Naming the Bear

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‘My bear is called “Anger”.’ the manic sales assistant stated flatly in the teddy bear shop.

We eyed her warily, and gingerly edged past her to the teddy bear section. We were buying a teddy bear for my cousin’s new baby that was expected sometime in the New Year. The teddy bear shop allows you to make and name your own bear.


The teenager set to work choosing the teddy and then getting it stuffed at the nearby machine. He even sat on the computer and filled in its ‘birth certificate’.

‘What have you called it?’ The scary shop assistant asked breathing down our necks. ‘Cuddles!’ she sneered in disgust. ‘Well that’s original.’

We hurriedly left carrying the teddy bear in a box.

At home the teenager eased Cuddles out of the box and cuddled him. ‘He’s so sweet.’ the teenager said. ‘Can I keep him?’ He was looking at me with irresistible big puppy dog eyes.

I had to agree.

The bear ousted other creatures that had once been close to his heart: a stuffed Nessi, an elongated Border collie dog draft excluder, and a kettle.

As a youngun the teenager had preferred to share his bed with electrical appliances rather than teddy bears.

There was one memorable night when a friend had babysat for me.

‘Oh he’s fine. He’s fast asleep.’ she’d said on my return.

I went upstairs to check on him.

He was indeed fast asleep, though his bed looked like a scrap heap.

First, I had to fold away the umbrella that hid him completely. Then I had to begin extracting a variety of plugs, leads and kettles that he was entwined around. Finally, I had to ease his arms away from the vacuum cleaner that he was lovingly hugging.

So I was pleased that the teenager was finally going through the teddy bear stage.

‘Cuddles’ is a great name for a bear.

So seeing Sudanese men baying for blood and demanding that a woman be killed for allowing the children in her class to call a teddy bear ‘Mohammed’ is something I find sickening and disturbing.


A bear is a thing of comfort and something to cling to in the darkest hours; rather like religious beliefs. The children chose the name that they liked the best. The name that was special to them and that signified something safe to them. No doubt if they had all made their own individual teddy bears in the teddy bear shop most of them would have left clutching a teddy bear called Mohammed.


It makes me wonder what these edgy protestors in the Sudanese streets waving their knives in the air call their teddy bears when they climb into their beds at night after saying their prayers.

Perhaps ‘Anger’ is top of their list of names too.

Reckoning without the Rain

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It’s been a bad year for frogs.
They did spawn in the pond as they’ve done for years; but this year there were no tadpoles. Perhaps one of the late frosts was to blame.
This year the fish spawned instead.
Over the summer there were hundreds of tiny goldfish hiding amongst the overgrown oxygenating plants.



I wanted them all to live: but there was no way a hundred little fish would be able to survive in my pocket handkerchief pond.

They had to be re-homed.

Luckily a friend who is a gardener had recently built a series of ponds, for his employer, and he needed goldfish.

It sounded idyllic: deep ponds, lots of food, flowing water and best of all no other fish. So I drained my pond bucket by slow bucketfuls, scooping out the tiny goldfish until all that was left was stinking, black, jellied mud. This black sticky mud stained all it touched leaving me with snaky black tattoos down my arms. I scraped it all of it out, diluting it like a homeopath until I was sure there were no tiny goldfish left.

It took days.

Still I’m sure the rich man would have done the same for me.

The last four tiny goldfish that I found I kept in a square glass vase in the kitchen, while their siblings travelled off to their new utopian life.

My pond was decimated.
Not only had I removed the fish but also all the tiny microscopic life that had been thriving there.
I was a murderer.

The pond consists of two deep parts and there is an underwater ridge that separates the two sections. The large fish had been kept in one section while I’d drained the other.

My four tiny captive goldfish looked miserable too. They watched me as I chopped orange carrots with undisguised fright, yearning for eyelids.

They fled, when I sang and danced on the cold kitchen tiles, yearning for fins that could plug their ears.

Worse they hated it when they swirled in the mixing bowl while I washed the green curtains of algae from their windows.

I had to put them back.

