Lynn Farley-Rose's Blog, page 7

An Exceptional Treat

These days I spend a lot of time in my head, playing with ideas. I used to think naively that writing was about sitting down and making the words flow but actually the most time-consuming part is working out how to solve various problems—what angle to take, how to structure the story, what to include, and crucially if you are not to bore your reader, what to leave out. This is all wonderfully absorbing but the downside is that with so much mental stimulation it’s easy to neglect the physical world.

The first time I gave proper attention to this thought was about four years ago when I was in shreds at the end of my marriage. I had some sessions with a counsellor and during one of these she suggested I spend time focussing on the sensual side of life. And she was wise—moments of taking in the smell of the roses in the garden, the taste of a juicy nectarine, or the sound of birdsong in the park, brought brief relief. They provided some escape from the repetitive thoughts that went round and round in my head as I tried to make sense of what had happened and to adjust to it.

When my marriage finally shuddered to an end in court I tested out my new, raw state of independence by having a day alone in London. I did something to stimulate each sense as a symbol of being alive and ready to face a different path. At the National Portrait Gallery I lingered amongst entries to the annual portrait competition. Some made me smile, others were poignant. Such a mix of lives ranging from two elderly women having their hair done, to an impoverished waitress in a South African township cafe. They stared out at me and I escaped briefly into many different worlds.

Photo: Jeremy Thompson

Then I walked to Paul A Young’s Soho chocolate shop. He pushes the boundaries with extraordinary flavour combinations…sea salted caramel with cigar leaves…raspberry and rose vodka…ginger pig black pudding, sourdough and rye whiskey…goats cheese, rosemary and lemon… The assistant offered me a sample. It was quite simply the best truffle I had ever tasted; dark and velvety with a hint of salt. I groaned Harry and Sally style, and she backed away nervously. Later, I sniffed 1930s perfumes whilst discovering some inter-war social history in one of Odette Toilette’s engaging talks. A swim at Marshall Street’s art-deco baths came next and I tried to concentrate on the cool water rushing over my bare arms and legs. It was welcome on a sultry city day. And to round it all off, I sat in a pew at St Martin-in-the-Fields whilst a passionate, long-haired violinist bowed Vivaldi, and reflections of candlelight cascaded in the windows. It was a perfectly distracting, perfectly rounded day to mark the start of my new life. But grieving is not easily cast aside and the next day I was frustrated to find myself crying in despair at the supermarket checkout.

Photo: Tom Morris

There were reasons to be cheerful, though, and one in particular was a man I met for the first time under the clock at Waterloo. We’d been introduced via email by a thoughtful mutual friend and I was nervous at this first date in thirty years. I tried to stay cool and present myself as a woman of the world but within minutes I’d blown it. Instead of leading us confidently towards Waterloo Bridge and the lunch he’d booked, I led us confidently into a dustbin area round the back of the station.

Photo: Oxyman

Things progressed tentatively but positively and after a couple of birthdays together I gave him a present of a five senses day in London: a guided walk around Chelsea’s Arts and Crafts architecture; spectacular food at Borough Market; choosing a new aftershave at Jo Malone on Sloane Street (nutmeg and ginger); an indulgent afternoon at Ironmonger Row spa, and a balmy outdoor performance of Porgy and Bess in Regent’s Park.

The day was such a success that we had a return match for Christmas. This time with 1960s perfume in another of Odette Toilette’s social history talks—hippie patchouli, Kennedy, bachelor girls, and aspirational advertising. Then there was a giddy view of London from the top of the Shard, and later, cocktails at the Ice Bar. The walls are frozen and it’s so cold that they give you insulated cloaks to wear, and gloves to hold the chunks of ice that serve as glasses. We took in the sharp, hot, satisfying flavours of Peruvian food at Ceviche in Soho and then danced in Camden’s Jazz Café as Yolanda Brown played reggae-influenced jazz—a beautiful young woman in a short skirt, totally absorbed in playing her smoky saxophone. I knew my companion would enjoy that.

Photo: Richard Kaby

And now, several years later, I’m on holiday in Guernsey. Relaxing after a hectic few months and once again trying to make sure I notice at least some of what my senses feed me. There’s the crunch of the pale sands, the fruity sweetness of mango sorbet licked in the cone until my tongue is rough like a cat, the wide open island sunshine reflected from the water all around, the elusive scent of the hedgerow honeysuckle, and best of all—the feel of my new husband’s hand in mine.

 

Enough’s Enough

I’ve had to talk firmly to myself over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, there are plenty of momentous distractions in the UK right now so I’m not concentrating terribly hard on what I’ve got to say. But I must find a way to listen. It’s important.

My problem is that I’ve unwittingly hopped onto a treadmill. And now that I’ve realised my mistake I need to figure out how to get off—it’s exhausting and can only end in tears.

Since publishing my book, 31 Treats And A Marriage, it’s been gratifying to get positive feedback. Some people seem to have genuinely enjoyed it and I got a lovely write-up on the BBC Arts website.  At one point I was squeezed there between Benedict Cumberbatch and Kazuo Ishiguro—a pretty good place to be.

The trouble is that whilst that’s more than I could have hoped for, it’s a hungry beast to feed. The other day I spotted a good review on Amazon—the pleasure was momentary—then it was straight onto hoping for the next one. A book group told me that they were planning to read 31 Treats—and then there was another—it was all very pleasing but I couldn’t help wondering about the next one.

The drive to keep achieving more is one of the reasons we’re such a successful species. Monkeys don’t push themselves like this. But whilst it’s got plenty of benefits, it’s also a curse. Is the really successful person the one who ticks all the boxes and immediately creates a new set of goals? Or is it the one who finds every bit of success exciting and takes a lasting pleasure in each one for its own sake?

