“Wait a minute, Mr Postman…”

Until sometime around the early ’80s I was very Little Britain, very provincial – I just assumed that everybody had a letterbox in their front door, plus a postman to trudge round every morning pushing letters through it. It wasn’t until my sister emigrated to Canada and started to tell these tales…

Well, it seems that even in the middle of winter, when temperatures are 40 degrees below or whatever, if she wants her mail she has to don full arctic gear and big, slip-proof boots and trudge down the newly snow-ploughed driveway in order to spray something on her mailbox to melt the overnight ice that has welded it shut. She also needs a chisel or screwdriver in case the spray doesn’t work, and then a key…

And it wasn’t until sometime in the 90s, when I went to work for a university college providing postgraduate distance-learning courses to students all over the globe, that I realised there could be such a thing as a dwelling that does not have a well-defined address. So we could be mailing giant parcels of course materials to “Beyond the village, turn left at the lake, third hut.” I used to wonder how they plugged their computers in, because surely a hut whose location could only be vaguely described would not have electricity. Students also had trouble with beads of sweat dropping onto the page, creeping damp, and ants. Paper-chomping ants.

You would think I would be grateful for my nice, civilised British letter-box and my nice, predictable British postman – or in fact, lady – but I have come to mostly dread what might tumble through it. I cannot properly concentrate until the witching hour – mid-day or thereabouts – has passed and I know I am safe from yet another bill or – OMG, the Bank Statement. That always arrives on the 13th. I spend the whole month dreading the 13th. I count down to the 13th. In various ways I aim to distract myself from the fact that the 13th is drawing ever closer.

Aside from bills there is the monthly Parish Council Newsletter to cast a pall. This is a single sheet of A4 paper folded into three. This month it is yellow. Even the folding-into-three depresses me. It reminds me of when I was a legal secretary and had to fold my boss’s signed post and put it in the envelope, with the address showing exactly in the centre of the glassine window. I was very good at this.

In fact I still am. I only have to look at an A4 sheet of paper and I can fold it exactly into three, with the edges exactly touching. I can even accomplish this feat with my eyes shut. Trouble is, it reminds me that a) I was no good at any other part of that job and b) it was the only thing I ever managed to do that impressed my mother. It seemed to be my life’s work to impress my parents in some way but all I ever manged was the paper-folding thing. And then only my mother.

The Parish Council Newsletter enrages me because it lectures me, in badly-written, ungrammatical prose, on things I have not done wrong:

“Dog Fouling: Please be aware it is an instant fine for not picking up after your dogs. It is also unhygienic and nasty!” I don’t have a dog.

“Parking: Complaints have been received,  (and why the comma?) that there is an issue with people parking in places that can be considered dangerous. It has also been reported that there has been parking on paths and green areas, you can be fined up to £500 for this offence.” But not me, guv. And where? What green areas? What paths? And complaints by whom? At least make it interesting.

“Speeding Cars: Please note that the exit road from the village is a 30mph road, and many concerns have been received especially from parents walking children to and from school.” How is anything managing to drive at over 20mph, say, when the road is beset with giant speed-bumps so large even the bus has to slow right down to negotiate them? Is there a manic 40mph cyclist about?

Or else it tells me things I don’t care about even though I feel I probably ought to:

“The Annual Seniors Christmas Lunch in the Village Hall. Forms available from the Post Office.”  Just went gluten-free. And went last year. That was an experience.

“Christmas Lights Competition –  6 prizes of £25 each.” Why not use up the earth’s dwindling resources and pollute the starlit night sky with tawdry flashing lights? Why not spend £100 on lights and electricity in order to win £25?

“Park Renovations – The Village park is in need of a new paint job, this has been sourced and the work should start shortly.” I’m confused. Are they painting the grass a more acceptable shade of green?

The stupid yellow creature just makes me feel slightly at odds with the rest of the human race – defective, somehow.

Into the Recycling you shall go, ee-aye ee-aye ee-aye oh
And if I catch you bending…

Knees up, Mother Brown…

But enough of that, now.

Party On, Gran!

The usual Christmas card came from an old friend, many miles away. It contained the usual folded-in-four, once-a-year letter. I’m not sure how old Jen is now but she must be ancient, considering she was a great deal older than me when we typed together for a while, in that tiny, exhaust-fume filled basement next to the ring road – bars on the windows; stiflingly crammed with sweating female bodies and those massive old word processors and printers. She tells me that her husband and his mother are on different floors of the same hospice – rooms above and below one another – and that she walks uphill for twenty minutes or so several times a week to visit them both. Neither of them know who she is.

One sentence from her letter has stuck in my mind – “I am afraid my world has become rather narrow”. Poor Jen, it was always narrow, though she wasn’t one to complain – a narrow, if cheerful, upbringing, narrow horizons, narrow expectations, narrow opportunities – and now it is narrower still.

Yesterday I went to the free Christmas Dinner the Parish Council put on every year. This place gradually seeps into your bones. You find yourself beginning to acquire the local cunning, which basically boils down to a series of mottoes such as:

• Pay no more than 50p for anything.
• Get the 9.30 bus so that you can use your bus pass. Argue piously with the driver if he says it’s 29 minutes past. By the time you have finished arguing it will be 30 minutes past. And then you can use your bus pass.
• Leggings go with everything, and they are very cheap.
• Tee shirts go with leggings, and they are also cheap.
• Get your hair (beautifully) cut and (unpredictably) coloured by college students. They are very cheap.

Everyone goes to the Christmas Dinner, and every tiny parish has one. You have to fill in a form from the Post Office requesting a place. You have to be old, and local. There are a series of Christmas Dinners on different days in one of the three possibly “venues”. Sometimes the same venue hosts different parishes on different days of the month. It’s complex. But free. And actually, quite good. At least there’s plenty of it, even sprouts, even those tough-ish roast potatoes that remind you of school – even if a rainstorm is swirling outside, the car park is a sea of mud, your baby elephant sized paper hat is falling down over your ears and you are being forced to listen to mega-amplified Sixties classics sung by a man with sideburns in a shiny suit.

I saw him, hiding behind the amplifier, wolfing it down before he began. A plate of Christmas Dinner must be part of the fee.

Poor chap, he worked really, really hard, but they made the mistake of calling the raffle (30 sumptuous prizes, including a box of biscuits-for-cheese) moments before he got up to tune his guitar (new strings, he was having problems with them). Immediately afterwards all the oldies started struggling into their coats and hats to go home. Mr Guitar Man was left, mid-afternoon, trying to ginger up a three parts empty hall, the few remaining oldies in the middle with their elephant hats, full of Xmas Pud and clapping sporadically, and a few schoolgirls (still in uniform) propping up the bar. Presumably they were related to the proprietors rather than hardened drinkers.

And oh, he sang Driving Home For Christmas. Extremely tunefully, but very loud. How I loathe that song. And Another Brick In the Wall by Pink Floyd, which I used to like but only for about three and a half minutes back in the Seventies. Very, very loud. And that Ride, Sally, Ride one. What’s that all about? Wasn’t that the Fifties?

And this – by way of attempting to bite one’s tail, post-wise, serpent-wise – is what really worries me. But I don’t think I can explain it. Oh well, I’ll have a bash.

It’s what my first-paragraph friend said about the narrowing of one’s world. I see it happening to me, of course, and yet, oddly, not. I see the advantages of being sucked in and submerged, the comfort and blanketing ease that narrowness brings – old age, no money, working class. Belonging. You see, that is what I have never, ever experienced, and part of me wishes only to be absorbed into it, never to have to think ‘outside the box’ again. Never again to be forced to sit on some hard, chilly seat and observe. I didn’t want to write this, because I observed it.

All the while I was sitting in the corner on that hard, chilly seat and knew however much I was clapping and smiling and chinking glasses and wishing people Happy Christmas at the socially appropriate (also observed) times, playing with the debris from the Christmas crackers, wishing I’d got one of those tiny spinning tops instead of a tiny yellow car – I was making mental notes, and I couldn’t stop. And I knew that I would never be able to, however lonely it was.

Watching my friend (of this paragraph) struggling to her feet to clap and sing along to Driving Home For Christmas; watching her propping her telescopic walking stick out of sight and hobbling onto the dance floor to do a kind of dignified, shuffling Sixties dance in the middle of the floor with another woman; observing her dancing, her with her floaty, surprisingly-coloured-by-students hairdo, wearing a blouse so large, twinkly and besequinned it was like a little constellation all of itself, I so wished I could do that, be like that. And yet I didn’t, and I couldn’t. I would rather the floor had opened and swallowed me whole than venture forth to dance. The other half of me was wondering how soon it could think of an excuse to go home and feed the cats.

The part of me that recognised courage in the face of adversity, a certain inexplicable joyousness about her, also felt the horror.

I Wish I Was A Wizz

Or should it be: I Wish I Were A Wizz? Suspect latter, but grammar purists free to comment/vote. Unlike UK Parliament at the moment. If I was or were a Wizz, I would no doubt be able to sort out what was going on, politically speaking. Or perhaps only a Sorting Hat could do that.

I always had a bit of a thing about wizards. Not witches, for some reason. I saw myself as a bit of a wizard, only I was a green (with stars) robed wizard, not a blue one. Suspect green is more elevated and wonderful than mere blue, in my imagination. Well, if you’re going to have fantasy fantasies, you might as well be the hero.

It’s been a funny old day. I was meant to go to some sort of ‘do’ at the Over 50s, which is now not, technically, the Over 50s but the Tea and Bingo Club, or possibly the Bingo and Tea Club. All ages welcome. As it turns out I didn’t quite make it to the meeting, in the Scouts Hut in the next village, but suspect 99% of the members playing Bingo and drinking tea will still be Over 70, just as they were when they were the Over 50s and met in the pub.

I did try to go, even though I didn’t want to. It was the Christmas one and would have involved purple tinsel, Christmassy paper plates with red and green elves and reindeer on, and Christmassy tablecloths. I know because I helped with the sourcing of these items in one shop after another in town, and the lugging of them around afterwards. And the driving of them home in the boot of my car, and later re-delivery.

I gave myself a good talking to all morning, trying to work up the enthusiasm.

You know you’ve got to go.

It’ll only be a couple of hours – or three, or four… time will soon pass.

It might be fun, you never know. There’s always a first time, in a fun-less lifetime, for something to turn out to be fun.

They might have made special vegetarian sandwiches for you, the only vegetarian. What are they going to do with a mountain vegetarian sandwiches if you wimp out?

And so on, and so forth. And I did set out, honestly. I drove all the way over to the next village, repeating the above backbone-stiffening mantras in the car, and wound my way through the snarled and tiny streets in the hope of a) avoiding loss of wing-mirrors and b) finding a parking space.

