THE STRANGE TALE OF PIGLING BLAND

I think all houses should have a window seat, preferably with a handy bookcase close by. To sit there, in the middle of a busy day, idly leafing through the pages of a book, is to find a cultural oasis in the sands of life’s desert. Even simply to look out of the window, watching the passers by, or the birds in the sky, is a haven of tranquility.

In fact, now that I come to think of it, one of my early memories is of sitting in the bow window of the spacious house in which I grew up, reading a book about the Channel Islands. I had picked it out of the bookcase attracted by its handsome blue binding and its title, racily picked out in gold blockwork, which suggested historical romance. So I was disappointed to find that it was only an upmarket travel guide, and quite devoid of musketeers. Still, I persevered in my moment of tranquility when in all probability I ought to have been feeding the pigs.

Had I known it then I could have pleaded efficiency. For I read somewhere that to remain maximally effective throughout a busy day requires periods of complete idleness. I was also in good company as Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, did the same thing. Or so I learned later.

He quotes an incident in his autobiography, where, in the midst of some crisis or other, he sat in the Downing Street cabinet room and read Jane Austen for half an hour. That, it seemed, showed a better sense of proportion than the gadarene rush of politicians today. And so it came about that in the middle of a busy day recently, I found myself sitting by the window re-reading Beatrix Potter’s ‘Tale of Pigling Bland.’

In our household Beatrix Potter is read and re-read until the little square books collapse with age and over use. We renew them, I suppose, each generation and the current volumes were bought for Elder and Younger Daughter when they first learned to read, or maybe even before. Their names written in shaky script with an eclectic variety of implements appear on the fly leaves.

Occasionally they would try their infant hands at copying a long word like ‘Tiggywinkle’ - the handwriting starting big and bold and optimistically level. But with the rapid encroachment of the edge of the page, the puffed line of writing would shrink like a deflated balloon, arching downwards in a waterfall of letters. Now Younger Daughter is (officially) pregant we shall have to contemplate buying another set.

You can tell the favourite stories by how well-thumbed they are and if I tell you that the ‘Tale of Pigling Bland’ could almost pass for pristine, it might suggest that it wasn’t as popular as the others. Partly this is because it is possibly the longest of the Potter stories and partly perhaps because it tells an adult and chilling tale.

At its simplest it concerns a family of large white piglets who are dispersed from the farm on which they are born. Two of the pigs, Alexander and the eponymous Pigling Bland are given licences and sent off, amid much tearfulness on the part of the mother pig, Aunt Pettitoes, to market in Lancashire. The two pigs carry provisions and ‘conversation peppermints.’

(Now you may reasonably ask exactly what quality a peppermint requires to make it a ‘conversation’ peppermint - indeed what quality makes for ‘conversation sweeties,’ another term that crops up in the book. I do not know, myself, and so am asking).

Inevitably the two pigs do not make it to market. Alexander, the improvident one, loses his licence and is escorted home by a policeman to be ‘disposed of’ in the neighbourhood. Pigling himself, having lost his way, is kidnapped by a farmer and about to be disposed in a culinary direction when he discovers a similarly aged black Berkshire girl pig (Pig-Wig) in much the same predicament. Together they escape and head for the Westmorland county boundary, which, by a ruse, they manage to cross, hand in hand, to live a life of freedom growing vegetables.

But sitting in the window there re-reading this children’s tale, I found myself asking more than just about ‘conversation peppermints’. For here, surely, are all the mementoes of slavery - of families being broken up - of slaves being prodded and poked and hired in the market. Of licences to travel, and of the tearful mother forced to say goodbye to children whom she will never see again.

Then there is the curious white pig-black pig combination and the escape over some arbitrary line to freedom. Is this not Huckleberry Finn and Jim heading (but not quite reaching) the Ohio river? By the time Beatrix Potter was writing, of course, slavery had been abolished - at least formally. Is this just an innocent children’s tale - or is she trying to say something more, than the usual fable of right and wrong amongst the rabbits and the lettuces? Is this not a plea, disguised as innocent anthropomorphism, in favour of the unity of the human race?

So much to ponder from such a small white square of a book. Yes, get a window seat.

