My Dad's a Communist

Taxing Thoughts

2012-01-28T18:25:00.002Z

I paid my tax today. Because I'm self-employed, I have to pay it in two chunks generally: one before the end of January and another chunk at the end of July. This is based on what Mr Taxman thinks I will owe, based on what he thinks I will earn.

It's really not predictable, so what tends to happen is that one year I pay too much and the next year I get a refund. This, sadly, is a payment year.

I work for up to ten different employers. Some of them deduct tax on Pay As You Earn: some don't and pay me the gross amount, leaving it to me to pay the tax owing.

I don't actually enjoy handing the money over, of course - who would? - but I do believe in paying taxes to finance education, the National Health Service, the police, the arts - - and all kinds of other things.

I think, for example, that public transport should be subsidised, and everyone encouraged to use it where possible. I don't like passengers on trains described as "customers" - I think they should be "travellers". There's a subtle difference. Trains should be a public service, not a commercial venture.

It does not, however, please me to learn that millions of taxpayers' money is wasted on inefficiency in all kinds of areas. I'm still thinking of the trains here - - but that is not, of course, the only area in which it happens. And it annoys me when people use the blanket term "inefficiency" to mask huge cuts in services.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if we could choose how our taxes are spent. The government could provide us with a list of areas where the money might be used. They could make a list of a hundred or so things we might spend it on, and we could choose, say, ten of them.

Now there are some disadvantages to this that I can foresee - - very rich people spending it all on subsidies to people who have more than three cars and a house with more than ten bedrooms - - but I'm sure it could be evened out so this didn't happen. Even the choice of things to spend it on could be decided on a one-man-one-vote basis.

If I'm ever in power, I might try it. Because then, surely, we would most certainly get the money spent in the way we choose. If we end up with a country with great holes in its provision - - well, we have that now! My system would be fairer, though. And whenever we grumbled about something that was missing we would know it was entirely our own fault.

A Dog I Once Knew

2012-01-26T21:07:00.002Z

Reading Silverback's highly enjoyable post about the long-haired dachshund Pixie, I thought of a dog I knew years ago.

I was teaching at a secondary school at the time. There were two PE teachers: a man with all the sadistic qualities of Sports Teacher from Hell, and a young woman who was very pleasant.

Sadistic Sports Teacher was one of those who liked everyone neatly lined up all the time. If they weren't lined up then they had to be running about in the rain or - even better - the snow. I think that he felt that shouting at a line of shivering eleven-year-olds proved his masculinity or some such. I wasn't impressed. I think he knew this. We avoided each other as much as possible.

However, his colleague, Sally, was much nicer. She did blow a whistle a bit but I think that goes with the territory for PE teachers. She didn't shout though. I'm sure that Sadistic Sports Teacher didn't like her either.

One day she came into school with a tiny puppy. It was brown and squarish in shape with tiny little legs and a little tail. She had rescued it from someone who had found it and didn't want it.

Very cute, we all agreed, though hard to identify. Mongrel of some kind. Perhaps a bit of terrier? Perhaps part Labrador? Nobody knew. Sally called it Spot, because it didn't have any.

Sally didn't want to leave Spot at home all day so hit on the idea of bringing it to school with her. It could stay in her car when she wasn't teaching. When she was teaching, however, Spot could run round the hockey pitch and generally enjoy itself in a doggy way.

You couldn't do this nowadays, I know. Health and Safety. What if one of the teenagers tripped over the dog, and sustained a dog-related injury? What if anyone was allergic to dogs? What if it bit someone? What if it gave anyone fleas? Or rabies?

However, by an amazing stroke of good fortune, none of these things happened. All that happened was that the puppy had a great time running round the sports pitches, and the teenagers said "Awwww" a lot and were a bit less sulky than usual.

Because Spot was so small, it found it hard to keep up with its owner as she hurtled round the pitch taking an interest in bully-offs and other strange properties of hockey. By lunchtime, the poor thing was exhausted. Sally would sneak it into the staffroom, where it would flop down on the floor, barely able to move. Without any thought for their personal safety re: allergies, rabies, bites etc - the staff would feed it broken biscuits and drinks of water until the bell went and it was time for the poor little thing to start dashing about again.

But never mind. Soon Spot would start to grow, and then it would find the dashing-about far easier.

Except it didn't grow. Well, it didn't grow any higher, anyway. It stayed resolutely at about the height of Sally's ankles. But its body grew longer, and longer, and longer.

People took to looking it and saying, knowledgeably, "Ahhh: it must be part dachshund."

After a few weeks they would look puzzled and say "Have Spot's legs grown at all?"

The answer appeared to be NO. Spot's body got longer and longer and its legs stayed exactly the same. They weren't so much legs as feet attached to its body. It was not a dog that was made for running.

But Spot was happy, oh yes. He had the soul of a Border Collie and didn't know he looked like a speeded-up caterpillar when he ran. When I left the school, some months later, Spot was fully grown and bore a close resemblance to those dogs made out of balloons. Still rushing round the sports pitch. Still collapsing, exhausted, at lunchtime. I hope he had a long and happy life.

The Road to Harrogate

2012-01-24T23:09:00.003Z

The title of this post, for anyone who knows Yorkshire, sounds like a metaphor. "I was born in Leeds but I'm on the road to Harrogate". For Harrogate is a Cut Above. Frightfully refined. It boasts the famous Betty's Cafe for a start.

My cousin's daughter Olivia used to work there. She is dainty and elegant, just like I'm not. I have never set foot in Betty's for various reasons. Firstly, it's jolly expensive and secondly, places like that intimidate me. Anything I didn't drop I'd knock over. Blue-rinsed ladies wearing strings of real pearls would look at me disparagingly as china teacups crashed to the floor and scones bounced amongst the elegant footwear.

However, also in Harrogate is the splendid White Hart Hotel, which is often used for training courses for doctors, nurses and simulated patients. This is much more my kind of thing. Lovely place, fascinating work: and so it was today, though I can't tell you what as it's strictly confidential.

But first I had to get there: and that's why I was on the road to Harrogate at eight o'clock this morning.

It's only thirteen miles, door to door. I had to be there at nine, so I left the house at eight. An hour for thirteen miles!

The trouble is, the road was made before cars were invented. So it's both winding and narrow in places. The speed limit keeps changing. There are roundabouts, and side roads, and agricultural vehicles. However, drivers assume that because it's the main road to Harrogate from Leeds it must therefore be a motorway.

This morning it could indeed be said to resemble a motorway: yes, the M25 around London. There are cars on that road that have been there since the day it opened, unable to escape. It is a kind of circular car park.

This morning the road to Harrogate was dark, and it was raining, and there was lots of spray, and there was nose-to-tail traffic. Occasionally we would reach a foggy bit and it was then that some big flash car would hurtle up behind me at lightning speed and hover there in a kind of "I know the sign says 40mph but LET ME PAST NOW!" way.

I wish that my car had a sign for "Is your wife in the passenger seat in the final stage of labour? Well if not - - GET BACK!"

There were plenty of cars going in both directions. People with delusions of grandeur who choose to live in Harrogate but who are forced to support their extravagant lifestyle by working in "where there's muck there's brass" Leeds. And people who live in Leeds but work in Harrogate and aspire to move there one day and never clap eyes on Leeds again.

It took all my attention, I can tell you. I had to use all three gears. I slipped into the White Hart at one minute to nine and was grateful that quite a few people arrived after me, having met with similar delays.

On days like this I always remember, with pleasure, that I work in different places and don't have the same commute every day. And I count myself very fortunate.

Message on a Bad Line

2012-01-21T21:07:00.002Z

I found an answerphone message the other day, with a very crackly line.

Unfortunately, I think it was from an old friend of mine with whom I've lost touch - she was living in Holland when last I knew of her.

She asked me to ring her and then gave the number - - which was crackle two crackle 6 crackle crackle - - etc.

I haven't changed my number in years but I'm pretty sure she's changed hers. And I couldn't dial 1471 to find out what the number was as someone else had rung afterwards.

I know she used to read my blog so perhaps she'll see this - - and if so, please could you ring me again and, if I don't answer, leave the number twice, just in case?

Of course, if she doesn't read my blog any more, she will simply think I don't want to get in touch and will probably never try ever again. Sighhhh.

And, actually, because she only gave her first name and the line was SO crackly, it might not even BE her, though it's my best guess. But whoever it was said they wanted to speak to Daphne so I'm sure it wasn't a wrong number - - there aren't many of us Daphnes about, are there?

However, I do know several people with that first name so it's just possible another one of them is thinking "Why doesn't she ring me back? How rude!"

Technology eh? I have already tried the usual methods of seeing if I can contact her - - Facebook etc - - no joy. Sighhhh again. Let's see if this works!

Work as Distraction from Life

2012-01-20T22:00:00.005Z

There have been lots of things happening in the family that I can't write about on this blog. Lots of things for a worryaholic like me to worry about!

My way of diverting myself from problems has always been to throw myself into work. It became a habit when I was really young. Would I pass the Eleven-Plus exam? Our teacher, the indomitable Mr Storey, never let anyone in his class fail: but we did it by ploughing our way steadily through Further English Progress Papers and Further Mathematics Progress Papers and Further General Progress Papers.

Perhaps it was then that I learned that if I was concentrating very hard on my work, then other worries would fade out for a while.

Then, of course, there was the pressure of grammar school where the ethos was very much "I got eighty-four percent, what did you get?" They gave us masses of homework. I have always grumbled that when asked "What did you do when you were a teenager?" the answer is "My homework." I think it's a shame as - apart from the occasional trip to the theatre - I gave myself very little free time.

You note I say "gave myself" - - yes, I do remember many an occasion where my mother would say "Why don't you stop that now and go to bed?" and I'd reply "No, I just want to finish this essay."

At university, finding I wasn't very interested in the course I was doing, I threw myself into things I was interested in: mostly theatre.

Then, when I entered the world of work as a teacher, I always believed that if I didn't mark their work, the teenagers had no motivation or reason to do it. So I'd be up late at night marking and marking.

Now I work in several areas: the actors' agency, where I spend most of my working time. Roleplay for healthcare professionals in many fields. Teaching Communication Skills to medical students.

Sometimes, looking at the week ahead, I have to take a deep breath and wonder how I'll get through it all. The answer is always - a chunk at a time.

I always make sure I look at briefs for roleplay in good time, just in case there's a vital bit missing, or the printer breaks. I always make sure that I have clothes ready for the next day. If I'm going somewhere new, then I always look at the map and Streetview as well as taking the satnav with me, and I always allow plenty of time.

Some people criticise me for being too much of a planner and not enough "in the moment" and I expect they're right. Yes, yes, there's still a lot of the School Swot about me and I can't seem to help it.

I hate having to do something that I'm not prepared for and I try to make sure it only happens very rarely. I do remember one occasion where there was snow, someone couldn't make it to a roleplay, I had to replace her and I learned the brief whilst running through the snow to the venue, arriving there just in time and being grateful for my abilities to learn a brief very fast (I've had lots of practice!)

One thing that gets me genuinely excited is going on holiday. The other most exciting thing - and you may think this is sad, but it's true - is an offer of a new and interesting piece of work: I just buzz all day with the idea of it.

I'm aware that, especially in these very difficult times, I am really lucky to have work that I love. But I'm also concerned that I really am very bad at stopping working. When I stop working, I start worrying and thinking and getting upset.

I don't think it's particularly healthy. When I see on Facebook or Twitter that people write things like "Day off today - - done nothing but laze about!" I realise that I never, ever have a day like that and perhaps I could do with some.

I want to keep working, of course. But over the next few years, I'd like to learn to stop working for a while without feeling worried and sad. At the moment I can do it while I'm with other people but I just can't do it on my own. If I'm watching television, I'll be ironing too. I want to learn that it's okay to stop for a while.

Crisp and Clear

2012-01-18T23:23:00.002Z

"No, you haven't got a chest infection," said the doctor. "Your airways are crisp and clear."

"Errrrr - - WHAT?" I thought. "Crisp and clear"? What on earth did he mean?

I've been working all over the place recently, in many different parts of the country, working with medical students and doctors to help with their training.

Today I was a very long way from Leeds, working with qualified doctors, playing someone who wanted antibiotics because she thought she had a chest infection, but didn't have one. There was more to it than that but I can't go into too much detail.

I was struggling rather with the meaning of "crisp and clear" and I reckoned that the woman I was playing would have been struggling with it too, so I asked the doctor what he meant. He was from overseas, but his English was very good. He looked a bit bewildered.

"It means you haven't got a chest infection. Clear. Crisp. You know. Your airways are crisp and clear."

Very poetic, I thought - - it makes my lungs sound like a December afternoon. But I still wasn't sure what the "crisp" bit was.

I moved on to the next doctor, again from overseas, and again with very good English and a very clear voice. On we went with the roleplay.

"So I'd like some antibiotics to clear up the chest infection, please."

"Well, actually, I'm pleased to tell you that you haven't got a chest infection. Your airways are crisp and clear."

AGAIN? At this point I was beginning to feel that I was living in a parallel universe where people spoke in riddles.

"Sorry? What do you mean by crisp and clear?"

"It means they aren't blocked at all. You don't have a chest infection."

Yes, yes, well I KNEW that - - but I just didn't understand the "crisp and clear" bit.

I moved on to the next doctor, who had a British regional accent, and, again, a very clear voice.

On we went.

"So, could I have some antibiotics for the chest infection then, please?"

"Well, in fact, although you have a cough, you don't have a chest infection. Your airways are crystal clear."

AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH! EUREKA!

All I can think is that the overseas doctors must have, at some point, heard a British doctor using the phrase "crystal clear" and misheard it. I do hope someone else as well as me noticed their Chinese-whispers version of this phrase, and explained it to them. Otherwise they may be telling patients about their crisp and clear airways for a very long time.

In Praise of Pantomimes

2012-01-07T22:18:00.003Z

"It's behind you!" "Oh no it isn't!" "Oh yes it is!"

Taking the kids to the panto is an essential part of Christmas for many in the British Isles.

We take it for granted - - and yet, it's a glorious and strangely British art form, dating back years - centuries, even.

People who say they don't like panto have often seen what are - for me - the worst kind: the ones which lazily star some so-called "celebrity" from a reality TV show. Just having the "celebrity" there may, perhaps, pull in the crowds - - but that doesn't mean that they can do the job on stage. Often they stand there like a fish out of water, because they don't have any of the necessary skills.

I'm always very surprised when people don't apparently understand that pantomime requires a huge spread of different skills, all to a very high level. Stick in some minor celebrity and nine times out of ten they'll be a disaster on stage and the rest of the cast will have to "save" them.

The best pantomimes, unquestionably, are the ones which don't have star names, but instead have actors who have the skills and talent needed.

You probably won't have heard of Berwick Kaler unless you live in York - -but he has written, directed and played the Dame in York Theatre Royal's pantomime since - - well, probably since the days of Dick Turpin. He's fantastic at it. Today I saw another superb Dame - - Dominic Goodwin, at the wonderful Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, North Yorkshire. Funny, inventive, commanding, gloriously naughty and a shameless flirt with a poor man called Michael who had foolishly sat on the front row.

In case you've never seen a panto (and if not, oh, I pity you!) the Dame is a man dressed as a woman, with superb audience-in-the-palm-of-his-hand skills and great comedy ability, plus superb improvisational skills, the ability to interact with any audience and the ability to cope with just about anything that happens. Oh yes, and he needs to be able to sing and dance too. That's all.

There's also the Principal Boy - - played by a girl, with generally lots of thigh for the audience to admire - - and the Principal Girl, who can often be a bit soppy. In today's glorious Adventures of Sinbad, she wasn't though - - she was a terrific acrobat who was flung all over the stage as the baddie tried to steal her away. Oh yes, and she could sing and dance too.

In fact, all the cast could sing and dance as well as act, and most played instruments, such as the superb Jill Myers as the Princess's mother, who plays the trumpet.

And there were the traditional panto routines - - three people singing a song on a bench, and the baddie keeps stealing one away, in spite of the audience's best shouts to stop this happening. I saw this same routine at the Victoria Theatre, Halifax, last week, with our excellent Ann Micklethwaite (from the agency I work for, Direct Personal Management) as So-Shy in Aladdin. I love it when these traditional routines are reworked and reinvented in different shows.

I love the props and special effects, too - - some are expensive (such as the huge elephant puppet in the Halifax panto) and some are just brilliantly inventive. Today, in Richmond, we found ourselves on the Island of Dunnadoodoo (oh yes we did!) and we sorted out the baddie by throwing bananas at him. Everyone in the audience threw at least one. If you've never hurled a banana at a baddie, you just won't know how much fun it can be.

A thousand bananas have been involved during the run of the show, all knitted from yellow wool by the good folks of Richmond and surrounding areas. Wonderful! Hurrah for pantomimes!

New Year's Eve

2012-01-04T22:52:00.005Z

Ah well, there I was on New Year's Eve, ready to write an entertaining and yet deeply profound post all about the past year. Well that's what I hoped, anyway.

Clearly everyone else had the same idea and that, coupled with the fact that our internet's been at the speed of an extra-slow snail recently (they are trying to sort it out), meant that I just couldn't post at all.

So I harrumphed off and watched telly instead: and since then I've been madly busy: and now it's the fourth of January, which is almost Spring. I hope.

It was strange for me being on my own on New Year's Eve - it was the first time it's ever happened. Stephen had just been started on some new painkillers and they came with a possible side-effect of "may cause drowsiness". In Stephen's case this always means "may cause SEVERAL DAYS OF SLEEP". So he stumbled off to bed before he fell to the ground.

My brother Michael and his family were over from Amsterdam and they took my Mum off to a party at the house of a friend of theirs. YESSSSSSSSSS!

There was a scary moment when she nearly didn't go because she didn't want poor Daphne to be left on her own without some kind of party to go to.

My poor mother is of course old now and she's never going to understand, even though I have told her several times a year since I first learned to say it. I don't like parties in general and I don't like New Year's Eve parties in particular. Oh, occasionally I have been to one that I've enjoyed, but that's very rare. Usually I've just crept away and sobbed in a corner hoping that nobody will notice the Killjoy at the Feast.

Sadly, if my poor mother's there - - and she often has been - she just can't leave it. "Come and dance, Daphne, you can't just sit there."

Jolly party-lovers like my mother who say this kind of thing to you they then think it's rude if you say that you can just sit there, and you will, and please could they go away and leave you alone? The next thing they do is to try to drag you to your feet. And then they get upset if you immediately leave and go home.

I'm not sure why I find New Year so very upsetting but it just makes me think of all the sadnesses and tragedies of the past year and I don't seem able to overcome those feelings when I'm in a group of people singing Auld Lang Syne and watching Big Ben and getting rather drunk and listening to Jools Bloody Holland.

So this year - - okay, last year now! - I was on my own.

I drank two glasses of Baileys and watched telly, and I didn't watch any of the New Year's Eve programmes, and I didn't listen to the bongs of Big Ben and - - for the first time in many, many years - I didn't cry my eyes out.

My mother was most unimpressed with me the next day. She'd had a lovely time at the party. "And what did you do, Daphne?"

"I watched telly. And I didn't watch anything to do with New Year."

She shook her head sadly. "Oh, what a shame."

I know it's practically halfway through January now but I just want to mention how much I enjoyed the holidays I had last year and the places that we visited: many new to me, and some old friends. Some with absolutely astonishing scenery and some places which I loved because they somehow grabbed my heart.

So here's the one I'm choosing as an illustration. I absolutely loved it. Carnlough Harbour, in Northern Ireland, on a sunny summer's evening. Bliss. Thank you, Silverback, for taking us there, and to the other beautiful places in Northern Ireland too.

Happy New Year, everyone.

In the Winter Sunshine

2011-12-26T17:59:00.006Z

Last Boxing Day I swam in the sea, doing the Tenby Boxing Day Swim, with snow on the ground and everything very cold. I loved it!

Sadly, not being anywhere near the coast, I couldn't swim in the sea today although this year's swim seems to have gone very wel l.

So today we went for a walk in the winter sunshine, at Hetchell Woods near Thorner, just outside Leeds. It's not a very well-known walk but delightful, nevertheless. No matter what time of year it is, I do love a sunny path stretching ahead of me.

The path goes through Hetchell Woods and then out the other side, where it runs alongside a field and becomes, after any kind of rain, a track of pure mud.

We knew it would be muddy there - it's always muddy at that spot. It was just like being in our garden at home after the building work!

But we are experts at getting through mud now, so on we squelched. Then you loop back along an old railway line - one of the ones axed by Dr Beeching. But at least it makes a good walk!

After a while you have to climb down a muddy bank to reach a muddy path at the bottom. It's always a bit tricky, this, but today there was the added possibility of the whole thing becoming a mudslide. Those bits of rope were really useful!

Then you go on a winding track past some very old tumbledown cottages which fall down a bit more with every year. I always find myself thinking of the people who might have lived there, in a relatively remote spot when Leeds would have been a day-trip away.

Then the landscape changes: the mud turns to sand and you find yourself walking along some little hillocks.

A disused quarry, says the internet. Disused from before 1950, was the most I could find. Now it's a haven for wildlife and very pretty too. The little hills are fun to climb. Here are our shadows, waving to you.

I don't think anyone knows that much about this place. "Roman?" people mutter when asked. The Communist always called it "Pompey Cali" in a kind of strange Latin. "Why Dad? Why's it called that?" "Because that's what it's called." And, sure enough, there are a few references I can find to "Pompicali" but no explanation.

It was a lovely winter walk: blustery, but sunny and very mild.

And it isn't even January yet: but I felt that Spring is on its way. And I have evidence.

Christmas Days

2011-12-25T18:03:00.004Z

I think I've been very lucky this year.

I was, quite honestly, dreading Christmas. The Communist died just before Christmas in 2008, so that Christmas passed in a bit of a blur.

Christmas 2009 was not good - I was thoroughly miserable and am sure I spread it round everyone else. It felt just like all previous Christmases, ever since we first moved into this house in 1959 when I was three - - except it was without the Communist.

The Communist, Jewish by birth and atheist by belief, absolutely loved Christmas: all the family together, the food, the presents - - and I used to love it too, but since his death - - well, I just haven't.

Last year was different - we went to our favourite Park Hotel in Tenby, where they treated us wonderfully well, and where I did the Boxing Day Swim in the sea, and loved it. But hanging over the whole thing was that Stephen was going to be made redundant in January and it was so VERY scary.

However - - Stephen wasn't made redundant, his job was saved, he has a new boss who really seems to appreciate him. Hurrah!

But I was still dreading this Christmas. How would it be?

A pall of gloom hung over me whenever I thought about it.

Then, quite unaccountably, a couple of weeks ago, I cheered up. I think it was something to do with the fact that we had to have Christmas Day early, on 22nd December, so Olli and Gareth could go down to Gareth's parents for Christmas. That kind of took the pressure off. Also, I gave myself a sound kicking and decided I was going to jolly well enjoy it all, for the sake of everyone else, especially my mother, since it's her 88th Christmas and who knows how many more she will have?

So we had an early Christmas, and Gareth and Olli and Alex cooked the meal - a vegetarian one - and it was absolutely delicious, and the presents were lovely, and it was altogether a Good Do.

Then today we did it all over again, with a turkey, and just Stephen, my mother and me.

Here it was, on its way into the oven, covered in bacon:

Whilst it was cooking, Stephen and I went for a brisk walk round Waterloo Lake in Roundhay Park. There were very few people about - we didn't see a single child in the usually bustling park! - but there were a lot of very hungry birds, as there were fewer than usual visitors.

Fortunately I'd remembered, just before we set off, that we had a stale loaf in the house, so Stephen kindly fetched it and these birds devoured it, though I saved some for the crows at the other end of the lake, because I always like crows.

We didn't say anything to these birds about the turkey cooking in our oven. I didn't want to worry them.

So, home we went, and the meal all went very well, and my mother really enjoyed it - for one thing, a gentleman neighbour who's been visiting her recently brought her a silk scarf and a poem!

And we have the Christmas tree up, with the oldest fairy lights still working in Britain, probably.

I took this photo before we'd opened the presents, on our first Christmas Day on the 22nd December. Sadly you can see why we had to spend a small fortune recently on recoating the house - - look at the damp on the wall!

Finally, here's the old Communist, sitting next to the tree.

Of course, this photo was taken in 2007: his last Christmas at home, when he was eighty-four.

He's the Ghost of Christmas Past, all right. Though if he was there in spirit today, he'd be VERY cross, because he had no belief in life after death at all.

I've missed him, of course, this year, as I do every day: but this year I've been able to bear it. I suppose that's human nature - - we grieve, and then we move on slightly, although we don't forget.

I can hear him now. "Is this for me? Oh good! What time are we having dinner?"

Thank you, as always, for reading my blog, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

The Cat that Wants to be Watched

2011-12-24T21:04:00.005Z

There are two cats in our house.

Wendy is young. She rushes about and chases anything that moves, and spends a lot of time exploring everywhere.

Froggie, on the other hand, is old. She was a stray who came to live with us in 1999, and I don't know how old she was then.

She used to rush around like Wendy but now her life is more sedate. Sometimes she sits and looks out of the window:

Sometimes she just sits, in Powersaver mode:

Often, she sleeps.

She's tiny - the story we were told was that she had kittens at a very young age and never grew any more - and good-natured, and thoroughly adorable.

But she has a strange characteristic, that I haven't known in any other cat.

She insists on being watched when she eats.

When she first came, I put some food down and left her to find it. I came back into the room to discover that she had found it, and was simply staring at it. However, as soon as she saw me, she gave me a look that said "About flaming time too!" and then she started eating.

And ever since, it's not enough to put food down. Oh no: you have to watch her while she eats it. If you try to sneak away in the middle, she will turn and stare at you until you come back.

If she's hungry, she doesn't go into the kitchen to eat. She comes to find me, or Stephen, and insists that we follow her to the kitchen to watch her.

Over the years, she has trained us well. Visitors sometimes think it's strange when we say "Sorry, I've got to go into the kitchen. The cat wants me to watch her eat."

Here she is eating some Christmas tuna this morning.

I took several photos, all with flash. Was she distracted from her food by this? No, because she had my full attention, and she knew it.

Is there, I wonder, any evolutionary purpose to this behaviour? Perhaps it demonstrates to her that she is still Top Cat, because we let her eat first and don't try to steal her food, like the Top Lion in a pride.

Or perhaps Froggie's just a very strange cat. Though she's theBest Cat in the Whole World, of course. Wendy knows she's very cute, but she knows her place and it's Second-Best Cat in the Whole World. Froggie may be old, but she is most definitely Top Cat.

Jeremy Bamber and the Murders in 1985

2011-12-23T21:11:00.002Z

It's all very well in detective stories. The way that they generally go is that the police are failing to solve the crime: along comes Maverick Detective Adam Strong. He infuriates all the local police with his quirky methods and is threatened with being taken off the case - - and then he finds the key evidence which helps him to find the real murderer, who goes to prison. The End.

I think I must have known all this since I was very small. I invented Adam Strong the Detective and wrote a story about him when I was something like nine years old.

Maverick-detective stories are very satisfying to read, or to watch - many, perhaps most of television police dramas are roughly along those lines.

In real life, things are a lot more complicated and one of the complicated cases that I've thought about quite often over the years is the murders of the Bamber family in 1985. The case is so strange that "you couldn't make it up" is putting it mildly. It's as though the whole thing was put together, rather clumsily, by an aspiring crime novelist.