And there was a funeral on. Outside the little, scenic, Christmassily decorated church, a horde, a veritable Ghengis Khan’s Army of self-conscious, shoe-polished, black-clad mourners.

I did try the tiny car park outside the Scouts Hut but, as anticipated, it was clogged to the muddy fences with large, shiny mourners’ car, everything double-parked and blocking everything else in. With difficulty, I extracted myself from the car park and, with even more difficulty, got back out onto the village street again without losing a wing mirror or getting dented. Dented already, of course, but that dent was self-inflicted, which is different.

And I did look for an alternative parking space in the narrow village street, honest, but there was nothing I could get into without parallel parking skills or one of those cars that does it all for you.

And so I panicked and came home. Unlike the Prime Minister, I am not Admirably, but Quite Exhaustingly, Limpetishly Resilient. Or it may be that when I see quite clearly that something is not going to work – never, ever going to work – I instantly give up. Make a new plan, Sam. Hop on the Bus, Gus. Don’t need to discuss much… Etc.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

A Einstein

And so I went home, texted

(apparently only old people say texted, everyone else says, ungrammatically ‘text’. I text… the ‘ed’ which would have made it clear that I am not texting right this second but actually text some hours ago – being silent)

my plate-and-tablecloth buying friend and told her the plain truth, that the funeral had prevented me parking. Which she will not believe. Sigh!

And then, as if in retribution, the Jehovah Ladies turned up again – smiling, anxious, warmly wrapped up against the cold. I have written before of the Jehovah Ladies, who like me. I usually manage to deflect them into discussions of cats with three legs, the weather, my-mother-in-the-home (they had it on their secret card index system that she was passed or gone beyond or whatever and I had to correct them on that – still technically alive). This is where being probably ADHD is an advantage – your mind works on digressions and cul-de-sacs. A veritable quagmire, a bottomless pit of irrelevancies and non-sequiturs is at one’s command… Normally, the difficulty is to avoid sinking into it…

So I got my coat on and stepped out into the back garden to have the usual little chat and accept the limp leaflets – two, this time, because they missed me last time. I don’t actually listen to what they say, to be honest, but I value the fact that they care about my soul, and my salvation. No one else does.

A moment of inattention and they had managed to wrangle me back from three-legged cats, vets, mother-in-the-home, weather etc – to tell me that I need not worry. The world appeared to be in a dreadful state but God would step in. God was just waiting for his opportunity to step in and save us all from ourselves. Didn’t I find that comforting? I would find that comforting indeed, if I could only believe it.

Maybe I should try the back-stiffening mantra thing, as above:

God will fish all the plastic out of the sea…

God cares what happens to us stinky old polluting naked apes…

We really don’t deserve to make ourselves extinct, the sooner the better…

And then they told me the story of Adam and Eve, and how Eve ate the apple because the Devil was disguised as a snake. Strangely enough, I knew that. I remarked that people will always feel compelled to do the one thing they are told not to do, it’s like children. And cats.

And then I foolishly remarked that that would be all very well but it said in the Bible that God granted man dominion over all the animals, which was why man felt entitled to eat said animals and perform horrifically cruel experiments on them. They said ah yes, but dominion only means caring for. God instructed us to care for all his creatures, to love them as He loves them. I said I thought dominion didn’t mean that at all.

So they tried me on another word, subjection. They showed me the relevant verses in Genesis, though none of us had our reading glasses on so it was all a bit out of focus. And they said subjection also meant caring for. And I said, to me subjection meant more or less the same as dominion, it meant imposing your will on something or someone weaker than yourself because you felt you had a right to.

But no, apparently subjection also means caring for.

And then I think I managed to non-sequitur them back to cats, and the price of cat food.

Do you possess a Bible, by any chance?

Actually, yes. Do you possess a cat?

From Mum’s Old Recipe Book: Christmas Morning Cranberry Muffins

I know it’s not Christmas, and I know I mentioned Christmas once before already this summer. Blame it on the patchwork. For some reason best known to Self-of-a-few-days-ago I am piecing some Christmas fabric at the moment. Presumably then-Self thought it would be an excellent ruse to try to sell Christmas cushion-covers or a Christmas quilt top in July/August. Who knows?

(Oh dear, five Christmases!)

However, that’s what they’re called, according to Mum. And after all who’s likely to be cooking muffins on Christmas Day itself? Need a few practice runs.

(Seven!)

CHRISTMAS MORNING CRANBERRY MUFFINS (eight, sorry)

• 1 cup cranberries
• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

I had to look up ‘all purpose flour’. It’s is in Mum’s own handwriting but I notice everything’s in cups so this may originally have been an American or Canadian recipe. According to the internet British plain flour can be substituted for ‘all-purpose’ in all recipes, except bread.

• 1/4 cup white sugar
• 2 tsps (teaspoons) baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp mixed spice
• 1 beaten egg
• 1/4 tsp grated orange peel
• 3/4 cup orange juice
• 1/3 cup melted margarine
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts

Coarsely chop cranberries. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup sugar. Set aside.

In bowl stir together flour, 1/4 cup sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon & spice. Make a well in the centre.

Combine egg, orange peel, orange juice & melted butter. Add all at once to the flour mixture to moisten. Fold in cranberry mixture and nuts.

Fill greased muffin tins and bake at 375º F for 15-20 minutes or until golden.

Did I just not-bodge something?

I have lived a long time and in all that time I have been, as far as I could tell, a bit of a bodger.

My father was a bodger too, sadly. I think I inherited the gene. My father mended things with lumps of putty and wadges of duct tape. My father stood in the bath in his boots to descale the boiler. The bath – as my mother had, in hysterical whispers, predicted – filled up with sharp lumps of stuff which the big boots then ground in, ruining the surface of the bath. More hysterical whispers. My parents rowed in whispers, and occasional muffled sobs.

My father brought home some special rubberised white paint and painted the sandpaper surface of our bath. We did not have a shower in those days and so had all had to put up with sandpapered sit-upons for some weeks by then. The special rubberised white paint began to blister and peel the first time it came into contact with hot water. We are a family of tinkerers and destroyers. Powerless to resist we all separately and secretly picked and tinkered at that peeling paint until the bath was a mass of torn white strips. I don’t recall what happened to the bath in the end. Did they ever replace it?

My father cut down my mother’s favourite tree in the front garden, though she had begged him not to. He just couldn’t resist having a go at that tree once the urge to tinker and destroy struck him. I know that feeling. Must…just…ruin something.

Ex was scathing about the practical manly abilities of my father – and indeed of my grandfather, a carpenter with a tendency to produce stools with a slight wobble to them – criticisms which hurt my feelings all the more deeply for being factually correct. Ex was a clever, gifted and gentle man in many ways but there was a Wide Sargasso Sea of human interaction that he never managed to navigate – or even notice. You could summarise it something like this:

• Occasionally you can avoid stating the obvious.
• Sometimes, with difficulty, you can bite your tongue and pretend not to know something when in fact you know it very well.
• Once in a while you can allow people prove you wrong even when, if you really set your incisive, logical mind to it, you could easily prove them wrong.
• It is not lying to appear to be impressed by something that is neither clever or wonderful, purely for love of the person who just paid you the compliment of sharing it with you.

Where was this leading? Someone remind me…

Oh yes, not-bodging. Today I made my first patchwork quilt block on the sewing machine. I took care over it, mainly because I wanted to, and because am hoping to sell the ‘quilt’, or rather the quilt top as I have recently learned to call it, once completed. I ironed every seam. I unpicked one seam that had failed to come out exactly a quarter of an inch at one end. And do you know, examine it as I might I can’t actually find any evidence of bodging. One down, only seventy-seven more like that to go.

I thought I might enjoy designing my own quilt patterns but am still waiting for  squared paper to arrive. In the meantime, so as to strike while the iron is hot, I have embarked on a Christmas-themed sampler quilt – ie, working my way through all of the traditional American quilt blocks in my book using the three templates conveniently provided in an envelope at the back. They thought of everything!

Did I just mention the ‘C’ word in July? Sorry.

They have lovely names, but some of the block patterns are more compelling than others. I started with Anvil, which does look like an anvil but is pretty ugly. I guess it may look better when repeated over an entire quilt. Good to get that one out of the way first, I thought, so that’s what I did. And not-bodged it! Next block: Barbara Frietchie’s Star. I am wondering who Barbara Frietchie actually was (and what ‘Old Tippercanoe’ might signify). Answers on a postcard, please.

By the way, if you haven’t yet got round to reading Wide Sargasso Sea – a kind of ‘prequel’ to Jane Eyre from the point of view of Mr Rochester’s infamous Madwoman in the Attic – it’s good. Disturbing, but good.

Midsummer Snowfall

Why did this never happen to me?

Holding thickly-mittened hands with a young (enough to be my grandson) man in perfectly edible yellow jumper, perfectly accessorised with a scarf in avocado green, only slightly made up, hair only slightly enhanced by styling products…  And they’re at a skating rink and she’s got that sweet fair-isle jumper on and that kooky hat and ah, don’t they look nice together and it’s Christmas and all…

Except it isn’t. I’ve been stuck in front of the television set in the middle of a hot, sticky afternoon watching the second half of a film of some romantic novel called Winter by Rosamunde Pilcher. Furthermore, to land on Winter, with all its Christmas frippery, I had to bypass a session on Christmas Crafts on the crafts channel. What’s going on? It’s not even July.

And why did I get stuck in front of the TV on a June afternoon? Wasn’t I half way through planning a story (sheets of green file-paper are scattered on the floor around my computer even now); the cats were due to be fed; four games of WordsWithFriends waiting for me to make my next electronic move. I had worthier things to do.

Could it have been the snow? It looked so real, so crisp, so glistening… Was it the country house with the long, gravel driveway lined with snow-loaded fir-trees and snow-capped stone statuary? Could it have been the romance? Not a lot of romance in my life – maybe I’m starting to yearn for it in my second adolescence – a kind of balancing out? Could it have been the soft-focus… everything? Could it have been the acting?

No, it definitely wasn’t the acting. Despite the fact that the film contained at least four famous actors that I recognised from other things – in which they had been able to act – in Winter they seemed to have switched off normal acting in favour of prolonged, soft-focus, emotionally-charged, silent staring at one another. The stared at one other over grand pianos; on the snow-laden steps of the that country house; over expensive pairs of white skates; reflected in huge ormolu mirrors in London flats with lilies in the foreground; in the stable over chestnut horses; in the drawing room over the half-restored paintings… You could tell they were thinking deep and moving thoughts. But about what?

