The World According to Little Brown Dog

Portrait of a modern marriage (well, I'm nothing if not topical...)

2011-03-17T02:20:00.033-12:00

I'm afraid I can't muster a huge amount of interest in the royal wedding. On the one hand, I suppose it's an indication of just how far we've come in that a rather pretty, extremely slim, expensively educated daughter of a millionaire can end up marrying a publically-funded royal prince in an event that will inevitably be costing untold millions lavishly entertaining heads of state from some very questionable regimes around the world, however that apart, it all seems a bit same old, same old. I'm quite looking forward to seeing the horses, though. My mother-in-law seems unduly concerned that Kate should not be sporting a white dress for the occasion, in view of the fact they've shared a home for the past umpteen years, however I find it hard to see what the sexual status of the bride has to do with any of us. Why we continuously need to use these occasions to judge women is entirely beyond me. I was slightly shocked, though, to hear she's been following the Dukan diet in preparation for the wedding which, if it's true, is a terrible role model for the young women of our society – if someone like that feels the need to diet, what hope is there for any of us? I can only hope that Kate and William will be as happy as H and I have been and that they'll hurry up and get on with abolishing the monarchy.

H's side of the bed has now reached archeological-dig proportions – which could have something to do with the fact that you haven't heard from me for a while. In fact, I'm half expecting Neil Oliver to appear through the piles of paperwork and sheaves of train tickets reporting in his inimitable over-the-shoulder manner how, "...the typical twenty-first century male seems to have outgrown both the filing cabinet and the waste-paper bin..."

Actually, talking of Neil Oliver (and I'm afraid I'm about to digress a bit here, but it is, after all, Neil Oliver we're talking about), he was actually in our village recently – sharp intake of breath – a fact that I was only availed of at a recent Parish Council unveiling of something-or-other that now escapes me, having been eclipsed by this substantially more monumentous event. There I was sitting at a table with several other councillors when Hector the blacksmith dropped it into the conversation that Neil had stopped by at his forge a couple of weeks ago for a spot of filming. I think I may have dropped my fork.

"Not THE Neil Oliver?" I asked breathlessly. "He of the raven-black, wind-touselled hair, brooding Heathcliffe-like countenance and gravelly Caledonian vowels? The one with the enviable collection of Aran sweaters and belted waxed all-weather jackets?" Why had no one alerted me?

There was a slight pause, punctuated only by the clinking of cutlery scraping against institutional-grade porcelain of the hostelry in which we were being entertained (not at the taxpayers' expense, I hasten to add), which was finally broken by Sid's Black-Country tones:

"So, you have an interest in archeology, then?"

* * *

I think I can feel a small mid-life crisis coming on – I'm assuming I'm destined to live well into my nineties, but I suppose I could have missed it. Maybe I've already had one? How do you know when you're middle aged? Is it something that creeps up on you, unawares, or does it suddenly crash into your life unannounced like the univited drunk at a party? Do you suddenly catch yourself in the mirror and realise you're there, or do you get the odd calling card - a few grey hairs around the temple, a stray whisker on the chin, the sudden realisation of a hitherto unrecognised penchant for elasticated waistbands and long-line garments in shades of putty and beige - several years ahead of the actual event? Or worse, do you perhaps not realise until it's already arrived, moved in and unpacked the contents of suitcase – surgical stockings, corn pads, bunions, hair rollers, Horlicks – and it suddenly dawns on you that you were the last to know? Is it really to be feared, or rather should it be embraced with wild abandon – a new territory to explore with an open heart?

What, after all, is middle age? What age does it hit? 50? 40? 35? Or is it something that varies from person to person? I went to a talk with my friend Judy the other week by Jane Shilling who was promoting her book The Stranger in the Mirror - an event which the flyer promised would make me "laugh, think and might change my view of middle age," although at that point I wasn’t entirely sure what my view actually was. Secretly what I really wanted to find out was: a) are you still allowed to have long hair, and b) to you still get to have sex now and again? (Just occasionally, I mean – obviously not all the time – even I can see that would just be wrong.)

Sadly, neither question was answered adequately, although Jane Shilling was undoubtedly an eloquent speaker and provided answers to several of my as yet unformed sub-questions – such as the fact that I will still allowed to wear heels and slightly above the knee skirts with a bit of fishtail detailling, should I feel the inclination. As regards the knub of the matter, I’m afraid I came out still in not-so-blissful ignorance, unable or unwilling to fork out the requisite £16.99 for her book.

"It'll be out in paperback in six months' time," I said to Judy. Who gave me a look in return that perhaps might have been translated as, "I'm not sure you've got that long..."

* * * * *

The questions in my head refused to go away so I shared my anxieties with my hairdresser, Hayley (who was just tidying up my ends and taking half an inch off the bottom, in case anyone is now imagining me ensconced under one of those helmet-style hairdressers with a copy of People’s Friend and an impending bubble perm). After some deliberation, we decided on the Ma Walton approach – a soft chignon-like affair –gradually graduating to Grandma Walton when the time came (although the thought of H arriving home from work in a check shirt and dungarees was slightly disturbing...) Flushed with the success of this eminently practical solution and determined not to be typecast or pigeonholed by anyone, I headed off to Knees for some Kilner jars and a selection of chutney ingredients...

* * * * *

There are other small indignities. I was appalled to hear an anecdote from my parents-in-law who had just come back from a short holiday in Turkey. They’d been persuaded into a carpet shop by a man with a persistent manner and a rather dubious taste in golfing sweaters. Pa was politely trying to edge towards the door but the carpet seller was having none of it. “Just come over here,” he beckoned from the opposite side of the shop. “I have exactly the kind of thing you have in mind...” Ma tutted and looked at her watch “Come on, I think we’d better be going or we’ll never find anywhere for lunch,” at which Carpet Man zooms across the shop, lays a proprietorial hand on Pa’s forearm and whispers, “Why you put up with her? I find you two others half her age...”

The more I think about it, the more resentful I feel (mind you, it doesn’t take much these days). Why do we put up with this future of being judged, deemed wanting and gradually marginalised by a patriarchal society that objectifies women valuing only the firm of flesh, the airbrushed, the blemish-free? Is there not more beauty in the face that has lived, loved and possibly enjoyed a bit of chocolate in its time, rather than the stretched blank canvases onto which men project their fantasies? Really, I have no desire for botox (partly it’s the ‘tox’ in the name that puts me off). Why on earth do women feel the need to poison ourselves to erase our history, our individuality our very selves? We should stand together, embrace our lines, our silver hairs, our less than pneumatic bodies – Helen Mirren, get out of that wind tunnel and take that biker jacket off now! (And while you’re at it, perhaps you could pass me the rest of that Easter egg...)

* * * * *

First they came for the communists

But I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

But I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the middle-aged people,

But I didn’t speak out because I was too busy deliberating over whether to go for the collagen fillers or the laser-skin resurfacing and wondering what Neil Oliver might be wearing on the next episode of Ancient Britain...

* * * * *

OK, I may be getting slightly more relaxed about growing older but if anyone sends me a birthday card with an age on EVER AGAIN they will not be getting an invite to my my party...

Death, Be Not Houseproud...

2010-05-02T07:29:00.011-12:00

Here’s one I made earlier. Exactly how much earlier, I’m afraid I couldn’t say – looking at it carefully, I imagine it might have been a dough ball, and I last made pizza dough – ooh, let’s see – about three weeks ago? At a rough guess. Just perhaps omitted to take it out of the oven...

I don’t have a lot in common with Nigella. Apart, perhaps, from a propensityto obsess about food at inappropriate times, and an occasional urge to wax lyrical over an unexpectedly fine pudding or a particularly toothsome slice of coconut cherry cake. (Aha – you thought I was going to confess to being married to a media-shy multimillionaire art collector, but alas, no. Although I did once have the dubious honour of playing a game of rounders with Charles Saatchi (or was it perhaps Maurice? – I’m afraid multimilionnaire media moguls tend to be somewhat interchangeable in my rarified world) however I think I scuppered any chances of marriage by stumping him out at third base. Well it was either that, or the cooking – although I would like to take this opportunity of pointing out that I am in fact younger than Nigella, by several years. Well, a couple…)

Since my last update, I’m afraid to report that things have not been going swimmingly on the home front. The Easter holidays were dominated by various visits to sick relatives – a vision of a future spent ricocheting back and forth up and down the Fosse Way courtesy of First Great Western, who is simultaneously draining my bank account, flashes before me as I realise this is probably going to be the shape of things to come. I return home to several loads of washing, about an inch of dust over just about everything and a strange, lingering smell in the bedroom. Even the invisible cat has vacated and we resort to spending the night with all the windows open.

After much cleaning and shifting of furniture, the source of the smell is eventually revealed: a large dead mouse under the bed, slightly over to H’s side, it has to be said. At least I think it was a mouse.

Monday is back to school, school uniform is partly missing and I have a shedload of work to do, so – understandably I think – I’m perhaps slightly on the irritable side of grumpy. Just slightly. After what seems like hours of fruitless searching, I suddenly come to the conclusion that the school shirt must have been left at Tom Campion’s after Tom’s end-of-term sleepover and put together urgent on-the-hoof contingency plan to make a quick en-route stop at the school-uniform shop, temporarily diverting school dinner money towards the purchase of a new shirt, which is slightly galling, as we’re now in the final term of Year 6. This, for some reason, seems to prompt much complaint, for which I don’t have time.

“Honestly, I don’t understand why you’re so grumpy, Mum,” complains Alex, who has evidently never had to do several loads of washing, clear up a dead mouse and buy a new, completely unnecessary school shirt on the same day. “Tom Campion’s mum is never grumpy and she has far more than you to do – she has five children.”

“And she’s French,” adds H. A propos of nothing, but with that faraway, slightly wistful look that men sometimes get when the contemplate the idea of a French woman.

I shoot them both a look that I hope encapsulates the suggestion of an Icelandic volcano about to unleash an air-traffic-stopping cloud of ash several continents wide before either of them can add, “And blonde”.

“Well, if either or both of you would like to go and live at Tom Campion’s, I’m sure Marie-Louise would be happy to accommodate an extra child and husband without breaking into a sweat and perhaps we would all be a bit happier”. The idea of the possibility of Marie-Louise breaking into anything as humdrum and unfeminine as a sweat perks me up very slightly and I storm off to get my bag and jacket. Actually, she’s slightly less blonde than I am, too, but since we’re talking bottle blonde in I suspect both our cases, I was in no mood for splitting hair-colour charts at that time in the morning.

* * *

Boy dispatched to school complete with new shirt and a very pursed-lipped goodbye, I whizzed down to Chippenham to catch the train to Swindon. I’ve been commissioned by one of our local ‘county’ magazines to write a feature about Swindon – evidently, not a jolly at the top of any of the staff’s list – and since I’ve spent the last five years studiously avoiding any contact with Swindon, I thought I’d better pay it a visit, since there’s only really so much one can glean from Wikipedia.

It was perhaps not the best to day to be accosted by a reporter with a microphone as I exited Swindon station, narrowly missing a speeding man in a mobility machine as he clipped me smartly on the back of the leg on the way out eliciting from me a somewhat less than politically-correct scowl.

“So, Madam. What are your views on the hot topic of the day?”

Hot topic? What could that possibly be then, I thought quickly to myself whilst bristling slightly at the choice of the word ‘Madam’ and briefly contemplating a sort of Dick Emery-type swing at the man with my handbag.

“Immigration. What do you think about the present government’s immigration policy?”

Hmmm, immigration. Well I may have a private opinion about the unwarranted influx of French women flocking in and tempting our men and boys with their fecund Gallic ways and promises of smilingly efficiently run homes with a marked absence of Anglo-Saxon frowning and grumbling, but I was blowed if anyone was going to have me down as ‘that bigoted woman from Swindon’.

“Well, to be honest, I can’t say I can see what all the fuss is about. Here we are in Swindon – apparently the country’s most demographically representative town – can you tell me where all these droves of immigrants are threatening to take all our jobs and swallow up all our social housing?”

I looked around me waving my hand vaguely in the direction of a sea of mainly white faces and the odd mobility scooter making their way quietly out of the station doors before realising that this was radio. The reporter looked back at me slightly blankly, but didn’t say anything, so I went on.
“In fact I might go so far as to say we haven’t got enough immigrants. Take my village, for instance – we’ve got one Polish builder, and he’s got a waiting list as long as your arm. To be honest, we could really do with a couple more.”

I could almost see the thought that must have flashed through his head at that point – nutty woman from Swindon – might give a bit of zest to the programme, but then again, might be a total disaster. At that moment, my disabled assailant from earlier in his mobility scooter beetled past again, shooting me what I took to be another ‘get out of my bloody way’ look, and the reporter flicked off his microphone before I could add, “But don’t get me started on disabled people. Swindon’s absolutely teeming with them – bloody hazard on the pavements, all these mobility scooters. Where are they all flocking from, then? Give me a Polish builder any day…”

But thankfully I didn’t.

* * *

Back home to my ungrateful family, I crept into my office to check up on my emails. There was one from my old boss asking whether I might be free to do a bit of sub-editing on a magazine up in London in a couple of weeks’ time. Almost before I had got up the First Great Western website to book my train tickets, I am factoring in a visit to my friend Karin’s and the British Library exhibition on mapmaking. I would get to wear normal clothes that wouldn’t get covered in paw prints within the first five minutes of my day. I wouldn’t have to scurry around checking that homework had been done, that the right PE kit was available in the bag and the right sandwiches produced along with the correct flavour of crisps. Bliss! My ungrateful family could fend for themselves for a few days. Perfect misery to perfect happiness!

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, Yesssssss!! " I reply in 72 point, just to demonstrate I can still handle a large font size, should the need arise (although restraining my enthusiasm slightly where exclamation marks were concerned, as most Chief Subs take an extremely dim view of excessive, unnecessary punctuation and an overenthusiasm for a couple of days subbing might be viewed – quite understandably – with a little healthy scepticism…).

I ping the email off Londonwards, before remembering that a couple of weeks’ time happens also to be SATs week…

Still, I’m sure Marie-Louise won’t be too busy…

Please find attached...

2010-03-31T09:56:00.016-12:00

If a handbag is a mirror of a woman’s personality, is the state of a marriage, then, reflected in the state of her bedroom? I ponder this vaguely disconcerting possibility as I contemplate the sad plight of our bedroom décor with its partly unpainted ceiling, indecisive wardrobe arrangements and ill-matched bedside furniture: on my side of the bed, a miscellaneous mountain of books on various topics – Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe, Natasha Walter’s hard-hitting feminist tract, Living Dolls, a guide to No-Dig gardening and Composting for Beginners, next to a bundle of half-finished knitting projects; on his, a skew-whiff tower of well-thumbed copies of Mojo, a dusty bicycle panier, a deflated inner tube… I find myself wondering why in all my years working on women’s magazines I have never come across a letter in the agony column asking whether there is any hope for a marriage once knitting has been introduced to the bedroom.

Perhaps by then it’s too late.

I’m currently reading Barbara Pym’s delicious novel A Glass of Blessings and find myself identifying increasingly with the antiheroine, Wilmet Forsyth. Wilmet is a wistful sort of woman married to a man who barely seems to notice her, who seems to spends her days not quite sure what she should be doing only to end up organising church functions and hankering idly after various unsuitable men. I do a quick tarot spread, which tells me in no uncertain terms to pull myself together and get on with some work. I’ve got a stubborn and steadily growing overdraft and loads of work, yet somehow none of it is satisfying nor particularly well-paid. I wish there were more time in my life for church functions and hankering. I look in the mirror (which is in dire need of a dust) and try contorting my face into a version of Edvard Munch’s Der Schrei, before I remind myself that I am a respectable married woman with several loads of washing to do and a dog that needs a walk.

* * *

I’ve decided to take myself in hand before my life disintegrates into a full-blown mid-life crisis. Lacking funds for the real deal, I sign up to some cut-price cyber version of the personal stylist. Each week new ideas for sharpening up my act and sprucing up my wardrobe are beamed in to my inbox. This week, for instance, under “Perfect for You…” I’m tempted with a pair of Indiana High-Waisted Jeans, which I’m informed are “Ideal for your rectangular body shape” and “great for your £100 a month budget.” Lovely. If only Gok Wan could make things sound so tempting. Except that they remind me rather too starkly of Akela’s scouting trousers. I move on. Further down there is something with flowing batwing sleeves that looks as though it would make a good outfit for trick-or-treating in. “Perfect for disguising your big tummy!” I’m told. Had they not added the exclamation mark, I might just have been persuaded. The fact that it’s no-iron and machine-washable in 94% viscose/6% elastane does little to lesson the affront.

On the way home from the morning school run, I find myself inexplicably drawn towards an attractively displayed suede bag in a shop window, the recently purchased Wasabi mock-crock number with it’s stiff, unyielding flaps and shiny buckly already beginning to feel like the memory an ill-advised holiday romance with some snake-hipped Spanish waiter with whom the few common words you share in either language revolve around ordering drinks and seeking directions around an unfamiliar supermarket looking for something banal, such as kidney beans or self-raising flour. Thankfully, the shop is not yet open, but a seed of temptation has been planted and already, driving home, I find myself making plans involving credit cards and diverted housekeeping money...

Life is not going well.

I have a distinct feeling that Something from Beyond is trying to tell me something, but what that message could be is somehow, like the words of the snake-hipped waiter, lost in translation and unmitigated by a balmy tropical evening or a promise-filled sunset. Still with unrequited bag-lust, I arrive home to find my friend – to save embarrassment, let’s call her “Janice” – waiting for me in the drive. We’re off to a networking seminar somewhere in Swindon to learn how to “talk up our businesses”. I’m dressed slightly down in my favourite smart jeans and a longline v-neck jumper that’s “perfect for my rectangular body shape and great for disguising my big tummy.” Except that, when I get in the car, I discover that it’s useless at disguising the lumpy belt I need to hold up my favourite jeans. “Janice” has new business cards and is looking creatively pulled together in a gorgeous skirt in a retro print and has a new red satchel-style handbag, which provokes instant envy from my side of the car. My Wasabi green mock-croc slumps sullenly alongside.

We pull into the car park, which is inexplicably full, so retreat to the far car park a little way along the path; rain teems down, splashing up from the milky-brown pothole puddles. I open the door to get out, thinking if we make a dash for it, we might not get too wet, then it happens – the red satchel handbag appears from nowhere, lassoing my ankle and sending me cascading onto the muddy ground, my right cheek glancing sharply against the open car door as I tumble.

We arrive at the conference slightly late, me with a generous spattering of mud up my leg and a wodge of paper towel clamped to my cheek. The assembled crowd of – ooh, about fifty smartly dressed and purposeful people – crane their collective neck round to see what the kerfuffle is around the door. Talking up my business is going to be an uphill struggle.

* * *

Back home, an impressive black eye is brewing. The butcher’s assistant looks as me with a gleam of concern in his eye from behind a mound of Westport sausages, tempted, but possibly not sufficiently confident to offer me a hunk of cooling sirloin in Mr Thomas’ absence. Daphne over the road asks what happened and whether I’m all right; Alan and Jenny, walking hand in hand back from the allotments look concerned – even Debbie in the shop looks impressed. My husband, however, hasn’t noticed. Arsenal are playing Barcelona this evening and the antics of Messy and Chavvy are absorbing all his powers of observation, and now it looks as though Fabricas may be being sent off... I present his supper to him on a tray and sulk huffily into the office to apply some more arnica and see whether there’s an email from an unsuitable man I might or might not be ill-advisedly hankering after.

There is, and my heart lifts a little.

“Please find attached…” it begins…

Handbags and gladrags

2010-03-10T23:52:00.007-12:00

It was International Women’s Day this week, so I thought I should do a blog celebrating 40 years of feminism, but I’m afraid I’ve just got too much housework to do. So you’ll just have to make do with one about handbags.

You may or may not have noticed that there have been a rash of blogs about handbags recently from the likes of top bloggers Exmoor Jane, and the gorgeous ElizabethM (whose is a tip-top blog, by the way - always full of insight and inspiration and glorious photography). I note that no one has tagged me to do anything for aaaaages, but I’m not feeling miffed. Really, I’m not (ok, maybe I am a bit, but I promise I’ll try not to hold it against you). But I’ve felt troubled for a while after reading on Jane’s blog that “more than a random set of ‘things’ – a woman’s bag is a mirror of her personality.”

Well if that’s the case, I think I might as well just go and shoot myself now. Because mine is a sad old baggy thing with a broken zip and a collection of old bus tickets, shopping lists, some random small change, a very old tube of Anthisan, an indiarubber with a picture of a cow and several (thankfully empty) dog-poo bags. Oh, and there’s a sort of layer of gritty dust at the bottom, which I suppose counts as an object. No wonder nobody tags me.

A handbag is like a husband. You don’t want to go about changing them too often, even though other people’s sometimes look so much more practical and, well, useful, not to put too fine a point on it. One is always being tempted by new ones in soft stroky ponyskin and the like dangling enticingly in shop windows, but we all really know that way lies danger. And guilt. And disappointment. And probably penury. We used to have an old family friend called Mrs Fitzpatrick, whose wise words on the subject were indelibly etched into my pre-teenage brain.

“Changing one’s handbag is an absolute nightmare,” she would say, stressing every perfectly annunciated alternate syllable in her inimitable RP English for emphasis (despite the fact that we all knew she hailed from the wrong side of Dublin, something she had always tried to keep very quiet but the odd ‘Mother o’ Mercy’ exclaimed at times of stress would invariably give her guilty secret away). As she scrabbled in the bottom of a capacious shiny alligator-skin Kelly bag, lacquered nails would click expensively on the hard shell of a compact or an Estee Lauder lipstick case as she rootled around for something or other that always seemed to elude her. “Take my word for it,” she added, coming up for air for a moment. “Buy the best one you can possibly afford, and hang on to it for Dear Life.”

Wise words indeed. Mrs Fitzpatrick wasn’t quite so careful with husbands, however. She’d had at least three – the last one being dispatched unceremoniously following a disagreement about whether peas or leeks were the more appropriate vegetable to have with a roast duck dinner – before she moved on into the realms of the “gentleman companion” – and I’ve lost count of the number of those she’d pop up with to various family functions.

Still, I think she had a good point. It’s all very well to experiment with different bags as a young woman; a flappy satchel with capacious, sensible pouches one day, a glossy clutch with its tinkling chain the next… But the idea of the It bag, however – the handbag as a disposable fashion item – has always seemed a bad one to me. Like a series of unsuitable boyfriends. Quite apart from the expense, they all have pockets and buckles in different places, and just when you’ve got into the habit of diving into the middle bit for your lipstick, or the pocket at the side for your keys or your mobile phone, suddenly you’re faced with a whole new battalion of possibilities. Quite apart from the obvious question of expense – come again, how much??? (Oh dear, hang on a minute – I think I may just have started to channel Mrs Fitzpatrick…)

So falling on Mrs FitzP’s immortal words like pearls of whatnot from beyond the grave, I saved long and hard and sometime during my mid-twenties, I threw in my lot with a soft brown leather bag from Jones the Bootmakers with a secret central zipped compartment and one small side pocket for my keys, my lipstick and a mirror.

And it lasted me well, until now. Battered and a bit bruised, and with the zip distinctly broken, I’m afraid it’s nearing its nether days and if I’m to retain any credibility in the working world, I’m afraid it’s going to have to be replaced.

* * *

I think I mentioned a while back I have sort of been sucked into a kind of networking group full of glossy women called things like Astrid and Davina. I’m not quite sure how it happened – I can almost hear my mother whispering over my shoulder “you’ve got in with the wrong crowd,” because glossy I have never been. Lived in or friendly, perhaps – definitely on the shabby side of chic; the sort of woman you might ask to help out at a church jumble sale or prevail upon to walk the dog if you have to go out for the day – but never glossy. But if there’s a chance of paid work involved, I guess I shouldn’t be too choosy.

The women at the networking lunches all appear fantastically confident, colour-co-ordinated and organised and epilated to high heaven, as they fiddle around with their Bobbi Brown make-up bags and their iPhones while I rummage haplessly amongst old bus tickets and unwieldy plastic keyrings either bought as presents from the school’s Mother’s Day Secrets Room, or embedded with pictures of my child whizzing down one of the water rides at Legoland for my chequebook – only to find the restaurant doesn’t take cheques any more. One of the women there is Siobhan, who does something to do with scarves and skin tone – don’t ask – and runs capsule wardrobe seminars in a nearby town, and whose mission in life seems to be to rescue women from spending their lives ‘trapped in black’. Siobhan is far from being trapped in anything; she is always joyfully, exuberantly liberated in a cascade of virtually every colour known to man, and some I suspect probably hitherto not (hi-visibility magenta, anyone? Thought not.) invariably accompanied by a shiny co-ordinating bag. Whether not I had been subconsciously prompted by Siobhan’s multicoloured hints at my monochrome sartorial failings, I couldn’t fail to notice that quite apart from not quite having the right shoes, the right lipstick or the right mobile phone, it soon became patently obvious that I certainly didn’t have the right kind of handbag. Patent, perhaps, being the operative word because among the bags large and even larger (I was going to say small, but mine was indisputably the smallest and the least shiny one there) there was an awful lot of patent about.

Now there are few things I enjoy less than handbag shopping (barring perhaps a weekend spent sharing a tent with Akela at cub camp or maybe, at a push, an endoscopy). I suppose in a way it’s probably a bit like husband shopping – so many possibilities for dismal failure waiting to plunge one into a lifetime of regret and despair (mind you, I suppose with a handbag, at least you have the advantage of a receipt, although inevitably, as with husbands, you don’t tend to find out you’ve picked something unsuitable until it’s too late…) Perhaps I’m stretching the parallel too far, but you get my gist...

But it had to be done.

So with Mrs FitzP in the back of my mind, and something in shiny fake alligator in the forefront, I soon found myself inescapably drawn towards a large Kelly-style tote with a determined-looking buckle in a shop window in Chippenham that will remain nameless. Why I was there, too, must, I’m afraid, remain behind a veil of the secrecy – needless to say, it had something to do with the allotment. But, whatever – there it was – something that might sit confidently alongside Siobhan’s vision in strident tangerine with tortoiseshell trim and slip seamlessly into the serried brightly coloured ranks of the ladies from the Glossy Club. The only problem was that it was bright red, and try as I might, I’ve never really thought of myself as a red person. I kind of hoped they might have a sort of brown version that wouldn’t look too out of place being hoicked in and out of my aging Nissan Micra, so in I stepped.

“I don’t suppose you have this in any other colours,” I asked the beaming girl behind the counter, once I had opened and closed the bag, ascertained it had the requisite number of internal pockets and not too much in the way of fiddly zippery and flappery, and the catch didn’t snap too loudly.

“We have a kind of green one,” she replied after a while, with an expression clearly reflecting the thought that this was not a woman likely to buy a bright shiny handbag.
“What kind of green?” I asked hopefully, bracing myself for something bright yet possibly not too strident.
“Wasabi,” she told me. I looked blankly back. “It’s a bit like this,” indicating a piece of jewellery that was something between jade and viridian. I wasn’t very much the wiser. I thought wasabi was a sort of Japanese condiment, but it seemed a bit churlish to point this out.

I beamed back and waited for her to offer to get it out, but she didn’t, so eventually I asked, “Could you possibly…?”

“It’s upstairs,” she said at length, not looking very enthusiastic about the thought of clambering up the vertiginous spiral staircase in the corner.

An audible sigh and a lot of clanking and pulling things out of boxes later, she appeared with the bag.

* * *

Well, obviously after all that I had to buy the wretched thing, and I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. So, much to Mrs FitzP’s almost palpable disapproval from beyond the grave, I’m running two handbags at the moment, to see which one I end up with, and I have to say, it does feel a bit like I’m having an affair (obviously, I have no experience of this – Obviously – but I do like to think I have a fairly creative imagination). I can’t quite let the saggy old baggy one go, but then again, I’m not quite sure about the stiff, shiny Wasabi Green one either, with all it’s flaps and buckles and fiddly bits.

If only life weren’t so complicated.

So This Is Christmas?

2009-12-23T05:46:00.020-12:00

nd so it came to pass that I found myself arriving home one evening last week to the less-than-festive spectacle of what might easily have been mistaken for a grave for a very thin person of about seven foot three, dimly illuminated by Adam and Cheryl’s twinkling Christmas lights over the back wall.

Which was probably just as well, otherwise I might have fallen into it.

Luckily, Phil the new builder had been there to explain all, though unfortunately he felt the need to explain in the arcane building dialect known as Womanspeak, which was sufficiently vague and peppered with words like ‘thingummyjig’ and ‘whatsit’ and accompanied by effusive arm-waving and vague expressions of reassurance in a way that left me feeling slightly glazed, more than a little worried and very little the wiser as to what was actually happening.

Of course if my husband had been there Phil would have been able to converse in regular English and there’d have been very little problem in understanding at all, however without the necessary male translation component, communication was always going to be a bit of an issue between me and Phil.

I fought back the urge to tell him I knew what a countersink drill bit was and I could find my way perfectly well around the Screwfix catalogue should the need arise, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. It would be like the time I tried to buy train tickets in Chinese at Beijing Railway Station – the assistant’s face would assume an expression of non-comprehension, as if to say, “Well, it sounds like Chinese, but she’s obviously not Chinese, so it can’t be… DOES NOT COMPUTE; DOES NOT COMPUTE…”

* * *

“I think it’s something to do with the electricity,” I explained to H when he got home.

“Electricity?” he spluttered. “But it’s a shed. And this is a seven-foot hole at the opposite end of the garden.”

I could see his point, but since it had only been explained to me in Womanspeak and didn’t altogether make total sense to me at the time (and the fact that Brown Dog had been snapping distractingly at the cord of Phil’s Black & Decker at the time had probably not helped either) I was struggling to put it into plain man’s English. Grudgingly acknowledging defeat I turned my attention to more womanly matters such as getting a stubborn stain out of the cuff of one of H’s workshirts, until I realized I’d forgotten to take the cufflinks out when I put it into the washing machine.

“Look, I’m beginning to get a bad feeling about this,” H said at length. “I mean, what do we actually know about Phil, apart from the fact that he drinks in the same pub as Richard? It’s not as though he’s been recommended or anything.”

I thought about it for a minute. The only thing I could really say I knew for sure about Phil was the fact that he had rather impressive sideburns and a propensity for making effusive hand gestures which tended to knock things accidentally over and send plates of thoughtfully provided biscuits flying. Not exactly shining qualifications for the building trade, even I was forced to admit. I wasn’t even sure if he had his own ladder.

I mentioned our concerns to my hairdresser, Stella, when I popped in to make an appointment for my highlights the following day.

“Phil?” she asked ominously. “You don’t mean Phil with the sideburns…”

* * *

That’s the trouble with builders, in my experience. The whole business seems to be such a lottery. What I can’t understand is how Anita on the other side of the field can get a two-storey extension with a brand-new state-of-the-art kitchen under her belt while we are still struggling to finish one side of the roof of a very small outbuilding. Richard has now moved on to pastures new, doubtless lured by superior cupcakes and a more regular supply of sweet tea, leaving us with Phill, who joined Richard as his builder’s mate some months down the line and now seems to have taken over the job, occasionally accompanied by Keith, AKA Wiltshire's Finest Digging Machine. Phil has a number of good points, in that he turns up when he says he’s going to and seems to have a wide selection of drill bits and power tools, however he has a considerably larger appetite for biscuits than Richard and does not have the compensating factor of looking like Paul Newman. Noddy Holder, perhaps, in a certain light…

* * *

The following day there was no doubt about it, it had definitely got colder. there was a sprinkling of frost on pan-tiled roof tiles - some of which were unfortunately still leaning up against the back wall. Phil turned up slightly late – it seemed he’d somehow managed to lock himself in the back of the van and had had to bang on the door until someone had been kind enough to let him out. Things did not bode altogether well...

“I don’t suppose I could possibly borrow a heater?” he asked. “Not for me, you understand,” (with the underlying implication that any builder worth his salt would never stoop to the suggestion that he might ever feel a bit cold) “but I was going to do the plastering today and it would be good to help it dry out slowly with a bit of gentle heat.”

Plastering? I thought. It’s a shed…

I rummaged around in the garage and found an old oil-filled radiator, and soon Phil was working away with the plaster, nipping and tucking or whatever plasterers do... I must say, he seemed to be doing a splendid job. When I went in at lunchtime with a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits, there was Phil, sitting in a T-shirt, a rosy glow setting off the beads of sweat on his forehead most fetchingly, his feet up on the window ledge. The inside of the shed was like a steam room in a chicly rustic, expensive spa. All it needed was a patchouli-flavoured incense or perhaps the odd bowl with a few rose petals floating on top and a few scented candles…

In terms of comfort and interior finish, I suppose it was a step up from a stable in Bethlehem, but I was beginning to be slightly concerned about what Phil might be about to give birth to…

“One of the things I don’t think women properly understand,” he began – it was almost as though the steam from the plasterwork had transformed him into some kind of Yogic mystic and all need for Womanspeak was now dispensed with, he was now speaking in fluent New Age Bollocks, perhaps with just a hint of North Wiltshire lite (Smoking Dog sub-dialect) chucked in – “is the importance of the shed in the male psyche.”