Nevill and June Bamber were very wealthy and they lived in Tolleshunt D'Arcy in Essex. They had two adopted children: Sheila Caffell - a slim, fragile-looking former model known as "Bambi" - who had six-year-old twin boys, and Jeremy Bamber.

Police were called to the house one day in 1985 to find that the parents, Sheila, and her twin boys had all been shot dead.

Initial suspicion fell upon Sheila, who was a schizophrenic, and for a while it all seemed cut and dried. She had apparently shot all the family and then killed herself.

But then Jeremy's girlfriend, Julie Mugford, said that he had confessed to her that he had killed them all, even though police records seem to show that there was still movement in the house when Jeremy was actually outside with the police.

There are lots of conflicting bits of evidence, any one of which is capable of making you think, firstly "Oh yes, he did" and secondly "Oh, no he didn't."

You can read all about it here.

Sheila Caffell was a schizophrenic with a history of delusions. In those days, schizophrenics were frequently regarded as likely to display violence, although I understand that most schizophrenics are now regarded as more likely to harm themselves than others. But that doesn't mean that she didn't do it!

Jeremy Bamber is well-spoken and was a good-looking young man: he sounds very plausible. But that doesn't mean that he didn't do it!

One fact that everyone seems sure of is that there was a lot of confusion on the day itself - hardly surprisingly - and that the police investigation was very badly mishandled. See more by watching the video here. But that doesn't mean that either Sheila or Jeremy didn't do it!

In the end Jeremy was convicted and was eventually told that he will serve his whole life in jail. Is the conviction safe? He is the only person in the country serving a whole-life sentence who has constantly protested his innocence.

The thing that always grabs me about this case is that I absolutely hate any kind of miscarriage of justice, and that's what haunts me about it too.

When the murders happened, Jeremy Bamber was twenty-four. Now he's fifty, and he has been in prison all that time.

If I think back to 1985, I was twenty-nine. If I think of all the years - - all the things that have happened - - all the places I've been - - so much of my life has happened since that time.

I think that many people would say that the ages between twenty-four and fifty are the prime of life.

I don't, of course, know whether or not there has been a miscarriage of justice here.

But what if there has? What if he didn't do it? What if he's innocent, and all his family were killed, and then he was locked up for life?

I think it's impossible for any of us to imagine how that would feel.

The Mammogram I Have Not Had

2011-12-20T20:19:00.003Z

Well it's not very festive, I know, but today I'm going to tell you about my mammogram. The one I haven't had, but should have had over a year ago.

In case you don't know, a mammogram is a screening test to detect the early signs of breast cancer. They tell you it won't hurt but may be a bit uncomfortable and then squish your Upper Lady Bits into something resembling a sandwich toaster, left to right, up to down, one side at a time. It's really not very pleasant or indeed very dignified - - but it's a very good idea.

Now then, because my mother was given a drug called Stilboestrol when she was pregnant with me, I am supposed to have annual mammograms as it has increased my risk of breast cancer.

(Don't start me on Stilboestrol - - evil drug, supposed to prevent miscarriages, but actually causing womb deformities in the children, which is why - being a child of a woman who had it - I lost my first baby).

Anyway, in Blighty there's a screening programme where women over 50 have a mammogram every three years. All very well but I'm supposed to have one annually, because of the Evil Drug.

My last mammogram was in November 2009. So early this year, when I had received no summons for another one, I mentioned this to the doctor and asked him to refer me for one.

Then, a few months later, when I realised I still had received no appointment, I assumed that the doctor had forgotten and asked again.

By November this year, I realised it was now two years since my last mammogram. So I rang the surgery and asked the receptionist, very nicely, what was happening about it.

"Oh yes," she said, "the doctor referred you in September. You should have heard by now. I can give you their telephone number so you can chase it up if you wish."

What I wanted to say was, "Look, sunshine, why is that MY job? YOU chase it up." But hey, I could hear the sound of a buck being passed so I took the phone number and rang them.

"Ah yes, your doctor referred you in September, and before that in January," said the woman who answered the phone.

"So why haven't I had an appointment then?" I enquired.

"Well this is a Well Woman breast screening service. We can only screen people every three years. You had a mammogram in November 2009."

"Yes, but because of a drug my mother was given I'm supposed to have a mammogram every year," I replied, with rather excessive politeness. "That's why the doctor referred me."

"Yes, but this is for women who are well. We only screen people every three years."

I suspect a teensy little bit of "NOW LOOK, STUPID!" was creeping into my voice as I replied, "As far as I know I AM well. I am trying to STAY well. In order to do this, I am supposed to have a mammogram every YEAR AND NOT EVERY THREE YEARS."

"Oh, no, we can't do that here. We haven't the funding."

"So," I said with elaborate politeness, "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET MY MAMMOGRAM THEN?"

"Well you'll need to go to Leeds General Infirmary, of course," she said and I could tell she was thinking "Doesn't everyone know that?"

Look, the NHS is wonderful. It's just that there are idiots who work in it, as everywhere. When they received the two referrals from my doctor, wouldn't it have been good if they thought "How odd, when it's not been three years since her last mammogram. Why does he keep referring her? Let us speak to him, using this modern device known as a telephone, and find out."

Mind you, when I had my last mammogram, ALL THAT TIME AGO, the woman who did it wasn't exactly great in the communication skills department.

"So, have you found any lumps, then?" she asked me.

"Oh, no, I haven't found anything, I'm just coming for screening."

"Ahh well," she said, as though to a small child, "just because you haven't found any lumps, that doesn't mean they're not there, you know."

D'you know what, I like to think I'm more knowledgeable about medical matters than most people not trained in healthcare, and I know about people who phrase things carelessly because their communication skills are not very good: and I knew what she meant, which was that the screening test is to detect cancers early before they become large - - AND IT STILL FRIGHTENED THE LIFE OUT OF ME!

I did think about giving her some strongly-worded feeback about the way she'd said this - - but since she was about to clamp my boobs into a sandwich toaster-thingy, I decided to keep quiet.

Back to the doctor. I need to tell him to refer me to a different hospital, and what explanation to give. Really, sometimes you need to put a lot of hard work into being a patient.

The Mystery of the DIsappearing Tablets

2011-12-15T22:32:00.002Z

When you can't remember what tablets you're supposed to take and when, the doctor can arrange for them to arrive in something called a dosset box.

My mother has one of these. The pharmacist counts them out into the dosset box, and then delivers the next week's tablets, every Wednesday.

There's one little plastic box for every day of the week and it's divided into four compartments which are labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Bedtime.

So far so good. Simple! But the trouble is, it's not really.

Firstly, the boxes are remarkably fiddly and I'm amazed that nobody's designed one that is easier for elderly hands to use.

Secondly - - well, taking Monday's tablets on the right day relies on you knowing which day is Monday. And the labels such as "Breakfast" don't help with tablets that have to be taken before meals, or after meals, rather than with meals.

So every day I get the little box out for the next day, and put it on Mum's kitchen table, and remind her that these are the tablets for the next day and she must ignore all the others in the big box. Then I close up the big box and put it to one side. I have often wanted to take it into safe custody at our house and just leave Mum the ones for that day - - but somehow, that's another little step away from independence, so I have left the big box there.

She isn't on a lot of tablets - just morning and evening - and she generally remembers the morning ones, as she's more alert then. In the evenings I go over to see her and so I remind her about the evening ones, and get her to take them then, if she hasn't already.

Last week, however, the doctor gave Mum a course of antibiotics: four a day, before meals. Impossible for her to remember, of course, but I have told Mum this about a dozen times, and counted each day's antibiotics into the dosset box, leaving the rest in the packet.

I can't be there for each mealtime - I just can't! - so every day I've counted out the tablets, gone on and on and ON about "the blue ones BEFORE MEALS" and put the rest to one side in their packet along with the "master" dosset box.

I'm not sure whether or not she has taken them before meals, but she does seem to have taken them, at least.

Tonight when I arrived she'd taken three of today's antibiotics, with one left to take, and that was fine - I got her to take it.

Then I looked for the packet to count out tomorrow's tablets. It was nowhere to be seen.

"Mum, where's the packet that these antibiotics came in? Little blue and white packet?"

She denied all knowledge. Had never seen such a packet in her life. Nope. Was I sure that such a packet had ever existed? She looked at me as though I was inventing the whole thing.

So I looked in the obvious places - - the drawers, her handbag - - and a few less obvious ones - - underneath the Radio Times - - in the fridge. Nothing.

"Perhaps I've finished them all," she said hopefully.

"I hope you haven't, Mum, because there's about three days' supply left," I said, whilst carrying on looking.

Then I had a brainwave. I looked in the bin and there was the empty packet.

I took it out of the bin. "Mum, here's the packet. Now where could you have put the tablets?"

She looked at me blankly, as if I'd brought a rabbit out of a hat. Clearly, she had no recollection of ever having seen the packet before in her life.

I was now rather worried that she had somehow scoffed the lot. But then I had Brainwave Number Two (which is not bad for a Thursday evening, I have to say).

She has a little purse which should really be labelled "Ill-Assorted Ancient Tablets Well Past Their Sell-By Date", which she insists on keeping and which I haven't had the heart to take away from her. She was a pharmacist's wife, for goodness' sake! She knows about tablets! - - Or used to, anyway.

Inside the purse were the rest of the antibiotics. Phewww.

I counted out the tablets for tomorrow and put them in the dosset box labelled Friday and explained about taking the blue ones before meals. I stayed - outwardly at least - both calm and cheerful.

"There you go, Mum. That's all you need to think about. Just take these tablets tomorrow."

"What about the rest of the ones in the packet?"

"Well, I think I'll take that back to our house, just to be sure, and I'll bring you some more tomorrow."

Tomorrow, when she's forgotten I took away the antibiotics, I'll be taking away the "master" dosset box. And when she's forgotten that I did that, I'll be kidnapping the purse with the Ill-Assorted Ancient Tablets Well Past their Sell-By Date.

She didn't seem to mind too much, though. Even that's a measure of how she's changing, day by day, week by week. The previous version of my mother would have resisted like crazy. It's a slippery slope, as the Communist would have said. And I hate it.

I Used To Remember Everything

2011-12-11T14:04:00.003Z

"So, where's my sock gone now?" asked Mum, having shown the doctor her feet, which have thin and peeling skin on them because of what the Communist would have described as "old age and poverty".

The sock had, interestingly, vanished without trace. So had her glasses.

"Stand up, Mum, I think you're sitting on it," I yelled.

"Sorry?"

"YOU MIGHT BE SITTING ON IT!"

"What, on my glasses?" asked Mum.

"No, on your sock!"

As she stood up and found her sock, and then found her glasses in her bag, and then sat back down again, the doctor was looking at the list of ailments she'd brought with her. He was very nice - I see him for my diabetes - but I could tell he was realising that seven minutes for this consultation was never going to do it.

"And my hands don't work properly," said Mum. "And I can't hear, and I've lost my sense of smell, and I forget things all the time. What else was on the list, Daphne? I've forgotten."

The doctor dealt with the hands - some arthritis - and realised how long everything takes, and the amount of forgetfulness that goes on, which is probably caused by the major stroke that she had in 1992, when she was a young thing of 68.

"You should apply for Attendance Allowance," he said. "I think your Mum is eligible for it. All you have to do is fill in a form which is about a hundred pages, whenever you have a fortnight or so to spare."

Attendance Allowance is a non-means-tested benefit of about £50 per week for over-65s who need help with their personal care. And although my mother, who is 87, is physically amazing in some ways - and still busy gardening for several hours every day - I give her a lot of help now with shopping, and remembering things, and finding things, and putting out her tablets, and checking she's remembered to take them - - all that kind of thing. She'd never go anywhere if I didn't take her, except to the Post Office along the street.

If she had Attendance Allowance, she could use it for whatever she likes - and I'm hoping she'll use part of it to get a cleaning lady in once a week. Mum's not doing too badly at the moment on the cleaning front - but I'd like her to have someone coming in now, before she's in dire need of it, so she can get used to it.

So this morning was Filling In the Form day, and Stephen and I decided to do it online. The form isn't quite a hundred pages - - just thirteen pages - but it's a bit gruelling to do. All her illnesses - - date of birth - - National Insurance Number - - list of medications - - supporting documents - -

Also, the form only works with a limited number of browsers, most of which were current in the 1990s. Oh yes, and you can't submit it on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings because the website is out then - - for coffee, or something.

So - - - we logged in to the Government Gateway, and got a username and password, and started ploughing through it all, saving it as we went. Then we couldn't continue because it wanted to know what kind of phone number my phone number was - - and there was no box to say so, and without it we couldn't progress.

So we saved the form, and tried a different browser, and this time there was a handy box to say it was a mobile phone, and on we went.

As we approached the end of the form they said they want a statement of Mum's problems from "the person who knows best what they are" - - but that, apparently, can't be the same person as the one who filled in the form, if someone else has filled it in for her.

Now how many eighty-seven-year-olds who need Attendance Allowance and who are also capable of filling in an online form do you think there are? I'd guess it's a fairly low number, wouldn't you say? But that's the point really - there's only me, the person filling in the form, who sees Mum on a daily basis. But we nominated Stephen to make this statement, and hope that works.

So. After what seemed like as long as single-celled creatures took to evolve into Professor Brian Cox, we reached the end of the form, and then I remembered that I hadn't put "deafness" in her list of things wrong with Mum, so we saved it and went back to that page, and then the whole thing stalled completely and did NOTHING for a very, very long time.

So we logged out and logged in again and filled in all the password and User ID and got to the same place and it stopped again and continued to do NOTHING.

So we thought - - oh, sod it - - and went off to the pub for lunch, and Mum came with us and enjoyed it very much.

After I had eaten the WHOLE CARVERY (because I had swum over 70 lengths this morning, oh yes!) we returned to tackle the form again. Logged in - - passwords - - user ID - - - through the website to the same place - - NOTHING.

So we changed browsers back to the original browser - - and lo! it worked! So I added some information about Mum's deafness (clicking the "Add another illness or disability" box which for some reason amused me greatly).

Then I went to the end of the form, where it said that someone else could fill it in but that Mum herself had to type her signature.

So I enrolled Mum in a Computing for the Over-Eighties course at evening classes, and after a few months she had learned how to type her name, so I got her to type it, all by herself, because of course I couldn't type it for her in any way at all, as that wouldn't be right - - -

And then pressed "SUBMIT" and HURRAH! it worked and gave me a reference number.

It also asked me to send them a copy of my Power of Attorney which I know exists. Definitely. Somewhere. The Communist set it up a few years ago, and kept everything neatly filed - - but now -- who knows? So I will go and look, next time I have a couple more weeks to spare. I do hope it all works and she gets her money.

At the end of the doctor's appointment Mum said "It's not fair. He thinks I'm a potty old lady and I AM a potty old lady. But he doesn't know that I used to be top of the class, and that I got the only scholarship to University from my part of the North-West, and that I was a journalist, and that I was a teacher, and that I used to remember everything."

Old age, as they say, ain't for sissies.

Glorious Mud

2011-12-08T18:22:00.002Z

It seems like a decade ago, but it was probably only back in October that the House Coating Men set about removing the old coating from the outside walls of our house, and then applying a new coating.

Everyone who looked at it gave a few Tuts and then stared at their boots and muttered "It's a big job."

It is indeed a big job, and it's not finished yet. The house is surrounded by scaffolding. The garden is full of pallets and sacks and ladders and skips and wheelbarrows.

And, particularly, mud.

Three men traipsing across what used to be the back lawn many times a day. Three men walking across the front lawn, and the grassy areas at the sides of the house, over and over again.

You want mud? We have mud. The garden looks like - - - well, the Mud Sea.

This would not be so bad if the mud stayed outside. But it doesn't. It comes in.

In spite of visitors' best efforts in removing their shoes, every entry to the house is accompanied by a couple of gallons of Best British Mud.

And then there's Wendy the cat. We also have another cat, Froggie, but I am exempting her from all blame. It's winter. She's very old, and it's winter. She looks outside with horror, turns round and comes back in. No mud from her.

But Wendy? Ahhhh if Wendy could talk she'd say this:

"OUT of the house! Yessssss! I'm rushing out and round and round the lawn in CIRCLES and now ROUND THE SIDE OF THE HOUSE and ACROSS THE FRONT AND INTO THE WHEELBARROW. Up the pear tree! Down again! Onto the car roof! On the garage roof! Oooooh a bird! I'll chase it! And now - - Wheeeee! Down into the MUD! And - - - repeat the whole lot! - - - - - And - - - repeat! - - And now I'll come into the house, shall I?

Yes - - through the kitchen, on the windowsill, into the dining room, round and round the carpet - -let's look in the office shall I? Oh yes, onto the desk - - some interesting papers here, I'll walk right across them - - and on the keyboard, yes - - and finally - - into the lounge, across the carpet, across the coffee table and onto the windowsill for a little snooze - - ahhhh blissssss."

We have a layer of mud. Everywhere. Inside and out. If by any chance you need any for your living-room, you have only to ask.

Through the Window

2011-12-07T17:53:00.003Z

I've been working all over the place this week, with medical students and doctors.

One of the things I enjoy is that some of the work is in unusual venues. I'm particularly fond of football grounds where I can be doing a roleplay in one of the boxes whilst, a long way below, someone is rolling the turf.

Today I was in one of the nicest places I ever work in: the White Hart in Harrogate. It's a very old hotel which is also used as a conference centre and training centre for the NHS, and it's delightful.

I worked in various smallish rooms in the hotel. It was very intense, requiring lots of concentration - - - so I got a bit of a shock in one room when I looked up and saw a white deer standing outside the window. This was particularly unusual since we were on the first floor and several yards above ground level.

I was lost in a rather complex piece of dialogue so it took a few moments for me to work out what I was seeing - - and if you click on this link you'll see it too, and you can work out which room I was in. Oh yes, the White Hart - - of course - - !

So then I moved to the next room along for the next session and again I was facing the window. I was listening intently to what the doctor I was working with was saying - - and then suddenly what appeared to be a white net with green inside appeared from below outside the window. Again, it took me a second or two to work out what I was seeing - - and I realised that it was a huge Christmas tree, covered in white netting. Having popped up, it gradually moved first to one side of the window, and then to the other, and finally to the middle.

It did look like one of those Ents from The Lord of the Rings and I have to say it was very Ent-ertaining (yes, I know, groan, I don't care).

All this time I was concentrating on serious medical matters - - and then a pole popped up and poked at the white netting, jiggling up and down to try and remove it.

Nothing - - NOTHING - will ever bring me out of role in a roleplay - - but this tree was absolutely in my line of vision, and yet the doctor I was working with had his back to it so couldn't see any of it at all. I doubled my concentration - there was no way I wanted the doctor to realise that there was anything interesting going on, even though the impulse to shout "It's behind you!" grew stronger by the moment.

After about five minutes of pole-jiggling, the netting finally came off, accompanied by muted cheers from the floor below - - and then a sad little"Ohhhhh noooooo" as the tree slowly and inexorably fell over backwards and vanished from view.

I have to say it was hilarious and I am proud to say that the doctor never noticed any of it.

At the end of the day I was back in that room again. It was dark by now and there was the tree, outside the window, now covered in fairy lights and looking very Christmassy.

One of the things that I love about my work is that it's always interesting. Even though sometimes this is not quite for the reasons you might expect.

Dorothy! Go Back from Whence you Came!

2011-12-03T14:08:00.003Z

It isn't often that I'm alone in the house at night, but I have been alone this week because Stephen was away, working in Finland. He's back now.

There's been a lot going on recently that feels "different" from usual, I have been doing some very "heavy" roleplays about end-of-life issues and there have been workmen outside the house for what seems like forever - - and I tend to have bad dreams anyway - - so it wasn't entirely surprising that I had a nightmare.

Suddenly I was wide awake. I had woken myself up by shouting, at the top of my voice, in tones of horror that terrified me, "DOROTHY! GO BACK FROM WHENCE YOU CAME!"

I don't know what the rest of the nightmare was about - - something about statues in a cave that needed to be restored - - and I couldn't work out what this loud shout was for.

I've only ever known two Dorothys - - my lovely cousin Dorothy in Barrow-in-Furness who makes wonderful cakes, and the Communist's sister, who died a few years ago.

I don't think it was either of those two. And I don't know where the Dorothy of my dream came from, but I was very scared and I wanted her to go back there.

It's odd after a nightmare. Everything seems different. I was wide awake of course. I had a quick wander round the top floor of the house to check that there weren't any marauding Dorothys, and then read for a little while. Then I switched the bedside light out to go to sleep and switched it straight back on again as everything was too dark and full of Scary Things.

I slept for a while with the light on - - then woke up again to the grey dawn light, and the understanding that the sun was coming up. Another day was here and the unseen terror was gone.

The terror from a nightmare is a terror like no other, a kind of primeval horror that blocks out all sense and daylight. I am still haunted by a nightmare of my childhood about a bent old woman, dressed in black, walking along a country road, who looked up when I asked her who she was.

"The Dead of the Dead" she replied.

Yes, I'm still scared, thinking about it.

A White Knight in the South East

2011-11-30T19:09:00.003Z

Whilst waiting for my roleplay to start today, I was watching a screen with rolling news on it.

Most of it was, of course, about the strike of public sector workers today.

Justin case you don't know about this, basically what happened was, the banks bankrupted themselves and lost so much money that poor impoverished Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland only got a bonus of about a grand a day, the poor poppet. (You may hear him referred to as Sir Fred Goodwin but when I'm in charge he won't be so I am unsirring him now, to save time.)

Anyway, the Government decided that the only way to get this money back was to nick it from the public workers' pensions, so that they will have to work more years before they retire and get less dosh at the end of it.

And the workers didn't like this - and who could blame them? - so they went on strike.

There was extensive reporting about it on the screen as I waited to work with some (excellent) radiography and audiology students.

But because the screen has its volume turned down, it had that automatic subtitles thingy turned on so that everything that was said appeared on the screen. When one person spoke, it was in white - - when another replied, it was in orange. That kind of thing.

But unfortunately, the subtitling couldn't really keep up with what was on the screen and it kept entertaining me by getting things very wrong.

"The most widespread strike for regeneration" it kept telling me. Great idea! That sounds like the kind of thing this country needs! Regeneration!

Except that what it meant was "The most widespread strike for a generation".

The inaccurate subtitling renders everything that was said slightly disjointed, and a tad comical. And when we saw Prime Minister David Cameron talking in Parliament, it came out as complete rubbish.

Oh - - wait - - -

Anyway it made me think of a suggestion I read that whenever any kind of ridiculous slanging-match is going on in Parliament it should have the comedian Benny Hill's "chase" theme played over it.

Finally we moved on from Parliament, and it looked as though finally, Britain's saviour had arrived.

"There will be a White Knight in the South East" said the announcer.

Hurrah! I pictured the White Knight on his magnificent horse, galloping along, waving his sword to rescue us from Fred Goodwin and the wunch of bankers.

Then I realised with a sinking heart that this was not the case. The television had simply moved on to the weather forecast, and was promising us some blustery and rainy weather after sunset - - a wild night in the South East. Damn.

Three Days in the Far East

2011-11-25T23:11:00.002Z

I've been in Hull for three days, working. It was fascinating.

We still have all the letters which my Grandpa sent to my Grandma from the Front during the First World War.

These two statements may seem entirely unconnected but they have one thing in common and it's a lack of information.

Because of censorship, nothing of any interest or importance could be put in to Grandpa's letters.

Without censorship, he could have written,"I am a machine-gunner on the Front at a time when the average life of such machine-gunners is about fifteen minutes. We are living in trenches full of mud and many of my fellow soldiers have died this week following a German bombardment."

As it was, his letters are full of "It's been quite a busy few days".

Now then, the only thing - - yes, of course the only thing - that this blog post has in common with Grandpa's letters is that I cannot tell you a thing about what I was doing. I was staying in a very pleasant hotel with lovely food and - joy of joys! - a swimming pool - and working with some really interesting people.

And that's all I can say about the work. However, it was a real delight to be able to swim before breakfast every morning.

Sometimes the best stories are the ones which can't be told.

Knitting in Nineteen Thirty

2011-11-19T21:41:00.002Z

"I was six years old, and so was everyone else," said Amy, who is now eighty-seven, "and Mrs Scott was very Victorian and had no rapport at all with young children. Mind you, teachers didn't have to have in those days."

All the class had all been shown how to cast on a row of twelve stitches, and then how to knit the next row in plain knitting. In, over, through, off. In, over, through off.

When Miss Scott thought they had all grasped this she told them to carry on with it, and to come to her if there were any problems.

Well, it's a tricky thing, knitting, when you're six and so of course there were problems. Pretty soon a long snaking line of infants stood waiting by the teacher's desk, all with dropped stitches, lost stitches, lost needles, tangled wool and any combination of all of those.

Amy was determined not to have to join this boring line. She started knitting and muttering it to herself. "In, over, through" - - and at this point she paused. She wasn't sure about the "off" bit. Surely if you dropped the stitch off the needle - - well that would be a dropped stitch, wouldn't it? And that was what half the trouble at the long line at the front was all about. Dropped stitches. She heard Miss Scott muttering about them all the time.

So she decided to omit the "off" bit of the process. "In, over, through - - In, over, through - - "

But if you miss out the "off" bit then what you're doing is doubling the number of stitches on your needle. To Amy's surprise, pretty soon there were twenty-four stitches and not long after that there were forty-eight. When she got to the next row and heading for ninety-six, she ran out of room to squash them all on the needle.

It was a bit like that old story where the peasant has won some kind of ancient lottery and the Emperor of China (or some such: I am not sticking very closely to the letter of this story) tells him he can have whatever he wants as a prize. And he asks for one grain of rice on the first square of a chessboard, double that on the second - - double that on the third - - and by the time the peasant has done a few rows on the chessboard all the rice in China belongs to him.

And so it was with Amy's stitches, which were multiplying at a most alarming rate. With a heavy sigh, she joined the ever-increasing line at the front of the classroom.

Miss Scott was not pleased with Amy's ninety-six stitches. She removed eighty-four of them and all the knitting that Amy had done so far, and instructed Amy to start again. Amy was to knit her twelve stitches, remembering the "off" bit, until she had three inches of knitting, measured against a ruler, and then she was to return to the teacher.

Amy was not pleased with this outcome. As far as she was concerned, she had made a lot of effort to avoid dropped stitches, and it had all been thrown back in her face. Three inches was a lot of knitting, and it was distinctly dull to do. Though, in nineteen thirty, school was not expected to be interesting, of course.

After an eternity of "In, over, through, OFF, In, over, through, OFF" Amy's knitting measured about an inch and a half. It was then that she made an interesting discovery.

If you got your inch and a half of knitting, and pulled it enough, it would measure three inches. Hurrah! Triumphantly, she joined the queue.

Sadly, by the time she had progressed to the front of the interminable line, her knitting had shrunk back to its original inch and a half, and Miss Scott was most unimpressed with it. Amy was sent back to her desk to complete her task, which, grudgingly, she did.

After the three inch hurdle was reached, they were shown how to cast off stitches a couple at a time in each row to bring it to a point. The direction they were heading in was to knit several of these woolly oblongs-with-a-pointy-end and then they were to sew them all together to make slippers for their little brothers or sisters.

It was, of course, eighty-one years ago and so Amy can't quite remember if the slippers were ever completed.

Of course, the result of this story should be that Amy was so traumatised by this early experience of knitting that she never picked up knitting needles ever again.

