Kittenville

Definitely time for tea!

2010-02-20T19:28:00.000Z

I'm a complete sucker for a pretty trinket, hence why my room looks like a kleptomaniac magpie's nest.

A few discoveries to share with you:

Pal Louise's LouisaRose Etsy shop where you can buy prints of her very lovely photographs. Not on the High Street sells all sorts of yummy things for house, home and personage, and for fans of tea like myself, scrumptious little teapot and teacup jewellery, amongst other things, at Temporary Secretary. Loving Alice's Teacup necklace (pictured).

Classical music to melt into

2009-06-28T01:00:00.000+01:00

15 little slices of classical audio heaven

Symphony No.3 - Henryk Gorecki
The secret life of daydreams - Dario Marianelli
Gabriel's Oboe - Ennio Morricone
Opus 36 - Dustin O'Halloran
Her Gentle Spirit - Jocelyn Pook
Weep you no more, sad fountains - John Dowland
O clemens, o pia - Giovanni Pergolesi
Sul Aria - W.A. Mozart
I giorni - Ludovico Einaudi
Nulla in mundo pax sincera - Antonio Vivaldi
Misere Mei - Gregorio Allegri
Nocturne No.1 in B flat minor - Frederic Chopin
The Humming Chorus - Giocomo Puccini
The Coventry Carol - mediaeval traditional
Prelude, Cello Suite No.1 in G Major- J.S. Bach

Possibly the world's worst poem...

2009-03-17T17:27:00.000Z

A Tragedy

(You're not wrong there, son)
Theophile Marzials, 1873

Death!
Plop.
The barges down in the river flop.
Flop, plop.
Above, beneath.
From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,
As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,
Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly
To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop
On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,
As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.
Plop, plop.
And scudding by
The boatmen call out hoy! and hey!
All is running water and sky,
And my head shrieks -- "Stop,"
And my heart shrieks -- "Die."

My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead.

And the shrill wind whines in the thin tree-top
Flop, plop.

A curse on him.
Ugh! yet I knew -- I knew --
If a woman is false can a friend be true?
It was only a lie from beginning to end --
My Devil -- My "Friend"
I had trusted the whole of my living to!
Ugh; and I knew!
Ugh!
So what do I care,
And my head is empty as air --
I can do,
I can dare,
(Plop, plop
The barges flop
Drip drop.)
I can dare! I can dare!
And let myself all run away with my head
And stop.
Drop.
Dead.
Plop, flop.

Plop.

To sleep, perchance to dream

2009-03-12T00:35:00.000Z

I am terribly tired tonight, and just about ready to hit the sack for a date with the Sandman. William Shakespeare wrote of a good kip in Macbeth that...

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast

This links nicely to today's discovery of a good article on the BBC news website about the discovery of a verified portrait of Shakespeare, or as Bill Bryson and assorted scholars would have us now write, William Shakspeare. This is on account of this particular spelling being the most common variation of the name in the Bard's own hand.

Only six examples of Will's signature survive, and bearing in mind they're from a time when spelling was not standardised. Elizabethan Scrabble must have been a riot, quite literally. Given that the vast majority of Elizabethans were illiterate, a bag of X tiles would have served Scrabbel in the Age of that moste Excellente Prince, Gloriana, our beloved Queene quite sufficiently, meaning everyone was a high scorer on the board even if they could only muster a measley cross by way of a word.

Eight points for an X, in Scrabble. I think I can beat that with the ten pointer, Z. Zzzzzzzzzzz ....

From the sublime sign to the ridiculous...

2009-03-11T01:13:00.000Z

I spotted this little corker in Bouverie Place shopping mall in Folkestone yesterday. It appears to be working; there were no dogs on bicycles in the pedestrian zone at all.

Sam found an equally amusing sign tonight: on a packet of Durex in Sainsbury's, said store had helpfully put a label on the condoms that 'This packaging is not microwaveable'.

Hot sex is out then, folks.

What cannot letters inspire?

2009-03-11T00:11:00.000Z

I made a point today to write a few paper letters. It vexes me no end that no-one writes a nice paper letter anymore. When one considers that most communication, of love, of feeling, of sentiment, is conducted by such transient, tenuous means these days- email, text, phone-then you can only imagine what beauty is heartbreakingly denied to posterity.

I can count on one hand the number of people that write me a paper missive from time, and the effort expended by those few in producing something lovely, a gift on paper, is something I appreciate immensely. I should write more. It's exciting to receive something that is not asking for money or offering a credit card in the post.

I think that I have exhausted my spiel in the doing of the above, so I shall leave you with the following excerpt from a letter:

"What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart; they have all the fire of our passions. They can raise them as much as if the persons themselves were present. They have all the tenderness and the delicacy of speech, and sometimes even a boldness of expression beyond it. Letters were first invented for consoling such solitary wretches as myself!"

This was a letter from the French scholar, and later prioress, Héloïse to scholar Peter Abelard, between whom a legendary love affair was borne out, ending rather tragically in castration on his part, and the taking of the habit on hers. There are over a hundred letters attributed to this couple, dating back to the twelfth century, displaying poignantly, the enduring nature of an earnest missive.

After you're gone

2009-03-02T22:14:00.003Z

There is a glazed case towards the back of the room, the fruits of the taxidermist's labours, mounted on a beautiful hard wood, probably mahogany. Behind the glass, a bird. Dust does not settle upon it and the years have been kind for there is little of the bird itself left to decay. It perches, replendent, in its engineered bower, a craftsman having defined a fitting backdrop for its comeliness and it has been posed, postured and affected to look entirely attractive in the little tableau . It sits mantled by an irradiant plumage, its beak half-opened as if it were about to joyously trill. It is wonderfully still, stiff, unyielding and proud, and visitors remark on its beauty, and in secret whispers, how macabre it is. Its beautifully fashioned glass eyes - don't they look real?- stare confidently, brightly and fixedly at a single point ahead. In short, it is an excellent specimen, and will last forever encased as it is, if well looked-after.

And if you don't look too closely, you won't see where it was wounded, that fact hidden oh-so-deftly by the skilled craftsman. You won't see where it was pulled from its natural state, the life drawn from it and the warmth left to dissipate on a cold workbench before it was dressed up, posed and placed in its beautiful new roost, for all the world to admire behind glass.

Scents & Sensibility

2009-02-11T23:35:00.004Z

Mum had just switched over to a new washing powder, and had asked me to load up the washing machine with our school shirts. I took a scoop of the powder as instructed, slightly entranced by the fact that it had little blue specks in it, and took a sniff. It smelled wonderful - clean, fresh and actually quite enchanting. I suddenly liked washing the clothing. Mum thought there was something wrong with my noggin, but nevertheless acquiesced to the repeated offers of assistance with the washing. I was mad for that powder. It got to the slightly unnerving stage where I had to take a small tub of it upstairs. I'd open it periodically and have a whiff of the lovely aroma of clean white shirts ready to iron. Mum confiscated it and then they changed the powder. The mysterious Keznip ingredient was different and gone.

Smell is the most evocative of the senses. Sure sight, taste, touch and hearing are all grand but nothing beats a scent to transport you back in time. It has the ability to conjure up an image, powerfully summon a memory or inspire an emotion. Old perfumes, grass, soaps, foods, smoke and for the unstable amongst us, washing powder, all have a mastery of memory.

If I want to feel a particular way, I'll return to a perfume I wore at a time that I felt that way. I wore Ghostfor Women throughout a change period, and I'll return to that to galvanise myself into feeling confident about doing the same again. Paul Smith's Floral is my happy scent; I'd regularly borrow it from Leah and wear it on a flouncy day. She bought me my own bottle for my last birthday and I douse myself in it when I feel particularly cheerful. Flower by Kenzo inspires holiday feelings, Impulse o2 the same but more innocently as I was 17 when I last wore it, Ghost Deep Night and Ghost Cherish make me feel different about myself. I will not wear Georgio Armani's Sensi or Emporio Armani's She again for they remind me of a person I was, and do not wish to return to. Armani Code is Leah, Oscar de la Renta is Mum, Chanel no.5 is Nan and J'adore is Sam. I will look up if another woman wearing them wafts past me in a cloud of fragrance worn by my family members.

I think perhaps the most powerful of all scents is that of the people you love. There have been many research projects into whether humans have pheromones, with differing results and uncertain outcomes, but it's not this I refer to. It's the day-to-day smells of those close to you; the smells beneath the perfume or the soap. Nan smelled of Imperial Leather and home and safety. I regularly hugged her and her scent was as familiar to me as my own. Her house smelled of her, and when she died, I took a blanket that smelled of her for a while before she faded and I grieved. My parrot smells feathery; I like to cuddle up to him and breathe it in (Psittacosis, here we come! ) and the smell of a lover is dear and private.

That perhaps is the true purpose of scent and smell; to know your mate above all others. It is the fragrance that will wrap you in your history when you're just in bed linen, or cling to you in absence, or evoke in you the memory of moments shared and private - the true wonder of this most marvellous sense.

Corn

2009-01-24T20:04:00.001Z

We walked up the cliffs, across the Jubilee Way from Dover Castle, the sun was high in the sky and turning the channel azure, the ferries into white horses on the horizon. I was nine and living with Little Nan for a few months while Big Nan was undergoing radiotherapy for breast cancer, and spending a lot of time with a friend who lived close by.

It was August, the summer holidays, and the corn was full-eared under the sun's glare. My friend, her father and I took a long walk most days that summer. The dad had been drinking again and was lagging behind, singing randomly. My friend's mother made him walk it off most days and we took the opportunity to accompany him, redfaced, on his adventures to the castle, the Pharos, the clifftops and the countryside. He was a happy drunk, full of great anecdotes, nuggets of information and philosophy that seemed wonderful to a pair of nine year olds. He would quote poems and talk of art, the slight slur in his cultured, drawling voice not detracting from the yarns he wove. The corn was high and golden. It was punctuated with the vivid scarlet of poppies and I marvelled at the practicality of corn fusing so harmoniously with the uselessness of the red blooms, the hardiness versus the fragility and transience of the latter. Husband and wife were corn and poppies; they co-existed despite their polarities.

My friend and I gathered the corn-heads, filling our pockets with the golden ears and then we took them home, where Little Nan helped us to plant them in a small section of the yard-garden with raised flower beds that she'd cordoned off for us. Reaching up to the top shelf in the conservatory, the shelves running the entire length of it, she brought down a small wooden gate plant pot that once housed two cacti. The cacti long dead, we took it into the yard, and it became the threshold for the small corn garden.

The corn garden grew every year for ten years, where it was tended, with its little wooden gate , by successive grandchildren. It was a hardy plant, that corn. It weathered out every year doggedly. Nan got better, as did my friend's father. I did not see much of my friend after that summer.

As I grew into my teens, I would look at the ears of corn rising proudly from their corner, the little gate growing tatty and rotten, and I would remember that August. It was the lost summer; of cornfields and recoveries, of healing and of growing, and I would think how lucky we all were that we were corn.

The Cottage

2009-01-10T12:03:00.000Z

Went to Mum’s new cottage last night – it’s brilliant; higgledy-piggledy, colourful and eclectic. It suits Mum down to the ground.

Upstairs, there are two brightly painted bedrooms where the children have their rooms, downstairs, wooden floors, a lounge chocker with art, trinkets, glassware, original paintins and crockery belonging to my mother and her good friend –and the landlord - opera singer and author, Michael.

The kitchen is rustic and crammed with paintings, an old wooden dresser and Welsh love spoons. The ceiling has been decoupaged with food pictures from old magazines from the fifties and sixties. The entire annexe where the bathroom has also been decoupaged with old fifties song sheets, music scores and album covers including, amusingly ‘Love’s Cigarette’ (fans of which are sharing romantic respiratory conditions now, I’ll venture) and songs by Philip Ponce.

Mum’s bedroom is in the cellar, which you get to by means of a charming little wooden staircase, and is full of arty books, paintings, antique chairs and Mum’s beautiful wrought-iron bedstead with a wonderfully colourful embroidered coverlet with poppies and vines. Michael’s tastes and Mum’s are hard to tell apart - his art mingles with her as if they're an extension of each other, so similar is their taste. Perhaps that is why they are friends? Mum’s utterly bohemian and likes collecting handsome and diverse things like a magpie. The cottage is so utterly her! I loved it.

Lady Midnight

2009-01-08T19:25:00.000Z

Leonard Cohen is on the CD player. Lady Midnight is playing and I sip my tea and fuss the cat while the gravelly strains of Well, I argued all night like so many have before, saying, "Whatever you give me, I seem to need so much more." And things are different for me now. I have left the mantle of twelve years of my life on the floor and stepped out of it like an old skin I've shed. I am at once unburdened and unfettered and yet so very scared of what is to come. A new skin, a new fit.

The end of a long love is one of the most sorrowful events in life; worse still when it is not precipitated by arguments or some such catalyst, but by the slow and barely detectable erosion of time. When you reach a cross-roads in life and turn to take the hand of your lover to cross it, you see that they are not there with you, nor indeed have they been traversing your path for some time. You have been walking in parallel lines, and in doing so will never share nor cross tracks again. Time has taken a love as strong as rock, and its tides have lapped at it and broken it down to pebbles, and then gravel, and then sand, and that sand escapes through your fingers imperceptively until all you are left with is grains and fragments. Smaller pieces, harder to hold on to, impossible to visualise what they came from or what they can be used for.

I was fourteen when I first heard Leonard Cohen. His songs of age and experience, love and loss meant nothing to me then for I had nothing to compare them to. I had no memories of looking into the face of the one you loved for a third of your life and saying "I'm leaving you" and no recollections of the frustrations of trying to be an individual in a pair that defined me, or of being together but alone. No remembrances of breaking hearts, nor of having yours broken, of bathing pillows in tears and of wrenching yourself from the comfortable haven of mundanity to cast yourself out there in a huge unknown seas of new experiences, new people, new disappointments, new adventures. There were no reminiscences of the fears of new lovers, of learning a new man, nor of the jaded and faded feeling when he is not in fact right for your heart and is an ill fit to you. No way to tell that you'd have to dust yourself off and pull yourself up to the starting block again, over and over.

Leonard sings along in a level and open way, his voice faltering. He's a poet more than he's a singer. I admire where he's been and that he sings about it with no reserve as if his disappointments are an open book thrust forward to invite you to read. I sip tea, I fuss the cat, I reflect. This is my new skin.

"Oh, Lady Midnight, I fear that you grow old,the stars eat your body and the wind makes you cold."

"If we cry now," she said, "it will just be ignored."

Seasons in France

2009-01-06T17:09:00.000Z

The air was warm in the summer and blew gently through the verdant valley like a lover's caress; soft and warm. Life was in hues of amber and honey then, the days long and endless. There were songs in the gardens, laughter and promise. The valley was in her prime, her unintentional arrogance was only to assume she would stay this way, feted by the sun.

In autumn, the air cooled and the light grew bluer. The trees denuded themselves as if they were embarrassed, and the days grew tangibly shorter. It was cooler, darker and a frigid chill crept into the night hours.

Winter came and spread a crystalline and cold mantle of snow across the valley. The days were short and the light and warmth weak, the nights long and bleak. The air was so very, very clear then and the naked valley lay open to the hawkish freeze that blanketted her. The landscape in the harsh winter light was different; another place. The year was over and it was time to await the return of the warmth, the resurrection of the greenery and the cycle to start again.

What's important to me

2008-12-29T00:38:00.000Z

Cleverness should be judged not by how much you know, but by how much you are willing to teach it to others. Love quickly and wholeheartedly; love is the one thing you can give away in copious amounts without being any the poorer for it. Treat everyone as you would like to be treated. Sometimes just treat everyone! Spending money on experiences such as travel is never a waste of cash, but also recognise that traversing your own life, mind and heart is the most exciting and rewarding journey you'll ever make. Your success as a person is not determined by your capacity to earn, but by your capacity to love. If the world is just, which it eventually is, you will receive it back manyfold. If you love someone, in whatever way or form, tell them. I've had friends for whom tomorrow wasn't guaranteed, but the three seconds it takes to tell a person usually is. Use today wisely; if you've nourished your mind, warmed your heart and rattled your ribs, it's been a day well spent. Wake up every day and count your blessings. Consider your day a success if you have an extra one to tally.

I had one less blessing to count today which makes me very sad, but the rest will be gathered to me now, like a nest of precious eggs, and I will treasure them even more.

Hidden Histories

2008-12-27T18:56:00.000Z

The thing I most like about history is the ordinaryness of it all - history is after all, just one great yarn. You have the major events that are like a warp thread in life's great tapestry. They hold it all together and give events substance. Then you have the weft, the colourful events that happen to all of us, that weave in and out to make the vibrant patterns of human existence.

I was struck by the great wealth of hidden history that there is amongst us all; the yarns and family fables that come out at gatherings when the vocal chords are lubricated by a festive toddy or two.

Zand's great-grandfather knew Dylan Thomas, being a fellow resident of Laugharne, and the two would have a chinwag whilst sitting on the garden wall. His grandfather was in Dunkirk when British troops were annexed by the Germans and rescued by hundreds of boats, narrowly escaping being blown up.

Every family has a few skeletons so deeply buried in the closet that there must be a proliferation of anatomical specimens in Narnia. My paternal family, of German descent, has a little talked-about family member that was high up in the Nazi party. There's the poetry and carpentry legacy of Grandad Barnes; I found out there's a plaque in his memory in a church in Dover because he did all the woodwork there. There's a bridge in Bushy Ruff that he made. There's the tales of when he and Nan Barnes lived in the cottages on the other side of Shakespeare cliff, and Nan Barnes went into labour. They caught a lift on a passing freight train, but the twins, Aunty Alison (for who I am named) and Uncle Stevie were born en route as Nan couldn't hold on. Then there's Uncle Frank.

Uncle Frank, Nan Barnes' brother, was based in Borneo during the demise of the North Borneo territory. He was a patrol leader in the jungle, and the patrol was attacked by insurgents. He motioned for everyone to duck, and they went to ground. Shots were fired, and eventually everything went quiet. Uncle Frank stood up, but there was silence. The entire patrol had been killed; he'd been left alive to relay a message to his superiors.

I think the concept of hidden histories is fascinating. That there are millions of untold stories at the nation's fingertips is an enticing prospect for the would-be chronicler.

Christmas gifts

2008-12-22T04:39:00.000Z

I was lately received of a most excellent e-gift, a good chortle, in the form of an email containing a riotously witty piece by PG Wodehouse on Christmas gifts. After the rumble in my diaphragm stopped appearing on seismograph read-outs in Japan, it got me to thinking about gifts; in particular duff gifts.

We've all had them; a slightly collapsed strut in the taste and decency framework of friends and family resulting in something embarrassing to receive. It is not, in my opinion, chance that the German word for poison is Gift. I have received some truly noxious articles worthy of a health warning.

I have to advocate the cheapskate school of gift-giving. My family limits Christmas presents to a fiver, and most of the fun is derived from shopping for something meaningful on a budget that yields only moths and Pound Stretcher carrier bags.

Mr and Mrs X (who shall remain unnamed on account of my inordinate fondness for them) are the principle pairing in the naff gift stakes. After a succession of awful gifts from Mr X to Mrs X which included, but was not limited to, a porcelain pierrot doll with a lugubrious face and sinister eyes which had to be turned round because it scared people, a six pack of Tempo tissues and two cans of deodorant, Mrs X finally thought she'd overcome the poor run of tatty tokens when she spotted a ring-sized box under the Christmas tree. Rattling it sounded entirely promising, and so it was with some optimism that she regarded Mr X as a reformed gift-giving character in the run-up to the holiday period, and lavished a little more on his presents as a result.

Alas for Mr X, it might have been the season of good will to all men, but not the season of good luck. On Christmas morning, Mrs X was to open the small box to reveal a thimble from the local castle gift shop, lately purchased by Mr X when he repaired the pipework there. At the last update, Mr X is well equipped for sewing should he choose to sit on the needlework.

I myself have been in receipt of some strange gifts. A leather handbag was bequeathed me on my twelfth birthday when my mother's usually good taste died a small death. Knitting seems to be a particularly sadistic avenue by which to foist something wholly unsuitable on an innocent bystander. One Christmas yielded a set of hand-knitted stripy leg-warmers and matching hat with a hole in the middle, through which my ponytail was supposed to go in some head-lagging ensemble. Even my own grandfather fell prey to the lure of knit one, pearl one, offend many.

Now, I might add in advance that my paternal grandfather was a man of style and words. He was an accomplished carpenter and a poet in the romantic, naturalist ilk; his legacy in wood and words is as great as it is touching. In short, he was an artist with both his hands and his mind. His gifts though, mostly on the dodgy side.

I was about fifteen when my grandfather decided, for the first time, to autonomously gift me with something he chose himself for Christmas; unfortunately it the fruit of the knitting circle. Two awkwardly packaged gifts were gruffly handed over, and he regarded me with a beady, yet nevertheless slightly satisfied eye as I bit through the layers of Sellotape esconcing the seasonal offering. The first was endearing; a seventies photo album with palm trees on the front and yellowed adhesive inserts. The second, squishy and considerable in size. I thought a jumper. This was further supported by the pleased interjection of my grandsire with "I have friends who knit" upon the occasion of the unveiling of the gift.

Four gloves were in the wrapping paper. Four enormous woolly, left gloves. They looked like they'd been knitted from pure lamb's wool, only that someone had forgot to detach it from the sheep. Upon the obligatory donning of the gloves for appropriate cooing and crowing at the niceness of the present, they allowed for mobility in the digits only afforded by the best quality oven mitt. Two were the thickest black yarn with yellow stripes on the back of the hand, or in the case of the erroneously left mitt, the palm of the hand. Worse was to come.

The remaining two were knitted out of the same black asbestos fibre. A large square on the back of the hand, and as previously mentioned, the palm of one, was given over to a square patch of long purple mohair wool. The result was Legend of the Hairy Hands meets all the myths given over to autoeroticism. My father choked on his mince pie. My grandmother wondered aloud whether we ought to trim the mohair a little for practicality's sake. I regaled my grandfather with tales of how useful these 'lovely bumblebee gloves' would be. I wasn't able to muster comment on the psychadelic Kong affairs at that time.

As a footnote of gift-giving redemption, before my grandfather died, he gifted me with a tiny mahogany box carved from a single piece of wood. To this day, it houses precious treasures and reminds me of the man, without going via the gift middle-men, and his skills.

I'm a great believer in 'it's the thought that counts'. Truer today than ever that sometimes it's a lot safer to leave these gifts at the thought stage and simply gift a loved one with your affection.

Wash Day

2008-12-22T02:31:00.001Z

Nan and I stand at the window at the far end of the long kitchen, where I learned to ride a two-wheeler bike. The twin-tub is tucked neatly under the kitchen side, and the spin dryer sits adjacent to it. The gap between the two is the best hiding place I've ever found; neither Mark nor Sharon can ever find me when I hide in there. Nan mysteriously always knows that I've managed to squirrel myself in there whenever we're playing hide and seek because she talks to me whilst making tea on the work-surface above, and I get quite indignant at the lack of sanctity afforded to the excellent hide-out.

All that aside, it's a fine afternoon and Nan's had the twin tub out. There's a crow's nest type thing in the middle of the drum where she liberally shakes the washing powder. The twin tub swishes the contents from side to side and somehow shakes the powder from its nautical vantage point, before she uses a large pair of wooden tongs to fish the wet clothing out. She wrings it by hand, before folding it into a large yellow plastic washbasket to go out to dry on the washing line.

This is a day I can remember particularly clearly because I am ill and I have been sick on Ted, my treasured bear which I've had since I was a baby. When Nan tucks Ted and I in at night, I get her to tell me how she found Ted (in Woolworth's toy shop which was separate to the main store then) and why she picked him. I've never slept a night without him, and therefore it's slightly disconcerting that he's had to be washed today and he go out with the twin tub washing on the line.

