FAX AND WUNDERFAX

I have always been fascinated by fax machines. Too much watching Startrek, I suppose, where people go in one end and come out the other. I remember a splendid cartoon once showing someone in court with the judge looking grim and asking the prisoner at the bar whether he had anything to say before he passed sentence, whereupon the prisoner breathes into his wristwatch "Beam me up, Scottie. I'm in the s***t down here."

Oh well, yes, fax machines. But why stop at mere text is what I have always wondered. Will one day we be able to fax more than just text? I'm thinking specifically of food - or at least a Caesar Salad and croutons. You have a machine, plugged into a telephone line and linked up to a few simple containers of veggie protein, flavouring, starch, and so on - and then you would take a recipe and the machine would whirr and grind and synthesise for you an atomically perfect Caesar Salad - or Boeuf Bourginon if you'd dialled the wrong number.

You might ask why the machine could not simply concoct the Caesar Salad from resources in its own memory bank in the manner of a most marvellous coffee machine I worked with once in Spain which, when you gave it a peseta or two, ground and churned and hissed and produced a perfect cup of freshly ground coffee from starting ingredients of whole coffee beans and water?

Well, the telephone would be necessary so that the machine could check the atomic balance of its ingredients against some sort of master template - which might of course be your Mum. So you would phone up and say, 'Mum - how do I make Yorkshire Pudding?"

And Mum would say, "Put the Wunderfax on dear," and she would then scan one of her Yorkshire Puddings and send it down the phone line and in a few moments the machine in your kitchen would ping and you would open the door and there would be your beef and potato accompaniment and your husband would beam and say, "Those Yorkshires are every bit as good as your Mum's."

The invention would add to marital harmony and join the dishwasher and vacuum cleaner in the annals of domestic essentials.

So why have I put a bottle of whisky at the top of this post? Well there's a back story, which briefly is that running low on my favourite cold cure I went into our local store looking for Highland Park, my favourite malt, only to find that with the budget and VAT rise, prices had almost doubled overnight.

The price of malt whisky, incidentally, seems to fluctuate wildly for no reason at all. The bottle that is £33 today, sells for £19 tomorrow. I do not understand why. Nothing else does this. Nothing I like anyway.

Which brings me at last to the point. You see driven by these cost pressures I eschewed my normal 12 year old malt in favour of a souped-up ('with peaty, smokey malts,' the label said) version of 'Famous Grouse', called 'Black Grouse,' which was half the price.

Unfortunately, it was only half as good, at least to my taste. If you had blended raw spirit with battery acid and left it next to a bonfire you might get an idea of the taste. No doubt the makers have tried very hard but as they suggest drinking it with oranges and Coca-cola, it suggests that the flavour on its own may need disguising.

Now, when you make whisky you distill malt and then you stuff the brew away in barrels and leave it a long time to absorb the flavour and the colour of the wooden barrel. To make a good whisky you need to wait 12 years and a really good whisky, 20.

But why? When we are all constantly beseeched to improve our efficiency this must be the most inefficient industrial process going. Twelve years? It isn't even as if they move the stuff about, stir it, heat it up, mix it with platinum catalysts. No, they leave it in a warehouse.

Well, brother-in-law is an inventor and he has a theory that you can age any wine - or presumably whisky - by zapping it in a microwave oven. One zap per year. If you want to age it by twenty years you give it twenty zaps. I did try this with the Black Grouse and to be fair it did take the edge of the rawness. But you have to be careful that you don't end up with a hot drink instead of a cold one.

Surely in this modern age we could analyse what goes into a good whisky? What are those complex flavour and aromas but chemicals? So much of this, and so much of that. Couldn't we just mix the stuff?

Instead of waiting 12 years you could buy bottles of spirit distilled yesterday and then dial up on your Wunderfax - the same machine that made your Mum's Yorkshires - with a few extra ingredient compartments. There would be little sliders perhaps like those on fancy hi-fi sets - more smoke, less peat, more strawberry, less haddock, more colour, fruitier, richer - and there you would be.

Think of the savings! Think of all that whisky stored for 12 years that would no longer be needed. Think of the sherry casks and all those oak and hickory trees that would now no longer need to be cut down.

And if your father in law was in some far off land enjoying a most excellent aperitif, he could dribble a little of it over his mobile phone and it would pass down the telephone line and into your kitchen Wunderfax and out would come the same thing, same flavours, colours and all.

Of course, you'd be stuck in a power-cut.

