Deepest Darkest England

Don’t choose Virgin Media

2012-01-23T15:21:00.001-01:00

It takes a lot for me to change service providers there has to be some kind of push. This year I got such a push from Virgin Media.

They’d posted through my door over the years hundreds of leaflets, but this time I actually read one.

Generally they had gone into the bin unread because I was already with Virgin Media, but this time I hesitated and read the leaflet. It seemed there was a package on offer at a quarter of the price I was currently paying.

So I rang them up and was told that as an existing customer this offer was not available to me.

So I simmered for a while, thinking about this, and months later went on a price comparison website for other service providers. It seemed I could pay a fraction of my current bills if I joined another company. And they would do everything regarding the transfer they claimed.

So I signed up.

But a few weeks later I had a niggling doubt that the, ‘We will do everything claim’ might not be entirely true. So I checked with them and found I was right. I was joining them for telephone and broadband and it seemed they had only told BT of this intention and not Virgin Media.

Alarmed by this I contacted Virgin Media immediately guessing that they would require time to elapse before they would cancel the service.

I needed the service to be cancelled in December on the 19^th but I was told (as I feared) that it would only be cancelled in January on the 13th.

However, I was assured that the payment I made in December would indeed be my last.

I took that to mean that the payments I was making by direct debit paid for the service in advance.

On the 13^th of January at the witching they did indeed cancel the service and I activated in full my new provider’s service.

A few days later I realised that a payment had been taken from my bank account. I hurried to the bank got the money reinstated. It had been taken by Virgin Media. I cancelled the direct debit thinking perhaps their accounts department had slipped up. Interestingly, BT had not taken any further direct payment for January so I assumed that BT had got it right, and Virgin Media had got it wrong.

Today, I received a letter from Virgin Media demanding full payment. I rang them up immediately expecting to learn it was a mistake.

The man I spoke to who had a strong Indian accent and also spoke so rapidly it was hard for me to catch his words. But he explained that I was mistaken and that there had been no mistake on Virgin Media’s part. It seemed I was paying for a service in arrears which totally contradicted what I’d been early told in December. Confusingly, he then claimed that this January payment was my December payment!

When I spoke to someone else I was told there was a discount. Suddenly the amount I owed had magically almost halved; though how that could be if I was paying in arrears for a service that had stopped on the dot as they had said, I really don’t understand.

I again went over what I’d been told in December, and how I had been led to believe my December payment to them would be my last in order to conform to their policies, but was told again and again that I owed this new amount.

I then pointed out my previous length of time as a loyal customer, seven years, one who had always paid by direct debit and so was therefore reliable and asked for these few pounds owed pounds to be waived; especially as I had acted in good faith throughout in accordance to what I had been told. This cut no ice.

So, ‘You are not prepared to offer any goodwill?’

It seemed they were not.

‘Even though I’ve obviously been paying a higher rate than most of your other customers for years?’

This it seemed this was of no concern to them. But some admission that I had been a well milked fatted cow was confirmed when he said:

‘You should have changed to another package!’

‘But I tried to and was told they weren’t available for existing customers.’

‘They aren’t available for existing customers.’

And so thus we went around in circles.

‘So for the sake of a few pounds you are sacrificing my goodwill? You obviously don’t care about winning back my custom?’

It seemed that was indeed the case. An amended letter demanding a new amount will apparently to be sent to me.

‘Then I shall tell the world never to choose Virgin Media if this is the way you treat your customers.’

He was unperturbed.

And so… because I am a person of my word, unlike Virgin Media, I would just like to say:

Don’t ever choose Virgin Media!

The Devil Comes Knocking

2011-11-23T13:23:00.001-01:00

The banging on the door was heavy and most insistent. Whoever was there wanted me to come quick. It took me a moment to realise that the banging was on my door, but as I got up I realised it was actually coming from the kitchen.

Somebody was in the kitchen!

Not somebody something.

A manic creature which was shaking the kitchen to pieces.

I rushed from where I was sitting hearing things crash behind me as I did so, was that the lap top that had just fallen to the floor?

The banging noise in the kitchen was coming from the washing machine which had gone into a spin and was battling with an uneven load. I switched the machine off and as it sighed to a halt I looked around at the damage.

The washing machine in its shaking and rattling had managed to dislodge the wooden plinths from the adjacent work units. They now leaned out just above the floor revealing builders rubble in the crevice beyond.

‘Won’t take a moment to put them back,’ I thought after extracting my sopping dressing gown from the machine and draping it on the bench outside.

After sweeping up some of the rubble first and wiping the tiles I set to work. The small plinth on the right hand side slotted back easily into place. Cheered by this I now attempted to put the other plinth back.

It wouldn’t move.

It was jammed.

I tried to shift the washing machine but it wouldn’t budge.

The few second job was already eating away the minutes.

Eventually I ended up like an upside down crab on the floor using my feet to push it back into place.

The plinth didn’t move.

I was afraid if I took it out that I would never get it back in place.

But I did.

Minutes later I repeated the crab dance on the kitchen floor.

And to my great joy the plinth slipped back into place.

‘Hah!’ I thought. ‘I did it!’

I was thinking this as I opened the cupboard door under the sink to throw away the onion peelings and carrot tops and tails.

To find that the bin had been shaken from its place and failed to open out just as the peelings dropped from the plate.

After that was fixed I dared to check on the lap top. It was fine. It had been a pile of books that had tumbled to the floor after my hasty exit.

Phew!

Small Birds Need to Fly Even Lower!

2011-11-23T09:28:00.001-01:00

The birds don’t sing anymore in the evenings.

I had thought it was the season, or perhaps the disappearance of birds that had caused this emptiness and quietness.

It was while on a recent visit to Barnsdale Gardens as I said my goodbyes to a friend that she chanced to mention birdsong. She could hear them merrily tweeting away in the gardens behind us whilst others she said were singing in nearby high trees.

I strained to hear.

But all I could hear the low rumble and whoosh of cars on the road. I did hear the flat call of a duck from somewhere close, and I could hear my friend’s voice as she turned and pointed in the direction of another small bird she could hear.

But I could hear nothing.

It was quite a shock to realise that something as precious as birdsong had vanished and was unlikely to ever return.

Whenever I read the I Ching it usually tells me, whilst at the same time emphasising my lowly status in the world that the small bird must fly low for its song to be heard. A lovely poetic piece of writing.

So it seems small birds need to fly even lower, and perhaps even perch on my shoulder for me to have a chance of ever hearing them again.

Sword Dancer

2011-10-30T19:06:00.001-01:00

I’ve become a sword dancer.

‘Come at seven,’ they said.

On a day rainy day I pulled into the car park against the gothic pile of a church and then waited for others to arrive.

I was on time, but the people who were to unlock the hall doors were late. It was a cold night and raining. Thankfully some degree of prescience meant that I had a hot water bottle with me.

The hall eventually was opened up and the sword dancers entered.

It was my first lesson.

Thankfully the ‘blades’ looked nothing like swords.

“Hold the swivel in your right hand,” I was ordered.

I puzzled over the handles wondering which one was the swivel. The ‘swivel’ obvious the others had to be pointed out to me. It was a handle that moved. The wooden handle on the other end was fixed.

So that was how the illusion of the dance was created, the handle moved saving twisted arms from falling off.

Before too long I was walking under ‘blades’.

These were ‘rapper’ blades apparently used by miners to scrap the coal dust from the backs of ponies.

“Don’t duck,” a woman called.

It was all right for her. When the arches formed she was quite safe, being so short in statue, whereas for me the blades were circling just above my head.

“Don’t duck,” she yelled again. But I did, ignoring her, and wisely so it turns out as the blades narrowly missed slicing into the forehead of a tall girl opposite me.

Somehow we weaved in and out, formed what they called ‘nuts’, spun around and picked up our blades anew.

Afterwards, I rang the ex-teenager, ‘I’m now sword dancer,’ I proclaimed wanting to impress, but I left out the information about pits, ponies and coal dust.

I’m a Man!

2011-10-19T02:35:00.001-01:00

In the traditional folk dancing group I have just joined women outnumber men. I was so impressed by the willingness of some of the women to take the man’s role, so that so many more could then enjoy the dance. They slipped bands over them so that we could identify them more readily. And they did so with minimum fuss.

I had wondered if men could as easily take the part of a woman if ever it was necessary.

The other evening I got my answer.

One of the dances called for a set of nine people. The Caller wanted the men to stand in the middle with a woman on either side.

By chance in my group of nine people this worked out perfectly. And we also had real men and real women. Except, I noticed a man in one of the woman’s position. I was impressed. By taking the woman’s part in this dance he was allowing the other eight people to dance.

Nobody said anything to him, as we went through the walk through.

Then by chance he looked around at the other sets and realised the role he was playing.

If this had been a woman playing the part of a man she would simply have got on with it. She would not have made any fuss. Would not have caused a hold up. But not this man.

“Hang on a minute,” he called out, preventing The Caller from explaining any more of the dance steps. “I can’t do this. I’m a man!”

In this particular dance it really didn’t matter who was who, at all. There were right hand stars, and left hand stars, and we then had to follow this person or that person. There were no paired couple steps at all. It was a dance like a whirl of cogs rather than of romantic hearts. And we already knew this from the walk through. Everyone knew this.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter, _____,” someone, perhaps his wife said.

“But this is a part for a woman!” he protested, “and I’m a man.”

His voice was getting louder, and I also wondered if he’d also lowered it an octave or two to emphasise the point. He blustered, inflating his chest with air.

“I’m a man!”

His shoulders were flexed, he-man style, as if he was about to wrestle a woolly mammoth.

The others’ cajoling had no effect on him.

“I’m a man,” he declared.

His arm went into the air. He wanted a woman who was sitting out to take his place.

A dainty elderly lady did so.

As the he-man still chuntering his man-tra sat down with arms folded across his chest, and with his legs set apart.

He seemed too large for his chair, but soon as the dance began we forgot all about him.

He was after all only a man!

The Devil’s Chain

2011-10-09T19:08:00.001-01:00

I’m standing still and everything around me is in confusion.

“Don’t stand still,” the caller implores.

I look for hands to hold, to make the lady’s chain. There are none.

Someone grabs me, it’s an unknown woman, “I’m your man,” she says. She spins and releases me, but I’m now going the wrong way.

“The woman should be on your right!” the caller’s exasperated voice yells.

I’m unravelling the complicated weave of the dance. Everything has become chaotic. We stop to reform and wait for the beat to reach a beginning again.

I try once more. It goes half right, but there is one part I can’t recall, I’m suppose to peel away in a half-eight or something, and then do something dozy with the man, who is it the woman-man, and then step to the left, or was it the right?

On the next dance a woman elbows me sharply in the chest and I wince. I think she was trying to show me the right way to go, but it might have been deliberate.

I’m trying to be light-footed, to twirl on toes. I greet the ones I walk towards with a smile.

“Don’t smile,” the caller snaps.

I realise that the others don’t.

They are simply mechanical parts in the machine of the dance. With tight thin lips they shunt forwards and backwards.

The expert real men occasionally grab me tightly and march me firmly into position, before releasing me to my twirling fate elsewhere.

“Keep the woman on your right,” the caller snaps.

I puzzle over rights and lefts. First we are couple number two and then we couple number one. Now we are couple number three and improper!

The brief rehearsal hasn’t been enough. I’ve forgotten the next bit as I’m grabbed. Was it three steps then a half-turn? Do I go forwards or back?

By the end of the evening there are none that want us to join their set. and I can’t blame them. I am disturbing the free flow harmony. But some do join us eventually.

“Don’t dance it. Walk it!”

I realise this is what the others are doing, with flat footed accuracy.

There are more women to men, so many of the women are having to double up as men. I don’t know who is a man and who is a woman anymore. The men-women also get confused and remember the woman’s steps and not the man’s

The men have none of this confusion. They have never been asked to dance a woman’s part. They have no idea how difficult this can be. How alien and confusing.

“Right hand, left hand,” the caller bellows.

There is an interval and the floor clears.

We sit. I’m hot and sweating, but feeling quite please with how it’s going. I got some of the steps right.

My friend and I were in an animated conversation, When the caller comes a calling.

I look up.

He’s not happy.

“We’re not that bad are we? my friend asks.

“Well, yes, you are,” he says.

My friend is mortified, and I feel upset as it is her birthday and I’d said I’d accompany her, as she wanted to dance.

“He’s just watching us,” she said.

I’m embarrassed.

When the next dance is announced we gamely stand up again.

“Oh, I’m going to go through that again,” the caller says wearily during the next walk through. “You two change places.”

Everyone stands still to watch.

“We’ll go through that again.”

He dictates the moves, but I’m struggling to remember the earlier steps.

The music begins, and I am whirled into position. Some dragged me here. Some drag me there. I’m cajoled by some and yanked into position by the exasperated male experts. But there are some delights. A half-blind man cheers whenever I repeatedly find his waiting arms.

“Here she is again,” he laughs, and I’m delighted by his sense of fun as he promenades me back to my partner.

At the end of the dance, the caller jokes, “I’ve been watching the newcomers and calling for them, I knew they were behind. I didn’t realise they were four beats behind the rest.”

He gets a laugh, but it is embarrassing. He is watching my every mis-step.

I am delighted when a real man takes my friend away to dance. Glad that she is given respite from my errors and clumsiness.

Right at the very end this same man reappears again He kindly walks with me in the dance. Shadowing me so that with this one I can not go wrong.

I am grateful. I think the dance was called ‘The Devil’s Chain’. First I’m on the inside and then I’m on the outside. He indicates the next person I am to dance with. These men grab me with a fierceness worthy of the devil himself. I am touched by this help. Then when I look for him he is ahead of me seated on a chair and smiling to see that I’m doing the dance properly.

I’m happy and rosy-red when the folk dance evening finishes.

It was fun.

But the next day, I fret that perhaps I ruined it for the tight lipped, flat footed, elbowing dancing experts who had probably wanted a lovely evening of intricate woven dancing and there I was unravelling it all.

Bert Jansch

2011-10-08T16:28:00.001-01:00

I don’t know the names of the people who sewed my clothes, made my carpets or designed and made my furniture. I make my tea not knowing who made my life so much better by designing a kettle with a flip lid or who enhanced my enjoyment by choosing that particular blend of tea. They are nameless and legion. Perhaps every item should have a tag on it. this was made by … and brought to you by… and then a whole list of people could be applauded for their vision and skill.

But music is different. There is a tag on every song to say who it was written by… and then there is always a singer’s name.

So we more easily moan the loss of the singer-songwriter than we do the person who designed the kettle.

So with apologises to the anonymous kettle makers who find themselves entering the pearly gates I want to pay tribute to the singer songwriter by your side whose name I do know: Bert Jansch.

I never saw him play. I was not a huge fan, but I have enjoyed so much of his music over the years. His guitar playing skills made acoustic songs hauntingly beautiful.

Sadly this troubadour, who bound the present day to the tender music of yesteryear, has passed on by; and England’s lost and ruined castles are draughtier and silent now.

My young love said to me,

My mother won't mind

And my father won't slight you

For your lack of kind.

And she laid her hand on me

And this she did say:

It will not be long, love,

Till our wedding day.

As she stepped away from me

And she moved through the fair

And fondly I watched her

Move here and move there.

And then she turned homeward,

With one star awake,

Like the swan in the evening

Moves over the lake.

The people were saying,

No two e'er were wed

But one had a sorrow

That never was said.

And I smiled as she passed

With her goods and her gear,

And that was the last

That I saw of my dear.

Last night she came to me,

My dead love came in.

So softly she came

That her feet made no din.

As she laid her hand on me,

And this she did say:

It will not be long, love,

'Til our wedding day.

Paint Stalactites

2011-10-08T06:59:00.001-01:00

I’m not very good at painting.

My window sills over the years have all grown stalactites.

These have been formed as the white gloss paint slowly drips after I’ve finished painting a window sill.

It was the warm sunshine that got me painting.

It’s a nerve-wracking procedure for me as I have to use the step ladder, and just climbing onto the first rung is scary.

I also tend to get more paint on the glass than on the window frames.

This year I sellotaped around the glass, close to the frame so that when my brush inevitably erred I could then remove the tape, and revealed… drum roll… a perfectly painted window.

That was the plan.

A week later, I removed the tape.

I even scoured along its edge with the sill so that the paint would not be pulled off the window frame itself as the tape was removed.

Sellotape has a mind of its own.

Somehow despite the soaring temperatures that week and having left the gloss paint a week to dry, some of the paint on the sellotape was still wet.

The sellotape then snapped as I tried to pull it away, leaving long thin tapering fiddly sections that I had to prise away from the glass.

I realised that somehow the paint had seeped under the sellotape.

How could that be?

‘That’s from last year’s paint job,’ I kidded myself.

The tape having broken would then writhed like a snake into as many different formations of the figure eight as it could possibly invent. Wrapping itself tightly around my fingers, so that I had to prise it off, before placing it in a heap at the top of my wobbly step ladders.

Soon there was more paint on the windows, on my fingers and on the step ladders than on the window frames themselves.

As for a nice clean paint job… well no, I’m afraid not.

And when I last checked, all the paint stalactites had grown a little longer to show that yet another year had passed.

Looks Deceive

2011-10-08T06:39:00.001-01:00

I was aware that I was being watched. I looked up and saw a woman leaning out of an upstairs window next door but one.

She was staring at me, and had probably been staring at me long before I looked up.

“Hello,” I said.

She didn’t reply but continued to stare, making me feel very uncomfortable in my own garden.

That particular house is occupied by students, a different cohort every year.

Last week, I saw the new intake for the first time.

The weather was warm and they were outside on the lawn. Two were sunbathing in what seemed to be outsized pyjamas into which they were squeezed. A young man was idly kicking a football as he stood chatting to them. A studious-looking bespectacled girl was sitting upright seemingly concentrating on the papers she was holding, whilst an older red-haired woman looked on.

I was impressed by the studious girl. She was obviously trying to work despite the others lazing around her. She was obviously keen to get a good degree and to get her studying off to a flying start.

As I glimpsed them a little later, I realised there was something wrong with this picture.

The studious girl was the focus of attention. Her hands seemed to be busy with the papers in front of her.

Then she lifted the paper up to her mouth and licked its edge.

All the time I thought she had been diligently studying she had in fact been rolling a joint.

The woman who had stared at me from the window a couple of days later and not responded to my, ‘Hello’ was breathing smoke out into the air.

So with this cohort, it looks as though the local university isn’t likely to climb any higher in the league tables this year.

The Pretty Things Sad Eye

2011-10-04T06:13:00.001-01:00

Sad Eye

Well if you ever baby,

Feel like changing your mind,

Don’t think twice just take it easy,

Anything you do will please me.

Just as long as you see me.

And if you ever baby,

Feel like starting again,

All you gotta do is phone me,

There is nothing you need show me.

Just as long as you know me.

Well I knocked on every door,

Looked on every sea and shore.

Just to find that you had left me.

You were a special one,

Like the setting of the sun,

Now it’s too late to help me.

Kimya Dawson Singing Machine

2011-09-29T07:19:00.001-01:00

We switched to Jay Leno from da Ali G show
To see some kids that we know do what they do on TV.
Sometimes I wish I was there, but mostly I just don't care
I cry and laugh and forth and back, it's all good comedy.

And there's no rhyme or reason for the changing of the seasons
Sometimes the winter lasts for months sometimes it lasts for days.
The world is an amazing place there's gaping holes in outer space
Sunburned for the first time skin is peeling off my face.

Open up your eyes and see the beauty over there
Open up your ears and be surprised by what you hear
'Cause it's not just on the radio, it's not just on the video
It isn't all downloadable, there's music everywhere.

And the fact that they divide us should be enough to unite us
We are the world so boys and girls let's all collaborate
'Cause when we play together we won't notice the bad weather
Like flashlight tag when it's real cold or kickball in the rain.

Get out there and be seen, you're lean and clean,
You're barely nineteen, you're a singing machine
Get out there and be seen, you're lean and clean,
You're barely nineteen, you're a singing machine
Get out there and be seen, you're lean and clean,
You're barely nineteen, you're a singing machine
Get out there and be seen, you're lean and clean,
You're barely nineteen, you're a singing machine
Get out there and be seen, you're lean and clean,
You're barely nineteen, you're a singing machine.

It doesn't matter what you look like, doesn't matter what you sound like
Doesn't matter if they like you, just remember to be kind.
And tell someone you miss them, tell someone you need them
Tell someone you wish you could be with them all the time

Sounds silly but it's not a game, making music makes me sane
I sing away my pain and everything turns out okay
And I’m not talking fame and glory, 'cause that's a different story
This story is about how truth and love can save the day

And Bruno said what Anders said some producer said to young Lennon
"They can't all be ballads Julian"
And Bruno said what Anders said some producer said to young Lennon
"They can't all be ballads Julian".
And Bruno said what Anders said some producer said to young Lennon
"They can't all be ballads Julian"
And Bruno said what Anders said some producer said to young Lennon
"They can't all be ballads Julian".

"They can't all be ballads Julian.”

The Eighth Deadly Sin

2011-09-27T14:54:00.001-01:00

I’m perfectly happy.

I’m enjoying the occasional windfalls like the gift of a bag of apples and some small gnarly looking potatoes for the great treasures that they are.

I’m loving the sunshine, the salmon pink hollyhock and the peacefulness of my house.

I ‘ve just enjoyed home made carrot and coriander soup. (I even grew the coriander myself from seed. Oh, it was organic seed too. From Duchy seeds.)

I’ve a few cherry tomatoes ripening outside.

All is well.

I am at peace with the world.

Except there’s one tiny little thing that’s troubling me…

I’m worried about being smug.

Worse than that I’m worried that my smiles of delight will be taken for looks of smugness.

Oh hang it!

I can’t help it!

I shall embrace this eighth deadly sin.

Today I am merrily, deliciously smug!

Astral Projection

2011-09-27T14:35:00.001-01:00

There was a saying my grandparents were fond of, “See a penny and pick it up and all the day you’ll have good luck.”

I wasn’t sure if this applied to really dirty pennies but I did pick one up and slipped it into my bag.

With the economy drive I seem to have embarked upon I was walking to the huge big Tesco store almost three miles away. I intended to exchange my remaining Polish bank notes for ones that I could actually spend.

I intended to make just one purchase; a tub of Astral moisturising cream.

I had run out of it, and as it was something my skin had become addicted to, this constituted a crisis. I had to get some.

I’d been introduced to the stuff by Karen on Kibbutz Yiron. She swore it kept her wrinkle free. Being a mere twenty-one years of age at the time, or something close to that, I was easily impressed. And she obviously had no wrinkles and was really old; I mean really, really old I thought that if it works for her it might work for me. Karen was twenty-seven…ancient.

So I exchanged the Polish notes with no difficulty in the Tesco store in the post office there and then I set about trying to find Astral Cream. I even asked somebody for help. She kindly took me back to where I’d been earlier looking and then pointed out an empty plastic container on the very bottom shelf. They were out of stock.

Undaunted, I walked back towards home via Morrisons.

In Morrisons I ask first one person who then put me onto somebody else.

It seems Morrisons are no longer selling Astral Moisturising Cream .

“There’s no demand for it,” I’m told. They stopped selling it, “three months ago.”

I walk on towards home, there is a chemist on the way. They sell tiny tubs of the stuff at exorbitant prices. I shall have to go in there.

I’m musing about the so called ‘good luck’ that my penny is bringing me as I trudge along. It might have been better had I left it on the ground.

After a journey of nearly six miles I enter the chemist shop. And begin my search.

They do have the cream on the shelf.

They even have a special offer on it.

And it’s cheaper than ever it was before.

Delighted I buy three tubs.

By the time they run out I will be ancient and my skin will resemble crocodile hide so it not longer matter much if there is none available in the future.

I drop the change into my bag and it jingles with the lucky penny as I walk home.

Chinese Rose Tea

2011-09-26T16:37:00.001-01:00

I’m on an economy drive and have just run out of tea.

For a tea drinker like me this is terrible.

I am trying to use up what is in my cupboard. What is left at the bottom of my tea caddy is not very nice. It is a spicy concoction which makes me grimace.

Even more unpleasant is what lies in my cupboard. Here are the gifts of tea, herbal infusions and the like. There is one box right at the very back of the cupboard on the top shelf. You have to stand on the shoulders of a giant to reach it. I do so and bring the pretty box down to eye level.

The wording is in Chinese. One of the ex-teenager’s friends bought it for his Chinese mother. She declared that she did not like it and so this mysterious box was somehow passed to me, and it has remained at the back of the cupboard ever since.

But now desperation forces me to try it.

The instructions are written in Chinese, but I assume that the method of brewing tea to be universal and known to all known civilisations, except for those living in North America.

I opened the box and discover a plump sachet inside. I open the sachet. There is something curled up and brown inside. It looks like a desiccated foetus. I prise it out gingerly. It does not look like tea at all. I drop it into the pot and pour boiling water over it. Then I leave it for a minute or too.

When I eventually pour it out something akin to urine fills my cup. I try it. It is tasteless, perhaps there is a hint of rose petals as suggested by the label on the packaging, but it is not tea.

Disappointed I pour the rest of the brew into the sink.

Then I look and shiver.

In the sink are blanched alien things. They look like mini starfish with octopus tentacles, that are spread out and open, and half the size of my hand. I’m guessing this was the ‘rose’ flower. But it’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen in the sink. Sort of slimy yellowy-green and transparent.

It makes me shiver…or perhaps that’s the withdrawal symptoms from the hard stuff: proper tea.

The Sounds left in the Air

2011-09-25T07:32:00.001-01:00

It is appalling to be in a place and not to see it.

I’ve been reflecting on my visit to Schindler’s Enamelware Factory in Krakow.

On the way back to the Qubus Hotel I had stepped over old railway lines overgrown with weeds vaguely wondering where they once went.

I’d then crossed the main road laced with tram tracks and found myself in a square. It was an empty place and I wondered at its large size and whether or not it was still used for markets. It was surrounded by run down buildings and a few businesses which did not appear to be thriving.

I knew where I was, and yet at the same time I did not know where I was.

I noticed an odd statue of a chair, and others beyond it; But I dismissed it as an oddity, some modern temporary art installation perhaps. And by the time I’d reached the hotel I’d forgotten this chair entirely.

Last night I watched again Schindler’s List.And saw again the Enamelware Factory, the railway lines and this square.

Equally chilling was the view at night of the ghetto in the film, with flashes of light as it was cleared with machine guns. Was this the same view I’d had from my window in the Qubus Hotel? The view I had thought of as ugly, and had thought little of at the time. How I now wish I had really looked.

Sometimes we can see things without seeing.

When I saw the bronze chair in the square I did not realise its significance. Now I understand that it was meant to represent the furniture of the Kraków Jews that they carried there following their forced removal from Kraków. This square was in the ghetto.

I’ve since learnt that the square is now called Plac Bohaterow Getta, once known as Plac Zgody Square.

Unknowing I had walked hurriedly across a place where so many murders were committed and transport selections made.