I guess life is full of such mysteries. And I guess there will always be some things, like the Call of the Shed and Womanspeak, which I will never understand, no matter how hard I try.

* * *

And, perhaps even more bizarrely, our little local YouTube Christmas tribute (yes, that’s right, the one with the little jumping kid (The Boy) and the random arm movements (er, me)) seems to have scored over 50,000 hits and made the front page of the Western Daily Press for Christmas Eve. Or so I’m told…

And Adam's going to be live on BBC Radio Wiltshire tomorrow morning (I'm afraid I chickened out - icy roads, and I'm not that keen on Swindon at the best of times. Also, I wasn't sure those arm movements would come out all that well on radio) between 8.30 and 9.00am, so tune in...

Apologies to everyone who’s already seen it on Somerford Rambles, but SURELY Someford's answer to Bono deserves another click... (Go on, you know you want to!)

Happy Christmas everybody. I'm afraid I didn't get round to writing Christmas cards this year, but click on the link and I'll (nearly) sing to you in person.

X O X O X O X

A dog is not for Christmas. Or ever, actually

2009-12-15T21:23:00.023-12:00

Sometimes I hate my dog. No, I really do. Dogs have none of the advantages of children – there's never the prospect of their leaving home or emptying the dishwasher and you can't bribe them to run errands for you with an extra half hour on the Playstation. Well, not when there are handknitted cushions to be chewed, cats to be terrorised, conversations to be drowned out and neighbours to be annoyed by incessant barking.

When we were first entertained the rash thought of possibly getting a dog (it must have been a combination of too much red wine and some misplaced idea of God being in his heaven and all being right with the world – of course all is never right with the world and God is inevitably probably stirring up some fundamentalist militancy somewhere or other, although if truth be told, the red wine is probably more to blame…) a friend – I forget which one – lent us an illustrated guide to breeds of dog. Fatal. It was full of cutesy line drawings of perfectly groomed dogs with no muddy pawprints in sight, no rummaged-through bins lying on their sides, no itemized vets’ bills running to four figures, no hideously expensive dietary supplements… I tell you, if I was ever given to put pen to paper to devise a guide to choosing your first dog it would be very short. It would probably consist of a one-word leaflet simply saying DON’T. In 72 point capital letters in Garamond Extra Bold. With a monochrome silhouette of an all-purpose dog superimposed with a big red X. Dogs are Trouble with a capital T. They will empty your bin, deplete your bank balance and shred up every decent thing you have in the house. And then you fall in love with them and they die. I tell you, it’s a recipe for a lifetime of misery.

Anyway, back to the book. We initially thought we might try a Labrador – easy and friendly, but then I thought everybody round here has a Labrador – it seems to be the kind of canine equivalent of an Alice band and a puffa jacket – and what happens if you take the wrong one back home with you accidentally? And, not to put too fine a point on it, aren’t their poos rather on the large side? Imagine the number of bags you’d have to take with you on a walk, and just think about the business of picking them up… Perhaps not. Perhaps a small terrier might be in order? Front of the runners in the ‘smaller dog’ category was a Border Terrier – reputed to be a favourite among vets, they’re said to have an easy, friendly nature, be good with children and suffer with few of the hereditary conditions other breeds are blighted with. “Yes,” I thought, looking at the picture cynically. “But there’s no getting away from the fact that they’ve also got beards and bushy eyebrows and look suspiciously like a grumpy pensioner with a jabby walking stick and an attitude. And, thinking about it, vets would hardly be recommending them unless they were in reality riddled with trivial complaints providing a steady flow of income through the surgery door…”

Then my eye fell on the the Cocker Spaniel page; the picture was sketchily drawn, but I swear it looked as though the dog was smiling, and not in an evil ‘I-could-ruin-your-life’ sort of way, but a beguiling, matey kind of grin. The Cocker was described as: ‘a happy, busy, bustling type of dog with a friendly disposition and a merrily wagging tail’. I imagined an anthropomorphic Beatrice Potter sort of character, possibly crossed with Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music, perhaps dressed in a brightly starched pinny, busily rustling up some scones, making soup or mending the fire… And as luck would have it, the next time I found myself at the local pet shop stocking up on meadow hay and monkey nuts for the sex-change guinea pig, there on the noticeboard was an advert for a six-week-old Cocker Spaniel puppy. It seemed like fate…

In fact, there were seven in the litter, but by some strange quirk of fate the only one left was the brown one.

“You want a busy, forthright dog with a bit of personality,” said Ron, who was selling them, although I now know that personality is precisely what you don't want in a dog – it's a dog, see – there's a clue in the name. He couldn’t understand why the brown one hadn’t been snapped up.

Six-week-old Brown Dog (who was then Brown Puppy, and hardly bigger than something you could fit in the palm of your hand) waddled into the middle of Ron’s sitting room, eased out a slightly runny poo, then took hold of a little lacy tablecloth between his tiny needle-like teeth and pulled and pulled sending several fiddly ornaments flying.

I looked at H nervously, immediately regretting our decision to go and view the puppies en famille, and started to say, “Well, I’m not sure…” but the boy looked at me imploringly, and H said, “He’s a lovely dog…”

The rest is history, but can I please remind everybody, it was Not My Fault. What I didn’t imagine was a dog who was busy, all right, but his particular brand of business was directed more towards raiding the bin, worrying the postman, shredding a handmade knitted cushion or chewing the finger off a favourite glove. I’ll tell you this for nothing – don’t get a Cocker Spaniel, unless you like doors with deep scratches embedded into them, chairs with chewed legs, kitchen floors peppered with muddy paw prints and relish the idea of spending your days swathed in old jumpers and a fleece tramping round muddy fields in a vain effort to wear him out, and evenings spent teasing out muddy dreadlocks (or what a friend rather euphemistically used to call “winnetts”) and like your post crumpled and muddy, only to be retrived after the postman has chucked into your hedge with the words “dog hazard” hastily scrawled across one of the envelopes.

Dogs do you no favours style-wise, either. At our recent dog-walkers’ Christmas Dinner – yes, isn't it marvellous how you can find self-help groups for almost every kind of minority obsession or affliction these days? – someone asked me whether I’d suddenly lost weight. It was just that I don't think she'd ever seen me not wearing ancient dog-proof jeans and three fleeces, with a collection of lumpy doggie treats, one or two chewed tennis balls at various stages of disintegration and about five plastic bags in case of accidents arranged for easy access about my person.

Yesterday, on the way back from a muddy, drizzly walk in Westonbirt, I was driving back through Malmesbury when I spotted an elderly lady from the village standing by the bus stop. I pulled in and asked her whether she’d like a lift, however as she got in, Brown Dog, who had been happily sleeping on a damp towel on the back seat suddenly decided she had ‘looked at him in a funny way’, and wasn’t having any of it.

“He’s not normally like this,” I tried to explain over the frantic barking and madly snapping jaws yipping wildly around her ears from the back seat like some demented beached alligator intent on separating her from her dangly Christmas earrings.

“It’s uncanny how dogs always seem to resemble their owners,” said Gerald one morning when I bumped into him out walking and Brown Dog waddled up to him, ears dripping with the remnants of some muddy puddle he’d just taken a swig from, tail wagging eagerly at nineteen to the dozen as he rammed his nose friendlily into Gerald’s groin. Then as Gerald tousled his topknot, Brown Dog sort of keeled over sideways, splaying his legs wantonly for a good old tummy-tickle. The last bit happened after Gerald had made his thoughtful pronouncement, just in case anyone gets the wrong idea about my dubious social skills.

So please believe me, when I tell you that a dog is not for Christmas. A dog is for life with no possibility of parole unless something drastic happens. A dog equals a life sentence, in a rather grubby prison and with a very muddy cell mate with bad breath and dubious personal habits. Think before you buy – on second thoughts – just don’t. (Unless it’s a friendly one-eyed four-year-old cocker spaniel you’re after, in which case I might know just the one…)

Revenge is a dish perhaps best not served at the Mayor of Malmesbury's cheese and wine-tasting soirée

2009-11-20T13:57:00.034-12:00

Now, it’s not really like me to think of avenging a small slight…

Ok, it probably is like me to think of avenging a small slight – big slights I can usually overlook; small slights, however, for some reason seem to take slightly longer. Small slights sometimes really seem to get under my skin and rankle away like a tiny piece of grit in your shoe when you’re wearing tights and sitting through a long and less than entertaining Sunday sermon which you’ve completely lost the gist of whilst feeling hungry and not really being sure there is anything suitable for lunch.

Especially when the person who’s slighted you really doesn’t even seem to recognize the fact they’ve done anything particularly revenge-worthy.

So when Geraldine Fitzpatrick decided to organize her own table for the new Mayor of Malmesbury’s cheese and wine-tasting soirée and bag all my best friends, you can well imagine my nose was put just a teensy weensy smidge out of joint. Especially when the very friend who had asked H and I to join her for the evening and got us both into a very-slightly-almost-looking-forward-to-it frame of mind, and then cancelled a couple of days later to explain, just a tad abashedly, that she hadn’t actually realized it but Geraldine Fitzpatrick had earmarked her for the Fitzpatrick table and was getting into a right old flap at the thought of having her table plans upset.

“And you know what Geraldine’s like when she’s in a flap – there’s just no reasoning with her…”

I’ll leave you to make up your mind as to whether that constitutes a small slight or even, perhaps, a slightly bigger than small – perhaps almost a medium-sized – slight.

* * *

“Obviously, we can’t go now,” said H, almost indignantly. Although there was reputedly a space on Akela’s table that they might be able to expand into two very-tightly-squashed-together chairs. And that would inevitably entail incrementally less wine and a very snug tete-a-tete situation with the Group Scout Master.

That’s the trouble with living in a small place. In a larger, more anonymous community, I suppose one could conceivably drum up another group of friends from a different set and blend in quietly whilst darting evil snubbing looks Fitzpatrickwards. But not in Malmesbury.

Anyway, as luck would have it, another friend – let’s call her Madeleine (actually, none of my friends have such flowery, flamboyant names, but please bear with me – I’m feeling slightly Bertie Woosterish) – happened to be on the organizing committee.

“I’ll tell you what,” Madeleine suggested pouncing on a possible silver lining of the useful variety poking out of the corner of my billowing black cumulo-nimbus of festering feeling slightedness as I poured out the details of my social predicament. “Why don’t you come along and help. That way, you don’t get to miss out on the wine-drinking and socializing, yet you don’t have to suffer the indignity of being squeezed onto a table with lots of people you don’t know very well. And better still – you don’t even have to fork out for a ticket. I'm sure there won’t be all that much to do, and there are lots of interesting people on the committee. Movers and shakers – that sort of thing. It might be useful, too, from a work point of view.”

She was beginning to appeal to my vanity, which was fatal in my present frame of mind, and it also occurred to me there might be a slim possibility of accidentally spilling some Beaujolais over Geraldine’s new frock… Social evenings are few and far between in a small, rural community, so I made her promise there would be no washing up involved.

“I’m sure they’ll have a dishwasher at the Town Hall,” she reassured. I thought about it. After a reputedly £million-and-a-half refurb, I felt sure they’d have been able to run to a pretty decent dishwasher.

* * *

How wrong I was, as those of you of a righteous bent hoping for an edifying conclusion to this most humiliating of anecdotes will be pleased to discover. The only thing moving and shaking that evening was a trolley with one squeaky wheel ergonomically designed for someone considerably shorter than me. Back and forth I trundled with groaning platters of paté and cheese, bowls of smooth, succulent-looking olives, baskets of bread... Then the plates would have to be trundled back out to the kitchen again and replaced with ramekins of chocolate mousse, dishes of apple strudel and jugs of cream...

“What on earth are you doing?” hissed Imelda Thorncroft, as I squeaked past her table, a stooped vision of martyrdom perhaps bringing to mind Mrs Overall crossed with a surly cut-price-airline flight attendant.

“I feel terrible,” confessed Anna, the friend who’d abandoned us so thoughtlessly, defecting to the flappings of the Fitzpatrick table like some Cold War Cambridge graduate. Geraldine Fitzpatrick seemed oblivious to it all, flushed behind a leggy pink orchid she’d picked up in the raffle and a row of now-empty wine glasses.

“Could I possibly have tea?” she asked airly, as I hovered by her shoulder with a temptingly hot pot of instant Kenco. “It is getting rather late for coffee.”

* * *

Back in the kitchen, things were no better. Gaynor Baines was protesting at Madeleine’s decision to put her on coffees, while Helena and Brian swept round the tables with sheaves of raffle tickets. Gaynor and Madeleine seemed to be having a bit of a stand-off as Geoffrey looked on, an unwilling umpire in the whole proceedings. It getting to a point where it was kind of difficult to negotiate a way through what looked like an increasingly complicated maelstrom with my rattling trolley. As I trundled back into the kitchen with perhaps my 64th cargo of brie-encrusted butter knives and chocolate-smeared forks – I’m guessing here, I lost count somewhere between the ninth and the fourteenth – I was just in time to see a flash of Gaynor’s expensive black coat disappearing huffily down the grand staircase towards the car park, Brian following meekly with the car keys leaving the hapless few to cope with several carloads of washing up.

Even the Mayor had found herself late into the night, hands encased in some rather worn marigolds, wrist-deep in tepid dishwater, trying against the odds to dredge up some comradely chit-chat whilst her chain of office clinked bleakly against the Johnson’s creamware long after the last reveler had gone. It seemed the substantial Lottery grant had run out before they'd reached the kitchen, which was a vision of hastily chucked together formica and a gaping dishwasher-shaped hole somewhere between the tea urns and the microwave. Geraldine Fitzpatrick was probably by now safely tucked up under a goosedown duvet, a packet of Anadin on the nightstand and a box of Rennies at the ready in the bathroom cabinet, dreams doubtless blessedly undisturbed save possibly from the effects of perhaps a little too much Brie, possibly one too many glasses Cotes du Rhone; frock thankfully free from coffee or Beaujolais stains safely stashed away for the next perfectly orchestrated social function.

Which was why I could be observed – if anyone apart from the few lonely drunks spilling out of a lock-in at The Borough or the late city worker who’d left it until long after the rush hour to beat his way down the M4 to his country pad, had been moved to cast a glance towards the dejected clip clop of sensible heels blunted by the midnight drizzle – scuttling across the town square at 1.30 in the morning with three limp baguettes under one arm and a dubious bottle of Beaujolais in the other.

And the moral of the story is…

Actually, I’ve no idea what the moral of that story is.

An Irritating Truth

2009-09-29T23:36:00.037-12:00

I’m feeling out of step with the world. It’s something I’ve been feeling for a while, now, and I’m not really sure quite what to do about it.

I suppose I should be feeling hopeful. On the face of it, things are looking up. There’s a lot of constructive stuff being talked about the Copenhagen Climate Change summit, our Government seems to be getting serious about looking at alternatives to fossil fuels, and for once we seem to have an American president who appears to be taking Climate Change seriously– I suppose that’s good. But I can’t help thinking about the 15,000-plus return flights to Denmark the summit will entail (haven’t they heard of video-conferencing?) and wondering whether it isn’t just going to be another Kyoto.

Yes, I know it’s about finding alternative sources of energy, but energy for what? For manufacturing the millions of throwaway plastic toys that go into party bags – then straight into landfill – each year? For manufacturing mobile phones designed to be upgraded every time you fancy a new colour, or a different sort of keypad? For filling up planes to fly gap-year students and bloated western tourists thousands of miles across the globe to rape, pillage, buy large quantities of knock-off designer consumer durables and destroy the places they’ve visited? Unless we in the West begin to accept that we’ve got to consume less – a heck of a lot less – and adapt the way our economies work accordingly, it’s just so many angels dancing on the head of a pin.

* * *

I went to a meeting of our local Green Group the other evening. As usual, I arrived fifteen minutes late and everyone was already talking enthusiastically about The Wave. Someone suggested hiring a coach, and they were discussing the comparative merits of a 49- versus a 52-seater and the fact that they would need one with a toilet, as well as DVD screens to show rabble-rousing films like An Inconvenient Truth and Age of Stupid on the way. My heart sank slightly. While I have no objection to people going on marches, I think there are many more important, more useful things we could do at home. Frankly, I’d rather see people signing up to the no-fly pledge or 10:10 – or even finding a way to build a skatepark for the local youth so they didn’t have to sit at home watching endless reruns of Top Gear – than travelling halfway across the country in a diesel-guzzling pantechnicon. What is it with old people and coaches?

“Wouldn’t it be greener to go on the train?” I suggested, although personally I had no intention of going. I went on a march six years ago with about two million other people and a fat lot of good that did anyone.

“Oh, but it would be so much more fun going all together on a coach,” declared someone, clearly looking forward to the prospect of a Grand Day Out. “We could have one of those special banners made to put in the window of the coach – it would be great PR for the group and would almost certainly work out cheaper than the train.”

Cheaper? Since when was cheaper part of the Green agenda?

“Or maybe we could charter a special train?” suggested someone else.

“Er – but there are trains running anyway. Every half hour from Chippenham, and every hour from Kemble.”

There was a half-hearted sort of discussion about the logistics of getting to Chippenham or Kemble on a Saturday morning, but it was quickly decided that the four or five miles entailed would prove far too complicated without a regular early-morning bus service – and of course, there’d be parking costs. It would be far easier just to hire a coach.

“But it’s a green rally,” I tried. “Surely it’s counterproductive to be traveling down on a coach when there’s a perfectly good train service.”

The chairman looked at me blankly. “Is it the possibility of violence you’re worried about?” he asked me.

I’m beginning to come to the conclusion that I must have one of those voices which is like the sort of whistle only dogs can understand, and yes, now he came to mention it, I was beginning to think there may well be a possibility of violence, and perhaps somewhat sooner than he was anticipating.

* * *

And these are the people who are supposed to care. That's what’s so depressing. My inner George Monbiot heaved an enormous sigh and shrugged “What’s the fucking point?” as I reached over towards a plate of unfairly-traded, chocolate (doubtless gleaned from some slave-labour tolerating corner of the world) biscuits. Why not just go the whole hog and charter a private jet from Bristol? Only I didn’t say that, or someone would probably have pounced on it as the best idea they’d heard since the decision to sign up Alesha for the Strictly panel.

* * *

I was at a wedding at the weekend. A wedding which was lavish by any standards – there were quantities of cake that even Marie-Antoinette might have blanched at. But a wedding is a wedding, and the couple involved looked radiant and happy, which, after all, is the main thing. There were lots of people there involved with the Cape Farewell project, which if you haven’t already come across it is a sort of consciousness-raising exercise about climate change. All well and good, I suppose, if you overlook the fact that it’s really a lot of celebrities and popstars chasing photo-opportunities in far-flung places which they’ve got to using rather large quantities of jet fuel ((sorry if I’m raining on your parade, but it ain’t me that started messing with the weather). I fell into conversation with a journalist and a documentary maker, who’d been filming on the project, and before too long, the conversation turned to handbags. Designer. Fucking. Handbags. Comparing their collections, bandying about names I’d barely heard of and quoting prices, none of which was less than three figures, and some of which were considerably more. One of them even had a special designer handbag-bag to keep her designer handbags in. I quickly stuffed a cupcake into my mouth before I found myself saying something I might regret.

Climate change has become a fashionable issue – and that’s a good thing, some might say. But fashion, by its very nature, is transient and fickle, while our problems with Climate Change are long term and serious. Climate change and fashion make very uncomfortable bedfellows; things may all seem romantic and rosy during that first flush of passion, but it’s an attraction of opposites, a marriage – unlike the one we were at, I hoped – that I fear that is doomed to failure; the two things cannot co-exist for long without someone getting hurt. Badly.

Climate change is not a lifestyle choice, to be ditched as soon as the next catwalk shows come around. The people who are already being affected by climate change don’t have lifestyle choices – some of them don’t even have the choice of any kind of life at all thanks to our culture of “Because You’re Worth It”. “Because You’re Worth It” implies that perhaps others aren’t. The poor b*ggers in Bangladesh, for instance. Here – have another Ryanair trip to Barcelona – you deserve it. Hey, it might involve a few thousand people getting made homeless, or being washed away by the rising tide of inhumanity, but You’re Worth It. And They’re Not.

I suppose what I'm saying is, if you care about Climate Change, you must be prepared to put your money where your mouth is. It’s not about marches. I’m as partial to a bit of part-of-the-crowd-fuelled righteous indignation as the next man, but I suspect its impact will be minimal in real terms. And what’s insidious is that, after the march you can feel you’ve done your bit, so it’s ok to go back to booking that cheap city-break, buying a second home or flying to that exotic place you’ve always dreamed about, because you deserve it. You’ve done something. Some estimates suggest that as much as 50% of our emissions in the UK are caused by leisure air travel. Leisure travel. That's people who don't need to do it. If something looks too cheap to be true, that's because it probably is. It's NOT because You’re Worth It – no one could possibly be worth those tens of thousands of third-world lives, demolished eco-systems, ruined economies – someone, somewhere will be sure to be paying the price.

Fashionistas should stick to handbags. Or rather they shouldn’t. If I were in charge, there’d be no handbags, no cupcakes, no cheap flights, no gap years, no second homes, no cheap throwaway clothes from massive supermarket chains made from Uzbeckistan’s cotton slave trade and stitched by two-year-olds who’ve been sewn into their mothers’ skirts because they’re too tired to stand up, no shoes… Well, some shoes, obviously, but any frivolous expensive designer nonsense would be banned. The odd pair of Birkenstocks, perhaps, I might turn a blind eye to…

Compulsory hair shirts all round, then? the waspish fashionista wife might snarl at the moralizing environmentalist husband, once the bills for the blow-out eco-style honeymoon start landing on the doormat. My husband tells me I’m turning into some kind of Green Stalinist, but I think I might be more ruthless than Stalin. Mind you, I think I might have to get a better stylist …

I feel like I’m raining on everybody’s parade, and perhaps I am. Perhaps there is no really is no hope.

* * *

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock still, hearing his youth
at the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade One piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

Right, I’ve got that off my chest, now. Shove up and help me on to that diesel-powered handcart, then...

Cupcakes - just say No!

2009-09-02T09:23:00.024-12:00

We’ve been invited to a wedding. I haven’t been to a wedding for ages – in fact, I don’t think I’ve been to a wedding since our own wedding, and that was coming up to ten years ago (can it really be only ten?). I’d forgotten what a palaver they are. H is not coming. We have different views on the fact that children have not been invited. I don’t particularly mind children not being invited – I love my boy, but I don’t expect anyone else to love him, and I can think of quite a few of my friends’ children who I wouldn’t particularly want to have at any wedding, let alone my own, but H is sticking his heels in on this one.

“It’s outrageous,” he protests. “It’s like saying ‘no muslims or black people’,” he suggests. Which is hardly likely in this case, given the people concerned. I point this out, but it’s met with an immutable shrug. At least it saves the need to make arrangements for a boy and dog.

Mind you, I think to myself, the invitation doesn’t say ‘no dogs’…

* * *

A wedding exists in its own time/space continuum, boldly flouting any natural social law and setting its own arbitrary frame of reference without concession to the normal rules of life. Hopefully, in life’s long and eventful journey, not too much damage is done and everything returns back to normal afterwards, once the Bridezilla moment has passed. While I don’t have a particular view about children are at weddings, there are other no-nos – far more serious, to my mind – to wedding planning about which I do have a view, and a strong one at that. In my book (one that probably extends to several volumes) wedding faux-pas include:

• wedding lists sent out with the invitation
• wedding lists with requests for money
• imposed dress codes
• any element of compulsory audience participation
• stratified arrangements to which some guests are invited; others not, indeed any kind of obvious hierarchy at all – friends are friends as far as I’m concerned, everybody’s made an effort to come and should be treated equally, we didn’t even have a top table at our wedding
• a pay-bar at the reception
• opening gifts in front of everyone…

The list is long and I could go on, but I’d probably end up upsetting far too many people. I totally accept people’s right to do their own thing on what is, after all, their Big Day – a Morecambe and Wise song for the first dance is, I admit, not everyone’s cup of tea, and H and I even sat at different tables at the reception – crikey, if I was going to spend the rest of my life with this guy, surely I could be spared sitting next to him at my own party.

(As an aside, I’m as happily married as the next man, but did anyone else not feel, as the priest or the registrar or whoever happened to be marrying them embarked on the lengthy litany of for richer for poorer, for better for worse, in sickness and in health, as long as ye both shall live… just a tiny note of panic, a hint of a thought along the lines of, “erm – could you possibly just give me a few more moments to think about it?” No? Really?)

In the great scheme of things, banning children is, I feel, fairly small fry and I’m prepared to overlook it for what is, after all, one of my oldest friends.

* * *

I say we’ve been invited, but there has been, as yet, no invitation as such. My friend - let’s call him ‘Frank’ – sent me an email a couple of months ago to say he was getting married. He’s one of my oldest friends – someone I’ve known for getting on for thirty-five years. He was in the year above me at school and we have a long history and many shared memories of pranks played on teachers, chemistry experiments gone awry and hideous sixth-form discos. He was finally tying the knot at the grand old age of 48.

That’s great, I told him. Congratulations!

It’s on the XX of September. Hope you can come.

I hope so, too, I emailed back. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

A few weeks later I got another email.
Well, are you coming, then? We need to know before we send out the invitations.

Sorry? I was under the – obviously misguided – impression that was kind of the general purpose of an invitation – to invite – but apparently I’m wrong. These days, apparently, you send out a ‘save the date’ pre-invitation invitation before you send out the real one. Just in case you waste an invitation on someone who can’t come.

Er, well, yes – I think so (looking in the diary). Alex might have some kind of scout thing on, but I’m sure we can work round that.

Erm… well, I’m afraid we’re not inviting children. It’s such an important day for us – we want to have all our friends there and there might not be enough room…

Oh. Right. OK.

* * *

Four weeks before the wedding and the invitation – the real one – still hasn’t arrived, so I don’t know where the wedding is or what time it starts, and I’m beginning to worry that maybe I’ve been demoted to the B list – or worse still, for some unknown reason struck off. Surely not. Perhaps it’s gone astray. A tentative email to ‘Frank’ ensues.

Must have gone to the wrong address, ‘Frank’ replies. You're definitely on the list. I’ll pop another one in the post. By the way – has Lizzy spoken to you about the cupcakes yet?

I’m now being lulled into a false sense of security. It’s obviously going to be a low-key kind of affair with a cosy, raggle-taggle gathering of old friends, a few beers, home-made cakes, some old favourites on the juke box… Can’t think of anything nicer.

Half an hour later, I get a call from ‘Lizzy.’ She’s at work and I can something that sounds like an auditory equivalent of a spreadsheet whirring away in the background. She’s up against a deadline, so this can’t take long…

Twenty-five minutes later, we’re still talking about cupcakes.

...Well, we’ve got this kind of peacock-feather theme going on. Everything’s colour and shape-coordinated, and we’re thinking flavours like lemon and cardamom, and a sort of cup-cake version of millionaire’s shortbread… Laura texted me this fabulous picture of a cupcake done in several layers of peacock-coloured frosting… And they have to be made that morning. You can’t make them in advance or they’ll dry out.

And there was I thinking of knocking up a tray of iced buns, perhaps with a few of those decorative sugar balls on top if I happened to be feeling creative the night before. I was thinking of going by train, too – if I was having to go to this thing on my own, I was buggered if I wasn’t going to be able to have a drink – God knows what my miniature multicolour pea-cakes might look like by the time I’d changed trains twice and clambered over the bridge at Birmingham. This wedding, let's not forget, was hardly round the corner.

I foolishly mentioned this thought to ‘Lizzy’, whereupon there was a sharp intake of breath, a momentary silence followed by a sort of ‘clunk’ which I imagine might have been the sound of her jaw landing heavily on her desk…

And she hadn’t even got on to the wedding list and dress code and the compulsory dancing and the circuitous travel arrangements…

* * *

Sex at 48
On a different note, it was my friend Sally’s birthday recently, and a few of us went out to celebrate. Sally shocked us all by revealing her age – she looks about 35.

Do you still have sex at 48? asked one of the younger – cheekier – members of the party (who I think sees herself as a bit of a yummy mummy even though her children are now all at secondary school and she could, technically, be a grandmother, she added, perhaps a tad cattily).

Oh, yes replied Sally, without missing a beat. But it’s a bit of a walk – we live at number Five.

* * *

Bring me Sunshine, in your smile,
Bring me Laughter, all the while,
In this world where we live, there should be more happiness,
So much joy you can give, to each brand new bright tomorrow.

Make me happy, through the years,
Never bring me, any tears,
Let your arms be as warm as the sun from up above,
Bring me fun, bring me sunshine, bring me love.

Words - Sylvia Dee, Music - Arthur Kent, Dance - Eric & Ernie

And, before anyone asks, we didn’t go off into the sunset doing the famous Morcambe & Wise dance… But only because H put his foot down for once.

PS I’d just like to say, in case ‘Frank’ or ‘Lizzy’ happen to stumble on this that I truly believe that people’s wedding arrangements are sacrosanct and I’d never assume to impose my views of what’s right and proper on anyone else.

Just don’t ask me to make cupcakes.

Networks Schmetworks

2009-08-06T11:47:00.028-12:00

There’s an old Portuguese saying:
You have five true friends – all the rest is landscape.

And while I’d like to think I have slightly more than five (er…two, three, four, five… …. ah yes, possibly six… ) I think there may be some truth in this.

By the way – and slipping off at a slight tangent here – many years ago I used to work with a gorgeous Portuguese woman called Ana who was always coming out with odd Portuguese sayings, such as The dogs bark and the caravan moves on, – usually when she’d been ticked off by our taciturn, Saturnine boss for some trivial office misdemeanour – or a long tongue betokens a short hand, which means... well, what could a saying like that possibly mean? You decide. Honestly, there must be hundreds, some of which admittedly were so gnomic they didn’t sound as though they could possibly make any sort of sense whether in Portuguese, Urdo or an obscure Mongolian dialect. One of the things she often came out with (said with a despondent shrug of the shoulders) was: “It’s behind me.” I think what she was really trying to say is, “it’s beyond me,” but I didn’t like to correct her because it meant that for a few short moments I could imagine that, instead of being stuck behind a barren desk of an airless Bond-Street art gallery where no one ever came in and nothing was ever sold between the long hours between nine and six, I was actually at the theatre watching a pantomime.

It was incredibly quiet in there. Sometimes, the gallery owner would go for days without uttering a word to either of us. I finally realised it was time to leave when I came in one morning to a note on my desk which said: Could you please try not to slam the door when you come in? I suddenly had a terrible urge to run over to the door and slam it repeatedly as hard as I could, shouting Big Dog’s Willy (or some other similar mildly offensive profanity) at the top of my voice until the owner could bear it no longer… Needless to say I didn’t. The dog didn’t bark, but the caravan still moved on…

But as usual, I digress…

My friend Astrid has recently come back from Belgium and she’s decided to set up a local women’s networking club. Now I’m as sociable as the next fellow, but when she asked me to give her a hand with some PR for the launch in exchange for a year’s free membership, I have to admit my heart sank a little. Actually, that’s not quite true – it sank a lot. Truth be told, I’m not the world’s most enthusiastic PR. Yes, times are hard and needs must when the devil takes the hindmost (and there are other probably various other Portuguese sayings to sum up the vague cloud made up of equal parts of ennuie, despondency and a vital urge to procrastinate at all costs which descends on me whenever the two letters P and R are found in the same sentence), but really. Do I have to?

As I think I may have said before, I’m not really motivated by business. I like journalism, because it gives me a excuse to be nosy. I can flit and flutter between topics at the whim of my editor – one month (admittedly July, when the rest of the Northern hemisphere is planning holidays and shopping for bikinis) it’s Christmas gifts, the next it’s British Castles. And next week I’ll be dipping my toe into the world of the psychology of doodling (no, really – I can’t wait) – but PR generally means Clients. And Clients – unless they are actually certified brain dead (not entirely unknown, I gather) – generally have Expectations, which is where the trouble starts. The very idea of a networking to me represents a hitherto untapped tsunami of false bonhomie and bothersome irritations to days otherwise spent gazing out of the window, eating cake and listening to Radio 4. (And possibly writing the odd article if I really must.)

I do like Astrid – I hugely admire her round-the-clock enthusiasm, her perfectly applied lipstick, her bulging appointment book and the way she seeks out new contacts, new opportunities, like some heat-seeking, mission-accomplishing homing device, but it has to be said my feeling of admiration is somewhat akin to that of Homer Simpson with a can in his hand and a pile of donuts on his lap watching the perfect home-run from the comfort of his sofa.