POINT OF DEPARTURE

You know what they say - don't shoot the pianist he's only doing his best.  Mind you I don't know who 'they' are in this case.  Anyone know from where the saying comes?  Or so I have just enquired of the Purple Coo website - of which I am a longstanding member. The site has just been rebuilt and in another place causing much ruffling of feathers in the dovecote. I guess we’re getting old and change is too difficult.

My own life I keep feeling is in a rut. There’s this horrid feeling that comes sweeping over me and tells me that there is an inescapable sameness about day to day events and that I ought to sell up and head off into the setting sun on a camel - or take the Queen’s shilling, or become a foreign correspondent or whatever the modern day equivalent is for someone of my advanced age. Maybe it is to join MSF as a volunteer, or some other benevolent organisation, and be shot at for your pains.

I did try to join VSO once - when I had fallen on hard times and I thought they might welcome a pair of hands while I gathered my wits about me, but they didn’t and wouldn’t let me. Bah! Ah well, it was before the Big Society.

Still running off to sea or whatever would I tell myself be grossly irresponsible seeing as one has responsibilities in the here and now, friends, and particularly relations, who would be not one wit pleased by some poetic abandonment. Besides, I have to say I would miss them dearly as I am fortunate to enjoy tolerably good relations with my relations, if you see what I mean and I would be bereft were I not to see my little grandson who is coming to lunch tomorrow with his parents in tow. Which means I shall have to scrub the kitchen floor ready for him to deposit and smear a new quantity of comestibles over both it and the kitchen furniture.

Babies and toddlers should really be fed on dried food until the age of ten.

Well, where were we? I am afraid this may turn out to be a somewhat meandering post. So let us return to the pianist issue with which I began this ramble. Last evening I put on the radio and heard, quite by chance Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. On Classic FM. I love that piece and can recommend a listen to anyone fancying a quiet fifty minutes, curled up on the sofa with some light and not too distracting reading matter. It was the first piano concerto (and maybe even the last) to open with the piano itself. A soft chord. Beethoven played it first time round, apparently.

I think it is safe to say that he didn’t play it on a Yamaha either, which has always made me wonder why you don't you ever see a Bosendorfer motorcycle? Or a Norton organ, I suppose? I mean it is hard to think of two machines with such different purposes as a piano (or an organ) and a motorcycle with a particularly plangent and revolting whine. You don’t think they make them in the same place, do you? I suppose both machines have to be tuned. But not, I guess by the same people.

I'm going to a film preview tonight. A French film. The story of (I've forgotten - it's about some woman writer who lived 100 years ago).  All top hats and petticoats.  But somehow Egypt comes into it too for the blurb describes it as Indiana Jones meets Amélie.  The fearless writer doing the equivalent of volunteering for MSF in 1911. A year incidentally when very little happened. Or so says James Cameron - the famous foreign correspondent responsible for preaching the then heretical doctrine that the people who lived in Vietnam at the time it was being bombed to pieces were actually human beings and cared just as deeply about their nearest and dearest as the rest of us. James Cameron was born in 1911, or so he tells us in his autobiography, and grew up in France.

One day he had rather a shock when his school teacher in a fit of heightened emotion removed his own arm and waved it above his head. It was a false arm, of course; the previous one having had an argument with an explosive projectile around 1916, but the young James Cameron hadn’t realised this. It rather put him off wars and fighting for life.

Anyway, his biography, which came out around 1967, is a very good read. It is called Point of Departure and was once available in Penguin. Not one letter of this beautifully crafted book is out of date though for all I know they all may be out of print. He was a pianist and most definitely not one to be shot at. Though of course he was. Literally and metaphorically, too.

The picture shows a most respectable looking James Cameron in India and comes via the BBC and the Guardian, whose assistance is acknowledged with thanks.

WE WILL ROCK YOU

When I mentioned to a good friend that I was intending to see the ‘Queen’ musical ‘We Will Rock You,’ he told me that I never ceased to amaze him. I don’t know why. Though he and his wife have a more conventional taste in concerts - Mozart, perhaps, or a spot of Bruckner, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t be able to enjoy both pop and classics. I feel sure that Mozart, for instance, would have revelled in Queen’s fantastic creations and wanted to join in. What Bruckner’s attitude would have been I’m not so sure.

Anyway, whatever, we booked for the Wales Millennium Centre and we went despite the show having been panned by the critics for the past ten years. Had dear Freddie Mercury been buried rather than cremated the gyrations of his corpse in the grave might have rendered the search for further sources of renewable energy quite unnecessary. As long as people like me went along to see 'We Will Rock You,' that is.