I figured I could put the larger goldfish in the deeper part of the pond. Then I could lower the water level so that the ridge would isolate the shallower section from the other; then I could replant some of the pondweed and set my four captives free in the sanctuary of the shallow part of the pond. I’d left the mud in this part of the pond in the hope that its microscopic life would be able to cling on and repopulate the whole pond one day.
Gently I released the four younguns into their new home.
I saw them briefly swimming merrily together doing a full circuit.
A few days later I saw the bubbles.
Not methane, but the belches of a tench, which was languishing in predatorial style in its mud bath emporium, and burping with satisfaction.
My heart sank.
A few days later a huge heron landed in the garden and gazed at the pond before taking flight.
I sighed again.
Then it rained and I couldn’t go out to see if there were any traces of the tiny goldfish.
Then it rained some more.
Of course I’d forgotten to take rain into account. The water level of the pond has of course risen up and the larger goldfish can once more swim freely over the ridge.

And they’ve done so.

Latest News: To date there has been no sign of the tiny fish.

Cutting the Rope

Hammy used to get out at night.

He used to be able to climb up to a gap in the ceiling of his cage. It was amazing to see. He would, in a Joe Simpson mountaineering style, place his right paws on the craggy edges of his wheel and his left against the slippy ice-like smoothness of the tube that led to his attic bedroom. Then without ropes he would lever himself gracefully up to the summit. Once out he would then roam the pinnacles of books and magazines before scrambling down to the lower valleys of the downstairs rooms.

After exploring this dark world, he would then return to the soft down of his bed. First climbing up a plastic tube to regain his cage, and then by scrambling up another tube to reach his attic bedroom.

The kitchen was his favourite place. He would always explore it in a clockwise direction; and I would occasionally leave little piles of food in corners to make his explorations worthwhile. He was our own personal midnight Dyson.

Over time he stopped getting out at night.

A few weeks ago he seemed unable to reach his attic bedroom so I made him a warm soft down bed at the bottom of his cage.

Two mornings ago I was alarmed to find him dragging one of his legs. He had somehow got the down twisted like a rope around his left hind leg. I cut him free it; then I had to cut away a bracelet of down that was still tightly wrapped around his leg like a tourniquet.

That evening I checked him out. His foot was swollen but looked as if it would be all right. I placed him in the kitchen so he could enjoy a wander hoping also that the cool kitchen tiles would help his swollen foot.

To my alarm Hammy began to walk in circles like a clockwork mouse.

I fear that our Hammy might be getting close to touching the void.

Yellow

I emerged. There was crack in the cocoon and I was breaking free and stretching my wings.


I was looking outwards through the train window. In the distance a squirrel tiptoed hurriedly across an icy wall. The train eased slowly away from the station. Long thin November shadows cast by the morning sun over the frosty fields were wonderful to see. There was space in the carriage to stretch and breathe. No one knew anyone else and we sat in an equality of silence: blobs of potential colour.

Then the train stopped and more people got on.


Broken tangled fragments of conversation like strands of coloured yarns bound friends together repelling strangers to the darker regions of their own thoughts.

The elegant people opposite me, the one young, the other old, were dressed in rich tones of subtle complementing colours: neatly cut. They spoke with an assurance of smiles. I caught phrases, an odd word here and there. They were going to the city perhaps to launch a new fragrance upon the world; or maybe to reveal a new line of fashion, bright with colours. They spoke of wood, not of oak veneer, but real of real solid oak, which would look nice in the cloakroom.

Opposite them I greyed and looked inwards unpicking the stitches of my life.
When the train slipped into the station, I stepped once more into the colouring book world of bright sunlight.


Which way to go?


The building ate me up as I entered its shadows and climbed its teeth of steps. I walked through its cavernous echoing stomach then into its long intestinal corridors. There were moving walkways that I moon-hopped along.


I’d found the venue: the ‘Design and Technology Exhibition ‘in hall ten. We had to queue to register. Already I could feel the pull of the lights within. My name was printed; and once labelled like goods I was allowed inside.


