly what he means; I could have written much the same. Though not in a million years his next sentence: 'So what? I haven't picked them up. I just walk on them.'

I was prompted to recall Alan Clark's attitude to filing by a piece by Jane Shilling in Times2 that caught my eye this week. At the instigation of her editor she has been trying to spend a few days stress free according to principles advocated recently by Stephen Cottrell, the Bishop of Reading, the cornerstone of which seems to be ditching that awful taskmaster, the To Do List.

Freed from its clutches Jane sets out to tackle jobs put off for too long. There's the growing pile of unread newspapers kept against the possibility of their containing some vital scrap of information. And then, 'the almost equally large pile of unanswered correspondence and the nasty slithering heap of filing barely contained in a cupboard out of which it threatens to burst at any moment. They gnaw at my conscience like sin.'

'My own admin,' she writes, after opening the cupboard and listening to the radio about a scientist who sorts out his paperwork at 4am, 'is a debilitating sight, strewn all over the floor, but I round it up into an assortment of tidy sub-heaps and go off to Pilates, which I've never done before.'

Here, then are two very different people, writing 24 years apart. Both are having the same problem - a problem moreover, that I can relate to utterly and completely. For I have 'sub-heaps' arranged on almost every flat surface, bulging cupboards, tottering piles. They, talented and successful as they may be are no better at it than I am. This is truly a wonderfully comforting feeling.

REFLECTIONS ON HAY

The heavy rain on Sunday had churned the drive into the Hay Festival car park into a rich red mud. By the time we had crossed the field and entered the site a fair bit of it was still attached to our shoes. The Festival was in full swing, this being the bank holiday, the events sold out. Bigger than ever seemed the tent city, complete with those vertical flags that seem to have come from the Mongolian steppes. And everywhere hordes of people. Wherever do they all come from, I hear myself thinking?

I love the Hay Festival for it is an easy, forgiving sort of place where the more eccentrically you dress the more intelligent you are deemed to be. As someone who has never mastered the essential elements of looking smart I am in my element. I am windblown, dressed in a suede coat with mock fur (it was very windy) my shoes covered in mud. Thus I stumble into the administration offices in search of tickets to hear the war correspondent, Patrick Coburn, being interviewed by Rosie Boycott about his Baghdad experiences.

I am loosely attached to some minor UNESCO Committee or other and, rather at my suggestion, I'm afraid, we were supposed to be sponsoring Patrick's talk but somewhere along the line the wires became crossed and we found that we weren't after all. Someone else had got in before us, or after us. Usually sponsorship is so desperately sought after that it is a surprise to find that it has become a species of competitive event. Still, the organisers had apologised and gamely said we could have our ticket allocation. The only trouble was that no one could find these tickets allegedly endorsed for our benefit.

'Never mind, we have briefed the steward' someone said mysteriously.

So under her beady eye, we go and sit in the sponsor's seats, all five of us, wondering who we might have displaced, when who should arrive with another party but Simon Scharma, - the charismatic tele-historian. He of the doom-laden voice. Oh dear, I thought.

But I needn't have worried. The stewards quickly ushered the Scharma party into some casual chairs (perhaps meant for us) set randomly at the side of the auditorium and the show began. Tee-hee, I thought, I shall never be able to look at him again without thinking of the time I pinched his seat.

Patrick Coburn has been travelling the Middle East since 1978. He got into Bagdad just before the invasion and has stayed there, on and off, for much of the time since. He was lucid, incisive and presented a horrifying picture of daily life in Iraq in the years following the invasion. He ground no axes, just told the tale of what he saw and tried to explain some of the tribal, religious and political complexities.

Rosie Boycott adeptly set him talking. (I was relieved to see that she also had decided that the windblown, hedge-backwards look was in vogue at this year's Festival). Much of what he said appears in his book, called simply 'The Occupation,' copies of which he signed in the bookshop after the event.

I'm a sucker for signed copies. Authors usually made a great fuss when doing this, but he signed mine with little more than a grunt of acknowledged thanks when I said that I had enjoyed his talk. Maybe he thought me a sycophant.

But I had wanted to ask him why? Not why he might dread sycophants but why he should choose of his own free will to report from surely the most dangerous place for journalists in the world. What drives him, I wonder, other than a secret and cruel death wish?

When I got home I went for a long walk to reflect. Arriving at the top the old Roman road my path was blocked by a car in which a young couple appeared engaged in vigorous copulating operations. What they thought they were doing in such a public spot on a Bank Holiday I have no idea. They couldn't have been local.

Still I guess we've all been there at some time in our lives so I made an elaborate pretence of looking at the ground and by taking the far path managed to avoid passing the car too closely and instead skirted the copse on the far side.

Partly I was considering how I might save some money from the incessantly increasing household budget, which left to its own devices for the past few months has expanded skywards with enthusiasm. How can I cut back our expenditure? Well, one thing, I suppose, might be to stop buying author-signed books at £15.99 a throw. But then I do so love books. It's always like that isn't it?

MY WEEK - WALNUTS, HONEY BUT NO WINE

Tree
Each morning I go to look at the little walnut sapling I brought back from the Auverne. Having survived being uprooted from the old tin bath in which it had germinated, the journey back to Blighty wrapped in sacking, and being over-wintered in some very acid compost, which rotted away its few remaining roots, I finally planted it on the lawn as part of the recent gardening operations, where it now stands like an accusing finger.

This week - we are in late May - it put out its first tentative shoot, low down on what one day may be called a trunk. Well, walnuts are not the earliest of birds.