I accompany Nan into the back garden today due to the solemness of the occasion. Nan fans out the rotary line, which has yellow cord to match the basket, and pegs the sheets out first. They look a lovely, crisp white and smell fresh and of home. Whenever Nan pegs washing out she tells me that it's her favourite sight in all the world, and that when she lived at home with her mother, Elizabeth Mary, the washing would bring them both a great deal of contentment when they drank their tea and saw the fruits of their efforts with the mangle flapping in the breeze. She extols the virtues of the marvellous twin tub - "I did all your terry towelling nappies by hand. Imagine!" she trills happily. Ted is then pegged out by his ears, with concerned instructions from me to rotate the line so he faces the house, and so that I can watch him in case he gets stolen; he is after all, the most desirable and valuable bear in the whole world.

That afternoon, I spend four hours sitting on the kitchen work counter keeping vigil on my vulnerable bear, at obvious risk of thieves and delinquents. I read 'Spooky Stories' to pass the time. I play with my dinosaurs and Britain's farm animals in the kitchen sink where dilophosaurus, the pteranodon and the t-rex are headed off by Farmer Giles, Shep, a Massey Ferguson, a dairy herd and the brachiosaurus. I see Joe tending his garden next door and wave, getting scolded by Nan for messing up the nets, and I write a story in red ink on my typewriter because the black ink has run out.

Finally Ted has dried to a degree which means he can be brought in, although I'm forewarned that I'll 'catch my death from him' if he sleeps in the bed tonight and so Nan has agreed to concoct an elaborate Ted Bed out of towels to allow him to sleep well.

I still have Ted, but unfortunately not Nan. We finally persuaded her to have a front loading machine in her last years, after being a staunch supporter of twin tubs. Imagine her great delight at being able to sit back with a cup of tea and regard the machine doing the work that she and her mother used to do by hand on the washboard and mangle. In the twenty-five intervening years I've insisted that Ted gets a surface wash rather than a dunking, and that he's dried indoors.

The Perfect Life

2008-12-12T01:52:00.001Z

Love is our great compensation for being such ordinary, unfulfilled creatures. Love warms lives, shields hearts and fortifies us against life's onslaughts. Any perfect life of mine would have to be saturated with it, and so to place myself in an ideal scenario, I'd have to have a loving home at the centre of things; a place to come back to where the world could recede. There would be a person in it who could laugh and love a lot with me. Three L's would hang above my door to remind me to laugh, love and live, and my home, a canvas painted as a testament to the affection housed within its walls. Whether I have children or not, my house would still be a family house. I want it full of my family and friends. I want old people moaning and snotty little handprints on the glass. I want to cat-sit and cook dinner for fifteen. I want my parrot mimicking many voices and squawking at delighted children. I want to bring the dining chairs into the lounge because all the suite seats are taken.

I'm not a particularly materialistic person but I value space and privacy from the outside world, so a big house would be necessary for me in my perfect life. It would have a library with a fire and a battered old chair big enough to tuck my legs up, a writing desk facing the window where I might conduct my correspondence. There would be a discrete hifi. I like to listen to Einaudi when I diary-write, and old jazz to make me happy. I like to air guitar to seventies rock and caterwaul to Emma Kirkby and Fats Waller. I love to hide away to read, being a bit of a claustrophile, and so a house of many nooks would be simply idyllic for me.

Nourishment is important to me; nourish your body, nourish your mind and nourish your heart and you will never be unhappy. A dining room with an expansive table to seat twenty would be a feature of my ideal home. I love to cook, I love to eat and I love to spend time with my family and friends talking. Where better to indulge these wonderful likes than at a table surrounded by people you love? I am a sincere believer that the heart of a home is the dining table. It's a place to come together to share the day's events, moot ideas and dissect philosophies over something delicious and warming. I love the occasion and ceremony of dining, the allocation of time for nourishment of all kinds. The table and chair are a little recognised key to fulfilment in this life.

When I think of a perfect life, I think little of money although I recognise that you probably have to have it so that you've got no occasion to fret about how you'll pay the bills. In an ideal life, I'd earn money by writing. Words are such wondrous things that can evoke, transport, change, document and immortalise. If you were looking for the elixir of life, you'd need not look further than a dictionary and let imagination be your alchemy. If any of us live forever, it'll be through words and blood. Make babies and books; live forever in hearts and minds.

Time is the last feature of my ideal life. Time to enjoy my life is what I would ask for. A day spent in the company of your beloved, a night spent sleeping soundly with no worries, years that weave you a history and give you a voice to recount it, decades that build experience and make the lines on your face a map of your wisdom . Time is such a great gift. It's marvellous to know it stretches ahead, and it's wondrous to have already absorbed it in the form of experience and knowledge. Mourn not the lack of days ahead, but celebrate the days that you have within you. Age enhances life; it distills your enjoyment of it if you can forgive it for making you work harder and ache more.

A home, a heart, some words and some time. This is my perfect life.

Nan's house

2008-12-12T01:44:00.000Z

At the moment I am staying at Little Nan’s house. I came here on Wednesday and will be going home on Sunday. In between is a divine mix of me being a grown-up with all the freedom that entails such as choosing my own bedtime and being allowed free run of the romance novel cupboard, and being a granddaughter which merits a cup of tea and a slice of toast in bed in the morning and gifts of face-cream and bubble bath from my lovely Nan who still likes to spoil me.

Nan is the daughter of the Nan I lived with- my mother’s mother - although to look at her, you would never think her old enough to be my grandmother. She is lively, witty and modern with soft blonde hair and modern clothing. Having four generations in my family alive at the same time meant that we had a Big Nan and a Little Nan. Little Nan still retains the title even though Big Nan is gone. I lived here once, in this house, for three months whilst Big Nan had radiotherapy for breast cancer. I had Aunty Lee-Anne’s old bedroom in Nan’s rambling five bedroom Victorian house. I stay in there whenever I come to stay.

The house has evolved rather than changed over my lifetime, like the view from the window. It sits on an Anglo-Saxon burial site- skeletons have been excavated in the neighbours’ gardens- and overlooks Dover Priory, now Dover College and the old Victorian train station, high on a hill. The expansive windows frame Dover Castle to the left, the great dry estuary valley in which Dover nestles, the slate grey sea line of the English Channel with ant-sized ships, and the Drop Redoubt, a Napoleonic era defence fort on the right. The landmarks change very little over the years but the bit in the middle is always subtly shifting, eking out a change here and there.

Inside, there is just as much to look at. Nan collects Africana and the house is an eclectic mix of Victoriana and tribal art. An olive green horsehair-stuffed suite juxtaposes wonderfully with a life-sized wooden head from Kenya. Uncle Jim, an antique monkey ashtray, sits with Japanese cloisonné salt and pepper shakers, whilst Thai buddhas cosy up to the framed Irish blessing I stitched for Nan on the wall and netsuke sit with opalescent glass mushrooms.

The house holds such memories. Nan’s Ottoman trunk for example, was a great launch pad to jump on the bed as a very small child. Uncle Darren, my mother’s younger brother and only eight years older than me, would throw me from the trunk onto the Nan’s great brass bed in a tremendous parabola of delight and fear. Either that or he’d send me off to play Hide and Seek in the expansive house. Half an hour later, when I heard the TV on, I’d shout down “Are you coming to find me, Uncle Darren?”. A suspiciously crisp or chocolate-muffled reply would come back “Seventy-five…seventy-six…seventy-seven”. After about an hour, and feeling exceedingly pleased with myself that my hiding place had not been discovered, I’d present myself in the living room to an obviously reclining, TV-watching uncle who’d feign astonishment at the difficulty of the chosen hiding locale.

Uncle Darren was an exceedingly naughty Uncle. A large ship’s steering wheel adorned –and still adorns – the kitchen wall in Nan’s house. Uncle Darren and his best friends Steven and Spencer told me that there was a spy camera in the middle of it that linked up to the police station, so that if I was naughty, the police would come up and get me. Moreover, if I nudged or moved the wheel, the house would turn round and the back door would be at the front of the house with guests having to climb over the back yard wall to visit Nan and Grandad Den. Uncle Darren also told me there was a poltergeist called George in the top landing cupboard, so I spent much of my time here in awe of the paranormal properties of the house. Uncle Darren also informed me that currants were legless spiders and that mushrooms were snails with the shells cut off, so all in all, he was responsible for a number of childhood issues. I adored him, and continue to adore him, even though he still calls me Thicko and Dopey. These days I can hold my own with ‘Spazza Dazza’ on account of my advanced age.

Little Nan and Grandad raised ten children between them here in this house. They had lodgers, gas apprentices from Grandad’s work with the Seeboard and channel swimmers like Stella who still visits. But these days, the house is a quiet haven for the likes of me. Nan and I can sit in companionable silence in the evening with our books, the occasional cup of tea punctuating the balmy peace. I can open the kitchen serving hatch without getting told off, and even nudge the steering wheel without fear. Peace, quiet, memories and beautiful scenery. What a house!

The Devil's Pipe

2008-11-09T19:24:00.000Z

It seemed like a wholly good idea at the time: make money by busking.

Now, this would be fine for the likes of Al, who can play a guitar like a veritable dream and has quite a good voice. I, on the other hand, should be limited to the playing of the air guitar for safety reasons, and my singing voice should be issued with a goverment health warning. However the Venerable Al did have other ideas, and thought thought that money-making might be achieved with the purchase of a recorder. Yes, one of those plastic things that children use to the pollute the air.

The idea would be to pair the guitar - a beautiful and elegant instrument, with warm nuances of harmony and tone within the sustain of a note plucked on a beautiful bronze string ... with a recorder - that plastic digression in good musical taste - to make mediaeval and folk style music. 'Mediaeval' might sound romantic, but let's remember that the Black Death, revolting peasants and particolour tights on men also came out of this era. It is a time period equally not to be trusted on the musical front.

The recorder; an object of loathing, the source of many a child's feelings of inadequacy and cause of the subsequent collapse of their fledgling psyches primarily through overexposure to failure. An instrument of torture - like toy drum kits and the Casio PT20 - in the hands of a youth. It operates at frequencies only painful to the adult ear, and produces tunes offensive to those of a delicate disposition such as Oats and Beans and Barleymow and Swannee River. It invariably comes in either cream plastic, or an odious cream and brown tonal ensemble, evocative of bad slacks and nylon curtains circa 1974. It produces a noise akin to an owl being molested. In short, it is a reprehensible and repellent creation.

Schools, in the eighties, used to force recorder lessons upon their charges in what I believe was a subtle and subliminal way in keeping the education sector buoyant by the audio subjugation of teaching staff through the loss of will to live. I, through sheer dumb luck, never learned the recorder. However I did have the misfortune to own two; a wooden one and yes, a plastic cream thing, but unfortunately was unable to make any notes of note out of either, on account of them being an attractive perch to my budgerigar who would sit on the end, obstructing at least three air holes, and chirruping into it with his crest stuck up like an Elvis quiff thus, hampering any bond that the recorder and I might have developed.

Therefore, it was with some alarm that the concept of playing a recorder was introduced to me.

I am happy to report that busking practice is going well, with the guitar now tuned to the recorder (so they both sound heinous, but at least we're consistent) . The busking donations will soon be pouring in; largely, I suspect, because people will be incited to throw coins at our heads.

Private thoughts on public houses

2008-07-29T18:02:00.000+01:00

It was splendidly skanky, and was situated just a short hop across the road from the station. The Globe.

A pub called The Globe had such excellent Shakespearian conurtations and great promise of being a good dive. It was conveniently slapped on the corner of the high street, and the exterior was painted in white with suitably tacky blue trims. It had a large smooth pavement outside - easily swillable to get rid of the blood, and several entrance-ways to make a quick getaway if you were going to get your head kicked in. 'Courtyard Beer Garden' declared the sign, and it looked promising; it might just have said 'Court' with the kind of clientele I was hoping for. The 'courtyard' doubtless was the kind of beer garden which constituted of four plastic chairs round a large ashtray, next to the Biffa bins.

I expected everyone in there to be attired for the Globe, in ruffs, velveteen doublets and particoloured hose, comparing the excellent sherry to a summer's day, 'Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Lend me your beers' and all that jazz. It looked like the kind of establishment where Marlowe ought to be stabbed, and where you were thrown out by the collar if you had a full set of teeth and were free of consumption, but alas it'd been turned into one of those swanky foodie type pubs. You're not likely to see a pinot grigio, followed by a tweeded gent, slide up the bar in this sort of place.

I rather fancy that we're doing a disservice to the public house tradition to allow them to become these sanitised and fancy drinking holes. They're completely soulless.

As a small child, the King Edward VII was our local. It was situated at the top of Wyndham Road, where my Nan was born, raised and lived much of her adult life. It looked to be of architecture suited to the turn of the twentieth century, a prosaic and bland design, and oddly, looked halved. I'd hazzard a guess that perhaps it was war damage. Nan's occupied a prefab immediately opposite it during the forties and fifties, and the patterns of Lower and Douglas road further up indicate that the spot would have been filled with terrace houses. It's entirely possible a small area was bomb-damaged which included the other half of the pub.

The pub was used extensively by the 'Hamlets' folk, Tower Hamlets in Dover being one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Dover. It was brown and dingy inside; a rubber ockey for the darts curling up, brown carpet tiles and thick patterned and stained glass windows gave it a claustrophic air, even in the height of summer. The air was always thick with smoke, and cloying.

Grandad quite often went down the King Edward for an hour for a half pint of stout, which in those days was on draft as it was popular. Nan and I might join him on a Sunday afternoon for a bitter shandy. Grandad would always wear a suit jacket to the pub, and in the winter, this would be worn over his zip-up 'indoors' cardigan. He would smoke Woodbines and talk with the local men, usually the other retired miners from Snowdon and Tilmanstone collieries who'd settled up the Hamlets. The likes of Nobby Clark and Mr Prothero often bought their dogs to the pub, and the mangy old mutts would lay patiently at their masters' feet. Grandad had a particular seat he would occupy in the King Edward, but many of the younger men like to sit up to the bar to smoke. The ladies were husky-voiced and over-madeup, and the landlord fancied himself Eric Bristow.

If anything was on the menu, it was hot pot, steak and ale pie or egg and chips, depending on whether the landlady was cooking that day or not, and no one thought to complain about dog hairs going on the food. In such rank circumstances, everyone socialised quite happily. Indeed, the annual Christmas party for the local children was always held in the acrid atmosphere of the pub. You always went home vaguely nicotine-stained, clutching your rubbish smoke-scented present to your newly emphesemic chest. I attended one year in a pink velvet party dress, and had gold conical party hat. We ate iced gems and egg sandwiches with weak orange squash served in a tea urn. Father Christmas was skinny with black eyebrows and swore a lot. It was quite marvellous.

So, you can imagine my horror when I entered the Globe, to find it all quite respectable. A gaudy stripy fabric in the restaurant area was the only nod to tat, and the walls were pristine cream; a sure sign of the adverse effects of the smoking ban. Everyone had teeth. You could order PG Tips or, alack!, a Slush Puppy at the bar. No one audibly hissed 'That's Harry's seat and he's coming in next Tuesday!'. There were meals with French names on the menu. What happened to egg and chips with the remnants of the cook's Benson & Hedges in it? Wines, wines and more wines with explanations about the bouquet . "Undertones of plum and oak, my arse!" Grandad would have muttered at this sacriledge.

We will, alas, lose the kind of place where you can stick to the carpet, and where the wallpaper makes you nauseous. Where Chas'n'Dave play on the juke box, and somehow everyone knows the words and has a sing along in faux-Cockney accents, and then Foster & Allen follow. The kind of place where you can't put your elbows on the table because it's harbouring a small bitter mere, where you can't use the toilets because the resident alsatian growls at you and where there are still wooden swing-boats in the beer garden. A little slice of our quirky social history is fast disappearing.

Two words

2008-07-27T11:54:00.000+01:00

Les and I often sit and have lunch together. Les is one of my best friends; at sixty-five to my thirty, there is a bit of an age gap but I don't notice it when we talk. We are able to discuss anything frankly, with the confidence that the advice and opinions voiced will be honest. We both have similar world views, interests in forensics and detection, and often discuss sociology, human social structure and the natural order of society which would improve things.

Les is a rock and roller - he still wears a quiff straight out of the pages of the fifties. He likes Jerry Lee Lewis, and dressing up to Les is putting on his best drapes with a pair of white shoes he made himself back in the sixties, combing back the quiff and hitting the town. He's been a band manager, a shoemaker, a gold trader, a milkman, a security guard, a husband - three times, a poet, owner of a large tourist attraction on the Isle of Wight, a lorry driver and now a writer. He's been involved in east end London life of the sixties, and he's been questioned in connection with the Yorkshire Ripper murders. He tells of loves lost, of a brutal childhood, of being a war child who didn't know his father until he got back, of beautiful women and of nefarious fights. His is a world that has almost gone now. He has seen a lot of things, has Les. Into his sixty-five years, he's crammed a hundred and thirty years' experience.

So, when Les gives advice, I generally perk up and take a listen. Les says the two saddest words in the English language are 'if only'. If only. So, it is with a view to open myself up to new experiences, to say 'yes' to harebrained schemes and perhaps a few risks, that I have decided that life shall no longer be a series of 'if onlies'. I'd rather be sorry for the things I have done, than the things I haven't.

Hug

2008-07-21T21:14:00.000+01:00

I had the best cuddle today. Can there be a better place to be in all the world than in the arms of someone dear to you? I think not. A good, earnest embrace makes the world, and all its unnecessary exertions on the spirit, recede. A hug revives the weariest soul, I am convinced of it.

The sun was warm upon us, and affection warm within me as my chin tucked neatly the crook of his neck. His shirt smelled clean, of a nice washing powder, and he was warm and comfortable. I heard the deep, unhurried exit of his breath as he relaxed into it, and felt him nuzzle into my hair. We stayed there for some time, enjoying being enfolded in each other's arms in a little cocoon of affection and rest. As with all the best squeezes, I felt myself becoming slightly drowsy, my breathing slowing. I forget how I'm postured and I forget where I am. The world becomes heads, necks, scents and the sounds of exhalation. Luckily, there was no hurry, my friend being an equal fan of heartfelt hugging. We prolonged the experience.

Such a beautiful encounter, hugging. I still cuddle into my mother at thirty; my younger siblings joining us and coming in to take places nestled into each others arms too, like dear matryoshka dolls, five or more to a sofa. I love most of all things to lay within a lover's arms and listen to the rhythmic thud of his heart and know with certainty the world is to rights because we have each other. I like to take my sisters in my arms and close my eyes, knowing that none of them will want to rush the experience. A hug says "Be welcome in my space because you're already in my heart" and is a short, simple journey to a utopia accessable to all of us.

I truly believe that cuddles are magic.

Time Traveller

2008-07-14T23:52:00.000+01:00

My books are now packed; the recollections of a hundred authors, and the quiet instruments of, for me, a receding reality; a peaceful hiatus, in paper.

My books, save for my most precious treasures, are the most important things I own, far more important than clothing or trinkets. You can buy anything to wear on the outside; a book says far more about who you are, for it has enriched your knowledge and become part of you.

Some books were gifted to me and have been packed carefully with my diary volumes in a box marked with 'Books*'. These ones will come with me, and not be stored in Nan's rambling old house, in the rooms in the eaves. They are words which have meant enough to my friends to become part of them and to share with me. I love my friends dearly, and their treasured words become my own. In amongst this cherished cache, volumes of my journals, the words of an optimistic child and echoed by the woman grown.

I still recognise her in me although she angers me as much as she delights. Her analyses of things are askew, she worries far too much about trivialities and her moods are inconsistent, but she's likeable and I like her frankness. She succumbs far too much to juvenile tantrums. The world to her is amazing and then it's all against her. She forgets to add explanations of who people are for my reference, and so I don't know what manner of boy it is she's just kissed at a wedding reception, and I can't visualise the fauvist triptych she's currently creating with oil bars that pleases her so.

Kezdez is packed up now, the volumes carefully stored in small book boxes that can be easily be found when I seek them. This is the fifteenth time my life has been packed up in boxes and set to be moved; I am a time traveller and a hobo.

My past is in a box, and my future is uncertain. Where I'll be when I unpack myself again, I do not know.

The Meaning of Life

2008-07-12T23:53:00.001+01:00

Let's face it folks: none of us are making it out alive. So live, love and laugh. Fill your life with happy moments. Make mistakes. Love people quickly and unreservedly. Work to live, not live to work. See the wonder in nature. Be unafraid to be ignorant- magic lies in things you don't understand. Get a Big Mac on Fridays.

That's my secret to a meaningful life (and high cholesterol).

Idiosyncracies

2008-06-29T03:19:00.000+01:00

I get irked by people that read my newspaper, books or magazines before me, and if my periodical is peered at, I will purposely speed-read it and then deliberately turn the page when I deem the snooper to be suitably engaged by the writing.

I dislike swearing, but love the words 'sod', 'git' and 'bloody' and pepper my language with them when at all possible. I spend hours in the bath reading, topping up the hot water with my toe. I may also dine and have a drink in the bath. It's not uncommon for me to perch a full plated salad on my clavicle whilst engrossed in an excellent book in the bath. The preference for the salad is tuna, marinaded feta and black olives, liberally doused in fresh lemon juice. A fine salad for a bathtime meal.

I talk in my sleep in both English and German and it's perfectly possible for me to have a fairly substantive conversation without being conscious. With prompting I sometimes vaguely remember it. Digestive biscuits, calamari and dandelion and burdock all disgust me. I like to own a fountain pen and I refuse to write a letter in a biro. I own the crucifix that Nan wore on her wedding day in 1940. I like wearing white; it makes me feel happy. I can't sing for life nor money, but I enjoy humming mediaeval songs in the bath (out of tune, mind). When I feel particularly chipper, I like a good rousing, bathtime chorus of "Over the Hills and o'er the main, to Flanders, Portugal and Spain, the queen commands and we'll obey , over the hills and far away." punctuated with splashes. This is repeated until someone throws shoes or other household items at me.

I like to collect things with a story, and it matters little to me whether things match. I treasure things, especially books. I've written a journal entry every day since I was fourteen, but I lost my early volumes in a house move. Current volumes document my thoughts from age fifteen to present. I have found two mind-matched individuals in the last decade. My Charlie Bird is the most treasured thing in my care. I've had him since he was a baby bird and I am inordinately proud of the quirky and cantankerous creature. We have a deep understanding despite being different species.

I like to own a jack-in-a-pack at all times, but I invariably lose at least one a year. This is the fifth year and fifth jack-in-a-pack and thus far I have managed to retain this kagoul. It bodes well. I still like slow-worms, and if I spot one, I will still try to catch it. I can't pass a zip-slide or a swing without being tempted to have a go, and my inclinations dictate I must own a kite at all times. I have a large sports kite waiting for a maiden flight with Dad.

I enjoy being me.

To run

2008-06-28T21:37:00.000+01:00

I used to run a lot. At school in Germany, cross-country was my thing and I would speed through the forest in which the school was situated. It was a typically dark germanic sort of woodland, with steep inclines and heavy canopies of stout conifers. Snow, which lasted well into spring, did not dissuade me from running; I would set off, in only shorts and t-shirt, and relish bounding through the trees like a small Diana, my legs reddened by the chill, the air crisp and still as I drew deeply upon it to fuel myself .

These days I am hindered by boobs and a jelly belly, and a pair of lungs which are more accustomed to bellowing air for nagging than for regulating oxygen to the body for sporting activities, but I often feel an urge to take off and leg it. I sometimes oblige that compulsion.

