Here Comes the Crunch...

Are you not constantly amazed by the funding that goes into things that are totally self-explanatory to the likes of you and me?
There was an item reported  this week that boredom snacks are recipe for obesity. Shock-horror indeed. The thought had never occurred to me that I might be eating because I was bored. I am apparently seeking stimulation when my dopamine levels are low. And I thought I was merely being a greedy little piglet when those eleven o'clock pangs lead me by the snout into the kitchen for a bit of unholy foraging for items of an unhealthy nature. No, according to the University of Central Lancashire, I am being driven by boredom.
They have done research with two groups: one watching an entertaining video, and the other a lecture on statistics, surrounded by snacks. Like the whole schamozzle: from healthy (i.e boring) options like fruit and salad (salad? You cannot call that a "snack", unless you have buck teeth and a bobbly tail) to crisps and (now you're talking..) chocolate.
And guess what? The poor suckers who got the statistics lecture, ate more crisps and sweets than the other group.
I could have told them this. Needn't have gone to all the trouble and the expense of family-sized packets of Walkers...
The other scientific headline that caught my eye this week, is that we should all postpone retirement if we want to live longer. Bloody great that is. Been quite enjoying my retirement since January, entre-nous.
Now, I'll have to start looking for a part-time job of some description...
Maybe the University of Central Lancashire need some part-time volunteers to finish up those crisps?

Don't Forget the Doomsday Book, Mum

"Don't forget the fruit gums, Mum."
Do you remember that advert?  Dennis Waterman as a freckly kid. Amazing how deeply ingrained are  advertising slogans from the sixties and seventies.

Apropos of nothing in particular some months ago, my son mentioned that a colleague at work had an arrangement with his elderly parents. Should anything happen, all vital information could be found in a file which they, with grim humour, called "The Doomsday Book".
Our filing system has a certain notoriety in our family. And not in a good way. I am in charge. That just about says it all, really.
Filing is a bit like dusting. Once you've done it, you sit back sigh and bask in self-congratulation.. then, bugger me, you have to do it all over again. In the same week...
Let me just say, in case you think I am being too hard on myself, that for many years we  kept tickets for events in the corner shelf of the kitchen (Advice to the young: never have a corner kitchen shelf. A waste of time.) amongst sundry statements, invoices, school reports and the like... This meant that two days before we were due to go to the theatre we could never find the tickets because they had evaporated... A new kitchen four years ago prompted a system. So now I can go to a file in a filing cabinet which says "Tickets - Oh yeah!!" because now the system works.
Anyway, this evening, I finally remembered to say to our son on the eve of his holiday, that I had been unusually organised and had heeded the example of his colleague's parents. I told him that we had written a list of useful information in the back of my very lovely RHS Diary. (The pictures will be so consoling when the time comes...she says, hoping they will have yellowed with age by then.)
He of little faith, said "Do you know where it is?"
This caused a paroxysm of anxiety as I failed to find it for a whole hour. As I tripped over the suitcase left carelessly at the bottom of the stairs after my recent sojourn with grandchildren, crunched my shoulder, and ricked my back, I thought Doomsday was knocking on the door.
No alarm.
I'm fine. Thanks, for asking.

My secret is safe with you

Nighty Night, Hope the Bugs...

I don't think we have bed bugs. Thank the good Lord.
However, we are fighting the ants in the kitchen. I smugly think I've dealt a knock-out blow by putting down an ant trap at the first sign of scurrying activity.
Actually, that's not strictly true. Initially, I tried to avoid a trip to the hardware store on a relentlessly rainy day, by looking up a home remedy.
I remember my mother when I was young, putting down cloves by the back door to deter the marching ant army. A Danish visitor we had, was curious about the scattering; after my mother had explained, she said,"You British are so kind to animals; you are even kind to ants."

Not true. We hate ants in places they shouldn't be.
I looked up guidance on the internet. No mention of cloves. No, a mixture of bicarbonate of soda and icing sugar was recommended. Apparently, the ants take the mixture back to their nest and blow up. Yes, explode. I know, it does give you pause for thought.
Bicarb was no problem, but icing sugar? I found some some pink glitter sugar (that I'd once, in an uncharacteristic fit of baking, put on top of some cupcakes, circa 2006, but would they notice?) I grimly thought to myself that at least they would look pretty glittery at the Ugly Bug ball where "the ants are fancy dancing with the fleas.." Before they exploded...
Now however, a discreet tin of Raid now sits in the corner of my kitchen. At least I do not know technically, what happens next.
I am hoping that it  contains a little Car-park AttendAnt that re-directs them, safe and sound.
To my neighbour's....