However, that is not the case. What Miss Scott never realised is that Amy was one of the most talented infants ever to cast on a stitch. Amy grew up to paint, sculpt, embroider, sew - and knit anything at all with consummate skill. Woodwork and bricklaying are not beyond her, either - - or most other crafts requiring a clever pair of hands and an artist's eye. I once saw her make a dress by throwing the material on the floor, looking at it for a bit, and then cutting a perfect fit with no use of a pattern at all.

And my favourite childhood jumper was originally made by Amy for her daughter Lynda, and when she grew out of it it was worn by her son Frank, and when he grew out of it I became its proud owner and wore it until I could squeeze into it no longer.

Ah! Miss Scott, if only you'd known all this. How surprised you would have been.

Sunrise on the Coast Road

2011-11-14T19:00:00.003Z

I'm back from a lovely weekend in Barrow-in-Furness, which included a visit to Coniston.

I was taking my mother to Barrow: she's staying with Amy, wonderful Amy, her great friend since their schooldays, for the week. I wanted them to have a lovely time and they did seem to: here they are on a boat on Coniston Water: my mother's on the left.

They are both eighty-seven: my mother is just three days older than Amy.

I decided to travel back early this morning instead of last night, so we could have a full day out yesterday. I did need to be back to work in the agency's office this morning and to work with some first year medical students this afternoon.

So I got up at six and decided to travel the slightly longer way to Ulverston, along the Coast Road, as I was hoping for some early-morning light over the sea.

I could see the sea in the distance with just a slight glow of red above it as I left Amy's house and I hoped that I would get there in time.

As I neared the sea, I was listening to the traffic news on the radio about elsewhere in Britain - - traffic jams - - gridlock - - but where I was, near Roa Island, I was the only car on the road. And then I reached the sea: the tide was out and I saw this:

The colours were stunning. The round things in the foreground are tufts of grass, which is gradually invading the shoreline.

So I just stood and watched whilst the colours gradually changed:

the reds turned to pinks:

and purples and lilacs

It was a beautiful drive back to Leeds through the Furness Peninsula and the Yorkshire Dales. Some things make it well worth getting up early.

Guilty

2011-11-11T20:58:00.003Z

I started to watch the latest in Derren Brown's Experiments series. He had set up a fake conference in a country-house hotel with the aim of convincing a perfectly innocent man that he had committed a murder, and getting him to confess to it - - just to see whether this could, indeed, be done.

I could only watch the first five minutes. Early on, they were going to plant feelings of guilt in him by persuading him to think that he had really, really annoyed someone he admired.

And that was it: I could watch no more. I usually find this kind of thing interesting but I just could not bear the idea of this poor man thinking he'd done something to upset someone he admired.

It's one of my big worries. I think that someone I love or admire or both will suddenly be furious with me for no reason that I can think of: I simply won't understand what I am supposed to have done, and will be given no chance to explain, and they will be furious with me for ever and ever.

Has this ever happened to me? Well, no, not that I can think of. But it's such an ongoing, deep-seated fear and I can't quite put my finger on why. Just a nameless, stomach-churning guilt that I have DONE SOMETHING TERRIBLE.

If I'd been the chap in that house, I'm sure I would have confessed to the murder very easily. It wouldn't take much to persuade me it was me wot dunnit. I am constantly awash with guilt.

And yet I'm not sure why. I know such feelings are often rooted in the dim and distant past. Looking back into my childhood, did I do anything that I'm terribly ashamed of?

When I was ten - and I feel so bad about this story still that I can hardly bring myself to mention it - I loved having pets and had as many as my parents would let me have. I did always look after them myself but when I was ten I asked if I could have some mice, and they said no. They thought I had enough animals what with the dog and the tortoise and the tank of fish and the tadpoles that I was rearing and the two terrapins.

A friend of mine gave me two mice. I kept them in my den in the garage, in secret, for some weeks, until I could bear the secrecy no more and confessed.

That was the worst thing I did as a child. Any of the more usual things that children do that are naughty - - well, I never did them. I was a Good Girl.

What does annoy me slightly is that nobody seemed to notice. It was just expected of me. I was the eldest child and they had nothing to compare me with. Okay, sometimes - probably often - I said "Just let me finish this chapter" when asked to come and do some household task - - but that was it.

The only possible thing that I can remember as a cause of my guilt dates from soon after we'd moved into this house. My Grandma, who lived with us, must have thought I was being too demanding - I'm not sure what I was doing, because I was only three - and, being a Victorian, she told me that if I continued to behave in this way, I would wear my mother out and she would disappear.

Nightmares of my mother disappearing in a small explosion woke me for some time after that, and can't have been very enjoyable for my parents to deal with, so Grandma's story was really somewhat counterproductive.

When we got to be teenagers, others did drink and loud music and backchat and rebellion.

What did I do? My homework, that was what. The school I was at was all very "I got eighty-nine per cent, what did you get?" and I just worked like crazy to make sure I was up there. To me, failing an exam would have been like the end of the world and I was going to make sure I never did.

In a reversal of the usual teenage issues, I remember my mother constantly telling me to stop doing my homework (they did give us lots of it!) and go to bed. One of my favourite programmes was Star Trek - the Sixties version with Captain Kirk and Spock of course - and I have only to hear the theme music in order to feel guilty - - because I would watch it and put off doing my homework until after I'd seen it.

I tell myself that I work hard and that I shouldn't have to work hard all the time - - and yet, even now, if I'm in front of the television and not simultaneously doing a pile of ironing I feel vague stirrings of guilt. As for my guilt about my mother and how much more I could do to improve her life - - ohhhh - don't get me started, you really don't want to know.

Perhaps I did something very, very wrong in a previous life. Or perhaps it was in this one, and I just haven't worked out what it was yet.

A Time Without Internet

2011-11-10T19:37:00.005Z

As many of you will know, I work for an actors' agency and it's based in our house.

Our telephone lines are therefore pretty crucial to us. The agency has two phone lines: one known as The Little Phone, because - - well - - because the phone on that line's always been known as The Little Phone, okay? And it's - well - smaller than the other phone. Guess what the other phone is known as? Yes, the Big Phone, which has a fax attached. Yes, I know! A fax! Ancient history!

"Could you sent me a fax confirming that?" asked a casting director recently.
"No," replied one of our actors, "because we are no longer living in the 1980s."

The Little Phone is for the actors to ring the agency, and the Big Phone is for such people as casting directors: so we want it to be kept clear for auditions coming in and suchlike.

Towards the end of last week, the Big Phone went a bit crackly and then on Monday, when people rang it, it made a sad little beep and refused to say more.

As you may imagine, even though a lot more is being done by email (yes, email! Not faxes!) these days, the Big Phone is still crucial. In a cunning bid to find out if the problem was with the phone or with the line, Stephen swapped the phones over so the Little Phone was now on the Big Phone's line and vice versa. Then we rang the Little Phone, which was now pretending to be the Big Phone, from the Big Phone, which was now pretending to be the Little Phone - - and it didn't ring.

So we now knew that the problem was with the line, not the phone, so we rang the telecoms company, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, and asked them to come and sort it out.

Telecoms Company sent what appeared to be a PFY. In the company that Stephen used to work for, this term was used as a job description and stands for Pimply-Faced Youth.

He was perfectly pleasant, though slightly prone to telling himself everything that he was doing. "I'm following the wires back now" - - that kind of thing. Sometimes he told me things too, and one of the things he told me was "The internet might go off for a little while."

"Okay," I said in a very small voice whilst quelling rising panic and thinking "NO! DON'T TAKE MY INTERNET AWAY, I BEG YOU!"

And, suddenly, there it was, gone. NO INTERNET!

I kept calm. You'd have been proud of me. I stopped working my way through the ever-full office inbox and turned my attentions to typing up the minutes of the last meeting, whilst PFY told himself, and me, about lots of other things he was doing. "I'm removing the box. I'm putting the master socket in the cellar, instead of up here". That kind of thing. To tell the truth, I don't find this kind of conversation fascinating, but I did think that I should perhaps be listening to it.

Finally, he said "That's it, I've done."

"But - - but - - " I said in tones of suppressed horror "there is still no internet."

"Ah well, I think it just needs to be reset," he said - - and as he said it, his phone rang.

Since he was standing next to me, I couldn't really help but overhear the conversation.

"So your waters have broken? How often are the contractions coming? What does the hospital say? - - Okay, I'll come straight home."

He didn't look old enough to have a girlfriend, let alone a baby, but I thought that now was not the moment to point this out.

He explained that it was their first baby, and that she had two children already, and that his parents weren't sure about it all because he was only twenty-two, but that he'd better go now and get to the hospital quickly, as her labours never lasted very long, apparently.

I wanted to say "What about my internet? I HAVE NO INTERNET! Can't she just give birth in the living-room or something whilst you make it work again?"

But instead I said "Don't forget this box with the meter in it."

He remembered the box with the meter in it and off he rushed. When I looked under the desk, I discovered that he had forgotten his toolbox.

Stephen came home from work. "NO INTERNET!" I wailed.

Stephen knows better than to ignore such wailings. They only get louder, and more frequent.

He went and looked in the cellar.

"The internet has been wired in to an old wire and the new wires have gone, so it's impossible to restore the connection" he said, quietly but with great displeasure.

He rang Telecoms Company. They would come back this afternoon. And they did. I was teaching a group of third-year medical students at the time (that's my other job, if you are now confused) and checked my phone in the break, and a little envelope had appeared to show I had email, and my happiness was complete.

But for a WHOLE EVENING I had NO INTERNET.

I'd like to say that it opened up a whole new world to me and I rediscovered the pleasures of life without the internet but that is simply not the case, okay? If it had been a warm summer evening - - maybe. But in November a woman needs her internet and that's all there is to it.

No, I revisited Life in the Olden Days and it wasn't fun. No wonder they all died.

The Slow Train

2011-11-08T20:33:00.003Z

Silverback, currently in Florida, saw an armadillo today and wrote about it, very entertainingly as usual, on his blog.

Well, this of course got me thinking of all the songs I know about armadillos. Which is a total of one. In fact, it is probably the only song ever written about an armadillo ever.

It is by the wonderful Flanders and Swann, that glorious comic double-act of the 1960s, and the plot centres around an armadillo which falls in love with an armour-plated tank on Salisbury Plain. It's all rather sad. The armadillo sings a love song to the tank, which sadly fails to respond.

"I left him to his singing, cycled home without a pause. Never tell a man the truth about the one that he adores."

I tried to find this on Youtube but it's not one of their more famous songs and sadly isn't there: at least not in their original version.

But - - ohhhh - - you know what it's like on Youtube. I found one of my very favourites of their songs which is delightful and also very typically British.

It's The Slow Train. All the places mentioned in it were real stations, sadly axed in the 1960s by Dr Richard Beeching, in an attempt to make the railways more profitable. It was a source of huge regret in Britain and to those old enough to remember, it still is.

I love this song.

From Tough Teenagers to Student Doctors

2011-11-07T20:20:00.006Z

I had a big class of medical students today - there were fourteen of them.

Yes, I know, huge! Most times, I am working very intensively with groups of four or five.

Anyone who's ever taught in a school is now thinking "WHAT? Only fourteen! Lucky woman!"

Yes, indeed. For I too used to teach in schools.

I started teaching at a hellhole of a secondary school in Newport, Gwent, South Wales. The school was a split-site school. The two sites were half a mile apart across the town centre. If - as frequently happened - I was teaching in one site before break, and the other site after break, I would spend break running as fast as possible across the centre, scattering bemused shoppers all around me, to get to my classroom for the next session before the little darlings wrecked the room.

My drama class was held in a wide piece of corridor outside the Head Teacher's room My brief for drama teaching was "Don't let them make any noise, or it will disturb the Head". A few years later, with a bit more confidence, and I would have replied to this with something much less than polite. But as I was young and keen and green, I did a year of mime in my drama lessons.

Then I taught in a school near Wakefield which was - er - going through a difficult time. Here the problem was staff politics - - basically, everyone hated the Head, because he was a very, very, very bad Head. It's quite hard to sack a Head. A specialist school-sorter-outer was sent to the school for six months to try to help the Head to sort out the problems. He lasted two days. "The conflict between the Head and the senior staff cannot be solved." It didn't make for a happy working atmosphere.

Then I taught in a school in one of Leeds' most deprived areas, for several years. Although I was technically there as a supply teacher - to fill in when teachers are absent - and was booked a day at a time, in fact I was generally there every day. The teenagers I taught were poorly fed, pasty faced, and had more important things on their minds than anything we were trying to teach them. "Sorry I'm late, Miss, but my Dad was arrested last night and I've just come from the police station."

It was tough. Sometimes very tough. Because I was on supply, I tended to get the classes that nobody else wanted.

Step One: Get all the class into the classroom, without them noticing that this is what you are doing.

Step Two: Get them all sitting down. A triumph!

Step Three: Get them all to stop hurling insults at each other, and also get their attention by trying to be both really interesting and preferably funny, too.

Step Four: Teach them something. And it must have a spin on it that makes it meaningful for them, or they simply won't listen.

There are advantages to teaching teenagers like these.

Firstly, anything you can do for them - or teach them - is a plus, as their lives are full of a lot of empty shouting and often violence, too, and not much else.

Secondly, it can be very rewarding on those occasions when they actually see the value of what you're teaching. Amazing.

Thirdly, when someone who learns very slowly finally grasps something, it can be a delight.

Fourthly, when you know that they have given you a grudging respect and you know that they wouldn't smash the room up even if you left them for ten whole minutes, it can be positively thrilling.

There are, however, lots of disadvantages. Mostly along the lines of it being very, very, very stressful and requiring you to be totally on the alert every minute - - eyes in the back of your head, all right! You need to know when they're about to kick off, a whole minute before they know it, so you can distract them.

I learned a lot from them, much of it about the unfairness and horrors of some people's lives, and the resilience and bravery of the ones who rose above it.

So - - now I'm teaching medical students.

Here the advantages are many. They come in much smaller groups. They are polite. They wouldn't smash the room up even if you left them for a whole hour. They are witty and they make me laugh: and what's more they have the good sense to laugh when I am trying to be funny. They are very, very quick to learn and if they see the importance of something they can learn it, absorb it and instantly use it.

I am learning a lot from them, too, about all sorts of things.

Sometimes I hear others who do a similar job to me complaining about the students. You won't hear me complaining. It's bliss. I am enjoying every moment.

As for teachers who teach in schools - they have my utmost respect and admiration. I did it then, and I'm glad I did: it was never dull, and I learned a lot.

I'd like to think that I could still give a class That Look that would quieten them immediately.

And I'm very glad that I no longer have to.

Mushy Facebook Statuses

2011-11-03T19:51:00.004Z

I'm not one of these people who goes on and on and on about how they don't see the point of Facebook or Twitter. I am on both and like both and look at both a lot. I think they're fun and I also like the way I can now keep in touch with far-flung relatives very easily - and I DO.

I don't like the games that appear on Facebook, such as Farmville etc - but that's probably because I'm just not very into games. For those who like that kind of thing (as Jean Brodie said) that is the kind of thing that they like, and that's fine - it's just not for me.

What I don't like are what I would describe as Mushy Facebook Statuses. They go something like this:

If you think that the world should be a better place, and that poverty should be done away with, and that nobody should ever be ill, and that everyone should be really happy all the time, post this as your status for one hour to show your solidarity with everyone else who's fallen for this meaningless crap.

(Except it doesn't usually say the last bit.)

I hate it! If you want to go and do some good in the world, then kindly go and DO it. Don't just put empty guff on Facebook about it. Pah!

Game for a Laugh?

2011-10-30T17:33:00.002Z

I hate all practical jokes.

Okay, perhaps there might once have been one somewhere that was mildly amusing but I have never found it. I think practical jokes are unfunny, and cruel, and all about the enjoyment of the people planning them. I hate them.

There used to be a television programme Game for a Laugh? where practical jokes were played on members of the public. Some of them were very elaborate - - someone came home from work to find that, apparently, someone had set fire to their car - - whereas in fact their car had been taken away and the one going up in flames was one that looked just like it!

Hilarious, eh?

At the end of the programme the presenter would reveal himself, explain that it was all a jolly jape and the poor victim would then be expected to show that he had taken it all in good part - - because he was "game for a laugh". Of course, if the victim then picked up the presenter, punched him in the face and threw him into the embers of the blazing car, that was considered really bad form - didn't he have a sense of humour, for goodness' sake?

I know myself well enough to know I would never be "game for a laugh" in such circumstances. I'd be a weeping, furious heap, totally out of my own control.

A few years ago, I was involved in planning a surprise birthday party for a close friend. The "surprise" bit was not my idea and in fact I found it very hard to take, and very hard not to tell him - because to me, any kind of "surprise" like that is equivalent to a practical joke - - and I hate practical jokes.

This week Derren Brown's latest show set out to demonstrate how an audience can quickly take on the characteristics of a mob. The audience thought they were watching a new gameshow where - anonymously and wearing masks - they had to choose repeatedly between a couple of alternatives of what would happen to an unsuspecting "victim" - would he win a prize or be accused of shoplifting, for example? Whatever the audience decided, then happened to the victim, with the other roles played by actors.

We saw an interview with Chris, the victim, at the start, where he was set up for us not to like him much - - he cheated on girlfriends, he played lots of practical jokes on others. He had been interviewed for Derren Brown's show but then told he hadn't been chosen - - but oh yes, he had.

The audience thought the show was about Chris - but it wasn't. It was about them. Derren Brown constantly validated their decisions: and their decisions became more and more cruel. "Excellent!" he said, again and again, laughing and encouraging them. Each was pressing a button anonymously, of course, so they didn't think there would ever be any comeback.

Of course, knowledge of this mob behaviour is not new and neither is the fact that, when encouraged by someone in authority, people will go much further than they think they ever would. Even so, it was fascinating - in a very disturbing way - to see.

Only a very shocking ending - which I won't describe in case anyone hasn't yet seen the show - finally brought the audience to their senses. They removed their masks and looked genuinely shocked and bewildered. One woman fled the auditorium.

I'm not even going to get into the morals of showing all this - I'm not really sure what I think about it. Perhaps, disturbing as it was, it might have made a lot of people aware of how easily a group can become a mob, and that might be a good thing.

And then, I find myself wondering - - if I had been in that audience, what would I have done?

Because I hate any kind of practical joke so much, I think I would have left in the early stages, when we were voting on whether Chris should be falsely accused of pinching a girl's bottom. I found it disturbing enough to watch from my living-room - I'm not sure I could have stood it from being in the audience.

Stephen, however, suggested that I might have stayed and pressed the "nice" option each time, just to try and counteract the majority vote for the "nasty" option.

Possibly. That would, perhaps, have been more brave. I think I would have fled.

I cannot honestly think that I would have stayed, pressed the "nasty" button and laughed along with it all.

But, d'you know what, I bet there were some people in that audience who would have said the same, and yet were swept along with it. I'm hoping I would not have been one of them.

My Failure in Ballet

2011-10-28T16:23:00.005+01:00

We went to the ballet quite often when I was little. I saw lots of the big traditional ballets: everything from Swan Lake to La Fille mal Gardee, where the Fille in question's suitor comes on stage in the middle of a dance involving lots of bales of hay, and then suddenly bursts out from the hay. I never did work out how they got him onstage, but I loved it.

I was learning ballet myself, oh yes, at Miss Carr's ballet school above the Clock Cinema at Oakwood.

So, there we were, me aged only four, at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, watching a big spectacular ballet - - something like Giselle. I'm sure I didn't understand the plot, which is slightly over-dramatic to say the least, but I did like the look of it, and I enjoyed the music. And then I heard the grown-ups talking about tutus, a word I had never heard before.

"The tutus are wonderful," said my mother.

"Yes, beautiful," said my grandmother.

"They're lovely," said my father.

They all looked at me expectantly, waiting for my comment.

Well I hadn't a clue what they were on about. I didn't like to say "I'm only four, I have not yet mastered all of the English language, I have no idea what this strange word means."

So I adopted the strategy which has served me well on most occasions ever since. It is to pretend I understand and hope that all will become clear in the future.

I leaned back in my seat with what I hoped was an all-knowing air.

"Oh yes, the tutus are simply delightful. Marvellous." I said.

Everyone sighed with pleasure. I had clearly said the right thing.

Sadly, though, they never referred to them again. I went home muttering "tutus, tutus, tutus" to myself in the hope that the meaning would reveal itself.

Having pretended that I knew, there was no way I was ever going to ask what the word meant. Oh no. Far too much pride for that.

It seemed like decades later, but was probably only a few months - time passes slowly when you're little - and I had bought a copy of one of those girls' annuals in a Bring and Buy sale.

And there it was! A photograph, captioned "Margot Fonteyn, ballerina, wearing a white tutu."

So that was what it was! A sort of sticky-out frock of the kind I had coveted since - - well, forever.

Finally, I knew what it meant! I longed to grow up, become a ballet dancer and wear one myself.

Sadly, although I did match the ballerina height requirements, that was as far as it went. Broad back and short legs and even shorter arms do not a ballerina make.

Other girls, I could see, could jump higher than I could, and with a lot more grace. "All together now - - spring points! One - - two - - one - - two - -" Some girls landed like feathers, and I landed like lead. And then we had to sit on the floor with our feet together and knees out and try to get our knees flat on the floor. Some girls could do it easily. I couldn't do it at all. My balance wasn't great either. I would stand on one leg and fall over. Arabesques were going to prove tricky, I could tell.

I had one thing in my favour: I had a lot of stamina, and still do. But even at the age of five I could tell it wasn't going to be enough. I put all these lack of skills together in my head and decided it was a no-no. Nureyev was going to have to dance with Fonteyn, and never with me.

I hung up my cute pink pair of ballet slippers. I never did get to wear a tutu.

It's a source of lasting regret.

Workmen of the Nineteen-Sixties

2011-10-26T18:06:00.006+01:00

Two workmen arrived today to start a huge job - removing the old render from the outside of the house and replacing it all. The house is very high and they are expecting to take up to a month over it. There are lots of associated jobs, such as replacing all the downpipes. It's all going to cost more than our first house - but it needs to be done, because damp is getting in. Once it's all done and the house has dried out properly, then we can start the next job, which is redecorating. Sighhh.

Although these two seem to have got a lot done today, I don't have very fond memories of some of the workmen in this house, though some have been great.

Amongst the worst were the ones who built the extension, in 1964.

My mother was pregnant with my brother, so there was a lot of change going on anyway, and I wasn't sure about it.

Although the house already had four bedrooms, my parents decided to make it larger. My grandmother - my mother's mother - was living with us, and they decided to add two extra rooms. One downstairs - now the office where the actors' agency is based - and one above it, which became my Grandma's bedroom.

They did it by filling in two sides of a square and moving the back door to what used to be the pantry. I didn't like this. I liked the pantry, and I liked the old back door, even though I once fell down all the stone steps outside it. The steps are still there, hidden under the extension.

The builders weren't very good - a lot of builders weren't, in the nineteen-sixties - and the new flat-roofed extension was totally out of character with the rest of the house, which was built in 1896. But the Communist, born in 1923, hated anything to do with the nineteenth-century - he didn't think there was anything appealing in it at all. Like a lot of people at the time, he thought that the sooner every trace of it was gone in housing and decor, the better.

I didn't like the workmen. I was shy and very bookish and wore glasses. Whenever my parents or my Grandma weren't around, they would tease me for being a swot - the kind of teasing, ironically, that in spite of the fact that - let's face it - I really was a swot, I never really encountered at school. I hated such teasing and had no idea how to deal with it.

I used to read a lot, when I wasn't playing out. One day the workmen found me reading Alice in Wonderland when they arrived in the morning, and then a different book when they had their afternoon tea break. Or one of their tea breaks. I remember a lot of tea breaks.

"So what happened to the book you were reading this morning?" asked Nasty Workman One.

"I finished it," I said. I was aware that, whatever direction this was heading in, it wasn't a good one.

"You can't have." he said. "You'd only read a bit of it when we saw you this morning."

"I read fast," I said.

A more useful answer, of course, would have been "FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE, YOU ASSHOLE, OR I'LL TELL MY DAD YOU'RE A PAEDOPHILE." But, in those innocent days, I had not yet encountered three of the words in that sentence. So I stuck to "I read fast."

"You can't read that fast," said Nasty Workman One.

"Nobody can. You're lying," said Nasty Workman Two.

I wasn't lying. I did read fast. I still read very fast. To this day, from time to time, people say to me, "What, have you read that already?" I used to get into trouble at school because teachers thought I hadn't read books properly, until they tested me and found that I had. My son Olli had the same problem with teachers for the same reason. If anything, he reads faster than I do.

"Well, go on then," said Nasty Workman One. "Prove it. Read aloud to us."

And so it was that, in April 1964, age seven-nearly-eight, I found myself sitting on the settee in the lounge reading Alice in Wonderland to two men who should have been busy building the extension to our house.

I knew that whatever I did, the result would be bad. If I read quickly and with no problem, then I was that dreadful thing, a swot. But if I read slowly and with hesitation, I was that other dreadful thing, a liar.

I read fast, and I read well, because I was a swot, and they found that very amusing. They hated me.

I hated them.

I still hate them.

The Shortest Swim Ever

2011-10-23T10:39:00.003+01:00

It's always a bit of a pain getting out of bed to go swimming on a Sunday morning but once I'm in the water I love it. So I always have to keep reminding myself of this as I get ready to go.

And so it was this morning. Get up, feel dreadful, hate it, eat porridge, get ready, drive there (only eight minutes or so), get into the pool - - bliss!

Swim a length - - swim back again - - two done, sixty-eight to go - -

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" A loud klaxon sounded.

"THE pH OF THE POOL IS TOO LOW. YOU'LL ALL HAVE TO GET OUT! NOW!" shouted the swimming-pool attendant, in the manner of an officer tending a prisoner-of-war camp.

I find this about swimming-pool attendants. I think they are all thwarted PE teachers of the kind who enjoy blowing whistles and making small children stand about in lines on freezing playing fields.

"YOU'VE GOT TO GET SHOWERED OFF!" yelled the Camp Commander. "THE pH IS TOO LOW!"

An apology would have been nice, I thought, but none was forthcoming - - people who thrill to their ability to blow whistles and shout a lot don't tend to do apologies.

So, reluctantly, we all clambered out, and had showers to get the nasty alkaline water off our skin, and - in my case - texted our friends to tell them not to bother coming this morning.

The receptionist is friendly though and as I went out she said "I'm really sorry you've had to get out of the pool," which definitely helped. Why don't people realise that a "sorry" is such a good thing?

One of the managers was standing next to her and he explained that it will take a while to sort out. At the moment the pool is too alkaline and so would at best irritate the skin and at worst dissolve the swimmers. But it's easy to make it too acidic and if that happens apparently it's much harder to restore the correct balance. So they will have to increase the acidity a bit at a time. (Gareth suggested later that they'll squeeze lemon juice into the water, a few drops at a time. That kind of thing.)

See? There's a lot to looking after swimming pools. And there was I, thinking that all that they did to keep it in its usual state was to go round first thing and chuck in a few used sticking-plasters and a scattering of pubic hairs.

Ewwwww. I wish that I hadn't written that last sentence. Too late now. Sorry.

Raw Nature in the Suburbs

2011-10-18T20:04:00.002+01:00

I was driving through one of the posher Leeds suburbs today, on my way to visit Silverback for a cuppa.

Suddenly, right ahead of me, I saw a Squashed Dead Thing by the edge of the road. I couldn't work out what it was - perhaps a squirrel that had been run over.

Next to it was a large crow, happily pecking away at this free lunch.

I slowed down to watch the crow - and then something amazing happened.

Out of nowhere, a huge bird of prey dropped like a stone onto the crow, which never saw what hit it, but nevertheless staggered clumsily for a couple of steps and then flew off, chased by the much bigger bird. The crow was very unsteady in the air - it was clearly thinking "WTF?" And in fact the bigger bird had droppped so fast that I hadn't seen it coming either.

I recognised the big bird: it was a red kite. I have occasionally seen them in the area as there is a breeding colony at nearby Eccup Reservoir.

They have very wide wings - a five-foot wingspan! - and a forked tail and this makes their shape very easy to identify. Once I saw one above the parade of shops at Moortown Corner - it looked very incongruous, this huge bird of prey gliding above Marks and Spencer's!

But today, the red kite was just a few feet in front of me as it swooped down on the crow: I've never seen one up so close and it looked absolutely huge. Of course, when you just see the silhouette in the sky it's hard to tell the scale. I knew they were big but it made the crow look like a sparrow in comparison.

I had stopped the car - I was going slowly anyway but don't remember stopping so it's a good job there wasn't anything behind me! As the red kite took off again after landing on the crow I could see its forked tail and the red on its wings very clearly.

Once it had made quite sure the crow wasn't coming back - - and believe me, the crow certainly had no intentions of ever coming back, in fact it's probably still flying in the general direction of AWAY - then the red kite did a rather fancy turn in the air, came back, landed on the Squashed Dead Thing, took a large beakful and then flew away.

The whole incident took much less than a minute - - perhaps only thirty seconds.

What is it about birds of prey? They always give me a little frisson of excitement. And the suddenness of it all, coupled with the size of the red kite and its closeness to my car made it a thrilling thing to have seen in a Leeds suburb on a Tuesday afternoon. All over in less than a minute - and yet I know I'll always remember it.

Target reached - - and some wonderful pools

2011-10-16T19:39:00.006+01:00

Some of you were kind enough to sponsor me when I did the Great North Swim back in June. The contributions from this - over £500 - helped towards my friend and colleague Sally Womersley's bid to complete the funding to buy a “Zeiss ApoTome” imaging system: a state-of-the-art microscope to help with the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis.

Sally herself has organised two Charity Balls and a zip-wire ride towards it and raised many thousands of pounds. The machine costs £80,000 and when I met Sally this week she told me that the zip-wire ride has completed the funding needed and the machine can now be bought.

So I'm delighted that my swim helped towards it and am very grateful to everyone who sponsored me. Although MS perhaps doesn't receive as much publicity as some long-term illnesses, I know several people who have it and it's a cause dear to my heart.

So a very big THANK YOU! And congratulations to Sally for all the very hard work she's done in fundraising for this machine.

I'm still swimming of course! I haven't been able to swim for a couple of weeks because I've had a cough but it's finally gone so I went swimming this morning. I've been quite tired recently - possibly because of the cough, and I know I've been working hard as well, and I know that diabetes is supposed to make you more tired.

So I got up at half-past seven, grumbling and wanting to stay in bed, but repeating my little mantra to myself which is "Daphne, you have never regretted going swimming so just get on with it!"

The pool opens at half past eight but I need to get up an hour earlier in order to eat a very large bowl of porridge to give myself energy to swim!

It only takes about eight minutes to drive to the pool on Sunday morning. As soon as I'm in the water all tiredness goes and today I swam my usual seventy lengths with no problem at all.

The first ten lengths or so are not exactly difficult but always harder than the rest: and after that my body seems to go "Ahhh SWIMMING! THAT's what I'm doing! Why didn't you SAY so?" and the rest is really enjoyable.

Of course I don't imagine I'm in Fearnville Leisure Centre, oh no.

In my daydreams I might be in this pool, in Buttonwood Bay, Florida, which I swam in during our holiday in November 2008:

Or I could be at our friends Graham and Christine's glorious place in Burgundy, which we've visited several times now, including this summer: do look at their website: Maison Creme Anglaise:

Here I am in their pool:

and another one:

or in this beautiful pool at Mas Pichony, the farm where we stayed in Provence this summer:

Oh I've been lucky to have swum in some lovely swimming pools this year, not to mention the sea and Windermere!

But for everyday swimming, I'm still very, very grateful to have a municipal swimming pool very near to me. And thanks again to everyone who sponsored me.

At Land's End

2011-10-12T20:56:00.002+01:00

As I watched Richard Wilson, on the television programme Britain's Best Drives, approach Land's End in Cornwall, I remembered it with sudden clarity. It's the most south-westerly point of England. What I remembered most was the scent of the grassland, and all the little flowers in the grass.

There are cliffs, and wild seas, but actually I don't remember those at all - - just the approach to them, and the grass, and the flowers.

It's not really surprising that I don't remember the views - I wouldn't have been able to see them. This was nearly a couple of years before anyone knew that I couldn't see very well at all. But I've always remembered the smell of the grass, and those mysterious words "Land's End" which sounded both pleasing, exciting and faintly scary.

We were on holiday in Penzance, and I was three.

The approach to Land's End is one of my three memories of that holiday.

The second one is of visiting what must have been a gift shop. It sold donkeys and carts made out of pottery. It was a low-lying, stone building and they had lots of the same ceramic donkey-and-carts of different sizes, in greens and pinks. Some were as big as me - or that's how I remember them, anyway. My grandmother - my mother's mother - bought me one, a little one. Of course I kept it for - - well - ever. I'm not sure where it is now, exactly, but I'd guess it's in this house somewhere: it was quite chunky and I don't remember it ever getting broken.

My third memory, however, is not so happy.

It's nearly four hundred miles to Penzance from Leeds if you take the quickest route by motorway.

Of course, in 1959, there was no motorway route. I expect it was well over four hundred and fifty miles, and never very fast.

So we stopped on the way, in Bath, at one of those old-fashioned boarding houses.

In those days, our family was made up of the Communist, my mother, and my grandmother, who had come to live with us just that summer. It was the summer we all moved into this house, the house where Stephen and I live now. Grandma had moved to Leeds from Barrow-in-Furness, because her husband had died a couple of years earlier.

So that summer was the first time she'd ever come on holiday with us.

All went reasonably well I think - though I can't remember - until the boarding-house in Bath.

Somehow the Communist lost the belt from his trousers. I have absolutely no idea how.

Grandma was one of those women who thought of men as a separate species - useful in some ways, but perhaps a bit dim. She had herself been very happily married. Grandma was a ferociously intelligent woman who had never been out to work but who was very much in charge at home.

She and the Bath landlady joined forces in finding the Communist's missing belt absolutely hilarious and mentioning it with tremendous hilarity every ten seconds or so throughout breakfast.

The atmosphere became more and more tense. I remember crying and being taken out of the room by my mother. I was aware how upset the Communist was at being the subject of such teasing, and how the two women wouldn't stop laughing.

I think the events of that breakfast cast a long shadow over the future years. Grandma lived with us for the next thirty-three years and the relationship between her and the Communist was never easy - they tolerated each other, but that was about it. Grandma always made lots of little digs. Every day when he came home from work, she would say "Oh, is there a man here?" in such a way that it was very nearly a joke - - but not quite.

I loved my Grandma, and I loved the Communist of course, and I often felt torn between them. I think it must have been difficult for my mother.

Whenever I have heard people, in the company of small children, say something like "Oh, she's too young to understand," I have thought of this incident. Of course I didn't know exactly what was going on - - but I knew it was horrible, and I hated it.

Some Memories for Jeannette

2011-10-10T17:42:00.004+01:00

Yesterday, JeannetteLS left a comment on my post about Kirkby Lonsdale. She mentioned that England has many lovely place-names and mentioned Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds. Although she's American, she had visited there forty-four years ago and remembers it very clearly.

Well, I was there just last year and I thought that Jeannette might like to see some photos of how it is now. Which, I'd guess, is much the same as it was then.

Buildings made of lovely warm Cotswold stone:

Gorgeous gardens:

The water and bridges that gave the village its name:

Lovely old pubs (we had a very good lunch in this one)

Children playing in the river:

It was the essence of "Englishness" on an idyllic summer's day.

I hope that's brought back some good memories for Jeannette and for everyone else who's been to this beautiful part of England.

Kirkby Lonsdale

2011-10-09T16:57:00.004+01:00

All my life I've travelled to Barrow-in-Furness quite often - though not as often as I'd like! My mother's from there and some of my favourite relatives live there, and it has some of my favourite beaches.

To get to Barrow-in-Furness from Leeds, the best way is along the A65. Though tell that to my satnav! For some reason which I've never quite fathomed, she thinks the best way is along the motorway - the dreaded M62, always incredibly congested. Whereas the A65 is a pretty country road, much shorter and hardly ever busy.

Even when we instructed the satnav to favour motorways a bit less and country roads a bit more, she just wasn't having it. "Turn around when possible" she says, repeatedly, until you're nearly halfway there. Then she sulks, thinks to herself for a bit, and finally decided that okay, if you MUST go that way, she'll reluctantly give you directions. And the distance suddenly jumps from about 130 miles (because she wants you to go all the way back to the M62 and start again) to about 55 miles. Pah! I think whoever devised the satnav programming must have had a hated relative who lived along the A65.

You travel along the A65 until you cross the M6 motorway, and then you travel west for what seems like forever, and you reach Barrow. It's one of my favourite journeys.

On the way, just before the M6, is Kirkby Lonsdale. All my life I've liked it! When I was little, and the drive to Barrow took a lot longer (it seemed like days, but it was about three hours for a hundred miles in those days) I used to do the "Are we nearly there yet?" thing that is a necessity for all proper children.

Eventually, my parents realised that "Look out for Kirkby Lonsdale, because when we get there, it's not that far to Barrow" would keep me quiet for a while.

And what a lovely name. Kirkby Lonsdale. Along with Cark and Cartmel and Nook and Cow Brow - - ahh, there are some lovely names you pass on the way to Barrow and round about there.

By the river in Kirkby Lonsdale is a favourite meeting place for bikers, and my biker cousin Robert from Barrow often used to drive out there. He died from cancer in 2008 and I always think of him when I see all the leather-clad bikers meeting by the river there.

And the river's always worth a look if there's time to stop.

Last time I drove through Kirkby Lonsdale was when my mother and I took our cousin Amy back to Barrow, in early September - she'd been staying with Mum in Leeds for a while.

It had been raining. A lot. So I thought that the river might be rather full.

I sometimes use an application on my phone called Glympse, which allows friends and family to follow your route and see where you are - it's good fun and can be useful too of course. I'd sent a Glympse before setting off from Barrow.

Even so, I thought it was very amusing to get a message from Silverback on my way home which said "You're standing on the bridge at Kirkby Lonsdale taking photographs, aren't you?"

Of course, the Glympse just says where your phone is located - - you need a bit of insider knowledge to work out what I was up to. Did he guess right? It's a fair cop, guv. Guilty as charged.

On the Naughty Step

2011-10-03T19:55:00.003+01:00

I once saw a survey that showed that, of Britain's major cities, Hull was the one that most people couldn't place on a map. This is probably because nobody is ever passing through Hull. It's way out on the East Coast. It's remote and different and actually I rather like it.

Unfortunately, it wasn't until Saturday morning that my son Olli remembered that he had a hospital appointment in Hull this morning, ie Monday. Well - - probably. But he wasn't certain.

The trouble was, he didn't have a letter of confirmation and there was no way to check.

He did try to check - - but the hospital in Hull said that there was no way they could find out on a Saturday. The only way was to ring at eight-thirty on Monday morning and ask the department then.

Ahhh yes, but that was a bit of a problem. If you're in York - as Olli is - and the appointment was in Hull first thing - - and Olli knew he would have asked for it to be first thing as he starts work at midday in York and would need to get back from Hull in time for work - then eight-thirty this morning wasn't early enough to have confirmation, because that would be too late to set off from York (in the middle of the North) to Hull (on the East Coast).

And he would have to get back in time for work, because he hadn't thought to tell them that he might be late, because it wasn't until Saturday morning that he realised he had an appointment at the hospital. Or might have.

Furthermore, the trains from Hull to York are such that he couldn't get back from Hull by train, and he hasn't yet passed his driving test. Gareth was working today, driving lorries. Stephen was on his way to Helsinki for a meeting.

So I looked to see who everyone was looking at; and oh yes, it was me.

Well I'd been working all weekend, because it was the agency meeting and I had a lot of financial work to do for the agency too. But still, what a fun idea it could be to get up at quarter to six on a Monday morning and to drive to Hull, collecting Olli from York on the way.

So, whistling a merry tune of pure happiness, off I went in the cold and the dark to drive the twenty-something miles to York to collect Olli, and then the subsequent thirty-something miles to Hull.

(Though, damn it, it then got all warm and sunny and turned into a beautiful day. And the drive to Hull that way is much nicer than the M62 and took a shorter time, so that's good to know for the future, and it was jolly pleasant to spend some time chatting with my son, too. Please don't let Olli read this paragraph, though, because I want him to dwell on all the unpleasantness he's inflicted on his saintly mother.)

When it got to half-past eight we were nearly at the Hull hospital and thought we might as well turn up and see if Olli did have an appointment, rather than ringing. If they told us to go away I thought I'd try my look of shocked innocence - which I've perfected in many a medical roleplay - and just see if by any chance the consultant would see him anyway.

Yes, yes, I know, that's impossible, hospitals just doesn't do such things, I was being ridiculously over-optimistic. Appointments with consultants are like gold dust and if you miss one you can have to wait months for another - - which is why we didn't dare risk missing it in the first place.

"Hello," said the receptionist, with a friendly smile, "Can I help you?"

Olli said that he thought he had an appointment today, but didn't know what time. After a bit of searching, Friendly Receptionist looked confused.

"I'm sorry, you do have an appointment, but it's on October 24th at 9.40" she said.

I was getting all ready to do my Shocked Innocence acting followed by How Many Miles I'd Driven acting - - but she was ahead of me, and smiled.

"I'll see if the consultant can see Olli today," she said.

Five minutes later back came the news that the consultant would indeed see him.

Five minutes after that, Olli was called through to see him. The appointment was very necessary, but it didn't take long.

So, a coffee and a bun in the very pleasant cafe and we were on our way back to York (and, in my case, then to Leeds, of course, I wouldn't want Olli to forget the extra twenty-something miles). As I dropped Olli off at work he was beginning to wonder - - - if he didn't have an appointment at Hull hospital today then - - um - - where DID he have an appointment? I don't know if he ever solved that one.

In conclusion: I love the National Health Service in general and this hospital in Hull in particular. Oh yes, and I love my son too.

As for Olli getting the appointment date wrong - - well, Olli is very very clever (don't deny it Olli, or it'll be all your exam results on this blog next) and doesn't usually forget things. So he knows I won't mention it again. Well, not until tomorrow, anyway. And the next day. Oh yes, and several times a week for the next few weeks.

He did think that he was in line for a suitable punishment for making his poor mother drive a hundred and seventeen point seven miles (I just happened to notice the total) very early on a Monday morning and, at twenty-two, he's twenty years too old to be made to sit on the Naughty Step. But he hit on a self-punishment that would suffice.

"Okay, Mum," he volunteered in tones of resignation. "In return for driving me to Hull, you can blog about it."

On a Hot October Morning

2011-10-01T13:51:00.006+01:00

The Communist loved Roundhay Park, Leeds' huge Victorian park. As a child his family used to have day trips to the park from the slums where they lived and it was the Communist's ambition to live near it. He achieved this at the age of thirty-six, when my parents bought the house where we live now, and he never wanted to move ever again.

The Communist visited the park every week or so. But in his whole life he never experienced a day like today, because there never was an October day as warm as this in his lifetime.

The people of Leeds were making good use of it this morning.

Walkers in the dappled sunshine by the lake:

Ducks and geese being fed until they could barely stay afloat:

Keep-fitters on the grass:

and others running up and down the hill which used to lead to the open-air swimming pool which closed in the Seventies (sighhh! I'd have been swimming in it today!)

Children in kayaks on Waterloo Lake:

and others learning how to fall out, and then - hopefully - how to get back in again:

The beautiful, mature trees that I've known all my life, and that the Communist knew all his life:

The tranquil walks by the lake:

And, in the dappled sunshine, the seats where the Communist, in his old age, used to sit for a little rest on his slow stroll round the lake. "Shall we stop for a while, Daphne? I'm not as young as I used to be, you know."

I missed him there this morning.

Somewhat Outclassed

2011-09-25T13:55:00.008+01:00

When I go swimming during the week I swim 66 lengths (two lengths more than a mile, in case I've counted wrong) and on a Sunday I swim 72 lengths (a mile and an eighth, though today I did 74 lenths, in case I'd counted wrong.)

I'm quite pleased with myself for swimming this distance and I always enjoy it. But - - all things are relative - -

Today I met my old friends Jo and Deb - the sisters I've known since - - well - - forever. The Communist was best friends with their father from schooldays until the Communist's death (their father is still hale and hearty at something like 88).

We used to go swimming a lot together as children and we often meet in the pool now. They are both much better swimmers than I am - - but I am taller, so there. I shan't tell you how tall they are - - or rather, aren't - but I am 5'4" and Jo and Deb are the reason I grew up thinking I am a giant.

To my surprise, Deb was swimming in the "medium" paced lane, where I swim, instead of in the fast lane, where she usually swims with her sister Jo.

So I asked her why. It turned out that this morning's swim was, for her, merely a twenty-five length warm-up prior to doing the Ilkley Triathlon this afternoon.

"So what's that, then?" I asked. "How far?"

It turns out to be twenty lengths of the pool, followed by an eight-mile cycle up and down some of Yorkshire's finest and most hilly hills, followed by a three-mile run.

Ah. Yes. Could I do that? Nope.

But then, of course, you have to remember that Deb is younger than I am, of course.

She's only fifty.

Murder in North Yorkshire

2011-09-24T14:09:00.002+01:00

I can't give you too much detail about this story, to protect the innocent. And the guilty.

In this case the guilty party was my son Olli, but his guilt wasn't really as bad as it sounds. All he did was kill the wrong person.

He works for a company which has a scheme that families can belong to. They pay into it and get benefits from the scheme. Olli's job is to decide how much they can get.

But, of course, if one of the family dies, then that family member doesn't pay into the scheme any more. I think that's fairly clear.

So an elderly man, whom I shall call Old Man, rang Olli and said, sadly, that one of his family had died and that her name was Shirley Knott. (Actually that wasn't her real name. Shirley Knott is a bit of an Annette Curtain or Lydia Dustbin kind of name, and I've just invented it, and I'm rather proud of myself.)

Knowing, of course, that the devil is in the detail, and so it's vitally important to check, Olli said that he was sorry to hear that, and asked for Shirley Knott's date of birth, to check that he had the right person.

"I can't remember her date of birth," said Old Man, sadly.

"Don't worry," said Olli, soothingly, "can you give me the postcode instead?"

Old Man gave Olli the postcode. Olli checked that there was indeed a person called Shirley Knott living at that address. He transferred her into the category of Dead Customers and was about to say goodbye to Old Man.

And it was only then that he noticed that there were two people with exactly the same name living at that postcode.

"Aaaaah," said Olli. "There seem to be two people called Shirley Knott at this address."

"Oh yes," replied Old Man. "One's my daughter and one's my daughter-in-law. I forgot to mention that. You wouldn't want to put the wrong one down as being dead, would you?"

Well, of course - - Murphy's Law - - if a thing can go wrong, it will - - -

And the way their system works is that once someone is listed as Dead, it is impossible to undeadify them and put them back into being a live customer again. Whoever wrote the software didn't believe in reincarnation, clearly.

Olli decided to follow the proper procedure in such cases, which was to panic and then to go home for the weekend.

He did leave a note, however, to his colleagues, to say that if anyone from that family happened to ring over the weekend, they were not to say anything about Shirley and her deadness.

On Monday he will have to see if the Top Manager has a Special Button to be used for bringing people back to life. Otherwise he will have to talk to the IT department, probably bribing them with chocolate. And if all that fails, poor Shirley will just have to remain dead until the day she dies.

Looking for the Zebras

2011-09-21T17:40:00.002+01:00

I'm going back to working with medical students tomorrow and thinking about the phrase that I've often heard.

"Common things are common."

When I first heard it, I didn't have a clue what it meant: but what it meant is that if, for example, you have a headache, it's much more likely to be a tension headache than a brain tumour. Tension headaches are very common: brain tumours are rare.

In fact, I did hear a GP say once "Well I know I won't see another brain tumour until I retire, because I've had one patient who had one."

He wasn't being entirely serious, but it's an interesting point. Statistically, he wasn't likely to have another patient with a brain tumour - - but then, statistics, as we know, don't always give the full picture.

It's true, though, that student doctors are taught to look for the likeliest things first, so they don't miss any common illnesses or injuries. And it's the right thing to do in some ways.

However, what it means is that, if you don't quite fit the usual picture, sometimes they will be totally at a loss. And, at other times, they simply won't listen. My best example of this, that happened to me, went like this:

"I'm sure I'm in labour. Absolutely certain."

"No you're not. Don't be silly."

And it was not until the baby arrived that anyone believed me, and even so, nobody ever acknowledged that I'd been right all along, or apologised. Their training - and here it was nurses at fault as well as doctors - taught them that if a woman is in labour, she is also in pain. I wasn't in pain, so they wouldn't listen.

As it turned out I have something unusual wrong with me so I don't feel labour pain and the labour doesn't work too well either. But it was unusual, and nobody was thinking "Perhaps there are exceptions - - "

My friend John told me another version of "Common things are common" the other day which I rather like.

"When you see hoof prints, look for horses, not zebras."

And that is - for much of the time - true.

But if you look for horses, and there ARE no horses - - - well, that's the time to go and find the herd of zebras grazing just behind the clump of trees.

In Front of a Class Again

2011-09-20T20:51:00.003+01:00

I don't believethat dreams can predict the future, or in any such thing - - - but I do believe that they tell you quite a bit about yourself. So I suppose they can predict the future to some extent in that they can tell you about how you're likely to behave in a real-life situation.

Last night in my dream - - and believe me, it was so realistic that when I woke up I had to work pretty hard to convince myself that it WAS a dream - I was back teaching in a secondary school. Supply teaching, much as I used to do at a secondary school in Seacroft, all those years ago, before Olli was born.

If you know Leeds then the word "Seacroft" will not fill you with idyllic thoughts of little houses on the coast. It's not, perhaps, the most genteel part of Leeds, and many of the teenagers I taught there came from very difficult backgrounds.

"Sorry I'm late Miss, but my Dad was arrested last night for flashing, and we all ended up spending the night down the station."

(For those of you who need an explanation: "flashing" is "displaying one's genitals in an inappropriate place and suggestive manner" and "the station" is "the police station.")

Yes, it was quite a memorable excuse.

And last night, I was back supply-teaching again. I knew it was going to be a tricky day. My class, which numbered about forty, was to be taught in a field. They had all been asked to come in historical costume for some different lesson afterwards, and they were all dressed in cumbersome plastic outfits with swords and bows and arrows and a few guns. They were, of course, already poking each other and hitting each other with these weapons.

I was going to be teaching them English so I looked for the books and there weren't any. Another teacher turned up with some story-books for seven-year-olds and I knew this would go down badly with the fourteen-year-olds in the field. And I'd have to shout my head off to make myself heard - - it was a pretty big field.

However, I did manage to get them all sitting down, and I confiscated a few swords and such, and was all ready to start. And then I lost my voice.

This was so traumatic that I woke up.

On Thursday I start again working with medical students in Communication Skills. I loved it last year. The students were great, the work was interesting, they are split into in groups of five students only. Compared with the big groups of troubled teens that I used to work with - - well, it was bliss.

And yet I'm still nervous, as the dream showed. I want to do the work as well as I possibly can. Perhaps if I wasn't nervous, I couldn't do it.

Indian Summer

2011-09-18T14:32:00.002+01:00

Yes, we all know it hasn't been a great summer in Britain. But never mind, I thought - - there might be an Indian Summer. Early September is often gorgeous and I have fond memories of lovely narrowboat trips at this time of year.

Sadly, in a helpful attempt to over-compensate for the Spring drought, the weather continued to throw it down.

However, we did have an Indian Summer, in the sense of an Indian Takeaway. That is, it was pleasant whilst it lasted but was all gone very quickly. It was last Thursday.

And, luckily, Silverback invited me to go for a walk with him on Thursday, and it was the perfect day for it. Blue skies. Little white fluffy clouds.

So I left all the financial stuff in our office temporarily, and off we went to Eccup Reservoir, just outside Leeds.

Lovely day or not, Eccup Reservoir is somewhat lacking in what Silverback termed, in his blog post about it all, as photogenicness. (And now this word has been used twice I think it should enter the dictionary).

To try to alleviate this problem, Silverback stood me in the front of the reservoir in his photo in the hope that I would look interesting. Judge for yourself the result on his blog. To my mind, the most interesting thing was that in his photo, every other colour looked just as it did in real life, except my hair, which is light brown but looks ginger.

I didn't think of adding any foreground interest, and hence my photo of Eccup Reservoir is one of almost stunning dullness.

It was a gorgeous afternoon though. Every fruit-bearing tree is bearing more fruit than I would have believed possible. I think it is because of the hard winter last year. It frightened them. "Nooooo! It's minus TEN! We're going to DIE! Quick, we must produce lots and lots of fruit to carry on our species!"

Here are some hawthorn berries. See what I mean?

I knew I wouldn't starve on this walk. There was plenty of food on the way, such as this field of turnips.

I like raw turnips. I like most raw vegetables. I spent a lot of my childhood eating raw cauliflower, raw cabbage, raw carrots, raw turnips, raw potatoes - - and then, to my annoyance, suddenly this became fashionable and suddenly everyone was diong it. Except for the raw potatoes, which are poisonous, apparently. I told Silverback this and he nodded sagely in a kind of "This explains EVERYTHING" way.

Anyway, here's my favourite crop. A field of stripes.

It was a delightful walk, and only three miles from home.

I thought, and not for the first time, how much I enjoy wandering along country paths like this.

It's chucking it down again now. But the Indian Summer was lovely while it lasted.

Are You All Right There?

2011-09-17T18:38:00.002+01:00

I start the Communication Skills work again soon and thought I'd better acquire some new clothes so as to look respectable in front of medical students.

So off I went to town - very bravely, I thought, as I hate the city centre at any time but particularly on a Saturday morning.

Anyway, I found much of what I was looking for, which included two jumpers.

It wasn't easy, mind. Some of the jumpers currently on sale have short sleeves. Now then, what use is THAT? Why do I wear a jumper? To keep warm. What does a jumper have to keep me warm? Yes, long sleeves.

These are also jumpers - - oh, okay, I suppose they're cardigans - that don't fasten at the front. You put them on like a cardigan. But, in general, I'd expect any sort of cardigan-type garment to have either buttons or a zip. The buttons or zip draw the two sides together, thus covering your front and keeping you warm.

But - aha! Cunning plan by the jumper-sellers! These garments, lacking buttons or a zip, don't keep you completely warm, and neither do the short-sleeve jumpers. They only keep you a bit warmer than you were in your summer garb of hotpants and bikini (well, that's what I've been wearing since April, I don't know what you've been wearing of course). So these jumpers are only warm enough for Autumn.