Sometimes we walk and can not feel the ground beneath our feet, or hear the sounds left in the air.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plac_Bohaterow_Getta_Krak%C3%B3w.jpg

A Memory Was All She Ever Was

2011-09-24T09:24:00.001-01:00

She’s gone.

I didn’t know until her daughter and son in law knocked on the door. I invite them in. They’ve never been in my home before and sit uncomfortably on my settee making me embarrassed about its shabbiness.

My neighbour, a woman in her seventies, has been taken into a nursing home. They’re not certain that she’ll be able to come back home. She has a mysterious rash and terrible pain in her back. No one seems to know the cause.

I bubble, saying too much, saying too little, not knowing what to say.

It is only after they’ve gone that I realise that she probably will not return. It is only today that I realise that my neighbour’s daughter has already begun to reassess where her mother should be and that back home is probably out of the question.

The other daughter is taking the tortoise today. It was her childhood pet which she’s now going to reclaim.

The blinds are closed in the kitchen and bathroom windows. I used to look to see if they were open, felt oddly comforted when the lights were on.

I feel I haven’t done enough. I remember how when last cutting the grass my neighbour had stopped and then sat on the wall. Spotting this, I’d finished the job for her.

I’d planted pink geraniums in her garden, and I’d recently cut down her two nitida bushes. I’d given her some of my home made soup and shop bought bread to try. I’d looked after her tortoise. I’d given her hot buttered crumpets when she complained about hearing a didgeridoo that kept her awake at night. And I’d chat with her over the wall if ever the sun was out.

It seems like neglect on my part that I didn’t know about her most recent suffering, and that she’d gone away on Monday and I didn’t know until Friday.

The house next door now feels terribly empty.

I don’t think her daughters will let her return, for one is kindly, and the other a practical business woman; a deadly combination.

And now it seems that my neighbour’s life has been concertinaed into this single moment, as if a memory was all she ever was.

Was this the Satellite?

2011-09-23T20:27:00.001-01:00

It’s 22:20 and I’ve just witnessed one red glowing light travelling low which seemed to burn up which was then followed by three similar lights. One of which seemed to disappear and the others then were obscured by trees.

Before the first glowing light appeared a plane was heading towards them. The lights appeared to be on a lower altitude.

Was this the tumbling down to Earth satellite?

The Blog the Search Engines Can’t Find!

2011-09-22T09:26:00.001-01:00

Hardly anyone visits this site so this post probably won’t be read for many, many years.

Even I can’t find my blog through search engines.

I typed ‘I believe in Dragons’ into Google’s search engine knowing that to be the title of one recent blog post. I then searched ‘blogs’ but there was no sign of my post, even when I added a date.

This site seems to be eluding the search engines.

Consequently, this blog is well under the radar, and visited by just a few like yourself who must have stumbled upon it by chance, and who will probably never find it again.

In the last month the stats say that people who found this place came from:

United Kingdom

226

United States

Philippines

Russia

Germany

Singapore

Ukraine

Latvia

Pakistan

France

Hello all, especially those in the Philippines, Russia, Germany, Singapore, Ukraine, Latvia, Pakistan and France. I was so surprised to find there were visitors from such countries.

And this is what you were reading…

Posts

Cue Camera Action!

18 Sep 2011

8 Pageviews

I Believe in Dragons!

17 Sep 2011

5 Pageviews

Point for Discussion

26 Aug 2011

5 Pageviews

Thank You for Visiting!

13 Sep 2011

4 Pageviews

Back to the Nursery

16 Sep 2011

4 Pageviews

Voices from the Universe

22 Sep 2011

3 Pageviews

Shut Your Row!

19 Sep 2011

3 Pageviews

Dog Sitting

21 Jul 2007

2 Pageviews

Hello…Hello

6 May 2011

2 Pageviews

The Gardener’s Chanel

21 Sep 2011 2 Pageviews

Thank you for visiting… tis music to the soul!

Waiting for Pandora Radio to Return

2011-09-22T09:08:00.001-01:00

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in United Kingdom….

This happened long ago and this site still can not be accessed from the UK. This was grievous for me as I love music.

When I was able to access Pandora I discovered music I liked. More than that I was introduced to bands that I’d never heard of before.

And then.

Guess what then happened!

I bought the music!

Yes, I bought the music I really, really liked!

I bought hundreds!

So I was supporting the music industry.

My music buying habit was stultified instantly once this Internet radio station closed its door to the UK.

I tried other stations but they were just not as easy to use and were simply not on my wavelength.

So obviously I can’t access Pandora. And if I could then I would protest loudly against any new design should they have adopted one… should I be able to see it.

I loved the old format, the design, the colours, the style, the ease of use. I loved it. Loved it!

I loved the pale blues…so should a new patterned format with circles in a dark blue background enshrouding the music information bar be used, then I would say no! The original was better. Much better. Please give me back the original instead.

I hate such updates!

I would protest loudly if I had experienced …(but being in deepest darkest England how could I possibly know of this?)… adverts that blare over a track even as it is being played.

I would also decry any sudden expansion of adverts, perhaps for ‘I’m guessing, ‘Charlies’ Angels’ suddenly exploding forwards and taking over the whole screen, especially when the music is playing beneath it.

I would protest most strongly … should I have witnessed any such thing.

They wouldn’t tamper with the lovely Pandora format, would they?

That delightful interface we love so well and which so many are patiently waiting to see again.

My dream is that one day Pandora will be open world-wide once again and the interface we loved will be back looking just as it did before.

But being in England how am I to know of such things?

Must just be something passing in the air, some nightmare, made visible by some aberration.

It will come back, won’t it? Pandora Radio. Looking just as it did before.

And soon please. Soon.

Voices from the Universe

2011-09-22T07:00:00.001-01:00

I am getting better at it: multitasking. A friend rings and I find I can listen to her and write several emails at the same time. I can talk to my parents and Skype to the ex-teenager at the same time. I can even retune the TV to the new digital settings and continue chatting to the ex-teenager on Skype.

Having done all this I want just a little time solely to myself. The plan had been to listen to The Archers and then to watch the programme about dinosaurs, but my friend had rung just as The Archers was starting and my TV needed retuning during The Dinosaurs so I ended up missing both.

Once all was quiet I idly flipped through the channels.

It seemed I now had 700. When only one really good one would have been enough for me.

I found a programme that looked interesting and settled back to watch it. It was nine o’clock and I was ready to be entertained.

Suddenly the phone rang I picked it up just as the music on the tele reached a particular scary sound.

It was from a woman I’d worked with many years ago and with whom I’d not spoken to for over twenty-five years. She was about to go on a theatre trip and had somehow been reminded of me. She was getting in touch with people who had been helpful to her in the past.

This set all my alarm bells ringing.

I switched off the computer and unplugged the television to give her my full attention.

Sometimes our wheels travel too close to the precipice.

She said she heard voices from the universe. That there were patterns. Connections.

Inwardly, I sighed for I do not believe in such things, seeing such synchronicity only as happenstance and coincidence; but I did not disillusion her.

She was picking over old wounds of which I knew nothing. I did not ask for the details, as I didn’t want to open these wounds afresh; and also as it was obvious that she had gone over these past problems in great detail with many others, over many, many years, before she’d picked up the phone to me.

It was a long call.

Towards the end of the call I said, “I’d like to be one of your voices from the universe.”

She stopped talking, and listened.

“Each time your brain signals an unhappy memory, try saying, “Thanks for that brain. You’ve reminded me about that before. And I don’t need to be reminded of it again. Thanks all the same. Is there anything more cheering you can remember instead?”

“Oh, she said. “So that this means that the wound has a chance to heal and that you no longer pick at the scab.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s just a suggestion, but it works for me.”

Who knows if these words were of any help, but I felt she was now driving towards safer ground.

All I really knew was that towards the end of the call I was multitasking once again, and had somehow clambered into my pyjamas.

The Gardener’s Chanel

2011-09-21T05:52:00.001-01:00

My shoulder hurts.

It’s my own fault.

Some months ago I was sat with a group of people in a nearby house. The conversation turned onto the subject of the house owner’s garden as she kindly made us all some tea.

I hadn’t seen her back garden but guessed it was something similar to the front garden. This had been covered with a black fabric looking sheet and then pegged down.

“We could dig over the back garden and grow vegetables,” the sparkly lady said.

“Oh that’s a good idea,” the jigsaw enthusiast replied.

A mouth watering discussion about vegetables followed, and I envisaged runner beans growing on canes, stately rows of fat onions, and tall rows of leeks standing smartly to attention.

“Are you interested?” the sparkly lady asked me.

I was. It sounded like a great plan and also a ‘thank you’ for the woman who lent us the use of her house every week for us to gather.

Around me there were other voices of agreement.

“What’s going on?” the owner lady asked as she handed out the mugs of tea.

The sparkly lady announced the peaceful military coup that was to take place.

“Oh,” said the owner lady. Gardening wasn’t her thing, and she wasn’t really interested.

“Obviously, since I have…” the sparkly lady reeled off a list of ailments that would prevent her from doing any actual digging of the garden… “So I can’t.”

It seemed that all the other voices who had sounded so enthusiastic had also wisely not committed themselves either and that I was the only one to have actually have actually said, “Yes”.

“I understand you are going to do my garden,” the house owner said some time later.

My heart sank. It seemed I was the only one.

But I am a person of my word. If I say I’m going to do something then I do it.

I cheered myself up with a vision of raspberry canes and strawberries all bearing fruit.

“I don’t want vegetables,” she said. “I want low growing plants.”

“Oh!” I say.

“My garden once looked really lovely,” she said.

I love flowers, and so I smiled and ask her for a description of how it had once looked. I’m imagining neat lawns and beds of cascading colours.

“It was black,” she said. “All blank. It was just after the covers were put down.”

My heart sinks even deeper into my boots.

I went around to take a look at her garden. The black material which had now decayed was torn. Weeds had grown through this fabric and around it. They were high and obviously deep rooted.

Sparkly lady tells me she is actually free on the day that I’ve chosen to do some gardening, but she’s not sure she can make it. She will ring, but she doesn’t.

And so I begin alone.

The ground was harder than I imagined. And the day and time I’d chosen always turned out to be always the hottest of the week.

I would attempt to dig out the weeds for a couple of hours until I was thoroughly exhausted and demoralised; and I could see as I left that the house owner was also not overly impressed by the little I had managed to clear.

Eventually, I’d cleared one quadrant and planted ‘snow in summer’. Then I cleared out most of the next quadrant and planted campanula.

In August I was away, or had guests staying, and so could do no more.

I had suggested another blue plant for the third as yet uncleared quadrant. And the house owner ordered this plant which would be delivered in September.

This meant that this quadrant also needed to be cleared and soon.

The house owner helped a little, but despite the two of us digging for a whole morning we didn’t manage to clear it. Also distressing for me was seeing the return of weeds in the two quadrants I’d earlier cleared.

The snow in summer was losing its battle against dandelions and the invasive grass; and my heart sank even lower when I could see no sign of the campanula at all in the other quadrant.

I spent ten hours alone last week trying to clear this new quadrant and weeding the other two.

I was so pleased to have got these three quadrants done almost to my liking. It had been very hard unpaid work indeed.

My shoulder still hasn’t recovered.

Thankfully at the back of the bathroom cabinet was a tube of “Deep Heat” the balm that the miners in Yorkshire used after they’d bathed in front of fires in their tin baths.

It is wonderful stuff.

It somehow warms when it’s rubbed into the skin. It has a very strong smell which is not quite Chanel number 5. After using it I know I can’t go into anyone’s company.

With my aching back, my tender shoulder and this smell of ‘Deep Heat’ wafting around me, I was hunched like a troll as I opened the door after series of loud knocks.

“I’d like to treat you to a one day course, as a thank you for what you’ve done to my garden,” the house owner said.

I’m touched and grateful. I thank her and profess it’s far too much, far too generous.

“Well, the fourth quadrant still needs to be done, you can owe me that,” she says.

My heart sinks.

It seems that somehow I am now in debt to her.

Bewildered, I hear the laughter from that first evening when the gardening idea was first mooted ringing hollowly in my ears.

I inhale deeply the gardener’s ‘Chanel’ and sigh.

Shut Your Row!

2011-09-19T05:27:00.001-01:00

Once long ago, I had a story accepted by a magazine.

Posting the ‘Yes, you can have my soul’ letter that gave the magazine the first rights to publish this story was one of the happiest days of my life. I still regard the post box into which this letter tumbled with particular affection and smile whenever I see it.

Reading my printed story in the magazine (some months after than when they said it would appear) was one of the saddest days of my life.

I had at that time no idea that a magazine had particular guidelines about what it would print. Instead, I’d simply read the stories in the magazine, and had wanted to write one that I would prefer to read instead.

I had noticed how the words used in this magazine were rather simple. ‘Dumbed down’ I thought. I’d wanted to change that. And so my story was peppered throughout with erudite language which I hoped would set the reader reaching for their dictionary.

At that time, the stories in this magazine were somewhat gloomy, so I’d written something light and funny, with an accompanying uplifting title.

I had no idea that a magazine makes substantial revisions to a story.

My delightful title had been revised:

“Shut your Row!” I read.

All my complex vocabulary had disappeared and had been replaced by bland simple words.

The ending had also been changed.

And then, as if to make a point, even my name was misspelt.

It was no longer my story, and I felt ashamed of it, and hurt.

Magazines, it seems, imagine the mindset of their readership and then set their contents wax in such a mould. The result is a house style which suppresses the different styles of contributors.

Suffocation of a writer’s natural flair is ensured by guidelines that would be writers read avidly before beginning.

So many topics are off limits. So many tones and styles are anathema. So many plot lines or devices are just not wanted. Adjectives, similes and metaphors are trashed in favour of pared down, simply-worded sentences: the shorter the better.

Writing within such a strait jacket of rules is an art form in itself. I recently learnt that only a quarter of one particular well known writer’s work is actually accepted by the magazines she writes for. And she’s written the “How to…” book on the subject.

Women’s magazines have now started to curtail their fiction slots. So the poor writers, still dutifully adhering to the rules, have even fewer outlets for their work.

With the competiveness this creates, the lonely writer will inevitably hear the yowls of their cat when rejected stories land on the mat.

I can’t help thinking that magazines have got their fiction slots wrong.

And the trend is now to remove fiction slots magazines.

This must be because market research has indicated that fiction slots are no longer popular with their readership.

Now why should that be?

Could it be because women’s magazines have stifled creativity? Could it be because they have churned out bland stories in the house style format week after week? Is it that they have underestimated their readership?

I think this is indeed the case.

It is as if magazine fiction editors have treated their female readership as children.

I squirmed with dismay when I read my mutilated story.

And I squirm even more when I read what is still being printed today.

Cue Camera Action!

2011-09-18T06:49:00.001-01:00

So there is a satellite to hurtling to Earth

It will break up, they say. It will break up into smaller pieces.

It is likely to land anywhere between “57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator”, sometime around the twenty-fourth of September, they say.

So I guess I won’t be the only one wearing a hard hat that day.

The chance of it landing on top of my hard hat, or yours, is just “1 in 3,200”, they say.

And only two hours before it lands will NASA be able to issue any more accurate predictions as to which particular hard hat or unshielded skull might need to raise a defensive umbrella.

With a motto of ‘Cowards Live Longer’ I should be gathering up kith and kin and dashing off to the island of Skye in Scotland, which has a latitude of 57 degrees 15’ just out of the danger zone.

There is after all plenty of time to do so, but I won’t.I’ve watched too many disaster films. I know that my role is to stay put and to ignore the geeky scientists just like the extras do in films.

Then when the two hour warning is given, my role is to go screaming into my car, before joining the honking gridlock of the M1 motorway.

Escape of course would be impossible.

For the safety of seagull encircled Skye is much further than two hours distance from here.

Only if the film’s hero jumps into my car with some sort of hand held tracking device, and then directs me away from the road and into the fields would I have any chance of survival.

But only if I can drive fast, soar over ditches and turn the wheel hard enough to miss the washing machine sized pieces thumping into the ground around me.

Chances of a hero with such a tracking device jumping into my car… er zero.

Chances of meaty chunk of metal landing on top of my brainless skull even with its hard hat… er very high. 1 in 3200.

I’m not a lucky person.

If there were two pieces of paper in a bag, one that said ‘You’ve just won a million pounds’ and the other completely blank then my hapless fingers would inevitably curl around and the blank piece of paper.

If there is one mud puddle in a field the size of England then I’m the one who would straight into it.

So if there’s a satellite hurtling to Earth…

Oh hum!

Cue camera, action!

I Believe in Dragons!

2011-09-17T06:19:00.001-01:00

I believe in dragons.

I always have. They had to have existed, for why else would they be spoken of to children who are barely out of nappies. And why does every child instinctively understand their shape and form as if dragons are as simple to understand as breathing, but just like breathing their presence hadn’t been noticed before.

They had to be the remnants of ancient dinosaurs.

Which means that I believe dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

This was of course very bad news for the dinosaurs, especially for the ones that laid eggs. For we all know how keen humans are on eggs.

Just think how easy it would be to drive a creature to extinction simply by eating all their eggs!

It happened in New Zealand when the first tribes in that land (not many people) hunted the moa to extinction. No doubt the bird’s demise was also hastened by clever observation of the its nesting habits and then the subsequent thieving of their eggs.

How much easier it would have been for more ancient peoples to dine upon dinosaur eggs rather than risk breaking their teeth on tough dinosaur hide.

Eat all the eggs, and all the dinosaurs in that region within a generation become extinct and the fire breathing menace is gone. Egg eating was probably the first effective pest control activity our ancestors ever used.

Dragon eggs no doubt were equally tasty.

You wouldn’t need a comet to collide with the earth, or even a volcanic winter to drive these great beasts towards their demise, just a few omelette loving humans armed with a frying pan would be enough.

So the next time you mention dragons to a child pause a moment, observe if they lick their lips. Then ask them exactly how they’d like their eggs.

Back to the Nursery

2011-09-16T07:39:00.001-01:00

Nursery workers are brilliant. They set up islands of activities in well lit areas. When you toddle in with your youngster you too want to reach for those paintbrushes and leave marks on those white sheets of paper. You too want to sink your hand into the coloured warm bubbly water and play with the boats, and you too can not help but start building towers with the bricks. And indeed when only the little ones are watching… you do!

It is all there ready and waiting and all the child has to do is to begin.

For adults, with their tidied away homes and everything in its place, we think about doing something creative perhaps when passing and glimpsing something on the way from the computer to the kitchen. But it’s a fleeting thought, for within minutes after the kettle’s boiled and the tea’s made, we then troop back the way we have come not deviating from our well trodden path across the carpet.

This happens to me. There are some pencil crayons I glimpse on a shelf beneath a desk. I see them as I go out to feed the fish in the pond. These pencil crayons were bought for the now ex-teenager for one of his school years long ago. He never used them. Twenty-four beautiful shades that each time I see I yearn to touch and use. But the thought is only fleeting. Within moments the fish are holding my attention and I’m trying to remember the names I gave to them; made difficult as they are changing from black to golden and the patches on their bodies keep changing. Then there are the last of the tadpoles the few that for some reason shrugged off the state of frogdom and opted to remain aquatic instead. Their tails are ragged and tinged with white and I wonder why these few lacked the switch to change their being and preferred to stay in the nursery. Perhaps we all should have remained in the nursery longer experimenting with colours and shapes and how things fit together just like these tadpoles. You can see from this just how quickly I forget the pencil crayons. And on the way back inside I don’t see them at all.

The other day I had a brainwave.

A very rare thing for me!

I set up areas downstairs in the house as if it was a nursery. Islands of things to do that might tempt me to stay and linger there awhile.

On one desk I’ve set up paper and the pencil crayons and also a picture of anemones that might inspire. On another there is a pen and a writing pad. By the keyboard I have the first few bars of “God” by John Lennon ready to try. On the coffee table I have placed a book and a book mark that I started to read and then though I glance at it on the shelf I still didn’t reach for it. At each of these places I have set the chairs at an angle as if inviting me to sit there awhile and try it for a moment. The coffee table is also on an angle inviting me towards the settee beyond where the cushions are plump and inviting.

And though these last two days I’ve been out and too busy to try these things I am lingering longer as I pass them by, and studying the picture as if to see exactly how I could draw it. And oh, it’s all so wonderful and tempting as if I’m back in the nursery and beginning again.

And I’m now thinking exactly how does the piano sound in “God”?

God

2011-09-16T07:36:00.001-01:00

A Good Short Story Should be like: Fish and Chips!

2011-09-15T16:26:00.001-01:00

Not being the brightest button in the box I know the fault is mine. But I do try to listen, and I do concentrate, and I do try to understand.

I’m talking about the BBC Short Story Competition that’s running this week.

I’m thinking they must be so fine these stories, so erudite, so well written that they will be like spun glass, or the finest wine or the most amazing orchestral symphony. That was what I was thinking as I waited in anticipation to hear them.

I’ve listened to three so far. I missed Tuesdays, so I don’t know if that one was any different to the rest.

I’ve already forgotten Monday’s story.

I can only remember Wednesday’s as it was on yesterday and it was about sugar beet. Though I can only remember that because I’m a dull thick button. I didn’t know what a sugar beet looked like, and instead of imagining a round turnip/swede-shaped thing when I listened to the story I imagined a stalk of sugar cane instead.

I only realised my mental image was all wrong when I listened to the interview with the author. I had taken the trouble to listen to this particular interview because of course being made of dull plastic I didn’t understand the story’s ending. I was hoping for some explanation, some hint that would allow a dawning revelation, but I didn’t get any. So I’m still as confused as ever about what actually happened at the end.

Thursday’s story was about an astronaut trying to readjust to daily rhythms back on Earth. And whatever finer points there were in that story passed me by completely.

I don’t understand these short stories.

The judges obviously think they are excellent like chilled sorbet, and simply delicious, but I find them bland, rather like blanched cabbage and over-boiled at that!

They end, and I think, okay… so what was the point of that?

I’m not enlightened, thrilled, amazed or moved. There is no imagery that inspires me, no plot that makes me smile, and no heart to these stories at all.

But then though, it’s probably just me. They are probably so brilliant that someone like me obviously wouldn’t be able to understand them at all. Couldn’t understand them.

And the tone of these stories is so flat and empty like a wasteland. A wasteland populated by characters who don’t communicate with others properly and have loneliness written through them like a stick of Blackpool rock.

I guess I don’t get these stories in the same way I don’t get orchestral works or red wine. I guess I prefer candyfloss to spun glass because I’m just the wrong kind of button in the box.

This dull button would prefer a story that makes her say, ‘Wow!

Rather like when you eat really good fish and chips when you’re really, really hungry, and you can’t help but exclaim, “Wow! Delicious! Yum!”

That’s what a good short story should be like: Fish and chips!

Totally Inveigled in the Underworld

2011-09-14T08:43:00.001-01:00

There is heavy banging coming from somewhere.

I vaguely wonder if it’s my neighbour needing help, but these thuds have more energy behind them.

It’s half-past seven.

I’ve been awake since five so I’m not being disturbed by the banging that continues.

I realise there must be someone banging on yappy dog’s door.

I wrap myself in my dressing gown and go downstairs.

I know I look a fright and that my hair is wild.

There is a policeman standing outside the house next door.

“Sorry love,” he says as if I’ve just arisen from the sleep of Alph. “Sorry to disturb you. Do you know if Rhys still lives here?”

I have occasionally seen a man living there in the rented house, but I didn’t know that his name was Rhys. I’ve also been away recently and I haven’t seen my neighbours in their garden, but with the remnants of hurricane Katia blowing through the trees wildly that’s hardly surprising.

“I don’t know,” I reply, suddenly conscious that someone might be listening to my words.

But for all I know they might have left last weekend, while I was away. The yappy dog certainly hasn’t been around.

The policeman looks at me as if he knew I would say, ‘I don’t know’. His look tell me that he thinks I’m obviously an old bag totally inveigled in the underworld who is protecting my neighbour. He looks at me as if he knew I’d be the type of person that wouldn’t co-operate with the police. He expected me not to know who my neighbours were. He expected no help and he didn’t get any.

“Sorry to disturb you,” he says dismissively and he gives up battering next door’s door.

And I’m left to ponder my answer. Did I tell him the truth? Was there anything else I could have said? At least I restored peace and quiet to the street.

Trains

2011-09-13T17:32:00.001-01:00

My passengers had to get to Norwich.

There was a train that left from Sheffield Railway Station that went straight there and would have been ideal, but for two people the cost was close to £100.

I was travelling down into the East Midlands and by going down the Great North Road the A1 and then dropping them off at Peterborough there was a train that could take them to Norwich for only £20 for the two of them.

So we did that.

I heard today on the radio just a few moments ago that the train service in England is a rich man’s toy.

It is so true.

What a terrible shame.

What I found amusing as I checked the prices of these trains on the internet was how the trains with more stops and changes were more expensive than the train that went directly to Norwich Station. Seems the poor old passengers have to pay for the inconvenience of getting on and off trains and waiting on windy platforms.

Thank You for Visiting!

2011-09-13T17:03:00.001-01:00

I had thought that as the blog counter slowly ticked up that people maybe just one or two were reading each update and keeping up with my tales from this darkest corner of England. What vanity! This is not the case at all. No one is reading my posts here. And this one is unlikely to be read I’m guessing for many years going by what I’ve just discovered.

A new tab now shows ‘stats’ in the back room of the blog, and from ‘stats’ I’ve discovered some remarkable facts.

It seems that my older posts from 2007 are the ones that most people are reading.

The most popular pages being:

The World's Worst Teacher

17 Jul 2007

123 Pageviews

Semi-centenarian

3 Mar 2007

103 Pageviews

Shaking Ambridge to The Core.

2 Jan 2011, 2 comments

87 Pageviews

Mud Hounds and Worms

6 Mar 2007

51 Pageviews

Sorry I Missed Your Call

17 Feb 2009, 2 comments

45 Pageviews

Another surprise was that people in Russia were so interested in the blog. Though the word ‘interested’ is taking a bit of licence with a blog that gets so few hits.

United Kingdom

1,184

United States

807

Russia

Germany

India

Canada

France

United Arab Emirates

Ukraine

Japan

So hello all where ever you are, and thank you for visiting.

Gift of a Thistle

2011-09-13T16:49:00.001-01:00

Gift of a Rose

2011-09-13T16:42:00.001-01:00

There is a small village in Norfolk where some of our ancestors once lived many years ago.

We pulled off the main road to visit it. A man was cutting the triangle of grass in front of the church.

I had never been inside the church but coming towards us was a woman with flowers who seemed to be holding a key.

“The church is never locked,” she told me.

It seemed there was a knack to opening the door, which had defeated us on the last two occasions we’d visited.

It was odd to find myself in a small white washed church where once my ancestors were baptised, married and buried. Odd to think that they too would have studied the carvings on the font, or wondered at the lopsided features of the altar as they sat in the pews. Odd to think that they may too have worked their needles to design the patterns on the kneelers.

The woman standing at the font was rearranging the flowers. She had sprays from a small pink floribunda rose.

“Smell that,” she said.

I did.

The scent was faint and delicate.