Shall I find a way to be happy that I’ve met one of my biggest ambitions by writing a book? Or shall I be dissatisfied because I’m never going to win the Pulitzer Prize? And even if I did win it, then the next wish would throw itself into the fray. I’d long for comparisons to Shakespeare—with him coming off worst, of course. A hedonistic treadmill, indeed.

And if I was to reach the absolute pinnacle of my ambitions? Where next?

I could slither down or jump off.

I did an interview recently with a young actor named Susan Wokoma and we talked about some of the problems of being creative. One, is that it’s hard to know when you’re a success. Out of a hundred people, ninety-five might like your work and five might hate it. But Susan has a calm confidence and talked about realising that her rewards don’t come from impressing people or showing off. What’s important is the intrinsic satisfaction of doing something that she loves.

My chat with her came at just the right time, when I was tussling with my treadmill. It made me realise that I, too, am doing something that I love. Sentences go round in my head all the time and elbow their way out—sometimes at the most inconvenient times. If I stopped writing then I wonder where these sentences would go. I imagine them rioting through the streets or worst of all, lying defeated and lifeless in the gutter before they’ve had the chance to draw breath. I couldn’t let that happen and so would have to write even if I had no audience whatsoever.

I’m working on my second book now and am becoming intimately acquainted with twelve great English cities. I’m finding out such a lot of interesting things. In Worcester I learned about secret industrial recipes; in Manchester I got to grips with some powerful political history, and far-flung Hull was saturated by the elements and its history of whaling and fishing. All of this was interlaced with the poetry of Philip Larkin. And most recently, in Leicester I set foot tentatively inside a huge white Hindu temple where I was welcomed and allowed to sit quietly and absorb the atmosphere. Every city has many sons of which it is proud, but I am focusing on just one daughter for each; twelve women who have challenged the prevailing constraints of their time. Who knows what might happen with all of this—and does it matter anyway? I need to step off the treadmill and just enjoy the process. After all, I’m busy saving those little sentences from an early demise in the gutter—I’m doing what I love.

 

One thing I’m particularly enjoying at the moment is the Chain Interview Project. I’m meeting fascinating people and mining all kinds of stories that I would never find otherwise. You can read the full interview with Susie Wokoma by clicking here. She told me about her work and what’s important to her. And it’s an exciting time for her: she’s just started filming a big TV series. Find out, too, about the next link in this chain. Susie has passed me on to someone who’s played a very important part in her life.

 

A Box of Memories

I’ve had my car for eleven years, and yesterday I sold it. It’s a silver Toyota Prius and started out pristine like the one above. Since then it’s collected quite a lot of bashes and dents. A bit like me.

Molly, my youngest daughter, was seven when I bought it, and this week we were sitting in the car, when I told her that we wouldn’t have it much longer. I was surprised at her reaction. ‘Is it going to a new family?’ she whispered, with concern. When I shook my head she lowered her voice further and said, ‘It’s not going for es see ar a pee, is it?’ I said that I wasn’t sure, but it might be, and she patted it kindly.

I’m not sentimentally attached. It’s a car and all I want it to do is to start when I put the key in, and to keep me and my loved ones safe. It’s never once let me down but a recent service showed that there are several expensive problems looming so I decided that the time had come to part company. It’s done many miles and I’ve bumped into a lot of obstacles so I knew that it wasn’t worth very much.  I made an appointment and drove it to a supermarket car park on the other side of town. There, I parked next to a PortaKabin and got out for the last time. On first sight the webuyanycar.com representative, Leo, seemed bluff and brisk but as I sat down he looked at me and asked gently if I was upset. ‘People often are,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s OK. It’s just a car.’

I produced the log book, my driving licence and a recent utility bill. Then I sat patiently whilst the IT system went down and Leo made lots of phone calls and sighed. I was grateful for a quiet few minutes with nothing much to do.

It’s always astonished me that I’ve managed to accrue such a huge mileage on this car. I’ve used it for work commuting and also for what must amount to thousands of school runs. Even so, 216,000 miles seems a lot and my local mechanic obviously thinks so too as he calls it ‘the space shuttle’.  But recently a knowledgeable friend told me that he knows of several cars that have done 400,000 miles and some that have done a million. There’s even one Volvo in the US, that’s driven more than three million miles.

I’ve enjoyed having a hybrid car. For one thing, the road tax has been zero and for some years it was exempt from London’s Congestion Charge. And a particular quirk is its quiet engine. There’s almost nothing to hear when you start the ignition. This can be dangerous for pedestrians and on one drive to school through Kentish country lanes, we came up behind a very elderly gentleman walking down the middle of the road with his dog. For several minutes I crept along at walking pace, with Molly and her friend squealing with delight. It seemed rude to hoot and I was worried about frightening him but eventually I had to do something, so pressed the horn as lightly as I could. He whipped round, threw himself into the hedge and we passed silently on our way.