It was a quiet night, and unfamiliar sounds assailed me. It was as warm as daytime here in this strange place on another continent, and cicadas provided an exotic soundtrack for my walk along the beach. All was quiet, the noise from the bars having receded with distance. I left my sandals and my drink on a sun-lounger and headed to the waterline. The moon was bright and the ocean appeared ultramarine, the sand still warm underfoot. It was then I had a Mercurial urge to take flight, and I acted upon it.

I was slow and cumbersome, but the darkness compensated for that fact. Ever has it been that the twilight has a magical way of changing perceptions; things are scarier, louder, senses are enhanced and sharpened. The sensation of speed alters. Once again I was propelling myself along at great speed, my legs easing into the rhythm of the run and I felt the great freedom of giving in to instinct.

At the end, the beach ran out along with my energy. I sank to the sand, my ribcage heaving and the blood pounding in my ears. My mouth was dry, I scarcely had the air to exhale to make laughter that bubbled forth, and time's effects, my body's condition and the increasing disparity between what I can do and what I think I can do were once again conspired to keep me idle and still. But for a moment, with wings at my heels, I had forgotten that I was no longer a girl, a runner.

Age will further steal my feet's wings from me, I fear.

Her Hands

2008-06-28T20:37:00.000+01:00

Her hands were always soft; she had gracile and elegant fingers with tidy, clipped nails. They had never once been painted, in over eighty years, and she never adorned them with jewellery but for a slender gold wedding band. The skin was paper-thin with age, and slightly translucent, the weave of pale blue veins threading delicately across them, carrying the blood we shared.

Nan looked delicate, but she was more lion than lamb. The grip she exhibited with those hands was extraordinary, her grasp firm and earnest. When we had been parted for some time, she would take my right hand with her left and squeeze it so tightly that her wedding ring would dig in. It was a grip that had rescued me, as a small child, from many a pavement, with scuffed knees and hot tears. It had pulled me out of the sea when I fell in, guided me across the road and kept me close and safe in shops. It had walked me up to bed, reassured me in thunderstorms and pulled me home, slightly jarringly, when I'd been naughty.

Nan's hands were the last thing I remember of her as she slipped quietly into her repose. Her left hand in my right, the grip weakened until it was no more and her hand, her lovely familiar hand, began to cool in mine, pale and milk-white.

Shockspeare

2008-06-27T06:11:00.000+01:00

I read a biography today of William Shakespeare, although I ought to heed the advice of scholars and spell it Shakspeare, which is regarded to be the true spelling.

To my deep surprise, it pans out that Shakspeare's sonnets were not intended to be published. They were acquired by a publisher and put into print without Will's knowledge. Moreover, many of the sonnets are addressed to a male recipient. That's correct, even the most well-known:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Utterly extrordinary! About a man no less! But now it's pointed out, how easy it is to see. You learn something new every day.

I am always humbled to learn new things.It delights me that I am so ignorant of everything for it's a reminder that life has much to show me and I shall never, ever exhaust the potential in it. There will always be something waiting to inform, interest and educate. I shall die with multiple lifetimes of knowledge still to acquire. Ignorance is indeed bliss!

The Needle and the Woman

2008-06-27T04:44:00.000+01:00

Hardwick Hall "More glass than wall" is an impressive - or rather two impressive - stately homes in Derbyshire. The newer of the two was built by a great heroine of mine, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury as she was then, or Bess of Hardwick as she is more affectionately termed.

Bess herself was a woman in possession of uncommon power in Elizabethan England. From reasonably modest roots, she used marriage as a way to gain power, influence and means. She married four times, each husband a leg-up the ladder as it were. Her fourth and last husband, George Talbot was the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury. When Bess married him she was already a landowner of some reckoning, owning large tracts of Derbyshire. Union with Shrewsbury and his wealth and adjoining lands in the midlands made her an incredibly rich and powerful woman, second only to the Virgin Queen herself. Bess's dynasty, her children from her second marriage to William Cavendish, lend their blood to the Dukes of Devonshire and countless other aristocratic lines. Her granddaughter, the infamous Arbella Stuart at one time a potential heir to the throne of England. Bess's architectural legacy includes Chatsworth and Hardwick, Derbyshire's finest stately homes.

But I talk not of the greatness of Bess in a time when, despite there being a woman on the throne, emancipation for women was mainly limited to the freedom of the kitchen and the management of the household accounts. When I refer to Hardwick, instead I look to a modest piece of needlework in the Hardwick needlework collection.

The tapestries of Hardwick are impressive indeed- breathtakingly so- but it was a comparitively diminuative set of samplers that caught my eye, worked into wooden panels. They showed botanical specimens, and dated from the sixteenth century. They were stitched onto canvas and the colour of the threads was still remarkably true. They'd been looked after, these pieces.

I can embroider and cross-stitch, indeed I have a number of examples of my own needlework dotted around my home. It is a painstaking, and, dare I say it, inebriatingly boring pastime. Working great swathes of aida fabric with forest green is no-ones idea of fun, surely. Reflecting on these astonishingly old pieces, I wondered if I was really at any sort of advantage over the woman that hunched over this piece of canvas with a roughly hewn needle and a skein of thread. These were embroidered by a woman whose education might have been limited only to the genteel arts for ladies.

A sixteenth century woman might have been lucky enough to get an education if she came from a wealthy family. She would have been tutored at home, taught music - to play the virginals or a lute perhaps- She would have be taught to be an effective chatelaine and to manage a household, to have good manners and be well-versed in etiquette, to dance, and to speak some languages including French, Greek, Italian and Latin. She might also be taught some ladylike sports such as falconry, and how to ride. And of course, needlework would be a suitable skill. Her education was designed to make her a worthy and desirable helpmeet for a decent, rich sort of chap, preferably one with a good title and pedigree.

I on the other hand am extremely lucky. In fact, as a woman in the twenty-first century, my freedom probably exceeds that of a man from times of yore. I have been taught throughout my school and further education career - but did not necessarily retain - French, German, Russian, literature, the classics, the sciences, geography, geology, psychology, sociology, history, politics, economics, philosophy, religious studies, mathematics and much more. Less emphasis was placed on cookery and needlework, and little on music. Noone taught me to dance. If courtship relied on my dancing skills, I would die a spinster. Etiquette too, not on the school curriculum. I was educated to the same level as any boy, perhaps more so than many boys as I attended a grammar school where the education is accelerated somewhat.

In my personal life, I am emancipated. I have suffrage, I can walk into a workplace and not be rendered subservient to men, my husband cannot beat me for burning the toast and indeed I can wear trousers. I can choose my own fate. Marriage is incidental to my personal power; for a sixteenth century woman, it would have been the crux of it.

So, you think I'd be feeling somewhat satisfied by the position that time, tide and feminism has afforded me. Surprisingly, I did not. I looked at a small piece of needlework and thought ruefully, that for all our education, few of us will leave anything to posterity at all. In five hundred years, nothing I have done will be looked at by those women. I will have faded, for all my freedom and education. If I leave a mark on history, it will be as my sisters before me. In blood; a bloodline and you don't need a vote or a degree to achieve that.

It will be in simplicity that we achieve the greatest things.

A love affair with melanin

2008-06-05T21:07:00.000+01:00

Back in the day, before the twenties, having a classic English creamy-white sort of complexion was all the rage. The paler, the better - there were nice names for it: 'alabaster', 'peaches and cream', 'English rose', 'porcelaine' and not forgetting 'albino'.

Being anaemic was hip to the nines. The ancient Romans painted their faces with a chalky mixture to lighten it, Mediaeval women tinted their face in pale shades to show off their wealth, and the Elizabethans slapped on arsenic and lead based cosmetics to whiten up- and to hide signs of disease. They even painted on veins in order to look pasty. Such was the fashion.

In the nineteen-twenties, a stylish young miss called Coco Chanel was spotted sporting a tan after a yachting holiday. A trend was born, and now in the twenty-first century, we can view a number of budding Cocos all round. Coco the Clown, that is.

Humankind has landed on the moon, we've built nanobots, we've conquered the skies, life is computerised, we've answered many of the gargantuan puzzles of space and time and we've iradicated most forms of pestilence. Yet no-one seems to be able to perfect fake tan.

Fake tan is a devil to apply. It comes, from the high street vendor, in a spray, lotion or towellette form. You apply fastidiously to all areas including your face. After a few hours, the colour starts to develop, and overnight you should turn brown. 'Brown' is a loose term that means orange and streaky. Every tanning product I've ever bought, at any price, in any shade, always comes out as Oompah Loompah with unnervingly ever-present striations in the colour. Like DNA is always formed in a helix formation, molecules have a set and universally consistent structure, and Bounties always come in twos, Fake Bake follows some kind of simple physics rule so as to make stripes.

In the west, we've developed the Cult of Melanin; everyone has to be tantastic. But society now faces a quandary - there is conflicting evidence that flies in the face of the overwhelming adulation for brown skin, and it comes from the scientists. Over-exposure to the sun, and to tanning beds, causes an increased risk of malignant melanoma, premature skin again, cataracts, uneven skin pigmentation and a whole host of other nasty things. The Melaninnies have been forced to seek solace, if you'll excuse the pun, in the synthetic alternatives.

I'm not a stranger to a tanning booth myself, having had both the 'fake bake' and the tanorexic's dream, the walk-in booth where you go in Unigate white, and magically come out lobster red. The latter is an odd experience. In the spring of last year, I decided, for the first time in my twenty-eight years, that the summer of 2007 was not going to be spent looking akin to one of those deep sea creatures that live in the pitch-black and have lost their eyes and pigmentation due to the lack of sunlight; I was going to go and grill my ass down at the local salon. I read up on the health and safety information on tanning, and after twenty seconds of soul-searching, decided that looking like an old boot for one summer was worth it. I proceeded to walk to the salon, and started with a gentle three minute exposure.

Gradually increasing my exposure to nine minutes, I actually started to go skin colour, something of a mentionable occurence for me. Eventually, I was freckled to the point of Pointillism and I could have hung nicely in a gallery next to the Seurats and Signacs; my behind and boobs were singed and my skin had taken on a hue that looked remarkably dirty even when I was fully clean. Walking out at night, only my teeth and eye whites could be seen. People spoke in Spanish to me. I gave up on foundation, bypassing the cosmetics stand for the shoe polish. It was all good.

This year, I have decided that I shall stay a natural shade of cream, and avoid looking like I've taken a tannin bath, and forego the pleasure of being vermillion and streaky. I shall stay au naturelle, despite the fact that I all I need is a silver hat to look like a pint of semi-skimmed.

Two new words

2008-06-02T21:15:00.000+01:00

Every day I consult a dictionary for one thing or another. I even bookmarked the dictionary on my mobile phone - if there's a juicy new word to be had, I type it in then and there and then play around with the new brain-nugget for a while, slotting it into hypothetical sentences.

Today, I learned two new words: embonpoint, curtesy of Charlie's photograph comment. It means excessive plumpness or stoutness and you have to say it in the French way. That means with an overriding English inflection with a charicaturish Clousseau accent if you are me. I learn such good things from Charlie - ouds and Wodehouse, archaic sayings, old films and strange places within strange places, and of course embonpoint. The latter will be invaluable if I need to call someone a short, fat git without them realising it. It will slide off the tongue, in the French manner, with the promise of the elegance of Versailles, coupled with a hint of the chic culture of our continental neighbours; the lovers, the foodies and artisans across the water. Liberté, egalité and lardité, you hefty sod .... with Parisian panache. My wicked humours bubble at getting to use that one.

Secondly subsume. That naturally led to a mental enquiry about subsumption being the correct noun for it. And that led to a quick foray into the new word's territory.

Subsumption, a minor premise in symbolic logic
The Liskov substitution principle in object-oriented programming
Subsumption architecture in robotics
a subsumption relation in category theory, semantic networks and linguistics, also known as a hyponym-hypernym relationship (Is-a); a given set A is said to subsume set B if B is a subset of A; in other words, all individuals from B are also in A, not excluding the possibility that other individuals are also in A. In other words, B is a subset of A. This can also be written as "A ⊇ B", pronounced "A subsumes B". The inverse relationship also holds true: "B ⊆ A", or "B is subsumed by A". For example, A can be all animals and B can be all cats.

And that held no interest at all. Hyponym-hypernym relationships indeed. If you can't insult someone on the sly with it, what in gad's name do you want to know it for?

Book

2008-06-02T20:48:00.000+01:00

Oh, hell, the noise on the train was assaulting my lugholes; the din laying siege to my poor head, muzzy with the most soporific journey of changes and rubbish stations every ten minutes where noone gets on or off. The point? , I tutted directionlessly. Noone was to blame for this, it's just the way things are. Stations in ghost towns. I was at the ragged stage of staring children out; their gormlessness ires me.

It lay in my bag, reassuringly weighty. Its large red cover was an enticing echo of the blue one, the author's previous work; a subtle promise of more of the same excellent content. I opened it, only a chapter or two in, and its crispness was still satisfying as a new book should be. I jumped into the chapter recklessly and gawping children, the rikketty-rikketty-rik of the carriage and disgust at old coffee cups and curled newspapers and backwater station rage all melted. I was on the trail of Debussy, in Paris.

An hour passed in one fluid moment.

Lonely Train

2008-06-02T19:19:00.000+01:00

It never ceases to amaze me, when you're travelling in and around London, packed like sardines, how impersonal it all is.

It was a weekend, although to all intents and purposes you couldn't tell because the Tube was heaving with suits and briefcases, books, bags, muted children and blank faces. No-one had seem to disembark at this particular station, and I headed on only vaguely optmistically, hastily tucking myself into the door arch as the door closed behind me.

I can't resist a peek at other passengers on the Tube - people so utterly intent on looking neutral and unconcerned at being herded like cattle. I long ago lost my parochial sense of personal space whereby I would retract, disgusted, at the intrusion into my Me Bubble by strangers. Today, I stood in the armpit of a tall man , close as a lover might be, while we studiously avoided eye contact.

In his right hand suit pocket, the corner of a thick cobalt blue edition of a book with a partial illustration of a dragon on it poked out enticingly. I recognised it immediately as the first in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance triology, Eragon. I couldn't resist.

"Are you enjoying Alagaësia?" I enquired casually. The man craned his neck at me at an unnatural angle. Evidently it was quite normal to have a stranger practically squashed upon his person, but not to engage in conversation with them, which perversely was considered an intrusion. "I..." he looked bemused, then took a deep breath overcoming the initial surprise. "It's a very rich narrative... the lore" he ventured.

"I agree," I smiled up at him. "They're publishing the third, Brisingr, soon you know?" to which he raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement and interest, nodded but then apologised - this was his stop, and then off he went, Reader of Eragon, whatever his name was. We shared an underarm and two sentences which was quite remarkable for the Tube.

When on the London Underground, I like to take a seat even if my journey is short. It frees me up from the precarious task of balancing, and allows me to have a good nosy parker up the carriage at the people. The first thing I notice is that noone looks at anyone else. The second thing I notice is that I dress different to these people, people in stylish designer clothes or high fashion. They sit in lines, like well-dressed dolls, staring ahead and moving in unison as they are jostled about by the movement of the train.

Me, I like the underground. I like it that the stations look different. Charing Cross has a mediaeval design on the wall detailing day work tasks of the middle ages, Southwark has fancy looking posh doors that open to let you onto the train, Waterloo is like walking through the thirties. They have a rich variety of busker - guitars, accordions playing the tango, steel drums, percussionists, flotists. There are interesting signs for stage shows, and adverts for new books, and billboards for strange holiday destinations. It is geared up to the culture sponges of the capital; strangely, noone stops to regard them.

Best of all, I like the escalators in tube stations. Metal behemoths that pull you up through the bore-holes and into the light. All the people, milling around in the ant chamber below and for a short time, here is a moving staircase. There is a little time to take a breather from the frenetic rush. Couples often take the opportunity to come in close, to kiss or to embrace on the escalator. It is like a production line of happy twosomes when you look closely. If you are mindful of where you are, it is possible to turn and look, or to meet the eye of people travelling in the opposite direction. An interesting glance received or the meeting of an eye with a stranger is a worthy prize on this strange hunt. In the sea of humanity in the tunnels, where everyone seems to be drowning and hypothermic, it's good to make contact.

Prague

2008-05-05T04:27:00.000+01:00

There are many travel books that can tell a person about Prague far better than I can. A Rough Guide to Prague will give you a thousand and one ideas on where to stay, where to eat, what to see, what to visit, which toilets cost five Czech crowns to use, which clubs to avoid, the local customs and will point out the whole lot on a map. I cannot. A million feet have worn a path through Prague before me, and probably only in the fortnight timeframe before I arrived. It is a tourist trap, a haven for stags, hens, history buffs and culture freaks. I have nothing new to add to it. But I do love travel.

Prague was not my choice, despite my professed love of history. Bohemian is just an adjective to me, and I know little to nothing of the history or culture of the beautiful Czech state, when my usual travels serve to illustrate my prior research into things. I went simply in search of the mythical 70p Big Mac and the good company of my friends. Again, as I find with all of travels, I found a piece of myself.

Travel for me is not about seeing different things, visiting new places or experiencing different cultures. It is the repeated reassuring experience that everything is the same wherever you go. Admittedly, I have only scooted round Europe, but with its plethora of different languages, peoples and histories, often with conflicting interests in the past, it's not a bad place to start.

To travel abroad is to be rendered illiterate and mute. It is a humbling experience indeed. You cling to the familiars- a word that looks recognisable, brand images, and the unsaid. A search of McDonalds off Wenceslaus Square revealed two parties of English people, clinging to familiarity and Chicken McNuggets. Czech is difficult; accents and strange marks punctuate the language. How do you pronounce things? I felt vulnerable.

The differences at first seem overwhelming; the unfamiliar holds sway. In Italy, you are greeted with a 'Is it an ace? Higher!' kind of upward motion of the arm that looks alarmingly fascist. This is a gesture of greeting. In the Netherlands, three kisses to the cheek upon meeting with friends, like you're knighting a person with your lips, is de rigeur. It's a sharp learning curve for frontal lobe of the brain, all these new mores. Going out to find a pint - or half a litre - of mjelk was a trauma.

And so, words and syntax, the rigid core on which we base so much interaction, is useless when you travel in a country where the language can flood your ears and yet you understand nothing. You are forced to rely on that most wonderful of things- the inherent sameness of people. No matter where you travel, or the language you speak, people are the same. Their facial expressions, their body language, their mannerisms. A smile spans all languages, which is why on Saturday night at nearly five in the morning, I was still dancing with people who didn't understand me, and whom I could not understand either. But we were laughing, joking, we knew each others names. Through our gestures, we could convey 'drinks' and why we were all in Prague (all on holiday as happens). We liked the eighties music, and through lyrics sung very badly found that for a short time, we were making the same sounds in unison.

Some holidays are based on the natural world, but if you notice, most are based on people. Buildings that people made, their art, their culture, their foods and drinks, their experiences and in some cases, their histories, battles, deaths and resting places. You travel the world on a personal odyssey through the people that live on it and so, no matter how far you travel, you haven't gone that far. We are universally the same.

Dusty

2008-04-13T01:30:00.000+01:00

The horse-racing was on the TV at Grandad's request. Nan would pull the telly out slightly for special programmes or films- usually forties matinees which we enjoyed as a family on a Sunday - and then she'd fetch the tea for us all, and install herself in the armchair nearest the kitchen.

Grandad was an extremely flexible and magnanimous Man of the House and Nan and I always had the say for the TV schedule with the sole exception of the cricket, Songs of Praise or the horse-racing. On this, he was resolute: we watched the racing.

The Sunday horse-racing was a family telly event and today was the National. I was documented it in a childish scrawl in a school newsbook. 'The Grand Nashinol is on the telly' it said succinctly. More often than not, at my request for the racing, the white rocking chair would be brought downstairs by Nan - Grandad was too thin to lift things- and would be placed in front of the television. The rocking chair was my 'horse' and I would 'race' with the on-screen equines. After the racing, Nan and I would put the rocking chair away together, hoisting it back up the stairs.

Christmas 1985, when I was seven, had followed a hectic summer of rocking chair racing for me, and it was on Christmas morning that I came sleepily down the stairs, Nan and Grandad up before me. I never heard them rouse ever, and they would always be installed in their respective armchairs when I got up. Christmas morning was no exception.

I entered the lounge to a look of barely-concealed excitement on the faces of both grandparents, but the excitement hadn't stopped the flow of tea, which was being sipped leisurely, irrespective of the occasion. In the middle of the lounge was a huge present. "For me, Nanny?" I asked. She dipped her head slowly, and I, uncharacteristically, peeled the paper off hesitantly.

My, it was fine. Under the wrapping was the single most beautiful toy I had ever seen: a rocking horse. "For the horse-racing" said Grandad, replacing his cup on his saucer slowly, his eyes shining.

My eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. It was a brown velvet thoroughbred horse, and he had red leather livery and silver stirrups. He stood tall, his back chest height to me, and had brown glass eyes, a wooden muzzle and a long silky black mane and tail. He was mounted on wooden rockers, and I was amazed.

I kid you not, when I say I rocked everywhere. 'Dusty' as I called the horse, had rockers which slipped easily across the carpet so if I wanted to visit Nan in the kitchen, I would rock across the carpet, through the hall past the playroom, and into the kitchen to see her. I raced to the horses every Sunday. I raced to cowboy and Indian films, the Lone Ranger, and Black Beauty. I made carriages out of boxes and string for my toys, and my friends came round for horse shows (with one horse).

Dusty still lives and works well. In the top rooms of Little Nan's large Victorian home overlooking the channel, he looks remarkably grand. He is battered now, his livery worn and his stirrups tarnished, but all the children love him. I still love him, and when I visit Nan, will steal a quick moment to slip up the stairs and have a rock on my old wooden steed, remembering a Christmas morning, just Nan, Grandad and I and the tangible happiness of our family.

Fashion

2008-04-09T22:31:00.001+01:00

Oh dear lord, how I adore fashion! It's spectactularly wonderful, marvellous and excellent. But not to wear; no, as a smug outsider of the fashion circle, it affords me great entertainment indeed. I rather suspect it affords people in the photo shop even more of the same. Since freak shows were banned, the circus maximus fell into disrepair, and in light of the fact that the circus only comes to town once a year, fashion makes a worthwhile contribution to society.

Now, don't get me wrong, I've walked the plank on the Good Ship Style and Taste many a time myself. I am no untarnished innocent in the fashion stakes. I can't peruse a family photo album without having some sort of bring-up-vomit-into-my-mouth reaction at the heinous atrocities I enjoyed wearing.

Take the eighties for instance, when I sported this marvellous piece of follicular engineering, the mullet. Contrary to popular opinion that I was an abused child, forced to lay, every six to eight weeks, in the path of an oncoming strimmer - operated by Pat Sharpe who was on a mission to clone every child in Britain into a Fun House wannabe, desperate to break their ankles on a foam slide for a Swatch watch- I did in fact ask for this hair cut. It was 1986, and I wanted to be just like my aunty Lee-Anne, a sophisticated teenager with her finger on the eighties pulse. Lee-Anne had all the fashionable teenage things: Duran Duran posters, a record player, orange stillettos and acne. But the pièce de résistance was the most impressive hairstyle since, well, hair began back in 1433.

Lee-Anne had the same mullet as me, but with the magical aid of a Carmen hairdryer and half a can of Elnett, it was transformed into a magnificent rock-solid keratin sculpture that flicked nonchalantly away from the ears into a bird's wing effect of some proportion, in order to balance out the head to shoulderpad ratio. I, on the other hand, being a parochial eight year old did not have the benefit of Elnett; quite fortunate really as had I lacquered up the pudding basin mop-chop, I'd have been asked by banks and petrol stations to remove my crash helmet.