“Beautiful,” I said.

I told her why we were there. That we were descendents of people who had once lived in that village. We later established that both she and my son shared a grandmother with the same surname as she readjusted the flower display, and I wished she would also replace the wilting greenery.

“Would you like a cutting of this rose?” she asked.

“Yes please,” I replied.

She took me back towards her house.

I had been told earlier before we arrived that day, that the original houses when my ancestors lived had long since been pulled down and that new buildings had taken their place.

I asked her about a road with Kiln in the name, for that had been the road where they’d lived.

She didn’t know of it. But she asked the man cutting the grass who said that there had been a brick kiln down that road. It turned out that he was pointing towards this woman’s road.

So I’m pretty sure that I later found myself standing in the garden that my ancestors had once stood in long ago even though the original name of the road had been lost and forgotten.

She then gave me a cutting of a rose that was growing there.

I felt I was under an enchantment.

Nearby was a tumulus called Peace Hill. And I wondered if there were older more ancient ancestors stirring there awhile to witness this gift of a rose.

What you can find on youtube when you can’t sleep!

2011-09-08T02:18:00.001-01:00

Updates part Two

2011-09-05T05:53:00.001-01:00

Just a few days after complaining about ‘updates’ I thought I would check to see if there were any comments on this blog.

I hadn’t checked for a while. It would only take a few seconds.

I signed in to discover only that I could not get any further at all.

I forget the exact words, something about ‘my browser’ and ‘not supported’ and ‘try Chrome’

Not being a techno person I had no idea what ‘Chrome’ was. Something shiny and cheap and to do with plumbing came to mind, but before I could gather my scattered wits my Internet connection stopped working.

It seemed after trying again and again to access the backroom of the blog that it all been ‘updated’ which is a euphemism for ‘it doesn’t work any more’.

For some reason the Google blog would only work in conjunction with a Google browser… funny that!

So heigh ho! I download ‘Chrome’ so I can get into the back room.

By then I’d forgotten why I’d wanted to go in there anyway, as so many minutes had passed.

Then I remembered, comments.

I check.

An hour has gone by.

There were no comments.

I feel uneasy though about certain websites only being accessible if you have their own particular shiny browser, if that is what ‘Chrome’ is.

A friend was telling me how she had tried to update her blog and mentioned Safari and something else. The something else she had forgotten doesn’t like to work with her Mac computer. A simple uploads task that should have taken just a click took her instead the entire morning as she struggled to get various interfaces (if that’s what they were) to relate to each other.

It seems such a shame that there are such in built barriers, and it’s made worse when your old way of doing something has been suddenly blocked by new barriers.

“Do you want to go back to the old format one backroom message prompts?”

Yes, yes, yes!

Taps

2011-09-04T20:05:00.002-01:00

Not many people wax lyrical about their kitchen tap, so I’d like to sing the virtues of mine.

When the original was fitted some years ago, water pooled around it. Being short-sighted and therefore less observant than the average person I did not realise that my brand new tap had several tiny holes along its horizontal brass top. These holes sprayed water into the air like mini fountains whenever I turned the tap on.

It took five years before I realised.

I quite like quirky things, so I rather enjoyed this mini fountain display. Then when the tap started to drip. I coped with that too. A sponge strategically placed, and the tin drumming sound was instantly muffled.

I used to attach the hose pipe to the kitchen tap in order to water the garden. This worked fine for many years, until one day when after watering the garden I came back inside to discover that water was dripping down the kitchen windows. The mini fountains had become larger and were now spraying water high into the room.

So the next idea was cling film.

I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that before. But somehow the cling film idea didn’t quite work. Water seeped into it making it bulge like a rather heavy soggy nappy.

Still for a while it served.

Then while I was out of the country something inside the taps gave up completely. Water would only drizzle if you were lucky, and if you waited awhile. And the clunking sound (which I’d forgotten to mention as over the years had become so familiar and was hardly noticed) became louder.

Squinting closer at the tap I realised that tiny stalactites had formed where the water had leaked out from the cling film, and below them was a soggy mess.

So now there is a bright new tap in the kitchen.

After the new plumber fitted it it worked perfectly, but as soon as he had gone it began to play up.

Turn the water off and the flow stops instantly. Take four steps away, and there’s a sudden dribble of splattering water.

“Is it supposed to do that?” the ex-teenager asked.

“Dunno,” I replied.

But secretly I was pleased.

Seems this new tap has character too!

I hate the small yappy dog next door.

2011-08-30T19:54:00.001-01:00

I hate the small yappy dog next door.

Except it isn’t next door. It’s in my garden.

I bang on the bathroom window.

The small yappy dog looks up at me. It can see I’m furious. It can see the steam coming out of my ears. It’s been barking incessantly at the birds in the tree, and driving me mad, but now it knows it’s being watched.

So what does it do?

Does it beat a hasty retreat?

Does it panic and jump back over the wall.

Heck no.

Instead it simply cocks its leg and wees all over my most prized Aquileia, the pale cream one, before trotting off calmly back home.

I hate that dog.

A little later I have to buy fish food. The fish are starving.

While I was away the house sitters who were responsible for feeding the fish left the fish food containeron the bench. Of course within the hour the ‘orrible small yappy dog had mangled the box, worrying it until its contents spilt and then ate the lot.

Oh, how I hate that small yappy dog.

I hope it grows fins!

An Update

2011-08-29T16:40:00.001-01:00

I want an end to “Updates”.

There I am happy in my little computer bubble, oblivious of the magic that makes it all work, happily using just the few bits that I like and understand.

I am perfectly content.

I am happy.

There was a song I’d come across. I just wanted to know when it was written and if the version I’d heard was the original version.

The title was “Let’s Go Dancing” and the band, Drivin’ N’ Cryin’.

I got nowhere on the Internet. Then I thought I’d go and have a look at the iTunes music store and see if I could find the same track and the year it was written.

(I have recently played music on my iTunes player on my PC, but I’ve not had cause to buy new any music for ages since the Internet Radio Station Pandora closed its doors to the UK.)

I clicked on the iStore link to be told I needed a new update to access the iTunes iStore.

I clicked on the link.

Again and again.

I went to the support pages which take an age to update and then show videos on how to download iTunes for the first time… but I didn’t want to do that. I’ve been directed here to get an update and have been left in a sort of no man’s land which does not explain anything about updates.

I try again.

I shut down my computer and restart.

Minutes pass. I still can’t access the iTunes iStore.

I begin again.

Something finally begins to download. I blindly agree to everything, and a status bar tells me its status. It’s looking hopeful.

Then it tells me something is now wrong with QuickTime. The status bar now tells me its unravelling all that it has just done. And now I’m panicking. Will all my precious music be lost? Already my iTunes short cut icon has vanished.

Terrified, I wait twenty minutes while the install tells me its removing even more files.

Then the computer restarts.

My iTunes short cut icon is still not there. I manage to get iTunes to load up but it looks all wrong. I spend an age amending the view back to the way it was. I then have to send off again for the album art work. Apparently, iTunes can’t find the artwork for 8 tracks. A report has been sent, it says. This makes me feel anxious, even though these are tracks that I have uploaded from discs that I own; but I now feel that iBrother is looking over my iShoulder.

Then I try the iStore. I do get in but the search facility pings and will not allow me to type in my search.

So I close iTunes and start again.

I do eventually find the song, but no date is listed.

So I’ve just spent two hours on this wild goose chase and have wrecked so much to end up with not so much as a feather. All because someone somewhere decided that something somewhere had to be ‘updated’.

The next time I’m asked ever to update anything the answer will be, “No, no no!”

So dear techie type can we please, please have ten years off from updates?

Can all you bright young things who think of these things put all iIdeas on iHold?

Hang on, let me update that….

…can all updates be put on hold? PLEASE!

Thanks!

Drivin' & Cryin' -- Let's go dancing

Well, the hobo's watch stopped at five o'clock, I fear I'll never find him
Oh Dear John, where are you? I know you're out there somewhere
Well I've got a hurricane in my pocket, but no one will believe me
They poured a bucket of tar on top of a flower, somehow I knew they'd try it
To find it, and defy it, and to buy it
Oh, let's go dancing
Ooh, Let's go dancing
Said the firefly to the hurricane
Said the pouring rain to the open plain
How many times?
Oh, I stopped a freight train with a grain of sand, can you hear it crashing?
I split a mountain in two with a flake of snow, still they won't believe me
Well the tales were tall the stories were old, yet some reason I believed them
I said what do you know about revolution? When all I's taught is patience
And waiting, and making a statement
Oh, let's go dancing
Ooh, Let's go dancing
Said the firefly to the hurricane
Said the falling rain to the open plain
How many times?
Oh, let's go dancing
Ooh, Let's go dancing
Ooh, Let's go dancing
Ooh, Let's go dancing
How many times?

Dangerous Game

2011-08-28T16:22:00.001-01:00

So I am on tortoise duty.

And the tortoise knowing his owner is away is patrolling his patch like a Rottweiler.

He spotted me at the bottom of his garden trying to cut down the nettles, the over tall docks and the lonicera nitida… the latter being a knitted and knotted bush which has outgrown both its welcome and space.

The tortoise wasn’t at all happy upon seeing me trespassing at the bottom of his garden.

He charged.

There is nothing quite like a charging tortoise.

Hurriedly I slashed at the nettles.

The tortoise stretched its long scaly neck into the wind.

I then cut down the docks, as the tortoise lifted one terrifyingly clawed foot.

Every time I glanced at him he froze. It was as if we were playing a game of ‘What’s the Time Mr Wolf”, though he seemed confused as to who exactly was playing the part of the wolf.

Then as tortoise revved himself up into his heart stopping top speed, I sawed through the nitida’s complicated cathedral columns.

The tortoise was closing the gap.

I wouldn’t have long to complete this task if the steely look in his eye was anything to go by.

Frantically, I hacked and sawed dragging the tangled pieces to a heap in readiness for the bonfire.

It took an age. And it was all the more terrifying as the tortoise was in such a defensive aggressive mode.

I nearly didn’t make it. The tortoise really had travelled at least an inch in the hour while I was there.

Phew! Lucky escape!

The Taxi Driver

2011-08-27T16:27:00.001-01:00

I was driving back through town.

The taxi behind me was obviously in a hurry. He was driving far too close.

I didn’t increase my speed, as the lights ahead were red. As I slowly approached them they turned to green, and I went sailing on by at the same steady slow speed.

This infuriated the taxi driver in his black cab jammed up behind me. He flashed his lights aggressively, but there was no where for me to go except forwards.

There were two lanes of one-way traffic on this particular stretch of road and also cars parked to my left so I couldn’t pull over and let him go by. He flashed his lights again. He wanted me to speed up, but I’d already noticed that the lights ahead of me were at red and that the traffic was banking up behind them.

As I slowly approached the stationary cars the lights turned to green and I went sailing on. As I rounded the corner I realised that the taxi was almost in my back seat, but again I didn’t increase my speed, for the next set of lights ahead were at also at red, and the cars that had raced ahead had already juddered to a halt.

I simply chugged along at a slow steady speed.

No doubt I was being called every name under the sun in the taxi. Ignoring it, I steadily motored on and as I approached the lights turned to green allowing me to gamely chug on further without stopping.

This was too much for the taxi driver. He overtook aggressively his engine racing leaving me in the wake of his exhaust fumes and curses.

Ahead of us both the traffic had already ground to a halt at the next set of traffic lights. The taxi driver screeched to a halt in a traffic lane which would allow him to turn right.

I simply chugged along and entered the left hand lane just as the light for this lane turned green.

There was undiluted delight in sailing straight past the taxi with its irate driver and then continuing at the same steady speed. I didn’t bother to glance in his direction.

For all his bluster and impatience the taxi driver was in the exact same place he would have been in had he simply relaxed and just gone along with the flow.

Still it’s something I’ll have to remember the next time I find myself in a hurry and find myself behind a slow moving vehicle.

Maybe, just maybe, they might know the timing of the traffic lights.

(Oh, and I wasn’t really going all that slow!)

Point for Discussion

2011-08-26T15:51:00.001-01:00

It’s when travelling that you understand how ignorant you are.

I felt, for example, so foolish in Poland for not knowing their language.

I struggled to say thank you, and I still have no idea how to say “Please”.

Then there was all the history of Krakow of which I was completely oblivious.

Being in Krakow was like being in a parallel world. Familiar and weirdly unfamiliar at the same time.

I found the lack of language ability on my part to be such a barrier.

One of the guests smiled at me as we waited outside the church. Later this same person stood for a photograph together with the bride and groom. I was also asked to stand with them. This was a great honour as in Polish weddings family/guest photos are not taken; as usually, the bride and groom are photographed in scenic places alone.

In Krakow I had been passed by several brides and grooms on route with their photographer walking alone to various scenic spots for a dramatic photo opportunity: all a bit staged and contrived. The tram terminal seemed to be a particular favourite such venue with one of the Krakow photographers.

On the road to Żywiec we passed another already married couple being photographed on a dam wall.

However, as the wedding I was attending was aiming to combine both Polish and English traditions the groom had prevailed upon his photographer to take a few shots of family and guests.

The groom had already told me that he was determined to get a photograph of me. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. Now I am not at all photogenic, being 99% all teeth and 1% cock-eyed, and then to ruin most photos with my gargoyle presence, so I was surprised to be asked to join this small group.

“It’s because we don’t have a photograph of you,” the groom explained. “And also you are my godmother and this is Maria the bride’s godmother.”

Maria smiled at me following this introducing, and exclaimed over the similarity of our roles. And so we then posed for the photographer, who did not look at all happy with the figure standing next to the groom and who looked less than pleased that I wasn’t a tram or a vast expanse of dammed water.

Much later during the reception I went to sit with Maria. I wanted to just chat with her. I knew she didn’t understand English, and that didn’t matter to me. I wanted to just say something, anything. I wasn’t at all interested in being understood. It wasn’t important. I just wanted to use gesture and smiles and to chat. I was hoping that she would reply in Polish and that we could then companionably chatter to each other sitting side by side saying whatever came into out heads and not being understood at all.

Unluckily my presence flummoxed her. She was appalled by me suddenly sitting by her side and yabbering away in an incomprehensible language. She felt embarrassed that she couldn’t understand me. In alarm she filled up a glass with vodka, then raised her glass in a toast. She looked as if she’d be happiest after the toast was drunk if she could climb into the nearest hole to get away from this bizarre English woman that had suddenly attached herself to her side.

Polish weddings don’t end until the wee hours. And at five in the morning Maria finally got up to leave together with the rest of her group. She shook hands with all those who had by now also joined this table.

What was so special for me was the warm hug she gave me as we said our goodbyes. It was as if we were kindred spirits.

Maria was a far better godmother to the bride than I had ever been to the groom, for the couple had married in a Catholic church, and the groom had converted to Catholicism in order to do so.

However, the groom’s parents were not at all displeased by the outcome; for they had chosen me to be their son’s godmother even though they had known I was an atheist.

Perhaps atheists make the best godparents after all… discuss!

Not Quite By the Pen

2011-08-22T15:58:00.001-01:00

A novelist would take advantage of a wedding to place an unattached man with an unattached woman of a similar age and interests.

There was one such chap who was a guest at the Polish wedding, and for my sins I was the unattached woman of similar age and interests.

Prior to the coach trip from Krakow to the village where the wedding was to be held I had not realised that this chap was unattached, and had chatted to him in the hotel reception area thinking him to be one of the husbands in the extended family.

This chap though had been under no such similar delusion. He had worked out that I was travelling solo.

Before too long as if he was a squiggle of ink from a romantic novelist’s pen I discovered him pooling by my side.

Fiction is so unbelievable. No one would credit a story in a book where a woman travelled over 900 miles to the east and then met someone who lived only a few miles away from her home back home, but this was indeed the facts of the case.

As all heroes should The Chap quickly found all sorts of things we had in common, and said kind things about my home town.

However, as we boarded the coach for the onward journey The Chap shielded me protectively with his hands. The others sat with their partners, and I suddenly realised that The Chap was now staking a claim upon me. This was done in such a proprietarily way that I felt suddenly very uneasy. The novelist’s pen was slipping for this act of chivalry being more like staking ownership; and I did not like for one second being made to feel that I was now someone else’s possession. Thankfully, my friend abandoned her husband to sit by my side. she was unaware of the novelist’s penmanship she had chosen to sit next to me so that I could entertain her and prevent her from feeling travel sick.

Such are my unsung uses!

When I finally stepped off the bus I sensed The Chap expected me to walk by his side. This was unnerving as I’m so used to having the freedom to wander hither and thither as I so choose and I’m not used at all to being so corralled to such an orbit.

Later at the reception I discovered to my dismay that The Chap had been seated directly opposite me and I so wished that I could exchange his card with someone else’s, but even though the placing of the name cards was my responsibility i did not dare change the seating plan.

In a romantic novel the champagne and wine would have been followed by dancing and in the next chapter that is exactly what happened. He dragged me off to dance.

Neither he nor the novelist knew that I had not danced for many, many years and that when I have danced it had always been alone.

Still politeness meant that when I was asked to dance I acceded with good grace and a smile and allowed him to take me to the floor. I’m unused to being held but gamely I held his hands as I listened to the rhythm of the band in order to catch the beat.

“Okay, you lead then!” he sneered, after I took a few steps.

Shocked, I apologised and tried to amend my forward ways; unluckily the dance was a slow one. I found I did not want to look at him at all and averted my face.

This would not have happened in a romantic novel. The music would have been perfect and the pair would not have been able to help gazing into each other’s eyes.

Dispirited, I returned to the table.

When next he tried to grab my hand and attempted to drag me off for a second dance, I politely declined.

What he didn’t know was that I was suffering from oedema. My feet had swollen up like balloons following the air flight and a multitude of coach journeys. No novelist would have given her heroine this condition. This poor Chap was not to know that oedema combined with the too tight dressy shoes had made the last dance absolute agony.

Unhappily, The Chap did not give me any chance to explain this predicament; instead he went storming off in a huff.

I had spent much of that and every morning with my legs up in the air, in an imitation of a dying fly, hoping that gravity would sort out the problem. So after The Chap had left I decided to return to my hotel room in order to change my shoes to some that were far more sensible and comfortable.

I had been told that there was going to be quite some time between the various courses, so I cast off the painful shoes, changed out of my posh dress, put on my pyjamas and once again imitated a dying fly.

A little while later there was a knock on the door. A novelist would have had The Chap tapping gently on the door and then the romance would have escalated into something really rather special. That is if the heroine had actually liked The Chap.

When I opened the door to my surprise it was the groom’s father who told me that the next course had been served and that my vegetarian dish was on the table awaiting me and going cold.

Embarrassed at being caught in my pyjamas I redressed and rushing back downstairs, wearing the flat sensible shoes, rejoined the diners.

The Chap was no longer sitting opposite me. It seemed that I had been gone for a quite some time for everyone had already finished this course and were chatting merrily.

The Chap was now sat at the far end of the table chatting to another woman, and I breathed a sigh of relief, already the tidy seating formations were breaking up.

Meanwhile, someone else borrowed The Chap’s empty chair, When The Chap finally did return to his original place he complained bitterly and loudly to all nearby that I had “… given away his chair!”

And then realised that the romantic novelist had had enough of me and was now intent upon blackening my character instead.

The Chap’s mood was not improved as the meals progressed. He accidently dropped salad into his glass of water. Then whilst reaching over the table for more meat caught his glass of water with his sleeve and knocked it over.

In a story, the hero would have laughed, would have been jolly about the accident, ruefully looking over his flooded half of the table and smiling when the heroine helpfully offered him her serviette.

Instead The Chap was mortified by this accident. He refused my serviette, and instead testily demanded more serviettes from the waitress. This was done in the form of an entertaining mime as she didn’t speak any English and he didn’t speak any Polish.

Eventually, he had mopped his half of the table and more dishes of food and appeared, been eaten and then been taken away.

“Why are you smiling?” The Chap demanded crossly.

I hadn’t been aware that I had been smiling and realised that if I was then it was because I was happy for the newlyweds. However, from the tone of The Chap’s voice he’d obviously decided that my stray smile was because of his recent clumsiness. He had taken offense and was obviously affronted.

So alack and alas.

In a novel it would have worked. The Chap would have been a delight to talk to. He would have noticed my painful dancing shoes and insisted that I should wear his size twelve shoes instead.

Nay, he would have carried me up into the air to save my feet from even touching the ground.

He would have laughed at the spilled water and told me other tales about water he’d spilt. He would have been a fount of knowledge about ancient history and would have spoken in awe about the music from the like of Espers and the Howie Day. In short he would have been great fun to be with.

But alas, it was not to be.

But wasn’t it weird that he should have taken such umbrage with me when later another hugged me as if I was a long lost sister!

Crushed in the arms...
Crushed in the arms…
I was there

And I…

Crushed in the arms...
Crushed in the arms…

I must say…

I was there

And I

I must say

Crushed in the arms...
Crushed in the arms…

I must say

I was there

And I…

I must say

Crushed in the arms...
Crushed in the arms…

I must say…

I was there

And I must say…

Never could fall in love.
The feeling is such a thrill
Oh.. why don't you anger me,

Anger me, or will.
Oh... Why don't you anger me?

(crushed in the arms..)
Now I could never fall in love.

I must say

And feeling such a thirst there
Strangle me.

Strangle me

You want my strength.

Strangle me

I’ve a feeling you want my strength.

You live some time

You live some

You listen

You live some time

You live some

You listen

You leave some body

Yeah

You leave some

You listen

You leave some body

Yeah

You leave some

You listen

You leave some body

Yeah

You leave some

You listen

You leave some body

Yeah

You leave some

You listen

You leave some

Sleepwalking Sheep

2011-08-22T12:13:00.001-01:00

I don’t like admitting that I’m a vegetarian.

It’s lovely when you can order something from a menu at the same time as everyone else and when nobody realised that the dish you’ve ordered is meat/chicken/fish free. You can enjoy the evening and discuss so many different things.

But once your companions know you are a vegetarian then the inevitable onslaught is merciless.

The hapless vegetarian is subjected to dissertation as to why their companions could never give up meat. How they tried once, or how succulent different meat dishes are.

After a while, they look at the vegetarian’s blanched face and then sometimes ask outright, “Why are you a vegetarian?”

My reply of “I don’t want to kill animals,” is then usually met with a discourse regarding the different methods of slaughtering animals. No detail is spared.

After this, by the time the food arrives I have very little appetite and feel even more self-conscious about my food.

I’d hoped that by ordering one meal in advance, on my recent trip to Poland that I would avoid this situation. (See the menu listed in an earlier blog.)

However, in this restaurant, to my horror, I discovered that no one else had ordered a starter.

Then as the dishes were laid before me I realised that no one else had order a dessert either.

For set before me on the table was a bowl of soup I had ordered, next to the Greek salad, the potatoes with a pipe and the ice-cream pancakes. (The latter in the superheated atmosphere were already melting.)

This arrangement, as good as a neon sign, instantly signalled to the others, who were tucking into great troughs of food, that I was eating something slightly different to the rest of them. That I was a vegetarian!

Mortified, I managed to grab an opportunity to leave earlier than the rest and was spared the more pointed comments.

I was not so fortunate some few days later.

Polish weddings go on into the early hours. We had been invited to the bride and groom’s home for a meal the following day. This meal was goulash cooked by the bride’s mother who had also had very little sleep.

Dishes of steaming goulash were past down the table.

And inevitably a dish was set before me.

Then someone in a sleep exhausted panic told our hosts that I was a vegetarian. Mortified that this now meant the exhausted cook was now put into a quandary as to what on earth she could possibly serve this rather picky guest I piped up hurriedly, “Tell her not to worry. I’ll eat this.”

I did.

It took an awful lot of courage.

All those around me were ladling spoonfuls of soup into their mouths and eyeing my stillness as I readied the spoon and steadied my nerve.

Not a word was said as I emptied the bowl. I was one of them.

“It was delicious,” they declared , but I was unable to echo this sentiment.

For me, it was the first beef I’d tasted for over forty years. I hadn’t forgotten the taste. It was familiar but perfectly horrid. Not because of sentiment but simply because of its taste.

For me it tasted of what it was: dead animal. It tasted like cardboard, and I felt thoroughly unclean having eaten it, and still do.

It made me realise what a collective delusion meat eaters maintain when they tuck into their cuts of meat and proclaim how tasty they are. Of how such flesh does not compare in terms of deliciousness with say a freshly picked strawberry or a juicy apple. Of how the dull brown-grey colour of meat is a far better advertisement of its taste than anything else. Of how farmers have portrayed meat as being the food for virulent strong men and salads more suitable for sissies. And of how so many are fooled, go along with this delusion and try to brainwash others into this meat eating cult.

A week or so later I read how words in The Bible had to be altered in order to placate Constantine the Great who was about to convert to Christianity. Constantine like his meat and so omissions and changes were made to the Biblical text to accommodate his preferences. It is likely that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” had been interpreted by the early Christians to mean “Thou shalt not kill humans or animals” rather like Buddhism’s ideal. The early Christians were therefore likely to have been vegetarians, but had then had to forgo this ideal in order to secure Constantine to their ranks. And so Biblical accommodations were made, which later generations would regard as being set in stone the meat marketing board was the resultant winner. All that is left to do then is a little brain washing and bullying and the meat eating cult rules supreme.

For me the teasing continued at every meal until when asked what I was eating as I lifted a leaf of lettuce to my lips I replied it was mammoth steaks in dipped in lamb sauce. An answer that placated my more determined tormentor or perhaps he noticed the whites of my eyes.

Vegetarians live eight years longer than meat eaters… I told them.

The amount of land it takes to feed one meat eater could be better used to feed twenty vegetarians… I told them.

But their ears were closed and their eyes were drawn to the meaty chef’s specials twice as expensive as my humble dishes.

(~Sigh) I do however wish I had not eaten the goulash though eating it gave me the certain understanding that meat eaters are sheep.

A Sense of Place

2011-08-22T10:59:00.001-01:00

So there I am swimming under a starless sky with the lights of Kraków silhouetted against the dusky evening blue sky. The pool is on the top floor of the hotel. Below me weaves the darker Vistula River lit up by floating river boats restaurants that are moored against the northern bank.

Then a real treat, for me, a Jacuzzi!

So I sit experimenting with the buttons that control the pummelling warm bubbles.

Then, oh my goodness, a sauna!

I try it out but don’t stay in too long; the smell of hot pine is delicious.

I’m not used to such luxury.

But now I am utterly ashamed of this indulgence. Yesterday I realised just where my hotel was situated.

I had walked from the hotel into Kraków thinking that the Jewish section of the city had been the part that had been walled up and had formed the ghetto. I had two guide books and had even visited Schindler’s Factory and I had still left Poland with this misconception.

Yesterday I realised that the Jewish Ghetto had been created south of the river close to Schindler’s factory and that the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp had been situated south of the ghetto.

To my horror and dismay I then realised that the hotel where I had been staying, and had spent a few minutes enjoying the luxury of the pool, Jacuzzi and sauna, had been built right on the northern edge of the Jewish ghetto.