I don’t mind driving a scruffy car. In fact it’s quite a stress reducer. Once you have a few scrapes then you can stop worrying about further damage. But I know that not everyone feels this way. I fell foul of this some years ago when I borrowed my then-husband’s precious Land Rover Discovery and used it to take some rubbish to the tip. As we arrived I was chatting to my youngest son and imagined that I was in my own normal-height car. However, I soon remembered that I wasn’t, when the high-sided Land Rover got wedged under the height barrier. It hung there unhappily and the roof looked as though it had been attacked with a large can-opener. Several staff appeared and walked around with pursed lips. ‘He’s not going to like that,’ said one. Then they helped me unhook it and I drove it home. I knew that ‘he’ wasn’t going to like it so I took a deep breath and tried to soften the blow. ‘I’ve got something to tell you’, I said. ‘I haven’t been having an affair, or beating the children or shoplifting or fiddling my tax, but I have had a little accident in your car’. I’d never seen him so furious. He could barely talk to me for days. Sometimes I wonder whether this marked the start of our terminal decline into divorce.My car has seen me through an exhausting succession of stages. Whilst I’ve had it, I’ve been married, separated, divorced and now engaged again. It’s taken me and my children on many trips up and down the country for university, holidays, and treats. It’s been there whilst I’ve laughed, chatted, listened to Radio 4, explored new music, sworn in frustration at the M25, and rubbed my sore feet at the end of many a long walk. For several years it was also there whilst I cried and raged in despair. And when Molly and I moved a hundred miles to start a new life, it carried us and our belongings.

Eventually, Leo stopped huffing and puffing and announced that the IT was now working. He took his clipboard and walked slowly round the car noting down three pages-worth of dents and scrapes. We did a bit of negotiating on the price and then he scanned my documents. It was very simple. Even though I profess to be unsentimental about objects, I found myself asking, ‘What will happen to her?’ ‘Someone from British Car Auctions will come and collect it,’ he said. I hardened my heart. It’s just a car.

But as I went out, I couldn’t help but lean over and give her a surreptitious little pat and a ‘thank you’ slipped out. It’s about the memories. We’ve been through a lot together. Now it’s time to move on.

Remains of the Hay

Last week I went shopping with my daughter, Emma, and as always she gave me something new to think about. She works in business development and has recently been exploring wearable technology. One particular growth area is lifelogging when people capture every aspect of their life by continuous video recording using a camera in their clothing, on their glasses or round their neck. One of the issues with lifelogging, though, must surely be in identifying what’s noteworthy in amongst the daily round of cleaning the loo, munching toast and snoring.

As it happens this week has had less loo cleaning than normal as I’ve been at the Hay Festival. It was my first visit and turned out to be a real treat. Hay-on-Wye is an astonishing small town just inside Wales with thirty second-hand bookshops and a population of about 1,500. The Festival of Literature & Arts was devised around a kitchen table in 1988 and was said to have been funded from the winnings of a game of poker. Today, it’s a world-class festival of ideas, with international offshoots; you can if you want go to Hay Festivals in Mexico, Spain, Peru, Ireland and Colombia. Bill Clinton spoke at the 2008 Festival and called it ‘Woodstock for the Mind.’

I often feel frustrated that most of life leaves such faint traces in my memory. It’s back to that old idea that if you don’t have reminders then there’s no proof that you were there. And this week there was much that I would like to have held onto. As usual, though, I was distracted by random thoughts that jostled in sideways, and so in the absence of lifelogging technology I shall have to rely on a disparate collection of the bits that did stick. With hundreds of events taking place over ten days, everyone there will come away with a different set of impressions. Here are some of mine.

I could have listened to Bridget Kendall, the BBC’s Diplomatic correspondent for hours. She was fascinating on the subject of Russia and described the occasions when she’s met Vladimir Putin. In 2001 he’d been president for just a year and she talked of meeting two Mr Putins. There was the public one, and the personal one who was less certain of himself. When asked who wore the trousers in his household he laughed and said it was his wife. Five years later, the Russian economy had grown and he was stronger and different. Now there was just one Mr Putin. The one with steely-blue eyes who tried to score points off the foreign journalists.

Then there was the philosopher AC Grayling, who spoke softly and intimately as if he was telling us a bedtime story. His account of the changes in thinking brought about by the Thirty Years War was illuminating but it was a small nugget about Newton that stuck with me. Everyone knows about gravity, the apple, and calculus, but I’d not known that he spent a great deal of time looking for hidden messages in the Bible. He believed that if he could only crack its numerological code then he would discover a blueprint for the universe.

AC Grayling: photo by Ian Scott

Joan Bakewell talked about what it’s like to grow old and it was very hard to believe that she is now 83. There was lots there of substance, politically and personally, but I liked what she said about her pastimes. All her life she has collected postcards from galleries around the world. She keeps them in shoeboxes and often these days she thinks to herself, ‘I’ll have an afternoon with my postcards.” She takes them out and looks at them closely. Each time she sees something new. She’s also patron of the National Piers Society and enthused about the contrast between the upperside which is all jollity and the underside which is sinister and eerie with its barnacles and detritus.

On Monday afternoon, Danny Dorling, an Oxford professor of social geography talked about analysing the three most recent censuses up to 2011. There was a huge amount of data there but I was struck by an unexpected trend. Everyone thinks that life expectancy in the UK is increasing but when you look closely then it’s not so straightforward. Immigrant populations are living longer overall and boosting the figures but there’s been a big increase in people dying in their late 70s or early 80s and these are mostly middle-class women. The life expectancy of this group seems to be falling, and Professor Dorling speculated about the role of austerity in this. Meals on Wheels have been abolished, and there have been significant cuts to rural bus timetables and healthcare services.

The comedian Susan Calman talked about her ‘crab of hate’ depression and managed to make it both moving and humorous. Earlier, I’d listened and watched as Benedict Cumberbatch, Maxine Peake, Olivia Colman and friends read out a diverse collection of letters and I’d also passed Germaine Greer in the street and recognised her indomitable voice before I saw her face. On Monday evening, the award-winning documentary maker, Norma Percy chatted about the making of her recent series, Inside Obama’s White House. She described Obama as ‘the coolest guy in the world’, and was granted an interview with him. Unfortunately she missed it as she got mown down by a bicycle whilst walking towards the taxi that was due to take her to Heathrow. In the ambulance the paramedics said conversationally to this unassuming grey-haired older lady, ‘And what were you planning to do today, love?’ Her reply that she was going to the White House to interview Obama only served to increase their concern about her level of brain injury.

Norma Percy: photo by Peabody Awards

But the highlight for me was a session on punctuation by the linguist and broadcaster, David Crystal. It might not sound the most gripping of subjects but in the hands of a master speaker it became fascinating, and the audience of 1,700 was rapt. He set out to write a book about the usage and history of punctuation marks in the English language and expected it to be about 150 pages. The rules are so complex and inconsistent, though, that it ended up at more than double that length. And no punctuation mark attracts more inconsistency than the apostrophe. You have only to look at London underground stations to get a taste of this. There’s King’s Cross, then Earls Court with Baron’s Court right next to it. Harrods and Claridges should by rights be Harrod’s and Claridge’s, and Waterstone’s recently transmogrified into Waterstones causing massive annoyance to pedants.

Later, I went to another excellent talk by David Crystal. This time it was about eloquence. He analysed some of the great speeches including Obama’s ‘Yes We Can’ victory address. And I learned that the concentration of listeners wanes briefly every five minutes or so. Perhaps my random jostling thoughts are quite normal after all. Wise speakers anticipate this pattern and give their audience regular breaks; they might pause for a sip of water, or just stay silent for a moment.

I was at the Festival from Sunday to Wednesday and it was a wrench to leave. Had I stayed till the end I might have seen Michael Palin, Simon Callow, Fay Weldon, KT Tunstall, Jeanette Winterson and any number of other less famous people with interesting things to say. What I have done, though, is to book accommodation for next year. Who knows—if I keep going then I might one day see Obama there. Like Norma Perry, I too, think he’s the coolest guy in the world.

 

 

Stage Post

Photo: Angela George

Last week I heard one of my favourite actors almost lose his composure. Tom Hanks was the castaway on Desert Island Discs and talked about the impact that theatre had on him as a teenager. By the age of thirteen, he’d already had a mother and two stepmothers, and had lived in ten houses in five cities. Life was unsettled but he started going alone to the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and there he discovered a new world. He saw ‘plays he never even knew existed,’ and when he talked of it giving him a ‘vocabulary for loneliness,‘ he was audibly moved. In these situations radio feels very intimate. As listeners, we heard him gulp and swallow and we waited as Kirsty Young gave him a moment to recover.

I could relate to that in my own way, as I, too, learned to love theatre as a teenager. Growing up in a sleepy Devon town where nothing happened I was hungry to move to London. Once there, I stretched my wings and explored what the city had to offer. Museums, galleries, cinemas, dance, and music were shiny, but for me, theatre was the jewel in London’s creative riches. I could breathe the same air as accomplished actors, famous or not, whilst knowing that the performance I’d seen was unique and ephemeral. It can’t always be good, but theatre was then, and still is, a favourite treat. A prospect to relish during a busy day, before you slide into your seat in the dark, and let it take you over.

Many plays are just confections but others have the potential to disrupt society and at times their performance has been tightly controlled. The Puritans under Oliver Cromwell banned staged plays because they feared civil unrest. Then after the Restoration, theatrical performances started up again, often in converted tennis courts. But they were quickly brought under control so that ‘the spoken word for gain’ could only be performed in a theatre that had been granted a royal patent. Initially there were just two; one in Drury Lane, the other in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and then gradually through the eighteenth century others were created. These were the Theatres Royal and several still continue today including the Theatre Royal, Haymarket and the Theatre Royal, Bath. Right up until 1843 it was illegal to perform a serious play unless it was in one of these theatres. Anything with music, however, could be freely performed and this helped to boost the popularity of opera, pantomime, music hall, and plays with musical interludes.

In 1809, a theatre itself was at the centre of unrest. The management of the licensed Covent Garden theatre, raised the prices and created boxes that could be rented. There was outrage amongst the theatre-going public and during a performance of Macbeth the audience began to riot. These riots continued for 67 nights. The theatre was filled with banners and it was difficult to hear what the actors were saying. At one point the management brought in a famous boxer and his associates in order to try to contain the mayhem but it just made things worse. These Old Price rioters, as they called themselves, ranged across the social groups and saw the price rise as a suppression of their liberty. Kemble the theatre manager was forced to lower the prices again and to issue an apology.

Today, theatre continues to explore new territory. I wrote in a previous post (A Postmodern Mystery) about the wondrous Punchdrunk with its immersive productions. Another intriguing company is You Me Bum Bum Train. I’m on their mailing list but the tickets are allocated by lottery and I haven’t yet been lucky.  Anyone who does get to go to one of their pop-up performances in an unusual London location, is sworn to secrecy. A Time Out reviewer said, ‘Part of the terror and joy of it is not knowing what might be on the other side of the many, very different doors…it’s also sort of a game and sort of like nothing else on earth.’ I’ll carry on applying.

London theatre is a big draw for tourists and some Australian friends had an odd experience a few years ago. They’d heard that Judi Dench was playing in ‘Peter and Alice’ at the Noel Coward Theatre and that a small number of returns tickets were available every evening. They joined the queue, only to get right to the front and be told that they’d missed their chance for that day. Suddenly, a man dashed out of the theatre in evening dress. He thrust two top-price tickets into their hands and said, ‘It’s your lucky night,’ as he dashed into the night. They thoroughly enjoyed their treat and spent the interval speculating about who their mysterious benefactor was, and why he’d not been able to use his tickets. Their favourite theory was that he was an eminent surgeon and had just been called away to do a life-saving operation.