Unfortunately style never turned up with a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers and announced "I'm coming to stay, darling". Throughout my teens, I went the hippie route and wore skirts so bright that meteoroligists detected a solar flare eminating from Kent, every single one worn, regardless of colour or style, with a pair of purple Doctor Martens and gaudy tights. I looked like I'd coated myself in Copydex and then fallen in Bimbo the Clown's bag of clothing to go to the charity shop, and I suspect this was the reason why I didn't get a boyfriend until I was sixteen.

The hippie phase ended abruptly at the said age, when, sauntering down the road in a patchwork skirt, Mary Quant fruit print tights and the aforementioned Doc Marten boots, a tramp with a can of Special Brew shouted out "I like your skirt". Thereafter I wore jeans and the odd boy, like a rash.

Overall, fashion these days is a bit more tasteful. We children of the late seventies had to put up with ripped jeans, Grolsch bottle tops on our shoes, New Kids on the Block t-shirts, shell-suits, Mc Hammer trousers, Global Hypercolour t-shirts which instantly advertised "I have sweaty armpits", lycra (even for men) and those disgusting and utterly pointless tracksuit bottoms which unpoppered up to the thigh.

This winter, and I can scarcely credit it, the fashion was for shorts with thick black tights underneath and fur lined boots. Sensible, the fur, seeing as the rest of the leg was probably not black because it was sporting hosiery, but because frostbite had set in.

Having now settled into a mode of dress that I shall probably stick with until my old age, and which the teenagers of the 2050s will ridicule whilst they wear tin foil and kevlar, I have that distinct advantage of noticing the trends. When you aren't participating in them, they speak at once of their transience. I am right thankful for the inconstancy of fashion. Change is always a good thing, and it is when we rally against it, and campaign on the side of the status quo that trouble occurs.

Figure 1: Without change, trouble occurs as illustrated by this hairstyle
in contravention of the Geneva Convention

Modern Schmodern

2008-03-30T03:19:00.000+01:00

Modern art has a curious effect on my blood pressure, one that can be likened to dangerously high cholesterol, heart disease or smoking eighty a day. Upon entrance to a modern art gallery, I become at increased risk of deep vein thrombosis, stroke and aneurisms. In short, modern art leaves me crazy mad and baffled.

I studied art history for A-level, I have a deep appreciation for anything creative and free, but I just don't get modern art. It's horrifically subjective; it is Jack Kerouac for the eyes, ramming itself down your throat until you want to choke on it.

The people in modern art galleries always fascinate me. Generally there are three sorts of people in them: normal people who have been forced through study, community service or curiosity to attend the gallery, highbrow sorts in cashmere coats and well-to-do accents; they can usually be seen carrying a bright orange or purple carrier bag with 'Tate' emblazoned on the side, and a couple of thirty-five pound books on the importance of the Abstract Expressionist movement in art history, or something equally baffling, and then there's the downright kooky, the oddly clothed and strangely styled. The latter social grouping formed a large part of today's gallery contingency.

I do like to watch people. This can make me appear odd, but as a painter in the years gone by, studies of people was my thing. As a historian, ordinary social history intrigues me; as a photographer, people, spaces and how they use them catches my eye. I like a good yarn, and you can glean a lot from people simply by being still and watching. I like their clothes, their hairstyles, the colours they wear, what they're saying, who they love, and how they look like they're feeling. I like their bags, their friends, listening to what makes them laugh, their group dynamics and their body language. People fascinate me. This is a large part of why I have trouble with modern art; it bends the rules, it moves the goalposts and in most cases, it does away with the external in favour of the ultra-internal. I am not accustomed to the raw bearing of souls without first gently going via the idiosyncracies of the exterior.

A fifty-or-so-year-old woman in black and white striped, knee-high socks, an acid green coat and platform shoes. What makes her tick and why is she alone today? Two bored-looking women dressed in high fashion coming down the escalator. A conspicuously wealthy man in a good shirt and nice brown shoes, when asked by his small son whether they aught to put a contribution into the '£3 donation' bin, met my eye and, with a naughty glint, answered no while holding my gaze. I laughed out loud. These chance things amuse me and I do like a good cheapskate. The people in the gallery, their stories, they are the true art.

It is in the numerous rooms, painted white, of sculpture, of paintings, that the modern art gallery comes into its own. It brings out curious traits in people, such as puzzlement, pompousness, derision, wonder and ire. People talk of Rothko and Picasso, Muñoz and Bourgeois; they rationalise it, they argue over it, they absorb and assimilate it. Getting closer to a painting evidently makes you understand it better. What can be told from these explosions of colour, or ugliness, or mess or blandness, I ask of this place? What does it leave behind for us? What does it tell us of people? No, not person - the artist - which is a selfish viewpoint indeed, but of us?

Like the big crack in the floor, it divides us. It splits us into a half that thinks it worthy, and a half that scorns it. I guess it fulfills its purpose then, for in disliking it so, it has cultivated a reaction in me. It makes me question. And the people in it, they are all like art. I may not get them, they may not get me. We may love or dislike each other, and quantify each others' values in different ways, but like art, there is a place for all of us, and to each of us, someone that appreciates us for what we are.

Watersmeet

2008-03-24T21:00:00.000Z

Watersmeet, Devon
Summer 1996
With Dad, Deb and my sister Fiona

Old Nan Bullen

2008-03-24T20:35:00.000Z

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas! I may no more.
The vain travail hath worried me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means, my worried mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain;
And graven in diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild to hold, though I seem tame."

One of my favourite poems, by Thomas Wyatt, a 16th century poet. I've always liked it- noli me tangere means 'touch me not', or in it's more subtle translation from the ancient greek to the latin, to the english ' cling not to me'. It's believed to have be written for Anne Boleyn, and laments her loss to the king, Henry VIII, 'Caesar' , her jewels marking his claim upon her.

She's a fascinating woman and one of my all time heroines. I don't for a second believe she slept with her brother, the Viscount Rochford, but perhaps she was unfaithful. Who knows? Does it really matter if she was afflicted with the age-old human condition, fallability?

Anne was not a beautiful woman and was even prosaic to look at, but she was gifted with a pair of dark charismatic and compelling eyes and a fine mind, which was documented at the time. Having spent much of her young womanhood in France & the French court, she was more continental in her manners than English; she was witty, bright and she drew people like a lodestone. History would later mock her for a shrew and an adulteress, but in truth she was a true Renaissance queen, courtly, well read, well educated and she had to play a political game. She was a great match for Henry, himself a well-educated theologian. Between them, they devised an impossibly far-reaching way round the fact that the Pope would not grant Henry dispensation to divorce Katherine of Aragon - they engineered the English reformation together, I suspect, their two fine minds at the hub of the changes they needed to make to legitimise the child that she was bearing Henry.

What manner of woman was she? Married to the man that had been her sister's lover (Mary Boleyn had had an affair with the king) and living forever under the strain of producing a male heir to secure power and stability for the procariously perched Yorkist house of Tudor. Her own position was tenuous at best- she'd held off Henry for a number of years, and if she did not produce a male heir, she would be cast aside like Katherine. Moreover, she was a pawn for her savagely ambitious family, the Norfolks.

I feel her to be rather a tragic figure, misunderstood and wasted. Executed at some time in her early to mid-thirties (her birth date is not accurately documented), beheaded amidst the public's hatred of her and her husband's abandonment, she nevertheless left a huge legacy behind. The fact that England is protestant and not Catholic is a testament to the emotion she inspired in a king, and her daughter, as dark-eyed and keen-minded as her mother, brought England into a golden era of religious tolerance, exploration and wealth. Anne was truly a renaissance woman.

Statues

2008-03-07T20:43:00.000Z

It budded, it bloomed and it faded; its colours had turned wan and then the petals fell off. The rose in splendour's scent had been enchanting and its hue remarkable. Now, all that was left was the stem and a ripening seed pod. It was ugly, but functional. In its functionality lie the rose's true enduring gift for, in a few short weeks, it would drop the seeds for new life and in the scattering of them, would ensure a profusion of colour, scent and new roses for the future.

It was August , the summer waning and my heart was broken. I was seventeen and wretched, for I had lost Daniel. Cast much in the mold of Nan, I tend not to show my feelings and I lick my wounds in private. Alone, in the garden, I hid myself past the roses and the poppies, by the pond. I did not want anyone to see my tears and cast scorn upon my fledgling love, lost. I couldn't bear the inevitable trivialisation of the pain coursing through me.

Daniel was that mythic creature, a woman's First Love, that man - or boy- that sets the benchmark by which subsequent lovers are measured, sometimes to be found wanting, and sometimes to supercede and replace in the affections. They are the gatekeepers of the betwixt-world, between being a girl and becoming a woman. They take you across the threshold, and if done with care and gentleness, in the doing of it find a niche in a woman's heart that cannot be touched by later men, however many there might be. There are only two things in the known world that can withstand being placed on a pedestal to such a degree: statues and First Loves. Both frozen are in a moment in time, both immortalising that moment.

He and I had met when I was sixteen. I was woefully underage and in a night club, having decided that as an A-level student I should be expanding my adult horizons, stepping forth into the grown-up breach as it were. Naturally, getting into the local hotspot without getting challenged by the doormen was the defining moment of adulthood, ushering in the new womanly epoch with the smell of stale smoke and a plethora of hands-a-wandering men to seal the deal nicely.

To this end, I'd borrowed Emma's dangley earrings to look older, and was quite oblivious to the fact that my art-student attire screamed "I only have a Saturday job and go to school the rest of the week". I was dressed in a short jersey dress, and purple Doctor Marten boots. My hair hung to my hips and strands had been braided by my sister Joanne before I left the house. A Bohemian in Clubland. A fish out of water.

Bringing back four bottles of Diamond White for myself and Emma (making the most of Happy Hour on a Saturday Girl's wages), I wended my way round the suburban portion of the dancefloor, where all the cool people hang out. Whilst regarding the new and as yet unlearned way of dancing to attract men, as being demonstrated by all the hardcore clubbers in their fashionable frilly satin blouses, I crashed directly into his chest.

"Good grief!" I exclaimed. I was horrified, and promptly proceeded to wipe the cider from his shirt with the hem of my dress, oblivious to the fact that it was rather unladylike to be showing off thighs to all and sundry. We both looked to the floor to see what spillage there had been, and both pairs of eyes settled on both pairs of Doctor Martens, one purple, one black, facing off. Two Bohemians in Clubland. We were together thereafter.

I cannot verbalise the first journey of my heart, save to say he was my first love, my first lover and the first passion of my heart, all of which was played out against the shabby stage that is teenage ardour. The grandeur and matchless splendour of love was offset by whether we had enough money for a Big Mac, and whether we could arrange a tryst around coursework. Knowing no heartbreak, having no emotional leftovers from previous relationships and having no concept of love-endings meant that the heat of these new emotions carried with them no promise of being burnt. I lovely wholly and completely, giving everything without hesitation.

At eighteen to my sixteen, Daniel was a man of the world, a mentor. He was not a classically handsome young man, but with his aquiline nose, goatee beard, full lips and intense eyes, framed by a long mane of golden hair, he was striking to look at. I adored him and frequently painted him. He was my muse.

At some point, time and a little experience combine to offer a new vista, one were the truth pervades the irrationality of romance. My Daniel, he was argumentative and firey. I was of a different sensibility; I liked calm and quietness. Anger causes me to retreat. I will face any truth, however awful, when it is put to me calmly, but confrontation, changeability and inconstancy of mood unsettle me deeply and I retreat. I spent all my time in emotional retreat from his sullenness and ill humour. It distressed me deeply to have my tenderness met with the need to argue, or worse, brooding silence. Unable to face it any longer, I took a letter to him to say goodbye.

I have not always been good with words, but in a letter above all things, I could be sure of getting across what I wanted to say. I wrote him goodbye; in between the lines, an invite to heartbreak to come and stay for a while. I mourned him long, for I hold love the longest and deepest of all emotions and then he became the myth. I did not remember the anger, the resentments, I only remembered the sweet journey that unlocked a woman.

I am almost thirty, and all too soon he will be half a lifetime ago. He paled and waned in influence.He is not a man I would pick now, nor would we have anything in common. He hates books, I live for the written word. He scorned Grammar Girls and I scorned the men that scorn them. His life now is nothing I would choose, and we would have been diabolically unhappy together, being the people were are now. I have had better lovers, known longer love, had my heart broken , and known greater loves die in my breast and yet still he is in there, on a pedestal, cast in stone.

U cant touch dis (Grammar Time)

2008-03-05T00:25:00.000Z

hi babz how r you ? hop u doin good just past through ur profile and u look
really cute and beautiful and dats the first i c dat coz if u cute we cant say u
beauty and vice versa but u one of kind anyway i needed to say dat to you take
care hop am gonna hear from ya byeeeeeeeeee

I belong to a travel website that purportedly is to enable you to meet friends in the locations to which you are travelling, glean local knowledge about your destination and share your own travel experiences. Nowhere in the About Us page does it mention "To illiterate perves as jam is to ants". Quite happily, this nest of numpties is an excellent place to view the 21st century phenomenon that is 'Text Speak".

Now, whilst I do not profess to have perfect spelling or grammar, I nonetheless think it's pretty important. I am vastly against letting the language borne of Bede and of Chaucer, of Shakespeare and Marlowe, lovingly handled by Keats and Wordsworth, stolen from the Romans, the French, the Scandinavians and painstakingly moulded by the venerable passage of history into this beautiful vernacular, be utterly ruined by the likes of Nokia and Motorola. 'Txt' may well be perpetuated by cheapskate illiterates so that they can keep their SMS messages under 120 characters so that they don't use up the 1000 free text messages they get with their phone contracts all in one day because they can't be bothered to visit people in person or write a real letter, but why does it have to permeate the mediums of correspondence where there is no cost restriction? Breathe, Kez, breathe!

Oh, how I loathe, abhor and despise this technological bastardisation of the beautiful mother-tongue. In just ten short years, we've gone from a nation of (albeit poor but proper) punctuation and spelling, to a literary debacle whereby A-level examination boards are considering allowing this... muck... in exams 'as long as the content is understandable'. Fie technology. It further fuels my hatred of the phone.

I was watching a programme celebrating Stephen Fry's 50th birthday. The man is amazing. I am quite in awe of his knowledge, anecdotes, and vocabulary and life experiences. He is perhaps one of the finest minds in British popular culture. I'm ashamed to say I have read but little of his work, having only read a small but extremely enjoyable essay on why he was celibate, from a book belonging to a friend. On the programme, they featured Russell Brand. I had thought the man rather vacuous but I was happily proved wrong as the observations he made were very astute, particularly on the subject of Stephen Fry's verbosity. Why do we compliment people for 'calling a spade, a spade' he paraphrased, 'If all a man can do is call a spade a spade, that's all he's fit to wield'. How true, I exclaimed to myself.

I am often verbose, particularly when writing. I read things back and castigate myself for not being succinct, yet when I try to rewrite it, paring the paragraph down makes it less vibrant. Effusive language, whilst making the reader work harder, is that much more enjoyable to read and indeed to write. To have a good vocabulary is to be able to weave intricate patterns when expressing yourself; embroidery to your tapestry of conveyance.

I often profess my love for words. What a beautiful thing language is, as Fry pointed out, a mish-mash of our history, both grand and yet mongrelised by eons of influences. To be able to express yourself in untold varieties and combinations by expanding your repertoire of words is a great joy to me. I will never have that extensive a vocabulary, and I rely on the dictionary like a crutch, but it interests me to learn new words often and how to put them in context. I like archaic words, and phrases gone out of fashion. 'Alas; alack!'. Keep these shades of language past, for they will soon be gone.

As we take on Americanised language, globe-spanning media forming a new melting pot of language influences, we will begin to lose the language we speak now. In two hundred years, this will be antiquated. As we wade through Dickens 'shewing' us his times, work at Austen, struggle to decipher Shakespeare, despair at Chaucer without footnotes and completely fail to understand Beowulf in the native tongue in which is was written, so too will these words fade from consciousness. Who is to say that I shd nt b ritn lk ths bcoz txt is gr8?

Change is inevitable, but words should be allowed to make a stately exit. Stave off the text speak a little longer, for pity's sake?

Narnia

2008-03-04T17:34:00.000Z

There was a hole in the back fence of the garden, a hole that took us from the council estate, financial hardship and impending divorce of our parents to a place of wonder and imagination and escape.

The garden was woefully overgrown at the height of the summer. Tall wild grasses were yellowing, and if you were lucky, you would catch a slow-worm or a lizard sunning itself on the rocks. Mum had left it as a wildlife area and it was full of butterflies and bees, grasshoppers trilling in the evenings, monkey-peas and ants. If you walked up through the yard, past the shed, up a steep mown incline and across the wildlife patch, you reached the boundaries of the garden demarcated by a black metal fence with a rung missing. At fifteen, I was willowy and slender enough to fit through it. Sam and Leah, my sisters then aged nine and seven, followed me up through the hole and Lily, our golden retriever tagged along patiently.

The garden backed onto a hill, all woodland and open space. From the fence, it was a steep climb up through the exposed, serpentine roots of a tree and onto a grass track. Lily would guide us through the undergrowth where we saw adders and wood-pigeons, the rustle of golden summer grasses as the breeze flitted through them, pools and flecks of the amber afternoon light playing on the ripened seed-heads. The hole in the fence was a portal to us, to a place to go to escape shouting, accusations or awkward silences. It was other-worldly up there; we could have been walking through any place, or any time. It was our own private Narnia.

The girls ran on ahead, catching crickets or gambolling in the grass with Lily. They would pick wild goodberries, or make grass kazoos, shinning along the tree felled in the hurricane and encouraging the dog to follow. We would amble upwards, up the hillside, often with no need to talk. At the top, the path ran along the hillside. There would be a break in the gorse and heather flanking our route, and we would lounge and rest awhile on an escarpment overlooking the valley, one of us cuddled into Lily (Lillo-pillow we called her).

Dover sits in the Dour Valley, the Dour once being a mighty estuary to the channel and the architect of the landscape. The Romans housed their fleet at one point in its mouth, but over the centuries the Dour shrank somewhat and Dover flourished in the dried vacuum, the great valley carved through the chalk by the river. Dover had also expanded to absorb some of its outlying villages, and from our lofty vantage point, we overlooked Kearsney, Temple Ewell, and River and you could see all the way to Hougham. Below us the great paper mill of Arjo Wiggins, Buckland Mill, where Nan told me that a tram had crashed and killed many passengers, and also the grounds of Dover Athletic at Crabble where on Saturdays you could see the tiny players in black and white fighting it out with a visiting team. You could look down the valley and see the urban heart of the town, and to the left, the great fortress of Dover Castle presiding over its ward, between that and the other hillside, upon which rested the Drop Redoubt, the great blue in-between of the channel and the ships upon her.

As Sam, Leah and I vexed about the worries at home, the great restorative powers of the Escarpment Escape were already at work. We would point out people at the recreation ground below, I’d tell them of the big pike that lived in that lake under Crabble Cornmill that no-one could catch, and of the kingfisher that was brazen enough to sit on reeds by the window when you were in the tea-rooms for a cuppa and a scone. We would talk of how invaders would attack the town by sea or air, or what it must have looked like before the Battle of Hastings and the Norman invaders changed our skyline and our architectural style. We pointed out churches, the homes of our family members and the Borstal up by the Drop Redoubt which had a road sign that said ‘Young Offenders Institute’ and under that ‘Long Term Parking’. We would sit and regard life in miniature like gods and it did much to calm us.

Then it was time to wend our way down to the house again, crossing the iron threshold back into the real world.

Up the hills, Autumn 1994 with Lily

In grief

2008-03-02T17:20:00.000Z

There was nothing else for it, I was going to have to nip in there and use the toilet. We were awaiting the funeral cortege, and it was going from the King Edward at the top of Wyndham road. I was handed the key to the flat, which poignantly still had her keyring on it. I walked in and kept my head down.

Oh, the ache and the loss! It assailed me from all sides. I could do nothing but to look up and see the emptiness; the echoes of bare floors and empty rooms rang through me and the smell of home was fading. I wandered through the hollowness of a house stripped, quite unable to make sense of it. There was a distinct picture in my mind of how it aught to look, and she would be there, in the corner, in the armchair by the unit and the spare change pot; she would smile at me and take my hand so tightly that her wedding ring would dig into my fingers, but she was not there. The chair was gone, the unit too. She was gone.

I was dressed in white linen with a black black lily print on it, for it was the height of summer and Nan had always joked with me about the preponderance of black clothing I owned. "At a bloody funeral again, are we my love?" she would slyly remark when I walked in, in what I took to be an elegant outfit in monochrome. She had a very dry wit and she would wait to gauge my aback reaction before hissing and coughing in mirth. So, I had worn white this day to make a point to myself. I walked to the window, devoid of her trinkets, and surveyed the family in grief on the payment outside the pub. Everyone's eyes were on the avenue, from whence the cortege would come.

I cast a look about the place. Her little kitchen, so spick and span and of which she was so proud was quite big with nothing in it. The bread bin was gone. She'd had it longer than I'd been alive. Walking through on the shockingly bare boards, the carpet gone and the new accoustics tearing rough-shod through my recollections of the place, I went to her bedroom,. It was painted in a cheerful pink; I'd decorated for her a couple of years before. I'd done the kitchen in yellow at the same time, having surprised her with a home makeover and some new homemade rose-patterned curtains. Nan had only ever decorated in magnolia; the wildest she'd ever got was Apple White in the Duluxe range. "I'm not sure I'll like pinks and yellows" she'd confessed to me, when I was halfway round the room with the rollerbrush. "Oh, hush up, Nan! " was my retort "You like Battenburg, don't you?" before we both melted into the giggles.

I shouldn't have come in. It had been so easy to believe that she was still here, a cup of tea and a mismatched saucer because that was the one she liked, her sat in the corner. She'd be watching Colombo, or looking forward to the afternoon matinee. It would have been so much easier than this. I used the bathroom and quit the place promptly.

And then there she was, turning round from the avenue. A man with a top hat and tails got out and solemnly walked in front of the car for the length of Wyndham Road. Nan had been born to George and Elizabeth in that road, halfway down, she'd played in the street with her brothers and sisters, she'd been married thrice, widowed once, divorced once, survived an abusive marriage, raised her children there, lost her mother to Alzheimer's there, and was coming back there to make her final journey. All the old residents came out to the doorsteps to pay their respects, many of the Wyndham road houses were empty that day, they belonged to family who like her, had not fallen far from the tree.

And then we walked her, the whole couple of hundred yards that her entire life played out on, her coffin bedecked with yellow roses, flanked by her heartbroken family, to lay her to rest.

Boobs

2008-03-01T20:48:00.000Z

Boobs- most women have them, and they're never right whatever you ended up with. They're too big, too small, too droopy, odd or just plain not there.

In fact, most women bemoan their bosums something rotten. We are a nation obsessed by them; we even have national newspapers that devote an entire page of their publication to coverage of them (or rather the lack of coverage of them). Fancy that. Civil wars, genocide, global warming and natural disasters, and yet a whole page devoted to maracas. The mind boggles.

Humans are the only species I can think of who have inflated boobs the whole time. In other mammalian species, the mammary gland is purely functional. Not so with us, we walk around with them several times the size they should (evolutionarily speaking) be. And why? Because we walk upright; your beestings/beehives are in effect your body mimicking your behind. It's a nice tender lump o' rump right in the eyeline of the male population, and therefore signalling you are a potentially available mate. That's right: your bosums are made to look like your bum. You are walking around with the homo sapiens sapiens adaptation of a big blue monkey bum stuck to your chest. And it's a curious phenomenon that we try to make the bottom bottom look smaller, and yet plump up the mimicked one. We even feel sad and worthless if our top bottom is too small.