I now feel utterly sickened to discover that I had been luxuriating in a place where others had once suffered appallingly.

No wonder I had the place all to myself!

Polish Menu

2011-07-31T10:27:00.001-01:00

My friend sent me a Polish menu for a meal next Friday night. Here are some of the highlights from the translation…

The chef recommends:

Tray pork, barbecue tray, tray fungal

(Dish for two persons)

Pork dish for two persons pork knuckle, black pudding, ribs, chop, fried cabbage, boiled potatoes, horseradish, mustard	65 -
Odour filter tray of grilled chicken, filet of tenderloin, pork, fried vegetables, baked potatoes, garlic and chilli sauce	75 -

Something Something for tooth tooth

Miscellaneous from pigsticking 150 g	12.-
Beer board 150 g	16.-

Warm Warm why not stuff

150 g Black pudding with onion The onion pudding 150 g black pudding with onion	8.-
Leggings made of 150 g	8 –

Soups better than grandma's soup better than at grandmother's

Black pudding with onion Pork soup.

8.-

Seemingly nothing but As if nothing ...

Dumplings for the selection of 300 . With meat, cottage cheese, cabbage and mushrooms or a highlander with sheep cheese.	12.-
Food Woodcutter 300 g	17.-
Bigos 300 g dish made from sausage, mushroom and sauerkrant	10.-

Fish dishes Fish

Trout cooked according to the weight of 100 grams of vegetables	6.-
Salmon from the oven according to the weight of 100 g spinach mousse.	9.-
Pinch stewed in white wine.	26.-
Pinch in spinach mousse with shrimp sauce.	33 -

Pork Pork

Highlander Pork 200 g in cabbage	18.
Grilled neck 150 g	15.
Roman Roast 120 g with pepper.	18.-
Mammoth 500 g for genuine guy	35.-

Beef Beef Beef

Devil's steak in pepper 180 g Diabolic steak in pepper.

39.-

Venison Venision

Wild boar roast 120 g in a hunter's sauce

39 -

Denmark wegeteriańskie

Chicken cutlets with 100 g of French fries letters, sweet carrot salad

24 -

Costumes Extras

Potatoes with "pipe" with garlic butter 150 g	6 -
Lard 250 g bowl Bowl of Lard	5 -

Desserts Desserts

Pear to heat a piece of caramel	10.-
Nutmeg ice cream dessert with a lawyer	12.-

Hot drinks Hot drinks

250 ml/50 ml Tea laced with alcohol Highlander Tea Tea 250 ml/50 ml Laced with alcohol	8 -
Coffee lawyer 7 g/200 ml	10.-
Fanta a shoe Fanta a shoe	4.-
Sprite, a shoe	4.-
Tonic a shoe Tonic a shoe	4.-
Mineral water a shoe 4.-
Burn a shoe 10.

Beer Bear

low alcohol foot. 0,33 l 0,33 l	5.-
Porter shoe. 0,33 l	5.-
Mulled Beer 0,50 l (with insert)	12.-
Mulled beer bottles. 0,50 l	9.-

Vodka and sparkling clean

50 ml	8.-
Finland 50 ml	8 –
Bitter stomach clean 50 ml	5.-
Lotion 50 ml gastric	5.-
"Coffee, the hunter."	15.-
"Cool down" stomach, Sprite	10.-
"Sex appeal"	15.-

I think I’ve learnt so much about Polish culture from reading this menu alone!

Do people in Poland really order side dishes of lard? Can they really be eating Highlanders, Hunters and Romans? Are mammoths still to be found south of Krakow? Can Finland really be bought for only 5-?

I’m not surprised after reading their main courses why their drinks are then called ‘bitter stomach clean’ and ‘lotion gastric.’

I struggled to find a vegetarian option, and finally had to settle for a Greek feta salad. Though I’m guessing after reading the above it’s probably made with real Greek!

Why There is a Giant Orange Ladybird…

2011-07-29T11:08:00.001-01:00

“Ha! I only cut my grass about three times a year,” I boasted. “Lawns are no trouble at all.”

The people sat around me looked at me in disbelief. They cut their grass at least once a week.

“How do you get away with that?” someone asked.

I explained that my garden was very narrow and that my constant walking up and down it probably stunted the growth.

They looked at me dubiously.

My boast was of course only partly true, though I do tend to go quite a long time before cuts.

I don’t enjoy cutting the grass mainly because this means retrieving the lawnmower and the extension lead from the depths of the cellar.

A couple of weeks ago my neighbour’s daughter was cutting her grass. Within minutes the cacophonous engine whirr stopped. I peeped outside and saw she was bent over the machine looking puzzled. There was a buzz of conversation between the two and guessing that their machine had broken I went down into my cellar to get mine for them.

As I emerged with it, I heard them discussing the possibility of borrowing mine, and they looked at me in surprise as if I had read their minds.

But before they did so, they tried different cables and suddenly their own lawnmower sprang back into life.

With my lawn-mower now outside I too began to cut my grass thinking that it was better for the other neighbours if we synchronised this noise pollution.

Just as I finished, my lawnmower stopped working. Unworried, I put it away thinking it might simply have over-heated; or even that there was some strange anomaly in that area that was somehow playing havoc with electrical appliances.

Today I planned to cut my grass again; it’s only a twenty-five minute job, easy.

Remembering that the lawn mower wasn’t working last time, I tried it gingerly. To my delight the engine started.

I began.

Suddenly the engine roared wildly. A plastic blade had gone flying.

I’d run out of spares blades, so I this meant a walk to the shops. Thirty-five minutes there and back.

Back home, I replace the blades and the lawn mower purred back into life.

Within seconds it roars wildly again.

One of the new blades has snapped.

I fetch another and cut the grass again.

Just as I nearly finished the lawn mower stops.

I check the trip switch in the cellar.

It’s okay.

I check the extension lead.

It’s okay

I leave the lawn mower to cool.

I try the lawnmower.

It doesn’t work.

I change a fuse.

Nothing.

And no one from next door dashes out with their lawnmower as mine lies upturned like a dead orange lady bird on the grass.

There’s simply silence.

I write my blog… another hour passes.

I try the lawnmower.

It doesn’t work.

Time it should take to cut the grass … twenty-five minutes.

Actual time needed … infinity.

Looks like I’ll only be cutting my grass three times this year after all!

There is so much blood in this land!

2011-07-17T19:23:00.001-01:00

So many fields in England have been stained with blood. So many battles have been fought on this earth that you can scarce walk a mile without stepping over bones.

There are some places that have seemed strange to me as if their umbilical cord to a past lineage has been somehow cut. Some places mystify me as if their presence is encoded wrongly, as if there is some anomaly. One such place I visited by chance some years ago was Newton near Geddington. A strange place that seemed half-formed whose church had been taken over for a field centre; where once I sat one afternoon looking at ugly wriggling water creatures from the nearby Ise brook. Creatures fit only for nightmares and horror films. And I was glad it took a microscope to see them. But there was something odd about the village as if credit had been withheld, and so it had not thrived. And I felt uneasy there, but didn’t know why.

Today someone told me the story of this village. Of how a thousand peasants, men women and children once gathered there to rebel against the enclosure laws that denied them the common land. Of a man who led others into battle against the landowners servants saying he had a magical pouch to keep his followers safe, and earned the nickname, Captain Pouch.

Of near fifty people who were then butchered for protesting their rights. Of how the river ran red with blood on that day the 8th June, 1607.

Of how Captain Pouch, John Reynolds, was captured and his magical pouch was found to contain only mouldy cheese.

Of how the ringleaders were then hanged and quartered and their body parts displayed throughout the land as a warning to others.

So the landowners won the day, and their greed for land was not checked.

Nearby is a great house where once I met a man in a wheelchair. I chatted to him feeling somewhat sorry for his condition and later discovered that he was the Duke of Buccleugh, at that time the richest man in England. He was a Montagu descendent. One who had inherited great wealth as a direct result of this greed and murder.

How the Montagu family must have laughed to have heard that there was only mouldy cheese in John Reynold’s pouch for they had the whole kingdom in their pockets.

And how sad that they felt no compassion for John Reynold’s condition. How they felt no qualms whatsoever for him only having mouldy cheese to eat. How sad that they were unconcerned that so many had died, or for those who were now forced to forage in the forest. How disgraceful that the surviving peasants had to sign an apology by leaving their mark.

How cruel has been the rule of law in this land.

I can only hope that the Montagus sniffed John Reynold’s piece of cheese for then they would have sniffed their own stench of corruption, a stench that I hope lingers around them still.

I can see no difference between them and those microscopic water creatures I found in the Ise brook, excepting that I now realise that those water creatures were much prettier.

http://www.newtonrebels.org.uk/rebels/history.htm

In My Own Internet Bubble

2011-07-16T19:14:00.001-01:00

Some time ago, someone, somewhere, perhaps on tele, but more likely on the radio, said that we were creating our own internet bubbles every time we went on line.

He tried to demonstrate by popping in to see his neighbour and asking her to tap in a few key words into Google. His experiment didn’t work as it seemed that she got the same recommended sites on her front page as he did. There wasn’t any slant in this direction or that. There seemed to be no truth in it at all.

However, it has just happened to me… this last week.

I am now inside an Internet bubble and there seems to be no escape.

It happened after I’d been researching toilets for my parents. They needed a new one so I had a look at different ones, checking prices and availability and then I phoned them back with the results of my research.

Now whenever I go on line I see adverts for toilets everywhere.

They are everywhere.

Even on my email page.

Now if this happened once or even twice I wouldn’t mind that much, but it’s going on and on.

Just now while trying to find the lyrics to a Castanet song I was dismayed to be distracted by a side bar showing a slideshow of different toilets. How can I sing along to Ray Raposa’s ‘The Night is When You Cannot See,’ when toilets are being paraded across the page in time to the music? How can I ever listen to that song again?

How can I make it stop?

Arrrgggghhhhh!

The Last of the Frogs

2011-07-14T07:57:00.001-01:00

This year was a great year for frogs. Over the last month the tadpoles have been completing their metamorphosis and hundreds of tiny frogs have already left the pond.

But there are still some tadpoles left.

These are the ones that swim more slowly so I’m guessing they are the ones that were not as fortunate in the genetic handout at the beginning of their lives.

Some are albinos with transparent skin.

Some have tails that are tinged with a white edge. I’m guessing it might be a fungal infection.

Some are healthy but are showing no sign of transformation and some of the others have developed arms but no legs.

I’m guessing that some of these healthy looking tadpoles may be intending to over-winter in the pond. A few of the others are still probably about to leave in the next month, and the rest are none too well.

The pond weed is showing signs of returning, but the oxygenating plants are there in numbers and the lily leaves are spreading well.

It has been fun seeing tiny frogs sitting on the lily leaves.

I hate the dog next door.

2011-07-14T07:43:00.001-01:00

I hate the small yappy dog next door.

The other night it was left outside all night.

All night it barked.

When I looked out of the window, at three in the morning, it was in my elderly neighbour’s garden and barking at a cat. Then it jumped the low wall into my garden, and the annoyed cat yowled as it was chased away, but still the dog’s yapping continued.

Unable to sleep at four in the morning, I made a cup of tea and walked the length of my garden. The dog jumped the wall back into its own domain. It was the time of the dawn chorus but this was ruined by the dog’s yapping.

Even as I’m typing this it is yapping, small insistent yaps enough to set nerves on edge.

When they recovered this dog after the last time it was lost its owners kept it on a long tether and I was cheered by this, but now they don’t bother any more and the dog is again allowed to trespass freely.

Is it too unkind to hope that the heavy dangling branch from the overhanging tree should fall and squish it flat?

No More Ice Cream

2011-07-14T07:23:00.001-01:00

Things can change so quickly and when they do change it’s often for the worse. Not having much money our pleasures were in simple things such as a short drive out into the country and then a walk. There were a number of places we used to go to mostly country parks.

The one at the reservoir was a favourite and then they put up car parking charges so we could no longer afford to go there. Instead we went to the other car park on the reservoir where it was possible to feed the ducks, geese and swans. We have had wonderful days there feeding the birds and throwing up bread into the air for noisy small gulls that dived over our car an in Hitchcock-like frenzy. We have watched the changing mood colours of the lapping water. We have cycled from that point and walked from that point.

A few days ago we went there again and to our dismay there were now new car parking signs. It’s £2:50 to park there now. We couldn’t afford to stay and had to turn the car around and leave.

It’s such a shame. It means we will never go there again. We used to pop in there sometimes if we just needed a change of scene after a tough day at work/school. We used to pop in just for minutes sometimes to feed the birds or to get an ice-cream from the ice cream van. This will never happen again. We have lost a freedom we had treasured.

Quicksilver

2011-07-09T06:56:00.001-01:00

When I was at school in the sixties I had a wonderful science teacher. His name was Mr Weigh. (I’m not sure if that was how his name was actually spelt.) He was elderly, very softly spoken and had a mischievous sense of humour. I thought he was wonderful.

One day he showed the class mercury.

He gave us all a blob of mercury to play with and we sat at our rough benches that were cracked with age and touched these strange blobs with our fingers. Then we rolled the blobs along the bench like strange bouncing ball bearings.

Mercury was a wonderful exciting discovery for us.

Then he took a coin from each of us, dipped it in the mercury and handed it back. My old penny now gleamed like silver. It was alchemy that worked: copper into silver.

All that day at school I felt for this silver coin in my pocket and rubbed it against my thumb. I wanted to show it to my mum.

Once home, I did show her the coin. But the shine had gone. I tried to remember something about the experiment that day, there had been heat. I switched on the gas stove and held the coin above the heat. To my dismay all the mercury vanished. My mother then lost interest, and I was left disappointed. Where had the mercury gone?

Looking back, knowing so much more about the harmful effects of mercury I am horrified that such an experiment was ever once allowed. And I’m appalled that so many of my contemporise were exposed to mercury vapours in that classroom and that I’d even done the same to my mum at home.

A few years before I took my ‘O’ levels Mr Weigh died. He never reached his retirement and I wonder now if mercury vapour played a part in his untimely death.

It can be so very, very frightening, when you look back.

A Hypochondriac is Born

2011-07-09T06:35:00.001-01:00

A table lamp wasn’t working downstairs.

So I went to get a light bulb to replace the low energy bulb that was obviously no longer working.

In the half-light of dusk I began to twist the bulb. It turned. All too late I realised that it was twisting as if it was a bulb with a screw attachment whereas the replacement bulb had a bayonet attachment.

I bent lower to peer at it just as the twisting stop and the bulb was freed.

“Oh,” I said, taking a deep breath.

Then I smelt air which had a metallic taint, and to my horror I realised I was only holding the glass part of the light bulb and that the rest was still attached.

I knew that there were dangers from low energy bulbs and immediately rushed outside to take a gulp of fresh air, and I then herded the two of us upstairs.

The following morning I opened windows to ventilate the room. By this time I had read about the dangers of inhaling mercury vapour. I had also searched for diagrams of low energy bulbs so that I could identify the gas that I had inadvertently freed. I knew that noble gases are used, but which one had been used in this Morrison’s light bulb? And had it been contaminated at all by any mercury? I didn’t know. But by this time I had also read about the effects of mercury poisoning.

http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/chemicals/chem_profiles/mercury/health_mercury.html

From which I’d read

“short-term exposure to high concentrations of mercury vapour caused harmful effects on the nervous, digestive and respiratory systems, and the kidneys. Initial exposure to high concentrations of mercury vapour produces symptoms similar to "metal fume fever" including fatigue, fever, and chills. Respiratory system effects include cough, shortness of breath, tightness and burning pains in the chest and inflammation of the lungs. ...Exposure to high, but unspecified, concentrations of mercury vapour has caused death due to respiratory failure. All of the reported deaths resulted from inhaling mercury vapours formed upon heating mercury.

Several case reports have described harmful nervous system effects following inhalation of high concentrations of mercury vapour. The most prominent symptoms include tremors (initially affecting the hands and sometimes spreading to other parts of the body), emotional instability (including irritability, excessive shyness, a loss of confidence and nervousness), sleeplessness, memory loss, muscle weakness, headaches, slow reflexes and a loss of feeling or numbness.

A classic sign of exposure to high concentrations of mercury is inflammation of inside of the mouth (stomatitis), sometimes with a metallic taste, excessive salivation and difficulty swallowing. Other digestive system effects include abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

Kidney injury is common following exposure to high concentrations of mercury. Reported effects range from increased protein in the urine to kidney failure. Exposure to high concentrations of mercury has also caused increased blood pressure and heart rate.”

All very worrying.

Day 1

That strange taste I now had in my mouth was that one of the symptoms? Did I now have an excess of saliva?

The symptoms “excessive shyness, a loss of confidence and nervousness, sleeplessness and memory loss,” especially worried me as I have all these already, and the thought of these characteristics being exacerbated was deeply depressing indeed.

That night I could hardly sleep.

Day 2

This morning, I have the beginnings of a sore throat and my right shoulder is aching.

Is all this psychosomatic? Did I really inhale any mercury vapour? Would Morrisons really sell a light bulb which would allow a part of it to be unscrewed so easily releasing a gas when people were trying to change it?

When I tried the light it worked (I had screwed the glass cover back on). But now I am worried if it is still safe to use. The light bulb now contains ordinary air. Will this still be okay to use? Was ordinary air being used inside the light bulb all the time and not a noble gas? Could it have been contaminated by mercury vapour?

Yesterday, I realised that there was another reason why the light bulb did not work in the first place.

It had been unplugged.

The plugs sockets were hidden behind the guitar so I didn’t notice.

I never unplug this light so I was surprised.

Then I remembered my son’s girlfriend who had set out various appliances on the coffee table and then plugged them in without a by-your-leave. She must have removed the plug, and then not bothered to plug it back in; and then I had foolishly jumped to the wrong conclusion when I’d tried to switch on the light.

Arrrrrggggghhhh!

The Round Table

2011-07-08T10:58:00.001-01:00

I had always thought that an Arthurian round table offered equality, ensuring that all that sat around it had an equal opportunity to speak out, but I was wrong, for a round table does not offer any such democracy, as there is always someone directing the discussion to whom all eyes must turn.

I had imagined that each would have been able to speak in turn, visualising those sat at the table’s rim to be radiating invisible spokes, rather like those of a cart-wheel, spokes which would meet and cross with others at the centre. And naively, I had thought that at this centre, truth like the grail would then become manifest.

Perhaps if all were indeed equal this may well have been the case, but a distinct dearth of grail manifestations attests that such equality is rarely found.

As soon as someone is the leader the magic of a round table is broken for invisible spokes no longer radiate to the heart of the table but turn to this one person. Some of these spokes will be short and others longer, but none of them would ever cross. Should someone speak to another across the table then there would later be the inevitable pull back towards the leader. So a round table with a leader creates a mathematical imbalance in which truth and equality could be lost

In Arthurian legend I’d thought that those chosen to sit closest to the king had the greater advantage. I hadn’t realised the special disadvantage that they faced, for when they turned to speak to the king due to the table’s curve there was nothing between them. They were thus terribly exposed; how much easier it must have been to face an irascible king with a good stretch of English oak between you and his wrath. Another disadvantage of sitting too close to the king when trying to make your point was that your close-coupled conversation would have left the others at the table feeling like resentful eaves droppers.

No wonder so many of the king’s favourites chose not to take up their seats by his side and instead found the perils of searching for questing beasts far more preferable.

No wonder the table was broken.

Unaware of any of this I was enchanted when I was taken into a room where a talk was about to be held and saw a round table.

I had no idea that when the speaker by chance sat by my side that I should have immediately leapt to my feet and made some excuse about questing beasts. Thoughts of capturing a yellow unicorn or a damp phoenix eluded me. Fool that I was I remained sitting in my place.

The speaker dished out pieces of paper containing a few facts from and our task was to build a character. After ten minutes of writing we then had to go into role, be that character, and answer her questions.

It was an excruciatingly experience. I found I could not slip into role at all. Worse I felt terribly exposed with everyone’s eyes on me. And worst of all I had to turn and face this tutor without any width of wood between us when it was my turn to answer her questions.

And that was when the real defect of the round table became apparent. There was no place to hide, when every radiating spoke pointed to you.

“Well your character isn’t interesting at all, far too bland,” the tutor stated dismissively, after I’d stuttered my unimaginative replies.

There is no way of hiding failure when you sit at a round table. If she had been a king my head would have rolled, and then bounced and then rested as a grim centrepiece. A warning to one and all.

Lancelot knew the pitfalls of a round table, as did many others. He too must have been shy.

Love Actually Smiles

2011-07-03T08:18:00.001-01:00

I worry and panic whenever I have to do anything involving airports. I had to pick up the now ex-teenager and his girlfriend from East Midlands Airport. This airport was about fifty-five miles away just off the M1 motorway.

In my head all I wanted to do was to drive to the arrivals building early, park the car, go inside the building, watch their plane land, and then meet and greet them, but I knew that anything as simple as that would not be possible.

I spent hours studying websites.

It seems that parking even for just a few minutes was going to be very expensive.

Eventually, I discovered information about ‘Shuttle Plus’ (one hour’s parking for free) as well as information about the short stay car park (£2 for 30 mins and then steep incremental rises.)

Booking in advance web pages were quoting ‘cheapest prices’ of over fifteen pounds for just one hour’s parking. “Cheapest Parking!” these web sites proclaimed. Yeah, I thought.

I am a coward by nature. The Shuttle Plus parking looked like a possibility, but the buses ran every fifteen minutes, and then the journey back to the terminal took an extra six minutes. Already after doing advanced calculus I’d worked out that in the worst case scenario I’d only have an eighteen minute window in which to meet and greet before the steeper charges kicked in.

It seemed it might be safer to go for the short term parking after all, and simply pay.

However, on my arrival a tiny bit of me that is still brave decided to give the ‘Shuttle Plus’ car parking experience a try.

I’d already read that the car park signs might be misleading as some old signs have yet to be replaced. So I was luckily able to make turns towards ‘car park 6’ whenever the Shuttle Plus signs were absent.

It was a longer journey than I’d expected past all the other car parks, and I was quite frightened when after travelling down this quite a long road I eventually came to a cluster of car parks.

I knew which direction to turn as I’d already studied the maps.

I got my ticket and the barrier lifted. My car park was only a quarter full and felt quite distant and lonely. Not knowing where the bus stops were I opted to park close to the other cars.

I had already read that you had to take your ticket with you for the other car parks so I guessed that this would probably be the same for this one.

The wait at the bus stop was thankfully only a few minutes, but it felt so much longer.

The bus then trundled back along the road I’d come at a steady unhurried pace as my heart raced.

The surprise being that at the Departure Terminal the bus driver told everyone to get off. It seems that the bus went no further. It seems that those destined for ‘Arrivals’ had to walk. There had been no mention of this on the web sites.

The bus driver then said something incomprehensible about where to find the bus on the way back, and when I asked him to repeat this garbled information it still made little sense.

It was quite a walk to the Arrival’s Terminal. All the time I was worrying about the time allowed and also I was now worried about where to find the return bus.

I like to get to places in good time so this was all very stressful for me.

Earlier that afternoon, I’d forced myself leave home without allowing for traffic jams or any other such problems on the roads. So I had arrived in the car park three minutes after their plane should have landed; when usually, I would have liked to have been there at least half an hour before their plane landed.

In the arrivals hall I eventually located a screen, and discovered with dismay that their flight had landed nine minutes late. Nine minutes isn’t much, but when you have so few minutes in credit in the Shuttle Plus car park it is an eternity.

My mind whirled with this new information. I did the maths. Late wasn’t good. This meant my car parking situation was under even more stress. How long would it take for them to get off the plane and then through customs. What if they got stopped?

A baby crying nearby didn’t help much either; especially since his parents were too busy playing with their mobile phones to pick up and cuddle him. He cried and cried, just as I was doing inwardly.

So I was greatly relieved when I saw my passengers and could rush and hug them.

In the film ‘Love Actually’ there is a touching scene when people are shown greeting other people at an airport with huge smiles and hugs. This is described as ‘love’. I disagree. I think such smiles are actually looks of relief because now the meeter and greeter knows they have a fighting chance of getting back to the car park in time just before the higher charges kick in.

Outside the terminal, I searched for the shuttle bus bay.

I couldn’t find it.

In a panic I eventually went inside the car parking offices to ask.

The chap inside said something totally incomprehensible, but luckily the passenger he was helping kindly took me to the door and pointed the way. He understood my terror.

The Shuttle Plus bus bay was hidden around a blind corner of the Arrival’s building on the left hand side as you exited. I’d turned right when I should have turned left.

There was of course no bus waiting , and a long queue of people.

We waited.

Time ticking.

Eventually the bus turned up.

It took an age for these people to board. The woman in front of me having little idea about how to simply place her back down in a space ,and then sit down. She stood blocking the aisle moving with infinite slowness as if executing the ballet of placing a suitcase in the right space.

She had two small boys with her who were also slow to take to their seats they stood in the aisle blocking the way forward watching her performance and ignoring her instructions for them to, “Sit down”.

Time ticking.

Then the bus steadily chugged on its way back as if on a scenic run of some seaside resort as time ticked away like a bomb.

Back at the car park trusting blind intuition I validated my ticket in the machine near the bus stop. Credit card at the ready to pay the excess.

But there was no charge.

Then at the exit barrier the validated ticket, despite being in sweaty hands, was accepted and the barrier lifted.

I sped out.

And only after exiting this strange world of the airport could I relax and listen to my travellers’ tales and give my ‘Love Actually’ smiles to the motorway.

How to Park at East Midlands Airport for Free (when dropping off and picking up passengers)

2011-07-03T06:43:00.001-01:00

My favourite part of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe” is this:

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

This is exactly what it is like trying to find information about how exactly to park for free briefly at East Midlands Airport to pick up or drop off passengers.

First of all I want to say it is possible. And if by some strange throw of the dice you have found this page then your chances have just improved even more.

This is what you need to know/do

· Leave the M1 motorway at junction 23A

· Follow the signs to East Midlands Airport

· At every roundabout follow the signs to ‘Shuttle Plus’ (or car park 6)

· It’s a long road. You will pass other car parks and a wind turbine and a lorry park.

· The Shuttle Plus car park is then the first one you see on your right.

· Follow the signs.

· At the barrier take a ticket.

· Protect this ticket and note the time for the clock has already started ticking. You have one only hour of free car parking time if you are any longer the fee shoots up to £6:20

· Drive as close as you can get to the bus stops as you can.

· There are two bus stops close to this car park. As you go into the car park they are on your far right. Closest to where other people already in the know have already parked.

· There is plenty of space in this car park so there is no stress about trying to find a place.

· Take your ticket with you.

· At the bus stop try not to stress. The buses come every fifteen minutes.

· The buses are labelled and are white.

· The buses are free.

· There is ample space for luggage on this bus.

· The journey to the departure terminal takes about six minutes.

· Everyone has to get off the bus at the departure terminal even those going to arrivals.

· Try not to panic.

· Follow the signs to the Arrivals Terminal i.e. turn right after getting off the bus. It is a four minute walk. So flat heels are needed.

· At the arrivals building just opposite the entrance door are the toilets!

· There are chairs where you can sit and a screen hanging in the middle of the ceiling (not immediately obvious) which tell you about the flights and whether or not they have landed.

· After meeting your friend/family exit go through the exit and turn left go around the blind corner and to find the bay where the shuttle bus returns from. (It’s the second bay)

· On the return journey press the bell for the bus to stop after passing the wind turbine.

· Cross the road to the Shuttle Plus car park

· Now place your ticket in the pay machine near the bus stop. This validates it. If you are under the hour there is no charge.

· Drive to the exit place your validated ticket in the machine and the barrier will lift to release you.

· Give an almighty cheer and follow the exit signs to the M1 motorway.

Here is a map and further information:

http://www.eastmidlandsairport.com/emaweb.nsf/Content/LongStayParking

Apples

2011-06-26T07:54:00.001-01:00

I have no right to speak of this, for I meter out death to slugs and snails.

I have shouted out aloud that such creatures are not welcome here, and hoped that the grisly piles of their broken brethren under the buzz of bottle green flies would help translate my words, but still they come, and so still I murder with the snip of scissors, the burn of salt, the scald of water or the quick flattening action of a grubby shoe.

I have tried nematodes, organic slug pellets, and long ago industrial slug pellets. And still they come treading over foil and broken eggs shells as if I’ve laid out a welcome carpet for a stately trail of silvery slime.

I want them gone. I want a Pied Piper to call a tune and for them all to follow him, so a pansy flower might bloom and sunflowers no longer stand on short stalks in my garden beheaded.

I would prefer them a painless exodus as killing them leaves a festering ulcer in my soul, and I take no pleasure in it.

So I am hoping that the rapacious mouths of this year’s tiny frogs will seek out my enemies tiniest infants and then feed and gorge .

So, with this partly in mind, I have nurtured my pond’s tadpoles spending many hours watching their antics.

The ones that are left in the pond are taking their time to change.

There is a plant with long thin leaves like the many spokes of a bicycle and these slower tadpoles swim together into its gathering apex. Many of them here then sun themselves as they practice breathing air. Nearby the tiny frogs that are able to crawl out gather preparing for a challenging steep climb out of the pond close to the wall.

Today when I checked on them there were fewer tadpoles in this their favourite spot, and it was only when I glance a second time that I see them. Apples. Small unripe apples bobbing on the water.

There is an apple tree in my neighbour’s garden, but its branches have been hard pruned and so do not stretch over the pond. So these apples haven’t simply fallen in. Someone has picked them. Someone has stood looking over the small wall and has then deliberately dropped them upon the tadpoles as if they were bombs. And then someone enjoyed doing this over and over again.

The neighbours whose parcels I take in and sign for.

But I have no right to speak of this, the bombing of the tadpoles, for I meter out death to slugs and snails.

Outcome

2011-06-25T17:46:00.001-01:00

Read first

http://deepestdarkestengland.blogspot.com/2011/06/one-with-character.html

There is another rattle of my letterbox.

I rush downstairs.

I can see the outline of a man holding a bouquet of flowers through the glass.

“These are for you” he says. “I’m so sorry about your car.”

He has roses and lilies and ferns and carnations all tied up with a pinky-peach bow.

“There was no need,” I protest. “You should give them to your wife.”

But he insists on giving me the flowers.

And they do look lovely.

I had no idea that I would be given a bouquet today.

In the Veg Plot

2011-06-25T17:35:00.001-01:00

There was a plant growing in my vegetable patch. It had a kind of beauty. I did not know what it was. It could have been something I’d planted, but most likely it hadn’t been. Still I watered it and nurtured it and it grew. As my beans were nibbled away and my onion sets remained stubbornly the same size and my strawberry plant bore two pitiful flowers this plant held out delicate leaves and stretched for the skies towering over my fly bitten carrots and dying chives.

It was when it flowered that I became suspicious.

I yanked it out and threw it onto the heap.

But I still wanted to learn its name.

Some time ago a friend had given me a book of wild flowers. It was a lovely second hand book called ‘The Observer Book of Wild Flowers’. It is a delightful book. Its previous owner had marked with tiny pencil ticks the flowers they had spotted: silver weed, hare’s-foot trefoil and red campion. All glorious names.

So I hoped that mine would be in there too.

It was!

It was described perfectly: the leaves bluish green in tint. Umbels and involucre- bits that hang down beneath the umbels.

I read on to the end to see if it was edible only to read: “The entire plant is evil-smelling and said to be poisonous.”

And then I read again its name which described both me and the plant at the same time: Fool’s Parsley!

The One With Character

2011-06-25T11:29:00.001-01:00

There is a rattle of my letterbox.

I have a friend who sometimes posts notes through and so I rush towards the stairs thinking it is her. But there is no sign of a note.

Then I suspect it’s yet another junk mail leaflet, and I’m about to give hell to whoever ignored my polite notice asking that none should ever be posted through my letter box. But there is no sign of any leaflet.

Instead there is the outline of a man just visible through the glass.

He’s a neighbour of mine. One of the few to know my name.

He tells me he’s just hit my car and, “Can you come and have a look?”

“Oh no, not my car,” I moan, “Just a minute.”

I close the door on him while I get my keys. I’m imagining the worst: a buckled front, twisted metal, a complete write off.

He is quiet and apologetic as he points out the damage. It’s a scratch about a foot long on the driver’s side right at the front. I can see black and blue paint.

“I had to pull over,” he explains. “A car that was coming up the other way gave me no where else to go. I’ll pay for the repair. I’ll clean it all up.”

I laugh.

I point out the bird poo on the bonnet that has worked like acid through the paintwork. I show him the two deeply etched lines down the side that another neighbour, I was told, gouged out with his keys. I point out the dent in the bonnet when at almost zero miles an hour I rolled into a tree trunk thinking I was rolling only into a bush.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

I tell him not to worry. That it gives my car character. That it is nothing to worry about. That the car is old. That it has done nearly 100,000 miles. That it is not worth repairing. I tell him not to worry about it. In fact I say it was probably my fault for parking too far away from the curb. But when I check I discover to my surprise that this time I have parked the wheels flush against the kerbstone.

Then I thank him for telling me, and tell him not to worry about it again, but he is sorry and troubled.

“It gives my car character,” I tell him. I then also tell him that I would have said exactly the same thing even if the car was brand new.

He is sad, quiet and apologetic and I know that his wife will feel upset for him too.

It is only when I get back inside and then make a cup of tea that I start to think about his car. How much damage did my car do to it? I then feel sorrier for him, for I know these neighbours are very proud of their cars. They clean and polish them lovingly, and then they tinker with their insides and with their frills and bonnets.

But I have no idea which one is his car, or what make it is, or even what colour it is. He would be shocked if ever he heard this.

I only notice and love my car. The one with character!

Tadpole Kaleidoscope

2011-06-22T19:30:00.001-01:00

The froglets like jumping buttons are leaving the pond. Hundreds of them! Three or four weeks back they were like guests that had outstayed their welcome and I longed for them to pack their tails, grow their legs and leave.

And now there is an exodus of tiny frogs and others queuing to attempt the rather steep climb out of the pond and I’m now sorry to see them go.

I’m left with the remedial group: the real slow and lazy ones who see absolutely no need to hop it. They too are developing legs so I guess in a month they will be gone too.

One of the fun things has been watching the tadpoles eating the fish food. This particular food (intended for koi carp) floats on the surface of the water like multi-coloured marshmallows and the tadpoles quickly learnt to swim on their backs and nibbled on them. So many at a time did this that anyone just glancing in the pond would have seen tiny marshmallow-sized fish food travelling in every direction, creating a wonderful visual work of ever changing art.

A tadpole kaleidoscope.

Svengali

2011-05-23T08:43:00.001-01:00

I bought the single ticket months ago, and it had been propped up on the kitchen window sill behind the orchid.

And yesterday was the big day.

I’m not at all used to going out in the evening and it’s years since I’ve been to the theatre. Usually, if ever I’m going into town at night it’s as ‘Mum’s Taxi’.

First, I couldn’t find the entrance to the theatre. It used to be opposite the museum, but the old entrance had disappeared. When did that happen?

Eventually, I followed some people through the door into the other theatre, and a woman who was even carrying her bicycle inside. Is there now a bicycle rack for theatre goers somewhere inside? She had disappeared before I’d negotiated a few swing doors so I never found out. Was that the first illusion?

With these confusions over, I was amazed to discover how many people were already in the bright theatre foyer.

There was a long queue for the bar which I joined. I bought a hot chocolate . £2 I was told.

‘That’s expensive,’ I commented.

‘Yeah, but it’s really nice,’ the smiling girl replied.

I doubted that. It was in a white plastic cup only three-quarters full and looked industrial.

All the seats in the foyer and bar area had already been taken and so I looked for a place to comfortably stand and passed a table with programmes for the event. But I thought £8 was far too expensive. Perhaps I’m just out of touch with today’s theatre prices. Then I thought it would be nice just to sit down in the auditorium, but the auditorium was not yet open and so I was left wondering what slick effects were still being put onto the stage.

A young usher then joined another nearby.

‘Don’t I know you?’ the younger woman asked.

It seems that she did.

So we chatted for a while and then the other usher told me about her grandchildren and suddenly I was once again caught up in the warp and weft of life and despite my dark clothes I was once again one of its colours.

Then doors were unlocked.

I had a wonderful seat just five rows back from the stage, right in the middle of the stalls, and a perfect view of the stage. I was surprised that the curtain was open so that we could already see the set and drifts of ‘haze’.

As people were finding their seats, paper and pencils were being handed out. Somehow I was missed, much to my relief. However, later in the show those of my ilk must have felt similar anxiety when there were further chances to be randomly chosen. No one was safe.

This was the first Derren Brown show I’d even been to and I was so impressed by his warm stage presence and his incredible skill at involving the audience, even those way up in the gods. He should be in the Olympics for his Frisbee throwing skills alone.

I was also amazed by the confidence shown by those who were selected to go on stage, who all played their parts really well.

Though there was one man who bounded down from the upper reaches of the theatre having just caught a Frisbee who then took a very unorthodox route onto the stage. He jumped up onto it at the corner instead of using the steps. This man, whoever he was, was obviously an extravert, but whether he was an actor or a clown we were never to find out as Derren politely asked him to leave the stage, citing his dramatic entrance as being partly the reason why he wouldn’t be able to ‘read’ more of this man’s character.

There was a lot of audience participation. It was amusing to watch the people in the circle with such good humour throwing their balled papers into the basket that Derren held. There was so much laughter it was almost like a children’s party.

On two occasions I found myself standing with everyone one else, and towards the end of the show I almost caught a balloon, but then just as it descended toward my lap the man next to me reached over and whacked it away.

At the end of the show there was a standing ovation and Derren Brown looked delighted with his well deserved applause.

All in all it was brilliant entertainment.

And I would love to say more, and perhaps even qualify the above statement a little, but to do so might give away the plot. I do hope I’ve not given nothing away here as I do wish to respect Derren Brown’s request that no spoilers should be revealed.

This request seems to be well observed on the internet, for I searched to see if a possible ‘glitch’ had previously happened in any previous shows, or if it was all just part of the act, but I couldn’t find any reference to that particular detail at all. So I’m looking forward to seeing the show again if it is televised to enjoy it all again and to clarify that one thing..

Thank you so much Derren Brown for a wonderful evening.

The Gong Bath

2011-05-22T07:48:00.001-01:00

The last session of the day was a ‘Gong Bath’.

A ‘Gong Bath’!

In a room full of other gong bath neophytes, I lay down upon a black blanket that the kindly gong master had provided

Then this grey-haired man began.

The sound was unearthly.

It suggested the heavy progression of doomed planets turning upon their axes and drifting slowly through space.

It was a dangerous unnatural sound: one that perhaps should only be found at the banished outer edges of the universe even though its presence there would have been in defiance of physics. It was a sound alien to human ears, with sounds within sounds in wave after wave.

Initially, it was fine but then these rolling, vibrating sounds, became too loud and too monotonous to long endure.

Lying on my soft black blanket of velveteen with closed eyes these sounds created great rolling clouds above me; crashing sulphurous cumulous clouds that were edged with dark yellows and grim browns. I looked for breaks amongst them but the wave after wave of sound was relentless and even more oppressive. It is as if it would be understood by whales and I feared their distress upon hearing it, and the deviation from their ocean paths it might cause them for this sound did not seem bound by the confines of the room and appeared to carry persistence, confusion and the ugliness of metals freed from their bound state into the greater beyond.

I yearned for lighter tones. I yearned for more variation. I yearned for softness and the cirrus clouds of finer vibrations. But the gong master fills his gong bath only with the deepest, loudest sounds. These were the striding manly sounds that go on and on like the rolling cries of successive wars victims being flung against the blackest rocks.

Then this dreadful sound (‘dreadful’ here with the old meaning of awe and fear) was broken unexpected by something that sounded like the trill of a bird but again it this was too loud and also far to artificial to have any relevance.

The dark clouds above my head had by now became heavier and even more oppressive. Also, a chill was creeping up from the floor below and into my spine. Feeling by now very uncomfortable I sat up and opened my eyes. I discovered that a friend nearby had also sat up.

“When will it end?” she whispered, as if drowning.

We both wanted to get out of this bath.

I watched the gong master at work. The gongs were decorated with symbols. He used different mallets softened with felted heads to caress and tap them to create his sounds. I wondered if there were ritualistic ways of sounding these gongs, and if each different method released different patterns of vibrations, but watching very closely I could detect very little in the way of artistry in his movements, and the sound remained heavy and oppressive no matter which stroke he used.

He then picked up another instrument rather like a flute and blew a few breathy notes. These notes were not quite right, and I could not help but be amused by these high pitched squeaky sounds which had so little affinity with bird song, which I guess he’d hoped to emulate, and which also failed to blend with the sonorous gongs. My friend by now was stifling giggles. These giggles were mounting, being fed by a boy who was sitting on the back row with his mother, for he was doubled up with mirth at the ineptitude of the gong master, and every time he caught my friend’s eye the two giggled even more.

It was like they had rumbled the king with no clothes.

The gong master, who hopefully remained oblivious of all this, returned to his solemn gongs, unleashing even more poisonous clouds of sulphurous sound, and we at the back worked even harder to stifle our giggles. Then as he walked around the room playing different instruments he set off our giggles anew as soon as his back was turned.

The gong bath would have been wonderful if an eruption of laughter had been allowed to weave its magic into the gonging as part of the sound. Or if at the start of the session we had been told feel free to add any sounds of your own, instead of his expectation that there would be passive participation and respectful silence.

Laugh if you want to, sing if you want to, be yourself! What a treat that would have been. Instead we were left buttoned up with inhibitions and frustrations.

Instead of the gongs bathing us with mystery, we were instead bathed in muddy waters of sound which left us feeling dirtied and choked up.

I wanted to grasp the mallets from his hands and create a more ethereal sound, one that spoke of blue skies and the sweeping flight of birds. I wanted someone else to play the flute. Someone who would find pure invisible notes to harmonise and add colour to his heavy monotonous brown wash. I wanted him to have taken more time over the initial meditation, when he asked us to imagine holding a ball of energy, and that energy seeping up first one arm and then down the other, and then down the right leg. It was all far too hurried. And he had also forgot the left leg. Why did he forget the left leg?

“If you want to tell me of any of your experiences I will be happy to speak to you,” he says quietly right at the end.

He is hesitant, self-effacing, a quiet gentle man who is under the delusion that his gong bath was magnificent and that he has given us a wondrous gift. That we attained astral heights. That we felt our bodies levitated and our chakras cleansed. That we were healed of aches and pains. That our souls were strengthened and rejuvenated; and that we were realigned to our true appointed destinies. That we touched the meniscus of enlightenment and managed to pierce its skin. He does not know that some of us were slipping off the slopes that could have taken us to such hopeful peaks, or that some fell into dark valleys through his lack of skill and empathy, and that many simply wanted the oppressive sound to stop.

And I feel sorry for him, because he truly believes in all this, and he’s such a nice man.

So once our gong bath plug is pulled, we rush away, releasing gurgles of laughter.

But sadly we are not energised, we are exhausted.

And I am only too eager to treasure the simple non-silence of stillness, and the beauty of true music held in the chirping of birds.

Yet Another ~Enemy

2011-05-19T18:07:00.001-01:00

It seems that something happens to me as soon as I step out of the door.

It’s as if the universe is waiting, watching, ready to pounce. It’s a worry!

I have a letter I need to post. It will take me five minutes to walk up the road and five minutes back. Ten minutes in all.

What could possibly happen in ten minutes?

I will even do it in less time as I need to rush to catch the five-thirty collection.

So what could the universe possibly throw at me in less than ten minutes?

I dash out.

I cross the road, and then turn left onto a road named after a poet.

I’m hurrying.

“S’cuse me.”

The voice is faint. Did I really hear that?

I glance around not expecting to see anyone, doubting that anyone was really calling to me.

There is a thin young wisp of a woman standing on the opposite corner next to the corner shop. I stop. I’m imagining that she is hoping I can give her directions; perhaps tell her how to get from A to B. I’m all set to help, but it will have to be quick as I’m in a hurry.

“Can you go into the shop and get me some fags?” she asks.

I’m astonished. Disappointed.

“No,” I say. “They’re not good for you.”

I can’t see her face. I’m not wearing my glasses. I can’t see her reaction as I turn and continue on my way.

But Thin Young Wisp of a Woman instantly becomes a parrot. She is now talking to someone else, and then echoes my words, “They’re not good for you.”

I don’t turn to look. I’m annoyed at myself. Why on earth couldn’t I just say no and leave it at that?

I continue up the road. I post my letter and turn around to go back the way I’ve just come.

As I reach the middle of the road I realise that Thin Young Wisp of a Woman is walking towards me with another teenage girl.

She is whispering about me to her friend. As I approach nearer they are both giggling and staring at me.

I stare back.

“I got my fags,” she laughs triumphantly. She waves the packet.

“More fool you,” I reply.

I then wonder who she got to go into the shop for her. I wonder who was beguiled by her wispy blonde hair and her slight frame. I wonder who thought they were doing her a favour, and who it was that got a smug thrill of satisfaction from their deluded act of kindness.

And I wonder how in less than ten minutes I could have made yet another enemy!

A Great Big Bouncing Dog

2011-05-19T08:34:00.001-01:00

I was walking back home across the meadows by the river.

These meadows border the railway lines and there are houses which back on to them. It’s a place of bruised beauty. A sullied abused place.

I am accompanied partway by a companion who is walking her two dogs. One is a border collie, which runs freely; whilst the other is held firmly on the lead. This is a recued dog, which is usually muzzled on this walk as it had a tendency for aggression. Though through my friend’s great care it is now beginning to mellow. It’s a dog with a slight frame and fine bones. A sensitive creature that is learning to forget the mistreatment it suffered as a puppy.

However, it’s also a dog that’s gained a reputation for threatening other people and their dogs, and the man who walks towards us with his great big bounding dog eyes it warily.

“Is that the rescued dog?” he asks, whilst his dog begins to flirt with the circling border collie.

My friend laughs.

“This dog is known by many names.”

She lists a few. They are mostly two-parters, and mostly feature the word ‘Devil’.

Calmly the slight dog stands back as if these names belong to some other creature. It is well groomed and its short hair is glossy black. It behaves perfectly.

Meanwhile, the love tryst between the border collie and the great big bounding dog is culminating with some more amorous attentions.

The man drags his dog off the collie, and then they continue on their way.

We walk in the opposite direction towards the town.

We have gone quite a distance when there is a sudden rush of darkness. It is the great big bounding dog. The collie is delighted and prances happily, and the two continue their romance.

My friend and I look back for its owner but there is no sign of him.

The great big bounding dog is now taking his love affair a step further, and the collie is quite happily accepting these amorous attentions.

But I know that the collie is getting on in years, and that my friend does not want her to have puppies. But my friend cannot intervene as she is holding the lead of the rescued dog, so I step forward.

I grab the chain around the neck of the great big bounding dog and drag him off. The collie yelps. I am now holding the big dog by his chained collar; my friend suggests that I should slip on the spare lead.

I do so.

There is still no sign of its owner; so I say I will walk this dog back in the direction that the man took.

Confidently I set off back along the track: just this dog and I.

I look down at the dog and find it is staring up at me. It has great big brown eyes. I quickly look away. To be the top dog in this situation I know better than to enter a staring contest.

A little further along I spot the dog’s owner. He is a slight man dressed a little shabbily. I think there may have been silver earrings in his left ear and perhaps tattoos on his arms, but this is all conjectured now with the benefit of hindsight, for things suddenly started to move fast.

The dog pulls on the lead back in the direction of the collie, and I am dragged almost off my feet. I can’t hold this dog. I had no idea it had such strength and power. The man rushes forward. He releases the lead and the dog bounds off. I am bewildered as I realise that the man is actually intent on walking in the same direction as we were. He is obviously heading back home.

“What kind of dog is he?” I ask.

“A Rottweiler.”

I look at him in horror. The man seeing my expression then adds lazily, “They are not bad dogs. There are only bad owners.”

His dog is out of sight.

I’m speechless.

I walk back towards my friend who is still holding the lead of the rescued dog. The rescued dog is sitting patiently on the path waiting. The great big Rottweiler is again finding ways of entertaining the collie.

Eventually, the man takes his dog off her and walks away.

I am left in shock.

“I didn’t realise that was a Rottweiler,” I say.

“Didn’t you?” my friend replies. “I saw him looking at you as you walked him back. He was obviously trying to work you out. He must have decided you were all right.”

I feel so foolish for my D- dog recognition skills.

Then I go over what I’ve just done:

I’d just dragged a copulating Rottweiler off his love interest… which must have annoyed him a little.

I’d then held this great big Rottweiler by his chained collar…which must have made him furious.

I’d then clipped a lead this great big Rottweiler and made him walk back along the track in the opposite direction to his home…which must have been so puzzling for him. No wonder he’d just stared at me.

I’d then just been dragged by a great big Rottweiler that had demonstrated that it had twice my strength and stamina… and I had for the first time experienced the power and packed energy of this creature.

So I’d been taking a strange dog for a walk…a great, big, strange Rottweiler for a walk.

That night I couldn’t sleep.

I kept replaying those rapid scenes and my over quick reactions.

I could still feel the animal’s strength, and I frightened myself as I imagined how this Rottweiler could have reacted differently at each and every stage.

I imagined its jaws and teeth.

And I felt ever so very grateful that after this encounter it was only my specs that were bent slightly out of shape.

I’d taken a great big strange Rottweiler for a walk…oh joy!

Inspirational

2011-05-16T12:34:00.001-01:00

I have joined a walking group and walk out with them every third Sunday in the month. The walk yesterday was very dramatic as one poor chap collapsed as we walked by the River.

We were miles from anywhere. A gate was locked and prevented an ambulance from negotiating a long farm track down to the lock on the river.

So the fire brigade were then called and then the air ambulance.

And much to my amusement, despite all this, the plucky chap refused it all and walked to the ambulance.

Inspirational!

Xenomancy

2011-05-16T11:49:00.001-01:00

I was in a rather large village with a friend yesterday and we went to one of the pubs there. There we met Geoff. Geoff had established a writers' group in a long narrow back room.

It turned out to be more of a drop in session rather than a workshop or a critique group. A place where writers simply met and chatted, or so it seemed. Geoff (I didn't catch his last name) seemed to be simply a facilitator and the meeting he presided over had no rules.

After the previous day’s experience at the swimming pool the thought of ‘no rules’ cheered me up immensely.

It was a very odd affair.

My friend and I were the first to arrive.

My friend gave her name and shook his hand.

Then he turned to me and I gave him my name and shook his hand.

“And you are?” Geoff asked leaning towards me.

I was flummoxed. I did not know what else to say. what more I could add. I’d already told him my name and felt awkward about saying it twice.

I had the sensation I was in a damp, dark cave and up against the wall.

“Er… I’m just me.” I said, Hoping that I’d given the right answer.

My friend, long practiced in the art of explaining herself to the hard of hearing took, control of the situation and gave my name; while was still mediating that the syllables of my name must sound like, “Pleased to meet you,” to the deaf.

After that initial embarrassment, Geoff then talked to us very enthusiastically about an agreement he had obtained with Orchard Press to publish books from the group. He talked very enthusiastically to us about this project and we were so very impressed until…

…unhappily for Geoff, a group of people then arrived. They were in despair. They wanted to know when they were going to see their finished books. It seemed the publisher was dragging his feet and that nothing was actually happening after over a year of waiting.

When we asked one of these complainants about her book she retorted that she had actually set them seven!

She then showed us a magazine article featuring her books and pictures of the already prepared hard covers. They were children’s books, illustrated by another person in the group. The meeting then threatened to turn quite nasty with vociferous protests from all involved.

However, Geoff remained unruffled by all this.

He is an elderly man, who simply flipped away their protests by talking about his grandson or by flirting with the children’s story writer once her husband had left the room to buy drinks.

Whilst all the bitter arguments were going on, the woman next to me handed out fliers for her upcoming book reading. She was an author who had not gone down Geoff’s ‘publishing’ route, but had instead simply sent out extracts of her manuscript to twenty publishers. She hadn’t written short stories first. She hadn’t written for magazines. She hadn’t got an agent. She had simply sent her work out to seven publishers at a time choosing the ones she thought would be most interested in her work.

She told me that she didn’t actually have any ambition to be a writer. She had simply had an idea, had written her book and had then sent it off …and then she had got it published! On the twentieth attempt!

What joy!

I later learn of xenomancy: divination using strangers. So I resolved to learn from the unflappable, calm and unruffled Geoff , man who faced down a storm of protest and remained untroubled; and the author who took a different route, but persevered and got there in the end without using the word ‘rejection’ in her conversation once.

Divination

2011-05-16T11:16:00.001-01:00

In the past, the diviners looked for signs and portents in the bones cast upon the floor. And those that were wise enough would then advise as to whether an enterprise should be undertaken, and whether there would be a favourable or unfavourable outcome.

So anyway, I opened the door and discovered a bone lying beneath my doorstep.

It is a leg bone from some poor unfortunate animal that once grazed a field. It has been gnawed and chewed.

I am not skilled in reading bones. Had I been able understand its import then I would not have bothered going swimming, instead I would have immediately turned around and gone to watch the antics of the tadpoles instead.

However, sadly, ossomancy lessons did not form part of the curriculum in my Yorkshire primary school, even though my teachers were relics from the dark ages, so I failed to take heed of this well placed warning sign and stepped over it.

There were other messages too that I fail to read…

The sky is the underside of a blue bowl pressing over me as I cross an expanse of grass. There are clouds as if the gods themselves are trying their best to warn me to turn right around and go back. But like all gods their spelling is lousy and they tend to blot the blue pages of their copy books with fat white blobs with fractal swirling edges.

You’d think by now that the gods would be able to write a clear message in the sky.

“Don’t go swimming!”

How hard is that?

A couple of cumulus clouds here and a few wisps of cirrus clouds there and… da da! The message could be received and understood.

I think we have thick, slovenly gods.