I’ve been keen to share my love of theatre with my children. It’s clearly worked with my elder daughter, Emma, as one of her current treats is to see all of Shakespeare’s plays. So far she’s seen quite a few at the Globe Theatre, including a gory production of Titus Andronicus that caused over a hundred people to faint. But I misjudged the situation with Molly, my younger daughter and started too early. When she was seven, Emma and I decided to take her to see ‘Anything Goes’ in London. We told her that it was a special treat and that she’d love it. She agreed happily but this was probably because she adores clothes and it was a rare chance to wear her smart hand-me-down coat. To anyone seeing us on the train that evening she looked the perfect theatre-going, middle-class wunderkind. However, she didn’t want to play ball. The performance started and within ten minutes she’d decided that she didn’t like it. She sat with her back to the stage and spent the next few hours with her arms crossed and a stony expression. Later, on the train we laid her down on a seat and she went straight to sleep, snoring loudly. People peered across to see where the noise was coming from and instead of seeing the corpulent banker they presumably expected, there was just a very small girl in her best coat; tired out after a rebellious evening at the theatre.

And here’s a theatre-related bonus. I recently met the fourth link in my chain interview experiment. Holly Race Roughan is a young theatre director and is currently associate director on the National Theatre’s award-winning production of People, Places and Things. I learned what her work involves and she told me about the things that inspire her. We talked about her successes and also about a recent challenging experience. You can read the interview by clicking here.

System Overload

I like my neighbourhood very much but one of the disadvantages of living in a terrace is that it’s rarely possible to park outside our house. We often have to resort to the next street and sometimes this causes problems. Fortunately, our neighbours have dogs and regularly walk to and from the park. They’re impressively observant as several times they’ve spotted Mike or me wandering along vacantly trying to locate our cars, and have pointed us in the right direction.

This week, though, there have been many things to occupy my mind other than parking spaces. The most important of these is that Frank is in hospital. I’ve written before (in The Old Man and the Pea), about this rather wonderful 96-year old gentleman who last summer came to live with us. Five weeks ago he was admitted to hospital with stomach pains and then he got pneumonia. It’s very upsetting for him as he’s almost blind and matters are not improved by the fact that his hearing aid has disappeared. We think it got caught up in his bedding. His beloved talking watch has also gone. It probably went down the same laundry-oriented route. However, he does press the button every five minutes so we can’t discount the possibility that a fellow patient got fed up with the continual updates and disposed of it for him.  We’ve bought a replacement that he can use at home but for now, he is without it.

It’s hard seeing him in hospital as he is so disoriented. The other day I went in just as two nurses were changing him, and he looked so small lying there. I felt compelled to tell them that this frail, confused man once took an engineering maths exam and got the highest result in the whole of South Africa. My comment was no criticism of the staff, incidentally, as it’s been heartening to see the kindness and respect that they show to patients even when dealing with challenging behaviour.

We hope to get Frank home soon but his care needs have increased and we’ve had a number of conversations with the occupational therapy team about new equipment. He needs a pressure-relieving mattress, a special cushion for his chair, a frame to go round the toilet and an alarm to warn us if he gets up at night. There’s a lot to consider.

Something else to think about is our forthcoming move. This should be happening in about three months after the new house is  renovated. Currently it’s a building site. We’ve cleared the overstuffed loft, disposed of the old appliances, and had many, many trips to the tip and charity shop. Now we’re into the stage of constant questions from the builders. It’s exciting but there are so many decisions to make: kitchen units; bannister rails; door handles; sinks; windows, paint—my head feels full.

The other big thing that has preoccupied me this week is the birth of 31 Treats And A Marriage; my first book. It was published on Tuesday and is something I’ve been working towards for over four years. That morning my editor emailed and reminded me that I should post something on Facebook. But because of this ‘full head’ problem I couldn’t think what to say. I couldn’t even remember how to put up a post. Then after a bowl of porridge and a strong coffee, I got some perspective. An elderly gentleman, a house that’s a building site, and a book launch are a lot less demanding than previous bouts of juggling. The most challenging memories are those when I had four children at four different schools, a stressed-out commuting husband, an acre of out-of-control garden, and a pair of goats who spent every spare moment plotting their escape. These are all in the book together with plenty of things that made me laugh, and plenty more that didn’t.

Eventually I managed to post something. The day improved as the book crept up the ratings and by the evening it was number one in its category on Amazon. Suddenly it all seemed very real. Then Amazon went into its own kind of system overload. It uses a complicated algorithm to work out how much stock to keep and when demand exceeds this then it puts up a message that says ‘temporarily unavailable’. If you were thinking of ordering a copy then please don’t let this put you off. It should get resolved quite quickly anyway, but will undoubtedly be helped by people placing orders. Click here for the link.

 

That evening after all the palaver, Mike took me out to a New Forest pub to celebrate. It was old with atmospheric woody corners and the air was full of a fishy deliciousness. We had a happy few hours and managed for the most part to keep off the subject of juggling. But as we got back, the day’s concerns sidled in again. We drove past our house and into the next road looking for somewhere to park. ‘I must have a good look for my car, tomorrow,’ said Mike. ‘I don’t know where it is.’ We both stared blankly into the darkness ahead.

Then I had a moment of clarity. ‘I know where your car is,’ I said. ‘We’re in it.’

Thank you to everyone who has sent such supportive and kind messages about the book. I hope you enjoy it. And I hope, too, that the system overloads for me, Mike and Amazon are quickly resolved.

 

 

Murder, Blackmail and Other Stuff

“Mum,” said Henry the other day, giving me an odd look, “Is everything alright?” “Yes fine,” I said, briskly. “Why?” “It’s just that I was in the kitchen and happened to look at your list. It said, Clean bathroom—Hang out washing—Buy anti-snoring device—Get fence mended—Murder!”