                                                     

Watching the Cress Grow....

By golly, it's faster than grass. Cress that is. You can sit and watch it grow all day and feel that you've done something useful.
A Science experiment box opened on Sunday revealed three mini flower pots and a packet of seeds. If you want almost instant action, then Cress surely delivers... (Unlike Dairy Crest which doesn't any more.)

Back in the day, I recall damp blotting paper on the kitchen window sill, yielding a sparse offering of cress, enough for a minute egg and cress sandwich to be shared four ways... Delicious. You could always tell it was home-reared.  If you could identify it all.  Maybe the odd strand between the teeth?Or the bean in a jam jar, again with blotting paper, (Oh blotting paper, where art thou, now?) lean, and deformed, searching for the light.

Images of childhood abound at the moment.
My daughter was given a little crate of glass milk bottles. It made her nostalgic, for both she and her brother  enjoyed small bottles of milk at break time in their infant school. Oh, the honour of being a Milk Monitor... No greater pleasure than being able to stick the straws into 44 bottles of milk. That's how many there were in our class, in the sixties. I can tell you, because I took the honour seriously. And counted slowly.

Milk was delivered in bottles until cartons and plastic bottles took over. Most of us now seem to spend a large amount of  time actively re-cycling our refuse which includes squishing the air out of large milk containers to reduce volume. And some of us even know which coloured bin to put them in... I say nothing more on that front, but you get my drift. It's enough to make you want to squish the air out of someone close to you...
So I was I was really pleased to see that Muller, the big dairy company (which bought out Dairy Crest) is talking about "rejuvenating and expanding Milk and More which delivers to 600,000 homes". This means ditching the plastic and going back to glass bottles. Re-employing all those milkmen, and recruiting more.
Ernie, once more you can be the fastest living milkman in the West...

Now that's true re-cycling... old ideas and products... delivering a glass act, if ever there were one.

A Cure for Ear Confections?

Lacrosse is a brutal game. 

You wouldn't have had me down for a lacrosse player, now, would you? How well you know me.
It was, for three years, a form of purgatory. Running up and down a pitch, cradling a butch-looking shrimping net. And that was my sole involvement. Up and down; up and down, until some wretched Amazonian slung the hard rubber ball in my direction and miraculously I caught it. In the eye. It felled me. I lay on the pitch in exquisite pain and blinded by my sporting triumph. 
The only bonus was to get sent home early with a magnificent shiner.  

My grandmother was up from Llanelli as my mother had recently embarked on a Mature students' teacher training course, and my six year old brother was recovering from an emergency appendectomy.
No phonecall heralded my early return and before my shocked grand mother could say anything, my little brother, groaned, "Oh no, not another one ill." 

Siblings are often underwhelmed when it comes to sympathy for each other. This week will be testing the theory in a younger generation. Izzy had her tonsils and adenoids out a year ago and has subsequently developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Pernicious and debilitating it shapes her life and that of her family. 
Tonight is the eve of six year old Joseph's adenoid removal. 
When he returns tomorrow, one pair of adenoids lighter, I am sure his sister will be far more gracious than my little brother...

A dog and his boy...

What do squirrels dream of?

"No, don't tell me what you dreamt,"my mother would interrupt  as I attempted to regale her with last night's dream. My grandmother would tell me that dreams told on a Friday would come true on a Saturday, with more than a hint of foreboding doom.
It was not until very much older, when others started to tell me their dreams, and I politely listened, that  I realised that this early brainwashing had nothing to do with superstition, it was merely a way of instantly avoiding abject boredom.
Other people's dreams are undeniably boring. However, I am staying with my grandchildren at the moment and so I am exposed to hopes and dreams of all kinds. I am sharing a bed with ten year old Izzy, so the very least I  could do was to remove the embargo of talking about dreams.
She told me that the worst dream she ever had, was finding she was naked in a public place. What a relief for her to find that her grandmother, some fifty years older, experienced the same dream, quite regularly.
We both had experienced the joy of being able to fly like Peter Pan. She had not yet, however, experienced the awfulness of sitting down to a History A level without having studied History, and writing an essay on Napoleon. "He was a little on the short side. He kept his armies up his sleevies..." followed by a lot of abortive head-scratching.
Nor had she yet experienced being on stage in a play she had not rehearsed, and found herself improvising wildly.
These are joys to come.
There are no guesses, however, as to what Ted will be dreaming of tonight.... That pesky squirrel is his naked ambition.