The picture shows Pigling Bland and Pig-Wig contemplating the free hills of Westmoreland

THE PROMPTER'S NIGHTMARE

I am sitting in the prompter’s box with my feet perched up on the corner of the stage. I’ve a glass of red wine beside me for refreshment, my hand bag is tucked away under my legs and I have in my hand one of those miniature battery torches that usually sit on your key ring to help you find the keyhole in the darkness but on this occasion will serve to light up my script in the darkened passages of the play. The light on the prompter’s box has broken, you see, (for this is amateur theatre) and we have not yet sent someone on an errand to buy a new bulb.

Actually I am the director of this play but as the Bard says we all have to play many parts and as our usual prompter has duties at a wedding, it falls to me to snuggle myself into the box and prepare to watch Saturday’s entertainment at eye level to the stage. I will say this, though: you get a wonderful view of the shoes.

Our Chairman comes on, the audience hush. He makes the usual announcements, remembering to include the variant of that otherwise rather tedious mobile phone injunction. “We know that members of the audience lead busy lives on which live, death and junior members of the government may depend. We understand therefore your absolute need to keep your mobile phone switched on. All we ask is for a small contribution of £50 should you need to receive a call.”

I turn on my torch, noticing it has been provided by RIAS - insurance for the over 50s. Well that’s well-targeted, I think. In this place 50 is positively juvenile.

Or not quite: for on stage is a 15 year old, participating in her first play as a whiny, adenoidal youngster. Nevertheless, I have had to work hard on her. Why do teenagers think it only necessary to pronounce the first five syllables of a sentence, leaving the rest as a sort of swallowed gurgling? There isn’t a tax on articulation.

In fact none of my cast were regular actors. For reasons that needn’t detain us here I found myself directing Fumed Oak - a one act play by Noel Coward - a rather spiteful and misogynistic piece, not chosen by me I hasten to add. It’s about a bickering grandmother, mother and daughter from whom a hen-pecked husband walks out amid scenes of great calamity domestic upset.

Still, my cast were wonderful, bless them, even if they wouldn’t often do that which I asked of them - to look at the audience when they were speaking, rather than at each other. We have a natural compulsion to look at the person we are talking to. But if you do this on stage, all the audience sees is the back of a head. And all it hears, if it is lucky, is a bit of a mumble.

In the theatre as much information is conveyed by an actor’s face, by their eyes, by the unconscious set of their mouth and by subtle tones in the voice, as by the words themselves. If the audience cannot see the actor’s face then it sees only half the story. It’s a book without pictures. But to get inexperienced actors to speak out forcibly into the black void when saying something intimate and personal to someone behind them is a problem with which all directors have to struggle.

Never mind. If you are prompting, you need your head down in the script and to disregard where people are looking. It is only at rehearsals that you can make frantic hand gestures, like a football manager on the touchline. You have to follow the text like a hawk for if an actor dries up, you need instantly to know the line.

But actors don’t often dry up. What happens more frequently is that in the adrenalin stress of a live performance lines are often skipped. It’s quite surprising actually how little this matters and rarely does the audience notice.

The prompter’s nightmare is when an actor skips not just a line or two, but a whole page. Like a train jumping the tracks an actor can start a line on page thirty-one and follow this with something from page thirty-four - conveniently missing perhaps a vital ingredient of the plot.

No quiet hiss from the prompter then - you have to bellow above the actor’s voices, attract their attention and hope they have the nous to realise the mistake and ad lib their way back to page thirty-one again. Last Saturday, however, none of this happened. ‘Fumed Oak’ was followed by a happy rendition of the Frank Vickery comedy ‘A Night Out.’ None of the actors needed prompting. We had a happy show, a good audience, food and a wonderful atmosphere in the bar afterwards, and we all went home happy.

Picture shows our little theatre looking at the auditorium from the stage. The prompter's box is just out of sight in the bottom left hand corner of the picture.

ON MEDICAL HERBALISM

Last weekend Elder Daughter invited us over for the Frome Festival. Not that it was an auspicious weekend, weatherwise. In fact in rained almost continuously. I rather fear than global warming has been replaced by global wetting, at least so far as southern Britain is concerned. There were, nonetheless, interludes between the wind and rain, which was fortunate as we were booked to attend what the Festival advertised as a ‘Medical Herbal Walk along the East Mendip Trail.’

This turned out to be most excellent value for the £5 we each paid. Indeed so full of insight and information was Zoe Hawes’ perambulating seminar that my one criticism of the event was that we should have been pre-warned to bring pencil and paper in serious quantities, and perhaps a camera too for the photographing of unlikely specimens of greenery.

Zoe’s job was to occupy us for two hours on the subject of medical herbalism and she did that wonderfully. If you get a chance to attend one of her walks (listed on her website zoehawes.co.uk) then you won’t be disappointed. I shall attempt here to record some of the things she said. But as I speak from memory I am sure I shall omit much of importance and may get other matters quite wrong. Please take my apologies therefore in advance.

She had, she said, begun her professional life as a nurse, but progressively began to have doubts about orthodox medicine’s approach to complex medical problems. Of course, orthodox medicine would be the first port of call should you have an accident, but for many chronic conditions, she concluded, orthodox medicine tended to treat symptoms and ailments rather than asking the more difficult question of why the body is no longer at ease with itself (and so dis-eased). Many different causes might give rise to same symptoms, she said.

So she had switched from orthodox medicine, undertaking five years of training as a herbalist and now having her own practice in Frome. She believes, so far as possible, in using herbs that grow locally and gathering as many as she can herself.

The walk began. We didn’t go far before reaching a clump of nettles that conveniently sheltered a patch of white ‘dead’ nettles beside them. I won’t try to rehearse her catalogue of life-giving properties attaching to these two plants, though I do remember that she said nettle seeds, the tiny, dusty strings that hang from the plants at this time of the year, could restore adrenal glands that had become tired and battered by stress. A teaspoon of these (I hope I remember the quantity right) sprinkled on your morning cereal or yoghurt could work wonders.

We walked on to stop under a lime tree. Zoe explained the restorative potential of lime flowers on the circulatory system, relieving high blood pressure and inducing relaxation. You can buy packs of these flowers in France apparently, where people use them regularly and not just to make a relaxing tisane at the end of the day.

And so walk continued along the trail beside the River Frome. We saw Comfrey and St John’s Wort, Vervane, Plaintain, Burdock and Meadow Sweet. And probably others too that I have forgotten. For each one she described its properties and how it might be prepared - tinctures prepared with vodka or neat alcohol, or dried and infused or sprinkled on salads.

However, herbalism is not about seeing the forest as a kind of free pharmacy full of wonder drugs for self-prescription. This may be one element if you know what you are doing, though I would always rather buy my St John’s Wort from Healthspan rather than trying to make my own preparation from something I might, or might not, have identified correctly.

The basis of herbalism might be the chemicals produced by plants, some of which are very powerful. That’s why we don’t eat hemlock or deadly nightshade. But if this were all that herbalism were about then we should be back to orthodox medicine - treating headaches with willow bark, perhaps, rather than with aspirin produce in a factory. No, if I interpret Zoe correctly, that there are at least two other major aspects to the science.

First there’s the history. People have been using plants to fight disease since time immemorial. Moreover, for much of this time herbalism practitioners have been cut off from one another: by geographical distance for one thing, and by an absence of books at the level of the ordinary village practitioner. Now that communications barrier has been removed.

Remarkably, we find that the treatments that have evolved in different places, using particular types of plants in standardised ways, have a great deal in common. Trial and error in many different places and at many different times has yielded a broad corpus of agreement. This would not be the case if herbalism didn’t yield practical results.

Secondly, there is the emphasis on treating the whole person. Seeing a person’s symptoms and lifestyle and history as a connected whole and therefore seeking to move beyond the presenting aches and pains and tiredness or sickness to a variety of possible deeper causes.

As I say, this is my interpretation of the gist of what Zoe was talking about. I cannot claim to be definitive. But in my own experience I know two people on whom orthodox medicine had given up - or at least whom at the end of a substantial period orthodox medicine had had to conclude a lack of any improvement - who subsequently took themselves to herbalists and have found the cures that they had initially hoped orthodox medicine would provide. Of course such evidence is anecdotal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is wrong. And there have been umpteen studies demonstrating the usefulness of certain herbal treatments.

At any rate as we all huddled around at the end of the walk and Zoe produced several flagons of elderflower cordial we judged it to have been an excellent and informative afternoon, on which even the rain had deigned not to pour.

Image is from Zoe's website.

ON LOVE, MARRIAGE AND THE DATING AGENCY

Marriages, they say, are made in heaven, though if this is the case there is an awful lot of twiddling with the raw materials that goes on here on earth, much of which, it has to be said, is unsuccessful.