Though I’m sure they were writing to warn me, but as I can’t read god blobs and blotches their scrawl was meaningless.

I discovered long after the event that in Leviticus 19-26 there is in fact a warning not to observe clouds. Leviticus needn’t have worried, for my aeromancy skills were zilch and hence I continued on my way.

Then I am there.

I am in the over-fifties swim.

The lanes have been sectioned off into three sections: slow, medium and fast. Signs indicate the direction we have to take. These signs also warns us against congregating at the ends; and that there is a space in the middle for those that wish to overtake slower swimmers.

A regular group of people go.

I have only been a few times, and not at all this last month. I have yet to make any friends there. They are an insular lot. There is a woman who looks like an ex-headmistress who has given me a ‘hello’ and a ‘goodbye’. A woman from whose serious demeanour I’d already previously determined I would try to avid getting the wrong side of. This woman is there when I arrive and she’s already going up and down the slow lane with her shark like motion.

I go into the slow lane.

The water is cold, and it is a shock.

I begin.

Cold Ex-Headmistress gives me a perfunctory ‘Hello’ as she swims by, and I laugh and tell her how out of practice I am, but there is no warmth in her response.

She is a faster swimmer than I, and will overtake me soon.

I have completed four lengths, when a friend of mine unexpectedly arrives. I am delighted to see her. My friend is registered blind and yet she is gamely carrying on and not letting this affect her at all. I call to her and she too gets into the slow lane. It is great to see her and we begin to swim up and down the pool side by side. Her daughter has just come back from a round the world trip and she is eager to share her news.

It is lovely to be swimming side by side and chatting about New Zealand, Australia and Thailand and we are laughing and I am thoroughly enjoying her companionship.

But there is a rattle of old bones and a gathering of clouds.

There are chuntered comments here and there, something about lanes and overtaking.

I am sensitive to the needs of the faster swimmers to overtake and so I’m doing an odd doggy paddle, cum crawl, cum breast stroke so that I’m as close to the edge as possible and my friend is also close to the edge so that there is ample room for such sharks to glide by.

But something is building up. I catch an occasional comment from another swimmer, a woman with a cherry aspect.

This woman when I first saw her, on another occasion, had commented to Cold Ex-Headmistress about how quiet it was in the Friday swimming session, and had sung a little.

I’d quite liked that. I thought she might be someone to break us out of our ‘One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest’ silence. I thought she might be a bit of a rebel. Someone who would liven things up. It seems I was both wrong and right.

The slow lane isn’t at all busy. There are perhaps less than ten of us are there. As they complete their twenty lengths many soon leave and there’s even more space.

However, Cheery Aspect though is not the anarchist I’d hoped she was going to be. This time she is not singing but complaining. She finally complains sharply that me and my friend should not be swimming side by side as we are blocking the over-taking lane.

I am shocked. I have seen her on other occasions swimming parallel to her friends and chatting as she did so. I am astonished by this intolerance and saddened by her being such a stickler for the rules.

She has enlisted the support of Cold Ex-Headmistress with whom she has an formed an alliance. And just for good measure an elderly gentleman with pale white skin and flabby flesh that seems to be already falling away from his bones kicks me hard on my thigh to show his support.

Luckily,my friend is made of stern stuff and laughs at all this, but I’m upset.

I know the rules as well as them, but I also know that I would never have complained should ever they were swim side by side with one of their friends. I would instead have been pleased to see such companionship and to have heard their merry chatter.

I also know that if ever I found my way similarly blocked that I would have simply cut across to the other side and found open water and simply gone back the way I’d come.

However, the slow lane is now dominated by these two: Cold Ex-Headmistress and Cheery Aspect. It seems they have appointed themselves the prefects of the slow lane. I don’t want to give in to their bullying and so my friend and I continue side by side a little longer.

Then I catch up with Cheery Aspect and explain that my friend is blind.

“I wouldn’t have complained if I’d known,” Cheery Aspect says.

I hope that she will now think about what it is like to be blind and cut off from the world, and what pleasure my friend was hopefully gleaning from our conversation.

I then wait for Cold Ex-Headmistress and give her the same information. “Oh, I know she is,” she says. “But this lane is for people swimming in single file and you shouldn’t be in the overtaking lane.”

I know she’s right about the rules, but I tell her that I would never have complained about her.

I then wonder about such rules and why some people like to hit others over their heads with them.

I wonder why they can’t find other creative ways of solving such problems which doesn’t involve curtailing the happiness of others. Or why they don’t stop to think instead, ‘Way ahead blocked, I’m obviously much faster than these slow coaches perhaps I’m in the wrong lane. Or way ahead blocked, I’ll just tread water for a while because those two people look as though they are happy and enjoying each other’s company and I wouldn’t want to spoil it in any way.

The next thing I notice is Cold Ex-Headmistress and Cheery Aspect are now complaining to the lifeguard about us.

I’m now swimming behind my friend and trying to catch up with her and I tell her what I’ve seen.

My friend laughs.

The lifeguard has called his boss.

I now feel frightened and upset. Any minute now I expect to be hooked out of the water and thrown out of the swimming pool.

The lifeguard and the boss talk awhile longer.

Then Cheery Aspect and Cold Ex-Headmistress tell us that because my friend is blind she should have a lane all to herself.

I am sickened by this.

I am sickened that between them they have dreamt up such a solution. I am sickened to discover that they have discussed this with the lifeguards. I am sickened that they are now telling us what they have been discussing. I am sickened that they are reminding my friend about her disability when she came here to get away from all that.

I am swimming now behind my friend in the ordained single file, but I have fallen back as I tiring and feeling so upset.

Cold Ex-Headmistress then comes across yet again to tell us that my friend should have a lane all to herself and how that was how it was done once.

My friend laughs.

I try to imagine the other poor blind person who once found themselves banished to their own lane. I’m astonished that this segregation was ever deemed necessary. I tell Cold Ex-Headmistress that this is an appalling idea and that it has upset me so much I don’t ever want to talk to her.

Soon there is hardly anyone left in our lane. It’s nearly the end of the session. My friend and I stop to chat at the side of the pool. I apologise to my friend for not being able to handle it and for not being able to think of the right thing to say.

Then the lifeguard comes along. He is kind and sympathetic. He tells us that the ‘rules’ are not ‘rules’ but guidelines. He tells us that we were not doing anything wrong. He tells us that there was plenty of space for the others to overtake when we were swimming side by side, and that some people are like that and not to let them worry us.

My friend then suggests to him that perhaps the faster swimmers were in the wrong lane and should have been in one of the other lanes.

He thinks about this for a while. The idea hadn’t occurred to him.

So we leave and shower. I see my friend across the road and then I walk home.

I think about how some people use rules as iron rods to beat the heads of others.

There is a heavy thick cloud across the sky as if a god in a, ‘I did try to warn you!’ flounce has just spilt white ink all across the sky.

I wonder if the bone will still be waiting outside my door, or if a hungry dog would have found it, or maybe even a passing T. Rex.

I discover the bone is still there.

A warning perhaps of what I will find inside.

I open the door….

and find…

bills!

Burnishing the armour of their “Yes”

2011-05-10T16:44:00.001-01:00

I need a quiet day and a very rare thing: equanimity, if ever I’m going to paint.

I also need a lovely, bright sunny day, and the light just right.

A day like today.

My intention was to finish my painting. My painting is a watercolour painting of grass with bluebells.

I’ve been painting it for about fifteen years. Each centimetre has taken about an hour to achieve.

The two small plates I used as palettes have been covered in paint that has been wet and dried for well over a decade. They are things of beauty in their own right with all their various shades of greens and browns and blacks.

Since everything was absolutely perfect I decided that I was going to finish the painting today.

I’d prepared everything the night before.

This morning I worked out a timetable: fifteen minutes painting followed by fifteen minute breaks to give my eyes a rest.

And so I began, feeling optimistic and utterly content.

All was going perfectly, until there was a rattle of the letter box.

Reluctantly, I put the paint brush down.

When I opened the door there were two women standing there. They had an air of unease; and I sensed instantly that they were long used to confrontation whenever people opened their doors to them.

“Do you believe in creation or evolution?” the woman nearest asks.

In her cleanliness and the neatness of her clothes there is a softness and warmth about her. She is dressed in her Sunday best as if for church, wearing light coloured fabrics which proclaim propriety, dignity and righteousness. She is a wholesome person. The sort of woman you’d expect to find by the Aga cooking birthday cakes and ministering words of wisdom to a crowd of eager children with upturned faces. A Disney woman on whom the sun would always shine and one for whom everything would always work out right for in the end. She smiles like a mother patiently waiting for an answer from a particularly difficult child.

I am dressed in black. And I’m now frowning. I am darkness personified. I am the devil incarnate made so simply by her presence on my doorstep.

I can feel annoyance rising, so I get my words in quick trying to be as polite as I can.

“Evolution is right. I don’t believe in god. And I think you are wrong to be going around knocking on doors and disturbing everyone.”

“Can I give you this?”

She proffers one of her magazines.

“No, thanks.”

She remains unruffled and smiles robotically; as does the chocolate coloured elderly lady behind her. I observe that they are no longer showing any signs of unease. They have found familiar ground. They are used to hearing the word “No.” It conveys upon them sainthood. For their prosthelytizing has achieved a “No” that has burnished the armour of their “Yes”.

As I close the door I see that they have peace and equanimity.

My peace and equanimity!

I return into the room and find that I’m now carrying unease, the unease I saw in them when I first opened the door; an unease which is now fermenting inside me into a seething annoyance.

They have shattered my peace.

I pick up the paintbrush…

….

… and then I put it down.

A Pencil Sketch

2011-05-09T07:45:00.001-01:00

Poor old Jane Austen was accused of never including details of momentous events in her writing: of leaving out any references to wars and turmoil that formed the distant backdrop to her world as she sat scribbling at her desk.

She should have done, it was argued, by my lecturer. And gullible and naïve, I thought so too. “Yes, she should have said something,” I believed back then, “just to set the scene. She should have thrown in a reference to Napoleon perhaps here and there. It would have firmed up the context.”

Now I realise that if she had have done then something else would perhaps have been lost. Some little detail. A pencil sketch of everyday life that would have been lost forever had she too listened to the voices of such critics.

Those that wrote of Napoleon’s campaigns were never accused of not giving any attention to the minutia of everyday life of those he warred against, not realising how much they lost by not doing so. For they lost the details of foreground: the details of the lives of those who made the buttons for such shiny battle coats.

Jane Austen realised this no doubt, that others would write well of wars and battles, and that it was far better if someone did in fact write about the minutiae of life instead: the little things. The little things that add up like pennies to form the banks upon which we found our existence… like for example a local election.

Jane Austen, of course, would have not been allowed to vote had there been such election in her time. Writing this fills me with such sadness and pain. For perhaps history could have been transformed for the better if women had always held that right.

I have always voted.

I vote because it is my way of saying thank you to those that fought so hard for my vote.

I never miss a chance to vote.

Interestingly, in all these years of my voting not one person I have ever voted for has ever been victorious in any election.

My cast vote, my X against a name, means that so-and-so will have absolutely no chance of winning.

I have changed my voting colours I have voted over the years for yellows, reds and greens (though never the blues) and not once has anybody I’ve ever voted for been elected.

I live, I am reliably told, in an indicator town. A place that unfailingly always returns the winning political party every year to Westminster. When our town votes are counted that is it. The election is effectively over and the government a foregone conclusion.

It seems the voters in my town, with the notable exception of me, are in tune with the political mood of the country and all, with the exception of me, are psychically aware of what the future holds.

When you think about it, the country could save itself an awful lot of money by just allowing this one town to vote.

And then also any individual candidates on this voting list could save themselves hours of wasted time, effort and expense by simply knocking on my door and asking me which way I intended to vote.

Imagine the relieved smiles of candidates leaving my threshold after being told I was not voting for them.

And the happy smile of the one assured of my vote who would then be able to call a quick halt to the expensive leafleteers and pop off for a holiday in the sun instead of pointlessly trudging the streets.

It could save an awful lot of time.

The rooms where I vote are at the back of the Methodist church. They seem to become sepia as soon as I enter. It’s a dusty place. An empty crowded place. It’s full of ghosts. There are soldiers and curled-haired women in tight skirts dancing to music that only they can hear. There is a warm hush in this place. The people behind the desk are delighted to see at last a voter, someone with whom they can interact and prepare papers for.

They’d changed the layout a little. I walk into the open booths set further back, dodging the ethereal dancers whose thoughts are on the war, and then I look down at the names on the voting list with sadness knowing that my cross will mean that some poor unfortunate’s hopes will be instantly dashed.

I hesitate, and then make the two quick slashed lines. It is as if I’ve wielded a sword and not a stubby thick pencil tied to a string.

The 8th of May

2011-05-08T09:25:00.001-01:00

My garden looks prettiest in the first few weeks of May. The snow-in- summer (Cerastium tomentosum) opens its star shaped flowers above short silvery leaves. The geraniums unfurl baby blue petals. My aquilegia trumpets soft pinks, creamy whites and many skirted deep blues. And the climbing rose’s cerise coloured flowers set against the dark wood of the contorted willow tree are a heartbeat of wonder.

No one has ever seen this, except for me.

This is the time when someone should call, but no one ever does.

So this time, very early in the year, I sent out an invitation.

“The weekend of the 8^th of May… please come and stay.”

Many weeks later, my friend writes back, , and tells me that she will be decorating that weekend.

I am saddened to come second to pots of paint.

Another friend then tells me that in early May she will be running in a charity event just up the road from me.

Cheered I ask,“Which weekend?”

“The weekend of the 7^th May,” she writes.

“Come and stay,” I say.

“Okay, that will be great,” she replies.

Months later, when we chance to chat, I tell her how much I’m looking forward to her visit.

“Oh, I’m going to stay with XXX instead,” she says, in a throw away comment, that I only just manage to catch.

Then I realise that if I had not mentioned it, it was unlikely that she would have told me about her change of plans at all.

XXX lives two miles away from the event; it’s only a two minutes walk to the event from here.

Long ago XXX had an affair with my friend’s ex-husband, before he was her ex-husband. My friend knows this.

It seems this time I’ve come second to spots of taint.

Yesterday, my friend travelled all the way from the north of England to an event, just a hop, and a skip, and a jump away from my house, but she did not call in.

Though I did have a phone call.

“I am ringing you to tell you that your computer has a virus.”

It is the sing-songy Jasmine Flowered Indian Lady trying her phishing scam once again.

I don’t argue with her. I gently put the phone down on the carpet, and then replace it in the cradle. Later, I wish that I had invited Jasmine Flowered Indian Lady to visit my garden on the 8th of May.

It rained all last night.

And I discovered that the guttering which had been fixed, but had not yet been put to the test, is still not working properly. Water streamed down the brickwork, only more so.

And then this morning, when I look out at the garden, a smaller visitor, a cat, is to be seen raking the grass after having just left something steaming behind.

And then when I step out into the garden, I discover the newly opened delicately petalled roses have all been bruised and battered by a heart attack of rain; that the trumpeting aquilegia are now all downturned and muted, that the geraniums have become grim geriatrics barely able to raise their heads from their beds. And worse still, that overnight dandelions have sprung up like pirates, tall and proud, to claim domination of this green ocean with their serrated cutlass blades.

And then, as if nothing could be any worse, there is the yapping sound from a small, white dog.

Pudsey, it seems, has been found.

They have him on a long lead.

And it’s just as well, as my clouds darken.

Small Dog

2011-05-07T08:25:00.001-01:00

I admit I have plotted against the dog next door. It is a small, wiry, yapping thing.

I hate it.

The nextdoor’s back door opens at about seven-thirty every morning and this grubby white beast bounds down a narrow well worn path it has etched into the lawn and then jumps the low wall into my garden. It lands in my vegetable patch. It then poos where I had hopes of growing peas and carrots, and then it wees against my leeks.

Later, flies rise from these heaps and buzz. Even worse are awful moments when I’m gardening and I have failed to notice a recent deposit.

The people next door must realise exactly what their dog is doing when they open the door at seven-thirty in the morning. They haven’t opened the door for their dog simply to take the air, they have opened the door for a purpose. They can see exactly what direction their dog takes every day. Indeed they must have taken some pride in the fact that their dog never left any mess in their own garden.

What a thoughtful dog!

And they must have caught the occasional glimpse of me scooping up its droppings and then throwing them onto the ashy fire heap with less than delight. So I guess they must have realised that I’m not exactly Pudsey’s number one fan.

My neighbour looked into my pond a few days ago. She was with a friend. They looked into the clear waters for some time and I realise now what they were really looking for.

The pond is doing really well. The tadpoles are voracious eaters. They have gobbled up all the blanket weed, and now go frantic if any fish food floats over their heads. I seem to have got the piranhas of the tadpole world in my pond. They are fat beasts with long sinewy tails that they wave in the water like small pendants. They are 90% gummy gums that occasionally bask upon their backs opening and closing their mouths as if hoping for a heaven sent feast.

The other day, I had been absentmindedly watching them when my neighbour said,

“You’ve got a lot of tadpoles.”

She startled me, I hadn’t heard her approach.

“Yes,” I said, as I scrambled from a kneeling position to my feet.

“Have you seen, Pudsey?”

I look at her blankly.

“My white dog. My little dog,” she raises her voice like you do whenever speaking with the enfeebled. “My little white dog.”

“No,” I answer, “Is he missing?”

I am innocent of any crime, but instantly I realise that I’m already their prime suspect, and suddenly I feel very guilty indeed.

“I let him out, at seven-thirty this morning, like I always do, and he never came back.”

“I haven’t seen him,” I answer, hoping that she can’t see how much I’m inwardly cheering.

The woman looks beyond me to the other gardens she has allowed her dog to freely trespass.

“He can’t have gone far,” she says. “He can’t have gone further than that fence over there.”

She has obviously decided long ago that particular fence would form the boundary of little smelly Pudsey’s domain; and I feel annoyed that she has not been the slightest bit concerned about the feelings of those affected by such little Smelly incursions.

I have never once complained about her dog and what he does in my vegetable patch, but perhaps she can read my thoughts because she suddenly says, “He’s such a little rascal.”

I glance back at my house, the back door is wide open, he have could easily have run inside. He has been inside before. I half expect him to bound out as I look. I must confess that I had earlier thought that the next time he trespassed inside I would open the front door and let him out that way, to take his chances in the wilder world, in the hope that he would disappear for good, but I had dismissed it as a fanciful idea, and knew that I would never have gone so far no matter how much I disliked their yapping dog. A dog that barked at me whenever I stepped outside to hang up the washing, and which ruined my peace if ever I sat outside to read a book.

“He’s been missing before,” she tells me. “But he’s micro-chipped, so we got him back.”

My heart sinks.

“I’ll keep a look out,” I offer dejectedly.

“Thanks she says.”

And then I’m left alone in the tranquil peace of the garden, guiltily hoping that Pudsey has found a happier home somewhere else, somewhere far away, and that he will never ever return.

It is then I look again at my piranha tadpoles and their opening and closing mouths, and see how their bellies are fat and bloated, as if a small dog has recently chanced to fall amongst their midst.

Hello…Hello

2011-05-06T10:13:00.001-01:00

I’m shaking.

Trembling.

There was a phone call.

“Hello,” I’d said cheerily.

My friend had said that if she had no work then she might call.

At first there was no reply, but then I heard the hideous tell-tale call centre sound in the back ground.

“Hello,” a female Asian voice says.

“Hello,” I reply.

“Hello,” she says again.

“Hello,” I answer.

We continue the ‘Hello’ game a few times more.

She has my name, she has my phone number and she tells me that there is a problem with my computer.

I don’t listen. I know it’s a scam. I know Microsoft don’t call you up to say this or that is wrong with your computer. I know that I have more than enough virus protection, flaming firewalls and Trojan horse booby traps to keep my computer safe from all determined Greeks and geeks. I know she is lying and is probably in Bradford, Luton or some other such unholy place.

I know it’s nonsense. They’ve called before. A man last time. Worried me. Frightened me. But then I had then gone onto YouTube and found a man who had taped a similar call… and then had teased his caller with pretended gullibility. Thus forewarned I am only angry.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask.

She begins again with her script.

“Why are you lying?” I ask.

She continues calmly never once changing her sing-song voice of jasmine flowers.

My voice is rising; hers is like a still ocean unruffled by the breeze.

I wonder if she too is duped. If the sincerity of her voice is because she truly believes in what she is saying?

I tell her it’s a scam. I tell her I know it’s a scam. I want her to hang up. She doesn’t. She persists with her script. I then I find myself lying also.

I tell her that her phone call is being recorded.

She remains unruffled.

I tell her that the police will soon be knocking on her door.

Her voice is silvery and rounded like the moon.

I tell her that she is lying. I’m trembling. I feel rage and anger building that this woman has disrupted my peace and tranquillity. That she has changed my mood into darkness and the gunge water you find at the bottom of a dishwasher.

I hold the phone away from my ear and pretend that I am speaking to someone else in the room about her bogus call.

She hangs up.

I leave the phone off the hook so that she can’t call anybody else.

After a while it makes an annoying sound. Then I hear an automated operator’s voice. I’m thinking maybe I should dispense with the phone once and for all.

And I am angry with myself that I could not find the right words to crack her lies and that I lied myself.

I am angry that I raised my voice whereas she remained calm and serene.

But above all, I am angry that I am being lied to by a woman.

I search YouTube again and waste minutes listening to similar scams. I hear the same woman’s voice again. She is calm and serene as she realises that the man she had called has rumbled her. He is typing offensive words into a box one letter too many or one letter too short so that her phishing scam will not be activated. He reads out the letters. They spell enough of a rude word to shock. She understands enough to realise he is not going to be fooled. And calmly she ends the call as if it was he and not she who was the time waster.

My phone is still off the hook… looks like my friend will not be able to get through… but at least Indian Jasmine Woman can’t phone anyone else and it’s so peaceful here now that my equanimity is returning bit by bit.

A Quick Fix

2011-05-05T08:30:00.001-01:00

The dishwasher has not been washing properly for some time. I had cleaned out the filters and had previously found a pool of mucky looking water beneath them which I had emptied bit by bit with a dishcloth.

I’d even walked to my supermarket and had bought the special stuff that came with a warning about being an irritant to the eyes and had followed the instructions to the letter.

Though the next wash seemed better after I’d used the clean your dishwasher stuff, the washed pots still didn’t look right.

So I decided to clean out the filters again, and was shocked to find again more muddy waters that were gritty with food particles and grey particles.

I left the filters soaking in the sink while I went in search of the handbook which had come with the machine seven years ago.

My house is full of such handbooks. Every appliance comes with such a beast. They are fat tomes which say the same thing over and over in every language of the EU. My handbooks could fill a library of shelves. Luckily, this particular handbook was in one of the kitchen cupboards right at the bottom under a pile of other such handbooks and I knew where to find it.

I’d never read it before.

It described how to clean out the filters, which I’d already figured out for myself.

It described how to dismantle the rotating arms, and how to clean out the jet holes.

It was getting exciting.

It described how to unfasten a screw and to clean out the area near the pump. Wow! That sounded like advanced physics, I didn’t really want to go that far.

It said you could put detergent in the machine to wash it out.

Now that I could do.

So I popped detergent into the tablet holder part of the machine and set it on, minus the filters and the lower plate that were still soaking in the sink.

As the machine burbled I then started ironing and at the same time began to cook a frozen portion of soup (see post below).

There is a universal law that states whenever your house is in total disarray the telephone rings.

I switched off the iron, switched off the soup, switched off the radio in the kitchen, switched off the radio in the living room and scampered to reach the phone in time.

The call is from a call centre, I can hear disembodied voices. I can hear distant chattering with tell tale Indian accents, but no one is attending to my line and answering my plaintive, ‘Hello? Hello?’ It suddenly cuts off.

I go back to my ironing. I switch the radio back on which has now decided to go off the station and has to be retuned. I start the ironing again and then realise that my soup is not defrosting so I lean over the ironing board to switch the cooker on again. The dishwasher is making an odd sound behind me, and I’m beginning to worry that I might have used too much detergent; and did it rally mean washing up liquid or did it mean the usual dishwasher tablet. I’m beginning to worry.

The bedding I’m ironing is not losing its creases and I realise I haven’t switched the iron back on again. I go into the next room and find the radio is off so I miss the next few words of the programme I’m trying to listen to and I switch that radio station back on.

And all this disruption has been caused by a stupid computer randomly dialling up my phone.

I curse all call centres and then take armfuls of ironed bedding upstairs and begin the exciting task of stuffing a duvet back into its cover.

There is a universal law that states whenever your house is in total disarray someone always knocks on your door.

I’m delighted as I’m expecting a parcel. This is why I’m inside doing all these jobs so that I don’t miss this knock. I scramble over the duvet and bound downstairs.

It’s not the parcel. Instead its my friend. I’m delighted to see her.

She comes inside and I rush upstairs to turn off the radio upstairs. As she comes into the front room I switch off the radio in the corner and then I switch off the radio in the kitchen.

I switch off the soup…she’s not tempted (see post below).

And then I finish ironing the St George flag. The one that hung from the upstairs window for the royal wedding and that’s been washed and dried.

My friend knows me well, and isn’t at all surprised to come upon me ironing a flag. It’s the last item. I fold it and put it away, then I tidy away the ironing board and we go outside to sit in the sunshine.

When we have set the world to rights we eventually return inside. Seeping from beneath the dishwasher is a mass of growing bubbles.

I grab a cloth and place it at the bottom of the machine, and we continue our chat in the living room while I have visions of bubbles taking over the whole kitchen.

Once my friend leaves I go back to look imagining the worst.

The dishwasher has finished its cycle. I gingerly open the door. It is full of small bubbles. I grab a handful and then blow them into the garden and they are caught by the wind and spiral away: a thing of beauty and mystery.

I then re-read the dishwasher instruction book and decide to have a go at cleaning the holes on the arms.

I am horrified by the gunge inside the top arm. There are particles of food, black bits, and egg shells. The holes prove trickier to clean out than I imagined, and at each end of the arm tiny particles of egg shells refuse to exit through their respective holes.

I try using an unravelled paper clip, tweezers, a pin and then a needle. I cover the holes in the arm as if it is a flute and play tap water through, it hoping that this will clear the holes.

It doesn’t.

I then take the arm up into the bath room and try the bath tap hoping that this stronger jet of water will do the trick.

It doesn’t

My sleeves are wet, my socks are wet. I change jumpers and socks and try again with the needle and eventually I have cleaned out the holes.

It is now the turn of the lower arm. This one thankfully was easier.

By this time the bubbles have all melted away and to my horror I discover that there is a puddle of disgusting looking dirty water at the bottom of the dishwasher. Horrified to find this again, I study the manual. It described how you can unfasten a screw and reach and then clean out the next section near the pump.

I decide to give it a go.

There is a universal law that states whenever there is a screw to unfasten it is bound to have the wrong kind of head.

From the diagram in the manual it looked liked a Phillips screw, so I got my Phillips screw driver.

It didn’t work.

I tried a smaller screwdriver.