There are several schools of acting – the Shakespearian kind where everything is  enunciated at you, and charged with great import – the Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellen school, as it were. There’s the Australian soaps style where everything is either gasped or screeched at you and goes way, way up at the end of every line. And then there’s the John Wayne/Hugh Grant strategy – look and sound exactly the same whether playing a cowboy, an Irish leprechaun, a deep-sea diver or a restrained but lovelorn eighteenth century gentleman. Oh, be a trifle bandier (having just got off the horse) when being a cowboy, possibly, and allow the fringe to foppishly flop a bit (having ridden post-haste from Bath) for the eighteenth century. This was the soft-focus-looking-somewhat-wistful school.

So why didn’t I just turn it off? Well, I suppose I’m having a slightly bad day. Some days you just seem to need a too-small, saggy sofa and a romantic film. You need to dine on yoghurt, hacked-off lumps of cheese and cream crackers, and drop a lot of crumbs on the carpet. You need to shed a tear when the patriarch lies prostrate at the bottom of the slippery stone steps in his wine-coloured smoking-jacket – like a rheumaticky, white-haired snow-angel. “I always did like the snow,” he remarks with a faint but rueful chuckle, before expiring.

One of the things reviewers keep pointing out about Jean Lucey Pratt, whose diaries I reviewed in a recent post, was that she “read widely, but not well”.  And it’s true – the many, many novels she mentions in her diaries are all also-runs: long-forgotten stories written by long-forgotten novelists of the forties and fifties. I think this is a bit unfair. Better to read widely than not at all. And as a writer you can learn just as much, probably more, from a bad book as from a good one. And she enjoyed what she read. What’s wrong with that? Maybe I need to defy my inner critic and read a Rosamunde Pilcher. Then I might then understand what was happening in the film.

I just checked out the works of Rosamunde Pilcher online. Apparently Winter is only one of a suite of soft-focus romances called the Four Seasons. So there is a Spring, a Summer and an Autumn featuring the same characters. Fortunately, the others have been shown already. Winter (in June) must have been the last one. Or unfortunately.

Sigh!

I mean, she does this all the time – slightly pensive, slightly sideways, anticipatory, innocent and yet… wondering…

A PAINTED CAT FOR CHRISTMAS

Christmas is turning out to be stinkier than anticipated. I had envisioned scented candles, pine needles – bath salts, maybe – but what I’ve got, in line with my usual quota of luck, is an un-neutered tomcat called Christmas.

My friends don’t know about Christmas yet – so this will be by way of post and email. But they won’t be surprised. They would probably be more surprised to get an email that didn’t mention yet another cat. We’re now up to fourteen. However, two of the residents are elderly – 18 and 20 – so we’ll be back to 12 within the next year or two.

Unless more turn up.

You know how you leave mince pies and a glass of sherry out for Santa Claus? Well, I’ve always left a bowl of cat food out for any moggie vagrants passing through my back garden en route for pastures new. Sometimes the hedgehog got to it first, but that was OK. But after the last one (Kitten, aged 20) I decided not to do it anymore, and not to look out of the kitchen window if I could help it. Every time I look out of my kitchen window there’s another disastrous pussycat just standing there – staring back at me. As if he’s been there for hours, just waiting, just in case I might look out and might be tempted to reach for the Felix.

And there he was – a grubby, black and greyish-brown (presumably he’ll get round to washing, eventually) tom. You can tell an adult tom even from a distance by their general hugeness and square faces.This one was further decorated with strings of those spikey burrs that attach themselves to passing animals, and giant gobbets of gloss paint. It looked as if someone had thrown the entire pot at him, catching him running away. His tail in particular was thick with the stuff. The paint was the colour of ‘seventies bathroom suites – also a ‘seventies Reliant Robin owned by a woman I worked with/for and disliked, but who insisted on giving me lifts. Her car was that colour. It also had a nail just inside the passenger-side door, which seemed to have been placed there specifically to tear a person’s coat as they clambered in. And it was always a clamber as far as I was concerned. I am not a small person (Dad was six foot four) and Reliant Robins are the smallest cars on Earth.

But I digress. See where a painted cat can lead you.

This morning he got to see the nurse, who shaved most of his tail and most of his back. As the clippers began to whirr and chunks of paint-clagged fur started to land on the consulting room floor, far from being offended Christmas became a different cat altogether – stopped all the hissing and growling and behaved – well, like a pussycat. Now he’s asleep on the windowsill behind my computer, one filthy foot pointed in my direction. He has his front paws folded over his chest as he sleeps. See, you got me now, he’s saying, in his sleep. Bald, but at peace with the world.

That’s because I haven’t told him about the neutering. Unfortunately, there are no spaces in the vet’s crowded surgery till January the 4^th. Such a long way off, and such an aromatic gentleman.

Luckily, no visitors.

ARCHANGEL WANNABEES (Angels & Other Occurrences 6.1)

“What do you mean, can I drive?” he said. “Course I can drive. I got more motors than you can shake a… wand at. I collect cars, man. I got a Cadillac Escalade –with the tinted windows – a Jeep Wrangler, a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti… and that’s only for starters. And don’t get me started on the motorbikes.”

“I won’t,” said the Angel. “By the way, we don’t do wands – that’s wizards, my man. Our thing’s wings. As you see, I myself am sporting Archangel Wannabees with the peacock-feather insets. I sure be bling-blinging it tonight!” He spun around in order that the footballer could fully appreciate him in all his glory. “And all for your sake, my man. In the hope you’ll agree to my little plan.”

“Nice!” said the footballer, genuinely impressed by the Wannabees. He recognised quality when he saw it. “But what was it you were saying you wanted me to do?”

“Drive an ice-cream van from here in Edinburgh to a muddy field Norfolk, please.”

“I would. Anything to oblige. But here’s the thing – I gotta give an after dinner speech in this hotel in ten minutes or so. It’s a charity dinner. Her Indoors talked me into it and you gotta keep on the right side, know what I mean?  People are paying to hear me saying loadsa stuff about – you know – football. I only came out for some fresh air – get my courage up. To be honest it’s not my thing, this public speaking. It’s the voice, you see.”

“I hear the voice, my man. Little on the high side. Somewhat at the squeaky…”

“Yes, OK, OK. I know. I ought to, after all I was born with it. On the pitch it’s not a problem…”

“On the pitch, my man, you is master of all you survey. I’ve watched your games with awe!”

“You watch TV in heaven?”

“Set not required, man. Just look down – see everyfing. You’d like it. Now, you is the greatest British footballer ever, Mr B.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. And there’s the voice. It doesn’t exactly match…”

“… your sun-tanned splendiferousness? Your footballing fantasticality?”

“Well, I wouldn’t… I mean, there was Georgie Best and…”

“You a modest man, Mr B, for all the bling-bling-bling. But – back to ice cream project.”

“But I mean, why? What’s so special about this van, man?” He glanced across at where the angel appeared to have abandoned the giant white-and-strawberry vehicle, on the double yellows, half on and half off of the pavement, next to a damaged parking meter.

“I’d keep an eye out for traffic-wardens. I’ve heard the Scottish ones are like Rottweilers.”

“No sweat – it’s invisible.”

“It isn’t. I can see it.”

“That’s cos I wanted you to see it, man. Ain’t you worked this thing out yet? Thing is, you gotta come to Norfolk. My boss – his pappa has need of it. His name’s Sepp. Short for Giuseppe. His old van’s toast at the mo. Kaput. In a field. In Norfolk, somewhere.”

“Somewhere? You mean you don’t know? Then how am I supposed to find it?”

“GPS, man. State of the art. This baby’s top of the line – got everything. Couldn’t get lost if you wanted. Besides, I’m hitching a ride with you.”

“Not flying?”

“Flying? You joke with me, bro! Think I’m gonna stress out a pair of Archangel Wannabees with the peacock-feather insets flapping four hundred miles to Norfolk on a night like this? Case you hadn’t noticed, man, it’s snowing!

  *

The professor had been sitting like this for a long time, staring at the flickering screen in front of him. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, simply couldn’t believe it. The Theory of Everything.

After all these years. All these years of fighting against an illness that was supposed to have killed him within two but had crippled him instead. Living inside his head, tirelessly, obsessively searching for this very thing, a Theory of Everything.

How many times had he stared at a miasma of numbers and symbols that made sense only to him and a very few others. How many times, late at night like this, had he willed just this to come forth. The Theory of Everything.

Outside, the snow was falling faster. He could hardly turn his head but could just make it out from the corner of his eye, white flakes in the orange lamplight. He wondered what it would be like, to cast aside this massive, electronic beast of a chair; just for once to be able to walk out into the street, look up at the starry sky, feel snowflakes landing on his face.

It didn’t do to think like that. He returned his attention to the screen, and as he watched the numbers began to resolve themselves into – what? What was that thing with wings? And what was that music? Too much coffee, he thought. Nervous exhaustion, perhaps. Overdone it. These past few weeks he had pushed himself to his limit, working ridiculously long hours in his darkened study.

What am I going to do now, he wondered, a flat mood suddenly replacing the rush of euphoria. What am I to do with the rest of my life now I’ve solved this, the greatest of all the problems? Maybe there won’t even be a ‘rest’. I’ve survived to the age of seventy-three when by rights I should have died two years after diagnosis; and what has kept me alive all this time apart from… apart from this very thing? The search for the Theory of Everything.

“What is this music? What is this I’m seeing? Where are you taking me?”

“A journey, professor. We are going on a journey. Not far – Norfolk. It’s time to pay a visit to a mutual friend.”

The Lambfairy (Angels & Other Occurrences 5.2)

When he saw what stood there, he almost fainted. It was too much. He had hoped for a few more months at least of sanity – maybe increasingly forgetful sanity, but a little more time to spend with Jen and the boy. And now, suddenly, this thing that couldn’t possibly be there. This madness.

“Marcus,” he said, “I think you’d better take me home. It’s my head, it’s … oh Marcus it’s some sort of delusion. I can see a…

Marcus took his arm, but didn’t take his eyes off the open doorway.

“…a lamb, but with wings?” he asked.

“You can see it too?” Could brain tumours be hereditary? Oh no, not Marcus. For the first time in years he found himself praying. Please God, not Marcus too. Not my boy. Please God…

“Yes, Dad, I can see it. It looks like… a Lambfairy.”

The lamb laughed.

Lambs don’t laugh, he thought.

“Lambfairy will do well enough.”

Lambs don’t speak, either.

“Did you… hear that, Marcus? Did it…”

“Speak? Yes it spoke. Um, maybe we ought to say something back?”

What do you say to a lamb with a halo round it and little fluttery wings?

“Hello, Mr Lambfairy,” said Marcus. “How may we be of assistance?” He had heard this phrase in a TV drama recently. It sounded odd – overly formal – but it seemed to mean what he meant.

The Lambfairy laughed again.

Lambs don’t laugh.

“Hello, Mr Marcus. And how are you this fine winter’s night?”

It knows his name. It knows my son’s name.

“I’m OK, Mr Lambfairy.”

“You can be of assistance, actually,” said the Lambfairy. “I just need you both to follow me down the valley – it’s not far – you can see the encampment from here – and I will light the way. I would like you to visit a baby, a new little friend of mine.”

“But that’s the gypsy camp. They’ve been there for weeks. Is it a gypsy’s baby?”

“No, in fact. Well, in a technical sense I suppose He is everyone’s baby.  He is the Son of God. Worth a visit, wouldn’t you say?”

That took a moment or two to sink in. Then, seeing his poor Dad was rooted to the spot with his mouth half-open, unable to take in any more of this fantastic stuff, Marcus took charge.

“Definitely worth a visit, Mr Lambfairy. But why us? Dad’s just a sheep farmer and I’m just a… a boy. We were just watching the sheep because the security cameras… I mean, Dad…”

“Dad cut the wire to the security cameras,” supplied the Lambfairy, becoming slightly impatient now. “Yes, I saw him. Marcus, I am asking you because you are a good boy, and your father because he is a good man. You care for your flock, you care for each other and you care for your mother, Jen. This is a special night and you are special people.”

“Your father is sick. He’s in pain and I feel it. This night I shall give him back his strength.” And at that the lamb rose in the air on its gossamer wings and something – might have been snow, might have been fairy-dust, gold-dust, rainbow confetti or some kind of mirage – but something started to flutter around the older man. And there was all this singing, suddenly, like a whopping great choir in the sky.

“I feel better,” the man confirmed when the singing stopped.

“You are better,” said the Lambfairy.

“But I’ve…”

“No longer.”

It was hard to take in. The man’s mind, circling in confusion, lighted on a relative triviality. “But what about gifts? We can’t go and visit the baby without gifts.”

“Look in your pockets, gentlemen.”

The man felt around in the pocket of his greatcoat and to his surprise brought out a silk headscarf in a paper bag. It was sky blue, with a band of gold and green flowers for a border. He’d spotted it on a market stall this morning and had decided to buy it for Jen. She was a great one for blue, and flowers.

“But I didn’t buy it!” he exclaimed. “I meant to buy it but something distracted me… can’t remember what it was… and I forgot. I meant to. I could have kicked myself when I got home.”

“I know. I saw your intention and I saw your disappointment.”

“So I could give this to your little friend? This would be enough?”

“He will love it. He’s a great one for blue and flowers too, you know.”

Marcus rummaged in his own coat pocket and found, to his surprise, his school craft project – a little chain carved from a single block of wood. He had been working on it for weeks with the help of his woodwork teacher. He’d hoped to finish it for his father, to cheer him up. But only yesterday there had been an accident and he’d ruined the whole project. Somehow or other the chisel had slipped and taken a very obvious chunk out of one of the links. Marcus had thrown it down on the bench in disgust, breaking another link in the process. He’d have to start again from scratch.

Yet the chain he drew out of his pocket was the same chain – any carver can recognise his own work – but as he had wanted it to be. No break. Completed.

Marcus turned it over and over in his hands, lovingly exploring the curves and edges of his handiwork. “This?” he asked.

“Your gift,” confirmed the Lambfairy. “Right, gentlemen. Follow me.”

They were half way down the lane when the man’s phone rang. It was Jen, with an edge of anxiety in her voice.

“I was wondering when you were going to call it a quits, sweetheart? Dawn will be breaking soon and I’m sure any foxes are asleep in their beds by now. I… I’ve been worrying about you. What with…”

“I’ll be home soon, Jen. I’m just having to follow the Lambfairy. It isn’t far.”

“Lamb… fairy? Darling, is Marcus there? Would you pass the phone over to him, just for a minute? I’d just like a word.” This is it, she was thinking. This is the end stage, but come so suddenly. This is what we’ve both been dreading. And he’s out on the hill in the dark, without me.

“It’s OK, Mum,” Marcus whispered. “Dad’s OK – in fact he’s better than OK. There really is a Lambfairy, you see. I’ll explain – well, I’ll try to explain – when we get home.”

“What? Marcus? Marcus, are you there?”

But Marcus had gone. He was following his father and the Lambfairy down the lane, staying within the orbit of its guiding light, skirting round mud and puddles. And now he could see it, the trailer on the far side with the light coming from it, and the animals all around.

(Luke 2: 8 – 15)

THE LAMBFAIRY (Angels & Other Occurrences 5.1)

There would come a day, he knew, when he could no longer remember what it was – the thing he needed to tell Marcus. Marcus knew about the headaches he’d been having recently, but not about that devastating diagnosis – inoperable. He and Jen had decided amongst themselves to protect the boy from the truth for as long as possible.

Heavy duty pain-killers had done a lot to ease the headaches, but already he had noticed himself forgetting or not being able to do certain things. Not people’s names and not the names of his entire flock of Cotswold sheep, which he still had by heart. No, it was silly things like where he’d put the honey jar. Jen had found it in the fridge. She’d pretended she’d done it, making some weak joke about forgetting her own head if it wasn’t screwed on, but he knew it had been him, and she knew he knew. There were lots of little lies – kind, sad little lies – between them now.

He had always done the wages for his workmen himself but this last quarter he’d found himself in a terrible pickle with it, and it really got to him. Jen had found him in tears – a shocking event in itself – and they had agreed that now would be the right time to hand over the farm accounts to Jim Parry, their neighbours’ excellent accountant. They had been thinking of doing just that for some time, was their mutual pretence. ‘Save you the bother,’ Jen said. ‘Free you up to do other, more enjoyable stuff.’

But they wouldn’t tell Marcus. Not yet. Let the boy have this lovely, white Norfolk winter – the last of his childhood; tell him in the spring, maybe. ‘See how it goes,’ said Jen.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘let’s just see how it goes.’

It was funny how, as his short-term memory faded he seemed to be remembering more and more of the past. He was thinking only this morning to the times when he and his father would go shepherding together – real, old-fashioned shepherding out on the hills at night in all weathers. No need for all that nowadays: they had security cameras. The farm had prospered over the past twenty years and they had been able to upgrade in all sorts of ways. They even had a gadget called (oh please, let me remember) a photoelectric cell. If a fox, dog or any other animal broke the invisible beam from this cell, his mobile started ringing. My mobile, he thought, bewildered. A fox enters a field two miles down the road and my phone rings…

Nowadays he puzzled endlessly over things – small things he would just have accepted before. He needed to sort out in his head why things were, why things worked the way they did… These things, they brought him to a stop sometimes. He wanted to get on but found himself motionless, wondering.

From the age of eleven had gone onto the hills at night with his father, and that was when they really got to know one another – not as father and son but as men. That was what he had thought, watching over the sheep, dark shadows dotted over dark fields. I am a man now. There were things his father had told him during those long, sleepless nights that he had not known before. There were things he told his father.

It wasn’t that difficult to disable the security cameras. Just a snip to a single wire. The switch in the barn remained in the “on” position but the screens went blank. He returned to the house doing a good job, or so he thought, of grumbling about unreliable electrics and demanding that Jen to phone the electrician first thing in the morning.

“Marcus,” he said, turning to the boy,“how d’you fancy a rather chilly night out? Old Reynard’s been round a lot recently and I can’t risk him getting his teeth into my… our flock, especially now, with so many ewes in lamb. Of course, if you’re tired I could go by myself but the company would be…”

“I’ll come, Dad. No school in the morning, remember? No biggie.”

No biggie, he thought, no biggie. What on earth was that supposed to mean? Yes, presumably.

*

As they huddled together by the primus stove in the tumbledown looker’s hut he said, “In the old days, you know, there was a custom: a shepherd would always be buried with a Lock of Wool clasped in his right hand so that as soon as he arrived at the Pearly Gates the angels, seeing the Lock of Wool, would let him in. They’d know a shepherd couldn’t get to church of a Sunday.”

“I never heard you tell that story before,” said Marcus. “Do you know any others?”

“Probably,” he said, but he couldn’t think of any. Had he ever known any others, or had they vanished. The thing in his head was voracious, he thought; feeding on memories. “If another story pops into my head at any time I’ll tell it, how’s that?”

“Yeah,” said Marcus. “Good plan. ‘Cos you’re always so busy. It’s nice just to sit and talk sometimes.”

“There was something I wanted to ask you, Marcus” he said. “Something… in the way of… a favour”. Now it had come to it, he wondered if he was going to be able to spit the thing out at all.

“I know, Dad. That’s why you sabotaged the security cameras; so we could do the man-to-man chat thing?”

“How did you know that?”

“You dropped your scarf.”

“Ah… oh, yes. Guilty as charged, Your Honour. But… that favour.”

“I know that too, Dad. The Lock of Wool. You want me to…” His voice sounded odd all of a sudden. “You want me to do that for you when – I mean if  you…. And I will. I’d like to be the one.”

“Marcus, there’s something else,” he said on impulse. “Something your mother and I were planning to tell you, but not until…”

“Dad. I overheard you talking in the kitchen the other night. I know already. Gosh, I’m a bit of a know-all tonight aren’t I?”

And that was all they would say on the subject that night because right at that moment somebody – or something – knocked what little was left of the looker’s hut door.

SNOW AND A SUPERMOON (Angels & Other Occurrences 4.3)

Siobbhán looked back at the ice cream van with something like contempt. ‘You got all the way from London in that? My God, girl, you need to get yourself a proper gypsy trailer, and a nice, strong four by four to tow it with. Move those dresses off the bed, would you, Rawnie?’

The gypsies had at first mistaken them for the police, come to move them on, but the van had saved the day by treating everyone several rounds of its Popeye the Sailor-Man jingle before giving up altogether. This broke the tension. The large, scary-looking ‘menfolk’ turned back to their music, breaking open fresh cans of beer with tattooed fingers – they were having an impromptu party to celebrate the great moon’s visit – and a group of women and girls, summing up Marie’s situation at a glance – shepherded the young couple to a particularly large trailer on the edge of their encampment.

‘We save this one for birthings,’ Siobbhán explained.

‘And for storing our party dresses,’ piped up her sixteen year old daughter Rawnie.

Marie was dazzled by an array of sequins, satin, net and general bling. Neon pink seemed to be the overwhelming favourite, with electric blue and arctic white as runners-up. Rawnie lifted six or seven of these creations off the bed and hung them one by one, on a dress rail. ‘Thousands and thousands of pounds, these cost,’ she boasted. Marie could believe it and was impressed, in spite of the contractions, which were coming more frequently now.

Sepp, in the meantime, was speechless, overwhelmed by glitter and pink and … femaleness. Everywhere he looked was unfamiliar territory. And then everyone suddenly turned to look at him.

‘You must go,’ said Siobbhán, ‘Go join the men.’

‘But I promised my wife I’d be present at the…’

‘That’s the gorgja way, I know, but it’s not ours. We will fetch you after – very soon after.’

‘It’s OK, Sepp,’ said Marie. ‘I know how squeamish you are. I knew you were only being brave when you offered. Go and join the men by the fire. Talk about man-things.’ Man-things? thought Sepp. What man-things do I have in common with a band of huge, tattooed Irish gypsies? But he went, stumbling across rough ground in snow and darkness, and they made room for him in their circle. Someone put part of a tree branch on the fire and someone opened a can of beer and passed it along to him. The man sitting next to him slapped him on the back and grinned. ‘Young man, you’ve no idea what you’ve let yourself in for, and that’s a fact!’ And everybody laughed. Someone picked up the fiddle again, and someone else started singing in a language Sepp had never heard. It was comforting to hear. Something about it reminded him of Ma and Pa in the kitchen, talking Italian together, renewing their ties to each other and the land they had left behind many years before.

And so it was that baby Gesù was born, surprisingly quickly and not at all as planned, in a gypsy trailer somewhere in Norfolk, or possibly Suffolk, whilst outside snow fell and fell, blanketing East Anglia, fiddle music and beer-fuelled laughter echoed around an empty field and a rare supermoon shone in through the trailer window, silvering the faces of the women within.

Except the field wasn’t empty. Later that night, Sepp and Marie lay side by side on the narrow bed, their baby between them in a striped cardboard box that a very expensive gypsy dress had come out of, wrapped in pillow case and covered in a folded shawl. And unseen and unknown to them creatures began to gather around the trailer – a couple of sheep and a fox, a badger, a rabbit and a mouse, an owl on the roof, maybe even a rat or two. Creatures that would normally have hunted or avoided one another waited in the snow, basking in the strange warmth that seemed to be radiating from the trailer, at peace with one another for a night.

And inside the trailer, under the bed, also unknown, a lurcher suckled four new puppies and spiders crept from who knows where, to keep their own vigil.

Marie was sleeping, exhausted.

‘That moon is so bright,’ murmured Sepp, nine parts asleep himself, as a faint, ghostly light shone up from the padded dress box and its occupant, Gésu, his firstborn son.

(Luke 2: 1-7)

Angels & Other Occurrences is a kind of ‘alternative nativity’ short story sequence. To read other stories in the same sequence just click on Angels & Other Occurrences in the Category Cloud to your right.

NOW ON KINDLE: Angels & Other Occurrences

I thought I’d forgotten how to do it, but no. It’s been so long, but – guess what? I published another e-book.

The Angels & Other Occurrences sequence is already scheduled to appear in La Tour Abolie at the rate of one new story a day – and probably won’t all have appeared by the time you read this. So, if you’re desperate to read the whole thing in one go right now, or just fancy a copy of the whole shebang tucked away on your Kindle for that somnolent after-sprouts/far too many chocolates hour on Christmas Day afternoon, now’s your chance.

Pssst: heads up to La Tour Abolie readers:

It’s FREE to download for five days, starting Sunday 6th December.

If you do decide to download and can find time to post a review on Amazon – thank you so much. Reviews can make quite a difference – though I fear there’s little prospect of that sunshine holiday in the Bahamas even if I sell one or two between the end of the five free days and the disappearance of Christmas.

But one of these days! I’ve got the straw hat and the sunglasses, all ready…

Update: 13th December

The free download period has now ended, unfortunately. But I’ve put Angels & Other Occurrences back on at $0.99 (or equivalent sum in other countries) which is the lowest Kindle Direct allows.

 

 

 

SNOW AND A SUPERMOON (Angels & Other Occurrences 4.2)

So the idea had been to escape the Great Flood of London by taking Marie to stay with cousin Beth and her husband Zak up in Yorkshire. There Marie could have the baby in peace, safe in the knowledge that Beth had only six months earlier given birth to her own son John. It had seemed like a good idea at the time – and to be fair, there hadn’t been a lot of time for planning. It had been a question of grab the transport and go. If only the transport hadn’t happened to be Beppo’s ancient ice-cream van with the dodgy electrics. If only they weren’t now lost in a narrow lane somewhere in Norfolk, with dusk falling and snow threatening. They were never going to make it.

Sepp looked at his watch. Four-thirty, and the darkest month of the year. His thoughts strayed to London. He’d tried to get a signal on his mobile phone a minute or two back – no joy. Whatever was going to happen in London – the barrier being breached, his and Marie’s extended family and all their friends – all still there, though moving to higher ground – it must be happening right now. If only he could get online… but no, he must concentrate on Marie and the baby. He had been watching her out of the corner of his eye. He had a horrible feeling her pains had started, but she wasn’t saying.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes, just… a touch of indigestion… probably. But maybe we should try to find shelter for the night. We were never going to make it to Yorkshire, were we?’

‘With the benefit of hindsight, no, my angel.’

She laughed. ‘You can still make me laugh. That’s why I love you, Sepp.’

‘You mean that’s the only reason?’

‘That’s just one of them. But let’s get a move on before this old van conks out altogether. You look out the driver’s side and I’ll look out of this side, and we’ll stop at the first house we come to with a light in the window. Agreed?’

‘Agreed. Thank goodness for this moon – so big and bright. At least we’ll have moonlight on our side. And now that snow’s beginning to lay, we’ll have… snow-light as well.’

‘It’s a supermoon. I saw it on the News before we came away. It’s when the moon comes really close to the earth. Every fourteenth full moon or so there will be one… oooooow!’

‘Marie, you’re a mine of information, but that’s not indigestion!’

‘No, I’m afraid… I’m afraid…’

‘Next house with a light on.’

But there were no houses. The lane seemed to be going on and on for ever, twisting and turning, taking lengthy diversions round fields – or what might be fields if you could see them. The high hedges obscured their view. If anything the lane seemed to be getting narrower. It was obviously rarely used since a line of grass was growing in the middle of it, in the places where the tarmac had broken.

‘I hope to God we don’t meet anything coming the other way. I don’t fancy reversing this thing back to the last passing-place.’

‘Have we actually passed…. Ooooooow … a passing-place?’

‘I can’t remember. Oh come on, there must be a house somewhere down here. Plenty of sheep, plenty of donkeys, but where are all the human beings?’

‘It’s not London, you know. It’s just… sparsely populated.’

‘This isn’t sparse – it’s deserted. There is nobody!’

‘Look, this side – a gateway.’

She was right, there was a gate –one of those metal farm things with bars, held together with a loop of thick, frayed rope.

Beyond the gate was a track, and almost into the woods at the bottom of the track, lights.

‘Could it be a farm?’

‘I don’t know. Those lights – they’re all dotted about, not like normal windows. It looks odd. Maybe it’s those – what do they call them on the Fens? Will o’ the Wisps.’

‘I don’t think Will o’ the Wisps would be that square, Zepp. And they’d be jiggling about, wouldn’t they? Aren’t fireflies supposed to dance? Anyway, I can hear music.’

‘Creepy, heebie-jeebie-type music?’

No, Irish-type music. Fiddles, accordians and stuff. Owwwwww!

‘Good enough for me,’ said Sepp, jumping out to open the gate.

‘Fiddles it’s going to have to be.’

SNOW AND A SUPERMOON (Angels & Other Occurrences 4.1)

‘We’re lost, aren’t we? Why don’t you just admit it?’

Sepp sighed. ‘OK, I admit it, we’re lost.’

‘Here’s me about to give birth any day now and here we are together, alone, in an ice-cream van, in the middle of winter, somewhere in Norfolk or possibly Suffolk, and night’s coming on. Typical man, too proud to stop and ask directions…’

‘Well, who would you have me ask? I mean, there’s the sheep in the field over there. I do believe we might have passed a donkey or two half an hour back. Would you like me to reverse all the way back up this lane, because it sure enough isn’t wide enough for a three-point turn.’

Sepp glanced across at Marie, twisting uncomfortably in the high passenger seat of a vehicle never designed for pregnant ladies. She was close to tears, he realised.

He reached across and took her hand.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. I forgot about the hormones. Of course you’re worried, and I admit I’m worried too. I’m desperate to get you and… junior there… to a safe place. I’m sorry I got us lost. You know me – East End boy – find my way around the East End, no problem, but East Anglia’s a whole different ball game.’ He was trying to inject some humour into the situation. Trying to reassure her that he was still capable of looking after her. Except he wasn’t sure himself.

‘We’ll be OK,’ he said. ‘Whatever happens – and even if we are lost – you’ve got me. And the baby’s got us.’

They had been forced to leave the city in a hurry, four hours ago. Beppo had lent him the ice cream van. ‘I’m only thinking of myself, Giuseppe. If you’re going to come into the business with me once all this flooding business is over, we’re gonna need the van. Selling ice creams from a bicycle – not so good.’ This was the first Sepp had heard of joining Beppo in his business ventures. Ice cream was only one string to Beppo’s bow – there was the hot-dog stand, the baked potato franchise, the… he sometimes found it difficult to keep track of it all. Beppo was a business wizard, a real East End boy, on his way up. Sepp understood that Beppo was making him a very generous offer, in a roundabout sort of way. He gave his cousin a hug. Once the present danger was over, it might be a life-saver. A week ago he had been laid off from his job as a joiner on a building site. ‘I don’t want to let you go, Sepp,’ the boss had said, ‘but the housing market’s going seriously downhill at the moment. Just can’t afford to keep you on.’

He had not told Marie about this. She had enough to cope with at the moment, without getting all steamed up about how they were going to cope financially. Now he wouldn’t need to tell her. Beppo had saved the day.

But right at the moment he had to focus on finding them somewhere to stay the night. They were obviously not going to make it up to Beth and Zak in Yorkshire before nightfall, and the baby might come any time now. If only the Thames Barrier hadn’t decided to fail right now. Why couldn’t it have waited for a few days, till after the baby? The barrier was supposed to protect Londoners against flood tides and now… Now the weather people were announcing a tidal wave on it’s way towards the capital. The barrier, they said, whilst it might delay serious flooding for a while, was not going to be adequate this time. It was an unprecedented high tide. Those in lower-lying districts should evacuate to higher ground. If possible Londoners should evacuate the city altogether. At this point the News programme cut to a map, panning slowly over it. Sepp looked, but he didn’t need to. Their ground floor Council flat was just a few short streets away from the river. You couldn’t get more low-lying.

‘The young, the old, the sick and the vulnerable should go to stay with relatives in other parts of the country,’ the news-reader said. ‘Government advice: set out now. Evacuate now if you have the option to do so.’

Within minutes a text arrived from Zak:

Sepp come to us bring Marie. Beth so worried. Throw few things together get moving. Spare room ready. Come now.

The van was far from ideal. It had been sitting on Beppo’s driveway since the autumn and the battery had gone flat. Beppo had jump-started it and, hopefully, it had recharged itself by now. Hopefully. It wasn’t too reliable at the best of times. Something wrong with the electrics. Sepp just hoped the van wouldn’t start treating them (and any bystanders) to impromptu performances of its ‘Popeye the Sailor Man’ jingle, as it tended to do when its ‘electrics’ were on the blink.

FLYING WITH GABRIEL (Angels & Other Occurences 2)

Marie pulled up the collar of her coat, then fished a thick scarf out of her bag and wrapped it round the outside. March was not particularly warm in London, even at midday when the sun was doing its inadequate best to dissolve the last traces of snow. Marie loved snow, but not when it got this old and weary-looking, spangled with city grime. Unfortunately she would have to take off her mittens to eat her sandwiches. What was it today – she unfolded her mother’s crinkly baking foil – cheese and cucumber. She was chilly and hungry, but more importantly she was happy. Out of the office, if only for an hour; away from that word-processor and the piles of files. This was her quiet time – no longer Marie David, a secretary working for an international aid organisation – just Marie, alone in the Little Park, with her angel.

She came here every lunchtime, unless it rained. On rainy days she went to the library café and read a paperback over a cup of ill-made tea. They didn’t seem to mind her bringing her own sandwiches. But she liked the park better. It was only a small one, by London standards, and not exactly secluded. You walked up one of two shallow runs of steps and into a circular space of formal flower beds. Sometimes the Council gardeners would be at work, planting and discarding, their truck parked up on the pavement for pedestrians to squeeze past. Pansies were favourite, and geraniums. At the moment it was daffodils and crocuses. The daffodils were more advanced, the crocuses only just beginning to show white and purple heads through sharp green leaves. And in the centre was her angel.

Technically the angel was a war memorial. Beneath its stone feet were listed citizens of that part of the city who had died in the First World War. Marie sometimes wondered whether they would recognise it, those citizens, if they were permitted a brief return. All these high-rise offices, the gleaming plate-glass windows. The angel seemed small and lost, beneath them, not exactly neglected but left in peace. Pigeons perched on his shoulders, leaving strings of white behind. Lichen grew in the folds of his stone robes and moss about the base, for most of the day this place, overshadowed by skyscrapers, was cool and damp. Marie liked the angel. She always tried to sit facing him so that she could look into his face, though sometimes that bench was taken. In a way, they conversed.

Maybe others had been put off by the chill in the air, because today he and she were alone in the little park. She breathed deeply, separating in her mind the smell of new grass and young flowers from car exhaust fumes, separating the silence between them from the chaos going on outside. She felt suddenly very happy: and the angel came to life. It was not as if he moved, exactly, but as if he began to give off warmth. He was shimmering. So many colours! She gasped.

Marie, he said, you must not be afraid.

Who are you? she asked, in her head, although she knew.

You know me. You know me well, for I have been here all along. Some call me Gabriel, but I have many other names. Sometimes I have no name. I bring special news for you, Marie; you are blessed – favoured of God. He has seen into your soul, and He has chosen you.

Chosen me? She was afraid now. What could God want her to do? What could she possibly do that a God might want?

God has given you a baby son. Your boy will be great, he will be wonderful. He will become a king, of a kind you cannot imagine. He will reign forever and his kingdom will have no end.

There must be some mistake, she whispered. You see, I am… Sepp and I were waiting… We’ve been together since school. We love each other, but we were saving for a deposit on a flat, waiting till we could marry. I know it’s old-fashioned, but…

Gabriel, Sepp won’t understand if I have a baby. He’ll think, he’s bound to think… Marie thought about her mother and father, who trusted her. She thought about her sisters, her brother, her aunts and her friends. She thought about Sepp and his vast, affectionate Italian immigrant clan. They would all think…

How could this have happened? she asked. For she knew it must be the truth. Something inside her had been transformed as the angel came to life. She could already sense that tiny speck, the child inside her.

God is not bound by human realities. He has given you this child, both to cherish and to mourn. I can tell you that Beth has also conceived, and is now in her sixth month. A boy, also.

Beth? Marie remembered her distant cousin Beth, up north in Yorkshire. Beth with the cheerful smile and the tired eyes, married to ex-hippie Zak. The two branches of the family had drifted gently apart. She hadn’t seen either of them for years.

But Beth is so old… I mean, I thought they hadn’t been able to… Marie didn’t understand any of it.

Poor child, said Gabriel, and she felt his infinite compassion. He stretched out his hand to her. Fly with me now, he said. Be at peace. All shall be well.

And so it was that they flew, out over the city. They flew through the cold Spring air, tracing the winding course of the Thames and circling the grey suburbs. Together they looked down on palaces, lakes and other, greater parks. Marie felt this great city and indeed the whole world as Gabriel felt it, not as a maze of unknown streets and strangers but as a whole, a beating heart.

*

Giuseppe, she said, using the name she had first known him by, I can only tell you the truth. But it’s a truth you will not believe and Sepp, I am so afraid to lose you.

THE BIRD OF LIGHT (Angels & Other Occurrences 1)

At the midway point in the ancient spiral staircase, looking down into the little courtyard with the fountain, Martina paused. She liked to keep an eye on her staff, but discreetly. What was he up to now? Zak appeared to be enraptured – staring into space. For goodness sake, she thought, how difficult can it be to go in with a plastic bucket and a little shovel and remove a year’s worth of coins from a fountain, skim off a few floating leaves? Not exactly rocket science, even at his age. At once she felt guilty. Fifty-eight wasn’t that old, and what she had just thought was ageist. Fierce, when necessary, Martina did at least try to be fair to her staff, and honest with herself.

The main gates should have opened five minutes ago. Gatehouse had radioed up – punters queueing nine deep outside. Pushchairs, kiddies and cameras all over the place. It was the end of September and the start of the castle’s Autumn Flower Festival. Sunny it might be, with that low, intense sun of autumn, but it was none too warm to be standing about outside. The castle looked fantastic at this time of year – red, orange and gold leaves carpeting the lawns and lakes outside; and in every room that was open to the public, one and sometimes several huge, dramatic displays of autumn flowers and foliage supplied by all the top groups in the county. People looked forward all year to this Festival; they wanted in – and in was where she needed them to be. The castle had lost money last season – combination of a dismal British summer and the failure of the static balloon as an attraction. Unfortunately, that had been her idea. Balloons went down a storm back home in the States but for some reason people here didn’t seem to want to pay £25 for a ticket, to be tethered at treetop height, not flying anywhere. It had been a blunder, and she was desperate to make up for it. No one, as the Foundation had obliquely pointed out, was indispensable.

They were waiting for Zak, just Zak. What on earth was he staring at, sat on the edge of the fountain, bucket and shovel in hand? Oh come on Zak, she thought, don’t make me come down there and tell you off. I don’t have time.

Zak was looking at the Bird of Light. There was always light in the central courtyard. It was a strange place for that. When the sun was shining it reflected randomly off the leaded glass panes of the surrounding windows. Sometimes the light dazzled him (his eyes were not too good, nowadays). Sometimes the windows looked blind, like they’d grown cataracts. Cataracts of light. It had been, for him, a place of worship, yet what he was worshipping he could not have said. But suddenly, today, there was the Bird.

He had turned his back, to begin on the coins and leaves, but somehow he knew it was there. He knew something was there. Just afraid to turn round. Terribly afraid. It was watching him. Even with his back turned he could see… unusual light. Light cascading off the walls, bouncing off the cobbles. Light shining on the fountain, light crashing into other light. He couldn’t explain it. It wasn’t natural.

Turn, Zak.

It was a soft voice, but he hadn’t turned.

I am here, Zak. I have something to say to you.

He kept trying to shovel up the coins. Delusions? After all these years? How long have I been sober? Will it never let me go?

It’s good news, Zak. Please turn.

It was the ‘please’ that did it. He turned. And saw the Bird. At least that’s what it looked like. What it might have been. Except it was so tall. Could birds be tall. White wings, but they gave off light. It must be…

It’s about Beth.

And now it was replaying in his mind, the night he met Beth. It was if the Bird itself was controlling his memories.

They had met in the Station Hotel. He’d been drunk, as usual. He was rehearsing his last order. Time for another one, Joe? He was rehearsing his walk across the room to the bar which, by this time of night, felt like being on a fairground ride. So many chairs. And the chairs seemed to tilt and move. So easy to trip and then… there wouldn’t be another one. Joe would tell him he’d had enough. Joe would call him a taxi and pay for it himself. Joe was a good bloke.

But this night, there was this girl. He didn’t remember her coming in but there she was, perched on a bar stool, chatting to Joe as if they were old friends. Yet she’d never been here before, he was sure of it. She had long hair. Fair. Real fair, not dyed, that almost-mouse colour. She had dropped her carpet-bag at her feet. It was battered, that bag. She had been places.

And there was that picture again, the one he had seen before. He had seen her in some African market, or somewhere like Zanzibar. She was ahead, then she turned and smiled. Such a beautiful smile, and for him. And at her wrist there were bangles of all colours. They glittered in the sun, and the sky behind her head was so very blue, like no sky he had ever seen before. The Bird brought this back to him.

And then something strange had happened. Her train pulled in and he watched her get up to leave and he was thinking, that’s it then, she’s going, but she didn’t go, or least not at once, no, she stopped and came over to him, and she stood in front of him, looking into his eyes, and she said, My name is Beth. Come with me.

And then she was gone, and he couldn’t believe it had happened. He must be imagining. And then… Zak was up and staggering full pelt towards the door, chairs scattering in all directions as the room rocked and swerved around him. He was running across the gravel, he was heading for the platform. The whistle blew, train doors were slamming. He had to make it to that train; he had to catch her…

He had something to say to her. Good news. Such wonderful news.

She was fifteen years younger than him, but after that she never left his side. They had travelled the world for a while, then did what others do. They found a house and married, and tried for children. But the children hadn’t come.

They’d had all the tests. He’d assumed it was him, being so much older, but it wasn’t. There was something wrong with her. She’d had operations, and tablets, and tests. Nothing worked. Beth hardly ever mentioned it nowadays, but he knew it still hurt. Yes, he had wanted children by her, but she… It was something different for women, a greater grief.

It’s about Beth. Good news.

When he emerged from the courtyard he was dumb. The Bird had punished him for his disbelief. How am I to know? Zak had asked. What proof can you give me? I am getting old and Beth – she’s getting on. Forty-one next birthday. How can this happen?

His name will be John, said the bird. His name will be John. He will touch no drink. He will give you both great joy. He will be filled with light – this light. He has come to prepare the way.

The way for what? Zak was trying to say. Only no sound come out.

*

Today of all days, thought Martina, as she followed Zak in the ambulance. She guessed it must have been a stroke – something in the brain department – yet he was walking OK – in fact there was a  spring in his step. But, she thought, people don’t just suddenly forget how to speak if they’ve got nothing wrong. Maybe something less scary, like laryngitis. But it wasn’t as if he’d had a sore throat, even – not that he’d mentioned. And the man seems so ridiculously, insanely happy. Positively joyous. What sort of lunatic would be happy on their way to hospital? Poor Zak, she thought, he’s got a wife and… now she thought about it she wasn’t sure. He had never mentioned a family. But definitely a wife.

Martina reached across and laid a hand on his arm, hoping to reassure. For all his faults, she had a soft spot for Zak. He was a sweet old guy. He smiled at her – the biggest and broadest of smiles. And there was this weird kind of shining-ness about him.

Shepherds sorted, Wise Men plotted

Done – my Shepherds story for my new Angels & Other Occurrences sequence, which I’m scheduling to start on  1^st December. The Shepherds should come in on the 7^th.

Also – in the bath – along with driving, my best place for plotting – I suddenly ‘received’ the plot for my version of the Three Wise Men. Typed it out quick, before it disappeared. I looked at this plot outline thinking – that’s bizarre. That’s really weird. Can I really write something that weird? Yes, I think. If anyone can write something weird it’s probably me, and it’ll take my mind off the endless merry-go-round of upsets and complications that seem to breed in my family around Christmas.

Sometimes it pays to procrastinate, I’ve found. If you resist the temptation to start writing at once, often – it’s that Synchronicity thing again – see previous post: Synchronicity in Writing – a tiny new bit of information comes along and it’s that tiny new bit of information that the whole plot ought to have hinged on. Then of course you have to rewrite the plot but that’s all part of the fun.

This morning I was watching Countryfile and Adam Whatsisname, the handsome red-headed farmer chappie, was doing a piece to camera. He was telling us that, sadly, his father had passed away a few weeks earlier and this had reminded him of the Lock of Wool superstition. Once upon a time, he said, a Shepherd would be buried with a Lock of Wool clasped in his right hand; when he arrived at the Pearly Gates the angels, seeing the Lock of Wool, would let him in. They would know that a shepherd couldn’t get to church of a Sunday. He said he had done this for his Dad.

I was thinking, what a lovely story, and then I thought – I see – now I see how my Shepherds post is going to work, and how the Lock of Wool will be central. I see the characters, I see how many of them there are, I know their characters and their tragedies and why they are out on that hillside; I see who or what it is who will tell them…

That’s the joy of writing – sudden inspirations. More of a battle when the time comes to get them down on paper!

Guilty Pleasures

So, what was I going to write about television? Can’t remember… Oh yes. It always comes back in the end. I was going to confess as to my strange and exotic tastes televisual tastes.

It’s just that… I hesitate to say it… even though I’m not a seventeen year old boy and don’t spend the whole day in the back bedroom of my parents’ house playing computer games… even though I’m female and… not-in-the-first-flush-of-youth, shall we say… yes, I will say it… I like watching sci-fi serials. Whew!  My friends don’t understand. We’re on the same wavelength about almost everything else, so can’t complain, but somehow Star Trek… they’re not even sure which one Star Trek is. How could a person live without Leonard Nimoy? My hero! Those gorgeous green ears! Those eyebrows!

Most of the ladies I know like soaps whereas I can’t abide them. I really can’t stand all that shouting and stupidity. How many times can someone get murdered and buried under the patio, then dug up and everyone’s surprised to find them? How many times can people be secretly having other people’s babies, caught shoplifting, thrown into jail and hammily sobbing over their plight, only to be released in a few months’ time? Why, I believe Tony Blair, Prime Minister at the time, even lent his Prime Ministerial support to a national campaign to ‘free the Weatherfield One’ i.e the interminably bleating Deirdre Barlow who had been incarcerated on a trumped-up charge. (Not wishing to speak ill of the actress herself, Anne Kirkbride, who died in January of this year.)

I will watch any sci-fi/fantasy serial/film I can find. Unfortunately I can’t afford to subscribe any of those new-fangled ‘packages’ from people like Sky. All I have is Freeview, but even that has quite a few channels on it. Being Freeview-limited does mean you have to rummage around the channels searching, searching, searching… till up pops yet another set of random repeats of Star Trek, Andromeda, Stargate Atlantis, Farscape, Heroes or The X-Files. They are often shown out of sequence – so you get part II before part I of a two-parter, or you never do get part II, or you suddenly find characters who were drained of their vital energy, zapped, phasered or incorporated into some mechanical hive-mind with tubes coming out of their ears, by Wraith, Daleks, Klingons, Borg or whatever two episodes back re-entering the plot, large as life, tube-free, and with no explanation or you find new characters suddenly there and you find yourself yelling ‘Who are you, for God’s sake?’ Although on second thoughts, maybe that’s part of the fun.

Also part of the fun are the logic holes and plot malfunctions. These do tend to leap out at people who write but somehow… it doesn’t matter. And the make-up. They can sometimes go too far with this, particularly the green stuff. There’s this race of seductive green women: they always wreak havoc among the menfolk. Apparently they give off some kind of pheromone that only Vulcans can resist. Vulcans can resist most things. Those women are just too green, and too thickly-green. I mean, they look sweaty. Pheromones or no, who in their right mind would want to entwine with one of those?

Then there are the films. Another item I can’t afford nowadays. The nearest cinema is, like, hundreds of miles away? (The interjected ‘like’ plus upward inflection is so catching, like, isn’t it?) However, stuff pops up on TV. The only trouble is, because of having no Radio Times and my own habit of random sitting down, tuning in and tuning out depending on whether I’m in the middle of writing something, I tend to miss the beginnings of films. But no matter, I watch the ending, then wait for the beginning, the middle, or whichever bit I didn’t catch. I must be the only person on earth who loved Waterworld. I watched Avatar in three non-sequential instalments (wonderful film, all those lovely blue creatures with tails… and the flying) and that one with Jenny Agutter, much younger and in an inadequate sea-green tabard and… whatisname, the blonde, Germanic-looking chap with a single expression throughout… Logan’s Run… I collected that in four or five instalments. The record must go to The Fifth Element, though. I can’t remember how many times I’ve watched random bits of that and I still keep discovering new bits. I just love Bruce Willis in that orange vest. Bruce Willis seems to have been created especially for the vest. And those costumes! Jean Paul Gautier.

And then there are other guilty pleasures. Did I ever tell my friends that I watch every single episode of Ice Road Truckers I can get my hands on? Possibly not, but I have now. Did I confess to The Big Bang Theory (I am Sheldon Cooper’s biggest fan) or that animation The Snowman (every Christmas) and its twin animation The Bear (every other Christmas)? Did I ever confess to watching every single romantic, cheesy American Christmas movie ever made, sometimes several times over? If one of those appears of an afternoon, no writing is likely to be done.

And while we’re about it, Love Actually. I have got to the stage with Love Actually where I know most of the lines by heart. I am actually genuinely bored with Love Actually but somehow I can’t not watch it. And I still stifle sobs in the bedroom with Emma Thompson, when she discovers that her beloved Alan Rickman has bought her a Joni Mitchell CD for Christmas but an expensive necklace for the tarty PA. That must be one of the best bits of acting ever. And yes, I still laugh at a shot-away Bill Nighy’s multiple attempts to record a Christmas cover-version of Love Is All Around Us. Don’t you?

In the kitchen at parties

I never did like parties. Parties don’t suit my miserable, self-conscious, unsociable personality – but sometimes you can’t get out of them. I’ve noticed they get less frequent and more dire in direct proportion to one’s age. I’ve also noticed that my very presence at a party seems to guarantee dismalness…dismality…dismalaciousness…

So, the last party I went to was New Year’s Eve 2014. It was at my new neighbour’s house. Her ex-husband was there and between them they had cooked, or maybe bought (difficult to tell once out of the cardboard box and displayed on a reindeer plate left over from Christmas) a mountain of vol-au-vents, little quichey things, sausages on sticks and whatever. She said come over at nine. That seemed quite a late start but at least it cut down the amount of hours I could possibly be expected to be there. As I stepped over the wonky little brick wall that divides her house from mine I rehearsed my escape story. My sister had mentioned phoning from Canada at midnight our time. I just had to be next to the phone in case she did. So difficult to get a line from places like Canada and the States on a public holiday. All the ex-pats calling home at once. Etc.

I left it till ten past nine. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? And I figured it would be packed in there by that time and there would be less conspicuity involved. I tend to like to edge in sideways, find a seat and slither into it, and never leave that seat again unless forced to do so for a bathroom visit, throughout which I worry that ‘my’ seat won’t be there when I get back and I might have to stand.

So I knocked on the door and there was no one there, except neighbour and ex-husband in a rather startling red-walled living room; she had obviously been redecorating in the current local style – feature walls – visual indigestion. I loathe red. And there we sat. The ex-husband was conscientious about small talk. I did my best. None of us mentioned the fact that… well, that was the elephant in the room. All that food. No one to eat it. Then one other neighbour arrived with his girlfriend. He isn’t very keen on me, I think. He talked about long-distance lorry-driving a lot, and the correct way of loading a long-distance lorry, and the correct way of fastening a tarpaulin to a long-distance lorry. And eventually I remembered my sister’s imminent call, collected my coat from the knob on the end of the bannister, and went home. I felt this would be exactly the night for drinking half, if not three quarters of a bottle of Blue Nun all alone whilst watching TV till 2 in the morning and falling asleep on the sofa, but of course I had no Blue Nun so I microwaved myself some milk and put a teaspoon of honey in it.

The one before that was the Christmas before the Christmas before that. That was a lively one. Oh yes. I didn’t escape from that till one a.m. It was at another neighbour’s – the one down the end next the giant field that they seem to plough all year round, even in the middle of the night with floodlights on the tractor, when not spraying it with dung or pesticide.

The house is eccentric, being full of every sort of light imaginable. Everything lights up and moves all at once – pictures (waterfalls, etc) , fairy lights, a multitude of lava-lamps, the blue winking Christmas tree in the window, put there specially to annoy the neighbours over the road (‘Her and her Illegal Scotsman’) who were loathed and never invited; an enormous flat-screen TV with the volume up to 92 or thereabouts, which somebody kept flicking at with the remote control. I never knew a television could have so many channels and so many menus to find those channels on, or that you could watch five or six channels at once, whilst smoking packet after packet of cigarettes, dancing with children, drinking, telling jokes, and experimenting with a home karaoke kit. Forgive me, Delilah, I just couldn’t take any moooooore…

Once again, I found my chair – or rather half a small sofa – and stuck to it. The springs were wrecked and I suspected my bottom might actually be on the floor. It felt like it. People kept coming and sitting next to me, which was nice, if stressful. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about as I’m slightly deaf. Normally I don’t notice it but in any loud environment all I can hear is multi-directional loudness. I am reduced to lip-reading. Although I have become quite good at this over the years, it’s difficult when people are talking about tragic events that happened in the neighbourhood long before you arrived. At twelve-fifty a.m. mine host started to tell me for the second time that evening the tale of the old lady who had once lived next to the Illegal Scotsman.

Old lady, she was, and we didn’t realise she had died. It was them little dogs, you see. When her son found her a week later she was scratched to ribbons – scratched to ribbons, she was. It were them little dogs. He thought she’d been murdered.

Just what you want to hear when you have a vivid imagination and live alone with a multitude of cats. And for the second time in one evening. I couldn’t bear it. My head was spinning, my eyes were watering with all the smoke and I was full of chocolate mini-rolls and mince-pies. I made my polite excuses. No one else was leaving. It all went a bit silent. But we’re only just getting going…

At one o’clock in the morning! Had I been expected to stay the night?

And then there were all those other parties, stretching back into my depressing, lonely past like the white plastic poppers of a necklace I had as a child. I wore it to the Methodist Sunday School party, which was in fact not too bad. The poppers got pulled apart and scattered all over the floor by some idiot boy when we were playing spin-the-collection-plate (oh yes, we Methodists knew how to party) but there were sandwiches, and jelly with dobs of ersatz cream; there were balloons, and crackers with mottoes in them and adult-sized purple paper hats that ended up resting on our shoulders, and little dangly ‘skellingtons’. And best of all we didn’t have to wash up. The grown-ups crammed themselves into the kitchen – a corrugated iron shed attached to the Sunday School room – to do that.

And then there was the one when we were supposed to go in fancy dress. That was soon after I got married. We made our own costumes, thinking that was what you did. I went as a tree because I happened to have some brown cloth and some green cloth. I think I had an apple or two attached. I can’t remember what my husband went as. Everyone else had hired proper costumes and stared at us. It was in an expensive cottage, half way down a steep hill. The sort where everything gleams.

And there were the ones where we suddenly realised dancing had changed since we were single, and that imperceptibly we had become a couple, and dull. And the earlier one where I met my husband – and I would only drink orange juice, which was rather acidic – and somebody was smoking pot, which worried me and I wondered if I ought to inform someone – and I was wearing this long flowery dress which somehow seemed now too long, and not thick enough. And my future husband (I already knew) danced, and that was both embarrassing and endearing because he looked like a scarecrow come to life, all angles and elbows and self-conscious jiggling about. And afterwards we had to stay the night, but there was only the living room so we spent the night together on folding camp beds of different heights, him with his long, long curly hair and his grey gypsy eyes and the trousers his mother had lengthened for him with strips of appalling curtain material, I in my long flowery dress which didn’t look right, securely tucked around my ankles. Horizontally but chastely we conversed – I from aloft and he from below – and played the same three Leonard Cohen singles over and over – and I supposed we must have slept because eventually light came streaming in through the kitchen window, and it was a new day.

EVENING SHIFT HALLOWEEN

Bye BYE, says Ciggie Annie, finishing her survey with the customary high-volume flourish and coughing fit.

Faint mocking echoes from around the call centre, everyone in their rabbit hutches-no-pods so you can’t see who’s doing it:

Bye BYE …

Bye BYE …

Bye BYE…

Somebody giggles.

Over my head hangs a giant spider in black sugar paper, with orange-and-silver eyes. I don’t mind spiders but every time I look up this one is getting lower. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble. There are artificial cobwebs sprayed silver. There’s a hand with black fingernails poking out from behind the flickering strip-light. A fire risk, no doubt.

Bye BYE…

BYE…

In the kitchen someone is on their ten-minute break and is microwaving a curry. It is a meaty one, I can tell.

In what type of…type of housing does your target customer live?

Duplex? Mobile Home? Military Housing? Apartment? Houseboat? Condo…condo…condo…minny-um, thank you. Single-family house?

Who lives with your target customer?

Parent? Grandparent? Child? Romantic partner? Romantic partner?

(They mean like spouse, or boyfriend)

Romantic partner? Grandparent? Nobody?

Giving Margaret the woolly bear was a mistake. I just meant it as a good luck gift for the radiotherapy but she got better afterwards, or for the time being better, and now she can’t throw it away. I just meant it for luck but it’s become a talisman to her, a kind of amulet. She daren’t lose it. Did the wrong thing there.

In what type of housing does your target customer live?

The one who looks like a witch, except it isn’t fancy dress. Never remember her name but she’s sat next to me tonight. She says she can see my aura. It’s purple, she says, and purple is a really, really excellent colour for an aura. It means… I can’t remember what it means. Since then I’ve been squinting sideways in between surveys trying to catch other people’s auras by surprise, which she says is the best thing to do. But I still can’t see them.

Duplex? Mobile Home? Military Housing? Apartment?

Apartment? Like flat? That you live in?

Apartment?

Why can’t I see other people’s auras? If only I could. You’d thing I’d be able to. At least mine’s purple. I expect that’s something royal, something highly advanced on the spiritual plane.

Oh, yoghurts again.

Which of the following qualities would you say you most appreciate in a store-bought yoghurt?

Tasty? Fruit pieces? Thicker texture?

We were told we could come in fancy dress but not many people have. One of the floor-walkers has a witches’ hat with streamers. Agency punk girl flounces past in a pink tutu and shredded black stockings. Spiders’ webs painted on her cheeks with eyeliner.

Thicker texture?

Which is most important to you when selecting a store-bought yoghurt?

All the men are looking. Still surveying, but looking. Are they actually suspenders?

Value for money? Attractive packaging?

Positive. Vivacious. BUBBLY. At all costs, bubbly.

The very old guy in the corner is sinking lower and lower, as if hoping eventually to merge with the fabric of the desk. He came back from the colonies expecting to be still employable as something high up in an office, like he used to be. He told me once what it was. Something responsible and administrative in connection with accounts. But he wasn’t. Employable. No one wanted him. He has a lovely voice for the phones though. Deep. Respondents like deep. Soothing. Trustworthy. They like the sound of older men but not older women. Particularly Ciggie Annie.

Bye BYE.

He has a much-younger wife from some middle-European country – Slavic or Baltic or something – and he loves her. Perhaps she was mail order. He’s desperate to earn money to  regain her respect, keep her stitched to him, and this is all he can get. Despair bows him lower and lower as the evening wears on. He’ll no doubt die here. Fall off his swivel chair. Or if he stays on his chair the Certified First Aiders will wheel him out, one on either side to keep him sat up. I’ve seen that happen.

Which of the following qualities would you say you most appreciate in your store-bought yoghurt?

That curry’s disgusting.

Why is Ginger Martin wearing a baby-gro with ears?

They’re called onesies. He’s come as a teddy-bear.

You know those pumpkin faces you light candles in – how do you actually make them?

You don’t know that either? Good God, woman, where have you been?

How do you tell someone – concisely – that no one ever carved a pumpkin for you, and you couldn’t have children so you never got to carve pumpkins for them? How do you tell them you’ve never so much as touched a pumpkin, or a child for that matter?

How do you tell them that on your birthday party, which consisted of the little fat girl from down the road since Mum didn’t like people coming in, your Dad arrived home from work and sat at the tea table, a giant in his green overalls, and ate all four of the chocolate swiss-rolls on the plate, and you found yourself throwing a tantrum because at least one of the chocolate swiss-rolls was meant to be for you and one for the little fat girl because it was after all your birthday party. And then Dad hit you round the ears and the little fat girl got sent home with a smug look on her face and there were no more birthday parties after that.

How do you tell them you spend every Christmas morning alone with your Mum, looking out at her sunny, overgrown garden and dead hydrangea heads? And that she might eat half the microwave meal you brought with you and microwaved for her in her microwave that’s all rusty and manky before jabbing her bony old finger at you and starting on the usual litany:

It’s All Your Fault, Whoever You Are.

I’m Going To Walk Out And Drown Myself Tomorrow.

You Might As Well Go Home Now I’m Sure I Don’t Want You.

How do you tell them you’ve never had fun, ever, not once in your life, and if fun were to happen to show signs of happening to you nowadays you’d be terrified?

I’m standing here naked, says the man.

Oh, I see, I say, thankful that I can’t.

Do you mind me answering your questions Naked, Young Lady?

Young Lady! I got a Young Lady!

No, I don’t mind. But would you like a chance to fetch your dressing gown?

No, I’m fine as I am. Naked. I like to be Naked sometimes. On the phone. He sighs, in a suspiciously shuddery way.

Well then, I say. Which of the following qualities would you say you most appreciate in your store-bought yoghurt? Tasty? Fruit pieces? Thicker texture?

Thicker texture, he says. Oh definitely. The thicker texture.

There is a wrenching of polystyrene panelling as part of the ceiling sags down into the room. Luckily it’s sagging over some other woman’s head not mine. Ginger Martin in his baby-gro-no-onesie, clatters out with a giant aluminium stepladder and teeters plumply at the top of it trying to push the panel back. It doesn’t want to go. The woman below him is a real pro, none of your temp trash, and goes on with her survey. I can just about hear she’s on Hair Care:

Which of the following products do you use at least once a week?

Volumizer? Curl activator?

What’s curl activator, I wonder.

Straightener? Sculpting wax?

Wax? In your hair!

Heat protector?

The polystyrene panelling still teeters over her head, as does Ginger Martin on his stepladder in his onesie. She’d have an interesting view if she looked up, but she doesn’t.

If you could choose only one hair care product other than shampoo, which would you choose?

Volumizer? Curl activator? Sculpting wax?

On my other side, Jonathan stands up, turns around and sits down. He does that that every now and again, and in between he’s rocking. There’s something a bit wrong with Jonathan. This job’s ideal for someone with something a bit wrong. Most of us fall into that category.

Do you have any paracetamol? he asks.

I give him two from my stash. I don’t use them myself, they don’t touch my headaches, worse than useless, but I bring a packet in because everybody kind of expects Old Biddies to have handbags-full of pain-killers, safety-pins and paper tissues.

Any indigestion tablets while you’re at it? He asks, standing up, turning round and sitting down again. He gets incredibly stressed, does Jonathan. I like him. We have something in common but I don’t know what. He can only ever sit facing the door, otherwise he falls into a panic and throws a hissy fit. I pass him a whole sheet of Rennies. It’s a big box.

Keep the rest for later.

He blows his nose, loud and squelchy, and throws the wet rag onto the growing heap in the back corner of his cubicle. He’s getting the cold that’s going round. He begins to rock in his chair. I saw a Gnu do that in the zoo, once.

In what type of (sniff!) housing does your target customer live?

Any minute, the paper spider’s going to get me.

That curry just doesn’t dissipate.