What is curious is that the shoot - completely formed with leaves - is so small that you almost need a magnifying glass to see it. Even on my twig like tree it is disproportionately miniature - like those infant arms that bud out of the mighty chest of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Moreover, despite my daily coaxing the shoot shows no sign of actually getting any bigger. Other buds are bursting now; I wait with anxiety to see whether they will produce anything bigger. I do hope it grows - for I have pledged it as part of the 'Plant a Billion Trees' campaign. My (very little) bit to help save the planet.

Regime
I am on a new regime - I have forsaken my usual welcome glass with my supper and replaced it with water. This is a great sacrifice.

But having again put on a few pounds in as many days on my recent trip to France, I felt I had to do something drastic. I have always found alcohol to be a great appetiser and after a glass or two I am always hungrier than before.

So after a week of drinking fizzy water what has happened? Well, the weight has come down (a bit) but the biggest change has been an absence of that bloated feeling after eating: the feeling that someone has opened a valve in your feet and your energy has just poured out on the floor.

Usually after supper, I just want to relax, to read the paper or just potter about in the garden. Anything else demands real effort. Now I have regained that energy. Last night I was out cutting the grass until almost dusk.

Funny how these things creep up on you. Alcohol (in moderation) never used to have the effect of knocking me out - of leaving me feeling zonked - especially when I've had a hard day. If suddenly you started feeling zonked after a couple of glasses, you would, I suppose, stop immediately. But when the effect is gradual and irregular you simply accept it as normal. I suppose its age.

I don't intend to give up completely. We have a big barbecue planned on Saturday to celebrate the made-over garden. I shall make sure I indulge then. Wouldn't want to lose the habit after all.

Farm Shop
There's a new Farm Shop just opened in the lovely Vale village of Peterston-super-Ely. J and I have been over there a couple of times. It is full of lovely produce: locally grown vegetables, some of them organic, that remind me of the market gardens of my childhood. They also make quite gorgeous ice cream, marketed under the 'Wild Fig' brand, which left me thinking at first that their display must be very dull with only one flavour. Not true of course, and there are tables to sit outside in the sunshine while you eat it.

But the loveliest things in the whole shop are the jars of honey. For £28 you can buy a great Winnie-the-Pooh size pot of honey. The pot is glass (so you can see there is honey all the way down) and has a great honeycomb in it. The honey inside is a glorious amber through which the sunlight filters and refracts like a crystal. There must be at least a kilo of honey in each pot - but I could never dip into it; the honey pot is simply far too beautiful. Now all I need is £28.

THE CHESHIRE CAT MAY VANISH BUT HIS PHILOSOPHY STAYS

Why is it, do you suppose, that though our bodies seem to age with increasing rapidity every year, our minds seem set to a biological cycle altogether? Having advanced already into the silver age of the bus pass, concessions at the theatre and free prescriptions, I find my mind and outlook little different to how they seemed in my early thirties.

Like most of us, I suppose, I live in a dissonant world of thinking I am thirty years younger than I really am. Until, of course, I look in the mirror or wardrobe or spend a day twisting and bending in the garden. Then I start moaning and complaining. The mind may be strong but its corporeal reality is weak. Can anything be done to stop the body ageing twice as fast as the mind?

I was pondering this philosophical question the other day, relaxing in the sunshine after what had seemed a particularly hard session in the garden, when a smiling face appeared over the garden wall. It belonged to my neighbour's thirty-something son, Philip, who had been visiting his Mum.

As my garden is elevated, the wall in question is a retaining wall. Philip's grinning head therefore appeared at lawn level, disembodied and looking like a species of Cheshire Cat. Though he was standing and I reclining I still had to look down at him.

Philip is a musician and one of the most optimistic and even-tempered people I know.
Some years ago he invited me to his wedding - a curious affair conducted to a pagan ritual - somewhere up in the mountains of North Wales. The ceremony took place in a woodland glade to which we all marched, chanting, behind a bizarre battery of pipes and drums.

Everyone was dressed in their best finery - well, this was a wedding - but in costumes loosely based on 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' We were a fantastic collection of Titiania's and Oberon's, Pyramus and Thisbe's, elves and fairies, with an assortment of Tudor monarchs thrown in for good measure.

Making use of bridegroom's privileges, Philip himself appeared as Mozart in a splendid eighteenth century frock coat and breeches and thus was he joined with his Hippolyta, while we tied ribbons to the trees roundabout, some of which may even be there to this day.

At the party afterwards we drank mead, I seem to remember, rather than wine and ate off wooden platters and a very good time was had by all. It must have been the most memorable wedding I have ever attended. Sadly the couple have since parted, though in the spirit of that eclectic gathering they remain friends.

When he's not composing or teaching Philip likes to explore, trekking over the Andes and similar inhospitable places. I reminded him of this as I lay aching in my chair. "I feel as if I have just climbed to Machu Picchu," I groaned.

But Philip just smiled. "Do you know", he said, "the first day of trekking I did feel just like that. With altitude sickness, a headache, aching limbs, I just wanted to go home. But then I thought that I shouldn't be moaning. Instead I should remember how lucky I was to be amongst such scenery. Rather than feel weary and miserable I told myself I should feel grateful for the privilege of being allowed to do be there. And as soon as I was able to make that mental shift, from complaining to feeling grateful and privileged, then suddenly I had more energy and the pain went away."

He laughed a little. His face at the level of my feet almost made him seem like a little Buddha. And I thought, "of course, he's right." We do all complain so much that we forget to remember how lucky most of us are.

So maybe this is the way to stop the body ageing quite so fast: to feel grateful for what we have, rather than to complain about what we have not; to be grateful for the garden and the sunshine rather than the aches and the pains and the cost.

His face disappeared, like the Cheshire Cat. In Alice's tale the Cat vanishes but the grin remains. In this case Philip's smiling head disappeared, but, as you can see from this tale, his philosophy hasn't.