That being said, it is possible to see why many women are concerned with the size and quality of their bosums. It is after all, what we're putting out there into the ether as part of the attractiveness package. Personality is one thing, but you have to rope the fellas in somehow and it's done with make-up, nice clothes, an attention to presentation or just plain tartiness if you're unsuccessful with the first three . An expansive chest is quite a broadly successful way to pull a mate on a primeval level, and so size is rather an issue for ladies.

I was very lucky in that I didn't fall to the bottom of the rack stack. Both sides of my family have women that are somewhat Amazonian in stature (they cut theirs off and then hunt the men with bows and arrows) and so I was lucky to gain a fairly generous mammary inheritance. Of course, there's always things wrong with having larger boobs; you can't do sport in case you get knocked out, and it's difficult to buy buttoned clothing unless you find a nice twelve-man tent in Millets and live in the awning whilst the expansive maracas take up the living area, three bedrooms and still strains at the tent pegs, but overall I should imagine that being over-endowed is a lot easier to cope with than being flat as a pancake.

A quick perusal of the lingerie section of any good department store will bring to light a plethora of strange articles designed to plump up your monkey-bum. Firstly, the brassieres themselves are wide and varied. There's full cup, half cup and balconette: strapless, strapped, multiway and halterneck; padded, unpadded, underwired, soft cup, sports, t-shirt, seam-free, nursing and for special occasions, adhesive. The back sizes range from 28 inches right up to over 44 inches in most stores, and cups AA to G. There are bigger size ranges online. Approximately seven out of ten women wear the wrong bra size; I venture it's because they've probably passed out at the Herculanian task ahead of them just to select the right apparatus to keep their jubblies under control.

So, what are the options for those members of my sisterhood who suffer with Pirate's Disease (sunken chest)? The available aides to frontage are quite varied, and frankly bizarre.

Back in the early nineties, a miraculous invention came on the market; the Gossard Wonderbra. This foray into bust enhancement saved millions of women from stuffing their bras with toilet tissue, and no doubt boosted the profits of Handy Andies exponentially when the girls realised they could no longer blow their noses into their cleavage. That was back when I only had 'two aspirin on an ironing board' myself, and the results were excellent. The chronic lumbago and cheese-cutting effect of the straps into the shoulders was worth it for the upfront-and-squashed-together look. "Hello boys" was the advertising tagline, "Hello boys, the rest of me will be arriving shortly" was the effect.

These days, everything is a lot more sophisticated. You can, and I jest you not, buy inflatable brassieres. Do they come with a puncture repair kit? I want to know, as I can't imagine anything worse than a poor girl's breast hissing and dropping three cup sizes at in an opportune intimate moment with a new beau. They also do water bras, where you can plump up what nature gave you with a concealed water pillow. Again this strikes me as dangerous; a puncture in the throes of amour is going to look like the beach scene in From Here to Eternity and it'll be stemming from your armpit. Your man is likely to run like a struck whippet and you'll get a Dear Jane note with a can of Lady Mitchum in the post a couple of days later.

Then there's those extremely disconcerting silicone pads that you pop into your bra; the ones that look like a couple of uncooked chicken fillets. How on earth women choose to use those things is beyond me; they come with all the attractive promise of a nice rack... saturated with e-coli and listeria. Urgh.

And then we move on to the serious forms of boob enhancement: breast implants.

I have a friend with boob implants, and I have had a good squish of them (as did everyone else. Boob implants make your maracas public property for some weeks). On this occasion, they look very natural. She's not gone overboard, and they've plumped her up and evened her out. Fair play to the girl. But then we have the Lolos of the world who insisted on these big globular things stuck to their shoulders. What a storm in an E cup- these poor creatures with their puppies going for their throats look utterly plastic. Has noone told them?

If you were going to make completely natural-looking implants,you'd model them on tennisballs in socks, but I guess the idea of implants is to improve on nature. This means, when you lay down you don't get the big flat fried egg look going on, but they stay there in annoying pert little mounds. You can go out braless even if your boobs are so large they have their own centre of gravity and you can wear skimpy, flimsy dresses. The rest of us have to look indignant and call in a scaffolding contractor.

I should think that in fifty years, or a hundred years, our female counterparts will be laughing at our bizarre efforts to jig up the jugs. Had we but their hindsight and their options.

Golden Years

2008-03-01T19:41:00.000Z

Yesterday, quite by chance, I discovered the Facebook page of my old classmate, S. At seven, he was the love of my life and I used to kick him on the shins a lot as a token of my unending affection for him. It got me to thinking about my small primary school; education at the tailend of an era where it was self-determined, and before the government really got their mitts on the education system and sanitised it with political correctness, irreligious syllabusses and league tables.

When I was small, I attended Astor County Primary School in Tower Hamlets in Dover. Over the last few years, it has been, tragically, knocked down in favour of hideous powder blue apartments with porthole windows; no doubt the fantastically clever brainfart of some architect who took a nautical theme on quite literally.

When it still stood, the building was, I imagine, early twentieth century in design. Centrally, there was an assembly hall which was large to us small children, and two winds stretched out on either side. The lower wing for the infant class, and the upper wing for the juniors. The school office was also housed in the upper wing, as was the Headmaster's office, belonging to Mr Winter.

Mr Winter terrified the children; not so much that he was ruthless or cruel, simply that he was a stringent authoritarian. He ran things with great precision and an inescapable discipline; he was to be obeyed.

Every day, without fail, Mr Winter wore a grey pinstripe suit with a grey waistcoat. He had half-moon glasses on a chain about his neck which he put on to read, or to regard you more closely if you had misbehaved, and he had a large aquiline nose, earning him the nickname 'Concorde'. Once a week, the children of all classes had a lesson with Mr Winter. It composed largely of religious education and after a couple of years under his instruction, you realised he rotated the lessons . He would instruct you what to draw on the plain half of your exercise book, and then dictate somewriting for you to copy neatly into the lower, ruled half of your book. Annually, like clockwork we wrote about St Swithun's day and its forty days of rain legend, 'at the going down of the sun and in the morning'.., 'An advent Christingle represents Jesus as the light of the world' and other recycled lesson plans. There was an urban legend abounding that Lee Speakman's dad had come in one day to punch Mr Winter on the nose. We all agreed we'd like to have seen that; it was a snout of some proportion.

Despite the iron rule of Mr Winter, Astor was a very happy little school with a number of quaint traditions.

Every week, we had a PE session set aside for 'Country Dancing', and learnt steps to such routines as the Circassian Circle and the Yellow Rose of Texas, remembering routines by mouthing the steps "Heel and toe, heel and toe, 1-2-3-4, swing your partner, dosie-do". Mr Sheasby, teacher of class 8, the big class, would come along to the hall to call for this excercise. I later found out he did it as a hobby, turning up a ceilidh when was I a teenager only to find my maths nemesis sat on a bale of hay with a microphone and self-same zip-up cardigan I'd last seen him in a decade before. I greatly enjoy barn-dancing and ceilidhs (a product of brainwashing in childhood), although am terrifically inept at anything co-ordinated or musical, and this in instance, co-ordinated and musical.

The Summer Festival was a highlight of the calendar, and we spent many weeks in training for the maypole. The younger children were taught the Barber's Pole, a row of girls and a row of boys wrapping up the maypole into a striped configuration, while the older juniors were taught the Spider's Web, an intricate crocheting of the ribbons which you then danced back on yourself and unwound to finish. Parents and elderly folk from the neighbourhood would flock to the school to watch the festival, the plastic chairs invariably sinking in the tarmac as the day warmed. There were morris dancers, a green man, a chimney sweep for luck and a Dobbin which would trot up and down the rows of onlookers, clakking its jaw and making them jump, laugh or both. Then we'd have the arched paper flower garlands and make a corridor with them, making way for the May Queen, who'd be selected from the oldest class and sit on a throne of paper flowers. The afternoon would go on with a programme of accordian playing, morris dancing and Scottish Dancing from the children, showcasing our skills, and finish with weak squash from the tea urn.

Undoubtedly the highlight of the term for the children was a Film Day. Out would come the projector, and for a whole day, we would watch educational films. 'Charlie says never go with strangers', the Green Cross Code, never play with your kite near a pylon, look after your feet and the Blockaboots dramatisation, Jiminy Cricket shows you how the eye works... all sorts of wonderfully diverting films.

I for one am greatly glad of a traditional English schooling; of May Days and country dancing, of fetes and customs. I sometimes wonder whether today's children will be missing out on these halcyon experiences. I can't remember a test, apart from a Friday spelling or times tables one. Life was summer for me as a child. If I were to have children in the future, I would see to it that the wonderfully and quirky traditions of old were experienced by them. I really love England and her idiosyncracies; fetes and homemade cakes, old people and crochet dolly toilet roll holders, cricket matches and markets, maypoles and morris dancers. I relish it all.

Little me, from Dad's cine archive (1982 & 1985)

Check it Out

2008-02-29T13:58:00.001Z

I have a gammon in the oven. It's inspired by Elizabethan cookery (only with a gas cooker and no kitchen boy to clip round the ear). It's been poked with cloves and when it's half an hour off finishing, I will marinade it with a coating of lemon honey to sweeten it.

In days of yore, the strong aromatic properties of the cloves would have staved off the slightly rancid taste of meat going off, and they would have come from the Spice Isles of south east Asia, notably Indonesia. They would have taken a perilous journey across the waters and the continent by means of trading routes. Not so today; they came from the Spice Aisles of Asda via trading route, checkout 14. Perilous only because I have trouble steering trollies.

Overall, I hate supermarkets. They are the antithesis of man's hunter-gatherer nature in that it suppresses the true nature of human beings and their ability to hunt. This in turn largely contributes to those twin menaces of high levels of criminality, and the inability to watch a decent Sunday matinee on the TV on account of the sport being on. Man will out his instincts in other ways, you see. Now, if we were talking about live gammons as yet unsmoked, squealing up the aisles with you hot on their trotters, that would be more like it. Likewise, you would be gathering honey from the comb and between being pig-gored and bee-stung, you'd be instinctually satisfied.

I like very much to people-watch. Supermarkets are the best place. Asda Farnborough is always rich pickings.

Today I saw what was patently a mother and daughter. They looked disturbingly like each other. The daughter in her forties, the mother in her sixties. The daughter was practically orange (Boot's Soltan in Extra Brown Oompah Loompah, I think) and was regarding a very small denim skirt. The type of skirt that would allow your arse to hang out and have the butcher running off the meat counter, chasing you, thinking you were a runaway joint of mutton; the kind of skirt that would incite people to throw mint sauce on you if you were over 21 and wearing it. Everything about it screamed 'mid life crisis'. I wanted to bellow 'Noooooooooo!' and dive through the air in slow motion, grabbing the vile skirt and removing all possibility of muttonisation, but no. The stoic manners instilled in me by my Nan would not allow for it.

Thereafter to the fruit section. For some reason, if you buy anything other than oranges in Farnborough, people find you to be a mutant. You are alien. You might as well be drooling mucus and preparing your insectile young to gestate in their abdominal cavities to all intents and purposes. As I reached for passionfruit and physalis, I noted two women regarding me with distinct alarm. I perused the fruit quickly for worms. None. No evidence of Brothers Grimm tampering by old witches with a phial of poison and an evil cackle either. I selected a punnet of plums and one of raspberries; they looked more comfortable with the orchard & rubus fruit. Clementines and Granny Smiths, they started talking again, visibly relaxed. We knows apples, said their body language. Steer clear of the lychees, I noted to myself for future reference, else they'll be a-chasing you with the pitchforks.

Round to the melons. Psychologists say that women pick the melons that matches their breast size. I purposely avoided water melons and instead began studiously squeezing galia melons, and cast a glance to the banana area. The same must be the same for men, I think, duly noting a confident, tall man serruptitiously selecting from the 'fun size' banana range. I cast a lot of sympathy in his direction. Evidently the Man from Del Monte was a bit on the stingy side when he say yes. Size doesn't matter, except when you're getting fruit priced by the kilo.

The pet food aisle is an unending source of wonder to me. 'succulent, tasty chunks in delicious gravy' claims the tins of cat food. Who tastes it and thinks it so wonderful as to warrant this praise? It gravely concerns me that there are people out there who think that cat food is delicious. And secondly, cat food doesn't really reflect the true tastes of a cat. 'Beef and game in jelly' is all very well, but I've never once witnessed my moggy bringing in a cow through the catflap to pickle it in aspic. If my cat is an adequate test subject, I'd have thought that mouldy pigeon, earthworms, rock solid dead mice, grass and my housplants are more agreeable to the subtle pallette of the gastronome feline.

And so to the checkout, for meaningless conversation to pad out the monetary exchange and then away home.

Go Wild

2008-02-29T13:15:00.000Z

Thank you, Desmond Morris. I have not enjoyed life quite so much since I learned to look at it from a zoological point of view. The utter inanity of existence is put into perspective by the illustrious DM, and therefore made meaningful as a whole. I half suspect that Morris might be one of the happiest individuals alive, a person whose entire life is imbued with purpose and insight.

We live in a pretty intricate society, and are conditioned by it regardless of how free-thinking we might perceive ourselves to be. The UK’s greatest visionaries, conceptualists and philosophers still drive on the left without question, and get palpitations about taking a packet of biscuits beyond a supermarket glass door without paying for it, because they are conditioned to do so. Inasmuch as we like to think of ourselves as independent-minded, intelligent and individual, we are not. We are housed in a glass prison, its walls constructed of expectation and tradition; the promise of reprisal and alienation keeping us within its walls. Anywhere where there are other humans that uphold these mores, there will be no freedom. True freedom would consist of a group of established pairs and families, choosing to live outside the constraints of society, in an isolated area and glean their sustenance from the land. Humans are an altruistic species; this would stop the group from becoming amoral. The Swiss Family Robinson idea is utterly appealing to me.

For those of us that are left instinctually atrophying within the glass walls, we glean great joy and meaning from making our lives as elaborate as possible. Enormous weight is lent to activities such as employment, the law, entertainment, manners, socialising and the like. There are an accepted set of mores associated with everything we do, for example you don’t snog your friend’s wife when you meet her, you don’t turn up at a police station on the occasional Tuesday because you feel like being a police officer that day, you don’t wear a floral night-gown with your pants on the outside to the supermarket because it looks nice, and you don’t spit your soup out at a dinner party because it’s a bit too hot. There are so many nuances of acceptable behaviour to remember so that you are not outcast by your social group, that you’ve evolved a nice, fat brain to cope with it all.

Stripping everything back to the barebones, we’ve dressed it up a bit but we are still essentially ape-men out and about doing our monkey thing. A job replaces the flint axe for bringing the food home; a house replaces the cave. Like bower birds we bring shiny things home to decorate it. Like peacocks we dress ourselves up to make ourselves attractive. Popstars voice our mating calls for us; imagine the population decrease if you had to cop off on the dance floor just before the lights come back on with someone singing something to you akin to a chorus of strangled cats, with their tails trapped in doors, in baths of scalding water. As a species, we’d peter out.

I guess that any attempt to claw back our true nature from modern society would have to be an all or nothing affair. I can’t envisage a half-hearted attempt working out.

Imagine hunting a pig up a supermarket aisle. Making eye contact and hand gestures to the alpha male of my family group, who is wearing a swimming costume and woolly scarf because he thinks it looks good, we herd the pig into aisle three, pasta and condiments where he utilises his superior spatial awareness to spear it. We string it up on a Minky Wondermop, and then head to the checkouts. Might I order some five-spice as Chinese pork and rice would be very tasty for dinner?, I ask at customer services. No problem Madam, replies the assistant. I’ll put that onto the system for you. It’ll be in early next year due to the seasonality of it, and due to the fact that it’s coming by donkey from the far east. In the meantime, why not try this lovely English turnip…. with nettles.

No, no, no, that really wouldn’t do. With something like most of the UK population crammed into less than 10% of its land mass, there is the room to spread out a bit. Space to go wild.

D-I-S-C-O

2008-02-25T23:22:00.000Z

Ah, you can't beat a divey disco for a bit of people-watching. I went a-clubbing at the weekend for my sister's birthday. It was a doctors and nurses fancy dress theme. I was dressed as a Austrian psychiatrist. Evidentally curls and a white coat are all you need to qualify for this. What would Siegmund and Karl have to say about that?

I freely admit that I'm getting a bit old and misanthropic these days. I'm at the waning of my twenties, and a couple of moderately paced drinks over a meal with good witty conversation would be my night out of choice. It gets to about eleven o'clock at night, and I've no need for alcohol; the melatonin levels in my body have the same effect, and I find myself falling asleep in random places. But, to give the old meat-market-disco-perve-o-rama its due, you cannot find a better place to watch people make a fool of themselves. I being one of those fools, of course.

At twenty-nine, I am a bit dubious about stepping foot in a club. After you've clambered over the piles of milk teeth to get in, you really do realise that you have a good decade on most of the patrons. Why is it the bouncers will ask for ID, when you look like old parchment, and yet will let in someone looking like they're fit to star in a Pampers advert? The mind boggles.

The music in the nightclubs these days is new and fangled. There's been a cross-over in the last decade whereby the old hardcore dance genres have become mainstream. Gone are the old poppy numbers you could sing and dance to, ones that came with their own cheesy dance routine that had a whole floor joining in, to various degrees of success. The clubbing subculture has alienated itself somewhat as a result, and the great influence of clubs like the Ministry of Sound and Cream on mainstream music culture in the nineties has waned somewhat. Dance music used to be a real alternative to Brit Pop in the popular music stakes.

So, I'm on the dancefloor attempting to keep in time with the latest groove, and looking hopelessly like someone with an attack of muscular spasms. Everything has changed. No-one does Whigfield dancing any more. The DJ is the best mate of your friend's son... aged five. On the plus side, if you do drop dead with old age, the dancefloor, reverberating with the bassline of the drum'n'synth-electro-punk-emo-rockabilly or whatever's all the mode these days, will administer CPR purely through the vibrations radiating through it.

Men in a nightclub are a breed apart. Bring back smoking in enclosed spaces, I say; it covers up the Eau de Desperation exuding from them. A girl in a somewhat prim doctor's coat seems to be a target for anyone with a pulse, the XY chromosone and blood alcohol levels three times the drink driving limit or above. One drunken pack of stags approached me and pushed forth a shy lad, young enough to be ordering milk and biscuits from the bar, with a Stag Dare Sheet. "Can you help me out?" he said pointing to the sheet while his mates giggled on . Do you need me to sound out the syllables a la Here is Peter, Here is Jane? I thought wryly but smiled sweetly whilst waiting for the inevitable atrociously tacky request. Then there is was. Number eight on the list: get a girl's bra and thong. "Listen up sonny," I said removing the Clever Glasses, "If I removed my bra, I'd be needing the thong to hold them up" before mincing hautily off to fill my liver with more sambuca.

Don't get me wrong now lads, I've discussed the men first for a reason. The bulk of the vitriole of this diatribe is reserved for the women. Women, good grief. A hen party is quite the most fearsome entity on earth; it's a great tsunami of oestragen heading full-throttle at you, and woe betide the victims of its vigour. Great swathes of men are molested and mauled in the wake of a hen party. Girls are far naughtier than men, I'm quite convinced of it, and the older they get the worse they are.

At thirty, I've noticed a distinct change in my hormone levels. Ten years ago I was a nice wholesome, decent girl. Now I'm heading for raging old cogar territory. Men hit their peak at eighteen, I am told. Women, at thirty. Thirty years of the accumulation of hormones and nagging skills. Men in nightclubs, handicapped by their alchohol intake, handicapped further by dark corners and their inferior non-verbal skills are easy prey for gangs of cougar-hens.

It's no accident that some of the world's fiercest predators are female: Black widows chew their mates, preying mantisses bite off the heads of Mr Mantis, and lionesses do the majority of the hunting for the pride. In the human species, it's no different. In a curious twist on our hunter-gather roles, the pride of female cougar-hens will spot a lone, drunken male, separated from his group and go in for the kill.

His judgment weakened, the alpha cougar-hen will approach him from the front, capturing his attention with age-old gyrations, and if she's resourceful, netting him with a feather boa with condoms and L-plates attached to it. Like velociraptors, her pack females will flank her to the sides and surround the lone male. This will rouse the attentions of the male's pack, who will (upon noting with chagrin that the git's looking a bit too popular for his own good) move in to disengage the cougar-hens and disperse the group. Much non-verbal communication is exchanged between the cougar-hens, fulling utilising our gatherer's primitive brain functions to full effect in the face of music so loud that you can hear it in Dundee. Mate selections are made and indicated to the other cougar-hens with the quirk of an eyebrow, a twitch of the lips or a naughty glint in the eye. This is missed by the males who would require a verbal "F@~ me will you look at the $%%^ on that" signal.

The attack is ostensibly over to the males, who now think that dancing with the assorted cougar-hens is 'all's well that ends well'. But they have fallen into the cougar-hen trap , formed in 1988 when the ladies practised the art of share-and-share-alike by each choosing a different New Kid on the Block to adore. The men are mauled, molested, forced to buy drinks and in some cases provide entertainment of the nocturnal kind before being chewed up, heads ripped off and spat out to the streets with a hangover and the vague smell of kebab about them.

Thankfully, I take the zoological approach and prefer to watch, with a large measure of sambuca as food for thought. Desmond Morris would have a field day clubbing in the modern day. It's a regular pit of predators. Natural Selection is alive and well in Nottingham.

Life Expectant

2008-02-25T23:02:00.000Z

I am currently sat at the kitchen table - it's a smallish table and it's under the kitchen window which overlooks the garden. I am here with my laptop, and a large glass of cream soda. It's diet cream soda. At some point I started caring about dental cavities and my waistline. When the hell did that happen!

Being a grown up is such a boring thing. In my mind's eye, people stop at certain ages. My Aunty Maureen (mid sixties) is always forty-two. My Nan (late sixties) is always forty-four. Mum is twenty-eight. That makes me a year older than my mum in real terms, luckily I stayed twenty in my mind.

Adulthood is extremely boring. You don't have the energy or imagination you used to. You develop a sense of caution and danger which completely bypassed you at ten when you sat on the flimsiest branch at the top of the horse chestnut collecting conkers, but at twenty-nine means you get vertigo standing on a chair. Not that you'd be able to get down the conker tree at twenty-nine either, as jumping off low walls reverberates through your bone marrow. You'd be in casualty attempting your childhood backflips from branches. I cannot begin to convey how my own physical limitations ire me. The outside just doesn't do what the inside thinks it can.

Perhaps it is because we are not designed to live this long?

If I were a Roman, my life expectancy would have been about twenty-eight. I'd be considered lucky to have lived this long. Being twenty-nine in our modern age means that you are not considered a spinster you are not married and you're not considered barren if you don't have children. I'd have been written off years ago as a Roman woman, and would have probably popped my sandals by now.

By the medieval era, I'd still be considered an old hag. Life expectancy was about thirty-three on average. I should imagine that I wouldn't have weathered so well in the middle ages- I'd have lost my teeth due to poor dental care, restrictive and poor diet would have caused untold health problems, perhaps rickets (osteomalacia), and if I'd had children (or lots of them) I may have died already due to childbirth complications. Pestilence and poor hygiene meant teenagers were essentially middle-aged! I'd have faired better as a Victorian woman - thirty-seven was the average life expentancy for a woman in western Europe.

Lucky for me, that as a woman in western Europe in the modern technological climate, and having the benefits of a private pension which will raise me from the breadline in my old age, I now have a life expectency which is estimated to be ninety+. Whilst I recognise that having a serious medical condition probably knocks some years off, I still fare over three times better than my Roman counterparts.

Perhaps I shouldn't be moaning that I can't collect conkers any more?!

The Cabinet of Curios

2008-02-25T22:31:00.000Z

It stood in our lounge, between the hallway door and the cupboard under the stairs that housed many of my toys, and indeed me on occasions when I had need for a playhouse.

It towered over me then, but to an adult was only chest high. On top was a black and white picture of Aunty Mau Mau in her wedding dress in the sixties, a picture of me taken at playschool, and a framed photograph of a girl feeding birds in the snow. Behind Mau Mau's wedding dress picture was a small pewter key, its base a pretty trefoil pattern. The key opened the cabinet of treasures.

It may have been some sort of reproduction; its front was entirely glass with some kind of art neuveau swirling pattern, and it curved like a bay window. It stood aloft on four legs carved as lion's feet. Inside, the back panel was watermarked silk in a pale oyster colour, and the three shelves were glass. It contained all of Nan and Grandad's collected treasures, those things too fancy to go into the wall unit where the Advocaat and the glasses were kept.

Occasionally, I was allowed to take the trefoil key out and unlock the cabinet. If I was careful, I may, a shelf at a time, unearth the curios contained therein and play with them gently.

The bottom shelf was the first. It housed a 1950s bone china harlequin tea service which I now have. In the tea service were cups, saucers and side plates. Nan had got a cup, saucer and side plate a week until the set was complete. It comprised of 6 settings in pastel shades of pink, lilac, grey, lemon, green and blue. Each had a type of flower on the inside of the cup and was embellished with gold paint. Out came the tea service and was neatly piled into colours after the pictures of the flowers were examined. Then it was carefully put away. My favourite has always been the grey which contains a yellow rose. I display the grey at the front of my own cabinet which I keep in a cupboard. Things in things.

The next shelf up was the silverware. There were two twisting silver candleabras, a glass bowl with a silver edge, a milk jug, sugar bowl and at the back, a large oval silver tray with engraving upon it, and cutwork on its edges. It made a perfect ice-rink for dolls. It was polished monthly by Nan with a stripy can of something called 'Silvo' and chamois leather, and great time was taken with the fretwork on the tray rims. Nan was in service when she worked. She worked in the town hall during the war and even after she retired on occasions as a silver service waitress, so with the family silver , she was particularly attentive. It always gleamed.

On the top shelf was the least valuable items, but the best.

Hansel and Gretel sat on the top shelf. These were German dolls that Aunty Mau Mau had sent Nan when she and Uncle Derek were posted to Germany with the army in the sixties. Hansel was dressed in black felt, with knee-length trousers and a felt hat. Gretel had a traditional German dress on over a blouse, a straw hat with pom poms on, and long silky plaits. Next to those, a tiny Scottish bagpiper doll. His large furry hat often fell off.

Moving across was a fake oyster shell. Upon opening it, it contained a plastic water mill and was doubtless a souvenir from somewhere. Then Grandad's miner's lamp that he got when he retired from Tilmanstone coal pit. It was a proper working miniature lamp, and it could be disassembled. Across from that, a ceramic shell that said 'Great Yarmouth' with a crab on it. Aunty Mau Mau went to exotic places like 'Key Largo' and 'Tunisia' and so I naturally thought that this was a souvenir from one of those holidays when you came back brown with sandal straps in your tan.

There was a plastic pen holder from the trip to Key Largo in the seventies. It contained water and small shells and it swished around like a snow globe. The pen it held never worked in my lifetime but Nan never threw it away. MOving across, my silver money box. It was in the shape of a duck and it had blue crystal eyes and a flat head. Nan said it had had a baby bonnet on it, but that was lost. And there were two silver thimbles, a tiny silver tankard, and a tiny lucky horse-shoe. Occasionally there was a black cat in the cabinet too. Nan kept the black cat and the horse shoe in her purse normally, for luck.

The tiny tankard was treasured by Grandad. It was Uncle Laurie's. Grandad was really our step-grandad. Our real Grandad, Jim, had been killed by a shell exploding on Dover cliffs during the war. Later in life, she'd met Grandad who had only one son- Uncle Laurie. Laurie was in the navy and the apple of Grandad's eye, but when I was three, Laurie died mysteriously. Thus the little tankard was given a prized place in the cabinet of treasures and I had to be very careful with it.

And lastly, my favourite thing in the whole cabinet was a china lady in a pink dress, carrying a basket of flowers. If you turned her gently on her base, she turned around and played a musical-box tune. I can still hear the lovely tune it played in my mind, quietly chiming as she span slowly on the spot. When her dance was over, I put everything back in the cabinet in its own place, Nan would then secure the trefoil key behind Aunty Mau Mau's beaming portrait and the cabinet would be closed until next time.

Ant

2008-02-19T12:31:00.000Z

How I love those perfect little life-snippets, when time and event have conspired to conjure up something so magical as to make the heart happy. Happily, I am of a whimsical nature and I have these moments most days.

Many things make me glad to be alive, but I like simple things best. I love stars and skies, a warm wind, going on adventures to different places, the colour green, watching insects, hearing birds and opening a new book; equally receiving a good letter that makes me laugh, writing one back, the scent of lavender and waking up on Saturday morning with the promise of two whole days of no structure and the irrelevance of time makes me feel that life is really quite peachy. I’ve always leant towards the creative, and now that work steals my painting time, I paint pictures with words instead. Everything is inside-out and outside-in. I absorb many things; It reminds me that I am a spiritual and holistic being, and for me enrichment of the soul is every bit as important as nourishing the body. I do not like practical things very much.

Life is very much about how you see it, not how it is. Your success as an individual should always be measured by the former. Richness of soul is the prosperity to which we should be aspiring, not breaking our backs for material wealth.

I often feel sad for people that are weary with stress. It’s so very easy to shed the mantle of strain if you are crushed by burdens and feelings injurious to your happiness. Slip out of that mindset like an ill-fitting skin. Is not everything about perception and sensation? The whole world is about what you feel physically and what you feel emotionally as a result. This is an extremely powerful concept once you take it on board, for it means that at any given moment an individual has the ability to essentially change their world from top to bottom. You can choose to be bogged down by trivialities and trifles, or you can instead decide that life is not determined by the way we enact (and in many cases re-enact) the minutiae, but by the overall experience of living, choosing to live it thus.

Are we not all like ants collecting leaves, but on a grander scale? The anthill won't fall down for lack of a leaf, nor will the world stop if the ant does. True, he plays his part but if you're surviving, why become so focussed on collecting your leaves that you cease to see the beauty in that which you collect?

I sat in a plane returning from Paris last year. It was a short flight, and took less than 90 minutes. Everyone looked cramped and bored. I felt marvellously happy to be flying, something which a century before would be inconceivable to a counterpart Kez. Seeing the world from an unnatural angle is enchanting, the imagination takes flight with the plane. What could be capable of in another hundred years? How can you treat such an inspirational experience like a bus ride?

Flying over the coast of the UK, I looked down on our country. I could pinch a town between my index finger and thumb. Ships were small white blobs on the channel. Cars were miniscule specks on the ground. I couldn't make out people, and yet I was flying not so far over cloud level. Life on the ground, meanwhile, was going on as normal. People were working, worrying about money, concerning themselves with promotion, cleaning their houses, shopping for groceries, picking the kids up... the daily concerns that seem so important and yet, from just above the clouds, I couldn't see any of that. My Air France stewardess offered me a drink from the trolley and a packet of fennel snacks. I thanked her in my atrocious French, noting with irony that I was contemplating life through a plastic window the size of a dinner plate, while she was right in the thick of her own daily concerns.

Back on the ground that night, I looked up. The night was reasonably clear. Up there were clouds, beyond that planes full of passengers looking out of their portholes, and beyond those, planes of imagination. Who knows what the passengers think as they look down, setting off on their skyward beaten track? I wasn't even a speck to them. I didn't exist to them. Beyond the plane, the stars, each one a glittering jewel in the sky, but perhaps a nebula or star system in its own right. They were just a speck from here.

So there am I, less than a fragment in the great scheme of things, looking at vast formations of gases and matter in space. Forever and beyond was just a dot; More space than I can physically imagine or rationalise is but a pin-head of light in the dark fabric of the night sky. And I realised that tidying my house, fretting about finances, stressing about work, all these trifling matters, are not important. Be happy, work to live not live to work, choose to feel happiness, change your reality. As the saying goes “Why worry about life? None of us make it out alive anyway!”.

Choose not to be an ant.

Life Lessons

2008-02-16T02:25:00.001Z

At twelve, it was time to return home from Germany and we were returning to Dover. In Germany, I was schooled at a one of the three English military comprehensives over there, Prince Rupert School. Upon my return to England, my mother swang it for me to have an entrance exam at the local girls' grammar school. I passed easily, was admitted to the ranks of the grammar girls and then promptly spent a whole evening crying about it.

Where I grew up in Tower Hamlets, the lower end of the Dover estates, there was a very big sense of class. People who improved themselves and moved to the more affluent areas of Dover like Whitfield, or Temple Ewell were seen to be hob-nobbing with the brass. Girls and boys who didn't go to the local secondary, Astor, but instead passed the Eleven Plus and went to Grammar were toffs. I didn't want to be a toff even though I'd left Tower Hamlets behind three years before. How I howled and pleaded with Mum to go to the comprehensive with my friends. My mother stood fast. I was going to Dover Girls' Grammar School, and that was that. I thank her now for that resolve as it was one of the best times of my life.

DGGS with its latin motto 'Optima Tenete' - 'hold on to the best' - was a modern state school but with curious residues of old time schooling. I doubt very much if the school's ways and mores had changed much since the fifties. There was a very finite culture there of studiousness and archaic traditions.

The uniform for us was very staid in comparison to our comprehensive peers, who I often gazed at wistfully in their short skirts, fashionable platform shoes and knotted blouses. We had a navt blue uniform. For us, a regulation length school skirt from the approved supplier in the town. Strictly no trousers. Trousers were only allowed for the first time in the school's history in the Autumn of 1993, just when I'd entered the fifth year.

The skirt had to be one inch below knee level, and not show your legs off in an unladylike way when you put a leg on a chair. This was a contentious issue for the liberalists who argued that if we weren't allowed to stand on chairs, why have a skirt that allowed us to do it gracefully? In the summer, obligatory short sleeved blouses, in the winter, compulsory long sleeved shirts and school ties. Coats with no logos in black or navy blue. A navy blue sweater, smart. To accompany the uniform, a strict physical education kit with ,again, no jogging bottoms. It had to be a netball skirt and sports knickers. For science, a royal blue lab coat with your name chain-stitched on the back in red thread. For home economics, a white pinafore with your name embroidered on the breast, again in red thread.

The sixth formers seemed like demi-goddesses to us wee sprats. They were allowed to wear their own clothes to school, and they had an actual house to themselves in the grounds. This was known as the Sixth Form House and housed the elite Upper Sixth. Across the way, under the Science Block was the lower sixth form house. To the front of the grounds was a terraced house on the road which also belonged to the school. This was Frith Road House, and housed music practice room. Later in the Upper Sixth, I would learn Russian in there.

The traditions of the school were rigidly upheld. It was an Edwardian building, and housed an authentic glass and brass lift. Only teachers, sixth formers and lamed students were permitted to use it. Towards the New Entrance Hall was the Spiral Staircase. This was only allowed to be used by teachers and Sixth Formers. Certain toilets were for junior girls, and some for senior girls. It was frowned upon if you used the wrong ones. If you were a younger girl, you were not permitted to enter the Rose Gardens or the sixth form houses without an invite. In assembly, sixth formers got the chairs, and prefects sat on the stage with whoever was doing the assembly. Younger girls had to sit to the front, older girls at the back, all in defined lines. It was all rather Dickensian in a fun sort of way.

As staid as the atmosphere might have sounded, we had great fun. The class sizes were exceptionally small and you never wanted for attention. My class, pictured below in the fifth year (and that's me with a Rapunzel problem at the back), had only eighteen students, and was fronted up by the illustrious Sarah Taylor, our English and Drama teacher. It was obvious that the Drama side of things was Mrs Taylor's passion for everything she did, from taking the register to turning up twenty minutes late to our form lesson was theatrical.

Mrs Taylor was an exceptionally enthusiastic teacher, and was our form tutor for three years on the trot as the class and she got on so well. Drama was a fun lesson with her. We'd do Shakespeare comedies more often than not, which involved a free-for-all in the extensive costume department for curtains, bits of lace, gowns and props and then perform in a laughably wooden rhythmic iambic pentameter monotone, the works of old Will such as A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night or the Merchant of Venice. Mrs Taylor would get so carried away directing the so-wooden-it-was-practically-teak production that often we'd stand around in our curtains with drawn-on moustaches for a number of acts whilst Mrs Taylor helpfully voiced all the parts and all the stage directions whilst simultenously swishing around the drama room in protracted bursts of fervent Shakespearian theatricals. Half the fun was watching her, delightfully mad as a hatter, play Titania and Bottom, in love with herself in effect. She should have been on the stage. It left me with a love for Shakespeare and the sixteenth century in general.

The afore-mentioned glass and brass lift was a great source of amusement. It looked to be an original, the outer doors were typically art nouveau in style, and the inner lift had wooden floorboards and a cage mechanism. Our art teacher, Miss R. was famous for using it all the time. Famous also for 'going to do some photocopying' for extensive periods, leaving us to our own devices. We'd get up to terrible mischief with the powder poster paints until we heard the familiar clank of the lift and promptly returned to our places.

Miss R. was an easy target, unfortunately, for the errant ways of mischievous schoolgirls. We'd wait until the lift had stopped at the top floor of the building where the art studios were, and then quickly press the 'lift calling' button. Miss R. , a kindly yet generally preoccupied individual would frequently not realise that that she was in fact on the wrong floor and get out, looking puzzled, to the stifled giggles of her students.

Mrs Johnson, or Mrs Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaansan as we called her, was a lovely Canadian physics teacher. Physics, not being the most alluring of subjects was therefore a hive of naughtiness. However, Mrs J. was a considerable improvement on the unfortunately named Mr Scopes, our previous teacher. Mr Scopes was a bald, short-sighted man that had allegedly hooked up with a sixth former and had a baby. We often puzzled on how he managed it as his lessons were so boring that he'd spawned a phrase 'Going to the Land of Scopes' for falling asleep, and we called him Horror Scopes on account of the interminably dull content of his lessons.

A whisper would go around Mrs Johnson's class that today we were to have Eleven O'Clock Rulers. At the appointed time, everyone would drop them in an impressively natural manner, much to the consternation and puzzlement of the unfortunate teacher. When this trick had gotten a bit old hat, someone made the revolutionary discovery that there was in fact no glass on the classroom clock. This was to change the face of Physics forever. A metre ruler, applied carefully and quietly to the clock when Mrs J's back was turned to annotate the board with the principles of inertia, meant that, miraculously, twenty minutes - no more, no less, lest we arouse suspicion- would be shaved off the lesson. We would be let out early, by the innocent and deliciously punctual Mrs Johnson. Quantum Physics might have interested that unfortunate woman, for the time-space continuum was most definitely disrupted every Thursday resulting in a black hole where a class should have been.

In the Lower Sixth, I worked hard on developing more adult ways of handling the world. It was time to face up to the fact that in the real world, putting forward a clock was not really going to get you to the top of the pile. University selections would now be crucial and a good school CV would set you in good stead on the UCAS forms. I made the effort to boff up a bit, and my school life took off. I was elected a prefect, an honour second only to being Head Girl. I got to sit up on the stage, have a room devoted entirely to this select group in the Upper Sixth Form House, and mete out advise and occasionally reprimands to younger girls. I got to wear a badge.

Sixth form was the best time in my life for I discovered History. I'd been a bright but lazy girl throughout school until the sixth form. I'd passed my GCSEs with all grades As to Cs by cramming in the last week before the exams, always handed homework in late and I winged every test I ever took. So, I was the first person to be shocked by my new found enthusiasm for paced study and, shock horror, timely homework. I enjoyed writing historical essays.

I studied for four A-levels, and therefore a large percentage of the week was spent immersed in history. I had in-depth English History 1620-1660 some of the week, and a bredth study on European history of the fifteenth and sixteenth century with another teacher for the rest of the allocated time. I discovered a love of the Stuarts, the English Civil Wars, the French Wars of Religion, the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-reformation. I also found I liked to essay-write, a skill which I still employ to this day. I'm using that right now. All my writing has an opening synopsis, an argument which I defend with as much evidence as I can supply, and a conclusion which neatly ties up my argument. I vary the pace and length of the sentences and make sure I do not repeat words and phrases too often to keep a bit of interest up. I try to ensure spelling and grammar is the best I can make it. You get marked down for poor examples of both in A-levels.

To this end, in this my conclusion where I neatly tie up the argument or narrative I have put across, I will not add a deeper meaning to these experiences but to say that sometimes it is good to remember the happy times in your life, the times that became the best part of the framework of your adult character. Record them, document them and review that periodically. These memories are your history, your life lessons.

Goodbye Nan

2008-02-15T02:28:00.000Z

I was at work when a call came through to my extension. It was Uncle Derek, a man of scant telephone words, and so I knew immediately that it was about my Nan. Nan had gone in for a routine medical procedure, but they'd found a tumour on her kidney that was blocking it up. She was dying.

A low, gutteral cry erupted from me, and I don't know where it came from or how I sustained that noise for it was alien to me. I'd clung to her well into adulthood like a young child clings to its mother's skirts, and cried in advance of this most inevitable of days. Don't take the last piece of my family, don't take her. I pleaded in my head. Who am I pleading to, I asked myself barrenly, when you have no god and no faith? I was galvanised then to take practical action.

I made my pilgrimage home to Kent in a car. From Hampshire to Kent, a rainbow stayed in the sky the whole way. I caught it on camera and will place it here. It was the most bizarre phenomenon as it seemed to guide me home to Nan, my mother, for my final journey to her. When I left, she would be gone, along with Grandad and my budgie Joey - my family - and I would be alone.

The hospital had placed Nan in a private room with an outlook onto budhleia and chrysanthemums. The sheer numbers of our family milling about her, cossetting her, was disturbing the other patients. Nan was our matriarch, and it was a bemusing sight to see everyone there, putting aside deep-seated family divisions for the sake of Nan's peace of mind. My cousin was doing Nan's hair with the blue comb. Nan was sat, typically steadfast in the face of tragedy, in the thick of it all, perversely enjoying having all her family about her, united, even if the reason was bad.

I was the last to arrive. As I turned, a mass of red, swollen faces turned to me with pity, and everything went quiet for I was the closest to Nan and like a daughter. Silently, they parted to allow me to the bedside, and I suddenly saw that Nan was old and small. In the vacuum of silence, I went towards her, uncertain. My throat hurt with the tears I wanted to release. Instead I tilted my head sharply, allowed the small pooling of tears to run back over my ears and smiled widely. I resolved to make our parting memories ones of happiness and laughter, not tears and sorrow. And besides, if I cried, it shattered Nan's composure immediately. When, aged 5, I'd squashed my fingertip in a drop-leaf table, Nan had sobbed all the way to the hospital worse than I had. When I cried with teenage frustrations she didn't understand, she'd say 'Don't cry, love' and then break down in sympathy. I was not about to test her resolve with my tears.

The conversations with the doctors were bleak. The tumour was causing the kidney to block up. Renal failure and a back-up of toxins in the body would kill her, not the tumour itself. It could go two ways- fits or a peaceful slipping away. It would be quick. All that we needed to decide was how to care for Nan for the last couple of weeks she had. We talked to Nan about it, and all she said was 'I don't want to go in a home, and I don't want to be alone'. That settled it; she was coming home to Aunty Mau Mau's.

Nan got home to Mau Mau's, and she had one last night in her own bed before a special hospital bed with an inflatable mattress was to be delivered for her care. We'd brought the bed up from her flat so that she would feel more relaxed, along with a number of her ornaments and trinkets.

The realisation of the situation had hit home and she was scared. I slept in the bed with her that last night, like I used to when I was a child. She wouldn't have allowed anyone else to do it for she was too dignified, but I had somehow always remained her baby and there wasn't that division between us. Back then, I, small, afraid, nestled in between Nan and Grandad if I'd had a nightmare, or if there was a lightening storm. Now, this one last night, this one temperate June witching hour, the roles crossed and blurred and I was the comforting presence warding off the darklings, and she was small and afraid of what was to come, in need of the reassurance. In that one night, when we both finally stopped talking and settled down to sleep, we knew that from now on, I would have to be the adult. She would be going away and all the strength I drew from her would have to be drawn from myself henceforth, and in our handover of that mantle this night, when she drew strength from me, she would be satisfied that I would be alright.

Nan's last coherant words to me were "And I love you". We had two halcyon weeks to talk, to share memories and laughter, for me to be given the gold watch that Grandad gave her, and for her to satisfy herself that I was solvent, sensible and happy.

If a death can be good, I surely think that Nan's was, for she got her wish. She slipped quietly away in the night, in a circle of her closest, most adoring family, knowing she was cherished, having said her goodbyes and allocating her most treasured things to us all. We walked her as far as you can take a dying person, and then she left us... with memories and with a sense of completion. Nothing unsaid.

Womanhood

2008-02-15T00:41:00.000Z

I really enjoy being a woman. Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would be like to be a man, just for a day or so, but I quickly resign that thought. A day in a man's body would mean I would have ruined half a dozen pairs of shoes by peeing on them in an 'uncontrollable garden-hose at high pressure' kind of way, I'd have practically decapitated myself with a Gillette, and would probably have been beaten up by my football buddies for wearing out a brassiere, forgetting that I don't have boobs.

Womanhood is a delicious experience. I delight every day in its pleasures and perks.

Firstly, men. There could not be a sublimer creature on earth than the man. True, he has his strange idiosyncracies for example when he shouts at a television in an attempt to influence a sports score or, being able to line up a shelving bracket by eye but failing to judge the distance between dirty socks and the wash basket, resulting in a two foot shortfall. But, overall, he is quite the most divine creature. Men are so simple, so straightforward. He'll mostly say what he means, even if it does come out slightly monosyllabic and reminiscent of pan trogolodytes sometimes. Man is relaxing to be around, a great strong brute in a nice package. He takes out the rubbish. He rescues us from valetting our cars. In the whole human pair-bonding saga, we women came off a lot luckier. Men are a lot easier to live with than we are. I salute them.

Secondly, there's the beautiful double standard we have achieved. When Emmeline Pankhurst practically hoisted her drawers up the flagpoles in the excellent suffrage movement, I daresay she hadn't envisaged quite this scale of emancipation. For women, and despite what the bra-burners have to say, have a remarkable amount of freedom. A well-educated woman is every bit as able as a man in this day and age, to have a career and power. The fact that we haven't had a female president yet is not down to a conscious gender divide - women just have to accept that we, as a species, have not yet had the chance for evolution to catch up with changes in our primate group social conditions. We are still genetically programmed to have an alpha male primate to follow. A president is one manifestation of this. The fact that God/Allah/Buddha/etc are mostly all male entities is no accident. We are coded to follow the Big Cheese Monkey, a male.

Women have the run of the workplace now, as well as the run of the home. Traditionally- certainly in my family- it's the women that rule the roost. This is no slight to the men, who work hard and have respectable careers to support their families, it simply seems to be that the child-rearing, decisions about the family economy, and the day-to-day routines of the family is largely directed by the woman. The menfolk come home and are happy to acquiesce to the decisions made by the women. Again, nature comes into play here. Man, the hunter, returns to the dwelling place to be tended by woman, the gatherer, who has not been running so far afield. Thus a sharing of the physical resources of the family is achieved. I have noted that this inherent trait in our species comes to the fore regardless of whether a woman is a housewife, or whether she works longer hours than the man.

I really quite anger my feminist friends, who think that in the 21st century, women should be men-clones. I disagree strongly. The genders have two separate identities and to force them to inhabit the same behaviour spheres devalues both. True harmony will come when people realise that not nine or ten thousand years ago, the very differences in traditional roles allowed our species to survive.

If women had gone out hunting, leaving the babies undefended, we'd have died out. Our feminine communication skills, verbal and non-verbal would have been hampered as we'd not have developed, by need, a brain needed to communicate subtley and quietly to other women close by so as not to give away our undefended family group's location. Delight in the differences, I tell them. Bask in the lovely feeling that as a woman you are weaker physically, have rubbish spacial awareness skills and get left holding the baby. Don't try to overrule your nature, luxuriate in it and your differences from your man. Let him do his hunter thing, and revel in your gatherer thing. Spend time at home with your babies. Rather than decry it for the waste of your brain, realise it's what you were made to do, and no better use for your fine mind can be found than to educate your children and pass on all you know.

Lost to me

2008-02-12T00:59:00.000Z

There is no pain so bad as the ache
for something that cannot be;
the pain of something not just lost,
but lost to me.

I can count on the fingers of a hand the men I have been intimate with, and I can name only two that I have loved and that have loved me in return. There is one man I adored, but to whom I was a passing phase, I fear. I have never loved 'truly, madly, deeply' although I believe that sort of love exists. I believe I am capable of it. I hope I am capable of it.

I am cursed or blessed, I cannot say which at this time, with a heart much like a combination lock. Mind unlocks body unlocks heart. Tick, tick, click. It's not a combination that I get with many people. I guess I am just fussy, or perhaps blind. Who knows?

I am blessed because I have not ravaged my heart with lovers and heartaches. In fact, overall I am still quite idealistic where the heart is concerned and it's a blank canvas entirely. I am cursed because I have neither really travelled the highs or the lows, never known torment caused by love, never known what it is to completely lose yourself mindlessly in someone else, never given myself completely over to it. Mind unlocks heart, but mind is not unlocked and neither am I. It makes me want to take off in a frenzy and get my heart broken over and over and over, so that I can say I've felt it. I've felt it. I think, were it not for the tight controls instilled in me by a 'stiff upper lip' upbringing, that I might go mad looking for my Grand Passion, that which is lost to me.

I watched my friends experience the highs and lows of many love affairs, their lives like parades of colour and form, changing and moving on. They've loved, they've lost, they've had children. In short, their hearts have been on journies mine could never conceive of. My feelings work, forcedly, like an old Victorian camera. I forced my heart to require stillness, focus, quietness... and with that comes something that lasts and suffices, imprinted on me like images on glass; I am brittle and fragile. How I long sometimes just to crack the plates, and rip and scatter the stilted, sepia images I have made of love and rewrite everything from scratch.

My mother would be quite disappointed in me. She dragged me through my teenage years, teaching me to be more bohemian than this. I am ever the disappointment that I wasn't more wild and more liberal.. in all things. I can thank Mum for wild blood, crazy ideas and uncontrollable passions. I can thank Nan for the methods used to contain them. I can thank neither for the uncomfortable juxtaposition I sit in as a result. One day, I swear it, one day, I am going to leg it with joyful abadonment. In the meantime, get it out by writing.

Cuts and the Chrysalis

2008-02-10T13:58:00.000Z

I went into town got a haircut the other day. I like getting my hair cut. It's an expensive way of essentially getting another ape to pick your fleas out in an age-old primate ritual. You can't go up to someone in the street and say 'Can you pick my parasites out please because one of us is socially subordinate and it appeases my animal nature' , and alas there is a decided lack of fleas, ticks and lice in modern human society, so instead we pay a hair stylist to do it.

I always feel obliged to chat to the hair stylist whilst she's cutting or colouring my hair. I find this quite annoying despite it being very social and friendly. I do not always like to talk and sometimes prefer sullen silence and a book as I can't do small chat very well. Get me onto the topic of the French Wars of Religion, religion in general, forensic techniques or the works of Jane Austen for example, and I'll jabber away quite happily until someone makes a quirk of the eyebrow, loaded with meaning at another person, who then rushes forth with a roll of masking tape and shuts me up until I am coiffed and can be bundled out of the salon in haste. But talking about boyfriends, kitting up small chavwagons and what's in the the latest soap operas affords me many conversational hurdles. "Den and Angie have split up" I proffer... unfortunately the hairdresser wasn't even conceived until after that particular episode of Eastenders and hasn't got the foggiest. I am forced to pluck random East End sounding names out of the ether until the light of recognition dawns in their reflected eyes. "''Arold? Reggie? Ronnie? Ronnie? Ooh that Ronnie, he's a one. She's a one? Ooh, she is a one!".

Fortunately, all hair stylists seem to suffer from verbal diarrhoea and have an inane soliloquy about Ronnie at the ready for every customer. As a stylee, all I have to do is nod and make appropriate listening noises to indicate I am conscious, and occasionally make a hair-related comment to keep up my end of the flea-picking ritual. I could never be a hair stylist. I couldn't manage the social aspect of it and would spend a large proportion of the time chopping chunks out of people's barnets, or cutting lumps out of their ears with nerves because they look like they might initiate a conversation .

On the way home after the latest trichological talk trauma, I examined my pathological dislike of regular inane conversation. It's really not that bad, I chided myself, you should learn to open a conversation with 'How's your boyfriend's bunions you told me about last time' rather than 'Do you think God is the new primate alpha male?' once in a while, like regular people do.

I realised with a start that I have become a cynical old eccentric. My diary postulations of the last couple of weeks are misanthropic verging on the miserable. When did this happen? I still consider myself an optimist and a person that could be rehabilitated into society given a bit of a nudge, so do I need to review this Optimist and Extrovert title I have afforded myself? When did I become a miserable, strange old git?I thought about this a lot on the way home.

There's something about being laden like a mule with groceries that makes me ponder the nature of things. Don't ask me why. Sainsbury's and philosophising seem inextricably linked for me.I came up with a theory that I shall call the Anti-Butterfly Theory about all this malarkey. It's like butterflies, only backwards.

My theory is that in youth we are all like butterflies. We are bright and beautiful, light and flitty. We hasten between life's flowers lightly, sip their nectar and utterly take for granted that we shall forever be beautiful, light and have endless flowers on which to sup. And like the real butterfly who will perish in a week or two, we forget that our butterfly time is short and finite and that is has a purpose after which it must die. That purpose is to learn the ropes of being an adult before we take our place in society to raise children and uphold its mores.

And so, we are anti-butterflies. At the end of our winged phase- and who is to say when that is for any given individual- we begin to change. Our wings become our chrysalis and slowly we harden, we cease to flit and we are encased in our circumstances and our cynicism. We can no longer fly and we no longer look for the next flower.

The most unlucky and cynical of us become larvae. A larva is a sad person who has even gone beyond the cocoon. The larva's purpose is just to eat in the butterfly lifecycle, and a larva person just seeks the bare essentials of life - work, eat, survive. They have lost all joy and simply exist.

I may be an oddball, but I am quite confident I shall never be a larva. It's true that my wings have hardened a little through age, routine and stubborness which is a trait all adults display whether they will it or not, but I don't think I will ever lose the joy for flitting from life's flower to flower.

Endless Summer

2008-02-08T12:52:00.000Z

Modern children are very lucky. The sorts of things that children get today are quite expensive and would have been far beyond the conception or budget of my great-grandparents or the parents of my friends.

I lived on a council estate with my grandparents who eked out a modest living on a state pension and Grandad’s mining pension. Sometimes Nan had to work to supplement our family income and she would waitress at the Town Hall like she did in the old days. She had a black outfit and a broderie anglaise-trimmed pinafore and matching hat that she wore to serve at municipal functions.

Neither my, nor my friends’ families owned a car. We didn’t have fancy toys or expensive clothes. We couldn’t afford expensive day trips to theme parks or museums or zoos. My aunty’s friend knitted my school cardigans for me and Nan darned my woollen tights if I fell over in the playground – we still lived by the wartime ‘make do and mend’ axiom. Despite the lack of luxuries, I was always clean and neatly turned out. Nan had a twin-tub and washed many things by hand. Later we had a spin dryer which was considered a luxury for the draining of moisture from the clothes.

Despite our conspicuous lack of money, the neighbourhood kids had a lot of fun with simple things. There were lots of children on the avenue where I lived, and a play park at the end of it in sight of all our homes so we’d often congregate down at the park. It would not be unknown for a crowd of twenty or so of us to play together. Sometimes it’d be ‘Add’ (tag), or Snakes – which involved a long string of children swinging each other about and invariably resulting in skinned knees for the poor unfortunate at the end who got the brunt of the acceleration- or kiss chase (if you liked them); kick chase if you didn’t. On windy days, carrier bag kites were the order of the day, a small light carrier bag and a long length of wool formed a simple toy that would keep us engaged for a good hour or two. We made camps everywhere there was undergrowth, and the boys gave the girls ‘coggies’ home on their BMX bikes – a ride on the wheel pegs or metal over-wheel carrier. My best friend Mark always coggied me, unless he’d had his BMX impounded in the shed by his dad for being naughty… which was about twice a week.

My best friends were brother and sister, Mark and Sharon, who lived over the road. We became friends as soon as we were allowed out to play, so hung around from reception class age. Mark was in my class at school, but later one as we hit about the 7 or 8 mark, we had an agreement that we didn’t hang around together at school in case the boys picked on him for being a sissy for being friends with a girl. Sharon was in the class above and so we all had school friends, but did everything together at home. Mark had flaming red hair and freckles, Sharon had the prettiest eyes with long naturally black lashes.

We spent an inordinate amount of time together. As very small tiddlers, we all ran about in the street in our swimwear getting brown in the sun.. mostly with dirt. As we got older, we built camps, sunbathed on the roof of the bus shelter, went down the allotments to paddle in the tin bath full of rainwater for the plants, rode our bikes in formation, found holes in fences and trespassed into the Boys’ Grammar School grounds, welly-paddled in the road when the drains invariably flooded in the winter and formed a twenty foot long mere in which to splash about and ride our bikes through, or went up grounds of the High Hospital to catch slow worms and lizards. We also made the best of things – discarded mattresses made first-rate trampolines, gates made for good swings, as did bits of old rope and a branch suspended from perilously flimsy trees. My whole childhood seems to be summer on account of those excellent memories with Mark and Sharon.

Time is the only true enemy of the child for it steals, unnoticed, our idyllic, endless days from us; soon we grow up to be different people that by necessity must walk a different path in life, at a faster pace and with less joyful abandonment. I moved away to London at nine, and then to Germany, but we always resumed our companionships as if there had been no time apart. And yet, unhurriedly, the subtle shadow of our unavoidable differing adult personalities was to creep up upon us and take away that which no childhood argument had managed to do. Gradually, time itself eroded that unified identity we shared as children, and replaced us with adults with different aims, points of view, interests and circumstances. It drew a line between us, and so it came to pass that we no longer played, we no longer paddled and we no longer passed the time together. That was that.

Follicular Folly

2008-02-07T00:50:00.001Z

Tomorrow- down to the salons. Getting my wig coloured. Streaky streaky! Then on to be grilled, and then on to have my bikini line waxed, which surely is the most dangerous pursuit a women ever did indulge in.

For the unenlightened, bikini line waxing protocol is quite defined. It's genetically programmed into a woman, even though no-one tells you about it. It is my experience that boys get pulled aside by dad for a quick chat about how to use a razor without decapitating themselves once they start to display a bit of chin-fuzz. Noone pulls girls aside to forewarn them they're going to look like a barber's floor in the ladypipes department unless stringent anti-groin-Rapunzulisation steps are taken.

We girls nip along to the beauty salon for defuzzment. There is an unsaid code of honour between waxer and waxee. Firstly, you have your bits out for a stranger, secondly, they are depilating your bits, thirdly you somehow manage to have a perfectly normal, reasonable conversation whilst hair follicles are being agonisingly ripped from your nether regions. It's excruciatingly painful but neither the beauty therapist or you acknowledge this. Instead, we talk of men, soap operas, films, jobs etc and the only nod to the pain of the process is the efficient wax, smooth, RIP followed by a meaningful glance of concern by the beauty therapist, and the subsequent muted shriek from me which must be quickly turned into the prelude to a sentence: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAArrrrgh.... you going see that new rom-com at the weekend?". Then it's back to so-and-so killed so-and-so in Eastenders and 'ooh isn't Stacy a one?', accompanied by the running of eyes (for Stacy of course).

I tell you, men have not the slightest jot of an idea what we women go through to look passable. Given half the chance, I'd just leave the whole shebang. Have leg hair like a hirsuit family employed by a Romanian travelling fair as 'The Wolf Family of Sighisoara'. Hell, you could plait it with a nice bow and create a new feminine culture.

After two weeks of rejecting the Venus with triple blade and added aloe vera, Kez decides maybe she should do her armpits....

I love the whole beauty regimen for a woman.

In the mornings, I get up. I cleanse a face that isn't dirty because I cleansed it before I went to bed, and I haven't done anything in between to make it grotty. We women apply foundation to take the colour out of our faces, and then we put on blusher to put the colour back in. We apply lipstick to send an unconscious sexual signal to men, says the illustrious Desmond Morris, that we are sexually aroused and therefore available for date (see- you girls don't realise the true subversive nature of lipgloss!!!), and subsequently to make ourselves look attractive. Then we bemoan the fact of being treated like bits of fluff, and 'inequality in the workplace' and all that jazz, rar-de-rar!

We put on skirts that are not practical, and high heels to make our legs look longer, but acknowledge that no one is going to see them because they are under a desk. We totter around all day on what is essentially footwear on stilts in order to look acceptable in appearance.

And then, to top it all off, someone says 'You look nice' and you reply 'Thanks, but I've barely made an effort'.

Ha!

Stars and Carpet Bags

2008-02-07T00:44:00.000Z

Nan and I used to count the stars together when I was very little. There was a wooden chair in front of the window, and I'd kneel up on it and Nan would point out the bright ones and we'd count them.

I couldn't count above twenty at that age, but we used to look at the different shapes such as Orion, which was an upside-down saucepan. Nan didn't know the names of the stars, we just pointed out the extra twinkly ones. "That bright one hangs over the North Pole" explained Nan. "Where Father Christmas lives, Nanny?", I would ask breathless with wonder. "Yes love, where Father Christmas lives." I would huff on the glass and make lip marks and get told off for that. Sometimes, as a special treat if I was unable to sleep, Nan would get out the carpet bag.

The carpet bag was the repository of all our family photographic history. To my adult mind, it was an old tapestry knitting bag, but to a child it was an Aladdin's cave of amazing things, good stories and glittery trinkets. It was almost entirely full of old black and white photographs, square faded seventies photos and pictures drawn by different generations in our family. There were also different buttons in there, certificates and Grandad's old glasses and a couple of pairs of old false teeth. I had to be respectful of the teeth - if I was caught chattering them together, Nan would look at me with mild amused distaste and say "Oooh, go on. Put those away!".

I knew most of the people in the photographs by heart, but part of the fun was asking Nan who they were and what they were doing. The best ones were Angela's wedding where Nan made the cake. Butlins 1974 with Aunty Mau Mau sunbathing, Uncle Derek and a donkey on the beach. Me with a chimp at the circus. Aunt Flo's Ian, the consultant anaethestic (a point of pride in the family). "He lives in Windsor, you know. Our Ian's a consultant anaesthetist". Uncle Laurie (annotated by me as 'Uncle Lorry') in his navy uniform, Grandad on the doorstep as a boy with Uncle Leyburn, Uncle Darren's football team, a family wedding in the fifties where Grandad wasn't thin and all the ladies wore gloves, and great-great-Gran 'Polly', Nan's mum, outside the prefab. The glasses were worn, stories behind all the jewellery told, and the buttons were looked at and laid out. Nan had her mum's hair comb so we used that as well. There was a couple of metal thimbles which had to be worn and then the carpet bag was carefully packed away. It was time for bed.

Nan liked having her hair brushed and the only thing she would use to do it was the blue plastic comb belonging to her mother, from the carpet bag. It was a standing joke between us all my life that she'd say "Go and get the comb" and offer to give me 10p to do her hair. Back in the eighties, it was worth it and I'd immediately leap up onto the armchair back to come it for half an hour during which Nan would close her eyes, and overlook the fact that I'd styled her hair into bunches, a french plait, or on occasion, punk rocker tufts. I was happy to do it; that was two Highland toffee bars, or a large down payment on a Twinkle magazine back then. In my late twenties, not such an incentive due to the rate of inflation, but I did it anyway.

After the carpet bag was put away, Nan tucked me into bed. This involved pulling up many layers starting with a flat sheet, wool blankets and then an eiderdown because Nan thought it wasn't right that one of those new fangled duvets should entirely replace the nice heaviness of blankets. Then we'd discuss the photographs and our favourite ones of the night.

The carpet bag currently lives with my great-aunty Mau Mau (Maureen), Nan's youngest daughter, since Nan died in 2005. No one has yet been able to go through it and sort the photos out, as it's too evocative an item. And so it stays there, in the spare room, growing dusty, awaiting the day when it will be opened again and the memories cherished, the stories retold and perhaps a bit of ad libbed history to pad it out. After all, Nan was the authority on the wonderful carpet bag and all its magical contents and some of that is lost now. But like the north pole star, her influence was a constant, is a constant amongst us all , reminding us to all fill our own carpet bags with happy memories. Sometimes I still count the stars and it makes me happy.

Books, Words, Life

2008-02-07T00:20:00.000Z

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency-- the belief that the here and now is all there is. ~ Allan Bloom ~

I tend to buy a lot of books from supermarkets these days because their price is excellent. True, the stocks mainly consist of your standard chick-lit-and-charts fare, but occasionally you find the odd gem.

I am decidedly unchicklit orientatated. This whole 'pastel covers, reviewed by Richard and Judy malarkey' isn't my book bread and butter. I like history books, adventures, thrillers and true crime. I often reduce a conversation to silence unintentionally when I tell people I'm reading about serial killers, or forensic pathology or forensic psychology. For some reason, the calculation of a bullet's trajectory being mappable from a blood spatter doesn't seem as interesting as 'who is doing who in Eastenders', I can't imagine why! ;)

I like young adults' fiction - JK Rowling, Christopher Paolini, Phillip K Pullman etc. You can't beat a good bit of easy-peasy kids' books but there is something slightly shameful about admitting it. Do as I did, which is to unobtrusively slip the books into the basket whilst no one is looking, and thereafter cover them with sensible adult things such as a flash drive, bistro salad with separate watercress (only sensible grown-ups buy watercress for the enhanced iron content and the subtle peppery taste it gives to a salad) and a copy of Richard Dawkins' 'The God Delusion'.This should offset any accusations of 'you're too thick to read grown-ups' books' that onlookers may make, albeit mentally....

And so back to books. I once read a quote that 'How can you sit down to read when you have not stood up to live'. I quite disagree with this for no one person will ever have the time, the money or the energy to experience everything, and that sometimes, living vicariously through a book or an author can be very rewarding and dare I say it, essential.

A wide vocabulary and a curious, enquiring mind, gleaned from the reading of books, can take you a very long way. It will get you places, gets you jobs, outdoes people in arguments, wins a debate, wins hearts, wins respect. You can be penniless, but nevertheless an education (and self-education is the best because it is done off your own back) will stop you from being a loser. A book is an amazing thing. It can incite emotions, take you places, relay human experience, take you on adventures and allows you to see things differently through the words of others. Through books I have learned other languages, lived in the middle ages, been a spy, discovered ancient Egypt, climbed mountains, fallen in love with dukes, cast spells, solved murders, learned how to care for lavender, taught myself to knit, led a cavalry charge and been haunted. A well turned phrase can transport you beyond the boundaries of your prosaic life and into the realm of imagination. You can be anything through a book.

Likewise, people think that the internet is an evil entity, but I must disagree. Since the advent of the internet, you can log on and find out anything you like - whether it's a recipe for quiche, a recipe for a bomb, or the even what the weather is in Marrakech. It's all there at the touch of a few buttons- the wealth of human knowledge, easily accessable to a degree never known before.

And so I think as I write this, these black marks will translate into a voice in the head of someone looking at them and therein lies the beauty of words. They make something from nothing.

The entire knowledge and experience of Mankind has the potential to be documented now- in book or electronic form. It is madness to go through life without taking on board some of that knowledge, and equally to pass through your lifetime and leave no record of your own experiences. This is why I have a diary. Noone but me may read it, but it is my mark on the collective experience. We all have a right (not necessarily a duty) to make our own marks upon this tenuous line we call history.

To read is to empower
To empower is to write
To write is to influence
To influence is to change
To change is to live.
~ Jane Evershed ~.

Two legs and a pork pie please

2008-02-07T00:10:00.001Z

I am in possession of a small number of bizarre anecdotes. The strangest has to be the half-relayed experience of my friend J. whose grandmother who was sat on the beach at Dawlish when a train passed by. I can only ascertain from my research since that this must be Coryton Cove beach, where the railway runs close to the cove. Anyhow, the unfortunate antecedent to J. was sunning herself on the said beach, when, as previously stated, a train passed and she was smacked round the back of the head with a partially eaten pork pie.

The second anecdote is once more on a coastal setting- Cliftonville seafront, Kent, to be precise. It must be something about coastal regions that make for bizarre events. Perhaps the sea air affects people

S. and M. were sat in the car, on the seafront, with a juicy supper of Kentucky Fried Chicken and having a look at the sea vista. Knowing Cliftonville, I venture this might have been floating objects from the sewage outlet. S., being fond of birds, noted the hungry gulls, felt guilty at the fowl feast, and wound down the car door window. She fed a chicken drumstick to a seagull, which promptly snatched up the drumstick and took to the wing before the others relieved him of it. 25 yards or so away, the seagull dropped the drumstick and an audibly loud cry went up from a woman on the ground. "That seagull's leg's just dropped off!"

On the subject of birds' legs dropping off, I was at home one evening when I lived in Norfolk. My grandmother called me in a distressed state. She had my two budgies, Seedney Elvis Vicious and Flora on 'long term loan' for company, and she was quite agitated.

"Calm down Nan, and explain what's up" I said in my best placating tone.

"It's Seedney," she said "His leg's fallen awf". Naturally, I was perturbed by this news, and she informed me she'd looked everywhere for it to no avail and was calling in reinforcements, my cousins Craig and James, to look for the missing leg. She would call me back. She rang off abruptly and I spent a bemused half an hour waiting for an update on the purportedly missing limb.

The mystery of the missing mitt was solved shortly after, by a slightly hacked-off sounding Craig who called to let me know not to panic. He'd rushed up to Nan's to find the bird's leg was still quite attached; Seedney Elvis, oblivious to the distress and mayhem he'd caused, had been roosting on one foot at the time, the other tucked into his tummy-down as is a benumbed budgie's wont.

The news brought a great sign of relief to me. Poor old Seedney had had a rough year, having just lost his mate Henry VIII (who was the eighth mate in as many years). The last thing he needed was for his leg to spontaneously drop off.

It's a doll's life

2008-02-05T21:04:00.000Z

I never really was a Barbie fan when I was a kid. Barbie, during the eighties, looked like she'd fallen in Joan Collins wardrobe whilst coated in superglue. I did own two very glamourous Barbies- one of them was Crystal Barbie who wore an utterly heinous holographic clingfilm dress. However, I think Nan decided that Sindy was a more appropriate sort of doll and I had a large collection of those instead.