I was drawn to the bright things; the things that glittered and sparkled, tiny lights that shone through diaphanously thin plastics. I flittered on to the gauzy materials and the soft multicoloured woven fabrics. I touched the warmth of felt and the chill of silky fabrics. I watched thin, skeletal leaves being ironed into a fusion of multicoloured glittering strands. They were made into a bowl that when lifted had shimmering edges that floated in the air and caught the breeze.


Someone else was quietly painting a bowl with deft sure strokes of colour. Nearby, great noisy machines repelled me as they screeched and cut metal and wood.

It was a market place: prices were high but ten percent off if you buy now they said.

Some stall holders were friendlier than others. Some with a cursory glance turned their backs on me and continued their corporate chat.

Above some of the stalls was the word ‘PSH’, a word that suggested to me the sound a train makes when closing its doors leaving a station, or a whisper.


It stood for Primary, Secondary and Higher I eventually realised.


I felt the discrimination before I knew the reason why; like a child not knowing why faces are turned from them. I had not noticed the yellow stripe on my name tag that proclaimed that I was from a primary school. It was an unsubtle apartheid.


Yellow: the colour used in our school to denote the bottom group. Yellow: the colour used to make a star that led its wearers to annihilation was here being used here to identify the primary school teachers.


We sat through lectures where we were told of our yellow-bellyed cowardice when teaching D&T.


While we, when we thought of our Cinderella subject, thought about budget constraints “you can have fifteen pounds to spend” (that was once my allowance for a whole year which led inevitably to a lack of resources). Or we thought of the perpetual motion machine of changing schemes of work and policies, “We don’t do bridges anymore!” (Damm! just when we’d become the Isambard Kingdom Brunels of the classroom). We considered the time constraints (a Pandora’s box of issues here, far too painful to open). We thought of thirty children all needing help and support with different aspects of their project at the same time. We thought of children with behavioural issues; children with special needs; children nearly arrived in the classroom from abroad who are told to, “Put the cam on the crankshaft!” We thought of our deaf children who leave the room for special time in their unit and return to find that their classroom world is even more bewildering place on their return.


Then worst of all we thought of our own lack of knowledge.



'Look at this.' He points to a slide of children standing dismally around a table of yellow painted cardboard boxes. 'Terrible, no imagination at all.'



We squirm in our chairs.



'These were lunch boxes. The children could have added decoration and compartments. They could have researched catches; but when I spoke to the teacher she said she'd finished with them.' He sighs.



We sigh too for different reasons. We know the teacher's constraints. We hope she was teasing him.


‘Don’t make the chassis of the car with the cut dowelling and paper corners,’ the expert says ‘it takes too long.’


Now he tells us. We’ve spent hours trying to locate the items in the catalogue and ordering them.


‘Use cardboard, this sort,’ he says waving a piece in the air.


We are hungry for his words, we have been starving in the ghettos and he is offering us salvation.


‘Make your own wheels,’ he says and demonstrates ordinary paper wrapped around a thin piece of dowelling.


‘Put glue into a syringe (without a needle) and then you’ll be able to get glue in just the right place with less mess. And use a paper clip when you need to seal it.’


‘Use straws from Starbucks! They’re bigger, stronger and they’ll fill the dowelling.’ He says. ‘I suppose you’ve already tried fitting dowelling into ordinary straws?’ he asks, noting our world weary nods. ‘It doesn’t work does it!’ he smiles wickedly, while we close our eyes sighing and remembering.


He gives us invaluable tips and advice. ‘Don’t let the children get glue on the foil, when it dries it will be invisible and the electrics won’t work.’


We are entranced by the simplicity of his ideas and the strength of the finished products.
‘Come and see,’ he says and we swarm around the nectar of his ideas. We have been fed crumbs of hope and we might just survive.


I leave yearning for the expensive coloured gossamer threads.



Sadly, I know that instead of their bright colours that my house will become a permanent storage unit for dull brown cardboard with the occasional green Starbucks straw thrown in for good measure.



And in the darkness, as the train’s windows drains any colour from my reflection, and I am reduced to a shadowy being, I realise that I am more moth than butterfly.

How to be the World’s Worse Mum Step 8 The Football

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I’ve never been any good at sport.