We’re improbable friends, though, me and Astrid. We live in different worlds, the Venn diagram that describes our lives intersecting in just one – albeit important – part; we both have dogs which cause passers by to tutt and cross the street, neighbours to scowl and friends to hastily remember previously forgotten appointments when we meet them out walking. An unlikely bonding in the face of mass social excommunication, our walks out are like a two-pronged attack on the title for the world’s most badly behaved dog. While my dog is small, brown and irritating, hers is large, black and determined; what mine lacks in size he makes up in volume, while hers has an expression like an undeployed scud missile; an expression that seems to say with a forboding growl: Don’t misunderestimate me…

Anyway, the day finally arrived for the launch. I’d arranged to meet Astrid beforehand so we could start the day cool, relaxed and focussed, and all was going to plan until the night before when I received a phone call from my sister-in-law at 9.30 in the evening (I should say ex-sister-in-law – she and my brother have been divorced for several years now). We haven’t spoken for over a year – it’s not that I don’t like her; she’d somehow managed to lose my phone number, and one morning, following months of weekly automated emails inviting me to various counselling courses and weeks of self-awareness training, the grim realisation suddenly dawned: I’d finally made the transition from ‘friend’ to ‘contact’, so I swiftly diverted her into my Spam box. I have to make allowances for her, though – spending the best part of fifteen years being married to my brother would drive anyone into the arms of the self-help fraternity.

Having finally tracked me down and established that we now lived not very far from Bristol, it transpired that she had an appointment in Bristol the following day – could she pop in for tea and a catch-up? It wasn’t really the best of days to be popping in – for a start, there wasn’t much cake left and there was likely to be even less by the time she got here – but I somehow managed to stifle my sigh and make welcoming noises down the phone line.

“Oh – and it’s probably going to go on quite late," she added. "I’ve no idea how long it’s going to take to get home from Bristol. Do you think I ought to book a B&B?”

* * *

…Several hours of cleaning and bed-changing later, bearing in mind several minutes of injury time disguising the fact that we’d been letting the dog sleep in the guest room when it was cold and he’d been using the guest bathroom for canine cleansing activities over the past few months…

* * *

There was the added complication of The Boy. Since The Talk at school (the now soon-to-be compulsory sex-education video that my friend who’s a school governor had the pleasure of vetting in the company of the vicar – “yes, yes, yes,” he had nodded sagely, apparently – in a tone about as far removed from Meg Ryan’s as is humanly imaginable – “That all seems to be in order…”) The Boy has decided to shun the possibility of any possible contact with girls. The very idea of spending an hour or so at Astrid’s house with her daughter and a joint babysitter was clearly not to be contemplated. Finding an alternative activity proved hard – and time-consuming; Jimmy and Dom were both off on holiday and everyone else had been booked into the Camp, which was now full. Finally, but finally, some boy-friendly occupation was found, although this probably involved more unsuitable-age-rated X-box-related activity than I’d have liked in an ideal world (although, as you’ve probably realised by now, my world is usually far from ideal)...

* * *

I arrived at Astrid’s a few minutes late – in the dog car, unfortunately, since H’s has a flat tyre which I haven’t found time to deal with – to find Astrid in all her businesslike finery just emerging through the door with two other women, booted, suited and be-briefcased. It was just starting to rain, so I suggested the obvious – driving us all over to the restaurant instead of walking. Unfortunately, this was the dog car – two doors only and much-chewed upholstery-wise. I don’t think this was the entrance Astrid had been imagining. A quick glance in the rear-view mirror confirmed my suspicions – I’d completely forgotten to put lipstick on. Amongst the myriad glossy pouts I’d clearly be invisible; a detour via Boots had to be engineered.

To cut a long story short – and there is a lot more; the lipstick dispenser at Boots had evidently been tampered with and my determination to secure a lipstick without needing a mortgage resulted in the near demolition of the Max Factor display – the lunch was actually much nicer than I’d feared. As it turned out, I knew several of the lunch guests anyway – they were friends, not people I’d ever have hitherto imagined becoming contacts – and I got the feeling I wasn’t the only one whose heart wasn’t entirely, altogether in it.

There was much talk of things like Key Messages, Reciprocal Usefulness and Mutual Support, while I surreptitiously managed to swap Womad experiences and holiday tales with Jane. It wasn’t an altogether wasted opportunity, businesswise, though; I managed to palm off some unwanted work onto Louise, another writer, who I suddenly remembered was married to a haematologist – it was a piece about blood-pressure that I didn’t honestly feel qualified to write and which needed turning round quickly.

“There you go,” I said as I took Louise’s email details, “Bob’s your uncle.” (Or Stan’s your husband, more accurately in her case).

* * *

I still feel acutely uncomfortable about this shiftless territory between friendship and networking. I’ve sort of dipped my toe into Facebook, but whipped it out pretty quickly – and at the risk of sounding like my mother and REALLY losing friends and alienating people – I’m going to tell you why, rather in the manner of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, whether you like it or not (although I will promise not to mention albatrosses. At least, not more than once... However I might not be able to suppress the urge to shout Big Dog's Willy).

Try as I might, I'm afraid I really don’t get it. I was invited to join by a friend, who then bombarded me with quizzes and virtual Jammie Dodgers and all rational conversation ceased, save for generalised look-at-me observations on a virtual ‘Wall’ addressed to no one, and at the same time everyone. My friend vanished into cyberspace and turned into someone who only contacted me with jokes I didn’t find funny and those ‘special person’ sort of chain-emails which you’re urged to send to six or eight or fourteen other special people in the hope that something extra-extra special will befall you all. For the record, I don’t read these. (Well obviously I must have read one, otherwise I wouldn't know what was in them, but you get the message.) And also for the record, I certainly don’t forward them on. As Mr Incredible said in possibly the best ever Disney Pixar animation: ‘Everyone's special means no one is’, and in the fear that like some sinister unseen brand, they’ll somehow burn into the flesh of my friends who’ll then metamorphose into Contacts.

I looked my nephew’s page – he’s got something like 769 friends. How can anyone have a meaningful relationship with that number of people? More is not necessarily better; in fact I’d go as far as to say it hardly ever is. Relationships are becoming stretched and attenuated in this strange, vapid Stepford world. I open my own page and it asks me “What’s on your mind?” Well, if I’m honest, I’m wondering whether the fridge needs cleaning out or whether I can perhaps get away with it for another few days, but frankly, who else wants to know?”

I get a message from my friend John – at least he used to be a friend when we lived across the road from one another; now he, too, seems to have become a Contact – saying, “Just been to the dump with Sue, well you have to keep things fresh when you’ve been married a while,” and with hope's temporary and Pyrrhic triumph over experience, I pop back to put a friendly message on his wall which just hangs there in cyberspace, unanswered for all the world to see and looking rather foolish. Three weeks later, after a phone call with his wife, John sends me another virtual Jammie Dodger, by way of conversation and a link to a quiz to find out which Jane Austen character I am (I’m Lizzie Bennett, which pleases me for about a nano-second, then the crashing realisation dawns that this is all totally meaningless to me and a poor substitute for the to-ing and fro-ing of proper human interchange). I know some of my friends are on Facebook, and I'm sure they must have their reasons. I’m sure it has it’s uses, but exactly what they are is totally ‘behind me’, as Ana would say.

And just don’t get me on to Twitter… The much despised, Round-Robin of the future. I’ll say no more. Just don’t send me a Jammie Dodger (unless, of course I can actually eat it, then please feel free).

* * *

If someone knows a use for Facebook, please let me know.

The dog has barked, and now the caravan can move on.

Seven

2009-07-30T12:12:00.025-12:00

Writing about her novel Emma, Jane Austen said: “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like…”

Well, I’m not sure even I'm going to like the subject of this piece of writing, but my dear cyberfriend ChrisH has tagged me to come up with seven words that sum up who I am – and I don’t want to run the risk of being struck off the guest list for the novel launch, because I know there are going to be canapés (and possibly profiteroles, too…)

So here goes.

Seven words to describe myself:

Square I’m possibly the squarest person I know. The squarest inhabitant of Squaresville. Squarer than Spongebob. In fact, I’m so square, I’m almost cool coming out the other side.

Almost.

I think I was probably born middle-aged. My favourite job of all time was working in the subs' department at Woman's Realm where I was surrounded by knitting patterns, Madiera-cake recipes and fashion pages where the predominent colour was beige, outfits were invariably 'teamed' with a co-ordinating handbag and matching flats or pumps, and there was a preponderance of something called the 'longline cardi' and the 'Palazzo pant' (always singular, note). I think I may even have had a longline cardi at one point, but this could be a case of a fevered imagination and rose-tinted retro-specs. Amongst the crowds of people in novelty hats, blue facepaint and exuberantly-coloured knitted ponchos at Womad this weekend, I was perched on my folding chair with my bank-manager’s umbrella and a flask of tea thinking: it’s going to rain any minute, and that exuberantly knitted poncho is going to smell really terrible in the car driving all the way back to Wigan...

Greedy Some – probably apocryphal – research paper back in the Seventies claimed that the average male thinks about sex every seven minutes. Well I think about food, on average – well, substantially more frequently than every seven minutes, if I'm honest...

If I’m not planning the week’s menus, concocting my ideal cake recipe in my head or thinking about my next meal, I’m probably either wondering what’s currently in the fridge that could possibly constitute a second post-school-run breakfast or mid-mid-morning snack, rustling up a quick cake or half a dozen scones or rootling through one of my cupboards for something immediately consumable such as dried fruit or biscuits.

Or, alternatively, actually eating something.

Elephantine Surprisingly, I’m not nearly as large as I ought to be, given the number of between-meal snacks I consume – I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I suspect one day I’ll just be innocently popping up into the attic to look for something when I’m confronted by a vast and hideous painting of something that looks like a female version of Mr Creosote crossed with Jabba the Hut with cake-crumb-bespeckled lips and splodges of some tomato-based substance spattered down his front, and then there’ll be some scary fast-forward photography along the lines of that Barbara Carrera film where she ages several decades over the course of about a minute... Except in my case I’ll probably balloon hideously and find myself suddenly wedged uncomfortably in the loft hatch… Actually, best not go there.

No, what I mean is I have an elephant-like memory– unfortunately not for anything remotely important or useful (unless I happen to be at a pub quiz, at which I'm actually not bad...), but for obscure trivia and minor slights that happened many decades previously. Yes, Hilary Carr – I remember that last meringue at my fifth birthday party that was rightly mine. And I haven’t forgotten that bull sea-elephant comment Paul Marsh made at the school fourth-year Christmas party either…

Thrifty I’m not sure H would agree, but I’m actually quite good at making a little go a long way. I remember a marrow a couple of years ago that lasted us nearly three weeks. (In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's still a bit left in the fridge, even now, just waiting to be popped into a pot of minestrone or 'pepped up' – we did a lot of 'pepping things up' at Realm – with a dash of Worcester sauce and some sauteed shallots). I rarely splurge on clothes, having a capsule wardrobe that consists of about five items that sort of go together. (Actually, I’m not sure I would call it a capsule wardrobe – more a collection of things that A) still fit, and B) haven’t worn out yet, and C) happen to be either white, grey or brown).

Chatty I think I probably spent most of my school career standing out in the corridor or sitting on a chair outside the headmaster’s office for talking when I was supposed to be doing something else. At work, I would always be one of the last to finish, having spent most of the day discussing the various possible ways of tackling any given task, the merits of the job in hand, the pros and cons of various brands and methods of tea-making, whether we ought to have the window closed or open, whether ice cream should be one or two words (bizarrely at Homes & Gardens they always insisted it should be one word, which I always found very difficult to get my head round)…

These days, chatting opportunities are considerably fewer and further between, but I still find myself striking up conversations in the most unlikely places, whether the other party is interested in conversing or not. It’s not unheard of for me to strike up a conversation with the dog, if there's no one else around.

Nosy (Goodness – this is becoming a bit like Snow White’s seven dwarfs…) I try not to be gratuitously nosy, but I do like to get to the bottom of things. Ok, I’m probably gratuitously nosy, if I’m honest. I do like to know what's going on. Whether it's any of my business or not.

Slightly neurotic To live is to worry, I find. What do I worry about? Whether I've possibly inadvertently offended anyone without realising; whether that slight heartburn I had last night was really something dire and life-threatening and I'd be leaving a poor, motherless child; whether the dog has eaten those hayfever tablets I can't now find; whether a giant meteorite might suddenly, unexpectedly come crashing down to earth and obliterate us all; whether that olive-oil smudge on my linen trousers is going to come out... It would probably be easier to list what I don’t worry about.

Well, what do I not worry about then?

Erm…

… And I’d like to tag Milla, Fennie, SnailbeachShepherdess, ElizabethM, Kitty, Pamela and Lampworkbeader.

(Gawd - is anyone going to even speak to me after this embarrassing episode of self-revelation?)

The curious incident of the builder and the chocolate muffins

2009-07-22T21:26:00.011-12:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married woman in possession of the details of her husband’s bank account must be in want of a conservatory. As indeed I possibly would be, were our house not abutting our neighbour’s land and there being few suitable points along the front of the house on which to attach one, without going to the trouble of chopping down several trees and possibly moving the oil tank. (Hmmm – strokes beard – I suppose it might be a possibility…)

Although it has to be said there’s a large part of me that thoroughly disapproves of such wanton building. What about all the skips and the landfill? Not to mention the endless carbon-footprint-creating return journeys by builders’ van up and down the main road to Swindon, which seems to be the West Country’s mecca for obscure radiator fittings, extra long lengths of two-by-four and suchlike. When, exactly, this national obsession with all things construction-related started, it’s hard to say, but the sparks of what was probably a relatively manageable bonfire, with the help of several formulaic TV programmes starring the likes of Sarah Beeny and Ms Allsopp, not to mention the pocket-sized Kevin ‘Grand Designs’ McCloud (who I do quite like, actually – possibly something that has more to do with his being small, and therefore possibly more manageable, rather anything to do with his design credentials) have been fanned into a raging bush fire of continent-engulfing proportions. This, we’re told, is progress.

I have a perfectly lovely friend in London who, every time we meet, which nowadays unfortunately, isn’t all that often, asks me: “How’s the house? Is it finished yet?”
As far as I’m aware our house was probably finished somewhere in the region of 200 years ago, but somehow it feels a bit churlish to point this out. She is, I believe, on her third kitchen and a new en suite is planned above the garage. I mumble something about money being a bit tight, but I suspect what she probably means is have we finished ripping out all the so-called ‘improvements’ our predecessors put in and replaced them with ones of our own choosing – well, actually, no, although I have finally got round to painting the skirting board behind the sofa that was bare, new wood when we moved in.

Where we lived in London, every time a house changed hands – and this was something that happened very frequently during the late nineties and early noughties – a skip would appear outside to be filled with the previous owners carpets, kitchen units, bathroom fittings – in fact just about everything that hadn’t been irretrievably screwed down, plus quite a lot that had. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that we did – briefly – join the skip brigade, but I hasten to add that the house we moved into had been lived in by an elderly vicar with a predilection for the colours mustard, brown and olive – in as many and as varied combinations as possible – for the previous 40 years. There were also polystyrene tiles on all the ceilings and something that looked disturbingly fungal growing under the bath. Well, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

As I child, I vaguely remember having a chimney breast and a wall knocked down in the house we lived in to make what my mother used to proudly call the “through room,” but amongst people we knew this was almost unheard of – she was clearly a woman ahead of her time. I can hardly remember the builders being there, so swift a job they must have done – one day there were two small, dark rooms, and seemingly the next, there was a long streamlined expanse of featureless wall, clad neatly in magnolia-emulsioned anaglypta (for she did – and still does – like her anaglypta).

“Just go through to the “through room,” she’d tell visitors with a little cough and an airy wave sending forth clouds of Elnett with a hint of Tweed, whilst adjusting the décolletage of a kaftan cleverly rustled up with the help of her new electric Singer sewing machine in the full-length mirror in the hall. She was terribly modern. Through in the “through room”, there would often be an oval platter of bridge rolls ready and waiting, topped with her very own signature mixture of grated cheese, chopped tomato and raw onion – a sort of Grimsby forerunner of the canapé; portable enough to eat with one hand without recourse to a plate, yet substantial enough to evade the accusation of a hostess who – heaven forbid – scrimped.

But I digress, horribly.

Anyway, the truth is I’ve reluctantly joined the ranks of those married women who’ve got the builders in. We’re in the unfortunate position of having possibly the only Grade II listed toolshed in the country, and the roof – which looks as though it hasn’t been touched for at least 150 years – is falling in, so I sort of feel it’s a necessary evil. And I understand we could be sent to prison if it falls down completely. H, who watches more of the Kevin McCloud-type programmes than I do – I’m usually fiddling around doing something important in the kitchen when they’re on – is harbouring ideas about a garden office. He’s thinking along the lines of a couple of velux windows and a surround-sound stereo system, while The Boy has got ideas about sleepover bunkbeds and a mad-professor’s-lab-type decorating scheme. I, however, would be perfectly happy with a toolshed – all I can think about is the spiders and the amount of extra dusting anything else might entail.

Our builder is Richard, who I think I may have mentioned before. I should perhaps point out at this stage that Richard is 6’ 4”, has piercing blue eyes and looks not unlike a young Paul Newman in a certain light – well, if you can imagine a sort of young Paul Newman in a boiler suit with slightly curly hair holding a sweet cup of tea in one hand and leaning on an angle grinder.It’s like having a scaled-down version of the Time Team to visit. I’m taken through the various stages of development of the tool shed – there’s a Cotswold stone back wall, yet the front is faced in Victorian Brick – the stable door is obviously a later addition. Some of the roof tiles came from Bridgewater – look, you can just make out the manufacturer’s mark – they probably came up on the new Kennet and Avon Canal – however others are a different size. And the roof beams… Well, you get my gist. He is a proper builder, though – he takes three sugars in his tea and he does like his sweet carbs.

Anyway, the other week while I was up in London, scenes reminiscent of Wisteria Lane were unfolding in our lane. Richard rang up in the morning to say he might be late – our conversation is a series of misunderstandings and non-sequiteurs, along the lines of “When’s a day that would be good for you?” “Yes, I suppose Wednesday would be a good a day as any.” “So shall we say Wednesday, then? I was thinking more along the lines of Tuesday...” – and I finally manage to establish that he’ll be here around lunchtime. I tell him I won’t be here, but I’ll leave a key under a plant pot and plenty of tea and coffee-making things and a packet of biscuits in the kitchen. There’s a sort of buzzing noise in the background and I suspect he’s got another job going on at the same time as us – possibly several other jobs; his appearances are somewhat sporadic to say the least – then he says something that sounds like “I love you,” but I think I must have heard it wrong – it might have been “lovely” – do builders say lovely? anyway, there was no time to think about it, because I had a train to catch.

Anyway, when I got back later that evening, Richard had gone, and so had his angle grinder. The roof looked just the same as it had done that morning and when I got inside, I found a message from one of my neighbours – let’s call her Edie – to say she just popped round to ‘borrow’ Richard to do a little job for her, adding that she’d plied him with elderflower cordial and a plate of muffins. Curiously, Richard hasn’t been seen since. It seems my Custard Creams aren’t enough to keep him here any more; the toolshed remains roofless, and our garden bears an uncanny resemblance to an abandoned archaeological dig.

* * *

And a woman who held a plate of muffins against her ample bosom said, “Speak to us of builders.”

And the prophet replied:

Your builders are not your builders.
They are the physical manifestations of Wife’s longing for a new kitchen.
They come through you, but they are not yet yours;
And though they are with you, they belong not to you.

You may give them your tea, but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts, and they often bear little relation to what is drawn on the plans.
You may house their tools, but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
A house you will never see made flesh, not even in your dreams however much you promise to pay them.

You may strive to get hold of them, but seek not to make them turn up when arranged.
For life does oft appear to go backward, and frequently tarries with things it ought not to be tarrying with.

From The not-for-Profit, © Kanil GiBrown, 2009

Get thee behind me, Santa

2009-07-12T11:46:00.019-12:00

What’s it to be, then – the large pile of ironing or a blog? Hmmm. Tough one. Enticing as the ironing looks – hey, I was wondering what had happened to that grey vest top which I don’t think I’ve seen for a good three weeks, and which has now been revealed thanks to the top 18-inches of the ironing pile toppling down to the floor – I do have my public to think of. They’ll be wondering what’s happened to me while I’ve been trawling London’s seamy streets for the fruitiest mince pie, the creamiest egg nog and the crumbliest fudge (and boy, is there a lot of fudge out there this year, folks). Yes, it’s July again, which means Santa’s gift-laden reindeer – or jauntily smiley PR girls dressed up as reindeer – will be trit-trotting into my life once more.

In my world of work, one of the few regular jobs I have been getting to do over the last few years (but I'm not counting my turkeys) is the Christmas gift guide for a glossy magazine (I’m afraid I don’t get credited, so you’ll just have to read and wonder – but if you’re after a clue, look out for the Bob Dylan headlines). I read an article in The Guardian recently about the journalists who do this type of feature, where the writer claims, “It’s generally a pretty lowly job and I don’t think anyone actively looks forward to working on the gift guide. It’s just a lot of work, keeping on top of everything and making sure all the information is right” Well, Pah, Alice Wignall – I’ll tell you something: I do. So there.

For one thing, compiling a gift guide is a lot less tiring than trying to keep on top of a manically self-filling laundry basket and self-emptying fridge, fielding endless requests for obscure craft equipment or bizarre costumes for World Book Day – the armoured polar bear from The Golden Compass, anyone? – helping your child do homework that involves several hours poring over atlases and tracking down obscure information on the internet, or ensuring several lots of music practice are religiously done, often in the face of strenuous opposition. Many’s the Monday morning that I’ve fished in the unlooked at school reading bag to find a request for pizza ingredients or a plate of cupcakes and had to face down the disapproving tut of Mrs Humphreys as I try to pass off a box of Mr Kipling’s Viennese Whirls with a devil-may-care shrug. Well, I'll tell you something, I'm not sorry to be leaving that behind for a week or two.

What’s not to like about getting away from the office (for office, read paper-strewn kitchen table with half the breakfast washing up encroaching into your in-tray, and for demanding boss, read attention-seeking dog who goes ballistic at the very thought that the postman might be heading – even now – up the Chippenham road towards our village); heading off on a train – even sometimes getting to read most of the paper without interruption? I sometimes find myself driving back from the station at night after one of my infrequent London jaunts, arriving at the motorway roundabout with the sign that says London one way, South Wales the other, and a little voice in my head tantalisingly whispers London? South Wales? London? South Wales? London? South Wales? Then, of course, this being real life and not some schmaltzy romantic novel, I dutifully cross the motorway bridge and head up back home. I probably wouldn’t have enough petrol to get beyond Membury Service Station anyway.

Yes, yes, I suppose there’s the odd chore of having to take an interest in Igglepiggle from In the Night Garden (no, don’t ask – bask joyfully in your ignorance – I’ve forgotten already), conversing with a man (or could it have been a woman?) in a Spongebob Squarepants outfit and having to force-feed yourself with an unfeasibly large number of Sainsbury’s handmade chocolates… Well you have to take these things seriously. (I also like doing the ironing on occasion, I’m just exercising some self-control right now, saving it up for an uninterrupted moment when I can really settle down and enjoy it…)

It’s all been rather surreal – actually, it’s not completely over yet. I still technically have three more shows to go to, but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to fit them all in – well, there is the ironing you know… During the last week I’ve been kissed (on the cheek, mind) by Gok Wan, got stuck in a glass lift with a hyperventilating claustrophobic journalist while a clown tried to distract her by making a spanner disappear (Don’t make it disappear, you geek! I wanted to shout. Break the door down with it – I think we’re going to run out of oxygen any minute! Except I don’t, as it will probably cause her to hyperventilate even more) eat several thousand canapes and accidentally find myself apparently stalking another, quite famous, journalist.

“Oh, you’re Xxxxxx,” I say, as we’re thrust together in the signing in queue for one of the shows. “I recognise your byline.” She writes for one of the broadsheets, not the sort of thing you’re likely to find in the hairdressers, like me.
“Erm, likewise,” she replies politely, although the likelihood of her having read something by me is, let’s say rather remote. Unless of course she has her hair done particularly regularly.
“So, what are you writing about?” I venture, as we wait to be shown in by the canapés. She really seems quite friendly and I leap on the chance of an interesting conversation that isn’t about some gadget that I really can’t quite get my head round.
“Trends,” she replies. “I just do columns, really, now.”
“I’ve noticed a bit of a trend,” I tell her. “Have you noticed how white everybody’s teeth are nowadays?” I’ve just come fresh from being kissed by Gok and I’m trying to work out whether he’s had veneers.

She looks at me blankly, and then over her shoulder to see whether the queue is moving – it isn’t – and I wonder whether I’ve somehow accidentally managed to get some spinach from one of the five million canapés I’ve eaten over the last three days on my teeth. There’s an audible sigh of relief as the queue suddenly starts to lurch forward and she’s freed from the crazed country bumpkin who’s just been let out for the day.

Bizarrely, and not by any design of my own, I might add, I find myself hurtling into the lift with her at the next venue and praying it wasn’t about to get stuck. I was obviously beginning to look slightly the worse for wear by Friday, as arriving at the reception desk for the fourth show, an immaculately turned-out PR chap looked me up and down before suggesting, I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting to see the fashion...

John Lewis had the best canapés – tiny three-story smoked-salmon sandwiches and little mini lox-and-cream cheese bagels, which made a welcome change from all the fudge – while Lakeland had by far the best venue – a suite at the beautiful Soho hotel with a balcony overlooking London’s rooftops glinting in the early morning sun. If I had the money and a few days to kill in London, I’d book a room there like a shot – beautifully understated soft furnishings, gorgeous wood and stone finishes – but let’s face it, this is likely to be my one and only chance of seeing inside. Swept along by the smiling reindeer people, tasty titbits and silent waiters with ever-full trays of bucks fizz, smoothies, coffee – whatever you fancied, really, and let's face it, I probably fancied most of it – I manage to squeeze in two free manicures (well, I didn’t really like the first colour) and a pedicure, although I did turn down the offer of some stick-on Bollywood eyelashes, as I was meeting an old colleague for a drink afterwards and I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Or – which was more probable, knowing my track record with beauty accessories – something going horribly wrong and my eyes being irretrievably glued shut.

Of course I had to put up with the burden of carting all the inevitable goody bags – or greedy bags, as my friend Karin so rightly calls them – back to Wiltshire. Well, it has to be done. I know, I know, it’s horribly grabby, but I don’t get out much. I don’t believe most journalists – even now – are too sniffy to take one home. I’ve yet to see someone decant out the vital press information, discarding the boxes of eyeliner, lip gloss, chocolates and dvds and remember all too clearly when I worked on the 27th floor of a well-known magazine house, when you could honestly feel the entire building list precariously towards the Thames whenever there was a press event with an outside chance of a freebie upstairs in the penthouse.

The whole experience is fraught with conflicting feelings of disapproval at all the excess and the depressing thought that our fragile economy is built on everyone buying and – inevitably chucking away and replacing – so much stuff, battling the illicit, albeit transient, thrill of something shiny and new in a stiff, glossy bag.

Predictably, the ephemeral promise of illicit gifts wins out, and I find myself back home with an odd assortment of stuff: two Christmas puddings, some scented candles, a DVD of Miracle on 34th Street, a photo frame, a pink suedette Oxford English Dictionary, a couple of water bottles, some olive oil, several jars of chutney, a strange green kitchen implement that looks like the tool the Almighty is wielding in Blake’s The Ancient of Days, a magnetic spoon (why?) an interestingly-shaped cheese grater, a Sylvanian Families baby bear in a cot – and an awful lot of fudge. Well, I’m easily pleased. I give the new cheese grater its first outing with our Friday night spaghetti bolognaise.

“It’s great, Mum,” says The Boy enthusiastically. “Almost as good as our old one.”

Another pleasure, of course – and one yet to savour – is the headline opportunities – I’ve already managed one Bob one (sadly, it is one I’ve used before), and find myself feeling rather pleased with Licenced not to spill for an automatic martini maker. As I said, I’m easily pleased.

* * *

Stop press!
I don’t know whether any of you noticed Jess Cartner-Morley’s fashion page in this week’s Guardian Weekend? Her Going Up column flags up the peacoat I mentioned several weeks ago – what do you mean you don’t remember? That could be me writing about trends.

Remember, you heard it here first...

Cupboard love

2009-06-23T11:19:00.008-12:00

There’s a concept in Buddhism known as taṇhā. It’s variously translated as desire, craving or thirst (and has nothing to do with the recipe-book writing wife of Gordon Ramsay, although she, I should imagine, is not unacquainted with its effects). In Buddhism, taṇhā, as surely as night follows day, leads to dukkha, or suffering; in other words that which you strive for, inevitably, will turn out to be a disappointment.

When I was younger, my own taṇhā was focussed on knowledge. I used to think if I just read one more book or went to one more lecture, I’d finally understand what it was all about – life, the world and everything. Unfortunately, it never happened. I’m sure if I’d have had the application to actually attend all those lectures or the energy to get to the library before it closed, I’d have realised the error of my reasoning eventually. Before that, it was focussed on weight and spots – if I just managed to lose that last half stone, or eradicate those last few spots, that trumpet player with the muscly brown arms on the second desk of the North Lincolnshire Concert Ensemble would surely be mine. Alas, that was not to be either – I had another tanhā, which took the form of an excessive fondness for Caroline’s mum’s bread pudding and the contents of the biscuit tin, which was always to get the better of me - it was probably just as well.

Now, a handful of decades later and with hopefully a little more worldy wisdom under my belt (not to mention a fair few slices of bread pudding as well as the odd biscuit or 100), my taṇhā has drifted towards storage – a perfectly turned shelf, a pleasing box or a satisfying cupboard (although cake and biscuits still figure, obviously). I know in my heart of hearts it’s not the answer to all the world’s ills, but if I can just have enough shelves and storage space, my life, if not complete, will certainly be a whole lot tidier.

So when I spotted a possible place for a new cupboard following a sort-out for last week’s car boot sale, and H, having given the green light in the form of a shrug and a sort of grunt which didn’t exactly sound like ‘no’, my excitement knew no bounds. Unfortunately, Richard, our current builder of choice, had by now disappeared into a parallel time-space continuum following the Long Night of the Lamb Chops, and was nowhere to be found, so an alternative cupboardsmith had to be located. Luckily, our village is full of such artisans and within a matter of days Nigel and his Black & Decker had been installed into the spare room with a ready supply of sweet tea.

Now, as with all things in this world, where there’s yin, there’s yang; where there’s light, there’s dark, black and white, etc, etc – so although blessed with the fine talent of cupboardmaking, Nigel inevitably had to come with a downside. In fact Nigel had two downsides; a monsterous bread-eating dog, which accompanied him in all his endeavours, and an unstoppable urge to whistle. Under other circumstances, this would probably have been fine – I suppose I could have gone out and put the bread safely away somewhere well out of reach, but I had rather a lot of work to get through. Unfortunately, Brown Dog, being a Radio Three sort of fellow, is uncommonly sensitive to tuneless whistling and whenever Nigel whistled, Brown Dog would go off into a top spin, barking frantically and tearing around the garden, impeding all attempts to conduct an interview over the telephone, or indeed even think straight.

“I think it might be your whistling,” I suggested. For about the eighth time.
“Oh, sorry. I am trying not to, but I keep forgetting.”
Nigel appeared to be afflicted with some kind of whistling Tourrette’s.

I’ve got rather a lot of work on at the moment – although the work itself is easy peasy, it’s the sorting out of my life around it that’s the problem. In order to get up to London to check out the Christmas press shows, not only do I have to plan a timetable and book the necessary trains, but I have to organise the boy, sort out the dog and make sure the bread bin and the fridge are full, the bills are paid, the cat is fed, the plants watered, the lawnmower mended… I bet Benjamin Franklin with his meticulously planned and productive schedule never had these kinds of things to contend with. The boy is not difficult – polite and popular, he never seems to be short of people to go to tea with or bring him back from Cubs. The dog is more of a problem.

I make the first phone call to try and palm the dog off on some poor unsuspecting neighbour for the first of the five days I have to sort out. The whistling starts, the dog barks furiously the neighbour hesitates, goes away to check his diary and… “Oh dear – I AM sorry. We’ve got a dentist’s appointment in Cirencester that day…”

And so it goes on.

Finally, I resort to the dogsitter. It’s expensive, but at least if I’m paying, I don’t need to feel so guilty about the barking. It is expensive. I find myself wondering whether she has an especially high rate for noisy dogs...

At last, the cupboard is all but finished. I peer inside, fully expecting to glimpse Nirvana.

A polite cough interrupts my reverie.

“Oh – I should have told you to wait until the paint was dry,” suggests Nigel. Meanwhile, his dog is downstairs greedily devouring the wholemeal.

Little sawing men, Richard Time and an awful lot of books

2009-06-14T06:15:00.014-12:00

I woke up yesterday morning with a slightly sore head. Richard the builder was supposed to be coming at nine, but it was OK – this was Richard Time we were talking about here. When we'd asked him to do the job he'd said he'd have it finished by Summer. That was sometime early in 2007. Nine o'clock on Saturday morning could be anywhere between lunchtime and a week next Tuesday (as it turned out, he appeared just before lunch and ended up staying for supper and leaving after 11pm – well, we had a spare couple of lamb chops and it seemed rude not to offer him some when he was still beavering away at 9.30).

I spooled back to the previous evening – well, as much of it as I could remember. Inevitably, there were one or two “Oh, no!” moments. It had been the fete the previous evening, I hadn’t had time to have any supper and Adam had been on the nearby Pimm’s stall – a fatal combination of circumstances, as it turned out...

By some small miracle, I’d managed to find a lift for The Boy to cricket in Malmesbury, however this necessitated driving him to the next village – Ben’s mum had offered to come and collect him, but there was so much going on with the fete and all, I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty where I (or he) was likely to be at the appointed time. Boy deposited (trousers had to be hastily taken up – with slightly uneven results, sewing machine being unexpectedly broken), tea hastily – albeit slightly grumpily – eaten (“I thought I’d ordered beans on toast?” BoT being now on the Index Liborum Prohibitorum of my culinary repertoire, following last night’s incident at cubs), and various calls fielded from H updating me on his horticultural wish-list if I had time to visit the plant stall before he got back from work…

Arrived at the fete slightly breathless, newly hemmed trousers having snagged on my frantic bicycle pedals along the way. Never mind – they’d be safely hidden for a large chunk of the evening behind the book stall. My spirits lifted when I spotted a bushy lupin on the nearby plant stall – I was sure it was on H’s wishlist, which I could not now find – in my bicycle basket I had my address book and a packet of bacon I’d picked up along the way and subsequently forgotten to offload into the fridge, and a couple of dog-poo bags. No list, though.

Leaving Julie alone behind seven towering tables of books, I darted over to the plant stall, studiously ignoring Helen, who was waving raffle tickets hopefully in my direction, only to be pipped at the post by a determined-looking character in a raincoat, who was not to be swayed by one of my hardest stares. By now there was a crowd round the plant stall – I had to act fast, so I made a lunge for a voluptuous hydrangea and something beginning with R, which also looked promising. I was told it was good by a pond – we have nothing approaching a pond in our garden, but no matter. Were they on my list? I wasn’t sure where my list now was, and moments wasted rummaging for it could mean the difference between horticultural heaven and a major sulk which could last all weekend if I wasn’t careful. I bore my bushy prizes back to the book stall, where Julie was doing a passable impression of the Boy on the Burning deck managing the hordes who were now descending on the non-fiction. My phone started buzzing in my back pocket, but I didn’t have a free hand to answer it.

Gill waved frantically from over by the bandstand.
“Where are the chicks?”
The chicks? What chicks? Oh God – I’d forgotten to remind Suzy.
Suzy’s answer machine was on, children were gathering around an empty arc – I’d thought the fete wasn’t starting til 6.30, but it seemed it had started at 6… Customers lining up, proffering pounds, phone buzzing again in back pocket…

Managed to answer – it was Suzy, but by now the Wootton Bassett Brass Band had struck up with a lusty rendition of I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside and I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying… It seemed to involve the chicks, but then it would, wouldn’t it. A pile of Mills & Boon was being thrust in front of me “How much?”
“Oh, just take them,” I wanted to say, and at that very moment, Adam hove in to view with “emergency rations for Mrs Shearer”. Well, it’s only a slightly alcoholic fruit salad, really…

It was all downhill from there…

I suppose somehow, somewhere during the course of the evening we must have managed to sell some books. There still seemed to be an awful lot to be lugged back into the stables afterwards (although, interestingly, the bumper erotica and aphrodisiac vegetables were nowhere to be found). We did, however, have a fairly satisfying amount of money, so I suppose someone must have sold something.

I also managed to nab a little wind-up toy of two tin men sawing a log from the White Elephant stall in exchange for a book on knitted toys which I was saving for Janice, which made me feel inordinately pleased. £2.50 - total bargain, don't you think? There was a slight panic when the key was thought to have gone missing, but it eventually turned up safe and sound in the bottom of another box. It's the sort of thing I'd have coveted madly as a seven-year-old and saved up all my pocket money for, but I can't help feeling it's also the sort of thing I should have long grown out of by now. Oh, well. All over until next year, I guess.

Short cuts

2009-06-11T21:37:00.003-12:00

I shouldn’t really be blogging – I’ve got far to much to do – but I thought I’d squeeze in a quick one just in case you were worried I’d died or been abducted by aliens. Also, I don’t want to lose my Google ranking, and I believe you can if you don’t update regularly (how shallow is that?). Anyway, here goes.

It’s the village fete today – I should really be down at the farm where it’s being held, joining in with the general panic, helping to mix Pimm’s and sorting out where the baby chicks should go. This year I’ve been promoted to Books – I’ve been assistant manager on Trinkets for the last three years – now I’m co-manager on Books. I like books, don’t get me wrong, but they do have their drawbacks. Books are heavy, and it’s easy to get distracted by a discarded celebrity autobiography that I’d be far too sniffy to buy under normal circumstances. Also, I’ve discovered there are an awful lot of thriller readers in the village, which is a little worrying. Not, perhaps, quite as worrying as the pile of dubious erotica that was dumped in the dead of night one day last week which included a gardening guide to the aphrodisiac properties of certain vegetables. My suspicions stray over towards the allotments. There’s an awful lot of beetroot on one of the plots.

I really should also be doing some work. After months of grumbling about the lack of work, like London Busses or Wendy Cope’s men, it has suddenly pitched up en masse and I now find myself grumbling about having too much work.

In a similar vein, I suddenly find myself with an embarrassment of builders. The phone rang at 9.15 last night as I was just reaching for the gin bottle after a particularly taxing evening at Cubs (where I found myself in the confined space of the community hall kitchen demonstrating how to mend a bicycle puncture. Can I just make a plea to other cub mothers? Can you not give your boys baked beans on a Thursday night? I nearly passed out at least three times). I picked up, and the voice at the other end said, “Hi, it’s Richard”.
(Pause). Richard? Who is this? Richard from Cubs? Richard Attenborough? Richard Madely – he does live not far from here – he’s been spotted on at least two occasions filling up at our local filling station).
“Oh, hi, Richard. How are you?” Not wanting to appear rude and playing for a little time.
“Can I pop round and drop off some scaffolding?”
This last question rules out Richards Attenborough and Madely, however it does beg the question as to why Richard from Cubs would be wanting to bring round some scaffolding.
“Er – yes, I suppose so” not wanting to sound rude again – which is fast proving my downfall. “When did you want to come?”
“Well, tonight, I thought – if it’s not too late.”
Twenty minutes later, as the sun is just tipping over the horizon, Richard appears and the mystery is solved. It’s Richard the builder – of course it is. Who else would be wanting to start stripping off the felt from the rafters of our outhouse at twenty to ten of an evening?

I offer Richard a can of beer and then make the fatal mistake of engaging him in small talk about lime mortar. I haven’t had my supper yet, have several features to write, some urgent Parish Council business to attend to, next week's community news for the local paper to write and five million books to sort out before the fete the following day.

We also have Robert the carpenter (well, more cabinet-maker than carpenter, really) and I have decisions to make about bullnose edges, doorknobs and hinges.

I also have to organise a lift for the boy to Cricket this evening, unless I can miraculously come up with a method of managing to be in two places at once before then – which, at the moment, looks like being the more achievable of the two options.

H is still at work, of course.

Onward, ever onward...

2009-05-18T20:40:00.014-12:00

I’d forgotten quite how much medical conversation a visit from my mother entailed. By tea time, we’d reached the inevitable report on her heamorrhoids, over supper we were treated to a blow by blow account of a friend’s virtual colonoscopy and there was a breakfast-time report the next morning on the consistency of her bowel movements following last night’s rhubarb crumble (not as nice as hers, apparently; inevitably) – surprisingly firm. Too much information, perhaps? Well, it certainly seemed to be for H, who suddenly remembered some urgent work at the office that would have to be completed over the weekend. He did come home eventually, but only to disappear up to bed with a ‘bit of a headache,’ before heading off for work again not long after sunrise the following morning.

Mum’s other specialist subject is politics, at which, like so many other things, she is an expert. Anyone who disagrees with her is at best misguided, a cynic or has ‘fixed opinions’, which, of course, she doesn’t at all. She’s always firing letters off about this and that. I wouldn’t fancy John Humphrey’s chances – time would be called, but he’d be told not to interrupt in no uncertain terms. Or simply ignored. Europe comes in for a particular bashing – despite the fact, as H points out to her, that France has better healthcare and shorter working hours…

She rolls her eyes defiantly, as though these are but trifles in a sea of otherwise unredeemed barbarity. I think she was last in France about 1973. I have to remind myself that she was born at the time of the British Empire when half the world was pink and divided from the rest of it, in places like Africa, by neat, straight lines and coloured in various pastel shades depending on whether it belonged to the French, the Germans or (in extreme cases) the Portuguese.

She likes to talk – of course she does, she lives alone and relishes nothing better than a captive audience to regale with all those opinions she’s had time to refine and crystallise during those long afternoons that stretch endlessly between the end of the lunchtime edition of The Archers and the title music for The Last of the Summer Wine. Surely I can’t begrudge her that? I try to indulge her, I really do, but sometimes it’s difficult to keep up. Memories are brought out from the depths of an enormous mental Kelly bag and dusted off for inspection:

“D’you remember that holiday in Butlins we had?” She asks me.
I look blank as I thrash around vainly in my mind trying to catch a whisper of a memory, but before I can put my finger on anything she's off again.
“Now, was it Minehead or was it Filey? Oh, yes, Filey. You’d have been about two – look, I’ve found the photo of the Bonny Baby competition.” She rummages round in her bag and out comes a battered picture of a woman beaming and a rather fat baby who looks as though it has just woken up. “Yes, you came second. Of course I came first in the Miss Personality contest.”
Well, naturally. How could I possibly forget?

What I’d also forgotten about was the convoluted conversations about people at church that go off at many tangents along the way before coming back to the long-forgotten case in point. Parishoners who had strayed and priests who’d fallen short of her high expectations. All those Barbaras and Margarets – ample-chested, sensibly dressed matrons, usually in charge of a tea urn at the many church functions I attended as a child – women who moved together as one giant, surging wave of the Mothers’ Union or the National Housewives Register (which she always reminds me was for “women with lively minds” such as herself. But of course). Chaff was divided from wheat and sheep from goats between making the sandwiches and serving tea; a decisive twist of the tap, a slight tip, and Barbara could always be relied upon to squeeze out an extra cup for the vicar. Only twelve tea bags, too – she could do the whole congregation. A rare nod to modernity, yes, but so much more convenient than leaf tea. The feeding of the five thousand had nothing on Barbara, however it was invariably someone called Margaret who would know where the biscuits were kept. It would need to be a double act if they were to take on Jesus in a round of Ready Steady Cook. Rich Tea and Malted Milk – and on special occasions you might even be offered a Bourbon. It was a world of billowing tea dresses, tweed skirts, tightly buttoned cardigans and 30 denier tights in beige where husbands were called Les or Norris, and kept well out of the way if they knew what was good for them. It was clearly the women who were in charge, invariably outliving the Leses and the Norrises into respectable widowhood like some ecclesiastical branch of the Black Widow Spider family.

In this conversation, one of the Barbaras was tearing Jonathan off a strip – well, someone had to. I gamely try to keep up, having lost the thread several sentences ago, somewhere between Stockport and the Isle of Wight taking a momentary detour to Birmingham somewhere along the way, but I'm inevitably lost for a suitable interjection at this point, and the expectant look on my mother’s face tells me one is needed. A throat is being cleared and metaphorical finger is tap tapping on the table in anticipation.

“Who’s Jonathan?” I ask, entirely stumped as to where this conversation is heading, or indeed where it came from, so circuitous is the route.

I’m given a look that is somewhere between pity and irritation. “Dimbleby, of course!” I raise my eyebrows in a look that might possibly be interpreted as respect or awe – or possibly consertation – not quite sure what's required, but hopefully, this all-purpose expression will fit the bill and stop up this pregnant pause...

But it doesn’t seem to matter. On goes the conversational train bearing Barbara, Jonathan and doubtless Margaret, too, somewhere in the background of the guard’s van or behind the counter of the buffet car, tut-tutting at the spectre of powdered tea and pre-packed sandwiches with far too much filling in them.

It's alright Ma (I'm only screaming)

2009-05-12T10:20:00.015-12:00

My mother is coming to visit next week and after all the palaver at Kemble Station last time, she’s got herself a mobile phone. Her friend Tom gave it to her. He thought he’d lost it, so he got himself a new one and then it turned up, but by then he'd given everybody his new number. Mum does not have a good record with mobile phones, but you've got to hand it to her – she does try. I think it's called the triumph of hope over adversity.

“Why don’t you give me your number, then I can let you know if there’s any problem?” I suggest.
“Well, I was thinking I could use it to call you if I get held up. I don’t think you’ll need to call me. I can’t keep in switched on all the time – the battery will run out.”
Why the reluctance to give me the number, I wonder? My mother's mind works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform.

“I just thought it might be useful. If we were waiting for one another at the station – like last time – then I’d be able to contact you.”
“Well, I could just ring you, couldn’t I?”
“Well, yes – I suppose you could. Have you got my mobile number?”
The line goes quiet and there’s a general sound of rummaging. She doesn’t have a pen. I suggest that if she can just give me her number, I could ring her and then she’ll automatically have mine.

“How will that work?” she asks, genuinely bemused, I think, but it comes across as irritation.
“It’ll come up on your screen when I ring you,” I explain.
There’s an audible sigh and she disappears off to hunt for a pen. “You don’t need a pen,” I shout down the receiver, but it’s too late – she’s gone.

Finally she returns to the other end of the phone. It turns out she does have her number, after all, and she reads it out to me in carefully enunciated digits as though she’s the speaking clock, repeating it just to be sure. I repeat it back to her and all seems hunky dory, then I hang up and try dialing the new mobile. It rings for a few seconds before clicking on to answer mode with a helpful message telling me that I’ve reached Tom, who can’t get to the phone at the moment…
I try the landline again. “Have you switched it on?”
“Oh… No.”

I try the mobile again. This time there’s no ringing at all before Tom clicks in with his can’t-get-to-the-phone-right-now message. I realize she’s now not only switched it on, but she’s also pressed the answer button, and the phone’s now registering engaged. I ring the landline.

“Hello?” The voice at the other end sounds slightly exasperated. As though she's had enough of this particular experiement in new technology. And besides, it'll be The Antiques Roadshow in a couple of minutes. She’s exasperated?

“I think you’ve accidentally pressed the ‘answer’ button.”
“What?”
“The answer button. The button you press when you’ve got a call coming in.”
“What?” There follows the sound of some sighing couple with what sounds like the jabbing of fingers onto buttons.
“You’ve got to hang up before I can ring you.”
“Pardon? It's saying Menu... then Contacts... And now it's saying Games...”
Give me strength. By the time I get through to her the phone will probably be up for a slot on The Antiques Road Show, but I'm not at all sure my will to live is going to last that long.
“Turn the phone off, then turn it on again.”

Finally, we manage to make contact, but there’s a lot of crackling on the line and I quickly give up the idea of trying to explain how to save the number and type in my name. It’s all far too complicated.

* * *

Late, late, late…
I seem to spend all my time rushing these days… Arrived late for my first Parish Council meeting (the shame!) because for some reason Brown Dog had chosen to take an irrational dislike to the babysitter. They had met before, but I hadn’t realized Tim was a bit nervous of dogs. I saw him at the gate five minutes before I was due to go out, and thought – great, just enough time to bung a bit of jam in the Victoria sponge I’d been making, shove a jacket potato in the bottom of the Aga for H, sort out my papers and clear up The Boy’s supper tray. Five minutes later, I am nearly set to leave, but still Tim hasn’t appeared at the door.

I glance out of the window to see a white-faced Tim hopping over a clump of sedge grass, Brown Dog in hot pursuit, barking madly. The more Tim hopped and swerved around the garden, the more excited Brown Dog became – he’d only really wanted to show Tim his tennis ball. Just stand still, I want to yell, but Tim doesn’t look very happy at all and shouting at him doesn’t seem a very kind thing to do. So instead, I opt for a sort of ungainly lunge at Brown Dog, who seems to think this is a fantastic development in the game, and shows his enthusiasm by nipping, ducking, diving and jumping even more frenetically. Thankfully, I didn’t quite fall over and somehow managed to grab Brown Dog by the collar, but by now my hair is all over the place and I've somehow managed to get a grubby grass stain down the side of my trouser leg.

Brown Dog is placed firmly in the dog house while I dispatch The Boy off to Tim’s house – a popular choice all round, not least because Tim’s family doesn’t have a dog, however by way of consolation, they do have an Xbox 360 - at the moment, this seems like a capital arrangement to me. Hurried note has to be written for H to explain absence of Boy, plus instructions about potato, before hurtling off on my bike (which isn’t a mountain bike, by the way) over the bumpy glebe field which is the shortest distance as the crow flies to the community room. Unfortunately, I am not a crow and immediately regret not changing out of my Birkenstocks, as the nettles are quite high now and the track runs through a great big patch of them…

Ten minutes into the meeting, with my feet now stinging madly, they’ve already started handing out the jobs. It appears in my absence I’ve already been ‘volunteered’ for several – including supervising the village hall and co-ordinating Tai-Chi lessons. Next on the agenda is something about community healthcare, which I don’t quite catch, and make the fatal mistake of asking what it involves... Before I know it, my name is being written down against that, too. Spend the rest of the meeting in a vain attempt to maintain continuous eye-contact with my shoes, but not entirely succeeding. It seems my life is to become even more busy and complicated…

The Questionnaire

2009-05-02T02:39:00.032-12:00

Hurrah – I've been tagged by the gorgeous Fennie to do a questionnaire – not that I've ever needed very much encouragement at all to blether on all about myself...

What are your current obsessions?

H and I went to Cardiff last week to see Bob Dylan who was just fantastic – at nearly 68, he's still ice cool – despite having a slight headache from trying to negotiate all the Welsh road signs (that's me, not Bob, although I can't personally vouch for Bob's command of Welsh. I mean, Why? Cardiff is an international city and I’d hazard a guess that the number of people who drive around there with Welsh as a first language and an insufficient grasp of English to understand ‘City Centre’ or ‘International Arena’ must be somewhere in the region of 0.000001 %. If that. And they probably shouldn’t be driving anyway. If they must have it in Welsh, why can’t they put it in a smaller font? Preferably one that only Welsh speakers can see. Or a different colour? Or even better, put it somewhere else entirely? Aberystwyth perhaps?).

There was the added distraction of standing about a metre away from Monty Don who was pretty cool, too – no over enthusiastic dancing or inappropriate whooping – which is more than I can say for some of the other members of the audience. Between us and Monty stood Penguin Man who spent the night alternately whipping out his BlackBerry and texting frantically, and throwing himself bodily from one side to the other, at one point waving both flippers about yelling “How does it FEEEEEL… Like a complete UNKNOWN?”. Without any sense of irony. I’ve loved Bob since I was about 17 and I first had enough money to buy records, and after nearly 30 years of singing along, my voice is now almost as good as Bob's. H, however, took a little while to convert as when we met he was sharing a flat with a bloke who also loved Bob, but unfortunately he also had an acoustic guitar. I think H must have thought I was the lesser of two evils.

What are you listening to?
Bob. Obviously.

Which item from your wardrobe do you wear most often?
At any given time I have two pairs of jeans – one’s usually in the wash – which I wear until they fall to bits, before reluctantly replacing them. I hate clothes shopping with a passion, especially if it involves trying things on. There are two types of mirrors in shop changing rooms: the sort that make you look hideously fat, pallid and dimpled and the sort that lull you into a false sense of security with soft lighting, enticing you to buy something totally unsuitable which ends up looking hideous when you get home. Clothes shopping is just one big confidence trick. I learned that very early on.

What are you reading?
Kilvert’s Diary. The very idea of the diary of a Victorian cleric sounds desperately dull, which is why I've put off picking it up for so long, but it’s actually fabulous, albeit in a 19th-century sort of way. Francis Kilvert lived about five miles from here and his joyous descriptions of the Wiltshire countryside are enchanting. He also describes having to read the Sunday sermon with a hangover, losing his bathing drawers in a choppy sea off the Isle of Wight and falling in love with several different young women in the course of a couple of months. On Friday the 3rd of July, he’s waxing lyrical about Daisy’s ‘beautiful white bosom heaving under the lace edging of her dress,’ the entry for Wednesday, 5th August reads simply: ‘A splendid romp with Polly Tavener,’ and by Tuesday the 11th he'd alreay fallen in love at first sight with ‘sweet Kathleen Mavourneen’. Tragically, Kilvert died just a month after his wedding and his widow and niece subsequently destroyed all but three of the 22 notebooks he left. Embarrassed by all the naked bathing, heaving bosoms and romping, I should imagine.

I’m also simultaneously reading reading Forgotten Fruits, an excellent book on the history of fruit and vegetables. I was slightly disgruntled when my friend Karin told me about it, because I was mulling over an idea for a book on the very same subject. Unfortunately, I don’t think I could have done anything like as good a job of it as Christopher Stocks, who clearly knows a heck of a lot more about the history of horticulture. It’s out this month in paperback and I can highly recommend it.

What’s for lunch?
It started out as a cheese toasty, but I accidentally forgot about it and left it under the hot plate of the Aga for slightly too long and it seems have turned into a sort of raclette. The Aga will have to be cleaned later.

What makes you helpless with laughter?
Not that much, actually. A lot of things make me smile, though, and in exceptional circumstances, something may even elicit a quiet chuckle or – in extremis – an episode of restrained Ted Heathing, but I’m not usually given to public displays of mirth. One of the upsides of having spent several years as a sub-editor (once a sub, always a sub – one of the torments of an editoral background is not being able to go anywhere without noticing misplaced apostrophes and other random grammar crimes and having to suppress the urge at all times to correct them) is the inordinate pleasure derived from a particularly pleasing headline. The Secret Life of Cheese is a current favourite. I know, it’s quite sad, really.

First Spring thing?
Cows. Although snowdrops and crocuses herald the first hints that Spring is on its way, the actual arrival of the new season is confirmed only by the sight of distant pied oblong shapes dotting the Spring meadows. I have mixed feelings about cows. They look nice from a distance, but I wouldn’t want to get too close.

What was the last thing you bought?
A charcoal-grey wool and cashmere peacoat on eBay. Fantastic bargain. I have a feeling that peacoats are going to very big in Great Somerford this season.

Favourite plant of the moment?
Rhubarb.We used to call it rude stewbarb when I was a child. There’s something decadently Victorian about those voluptuous leaves, tumescent rhizomes, livid red stalks and urgently bulging buds. Crikey – I think I’m in danger of having a full-blown Nigella moment. I think I may need to go and lie down for a minute…

Guilty pleasure?
Apart from rhubarb? Managing to work titles or lyrics from Bob Dylan songs into things I’ve been commissioned to write – some are more difficult than others, but it’s usually possible to get at least one in. Merchandise round-ups are particularly good for this – I’ve had Hey, Mr Tangerine Man for a juicer, One More Cup of Coffee for a coffee machine (slightly obvious), How Many Roads Must a Man Drive Down (before he admits he is lost)? for a sat nav – and I even tried Tight Connection to my Scart for a dvd player a while ago, but for some reason, the editor took it out. Sad, but true. I’m currently working on an idea for a piece about our annual Spring frog crossing for the new village website, which I’m thinking of calling How Many Toads Must a Van Run Down? What do you think?

If you were a god / goddess, which one would you be?
Bob. Obviously.

Care to share some wisdom?
As family and friends will all too readily confirm, I am the absolute Queen of Unsolicited Advice – much of it useless, some of it downright dangerous. The only advice I would pass on is don’t take any advice from me. Sorry matey – you’re on your own.

Sum yourself up in a sentence
These are my principles; if you don’t like them…
Well, I have others…

The Rules
Respond and rework. Answer questions on your own blog. Replace one question. Add one question. Tag some people.

I'm tagging:
Menopausaloldbag (MOB) (Actually, I lied when I said I never succumbed to helpless laughter - it's impossible to read one of MOB's posts without guffawwing out loud.)
Countrymummy Yes, you too will be getting a peacoat this summer. If indeed you haven't already got one. You will, you will, you will, you will, you will.
Lampworkbeader
ChrisH (yes, I know you've been tagged already Chris, but I wanted to crank up the pressure ;-)
Calico Kate

Too many pies and not enough fingers...

2009-04-30T21:17:00.009-12:00

Crikey – what happened to April? It’s been a funny old month, one way and another. After all the excitement, stress, mayhem and galloping around on my hamster wheel of the book and Gardeners’ Question Time, I thought by now I’d be basking in the feeling of time on my hands and planning that trip to the spa with my friend Helga – or at least the enjoy the satisfaction of once more doing something approaching gainful employment – family coffers are still decidedly empty. It’s been a time of strange, stop-start push-me-pull-you energies and I'm aware of a distinct and unsettling feeling of too many pies and not enough fingers. I put it down to Uranus and Saturn. With any luck, it’ll all be back to normal by mid-May. Far from finding myself with time on my hands, I seem to be busier than ever.

I’m now involved with at least three new projects, all unpaid – one thanks to an ill-advised conversation in the fish queue a couple of weeks ago and another sort of spin-off project from something else I accidentally got involved with. I also find myself on the Parish Council – a couple of people nudged me and said, “hey, you’d be good – why don’t you apply?” and, well, I’m easily flattered… So as a soon-to-be upstanding member of the local community, I realise I’m going to have to be a bit more diplomatic about the sort of things I write about here. Especially after a conversation with the chap who’s designing a new village website, when I put it to him that it might be an idea to link it in with a village blog.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You’re the one who writes that Little Brown Dog thing, aren’t you?”
Crikey. How did he know? Unfortunately I was too taken aback to ask, but if you're reading this, Jon, do please feel free to leave a comment.

Anyway, there’s to be no more loose talk of WWFMTDWW or Akela (except I will divulge just this once that there was an unseemly tussle for the Cubs register last week and a few hard stares were exchanged concerning health & safety issues at camp…)

* * *

There may have been too many pies in a different sense, too. I treated myself to a new top a couple of weeks ago – I rarely ever go clothes shopping, but I was out with a friend and got swept along by her enthusiasm. Unfortunately, The Boy is none too keen on the top.
“Please don’t wear that when you pick me up from school, mum – it makes you look large.”
Trouble is, I have a sneaking feeling it may be nothing to do with the top at all. While I can never really claim to have ever been rail-thin, I'm afraid I've always been one of those people who seems to be able to eat pretty much anything without ever having had to consider venturing into the extra-large department. Alas, those days seem to be slipping away...

* * *

On the home front, H and I are currently engaged in Car Wars. Almost any discussion about anything we have to make a decision on seems to dissolve into an argument – polarised views and opposing agendas. Occasionally The Boy pipes up with some word of wisdom gleaned from Jeremy Clarkson, but that usually involves about £30,000 more than we actually have. We’ve been looking into Ford’s car scrappage scheme – as both our cars are over ten years old (well over ten years old in my case) we both technically qualify. His idea is to scrap my car and let me have his 12-year old Almeira, which I hate, not least because it’s green and has a couple of nasty scrapes on one of the wings (which I have to confess were caused by me on one of my many petrol-saving exercises). My feeling is that while his car is embarrassing on account not just of its age or its green-ness – as far as I’m concerned it has no redeeming features whatsoever – mine is so old it’s beyond embarrassing and is bordering on retro-chic. Well, more than his, anyway. Also, I feel rather mean even considering scrapping a car that’s stoically started every single day of its life (even if it does sometimes struggle to go over 40mph). The Boy thinks we should scrap both – according to him they’re both beyond embarrassing, and not in a good way. Anyway, it’s crunch time, because both cars come up for their MOTs next month, and there’s no point in spending any money on something that’s soon going to be a densely packed cube of metal swinging lamely on the end of one of those big magnet things.

First to be subjected to the gimlet-eyed scrutiny of Richard the mechanic is the Almeira. It turns out it needs about £600 to be spent on it before it passes its MOT. My eyes light up in triumph, but it later transpires that the scrappage scheme only kicks off at the end of May and we can’t manage with only one car until then. Reluctantly, I agree to the work going ahead – well, it’s either that or spending the rest of the foreseeable future on the community bus as it wends its stately way through the villages on its unhurried way – a journey of 15 minutes by car can take well over an hour on the bus. A complicated conversation ensued as H worked out the logistics of getting to work in Chippenham, then on to a meeting in Cirencester via the school run. Inevitably the community bus was involved, and all was well until I woke up at 3.00 this morning having suddenly remembered a dentist’s appointment that wouldn’t fit into the plan however hard I tried – a mental Rubiks Cube that refused to be solved.

However all was not lost. As we embarked on yet more intractable logistical discussions over breakfast, the phone rang and Richard the mechanic came to the rescue with an offer of a courtesy car, which neatly seemed to solve all our immediate problems.
Embarrassment levels, however, plumbed new depths as the car arrived – a jaunty purple bubble car with the name of Richard’s garage and his phone number emblazoned across the bonnet. Since the door on the driver’s side had somehow jammed shut, H had the unenviable task of squeezing himself in through the passenger door and manouevering himself over the gear lever.

The boy just stood there, mouth agape, an incredulous Clarksonesque expression borne of many hours ensconced in Top Gear on his face.

“I hope you weren’t planning to take me to school in that…”

Calling a spade a spade

2009-03-31T22:38:00.021-12:00

Well, the last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind, what with radio interviews, reports in various national newspapers and even a brief appearance on the local news – it was all really a bit surreal. Gardeners’ Question Time passed off (almost) without a hitch – well, of course there was the inevitable sticky moment with the celebrity gardeners gathered in the appointed place, press photographers at the ready, a spindly magnolia poised in its pot, all ready for the ceremonial planting by Arthur, the allotments society’s oldest incumbent…

It had been a bit touch-and-go the week before. Arthur had gone down with a heavy cold – it could have been flu, no one was quite sure – but I was having to rack my brains to come up with a suitable understudy should Arthur not be well enough on the day. It was all a bit of a conundrum: out of all the other contenders, each one had some kind of attribute that would be bound to put the others’ noses out of joint should he be chosen above the rest, and I knew I would never hear the end of it – one came from Devon, another controversially paid one of the contract farmers to plough his allotment with a tractor… Out of everyone, only Arthur was the only sure-fire winner – a third generation allotment-holder who’d been digging the allotment across the road from the house where he was born for over sixty years; no-one could argue there was anyone more suitable to perform the ceremonial tree planting. By Sunday afternoon, however, Arthur had made a full recovery, and his wife, Iris, declared he was fit and ready, both in body and spirit, for the ceremonial tree-planting.

“I’ll bring a spade,” I suggested.
Arthur looked askance.
“No, it’s all right,” he explained after a moment or two. “I’ve got a lovely new stainless-steel one. It’ll look just the ticket in all the pictures.”

So there they were, Eric Robson, Bob Flowerdew, Anne Swithinbank and Housewives’ Choice, Chris Beardshaw, anxiously glancing at their watches, wondering how long this was all going to take, when at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, Arthur arrived, slightly breathless, to take centre stage.
“Where’s your spade?” I hissed.
“Oooh,” said Arthur.
Then after a bit of a pause…
“I think I’ve forgotten it.”
Chris Beardshaw cleared his throat and looked at his watch again.

It was one of those moments when your peripheral vision all goes a bit fuzzy and everything goes into slow motion. I suddenly spotted the school caretaker and beetled off towards him, yelling, “Can you find me a spade?” while the assembled party stood round as though transfixed, all eyes on me, waiting for something to happen. School caretaker nodded helpfully, and ambled off towards the store room. The cameramen twiddled their lenses, arranged everybody in a semicircle, then rearranged them again, Chris cleared his throat a few more times, Eric Robson looked pointedly at his watch and, after what seemed like several hours, the caretaker eventually emerged with something that looked distinctly spade-like.
Except it wasn’t.
As Anne Swithinbank helpfully pointed out.

“That’s not a spade,” she said, “it’s a shovel. And it’s covered in something that looks distinctly like concrete…”
The idea of the ground opening up and swallowing me seemed suddenly incredibly appealing, however this was obviously out of the question in the inconvenient absence of Arthur’s spade.

Then in one of those moments when the dark clouds of doom seem suddenly and inexplicably to part just at the right moment, I spotted one of the design and technology teachers, the one responsible for organising the gardening and I dispatched her off to her department in search of a proper spade, running after her like some kind of deranged harridan bent on a long-awaited episode of frenzied digging.

Pictures were taken, reporters were dispatched with a hastily cobbled-together press-release, the programme was recorded and afterwards I had a lovely long chat with Bob Flowerdew, who was absolutely charming – in fact, all the panel were – about the impending plight of our native horse chestnut tree (they’re all doomed, apparently), naked gardening and the pleasures of the scent of jasmine. It was only afterwards, I realised I’d got Arthur’s name completely wrong on the press release, for some reason mixing him up with my neighbour – another Arthur, but of quite a different age and ilk – but by then, of course, it was too late…

Arthur and me are back on speakers again – just. I, of course, forgave him for the incident with spade almost immediately, but he was very miffed about my getting his name wrong.
“It all went so smoothly,” he grumbled, “until that mistake about my name. I’ll never hear the end of that.”

* * *

While I was temporarily caught up in my moment of mini-celebrity, inevitably something had to give. And that something was motherhood. Anyone who ever tells you that you can have it all is lying. You can’t. Believe me. Don’t be fooled by those lyrical pictures of Madonna, one child on her hip, another at her side tramping through Malawi in search of a third. (Hang on – I thought she had three already? Where was Rocco? Had she perhaps inadvertently left him behind at the airport, possibly whizzing round disconsolately on a luggage carousel waiting to be collected? Might he even have been mistakenly put on the wrong flight?) My personal motherhood nadir last week, was not embarrassing my son totally by appearing at the school gates – almost on time, for once – in a pair of ludicrously oversized sunglasses that had come free with an issue of Tatler a couple of years ago (yes, I know it was March, but it was quite sunny and you never quite know when you might be about to get papped), or even postponing a vet’s appointment for a painfully strained foreleg to squeeze in a quick radio interview with Radio Sheffield (yes, I know, I know…) but sending my child to school in a stripy T-shirt, a bandana and a quickly cobbled-together eye patch (constructed – rather cleverly, I thought – over breakfast out of a length of elastic and some stiff blackout fabric). We were a couple of minutes late, as usual, so it wasn’t until school pick-up at 3.15, after a day spent wafting about in the local church with a cameraman for South West News and blithely advising a reporter from the local paper about how best to grow peppers and new potatoes if you’re a bit short of space, when, to my horror, I realised World Book Day must have been the following week. Trailing along grimly behind the rest of the children pouring out of school in their regulation red school jumpers and navy shorts stomped a small, grumpy pirate, sans cutlass and sans eye patch, both of which had been promptly confiscated by his less-than-amused teacher. I think that salutary memory is something that’s going to stay with me for a long time…

* * *

And another thing…
I am pleased to announce that I’ve got a new job. Two jobs, actually. Well, “pleased” is perhaps overstating the case somewhat, and they’re both ‘sort-of’ jobs, and – in both cases – not exactly handsomely paid. Or possibly even not paid at all in one case.

The day after Gardeners’ Question Time, H forced me to attend an interview down in Melksham (Melksham. Exactly – what can I say?) for a sort of PR-type job by way of a chap we met in the village pub last week. H and I both looked at the company website, but neither of us could make head or tail or what the company actually did, and after a couple of pints of Moonlight, the man in the pub's description was far from clear – PR services were obviously needed, and urgently, however I was not at all sure I was the man for the job. Now, Melksham - although quite possibly a lovely place - is quite a drive away (although you can get incredibly cheap fruit and veg there, however this is but a small consolation after spending the best part of an hour driving along the A350, much of it spent in a traffic queue alongside World of Leather). And by the time I’d got there, I had convinced myself that I really did not want this job, whatever it entailed, so I spent the interview rabbiting on about how interesting it all sounded, but how little time I had with all my other commitments. Anyway, to cut a long story short, they rung me back the following day, asking whether I’d consider doing PR for them on a contract basis – obviously, as and when it fitted in with all my other work. Obviously this may well have been a mutual face-saving ‘don’t ring us, we’ll ring you’ tactic, as emails with instructions for projects have to say the least been conspicuous by their absence, but it’s the nearest thing I’ve had to a job in a long while, so I’m calling it one.

The other job is for H – he’s asked me to draw up some bills for him. Now, while there is some considerable incentive in the fact that this could mean bringing some money in to the family coffers, it is in fact incredibly boring. And complicated. As far as I can make out, there’s a lot of “perusing” going on in his line of work – I have visions of Peter Sellers in The Return of the Pink Panther and quizzically raised eyebrows. Now there’s something I could do. I reckon I could probably peruse quite well…

Rehab sprout

2009-03-05T01:05:00.021-12:00

Well, the book has finally been sent to the printer’s. But not before I’d managed to squeeze in a crash course in print production, converting files of all types to pdf, learning how to cobble them together as well as how to calculate spine width according to paper type (80gsm bookwove, for example, is virtually the same thickness as 120gsm art quality - no, really, you do not need or want to know…) Not to mention lots of to-ing and fro-ing between our house and my neighbour Adam’s with a memory stick as he converted Judith’s linocut into something that looked like a book cover.

“Doesn’t it take you back to the heady days of Woman’s Realm?” asks H, as I finally manage to upload all 20 megabytes of the book and cover onto the printer’s server after about an hour and a half and lots of swearing. As far as I can remember I never had to work out things like spine width, resize all the pictures or use my own credit card to pay the printer when I was working at Woman’s Realm.

I had a sort of mini nervous breakdown this morning. It had been after one of those long, sleepless nights where I’d lain awake for what seemed like hours trying to work out how I was going to get 300 chairs set out in the school hall, uncork and pour 50 bottles of wine, sort out tea for the production team, organize a press call for the tree planting and orchestrate the moving of 300 people from the school canteen to the sports hall without anything going too disastrously wrong. Would I be able to ensure the white wine was chilled? What about a spade for the tree planting? What would happen if someone fainted with excitement (more than possible, such is the eager anticipation of Chris Beardshaw’s arrival)? Or the press didn’t turn up? Or if I suddenly found myself with uncontrollable Tourette’s whilst giving out the fire-drill instructions? How could I engineer being in several places at once if the press arrived at the very moment when Chris Beardshaw needed his tea? What if the magnolia tree was too big for the hole? Or the band too loud, or the wine slightly dodgy? I also had the slightly less daunting, but still nagging problem of having to factor in a dog walk and a school pick-up, with my usual port-of-call unavailable because of it being her husband’s birthday. And the fact that it was also my father-in-law’s 70th birthday the previous day, and there was the small matter of a present to organize and a dinner to plan, cook – and no doubt wash up. There was also the small matter of the phone ringing every five minutes with people wanting tickets for Gardeners’ Question Time, all of which had already been spoken for some time ago.

The day proper started as usual, with a booming rendition of “We Plough the Fields and Scatter” from H in the bathroom, followed by an urgent call of “Muuuuuuum!” from the floor below, accompanied by furious dog barking. Packed lunches needed to be made, school uniforms, found and quickly spot-cleaned, dogs fed and watered… There was no time to dwell on unknown unknowns or even known ones. The phone rang – I was tempted to leave it, it was bound to be just some poor sap for the waiting list – but something made me pick up. It was a reporter from the Western Daily Press wondering whether I could possibly be down the allotments in half an hour for a photoshoot. God – did they really need me in the picture? Well, I suppose it could be an opportunity to shift a few of the allotment books, and under present circumstances, it really would be a bit mad to turn it down…

Meanwhile, the book proof has come back from the printer. H casts his eye over it for the first time, spending a long time looking at the acknowledgements page (which admittedly does go on a bit, assuming Gwyneth Paltrow proportions as I try not to leave anyone out who has helped me, however indirectly, feeling disproportionately grateful for the merest glance of encouragement – I think I may even have been tempted to thank the postman at one point for being kind enough to deliver my manuscript to the sorting office. H goes a bit quiet.

“So where’s my name?” he asks at last.
“But… You didn’t really help…” I started. And to be fair, H hadn’t even looked at the manuscript I’d been working on for the last six months, telling me he wasn’t really interested in allotments. “I’ll read it when it’s finished,” he told me.
“I put up with you while you were doing it,” he reasoned. “Authors always thank their spouses. Profusely. They just do.”

Lips were pursed and a packed lunch was shoved pointedly into a briefcase before H departed silently workwards.

There was no doubt about it, a mini nervous breakdown was definitely on the cards, but would I be able to fit it in before breakfast, or might it inconveniently manifest itself between the school run and my first meeting of the day with the headmaster and his PA, a bulging briefcase of bucks all poised to be passed – or worse, in front of the Western Daily Press photographer on the allotments?

Tears started to spurt cartoon-style from the miniscule pinpricks that were once my poor, sleep-deprived eyes.
“Have a banana, Mum,” was Boy’s suggestion. “Bananas have a special ingredient that makes you happy. Mr Oakes says so.”

I must say, Mr Oakes does look inordinately happy for a much put-upon deputy headteacher. He obviously eats copious quantities of bananas.

* * *

After the school run and a brief meeting with the headmaster about who was going to be delegated to put the chairs out (the caretaker), dig the hole for the magnolia tree (the groundsman), pour the wine (someone called Brian), make Chris Beardshaw’s sandwiches (the school chef) and do the fire exits bit (the headmaster), I dashed over to the allotments where a photographer called Richard was limbering up with his zoom lens by the sprouts. A number of bucks had been satisfactorily passed and the underlying feeling of panic that had been bubbling up all morning gradually began to subside. I’d even had time to nip home quickly and have a quick rummage through the bathroom cabinet where I unearthed some strange kind of roll-on stuff that must have come free with a magazine and promised to eradicate wrinkles. I slathered it on generously and hurriedly ate a banana for good measure – I might look a bit strange, but at least I’d be relatively wrinkle-free, which was the main thing. By the time I arrived, my face was frozen into a kind of fixed grimace, which I hoped at least looked friendly – even if it didn’t, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it since the wrinkle stuff had now set solid, and there was no telling what damage any facial gesture, however small, might wreak. Arthur – the oldest allotment holder – was supposed to be there, too, but he couldn’t be found, so it was just me and the sprouts. Bernard’s sprouts, to be precise. Arthur’s had been dug up already to make way for broad beans.

Arthur eventually turned up, but by this time Richard’s battery was beginning to fade – goodness knows how many pictures he must have taken in a vain effort, no doubt, to make me look somewhere approaching normal. If you happen to see a Western Daily Press tomorrow, the small, mad, slightly wizened one in the picture above a story about some 200-year-old allotments will probably be a sprout. Then again, I suppose it could be me…

(The sprout picture at the top is from a working drawing by my friend Kate who kindly did some illustrations for the allotment book. The allotment book - aka The Poor Man's Best Friend will be available next week (God willing) at the princely sum of £4.50 from me. You might also be able to get it in our village shop, but please don't buy it on Amazon, as they take nearly all the profit. which is all for charity, by the way - I'm really not being greedy... Ok, then - if you must... )

Crouching neighbour, hidden drag queen...

2009-02-08T01:30:00.034-12:00

The snow came to Wiltshire with a vengeance this week. Before it arrived, came shoals of redwing and fieldfare from Finland and Siberia, wheeling round and round in the skies above our village – a kind of severe-weather welcome party. It may be cold here, but it’s a darn sight colder on the banks of the River Volga where they can’t even find liquid water to drink.

“Don’t they feel the cold?” I ask Rob – our local naturalist (no, not a naturist – that would be a bit unwise this time of year) running into him on a chilly dog walk, close to the river where there are a couple of swans nestling down on a sheet of thick ice. Rob points out that feather down is one of the most insulating materials on the planet, and explains that birds can adjust their circulation, almost switching it off in their exposed legs and feet. They still looked cold to me.

* * *

The snow cut the village off in all directions, a cold, white, insulating shroud that deadens even the familiar low hiss from the nearby motorway and makes us feel even more isolated than we already are. We’ve had no post, now, for three days, and by Thursday the village shop has run out of milk and bread flour. There’s a sort of claustrophic quality to the atmosphere – it feels as though the village has been swallowed up into an Agatha Christie mystery. In fact, I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if somebody didn’t actually get murdered…

H made a few futile bids to escape, flying off his bicycle on black ice on Wednesday on the way to Chippenham, then attempting the hill in the other direction in the car, only to be pushed back onto the road, having skidded off it, by a man in a grit lorry.

* * *

The meeting about the allotments was scheduled to take place in the village community room. I rang Adam about half an hour before, just to check he was still on for it – just as well I did, as he’d actually forgotten and was more than halfway through his second can of Stella (or Wifebeater, as it’s sometimes known locally) and hadn’t yet had his supper. I began to feel slightly guilty. However good a neighbour someone is, I guess there are limits… Still, I didn't feel quite guilty enough to forgo my chance of a human shield at the much unlooked-forward-to meeting.

We arrived and the meeting began. An agenda was passed round and my heart sank as I saw how many items there were on it; Adam had just driven back eighty miles from London through snow, sleet and ice, he hadn’t had his tea – the last thing I imagine he would want to be doing was discussing hedge-trimming and a sign that had been being discussed and deliberated in every last minute detail for the the past seven years to commemorate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee (at one point, someone raised the question as to which queen we were talking about, which I suppose was not altogether unreasonable).

The sign had a space on it for a couple of lines of poetry to sum up the ethos of a piece of common land provided for the community to grow things on. Heads were scratched, poets were suggested and objections raised to anyone who wasn’t British – in fact anyone who didn’t have a connection with Wiltshire. Or even, possibly, our village itself… Adam leaned back in his chair, turning to me and, in a stage-whispered aside, suggested:

There was a young farmer called Brett;
Who grew an enormous courgette…

Things could only get better…

* * *

Kitty B has been writing in her blog this week about things she doesn't understand. I come across things I don't understand on a daily basis. This week, for example, there was a report of the world's first "openly gay" prime minister. Which sort of implies to me that there must be other prime ministers who are gay, but not openly so. Such as who, I can't help wondering? Not that I mind, of course - far from it - I'm just curious.

And I can't help wondering about the phrase "openly gay" bishops - which, to me, conjures up images of mitres arranged at a jaunty angle, crozier in one hand, glittery handbag swingly gaily in the other?

Perhaps it's just me...

Woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown

2009-01-27T10:33:00.028-12:00

Well, obviously, I had to make a miraculous recovery, as indeed I did. Headache had to be pushed to the back of queue and H and The Boy attended to. No time in my action-packed life for a spell in bed; far less the indulgence of not one, but TWO hot-water bottles... What was I thinking?

There were ructions at Coffee Pots last week. Coffee Pots is an age-old institution in our village that I believe started off as a mother-and-toddler group somewhere back in the mists of time, and there are still several founder members who get together and meet for coffee and a chat every Wednesday morning – school holidays excepted – come hell or high water some forty years later. The venue is published monthly in the Parish Magazine and, just in case anyone might have missed it for any reason, a four-foot-high hardboard coffee pot is positioned outside the appropriate house so that Coffee-Potters know exactly where to go. Most of the Coffee-Potters – those whom I’ve met, anyhow – seem individually to be lovely people. However just as an astrologer would never advise taking on a Scorpio, no one of sound mind who had ever spent a Wednesday morning in our village would ever countenance taking on a Coffee-Potter – far less, several Coffee-Potters en masse.

Talk at last week’s Coffee Pots meeting, I understand – I wasn’t there – quickly gravitated towards the subject of the Gardeners’ Question Time programme that was soon to take place as part of the 200-year-anniversary celebrations of the village allotments. The Garden Club were co-ordinating tickets, however there were several ladies who were – or who were married to – allotment holders, and they hadn’t been informed… Surely, since it was an allotment event, the allotment holders should be given first dibs… Hackles were beginning to be raised. The atmosphere quickly escalated until it was perhaps not so much cloak and dagger as cloche and dibber…

Word reached me later that day as I swung by the village shop to pick up our paper, en-route for the muddy field, Brown Dog in tow on our afternoon walk. It had sort of been at the back of my mind for a while that the allotment holders ought to be officially told and offered tickets, but somehow – having found myself in sole charge of both the book project and the radio programme recording – and possibly a village party with a hog roast, time and energy allowing – with no one on hand to help with the more menial tasks, I hadn’t managed to find time in my packed schedule to cram in the delivery of 44 letters explaining the same. In fact the previous week, I’d even thought to email the woman who’d found me too difficult to work with (not being quite brave enough to telephone) to see if she might possibly have the time to let the allotment people know. After all, she had the relevant names and addresses and was on the allotment committee… It had been more than a couple of days now, and I still hadn’t heard from her, so I took it upon myself to ring up Gwynneth* who’s on the Parish Council to see whether she might be in a position to chuck a bit of oil over the increasingly troubled waters…

Hackles had been raised in every quarter. All sorts of unexpected antagonisms and surprising loyalties were bubbling menacingly to the surface of the apparently calm and uneventful waters of village life. There was nothing for it. An impromptu public meeting needed to be called.

A sleepless night was spent tossing and turning, and imagining dire consequences in the inner sanctum of the village community room. Not only would I now have to face a questioning by the Parish Council in all its glory, but the Allotment Committee would also no doubt want their say, not to mention the Garden Club and doubtless various stray Coffee Potters who may have found themselves drawn into the fray...

On Saturday morning, pale and drawn with lack of sleep I rang my neighbour, Adam, to ask his wife if I could possibly take him along to the meeting to act as a human shield. He’s an allotment holder and has done some wonderful illustrations for the allotment book, so it wouldn’t seem too odd if he came along. More to the point, he’s about six foot three and has a very good line in Hard Stares…

* * *

During the course of researching the book, I’ve been going round the village, inviting myself in for tea with all and sundry under the auspices of collecting some of the older residents’ memories of the allotments in days gone by. It’s been absolutely fascinating. Among the many gems, I’ve heard about how people managed before the village had mains water (which arrived around 1950) and a proper sewerage system (which didn’t arrive until 1962); I’ve been introduced to characters such as Mr Gregory the village blacksmith and Charlie, who had a wooden leg which he used to use as a dibber to plant potatoes. Along the way, I’ve also been given some lovely old photos and a pile of parish magazines dating from 1921 packed with fascinating accounts of village fetes, harvest festivals and charabanc outings to Southsea and Weston-Super-Mare – one had an account of the baptism of the elderly gent I’d just taken tea with. It made me realize that beneath the surface of every sleepy backwater, behind each closed and weathered door and beyond every creaking garden gate, lie a hundred untold stories; countless secret hopes, joys and disappointments. I just wish I had a couple more years and about a hundred more pages in the book, which I'm sure I'd happily be able to fill.

On my way home, one of the older allotment holders touches my arm as I pass his garden gate.

“You know that building next to your ‘ouse?”
“Building?” I ask. “Oh, do you mean the garage?”
“That’s the one.” he tells me with an ominous look.
There is a slight pause…
“They used to make coffins there.”

I think I’d rather not have known that.

Things I have learned this week:

* There is an underground river under our lane (and very possibly our house). This was discovered as mains sewerage was being installed in the village for the first time in 1962.

* Our cottage used to be owned by Archie Day, the village coffin maker who used what is now the garage as his workshop. Just across the road from the churchyard, it must have been very handy...

* Given the opportunity, I will procrastinate until the last possible moment. It's already the 28th, and I still haven't made a start on H's tax return...

*Names have been changed for obvious reasons.

Goodbye Pollyanna, hello Mrs Overall...

2009-01-19T06:40:00.012-12:00

The Pobble swam fast and well,
And when boats or ships came near him,
He tinkledy-blinkledy-winkled a bell,
So that all the world could hear him…

Another less-than great week chez Brown Dog.

The Boy has been off school with a nasty flu bug. He’s lost his voice, so I manage to find him a little bell to tinkle when he needs anything. The bell seems to have so delighted him that he’s been tinkling on and off all week – for me to come over and turn the TV down, to find his book, to change the batteries in his Nintendo DS… I shuffle through to the sitting room for the umpteenth time feeling like an increasingly grumpy version of Mrs Overall. He's going to have to marry into royalty, I decide – possibly in some far-flung, excessively deferential realm with a ready supply of electronic consumer goods – he's going to be very disappointed with the service, otherwise.

By Thursday, he’s well enough to blindfold the dog who causes mayhem in the kitchen struggling to dislodge the tea towel that’s been wedged through his collar and round over his eyes, and I decide it’s time to go back to school.

* * *

During the week, the Gardeners’ Question Time tickets arrive – a girt big stack of them, which the postman has seen fit to wedge so tightly into the mailbox that it’s only with difficulty that I manage to wrest them out. I also discover that, not only do I need to organize stewards, signs for the car park, a box to collect all the audience questions and 300 glasses of wine and crisps in bowls to be dotted around the school canteen, but I also need to speak to the Police, check the school’s liability insurance and organize something called a Temporary Events Notice.

“Well, what if one of the wine boxes exploded in someone’s face – you might get sued,” points out Power Mum, when I regale her with the amount of stuff I need to sort out over the next few weeks.
“You’ll probably need to a risk assessment, too.”
I suddenly feel as though one of the hypothetical wine boxes actually has exploded in my face.

* * *

As the allotments book deadline approaches there’s suddenly a flurry submissions from eager allotment holders after a silence of over three months. I haplessly shuffle around the copy – which arrives in varying states of undress, on the back of an envelope, by email, on what looks uncannily like a small sheet of Egyptian papyrus – and it might actually be in hyroglyphics for all the sense I can make out of it – on the computer, but quickly realize there’s no way it’s all going to fit, even in six point Gill Sans Ultra Condensed… There’s nothing for it; sums will need to be done and a visit to the printer factored in. I’m probably going to need a few more illustrations, too.

Things are not going well for H at work. Although he’s busier than he’s ever been, changes to the legal-aid system are afoot, which means he’ll either have to take on new staff, which he can’t really afford, or join forces with another firm. He also realizes he’s forgotten to do his tax return – is there any way I could possibly do it for him?

On Thursday, with The Boy safely dispatched to school, I manage to arrange a meeting with the headmaster’s PA to sort out issues of insurance and licencing. After whisking Brown Dog out for a quick spin round the field, I pop round to see a lady in the village who might have access to some extra money for the book. So far, so promising – until I arrive back home to find the log man has arrived in my absence and, unable to get into the garage, he’s deposited a truck-load of logs in the drive. I KNOW I shouldn’t complain – by this stage we only have enough wood left for a day or two – but the horrible reality dawns that it’s almost time for the school run and there are now a couple of hundredweight of logs between my car and the lane. It also looks as though it might be coming on to rain…

There’s nothing for it: the logs – well, at least some of them – will need to be moved (or I will have to somehow try to execute a Jeremy Clarkson-style manoevre incorporating scaling a large and unstable log mountain), so I fetch the wheelbarrow and start stacking. I try as much as I can to lift the logs in as ergonomic a way as humanly possible, but it occurs to me that I will very possibly now need to factor in a visit to the osteopath, too. Just then, my friend’s husband – who actually happens to be an osteopath – walks past. Which is a bit freaky.

* * *

By the end of the week, just as I start to feel I’m making a bit of headway with the book – with inestimable help of the best sub-editor in Christendom, although I still need to speak to the printer – a flurry of emails arrives from various school governors. Can I sort out an induction for a new governor? Can I organize a skills audit? Can I organize someone to go on a finance course? The final straw comes on Friday evening when I get an email saying there’s been a bit of a reshuffle - two governors have decided to swap comittees, so could I possibly organize another parent-governor election. Great. 800 ballot papers to photocopy and about nine hours extra work to somehow be shoehorned into my jampacked life. A humungous headache starts to take shape inside my poor, overloaded brain, and shortly after H gets back I decide to shuffle off upstairs to bed.

By ten o'clock, the headache still hasn't subsided and seems to be getting worse. Come to think of it, I'm feeling a bit cold and shivery, too, so I ask him to bring me up a hot water bottle – actually, could he possibly bring me up two?

Five minutes later, a mortal cry winds its way upstairs from the bowels of the house. The wrong side of the best part of a bottle of Rioja, H has accidentally poured boiling water over his hand...

In the bleak midwinter - part 2

2009-01-10T02:58:00.013-12:00

Tuesday

Well, there’s good news and bad news.

Actually, that’s not quite true; there is no good news.

By Tuesday morning my get up and go has long packed its bags and what Dunkirk spirit I have left is crouching in the corner, limply waving a white flag of defeat. During the night, H seems to have stolen most of the three duvets and there is a thin film of spidery ice on the inside of our bedroom window.

“At least you’ve got the woodburner,” says Georgina, commiserating with my plight on the way back from the school run. Which reminds me – since the cold snap that coincided with our heating breaking down started, we’ve been getting through logs as though there’s no tomorrow (as well there might be if things continue in this vein). I’ve been meaning to ring the log man for a few days now, but I can’t quite lay my hands on his number. I reckon we’ve got about a week’s worth of logs left, with a following wind. The log man can usually deliver within a couple of days – a week at most, so while I’m waiting for the boiler man to appear, I manage to locate his number.

“A load of logs?” the log man asks.
“Well, that’ll be at least three weeks. We’ve had a bit of a run on logs and we just can’t get the wood at the moment. There’s been a bit of a cold snap, see.”

Really? I’d never have guessed.

I plead with him for a bit and he reluctantly offers to let me jump the queue a bit, since we’re regular customers.
“But it’ll be two weeks minimum – there’s absolutely no wood in stock. Tell you what, if you’re really desperate you can drive down to the yard and I’ll put some coal in the back of your car.”

Can you burn coal in a woodburner? Frankly, I think I might be past caring – I’ve been burning Christmas cards, old wrapping paper and a stack of egg boxes, and it doesn’t seem to have done much harm. The irony is, our house used to be called Sawyer’s cottage, having been built by the owner of the local saw-mill – there would have been no shortage of logs here 200 years ago.

* * *

Teatime, it turns out, is nearly five o’clock, by which time it’s beginning to get dark and things are getting distinctly chilly. The boiler man eventually arrives, and fiddles around with the controller with a screwdriver for a few minutes, whilst chatting about his holiday plans – he’s going skiing next week, with the only other plumber in the village, so heaven help anyone else who gets a blocked pipe or a frozen boiler. I’m almost tempted to try and get together a village consortium to organise a channel-port blockade. Then I hear the boiler woosh and things begin to get decidedly warmer.

The whooshing continues for another hour or so, and – joy of joys – water that could almost be described as tepid comes gushing out of the taps.

H comes home, has a shower and all looks hunky dory, until I realise the water is now boiling hot and the boiler is still whooshing madly. I try to turn the thermostat down, but nothing happens. An odd, strangulated sort of noise seems now to be emanating from the boiler and the on-off control also refuses to respond. From our bathroom upstairs, I can now hear the water boiling merrily in the hot-water tank under the eaves.

I ring the boiler man again and tell him the boiler is still whooshing, even though I’m supposed to have turned it off. He asks me whether I’m sure it wasn’t doing that before, and I tell him I’m fairly sure…

“Is your husband handy at all?” he asks me. There is a slight pause where I try to process a sentence with the words handy and husband juxtaposed. I try to come up with a phrase to convey the opposite of Is the Pope Catholic or Do Bears **** in Woods, but can only think of Does the Pope **** in Woods, which some how doesn’t seem quite appropriate. The answer, I’m afraid is an unequivocal no.

“Well, I think you’d better just switch it off at the mains, then,” he suggests, “and I’ll come and have a look at it again tomorrow. About teatime do you?”

From a long way off and as if down a long, echoey tunnel, the word Nooooooooo! echoes around my brain. But instead I find myself saying, “Teatime sounds fine.”

Things I have learned today

• It is currently 15 degrees warmer than here in Antarctica. Thank you Eddie Mair – I think I could possibly have done without that particular piece of information just now.

Wednesday

I still have my coat on from the school run – possibly from yesterday’s school run – in fact I'm struggling to remember a moment since Saturday afternoon when I haven't been wearing my coat – when my neighbour Kerry pops round to see if we’re ok and haven’t died from the cold during the night – three stiff, frozen corpses buried somewhere under three frozen duvets and a pile of coats.

“Oh – were you just going out?” she asks.

* * *

Teatime in Eric’s house is evidently a moveable feast, since he turns up just before eleven, toolbox in hand and a determined gleam in his eye. At least that’s what I think it is.

We get through umpteen fuses while Eric updates me on his progress (several possible causes eliminated one by one – I tell you, what I now do not know about condensing boiler systems isn’t worth knowing) then Eric disappears up into the roof space in search of the root of the problem and I take the opportunity of taking Brown Dog for a walk and seeking refuge and possibly a little non-boiler-related conversation in Janice’s nice warm kitchen. Eric is lovely, but he does seem to have an almost evangelical zeal for his job.

By the time I get back, Eric has located a possible problem, but this entails a trip to Swindon in search of a part that’s compatible with our 1950s heating system. It sounds as though we might be entering the realms of a whole new heating system and I’m not looking forward to the conversation I will doubtless be having with H tonight.

To cut a very long and rather technical story short, the problem is (temporarily) sorted by about 7pm, just before H returns from work.I now have the unenviable task of breaking the news that we need a new boiler, the whole system needs replumbing and it might be better if we can possibly arrange to go on holiday somewhere while Eric spends a couple of weeks drilling through walls and lifting every floorboard in the house. And he can’t start before May.

In the bleak midwinter

2009-01-05T02:54:00.016-12:00

It’s minus 12 outside.

Well, more or less.

It might be slightly warmer inside – but not much.

Our boiler has broken down.

I ring the only boiler engineer in the village and get his wife.

“Is he there?” I ask.
“Well, yes and no,” she replies.
“Yes and no?” I ask.
“Well, it’s Saturday…”

Obviously, I hadn’t planned for our boiler to break down on Saturday afternoon. A Tuesday morning at about 11am in June would have been much more convenient. For all concerned. Obviously.
“It’s just that our boiler’s broken down…” I try, appealing to her better nature.
There’s an audible sigh from the other end of the phone and I wonder whether it’s worth going into any more detail. I finally try explaining exactly how it was fine until last night, but this morning the electric controller has just gone completely blank. It’s probably something quite simple…

“He won’t be able to fit you in before Tuesday,” she tells me eventually.
Tuesday? We could all have hypothermia by then.
“About tea time”.
“About tea-time on Tuesday sounds fine,” I lie. And I spend the rest of the day grimly stoking up the woodburner and boiling kettles of water up on the Aga so we can wash whilst wondering whether there’s going to be any point between now and Tuesday when I’m going to want to peel off some of the five layers of clothing I’ve now donned to wash.

David, across the road, kindly brings over an electric heater, which I plug in gamely next to the Christmas tree waiting for something miraculous to happen. The Boy has just discovered whittling and, having found a suitable stick, is now sitting at the kitchen table wearing his padded anorak, whittling for all he’s worth. We seem to have somehow unwittingly stumbled into a kind of experiment in 18th-century living. He’s producing copious amounts of woodshavings which I throw on the woodburner from time to time to give us an extra quick burst of warmth and a brief illusion that perhaps things aren’t quite as bad as they seem.

The Boy’s friend Jonathan comes over, unseasonably dressed for our 18th-century experiment in a long-sleeved T-shirt and a thin jacket-y-type garment. I pack both him and The Boy off with H to the cinema in Swindon where it’s likely to be considerably warmer. A couple of hours later, both boys return with fresh sticks and I dig out another penknife so Jonathan can whittle, too. There’s something rather charmingly wholesome about boys whittling sticks with great flakes of snow tumbling down outside as the afternoon shadows begin to lengthen. Of course this is not really anything like the 18th century – in the 18th century, people used to die in conditions like this. Just then, Jonathan accidentally stabs himself in the thumb.

* * *

At about seven o’clock, I don an extra coat and a scarf and take Brown Dog up to the War Memorial to do the necessary, looking like something between Michelin Man and Abominable Snowwoman. It’s been snowing and there’s a kind of greasy, slipperiness to the lane. By the time we get across the road, Brown Dog sits down and refuses to budge, gesturing homewards with his one eye. I tug the lead and look at him. “Are you COMPLETELY nuts?” his expression seems to ask.

* * *

It’s so cold that by 9pm we’re all in bed. We’ve got three duvets on the bed and two hot waterbottles while David’s plug-in heater has been working valiantly in the corner to create a sort of half-metre forcefield of not-quite-freezing. I’ve stoked the woodburner to the gunnels with wood, so there’s a chance the house won’t be completely freezing come morning, but then I lie awake, wondering whether it might somehow overheat and accidentally burn the house down while we sleep.

I creep out to the landing and feel the side of the chimney breast, which is warm. I pop downstairs, where the woodburner is merrily burning away, glowing bright red in the gloom. There’s no way of turning it down further, so I go back to bed to worry somewhere slightly less cold.

I pop down again – it’s about 11.30 by now – woodburner still blazing for all it’s worth, but the wood has possibly gone down a bit, if I look at it from a certain angle. I try the chimney breast again for size. It's still warm and, if I’m not mistaken, it might even be getting warmer... Still, there's nothing I can do about it except possibly alert H to my nocturnal worries, which doesn't seem a terribly good idea.

I huddle back beneath the three duvets, where I find myself wondering what exactly the boiler man’s wife means by teatime Tuesday. Did she mean afternoon tea at something in the region of 3.30, or did she in fact mean high tea which is more like 4.30? Or even 5? Some people possibly even had what they called ‘tea’ closer to 6. Why hadn’t I pinned her down? When I was a sub-editor on Woman’s Realm, we used to have conversations that went on for days about what constituted teatime. When we weren’t engaged in window wars or debating whether or not Jane’s lunchbox might possibly be in Maggie’s line of vision, thus putting her off her stride should a page layout unexpectedly need to be tackled.

* * *
Eventually, I must have drifted off to sleep, because I found myself waking up this morning to find the house not burned down after all, but still standing, still freezing… I crept downstairs to put the kettle on for the first bucket of washing water, the veritable forest I’d somehow managed to squeeze into the woodburner now reduced to a thick pile of ash. I bunged a pile of shreddings from the paper shredder in, and a lump of firelighter for good measure – not particularly expecting anything much to happen, but within a couple of minutes, flames were licking the inside of the glass. It was surprisingly satisfying.

* * *

Things I have learned this week:

• The coldest part of our house is the spare bedroom – so be warned if you’re thinking of visiting us this winter

• The single most important factor to determine the start of the world’s most expensive experiment – the Large Hadron Collider – which many people feared might inadvertently cause a black hole and destroy the known universe was not some obscure scientific calculation, but the vagueries of Andrew Marr’s holiday plans (and I have this on very good authority, tho’ obviously cannot reveal my source…)

• Brown Dog can sing an (almost) tuneful rendition of When You Wish Upon A Star. In fact, if I had the equipment and possibly nothing much better to do, I might even be tempted to make a recording and upload it to YouTube. He’s a sort of high tenor – I suppose by rights he should really have been a castrato, but he does strain a little with those top Gs

In the country, no one can hear you scream...

2008-12-15T02:02:00.009-12:00

I’ve just written 79 Christmas cards and I’m all Christmas-carded out. Although I’ve tried to do what the good archbishop suggested and not send cards to those people I see every day, there are not actually a lot of people I do see every day – apart from H and The Boy, and obviously I won’t be sending Christmas cards to them. (Or is that a bit mean?) I do find myself, however, in a curious time warp writing the same message in the card I sent to my friend Jane last year and the year before – hope to see you in 2000-and-whatever… I was at college with Jane and last saw her at her wedding in about 1987; since then, she’s had three children, none of which I’ve met, yet every year we tell each other We simply MUST meet up! I suppose half the danger is, if we ever actually did meet up, we’d have to come up with something new to write in our Christmas cards.

I have managed to cull a few names from my list this year, though (and this is possibly going to make me sound rather peevish and small-minded, but hey…) such as the woman I met on a course six years ago who seemed – and no doubt was – very nice, but since then the only communication we have had has been email round-robin-type requests for school fundraising activities and earthquake relief efforts (all very worthwhile, I know, but I’m not short of my own school fundraising activities and can find my own earthquakes), and the former flatmate for whom I’ve left several messages on her answer phone over the years, none of which have ever been returned. That’s two stamps saved.

While immersed in piles of festive envelopes and pictures of snow fairies I caught a glimpse of a dark, hunched shape that was not so much scuttling as ambling purposefully across the opposite side of the kitchen floor. I looked again and the shape had disappeared, but out of the bottom of the dishwasher hung a long, grey rubbery strand of what looked like old spaghetti. Except we hadn’t had spaghetti for ages. Slowly and deliberately, it disappeared into the dishwasher. I opened the door, but there was no evidence of anything there except a few plates and the odd mug waiting to be washed. I went back to my cards, and looked across again to see a medium-sized rat jump squarely down and scuttle across to a cosy little gap between the Aga and the pan cupboard. The scream that escaped from my lips would have been a credit to any Tom & Jerry film from the early 1960s.

From his cushion in the corner Brown Dog managed to raise an eyebrow before drifting back to sleep, but otherwise no one batted an eyelid. The trouble is, I can see only too well what a lovely ratty haven that little space next to the Aga must be – nice and warm, quite safe from dogs and cats with the guarantee of regular spillages of porridge, stray crumbs from toast and other tasty nuggets – but I’m afraid Ratty will have to go.

On Saturday morning the village was cut off by floods in both directions, so we were thrown on our own resources for food, fuel and entertainment for the weekend. I rang Susie to borrow a couple of eggs for the falafels I was making, and when I arrived, she thrust a dead, but fully feathered, cock pheasant into a bag along with the eggs – a sort of country takeaway, but with a bit more faffing about. The water had gone down by the evening, but by this time we’d lit a fire and didn’t really feel like driving into town for anything else.

H was under strict instructions not to mention the rat when our townie friends, Kate and Jonathan came over. After the second glass of wine, though, I could see he was just waiting for the right point in the conversation to drop it in. I tried to think of things to talk about which bore as little relation as possible to the subject of rodents – Kate’s recent visit to Venice, the antique printing press she’d recently bought, the subjects her daughter was taking for GCSE…

I paused for a moment to take a mouthful of salad – a fatal mistake.

“Did you know we’ve got a rat?” H said, not one to beat about the bush.
Kate visibly stiffened, Jonathan put his fork back down on his plate and an uneasy silence descended on the table. I chewed rapidly, chasing a stubborn frond of rocket down with glug of Cabernet Sauvignon (very nice with pheasant) and gave what I hoped what sounded like a tinkly, carefree, dismissive laugh which came out as a bit of a cough and a croak.
“In the garden, H means. Only a small one. Ha, ha, ha, ha…”
“You told me it was huge and you saw it climb into the dishwasher,” H accused.
“Oh, you mean THAT rat!” I was now casting around frantically in my brain trying to come up with a plausible reason a perfectly innocent and germ-free rodent might have accidentally found its way – just for the very briefest of moments – by some strange twist of fate into our kitchen…

Jonathan and Kate left soon after that and a large helping of Rattak was dispensed underneath the pan cupboard.

* * *

Things I have learned this week:

• A pheasant should be hung by its neck before being plucked and drawn

• A horse can stand unaided and supporting all its weight on just one foreleg

• A rat can squeeze into an almost unimaginably small space

• H cannot be trusted to keep his mouth shut

Blessings in disguise

2008-12-02T11:32:00.021-12:00

TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

Du-doosh. Du-doosh. Du-doosh. There it goes again. It is the very dead of night and all should be quiet, but for a low, dull, quick sound – much like the sound a pocket watch makes when enveloped in damp Kitchen Roll, or an insistently ticking clock under a pillow. …

This has been going on for three nights now. Somehow, H is managing to sleep through it, though this must scarcely be possible, so loud has the noise become. Surely it can't simply be the sound of my own heart? I get out of bed, put on my dressing gown and feel my way downstairs where I look out of the window into the moonbright night… Yes, the wall is still there and by some small miracle H does not seem to have noticed that it’s listing perilously towards the lane, threatening to topple – possibly on top of the postman – at any moment. I make myself a cup of weak tea and peer again into the darkness. There’s supposed to be a recession on, but can I get a builder for love or money? The entire world and its wife, it seems, wants an extension and they must have it finished by Christmas.

As luck would have it, the crack – although grimly gaping and not at all discreet – is visible only on the lane side of the wall, therefore H does not see it, generally, as he glides past on his bike Chippenham-wards for work. Especially as The Boy and I have taken to distracting him by waving avidly from the window, presenting an unaccustomed tableau of familial affection – I’m even tempted to wave an old-fashioned handkerchief a la Railway Children, but casting around the kitchen, only an old piece of Kitchen Roll comes to hand, and that would just look strange. Or possibly as though I'm cleaning the windows; not something I'm wont to do first thing in the morning - or indeed any other time, judging by their current smeary state. By the time he comes home, the wall and its hideous disfigurement are shrouded in darkness – the Awful Truth is safe for another night, but I have hardly slept a wink since Sunday. I reckon I have until the weekend at most, when H’s workday regime is relaxed slightly to accommodate a quick read of the papers and a cooked breakfast. The sands of time trickle through the hour glass with a grim inevitability; I know my time is running out…

I find myself blurting out my predicament to the woman at the post office, bemoaning the sudden dearth of available builders.
“What about Andy Robinson?” she suggests. “Have you tried him?”

I clutch eagerly at this new piece of information. Andy Robinson turns out to be the husband of a friend of the post-office woman, who is semi-retired, but likes to do a couple of days work every now and again. I suddenly know how Prince Charming must have felt as he neared the end of his exhaustive post-ball search, and envisage Andy Robinson’s foot slipping deftly into my metaphorical glass slipper...

“Does he do stone walls?” I ask, breathlessly.
She folds her arms, and without a word passing her pursed lips, her face has told me already that Andy Robinson is a veritable past master when it comes to all things lapidary; a stone-wall technician par excellence…

I delve into my handbag for a pen and paper, dislogeing several dog biscuits and the odd (unused) poo bag as I go, and in my mind the job is all but done.

As luck would have it, Andy is available almost immediately, however the only slight fly in the ointment is the fact that he reckons the job will take him two days. So although the wall will be tippety top and as good as new by the weekend, there will be the slight matter of a wheelbarrow, a pile of rubble and six bags of sharp sand to explain away in the meantime…

By this time, I’d already been on to the insurance people, who were actually very nice about everything – I volunteered to take part in their customer-satisfaction survey at the end of the phone call and gave them five out of five. I imagine they must be speaking to people who drive into walls every day of the week, so by the end of the conversation I was feeling that my teensy weensy little mishap was hardly worth making a fuss about. Especially when she asked me whether there was anything else I needed to claim for while I was about it. £400 worth of wall obviously didn’t sound very bad. Positively modest, in fact. A wicked little thought flitted across my consciousness – one of the hinges on the garage door was getting a bit rusty and the door itself was very rotten at the bottom. Who’s to say I couldn’t have ricocheted off the wall, into one of the bins and bounced back, hitting and damaging the door? Or possibly even demolishing the garage altogether? The idea fluttered for a moment like a bat in the corner of my field of vision, then it was gone.

With my courage firmly in both hands (well, actually to be honest, it was a mug of strong tea and a chocolate hobnob) I picked up the phone and rung H at work. Ok, it was the coward’s way out, but at least I wouldn’t be within eye-rolling range. And do you know, he actually laughed.

So there you have it - my momentary lapse of concentration turned out to be a Good Thing in the end. There we were with less-than beautiful looking wall that had been badly patched up after a similar incident with the previous owner of our house (or so I’m told by the vicar’s wife, who Knows Such Things) - clearly not a good friend of the inestimable Andy Robinson - and now we have a craftsman finished dry stone wall to be proud of, all for the cost of the excess on our insurance policy - a mere snip and something that could, without too much difficulty, be accommodated by a little deft jiggery pokery in the Tesco shopping department and a temporary diet based around hearty soups and jacket potatoes. Andy Robinson got a nice wad of unexpected cash before Christmas, and H’s eye-rolling was kept to a minimum - he’s only told me to “mind the wall” twice since it happened.

In fact, this year has been full of such blessings in disguise (although admittedly some have been so heavily disguised I have yet to excavate the silver lining, but Pollyanna-like, I now feel sure it will be there, somewhere beneath the billowing greyness). Take H’s redundancy for instance – though devastating at the time, he’s now beavering away happily in his own office, gleaning all the fruits of his labours (or will be, once the money has actually started coming in properly) instead of handing over the lion’s share to someone with a VERY dubious taste in ties.

We had another blessing, too. H’s mum and dad have just come home from India where they’d been staying at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai until just a few days before the massacre. I know there are many others who weren't so lucky.

Caprish!

2008-11-23T22:29:00.017-12:00

It’s been a long day – it’s been a long week, actually, and, yes, I do look tired. H is already in bed, just having a last read of the paper before lights out.

“I don’t think the cat is getting enough mental stimulation,” is his opening conversational gambit. Which is odd. He’s never shown any interest in the cat’s mental development before.
“Look – it says here cats need mental stimulation,” he goes on, “as well as a raised shelf to sit on.”
That’s The Guardian for you. Whilst the rest of the world is worrying about financial meltdown and the collapse of the voting system in Strictly Come Dancing, The Guardian is worrying about the mental health of cats. I look at the invisible cat who has made one of her rare and unpredictable appearances in our bedroom and wonder at the size of her brain. Given that her fur probably accounts for at least half an inch of fluff all round the surface of her head I’d hazard a guess that it’s probably about the size of a small walnut. I make a mental note to scour the shelves of Malmesbury’s only surviving bookshop for feline flash cards, perhaps showing pictures of useful items like mice and rats. A picture of a litter tray, too, might be useful, since she has shown no sign of recognition as to what it might be for.

In the meantime, back to my week.

Monday
The garage man in the next village has diagnosed a problem with a hose which is now on order from Nissan. Given past experience, I imagine we will be looking forward to a few false dawns over the next few days, with alternately raised and dashed hopes in the form of the wrong hose arriving and having to be sent back, the unforeseen requirement of a completely different part and the possibility of the hose not having been at the root of the problem all along. Still, I try to remain optimistic, especially as he managed to get the car working again on Friday and told me that as long as I didn’t attempt any journeys beyond Malmesbury over the next few days and religiously carried a two-litre bottle of water with me at all times, I might (touch wood) be all right. Then again, I might not.

So buoyed up with what turned out to be a false sense of optimism, I set off on the school run planning to call in at the supermarket and drop off the Cubs’ bank book on the way home. Now, there are two villages between us and Malmesbury, and by the time I got to the first one, a steady plume of steam was exiting from the front of the car. My first impulse was to ignore it in the hope that, somehow, it might just go away – by now I had managed to get myself on to the Swindon road, where I didn’t want to stop in case I couldn’t get started again. I somehow got to the next junction and was fast approaching Akela’s house when I had a mad thought that perhaps I could somehow manage to wind down the passenger window and chuck the bank book onto her doorstep, en passant as it were, but by now there was far too much steam about so this idea had to be reluctantly abandoned. The next mile and a half was a complete blur (almost literally) but I managed to get home, where I left the car steaming madly in the driveway, the bank book probably having been reduced to the size of a postage stamp on the passenger seat. The Boy was going to tea with a friend after school so I had several hours with which to come up with a plan to somehow get him home.

Needless to say, I didn’t get round to thinking of a plan until twenty minutes before I was due to pick him up, and even more needless to say, it was only then I discovered I did not actually have the number of the mother whose house he was at. I tried BT.com, but for some reason the family in question had chosen to be ex-directory (why do people DO this?) I went back outside with a torch and a large watering can wondering whether I dare risk another journey, but fortuitously, my hapless neighbour Adam rounded the corner of the lane at just that very moment, fresh from having driven eighty miles from London. There was nothing for it; I flagged him down and demanded he take me back to Malmesbury.

Tuesday
Tuesday is a complete blank. I have three appointments in my diary, all of which have been crossed out. I don’t remember doing anything on Tuesday (although I must have somehow managed to do my Tesco shop, making strenuous efforts not to gloat in any way, shape or form lest the gods were still looking my way). Actually, I do remember something about Tuesday.
I finally solved the mystery of Caprish!It wasn’t as I feared that I’d been inadvertently channelling a hitherto unknown Lithuanian forebear. No, it was some little drink pouches that The Boy is rather partial to in his packed lunch, available – you guessed – as a two-for-one at Tesco. The Sarah / answerphone message I’m afraid still remains a complete mystery.

Wednesday
Wednesday started with a phone call from the BBC sound engineer I was supposed to be meeting in Malmesbury later that morning to do a recce for Gardeners’ Question Time. Wasn’t I supposed to be emailing him directions? Oh god, so I was. I’d completely forgotten.

We managed to meet up, slightly later than planned, and pictures were taken, air-conditioning units turned on and off and rooms were paced out and checked for power. He was very nice actually – nearly everybody I’ve ever met from the BBC seems to be nice (which sounds like I’ve met loads of them – I haven’t, but I have met enough to equate to a small but probably totally unrepresentative sample) – and we took in the Abbey and a quick foray into the museum en route.

Later that day I was supposed to be going to a local council meeting to find out whether we’d been granted the community award for the allotments book. The woman who had found me too difficult to work with has delegated me to go. She is retired and doesn’t work or have a family, so I imagine she must find it very hard to shoehorn even the most minor tasks into her day.
“I expect they might want to ask you one or two questions,” she suggested, “I’m just too busy to go.”

I arrived at the town hall expecting a small panel of maybe three or four people, but instead found a full district council meeting where I was expected to give an address about the project to 80 or 90 people. As I came to the end of my very short impromptu speech (it’s all a horrible blur now – I have no idea what I said – rubbish, probably) I was suddenly aware of a large fluffy phallic object being thrust into my line of vision and I think I gave a little yelp. It turned out to be one of those boom microphones and a reporter was holding a video camera about six inches away from me. The next speaker was all but drowned out by loud, hesitant zipping noises from behind me as the reporter spent the next five minutes trying, but failing, to put his equipment away quietly behind me and I had an overwhelming urge to giggle hysterically.

Thursday
I got the call from Gardeners’ Question Time saying alles was in ordnung and it was all systems go for Malmesbury. I then had to answer some searching questions about local topography, none of which I knew the answers to, and had to make lists of items I need to get back to them about (they need the number of the local Police station, for instance. Why would they need the number of the local Police? Is Bob Flowerdew about to smuggle illicit plants in? Might Chris Beardshaw try to pass off a counterfeit buddleia?) which I have now promptly lost. Hey ho. It will probably turn up, as most lists do, long after any need for them has passed. I then triumphantly emailed the people at the local gardening club to pass on the glad news.

In the afternoon, I got the call that the Hose had Arrived (alleluia!) and somehow managed to get the car from here to the next village, conking out only twice during the mile-long journey (unfortunately once was whilst passing a brace of horses, wide and slow, as you’re supposed to, thus leaving me stranded for a good ten minutes on the wrong side of the road on a dangerous bend). I walked back over the fields with Brown Dog, relieved for once not to be reliant on anything mechanical.

Friday
Parent governor election day and I spend an interminable morning counting votes. The chair of governors has meanwhile decided to tighten up on everything, triggering a flurry of emails in which I seem to be cast in the reluctant role of go-between. Can I please check when a decision was made about staffing pay scales? Do I think we need a rota for school visits? By the afternoon I am heartily fed up, and email him back with a somewhat terse response, which I immediately regret. It seems to do the trick, though, and the emails suddenly stop.

I spend the rest of the day trying to light the Aga. H has decreed it can Go Back On – three weeks early! – a decision I feel has less to do with the fact that it’s forecast to be a cold weekend than the fact that his old schoolfriend Andy and his brother are coming to stay on their way back from the rugby in Cardiff and he doesn’t want them to think we’re poor. The Aga takes about a day to light on a good day, during in which, because of the plumbing, we can’t have the hot water on for a good 12 hours or the heating on for a further 24. Today, however, is not a good day and I run through my whole gamut of swear words, even throwing in the odd “Caprish!” for variety.

Saturday
The Aga is finally on, and I triumphantly make cake and soup while H comes back from the butcher with a fatted calf (well, a leg of lamb, which probably costs about as much). Andy and his brother turn up and the boys disappear off to the pub for the foreseeable future. The lamb is cooked, but by this time the boys have had so much beer and pork scratchings that they’re “not really hungry”. I make Marge Simpson noises which fall on deaf ears whilst eating as much of the lamb as I can reasonably manage. Then as they repair once more to the pub (at which they seem now to havetaken up residence) I launch myself on the box of assorted milk chocolates the boys brought me from a service station in a vain effort to discover a nice one.

I check my email to find no one from the gardening club has bothered to mail me back to say “Well done” or “Thank you”. I’m not expecting a fanfare, but it was quite a lot of work. I'm beginning to feel a bit Little-Red-Hen-ish. Cue more Marge Simpson noises.

Sunday
Today I managed to break two glasses and cause £400 worth of damage to a stone wall (I know, because I immediately called the builder in the next village round to have a look as I was worried the wall might be dangerous). I haven’t broken the news to H yet and amazingly, he doesn’t appear to have noticed. I figure I have four options:

1. To wait until he notices, then feign surprise, blaming it on person or persons unknown. (This plan has at least two flaws – a) the wall needs to be repaired pretty damn sharpish before it gets any worse and b) this will necessitate coming up with a plausible explanation for the wall-shaped dent in my car bumper. Not easy.)

2. To try to surreptitiously get the wall repaired and finance same by either a bit of jiggery pokery with the housekeeping money or a sudden windfall from source or sources unknown. (This will entail Tesco-related bargain-hunting of hitherto undreamt-of proportions or some serious lateral thinking of possible sources of extra finance. During a recession. Hmmm.)

3. Maintain that H and his friends must have done it somehow when rolling back from the pub at about 1.30 yesterday morning. This indeed may be my best option, as I figure it’s very unlikely anyone will remember anything.

4. Come clean and brace myself for at least a week of eye-rolling and despairing sighing (the least attractive option as far as I'm concerned).

Suggestions on blank cheques or high-denomination banknotes please.

Journey around my mother...

2008-11-20T23:24:00.026-12:00

My mother and I are knitting a patchwork blanket. The squares she knits are small and neat, in bright, familiar colours from long-forgotten childhood jumpers, while mine are a loose arrangement of dropped stitches and half-remembered patterns in random shades of double-knitting wool or spindly four-ply which start out as one thing, and before I’ve realized have unexpectedly segued into something quite different... We have to use different-sized needles, because her tension is taut and tidy and mine is rambling and loose, but knitting passes the time and we both like to have a project on the go.

My mother was a child of the 1930s when every scrap of wool was saved, unravelled and cast on to clickety-clackety needles where it would be knitted up in an efficient, no-nonsense way into something useful, like a balaclava or an itchy cardigan with neat column of carefully salvaged pearl buttons. I, on the other hand, was born into an era of mass-produced, virtually disposable clothes in fabrics like rayon and viscose whose origins might be animal, vegetable or mineral as far as I knew, but, who cared, when they could be machine-washed, didn’t need to be ironed and came in such a mindboggling array of colours – many of which were doubtless hitherto unknown to man. Knitting, once a necessity born of a need for self-sufficiency has now become a leisure activity. No longer do you hear words like “gusset” bandied about without a hint of a snigger by rows of tight-lipped upright matrons, elbows going up and down to the mysterious rhythm of the time, knitting, purling, passing the slip stitch over as though their lives depended on it.

I tell my mother I want to knit some cushion covers – I’m thinking of something in moss stitch using thick, soft, grey wool – and she looks at me askance.
“Cushion covers?” she asks. “Can’t you just buy some?”

My mother has been staying with us for a few days. I arrive at the station just as her train is drawing in, only to watch it draw out again leaving no one on the platform. I dash over to the other side, peer around the waiting room, go into the ticket office, where there’s no one there, dash back to the side I’d started from… I try calling the mobile number she’d given me – she reluctantly carries a mobile now for such unforeseen emergencies - but there’s no answer. I’m not quite sure what to do next, given that she was probably well on her way to Swindon by now. Should I make my way there, or wait where I am? Can I get a message relayed on to the train to tell her to come back? It’s all rather worrying.
Eventually, I find her – she’s waiting in the long-stay car park.
“Why didn’t you stay on the platform?” I ask.
“Well, it said ‘Way Out’, so I went out.”
I suppose she had a point.

When we arrive home, I ask her for her mobile to check the number. It’s a great brick of a thing, and neither of us can work out how it works. Eventually, we manage to find a message that had been left some months ago by someone called Eric, but the number I had was completely wrong, and she was no closer to finding out how to use the wretched thing.

* * *

“But what is it you actually DO?” she asks me again. This all-too-familiar conversation is rehearsed practically every time I see her, but for some reason my answer never seems to go in, even though she seems to know chapter and verse about the jobs of all her friends’ offspring. Perhaps I’m not explaining things properly. As luck would have it, I have a piece in one of this month’s homes magazines, so I show it to her. She picks up the magazine as though it’s a rather smelly piece of fish.
“Oh,” she says, peering at my name in the credits, and then she puts it down again.
“People tell me I could be a writer,” she adds, almost rhetorically. I assume she's speaking to me - I seem to be the only other person in the room, but she seems to be gazing into the middle distance, in the manner of someone who's perhaps rehearsing a voiceover for a new Alan Bennett play. “But I’m not really sure what I’d want to write about. My friend Phyllis is always getting things published in things like The Lady and Saga Magazine, but I wouldn’t want to write about any old thing.”

My brother, on the other hand, is a Proper Writer. Who or what he writes about, nobody is quite sure, and to my knowledge he’s never had anything published, but he’s been telling everyone he's been working on a book for the last ten years and is clearly concentrating on Things That Matter, and not wasting his time on frivolous things like the comparitive merits of various types of kitchen tap and modern takes on the traditional brass doorknob. (Those doorknobs, incidentally, have caused me no end of trouble. Last week I had an email telling me that a reader had rung in wanting to get hold of something similar, and after about an hour riffling through my files and making phone calls trying to track them down, I emailed back triumphantly with the missing information. Later that evening, when I’d forgotten all about the wretched doorknobs, H arrived back wanting to check something on the computer. My email account was up on the screen with a message back from the magazine’s Chief Sub, saying, “My word, your knowledge of knobs is impressive”, which took a bit of explaining. Thank you Sean.) It’s just as well I didn’t mention the feature I’ve been comissioned to write for Gay Pride magazine and an elusive case-history I’m trying to track down…

I make her a cup of coffee, and she starts reading the article, then once finished, she closes the magazine and looks out of the window without another word. I’m probably misreading the situation, but I feel a bit diminished. I turn on the radio, where the Shipping News is just coming to an end and a Low 994, is veering southwesterly and losing its identity.

* * *

Later that morning, I take Brown Dog for a walk incorporating a trip to the shop to replenish our fast-diminishing supplies of tea and biscuits. I arrive back to find her on the phone.

Yes, yes, dear. I got that, she is saying. But are you Mr, Mrs or Miss? ... Mr, you say?... Are you sure? ... You do have rather a high voice for a man, you know.
My heart sinks. It’s the case-history I’ve been chasing. She hasn’t heard me come in and puts the phone down, so I have to ring him back, but he doesn’t return my call.

* * *

My mother likes to talk, whereas H and I are happy with companiable silences - at least some of the time - but I guess it’s easy to say that when neither of us lives alone as she has done for the last 20-or-so years. My sister, who’s a much better person than I am insists she means well, but I find it dispiriting how little we seem to understand one another. Much of her conversation revolves around people from her church, the majority of whom seem to be called Margaret - There was one conversation involving three different Margarets, which I found very difficult to keep track of, although I’m told off for interrupting her flow with too many questions. One of the many recently widowed Margarets seems to have met someone in an online chatroom, the story of which is related with a sniff of disapproval.

“Well, it certainly wouldn’t suit me,” she says, pursing her lips. “He’s been through two wives already – Margaret’s his third. They’re all on tablets, anyway.” I don’t like to point out that the Margaret in question is now happily living in Morecambe with someone called Trevor, tablets or no tablets.

* * *
At the end of the week, we see her off on the train and she’s borne off northeastwards in the direction of Dogger, Fisher and German Bight, needles clickety-clacketing, doubtless, to the rhythm of the train. The Boy and I go to the cinema to mark the end of the holidays with an interminable film called something like Horton Hears A Who or Clone Wars - I can't now remember which - and I’m beginning to wish I’d brought along a magazine and a booklight to help pass the time while he sits four seats away from me, a small coke and a straw on his lap and a small bag of popcorn. In the afternoon, I take him and his friend to the swimming pool – now they’re over eight, they don’t need to be accompanied by an adult. I arrive back later to pick them up, only to find they’ve spent their locker money on steaming cappucinos, which they’re chatting over like two old ladies. They end up tipping away most of the coffee, as it’s too hot in its flimsy plastic cup and I need to get into town before the bank closes.

“Whatever made you order cappuccinos?” I ask on the way home.
“I just thought the word sounded nice.”

Boys. Dontcha just love ’em?

Keep taking the tablets...

2008-11-19T10:32:00.019-12:00

How do you know if you’re going mad? I mean how do you actually know? Perhaps it's something that happens gradually. Something that creeps up on you over months and years? Perhaps you're the last to know?

I don’t just mean finding yourself on the landing and suddenly realising you can’t remember what you came upstairs for – I’ve been doing that for years and on an increasingly frequent basis – but a couple of things this week made me stop and wonder.

The first was coming in from walking the dog following the school run one morning. There was a message on the answerphone that said: Hi Jill, it’s Sarah. Thanks for your message yesterday – I’m back now. You can ring me any time.

The trouble was, I couldn’t think of anyone called Sarah who I’d rung. Couldn’t think why I’d needed to speak to someone called Sarah, or what my message might have said. I played it again. I didn’t recognise the voice – or perhaps I half did, but couldn’t quite place it. I suppose there was an outside chance it could have been a wrong number, but how likely was it really that someone would have dialled a wrong number and wanted to speak to someone with my name?

The next time it happened was when I came to write the weekly shopping list – we have a blackboard where we jot things when something’s running out or if we suddenly remember we need something. On the blackboard was a word which seemed to say either cuprish or caprism – I stared at it, but it didn’t seem to make any sense. H couldn’t make anything of it either. The only thing that was quite clear was that there was no mistaking my handwriting.

I left cuprish or caprism up on the board, hoping it would eventually come to me, but it didn’t. The longer it stayed there, the more unsettled I felt. Is this what the beginnings of dementia feels like? A friend of mine’s mother went completely mad in her early fifties. She came down to dinner one evening and just sat and stared at the cutlery on the table and burst into tears. She simply had no idea what she was supposed to do with it.

The third thing happened just this morning. The alarm went off, intruding on a particularly pleasant dream. Brown Dog must have heard it downstairs, and I heard him padding upstairs to the baby gate on the landing (we have to have a baby gate, otherwise he’d be in bed with us). Then somewhere between a bark and a yawn I distinctly heard him call "Mum!" My dog has started speaking to me.

OK, perhaps it’s not quite like the dog on Little Britain in America who tells the woman to take off all her clothes and get into a bin. But it may only be a matter of time…

The picture at the top is Edvard Munch's Der Schrie. The one at the bottom is "What? No ice??" by Adam J Lloyd

Things fall apart

2008-11-14T00:55:00.016-12:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

WB Yeats (from The Second Coming)

I think it’s called hubris. Presumption towards the gods. For there I was last Wednesday, gloating quietly to myself about the fact that, for the first time in more months than I care to remember, there was a chance we were going to get to the end of the month without going overdrawn. Though not usually given to boasting – something that was drummed into me from an early age by a mother who lived in mortal dread of one of her offspring being so bold as to push themselves forward for anything – I found myself relating the fact to H that morning with something approaching satisfaction. H’s response was to raise an eyebrow.

“Let’s not count our chickens, shall we?”
But counting them I was, again and again in the form of an impressive Tesco till receipt that came in just over £50, which boasted several buy-one-get-one-free bargains (including not one but two giant bottles of Tresemme conditioner which would surely last me well into the next decade. (And very possibly until all familial use for them had long since vanished, but, hey, they could be passed down to grandchildren. And children of grandchildren, no doubt.)

Still, man cannot live on hair conditioner alone, as I was soon to find out. Arriving home after the school run than afternoon, there was a sudden great hissing noise from the front of the 18-year-old car and great plumes of smoke came gushing out from under the bonnet. Dashed into the house to ring the garage man in the next village. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “No, I don’t think it's not the radiator (which I had replaced at GREAT expense about three weeks ago). It's coming from a kind of black flying-saucer-shaped thing in the middle of the engine.”
Puzzled silence.
“Flying saucer thing?”
“Yes, well it’s kind of black and circular and sitting on top in the middle of the engine.”
“Does it look like a tube?”
“No, it looks like a kind of black flying saucer. With sort of tubes coming out of it.”
“Is it sort of cylinder-shaped then?”
“No, I told you - it looks like a black flying saucer. About a foot across”
[Slight noise of head scratching from the other end]
“And you say smoke's coming out of it?”
“Yes. Billowing.”
“Hmmm. Well, I'm not sure what it is, but it sounds as though it's Kerry Packered.”

Anyway, Garage Man couldn’t come out til Friday, and H needed his car yesterday, so he dropped me and Boy off at school on his way to work, where I had some very tedious school governor business to attend to (which involved much swearing at photocopiers and being frowned at by the music teacher for hogging the photocopier). I’d already missed the 10.30 bus back from town, so I eked out the photocopying and distributing of letters until it was time to make my way back up into town through the teeming rain for the 11.30 bus. Well, either my watch was a couple of minutes slow or the bus left early, for I rounded the corner to the square in the centre of town to see the bus driver pulling away, completely ignoring the desperate figure running behind him and wielding an umbrella stolen from the school office. (Actually, it wasn’t a very good umbrella – two of the spokes had come out by the time I eventually got home.)

I finally managed to get hold of my friend Kate, who was supposed to be coming for lunch an hour later, and she agreed to pick me up in town where I dripped for a further ten minutes, feeling well and truly miserable and deliberating whether to pop into the bakers for a mood-boosting jam donut. Now Kate is one of those people who I would like to be if given a chance to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Eminently capable and effortlessly good at just about everything she turns her hand to – she’s got two degrees, one in mechanical engineering and one in art and illustration – she’s also extremely nice. I explained about the car and the flying-saucer-shaped thing in the engine.
“Ah, that sounds like the air filter,” she explained. “But I can’t think why it would have smoke coming out of it.”

We arrived back home to a basin full of breakfast pots and a dog who should have had a walk several hours ago. Beside himself with relief that he hadn’t been abandoned for all eternity, Brown Dog bouled in and out through the kitchen door, transferring as much muddy wetness onto my (admittedly not particularly clean) floor as he possibly could. Kate looked slightly horrified. “How do you put up with all the muddy paw marks?” she asked. It wasn’t long before she realised the muddy paw marks were among the least of my problems.

As it was still pouring with rain, I didn’t really feel I could drag Kate out round the allotments as we’d arranged – she’s doing some illustrations for my book – without giving her lunch, so I resurrected some courgette soup, Blue Peter fashion from the fridge while Brown Dog farted silently but emphatically under the table reminding us he needed his walk.

That evening, several other things broke. The TV volume button (the TV remote having died long ago) got somehow wedged into its socket in a way which meant it could only be adjusted by use of my car key. The garage light broke, and I somehow managed to break the glass on the fitting as I tried to change the bulb. One of the burners on the Baby Belling refused to heat up and the phone kept cutting out intermittently for no discernable reason. There was, however, a ray of hope in the shape of the inevitability of my having to get a new car, and last time we were at the inlaws, my mother-in-law had rashly promised that I could have her car as and when they got a new one – an idea that appealed, since my mother in law is not one of those OAPs in a brown Ford KA, but a dashingly elegant woman who drives a lagoon-blue soft-top Rover.

H, however, was not quite so taken with this idea. There was also the slight inconvenience of the inlaws being away in India until the middle of next month. And the fact that, having had a day to think about it, H had decided the best way forward was for me to have his old car and for him to buy a new one through the business, thus offsetting any expense against tax. This, to me was the least glamorous option. H’s car is an unpleasant shade of green, has a cronky old cassette player (does anyone still use cassettes any more?) and is exceedingly difficult to park. At least for me. That's the last time I'm going to gloat over my Tesco bill. I promise.

The healing power of stationery

2008-11-06T04:32:00.016-12:00

And so it came to pass that I found myself in a seminar for new businesses earlier this week. As part of last week’s New Business competition, H had been offered a free place on a marketing course, but since he was too busy working, I was delegated to take his place. Oh well, I thought, it might be quite useful. If nothing else, there’ll be a free lunch in the offing...

I arrived slightly late – I’d forgotten to print out the directions to the hotel where it was being held the night before, and had to wait about three hours for The Boy’s unfeasibly memory-hogging computer game to save and quit before I could get into my email. I erupted through the doors into the airless room in the bowels of one of Chippenham’s oldest hotels (which, incidentally was where the deeds for our village’s historic allotments were signed almost 200 years ago, but whose raison d’etre now seems to be confined to the hosting of such business events, since I can’t imagine anyone coming to Chip on holiday – not even in these straitened economic times). By the time I arrived, everybody seemed to have had coffee and been introduced to one another and given a badge and – for some reason – a pot of play-doh. Predictably, by the time I arrived, only the brown play-doh was left.

I tried to grab myself a coffee from the row of vacuum jugs on the table at the back, however I couldn’t work out how they operated, so empty-cupped and with much clattering I finally managed to squeeze myself into the last available seat – next to the Bottle Top Man who’d cruelly beaten H into runner-up position in last week’s competition. The room was sweltering and the seating was quite tightly arranged and I couldn’t work out how to ease myself out of my coat without jabbing Bottle Top man, who was sitting next to me, in the eye – or worse. Somehow I managed it, only to be confronted by the next hurdle – the chunky roll-neck jumper I’d been thoughtless enough to don in the early morning damp. It was November, after all, I reasoned in the chill confines of our heating-free house, however it seemed to be August in the windowless hotel room. I decided I’d already drawn quite enough attention to myself by now, so I elected to swelter, dishevelled and beacon-like in my seat.

“What is the one thing that stands between you and business success?” the facilitator (for it was a facilitator, not a man or a woman who was running the seminar, I was told) asked – rhetorically, I assumed. There was a long silence, towards the end of which I realised he was looking directly at me. Oh God – a question, and one I didn’t know the answer to. I was immediately catapulted back, psychologically, to the physics lesson where I had somehow lost control over the ticker-tape machine and everything went spiralling into a chasm of chaos from which my scientific education never recovered.

The trouble was, I sort of did know the answer – or several answers, for I’m only too well aware that there are many things that stand between me and business success – but I wasn’t at all sure any of them would be the answer he was looking for. There was the fact that my dog launches himself into the bin every time the phone rings; the fact that I see clients as bothersome interruptions to days spent otherwise eating toast, gazing out of the window and listening to the many excellent programmes on Radio 4; the fact that almost any attempt at anything approaching the description of work is interrupted by urgent missions to join a search party for the Wii controller, an errant shoe or the TV remote. I smiled, and muttered something vague about needing to be more focussed. He nodded and wrote it up on the board. It seemed there was no such thing as a wrong answer - someone suggested their obstacle was needing to cross a chasm. Perhaps I should have told him about the dog and the bin after all.

It was all downhill from there. There was much Marketing Speak including lots of acronyms I'd never come across before and words like "interface", which I immediately associated with that flimsy kind of iron-on stuff you use to make fabric stiffer, completely losing track of what the man with the clipboard and PowerPoint presentation was talking about. If indeed I'd had any idea in the first place, which was doubtful.

We were asked to model something out of the play-doh and rate ourselves on a scale of 1 to 10 according to how we perceived our business acumen (2, I decided. Which I thought was rather optimistic, considering). The man beside me had already created an enigmatic row of perfectly spherical balls from his play-doh, and one of the women at the table fashioned a perfect miniature bowl of fruit while I squished and squeezed my intransigent brown blob, failing all the while to glean any glint of inspiration from anywhere and ending up with something that looked vaguely like a tortoise. Or was it perhaps more like a frog? Then there came graphs and charts to fill in, and more impossible questions to answer: what was my key generator for productivity? what was the key issue that might "impact my process" (sic)? which key individual might champion my innovation? Now I don’t wish to be disparaging these kinds of business courses which I am sure some people find extremely helpful, but I’m afraid they’re things that for some reason I just can’t begin to understand.

It wasn’t a completely wasted day, though. Over lunch I got chatting to a very nice architect who has invited me over for coffee and to look at a barn conversion her husband has done, which might be possible for a magazine feature. And I managed to trouser a chocolate muffin that would doubtless come in useful as a bribery tool come school pick-up time. Dispirited and disconsolate, I wandered out into Chippenham in search of some new stationery to cheer myself up. At times like this, I find there’s nothing quite like some smooth, creamy paper or a beautifully cut envelope or some crisp, new box files and some perfectly sharp pencils to fill me with a new sense of purpose. I’m particularly partial to spiral-bound notebooks for some reason at the moment. Fresh, blank and full of promise...

Dance to the Music of Time

2008-10-23T23:24:00.020-12:00

Crikey – has it really been that long? From here, it seems as though the music of Time has suddenly speeded up into some kind of wild whirligig, a fast-forwarded double-quick quickstep that makes tunes like the Minute Waltz and The Flight of the Bumblebee seem sedate and sonorous by comparison. I have no idea where the last six weeks have gone (well, I have, actually, but it's something I don't care to dwell on too much). I love this painting – Nicolas Poussin in philosophical mode capturing the constantly changing circle of life: Poverty, Labour, Wealth and Idleness dancing to the endless tune of the Great Reaper himself. I think we’re probably somewhere between Poverty and Labour at the moment, with perhaps the odd slip backwards into Idleness on my part.

I studied Art History at university – well, to be honest the word “studied” is probably stretching things a bit, but I was lucky enough to do the course on French Baroque art under Desmond Shaw Taylor, who’s now keeper of the Queen’s pictures. Desmond must have been about 25 or 26 at the time – I think it was probably his first teaching job after university – and he wore tight white jeans, lectured enthusiastically and without notes, tripped over pieces of chalk in the lecture theatre and said “shit”, which endeared him to us young, fresh-faced students – mostly late-teenaged girls – no end. I can’t help wondering whether he’s still like this with the Queen, though suspect the white jeans have probably gone the way of all flesh. Desmond’s lectures were a beacon of light in an otherwise dull and grey university experience. Apart from my English tutor, the poet Tom Paulin, who was slightly scary and had a thick cable-knit Aran jumper and very piercing eyes, it seemed to me a world of greyness and people obsessed by job interviews and something called the ‘milk round’, the pinnacle of which seemed to be a job offer from a city law firm or Proctor & Gamble. I tried to enter into the spirit of it, I really did (not the city law firm bit, obviously although I did somehow find myself being interviewed by a panel of surveyors from the RICS, who made the mistake of asking me to comment on a current news story that interested me and I launched into a lengthy account of the storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, which obviously had little to do with the world of chartered surveying – a fact that I only realised afterwards, having gone into not inconsiderable detail about Indira Gandhi and Operation Blue Star, when the interviewers started rather pointedly looking at their watches and clearing their throats). My one other enduring memory of an otherwise bland and dull university career was the Art Department’s Italian-themed Christmas party, when I spent hours (which should really doubtless have been spent studying) designing an elaborate costume based on the idea of a postcard decorated with a picture of the Trevi Fountain, but unfortunately indulged a little too enthusiastically in various assorted beverages of the alcoholic variety.
“Well, you’ve got to hand it to Jill, she certainly entered into the spirit of the theme,” one lecturer was overheard to comment later. “She came as a postcard and went home as a pizza.” Desmond, if I remember correctly, went as a tutti frutti ice cream.

Art, for me, sadly tailed off a bit after Desmond, the Italian party and the Baroque period. After the pinnacles of fabulousness encapsulated Claude Lorrain, Poussin and an art historian dressed as a tutti-frutti ice cream, what was the point of anything else?

Anyway, back to the present. There was I thinking that behind every successful man, was a woman prepared to hold the fort, look after the child, bring in logs for the fire, mow the lawn, do all the cooking, washing and cleaning, sort out a website and put together a shit-hot business plan designed to secure the coveted New Business of the Year award. But I was wrong. Behind such a man, it appears, there is a precocious three-year-old child who keeps tipping the milk over. At least that seems to be the case in Chippenham, where H, with his much-needed services to the poor and disenfranchised was pipped to the award by a man who had invented a special kind of milk-bottle top. It was all rather Dragon’s Den and I was half expecting Peter Jones, flanked by that woman with the frown and the ill-advised make-up regime to unravel himself from a chair and tower imposingly over the assembled company. To cap it all, there will doubtless be a picture in the local paper next week of Beaming Bottle-top man wielding a large cardboard cheque in front of poor, despondent H.

My friend, Sally, asked me the other day whether I was managing to keep our weekly household shopping and petrol bill under £200 the way food prices have been escalating – I don’t think we’ve even got £200 coming in each week, in fact I know we haven’t, as H hasn’t been able to start paying himself yet and I’m still waiting for money for work I did back in June. Apart from The Boy’s new car-washing business (Frog Lane Wash ‘n’ Go), things are decidedly lean at the moment, but it’s all relative, I suppose, and it’s not as though we’re on the breadline, just eating a lot of vegetarian meals and huddling round the woodburner of an evening watching Dragons' Den.

As for me, well, as well as doing most of the gophering, fort-holding and general hewing and drawing of water as H’s new business gets off the ground, I’ve been involved in several local projects including writing a book to commemorate the bicentenary of our village allotments – the oldest surviving allotments in the country, no less. I did start out with a co-author, but I am very difficult to work with apparently, so I now seem to be going it alone, which is a bit daunting, not to mention time-consuming. I’m also trying to organise a visit from Gardeners’ Question Time, which is also a bit daunting and seems to be even more time-consuming.

On a brighter note, we’ve been enjoying some fabulously sunny autumn weather this week, so I popped up to nearby Westonbirt Arboretum with Brown Dog to take a look at the famous Autumn Colour that had been on the news the other night. There it was in abundance: shades of fuchsia pink, pastel blue, lemon and beige – lots of beige, mostly on the men – disgorging from 52-seater coaches and serried ranks of Ford KAs in the car park…

Brown Dog familiarising himself with the abundant Autumn colour at Westonbirt, October 2008

Unhinged melody

2008-09-18T20:58:00.018-12:00

Regular readers may be wondering what has happened to H, who hasn’t been mentioned much of late. Alternatively, you may well have completely forgotten that I have a husband – as, indeed, I have been on occasion known to do myself of late – oft has been the afternoon when I’ve found myself pondering the feasibility of a weekend trip to stay with a friend, or a girls’ nite out at the cinema, when suddenly I’m brought back down to earth with a bump in the shape of a lunchbox to wash or a pile of shirts to iron. Talking of cinema trips - I'm digressing a bit - I did manage a belated outing to Mamma Mia with my neighbour, Kay recently, which brought back a few dodgy memories from the late seventies – not least that I once had a pair of denim dungarees. Oh God, I did! I’d completely forgotten, and this untimely reminder precipitated an unpleasant mental rummage through the chest of drawers of my youth which unearthed amongst other things a nylon faux-moire taffeta skirt and some patchwork Brutus jeans with a 14-inch hem… I’d better stop there. Suffice to say, Meryl Streep’s wardrobe people knew where to draw the line. Just.

Anyway, back to H. Truth is, I haven’t seen much of him lately. Since that first day in mid-July when he teetered off on his bike a little lop-sidedly to his new office, he’s hardly been home (the reason for his lop-sidedness soon became quite apparent; as I set off on the school run I encountered a small green heap in the driveway – his second panier had fallen off his bicycle. Cue a mad dash with much hooting and flashing to no avail – he had his iPod on – before I managed to flag him down halfway to Chippenham and reunite him with his work clothes and packed lunch… ). That night, having got The Boy to bed and some robust stew or somesuch simmering in the oven – there was no telling when he’d be home – the phone rang about ten past nine saying he’d be home in about 40 minutes. Ten minutes later, it rang again: “Erm… Could you come over to Chippenham? I seem to have somehow locked myself in the office…”

After this less-than-auspicious start, things picked up, and I doubt it would have made very much difference had he just stayed in the office permanently from the very first night (although I suppose I might have missed the evening chit-chat over charred chops and wizened jacket potatoes about the installation of the photocopier and discussions about the best place to get stationery printed – Tetbury copy shop, apparently – information with which I’m afraid I can’t honestly say my life has been made significantly richer). Work has been fast and furious, despite the best efforts of BT, and his days of being a wage slave are disappearing swiftly into the past.

Yes, about BT. They’re not my favourite people at the moment. Having paid £2,000 for four business lines, what we’ve actually had so far – for eight and a half weeks – is one line with no handset – H has had to borrow one of our home phones which has to be physically carried into another office if the caller wants to speak to someone else. We now, however, seem to have no line at all.

I ring the fault line to find out what’s going on.
“It’s the Liverpool office you need to speak to,” I’m told. However the Liverpool office have no record of our number. I’m finally given a fault reference number and call the technical department, who tell me they don’t recognise it – I must have got one of the digits wrong. I ring back to speak to the sales team who assure me it’s the right number, but they can’t put me through to the technical people because they’re on a different number. And so it goes on. And all the while, I’m put on hold and subjected to a digital recording of something that sounds like Unchained Melody, except it’s on a loop, so it’s not, and the music just keeps on going round and round, not getting anywhere in a taunting metaphorical version the caller experience. The music is interrupted every so often by a recorded voice telling me they’re experiencing high call volume at the moment – oddly enough they seem be experiencing very high call volume every time I call BT.

Finally someone answers and I’m sorely tempted to subject them to my very own Unhinged Melody, but somehow restrain myself.

“What number are you calling about?” I’m asked for the umpteenth time, despite having punched it into my keypad at least seven million times by now. I tell them, and they ask me whether I’m sure, and I say, “Of course I’m bloody sure, I’ve been speaking to at least sixteen different people about this fault, and they all say it’s a different department, and I have to repeat the number at least four times to all of them.”
“Would you mind not swearing, Madam,” says Robert, who refuses to give his surname.
“Well would you mind giving me something approaching a decent service?”
I’m put on hold again – more Unhinged Melody for about ten minutes before I’m eventually cut off.
I call again – another minor triumph of hope over adversity and a recorded voice advises me that My Call May Be Recorded to Help Us Improve Our Service. I’m not convinced.

“What number are you calling about?”
“Are you quite sure that’s the right number – there’s no record of it on my computer.”
I’m quickly losing the will to live, and Brown Dog, doubtless picking up on my frustration, is hurling himself at the bin noisily.
“Are you sure you’re not with Virgin?” I’m asked. “No, but I might be by this time next week if you don’t bloody do something about the fault on my line.”
“Would you mind not swearing,” asks Kelly, before cutting me off again.

I lock Brown Dog outside and finally get through to someone called Anthony, who makes the right noises and at least sounds a bit sympathetic. Sympathy, however, isn’t enough to get to the bottom of the non-working phone line which seems to have disappeared into a black hole between Faults and Techincal Services.
“We’re losing hundreds – if not thousands of pounds in lost business,” I whine. “I need to speak to someone in authority – we’ll be seeking compensation.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t consider any claim for compensation until at least 30 hours after you reported the fault.”
“But I reported it on Saturday morning. That was four days ago.”
“Ah, but it was only logged as a fault yesterday.”
I finally threaten to shoot myself and Anthony (or is it by now Andrew? I’ve lost count) is just about to put me through to his line manager when there is a knock at the door – I have to put the phone down to deal with this as H has got our only portable handset at the office. It’s Barbara from next door, and she's wearing an exasperated expression and a determined demeanour. “Could you please stop your dog from barking?” she asks with a steely stare. It seems Ev the ginger cat who lives with Adam and Cheryl two doors down is sitting on the garden wall taunting Brown Dog from the top of the wall; Brown Dog is beside himself with indignation and has been hurling himself at the wall in a frenzy of barking for the last ten minutes. Barbara is, not unreasonably, none too pleased. I can see her point, but to my shame I’m still in Angry Consumer mode and give Barbara short shrift while Brown Dog goes back to Mad Animal Hurling Himself at the Bin mode, confirming her suspicions that I’m a completely irresponsible dog owner.

Anyway, after two days of which I've spent by far the greater part on hold with BT listening to Unchained Melody, two engineers turn up at the office, together with Firm Handshake Man, and somehow, between the three of them, they manage to divert the office line to H’s mobile – not ideal, but better than nothing. He comes home that evening – wizened jacket potatoes again (my new career of Professional Telephone Complainer allows scant time for creative cookery – or any other domestic duties come to that) – having learned all there is to know about digital and analogue telecommunications technology. The last thing I want to talk about after a day like today. It seems a man in Bangalore must have flipped the wrong switch and instead of diverting the phone line into a four-line router, he completely switched it off. Or something like that. However switching it on again is far more complicated ...

Still, I suppose if the worst comes to the worst and the whole operation does go belly up he could always get a job as a telecoms engineer. It sounds as though there’s plenty of work.

A visit from the Black Dog

2008-09-10T11:11:00.021-12:00

No, not that black dog, silly. Susie’s black retriever came to stay for a couple of weeks while she went off on holiday. Susie's parting words were, “She was supposed to come into season three weeks ago, but nothing seems to have happened yet. Oh, and by the way – she might have fleas”. Cue the sinking feeling that history was about to repeat itself...

Susie’s dog is sort of big, clumsy and gangly – a kind of canine version of Ja Ja Binks from Star Wars (Episode I – The Phantom Menace - parents of small boys will know exactly what I mean: George Lucas's most irritating character ever. With the possible exception of Padme Amadala.) She kind of blunders round the house crashing into things, careering down flights of stairs and swiping objects from low tables with her constantly wagging tail, jumping up at the slightest prompting and getting into constant tiffs and tussles with Brown Dog over who gets to sleep in the dog bed (her) and who can get upstairs first to harangue me in the bathroom (him). Due to the inclement weather, the house has spent the best part of the last two weeks covered in muddy canine paw marks and everywhere is engulfed within an all-pervading smell of wet dog. Susie's dog didn’t come empty pawed, though – during the course of the fortnight she gave Brown Dog Front-Line-resistent fleas and me a black eye by jumping up just a bit too enthusiastically just as I was bending down to pick something up.

The weather has been wet, wet, wet; a dubious-looking patch of damp is spreading upwards and outwards from my Money corner (implications please, Jane?) and a small hill has mysteriously formed in the middle of the sitting room where the floorboards have expanded. I’m trying to ignore it in the hope it will eventually go away and have almost got used to its unnerving trampoline effect, but secretly suspect A Man May Need to be Called. Meantime, H’s reliable Crombie overcoat (which used to belong to his great uncle Cecil and has seen at least fifty damp and snowy Aberdeen winters) seems to have succumbed to a creeping layer of mould in the porch (which is also our career area). What can this all mean? While I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been beset by the black dog, I have been feeling vaguely disgruntled, not least at the absence of a summer this year.

To be honest, I didn’t really think we’d be here at all, after today when they switched on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland this morning. I took a very brief and brisk shower five minutes before the time due for switch-on – if the Big Bang was to be replicated, I didn’t want to spend the rest of eternity spinning round the universe in a Perspex shower cubicle – particularly as H had used up nearly all the hot water. In the event, it was slightly disappointing. After a build up of days, there was a bit of a countdown, a switch was switched and some scientists clapped and cheered in what can only be described as a slightly subdued way. There was then talk of champagne being opened, which rather unnerved me – the thought of dozens of excited physicists intoxicated with liquor in charge of something that could potentially replicate the Big Bang did not sound to me like a very good idea. Anyway, we're apparently not in danger until the particles actually start to collide, which will be sometime in October. Which is very reassuring.

* * *
It’s official: Brown Dog has the fifth waggiest tail in the village (except he doesn’t – anyone who knows him knows he has the very waggiest tail ever; he just wasn’t pointing his bottom towards the judge and he’s handicapped by the fact that his tail was slightly docked before we got him and therefore shorter than the other dogs in the contest). What he does have – undoubtedly – is the most disgruntled owner. Mainly due to the fact that the rosette awarded to the dog with the fifth waggiest tail was pink.

“People’ll think he’s the only gay dog in the village,” growls The Boy, in a most un-politically correct manner, hoiking the offending rosette from his collar and chucking it into the utility room among the damp coats and wellies. The Boy also won third prize in the children's model-making competition with his Coiled Snake Around Its Eggs, which slightly cheered him up, although he's determined to do better next year. He's also taking rather a worrying interest in the Large Hadron Collider...

101 ways to be a cr*p mother

2008-08-21T18:30:00.027-12:00

I look forward to the summer holidays with a sense of dread. Oh, I always pretend I’m looking forward to them – especially where The Boy is concerned – those long, sunkissed unstructured days punctuated by bike rides and picnics, with nowhere to be and no time to be there by, and above all, no homework to remember. But I’m really not. Being a parent is something that has never really come naturally to me. Right from the early days, I never felt I was adequately prepared. It’s not that I don’t love The Boy with every fibre of my being – I mean, look at him – how could I not? He’s gorgeous. Let me explain.

I guess nothing prepares us for motherhood, and I think I was possibly less prepared than most. The first big shock (apart from finding out that I was pregnant– shurly shome mishtake, doctor? – and all that scary stuff about childbirth – blood, guts and gore – and a knitted purple uterus if the woman at the Active Birth class was to be believed - we left early, before discovering the vital information about how the baby actually gets out, H having dissolved into uncontrollable giggles during the breathing session much to the disapproval of everyone present) was when he arrived into the world not wearing any clothes. Sounds daft, but honestly – I was quite taken aback. Having spent my formative years up until that point studiously avoiding being within ten yards of baby, I don’t think I’d ever actually seen a baby without a minimum of a babygro and preferably several layers of crocheted christening shawl and about three rows of doting godparents between it and me. Then suddenly I was presented with this slimy, slippery, noisy purple alien.

I don’t know what I was expecting, quite – a five-year-old with a side parting, impeccable manners dressed in a prep-school uniform, perhaps? But this certainly wasn’t it. The midwife cooed gently (after having spent 20 minutes or so down the business end sewing as though her life depended on it – “more suture thread, please, Nurse” – he had big shoulders) “I’ll just leave you alone together for a little while…” “Nooooooo!” I wanted to scream. “I might drop him. He might stop breathing. Please don’t leave…” The first of many small betrayals. It was all downhill from there.

* * *

Fast forward to July 2008. It’s the last week of term and I’m hard up against deadlines as we nip into Malmesbury for a present for his teacher.
“But I want to get her something she can keep forever,” The Boy whines. “Something that’ll mean she’ll remember me.”
I’m in a hurry – I always seem to be in a hurry these days – and he’s leading me ominously towards a collection of particularly unpleasant garden gnomes in Knees, Malmesbury’s answer to Grace Bros, but with slightly less style.
“How about a chocolate orange?” I try. “Everybody likes chocolate oranges.”
“But I want to give her something special. Everybody gives their teacher chocolate oranges.” he counters.
I suppress the urge to remind him that his feelings towards Mrs Fusco over the last two years have oscillated between hatred and grim tolerance and he lurches towards the gnomes again (the cheapest of which, I note with slight horror, is £7.99). I grip his hand slightly more firmly than is strictly necessary – I know what happens to the garden gnomes of this world; I’ve manned the tombola at the school fete for the last three years and, boy, have I seen a lot of gnomes in my time. And scented candles. And picture frames… Just then his friend Jonathan hoves into view with his mum. Jonathan is carrying a bag bearing something that looks suspiciously chocolate-orange-shaped. I arrange my face into a suggestion of “I told you so” but a determined look comes over The Boy’s face. I don’t mean to, but somehow I find myself telling him about the tombola. We leave the shop with a chocolate orange, but my victory feels hollow.

The following day is school sports day. I’m running late again. I decide I can just squeeze in one more phone call to secure a paragraph closer to my looming deadline and leave the house with a feeling of satisfaction – but just ten minutes to do the twenty-minute journey into town. As I arrive at the playing field the races are in full swing. The sky is grey and blustery, the grass is slightly wet and muddy and the headmaster catches my eye as I make a dash towards the parents area next to the track. “About our conversation last week…” he begins, catching me off guard and slightly regretting last week’s forthrightness. Eventually, I manage to extricate myself from a conversation I wished I wasn’t having and realise I’ve just missed The Boy’s race. His only race of the afternoon, it transpires. As I approach, he turns away from me, refusing to let me see hot tears in his defiant eyes. Next to him is Scruffy Boy – a child, I’m ashamed to admit, whose friendship I’ve never really encouraged, being wary of his free-range lifestyle on one of the town’s more down-at-heel estates. Scruffy Boy puts an arm round my Boy and I hear him say, “Don’t worry. My mum hardly ever comes to things I’m in at school”. It hardly helps me feel better.

* * *

It’s the dreaded school holidays at last, and we have The Boy’s best friend Joe here for the week. Joe has arrived fresh from a festival with two pairs of trousers, both of which are muddy and one pair of socks which go AWOL almost immediately, never to resurface. His mum rings up an hour after depositing him to tell me she’s accidentally driven back to London with his shoes. “Oh, and I forgot to mention,” she adds, “he might have nits”.

Boy and Best Friend Joe (and presumably the nits - I don't know, I can't get either of them near a bath, and Joe has a particularly impressive head of hair) are inseparable all week. The Boy takes him into his favourite shop – a shop called Malmesbury Rocks! which is full of ammonites, trilobites and million, zillion-year-old sharks teeth. I tell them they can have £2 each to spend on crystals and they spend the best part of forty minutes deliberating between the Tiger’s Eye and the sludgy, iridescent Hematite while I trace the spiral of a fifty-five-million-year-old ammonite for what feels like almost as long... All the crystals have little cards explaining their properties – some are good for meditation while others help with concentration or promise joy.

“What’s libido?” a nine-year-old voice pipes up, pronouncing it “Libby-dough.” The shop man looks up from his cash register as if to ask, what indeed. I feel slightly flummoxed and try my usual tack of pretending not to hear, which isn't very convincing in a shop that's about six feet square. Another customer bustles through the door– a neat and mild-mannered grandmother with two sprucely dressed young poppets. I fear for their moral education in the face of my two rampaging nine-year-olds.

“Libby-dough! Libby-dough!” The Boy and Best Friend Joe are now chanting. By now everyone in the shop is looking at us – they’re probably not, but I feel as though they are. I try to distract them with a pot of beetles mummified in crystal, but they’ve seen it all before and are not having any of it. “Er, it’s kind of when a man likes the ladies,” I bluster, hoping that’ll cover it. “Bleugh!” they both grimace in unison, dropping the offending crystals back into the box with a noisy clatter.

* * *

It rains on and off all week. On the one day it doesn’t rain all day I take them off to Bowood House, which has a boy-tastic adventure playground awash with a pirate ship and something called a death slide. Twenty-one pounds it costs me, an adult and two children, and I spend the best part of four hours sitting on a bench trying to eke out a medium latte which has cost me a further two pounds. Entrance to the house is included, so when it rains I try to entice the boys off the death slide and into the Georgian house which has a fabulous Robert Adam library and is stuffed full of more renaissance art and neoclassical sculptures than you could shake a stick at. They are not amused. Or rather they are, and half-heartedly stifle uncontrollable giggles at the array of bare bosoms on show in the sculpture gallery. Then someone “accidentally” leans over the rope in the library and sets off the alarm, much to the consternation of the assembled party – an immaculately dressed family with three daughters, each dutifully filling in the children’s activity sheet that I was too mean to shell out for. I plonk the boys in the gift shop with the hissed instructions that they are to stay there until I’ve been upstairs to look at the watercolours and the emperor Napolean’s death mask (which I have to say, I found vaguely spooky). I allow myself about five minutes to take in four hundred years of art from several continents and on my return, the boys are clutching jelly centipedes and snapping dinosaur toys that I know will end up stuffed down the side of the sofa after five minutes. “Please, please, please, please, pleeeeeeease…” they plead.

Outside again The Boy decides he needs a poo. Best Friend Joe and I wait outside the toilets in the drizzle for what feels like several hours. Then Best Friend Joe decides he too needs a poo and I suddenly realise I have spent the best part of the last ten years sitting around various playgrounds and children’s activity centres trying to conjure up pictures from the chipped paint on various metal railings, looking at my watch and watching the minutes crawl by. I didn’t particularly see the point of playgrounds when I was a child – there’s no reason why things should have suddenly changed now. I think I’ve spent more satisfying hours watch paint slowly dry on my bedroom ceiling.

As we finally make our way back to the car park after what must have been one of the longest days EVER, my phone beeps. It’s a woman from Easy Living magazine – she wants more information about my PR client, the client I’ve been trying to get some coverage for for the last two months with very little tangible success. It’s a real coup – or rather, it might have been, had I not been in a windy car park in Bowood House, fumbling in my bag among empty crisp packets and jelly centipedes for a non-existent pencil and with none of the information she wanted to hand. And two overexcited nearly ten-year-olds singing at the tops of their voices: “Ars-ole! Ars-ole! A soldier I will be…”

Brown Dog's diary

2008-07-15T09:24:00.026-12:00

Monday
Discover Boy’s shoes are still soaking wet from previous day’s kayacking. Set off for school in wellies, detouring off at shoe shop where to my joy I see they are having a sale. Predictably, though, the only size shoes not in sale seem to be Boy’s. Except for a pair of pink Barbie trainers I cannot expect him to contemplate. Part with £32 for new shoes; arrive at school 20 minutes late.

Back home, huge quantities of work to be done. Back playing up. Osteopath conveniently has appointment at 1.20. Decide I can conveniently combine this with squeezing in trip to Tesco in Tetbury before school pick-up to investigate Milla's tip-off about bottom-shelf wine. Remaining guinea pig has not now moved for three days and is therefore presumed dead. Feel burial ought to be performed before Boy comes home from school to avert further tears, but spade is broken. Take spade to blacksmith on way to osteopath, however necessary blacksmithery means at least an overnight stay so after school run, pop round to neighbour’s to borrow spade which entails a cup of tea and a catch-up. It’s now pouring with rain, so burial abandoned in favour of cake-making for impending visit of in-laws later that day.

H comes home from office in bewildered state with three different quotes for computer installation and cabling that all come to several thousand pounds, but entail completely different scenarios. While poring over estimates, suddenly notice column of smoke emanating from oven. Cake now also presumed dead. I momentarily consider spontaneously cremating dead guinea pig thus averting need for rainsoaked burial, but fleeting mental vision of Boy’s horror and mother-in-law’s disapproving face precipitates the fast abandonment of this idea. In-laws arrive, cavalry fashion to take care of domestic duties while H whirls round in ever decreasing circles in pre-self-employment panic and I endeavour to earn some money.

Tuesday
Abandon Boy to the care of his grandparents and take train to London where I cram in four press shows, a cup of tea in John Lewis’s with my friend Annie (including much frantic texting between Curtains and Haberdashery) and a hasty dash into The Button Queen on Marylebone Lane, which irritatingly still seems to be in the 19th century and therefore not online or furnished with mail-order facilities. Cram pockets and remaining space in handbag with gorgeous little rainbow-coloured buttons for no other reason than I can – will think of something to do with them at a later date. Train home. Cold shepherd’s pie for supper. H has gone to bed.

Wednesday
We seem to have fleas. That’s not the royal we, or even the twee doctors’ we (as in “oh dear – we seem to have a tummy ache, do we?”) but we as in all of us. And the invisible cat appears to be the most likely suspect. Ensuing visit to vet costs £77 for various pet preparations and flea retardant spray that needs to be applied everywhere in the house the cat goes. As she’s invisible, this is hard to judge, so I opt for maximum coverage of all chairs, sofas and mattresses, momentarily considering whether this may result in green or two-headed grandchildren at some point in the future, but decide that is possibly the lesser of several evils. I also have spot-on treatment for cat, but this will entail lying in wait which I do not have time to do. Surruptitiously organise GP burial and attempt to get to grips with work. As usual, I find I do not have the right stationery, or the stationery of the correct colour, so make excuse for unnecessary trip to stationery shop in Malmesbury, with quick detour to Tetbury to pick up further bottom-shelf wine supplies. Feel stressed at how little achieved. Drink wine. Feel less stressed. H needs to make a decision about computers. We pore over estimates for a further half hour, drink more wine, jab figures into calculator then make totally unscientific decision to go for the northern man with the firm handshake for no other reason that he’s northern and has a firm handshake. And he can do the cabling this weekend. Susie rings up to say she’s got a side of smoked salmon she can’t manage on her own and would we like it. Wonder momentarily whether I have time in diary for smoked-salmon eating...

Thursday
Get up at some ungodly hour. Drive H to Chippenham station for train to London where he is going on a course. Drive home. Drive Boy to school. Drive back. Drive back to Chippenham station where I find myself stuck behind a tractor for about twenty minutes, just manage to get train back to London by skin of teeth. Cram in three more press shows, ten minutes late for appointment with advertising person simultaneously bumping into old colleague from about ten years ago, who says, “What are YOU doing here?” in a way that suggests she thinks I should still be on the downtable subs’ desk at Woman’s Realm... Advertising person looks at me askance. Not that there's anything wrong with being a downtable sub at Woman's Realm... Have argument with grumpy pensioner at Paddington station about why I am not standing at the back of some non-existent queue, get train back home. Pop into Susies on way home to collect smoked salmon. Hear about her plans for a free-range chicken empire (Susie has now abandoned plans for white horses and moved on to chickens), arrive home to find mother-in-law has kindly done shopping, made supper and done huge pile of ironing. Feel like hugging her, but resist urge as we are, after all, British. Pop out to drinks party over road for an hour, pick up Boy from cubs, bundle Boy into bed, open wine.

Text H to see how he’s getting on, but his phone is turned off. Worry that he might be lying cold, sad and alone on hard, impersonal hotel bed pondering the huge change he’s about to make. Or that he’s done a Reggie Perrin and left me with Boy, one-eyed dog, flea-ridden cat, dead guinea pig and large mortgage.

Friday
Can’t remember what happened on Friday. Oh, no – it’s all coming back…

Took Boy to school, then drove back in to Malmesbury to pick up coat he’d left at cubs the night before and swimming trunks he’d left at the swimming pool the previous night. En route, bump into school governor who intimates a snippet of information that confirms my suspicions about something going on at school, then on the way back to school to deliver coat, bump into another governor who subsequently confirms what first governor has intimated. On way to Boy’s classroom to deliver coat, see headmaster who asks if all is ok. Make snap decision to kill several birds with one stone and ask if I can have a word in his office. Immediately wish I hadn’t as find myself embroiled in difficult conversation about school business. Look at watch and attempt to extricate myself, but by this time is too late. Somehow manage to get home before lunch and just in time to wave inlaws adieu.

Think I must have done some work, but don’t seem to have much to show for it. Still have shedloads to get through. Picked up text from H sent about 1am to the effect that he was “out with oddbods on course”. Oddbods turn out to three women from Swansea who between them help him polish off five bottles of wine. Pick up Boy from school to find he’s been separated from Best Friend in Year 5 class allocation. On top of this, he has been put in same class as Nemesis Boy. Boy distraught and I guiltily wonder whether this might have anything to do with my meddling conversation with headmaster.

H manages to get train back to Chip, but also manages to forget bumf from course and get time of train arrival completely wrong, entailing last-minute dash to station with Boy’s supper hastily shovelled into a takeaway bowl. Make supper for H (to demonstrate what a wonderful helpmeet I now am), resist urge to roll eyes at story about Swansea women and forgetting of bumf, two-hour phone conversation with sister, to whom sad, bad and mad things are happening at the moment, but I'm afraid I can't go into details as that won't help the situation.

Saturday
Take Boy to swimming lesson and bump into Boy’s Best Friend’s mother, who tells me Best Friend is also distraught about Class Allocation Fiasco. Wonder what best to do. H goes off to do shopping then disappears for rest of day. Turns out he’s been at the new office and thought he’d told me, but I don’t think he did. Northern-firm-handshake man has been to lay cables, but didn’t think to cover chairs or floor with dustsheets or old newspaper. Also turns out secretaries have been down to office and set themselves up in biggest room.

Sunday
Go down to office to clear up after firm-handshake man (this entails 20-minute grapple with new vaccuum-cleaner which turns out to be James Dyson's take on the Rubiks Cube. Somehow manage to get it working, but end keeps falling off and have to adopt strange, ungainly stoop which will doubtless knacker my back again and render me looking like Mrs Overall from Acorn Antiques). Office is nicer than expected. Put up pictures, arrange leaflets on waiting room table. Mental note to bring magazines and toybox from home next time. Lunch at Pizza Express followed by pleasant walk down to river in old bit of town I never knew existed before. Mow lawn, lawnmower inexplicably cuts out halfway through. Discover blade has been put on upside down and now plug is fused. Neighbours arrive to help us out with smoked salmon, bearing unfeasible quantities of wine which we somehow manage to quaff under the pergola. Apart from embarrassingly overflowing recycling box, Boy’s classroom conundrum and my daunting quantities of work to get through, life – dare I say it – almost seems a bit positive…

2008-07-09T09:44:00.001-12:00

Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy...

Crazybusy

2008-06-25T06:16:00.013-12:00

It’s been a crazybusy week, and one in which I’ve been up and down to and from Gloucestershire more times than you could shake a stick at – firstly to the Kemble Air Show (noisy, but we were lucky enough to run into The Flying Dutchman, who gave us a helpful explanation of the difference between a Tomohawk and a Eurofighter, although I couldn’t quite make out what he was saying against the roar of four Tornadoes behind me. At least that’s what I think they were), a short walk in Westonbirt Arboretum (doggy), then a nostalgic trip up and down the beautifully restored Gloucestershire-Warwickshire Steam Railway which runs from Toddington to Cheltenham Race Course (steamy and trainspottery with a short branch-line diversion down memory lane) – all brightly polished brass buttons, smartly waving signalmen and billowing white steam blowing all over the platform – very Railway Children indeed. Honestly, if you’re in the area with a small boy who likes trains on a Sunday, you really should try it. And of course the highlight of the week was a meet-up with the gorgeous Milla – and if you haven’t yet come across her fabulously funny and spot-on-the-money observations in Country Lite, you’re missing a real treat. A queen among bloggers, she’s every bit as warm and funny in real life as on the page. The sun shone and we even had cake and bought shoes – a veritable day from heaven.

In between all this, I’ve suddenly got shedloads of work again. I know, I know, I’m always complaining about not having enough, and then, when I get some, what do I do? Complain. As I’ve said before, the trouble with freelancing is that it never rains but it pours – or in my case snows, it being Christmas and all (what do you mean, you hadn’t noticed? I’ve been surrounded by flashing wreaths and cut-out Santas for the best part of a fortnight, and I’m looking forward to three, perhaps four trips up to London over the next couple of weeks to nibble on mince pies and rub shoulders with strange bearded men in funny red suits amid an orgy of excess in the shape of the British retail trade - all a bit Marie Antoinette, I feel, in these credit-crunchy times). The postman arrived this morning (bearing several items emblazoned with silvery snowflakes and Christmas-tree-shaped envelopes) to hear me crooning John & Yoko’s Happy Christmas (War is Over) – slightly more in tune and less manic than yesterday’s rendition of Don’t Stop Me Now – and a sparkly wreath from Lakeland on the door – just trying it for size. I felt sure he gave me a bit of a Funny Look as I signed for a parcel – he’s obviously got me down as A Bit Odd, but I can’t think why.

Meanwhile, there’s been more talk about cabling for the new office (obviously), and gardening (inevitably). H has now morphed into a man who cannot now pass a garden centre without popping in for a bag of compost – even when we were supposed to be going up to the steam railway and it was Sunday.

Somehow amid all this frenzied activity I managed to squeeze in a hair appointment. I don’t know what it was, but suddenly I decided I needed a new style. I took in a picture of Sophie Marceau and my lovely, patient hairdresser said, “Hmmm”.
I waited. She snipped.
I came out looking like a cross between Noel Edmunds and Janet Street-Porter.

“You’ve got to dry it brushed forward, and sort of flick it back, like so,” she explained. That’s the trouble with new hairstyles – you need to adapt your morning routine to encompass New Styling Techniques.

I had a go, but I’m not sure I quite got it right. I tried brushing it forward, but then I couldn’t see what I was supposed to be doing and ended up like a cross between Noel Edmunds and an angry hedgehog.

“Hmmm, New Style,” said H philosophically. Still, perhaps I could hang a couple of sparkly baubles on the sticky-out bits and I won’t look too out of place alongside all the mince pies and wacky Father Christmasses.

The truth about love (and death)

2008-06-18T03:33:00.024-12:00

When it comes, will it come without warning,
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on the door in the morning?
Will it tread in the bus on my toes?

Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O, tell me the truth about love.

WH Auden

Now, I know some of you may think me a little disloyal to H, and indeed you may be right, but I’m not sure that means, as night follows day, that I am about to take up with a foreigner and trip off to Timbuktoo, as suggested by an astrology website I recently dipped into (Thank you Milla. I know, I know - I have only myself to blame. It just seemed for a minute more interesting than the work I have to do). The thing about astrology – whether you believe in it or not – is that it’s a symbolic language and I have my own theories about my Virgo Moon and Mercury square Saturn in the 5th. And much as I complain about H, he’s really not such a bad old stick. Besides, I like to have something to complain about. And quite honestly, I don’t imagine there are many other people who would put up with my many Little Ways, foreign or not. But enough of being nice about H – that is not my style, as regular readers among you will well know.

H now has a new assistant and business partner, one who seems to share his interest in gardening. Just last week she brought him a couple of climbing roses and a tray of chilli plants – should I be reading anything into this? (She’s also blonde and several years younger than me, but that’s doubtless by the by.) Bearing in mind his recent passion for all things horticultural, I asked him this morning over toast and marmalade, if I were something in the garden, what would I be. (I’m thinking rambling roses, buxom peonies, a tall ethereal poppy perhaps...)
"A compost heap," was his almost predictable reply. "One that needs turning regularly."

Now where did I put that passport...

A rare sighting of H under the new pergola (my friend Claire, whom I've known for over ten years refuses to believe he really exists apart from in my fertile imagination). You may also notice that the Dennis the Menace PJs turned up - they were underneath the seat cushion of an armchair, only to be unearthed when I eventually decided the loose cover needed a wash.

* * *

It’s a damp evening in June, and H and The Boy are hunkered down in front of Italy V Holland, the woodburner is flickering and the room is bathed in a cosy glow.

“It’s the simple things in life that make me happy,” H reveals contentedly as I bring in the supper on a tray. “Good food, a glass of wine and football on the telly.” I do not figure in this list, I note with slight irritation. Though possibly I should take comfort in the fact that he may not have me down as altogether simple.

H’s comment takes me back to the early days of our courtship when neither of us had much money – he had just qualified as a lawyer and I was the juniorest of the junior subs at Woman’s Realm (yes, it was indeed many aeons ago – they even had a knitting department. Yes, a knitting department. Although the young man who modelled the endless tank tops had by this time been pensioned off). We would often spend Saturday nights in doing something homely; I would cook something, and suddenly at about 10.30 he’d stretch, take a furtive look at his watch and say, “Hmmm – wonder if there’s anything on telly,” at which I’d switch on to find – to much feigned surprise – Match of the Day. Where it had been for the last 30 years. Funny, that.

Unfortunately I am not able to fully enjoy the woodburner yet. The supplier needs to come back and rectify the flaunching – as I now know it’s called thanks to Countrymummy’s most helpful husband, G – which has not been done properly. Also, despite nearly 12 years of trying, I am not able to enjoy football, either. I really tried in the early days, believe me I tried. I spent several interminable Saturday afternoons freezing miserably in the East Stand at The Valley, but was secretly grateful when at 36 weeks pregnant I wasn’t able to go to Wembley Stadium to see Charlton take Sunderland to 4 all, winning on penalties after extra time, with Mendonca (or Donks, as he was affectionately known) scoring in the 23rd, 71st and 103rd minutes. (See – I really did try.) As far as I can see it’s just 22 sweaty, muddy men chasing a ball about for far too long with lots of energy expended on something that’s ultimately pointless. What really put the tin lid on it is H’s penchant for a radio programme called 606. If you haven’t ever come across it, believe me: count your blessings and just don’t go there. Lonely men from Leeds with thwarted football management ambitions. I’ll say no more.

* * *

A bleak day for The Boy. Sex-Change Guinea Pig passed away yesterday afternoon under a gently beaming June sun. Rather serendipitously I’m supposed to be writing a feature at the moment about how to deal with childhood questions of sex and death, so this threw up an unexpected opportunity to test my theories on the subject. The gentle, though unvarnished truth, I reason, having got it completely wrong the last time it happened with our aged ginger cat. (I thought I’d explained it sensitively, and was thankful he didn’t seem overly upset until I heard him passing on my convoluted story involving a visit to the vet, injections and going to sleep to the girl next door and realised he’d got totally the wrong end of the stick when he asked when we could expect Gorgy to wake up again.) My gentle, yet direct explanation in the car on the way home from school precipitated a desperate wail, not unlike that of Moaning Myrtle in the first Harry Potter film – a wail which didn’t abate until long after bedtime, and the vestiges were still around this morning.

Still, grief, I guess, is a necessary, though uncomfortable part of growing up. One of those difficult rites of passage on the long and bumpy journey to adulthood. We discussed funeral arrangements and settled on a cardboard shoebox which could be unearthed and taken with him when he leaves home or if we were ever to move house. Embalming was briefly discussed, but we couldn’t find the book about the Egyptians which explained how to do it, and quite honestly I didn’t fancy the thought of what such a thing might entail (an unpalatable vision involving a crochet hook – which I would need to borrow from my friend, Countrymummy – flashed unpleasantly into my consciousness).

A boy’s first pet is a very special thing, and whatever else you could say about SCGP, no one could deny he was his own guinea pig – a prince (or possibly at times, a princess) among guinea pigs. SCGP had obviously been the runt of a very large litter, when we went to the pet shop to buy him, and a damaged ear was testament to some early homophobic bullying, but The Boy was insistent, that was the guinea pig he wanted, despite my drawing his attention to healthier, more robust looking specimens. Possessed of a rare hormone imbalance, an odd, jaunty hairstyle and an impressive, if slightly uneven row of bosoms, Harry‘s frequent amorous approaches to hutchmate Tom were obviously a bone of contention between the two of them for some time, but somehow they eventually arrived at an understanding and Tom managed to tolerate a certain amount of amorous burbling each day before nipping Harry sharply in the neck, and the two of them would settle down to their daily routine of munching grass and scuttling about in the chicken run.

More tea, vicar?

2008-06-11T10:26:00.012-12:00

We are the village green preservation society,
God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety,
We are the Desperate Dan appreciation society,
God save strawberry jam and all the different varieties…

I opened my inbox this morning to find five new emails. Sadly, no work of the paying variety. One was about last Friday’s Church fete (and I don't like to boast, but between you and me, I've actually been asked to be on next year's fete committee!), one from the beekeeping club to let me know we are now on the Wiltshire Swarm Collectors' list, one from the village allotments’ bicentenary committee talking about getting someone from Gardeners Question Time round, and one from the village book club (and, no, I didn’t manage to read last month’s book, so shouldn’t really be going, but the thought of wine, crisps and friendly conversation is just too tempting…). The last one was another one from Beekeeper man, saying he’d forgotten to add the information about a man from Hitchin who is coming over next month to talk about hives. I'm not actually a member of the beekeepers, but I've asked to be put on their mailing list because I don't want to miss anything exciting happening. What with school governors, the Malmesbury Fair Trade committee, cubs, the local writing group and Countrymummy's fabulous new knitting group (another excuse to catch up on gossip and patronise the local pub under the pretext of swapping knitting tips), it's perhaps just as well I'm not inundated with work at the moment - I'm not sure where I'd find the time to do any. The only local group I haven't yet manage to infiltrate is something called Coffee Pots - a weekly event signified by a large hardboard coffee pot that appears outside the house where it's being held, soon to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

Typical incomer, I guess, a slave to my own nosiness getting involved in every possible aspect of the local community, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve been inadvertently been sucked into some random episode of The Archers (where it all gets a bit silly and Lynda Snell tries and fails to direct a pantomime), and will wake up one morning in the not-too distant future to find myself answering to the name of Bunty and riding around the village in a pith helmet on a Pashley bicycle. Stranger things have happened.

* * *

All is chugging along a bit haphazardly with H and his office plans. While H tries to perfect the art of multitasking (never his strongest suit), I am confronted each morning with lists of Things I Can Do To Help (more often than not headed by the words “coffee machine”, which leads me doubt H’s priorities somewhat). Such lists invariably seem to lead to a dispiriting series of cross-purposes discussions about telephone systems, cables which incredibly seem to cost several hundred pounds a metre, and random bits of office paraphernalia…

Marital harmony was momentarily upset towards the end of last week with the unexpected appearance of Pergola Man – accompanied by an impressive collection of wooden posts – who I’d forgotten to cancel when our finances took a nosedive earlier in the year. Never mind, we now have a rather handsome pergola, H is once more immersed in seed catalogues and I can feel a trip to the climber nursery coming on.

We also have a new woodburner – yes, you read correctly: a woodburner. It seems I uttered the word once too often and my mother in a fit of generousity popped a cheque in the post to facilitate the installation of the same. I didn’t quite have the heart to tell her there were several more pressing items on our financial agenda. There was nothing for it – the thing had to be bought, and almost as soon as I put down the phone to the stove shop, a little van drew up weighed down with what seemed like several hundredweight of gleaming cast-iron. Unfortunately, the installation didn’t quite go according to plan – there was some problem with the chimney, a pot was forgotten and several bricks mislaid leading to some tiresome argy bargy with the supplier which still isn’t completely sorted out.

The woodburner will no doubt come into its own later in the year, with the price of oil going up vertically at the moment – last week when I enquired, burning oil was 58p a litre, this week I’m told it’s gone up to 70p… What I don’t understand is a) why this is suddenly happening now – I mean it would have been understandable when Saddam was setting fire to all the oil fields, but why now? and b) why no one seems to have seen it coming. So much for Gordon’s empty promises that the days of boom and bust were over; we now seem to be poised on the brink of the biggest recession in living memory. And of course the rising oil prices are really going to hit those of us that live in the country hard – we’ve no gas supply here (not that that’s going to get any cheaper), and mostly have to drive several miles for basic services city-dwellers take for granted. Still, I suppose if times get really hard we could always burn the pergola…

Several times recently, I thought I could catch the odd whiff of chip-shop in the lane, but put it down to an empty stomach or one of my unaccustomed bouts of townsickness. Recently, though, I’ve discovered that neighbours of ours have started making their own bio-diesel. They make a weekly trip up to one of the gastro-pubs in a neighbouring village, and do something mysterious to it – I haven’t quite figured out what – but it apparently involves creating glycerine as a byproduct from which they then make soap – and hey presto! Several litres of Bio diesel which works out at around 16p a litre. Unfortunately, they’re not allowed to sell it, and chemistry was never my strong suit, but the idea is becoming strangely attractive…

We are the Sherlock Holmes English-speaking vernacular,
God save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula,
We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity,
God save little shops, china cups, and virginity,
We are the Skyscraper Condemnation Affiliates,
God save Tudor houses, antique tables, and billiards

Ray Davies & The Kinks

White horses, black dogs and a Wiltshire crime wave

2008-06-02T10:07:00.022-12:00

On white horses let me ride away
To my world of dreams so far away
Let me run…
To the sun…

To a world my heart can understand
It’s a warm and gentle wonderland
Far away…

I’m not talking about Wiltshire’s famous white horses – of which there are no fewer than 11 – we’re the wrong end of the county, for that – this is the northern cheese country rather than the southern chalk where the legendary white horses roam*.

Susie, who used to do our cleaning, was once told by a fortune-teller that she would own a white horse and a black dog before she died. She’s already got the black dog, which I look after on Wednesdays and when she goes on holiday, and if I were her, I'd seriously consider leaving things at that for now. However she seems to be thinking about buying a horse, which has come up for sale in a village nearby. And for some reason this seems to involve me.

“I just need to run it past you before I talk to Roy about it,” she confides in a conspiratorial telephone call. Roy is her long-suffering husband, and not, I suspect, really either a horse or a dog man at heart. “You won’t mind looking after her when we go away, will you?” The white horse in question turns out to be an eight-year-old thoroughbred former racehorse; I haven’t ridden properly for at least 20 years, and the last time I did, I couldn’t walk for three days.
“Okay,” I find myself saying.

Later that morning, on our walk across the glebe field – mine and Brown dog’s – I suddenly espy a police car. And then another. By the time I reach the road at the far end of the field, there are now no fewer than three police cars parked in a line in front of the village school, and several blue-hatted bobbies are making house-to-house enquiries. I dawdle along, hoping to run into one of the policemen to ascertain what might be going on. Surely it must be something fairly major to warrant such a large police presence - I don't think I've seen so many uniformed officers in one place since - ooh, I don't know when. I seem to remember they only went round in pairs after the London bombings. I check in my bag for my press card, still waiting to be brandished importantly.

At last, I manage to engineer a convergence of paths between myself and one of the constables in question, and ask in an offhand kind of way that I hope doesn't look to goulish or nosy what the problem is. It appears a man posing as an employee of the local water board was spotted trying to get in to one of the houses and when challenged by the householder, he ran off.

A helicopter had also been deployed and a photofit compiled with the help of a police artist, we discover later that evening when the hastily, yet thoroughly compiled note from our local Neighbourhood Watch warden (affectionately known by our neighbours as Robocop) is pushed through the door. A bit of a contrast to my experience of crime in London, when my car was broken into and cleaned out of seats, steering wheel and other interior fittings (this was during the days when I had more money than sense – admittedly, not saying a lot – and a limited-edition Mini with some rather attractive interior features). I walked down to the local station – well, it would have been a bit difficult to drive without a steering wheel – whereupon the desk officer looked at me scathingly and said, “Well, you know you really shouldn’t leave anything in your car overnight…” It seemed as though it would be too much trouble to fill in a form or take fingerprints – there was little or no chance of catching anyone or getting anything back.

* * *

And finally, a Feng Shui update: The pro-Feng-Shui lobby will be pleased to learn that the effects of my thorough cleaning and rearranging of the bathroom (not to mention dispatching The Languid Goat to pastures new, somewhere in West Sussex - he's on his way, Lampworkbeader, bleating eagerly) already seem to have reached the hallowed walls of the Legal Services Commission in London who have now decided in their wisdom and after due process, no doubt, that H can, after all, take his Legal Aid contract with him, either to another firm or to set up on his own. I've also won a cheeseboard in the local village quiz. And I have been offered one of the soap jobs. Admittedly, it’s only a little job, but it’s a start…

On white horses, snowy white horses
Let me ride away...

*Wiltshire is the county of chalk and cheese – with high chalk downs to the south of Hackpen Hill, and muddy clay cattle country to the north where cheese is made. And if you remember White Horses you must be almost as old as I am - I can only just remember it - wonderful Serbian children's programme (well, wonderful to the horse-obsessed) dubbed into an English which probably bore no relation to the original script.

Brown Dog gets new wheels

2008-05-25T21:36:00.051-12:00

Sadly, it is just the wheels we’re talking about; my 18-year old car somehow managed to scrape through its MOT, with the help of four new tyres and a slight adjustment to the exhaust, so we’re still phutting round in the oldest car in the village. Whilst the car was in the garage The Boy and I were getting acquainted with the local bus service – as of this April our village now has an hourly service to Malmesbury, which I have to say is great (so long as you remember to brace yourself before you get to the speed bumps on the way into town – I nearly lost several personal items from handbag, not to mention what remained of my dignity as we rounded the first bend after the Silk Mills).

Fast and efficient, our new bus nips along the top road and trundles up to the market square in less than ten minutes, and I can breeze round town able to look the many Traffic Wardens on hand directly in the eye with a smugly clear conscience. The Boy now wants to start taking the bus to school on a regular basis – keen, I suspect, to distance himself from his mother and her embarrassingly superannuated car – but I’m not sure I’m ready quite for this new level of independence. Surprisingly, this new improvement to rural living doesn’t seem to have caught on yet – the few times we used the bus last week there was just one other passenger. Still, I guess newfangled things like a regular bus service take time to catch on in the country.

* * *

The Greek job conveniently evaporated as suddenly and unexpectedly as it arrived, much to my relief. Although the money would have been nice (well, more than nice, if I'm honest), when lines of communication with Athens were finally up and running again, it transpired that they needed the work by Tuesday morning at the latest, and I simply didn’t know where I would readily be able to obtain the necessary quantities of amphetamines to cram what must have been a minimum of about 100 hours of work into four short days.

Now, on to matters Feng Shui – and for those of you who remain sceptical about the powers of Feng Shui (and Miss Milla, yes, it is you of whom I speak), I have just this to say: Pah! I have irrefutable proof, if such a thing were still needed. Bearing in mind that the career area of our house as outlined in ExmoorJane’s excellent book contains not one, but two bathrooms – over the last few months while I’ve been wielding the duster and closing lavatory-seat lids, of the three PR jobs I’ve been offered to pitch for, two are for soap companies. I rest my case. (Or I raise it, as The Boy is often wont to say.)

With this in mind, I woke up this morning convinced I’d finally located the key to H’s niggling career conundrum. It felt like some kind of Eureka moment – not at all inappropriate, given the room in question. All the time my dustpan and brush had been making sterling improvements elsewhere in the front porch and symbol of all things career-related, vast quantities of dust (and goodness knows what else) had been collecting under the bath and in the far corners of the top bathroom above – and not the useful kind of Golden-Compass-fame dust beloved of Philip Pullman, facilitating access to parallel worlds teeming with wheeled cows and the like, but common-or-garden house dust, the bane of good housewives and dedicated Feng-Shui-ers. Furthermore, a thorough audit of the loo reading uncovered several dubious volumes with titles such as Expect the Worst… and The Languid Goat is Always Thin. Did I want H to spend his working hours bumbling around like a thin, languid goat doubtless in pursuit of some unsuspecting bag of shopping to chew on, expecting the worst? Not really, I suppose.

After a very uncomfortable 15 minutes fruitfully spent raking tumbleweed from under the bath (and I’m sorry, I’m afraid I cannot see the point of claw-foot baths in the 21st century, particularly in a small bathroom, when you can get a deliciously comfortable and elegant Bette bath made from gleaming chip-resistant titanium-finished steel designed to fill up in less than twenty minutes and with no room for dust gathering underneath for much the same price – don’t ask me what I found there; suffice to say I suspect some of it dated from before we moved in – I don’t think I’ve ever been responsible for purchasing pink Jeye cloths, and whatever his faults, I can't really see H doing so). I weeded out the worst of the books leaving positive-sounding tomes like Calm in the workplace and Life’s little instruction book and turned my attention to the various bottles and jars ruthlessly jettisonning the saddest looking and replacing them with classic colognes with names like Elite and Dynamisme gleaned from a recent photo shoot. I positioned my Kelly Hoppen Buddha behind the loo, then moved him to the table, as he felt a bit disrespectful there, but still there was something missing. What we needed, I decided, was a new bathroom cabinet.

I’d recently spotted just the thing, I remembered, on one of my frequent detours to the antiques warehouse on the way to Wootton Bassett (or Wooden Bassett, as my neighbour Pete would have it. Or often just Bassett – being some 12 miles distant from Wiltshire’s only other Bassett, Compton Bassett, and therefore unlikely to be confused with it). H frowned when I suggested more furniture buying: “I don’t think this is quite the time to be spending money,” he told me, sternly – just as well I’d neglected to mention to him a recent visit I'd had by a man named Colin – a purveyor of woodburning stoves by trade – who I'd invited to peer up my flue in order to ascertain the expensiveness (or – ridiculously hopefully – otherwise) of installing one of his longed-for appliances.

I needed to make an excuse to pop out. We needed more moss for the hanging baskets and H couldn’t be dispatched to the garden centre after his faux pas earlier that day when he asked my friend Sally who works there whether she had a Hairy Chervil. “I’ll write it down and let you know whether I can get one from the wholesaler,” agreed Sally, through pursed lips. Her patience with H’s increasingly ambitious colour-supplement-inspired planting schemes is beginning, I suspect, to wear a little thin.

Unfortunately, Sally's garden centre lies on the other side of Malmesbury in the opposite direction from the antiques emporium. I also realised a trip to the petrol station might be necessary in order to accommodate the excessive milage I was about to embark on, but these were minor, if irritating details. I'd simply have to drive quickly, I decided and somehow explain away the materialisation of a new piece of furniture in the bathroom later. The item in question might even no longer be available – there was no sense in precipitating an argument without reason. Anyway, by the time it had been duly feng-shuied into place, I’d have rearranged the bathroom entirely and H would hardly notice the little chest was there – his career would already be in the ascendant, and that, after all, was all that mattered. I would cross these bridges when I came to them, I decided.

Avoiding tractors and engaging in games of chicken with boy racers along the single-lane sections of backroad, I swung into the garden centre and picked up the moss along with some gossip about a car accident that had demolished half the Indian Restaurant on the Market Cross and sent two people to hospital (see – there are worse drivers than me, H) and a couple of bushy courgette plants – if it came to it, I could possibly use them as camouflage whilst smuggling the little chest into the house.

As luck would have it, when I arrived at the antiques place in a state of high expection, the little chest was still there – although inexplicably, the little drawers seemed now to be missing, and a thorough search of the immediate vicinity proved fruitless. It was now, however, being offered at a hefty discount, so I snapped it up in the hope that some baskets I’d bought from Ikea several years ago might fit. Flushed with the joy of this unexpected saving, I allowed myself a quick poke around and took measurements of a table that might fit nicely in our kitchen, eyeing up a tempting pile of Spode china en passant, however just managed to stop myself in the nick of time from wandering into the garden furniture section, as there was no saying what I might espy there to compliment our new, although yet-to-be-ordered pergola...

Somehow or other, I managed to spirit my guilty purchase in, by sleight of hand and a bit of deft handiwork with the courgettes, and a productive fifteen-minutes or so saw grubby tubs of own-brand shaving paraphernalia confined out of sight to the new wicker drawers and replaced by glossy products replete with the kind of smart, manly packaging and burgeoning with royal endorsements that might spur H on to greater things career-wise – a far, far cry, at any rate, from the realms of the languid goat. How can all my efforts fail to have the desired effect?

Watch this space, ye gainsayers all. Watch this space…

PS If anyone would like an ex-bathroom copy of The Languid Goat or Expect The Worst, just drop me a line. Personally, I can see the attraction of a Languid Goat under certain, non-career-related circumstances – particularly if you happen to be married to a Capricorn who's inclined to be a bit on the tubby side. I cannot however be held responsible for its Feng-Shui effects on anyone else's husband.