By the latter part of this week, I’d done all of those things and had a new list: Take parcels to post office—Contact dentist—Ring Barbara—Buy vitamin tablets—Blackmail.

This week in amongst various other activities, I’ve completed Treat Number 41: watching Alfred Hitchcock’s films. A couple are lost but fifty-two have survived and I’ve now seen them all. There’s a wide range: from 1925 to 1976; silent to talkie; black and white to technicolour; horror to musical; British to American; outstanding to relatively forgettable, and Blackmail to Murder! The exclamation mark is Hitchcock’s not mine.

I watched most of these films on my own, often in moments when I should have been doing something else. They felt like stolen treasure. And as so often with treats, this one spread its wings beyond the original idea. I read Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Hitchcock, and went to the cinema to see the recent documentary about the Truffaut interviews. There’s the enjoyment, too, that comes from sharing the enthusiasm with friends. Alan, if you’re reading this, I look forward to continuing the conversation we started last year. I’m now better informed so will have more to say.

The highs and the lows? Those that made the least impact were Jamaica Inn, Secret Agent, The Paradine Case, Under Capricorn, Juno and the Paycock, and Family Plot. But there were plenty of pleasures amongst the rest. Favourites include The Lady Vanishes (the true star is a steam train which puffs its way through pre-Second World War Europe), The Wrong Man (based on the true story of a decent man who is wrongly convicted of armed robbery and is played impeccably by a dazed Henry Fonda), Shadow of a Doubt (a strong plot and possibly Hitchcock’s own favourite), The Manxman (a powerful silent film about a love triangle) and Sabotage (engaging scenes of pre-war London and a moment that leaves you reeling. Even Hitchcock wondered whether he’d gone too far). But it’s Vertigo that I love best. I went to see it at our local Picturehouse cinema recently and the images, music and plot haunted me for days afterwards.

One of the intriguing things about Hitchcock is that he didn’t always provide audiences with feel-good endings. Some of his films have shocking final scenes. Another is his use of suspense. Psycho and The Birds make audiences scream, but in many of his works the hooks are more subtle. In the silent film Easy Virtue, adapted from a Noel Coward play, there’s a scene where the audience knows that a man is phoning his girlfriend in order to propose. Hitchcock chose not to show these characters at this point, but instead filmed a telephonist who listens in on the phone call. Her expression reveals what’s happening and builds suspense while both she and the man wait for the girlfriend to make her mind up.

Like most creative geniuses, Hitchcock had some unusual habits. One of the oddest was that every day on set he would drink his tea and then throw the cup and saucer over his shoulder. He had complex attitudes towards his leading ladies and he almost certainly had crushes on a number of them including, famously, Tippi Hedren. But in spite of that he was devoted to his wife Alma Reville who was just one day younger than him. He trusted her judgement implicitly and she worked on many of his projects as a screenwriter and editor.  They got engaged after he proposed to her during a terrible storm at sea. She was prostrate with seasickness and told their daughter years later that ‘I was too sick to lift my head off the pillow. I groaned, nodded my head, and burped.’ They were married for fifty-three years and she was lost when he died, as he would have been had she gone first.

A number of themes crop up again and again in Hitchcock’s films: trains, dominant mothers, secret lives, likeable criminals, obsession, murder, and blonde women. He also loved dogs so if one of his characters owns a dog it’s a strong clue that they’re of sound character.

And just like Hitchcock, all writers have themes that preoccupy them. Hemingway’s include fear, guilt, betrayal and loss. For Hardy, it’s the damage caused by social constraints, and the role of chance in people’s lives. And JK Rowling’s writing centres around themes of mortality and morality.

Within the next fortnight, I shall become a published author too, so I’ve had a think about what my preoccupations might be. At the moment I’d say they are individual differences, coping and the unexpected twists and turns of life. Lists crop up a lot too. 31 Treats And A Marriage will be available through Amazon and other booksellers by the end of the first week in May. My previous post has a link to an audio recording of the prologue. If you’d like some more you can listen to Chapter One. Just click here. I do hope that you enjoy it.

 

The Politeness of Treats

Last week I reached the end of a long walk. The North Downs Way stretches 153 miles from commuter-belt Surrey to the English Channel and I’ve been walking it in stages for over four years. Put like that, I seem a slow walker. But a lot has happened along the way. I’ve not only walked from Farnham to Dover; I’ve walked into a new life.

It was one of the first treats that I started, chosen because it was the nearest of the UK’s fifteen National Trails. I love the mystery of a long walk; you never quite know what’s going to unfold beyond that bend in the distance.  There are plenty of other pleasures, too: the landscape changes constantly; you have to watch out for the direction markers so it’s a bit like a puzzle, and it’s a perfect opportunity to think. Much of the North Downs Way coincides with the ancient Pilgrims’ Way: the route from Winchester to Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral. And at times, in the ancient broadleaf woodlands I felt so far removed from modern life that it would have been no surprise to bump into a silent, brown-robed monk.

I shared some stages with family and friends. These were chatty and companionable. But other stages were solitary and helped me to think my way round some tangled issues. Wordsworth is well-known as a contemplative walker and is estimated to have walked about 180,000 miles. In The Art of Walking, Christopher Morley says that ‘cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy.’ The South West Coastal Footpath is also on my list and providing my knees hold out, I’m hoping for some stunning days of walking around the very edges of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. There’s much more to be said about walking, but this isn’t the point of today’s post, so I’ll save it for another day. Instead I want to think about the difference between treats and goals.

