MORAL HYDRAULICS AT HAY

Hay 25 Draws to a Close

Last weekend I was perched, high up, on a plastic seat in a big tent listening to someone talking about 'moral hydraulics.'  And interesting it seemed too.  Yes, it could only be the Hay Literary Festival, whose 25th anniversary fell this year, and to which we make an annual pilgrimage to rub shoulders with the great and the good and spend a day eating over-priced grub and drinking wine whose cost makes you quite wilt at the knees.  Nevertheless, as I said to J, when you have to ship everything in to what is, in effect, a field and then ship everything out again and hire temporary staff - with all those modern regulations to trip you up -  the prices start to look quite reasonable.  Given the price of tents.


'Moral Hydraulics' - who on earth might be rabbiting about moral hydraulics and keeping a straight face, or at least a contented smiling face that makes him look as though he has just received a noble commission to go back to Columbia University and become King?  Yes it was  Simon 'Hi class!  I hope you are all in good form this morning and feeling bright because there'll be questions afterwards' - Schama, who with us is always a must-go-to-see.  His lecture last weekend, on Victorian England's search for some spiritual purpose and their consequent expeditions through the Holy Land to uncover the archaeology of the Bible and in the process equip Jerusalem with clean water (the 'Moral Hydraulics' of my title) had me literally on the edge of my seat.

For the first time in goodness how many years I actually felt alive and could feel the ideas whizzing around in the cortex.  My brain became a pinball machine with this idea, this memory, this connection, this 'wow' - all bouncing off each other and ringing bells.  I may have been missing my lunch but this felt like being back at university before the dreary business of examinations got in the way of education and one could luxuriate simply in the hot shower of ideas cascading upon one's head.  An hour, pretty much, of erudition, delivered pacily and without notes - a real tour de force.

Still reeling, we skedaddled out of Simon's lecture and made our way to meet William Boyd, being interviewed about his latest book 'Waiting for Sunrise'  of which he read us an extract.  Since reading 'Any Human Heart' - his novel cleverly written in the form of extracts from an 'intimate journal' - I have read several of his books and stories.  I like the style and sentiments and the way in which his own, defiant but slightly regretful voice, comes through his various protagonists. As he finished in good time for questions I thought I'd ask one and was disconcerted to find the television camera focusing on me and my torso projected on a giant screen.  It's true what they say, I thought: television does make you look a stone heavier. I wonder why? Maybe it is something to do with hydraulics.

The question I'd have asked Boyd if ever I had found myself next to him in a bar would have been whether he had actually tried skipping an evening meal in favour of red wine and crisps, which is what Logan Mountstuart,  the writer of the 'intimate journal' above,  does in his declining years in his house in France.  I suppose he has.  Come to think of it so have I, though not in France.  It seems such a remarkably civilised thing to do - a bottle of good burgundy, an entertaining book, a pencil and paper to make notes, a dog and perhaps a cat too.  And some good handmade crisps.  One could go to bed happy thinking that the evening had not been entirely wasted.  But only if one were dining alone.

But that would have been a question for the bar.  Instead I asked him what I thought was an interesting question about how in this, the two hundredth centenary of Dickens' birth, he thought that the profession of novelist had changed.  A question, I reckoned, that might have provided all sorts of avenues down which he might happily have charged - technological, abolition of censorship, competitive pressures, niche markets - and so on.  Instead he probably thought I was just some smart-arse and, perhaps caught off guard and having, perhaps again, like me, the type of slow brain that needs time to consider propositions properly, he simply floundered with the sort of answer that would hardly have got him into Columbia or anywhere else.

He would have thought me even more of a smart-arse, too, I suspect had I been able to carry through my intention to get him to sign a copy of 'Waiting for Sunrise' not William Boyd but Logan Gonzales Mountstuart.  Well, I thought it would make a change, given the number of copies there must be signed 'William Boyd.'  But it was not to be.  The queue was long and I was nowhere near the front and he seemed to be taking his time to talk to people.

Moreover, I realised suddenly that the next show was very soon to begin and I was supposed to be meeting others in the hospitality tent before hand.  My emquiries into Logan Gonzales Mountstuart (it is a feature of Boyd's writing that he chooses outrageous names) and his red wine and crisps habit will have to wait for another day.

So then an interesting presentation  on the ethical dilemmas of humanitarian medicine from the director of MSF in the UK.  Should you treat a diseased child prostitute brought to the clinic by her pimp knowing that she will simply be returned unwillingly to prostitution when she is cured?  Are you as a medical resource, simply providing a free medical service that the brothel might otherwise need to pay for?  Are you colluding with the pimp?

Profound questions indeed, but then it was time for a change of ideas and pace.  Our last show was Simon Callow - the actor - who wandered on to the stage in front of a thousand people and talked for an hour, again without so much as a note or a picture, about Charles Dickens who he has studied and read and played and has now written a book about.

We were expecting readings from Dickens but instead we got a biography that focused on Dickens' relationship with the theatre.  Absolutely fascinating! And delivered with an actor's panache.  Callow seemed to warm to the audience as he went along and while he started in a fairly pedestrian manner talking about some early comical experiences in playing 'A Christmas Carol,' he seemed to gather strength as he went on so that when he finished the applause rolled on and on and on.  A thousand people or so all applauding eagerly.  He seemed quite overcome and gave a very theatrical bow.  So  apart from managing somewhere to have a glass of bubbly in the sponsors tent that was that for this year.  But we shall be back next no doubt.

It usually rains at Hay, but we were fortunate in not seeing rain until the time came to depart. It had not rained then for two days and by then most of the mud had dried up.  The Macmillan nurses car park where we left our car was still open and conditions were almost civilised. We reached our car dry shod as the final Hay audiences were being entertained.

JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS

CADS In Holy Cross Church

 

 

 

 

 It has been a busy weekend full of Jubilee celebrations, marking Elizabeth II's 60 years on the throne. not something that we, or she, will see again.  It is quite remarkable when you think of it, 60 years of listening to and advising Prime Ministers from Winston Churchill to David Cameron, sixty years (and four children) of good times and bad times but she has come through it, elegant, graceful and smiling.  We have a lot to be grateful for.  I can never understand what the republicans think we should gain from abandoning an institution that works so well, which unifies the nation as no other institution does, which is above politics, which provides dignity to the office of head of state and above all which earns the country so much in tourist revenue.  Besides it is fun to celebrate from time to time.

Not Our Beacon

This isn't our beacon on top of  St Hilary Down, it's actually a representation of something in 1588 when the Spanish Armada threatened to make England a Spanish province.  Our beacon was very similar and would have been instantly recognizable to those folk of long ago, though they might have wondered why we made so many double barred squares out of planks of wood (pallets) and wondered just what they were for.  This enormous tower of wood was built in the middle of a field and some 300-400 people gathered around it in a big and happy circle.  Behind came a small army of officials (some with 2 way radios) ambulance men, firemen, a steelband man and a seller of hotdogs. The way itself was lighted by paper carrier bags filled with sand in each of which burned a nightlight. The beacon itself was ignited with firebrands made from a fierce, smoking pitch of the sort you see in Robin Hood films. (These, in fact, would have been a considerable improvement on the febrile Olympic specimens). The fire was to be lit at 10.15pm  We counted down the seconds 45, 44, 43, chanting in the darkness.

Cowbridge's Jubilee Queen

The whole scene then was medieval, the people gathered in their encompassing circle around the fire and singing - in this case, the National Anthem - as the flames curled and danced, high on a shower of sparks, far into the night, their faces glowing in the reflected glory of the flames. On the distant hills across the water,  pricks of light, glowed orange and showed where others were engaged in a similar activity. Most impressive, most impressive indeed. I met a couple of friends with a Thermos and we toasted HM's health in tepid coffee. I will have to request a hip flask for Christmas.

It was as well it didn't rain, not that it would have mattered to the bonfire but it would have mattered to we who toasted the Queen's good health and wished here, should it be possible, yet another 60 years and if not then long life for her children and grandchildren. But it did rain the next day, the day scheduled for street parties and maypole dancing, for the eating of cake and the performing of spectacles.

Children Dancing Round the (Indoor) Maypole

The King and Queen Process Through The Church

King and Queen Watch the Party

We produced our own reigning monarchs and King and a Queen and a little Prince and Princess. They moved among us encouraging the troops.  But if they reigned their rule did not extend to the heavens for the rain came down thick and heavy and continuous and the entertainments and festivities had to be moved inside, first to the Holy Cross Church - a fortified medieval construction built sometime in the fifteenth century on a much older site.  There the Cowbridge Amateur Dramatic Society had a stall to beguile likely souls into trying their hand at drama and their feet on the boards.

Later we repaired to a large function room where bands played and the children skipped and hopped around an indoor maypole, entwining each other about with ribbons, while their fond parents ate cake and drank tea from enormous urns, amid a sea of bunting and flags and general red, white and blueness.  We - folk from CADS - also put on a little show on the History of Cowbridge.  The children were still dancing much later when we delved into the recesses of this fine old medieval pub - much older than its patron the Duke of Wellington (of Waterloo fame) to find something a little stronger in which to toast the Queen's good health until it was then time to come home again and to put away our own noble Union Jack that has been doing service at Jubilees and Royal Weddings and the like ever since the first World War.  It was made somewhere in Lancashire of some traditional mixture of cotton or linen and the colours are softer and less garish than much that the modern world is offered from the factories of Guandong Province. 

COMING HOME

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

We are coming home tomorrow all being well.  After many adventures. We've had a delightful time.  Exotic weather. Hot, yet cool in the shade of the enchanted trees.  As ever I have eaten and drunk more than I should.  Our marvellous hosts hosted marvellously.

Our Shakespeare show, performed 'pour les voisins' went well enough.  We could have had a bigger audience, but it is not every day that you will find Shakespeare performed in 'La France Profonde' in front of the Deputy Mayor who is a proper mayor, though naturally with no chain.  There is no formality:  everyone kisses everyone else.  We drink rosé wine and eat smoked salmon sandwiches on the Mill lawn.  Under the walnut trees again.

We did the St Crispin's Day speech from Henry V and also some bits from 'As You Like It' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'  for which I had a fantastically painted face thanks to one of our friends here who is a face painter.  Our French audience applauded dutifully.  We provided translations.   The Scottish play figured too.

We've been in the medieval town of  Figeac today.  It was Market day and we heard someone from a far-off country playing jazz on a piano in the Place Champollion. Then he switched to Bach.  Prelude and Fugue number 1.  Absolutely beautiful.  We set ourselves to walk around the town, to snap the ancient buildings teetering over their alleyways, but tiring we sat down to lunch - for me a tough steak better suited to shoe leather.  But the chips and salad were agreeable. Then over to our friends in Lessal, a forgotten hamlet nestling in a forgotten departement. They have a swimming pool but I didn't swim because the water was only 26 degrees. My delicate skin needs 30: not to feel cold. Instead we watched a Redstart feeding her chicks and drank china tea and contemplated why Buzzards ride the thermals.  Their house is on top of a hill whereas the Mill is at the bottom of a valley - so it is hotter and more humid here.

There are wild boar around, we see their tracks and where they have dug for roots along the walking trails we have cut on past visits. But they make no noise and the place is silent apart from the eternal chuckling river and the birdsong and the drilling of the cicadas in the uncut hayfields.

Sadly the Mill is sold so we may never stay here again, indeed may not even see it again, so there will only be memories and photographs.  It feels like a death.  The trees will grow on without me. The tractor will rust. I drank a glass of Sancerre under the walnut trees this evening to say goodbye.

The others are watching Miss Marple on the television, but I am out here on the terrace, typing away.  How quickly a week passes and we have done very little.  Reading, a very little writing and learning lines, even less cooking.  But still it has been relaxing but I could do perhaps with another week and then perhaps another.  I asked our friends whether they didn't miss the madding crowd of social life back home and they looked out over the rolling hills and said 'no.'

We went to see a neighbour's house. A tiny house of two rooms and a kitchen - no bathroom.  Unlocked.  Tiny windows.  The whole place black with smoke from the fire.  The only concession to modernity an electric cooker shoved into the grand inglenook and a stainless steel sink in the galley kitchen But it must have looked much the same two hundred years ago, with the drain running out of the wall and into a clump of nettles.  Dark, oppressive and dirty; a hanging shelf in the middle of the room to keep food out of reach of rats. Quite eerie - a regression to another age.  Yet in the midst of plenty. 

The old mayor brought us a bottle of walnut oil this morning. He said it was strong and it looked strong - a rich nutty brown, and yet it has hardly any taste apart from a slight mustiness, similar to that which still rises like a miasma from the old and disused walnut pressing chamber in the Mill here.  That too is dark, black and gloomy.  Like hell with the fire out.  Most curious. We delivered to him last autumn three sacks of walnuts and he has given us back three sacks of crushed walnuts. Our task now is to separate the shells from the kernels.  In the old days apparently the village would get together for this task and spend a day shelling walnuts and generally feasting and drinking.  Then the shelled kernels would go for oil.  I am an expert on this now.

It is still warm, but becoming too dark to write. The birds are still singing and a cock has just crowed somewhere in the gloaming.  Neither have the cicadas found it time to go and clean their teeth. I expect the first bat will be along in a minute.

I WANT A MEMORY HAT

Lloyd Lee as Charles Dickens

 We've been enjoying a Book Festival in the town this week and as a small contribution from the theatre we staged a one man show 'The Squire of Gadshill,'  in which Charles Dickens reflects on his life and work.  This took place last Saturday evening and there I was all togged  up in Victoriana to serve behind the bar.  Lloyd Lee (who has taken this show all over Britain) looks the spitting image of Dickens and I am tempted to say sounds like him too, though I don't know if any of us know exactly what he sounded like.  But Dickens used to put on performances in which he read extracts from his novels, which Lloyd re-enacts in this show.

As Dickens he also talks about his working habits and recounts being asked in America whether the Muse was 'always upon him - or whether he had to coax it?'   And as it happens this was a question that I discussed with the lovely Kath Eastman when I met her for lunch a couple of days later when she came over to Cowbridge.

Dickens replied that frequently he had no ideas at all about his writing and just sat at his desk making dots and doodles on the paper.  But, and I think this may be the crucial thing, he always sat there 'until his time was up.'  This, he elaborated, was from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon (or four if writer's block had given way to writer's inspiration).

In passing I find it strange that this phenomenon of 'writer's block' appears only in the literary world (or is this just my ignorance?)  Is there such a thing as 'painter's block?' or 'potter's block?' Did Mozart ever sit at a piano, his head empty of musical ideas? Composer's block? And what about the engineers among us?  Do they have bridge builder's block?

Anyway, I have decided, given the inspiration of winning the little Creative Writing Competition that was a part of the Book Festival, that I shall now consign the label business to the afternoons - and if necessary the evenings as well if we are busy - and so keep the mornings free for scribbling.  I have resurrected a piece of military history that I first wrote on a typewriter in 1983. It was never published then and no wonder as it is terribly clunkingly written.  But with the centenary of the central incident fast approaching I have decided to re-write it, hopefully in a shorter and rather more pacey style.  It seems a shame to let all that research go to waste and I always intended to return to it when I had time.  I am about two thirds of the way through and so this particular labour will not be a long one.

I shall then return to Boraya, the Chocolate Factory in St Petersburg novel that Kath keeps urging me to get on with and about which I think about regularly.  So it will be as well to get my writing habit well established: nine until one with a half hour break for a cup of tea and urgent emails.

The best plans, however.......for yesterday morning I wasn't at my scribbling desk in front of the laptop but instead was taking the laptop to an appointment with the Genius Bar at the futuristic Apple Store in Cardiff, where no-one looks real and where everyone seems to speak in a strange mid-oceanic dialect, though I have to say they are all über helpful and ultra polite.   Apple - the Company - have done something amazingly clever, but the result is that last week, not having the right up to date software apparently, I couldn't receive emails for three days (except in the most cumbersome manner) and the whole computer slowed up as though you had put a tablespoon of treacle in the works.

The man on the Genius Bar fiddled around helpfully and quickly and there I was: sorted. He didn't even try to sell me a new computer.  He suggested I might like to buy some more memory, which could be easily and cheaply done. Unfortunately, only for the computer, I, on the other hand, would have to make do with the ageing memory I already have.  Why can't you buy memory for the brain? You could wear a little memory hat with chips inside it. The brain seems to communicate with waves and just this week we saw film of a paralysed woman operating a robot with her brainwaves. So why not?  I might suggest it to Apple.

THREE HAPPENINGS AND A FUNERAL

Zvernec Monastery, Vlora, Albania

It's been something of a four weddings and a funeral week, though without the weddings exactly.  We assisted at a funeral though, and sent Ann Patterson Daniels - aka Aged Mother - off to the strains of Nimrod and Abide With Me.  By the agency of some ethereal intervention, Aged Mother parted the clouds and the sun shone all day.  She still seems not so far away,  I feel her presence, watching and waving; just itching to tell the story again of her grandfather, the Mayor of Harrogate.

Still one out, one in, as they say, though the timing was unfortunate.  Aged Mother missed the arrival of Butterbean by just a few days. Had one lived longer, or the other arrived sooner, they might have overlapped and said 'hello' to each other.  To explain, Butterbean is my Younger Daughter's second child, born last week, and both have just escaped from the clutches of the hospital.  Clazza is tired and still in some pain - like having barbed wire in your girdle - but she is mending.  'That's the trouble with childbirth, admitted the daughter of a friend once, 'it doesn't half smart!'

Tiny as ever, Butterbean still has no proper name, though as everyone seems to like Butterbean calling her something else seems now quite redundant.  All sorts of exotic appellations have been canvassed but the last I heard was that the hot money was now behind Isla or Alice.  Isla might reflect her Scottish roots and sit nicely alongside that of her second cousin, Iona.  If they call her Alice we shall just have to pretend that she is English and be on the look out for rabbit holes.  Should you enjoy punting on outsiders, though, you could still place a bet on Xanthe or Amethyst, dark horses indeed, but still under starter's orders.

And then suddenly it was my own birthday, which I am ashamed to say I rather let pass without even so much as taking a chilled bottle of Sancerre out of the fridge to the bottom of the garden and drinking a toast to myself for having lived so long.  Mind you the weather would have rendered the bottom of the garden experience distinctly soggy and it wouldn't have been only the wine that was cold.  My reading matter would have been limp and the wine no longer dry.   Besides, we were expecting a delivery of an order for 83 kilograms of DVD boxes which we still sell from time to time.

So instead in the evening we motored over to Marks and Spencer, dined at the Deli counter on Peking Duck and I bought a new linen jacket to replace an old friend that had started to look even older than me.  Friends though were very kind with cards, calls and messages of support.

If these were the major events of the week then there were some minor upturns too, including a telephone call on Sunday morning to say that I had won first prize in the Cowbridge Book Festival's Creative Writing Competition.  Wow!  The first time ever I had won something and the first practical indication that I may not totally be wasting my time if I try, as our little labels business winds down, to earn a few supplementary coppers from the keyboard.   So far I have entered four story and one novel competitions this year and the score so far is one success, one failure, and three to be determined.  Still, even one out of five can't be too bad, can it?  I am encouraged and cheered.

In closing I must mention an email from my marine biologist friend whose 75th birthday this week it also was.  (Not that I am 75 I hasten to add). The missive came from an internet café somewhere in northern Albania where he has been backpacking by himself in search of medieval monasteries.  Having worked all his life for international organisations he seems never to be content unless he is travelling and regularly takes himself off to distant corners of the world simply to be on the move.  He walks and stays in bed and breakfasts.  I have noticed the same thing in other people:  travel is like a drug, they have to keep moving, and while I greatly admire the spirit I know that I am a very different person and prefer to read about countries without maps rather than experiencing them first hand.Above all I need to feel a connection.

So I prefer to go to places that are familiar and to this end we are off at the end of the month again to the Mill where Jim and Rosie have kindly once again invited us.  I shall have to arrange a birthday celebration there.  The Sancerre is cheaper and there is shade under the walnut trees.

The picture (without which no blog is ever complete) is of an Albanian Monastery.  I cannot guarantee that this is one that my friend has seen and I am rather hoping that you haven't seen it (or any other Albanian Monastery) either.  I certainly hadn't seen any before and now that I have I am not sure that they are markedly different from other such medieval institutions, but of course you (and my friend) may disagree. 

WELCOME, BUTTERBEAN

Mother Clazza and Butterbean

My granddaughter arrived in the late afternoon of the 2nd May,  a grey day on which it didn't rain.  Mother and baby are fine.   The birth happened in the Heath hospital, a vast institution on whose site there has been some sort of establishment since Neolithic times.  It may well have been a hospital then.  Once something becomes a hospital the tendency is to continue, for why would you do otherwise? Each generation adds a bit or knocks down a bit until six thousand years later you arrive at what you have now. Anyway it was not to talk about hospitals that I began this piece.

Lacking a formal name - the naming pot is full of potential names but none has yet been extracted - she is called Butterbean since she was the size, well, of a butterbean, when first we learned of her existence.  (The Butterbean is a species of Lima bean apparently, whatever that is, or so I learned when I looked the name up).  When I did this I saw also that the name had been adopted by an American heavyweight boxer, otherwise called Eric Esch.  He wasn't born on 2nd May but on August 3rd and in addition to being a heavyweight boxer he is also a mixed martial artist.  He is probably a nice friendly chap in reality but his photographs show someone that you might not want to cross in a hurry.  If ever there was someone of whom it might be said 'he will grind your bones to make his bread' then Eric Esch looks to be he.

Which seemed to me to be the very antithesis of our Butterbean who is a mere scrap of a thing weighing in at just 5lbs and 10 ounces and very cuddly to boot.  She now begins the long road - actually a surprisingly short road if you are a grandparent - of putting on weight and filling out and learning to sit up and then to crawl and then to toddle and then to talk and then finding out how the world works and that water is wet and fire burns and it hurts when you fall over and the thousand and one other things that have to be learned before you can even set one foot in front of the other on your way to school.

As an aside, you'd think, wouldn't you, that by now we would have evolved some way of simply plugging the brain with 'applications' - maybe delivered by headphones during sleep?  Could you download how to walk, for instance, or to make apple pie, or a history of all the kings and queens of Britain?  After all, birds seem to inherit complex nest building patterns in their DNA.  They don't spend time learning under the mother's wing - the weaver bird just goes out and weaves, termites build vast citadels, bees talk, bats can use sonic radar, all manner of species navigate across the oceans while the human infant is still learning which end of the spoon goes where.

Still maybe she will do all these things too. For the moment Butterbean is just a gorgeous little thing with blue eyes and dark hair and a contented expression when her head is next to your heart.  You can practically feel some mysterious bonding process at work.  And though babies are common enough each baby is special and reminds us that we were all once in this small and vulnerable state with minds empty and vacant, waiting to be filled with all the wonderful world has to offer.

And she is fortunate to be born on 2nd May - the same day, incidentally, as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia and James Dyson, the inventor and vacuum cleaner man. The same day as Engelbert Humperdinck, the singer, and David Suchet, the actor; as Manfred von Richtofen - the Red Baron - fighter pilot, and Jerome K Jerome who wrote the funniest book in the English language (Three Men in a Boat).  And should Butterbean ever find herself in Poland then her birthday will fall on the Polish National Flag Day and she will find that everyone is saluting her.  Na zdrowie!

So you see it is quite true what the horoscopes say about people born on the 2nd May being full of artistic and intellectual creativity.  They make extraordinarily good writers of novels, apparently, and good artists, too, if given pencil and paintbrushes.  On the other hand they have little interest in making money; they would far rather do something that they love doing, preferably in one of those professions in which the flow of income can best be characterised as being in a state of flux.

I have discovered my mistake.  I should have been born a week earlier - on the 2nd - instead of, as I was, on 9th May, for which the omens are not nearly so good. Alan Bennett (who was also born on 9th May) is perhaps the exception and he has clearly exhausted all the artistic talent available to Taureans born on this date.  Instead, all the boundless stock of Taurean talent is invested in those arriving on 2nd May and so, dear Butterbean, we shall expect of you (naturally in an entirely unpressurising sort of a way) great things.

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.