It didn’t work.

I then crawled almost inside the machine so I could peer more closely at the screw head.

It was shaped like a hexagon.

I got out my bits and pieces jar and tipped it out hoping to find an Allen key.

It’s now like an episode from Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The first Allen key is far too big, the second one is too big, and the third… I search through a heap of drawing pins, nails, screws and roll plugs… there isn’t a third!

In the living room I get a chair and reach for a toolkit on the top shelf. Joy of joys when I open it I discover it has three small Allen keys.

It’s again like Goldilocks and the Three Bears... except in my case it’s more like Greyilocks and the Three Bears! The first Allen key is far too big, the second one is too big and the third thankfully is just right.

I twist it and release the screw.

I find more disgusting gunge. I clean it all up. Then I scrape away lime scale deposits, and clean and clean and clean until this section gleams.

It takes an age to refit the plastic part and to get the screw to turn once more.

It takes a further age to refit the lower arm.

It takes forever to refit the filters and to replace the bottom shelf.

But eventually it is complete. I tidy up and switch it on.

It works… the plates are gleaning.

I’ve fixed the dishwasher!

Yeah!

It’s time for soup (see below) which of course by now is long cold.

I’m tempted to celebrate by hanging out the flag once more… but when I look outside it is already dark.

Soup!

2011-05-05T07:01:00.001-01:00

My old neighbour who moved a long time ago to another part of the town and now has a bungalow also has green fingers. When I visited her not so long back she gave me a herb growing in a pot and told me what it was.

A few days ago I decided I would make carrot and coriander soup from scratch and began.

When it was time to add the coriander I went outside to the patio and there was the pot I’d been given. I wasn’t sure if it was coriander, though I was certain that this is what my old neighbour had called it.

I had a vague sense of unease and feeling that coriander shouldn’t be a small stout looking plant with stumpy leaves. I had thought that coriander was a more delicate plant with slender stems and a sunny hat of swaying green leaves. I had bought a fresh coriander plant from the supermarket before and it had looked nothing like this. I wondered if it was a different form of coriander, perhaps the fore-runner of the more svelte variety found in the supermarket, an older version.

Despite these misgivings I harvested a handful of leaves and cast them into the soup and put it through the whizzer.

The result was a most delicious soup, not quite the taste I’d expected.

A friend called around yesterday and I showed her the pot containing the stumpy herb and asked her if she knew what it was. With barely a glance she said the name, which I instantly knew to be correct and also the name that my neighbour had used.

Oregano!

I’d made carrot and oregano soup and my friend could not be persuaded to try it.

O-ri-gan-o = four syllables.

Co-ri-an-der = four syllables.

Go-ing-craz-y = four syllables

Feel-such-a-fool = four syllables

I guess I now have these two herbs, oregano and coriander, stored on the same mal-functioning brain cell!

Still, carrot and oregano soup… delicious!

The Song of a Blackbird

2011-04-27T06:16:00.001-01:00

I was feeling really unwell and had somehow struggled to the supermarket. I was worried about how much time I would have before needing to make a quick dash.

As I walked the aisles quickly grabbing things. Someone spoke. She was a former pupil, now with grown up children of her own. A lovely woman and under other circumstances I would have loved a longer chat. However, I could feel my temperature rising, sweat edging to the edges of my brow, and my panic rising as my stomach threatened to cramp yet again and churn.

The pain had been so bad the previous day I’d had to hold my breath wondering how people endured this with more chronic conditions. I made a quick escape from the conversation without giving the real reason and hurriedly dashed to scoop a few more essential items from the shelves. I was after the BRAT diet for myself: bananas, rice, applesauce and toast; and then food for The Teenager who had luckily been unaffected by this stomach bug.

I raced to the checkout hoping to find the smallest queue, thinking that for once I might say, “Yes please, do help me with the packing this time,” when asked; but when it was my turn, I didn’t. Though, when I slowed the woman serving me did help, and I was so grateful to her.

I paid and rushed back to the car, and drove back home.

As I parked, I could hear a song even before I’d turned off the engine. It was a blackbird. It sang the song that told me I was home, that I’d made it. It was the blackbird that sung its song for this little group of terraced houses. I’d never really stopped to listen to it before. I hadn’t realised that I’d somehow internalised the sound, but as I turned off the ignition and listened I guessed that it was a call unique to this particular blackbird and this particular place: home. I guessed that should ten such songs be played that I would have known the one that said, “You are home.”

And never had a blackbird’s song sounded more beautiful.

Like a Curled Leaf or a Knot of Hair

2011-04-27T05:51:00.001-01:00

There was something on the carpet; perhaps a curled leaf or a knot of hair. I could either ignore it or investigate. I chose the latter.

It was a bee lying on its side.

I thought it was dead but there were faint movements near its wings.

I put a drop of honey on a piece of card and slid the card under the bee. I had the hope that it would smell the honey, extend its long rolled up tongue and sip it into an empty stomach. I placed a glass over it in case it did revive and so that I could then take it outside.

Once you get your eye in you can see bees.

There were two others walking on the carpet looking far feistier, the kind that might engage in a kamikaze fight if provoked.

I slipped a card with a drop of honey under both and again covered them with a glass. One of them stopped its aimless patrol of the glass rim, extended its tongue and sipped and I felt cheered that this one would survive. The other a different type of bee its body more elongated into a waspish shape was more angry and foolish, falling on its side into the honey and then dragging itself away from the sticky mess.

The first bee I carried outside, the idea being that I would leave the honeyed card with it and should it revive it could then fly freely away. Then I set the others outside too.

Hours later the two feisty bees had gone. but the one I’d seen first had curled into a tighter ball, like a curled leaf or a knot of hair.

You Don’t Want to Know What I Did With Them…

2011-04-25T11:18:00.001-01:00

A friend gave me two sunflowers.

“Watch out,” she warned, “slugs like them too.”

I knew that already.

I can not grow sunflowers as there are so many slugs in my garden; this despite the fact that I have a pond that over the years has turned out frogs in the hundreds.

So with these two sunflowers I found a spot and fashioned for them a silvery girdle of aluminium foil. I cut the edges of the foil into sharp pointy spikes thinking that no slug would ever risk tearing its thin flesh on such material no matter what mouth watering treat awaited them at the end.

I even set out broken egg shells around the stems so any such soft bellied intruders would slice themselves to pieces.

Well that was the plan.

I don’t know what the slugs do at night, after partying with the frogs, but I do know I have the SAS of the slug world living in my garden: the ones that use spider’s webs as zip lines, or the ones that climb up the trees and then bomb themselves bodily onto their target plant, and the ones that use blades of grass to catapult themselves over any mine fields and traps. I have that type of slug.

And yep! The very next day I go out to look, and one of my plants has folded over onto itself. And yep! When I take an even closer look its stem has been eaten away. And nope! A sticking plaster repair will not fix the damage.

I check the defences. They are all in order. And then I realise that I have the sappers of the slug world: the miners, the tunnellers, the sneaky creepy underworld type of slug.

I lift the foil and yep! There they all are enjoying the shade of the foil and nestling against the moist earth their fat stomachs breathing in and out contentedly as they listen to the fat bloated snoring of their companions.

I won’t tell you what I did with them… I won’t mention the sharp stones and the quick stabbing movements, or the sandwiching of slug between two very hard bricks. I will simply report that I took no prisoners.

I then cleared out their tunnels. There were no slugs alive when I left.

That was yesterday.

Today I checked again.

The other plant is now listing.

And yet again I found slugs. They had snuggled under the aluminium foil and were sleeping soundly as if under a light weight summer duvet. These were small tiny things. I won’t tell you what I did with them.

I’ve improved the ramparts yet again.

I’ve put dried pine needles around the sunflower to impale any that dares to cross no slug land … but I know that they will outwit me no matter what I do. I have that kind of slug.

Goodbye Blanket Weed

2011-04-25T07:48:00.001-01:00

Yippee!

The tadpoles are eating the blanket weed.

I’d been watching it carefully in this recent glorious weather. It was expanding exponentially and clumps of it were starting to float like the mythical green islands of Shangri-La.

Then one day I came downstairs to look and all these floating islands had gone. Gone too were the long filamentous stands that had clung to the sides.

The tadpoles are at the fat stage. They are still without legs and are munching through the blanket weed like it’s a fine salad. They have grazed all the blanket weed from the higher level of the pond already and are flocking to the lower levels. There are a lot of these greedy hungry mouths now eating the rest of the weed.

This is great as I’ve broken all the, ‘How to have a blanket weed free pond rules.’

For example I have been adding tap water.

According to the rules this is not a good thing to do. But I did it as I thought it would put cooler water into the pond and slow down the growth of blanket weed that likes warm water.

This together with the voracious hunger of the tadpoles has got it under control so it’s now reduced to a green carpet edging the lower sides of the pond.

Bravo tadpoles!

My pond seems to have three types of tadpoles:

There are the verticals that swim up from the lower levels and grab a bite of oxygen before descending again.

There are the horizontals that swim from end to end, lonely and aloof.

Then there are the socials who group together wherever the water is warmer rubbing as close to each other as possible and aligning their tails as if trying to swim beyond the edges of the pond.

And I would watch them for hours if it wasn’t for the wolf spiders that patrol the edge.

Royal Wedding

2011-04-21T21:54:00.001-01:00

Paper Jam

2011-04-21T09:46:00.001-01:00

Our friend was coming to lunch, she was also going to sign The Teenager’s passport form. The one he still hadn’t filled in.

We also didn’t have the photos ready having discovered that the photo booth in the nearby supermarket was not in working order.

The previous day at home I’d taken photos, and all that remained for to do was to choose one and print it out.

With minutes before the arrival of my friend The Teenager was sitting by the printer. He had been using photoshop. He had chosen one of the earlier photos I’d first taken as being the best. The earlier photos had been taken in ‘landscape’ form until I had turned the camera so that they would be in ‘portrait’. Consequently, because of this he’d had to use photoshop to add more of the white background.

There is an unwritten law in the universe that whenever you need something in a hurry a printer you intend to use at that time plays up. Our trusty printer was no exception.

“Paper jam!” The Teenager exclaimed.

He fiddles with it. You can sense annoyance rising in the room like an oncoming tide.

“I’ve cleared the paper jam, but the computer still says it’s jammed!”

Time is ticking away.

“I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled the printer and it still says it’s jammed!”

“Switch off the computer, then turn it on again and it will print,” I say.

I know that this works from long practice. The Teenager switches off the computer and goes off with Zen like calmness for a bath.

After I’ve finished getting things ready for lunch, I think to help speed things up by switching the computer back on.

As it reboots, I listen for the printer expecting it to whirr into action.

Nothing.

It’s switched off.

I switch it on.

The lights don’t come on. I check the plugs. The plugs are all in. I try the buttons again.

Nothing.

It’s broken.

The Teenager is still in the bathroom. I decide to ask.

“I pulled the plug out,” he explains, “like you told me to do.”

“No, I didn’t.” I reply, “I said switch off the computer.”

I go back downstairs to check the plugs for a second time. My friend will be arriving soon and here I am trying to make sense of a spaghetti arrangement of wires.

All the plugs appear to be in the right sockets.

I go back upstairs and call through the bathroom door a second time, “All the plugs are there.”

“No!” exclaims The Teenager. “I took out the cable at the back of the printer.”

“Why?”

“You told me to.”

I don’t argue.

I go back to the printer and eventually find at the back of the desk a grey wire which I then manage to reattach it to the printer.

The lights come on, but nothing happens.

I find his picture on the computer. I ready the shiny photo paper and press print.

The machine whirrs and clicks into life.

Paper jam.

I drag out the paper.

The Teenager has just come downstairs and he’s watching as I battle with it, “It’s like a reverse birth,” he comments as I tinker with the printer’s innards.

A car pulls up outside.

“She’s here.”

“Perhaps it needed more paper underneath to lift it up. We could try a practice run.”

“It still says paper jam.”

“Switch the computer off and then back on and it will print,” I say, as I go to welcome my friend.

We try to look calm but she can what is going on from the array of forms and papers on the desk. We explain it all as the computer tinkles its windows theme song.

Then the printer, loaded with ordinary paper, begins to print.

We watch hopefully. Images are appearing.

We look.

“You can’t use this,” I say.

“Why not?” The Teenager asks.

“Because your face is out of proportion.”

The landscape photo image has been stretched, and the distance from his chin to his nose has been elongated in a caricature of the face that is now looking at me.

After much debate, it is agreed that we will all go back to the photo booth at the local supermarket in the hope that it will now have been fixed.

I search the house for £5 in coins and then we set off.

As we walk towards the booth, I run through all the things he has to get right, “Don’t smile, get the seat in the right position, make sure there’s no hair in your eyes,” I say without nagging, trying to make it sound fun.

The machine is working. The Teenager goes in and closes the curtain.

And my friend and I giggle outside like kids as we listen to the machine’s voice.

“Three, two, one.”

Then we wait.

It prints.

We look.

There is hair over his eyes.

I want to scream.

“It’s all right,” The Teenager says.

“They won’t accept it,” I say.

My friend agrees.

Confronted with two against one the Teenager reluctantly agrees.

I have no more coins. I go back to the car. I find a five pound note.

“You’ll have to get change,” I say.

He goes off and returns with the coins.

“No hair in front of your face,” I nag, as he readies himself once again.

“Three, two, one.”

Then we wait for the photo he has chosen.

It prints.

We look.

It’s okay!

We go home for lunch, my friend fills in the form and leaves. We then fill in the rest. We check and double check the instructions. We add this, and recheck that until we are certain we have everything just right.

Then we post it.

And then, and only then, do we walk back home on air!

Three Year Old Legs

2011-04-20T08:31:00.001-01:00

One of my earliest memories is of running towards a group of lads gathered neared my boxed up toys at the lower end of a concreted yard and thinking that I would chase them away while we waited for the removal van.

I was three.

I still haven’t learnt from that experience. I still do it. I still try to chase away groups of gathered lads.

It happened only yesterday.

For some reason, perhaps a gravitational anomaly, or a rare juxtaposition of stars, or the beating of a butterfly wing in Outer Mongolia, a group of lads who’d been walking up the road suddenly stopped outside my house.

Hidden safe from view behind the net curtain, I spied on them from my settee, . When they didn’t move on I then felt the same protective urge rising in me that I’d once felt long ago when I was only three. This must have been the same impulse that caused people long ago to build their hill forts and fortifications: an urge to defend. Perhaps this was why dogs were tamed to bark at aimless lads from other tribes that loitered close.

One lad was picking at the mortar between the bricks of my house as he listened to his mates. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. There were two who were talking and the rest were simply stuffed shirts listening with gaping mouths. Then the sound quality of these voices changed. Whoever held their awe and attention had shifted his position. This ringleader had stepped onto my step just under the porch using it as a podium as he addressed the others; and I instantly felt it was time to run at them pell mell, like I had when I was three. Running as if to scatter them like sheep, running to send them fleeing, running to protect my own. Determined to chase them away, I got my keys and walked to the door.

The door suddenly opening surprised them. The lad on the porch step-stepped away. I’d then expected them all to move on, but they didn’t. Instead they formed a half-circle with me in its centre; though they had all taken a couple of steps back. I’d expected them to shift and drift like freed wood further down along the bank of terraced houses, but they didn’t, they held their ground fascinated by this new diversion and then closed in.

I stepped through them to my car which for once was parked just outside my house. I was trying to look purposeful, as if I was on some sort of mission. They probably thought I was going to drive off somewhere, but of course I had no desire to go anywhere; and instead I pretended that there was something I needed from the boot. I opened it. Of course there was almost nothing much in the boot, except for an empty plastic bag and the bicycle rack that I had left stored there.

“What’s that!” one of the lads exclaimed to one of his mates.

I must confess it did look like some form of medieval torture equipment with its black metal and black straps; and perhaps it did have its antecedents in the rack, the thumb screw and manacles that had once furnished the wettest dungeon.

They were all pressing closer to see this and anything else that I may have left hidden in the boot. I realised then that any chance of scattering these lads was not going to work; and I sensed rapacious hands reaching out as if for a teddy bear in an opened box.

Then one of them kicked his football hard against the side of my house.

Thud, thud thud.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

He’d been on the periphery of the group, one of the gaping-mouthed ones. In a raiding party against a stronghold he’d have been the one to watch. The one who was the most dangerous and unpredictable. The one who’d never say much but should he be the one to capture you would sling you into the ditch without your life.

Behind us one of the others began a sport’s commentary, “Oh, she doesn’t like that!”

“Why not?” the football lad asked with slack jawed insolence.

I’m surprised that he can speak.

“Because it’s my house.”

“I didn’t realise that kicking a ball against bricks causes any damage.”

There was probably a golden age when whenever anyone was asked not to do something by a person older than themselves bedecked with grey hair (and I do have a few strands, well more than a few to be honest) then they would have quickly said, ‘Sorry,’ and then that would have been an end to it. They would have moved on slightly embarrassed and ashamed; but no, that doesn’t happen anymore here in deepest darkest England.

“You can’t kick the ball Jake it’s her house, ” the commentator gleefully comments. His tone revealing his bias towards his mate.

“I didn’t realise kicking a ball against bricks would cause any damage.” Jake say again, repeating his words in a mumbled drone, as if my request is preposterous.

“It’s not that,” I say.

I’m wanting to outwit him. I want to say something that will sort him out for all time, something brilliant that will re-establish world order, and set everything right in the land, but I’ve never in all my life been able to think of the right thing to say. My words always sheer off target like a misaimed snowball, and slide impotently down a windscreen before melting away into nothingness. I await inspiration, but all that comes is, “because someone inside is asleep.”

He blinks at this, but it is meaningless to him. It makes no sense to him at all; and I’m now angry and cross with myself, for this is an empty lie. There is nobody inside the house fast asleep, and I hate myself for this falsehood.

I grab the plastic bag from the boot, and slam it shut. Anybody once asleep in the house would now be fully wide awake.

As I return to the house, the lad with the ball bounces it loudly on the pavement as close to me as he dares. He looks at me waiting for my reaction

I glare at him.

He stares back, and bounces the ball hard yet again, making a sound like a fist pounding against a shield.

A battle cry goes up.

“Ohm, she’s looking at you, Jake,” says the commentator, as if we are about to circle and swing our maces at one another.

“Yeah, she fancies you Jake,” another sneers.

They all laugh.

I wheel away. I go inside. I close the drawbridge and shuttle down the portcullis. I’m trembling. I look down at my weapon. I’m holding a plastic bag. My heart is racing. I am mad. And I’m so, so cross with myself for the lie I told, for I hate lies. And I’m cross that my simple presence, which I’d wanted to be silent was not enough to shift this gang from this spot and get them moving further along. And I’m mad because now I’ve brought the worse out of them, and I’m besieged.

My heart is pounding, and within it I can feel the pounding of a three year old heart.

I feel such a fool.

Eventually however, the lads outside do drift away.

But now I’m afraid. I’m afraid they’ll come back. That I’ve become a target. That my house and car will be marked in some way. So that they will return with grappling hooks and cannon.

I do see them later. They are walking down the middle of the road, a straggling group no longer held together with any cohesion. Perhaps broken apart by calls or text from mothers asking them to come home for their tea.

Then two younger lads pass by my car from another direction. I know them. They are neighbours. They live three doors up from me. As they pass my car they hit the wing mirror hard. It springs back into place, and they look back at it in surprise. My wing mirror has often been bent the wrong way as if it has met some hard collision, and now I know the culprits.

I look at the car. It has scratches through the paintwork which have been there now for some time. Someone’s key was held along the bright red paint and dragged. I look at the hubcaps wondering how long they will remain there, they have been stolen twice. However, the car is old now, and I have long learned not to care too much about such damage.

I don’t like the way I’m feeling. The adrenaline is still rushing through me. I try to counsel myself. Next time I’ll ignore them. Next time I’ll go into another room. Don’t run towards trouble with three year old legs, I tell myself, just let them drift away.

I fear I have set myself up as a potential crone for future torments and teasing merriment.

And then I remember that when I ran that time long ago, when I was only three, across the hard backyard where the lads had gathered that they too had stood their ground and laughed.

Next time… I’ll walk away I say…but I know that a primitive part of me still wants to protect my castle and fight for the safety of its toys.

Katerine Howard’s Last Dance

2011-04-19T20:18:00.001-01:00

Eyes Rounder than Black Moons.

2011-04-19T09:17:00.001-01:00

We were sitting side by side on the settee when there was a sudden pounding noise.

We listened trying to work out exactly where the noise was coming from.

It was from next door.

The pounding became heavier, louder, angrier.

It was a woman and there was no doubt about it, she was furious.

I wondered if perhaps she’d tried to find a passport form or a passport photo or perhaps she was going through some last final stage of an itchy rash caused by an allergic reaction to a spider bite; but no it was none of these.

This woman was incandescent. So angry was she that nearly every other word she yelled began with an F.

“I ----- want my ------ son back. You ------ sent me a ------- text saying that I was an -------- bad mother so I -------- want my son back. I ----- want my ------ son back. You ------ wrote all that on --------- my ---------Facebook page saying that I was an -------- bad mother and I -------- want my son back.

There was then some sort of scuffle on the doorstep after the door was opened and my neighbours joined in the argument with their side of the story. Then the door was slammed shut.

The angry woman then seemed to know all the people my next door neighbour had been rather too intimate with, and began to list them:

“ A ------- lap dancer. A ------ nineteen year old. Her ------- mother and her -----best friend. I ----- want my ------ son back. You ------ sent me a ------- text saying that I was an -------- bad mother and I -------- want my son back. He can’t -------- stay here.”

In all this I learnt for the first time my neighbour’s name first, last and an assortment of middle names. “Rhys you ------- Bastard,” she yelled. “I’m calling the police.”

She pounded on the door, and kept it up even though we could hear her son inside pleading with her to go away. She kept up the banging until flashing blue lights announced the arrival of the police.

It was amazing how quickly they turned up. We heard a policeman go inside while a policewoman remained outside to speak to the angry woman.

The police woman was impressive, though with their arrival the angry woman had instantly changed her demeanour. She laughed a little. The police woman seemed to have an instant grasp of the situation and calmed her down as she took her details and checked on the informal custody arrangement which apparently had previously been working quite well.

The aggressive woman had now dropped her rather glorious overuse of the ‘F’ word as an adjective and was speaking calmly.

“They said because he hadn’t had any dinner that I was a bad mother,” she explained. “His girlfriend sent me a text.”

The police woman listened, but managed to get more of her own sensible words and suggestions into the conversation. Then her colleague emerged from the house and said that the arrangement should stand as it was the father’s turn to have custody and that the thirteen year old boy also wanted to stay there. He then allowed the boy to speak to his mother briefly before it all resolved when he added:

“And your ex husband says he won’t press charges for the scratches on his face.”

At this the angry woman laughed a little nervously, she became even quieter, and then she left.

The door next door was closed, and the flashing blue lights also eventually went away.

And we, The Teenager and I, were left in our hallway, sat upon the floor where we’d been listening with eyes rounder than black moons.

Stepping Daintily

2011-04-19T08:36:00.001-01:00

The alarming rash has at last gone.

Each goose bump for just over a week was red, inflamed and itchy.

It had to have been an allergic reaction to something outside in the garden, and I had felt something in my hair just before the redness appeared.

I think it might have been a spider.

A spider that bit.

There are black spiders that guard the stone edges of the pond. They move with an unnerving quick action. I’m guessing it was one of those, so now I’m wary of them as I peer into the pond to watch the tadpoles.

When one spider approached too close yesterday I blew it away. It landed on the top of the pond water and yet still stepped off this surface as daintily and effortlessly as if it was on dry land.

I’m pretty sure it was a spider. A spider that got lost in my hair and then when I tried to oust it retaliated by biting.

It is so nice to have my smooth skin once more.

I didn’t treat the rash with any doctor’s prescription or anti-histamines, having faith that given time the body can heal itself .

And this it has proved able to do.

A friend gave me a mug the other night, which when I drank from it revealed a spider just beneath the rim. It was just a picture, but I did begin to itch.

“Don’t you like spiders?” she asked.

“No,” I answered.

Why there is a Cucumber in the Kitchen

2011-04-19T08:15:00.001-01:00

The Teenager needs a passport photograph.

One where you are looking straight into the camera with an unsmiling face. One where there is no hair obscuring your eyes. One where there are no other people just out of shot.

Last time I took the passport photograph it was a nightmare. It was hard trying to get the proportions right, and then coaxing the printer into printing it onto the glossy paper; glossy paper that was in limited supply and had a right and a wrong side.

I decided that even though the photo booth charges five pounds that it would be worth it going there to get it done. It would save so much angst and time.

So we went to Morrisons.

Of course I only had notes so we needed change.

And everyone knows that the best way to get change is to buy a cucumber.

So we bought a cucumber.

Then we went to the self service check out machines.

Such machines as soon as they realise a teenager is in the vicinity instantly behave themselves. This one was no exception. It opened up its screens before him without any hesitation, and then fawned before him. It allowed him to select fresh produce and didn’t even dream of not showing him the cucumber section. After a few dabs at the screen and the cucumber was ours…well almost.

I didn’t know where to put the note.

In Morrisons the feed for notes is down somewhere down at knee level, out of sight. It takes some finding.

Then the machine chugged out the change but surprised me by not rattling coins into a tray but by issuing a £5 note. So we still didn’t have enough coins for the photo booth.

So we go along to customer services and explain what we are trying to do. She exchanges the five pound note for coins very quickly but can not give me more than four one pound coins as she is running low on change.

However, after I team these coins up with one from the car we are ready.

The Teenager takes his place.

A woman’s voice talks. He is told to raise his chair, to check where his eyes are, to ensure that the outer curtain is shut.

It begins.

He feeds in the coins and waits.

There is a flash.

He giggles.

There is a second flash.

“It’s not working,” The Teenager says.

There’s another flash.

“It’s just repeating the first picture.”

There’s another flash.

“Choose your best picture,” orders the photo booth’s robotic voice.

“It hasn’t worked. Look,” says The Teenager.

I pull back the grey curtain and look.

His first photo has been duplicated four times. This wouldn’t have been a problem, but in it he is looking down, hair is over his eyes and he has a broad toothy smile.

I go back to Customer Services and someone comes out to have a look.

I try to explain what happened, but it all sounds like gobbledegook.

“It took the first photo and then duplicated it, and did not take any further ones although it did flash.”

It sounds like nonsense. The assistant without saying a word obviously thinks that The Teenager must have pressed the wrong button, that we have made a mistake or that we are larking around.

“Don’t press anything,” she says, and she goes away.

“Choose your photo,” the mechanical voice of the machine urges.

We ignore it and wait.

“Choose your photo,” the mechanical voice of the machine insists again.

We ignore it and don’t touch anything.

But the machine impatiently whirrs into action and prints out four identical useless photographs.

The woman comes back. You can have a refund she says and takes us back to the lady behind the desk in customer services.

There is a form to fill in and sign. It takes an age.

She gives me back a five pound note.

I look at it.

“But we need coins,” I say. I’m all ready prepared to do battle with the photo booth once again.