Once we get really really cold weather, we will all have to go to town AGAIN and buy a jumper or a cardigan that fastens at the front, to keep out the howling wind and the snow. See? They have effectively doubled their jumper-selling opportunities.

Furthermore, when queuing to buy said items, I learned a whole new shop-assistant phrase.

They would finish serving the previous customer, or arranging their social life on Facebook, or similar - - and then look up, and this is what they said.

"Are you all right there?"

And this, dear reader, is Shopassistantspeak for "May I help you?" They said it to me in three different shops, so I know.

I am not sure what the answer is supposed to be. I thought of several options:

a) "Yes, I'm fine, thank you so much for asking, it's lovely to have your concern".

b) "Am I all right here? Well, yes. The temperature's okay and this bit of carpet's quite comfortable to stand on. Just as well, really, since I've been here for quite a while now."

c) "Well, the past few years have been tough - my Dad was ill for two years before he died and he was in and out of hospital. My mother has dementia but it's not too bad yet. However, I'm coming to terms with everything slowly - I wouldn't say I'm all right, but I'm getting there."

Sadly, what I actually said was, weakly, "Well, I'd like to buy this, please." On each occasion this seemed a little bit of a surprise to the shop assistant, but she coped and struggled bravely through apparently unexpected events such as putting it in a bag and working the card machine.

Anyway, dear readers, I don't like this phrase "Are you all right there?" because it doesn't make any sense in the context that they say it in, and it's deeply annoying. I should prefer a return to "May I help you?"

So could I please enlist your help to bring this change about? If any shop assistant says it to you, I should like you to go straight for option 3, above.

Let us have a little rehearsal. The answer to "Are you all right there?" should be, initially, "Oh God. Oh no." Put your head in your hands. Rock backwards and forwards a bit. Then go into your monologue. "No, no, I'm not all right, not here, not anywhere else. Let me tell you about it. It's just unbearable. Unbearable. I'll start at the beginning - - "

That'll teach 'em. They'll think twice before saying THAT again. Let us bring about a return to "Good morning, madam. May I help you?"

Yes, it's slow progress, I know. One tiny thing at a time. But I'm hoping we can make Britain great again, one day.

On the Edges

2011-09-14T18:08:00.003+01:00

Of course, to get the best views you have to go up high. I know this. I love being up high. I just don't like edges.

My balance isn't great and if I'm on an edge I just think I'll sway forwards and become part of the view. The crumpled-heap part, many hundreds of feet below.

But then again, to get the views you need the heights - - so off we went through a gorge in the Luberon, Provence, South of France, on our way to Mount Ventoux.

People have lived along the gorge for a long time - this cave-room was a kind of extension to a little stone cottage. They had wonderful views, all right, and I don't think they can have been scared of heights.

Here's the kind of thing they could see: (you can click to make the picture larger and the gorge even more deep)

And here's the road we drove along. Now, honestly, do you see my point about the edges?

No, I didn't do the driving, for all sorts of reasons, of which one of the main ones is that it's best to keep your eyes open at all times on roads like this.

We passed quite a few cyclists - -

We also passed a floral tribute where one had gone over the edge. It didn't add to my confidence.

Stephen drove, well and carefully, for quite a while. He loves views too, but he doesn't even like heights, let alone edges, so I think actually this road was a bit of a triumph for him.

Then Silverback took over and cheerfully and accurately did the rest of the driving.

Of course, we stopped many times and took lots of photos. Here's Silverback taking one:

and here he is at another place, taking a photo of another stunning view of the gorge:

Is he scared of heights, or edges? I think I'll let you be the judge of that.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Daytime

2011-09-13T20:25:00.002+01:00

Perhaps it was because of the wind: I'm not sure.

At eight o'clock this morning I was driving up the street where I live, on my way to a roleplay with the early and very precise arrival time of 8.25am.

The road splits into two about a three-quarters of a mile from our house, by a parade of shops (yes, I still call it "a parade"), and each side is quite narrow: there are trees down the middle.

Just after the road split, I saw a man ahead of me in the middle of the road, so I stopped. He was bending over, with his back to me, and it took a while for me to work out what he was doing.

He seemed to be holding some kind of floppy toy. Then I noticed that his hands were covered in blood. Then - rather belatedly - I saw that there was a car just past him, stopped in the middle of the road, with its driver's door open.

It was like watching a film - I could see it all unfolding before me and yet, because I had the car windows closed, it was all in silence.

I realised that the lady on the pavement looking very upset had to be the driver of the car. I noticed that one of the shopkeepers had come out and was appeared to be asking what had happened.

And, finally, I understood what I was looking at. A dog - a brown, brindled dog, like a cross between a terrier and a pug - had been tied to a kind of plastic bollard, with the dog lead, presumably while its owner, an elderly man, wearing those kind of old-man tweeds the same colour as his dog, went into a shop.

Somehow - - and the wind was very strong, so perhaps it blew, taking the dog with it - the bollard, and the dog, had ended up in the middle of the road, and the dog had been hit on its head by the car, and was completely motionless, clearly dead.

After what seemed an eternity, the man managed to disentangle the dog and its lead from the bollard. Blood dripped everywhere. The man started shouting at the driver of the car, who was trying to explain that it wasn't her fault. I couldn't hear any of it, but I could understand everything.

I thought of opening my car window and offering to help - - but the shopkeeper was trying to help, and I didn't think there was anything I could do. I couldn't get past the woman's car which was exactly positioned in the middle of the road, with high kerbs on either side. By now a queue of about fifteen cars had built up behind me. Strangely, they didn't honk their horns - perhaps they could tell that there was something going on.

After what seemed forever, but which was actually ten minutes, the man carried his dead dog into the shop. The car driver got back into her car and, after a few moments to gather herself together, drove off, and I did too.

Then, as I drove off, I saw the man come out of the shop, carrying his dead dog in a cardboad box, in his blood-covered hands. Somehow they had cut a hole for its head, which drooped through the hole, its tongue lolling out, blood still dripping.

The whole image looked slightly comical and yet I felt so sorry for the man - all he had done was take his dog to the shop, and now here he was, slowly making his way home again, his life suddenly changed.

I wanted to stop and say something - - but what? And I had a queue of cars behind me, and I didn't want to be late for my roleplay. So I didn't stop, but all day I've wished I had. If I'd set off a few seconds earlier, of course, it could have been my car that hit the dog.

I keep thinking of the image of the man trudging home, with his dead dog in a cardboard box, and I can't get it out of my head. And now I've put it in yours.

On the Coach to Llandudno

2011-09-12T19:38:00.003+01:00

"Look out. Corridor-blockers."

That was how the Communist always described parties of old people who stayed in hotels. Eventually, of course, he became one himself. It comes to us all, if we live long enough.

My mother, age 87, has gone to Llandudno for five days, on a coach trip, all by herself.

She went on a similar one a few months ago, and loved it, and this one is to the same hotel. It has everything she likes: it's on the sea front, it has friendly staff, a heated swimming-pool, and it has entertainment and dancing every night.

Perfect, I thought, when I saw it in the National Holidays brochure - - and so it proved.

Last time she went just for three days so when I saw there was a five-day trip, I booked it for her. She was delighted.

This, of course, did not stop me feeling really REALLY nervous as I took her to the coach station this morning.

Everyone else had one of those cases on wheels that you can trundle along, but not my mother. She could have borrowed ours, but chose not to. Instead, she had a big black bag that she could hardly lift, and a rucksack. It's pink and green - - or it was once. That rucksack is Spirit of the Seventies. It wasn't new when David Bowie was singing about life on Mars.

"Mum, I'd love to buy you a new rucksack. How about it?"

"Ohhh no. This one's an old friend. I like it. It fits me."

Mum understands everything, but remembers - - well - - not very much. Not very much that's new, anyway. She liked this hotel. "They don't mind how many times you ask what your room number is."

When she says things like that, it breaks my heart, because I remember the stunningly intelligent woman she used to be. There was only one scholarship to University for her part of the North-West when she was eighteen: and she got it, which is how she came to be in Leeds.

But now she can't remember things. So the bag and the rucksack had to be opened and checked numerous times and, as we left the house, she picked up The Umbrella with the Broken Spoke.

"Mum, that one's broken. I'm sure you have others."

"Ahhh, wll, I like that one. Anyway, it'll be better than nothing." The bag was unzipped again, and in it went.

I drove to town, we parked and walked to the coach station. Mum insisted on taking the rucksack and I took the black bag.

We had to sit and wait for the coach to arrive. I wondered what would happen if Mum gets lost in Llandudno. She did have her address book with her, with all the addresses written in the Communist's neat writing, from years ago.

"Daphne's Little Phone. Expensive" was how he described my very first mobile, which was not, of course, little at all by today's standards.

Last night I read all his entries in the address book, and cried a bit, to myself, so Mum wouldn't see.

Whilst we were waiting for the coach, I wrote some things on a piece of paper. Mum's name: her date of birth: no allergies: no particular medical problems: my name: that I was her daughter: my contact details - - - all just in case. I put it in her handbag.

The coach arrived and a big swarm of elderly people - - yes, elderly but probably the oldest was ten years younger than my mother - all headed towards the coach.

I left Mum standing at the front of the coach and made my way to the back, for her name to be ticked off on a list and her luggage put in the boot.

"Is this you, then?" asked the driver, looking me up and down and noticing my extreme youth, and I was very pleased that he looked surprised.

"No, no, it's my mother. Eighty-seven. Very small."

"I'll look out for her," he said cheerily.

Now a queue of people had formed behind me and the way back to the front of the coach was really narrow, in between this coach and the next, and it took what seemed like half an hour as they all tried to move out of my way with their bags and walking sticks.

Slow, perhaps, but smiling. Looking forward to their holiday.

"Oooh, sorry love. Come on through."

So I climbed onto the coach with Mum and found her seat, and settled her down, and she hugged me and thanked me a lot, and I told her to be careful and not to even THINK of swimming in the sea - - and then I turned round to go out again and the corridor of the coach was completely blocked by people with sticks and hand luggage and newspapers and sandwiches.

"Excuse me - - I'm not going to Llandudno, I'm just seeing my mother onto the coach."

They all had a little jolly comment as I squeezed past them.

"Eeeeh, lass, you should come with us. We'll have a grand time."

"Yes, well, I can't, I'm working this week."

"Oh, poor you. Hey, Mary, she can't come because she's working this week."

"Oh, poor lass. Working eh? I bet you wish you could come with us."

Corridor-blockers, all right, but lovely with it. I stopped being so worried about my Mum. I turned round and she was already deep in conversation.

Several hours later, she rang me.

"Well it was a long journey - lots of stops - but we got here all right. I know I should have rung earlier but I've been in the pool all afternoon."

By now I'd guess she'll have drunk a glass or two of wine and will be either dancing or chatting up one of the more attractive waiters. I hope she'll have a lovely week.

The End of the Summer

2011-09-10T21:13:00.004+01:00

Today I was planning to write about the French sunflowers: and then I looked at Silverback's blog Retirement Rocks - - - and guess what? He's just written a great post about them.

I love sunflowers: they are some of my favourite flowers.

When we got to France, there were still some in flower. These were in Roussillon, in Provence, and weren't as spectacularly yellow as the one on Silverback's blog - but lovely, nonetheless. No wonder they were happy: they were looking at a great view:

If they turned their heads a bit, they could see this: (you can click to make the photo larger)

But by the time we reached the Loire Valley, two weeks later, there was a spider's web on the window of our bed and breakfast and there was a definite feel of autumn in the air.

The sunflowers had died, but the sun was still shining:

But once the sun has gone in, as Silverback pointed out, a field of dead sunflowers has a definite air of melancholy:

And, then, last night, just over a week later, I was putting some sunflower oil on the lamb chops whilst making warming British food as the drizzle fell outside.

It's the end of the summer. Sighhh. But oh, how wonderful it was.

Honey

2011-09-10T00:20:00.002+01:00

Honey was in her thirties when I first knew her, and the mother of two young children.

I never met her: I only knew her because I read her blog, and she read my blog.

Since those days, she met a new man, had another baby, and was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Less than three years later, she died on Tuesday, in her thirties, the mother of three young children.

Although I never met Honey, my son-in-law Gareth's mum was a friend of hers in "real life" and I know from her other friends too what a fantastic person she was, with great courage and tremendous love for her family and friends.

Okay, I've been through some tricky times myself in the past few years. During the past three years, whenever things have been difficult, I have thought of Honey and the truly horrendous situation she has been in, and have given myself a large mental kick. I am not going to reveal any more details of her life or her situation - and Honey isn't her real name, but it was the name she used when blogging.

I wish Honey's children and her partner all the very best possible for the future. Although, as I said, I never met her, I don't think I'll ever forget her.

The Hospital Appointment

2011-09-08T15:44:00.003+01:00

Today Stephen had a hospital appointment.

He has had a frozen shoulder for over six months now and is having some physiotherapy for that. But he has a lot of pain just about everywhere, and the GP thinks it's fibromyalgia.

Both these are chronic conditions which cause a lot of pain, and fatigue, too.

However, he's had no time off work because of them, and they haven't stopped him from cycling twelve miles a day in total to work and back. But sometimes the pain is so bad that he simply can't move for a while.

Stephen is not very used to hospital visits, or, indeed, doctors: - a glance at his medical records when he first went to the doctor's with the frozen shoulder showed that the last time he was at the doctor's was in the year 2000, and, before that, in 1994. So he doesn't really know how hospital departments work - - but, then again, why should he?

Anyway, finally, a hospital appointment for the fibromyalgia came through.

Stephen stood in front of the reception desk. The receptionist on the right was chatting in a gossipy way to one of the other staff. The receptionist on the left was looking at her computer and didn't look up. One of the queueing patients tried to talk to her but she cut him off by holding up her hand in a "what I'm doing is SO important, do not interrupt me" way.

Eventually she must have registered that Stephen was there, but didn't look up or speak: she merely held out her hand for the piece of paper he was holding.

She took it from him, but didn't say anything. Stephen waited for her to tell him what to do next. She didn't say anything. So he kept on looking at her, expectantly.

"Oh, do you need it back?" was her first foray.

"I don't know. Do I?" asked Stephen.

Then a nurse called him in. She was very pleasant but didn't introduce herself. She sat him on a chair and put a blood pressure cuff on his arm and left him for a while whilst it inflated itself. She didn't explain what it was, though, or why they were taking his blood pressure, or indeed what the result was when they had taken it.

Of course, because he cycles twelve miles a day, I'd guess his blood pressure is nice and low - - and couldn't she have said so, in a friendly manner?

Then she asked him to step on a machine to check his height.

"Shall I take my shoes off?" he asked.

"No, do it backwards," was the somewhat confusing reply, because she hadn't listened to what he'd asked and assumed he was asking which way to step onto the machine.

Finally he saw a doctor - or we will presume it was a doctor, since he didn't introduce himself.

The doctor checked all Stephen's joints lots of times. For Stephen was in the rheumatology department, and rheumatoid arthritis was clearly what this doctor was about.

Stephen kept explaining that his joints don't hurt: no, they don't swell up: they are fine. Everything else hurts, but not his joints.

"So, when do you get these aches?" said the doctor.

Stephen explained that they are not aches. They are sharp pains. They are everywhere except his joints. At their worst, he feels that he can't bear the pain.

"So, when do you get these aches?" asked the doctor, in reply.

Another doctor came in. Well, we'll presume he was a doctor, though he didn't introduce himself. The first doctor was very reverential towards the second doctor, so perhaps Second Presumed Doctor was more senior.

This doctor was foreign, with a strong accent.

"You should try Coblblblblblblbblblb for the pain" said Second Presumed Doctor.

"Sorry, I couldn't quite hear that," said Stephen, "what drug did you say?"

The doctor repeated it several times in exactly the same way. He didn't think to write it down, or to spell it out, and looked at Stephen as though he was displaying deep stupidity in not understanding.

First Presumed Doctor wondered to Second Presumed Doctor if the other pains and the frozen shoulder could be connected in some way.

"No." he explained, and said no more.

Second Presumed Doctor checked all Stephen's joints again. They still weren't swollen and they still didn't hurt.

Finally they decided that he should come back in two months to have all the same blood tests done all over again, although these blood tests don't seem to have conveyed anything of meaning. Not that they explained this to Stephen.

"It was the Sausage Machine school of medicine," said Stephen.

As regular readers (ohhh that sounds so grand!) of my blog will know, one of my jobs is to help to teach Communication Skills to healthcare professionals in different jobs.

Stephen was very unimpressed and I'd say that this was a lazy and thoughtless department. Many of the patients were "regulars" and knew exactly how the systems worked - - but Stephen was new, and didn't, and nobody bothered to explain, and their lack of communication skills was appalling.

The very least that a patient should expect is for everyone to introduce themselves - their name and their job: and to say what they're doing and why they're doing it: and to listen to the patient and to take on board what they're saying about their problems: and to reach a shared management plan with the patient so that both parties know what will happen next, and why.

Whereas what Stephen got was a couple of doctors who weren't listening to him, and hadn't the foggiest clue what was wrong, so passed the buck on to someone else in a couple of months' time.

Sometimes people say to me "Communication Skills? Isn't that just common sense?"

Yes, well, common sense is not so common, unfortunately. Some people just have naturally good communication skills. Others don't, and have to be taught. And some need frequent reminders.

I'll be starting to work with medical students again soon. Almost all of those I met last year were delightful, intelligent and keen to learn. So let us hope that things will - albeit gradually - change.

Meanwhile, Stephen's going to see if he can get a private appointment - he can get BUPA through his work and, ironically, that may well mean that they take him more seriously.

Things shouldn't be like that.

Pickpocket

2011-09-07T16:55:00.002+01:00

You may remember that last year in Amsterdam I had a close encounter with a pickpocket. I was standing watching the Gay Pride parade and felt someone trying to unzip my handbag. Without any thought, I grabbed his hand and threw it at him as hard as I could. He tapped me twice, on the shoulder, in what I'm sure was a "you escaped me this time" gesture, and melted into the crowd.

I wasn't pleased. For one thing, my handbag is very important to me. I have been told - hard though this is to believe! - that I'm a teensy bit obsessive about it.

Everyone mocks my handbag, its great size and its many contents. They mock me a LOT. Right until the moment when they need a pair of nail scissors, or a tissue, or a wetwipe, or a pair of wellington boots, or a towel, or a 50" plasma tv - - and then they're grateful. Okay, I maybe exaggerate a bit, but in general, if you need it, it's in my handbag.

And, therefore, I prefer the contents to stay in my handbag until I take them out, and not until Mr or Ms Pickpocket takes them out.

I had heard a lot about the street crime in Barcelona and therefore decided to take steps not to become a victim of it if I could possibly avoid it. At the same time, having thought about it a bit, I didn't want to leave my handbag back at the hotel, because, without it, I have a constant "my handbag is missing!" feeling, which I didn't feel would enhance my enjoyment of Barcelona. And if you think that's weird, well, I'm sorry to say that you're entitled to your opinion, but you're wrong. It's not weird, it's COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE, okay?

My current handbag is exactly the same as the one I had last year in Amsterdam. That one finally got old and tatty, which saddened me as it had exactly the right number of pockets and compartments and zips that I like, to fit in money and credit cards and emergency fruit and a road map of Western Europe and a 1974 typewriter and such.

So off I went to the same shop - - and they had another one the same, except a light brown colour, where the previous one was black. Hurrah!

I am very "tuned in" to my handbag and its whereabouts, because it is so important to me.

So, going down the escalator to Barcelona's excellent metro system, I was suddenly aware of something not quite right with my handbag.

I looked to my right, at my bag, and there was a hand inside it. Although I keep lots of things in it, someone else's hand is not usually one of them, and it brought a new and unwelcome meaning to the word "handbag".

He had gone straight for the little pocket that's specially designed to keep a mobile phone in it - - - and this was, luckily, exactly where my mobile wasn't. Because, luckily, everything that was of value I had removed from my bag.

"THAT BASTARD IS TRYING TO STEAL FROM MY HANDBAG!" I said, with more volume than elegance.

But he was already gone - - a train, interestingly, pulled in just as he reached the bottom of the steps and he stepped straight onto it.

I think there were two of them. He didn't look like a Baddie: early twenties, smart casual dress, jeans, jacket, MP3 player. I didn't really see his mate but he looked much the same. Nothing unusual, nothing to attract attention - - just like a thousand other young men wandering round Barcelona that day. Obviously, if you want to succeed as a pickpocket, that's the way to look.

He could, of course, just have been an opportunist - - but the trains are so regular there that I would think you could make a sound pickpocketing career out of going down the escalators just before a train arrives, and then disappearing very fast.

It's one of those crimes that spoils the whole city for everyone. People stealing because they're hungry and desperate - - well, I understand that. But as a kind of career option? It's just WRONG.

Starting with the Sheep

2011-09-05T18:14:00.004+01:00

So, here I am, back in Leeds, wondering what's that strange grey colour that the sky seems to be, and, as usual, protesting to the world that this isn't right, this is a different Daphne in a different world, and I prefer the holidaying one, and why has that one stopped?

Silverback has started a wonderful account of our travels during the past couple of weeks, with great photos, too.

I'm going to dart about a bit. I'm going to start with the sheep.

We travelled through a tunnel under the mountains from Bielsa in Spain to Aragnouet in the South of France.

The mountains were stunning and I kept saying to myself - - and to anyone who would listen - "We're in the Pyrenees!" because it sounded so exotic and foreign.

And then, high in the mountains, we rounded a bend and there was this:

A flock of sheep. And a helicopter. We stopped to have a look.

The sky was bright blue, with small white fluffy clouds and, from time to time, eagles soaring high above us. Some of the sheep were wearing bells round their necks that made a gentle clunking sound. It was very hot, even so high up, and the sheep were panting in the heat.

It was silent, apart from the sheep baaing and the bells clunking - - and then the helicopter would come sweeping in, with a very loud whirring of the blades, and take away a big container full of gravel.

It managed to alternate between being very peaceful and then rather exciting as the helicopter swooped in every few minutes.

We wandered about a bit, and took some photographs. It looked like this:

After a while, we turned round to look at the car, and found that it was now surrounded by sheep.

Their reasoning was not entirely logical, but clearly a deeply-held conviction.

"If my head is in the shade," they thought, "then the rest of me is in the shade too. And thus, I shall become cooler. And this will be a Good Thing."

Standing back a bit from our sheep-surrounded car, in the heat, with the blue skies, the baaing of the sheep and the clunking of the bells, this is what we could see:

I can't quite explain why, but for me, this was one of the key moments of our wonderful holiday. Glorious.

Vintage Knickers

2011-08-19T17:25:00.002+01:00

Readers of a sensitive disposition may need to avert your eyes in a moment.

As I've mentioned before, I have lived in this house, on and off, since I was three, and so there are very many - er - treasures from the past.

And today I found a rather unusual such treasure.

The secondary school which I attended, Roundhay High School for Girls, was a girls' grammar school. Next door was a boys' grammar school called Roundhay School.

The boys were seen as a threat. They were, apparently, lecherous brutes who would get a girl pregnant within a very short time of meeting her. We needed to be kept away from them.

The Women of a Certain Age who were in charge of the girls' school tried to achieve this in two ways:

The first way was that the start and finish times of the girls' school and the boys' school were different, in the hope that the boys and the girls would never, ever meet each other.

But, just in case such a dangerous encounter should ever happen, we girls were made to wear protective clothing.

And here it is:

Made of thick blue cotton, they came up to somewhere near your armpits. Heaven help any boy brave enough to get as far as these! The idea was that he would flee in terror, all passion suddenly gone. And indeed, these exciting garments were known to all as "passion-killers".

I do remember one girl suddenly disappearing from school for a while and then turning up at again with a baby in her arms.

It was clear to all that she'd been wearing non-school-uniform knickers.

The Foibles of Bed and Breakfasts

2011-08-18T08:47:00.003+01:00

There aren't many people who like to go to bed at nine o'clock, but strangely, the ones who do are always the same people who run bed and breakfasts in far-flung places.

I used to book lots of bed and breakfasts all over the country for the actors' agency. It was for lots of days' work and the actors used to travel from one place to another. Even though I did my best to plan routes where the journeys weren't too long, it wasn't always possible.

So I'd ring a b and b in somewhere like Falmouth and they'd say "But he must arrive at eight o'clock because we like to go to bed at nine and we never answer the door after half-past eight." And I would say no thank you, because he's travelling from Birmingham after a day's work there, and he won't arrive that early, and they'd be very surprised that anyone could be outside in the scary darkness after seven o'clock.

The French have a different way of keeping the tourists away from their b and bs. In recent days, we have been trying to book a b and b in Provence (we've done it now, hurrah! And I hope it's as good as it looks). We're trying to book b and bs in other parts of France too, for our return journey.

So - - here's the website - - - here's the email address - - oh, and it says things like "We will try to reply within forty-eight hours".

Well what use is THAT? Get a smartphone, check your email, find there's an incoming message whilst you're in the middle of serving breakfast, and reply straight afterwards - - How hard can it be?

Zut alors. Okay, on with the packing. Dover to Calais, then to a b and b south of Calais, then to our friend Graham's place in Burgundy, then to Provence for four nights, then to Barcelona for three nights, then Northern Spain for one night, back into France for two nights in the Dordogne and one night in the Loire and one night near Calais on our way home - - and then back to Blighty just in time for the autumn leaves. That's the plan, and I hope it works out well. All booked apart from the last four nights, and that's because B and Bs are not replying to emails: or not yet, anyway!

I may have to resort to ringing them. Unfortunately, for some reason, when I was at school, they never taught me the French for "I sent you an email, so why don't you just log on to your computer and check? Or better still, get a smartphone."

Preparations

2011-08-16T22:38:00.002+01:00

I haven't blogged for a while because I've been really busy. That's strange, because it's summer, and you'd think it would be quieter.

And in some ways it is: there's not much roleplay and no teaching going on for me at the moment. But there is still plenty to do in the actors' agency - I do all the financial things these days - - invoices, payments, receipts - and they've all still been going on.

On Saturday Stephen, Silverback and I are setting off on a two-week trip to France and Spain.

I'm looking forward to it of course - but I'm also anxious about it, I always am. I'm sick of feeling anxious.

I worry about everything: I worry constantly: I worry about things that are worrying and I'd guess I worry about things that are not.

I do know, however, that this legacy of worry was caused by things in my past that varied from the slightly worrying to the absolutely horrific. But why can't I damn well get over it and put it all behind me? I think I've just got used to being anxious. I wake up every day with a little core of anxiety gnawing away at me. Often I wake up thinking "Ohhh nooooo!" and I am not quite sure, for a while, what it's about.

After a while - usually a while spent throwing myself into work - I feel better. But often, if I try to relax, back comes the worry - - and so I tend to keep working.

It's not all needless worry, oh no. My mother, for example, has early dementia. However that goes, it won't be good - - and yet, worrying about it doesn't help - - but I do.

There are other things: I am not going to go on about them now.

And I booby-trap myself: if I have a lovely, carefree day on holiday, I will undoubtedly pay for it with terrible, guilty dreams at night.

There do seem to be some people who just aren't natural worriers. I sometimes wish I was one of them. Though I can't ever imagine it.

Still Life With Spades

2011-08-11T17:27:00.004+01:00

Olli, Gareth, Alex and David were a bit pushed for time when they set off for the Wacken Open Air Festival near Hamburg in Germany. Also, the car was a trifle full. Four people and all their luggage, including a tent and sleeping equipment and food.

"Just leave the stuff from your car that you don't need. Dump it in the dining-room," I said rashly.