My myopic and astigmatic eyes change the shape of any incoming tennis ball to that of a flying bat that’s been crossed bred with a twelve-armed starfish.

This problem has over time, caused me to sweep a lot of empty air.

At least I’d be able to see a football. Well that was the theory.
Long ago, I'd bought a football and took the teenager, when he was just a toddler (though showing marked teenager tendencies) into the nearest park and we'd attempted to kick the ball around.

The ball I’d bought was apparently made of solid iron covered in plastic. Neither of us could kick the thing without dislocating toes. Despondently, I dumped it in the boot of the car; where it has remained ever since; scoring goals of its own whenever I took a corner too fast, and where it makes strange bouncing sounds if ever I stop too suddenly.

‘No, I haven’t got anybody trapped inside the boot.’ I’d explain to nervous passengers who became wide-eyed and concerned on hearing the strange sounds.

They never believed me.

‘Just here will do fine,’ they’d reply. ‘You can drop me off just here,’ they’d say. ‘No, it doesn’t matter about the torrential rain. Here will be fine,’ they’d insist.

There was one occasion when I also had a Furby in the boot of the car. ‘Oh no,’ the Furby cried as the roving football bounced into it and woke it up. ‘Ohhhhhhh! I’m hungry,’ came the muffled cry.

‘Can you hear that?’ my passenger had asked, who was already holding tightly onto their seat belt due to my white-knuckle ride driving.

‘Oh that’s just Furby,’ I’d replied.

The Furby began to make some gagging noises. ‘Ah, ah, ah,’

‘Here will do fine,’ the passenger had said no doubt convinced that I was some sort of people trafficker and had some poor foreigner called Furby bound and gagged in the boot of the car. ‘You can put me down here.’

The football has recently been discovered by the teenager.

‘Let’s go,’ he says. He gets ready to kick the ball.

I stand in the downpour, a reluctant goalie. The ball curves towards me; it is winged with land mine spikes. I duck. It curls past me and rolls into the nettles.

‘Ah, ah, ah.’ I say as I retrieve it.

The teenager is berating my efforts, ‘This is Wayne Rooney’s football school,’ he says in a Russian accent. He kicks another ball past me. ‘You are useless.’

We are playing football on the old disused railway line. It is getting very dark and we accidentally frighten pheasants in a nearby covert who in a panic flap up over us; their wings making a heavy sound like the helicopters in ‘Apocalypse Now’.

I can’t tell what is ball and what is bird, but I’m trying to save them all.

‘Goal,’ shouts the teenager. ‘Goal.’

‘You can put me down here.’ I finally manage to gasp.

I’m exhausted.

‘I’m hungry,’ says the teenager. ‘Let’s drive home.’

And there are rockets exploding over the town as we drive back.

Walking Shadow

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The room had the smell of fresh paint.
There was a brightly coloured carpet and rows of empty white-glossed cubicle shelves. Walls had been knocked through to make a more suitable nursery.

Along the corridor was a small room stacked high with all the nursery equipment that had been stored there until the renovations were complete.

‘We have to move all these boxes into the nursery,’ the bright voice of the nursery teacher proclaimed.

‘Okay,’ I said rolling up my sleeves. I liked the sound of ‘we’. It would be fun working together to put the room straight.

I was going to be working in the nursery one morning a week. It was a whole new experience for me. It was the first time I’d ever stepped through the nursery’s doors.

‘So if you could just bring the boxes in and put them in the middle of the room,’ the nursery teacher said, ‘then we can decide where to put things,’ she added indicating her teaching assistant.

‘No problem,’ I said a little diminished.

‘Now I want you to put things just here,’ the nursery teacher said. Indicating the bull’s eye coloured circle on the carpet and walking to indicate the exact spot. She evidently doubted whether I was capable of discerning the centre of a room.

‘Okay.’ I said nodding. ‘I’ll do that. It’s a good idea. After all I don’t know where things go. I’ll start getting the boxes.’

I wished I hadn’t worn my best new clothes when I saw what I’d been asked to move. The storage room had been piled up to shoulder height with boxes.
I was dwarfed.