When I made my list, all the stages of the North Downs Way were quite accessible as day trips. But then I moved to another part of the country and it became more of a challenge. I managed some stages last summer, and eventually, there was just the final stretch left. The excuses of the winter came and went and then I got an image in my head of walking through fields with Henry, my younger son, and the English Channel coming into sight. He was happy to join me but finding a day we could both do was the first hurdle, and we postponed several times. When the agreed day finally came, we set off from home at 7.30am and with dire traffic it was midday before we were at the starting point. It was all quite an effort and I began to feel that I was doing it because it was on a list and needed to be ticked off.

But later as I sat high on the headland with my son, I had a moment of clarity. The Spring sunshine scattered diamonds on the water; the chalky cliffs of Dover were to our left and the transport hub of Folkestone bustled to our right. We ate sandwiches made from Henry’s homemade bread, drank lukewarm coffee, and chatted easily. I realised in that moment exactly what it is about a treat that makes it so different from a goal.

Goals are in your face. They’re the kind of guys that spout management jargon and make you feel bad about yourself because you’re never quite up to scratch; qualifications—deadlines—efficiency—success. Goals are necessary to some extent, but they’re voracious feeders. Tick one off to keep it quiet and there’s another one screaming at you. Treats are quite different. They hang back politely in the shadows and defer to the goals. They wait to be granted permission to step forward, and often get neglected. Sometimes they’re just the germ of an idea or desire but give them a chance and they’ll blossom. They’re the things that allow us to express our individuality and to grow into our real selves.

I’ve got many memories from my day of walking with Henry. There was the moment when we stood high on the cliffs above Folkestone and looked down as a train disappeared into the earth at the start of the Channel Tunnel.  It was strangely thrilling to think that it would emerge in a different country. Another moment was realising, when stuck in traffic, that I had my son’s company and so the time was not wasted. And when we arrived in Dover we needed to make our way back to the car. ‘When’s the next train to Folkestone?’ I asked the ticket clerk at the station. ‘September or October,’ she said. We hadn’t heard that the line got swept away in the Christmas storms. So we got a bus instead.

I’ve many impressions, too, of other stages of the walk. Dappled woodlands, quiet lanes, steep climbs, streams, lakes, brick viaducts, Neolithic burial chambers, sheep, bulls, thatched cottages, ugly developments, quarries, vineyards, fly tipping, primroses, bluebells, barns, chapels, the noise of the Medway Bridge traffic, cake, being elated, being sad…  On one of my walks I forgot to take any money. Solving that problem gave me confidence, as did walking alone. There were obvious pleasures and benefits but there were subtle, unexpected ones too. It was a multi-layered experience. And a true treat.

Photo: Del Malcolm

A final word – it’s now less than a month until the publication of 31 Treats And A Marriage. You can have a taster if you want—click here for an audio file of the prologue. I hope you enjoy it and that you like the music too. It was specially composed and performed by Henry.

 

 

About Time

I’ve written several times about Frank, the elderly gentleman who rather unexpectedly came to live with me last summer. And since I mentioned him in Christmas Chemistry he has passed another milestone and is now 96. With increasing age there’s no reduction in his enthusiasm for gin and tonic or chocolate biscuits but both his eyesight and hearing have continued to deteriorate. It’s no longer possible for him to see his clock even with a magnifying glass so we recently bought him a talking watch. He has a love-hate relationship with this well-meaning device. On good days it helps him to pace his way through the daylight hours and the long nights, but there are many occasions when he mishears what it says, and is surprised. His tendency to nod off at regular intervals adds to the disorientation, and his response to being told the time is always a polite but incredulous, ‘Good Heavens’.

We’ve probably all had the experience of coming out of a deep sleep and wondering where we are and what day it is. It happened to me recently when I was having a weekend away in Manchester and for a moment I felt quite panicky. Unlike Frank, though, I was able to reach for my watch and to look out of the window, and this put my position in time and space into perspective.

I’ve been doing research for my next book recently and one of the many things I’ve been thinking about is time. And I realise how I’ve always taken it for granted. Every March I’ve obediently put my clocks forward and then in October I’ve turned them back again. As though it were decreed by nature. But of course, it’s not and the path to our current consensus on time has been jagged.

When people worked on the land they had little need to organise their lives by the clock. They would rise with the sun and go to bed when it got dark. Time, if it was needed, was measured by a sundial in each town or village. But as soon as people started to work in factories and mills, things changed. Their lives were ruled by the clock. Being late for work could lead to dismissal and they weren’t allowed to go home until the hands on the clock proved that it was the end of the working day. This was not always predictable as many unscrupulous factory managers manipulated time for their own ends, turning the clock back to get more hours out of their exhausted workers.But the main change in time observation came with the railways. In the beginning there were different local times all over the country. In Norwich, local time was a couple of minutes ahead of London, and in Barrow it was thirteen minutes behind the capital. This hadn’t mattered much in the days of horse-drawn coaches as they travelled relatively slowly but trains carried people around at previously unimagined speeds and now these time differences caused confusion. People risked missing trains and appointments and with train drivers working to different times there was a danger of collisions.

From 1840 the situation began to improve as some railway companies started using ‘London Time’ which was determined by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. But it took about eight years before all the railway companies were setting their station clocks to this. Also, people were resistant to giving up their local time and so in many places the station clock would have two different minute hands, one displaying the standard time, and the other displaying the local time. Initially stationmasters used books of tables to work out the correct time for the station clock, but from 1852 the problem of standardisation was overcome.The electric telegraph was introduced and could quickly transmit the time from Greenwich to wherever it was needed. In 1880 the chaos was resolved once and for all when the Government passed an act that established a single time zone throughout the country.