I should at this point trot out one or two of statistics produced by those estimable people at the National Statistics Office for the benefit of columnists, bloggers and political parties. But being not so much lazy as short of time I think we can all take the point as read.

Simply put it is this: that a very large number of marriages fail and those failures cost us dearly, whether we are talking about emotional loss, financial loss, loss to the stability of society, loss to a child’s self-esteem and education, health, happiness and so on . Show me a broken marriage and, in most cases, I’ll show you an expensive tragedy.

Yet despite the vast scale - something like 40 per cent of first marriages end in divorce - we take little or no action to improve this state of affairs. In many cases love seems literally to be blind and unions are entered into that are manifestly unsuitable. When love departs, as love is wont to do, there is nothing left to hold the matrimonial edifice together.

Like one of those Shakespearean farces where the juice of something sprinkled in someone’s eyes is enough to make them keel over at the appearance of the most bestial of characters, so far too many people end up marrying whoever is closest when hitching time comes.

‘Methinks I was enamoured of an ass’ says Titania when she wakes. Alas, too many girls wake from the dreamy longings of ‘when, when, when?’ to find themselves married to arses and spending the rest of the time before the divorce asking themselves, ‘why, why, why?’

I should perhaps at this point exclude myself, my friends and my family most of whom have been freakishly successful in finding enduring relationships. But as my father had three wives and and my mother two husbands, I feel that a generation of matrimonial permanence is required.

Maybe I have been lucky, but my parents weren’t and nor are so many of the young lovelies that we see sweeping through the streets on a Saturday afternoon, dressed in improbable meringue in the back seat of some bizarre and unsuitable means of locomotion. Still most of us have been there: Elder Daughter arrived at her wedding in a boat.

I had the notion once that so great must be the cost of broken marriages to the National Health Service that the Government should institute a free computer dating service in every surgery, backed up with psychological profiling and parental checks.

In the old days, both boys and girls had suitors lined up for them by parents interested in forming financial or social liaisons with other parents. The young were pawns in such arrangements, but whether the heartbreak was any greater then than now, I doubt very much.

Then there is that famous painting - which, were I UPL, I would be able to identify with a photo, of a young woman faced by a comfortably off but obviously dull young man of the Reverend Collins variety while through the window behind her we see an impoverished, but no doubt interesting bohemian character vacating the premises. The painting carries the explanatory title ‘Torn’ and the sub-title - for those of duller intelligence - ‘What Should She Do?'

I suppose it rather depends on the number of years she expects to live. If she is consumptive then she should elope with the gypsy. If she has the constitution of an ox, then she should marry Mr Collins and make the best of it. After all, the world is not exactly populated with sage, wise and beautiful Mr D’Arcy’s.

Indeed one could make an interesting story by bringing together Lizzie and her sister in old age and comparing notes, as it were. The manipulative Collins almost certainly would have become a bishop, while the upright Mr D’Arcy, I feel, would certainly have come to a sticky end. For all we know, Lizzie might have ended up with the gardener.

While the practice of arranging weddings may still thrive in many cultures, we modern Bennets, have given up trying to marry off our daughters telling them to do the job themselves.

Many thus turn to dating agencies or those small ads to be found in every paper and magazine nowadays. My favourites are those in the London Review of Books. For instance, I love the spirit of this woman who has clearly had problems with agencies:

Getting laid through match.com isn’t as easy as the adverts make it out to be. I’m hoping for better pickings from this column. Woman 87. Box xxx

or the following extravagant example of the genre:

I’ve spent my adult life fabricating reciprocal feelings from others and I don’t intend to stop now, nor at any other London Review Bookshop event I’m summarily ejected from. Yes, once the history section had emptied and we were left alone his voice said ‘I’m not interested,’ but his eyes very clearly stated ‘please follow me home and observe me from the shrubs in the park opposite until squirrels start to burrow into your legs, believing you to be a tree,’ Woman, 43. Reading between the lines even when the lines aren’t actually there.

She ends with the stern injunction: Don’t pretend you don’t love me. Box xxx.