And here it is.

Some of it's a bit hard to identify - - a couple of spades from the seaside holiday in Tenby, some postcards, a Firefly dvd - -

I wasn't here when they left and never did notice that the thing in the grey box was the camping stove, which would have been far more use to them in the car, travelling to Wacken to seize its moment of glory.

Oh well, it didn't matter in the end - - they didn't starve and are now safely back again, and they had a really good time. Hurrah!

Show Us Your House

2011-08-07T08:43:00.003+01:00

All the politicians seem to have gadded off on holiday whilst Rome burns - - - well, the Stock Market plummets, amongst other things.

Granted, I'm about to do the same myself - - but then I never asked to run the country.

Of course, we voted for them. Well, somebody did, anyway.

One thing that always annoys me is that they bang on, pre-election, about how they care about us all, man of the people blah blah - - and some people actually believe them. In Dennis Skinner's case, it was actually true, but it usually isn't.

So I have devised a plan to highlight this before the election in future.

You know how when they're standing for office as an MP they always send you a little leaflet with a smiling photo that bangs on about how they're a lovely stable married person with three smiling children and they really care about your neighbourhood?

I think it should include a compulsory picture of their house. I once saw a newspaper article showing the houses of lots of politicians and they were mostly million-quid mansions.

"I really want to be MP for Chavstown Grimley as it's a wonderful area with some splendid salt-of-the-earth people and I have all your interests at heart. And here's a picture of my little twenty-two-bedroom house in Meadow Bottom. Sorry there's a bit of building work going on at the front - we're adding an extra moat."

A Strange and Quiet Time

2011-08-06T19:55:00.003+01:00

It's always a strange month, August.

It used to be known as the "silly season" where there was no news in the newspapers and people flocked to the seaside to sit on deckchairs with hats made of folded newspaper to keep off either sunshine or drizzle. We Brits know how to enjoy ourselves.

This month there's a bit too much news, and hardly any of it good. But it still has that strange, timeless August feel to it.

I'm still working though - I did two roleplays this week - one about sexual abuse for Mental Health nurses and one about diabetes for medical students - and I worked in our office too, though it's quieter than usual. Some actors are busy with summer theatre tours and lots of the casting directors seem to be on holiday.

And it's at this time of year that I look at the house, and all the jobs that need doing - most of which have needed doing since last winter. Sighhh. I have to shout at myself. COME ON DAPHNE. WASH THE CURTAINS. THEY USED TO BE A COLOUR BUT NOW THEY ARE NOT. THEY ARE GREY. AND NO, GREY IS NOT A COLOUR WHERE CURTAINS ARE CONCERNED.

The trouble is, once you start looking - - - ah, that way madness lies, as King Lear was heard to remark one day as he pulled out the fridge to clean behind it.

In a couple of weeks' time we're off to France and Spain - - and yes, I know I've been away twice this summer already, but I just haven't travelled enough in my life, and I'm trying to make up for it.

So in this couple of weeks I plan to learn as much Spanish as I can. I started about two weeks ago with the wonderful Michel Thomas's audio method and it seems to be working well.

I think it helps that I did a lot of Latin and French at school, and a year's Italian at university - - I think all this helps to learn the pattern of languages. And I'm really enjoying the Spanish.

So - - in these two weeks, I plan to clean every bit of the house and pack as well.

I can tell you now, it ain't gonna happen. But I'll do my best. And then, when we get back from holiday, I will look round at the slightly cleaner and slightly tidier house, resolve to do better next summer, and slowly slide into the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness with parts of the house still sagging under the weight of ancestral clutter and a thick greyness of dust.

Last week, I came up with a good title for a reality television makeover programme. From Shabby to Showhome. Great idea, eh? I volunteer our house for the first episode.

A Fish Called Daphne

2011-07-30T15:10:00.002+01:00

Back in February, you will remember, there was a terrible earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The fleeing inhabitants left behind a tank of goldfish in one building, a chartered accountant's.

A hundred and thirty-four days later, people returned to the building and found two of the fish still alive. Apparently they had been named after characters in Scooby-Doo. One was called Shaggy and one, far more interestingly, was called Daphne.

The story, whilst claiming that these two fish had survived all that time without food, slightly skirts round the fact that there were originally six fish in the tank. I don't know what the others were called. I think Bob is usually a good name for goldfish, since it's the only word they appear to know.

I've heard that goldfish only have a memory of two seconds so I expect that these two, after the earthquake, spent a couple of seconds thinking "What the - - ??" and then got back to thinking the thoughts that they normally think, which I have always feared might just be "Now what was I - - ? Now what was I - - ? Now what was I - - ?"

Anyway, that's it. Six fish for starters. Two left.

"Don't mess with Daphne," I think is the message here.

Do Geese See God?

2011-07-29T17:12:00.002+01:00

Thank you all for the palindromes - I love them!

And also thanks for Shooting Parrots' suggestion of this video, the Palindromic Sketch, which I very much enjoyed and I hope you do too.

The Great North Swim - my sponsorship total

2011-07-29T16:29:00.002+01:00

I know that some of the readers of this blog very kindly sponsored me when I did The Great North Swim back in June.

My sponsorship totalled £563.25 for Multiple Sclerosis Research. Grateful thanks to everyone who contributed.

Madame, Not One Man is Selfless

2011-07-28T15:15:00.003+01:00

"Madame, not one man is selfless: I name not one, madam."

It sounds like a quotation from one of Shakespeare's more obscure works. But it's not. It's a palindrome. It reads the same backwards as forwards.

I love palindromes (let's face it, I like most things to do with words.) I came across the one above only recently.

Perhaps the best known ones are "Madam, I'm Adam" and the one that Napoleon's supposed to have said when he was imprisoned on the island of Elba: "Able was I ere I saw Elba."

Of course I don't believe it for a moment. He wouldn't have been speaking English, for a start. I think this palindrome is a very loose translation of what he actually said, which was "Ohhh - - merde."

My favourite is one I've mentioned on this blog before, because it has a likeable spookiness about it:

"Live dirt, up a sidetrack carted, is a putrid evil." Glorious!

If you know any good ones, please do tell me.

Back in Time with Victory Vs

2011-07-27T21:12:00.005+01:00

I'd just dropped Olli off at work in York yesterday. I hadn't any idea of the way home so asked the satnav to take me.

After I'd driven about a mile or so, I saw a road sign. BECKFIELD LANE.

Instantly I knew where I was. I couldn't resist. I turned left and drove along the road.

After half a mile or so, suddenly, there it was.

A small pharmacist's shop.

The one that used to belong to the Communist, until he retired in 1985, when he was sixty-two.

That's the shop where he worked for over twenty years. That's the shop that provided for us all throughout much of my childhood and all my teenage years. That's the shop where I worked sometimes on Saturdays, and sometimes during the school holidays.

In those days there wasn't a ramp at the front. The little strip of grass on the left was full of flowers - I used to look after them and weed the garden when I went there to help the Communist. And in the summer, there were always swallows nesting above the door. I liked this, but the Communist didn't - he was always worried about their droppings falling on the customers' heads.

In those days it was - unusually - an off-licence too. My Dad wasn't much interested in alcohol. "It's just for selling."

That was his reply to a lot of things.

"Dad, what's this for?" I would ask about some new face cream or beauty aid.

"It's for selling," was his reply.

He knew almost all his customers. "When a customer comes in," he would say to his staff, "you stop doing whatever you're doing, and you serve them."

So, yesterday, in I went. One of the staff stopped what she was doing in order to serve me.

"Have you any glucose tablets, please?"

"Yes, I think so - - "

"And this was my Dad's shop."

Suddenly they were all listening, including the female pharmacist.

"What was his name?" she asked. "Was it Mr Blass?"

"Yes, that's him," I said.

"There's still a sign in the garage," she said. "Blass and Fisher Chemists."

I could instantly hear the Communist's deep voice, answering the phone.

"Blass and Fisher Chemists, Acomb."

The back part used to be the stockroom where I spent a long time tidying and checking things, and there were a couple of electric rings where the Communist would heat things up for lunch.

Now it's all been opened up and they have a much bigger area for dispensing.

"The Communist used to do all that in this little area here," I said, "and I used to stand here counting out tablets and eating Victory Vs."

Victory Vs were strong, flat sweets, brown in colour. I don't know what they tasted of really but I liked them. Only chemist shops sold them. They were one of the perks of my job, along with sticks of barley sugar, and, from time to time, fish and chips from the shop next door.

"You counted tablets by hand?" asked one of the assistants in astonishment.

"Yes, I did," I said. "I got good at counting to sixty or a hundred very quickly."

It took the assistant a while to find the glucose tablets, because she was new. And next to them on the shelf? Victory Vs. Amazing.

I bought some Victory Vs and drove home. With the scent of Chemist Shop and the taste of Victory Vs, the past felt so near I could almost touch it. It goes fast, this life thing, doesn't it?

In Carnlough Harbour

2011-07-23T20:52:00.005+01:00

We saw many, many stunning views in Northern Ireland but, for some reason that I can't quite fathom, this is my favourite:

It's the entrance to Carnlough Harbour: just a small harbour in a small place, but I absolutely loved it. We went there several times (Stephen and Silverback were somewhat surprised by how often, I think!)

I liked the reflections in the water of the boats:

and of the harbour wall:

I couldn't stop taking photos of it: here's one quite late in the evening:

There were steps leading down into the harbour:

Here it is on a different day:

I couldn't do it, because it was a harbour, and not a safe place to swim - - but what I really wanted to do was to go down the steps, swim through that lovely blue sea, out of the harbour entrance, and away. No, I don't know why. But tomorrow morning, when I'm swimming up and down in the pool at Fearnville Leisure Centre in Leeds, that's where my thoughts will be.

The 1960s Made Flesh

2011-07-20T20:29:00.005+01:00

I liked the 1960s. I felt comfortable there. It was a time of optimism, and - for me - childhood, all played out to a great musical soundtrack.

In the 1960s, round about where I live now in Leeds, there were lots of little family-owned shops, all within about a quarter of a mile of our house - the house where we live now. Most were much nearer - within a few hundred yards!

There were two little grocers called Beevor's and Cawdron's (actually I have no idea how to spell that last one - I don't ever remember seeing it written down!) There were two greengrocers - one was called called Perrin's. I forget the other one's name but its owner had thyroid problems and so had very prominent eyes which always fascinated me. His son was called Chris, I do remember that.

There was Turnbull's the baker's: I was at school with the daughters. Their mother was French but this didn't stop her making the best Yorkshire curd tart I have ever tasted.

There were two post offices - one was also Austin's the newsagent's - and a haberdashery run by my schoolfriend Janice Jones's mum. There was a cobbler's, and a kind of primitive small supermarket-type shop called The Thrift where - revolutionary idea! - you picked things off the shelves yourself and put them in a basket.

There were two butchers' shops, one better quality and more expensive than the other. If you wanted lamb, you went to the one next to the Thrift, but if you wanted mutton you went to the one next to the Post Office.

The first time I ever went as far as the nearest shop - the grocer's round the corner and down a bit - was New Year's Day, 1964. I led rather a sheltered childhood and was very shy, so I felt it was remarkably brave of me. But it was a new year, and I was now remarkably advanced in age - - seven and a half - and I felt it was time to begin a more grown-up exploration of the world.

So, proudly, I went round the corner, stood outside the shop - which was closed, of course, because it was New Year's Day - feeling grown-up, and then found my way the two hundred yards or so home again.

Then the first supermarket came to nearby Oakwood.

Within a decade or so, almost all the little shops were gone. Only the "parade" - as we called it - remains, with one of the post offices. All the others have been turned into houses and when I pass them I still think - - oh, there's the greengrocer's.

Then, last week, we went to Northern Ireland, and visited small towns such as the delightfully-named Magherafelt and Ballymoney, and drove through numerous villages.

And there, gloriously, they were. Small, family-owned shops, by the dozen. (Oh yes, and Chinese restaurants, too, interestingly - most places seemed to have one!) We did visit one shop with a very narrow front that went back and back and back until we were nearly in the next town. What did it sell? Everything.

I wish I'd thought to take more photographs of all these small shops, but my eyes were too busy looking sometimes because I enjoyed everything so much.

I was fascinated by the number of old-fashioned butchers' shops in particular, all with the meat neatly arranged and smart-looking butchers in cap and apron.

(Anyone recognise that gentleman striding purposefully towards the shop? Yes, they remembered him, though he left the town in 1970).

And here is another butcher's, with a name meaning "butcher" that I had never seen or heard before:

Just one small part of a fascinating week.

In Giant's Footsteps

2011-07-18T16:50:00.004+01:00

If, like me, your mental images of Northern Ireland were coloured by extensive television footage of people throwing petrol bombs in a rainy Belfast, the real place comes as a huge and stunning shock of the very best kind.

This, for example.

And this:

Yes, the Giant's Causeway, world-famous and deservedly so.

You walk along a coastal path from a car park, round a corner, and there it is: thousands upon thousands of stones made of basalt, mostly hexagonal, some short, some tall. They were either formed millions of years ago by volcanic means, or built by a giant, Finn McCool - you may take your choice of stories.

They stretch out into the sparkling sea:

Two grey seals were watching us with interest, their dark heads bobbing up from time to time as they discussed us. "Look - if you come here any day at all there are lots of people to watch. Wonder why they all congregate in this spot?"

Looking from beside the sea towards the land, this is the view:

It's a World Heritage Site, owned by the National Trust, and I was slightly surprised and very grateful that it hasn't been too Health and Safetyfied.

I was half-expecting not to be allowed to walk on the stones in case we damaged them, or in case they damaged us.

But hurrah! There weren't any notices saying that the stones were uneven and that we should take care. We just had to jolly well work that one out for ourselves. And, cleverly, we did. We all climbed all over them, marvelling and taking photographs. Stephen and I have some natural caution, but Silverback, I tell you, will stand absolutely anywhere to get a good shot, especially if it's on the extreme edge of something with a very long drop into some churning seas below.

It was my 55th (yes, I know, I know, sighhh) birthday. There has never been a better place to spend a birthday than the Giant's Causeway, and I doubt if anyone has ever enjoyed being there more than I did last week.

Northern Ireland is fantastic. Beautiful. Fascinating. Words nearly fail me - - but hey, those who know me will be certain that will never happen. So there'll be more posts to come.

In the Evening Sunlight

2011-07-06T19:47:00.002+01:00

I think last week's visit was our 46th annual visit to Tenby. I've been a few times in different seasons, too - so really I think we're heading for the fiftieth soon, all to the same hotel, Park Hotel, which has been owned by the same family all this time.

I've never ceased to love it. We all love it.

One of the things I love in Tenby is walking around in the evening sunlight.

The old lifeboat station is the one on the right - it's a house now. What a fantastic place to live! The new one's on the left: it opened a few years ago, but I'm glad they have managed to keep the old one as it's such a Tenby landmark.

Here's St Catherine's Fort. It was built in Napoleonic times and sadly the man who owns it now has stripped out everything of value and is letting it gently crumble away - such a shame. The only good thing is that it makes the little island a great place for seabirds.

In the next photo you can see, if you look carefully, the old path up to the fort. In the nineteen-sixties there was a zoo there.

Now nobody can visit at all. Every year in Tenby I long to climb up the path and go inside it again.

On the headland is a statue of Queen Victoria's consort Prince Albert, looking authoritative and important, and just a tiny bit pompous.

Unfortunately, it's quite hard to maintain any air of pomposity when you have a seagull on your head, and the Tenby Prince Albert so often does.

Walking up the road past North Beach after sunset, the sky is still lovely:

I've had a really busy few days since we got back on Saturday. But next Saturday, as Silverback has written here, we are off to Northern Ireland. I'm hoping for more beautiful scenery, and I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Breakfast Time with the Cheery Hungarian

2011-07-03T17:12:00.006+01:00

"So, that's one vegetarian cooked breakfast," said Cheery Hungarian Waiter in his excellent though heavily-accented English.

Over the past few years there has been a small invasion of Eastern European staff at the hotel. They have all been excellent but Cheery Hungarian Waiter is a particular favourite of ours. His cheeriness knows no bounds, but it's not a fake cheeriness, more a full-of-the-joys-of-life type of cheeriness. He is very efficient at the same time. And - top marks, in my book! - he always arranges for the open-air swimming pool to be opened half an hour early so we have more time to swim before breakfast.

(Yes, I do know that in most hotels taking the cover off the pool might not, perhaps, be the waiter's job. At Park Hotel everyone tends to do what needs to be done, as far as I can see).

He looked to Gareth next.

"A vegetarian breakfast, please, but with scrambled eggs, not fried eggs, and no beans," said Gareth.

He turned to me. "Fruit platter, please." Oh yes, I was being very virtuous. Also the fruit platter is delicious: several kinds of fruit and each in perfect condition.

Then to Stephen.

"Full English breakfast, please."

"Ah, good," said Cheery Hungarian. "That is very easy to remember. " He turned to Olli. "And for you?"

"Vegetarian breakfast but with no mushrooms and no tomatoes, please."

Then he turned to my mother, who can never say things when put under stress.

"Errrrrrrr - - - what do I want?"

"Do you want just bacon and eggs, Mum?" I said, because I could guess.

"Yes, yes, that's it. But not too much. They always give me too much."

"So." said Cheery Hungarian. "On this lovely day, beautiful sunshine outside, eh? Beautiful! What you want is as follows. One vegetarian cooked breakfast. One vegetarian breakfast with no mushrooms and no tomatoes. One fruit platter. One full English breakfast. One just bacon and egg, but not too much. And, finally, one vegetarian breakfast with scrambled eggs, not fried eggs, and no tomatoes."

"Sorry," said Gareth, "mine was with no beans, not no tomatoes."

"Nooooo!" shouted Cheery Hungarian to the heavens, waving his arms wildly in the air in a gesture of mock-sad resignation as he headed for the kitchens to fetch it all. "I am JUST SO SHIT TODAY!"

I am never going to be a waiter when I grow up. But oh, my goodness, I love Park Hotel.

In the Big Waves

2011-06-26T22:51:00.006+01:00

We are in Tenby for the week. I think it's something like our forty-sixth annual visit to Park Hotel, which has been owned by the same family all this time.

Today was perfect weather for swimming in the sea: just how I like it, with cloudless skies, but not too blisteringly hot.

The sea was quite choppy - huge waves, some bigger than me (mind you, I'm not very tall)

My mother, who is eighty-seven, insisted on coming into the sea, of course, in spite of the white crests everywhere. She had already swum in the hotel open-air pool with Olli and me, before breakfast, so now that it was about eleven o'clock it was definitely time for another swim.

Here she is amongst the big waves:

The beautiful North Beach is very safe for swimming: but not if you're eighty-seven and slightly built anyway. So eventually, she realised that the waves were too strong for her and she came out, but she wasn't pleased about it.

I pointed out that she was probably the only eighty-seven-year-old swimming in the sea in Tenby today - and perhaps the only eighty-seven-year old swimming in the sea in the whole of Britain. It cut no ice with her. The rest of her day included a walk round Tenby, another swim in the pool and an evening walk up a steep path to a local view. She doesn't compare herself with eighty-seven-year-olds, but with how she used to be and she doesn't like it.

The last time I was in the sea here was on Boxing Day, when there was snow on the beach and I did the Tenby Boxing Day Swim. Today it was much warmer. I stayed in for an hour, swimming and gliding in on the waves and jumping through the big ones - - and very occasionally getting caught unawares and knocked over.

I realise that I am still using all the big-waves skills that I learned here when I was nine. If you take your eye off the incoming waves for a moment and a big one knocks you off your feet, you must instantly jump up, because the one behind will be even bigger.

I jumped into them, and floated over them, and swam through them - - and I loved every second.

Here I am, just after a wave had gone over me:

If it rains for the rest of the week - and I do hope it won't - then I couldn't have had a better day.

A Life in Cold Water

2011-06-22T19:44:00.005+01:00

I should have done that swim thirty years ago, of course, when I was twenty-four.

But, of course, when I was that age such organised swims as The Great North Swim didn't exist.

Our family always swam in open water whenever we could, as long as it was safe, or as safe as possible.

Here's one of my favourite swimming places from childhood:

It's on the River Esk, near Boot in Eskdale, Cumbria - a delightful deep pool of cool - well, okay, cold - clear water, in beautiful surroundings. We loved it. I still do.

We swam in rivers nearer to home too, such as at Wetherby, near Leeds. We were always careful and we never had any problem.

We swam at the seaside of course. If there was sea, and it wasn't too rough, we'd be in it. I have always liked a few waves though - ones big enough to jump in and to catch the top of and be swept towards the shore.

My first forays into the sea were in the cold waters of the beach at Walney, Barrow-in-Furness, trying to balance on the pebbles underfoot. I couldn't swim then - I learned to swim at four - but I still remember loving it.

The cold never bothered me. My mother loved swimming - still does - and the temperature of the water never stopped us going in. So Windermere at sixteen degrees Centigrade was absolutely fine to me - I have swum in much colder water, without a wetsuit. (Yes, yes, I know, it's partly to do with - well - not being too thin!)

Some swimming always stands out in my memory. Swimming in the river pool in the photo above, looking for tiny fish. Swimming in the sea at Tenby, in the late-afternoon sunshine, with seagulls calling, year upon year upon year - - and I hope to do it again next week, when we're on holiday there again.

Swimming in the open-air pool at Park Hotel, as a child, with the wonderful swimming instructor with his splendidly apt name: Ivor Fish.

And, far more recently, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico in Florida in winter 2008, with pelicans diving in the sea around me.

Oh yes, I have enjoyed swimming all my life and hope to enjoy it for many more years to come.

But the Great North Swim was particularly special.

In my twenties I had hoped to do more open-air swimming than I actually did. In my late twenties it all seemed to have stopped forever when I lost my first baby, was very ill and had a thrombosis in my leg. I thought that had put a stop to swimming any distance at all.

I certainly felt that it put a stop to my youth, in one fell swoop, at the age of twenty-eight. I'd gone from being a happily pregnant young woman to being in a ward for people with chronic conditions, where the next youngest person to me was seventy-four.

Very, very slowly, over the years, my bad leg has got better, and the swimming has most certainly helped. I never thought, when I was in my thirties, that I'd be able to swim a mile in open water. So it meant such a lot to me.

So. In October 1984, I felt that I very suddenly lost my youth. In June 2011, it was as though, in the space of one hour, five minutes and twenty seconds, I got it back again. Very grateful thanks to those who believed that I could do it.

The Great North Swim

2011-06-19T16:22:00.009+01:00

A friend of mine was talking about The Great North Run.

"Oh, and there's a swim, too," she said. "A mile in Windermere."

Well, I thought, I could do that. I love swimming in the sea. I bet I could swim a mile, if I trained a bit. And it would be fun to swim in a lake.

Sometimes such idle thoughts just swirl round in your head and fade away. But these didn't. They resulted in me finding the website, and applying to take part in the 2010 Great North Swim, in early September.

I started training in December 2009. I hadn't swum a mile before - my usual swim had been 42 lengths, a kilometre - but that first day I just kept going and, rather to my surprise, swam a mile.

Righto, I thought, I'll do that every time from now on.

Sadly, last year's swim was cancelled at the last moment because of blue-green algae in the water (we had a lovely weekend in the Lakes though). I deferred my entry to this year.

I kept on swimming a mile as often as I could - I stopped counting after a hundred - and I loved it all.

But then, suddenly, the swim was upon us and we (that's Stephen, Silverback and me) were off to Bowness, where we were staying for the weekend.

And suddenly, I was terrified. The weather forecast was RAIN only to be interrupted by HEAVY RAIN. My biggest fear was that they'd cancel it because of poor visibility. My second biggest fear was that they wouldn't cancel it, and that I wouldn't be able to see where I was going, and that Stephen and Silverback would get drenched and we'd all have a thoroughly miserable time, and that I wouldn't be able to complete the course, and that I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't. I didn't know how I'd react to being out in such a deep lake. Most people I'd spoken to - even really good swimmers - said "Ohh, but it's so deep!"

So, yup, I was really really scared.

But, by a miracle, as we caught the boat up the lake from Bowness to the swimming site, there was NO RAIN AT ALL. I couldn't believe it.

The site was very busy - this is Britain's biggest open-water swim and ten thousand swimmers took part over the weekend, in half-hour "waves" of three hundred swimmers.

I knew that, because of my diabetes, I needed to make sure I'd eaten plenty or I would just simply run out of energy. An hour before my 12.30pm swim I stuffed a beef salad sandwich down my throat, but I was both very nervous and not at all hungry. It tasted like cardboard, but I managed it.

I changed into my swimsuit and wetsuit in a huge, steamy heated marquee filled with women of all ages, shapes and sizes. Never has so much female flesh been on display combined with so much rubber. Some people would have been in very heaven.

We had to wait a little while before swimming and I was getting both even more nervous and very hot in my wetsuit.

"The acclimatisation pool is down there, do you want to try it?" said Silverback. Hurrah! This was so helpful to me. I would not have spotted it because of the crowds, and also because my prescription goggles, though a great help, are not brilliant vision-wise.

The acclimatisation pool was just a little pool where you went in and swam round in a loop to get used to the temperature. It was sixteen degrees Centigrade - much warmer than the sea I went into for the Tenby Boxing Day Swim, that was nine degrees - and the water was clear and lovely.

As I went in, all my worries just went. It wasn't raining (it never did rain!) Suddenly, I was sure I could do the swim.

Out I came and joined the crowd ready to start.

Here we are, in a photo taken by Stephen:

I'm the one in the orange hat.

And then the hooter went and we all went into the water:

I'm the one in the orange hat. No, not that one! The slim, fit one right at the front.

Well, perhaps not. I hung right back - I wasn't bothered about the time, just about getting round, and a timing chip on my ankle would give the time at the end anyway.

After the first stroke I thought - I love this! We had to swim past three huge yellow buoys - very easy for even someone with my eyesight to spot - and then to a huge pink buoy labelled HALF WAY - and then back past three more yellow buoys.

There were people in kayaks for safety all the way - they were very friendly and I stopped to chat to a couple of them as one said "Everyone swims past and nobody wants to talk to me!" I found myself giving advice of "you'll get used to it - just carry on!" to a girl who was swimming in a wetsuit for the first time and was finding it really tricky.

I wasn't anywhere near the front - - but I wasn't right at the back either. Out in the middle of the lake, I realised how much I loved the peace of it, and the opportunity to be there. The swimmers were well spread out and it wasn't crowded at all.

Suddenly I was at the pink buoy - half way! I had to touch it before setting off back. On the way back I realised I had plenty of energy and so speeded up a bit and it was such pleasure just swimming as fast as I could through that beautiful, chlorine-free water.

We had to swim under an arch for the end of the race and then climb up a slope. They had two people on hand to haul the swimmers out - - because suddenly, everyone's legs just didn't seem to work properly and I lurched drunkenly along the path to give in my timing chip and collect my very pleasing goodie bag with a T-shirt, a medal (and I'm really proud to have it!) and various other things, plus a pair of flip-flops.

So here I am, at the end of the race, epitomising the phrase "bedraggled but very happy".

I was very pleased - and surprised - by my time of 1 hour 5 minutes 20 seconds. Okay, the men's winner did it in just over quarter of an hour but hey, I'm a bit older than him, and I was swimming breast stroke, okay? You can see all the statistics about how I did by typing in my race number 5145 to this link.

1980 Olympic Champion in the breast-stroke was there too - Duncan Goodhew - and there are some great photos of him on Silverback's blog, Retirement Rocks. Do read Silverback's post about the swim - and his excellent photos there really capture the atmosphere. Duncan Goodhew is the same age as me and I'm proud to have swum in the same lake as him this weekend - - though I think he swam a bit faster than I did!

Particular thanks are due to my husband Stephen and my great friend Silverback for their unwavering encouragement and also to those kind people who have sponsored me to help Sally Womersley in her fund-raising to help Multiple Sclerosis research (and there's still time to sponsor me for this excellent cause here). Also thanks to those who have given cash too!

What a wonderful experience. I'll never forget it.

The Longest Day

2011-06-11T14:46:00.003+01:00

"I just feel tired all the time." "I want a sick note." "I'm not happy with my medication."

Yes, it's OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) season and Simulated Patients like me have been working on the medical students' exams for them to be assessed on their consultation skills.

You often have several Simulated Patients (known as SPs) playing the same role so it's important that it's played in exactly the same way - hence we have a training session to standardise the roles, and also there's often a starting statement such as the ones above.

How it goes from then on depends on the student but there are usually a series of challenges that we give them so they can demonstrate their skills - - or lack of them. The level of difficulty depends upon the level of the students. In the early years they might be "taking a history" - finding out all about the patient's lifestyle, circumstances and past medical history as well as the "presenting complaint" - ie what the patient has come to the doctor about!

The fifth years who are about to qualify have much more complex scenarios - a patient asking for something that the doctor simply can't give, for example, or a very emotional patient.

In the early years of medical school each "station" is quite short - a minute to read the instructions and then, say, five minutes to do the task. It's amazing how much can be done in five minutes though. In the later years of medical school, sometimes it can be ten or even twelve minutes.

This week I've done two OSCEs and they were, I have to say, the hardest I've ever done. Very large year groups in the Hull York Medical School first and second years resulted in extremely long days.

On Tuesday I had to be in Hull - sixty-five miles away - by seven-thirty in the morning, and then we finished at about half past six at night, and drove back again.

In between we did eighty - yes, eighty - five-minute "stations" in two-hour blocks.

Then I did a similar thing, playing a different patient with a different problem, in York - a mere twenty-five miles away - on Thursday.

In the room is the examiner and me. A bell goes to start and then each student moves from station to station, with a bell going to signify the end of each station and the start of the next task.

So, from my perceptive, the bell goes, a student comes in and introduces himself or herself, I start with something like one of the statements above, and off we go, with the examiner marking the various skills demonstrated and questions asked - for example, in a scenario about a cough, it would be really important for the student to ask if the patient smoked. Then another bell goes, the student leaves, and the next student starts reading the instructions outside the door for one minute until the bell goes to start again.

It's a difficult two hours for the students of course. I have been doing OSCEs for years and years and worked with thousands of students and I must say that the students I met this week were almost all polite, friendly, knowledgeable, thorough and empathic. The standard of communication skills has really shot up over the years as more emphasis has been placed on it. Hurrah!

The examiners I worked with - both doctors of course - were a real pleasure to work with too and that makes such a difference during such a very long day.

Doing twenty roleplays in a row, then a short break, then another twenty, and so on, is just relentless and takes every ounce of concentration - otherwise you find yourself thinking "Oh no, I just said that!" and yet it was to the previous student. It's vital to give them all the same opportunity of course.

The way I get through it is with a kind of pig-headed determination. When the eightieth student comes in, I do my damndest to behave as though the whole thing is fresh and new. It definitely befuddles your brain afterwards though and SPs do talk about "OSCE brain" as a new and interesting medical condition.

During the very last twenty I did allow myself the luxury of counting down, writing on a piece of paper 20 - - 19 - - 18 - - and so on, in the one-minute gaps between roleplays.

Another of the SPs set himself the interesting personal challenge of drinking the whole two-litre bottle of water that he was provided with.

"And then, at the end, I went to the toilet and I peed for seventy-eight seconds! SEVENTY-EIGHT SECONDS! I timed it!" he said with considerable pride.

Ahhh, OSCE season. Glorious.

Mad Day

2011-06-07T22:35:00.004+01:00

I had to be in a Distant City by 7.30am this morning, which meant getting up at quarter to five.

The work started soon after 8am and finished at about 6.30pm with very short breaks - it was an exam for medical students. Eighty roleplays, each lasting five minutes, in four sessions, each of twenty roleplays.

It all went very smoothly, though I have never done so many roleplays in one day!

I will be going to bed very soon and I probably won't need to count sheep. Though if I do, they will probably turn out like the ones in this video.

The Great North Swim - - Again

2011-06-05T19:55:00.005+01:00

Last year, you may remember, I tried to do The Great North Swim.

It's swimming a mile in Windermere, the largest lake in the Lake District.

Two days before it was due to happen last year, it had to be cancelled because of toxic blue-green algae in the water.

I was gutted. I had been practising since November 2009 and I was really looking forward to proving something - - I'm not sure quite what! - to myself. That I'm not quite past it, I suppose.

I've always swum a lot. I'm not naturally athletic, but it's the only sport I've ever been any good at. And I've always loved it. Some people love the freedom of running - - well, I've never been able to run any distance at all.

But I've always been able to swim. Not fast, but I've always been able to keep going. Since November 2009, when I decided to work toward the Great North Swim, I have swum a mile two or three times a week: it's sixty-four lengths of a normal-sized pool. A mile takes me almost exactly an hour.

I swim breast-stroke, though not - I hope - that "middle-aged-lady" breast stroke with your head up high, your perm intact and your glasses on.

No, I swim a plunge-your-face-in-the-water kind of breast stroke and that's my only asset, really - I have quite a decent style. That and a kind of dogged persistence and an inner refusal to believe that I'm over about twenty-five.

Stacked against me in the swimming stakes are that I've had a deep-vein thrombosis in my leg, I'm diabetic and I'm - er - not in my first flush of youth. Also I'm blind as a bat. Even with my prescription goggles. Yes, I'll start off in Windermere - - who knows where I'll end up!

When I first saw the swim advertised I thought "hey - - I could do that!" But ever since, I keep meeting much better swimmers than I am who have said "Ohhhh no, you'd never get me doing that. Not in a lake. Oh no." And I keep thinking - - should I be worried? Will I be able to do it?

I've been practising swimming in my wetsuit, (they insist upon swimmers wearing them for warmth) which has taken a lot of getting used to - it's too big, and it takes a while before I can get all the air out of it. But I'm getting better.

Now then. I have several friends and colleagues who suffer from the terrible, debilitating illness Multiple Sclerosis, or MS.

An actress friend of mine, Sally Womersley, has been raising money to buy a special machine to assist with MS research. She has already raised nearly thirty thousand pounds for the Edinburgh Centre for MS Research.

So, in doing the swim, I am also trying to raise money for this excellent cause.

I am asking for your help. I have never asked you for money before and I know that these are hard times. But anything that you can give will be very gratefully appreciated. You can donate to Sally's MS Research machine here - just click on the link, it's a secure site for donations.

The swim's on Saturday, 18th June - in just under two weeks' time. Stephen and Silverback will be there to cheer me on, and I'm grateful for their support. I am nervous, but I am excited. Wish me luck!

In the Changing Room

2011-06-04T14:53:00.002+01:00

Two weeks today, I will be doing the Great North Swim in Windermere in the Lake District - and more of that in my next post!

It's a mile in the lake and they insist that we wear wetsuits. Me, I'd be perfectly happy without a wetsuit - I'm fine in cold water, have swum in it just about all my life.

But, since they insist, I needed to practise swimming outdoors, wearing the wetsuit, as it takes a bit of getting used to.

So off we went this morning to Ilkley Lido, which is an open-air pool built in the 1930s. It's unheated but I love it and I spent a lot of time there as a child. There are some photos on the site I've linked to and I'd love to show you some photos of my own but they are absolutely strict that you can't take any, for fear of paedophiles. Sighhhh. Stephen got his phone out at one point to time my swimming - - and was immediately asked to put it away, as it has a camera on it.

The pool has one of those old-fashioned changing rooms where you put your clothes in a box and hand it over to an attendant (rather than the modern locker system.) I like the old-fashioned system.

However, because it was sunny today, the changing rooms were really busy and, as always, I marvelled at what goes on there.

There are three showers, each producing not much more than a trickle of water, so why Yummy Mummy decided it was a good idea to wash all her four daughters' hair I don't know. It took forever, and nobody enjoyed it. A stoical British queue stood patiently, waiting for the showers, whilst shampoo foam oozed along the floor and the daughters kept their eyes open whilst their hair was being washed, and then got shampoo in their eyes, and screamed, one by one, each one failing to learn from the example of her predecessor.

At the sink stood Little Miss Beauty Routine. I don't know if she WAS going straight from the swimming pool to the Grand Ball at the Palace, but that was the impression she gave. She cleansed, she toned, she moisturised. She applied a base coat and then a top coat and blusher and eyeliner and eyeshadow and lipstick and then she swept her hair into some elaborate style.

When I left, she hadn't even started struggling into her ballgown (or whatever she was planning to wear once she'd removed the swimsuit). I noted that she had by now spent longer on her beauty routine than I ever have, ever, for any occasion, ever. Hmmmm. I'm not sure if that says more about her or about me.

As I got dressed, the child in the next cubicle had clearly learned much from Stewie in Family Guy. She, however, had a variant on his "Mom - - Mom - - Mom - - Mom - - Mom" routine.

Her question was this.

"Mum, do I need to put my knickers on?"

Mum, for some reason, failed to reply.

"Mum, do I need to put my knickers on?"

No reply.

"Mum, do I need to put my knickers on?"

Pause.

"Mum, do I need to put my knickers on?"

"Mum, do I need to put my knickers on?"

"Mum, do I need to put my knickers on?"

Oh! I was SO tempted to say "No, leave them off, give the paedophiles a treat" but I didn't want to be thrown out.

Her mother never did reply, possibly because she was now down the other end of the changing rooms, with the Exhibitionists.

I bet men think that you only get these in men's changing rooms, with men keen to demonstrate the size and perceived quality of their equipment to those less well-endowed.

Men are wrong. Women do it too.

Some women do the communal showers naked and I don't mind this at all. It's possible to be naked without emitting a "LOOK AT ME!!! I'M NAKED! NAKED! WITH NO CLOTHES ON! WOOOP WOOOP!" kind of vibe.

But some women are just keen to show off their bodies in the hope we'll be really impressed.

Some are the twenty-somethings who have been working on their Bikini Body all winter.

They don't just shower and leave, oh no. They sing, prance around, lather themselves - - but all in a way that's designed to show off their perfect bodies. There is always a subliminal message going on.

"Look at my BREASTS! COUNT THEM! For lo! I have TWO! Here's ONE - - and here's the OTHER! And now I am going to show you my LADYPARTS in all their GLORY!"

It's not just the perfect-size-tens who do this. You also sometimes get it from the Women of a Certain Age. Their message is different.

"You have NO IDEA how my body has suffered. For it has borne SEVEN CHILDREN and I have BREAST-FED THEM ALL. Let me demonstrate the effect that this has had on my poor old wrinkled body! For hey, I am PROUD and I am going to SHOW YOU, sisters."

I feel that the testosterone-fuelled competition in the men's changing rooms must be simplicity itself in comparison.

By the Bus Stop

2011-05-30T14:47:00.003+01:00

Opposite our house is a road leading down to some woods, and there's a bus stop just by the entrance to the woods. Here it is:

It looks fine at first but then if you walk past and look inside the fence we have this:

Yes, lots of cans and take-away wrappers and bottles and crisp packets, all behind the fence so it's really hard to remove them - - and, indeed, nobody ever has. There's rubbish back there that dates back to Dickens' time.

So what's the thinking - well, I say "thinking" but I'm not sure that this is the correct word - in the mind of Litter Oik, behind tucking the litter down the back of the fence then? Rather than, say, hurling it into the road, giving it to the bus driver, setting it on fire or just dropping it on the floor at their feet?

I think that in Oik World, putting the litter behind the fence is almost as good as putting it in a bin, isn't it? It has just the same feel to it - - putting it somewhere rather than just dropping it on the floor.

Once, when I was walking by the edge of Roundhay Park Lake, a teenage girl in front of me finished drinking from a large pop bottle and then simply flung it into the lake. I was so, SO tempted just to push her in after it. I had to clamp my arms to my sides to stop myself. Okay, I'd probably have ended up in prison but ohhhhh the moment of pushing would have been such a pleasure.

When I was younger, when I saw people drop litter I would pick it up and hand it back to them with a cheery smile and "I suppose you didn't notice, but you seem to have dropped this by mistake." It may not have done any good, but I enjoyed doing it and it made me feel better. I wouldn't try it now though - I'd probably get stabbed.

Sometimes, in my grumpier moments, I think that if they ever put me in charge of the Justice System (unlikely, on the face of it, but you never know so I'm getting prepared in case), I think I would try an experiment.

Firstly, introducing far more rubbish bins - there isn't one by this bus stop, I notice. And secondly, a mandatory jail sentence for throwing paper or cardboard or a can on the floor outdoors. Ohhh yes! In our current system it's treated as a very minor offence - and yet it's not. It ruins the environment for the rest of us. When I see other litter-free countries, I feel ashamed.

Something Groovy and Good

2011-05-28T15:55:00.003+01:00

In the ballroom at Park Hotel, Tenby, in the late 1960s, there was a Dansette record player. It was by the bay window, next to the piano.

There were only three records, all singles. One was Gerry and the Pacemakers' How Do you Do What You Do to Me? and I thought it was great. And I still do.

The second one was Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders with Groovy Kind of Love. I thought it was great. And I still do.

I'm pretty sure that the third one was an old and crackly - even then - copy of Tommy Steele with Little White Bull but I didn't like that as much as the other two so it has faded from my memory a bit.

There were a few of us there, on the cusp of our teen years. Stuart and Gordon Howe were my friends - we would swim in the pool, endlessly, doing lots of somersaults (I could do nine without stopping to breathe in those days, oh yes!) and racing each other (they always won, but in my defence Stuart later swam for Scotland in the Commonwealth Games). When we finally emerged and warmed up and were waiting for dinner-time, we would cluster round the Dansette and play the three records, and I can't tell you how much all was well with the world.

So, late last night, wallowing in nostalgia a bit, I started with Groovy Kind of Love and formed a theory.

And it is this: There has never been a song with the word Groovy in it that I dislike.

Here's three for starters.

Throwing off Some of the Load

2011-05-28T00:14:00.003+01:00

Still on the flowers theme after the laburnums, here's my mother tending one of her flowerbeds:

I love the garden flowers at this time of year - - lupins, irises, peonies, and the huge oriental poppies:

All these flowers have been in this garden for as long as I can remember and when I see them I think - - hey, it's nearly summer.

Summer seems to have crept up on me this year. I had a lovely few days in Plymouth in April and even that was to work - I just seem to have been constantly in work mode, constantly trying to do the current tasl to the best of my ability, and then to prepare for the next job, always with the feeling of letting someone down, which I know is not a helpful feeling but it's always there!

I have had too much weight on my shoulders recently - too many things to worry about. With the coming of summer, I'm going to try to throw off some of it, at least for a while. We're arranging some holidays, which is great. I don't want to miss the summer. Here it is in close-up.

Laburnum Tree

2011-05-26T20:16:00.004+01:00

There have been laburnum trees in our garden since before my parents bought this house, in 1959.

The one outside our bedroom window has always been there, and I love its yellow flowers in the Spring.

However, my parents seemed to go through a period of planting tiny bits of ivy in lots of places. They flourished and one climbed up the tree and was slowly overwhelming it.

So when the men came to trim our trees in the winter, they sawed through the ivy's trunk to kill it.

It was too twisted round everything to be removed, but gradually it died. So here's the laburnum tree, in full flower a couple of weeks ago, with the dead ivy.

This was the view from our bedroom window - - I love it!

The tree itself with the ivy round it gives an interesting effect:

It's a kind of twisty natural sculpture. I prefer it to much sculpture that's man-made.

Doppelganger

2011-05-23T19:49:00.003+01:00

"So, Mum," I asked, showing her the photo, "who's this?"

"Well, it's your Dad, of course," she said. "Why's he dressed as a doctor?"

To me, of course, he was dressed as a pharmacist. That's how I remember him in the shop, in his white coat.

My brother Michael found the photograph - but not anywhere where you might expect.

It was on this website about abortion in India. My brother, who lives in Amsterdam, came across it as part of his work.

Obviously it couldn't be the Communist. In India? Surely not.

And yet - - my brother and I had a careful look at the photo and it just looks like the Communist as he was in his sixties. He lived to be eighty-five, and died in December 2008, but this photo is exactly how I remember him just before he retired from pharmacy. Same eyes - - ears - - hands - - forehead - - hair - or lack of it! - beard - - and particularly that quizzical expression. Surely it had to be him?

And, of course, the Communist, after his retirement, did a fair amount of professional acting and certainly this could be a still from a corporate video or similar.

But still, of course, I thought - - well it can't be. And, amazingly, I really couldn't tell. Perhaps the fingers in the photo were just slightly slimmer than the Communist's?

I sent it to Silverback as I know he is Internet Search King and he kindly found the proof that we needed, here on this website of stock photographs.

Yes, it's not the Communist - - but in certain photos this gentlemen looks like his identical twin. It's an amazing likeness - it's the expression as well as the features.

If you click on the link, the fourth photo along on the top line, which also looks very like the Communist, is labelled "Intelligent Senior Man" and the description is "A portrait of a handsome, intelligent senior man."

If the Communist was still alive, I'd show it to him, of course. And we'd never, ever hear the end of it. "A PORTRAIT OF A HANDSOME, INTELLIGENT SENIOR MAN!" he would say. All the time. Several times a day. For ever.

He'd have loved it.

Foreign Parts

2011-05-22T14:09:00.002+01:00

You thought I'd vanished, didn't you?

What do you mean, you didn't notice? Sighhhh.

I don't think there's ever been such a long time between blog posts since I started this blog in 2006. But then, I don't think I've had such a busy week.

I've been working in the actors' s agency of course, and doing medical roleplay in Yorkshire from Huddersfield to Hull and several points in between.

Stephen, meanwhile, went off to Stockholm in Sweden for a week of meetings. Oh, yes, it was work - - but then he showed me the photos - - and I suddenly became a seething mass of envy! Hey, Stockholm looks great! It's all surrounded by boats and water and greenery. So I thought I'd add some photos of Stockholm to this post since they're a bit more exotic than Huddersfield or Hull (and I hasten to add I do like both of those, so there!) So here's a bit of Stockholm. They got better weather than we did, too.

To add to this, I had a big pile of marking from some students. I can't tell you too much about it, of course, but one student managed to write entirely the wrong essay. Just nothing at all to do with what he was supposed to be doing. Okay, fair enough, he got the title wrong - - though I'm not sure how. And then, amazingly, he stapled a printout of the correct title to his essay, and handed it in.

Wouldn't you have thought that he would look at the title as he stapled it on, and then look at his essay, and then look at the title - - but no. Just handed it in. Sighhh.

Here's a street in Stockholm:

On Thursday I worked on a roleplay in Huddersfield with Olli. In an inspired piece of casting, I was playing his mum: he's been doing quite a bit of Simulated Patient work too recently. But Olli then had to get to work in York by two o'clock so I drove from Huddersfield to York and then back to Leeds, where I did some work in the office, and then in the evening I had a job in Harrogate - an exam practice for doctors.

Shall we have another look at Stockholm?

On Friday I was working on another exam, for Mental Health nurses this time. It was very intense as they were practising their counselling skills on the patient (who was played by - you guessed it - me!) And, much to my relief, I was able to hand in my completed marking too on Friday!

When the exam finished and I came home to the office I just couldn't believe I'd got through the week. Stephen returned from Stockholm too.

Silverback came round for the evening. Never have I enjoyed a Chinese takeaway and a film so much. I think I must like working under pressure - I find it very satisfying when I do get everything done - - but this week was just a bit too much.

Next week, thank goodness, is a lot more normal - - busy, but not crazily so.

Here's some serene Stockholm sea.

That Time of Year Again

2011-05-11T17:46:00.000+01:00

The bluebells are out and with them come the OSCEs.

An Objective Structured Clinical Examination, known as an OSCE, pronounced Oskey, is an exam for medical students, or other healthcare students.

They travel round a series of little rooms doing a different task in each: things such as testing a patient's reflexes or taking a medical history of their problem.

Each "station" is usually either six minutes or twelve minutes, depending upon the length and complexity of the task.

At this time of year I, and other simulated patients, work in OSCEs in different parts of the country for the different year groups' exams.

Student doctors train for five years and today I was working on an exam for 5th year students - so it's their final exam before they qualify as doctors.

There's a lot riding on this exam, as you can imagine. Some students from the second year had come along to help, with the cunning plan of also finding out how OSCEs work, because they haven't had one yet.

I knew some of them and they were marvelling to me at the level of nerves involved. "It's making me terrified just looking at the candidates," said one. I comforted them by pointing out that, at fifth year level, the students are of course particularly nervous - - but also that most of them pass.

In some "stations" the students are really rushed but in mine they weren't - good candidates could complete it in less than the allotted time.

As the Simulated Patient, I would then just keep quiet and stare at the floor - it's really important to stay neutral, in role, and not to be drawn into any conversation or you can find yourself faced with a student saying "How did I do?"

But there is also an examiner in each room: and the examiner, once he'd made it clear that he had finished examining, often asked them how they were finding the exam. The students mostly said something like "Really scary" or "You just can't tell how you're doing" or "If you think you've messed up one station you just have to move on quickly and put it out of your head, don't you?"

One, however, went into a little monologue which I found very entertaining.

"Well, this is my third station in this OSCE and I'm from Liverpool. Usually I don't have a strong Liverpool accent but when I'm nervous I talk more loudly and much faster and more Scouse. So if you talk to the examiner from the first station he'll remember me as a Liverpudlian maniac who seemed to be trying to break the British speed-talking record whilst shouting all the time in a thick Scouse accent.

Then if you talk to the examiner from the second station she'll think I was far too loud and too fast and too Scouse but she probably won't think I'm actually insane.

Now then, by the time I've got to you I've calmed down a bit and you'll think I'm just a bit manic but I hope I've done well enough to pass.

And by the time I get to the eighth station which is the last one for this OSCE, I hope I'll be beginning to sound like a junior doctor and I hope they'll pass me so I can become one. - - Ohhh, there's the bell for the next station."

And off he hurtled to shake his clammy hand with the next Simulated Patient.

I love my work.

Like a Bloody Furnace in Here

2011-05-07T18:33:00.005+01:00

When we first lived in this house, in the late 1950s, it was slightly unusual. It had central heating, in the days when most people had coal fires.

It was fuelled by anthracite - there was a boiler in the cellar which was always kept lit. The Communist used to work in his chemist's shop on Saturday mornings and then on Saturday afternoons he would spend some time "shovelling anthracite", as he always described it, to get the fuel into the right place in the cellar for the next week.

It had definite advantages, this system. There was - and still is - a drying rack in the cellar, one of those that haul up to the ceiling. Because the boiler was there, the cellar was red-hot and any clothes placed there would dry very fast.

The boiler churned out heat at a great rate and the whole house was lovely and warm - or, as the Communist constantly put it, "It's like a bloody furnace in here."

The old Victorian windows let in plenty of air, even when shut, but this didn't matter because there was so much heat flooding round the old Victorian piping.

Of course, as a child I didn't find this central heating interesting at all. I loved watching the coal fire round at my grandparents' house and was very envious of it.

Then, sometime in the 1970s, we changed from anthracite to gas central heating.

This was better from the Communist's point of view as he no longer had to spend his Saturday afternoons shovelling anthracite.

On the other hand, it meant that the cellar was now cold and clothes didn't dry so fast. They still don't - though there is plenty of ventilation (most of it unintentional) and so clothes do dry down there.

But there was a lot less residual heat going round the house - when the heating was off, it all cooled down very fast.

And it was then that this wonder of technology came into its own.

Yes! Our electric fire! I could have one bar on, all glowing nice and warm, whilst doing my homework in the dining-room. From time to time the Communist would come in and grumble vaguely about the price of electricity.

Or sometimes I could sprawl on the sofa in the lounge in front of the television with both bars on. The Communist would look round the door. "Why do you need both bars? It's LIKE A BLOODY FURNACE IN HERE!"

Now, years later, we have a new, better, gas central heating system. The old electric fire hasn't been safe to use for many years, but just before I finally got rid of it, I had to take this photo, for nostalgia's sake.

Last winter was so cold that occasionally we had to use a - much newer - electric fire. It worked very well - - but it SO lacked the comfort factor of those brightly-glowing bars.

Roman Emails

2011-05-02T17:32:00.002+01:00

I'm trying to imagine a parallel with how it must have seemed to the native Brits when the Romans invaded.

Perhaps it would have been as if, during the Second World War, the Nazis had invaded Britain equipped with mobile phones and the computers that we have now.

The Romans were so very far ahead in technology and in just about everything else.

They were well-organised planners at a time when the Brits didn't do much except shiver a lot and wish for summer - - much as we do now, in fact.

On our recent visit to Hadrian's Wall we also visited the Roman fort of Vindolanda, which was at the far North of the Roman Empire.

I was last there in the early Seventies, soon after the Romans had left (let me make that joke before you do, eh?) In those days they hadn't excavated much of it - - but now they have excavated a lot of the fort and the village in front of it and also added a museum which really brings the place to life.

Museums can be deadly dull, full of bored children filling in worksheets. This one isn't dull at all - and the Roman Army Museum nearby is also fascinating. I loved such exhibits at Vindolanda as hundreds of different Roman sandals, from basic workman's shoes to elegant ladies' slippers, all preserved because the damp conditions kept the oxygen, which would have rotted them, out.

The museum's full of interesting details - - such as that Roman soldiers used to train with wooden swords filled with lead, to make them extra heavy - so that when they picked up the real thing it seemed light as a feather.

The Romans were there at about the time that BC had recently turned into AD. So a loooong time ago by our standards.

During the excavations, one day they found two tiny, thin pieces of wood stuck together. Closer investigation showed that they were covered in handwriting.

As the digging continued, they found hundreds of these writing tablets. When the Romans at the fort, or at the village, wanted to send a quick email, they couldn't, because email hadn't been invented.

So what they did instead was to write a message on a small piece of thin wood, and send it that way. Because - unlike the Brits of the time - the Romans were literate.

"Could you bring me some socks?" "We need more provisions for the troops." "I'm not going via Catterick, the roads are terrible that way."

"Would you like to come to my birthday party?" This one, unusually, was written by a woman and is the earliest example of female handwriting found in England!

Hundreds and hundreds of these tiny tablets were left scattered deep under the fort, discussing all sorts of subjects. When one cohort of Romans left, they started a bonfire to burn a big pile of them. But the reliable Northumberland rain soon put the fire out, so the tablets survived.

Again, the lack of oxygen has preserved them, and modern equipment can make the writing readable - though they are of course very difficult to interpret, being firstly written in Latin, secondly written in handwriting - often by people whose spelling wasn't brilliant - and thirdly, often using slang of the time, which, let's face it, we don't really understand. Though one writing tablet did describe the natives as "Brittunculi" -"wretched little Brits"- and we certainly understood THAT. Rude Romans. Pah!

Many of the tablets have now been deciphered and translated and they are fascinating. I spent ages poring over them - I do like historical documents that bring history to life in that way.

Both museums bring home in no uncertain terms how terrifying it must have been for the Britons when the Romans invaded. When they left, it took us a while to catch up with them, technology-wise. Well over a thousand years, in fact.

Unbuntified

2011-04-30T10:30:00.003+01:00

Okay, I have unbuntified my blog now the Great Event is over. If you were hoping for a few Union Jacks strewn about, plus some loud and really persistent patriotic music, then I'm afraid you will be disappointed.

It all seemed to go off well - nice frock and a few people turned up to watch. One or two people thought it was fancy dress: William came as the Bald Prince of Ruritania, the Queen came as a canary and I'm not sure what Beatrice and Eugenie were doing - perhaps they were quietly sending the whole thing up, similarly Tara Palmer-Tompkinson. You can see a photo of her on Silverback's blog.

Even though I'm not a royalist, (though I hate the idea of replacing them with some dreary politician so don't really know what I'd replace them with) I do like historical events so tend to remember where I was when they happened. As Charles married Di in 1981, I was kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland. As Wills married Kate, I was doing a pile of ironing. I think I need to plan a bit more excitement in my life.

Compulsory Buntification

2011-04-28T21:13:00.003+01:00

As I expect you know, it is currently compulsory for all British websites to have bunting and patriotic music in honour of the fact that one of Princess Diana's sons (the one who looks a tiny bit like Prince Charles and not the one who looks exactly like James Hewitt) is getting married tomorrow.

In a frantic bid to acquire the Common Touch that his father so blatantly lacks, the one who looks a tiny bit like Prince Charles but really mostly like Princess Di, is getting hitched to a woman whose parents are called, in a commoner way Carole and Michael. In the Olden Days of mediaeval paintings, all commoners were depicted standing with their mouths open, and I expect Carole and Michael will have been instructed to stand like that all day tomorrow.

I was invited, of course. Oh yes. Didn't make a fuss about it - just quietly declined as I have a bit of work to do in the office tomorrow and some junk to clear. I expect they'll struggle on without me.

Anyway, I got this bunting from Olli and Gareth's friend Tom Scott and I'm extremely grateful because, without the bunting, I'd be under threat of losing my British citizenship and perhaps even my Tesco Clubcard.

So I hope you're enjoying both the bunting and the music. Yes, I know the music is a bit persistent. Patriotic music is like that. If you can hear a strange whining sound in the background, it's the sound of the Communist spinning in his grave.

Hearing the Sound of a Barrel Being Scraped

2011-04-26T15:51:00.002+01:00

It had to happen sometime.

As the locum GP called Stephen's name I looked at him and recognised him.

For I had met him before, somewhere else, in a different part of the country, in amongst a group of candidates training as GPs, doing a mock exam.

He was one of a couple who - the examiner had told me at the time - had not been expected to pass. He stuck in my mind because of his particularly poor communication skills.

And on this morning's showing, I really don't know how he did pass.

Stephen has had an extremely painful shoulder and arm for a long time. He has been waiting for a scan and some physiotherapy. Because it's got even worse, we had gone to the doctor to try to speed things up. I went in with Stephen because I speak fluent Doctor.

It was just as well, because this doctor didn't speak fluent anything. He was from overseas and sometimes overseas doctors struggle because of a strong accent or inappropriate vocabulary.

That wasn't the case here. He just had inappropriate everything.

One of the strange things he did was insert the word "whatd'youmacallit" before every noun.

"So you have pain in your whatd'youmacallit? shoulder and it goes all down your whatd'youmacallit arm? and you have it almost all the whatd'youmacallit? time?"

Okay, in a better doctor this would have come over as a strange verbal tic and might not have been so crucial. But in the case of someone who was bad in everything else, it was just the opposite of icing on the cake.

No introduction. Very poor eye contact. Very dismissive. He diagnosed it - almost in passing - as osteoarthritis, without apparently understanding any of the implications of this for the patient.

"So it's just wear and tear caused by ageing. There's no point in having a scan because that's all that it will show. You're too young for surgery so there's nothing much you can do about it. Just take some paracetamol or ibuprofen."

Stephen was forced to explain, for the second time in several minutes, that actually, the pain is not just mildly annoying, not just very bad, but absolutely agonising and he didn't know how he can live with it.

Finally Dr Whatd'youmacallit, clearly pushed way beyond the limits of his abilities, prescribed another drug that he thought might help. We'll see.

Stephen has a week's supply of these new tablets and after that he'll go back and see a different doctor and start again.

I don't know how this doctor passed his final exams to become a GP. They have five years at medical school, then two years in a hospital, then three years to train as a GP.

I'm not sure how this chap passed any of it. He must have had an on day.

High Force

2011-04-25T14:22:00.003+01:00

When I was fourteen, we went on holiday to Northumberland.

One of the places I liked, and which stuck in my memory, was a walk along a steeply wooded valley to a huge waterfall.

Apart from that, I couldn't remember a thing about it. Over the years, I've tried a few times to find where it was but never managed it.

Last weekend, when we went up to Northumberland, on the Friday evening we just wanted to get there as fast as possible. So we went up the A1 and turned left - - there wasn't too much traffic and we made good progress.

However, coming back on Sunday we weren't going to be so pushed for time. Realising this, Silverback, sitting under a palm tree in Florida, worked out a route for us.

He suggested we should try the B6277 - a much smaller road. He had looked at it on Streetview and it looked very scenic.

We decided to try it.

The scenery was indeed beautiful, verging on the stunning. We came out of Northumberland and into Teesdale, a part of the country that I don't know at all.

Then, driving along, I spotted a car park and a big sign "High Force". I didn't know what it was but it looked interesting: I knew it must refer to a waterfall.

"Stephen, can we stop?"

We parked the car, crossed the road, and headed down the path through the steeply wooded valley with the fast-flowing River Tees below:

And then, there it was. High Force. The highest waterfall in England.

Beautiful in the evening sunlight.

Apparently you used to be able to walk to the top of the waterfall but Health and Safety have stopped that in case you are too stupid to realise that the top of a waterfall can be really rather slippy.

And we also had to be told that if you decide to swim at the bottom of such a big waterfall, it won't be so much swimming, as drowning:

Sighhhh. Sometimes I wish we could replace all such notices with "Go on! Show off to your mates! Have a swim! Byeeeeee!"

It's a beautiful spot with huge cliffs too. If you click on the photograph below to enlarge it, you'll see some people sitting right at the top:

It's a fine balance, isn't it, this Health and Safety lark? As long as they were careful, they were perfectly safe. If they weren't careful, it was a long way down.

We were very grateful to Silverback for working out the route for us - it made me realise it's a part of the country that I really want to go back to.

But still the penny didn't drop.

The following day, I was telling my mother about High Force and how lovely it is.

"Ahhh yes," she said, "now you say the name, I remember it. We went there on the way back from Northumberland, when you were a teenager."

Yes, my glorious waterfall. Found it at last.

Enough

2011-04-23T23:39:00.003+01:00

My mother, who is now 87, is not on a lot of medication, for someone of 87.

She is on a low dose of aspirin to thin her blood, because she's had a stroke. She's on a low dose of statins to lower her cholesterol. She's on a water tablet to stop her ankles swelling up. And that's it.

Today, suddenly, I noticed that her ankles were hugely swollen.

"So, Mum, have you been taking your water tablets?"

"Errrr no. I don't think I have any."

I looked. She hadn't. She hasn't any statins either. She hasn't had any since - well - January.

I have, from time to time, chased the pharmacist about this. They say it's the doctor's fault.

I have, from time to time, rung the doctor's. They say it's the pharmacist's fault.

Sometimes my mother tries to go and collect her tablets and comes back without any and can't remember why she hasn't got them.

Sometimes I try to collect them from the pharmacist and they say it's the doctor's fault.

The woman from the Memory Clinic says that my mother should have her tablets in a dosset box, all ready counted out, every week, because she can't remember whether she's had them or not.

Memory Clinic Woman said she'd suggested this to the doctor. Actually the person who suggested it first was me. But for some - as yet unexplained - reason, this hasn't happened.

I have had enough. My mother is supposed to be going to Amsterdam with my brother - who has come over to collect her - on Wednesday - but at the moment I rather doubt that she'll go. She will use the hugely swollen ankles as a reason but the real reason is that she no longer feels able to cope with being away from home.

I have had enough. I am sick of getting fobbed off with nonsense about why they haven't got a prescription for my mother and so can't give her any tablets. I am sick of the doctor saying they DID give the pharmacist the prescription.

I have had enough of this grey haze of forgetfulness that my mother is in - it's not so grey or so hazy that she can't live on her own yet, but it is getting that way. And then I don't know what will happen, because of her abject terror of hospitals or anything involving old people.

I have had enough of the fact that whenever I try to discuss any possible plans with her, she just says "Oh, I'll walk into the sea" and that's the end of it. It's not her fault: she hates to think about a time when she can't cope on her own - and who can blame her?

Because I have - as I have mentioned once or twice - had enough, I am going to go into the doctor's on Tuesday and sort it out. And if they say they can't sort it, or that it's the pharmacist's fault, or could I come back tomorrow, or any other such nonsense, I will probably scream the place down.

Because, dear readers, I have had enough.

Eighty-Seven

2011-04-22T20:29:00.001+01:00

Manchester in the sunshine! Well, that's something that you don't see every day.

In fact these are probably the first photos of a sunny Manchester that have ever been taken.

It's a Grand Northern City, all right, and very proud of itself.

Lots of big imposing buildings, both Victorian and ultra-modern (like the one I was working in, where you couldn't get through any door without an electronic pass card):

There are lots of hidden corners, too, which I like.

"What date is it?" asked the man I was working with.

"April 20th," I said. "I know because it's Hitler's birthday."

He looked at me quizzically, clearly wondering if he was sitting next to some kind of neo-Nazi.

"Actually, I know that because April 20th is also my mother's birthday, and she's always been furious that Hitler had the same birthday."

Hitler was born in 1889. My mother was born thirty-five years later, in 1924. She's always liked the symmetry of her birth date. 20/4/24. Twenty. Four. Twenty-four.

We took my Mum out for a meal the night before her birthday, to the Scott's Arms in the lovely Yorkshire village of Sicklinghall (great village, horrid name). It was recommended to us a while ago by Silverback and has become a favourite haunt of ours - great food in a lovely setting.

So, here she is, awaiting her meal at the Scott's Arms, about to be eighty-seven.

She may be rather forgetful, but she looks really well at the moment. Just don't ever suggest to her that she dyes her hair - it really is natural and has only gone slightly grey. Her mother, who was a redhead, was the same. I may well be too - I think my hair is only slightly grey round the edges - - but I keep dying mine so I don't know!

She seemed to have a lovely evening - she had a starter and then a dessert as she always complains that all portions are too large for her tiny appetite. And then, on her birthday, she had some of her favourite visitors (thank you, David).

She lives next door to me and I always feel that, although I see her every day, I don't do enough for her. But I hope she'll have many more happy days.

My Lovely Cheque

2011-04-20T19:54:00.003+01:00

You know how when you start a new job they take tax off at a rate that's far too high? Well, because I work for several different employers, and sometimes as self-employed too, this tends to happen to me a lot.

When I submitted my tax return in early January, my accountant got in touch and said he'd worked out that, because of all this, I was owed a rather decent refund of about two and a half thousand of our British pounds. Splendid!

So I waited for the cheque to arrive, and it didn't.

To be fair, I assumed that it would take ages. They have a dual standard operating, don't they? Whereby if you owe THEM money they want it yesterday, with interest.

However, if they owe YOU money it takes ages. Interest? You've got to be joking.

So when my lovely cheque didn't arrive in January I thought - - sighhh. But I wasn't surprised. I thought - - well, perhaps it will come at the end of the financial year then. I will put it out of my head until then.

And I didn't think of it again at all. Well not more than several dozen times a day, with increasing bitterness and frustration. "WHERE'S MY LOVELY CHEQUE?" I roared at the heavens, which gave a deafening silence in reply.

So early April arrived, and with it a lot of unseasonal sunshine. The daffodils flowered, and faded, and the leaves on the trees burst their buds, and no cheque-bearing envelope came through the letterbox of the spanking new porch, damn it.

So finally I got in touch with my accountant, trying to sound all casual and not as though I had thought of little else since early January. "You know that - - um - - cheque - - for my tax refund, that was mentioned to me in January? I just wondered - - idly - - er - - WHERE THE HELL IS IT?"

Back came the reply. The Inland Revenue claim they sent it to me in early January, as soon as they got my tax return.

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Except that I was already on the floor, beating my fists on the carpet. "MY CHEQUE! MY LOVELY CHEQUE! O VERILY, WHERE ART THOU?"

I got back to my accountant, once I had calmed down ever so slightly. "Could you chase it up, please?"

She did. She got back to me today. They are going to cancel the previous cheque, and send off a replacement.

Great.

How long will this take?

SIX WEEKS.

I ask you, please. HOW CAN IT TAKE SIX WEEKS? What is there to do that can possibly take that long? Find cheque number on computer. Press cancel. Get out cheque book and a nice new biro, and write new cheque. Pop to the Post Office for a stamp. Buy an envelope whilst there. Address it to Daphne. Put it in a post box. HOW HARD CAN IT BE?

Sorry to shout. It's just that I WANT MY LOVELY CHEQUE!

Where We Stayed

2011-04-19T17:53:00.004+01:00

Here's where we stayed: Holmhead Guest House. It's not just near Hadrian's Wall: it's where Turret Number 46A used to be, and hundreds of years ago some of the stone was used to make this house.

Behind the house are the ruins of Thirlwall Castle: this photo was taken from the bedroom:

A delightful bed and breakfast - friendly, characterful though well modernised, very clean and with a superb breakfast.

Lovely views in all directions:

I did like it when, out walking, we saw "our" bed and breakfast on a sign:

Just below Thirlwall Castle, along the red dotted line which is the route of Hadrian's Wall, is a building and that's Holmhead Guest House where we stayed.

It's a glorious part of the world, Northumberland: and, being rather a long way from many places where there is so-called "civilisation", it isn't too well known.

I'm looking forward to going back there as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I'm working in Manchester. That'll be different.

On Hadrian's Wall

2011-04-18T20:37:00.003+01:00

We spent much of the weekend walking along some very picturesque bits of Hadrian's Wall.

In case you don't know, the Roman Emperor Hadrian decided this massive Wall should be built to keep those wild and scary Scots out. It stretched 73 miles (80 Roman miles, since you ask) from East to West in the North of England.

They built it in six years, from AD122 onwards.

Six years! I bet it would take longer than that now even with all the modern equipment. It was huge: it used to stand six metres high.

The way they built it was this. The Roman Army was divided into lots of little units, all rather complicated but basically incredibly well-organised and with strong discipline and, it has to be said, very little regard for Health and Safety. And they set one unit against the other.

"Come on lads! I know that our lot can build our bit a lot better and faster than that lot down the valley. Let's show them what proper soldiers can do!"

So they built it incredibly fast and incredibly well. And the wild lawless primitive Brits watched whilst they did it, shivering, gnawing on twigs and from time to time muttering things like "Wow! They're really - - well - - advanced, aren't they, those Romans? But what did they ever do for us?"

And then, after a while, the Romans finally worked out that the climate of Italy was lovely and warm and the climate of Northumberland was, in general, cold, wet and windy.

Off they went back to Italy where they invented the deckchair, covered their beaches with the things and never looked back.

Meanwhile, the Brits spent a few centuries muttering to each other "Have they really gone?"

Once they decided that this was indeed the case, they looked round furtively, and then sneaked up to Hadrian's Wall and nicked large quantities of it to build houses with.

Even sheep can climb over the Wall now.

Well, the mother could. The baby just kept hurling itself against the wall in a sad and futile bid to reach its mother. Baaaa - - SPLAT! Baaaa - - SPLAT!

Those of you of a tender disposition will be pleased to know that finally the mother sheep gave up the idea of crossing the wall and returned to her lamb. Awwww.

Even depleted in height as Hadrian's Wall is now, it's still impressive.

The Wall is fantastic, the scenery is stunning and even the weather was glorious.

Many thanks, Hadrian. We had a lovely weekend.

Heading Up North

2011-04-14T21:57:00.004+01:00

It's been such a busy week since I got back from Plymouth!

Finally, after a long and exhausting winter, we have managed to arrange a short break away, for no other purpose than to rest and enjoy ourselves. Stephen and I are off a hundred miles due north, to the fine and relatively undiscovered county of Northumberland tomorrow, and we are staying in what looks to be a great bed and breakfast in the Middle of Nowhere next to Hadrian's Wall, near a village called Greenhead. Although it's in Northumberland, it's very near the Cumbrian border. To me, Cumbria is home territory and Northumberland is here-be-dragons land.

It's very near to the Roman fort at Vindolanda . I have been there before, though it was a long time ago. I think there were a few Roman builders standing around, pleased with their handiwork, and the paint was still wet.

Well - - perhaps not THAT long ago. But probably forty years - it had just opened to the public.

We have been told that the food in the local pub is excellent and that's my kind of food! Our plan is to walk a lot and then - - well - - eat a lot. And then walk some more. We may visit Vindolanda. I hope it doesn't rain. I'll let you know when I get back. I'm not sure the Emperor Hadrian installed wifi near his Wall: we'll see.

I'll leave you with a photo of a Plymouth eating establishment. I didn't actually eat there - - but I liked the name.

Spring in the South-West

2011-04-09T23:04:00.003+01:00

I heard on the radio, whilst driving back to Leeds, that bluebells have been flowering earlier than usual. I already had photographic evidence from Plymouth:

There was lots of blue about elsewhere, too, in the sea and the sky. Here's the Art Deco walkway on the front - I do like the colours!

Some children were splashing about in the sea and I really wanted to be in the sea too, of course.

And finally, one of my favourite things - - palm trees!

It was glorious. I hope I'll be back there.

On a Plymouth Wall

2011-04-08T18:53:00.003+01:00

Rather unexpectedly, I found myself in Plymouth this week, working there from Tuesday till Thursday. It was all very last-minute and a Top Secret Mission, and I really enjoyed it. Anyway, more of Plymouth tomorrow but meanwhile here's a man sitting on a wall, with his mate watching him.

So. Lovely views across Plymouth Sound and the Hoe from there. ("Hoe" means "High ground near the sea" since you asked).

Actually, I don't think Wall Man and Mate were interested in the views. They were interested in showing off their high testosterone levels and general courageous nonchalance, in the hope that any passing teenage girls would rush towards them in awe and admiration, removing items of clothing with every step.

Here's the rest of the wall.

Yes, one slip and they'd be firstly squished on the rocks below and then bounce into the sea and drown.

I'm quite surprised that Health and Safety haven't fenced off this wall, but it cheers me somewhat as I think that eventually they'll be fencing off everything. I mean - how can a teenager be expected to know that if you fall off this wall you're likely to encounter a slight dose of Death?

So: is it

a) These boys are brave young things and showing an adventurous spirit. Sir Francis Drake - who, if you remember, famously finished his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe before trotting away to see off the Spanish Armada - would be proud of them. Hurrah!

b) These boys are idiots. And if they fell off some poor person would have to go and collect up the bits and it wouldn't be a fun job. Would you want to do it? - No, me neither.

c) Evolution in Action. This is why most of us wouldn't go and sit where he's sitting. Most of the ones who did have died out before they had a chance to breed. There are only a few left who did manage to reproduce, and these two are their offspring.

Your opinions are welcomed.

Hopping Glad

2011-04-02T14:35:00.003+01:00

So there we were, enjoying a walk round Swinsty Reservoir last weekend, and I spotted this ditch.

And it's then that I realised that, in spite of all appearances, I'm still about ten.

Many - perhaps most - grown-ups would think "Oh, a ditch filled with water". That's if they thought anything about it at all.

Whereas I thought - - heyyyyyyyyy - this looks perfect frogspawn territory! A long pool of water, not stagnant but clear and fresh: lots of cover round about. And then I felt the old excitement coming back as I looked.

It's hard to spot, frogspawn, but I am (ahem!) a bit of an expert in this field. Or even in this ditch. So it only took me a couple of minutes before I saw the familiar bobbly surface.

It's in almost the exact centre of the photograph.

And then, getting nearer - -

Every Spring I'm delighted when I see frogspawn. As a child I would always collect some, rear it into tiny frogs in our little garden pond, and then release lots of them back into the wild.

Some froglets always stayed in the garden, of course - and as a result, their descendants live on. There are still lots of frogs in the garden, and, every year, home-laid frogspawn in our tiny pond.

Here's how to do it:

The frogspawn should have black dots in the middle, or else it's not fertile. They gradually elongate and wriggle, and then emerge from the spawn and cling to it. Then you need some pond weed for them to eat, and they'll cling to that for a while, with external gills - little frilly things - on the side of their heads.

Then they lose their external gills and begin to breathe air. They get bigger. At this point they need to eat meat. Tiny bits of raw meat are good, but you have to fish them out before they go bad and contaminate the water. It's fun to watch all the tadpoles cluster round for lunch.

They get their back legs, both together, and then their front legs come out, one at a time - usually the left one first, but not always. (This, I hasten to tell you, is not from any book about frogs, but from my own observation!)

Then the tail gradually gets shorter and at this point the froglets need to be able to get out of the water, or they will drown. And they find drowning easier than just about anything else that they do, so you have to keep an eye on them. I suppose this is what stops the whole world being overrun with frogs.

Finally their tails disappear, and they are tiny frogs, about the size of a fingernail, and they are very cute indeed. I used to feed them with tiny bits of meat, dangled on a piece of cotton. You swing it just past their field of vision and then they'll grab it. If it's not moving, they simply don't notice it.

And then, finally, off they hop into the moist undergrowth, to live their froggy little lives.

Other handy tips: if the spawn is in a blob, it's frogspawn, if in strings, it's toad spawn. Toads have drier, warty skin and they walk, whereas frogs hop. But rearing them is very similar.

When people ask me - as they have occasionally done - what is my main area of skill, they are often surprised when I reply "Rearing tadpoles into frogs." But, dear reader, I suspect this is the absolute truth.

What Royal Wedding?

2011-03-30T20:18:00.003+01:00

I expect they think it will take our minds off it all. All the recession, cuts, job losses and general misery.

It did work the last time. Or the last major time anyway - I think a few other Royals have got married since, and one or two have even stayed that way, though not many.

But history, as the authors of that worthy tome 1066 and All That pointed out, is what you can remember.

We all remember Charles and Di. "Shy Di" being chased by photographers and photographed in the street, looking shy, and with her back to the light so we could see her legs (shock!) silhouetted against her frock.

And the engagement. Reporter: "And in love?" Diana (shyly): "Of course." Charles: "Whatever love is". HAH!

And then the wedding. She wanted to look like a "fairytale princess". Why did nobody tell her to be careful what you wish for? Had she never read any fairytales? Most of them have at least a certain element of horror, and so it proved for Diana.

So she wore this huge great meringue of a dress, all frills and ruffles, and the rest - - - well, you know the rest.

So now we have another recession and they are trying to distract us again with more frills and ruffles.

But please, O Great British Public, don't go for it. We've been sucked into it all before. Enough already!

Now then. As part of my work, doing roleplay for the training and assessment of healthcare professionals, I have perfected looking Puzzled and Confused. It's a really helpful emotion to be able to express because doctors and such often aren't clear. If you can do a good Puzzled and Confused, then with a bit of luck they might notice, and explain more clearly.

I have to say (modest cough) that my Puzzled and Confused is very realistic and totally believable.

So I have decided to put this to good use, and I invite you to do the same.

Whenever anyone mentions the royal wedding, what you do is wear your best Puzzled and Confused expression, and say, in tones of quiet incredulity, "What royal wedding?"

I tried it out this morning.

As I packed my shopping after paying at the checkout at the Co-op, a girl was standing on a stepstool putting up bunting.

"Excuse me," I asked innocently, "what's that bunting all about?"

"It's for the Royal Wedding!" she said, as though to an idiot.

I looked at her with my best Puzzled and Confused expression and I have to say I did it very well. I thought for a bit.

"What royal wedding?" I asked, and, leaving her speechless, took my trolley and left.

As I reached the door, I could hear her behind me, telling her colleague in a very loud whisper.

"That woman didn't know about the Royal Wedding!"

Come on, folks. Try it. Tell your friends. These are gloomy times we're living in. Let's not swallow all the hype. And let's have some fun.

Winter Warfare

2011-03-29T19:28:00.003+01:00

After the sunshine of last week, Scarborough was grey and blustery last Saturday. But, of course, even a grey and blustery beach is a thousand times better than no beach at all.

We had gone for the day to see some lovely old friends, George and Margaret. Old as in "my mother used to teach with Margaret over forty years ago" and also old as in "George is ninety-five".

Yes, George is indeed ninety-five, born during the Great War. Still full of wit and good humour. "Don't ask me," he says to any tricky question. "I can't be expected to know. I'm ninety-five. I'm senile."

It was a real joy to see them both.

He told us about when he was a soldier in the Second World War.

His platoon was sent to Iceland to train. It was extremely cold there: it tends to be like that in Iceland. The idea was to prepare them for fighting in cold countries. They trained for six months in Winter Warfare.

Finally, fully trained in fighting during all the extremes of cold weather, they were sent to North Africa.

"It's like that in the Army," said George, philosophically. "Things don't always go according to plan."

Developing and Printing and Donne Studios

2011-03-25T17:15:00.004Z

Reading Silverback's post about the days of Developing and Printing took me back to some very early memories.

The Communist was a pharmacist and when I was very little he had a shop in Halton, Leeds.

It was an unpretentious Victorian building with a dark interior - here's how it looked when I was last there in 2007.

As you can see, it wasn't a chemist shop in 2007: its days as a chemist shop were in the 1960s when the Communist owned it.

When I was little I used to be taken there sometimes. If I was very lucky the Communist would take me to a local field near a railway line after work. It was there, one August long ago, that I first saw harebells in flower and thought they were the loveliest flowers I had ever seen.

There's just one more thing I remember about that shop and I didn't piece together the whole story until years later, but I remember there was a lot of gossip going on at the time all round me and I didn't understand it.

One of the Communist's shop assistants was pregnant. It was a big surprise to everyone. It was a particularly big surprise to her, because although she had a regular boyfriend she had never had what was known in those days as Sexual Intercourse. What she had participated in, presumably with some enthusiasm, was what was known in those days as Heavy Petting.

This interesting incident was, perhaps, why the story of Mary and the baby Jesus never impressed the Communist very much. Whenever the topic was mentioned he would look a bit superior and mutter something like "Virgin birth? My shop assistant had one of those. Happens all the time."

Anyway - - - - of course, in those days almost everyone who had a camera took their films to the chemist for developing and printing. That phrase "developing and printing" - or D and P as the Communist sometimes called it - is such a part of my world!

There was always a little box of films to be delivered to the place that actually did the developing and printing - and writing this post, its name has just come hurtling back to me out of the past. Donne Studios. And, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I found its address: 6-10 GREEN ROAD, MEANWOOD, LEEDS 6, LS6 4JP - and the company is now dissolved but how amazing that I found it!

One evening, after the shop closed, I went with the Communist to Donne Studios, and they showed me round.

Some kind person explained to me all about darkrooms and developing liquid.

I was fascinated. Thrilled. The idea of spending the whole day watching the magic as films changed into photographs - - wonderful!

For about the next ten years, whenever anybody asked me - as they often do ask children - what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would unfailingly say that I wanted to work in a place that did developing and printing. It was, in general, not the answer that they were expecting.