After hard day watching squirrels

                     

Victoria Wood (May 19th 1953- April 20th 2016)

Send her victorious, happy and glorious, to the everlasting hall of fame. Victoria Wood has died. On the Queen's 90th birthday, the world is a less funny place. She would have had something to say about that.. vying for headlines with her Majesty.
The final entry on her Twitter account read,
"Life's not fair, is it? Some of us drink champagne in the fast lane, and some of us eat our sandwiches by the loose chippings on the A597."
Much of comedy these days seems to involve cruelty. Hers, by contrast, would always warm the cockles of your heart by which the mundane would undergo a magical metamorphosis.
Remember?
"When you are in the middle of labour it’s like watching two very inefficient removal men trying to get a very large sofa through a very small doorway, only in this case you can’t say, bring it through the French window."

or

"I once went to one of those parties where everyone throws their car keys into the middle of the room. I don’t know who got my moped but I’ve been driving that Peugeot for years."

I loved her. Everyone I know has loved her.  Treasure is a word bandied around so much that it has almost lost its meaning. But I am truly grateful that through television we will always have a record of her work, and she will continue to make us laugh.

If you want to cheer yourself up then Google the lyrics of her wonderful song, "Let's Do it" and then sing it loud and sing it strong, not meekly, and then Beat yourself on the bottom with a Woman's Weekly... 

Don't delay.  Just do it...                       

Victoria Wood

                                                                

Bus-lust....

Did you feel the seismic reverberation in West Hertfordshire last week?
It was me. Running for a bus. Why do I do it? It's ungainly, and most often futile. Bus drivers in this area evidently go on a course to teach them to look ahead and ignore the sweaty door-knocking of tardy passengers. Probably something to do with health and safety or just simply sheer bloody-mindedness. They probably take a course in that too.
A far cry from the days when you ran for the open corner at the end of the bus, grabbing the ivory webbed pole, and stretching every sinew, resisted the contraforce of the swinging satchel on your shoulder, while you hauled yourself on to the platform. It really was a triumph over g-force. We were living dangerously and didn't even know it. And that was before  we took on a virtually spiral staircase to the upper deck where you would be met by a carpet of cigarette butts and a haze of blue tobacco smoke. Forget passive smoking. A short journey on the top deck, you'd have inhaled five of your five a day, fags not fruit, without so much as striking a match.

We were told by our secondary school Head that we should not wear red knickers because we would be enticing men when we went on to the upper deck of a bus. Well, at least, that was what a girl several years ahead of me told me. But it made sense to me on the basis that going upstairs on a double decker gave anyone and everyone easy visual access to underwear. It was after all, the advent of the Mini skirt and a model called Twiggy.
We rolled over our skirts at the waistband to bring up the length in the cloakroom before leaving for home. We placed our octagonal berets on the back of our heads so that you could just see a few points from the front. We put on white lipstick. Yes, white lipstick, which made me look like Dracula's Bride (According to my mother. I didn't know who Dracula or his bride was, but thought she must have looked fab.).

Did we look great? Probably not. We complied with uniform regulations while we were in school and gently rebelled on the way home.
Yesterday there was a report about a head teacher in Bletchley who said that tight clothing emphasises the "heftiness" of larger pupils. Said that tight trousers or short skirts were unflattering and made them prone to bullying. She's right, they are an unflattering fashion choice. But school uniform is, actually not about choice, it's about uniformity. You either embrace it as a school and maintain smart standards, or you reject it entirely. This Head teacher has, however, fallen into a sizeist trap. Everything you say these days is subject to the scrutiny of whom you stand to offend, whether overlarge or underweight. And the world and his dog is ready to jump up and howl if you tread on fat toes or skinny toes. ( I can currently provide both, by the way.)
Where I beg to differ from Mrs Jones is that she wants girls to look "modest and demure". Now that is something entirely different.

The Only Way is Up..

You never know, do you, what you'll find in a carrier bag on the pavement? A big white carrier bag, not one of those unpleasant little pooch-pooh bags that you see dangling in the hedgerows these days.

I once admired the jacket of a colleague in school. Knowing her propensity for rooting out charity shop bargains, I remarked that she had got lucky with this one. She told me that she had indeed been fortunate. She had seen a white carrier bag (No, I don't know if it was from Waitrose, really..) tucked in the hedge while out walking one day. Curious, she opened it, to find this jacket. Curious, indeed. So I said that she had obviously taken it to the dry-cleaners.
"No, it passed the sniff-test, and so here it is!"
Now, I'm a great believer in sniff-tests... when it comes to food. My children would, and do, turf out a lot of expired yoghurts on the basis of date, alone. Nonsense.
Anyway, after this extraordinary tale, mine this morning seems a little tame. However, not to be deterred..

Dearest and I sallied forth at seven this morning, and worked up a fair old froth. Well, I did. As we walked down The Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined road, I began to notice a number of items of litter at intermittent intervals, whenever I gulped for air. (Dearest believes he's training me for the four minute mile. Fat chance.) The inspiration of David Sedaris in my head, and the recent Clean for the Queen campaign not long past, I saw a carrier bag. Empty, just the job. From Asda, actually, since you're asking.
I started, with the Colgate ring of virtue, haloing round my head, to pick up empty coke bottles and beer cans. Thirty seconds later, there was a crash of Carling Black Label on the pavement as the carrier bag had obviously been jettisoned because it had a ruddy great gaping hole in it. I hastily gathered up the empties, now looking to the world at large, that I had a serious seven o'clock in the morning drink problem, and clutched them along with the carrier bag as I looked for a bin.
A quarter of a mile later, I came across a bin, and do you know what, dear readers?
I didn't discard them there and then, I  took my beer cans home and re-cycled them.
You can join me on this Stairway to Heaven. Any time you like.
Just make sure you have a good strong carrier bag in your pocket.
Brand irrelevant.

Autumn

 

Spring in your step.

              

Flying in face of adversity...

I would hang fatty balls in my garden for the birds if I could. The garden is so small that there is no appropriate place to attach a hook. Maybe in a few years time when my young Prunus Autumnalis develops sturdy boughs...
I never noticed the birds when I was younger. Copulating or not. The birds that is. But as I advance in years I suddenly have become aware of them and just how extraordinary they are.
So it was with some sadness that I read this weekend that we have, in England, lost our last Golden Eagle which resided in the Lake District.
By a quirk of timing we went to see "Eddie the Eagle" on Saturday. It was all that you could wish for in a film on a Saturday afternoon. As a nation we have a reputation for supporting the underdog. But here was a man whose drive and ambition took him to the winter Olympics of 1988 in Calgary even though he knew that he stood no real chance against the fierce opposition. His courage and determination was heart-warming as it was inspiring. If ever you were looking to find a film with a positive message for young and old, this is it.
I should go looking for a hook for the garden fence, after all... and hang 'em high as a belated salutation to Eddie the Eagle Edwards. He certainly had some..

Golden Eagle

If you go down to the woods today...

Not much action with the pants this weekend.
Have I got your attention? Good. Thought that would do it.
Do you have expressions in your household which would completely bemuse an outsider?  This is one of ours.
It refers back to 1978 when I was working as an an Assistant Floor Manager on the BBC production of Huntingtower, a child's serial based on the book by John Buchan. It was directed by Aberdonian, Bob Hird. In one scene, Wee Jaikie (played by the diminutive Eric Cullen) had to run into the set-up, as if he had been running for his life through woodland. "Action with the pants!" called Bob Hird, grinning, off-camera, to initiate Wee Jaikie's sweaty, breathy arrival.
We subsequently use it to denote either a complete lack of activity, or to goad ourselves into productivity, of any kind.

This morning, Dearest suggested doing something illegal in the woods. No, it was not action with the pants. Really.
A bright blue-eyed morning seemed the appropriate time to sprinkle his uncle's ashes in the bluebell woods. Uncle has been resting in our spare bedroom waiting for the right moment. He hasn't taken up much space but he is certainly heavy in weight. Yes, he weighed on our consciences, but mortal remains also weigh quite lot in poundage.
We didn't feel a floppy carrier bag was appropriate, so we opted for a staunch, attractive Waitrose bag. It could contain a picnic, we thought... as if Woodland Wardens would swoop on us and catch us in this act of illegality.
We strolled through the most glorious woodland, the sun streaming through and illuminating a resonant carpet of bluebells. I kept watch as Dearest emptied a seemingly endless stream of powder which caught the slightest of breezes and was held in transience by a sunbeam. It was more of a David Lean moment than a Bob Hird.. Bob was never big on sunbeams.

When we got home, I checked about the regulations regarding a scattering of ashes, and sure enough, I found we had committed no crime, after all.
Quite right too.  It was a perfect setting to commemorate quietly, a life well-lived.

Scales of injustice..

Rivalling my dislike of the camera is my dislike of bathroom scales.
For many years I went through a number of styles: glass, or pebble finish, automated digital, or old-fashioned. As none of them told me the news I wanted to hear, I decided our bathroom floor wasn't level, so it wouldn't matter what I stood on, or what shelf I held on to. (You mean, I'm not meant to do that?)
Last year I bought a jumbo-sized Salter's bathroom scales with a dial in pounds/stones and Kilograms that you can see perfectly easily without leaning like the Tower of Pisa and artificially inflating the poundage. Marvellous. Stable, and enough room on it to bring a friend. I now love my bathroom scales apart from its seriously dull message that I am still incontrovertibly overweight.

I will have mentioned in earlier posts that Dearest has taken to the streets, not in a Mafioso type of way, but rather in an attempt to counteract his sedentary life-style. I have 'til now, turned down his early morning invitation to join him. However, the silent admonishment of the Salter's dial has meant that I too, have to rise and shine.

Much to my surprise, I so enjoyed the invigoration of an early morning stomp yesterday, that I actually walked into town and treated myself to some Kitchen scales.
A friend of mine has given me a recipe for bread, and some healthy energy bars. I felt that the crappy old Weightwatcher scales that I have struggled with for the past ten years would not be up to weighing pounds of flour. So I have treated myself to yet another Salter's product : a most compact scale upon which you can stick any bowl or jug you like. Fantastic. Back-lit too, so I do not have to grapple with reading glasses.

                                                I know I am sounding like a product promotion for Salter's (did I                                                           mention the make?).

Nice scales...

 However, on the cusp of christening my new kitchen aid, it does make  me reflect how one set of scales, sadly, will be communicating with the  other and will be telling tales.
 Not behind my back, but under my feet...

Naughty scales...

It's all about the birds, not the bees...

The birds and the bees have reached Buckingham. Sex education hangs in the air like an inflatable foil question mark in my daughter's household.
Ah, memories..  My own sex education from my mother was proficient, unremarkable, and mainly supplemented by many happy hours spent behind the settee reading Marje Proops's Problem Pages in piles of Woman magazines.
My brother received the talk from my father who elected to deliver it while driving. An excellent plan, as he told me later. It was great, because it meant he was able to keep his eyes on the road ahead, and concentrate on his driving at critical moments while he thought of sensitive phraseology, or checked his mental filters.
My brother at the end of it apparently said, "Well, Dad I'm glad you told me; if anyone else had, I'd have thought they were joking!" Mission accomplished.
My daughter decided to prime her daughter for the big moment in school. She recalled her own school days when a teacher at the end of tortuous explanations asked if there were any questions.
Some bright spark wanted to know how birds had sex.
"How do they have sex?" I asked her, suddenly realising that here was a serious gap in my own sex education. "One flying upside down, the other on top, with  a lot of synchronised flapping," she said seriously.
Well, I never... I'm glad I asked.

New socks, please, we're British...

Some people have socks on the brain. I know I do.
Elton John has a new pair every day. Am I allowed to say that? My, you're getting jumpy. When I say new, I mean, of course, not  just freshly-laundered ( and if it's a Red letter day in our house, matching) but brand spanking new, with the label still attached.

You get to wear a lot of socks, post bunion op. This is not the most exciting aspect, I grant you, of having survived surgery and a lengthy recuperation. But it has focused my sartorial attention on an area that I normally ignore.
Now Dearest, who I am sure would not mind me saying, has got the sort of multi-directional toes that could play a Chopin waltz, if he put his ever preoccupied mind to it; he has also got, by way of nature's compensation, a very finely turned ankle. Obviously, a modest man by nature, it is something he never boasts about. So since retirement has enabled me to focus on the meaning of life and its peculiarities, I have noticed that ALL socks be they cotton, wool, bamboo even, leave a corrugated ridge around his slender ankle after the first wash.  So just imagine what circulation stoppage is occurring around my super sturdy ankles?
Has anyone looked into this from a health risk point of view? Isn't about time that somebody did?
So I think old Elton is on to something, because brand new socks do not do this to your ankles..
It is only when they have done a turn in the washing machine, and if you are lucky, they come out the same number as went in, that they become the uncomfortable health hazard I have described.
So I'm with Elton on this one (dammit! Where's the other one?)

Input v Output
Truth Facts www.kindofnormal.com

Family ties...

What a lesson to us all. The Archbishop of Canterbury's public acknowledgement that the man he grew up with, believing to be his father, was not his actual father, is an example of dignity and grace in the face of enormous adversity.
Growing up with parents whose identity you never question, is something I've always taken for granted. I am sure I am not alone in this.
I know that my mother as a child in a household where money was scant, sometimes imagined that she was in reality, a princess, carried off by gypsies as a baby, and left on her "parents'" doorstep. She was however, an imaginative child.
My father on the other hand, was brought up by three women: his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt. His mother had divorced his father when he had got "the railwayman's daughter with child". The two of them fled to Australia.
His mother re-married when my father was 13. A difficult age to accept a new step-father. It was not an easy relationship for many years. However, Grandpa Jones was the best of grandfathers, and through being a wonderful Grandfather there finally developed a mutual affection between my father and his step-father.
My father never found his real father; his own premature death at the age of 55, meant that he died before the age of the internet. He also felt that in some strange way, it would have been an act of disloyalty to his mother.
I suppose that I, armed with even the most basic of information, could attempt to track down the Australian family branch.
It would be scratching my father's itch. Only time will tell whether it will become my own. Or whether it would be an act of disloyalty to my father.

On not turning into my mother..

When my daughter's mother-in-law met my mother at our daughter's wedding, she announced, by way of introduction,
"I knit, I cook, I sew, and that's me."
My dear mother, with her usual elegant finesse, moved them out of this conversational cul-de-sac, but not by saying how well she herself, did all three. Not simultaneously of course.
My mother, as I have already mentioned, made my clothes when I went off to University. Something you can be sure Princess Anne's mum certainly never did. She also knitted beautifully, and crocheted as well. As did Grandma Leyshon before her.
My best chance of developing these skills myself lay with my Grandmother when I decided to take up knitting in my teens. I wanted a long scarf like Tom Baker's Doctor Who. I would leave my unintentionally holey efforts on a chair in Heol Elli, only to find that either mother or Grandmother had miraculously removed the holes and made it inches longer. That six foot scarf lasted me for years but I'll wager only six inches was knitted by the rookie knitter, herself.
When I met up with Doreen, redoubtable octogenarian Boules player, she was wearing a beautiful hand-knitted jumper. (The only talent I have, is spotting someone who can knit with flair.) Having complemented her, I asked if she would teach me.
"If your mother failed to do so, I don't stand a chance.."
Obviously Boules is enough of a challenge; I would obviously be a Boule too far..
My mother, then in her retirement, took up fine needlework, such as in tapestry and Bargello work.

Absolutely fabulous cushion covers and samplers were produced. I loved the products but had no yearning to join her in in this activity. It took a lot of counting I could see, and accuracy. So that was me disqualified, on both counts.
So I had resigned myself to being a craft clutz, until this weekend, when a friend decided that the moment had come for me to find, finally, my true identity.
Little did I know that this is where my future lay... making pompoms.. with a specially designed pompom maker.   (By a firm called Clover.. if this induces yearnings..)
You see, it's all a question of patience really. Genes will prevail. They might have mutated, however. Just a little.

Mixed Messaging...

I'll tell you one thing I never do. