RIP AGED MOTHER

Mrs Anne Daniels aka Agèd Mother

Agèd Mother has just died at the age of 90.  She was the mother of a close family friend who, since her husband's death, had lived partly with her daughter here, and partly with her son in York.  So we got to see quite a bit of her and she enlivened any gathering with her stories about how she had first gone into service with Lady Fermoy and later qualified as a fitter to repair and test aeroplanes during the second world war.   I used to write about her from time to time and so here is a piece that I wrote about three years ago when she would have been 87 and wheelchair bound for most of the time.  Nevertheless, always game for an outing.

I am pushing Agèd Mother around Waitrose again. She, in her wheelchair, attentively scans the aisles as we go up and down looking at the whiskies and the toilet rolls, the yoghurts and the shampoos.

I have written about Agèd Mother before. She is 87 and is sadly now feeling the effects of age in her knee and memory departments. “I know I have seen something that I want,” she says, as we go patiently back and forth, her eyes alighting eagerly on some scrap of coloured packaging only to dismiss it with a “No, it wasn’t that! What was it?”

Being an even-tempered and long-suffering sort of person I resist the urge to mutter, “I don’t know you haven’t told me,” but can’t help thinking it all the same. I mean it is not even as if this was my mother, though everyone of course thinks she is. She is actually Helen’s mother, but I have been brought along as, so often on these shopping expeditions that J and Helen organise, I am thought ‘good’ with Agèd Mothers. I use the plural because Helen has two: her own and her husband’s with a combined age of 185.

Helen and J each have each a trolley. I am the safe pair of hands on the wheel chair.  Actually I don’t mind at all. Agèd Mother, in her own way, is quite fun, and the whole quasi-Buddhist exercise of subjugating the self leaves one quite serene. I may very well be in the same helpless state myself in only a handful of years. If so I want to know I have credits in the Karma bank.

In small doses the very old and the very young are no different. All that is required is the ability to remain unembarrassed and an aptitude for one-sided conversations on Joyce Grenfell lines for which shopping provides splendid opportunities.

“Let’s look at the orange juice, shall we? Mmm, what sort shall we buy? Do you like orange juice? It can be rather acid, don’t you think, though mixed with olive oil it is supposed to be good for the bones, or rather the joints. Does that make a difference? I mean if it were good for the bones could one expect that it would be good for the joints as well?”

I pause for the response: “I don’t really know, dear - but orange juice, yes! Did I ever tell you my grandfather was the Mayor of Harrogate......” This is the signal for rapid intervention. The Harrogate story lasts ten minutes and is recited faithfully on each and every occasion we meet and sometimes more than once. I plunge in heavily to effect a diversion.

“Ah yes, Harrogate,” I say. “Beautiful town. But I wonder whether they drank orange juice there. At the mayoral meetings, I mean. You know, to wash down the toffee? Did your grandfather eat toffee, and if so how were his teeth?....” and so we go on.

If all else fails I recite Shakespeare to her: though to mutter ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings........,’ can serve to raise the eyebrows amongst the unwary.

Written down like this it all sounds horribly patronising, but it does work. She doesn’t know what we are talking about, but then neither do I really. But we both are, on the face of it, having an intelligent afternoon’s conversation. I ask her to hold a random carton of orange juice while we beetle off in search of J’s or Helen’s trolley to put it in.

We are having a similar conversation about bread flour which, I tell her, I need to purchase. “There’s flour here,” she says observantly from her position two feet away from where I park the wheelchair to browse. Indeed, she is right! Bags and bags of it. What a surprise! But this is Waitrose after all.

I am looking for a special flour, I tell her confidentially, one that has grains in it. I ask her opinion of granary flours. She considers the matter gravely and confesses she can’t tell, or doesn’t know, or has forgotten. But she says this most positively and we are both satisfied that this is a valid exchange.

We are joined at this point by a young woman holding a bunch of flowers in search of some Canadian extra strong, reinforced gluten, flour in a black bag with a red maple leaf, which happens at that point to be directly behind Agèd Mother’s wheelchair.

“Look at these lovely flowers,” she says to Agèd Mother, her attention temporarily diverted from flours to flowers. She thrusts them under Agèd Mother’s nose. “I couldn’t resist them.”

“Oh those are nice!” says Agèd Mother beaming. I move the wheelchair to one side and tell her we are looking for a flour with grains in. She replies not to me but to Agèd Mother (which makes me want to complain that it’s the people in wheelchairs that are supposed to be invisible not their hardworking pushers) telling her that the aforementioned Canadian flour is excellent because the strong gluten prevents pumpkin seeds with their sharp edges from cutting through the dough and ending up at the bottom of the loaf.

We are rapidly bordering surrealist territory. Agèd Mother enters the spirit of things by nodding sagely and opining helpfully, “Of course it does.”

“I suppose you’ve done a lot of cooking?” ventures the young woman wistfully, on the basis of those four words, which have now elevated Agèd Mother to the status of a sage to be deferred to on all matters of baking.

I will say this for Agèd Mother, she knows how to milk a situation. She stretches out an arm and says in a stage whisper. “I used to bake for Lord and Lady Fermoy, you know, Princess Diana’s grandparents.” And indeed she did when she was a girl in her teens and before she ran away at the outbreak of war to become an aircraft fitter, leaving the Fermoy kitchens bereft of her culinary talents.

But the Fermoy story and how she first introduced the name of Diana to the household is another well-scratched record. Luckily, at this point, fate intervened in the shape of the young woman’s husband. Grabbing a bag of flour, we executed a hand-brake turn and sped off to the safer pastures of the jellies and the jams.

SAVE COWBRIDGE CATTLE MARKET

Here we are preparing to set off

Every Tuesday big lorries loaded with bleating livestock descend on Cowbridge, destined to be bought and sold under the auctioneer's hammer.  The sales are quite a sight and visitors often go along to hear the incomprehensible babble so beloved of auctioneers the world over as your man in the Barbour jacket leans over a pen full of grey, recalcitrant sheep, occasionally poking at them with some species of stick and spouting his unique language.  Eventually the lorries and trailers that have been parked on the flat ground at the rear of the market come up again and the sheep, or what not, go off on return trips to new homes or, in some less fortunate cases, go off on single trips to the abattoir.  Welsh lamb being always at a premium

Of course, the market is not what it was.  Not since Foot and Mouth, not since the general decline in agriculture.  Nevertheless our market is one of only three in the whole of South Wales - the others being at Carmarthen and Abergavenney; and Abergavenney's market is under threat, we hear.

As indeed is ours!  That was why 'up to 1,000 people' - according to the television whose voice is always to be believed - led by the Mayor, the Town Crier, various elected notables and an ancient tractor - gathered yesterday to protest against plans by the Vale of Glamorgan Council to sell for housing and their own gain the land on which the market stands.

Now there has been a market in Cowbridge since medieval times.  When Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, in 1254 granted Cowbridge its first official Charter, he did so on the basis that this was a market town.  The clue is in the name after all, which is also reflected in our Welsh name 'Y Bont Faen,' which means 'The Cattle Bridge.'  In those medieval times the site now occupied by the Market, which lies just outside the town walls, was used for archery practice.  The roadway is still called 'The Butts'   The market moved here in 1954, seven hundred years later, (the yeomen archers having disappeared by then) and the land being in the ownership of the Cowbridge Rural District Council, the successors of the Council set up under Richard de Clare's Charter.

Sadly, twenty years later Cowbridge RDC became absorbed in a newly created Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council based in industrial Barry a dozen miles away, a town with which Cowbridge has always had an uneasy rural-urban relationship.  But the Vale Council, which of course is dominated by Barry with a dozen times the population of Cowbridge, now owns the land on which the yeomen of Cowbridge once practised their archery and on which generations of farmers have sold their livestock ever since; and the Vale is short of cash.  So it is proposing to sell the site for housing.

True, the Council has allocated land elsewhere in the Vale for a new market - but as no-one has money to build a new market, this isn't a real solution at all.  If the Cowbridge livestock market closes then the lorries full of animals will have to rattle away on a round trip of almost 100 miles to Carmarthen - which won't do the animals, or the environment, any good at all.

But beside these threats the town will suffer in a wider way if the cattle market site were to be sold off.  As you might imagine it is not easy to practise archery in small spaces.  So the cattle market site is actually quite large. This makes it easy on a market Tuesday to accommodate the lorries that bring the beasts here and then take them away again.  And as the market is usually finished by midday and only operates once a week, the market operators kindly make their acreage available to supplement Cowbridge's limited parking facilities by some 200 additional spaces.  All these would be lost if the market site were to be sold, making it even harder for shoppers and visitors to the town.

Moreover, our theatre is located at the furthest end of the Cattle market site.  (It is even called 'The Market Theatre'). The Council have generously told us that we can stay where we are - and so can the nearby Scout Hall - but of course they are proposing to take away our parking. Now many among our audiences are elderly and some are disabled. If we had no adjacent car parking we should not be viable any more.  Which sounds very much as though the Council wish to close us without obviously being seen to do so.  I imagine the same thing applies to the Scout Hall.

Here we are at the Cattle Market site.  Our Theatre stands on the far side of the cattle sheds

Next door to the Cattle Market site are the Town's playing fields.  These also the Vale Council has its eye on and calculating what they might be expected to fetch as building land.  They are not yet in any plan, but ask the simple question where people who bring their children to play rugby or cricket games on the playing fields leave their cars, and the answer is of course on the Cattle Market site and if this is sold and the parking lost then the utility of the playing fields is hit as well.  If they are no longer used, then, the Council will argue, why not sell them?  Already the Council have abandoned the upkeep of the public lavatories, formerly provided for those using the fields and attending the Cattle Market.

If only Cowbridge could run its own affairs again.  We have a lovely Town Hall and an oak panelled Council Chamber. In his ceremonial robes our Mayor looks like a medieval monarch.  We have aldermen in top hats that are the envy of any of our twin town visitors.  But this ancient council is powerless over anything more important than a park or a cemetery.  That they oppose to a man and woman selling the Cattle Market site is of no consequence.

So in case anyone reading this is moved by our plight, which could so easily one day be your plight too, could they please write to the Vale of Glamorgan Council and tell them to leave the Cowbridge's Cattle Market site alone.  Because you want to come and visit, don't you?  And if you do come and visit I am sure that you want to be able to park your car.  And perhaps visit Cowbridge's Theatre.  And, you never know, you might even have animals to sell, too.  Or, in the middle of the night when the cars and lorries have gone and the site is just the big and empty square that it ever was, you might be tempted to take up your longbow again and practice your archery.

ON A BICYLE MADE FOR TWO

My neighbour Annie and I used to work for the same consultancy firm back in the nineties and we both became friendly with the firm's librarian and researcher, Verna, who worked in the company's Edinburgh office.  We all used to meet once a year at the Christmas Party - a dinner and disco affair at some country inn in which we (and spouses too) were put up for the night.  The party went on until lunch the next day.

I hadn't seen Verna and her husband for more than a dozen years, although we had exchanged Christmas cards.  She and her husband are great cyclists, or rather they are great tandemists, possessing two tandems (lightweight and heavyweight - obviously -) on which they tour, not only their own country, but other people's as well.  They have even ridden across part of America, I understand.

Thus far they have never managed to tandem into Wales however, so it was with great pleasure that Annie informed me that they had announced their intention to come and that she was putting them up for a couple of days. We all had dinner together last night and they asked me if I could provide an itinerary of about 30 miles for them to cycle around today.

We are blessed here in the Vale of Glamorgan with a wealth of interests.  What to choose? I sent them to a Neolithic burial cairn (two if they don't mind a small detour); a power station; an interesting old stone town and the site of Wales' first monkish university;  the castle bought and restored by newspaper proprietor Randolph Hearst which now houses an international school and has gardens that run down to the sea; the lightouses and spectacular seascapes at Nash Point; the village of Ewenny whence came the yew wood for the longbows for Agincourt and the interior of whose priory was captured in a painting in the 1780's by Turner and which hasn't change one jot since;  the haunted Pwllgwrach, around which you can hear foxhounds baying on windy nights in winter (legend has it that at the same time that Turner was painting his picture of Ewenny the then hunt master at Pwllgwrach was being hunted and torn to pieces by his hounds for the crime of getting a poor servant lass in the family way and, according to some accounts,  murdering her as well).  Until recently the house was lived in by the Agatha Christie's nephew to whom were bequeathed all the rights to 'The Mousetrap.'  

The house also boasts a quintail, which, in case you don't know, is a bit of jousting equipment - a white metal figure with a sword that can swivel around a vertical pole.  This you gallop towards with your lance under your right arm and the object of the exercise is to strike the quintail in its exact centre.  If you do this then nothing happens: you can count yourself lucky and proceed to the jousting tournament. But should you miss and strike the quintail off centre then the device swings around and the quintail clobbers you with its sword as you go past.   Thus at the price of a sore back you progress.

I did offer them the Roman silver mines as well, but as these lie on the A48 (which Verna thought sounded excessively like a main road) they eschewed them.  In fact you can't actually see anything; you have to be told that somewhere in that bank beneath the gorse bushes you may discover a drift, long since collapsed or filled in, where once folk with names like Caractacus and Spartacus hacked their way into the limestone in search of silver for their goblets and lead for their central heating.

We shall have to see how the intrepid couple get on.  They are coming here for aperitifs this evening and no doubt some tapas type food as well and if the sunshine continues we shall sit in the garden.  Judging from the clouds however the weather forecast may be right and at seven o'clock we shall be watching the rain.

I cannot leave the subject of tandeming, however, with mentioning that I once had a chance to ride (and unfortunately wreck) a four-wheeled tandem, made from two ordinary bicycles welded together and with some clever linkage that turned the handlebars in parallel.  It was like a four-wheeled tricycle, I suppose, and was painted a rich burgundy colour.  Sadly, one day when I was riding the contraption alone - my friend who had built it had ridden it over to my house - I went around a corner too fast, whereupon the wheels simply buckled.  The sensation (to continue with the jousting theme) was not unlike a horse falling beneath you. You see you can't lean over on such a four-wheeled contraption and a bicycle wheel has no sideways strength.  So that was the end of my tandeming career and I have never been on another multiple person machine, although Verna did say that she would let me have a go on hers.  I wonder if she should trust me?

The picture, I am afraid, is not from the family collection but is courtesy of the ever dependable Wikipedia

ON SALMON FISHING AND CHILDREN

The Wild Atlantic Salmon

There's a trailer doing the rounds for a film out shortly: 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.'  I drifted into a charity shop on Monday and quite by chance saw the book there and bought it.  And then consumed two afternoons sitting in this week's glorious sunshine reading it. A most marvellous book, combining the mysteries of migratory fish with high (and Middle Eastern) politics. 

I recommended the book in turn to a friend who used to be a UNESCO colleague and who is a marine biologist and without quite realising what was happening we had an exchange of emails that could have come straight out of the book (which is full of emails).  He told me that there had been attempts to introduce Atlantic salmon in all sorts of places and that the farming of Atlantic salmon was now established in places such as Patagonia and Chile.  Indeed, he told me, that salmon had been released in a Chilean river and had returned to spawn, though the reproduction, for some reason, had not been successful and the authors of the project had returned to fish farming.  I would have thought (in line with the book) that sport fishing would have brought in more income than commodity salmon fish farming and, moreover, would have been less harmful ecologically.  That must remain a subject for debate. 

Salmon fishing is something that hooks you, if you will excuse the pun and though I last caught a salmon forty-two years ago on the river Conon near Dingwall in the north of Scotland whither my grandfather used to invite me and my sister to fish,  the romance of the noble fish and its capture has never left me.  He, my grandfather, was always a great fisherman and in his spare time became a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Edinburgh University.  In one memorable (and just possibly apocryphal) three day period he was summoned to three grand houses where the wife of the laird lay in the throes of childbirth.  All three babies took adequate periods of time to arrive; adequate anyway for him to change into his fishing gear and take himself off to the river (of course there weren't such things as mobile phones in those days) and catch a salmon.  Then he would come back and deliver the baby.  His account at the end of three days thus read: three babies, three salmon, three thousand guineas.

Yes, a thousand guineas was the fee apparently for delivering a baby in those pre-war days.  It seems a very great deal, (maybe £50,000 now?) which is another reason for wondering whether the story - like all fishermen's tales - may have been 'stretched' - a little.   Nor do I know the identity of any of the babies, though I do know that he delivered Magnus Magnusson.

Magnus (who will forever be identified with the upmarket Quiz Show 'Mastermind') once found himself in the spotlighted Black Chair, facing questions himself.  He was asked, he once recounted, quite a simple question: 'What was the name of Marilyn Monroe's first husband?'  But although he knew the surname was 'Miller' - the first name that intruded into his thoughts was 'Douglas,' rather than the correct 'Arthur.'  Afterwards he said that he had had a total blackout and had found it impossible to think of any Miller but his mother's doctor (my grandfather) who had by this time become a family friend.

One consequence of the fine weather is that children want to play outside and not only outside but with water as well.  Theo, my grandson of three, had invited his little friends - boy of three and girl of five - around to play and watering the garden while supervising adults tried to engage in a sensible pastime of a summer afternoon glass of Vouvray in the shade of an ivy hedge.  I think everyone enjoyed themselves, though the plants seemed to receive precious little water most of which found its way into the children's clothes.  This might bode well for a potential future career as fisherfolk.

As the Vouvray seemed to have gone down well I made some canapés of humous and paté and meanwhile finding the children some interesting activity indoors.   Recently I have been removing from the shelves reels of old labels that had lost most of their stickiness (labels do have a shelf-life).  But these actually make excellent playthings.  While we adults were enjoying the sunshine, the children, gone quiet for a moment, had decided to 'paper' and when we looked again the hallway was a mass of fluorescent yellow labels, that fortunately, having lost their adhesive power, came off easily.

I'd like now to bring this blog to a tidy close by reporting that we all then sat down to a dish of fresh rod caught Atlantic salmon.  But we didn't.  I fear sadly that my grandfather will prove to have been altogether more efficient as a guide in the salmon fishing department than I will ever be to young Theo.  The Atlantic Salmon is under great threat from fishery of the stock on the high seas and from the capture in vast quantities of the sand eels and other minor forms of marine life on which it feeds for processing into fish meal.  When Theo grows up the sight of wild salmon leaping in British rivers may long be a thing of the past.  If you'd like to know more have a look at the Atlantic Salmon Trust    website from where I have taken the photograph at the head of this piece.

LONDON WEEKEND

Rich experiences last weekend, which we spent in London visiting some very old friends who now live in Surbiton.  The Friday afternoon journey down proved tedious owing to an accident on the M3 (although clearly more tedious for those involved whose cars looked pretty mangled); still we arrived safely, but no sooner had we had a refreshing cup of tea than we were off again, driving into town and parking in Piccadilly to see the Hockney exhibition for which (being members of the Royal Aacademy) our friends were able to get us tickets without the hassle of queuing.

I'd like to say that I like looking at Hockney's paintings, which in the main are very large and very bright and often of the same landscapes.  But if the test of an artwork is whether you could live with it, then I only counted four paintings (out of maybe a hundred) to which I would have given houseroom. With the hordes of people milling around, the vast interest this exhibition has attracted and the hushed tones in which people speak of Hockney, I couldn't personally help feeling that there was an element of the Emperor's New Clothes about this display.  But still, as a phenomenon, it was interesting. And, for someone like me who knew very little of Hockney before, educational.  I was grateful and glad we had gone.

The following morning posed less of an assault on the visual senses: we went to Henry VIII's Royal Palace of Hampton Court to which I had never been and where I would have been happy to stay the whole day if not the whole week. (I am sure an enterprising down and outer could manage to hide away somewhere in the warren that is the Palace and live perpetually in some royal cupboard, perhaps posing as someone or other, practically in perpetuity).  The spring sun shone, there weren't too many crowds and buildings and gardens did really look very beautiful.  Tudor lords and ladies occasionally dropped in too so that for me it even felt a little bit like coming home as I did once play Cardinal Wolsey on stage.  This wasn't however enough to get me in for free.

So back then to a (very) late lunch for family and grandchildren.  Our friends' daughters are just a little younger than our own and grandchildren don't change very much wherever you go.   A most pleasant walk along the Thames followed, we watching the rowers and scullers and the passenger boats that ply a trade along the river. 

Needing a rest in the evening we all set off to see a film: 'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' which I can thoroughly recommend to anyone who likes a heart-warming, life-affirming story, being the one selected.  It made me cry and laugh in equal measure and as the cast includes Maggie, Smith, Judy Dench, Bill Nighy and a host of other stars all acting naturally and not trying to be edgy or violent,  watching them provided an acting masterclass.  It is a superb film, though, naturally, panned by the critics.

On Sunday we all drove over to Dulwich to see more old friends who had tickets for an exhibition of Van Dyck's paintings at the Dulwich Gallery.  At the same time the gallery was hosting a second exhibition of 'Ragas' - little Indian paintings about the size of an iPad - made three or four hundred years ago to accompany pieces of music and song - an early form of music video, I suppose, though these paintings didn't move.

Having had by then our daily shot of culture we adjourned to lunch or rather to a glass of champagne in the garden sunshine before sitting down, eight of us, to a splendid piece of roast beef.  After which our host, who is a bit of a wine buff, decided we should have a tasting of dessert wine to accompany the cheese and pudding. For each of us he produced six glasses into which he poured six dessert wines which we then had to link with a grape variety and a wine growing country or region.  We all did very badly, I am sad to say, but I appeared to have done slightly less badly than the others and so was awarded a history of Pol Roger as a prize for my efforts.

Then back round the South Circular to Surbiton and, after tea, back again down the M4 (we avoided the M3 this time) to Wales, noting that the Bridge tolls have increased again.  Anyway a most interesting and productive weekend.

The picture is of Hampton Court Bridge from Hampton Court Palace.  In the foreground of the picture to the right, there is (though you probably can't see it) a pigeon that had waded out into the river and was giving itself a bath like a duck. It was actually swimming but it wouldn't have taken more than a passing ripple to have lifted it off the bottom.

A NOVEL EXPERIENCE

Squizzey - the bestest little grey squirrel in the world

"Why don't we meet," she suggested - "seeing as you live close by?"

"Why not?" I answer.  See you next Wednesday!  And lo! it came to pass that I met the lovely Kathryn Eastman from the Nut Press in Cowbridge's newly opened Costa Coffee shop this week.

But that wasn't all - oh no -  for who should have come along as well but Squizzey - 'the bestest little grey squirrel in the world' (though he does have a tendency to say so himself) - the cool dude with his name on his blue polo shirt.

He sat on the table, playing umpire as Kath and I drank cappuccinos.  Ominously I think he was taking notes.  He has a blog as well which you can find here.

Now it seems a universal experience that whenever blogging friends meet they find - not that they are total strangers meeting for the first time - but that somehow they have become old friends already, with a great deal in common and even more to talk about.  Thus it was with Kath.  She had sensibly suggested we exchange photographs, but I would have known her instantly the moment she walked in through the door.  Two hours flew by and I'm sure we might have continued for another two hours had life not got in the way.  But we have plans to meet again and continue where we left off. 

Kath has a lot of advice to give and she was most helpful in suggesting websites and publications that I might look at to develop my own writing.  Since entering a couple of stories for the Choc-Lit Short Story Competition in January, I seem to be beset by competitions.  I sent off a story about learning to drive in February to one Writers' Group that I have recently joined.  There's another local competition in connection with the Cowbridge Book Festival, but the biggest current challenge is the Good Housekeeping/Orion Books competition for an unpublished novel.  Write a chapter of about 5,000 words and a synopsis and get it to us by 31 March, they say.

I have never written a novel and have no idea whether I could write one, but - a bit like climbing a mountain - I'd very much like to try and having a competition like this is a great spur.  (I discount entirely any chance of winning: the competition is useful only in that it provides a pressing deadline).

If I find, thanks to this competition, that I can scribble out one tolerable chapter and synopsis, then I might conclude that it might be worth continuing for a few more chapters.  I have found myself thinking more and more about the interesting characters in my Choc-Lit story and asking what happened to them before they met (and what will happen to them afterwards) and who all the other people are that flip the levers of their particular pin-ball game.  Thus has evolved, I told Kath, a wider, more complex story: part romance, part history, part thriller and set partly in St Petersburg, the most northerly metropolis in the world and capital of the Tsars.

Conceiving the synopsis and sketching out these initial 5,000 words has been fun.  Fun because,  if you will excuse the pun, it is, for me, a novel experience.  It is fun because I have no idea of how I should proceed, so the learning curve is steep and challenging.  No two novels are the same, it seems,  even if they are by the same authors.  Some are descriptive, some are personal, some go on inside the protagonists' heads, some are like film scripts. The canvas of the blank page can, I admit, be terrifying, but to me it is like a seaside cove to a child, filled with rock pools in which lurk all manner of exciting wildlife.  I have only to close my eyes and my characters are there telling me what to write down.  In both cases there are so many unknown things waiting to be discovered. 

In some ways it has been remarkably easy, compared to what I am used to.  When you are writing non-fiction you have to find something to say that is reasonably researched and true, or at the very least have an opinion about something that is reasonably true. If you are writing fiction on the other hand, if you do not know what to say you can just make it up.  For that's the thing about fiction, as someone said once, it doesn't happen. 

I'm also finding it fun to be able to make characters do things.  Having directed plays I try to make the actors appear in a certain light and present their personalities in the way I want.  This doesn't always succeed: the actor may be stubborn or I may fail to make him do what I want.

What a relief then to know that as a writer I have the power - should I so wish it - to make my characters turn somersaults in at the door, or to stand on their heads, or to present an angry, a facetious or a woebegone face to the world whenever I so decree;  I can dress them however I desire, even make them appear in shining armour, and move them back and forth in time.  (Virginia Woolf did this with Orlando.  Poor soul, he found himself being dragged through four hundred years and changing gender in the process). I don't think I'll go quite that far,  but it's nice to know that one can. 

"How's it going to end?" asked Kath.  At this point, Squizzey, who had started to look a little bored as I had rambled on, pricked up his ears and licked his pencil. 

"I don't know," I said, and here I looked directly at the Squirrel.  "For it may of course never end, in the sense that the story may languish still-born at the end of the first chapter.  In one sentence I may move everything two hundred years into the past and give everyone cholera and that will be that."  Oh, the power!

But if I should ever get to chapter seventeen, eighteen, nineteen: what then?  I just don't know.  (Well maybe I do know - sort of - but that far ahead the crystal ball is still a little cloudy).  I hope nevertheless that it will all end happily.  For the goodies anyway.  Baddies (and there are some) will just have to take their luck where they find it and hope they catch me on a good day.

(Otherwise they might just end up being liquidated by squirrels).

THE MAIDEN'S REVENGE

I think Balthazaar looked something like this

Why - or rather what - is she looking at?  In the early morning light from her house on the hill?  And, of course, why is she up so early? 

Maybe she is revising for an exam - an early medical student perhaps, though I'm not sure why she keeps a hat beside her.  At any rate it will fall off the dressing table soon.  Maybe she has just picked it up and has now perched herself on her stool again, one leg tucked neatly under her bottom to see if what she saw really was what she thought she saw; before she finds her slippers and goes out over the wet grass to discover the beast for herself.

But she's a little wary.  She's a medical student, as we have established, and she is still in her calico nightdress and she fears that it may have been over-zealousness towards her studies that has made her see things.  So she looks again.

Yes, there he is.  And he looks so dazzlingly white. And he is wearing a golden chain around his powerful neck. His mane is swishing in the light breeze and his rump looks powerful and muscular where the sun catches it.  He is stamping his four black hooves, which shine in the dewey sunlight.

Delicate feet, she thinks. But it is his horn by which her gaze is transfixed. That long tapering and spirally grooved horn of white ivory, as long as her arm.  She has never seen such a horn, or such a beast.  No wonder that she can't decide whether to fetch her slippers. 

The unicorn is caught, its feet entangled in brambles.  Should she run to help it? Or call others?  But if she went to help, might she not be caught too?  Not by the brambles, perhaps, but by the horn. She could become impaled and left dying on the dew while the beast snorted and flew off into the sky. She supposed a unicorn could sprout wings - or maybe it didn’t need wings - at all.  Her medical textbook was silent on this point.

No, of course,  the beast wouldn't impale her, but would instead go down on one knee, bowing its head and showing its golden chain. Perhaps it would neigh softly.  She would talk to it and give it sweet dandelions and plat its mane with daisies in the morning sun.  It might even tell her its name.  Balthazaar! 

She had always fancied Balthazaar as a name for a unicorn  She would laugh and, holding her hat, would kiss the beast's nose, enticed by its rich, leathery and equine smell.  Then, knowing her mother would scold her, she would abandon caution and clamber on the beast's back and all at once it would rear up and she would clutch at the golden chain and grip tightly with her knees lest she tumble into the brambles and close her eyes and the next moment they would be far away up in the sky heading for a different land, the wind whistling about her ears and the beast stretched out, the horn a compass needle to a future world.  She would awake, and he would lay her down gently, in the sand, somewhere to the south of Samarkand, beside a merchant selling silk and spice.

In this way have many potential female doctors been lost to science and many young women been enticed into the spice trade.  But wait!

When she came to her senses she noticed there were actually quite a few unicorns about the merchants' enclosure, most with their heads stuck in nosebags. Whatever they were eating it wasn't dandelions, nor probably oats either.   Nor were the unicorns any more a dazzling white but a kind of dusty grey.  Moreover,  their golden chains, she thought - unless she were very much mistaken - were in reality just a species of brass. 

A few hours ago she had been struggling to remember the anatomy of the gall bladder.  Now the choice seemed to be whether she should try walking back to Berkshire in her nightdress, or stay and become part of the merchant’s Samarkand entourage.  She looked to the Unicorn for inspiration.  But Balthazaar merely winked.  

Could one stow away on a unicorn? she wondered.  The exams were, after all, terribly important.  And the Samarkand desert wasn’t renowned for its sweet daisies and dandelions.  The vets were better too, she whispered into Balthazaar’s ear, as the darkness closed around them.