“Oh no,” she says. “You’re not allowed to use it. Others have reported the same problem today. I’m going to have to put an ‘Out of Order’ sign.”

I’m bewildered and inwardly annoyed as I take the five pound note. I’m left wondering why she didn’t warn us about the problem. I’m puzzled why she didn’t say make your first photo your best one. I’m fed up that so many people had to go through all that before she was at last prepared to put up a sign?

I ask if I can keep the useless photos. They are sweet and I like them.

“No,” she says. She snatches them away, and I’m sad to think of them ending up in a bin somewhere.

So we leave.

But we did return home with a cucumber!

The New Golden Age

2011-04-19T07:20:00.001-01:00

The Teenager needs a passport application form.

“I’ll get it for you,” I say.

I already know that my local post office doesn’t stock such forms for some strange mysterious reason and that I will need to go to the town centre. Still the weather is fine. I can walk there. The exercise will do me good.

The town centre post office has been renovated. The last time I was here I had to queue outside, but today I’m able to walk straight in. Most of what was once the post office is now a shop with aisles of food and drink. I join the post office queue which is long and snakes around.

I’m impressed that the glass screens have gone. It makes me feel that the world has become a safer place; that a perceived threat of danger no longer exists and that we can all breathe a little easier and once more relax.

Even the voice telling us which counter to go to is kinder almost soporific.

There are mostly African faces at the counters. All women, and I wonder if they’ve been chosen for their warm open faces and friendly smiles. The people in the queue don’t look anything like them. There are pinched faces and tired expressions and weary faces, but I guess once they’ve been served by such assistants that they too will thaw a little.

I wonder if this is a government plan, part of the ‘Big Society’ to make us all happier, more relaxed and content by removing the screens. I wonder if such barriers that once deemed all customers to be potential criminals and thugs will be similarly removed in train stations and banks. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new golden age, I muse.

When it’s my turn I go as directed to counter 3. The woman there has a moon shaped face which is lit with the broadest smile. I smile back and ask for a passport form.

“We don’t have any.”

It seems the main post office for the town has run out.

I don’t make any fuss, but the smiling counter woman must have secretly pressed an alarm button for suddenly another woman is with her.

I ask them if they know if any other local post offices have them.

The smiling woman rattles off a list, spraying me with her machinegun words.

I ask if she can write some down for me as otherwise I will forget. I am already imagining that others will have already have depleted such stocks, and I’m now on a mission to find the last passport application form left in the county.

Reluctantly, after a quick look back at the other woman as if I’ve just asked for classified information, she writes down three and gives me the list.

I leave.

After a three mile walk for no purpose, I know without glancing in any mirror that my face is pinched and that my expression is anything but sunny.

Chain Reaction

2011-04-19T06:42:00.001-01:00

I just need bread and yoghurt so I pop into Morrisons.

They have red pepper and mozzarella piazza, on special offer. So I take one, then two, then three. I can freeze them and use them later with soup.

Soup!

Before too long I’m buying soup, and so it goes on a chain reaction of purchases that once started is unstoppable until my basket will hold no more and my arm aches.

Soon I’m at the self-service check out till with the bread and yoghurt buried in a basket I can only just heave up the scale.

The assistant readies a bag for me.

I begin.

But this self-service check out I’m at isn’t working properly and needs the assistant to hold her plastic key fob against its metal heart.

“Oh dear doesn’t it like me?” I ask.

“It doesn’t like anyone,” she says.

I’m halfway through when I realise that I don’t have my debit card. My trousers have no pockets so there’s no money either.

I tell the assistant and rush out of the supermarket to the car park in the hope that it is there.

It isn’t. I’ve lost it.

I think back to what I really need: bread and yoghurt, and I root around in the car to find a few coins so that I can at least return home with what I went for.

Back in the supermarket I speak to the customer service lady behind the desk. I explain that I have dropped my credit card somewhere in the supermarket and then I ask if anyone has handed it in. She opens up her till. She has quite a collection: green ones, blue ones, red ones. I’m hopeful. She flicks through them like a dealer in Las Vegas, but mine isn’t there. I’m impressed that so many have been handed in and I’m guessing that mine has yet to turn up. I leave my name and telephone number and dash back to my till.

The assistant has kindly checked out the rest of my basket. My bags are waiting ready for me. Someone is trying to move onto the till. I apologise and explain that I haven’t quite finished and he backs off.

The assistant is on another self service machine which isn’t working properly; and then she comes over to me. She’s expecting me to be wielding my credit card, and manages to remain calm when I show her my handful of coins and say I can only take the bread and yoghurt.

The machine doesn’t like undoing everything one little bit.

I daren’t even glance at the queue that is building up, but I can feel its looming stillness.

Eventually, I am back to bread and yoghurt and my chain reaction bags are whisked away.

I attempt to scan these items through again and the machine goes wrong yet again scanning the bread twice.

“It’s because I’ve done this,” the assistant says, and takes away her key thing that she’d left magnetically attached against its heart.

I’m about to finish and pay when the lady next to me says, ‘Is this your credit card?’

She’s picked it up from the floor from just behind where I’d initially placed the basket.

I’m delighted. Her name is Sue. I thank her and explain to the weary assistant that I’d like to have all my bags back again.

She returns them and I have to scan everything once more. The machine of course still doesn’t work properly, and the assistant constantly has to step back to my machine to use her key fob.

Eventually though, I have the whole lot packed. I pay, and then thank one and all. I expect cheers as I leave, but there is only the reluctant sound of the next person shuffling forwards to chance their luck on the machine. As I leave, thinking of soup and red pepper and mozzarella piazza, I know without turning that that machine’s red beacon light will be already flashing red.

Truth upon Truth

2011-04-13T17:25:00.001-01:00

My neighbour is on the phone. She can hear a didgeridoo.

“Come and hear it,” she says.

I go around. She takes me into her front room. I’ve never been invited into this room before and I’ve been her neighbour for thirty years.

“Stand here and listen,” she says.

I stand still like a chocolate soldier and listen.

“Kept me awake all last night. I even went next door and banged on their door,” she says.

I can hear nothing.

“Can you feel the vibration?”

I centre my thoughts around my socks, but can sense nothing.

She is becoming agitated.

“Can you still hear it?” I ask.

She is anxious and distressed.

I listen again.

There’s nothing.

But her room is closing in on me, the browns, the swirling patterns, the claustrophobia.

“Why not come next door,” I say. “Come and have crumpets, tea and some of Ivy’s homemade plum jam.”

She follows me, and I make hot tea and steaming crumpets and ladle Ivy’s jam on top.

Her eyes are bright. She is looking around for electrical gadgets that could be making a noise. She spots the modem and its flashing lights.

“I can hear that,” she says.

I go closer to it.

It’s silent. Not making a sound.

The teenager comes downstairs.

He can’t hear the modem either, nor feel any vibration from it.

I tell her stories to cheer her up.

I tell her how I often mishear things. How when listening to a story that was being read out recently I thought the narrator said, “…running an umpire” and how mystified I had written down the phrase. Listening to other words in about batting and innings and how later I said how much I’d liked the cricket analogy. “Cricket?” they’d exclaimed.

Puzzled I’d then read out the puzzling phrase.

“Not ‘umpire’, empire!” It was explained, to much hilarity.

Then I tell her how during the same night in a poem about war I’d heard the phrase, ‘Troop upon troop’ and later commented on how effective I thought this phrase was and how it pressed home the terror. And how again I was given a mystified look. And then the line was read aloud again, and it turned out to be ‘Truth upon truth.’

I tell these stories so she will know that my hearing is not top notch and that there may well be a didgeridoo playing somewhere in her house which is sometimes punctuated with a thump before it beginning all over again, but even if there was or even if Rolf Harris was in the hallway giving it his all that I would probably be the person who would hear it.

She leaves laughing.

And I’m left wondering as to what my neighbour is really hearing and why I couldn’t hear anything at all.

It’s that sort of grass!

2011-04-09T09:31:00.001-01:00

My neighbour’s garden is mostly grass or mostly nettles but every year the grass is mown. We generally do it together as the first cut is so very exhausting.

I start at the bottom and meander through islands where tulips grow amongst wild geranium, buttercups and dandelions.

The buttercups put up the least resistance and fall in soft supplication as I mow over them, but they make me feel mean and cruel. The dandelions put up more of a fight, whilst the wild geranium create a summery stink as they are cut down to their stems. But the grass is savage. Every blade is a sword and it fights for its right to grow tall and reach for the sun. It side-steps, parries, ducks and thrusts; so I have to make first one cross and then another and another changing directions in order to spring my attack. It clusters in thick clumps and hides twigs amidst its centres with which it clubs my blades so I have to bring in a replacement. It is thick and damp and resistant.

My neighbour, who is in her seventies, limps off the battlefield field wounded. She can hardly breathe and needs her inhaler the other tactic the grass uses in its defence a secret gas attack.

We talk about the grass. It was stolen from the grass used to seed the nearby racecourse. Perhaps not stolen, but left over, so to speak. The sort of grass to endure the gallop of metalled hooves and to cushion them should they fall. The sort of grass over which hanged criminals on the gibbet there once dangled their legs. It’s that sort of grass!

I leave a tuft for her to finish, like leaving a child the last piece in a jigsaw and she does so with a glorious flourish.

A small blue butterfly flying low is our reward.

Perhaps Bites?

2011-04-09T06:15:00.001-01:00

The sun is shining.

I was in the garden most of yesterday, and today I've developed an alarming rash (perhaps bites) on arms, neck and torso.

Could it be an allergy to tulips? A reaction to geraniums? A vulnerability to violas? Or was it from leaning over into the pond to kiss the golden-eyed, bug-eyed frogs whose lips were cold and slimed with blanket weed and which then changed into princes at the touch? Golden-eyed, bug-eyed princes. Seven of them! With soft white throats that croaked.

Also, yesterday I bought a chair to replace the one that was broken. I'm trying to move back downstairs now that it is warmer and there's less risk of frost bite. It's supposed to be my new writing chair which I've set before the desk.

However, as it swings so slowly, I lean back, and oh it's so comforting, like being held, and I soon close my eyes and float away. It could easily become my sleeping chair!

Must put the seven princes on the Grand National today,

Yesterday I ate a Crunchie!

Happiness!

Deliciously Ridiculous

2011-04-03T10:29:00.001-01:00

This is not my work

It is stolen

Stolen

Let me begin…

My auntie has two cats

My disembodied face looks down from the sky and weeps,

Gillyflowers and sops-in-wine

My sister always checks her shoes for earwigs

Every morning

When we are little.

One Halloween evening,

My friend bursts into tears

Because there was a toad in her wellington boot,

Which she'd left outside my house.

She thought I'd put it there –

I didn't,

But only because I didn't have a toad to hand.

It’s me, it’s me! I want some tea!

Roll back the hearthrug!

Someone is trying to get in.

Who's that in your wellington?

Bluebottle lives!

And Nigel is not dead.

I am up,

I am down,

Deep in the vortex

That accounted for the last Dodo.

Icky tack dock.

Importunate publishers

Peruse purple prose,

Pretending prescience.

To what avail?

To tell the tale of life and death,

In Ebbw Vale.

Jewels and binoculars hang

From the head of the mule,

Indeed.

The preacher, his hands in back pockets

"Repent, Harlequin!" says the Ticktockman

Clocks tick,

Empires rise and fall,

Fidelity remains,

At most, questionable.

And when the tray is silver

And the butler wears gloves

What does it matter?

If the railway is golden?

For they are cup-cakes.

Raining on a skull.

In a leaky ark full of furtive halibut.

A hovercraft full of eels.

My Aunty has a cat.

Why do Anarchists use tea-bags?

Because proper tea is theft.

Revel in freedom!

I am not the vagrant!

Out in the cold

A Chinese takeaway for one.

Shot full of holes

A banana ice lolly in one hand

And a feather in the other

Oh Topper, Topper.

Little Frilly one.

The skies were not lit by moonlight

Stands he, or sits

Inwardness is indeed a gain

Good-night, sweet Fish

How do the little Angels rise?

As many red herrings

As swim in the wood!

She spoke of me, the guttersnipe, the common kid.

Join the Underwater Motorcycling Federation now!

We're benighted, here upon this bank and shoal of thyme

What rhymes within your face and pain?

What thing of beauty is a burning bird hide,

Beneath the limpid waters of the fishing lake?

A fig for the listeners.

Clapping with both hands

This thread is not Zen.

Indeed, it is the Finger not the Moon.

This is not a Fish

This is not three points.

Catpeed

Penguins assume nun-natures on a Tuesday

If it falls on a weak day

Before the sun reaches its zenith

Dirty habits.

Are they nuns?

The Penguins on Lakey Hill!

This sentence is in Latin,

Except for this clause

(Which is in Dutch),

While nobody is looking.

Soap on a rope

The shower of destiny.

A big she-bear

Living the timeless life.

Prayer and fasting.

A lowly amoeba

In the pot

A slipper in the bicycle stew.

Will come home to roost

If I am not mistook.

I think I am a carrot in the casserole of life.

A scaly, watered-down episode

When onions are rising in the East.

This not a chicken.

It’s not a message,

Ce n'est pas un poisson

All Washed Up

2011-04-01T19:16:00.001-01:00

I so rarely go into the town centre, but I did today.

I sign the petition, I don’t stand to listen to the preacher with his, ‘So he died for us, right? The flash cards on his board. I hate the way he cheats those that listen of choice by his slick words, ‘Right?’ knowing that they are boxed in and can not say, ‘Wrong’ because he’s given them no choice.

The police are burly, not from good dinners, but are fat with stab vests and bright yellow jackets beneath black buckles and straps. And I wonder when they changed. The policemen in my childhood didn’t look so. It now looks a scary job to patrol the streets and when I look from them to the people the people look scary too.

There is a young boy being led away. He looks rough. His clothes greys and thin with hints of blue. And then, this is false memory now, a boy with a graze to his chin who looks as if he’s been in a fight. Was he the one being held by the two police as he were a trophy cup? Later I see that he is limping, but his face says that he can still only think of walking back in the direction of more even trouble like that.

Everyone is ugly.

They are squat or fat or flabby. They sit on rough seats on the main street their skin holding too much flesh; and they eat bread rolls too big for human mouths, but which might have made a nice lunch for a giant.

The library is perhaps the most frightening place.

I rarely go there.

There is someone who is not quite right somewhere telling his life story to the air. The book which was there when I went on line, is not there upon the shelves; and when I check the computer’s catalogue it seems it was never there.

The person behind the desk is harassed.

He dashes first this way and then that. Too quick. Too rushed. Overloaded with queries and the accusations of the malcontents. The library seems to have lost most of its books together with its peace and slow, slow ways. It is now too many things. And people are impatient. Impatient with computers. I am just about to use one when I’m turned away.

The librarian has to go here first to do this, and then rushes there to do that, and the people he is dealing with are becoming ruder and unkind. As the mad man who is not quite right recounts his life story as if we are all his counsellors. A man rips a child away from a computer and roughly dangles him by the arm. He does the same thing later dragging him away from a keyboard and screen. The librarian who is there laudably says there is no need to shout at him. But the man ignores him and later ignores the child, no more than four, who is soon back again touching the keyboard.

And I want to rescue all the children I see from their smoking pushchair moms and their rough, stupid dads, but I know I would already be too late. And I think we’ve bred an ugly generation of people with worse still to come. When I see them they seem ungovernable and unreachable worse than the Elizabethan crowds that gaped at Tyburn.

There is no library card in the books any more, and of course when I try to use the machine to check out a book, it just does not work. And someone has to show me that first it’s this bar code and then it is that bar code. And I miss the person who once stamped the books and slipped the cards.

It’s all too busy and too stressed. It’s going to get worse I’m told. And even in the street I hear people talking about the cuts.

I buy a melon, bananas, avocado, strawberries and then find the music shop to buy an electric top E guitar string.

There is such peace in the music shop. Such quietude. It is an oasis. I tell him so, but he doesn’t seem to understand that beyond his door the world has become crazier and mad.

That there is a tide of people who will only wash up against his door.

The Partisan

2011-03-27T00:47:00.004-01:00

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
This I could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often,
I've lost my wife and children
But I have many friends,
And some of them are with me.

With me right here tonight

An old woman gave us shelter,
Kept us hidden in the garret,
Then the German’s came;
She died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on;
These frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from these shadows.

Les Allemands e'taient chez moi, (The Germans were at my home)
ils me dirent, "Signe toi," (They said, "Sign yourself,")
mais je n'ai pas peur; (But I am not afraid)
j'ai repris mon arme. (I have retaken my weapon.)

J'ai change' cent fois de nom, (I have changed names a hundred times)
j'ai perdu femme et enfants (I have lost wife and children)
mais j'ai tant d'amis; (But I have so many friends)
j'ai la France entie`re. (I have all of France)

Un vieil homme dans un grenier (An old man, in an attic)
pour la nuit nous a cache', (Hid us for the night)
les Allemands l'ont pris; (The Germans captured him)
il est mort sans surprise. (He died without surprise.)

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from the shadows.

I say, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come;
Then we'll come from the shadows.

------

Should there still be anyone still playing darts and croquet out there who once looked for this.

Four

2011-03-25T20:20:00.001-01:00

The room was full. They were all there to listen to a chap talk about gladiators. But before it began someone called out my name. I was surprised, but I did not allow myself to become excited. I guessed there were others in that room whose names had also been called out and checked off a list just to see if they were there.

The lady who had sold me the ticket for the event was so lovely. “I told you she’d be too modest to say anything,” she said.

The festival organiser was there and smiling. “You shouldn’t have paid for your ticket,” he said. “Have you come alone?”

The person who’d been sitting next to me looked hopeful as if I might claim back his ticket too, and then crestfallen when I confessed that yes I had come alone.

I was given a refund and then told that I’d won the short story writing competition.

I was thrilled.

“Oh dear,” the organiser said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

I could have hugged him. I could have hugged everyone in that room. I was delighted.

“Just look surprised when they call your name out,” he said.

He points me out to a curly-white-haired-woman and I stand up to say hello. I get her mixed up in my mind with a woman I met the previous year as I gabble about how pleased I am.

Then the gladiator man begins his talk, and I’m aglow, but also nervous I will have to go to the front at the end of his talk and look surprised.

At the end of his talk when Rome is sacked and burnt, he calls my name and I step forward. He is a lovely person. He surprises me by picking out an obscure section of the story as if it was the main event. He is sweet about my description and I step back and listen and after his kind words he returns the story that I’d posted to them. There is applause and I sit down. People are now getting up to get their books signed by gladiator man.

The curly-white-haired-woman comes and sits next to me. “It’s not finished you know.” She had a school ma’am imperious voice.

I have no idea what she is talking about, then I realise she means the story. She goes on to criticise it at length. You don’t make enough of this or that. The ending was disappointing.

I try to take it all with a good grace. I am all “I see,” or “Oh!”

I’m disappointed. I wanted her to say I really liked this bit, or the turn of phrase there. I wanted her to be enthused with what she enjoyed but it is not to be.

I had been told that the gladiator man was the judge. As her criticisms continue I glance in his direction.

“I was the judge,” curly-white-haired-woman declares, as if reading mind.

“Oh,” I say.

Once my bubble is well and truly deflated she leaves, and I’m left wondering why my story was chosen as the winner if she felt like that when they have hundreds of stories to choose from in such competitions.

I thank the festival organiser again. He is in conversation, but I am desperate now to know something and unfortunately I rudely interrupt.

“How many entries were there?” I ask.

He blinks, “Four,” he says.

“Four!”

It seems it wasn’t well advertised. I only knew about it because I saw someone win it the previous year.

“Four,” I laugh.

But for my hollow victory I won £100.

Hologrammed Neanderthal

2011-03-11T09:14:00.001-01:00

My passport needed renewal. My heart always sinks whenever I have any forms to fill in. I trundled dejectedly to my local post office and joined the queue. There are always people doing the most difficult lengthy transactions if ever I join a queue. This day was no exception. There was a man with many parcels of varying sizes that all needed to be weighed before any stamps could be issued. A man who moved with infinite slowness as he eased each parcel from his sack his parcels destined for the far corners of the galaxy. Eventually, I was there at the counter and asked for a passport form. “We don’t do those here,” I was told. He rattled off a long list of those post offices that did, all many miles away and then he shrugged his shoulders.

A day or so later I went to the town centre post office. It is a universal truth that if ever I am trying to get any kind of form that there must be obstacle after obstacle placed in my way. This time the main post office unbeknown to me was undergoing renovation. This meant that part of the building was cordoned off and a queue snaked out of the post office and away down the street. Everyone was in that queue; people of all nationalities, women with monstrous buggies, men from Timbuktu, grannies without teeth, and all languages being spoken except English. All had mobile phones in which they were informing the entire world in broken English that they couldn’t do x y or z as they were stuck in a long queue for the post office.

Added to this it was also bitterly cold. The queue moved at a pace slower that the widening creep of the Atlantic Ocean.

Madness set in very quickly.

They have a voice that tells those nearing the counter which window to go to. Its sing song repetitiveness rather than giving hope that you are getting closer always makes me want to run. And there is the tension. If you don’t step off smartly in the direction of ‘Cashier number seven, please’, you feel some of the mob behind you might give you a quick impatient prod.

The precious form then sat on the table for several days before I could steel myself to fill it in. I found it easier than I feared, and happily realised that I didnt have to have my photos countersigned after all.

I dash off to the local supermarket and sit on the cold seat of the photo booth. It is full of a man and a woman’s sing-songy automated voices. Raise the seat, close the curtains, and align your eyes. Pay £5. Then snap, snap, snap, snap.

I now have to choose the best one. They are all true likenesses and all absolutely hideous. I plump for the last one. A cross between a Neanderthal and John Prescott; realising all too late, that it also has the stretched sinews of a turtle’s neck.

It bears no resemblance to my previous passport photograph at all. I’m guessing it will need countersigning, but I take a chance I put in the envelope together with the cheque for almost £80 and then lick the seal.

It doesn’t stick.

I have to dash back into the supermarket for sellotape. Then I finally put the envelope in the post.

I’m expecting them to write back and say kindly, ‘This cannot be you. Please take more authentic pictures at once and then get them countersigned.’

But they don’t.

A week later there is a courier at the door.

‘Sign here’ He has my new passport.

It is beautiful, other than a rather sickly maroon colour on the cover and a frightening picture of someone purporting to be me on one of the inside pages. There are wildlife scenes on the different pages and holograms over my photo.

But it is here, and I can cross another worry off the list.

And I am utterly delighted!

World here I come!

The Spaghetti of Poetry

2011-03-10T15:56:00.001-01:00

Poetry is a language I do not understand as I can not tune into the words, nor their meaning if ever it is read aloud.

There was a white haired man a professor from the university. A man easily annoyed by latecomers and the bright chirrups of ringing phones who was about to read his work out in the central library. He was trying to entertain, and no doubt his dragooned loyal students found him so. But for me it was all patronising silliness that left me cold. He was a man who thought himself to be still attached to the threads of his youth, but he was threadbare and his jovial behaviour had a hollowness at its core.

I watched and tried to listen but all I heard was the word ‘doorknob’, a word he failed to turn; and he left unopened once again the door of poetry for me.

We were led into the bowels of the library a grim place of yellowed paint and thick pipes where amid the clutter in a room some were about engaged in writing a collaborated book in forty-eight hours. They had, when I chatted to them; though at that time they were more interested in quiche and unwrapping other plates of food from their cling-filmed covers; little idea as to the genre, the main character or where their story would go.

Behind them was a shelf on which was written the label ‘embargo’ perhaps that would be the place to put their book at the end for I could sense how it was being pulled apart before they’d even written it and that it was like so much cooked spaghetti that was falling from a pan each pulling upon their own strand.

I guess as well as poetry I don’t ‘get’ the collaborated novel either. Or more likely I just don’t ‘get’ anything.

Singing Bowls

2011-03-10T08:53:00.004-01:00

Once more I ventured into the town centre and into the Guildhall for the annual Tibetan flag raising ceremony. The numbers of people there seem to increase every year.

This year I sat right at the back which I guess was a mistake as the guest speaker this year Mr Thubten Samdup had a very soft gentle voice. I caught like floating fragments perhaps only every tenth word and I closed my eyes trying to piece the pieces together. I was left with a feeling that this was actually the message, that the Free Tibet movement was fragmentary and as ineffective as fragments of paper being blown by stronger winds. The speaker sighed as if he was disillusioned and tired. Peaceful protest, supportive words our very presence in that hall had amounted to nothing. Though again I have to say I could not clearly hear his words so perhaps I was mistaken.

I also got the impression that there was a fragility about the Dalai Lama and a heard the warning that he would not be there forever. This I can now see was a warning precursor for the announcement today that the Dalai Lama is to set aside his political role and concentrate upon the spiritual. Mr Thubten Samdup had obviously known that this announcement would be made and had been preparing the ground.

What it does mean though is a frightful experience for a child perhaps as yet unborn in Tibet when he is declared the new Dalai Lama after the present one dies. What incredible stresses he will be placed under. I can only hope that by that time China will have become a truly gracious country and will have ceded autonomy to Tibet.

The highlight for me as always were the singing bowls. Though, again by sitting at the back I could not fully appreciate their long sounds nor see how they were made. I always get the sensation of high mountains, snow, sky burials and great birds wheeling overhead when I hear these sounds that seem to come from a primordial primitive past and stretch into a future devoid of entropy and flat-lining into eternity.

The problems besetting Tibetans was highlighted yet again as they struggled to raise the flag giving time for the poem we had heard to resonate even more about how a mother struggling to flee Tibet over the mountains left behind a daughter in the snow who had waved her goodbyes. This as the flag finally waved in the air.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9420000/9420775.stm

A deer, a fox, a swan and a horse.

2011-02-20T14:25:00.001-01:00

Drivers in England

There were six people sitting around the table and somehow the conversation got onto animal kills. These are animals that have been killed by their cars. It was a depressing list. Made the worse for me to listen to as they were talking more about how much damage had been done to their cars after such collisions.

They had killed a deer, a fox, a swan and a horse.

So nonchalant were they in the telling of the each tale, as if it hadn’t really mattered save for the damage to the car.

How about…?

2011-02-20T14:16:00.001-01:00

10/10 for The Bull’s Head in Kelmarsh Rd, Arthingworth, Market Harborough.

As a vegetarian choosing from a menu is usually easy. There is generally only one choice so whereas my omnivorous friends have to deliberate between this dish and that said my decision is already made for me. Usually it’s a vegetarian lasagne.

I had joined a group of walkers and we were told to book our meals in the pub before we set off. My face had fallen at the sight of the vegetarian lasagne. I like it to be sure, but every time?

The man sitting on the stool nearby that I’d taken to be a customer turned out to be the chef. Would you like something else he asks. How about rice, with mushrooms, in a stilton cheese sauce, with garlic bread and a salad?

Oh yes, please.

The walk was slippy. We went on some very muddy pathways and then through one of the tunnels on the Brampton Valley Way.

And at the end a veritable feast, absolutely delicious served on hot plates.

Wonderful.