We went. A big treat. A looked-forward-to occasion at the end of a big week. And I can’t begin to describe how ghastly it was. Well, I suppose I can begin for I have already begun and the proof of the pudding should be in the eating rather than the cliché. But it really was awful.

To anyone tempted by the hype I say spend the ticket money on a bottle of good wine. Buy yourself some Green and Black’s maximum strength organic chocolate and play all your Queen CD’s several times letting your imagination run wild and the tears of joy roll down your cheeks. And donate the surplus you will have saved from the tickets to AIDS research or some other socially useful charity.

So what is wrong with the show? In a word everything that you can possibly think of: the music was wrong, the volume was wrong, the set designs were wrong, the whole approach to the audience was wrong, the story was worse than wrong, the actors were wrong.

But then when you’ve stopped tearing your hair out and thinking that yes, even I, given a freehand, Queen’s music and the back of a fag-packet, could have created a better show than that, comes the awful thought, the perilous, tragic, worrisome thought that maybe, just possibly, it is I (and the critics) that are wrong - or, even worse, just old. And square and the sort of people who shouldn’t be allowed access to Queen’s music at all because it might excite them too much before their bedtime cocoa.

But banish this dreadful thought. No! No, young people! And no, Ben Elton, and the stagers of last night’s performance who I won’t embarrass by naming: no, no, no! How can you possibly so traduce the fine art of putting on a show? How can the world of popular musical theatre have possibly descended (despite its already long decline) from the wit and elegance and cadences and extravagance and charm and acting and sheer vocal skill to this: sheer brute force and cacophony and a story line that would disgrace the Beano, with absolutely no relation to the music whatsoever.

Cacophony - brute noise and ignorance - that is what it was. Never have I been so deafened. Six bars into the opening number and I was tearing the corner off an envelope to put into my mouth and chew to a maché with which to make a species of ear-plug. My other ear I plugged with my finger, taking it out when people appeared to be talking. Even with these barriers the sound was deafening. It echoed out in physical waves way beyond those levels which, in a factory, would have the Health and Safety inspectors reaching for their prosecution pads.

When the posters said ‘We Will Rock You,’ we didn’t think they meant it literally. The heavy bass grabbed the theatre and worried it like dog with a rag doll. The place will collapse if they run many more shows like that. The Cardiff earthquake of 1990 shook us less.

Apart from posing a serious long term risk to one’s hearing ability, sound at that level isn’t true. You can’t hear music at that super-volume however sophisticated the amplification. The brain shuts down. All you can hear is super-noise, with the singers screeching distorted against it.

If we ask ourselves why Queen were so great, why Freddie Mercury was such a great artist and why their live performances were so loved - the answer would surely have been because they reached out, they touched, they involved the audience, they drew you in. Last night we might have been watching a film. Protected by this wall of sound the cast stamped and shouted and screeched their way through their lines, all subtlety gone, all humour gone, all wit gone and the only possible scintilla of substance remaining, some fair to middling dancing.

We left at the interval.

The picture at the top courtesy of Wikipedia is of Queen performing on stage in 1984.

WELSH MADNESS AND BABY BOOMING

I am besieged by official letters telling me to ‘ACT NOW!” Usually in capitals to increase the urgency and sometimes in very large envelopes - I suppose to make them seem more important. One weighed so much that I fear the spine of poor Annie, our ever cheerful post-lady, will be lop-sided ever after. Despite this she still smiled as she handed over my census form.

Incidentally, have you noticed how the majority of postmen (both male and female) are happy? Considering their lot - out in all weathers, carrying heavy loads, working to deadlines, awful management, poor pay - you’d think they'd be all as miserable as sin and only stay in the job a couple of weeks before exclaiming ‘blow this for a game of soldiers.’ But no, they go on and on. Smiling like the sun, even in the rain, and always ready to offer up those little courtesies that make life bearable.

Of course they complain - but they do so happily. Very few are sour and po-faced. So what is it about the postman’s lot? They are all very fit and I suppose that helps and seeing the rest of the world at seven o’clock in the morning must give you a comforting feeling of moral superiority.

But back to ‘ACT NOW.’ The heavyweight census form came in separate booklets in English and Welsh. Now I have nothing against the Welsh language. I even spent two years learning some of it at evening classes and I once played the Wicked Witch of the West in a performance of Snow White in some learners’ pantomime. I can still sing ‘Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go’ in Welsh (Hi Ho, Hi He, I ffordd y’r gwaith a’r ni). I have given a Welsh culture class at a school in Norway and had the students performing in Welsh and acting out a version of that great rugby song, ‘Sospan Fach.’ (Which means - and not everyone even in Wales knows this - ‘Small Saucepan’)

So I am not, you see, anti-Welsh. I have done my bit for the language. But I am certainly not up to completing my census in Welsh. Or any other form for that matter.

I shudder to think what it costs to send a Welsh Language census form to the ninety per cent of the population (and probably more) who will choose to respond in English. For many Welsh speakers will still choose to use the English version. More than two and a half million twenty-page booklets will go straight in the bin. All in the name of political correctness. The cost of translation into Welsh is appreciable and the cost of printing in Welsh is also elevated because most printers do not speak the language. But this is what the Welsh Language Act decrees.

It is madness. Why can we not opt how we wish to receive our government communications? When I go to a cashpoint the machine asks me, thoughtfully, in which language it should address me. Besides English and Welsh it offers other choices: French for instance, or German. So why not the government?

It would be a simple matter to register a preference. It could be done at the same time as the electoral register update? “Do you wish us to communicate with your household in: English only, Welsh only, or English and Welsh?” And we could tick the appropriate box. If there was doubt then the default position would be English and Welsh.

Still, now that I come to think of it, we might then demand another choice entirely. We might demand a form in English, properly thought through, and not in some form of hurry-up officialese.

For instance, seeing the words ‘ACT NOW’ you could be excused for filling in the form then and there and posting it off. Instead the small print says to complete the form on 28th March. But even acting on 28th March is wrong because the forms asks for details of people staying overnight on 28th March. Which means (because you never know who might turn up on your doorstep at two minutes to midnight, do you?) that it is impossible to complete the form accurately until 29th March.

Sometimes I’m glad I’m a baby-boomer and therefore on my way out. Responding to other requests to ‘ACT NOW,’ I claimed two pensions this week, one from the government (another binned booklet in Welsh) and one from a provider of ‘financial services.’ Or in my case disservices. Had I only listened to my inner self and put the money under my mattress I’m sure I couldn’t have done worse. Still I have ordered a small annuity and had it indexed. If now I can only manage to live until I'm 120 I feel sure I can extract my revenge.

SOLAR SYSTEMS

The boy called at my house, rang the bell, it must have been about half past four and I was busy. “Yes?” I said, in what I hoped was an unfriendly tone. He took a pace back and almost fell over the doorstep, but then gathering his courage he went into his sales patter. About solar panels, this time. I relaxed. eco-freak that I am.

Eventually I said he could send someone round to ‘assess’ my house though I warned him that I really didn’t have a spare £10,000 and while I appreciated the government’s guarantee of a premium rate for electricity sold back to the grid for the next 25 years, I didn’t think I could wait seven long years until the scheme had paid for itself. “We can provide finance,” he said hopefully. “For nothing?” I asked. “No,” he said. Anyway, someone would ring. I went back to work.

In due course Wesley rang. From a mobile. Twice. I said having thought about the matter over the weekend I really didn’t think there was any chance of my proceeding, finance or no finance, unless they could offer me a deal that was financially neutral, that is to say wouldn’t cost me anything. Could he? No!

But gosh Wesley was persistent, claiming that I would be earning £1,700 a year from my investment. Or something. “There’s another problem,” I said: we live in a conservation area. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”

“It is not enough to think,” I said, delighted at last to have gained the upper hand, “one has to know - otherwise the planners will have you pulling the whole lot down again.” I suggested that he first called the planners and then called me back again when he had done that, if he was determined to persist in his vain quest.

While he was thinking of his next gambit, I said ‘goodbye’ and put the phone down. Thus far he hasn’t rung back. Neither Wesley, who called from a mobile, nor his doorstep friend told me the name of the establishment for whom they worked. Or if they did, not so that I remembered it. No cards, no leaflets.

I mentioned all this to a friend who is a heating engineer and who suggested that solar panels shouldn’t cost me more than about £3,000. I’m not sure whether this includes connection to the National Grid and the various boxes of electronic tricks that I suppose are necessary.

Still, I should indeed love to have a solar powered house. Moreover, I have a roof that is large and sloping and faces south-east. Ideal, I would have thought, for any number of panels, provided the conservation planners would allow it. As the panels would be at the back rather then the front of the house, there seems little reason for them to be difficult.

I wonder why the government won’t lend me the money on a kind of interest-free ‘student-loan’ basis? After all it is clearly in the government’s interest for us to have solar-powered homes. The work would create jobs and would save having to import gas or coal to burn in our power stations. The government might have to borrow funds, but the saving would more than pay for the interest. It is a ready bankable proposition; if the government were more entrepreneurial it would realise this.

There is a great difference between a £1 billion borrowed to pay for, say the NHS and £1 billion borrowed to finance solar panels which would give a return of perhaps £50 million. The borrowing wouldn’t cost more than £40 million leaving a £10 million profit for each £1 billion of expenditure and perhaps 3,000 jobs created in installation alone. I offer this wizard wheeze free to our dear leaders C and C, which now that I think of it used to be the name of a cordial company - Cantrell and Cochrane, I believe. Sounds,, rather more solid than Cameron and Clegg, if you ask me. They competed with Kia-Ora, if I remember rightly, which phrase is Maori, for good health, or so it said on my bottle of orange juice!

Anyway, we shall battle on without solar power for the moment. But the sun is shining, pushing up both grass and daisies on my lawn and the lawn in front of of little theatre, both of which I have to cut this afternoon. Our play, ‘The Benefactors’ by Michael Frayn, in which I have some sort of starring role, starts next Thursday and we have to put the premises into order. I shall practice my lines as I mow up and down. I have 261 speeches in total. Enough for an afternoon’s mowing, anyway. What do you think?

ON REACHING 100

Ivy Kennard turned 100 this week. She’s a dear old soul, frail now, of course, and practically deaf, but still alert and enjoying life. She looks good for another 100; certainly she is fitter now than a year ago.

We first met her and her family almost thirty years ago. She lived in London then, by herself too, her husband having died another thirty years before, but she came down to Wales regularly to visit her son and daughter-in-law and her three grandsons who were then growing up in the village where we lived. I used to take the middle son on Sunday mornings to the dry ski slope; he is now a bigwig with Microsoft, somewhere in deepest Asia, and goes proper skiing in the mountains of Japan. He made a point of thanking me for those early lessons long ago, which made me feel even warmer than Ivy’s birthday champagne.

She had her card from the Queen, of course. It featured a large head-and-shoulders of the monarch, looking rather cross, as though a minion had dragged her out of bed, dolled her up and made her pose. Though the mouth half-smiled, the eyes looked livid. Or so I thought, but then I have a vivid imagination.

What I do feel though, and here I am not being facetious, is that our dear monarch should wear her crown more. Not some great coronation object, but something like the tin circlet that kings wore over their helmets during the Wars of the Roses. Made of brass probably. At least you could see who was boss.

Now that her hair is almost white and her bearing sadly no longer regal, I feel the Queen needs the visible trappings of monarchy to reinforce who she is. And so a crown, and possibly a sash too and one of those gold and silver starbursts that monarchs and high admirals used to wear could be both handy and useful. Does it matter if she looks Ruritanian? That’s what monarchy is all about if you ask me: trappings. I like my kings in epaulettes. The satirists have taken all the fun out of life. Ivy thought so too in between sips of orange juice.

More seriously, were I Queen I should issue an edict, on pain of the crime of lèse-majesté, to the effect that only I could send cards to centenarians. For poor old Queenie (as my French neighbour calls her) had to jostle on Ivy’s mantelpiece with cards from Carwyn Jones (First Minister of the Welsh Assembly Government) and Ian Duncan Smith (Secretary of State for Work and Pensions).

Now the Queen may genuinely rejoice that one of her subjects has reached her three score and forty - and so too may Carwyn Jones. But IDS must surely be rueing the fact that people are living so long and that his department has been saddled with paying at least fifteen more years old age pension than his actuaries had allowed for; and not only that but with an unlimited liability in respect of the years to come. Maybe his card should be tested for hidden poison!



Still 100 years is a very great age. We were going into lunch when I said to Glenys who happened to be next to me and who is about my age or younger: “Ah well, Glenys, in another thirty years we shall be getting our cards from the Queen and eating our centenarian cake.” But instead of agreeing, she looked at me quite shocked.

I wondered for a moment if she had been diagnosed with some horrible illness and was about to drop dead, but no, what she said was: “I’m not that old!” She said it quite coldly, too.

And then I made the mental calculation: yes, 100 less mid-sixties is a bit more than 30. “Do I look like I’m seventy?” she added in an accusing tone.

Oh dear! I had obviously fallen into a deep pit of my own making, made worse by the fact that she had taken care to look smart and elegant for Ivy’s birthday bash.

What had happened was that I hadn’t calculated at all; I had just taken a chunk of time - 30 years - and assumed that it would be sufficient to carry us all long past our sell-by dates. Try guessing how far Penzance is from Bristol; now add a bit for good measure and you will still probably have underestimated how long England’s south-west peninsula really is. I guessed that’s all.

But I’m not sure Glenys believed me. I tried another tack. Pinned up on the wall, picked out in silver letters, was the word ‘CONGRATULATIONS.’ How many letters, Glenys, I asked quickly, are there in the word ‘Congratulations.’ A quick guess. ’11’ she answered. I was saved.

I BUY EROTICA

One of the glorious things about writing is that moment when you start and the page in front of you is blank. I think all writers experience this feeling, so I am not saying anything new. I am feeling it now. At least I was feeling it a moment ago because now the page is already defiled with this initial clutter of words. Moreover, the happy, go-anywhere feeling of the empty page has become a gnawing worry that this introduction may not be going anywhere and that I may have to start again.

The woman above, a respected French writer whose name I regret to say is lost in the mists of time, was voicing just that sentiment when I copied her picture. She is writing longhand and it is in longhand that the pleasure is greatest. You can’t doodle with a computer, can you? A fountain pen, some nicely woven paper, peace quiet. Even Alan Clark says so in his Diaries. I don’t think I posses a fountain pen anymore, though I can still lay my hands on a bottle of Quink.

Mention of Alan Clark reminds me of Edwina Currie, who was on the radio this morning explaining why she resigned as Health Minister after telling us that we were doomed and not to eat eggs. The discussion had something to do with universities accepting donations from Libya and other undemocratic states. When universities are seeking alliances with China left, right and centre, the current Libyan shock-horror seems false. China is just so big that we tend to pretend it is what it isn’t; though what it has to do with Mrs Currie and eggs, I’m not clear.

Nevertheless, salmonella may be coming home to roost, as it were, for Elder Daughter has announced her intention to keep chickens. Three birds, producers of brown, speckled eggs, plus designer hen coop, are due to be delivered in a few days. Elder Daughter’s husband will turn 40 at about the same time and I can’t help thinking the two events are connected. Middle age should be renamed the Poultry Period.

Otherwise it has been a thin week and I have been reduced to clearing out the drinks cupboard to keep boredom at bay. In its recesses lay all kinds of interesting bottles; I have no recollection whence they came. First up was a bottle of blackcurrant cordial which had jellified: nothing would even come out of it. Not a good start, but then I found some rum; perhaps bought for a cake, so I thought I’d have a Cuba Libré just to see whether it was still good. It was, so I had another, this time with an elderly ginger ale. It tasted foul and I needed a glass of from the encrusted Bailey’s bottle to wash away the taste.

An almost full bottle of Turkish Raki - 50 per cent proof - with a German label - also seemed to be drinkable, (however, did I acquire that?) but the trouble with these aniseed spirits is that they only work in hot and dusty places and in full sunshine. You just can’t drink it on a cold, damp evening in Wales.

Most of the bottles I threw out. All evidence of the ravages of time, which young Kitty, who acts from time to time with us in CADS, has yet to encounter. She dropped by the other day, fresh from Miami of all places, where she had been attending a springtime antiques fair with her mother. This was being held in some great Florida mall, so large that the organisers provided electric buggies so that persons, with limited mobility or just plain lazy, could get themselves around the stalls.

One older woman, ugly, gross and decrepit according to Kitty, was riding imperiously up and down the aisles on one of these things. She would have been unmissable even if she hadn’t been wearing around her grizzled neck a large sign reading ‘I Buy Erotica.’

For some reason I now can’t get this image of the large and decrepit erotica-buying lady astride an electric buggy out of my mind. But then, now that I come to think of it, sadly very little connected with erotica is actually erotic.

Meanwhile, spring has come here too. I know this because we had a referendum and I saw my first lambs this week and tame they were too on the other side of the fence. Like many animals they seem to respond best to clicking noises made with the tongue against the roof of the mouth. It seems to reassure them. But to their defiant mothers (who I imagined facetiously with a sign saying ‘I buy Erotica’ hung round their necks) I bleat. Maaair...Maaair! This works better, I find than Baa - which, followed by 'humbug,'is what I wanted to say in the polling station.