Daylight saving is another innovation that has affected clocks and William Willett, a builder, is generally credited with promoting this idea in Great Britain. In 1907 he published a pamphlet putting forward his ideas. He argued that bringing the time forward in the Spring and Summer would improve people’s health by giving them more daylight for outdoor recreation, and stressed that the increased opportunities for rifle practice may come to benefit the nation. He also argued that the people of Great Britain could save £2,500,000 a year because they would spend less on electricity, gas, oil and candles. He acknowledged that the changes might cause confusion in our dealings with other countries but with unswerving imperial confidence was sure that when they realised the benefits, they would be quick to copy our example. With daylight saving, he enthused that a man (he didn’t mention women) will have gained two whole years of daylight by the age of fifty.

Willett aimed to gain eighty minutes of daylight and proposed moving the clocks forward by twenty minutes for four Sundays in succession in April each year. These changes would be reversed over four Sundays each September. He urged voters to send postcards to their MPs asking them to back this rather complicated scheme. It took until 1916 for a version of his idea to be adopted but sadly he didn’t live to see it. The system we use now when the clocks change by just one hour, and all in one hit, was introduced as a way of cutting domestic coal consumption leaving more available for the war effort.

As a child I could never remember which way the clocks went but when I was a teenager, an old lady named Phoebe used to say to me, ‘Spring forward, fall back, dear’. It’s a helpful reminder but there was one occasion when it didn’t work. Molly was about three weeks old and the whole household was in a fuddled state of post-baby chaos. Somehow we managed to put the clock forward instead of back and my then-husband set off dutifully for communion. Unfortunately he arrived two hours early and must have seemed very eager as he waited by the church door at 6am.

And now today as daylight saving begins, I know which way to put the clocks. That’s an improvement. However, there’s no improvement in the level of general mayhem in my household. Whatever time it is, the response is likely to be the same—a polite but incredulous, ‘Good Heavens’.

Occupational Hazards

Here in the UK, the news is dominated by whether we should leave the EU, and it’s likely to remain that way until the referendum takes place on June 23rd. Inevitably, we hear a great deal about immigration into Britain. But it’s also the case that there are many Britons who choose to live in other countries within the EU and it’s unclear what will happen to their residency rights if we decide to distance ourselves from Europe.

This problem is likely to affect my elder son, Will, who has lived happily outside the UK for over four years. Currently, he’s based in Riga, the capital of Latvia where he teaches, edits and writes about Eastern European culture, history and politics. The city has a rich heritage and is particularly noted for its Art Nouveau buildings. Before moving to Latvia, Will lived in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, another Baltic state.

Through this family connection I’ve learned a lot about the Baltic countries. But generally when I tell people where Will lives, the reaction is polite interest and a blank look. Emma, my elder daughter, found the same when she went to visit her brother in Estonia a couple of years ago. She’s a sensible kind of girl and before setting off she rang her bank to let them know she’d be using her card abroad for a few days. ‘I’m going away for the weekend,’ she said. ‘Lovely—’ said the customer service assistant. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘Estonia,’ replied Emma confidently.There was a long silence… ‘Which country is that in?’ asked the assistant. ‘It is a country,’ said Emma, patiently. Another silence—even longer this time. ‘We’re having trouble finding that,’ said the assistant. He was no doubt very proud to work for the bank that has ‘The World’s Local Bank’ as its tagline.

I managed a visit, too, a few months later with my younger daughter, Molly. And I was intrigued to find out how this small country has fared since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and it regained its independence. The Old Town is a World Heritage Site and that’s where we stayed amidst the cobbled streets and red-roofed buildings painted in pale shades of beige, green, blue and yellow. All of the Government buildings and embassies are at the top of a small hill and as we stood outside the Estonian parliament building, I couldn’t help but share Will’s enthusiasm. It is indeed impossible not to warm to a country whose political headquarters are based in a building resembling a pink and white birthday cake.

The Old Town is well-preserved and charming but from high above the roof-tops we could see the concrete bulk of the Soviet-era tower blocks. And wherever you go in Tallinn there is no escaping reminders of its brutal history. There’s a museum dedicated to the history of the KGB and Molly suggested innocently that as I’m a careers adviser I might be interested in the Museum of Occupations. The truth, however, is nothing cheerful like the ins and outs of what an ergonomist does, or how an orthotist is different from an orthoptist. Estonia’s history is dark and it has been invaded and occupied so many times that a whole museum is devoted to these traumatic events. Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and the Russian Tsars have all claimed Estonia at different times and even the name of its capital city translates as ‘Danish town’. A brief, glorious period began in 1920 when it gained its independence and the economy grew strong. Then in 1939 the Soviets crossed the border and it all went wrong again.

This first year of Soviet occupation was called the Year of Suffering and in one night, ten thousand Estonians were deported to Siberia. One third were children. In 1945 the Russians took formal control, dragging the small country into the Soviet Union. An astonishing number of young men and women took to the woods and lived in underground hideouts. There were about ten thousand in Estonia and more in Latvia and Lithuania. They called themselves the Forest Brothers and their mission was to ambush Russians and fight for freedom. They believed that the West would rescue their country from its plight, but this never happened and the last of the Forest Brothers was captured in 1978. During this period about 70,000 Estonians tried to escape to the West. Many travelled in fishing boats and were drowned. It was another century and another conflict but it’s an all too familiar story of people risking everything for a safer and better life.

Refugees crossing the Mediterranean – January 2016. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov/Unframe

And this leads into the third link in my chain interview project where each interviewee passes me on to someone that they think is interesting. It’s a surefire way to some fascinating conversations and I’m loving learning about things outside my normal range of experience. This time I talk to Mala Savjani, a young immigration and human rights lawyer. She tells the sobering story of what inspired her to get into this field and describes what it’s like inside a detention centre. You can read our interview by clicking here.