Sindy was a great role model. If Sindy with her pointy boobs, massive beachball head and invariably a dodgy fringe and fat legs were the ideal for girls to aspire to, every girl was going to grow up feeling like she fell in a vat of beautiful. Moreover- Sindy herself aspired to a three roomed home with no front wall, and a plastic lift which cleverly compensated for the fact that if she had stairs, you couldn't fit in the vinyl two-seater sofa and yellow kitchen that every girl wanted. She set an extremely low bar on success and happiness, god bless her little plastic heart.

My Sindy collection was grand. I owned about twelve of them, and they all looked the same and all were called Sindy. None of them smiled. They were like an ugly plastic clone army.

My first Sindy was ginger. She was a ballet Sindy (I had a number of these ballet models) and the tutu was pink. The Makers of Sindy cleverly overlooked the fact that Sindy's orange hair clashed heinously with the pink tutu, and also the fact that any ballet company would have sent her away to eat toilet tissue for a month or two because she was by modern standards, a bit of a lardy.

I had a Sindy horse and cart just like the one below with a dappled grey horse that was rigid in one position and a lovely yellow and brown trap. Due to the rigidity of the horse, it had to trot on one leg.

My ginger ballet Sindy also had a yellow moped, a bath with a real working tap and a plug hole and a three roomed house where the bath did in fact live in the same room as the sofa. And this was life at its best for me as a child. Evidently, the ideal lifestyle was one where you had a horse and cart, a moped and could bathe in the comfort of your own living room with a real plug whilst you entertained all your friends who also wore tutus or garish ballgowns. You went out for moped rides in your tutu/ballgown and your horse lived in your downstairs room with the cart whilst the moped got a wash periodically in the bath.

I liked also the fact that I and my friend Sharon spent an inordinately long amount of time setting up the house for Sindy and her ballgowned biffa brigade, and by the time it was set up, it was time for dinner and you had to put it away anyway.

Then there was Sindy and the real bath. No bath was complete without a Sindy or two who would drown in the bath, have a ride in a soapdish or have a hair wash with Imperial Leather, or the soapdu jour, Cussons Pearl. Cussons Pearl was marketed as a luxury sort of soap with a fancy pearlised box and we thought we were very metropolitan getting it. However, it was still just a scabby old bar of soap. As a result, all my Sindies looked like they'd just survived an explosion in a wig factory.

Making up your Sindies with felt tip pens was de rigour for a girl in the eighties. After I'd bitten the legs off my ginger Sindy and one of her jointed hands fell off, and the shocking orange hair was truly Cussoned, I decided a punk rocker makeover would be good. For this, Sindy was given a Mohican, green felt-tipped lips and Sharon and I 'dyed' her hair with a clever use of most of the marker pens from my Crayola Caddy. She also had a gold safety forced into her ear. Despite such a wicked disadvantage of having chewed-off legs, Ginger Sindy still enjoyed an active lifestyle including show-jumping with a cart attached to the horse whilst doing so.

I am led to believe that Sindy's production was stopped in the nineties. What a travesty. She taught girls that it's OK - you can bathe in front of your friends and devity the laws of gravity. Your house can be made of cardboard with a toilet in the kitchen and you can cook dinner in an evening dress and trainers. I think Sindy is partially the reason why I'm ultra happy with my own skin. God bless the ugly, miserable old mare!

The Sindy tutu- a versatile outfit for bathing, moped-riding and equestrian sports

Luxury accomodation complete with plastic one-person elevator.

Supermarket Sweep

2008-02-05T02:45:00.000Z

"This is a poo shop! Everything here is made of poo!"

Eddie Izzard on why supermarkets greet you with fresh foods and not toilet rolls.

Supermarkets are an annoying fact of modern life. Everything neatly housed under one roof. As well as your food you can now buy clothes, electrical goods, books, music, films, household soft furnishings and in some cases actual furniture in your local supermarket. Am I the only person disappointed with the spoon-fed consumerism of the noughties?

Moreover, supermarket chains employ psychologists to cleverly help lay out the store so that you buy more. Somehow, when you go out for a carton of milk and a packet of washing powder, you come home with nine pairs of £3 jeans, all fifty-six series of Lost on DVD and a three piece suite in orange leather because it 'was on special'. Aaaaaarrrrgh- it makes me so angry. It's convenient, it's cheap but overall, it's bloody soul destroying!

When I was small, and we're only talking 20-25 years ago, we did our shopping from a local greengrocers that was right in the middle of our neighbourhood. There was a small Tesco in the town, but the supermarkets didn't come until the late eighties. Consequently most shopping was done locally. 'Scrivenses', we called our greengrocers, although the sign over the shop clearly said 'Scrivens'. Mr and Mrs Scrivens ran the shop, and they knew everyone by name. The shop was on the end of a terrace of houses and Mr and Mrs Scrivens lived above it. Scrivenses was open-fronted and inside there were market-type tilted crates of vegetables and small shelves of tins. We shopped here for our groceries. There was no fancy stuff then - just your average local produce and a bit of citrus fruit which was about as exotic as it got. I was allowed a coconut now and again for a treat.

Down the road a bit was the bakery. It baked the bread on site, and in the morning you could go down, knock on the side door and get your bread or rolls directly from the baker in a white hat whilst they were still hot. If you wrapped them up well, they'd still be warm when you got home and you could melt your butter into them.

Opposite the bakery was the Cabin. This was run by a man called Sailor and sold tinned things and household goods such as washing power, washing up liquid and bleach. Behind the counter were rows and rows of different sweets, and in front of it, a small step-ladder for small children like myself. Nan would bring me here for a treat which usually consisted of a small glass bottle of Appletiser and a quarter of sweets of my choice. I usually liked cinder-toffee or cola cubes.

Then we'd cross over the square and go to the local post office. Nan would collect her pension, administer her finances as all her accounts were with the post office ('I'm not having one of those fangled cards' she'd say with disdain when the possibility of a high street bank account was mooted). Occasionally I'd also be allowed a treat from the various stationery goods in the post office. I got a lovely pack of coloured paperclips from there once and kept them for years, too unwilling to use them.

'I'm not having one of those fangled cards'

High street shopping was a lot different. There were some chain stores, but by and large each town was a lot more unique. On the way down was a shop called Winmore Enterprises which as far as I could discern only sold bingo cards and was only open on a Monday. There was Vaine's the cake shop that always had gypsy tart and wasps in the window, a hairdresser called CW Dorrington that displayed pictures of Burt Reynoldesque seventies hairdos right up to the late nineties.

There was Hawkins the estate agent, where my cousin worked. She was a typist. Further up was a Kentucky Fried Chicken where I'd get a drumstick and chips once a week when I went shopping with Nan; A furniture shop, Payne's the greengrocers, Hummingbird Records which was crammed full of teenagers on a Saturday looking at the vinyl LPs and a Marks and Spencer, home to the Raspberry Royale and where Nan bought expansive underwear. Later in the eighties, they opened the Charlton Centre (pretty pathetic by today's standard) which had a central cafeteria with plastic plants, and most distractingly for me, a toy shop and a joke shop under one roof.

The toy shop, Gamley's, was an exciting haven. It was huge, although in retrospect it was actually tiny, having one divider down the middle of the shop. Models and the holy grail of toys was at the back of the shop - the farmyard animals.

As a child I was never much interested in dolls. I had them, but the prized toy was my Britain's farmyard with its miscellaneous realistic animals. I got one most weeks if I was good in town and managed to have an envious collection ranging from dairy cows, longhorn cattle, horses, shetland ponies, geese, chickens, pigs, sheep, people, riders, farmyard equipment and sheepdogs. I had a farmyard, paddocks that my dad made me with green felt, a farm house and a milking dairy. I was going to have a farm when I grew up as I intended to marry a farmer.

So, I kind of get angry at supermarkets. There's no fun for a kid to be shoved in a trolley while they're wheeled up and down the bland aisles, and memories are relegated to biscuits and toilet paper. There's no variety anymore - every town is the same with the same old shops and the same old things in the shops. Where's the fun in that?

Time & Tide

2008-02-05T02:26:00.001Z

I miss the sea a great deal – she is beautiful, bountiful and savage. Everyone's experience of the sea is different. If you visit it on holiday, you associate it with relaxation and getting away. If you live near it, it's in your blood and likely you have strong ties to it. It inspires emotions, poetry, art and provides nutrition and livelihoods.

I come from the port town of Dover. Dover is called 'The Key to England' and nestles in Kent, 'the Garden of England'. Whilst Kent is undoubtedly pretty, rural; all oasthouses and hop farms, Dover with its immigrant population, high unemployment and general malaise of the local economy and infrastructure has earned the unfortunate misnomer of the 'arsehole of England' despite its history and pivotal role in England's defence.

Dover Seafront, 1920's

For Dovorians, the sea supports the local economy which is largely based around the port and associated legal aspects of border control of the world's busiest sea port. As such, the sea is just there, integral to the town's success. The sea is a workhorse in Dover – an almost industrial entity rather than a thing of beauty or wonder.

Dover's small natural harbour of prehistory right up to Roman times has been built up over the centuries with the ferry port at one end (the Eastern Docks), and the old Hoverport at the other which also now moors massive cruise ships. The Victorian Western Docks once housed a railway station where the train ferry went across to the continent also lived at that end of the seafront. My dad, a train driver, used to shunt the Orient Express around down there which always lent the place a lovely Art Deco elegance to me in my mind. But the Western Docks fell into disuse in the mid-nineties when the Eurostar superseded it. The town, bypassed, fell into a bit of forgotten neglect after that – almost tourist ischaemic if you will.

The local museum houses small models showing the port throughout history and where the local sights fit in; the Roman Pharos (a lighthouse tower on the cliff), the late 12th century castle built by Henry II and the 19th century Drop Redoubt, a fortress built to defend England's coastline from a French invasion led by Napoleon. Later, the cliffs housed secret wartime tunnels from which Churchill's cabinet commanded military intelligence and communications operations. And all the while, the sea has been lapping patiently at the ever-evolving shoreline of this most distinctive Kentish town like some grand old man laughing at a passing fad of youth.

While Vera Lynn might have warbled about the bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, the truth is much more mundane. Concrete fills gaping wounds in the greying chalk, and the promenade is prosaic and considerably shortened by the port extensions. It really is a disappointing vista, but the beach still holds great memories, and some sad ones.

As a small child, a day at the beach was a great treat. It's a pebble beach, so activities were conducted in jelly shoes or flip-flops or barefoot extremely gingerly. The pebbles were large and very painful at the top of the beach, but attrition meant smaller pebbles like gravel near the water's edge which were a lot more comfortable underfoot. There were sporadic patches of sand, used as foot-havens when barefoot or if your flip-flops had been washed away.

The pier was barnacled and rocky, but it was worth braving the scuffed knees and feet for a shot at catching tiny baby crabs that nestled in the seaweed on the rocks at that point. We'd collect them in our buckets or with cheap cane fishing nets. We'd play 'chicken-wave' with the surf and jump into the rolling waves lapping at the gravel – 'white horses' we used to call them. Periodically, a great whirr would go up from the pier and we would run hell-for-leather up the beach to the seafront, and along the first leg of the pier to look through the portholes and watch the hovercraft inflate and set off. These days they have catamarans – 'vomit comets' as they're disparagingly nicknamed- which are nowhere near so exciting as the roar of the hovercrafts.

Later on in my teens, Dad took me fishing off the pier. That was great fun. He regaled me with his and Uncle Graham's fishing anecdotes, taught me to cast out with my girly 10 foot rod without 'bird-nesting' the line and we enjoyed tea from the Thermos flask while our frames held the rods. My concern and attention was usually for the fish – undersized whiting and pouting floating on their sides in the fish bucket where their swim bladders were all over the place. Occasionally there'd be something good- a flatfish or mackerel or something that could be taken home wrapped in newspaper for tea.

For me and my friends, the beach was about summertime and fun, baby crabs and losing your flip-flops to the white horses. But one day, the sea lost its sparkle.

It rocked Dover. In March 1987, the Townsend Thoresen ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise was in the water on its side near Zeebrugge. 193 people had perished in the near-freezing water- both passengers and staff on the boat some from drowning, many from hypothermia.

It impacted on Dover profoundly as the seamen were mostly local people – everyone knew of someone that was affected by the disaster. The town was in shock and mourning. My friend lost her father, and my uncle lost his best friend Stephen. They were both 17 and the ferries were their first jobs after school. My uncle worked on the Pride of Free Enterprise, the Herald's sister ship. Stephen worked in the onboard bar in the Herald – he drowned because he couldn't swim. "Oh, it's such a shame," my Nan would often say "Only 17." And then she would suck in her lips, shake her head and her eyes would go glazed and unseeing as they did when something vexed her. My great-uncle who worked for the Harbour Board would talk about the investigation, and my family tuned into the news religiously for weeks for updates on it. As it was, my uncle left the ferries and I never heard him talk about Stephen again.

The cliffs were always a welcome sight for me. I'd always lived in Dover with Nan, but atten, my mother reclaimed me and we went to live in Germany. The cliffs were always the last sight of home, and the first sight of it on the way back. I cannot describe how excited and relieved I felt at viewing the imposing coastline from the bow of a Zeebrugge ferry. The last hour of an invariably rough four hour voyage was spent at the bow of the ship looking for the shoreline as it cut through the grey troughs and crests, and the bitterly cold sea wind cut through me. Occasionally I would take respite in the forward lounge – slanted windows looking out ahead until I saw them – the White Cliffs, my hometown and my Nan awaiting me. Then it would be time to return to my family, to go to the car deck stairwell and wait to be allowed down there into the car for the short drive out of the port to the family in Dover.

And how sad I would feel on the return to the continent, watching the same cliffs shrink as the tide settled the ship into the dogged, rhythmic rise and fall. The distinctive noise of the propellers buffeting the waves in a trough; how I loathed that sound, the sound of being taken away. We had left England, a homesickness engulfing me at the knowledge that my family, friends and old life were being left behind again. For all my love of travel recently, I can never forget the imprint in my mind of the aft of the ship and the curious, taunting reverse image of the homecoming. And I would often think of Stephen on that crossing, almost as if he was still lying under the horrible grey water with that abhorrent propeller sound above him.

Twenty years on, and tide and time has washed me home and washed me away again. One day I will go home.

Comfortable Three

2008-02-05T01:27:00.000Z

There are some pretty wonderful things in life: love, friends, family, music, art, books, laughter, food and cats. But the thing I'd like to wax lyrical about is comfort.

The best things in life are comfort-related. Take beds for example. Beds are divine- whoever invented the sprung divan needs beatifying. A sprung divan looks a bit old-fashioned, and quite frankly, rubbish. They're invariably covered with some horrid damask fabric that looks 'B&Q anaglypta wallpaper circa 1974', and they necessitate the use of valance sheets which are awful to iron and to look at. Fashionable homes magazines will peddle these beautiful sleigh beds as the thing to have, but when you get into them, it's difficult not to feel like you're on the rack awaiting the Grand Inquisitor. They're so lumpy and you can feel the struts. Now, sprung divans. I get into my bed and it melts around me. The pillows are soft and well-pluffed, not too high, not too flat. The thick and expansive duvet is a warmth-trap and within thirty seconds is cosy. I try to read in bed with all good intentions, but soon the comfort envelopes me and my eyelids become heavy, I become languourous and then fall into a welcome sleep of colourful dreams and fitful rest. Such is the effect of a good bed.

The next most comfortable place to be is in a hug.

"What's that stingy old effort?" I think to myself when I see people giving each other cursory cuddles. The trick to a good squish is to square up to it. Wrap tightly round the person like Velcro, close your eyes and snuggle in. Exhale in a manner that expresses satisfaction and a release of stress and then stay there. None of that back-patting that indicates 'this is over, shove off' , just remain and savour.

Of course, this depends on the hugger. It probably wouldn't do for new friends or work colleagues, or indeed people with bad BO, but for a long-standing (clean) friends, quite appropriate and even advisable. Hugs release the bonding hormone oxytocin, reduce blood pressure and decrease the risk of heart disease. Hugs make happy & healthy people. There was a man called Juan Mann who gave out free hugs in a city centre (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPPKSWSPP1E ). Unbelievably, the authorities removed him a lot. I think this man has the best job I've ever heard of. Every city should have a hugger to improve peoples' lives. The world would be a much better place if we all had a squish more often.

And lastly, possibly the best place to be confortable: your own skin. We're all imperfect, we're all flawed and unless you have a stylist, make-up artist, PR person and personal trainer hidden in your wardrobe are going to look at the very least a bit crap some of the time. Love your skin, love your mind, wear your wrinkles proudly as a mark of your age and wisdom, let your lovely grey hair grow, accept your lumps and bumps, look in your own eyes in the mirror every day and like the little glint you see, count your blessings not your stretchmarks, love your baby belly, and enjoy your food and your waistline. Life is too short.

Curl Up & Dye

2008-02-02T02:23:00.000Z

We saw Russell Bland today again. Russell Bland is an inhabitant of my hometown. He looks like a peroxide blond version of Russell Brand. Blonde. Brand... Bland. Capiche? I am quite in admiration of Russell Bland's coiffure. He must spend hours and hours backcombing it, for the elevated hairpiece is in a different degree latitude to its owner. Secondly, the man never has roots. His hair looks like it's gone seven rounds with Domestos and yet, never an inkling of brunette at the root.

Now, I don't know about you but thisto me is some superhuman feat of peroxide engineering. I only have to leave on hair dye for the 20 minutes developing time and the roots have already grown out. I can't abide roots. However my ammonia-based adventures are by and large preferable to my natural colour which I can now only describe as 'eyebrow blonde' on account that it matches my eyebrows but they're such a bland shade of dark blonde that they don't warrant a colour in any dye range as I could liken it to.

I started colouring my hair at about 17. Sun In was the foot in the door, and once I had those 'naturally beautiful sunkissed highlights' aka hideous streaks of peroxide-mangled straw-like crispy substance previously known as keratin, I graduated onto real dye.

I've not done too bad with dye, having learned a lot early on. For example, it is not a good idea to don a carrier bag on your head to 'keep the dye on' as my school friend's mum did. Not when you're dyeing your hair 'Lightest Champagne Blonde' (aka white blonde) and the bag you're wearing is Tesco Value carrier bag, with the Value pattern on the inside... and ink that becomes slightly less adherent to the bag when it's in contact with peroxide. I don't know what kind of 'champagne' Sylvie drank, but it was a nice shade of lilac.....

Dyeing your hair is a fine art indeed. Firstly there's the selection of the colour. Colourists tell you to go two shades lighter than your natural shade. To assist you with your purchase, the manufacturers put little number codes on the boxes. I don't remember those bloody things. I go for the box with the nicest smiler on it. It doesn't matter that the hair colour contained therein is going to colour my hair the shade of an Oompah Loompah's pubes; the woman on the front looks the happiest. Sometimes you want a change, don't you? In this case, many women select a nice dark brown ('Darkest chocolate brown') because the ravishing Mediterranean beauty on the front looks hot, whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that their own complexion is as pasty as an albino's armpit and they'll have to a) mascara their eyebrows forever or b) try a dicey looking blonde over the top and settle for a nice Jaffa orange-coloured compromise.

Once you've made the critical selection, hopefully picking a colour that isn't going to make you look like the afore-mentioned oompah loompah, you then have the delight of applying the formula.

They supply you with three bottles usually - the developing liquid, the colourant and the conditioner. You're supposed to do a skin test 24 hours in advance to check you won't go scabby like an aligator. I have yet to know of a woman that does this. Not only that, but there's an urban legend that hair dye bottles explode after a couple of hours of being mixed. Evidently noone's questioned , if it's the liquid that explodes, why noone's been decapitated by exploding hair. So, not wanting to risk the inevitable explosions, we mostly apply it to the head without a skin test.

The adverts would have you believe that every woman who is dyeing her hair, minces round with it in a chignon sighing over the lovely fruit oil scent. Wrong. The reality is you have an itching, burning, crunchy mass of frazzling hair akin to the texture of old hessian sat on your noggin. The smell of ammonia is hideous, and ammonia as we all recall is the chief ingredient of wee. So prance around all you like Andy McDowell and Eva Longoria. We don't doubt 'you're worth it'; your hair smells of tiddle and you've earned every single cent of your fee.

The result is, after lengthy conditioning, grooming and styling, nevertheless quite becoming. So men, if you notice that your good lady's hair is looking particularly nice today do make sure you say so. She'll be most gratified that her tortuous beauty regimen had a happy ending.

We'll meet again...

2008-01-30T23:53:00.000Z

My grandmother was married three times. The first time, she was young and undaunted by life and he was her One. The second time she married for romance and it went wrong. The third time she married a true gentlemen, she was older, wiser, thicker round the middle and finally found happiness. That one lasted, but I go back to the first.

As a child, I lived with my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, Nan's third husband. They were happy together and consequently I had a very lovely upbringing, adored by both and completely content. Grandad had a son who wasn't Nan's son, and I was told he'd been married before . Nan had two daughters, my Nan and my great-aunty who were very different. They weren't Grandad's daughters because they called him 'Syd'. "Were you married before too, Nanny?" I asked. She got up and I followed her upstairs. In the bottom of the wardrobe was a large carpet bag. The carpet bag contained all Nan's treasures and it was a great treat to get them all out sometimes and have a look.

Inside the carpet bag was a small embossed jewellery box with a faded floral motif. Nan told me it had been given to her by a patient of the High Hospital, the local asylum. Inside were brooches from Valerie, an art deco brooch belonging to her mother, and among other things, a little leather box. She handed me the little box; it had a button to push on the front which opened the mechanism and inside was a beautiful but fragile platinum ring with two diamonds. The metal had worn so, that it was practically paper thing at the base. I was too young then to realise it was an engagement ring. Nan never said much about sad things. In later days, she would gaze out of the window with unseeing eyes and her lips muttering her thoughts inaudibly, but mostly she said nothing. The little box was put away but I always made a point of delicately holding the ring when it was a Carpet Bag day.

James was my natural great-grandfather. Nan had married him in the July of 1940. He was a bricklayer from Sunderland, and beloved by many. 'Well-liked and jovial' is how the older members of the family remembered him. He had light blonde hair, and wore fashionable Oxford Bags. They must have made a handsome pair, my Nan slim, with glossy rolled hair in the pin-up style and large white teeth she kept pristine with Eucryl dental powder. They were very much in love. Very soon after the wedding, Nan became pregnant with my grandmother, Mavis.

It was the 14th November 1940, and Jim went to work laying bricks in a village outlying the town. He was building wartime bunkers. Evidently he prided himself on his appearance at work too because he went to work in a pink and grey striped silk tie that day, the day that a shell killed him and left my pregnant, nineteen year old Nan a widow. He was just twenty-eight, a year younger than I am now.

Nan remarried twice, and happily on the third time she found lasting happiness with Grandad, a coal miner. Grandad was the most lovely man, a Woodbine smoking, kindly soul with pencil-thin legs and a bad chest from the mine, yet I couldn't have wanted for a better man to bring me up.

Grandad died twenty years ago the other day, and Nan back in 2005. She never really did say anything much about Jim other than once muttering suddenly it was her fiftieth anniversary today. "Fifty years" she said absently, and then looked out the window and talked to herself silently. I watched on respectfully while she relived her day, beautiful and willowy slim on Jim's arm, he smiling broadly in his grey Oxford Bags, with Aunty Joan and others in mismatched bridesmaid looking on, such was the war.

So, that was it I had thought. My Nan's heartbreak went to the grave with her and I shall never know what she really felt.

So you can imagine my surprise and emotion to find this online quite by chance tonight, it dating from November 1941, the first anniversary of his death. She was a woman of few words where sadness was concerned.

She suffered inside without wearing her heart on her sleeve so to see this, her poem, was so poignant. Already the news of the find is going round the family. Nan was our matriarch and to piece together something from her days as a young woman is precious indeed.