There were also some awkwardly shaped items that had been placed perilously on top of it all: grubby play mats and dirty plastic toys. The sight could have won a prize at Tate Modern!

It would have to be dismantled with care if I wanted to survive and not have ‘She was crushed by Sticklebricks’ written on my tombstone.’

I sighed and picked up the first of many boxes. They varied in weight. Some were deceptively light filled with the ethereal faery effects of nursery education: glitter, sequins and sparking shimmering stuff. Others were heavy with the earthy weight of nursery stories, fables and tales.

I carried them along the corridor, inwardly grieving as I heard the bubble of noise from the children in the reception class and heard the teacher’s voice as he directed the lesson. I was no more than a passing shadow.


The pair in the nursery were debating where to put a teddy bear. Finally, it found its home on a shelf as I lowered another heavy box of books to the floor.

Over time boxes were beginning to spread out from the bull’s eye of the carpet.

‘Where are my teabags?’ the nursery teacher suddenly asked in a strident voice the next time I re-entered the classroom.

‘I don’t know.’ I said. There was no reply.

I lowered the heavy box of wooden building bricks to the carpet.

‘I wonder where my teabags are.’ she said again in a flustered manner as on my next visit I lowered the box holding the heavy wooden pieces of the train track to the ground.

‘I haven’t seen them,’ I replied brightly.

Again, I was ignored.

The classroom assistant was valiantly attempting to keep up with the job of decanting the boxes I was bringing in.

The nursery teacher on my return had found her tea bags and now held a hot steaming cup of tea in her hands as I staggered in with the toy garages. She stood and watched thoughtfully sipping her tea.

The next box was lighter full of dressing up clothes.

‘Ooh,’ said the nursery teacher. She took a small scarf from the box and held it up; then she left the nursery with it, went down the corridor, past the room which I was steadily dis-embowelling and began chatting in the office. Half an hour later she returned, passing the storage room once again still carrying the scarf, and walking past me without a word as I staggered out backwards from the room with the next heavy box.

On my return trip to the nursery I could sense resentment as I lowered the box to the floor.

Each box I brought in with its grubby innards was spoiling the pristine look of the freshly painted nursery. My Tate Modern sculpture of piled high boxes were evidently not at all to their liking in its new arrangement.

As I struggled down the corridor with yet another box, the Headteacher walked past me without a glance or a word, and I realised I had slipped into invisibility.

The Head was standing chatting amicably with the others as I staggered in.

I was aware of them attempting to focus on me as something just on the peripheral edge of their vision: something barely discernable, as I eased the heavy box full of paint materials to the ground,

‘Paints go over there,’ the nursery teacher said sharply pointing to the far side of the nursery. ‘Put the paints on that shelf?’ she added addressing me like a servant.

With a servant’s reticence I complied as they stood and watched.

The three of them were continuing their conversation about the colours of fabrics when I next returned and attempted to ease a small cupboard to the floor.

‘Now that goes in the home corner,’ the nursery teacher said in a sharp tone breaking off her conversation with the Head. ‘Can’t you put things where you can see they need to go?’ the nursery teacher added tetchily.

The Head teacher was eyeing me critically.

Back aching, clothes despoiled, hair pulled from its grips I staggered across the room with the item to where I imagined the home corner to be.

‘No, that’s not the home corner,’ the nursery teacher said with exasperation. ‘It’s over there.’ If she had had a whip in her hand it would have cracked on my back.

All three watched with narrowed eyes as I manoeuvred the item to the correct position. I wiped the sweat from my eyes when it was successfully positioned and smiled at them, but they had turned from me and had resumed their discussion of fabric colours; the nursery teacher idly twirling the soft red scarf around her delicate hand. ‘I want bright primary colours,’ the Head was saying.

Exhausted, I brought my last box into the room. I was no longer able to stand straight.

‘I have to go now,’ I called.

The classroom assistant smiled. Thankfully she could still see me.

‘I’ll see you next week,’ I called brightly.

‘Bye,’ I called. And left in the silence that surrounds the invisible.