But for sheer realism I go for this waspish example:

Most partners cite the importance of having a loved one who will listen to and understand them. I’m here to debunk this theory. The more you listen to your loved one, the more you will realise they talk crap, whine a lot and make unreasonable demands regarding holidays together (since when is a car ferry better than a plane, since when is a museum tour stop better than drunken evenings talking to oiled up Italians on a beach?) I’d like to state here and now that anyone responding to this advert and winding up in an emotional (or, even better, purely sexual and frequently tawdry) relationship with me will never be listened to at all. That way we can carry on the pretence of enjoying each other’s company for many an ignorant year. No lawyers. Woman 38. Box xxx

NOSTALGIA IS WHAT IT USED TO BE

I have a creepy feeling visiting houses in which I used to live. The cracks and corners and carpets and cupboards prompt long hidden memories, some good some bad. Moreover, instead of being tidily arranged neatly along the washing line of time, these suddenly prompted flash-backs jump out untidily all over the place, like clothes pulled at random from the laundry basket.

Looking out of a window, for instance, brings a rag-bag of memories of the same scene, in winter and summer, of small children and teenagers, quite juxtaposed and jumbled, like hymns ancient and modern.

Last Sunday we were back in the old farmhouse that we rented when the children were very small and we were very poor. We had gone there for a year. In the event we stayed for nine years, loving the place and too frightened by the heroic rises in the price of property around us to contemplate moving.

With its ancient Grade II listed walls, broad lawn and views all the way south to the Bristol Channel and the hills of Exmoor beyond, it was definitely a summer house. We revelled with games and barbecues in the garden on hot days and when overheated sought cool shelter in its unplastered rooms of stone.

Winter, of course, was another matter. We shivered. The house was perpetually cold and impossible to heat. Doors and windows might be bolted against the gales but wildlife still sought refuge inside. Bats and jackdaws came down the chimney, mice bored through the rubble interior of our external walls and made the kitchen their hunting ground, while their larger cousins, the rats, played football around our furniture in the attic.

A curtain hang at the entrance to the great staircase of stone that wound about the fireplace and in winter it would billow like the mainsail of a three decker, as if upstairs every window had been thrown open. Draughts seemed to blow from every crack in the stonework, from between every floorboard, around every door, down every chimney, despite fortunes spent in proprietary draught-proofing preparations and contrivances.
We came through nine of such overcoat-huddled winters resolved that never again would we live in an old house without proper heating.

But the summer was another story. Across the lawn we strung a net between bamboo poles, made of pieces of Netlon, sown together. Then we painted out a tennis court with white emulsion. On this we played ‘soft’ tennis with an orange sponge ball that floated on the wind with the low branch of an overhanging ash tree an additional hazard. From the precarious top of the step ladder, Younger daughter would play ‘Umpit’ while Elder Daughter and I battled out together our Wimbledon final.

We also played croquet. Unable to afford proper Hurlingham kit we bought £2 tent mallets from the local ironmonger and coloured plastic water-filled balls from the toy shop that were originally designed for boules. We made hoops out of wire coat hangers and raced around the circuit knocking each other deep into the herbaceous borders. Younger Daughter won invariably. She is ultra-competitive in these matters and the aggressive viciousness of croquet obviously appeals to her inner warrior.

Our energies from these games must have been absorbed by the trees around this garden for when the owners of the house finally returned from their travels on many continents and displaced us to our present warm, modern but not totally characterless dwelling, they set about building a boules court - or petanque piste - if you will, of regulation length and surface.

Not only that, but they acquired a proper croquet set for the lawn and for the past few years, winter and summer, have invited the neighbours (we are neighbours in time if not in space) to participate in a tournament complete with silver cups. Indeed the mid-summer croquet and boules event is fast becoming a must on the social calendar of village life.

By some weird streak of fate I, who am normally a dunce at any game involving spherical objects, managed to win the boules tournament in each of the first two years. Not entirely as a result of my own physical efforts, but as a result of wrangling an energetic teenage lad as my partner, young enough to listen to what I opined by way of strategy and muscled enough to deliver, with me bringing up the rear, as it were.

Croquet, I have never been able to master and the less said about this the better. If I closed my eyes I am not certain that the ball would run any straighter than it does when I hit it. I invariably come last, much to the disgruntlement of anyone uninformed enough to partner me.

So there we were last Sunday, back in what I still regard as ‘our’ garden, playing boules and croquet. Without my necessary ‘yoof’ to partner me I was knocked out in the first round of the boules, though as this was by the couple who went on to win, some honour was salvaged. This anyway left me time to sit in the sunshine, glass of wine in hand and listen again in my mind to Younger Daughter perched on her step ladder, crying ‘Out,’ with her usual delicious satisfaction.

THE NON-RECYCLERS

What to do with the neighbour that won't recycle? Everybody who lives on our little road here recycles their card, paper, glass, tins, plastic etc. We all sort it out and dutifully place it in bags and green boxes, thoughtfully provided by the Council, whence it is collected by surly and bad-tempered recyclers who seem to take great pleasure in throwing the boxes across the road, oblivious to the damage caused to the boxes themselves or to the gardens and hedges in which they land.

Alan Bennett commented in one of his diaries on this phenomenon. He expected, he wrote, that the bin men would be surly, but that the recyclers would be munchkins on a higher plane - being pioneers and ambassadors for the green ambitions of the nation. Which wasn’t so at all, he said, or rather wrote, wringing his hands. Indeed, Alan Bennett went on to point out that, if anything, the reverse was true. It was the bin men who were the polite and helpful envoys of officialdom. Well, here I am noticing exactly the same thing and 200 miles west of Campden. How odd! Maybe, being a green agent is wearing on the soul.

Still, back to my neighbours that don’t recycle. I don’t know why they don’t - possibly they are upset by the carelessness of the recyclers, but I doubt it. Possibly they have no recycling box, though the Council falls over backwards to give you recycling consumables and starts you off helpfully by providing large quantities of recycling literature to put in them, so I doubt it.

And because this family - there are only three of them: man, woman and child - don't recycle, they perforce put out a large quantity of rubbish bags. Yesterday, I counted six full bags. Most of the rest of us who do recycle have just half a bag. Not that I make a habit of counting people’s rubbish bags, you understand, but when the things are just a few yards from one's door and you can't help but walk past them on the way to the shops, their number intrudes subliminally into the sub-conscious. I am sure there were six. Which is two each!

Nor are the six bags the product of an epic bout of de-cluttering for there are regularly a large number of full bags on the pavement on Thursday mornings.

The question is how can one tactfully suggest to the family that they might be a tad more community minded? My dilemma is not helped by the fact that I don't really know them. They are relatively recent arrivals and we aren’t a terribly neighbourly lot around here. They haven't been to my house or I to theirs. But otherwise they seem agreeable folk. We say hello to each other when we pass in the street; we smile and remark about something or other. We recognise one another as inhabiting the same community.

Why should I bother I ask myself? Well, yesterday I found myself becoming irritated by the sight of the six bags of rubbish. I know I shouldn't be irritated. The world, I tell myself, is what it is; imperfect. It is not made soft and fluffy for my benefit. Irritation is nevertheless a failing to which I am prone. But what can I say that might be tactful and helpful and won't leave the family feeling that the neighbours are spying on them?

I have to confess to being hopelessly gauche in such situations. I tend to hide my head and hope what ever the problem was will have gone away by the time I look up again. I believe ostriches adopt the same principle and it seems to have worked for them. When I do try opening my mouth to remonstrate I either end up apologising (as I did once when a man parked his car on the edge of my garden - “so sorry that my garden should have got in the way of your car ”) - or else I say something that I immediately regret and which leaves me feeling foolish. I really do need to take lessons here. I don’t want to fall out with my neighbours who drive two BMWs between them but are otherwise, I am sure, very caring folk and kind to animals. Indeed they have a little dog. And I drove a BMW myself once upon a time and a very solid car it was too.

Which is why I throw myself on your resources. Is there an easy and tactful answer? Or should I mind my own business, stop trying to save the planet and get a life. Answers on a postcard please.

WONDERFUL ARE THE WORKINGS OF A WHEELBARROW

I have a magpie’s memory for bright little nuggets of prose and ‘Wonderful are the Workings of a Wheelbarrow’ is just one such phrase I picked up here on this site. Actually I think it came from UPL, or, now I ponder on it, maybe it was UPL’s Mother, who UPL was describing as wont to use it whenever a child got a little too full of herself and started to babble away like conceited children, high on over-attentive adult company, or the dregs of the wine bottle, are often wont to do. It struck me then as one of the most crushing put-me-downs that I had ever heard - devastatingly accurate and with all the deflating power of one of those 16 ton weights that used to appear regularly as extras in Monty Python sketches.

Wonderful, indeed, are the workings of a wheelbarrow! Exit, then, one sad and sorry child, tale between legs, eyes brimming with tears, lower lip trembling, the creative flights of fancy and newly acquired erudition shot down in flames and crashed to earth, the soul bruised, the spirit battered, the company laughing, the only hope left that the earth should open in one great enormous hole into which to tumble, down to oblivion and an end to the heart thumping pain of embarrassment. Death indeed could not come soon enough.

Of course, we don’t need UPL’s Mum (if indeed it was she for my memory these days is not what it once was) to administer such a coup de dégonflage. When one is grown-up (if indeed one ever truly grows up) there are enough gremlin mothers and teachers and stern aunts and railway stationmasters and policemen who inhabit one’s own head to stock a shop. And these are ready to unleash a flood of taunts every bit as excruciating and painful as the embarrassing put me downs of youth. The shame is even worse really because - as I say to myself - by the ripe old age of 62 YOU REALLY SHOULD HAVE LEARNT BY NOW WHEN TO SHUT UP!

So how did this most recent episode come about? While I am still in a manner of speaking ‘La dame aux etiquettes,’ or in other wise helping to run our somewhat pedestrian label business, I have been appointed, part-time and at bottle washer level to speak for the UK on a European project. And very flattering it is too, even more flattering when the horrible feeling of finding myself totally out of my depth did not materialise and I found that the waters were in fact not deep at all but rather shallow and that the project required (uniquely amongst all other work on this earth) the precise and eclectically random range of experiences that my wandering CV has to offer. Except labels, that is. At least so far!

So there I am in Brussels for a two day meeting, surrounded most stimulatingly by colleagues drawn from every state of the European Union with the wonderful advantage of not having to think via a second language as the project is conducted entirely in English. Hola!

Because I have a passing fluency in English - not perhaps as good as the Swedish guy’s or the Dutch guy’s or the lovely soul from Romania who confessed never to having set foot language wise outside Bucharest and yet who spoke English impeccably as though she had been born and bred in Guildford - they even put me on television. Well, not real transmitted television but sort of dummy DVD-making television to talk about no end of erudite matters of the moment. And whereas any hint of a camera lens - whether pocket digital or full-scale telecamera - normally makes me clam up and begin to do a fair impression of a long dead tree, this time the adrenalin flowed like water and I was high as a kite on it and everybody most kindly said how good I was.

So Fennie - dear - just why did you not quit while you were ahead?

Well, by the time I got on the Eurostar, I was ready to go home, but the adrenalin wasn’t. Out came the laptop, out came a sheaf of notes - had I not promised a report of my observations? Here were all sorts of things I wanted to say about the project, both good things and bad things - but I felt confident that the world and his wife would be interested in my musings for they were the best and most insightful musings in the whole wide world and they had to be committed to an email and had to be circulated.

So I typed and typed and typed. And as I typed I become more authoritarian, ‘we should,’ ‘we must,’ ‘I’m sorry but you can’t,’ ‘this is like going back to school.’ I could hear an internal dialogue in my head. “A bit strong this, isn’t it?’ says sensible me. “No, it has to be said, you know you are right. Don’t pull your punches. Don’t trim,” says the greedy child who wants yet another helping of chocolate pudding and a chance to win junior scrabble again before bedtime.

Anyway, clackety-clack, clackety clack - by this time I was back on bad old First Great Western and still typing, page after page. The following morning I was still high as a kite on the adrenalin rush. “Don’t you think, you’d better read through that missive?” asks sensible me. “No time,” comes the reply. “Must get on! Publish and be damned” and with that I hit the send button.

Immediately, the adrenalin evaporates. I wonder if it is now on the ceiling. I am hit with that truly awful “Oh what have I done?” feeling. The massed choirs of grim authority figures in my head hurl abuse and chant in unison “Wonderful are the workings of a wheelbarrow!” Worse, I wonder if I will now be sacked from the project for speaking out of turn. I am but a bottle washer. I am not Carole Vorderman! Ah well, at least people want labels.

I spent two miserable days. None of the colleagues had seemed to agree with anything I had said. But at least I had not been summoned to explain myself. And then the most marvellous thing happened. My main point, the one on which I had been most pressing and on which I had made myself most worryingly tiresome, was suddenly conceded. The project team had decided to listen to the batty bottle washer. I HAD WON!

So maybe, just very occasionally, and if I promise never, ever, to do it again - the workings of the wheelbarrow may just indeed truly be wonderful.

So God is back in his Heaven and all is right with the World. But gosh, I can be tiresome for England at times. And I think it was a near miss. Picture shows some of us in Brussels.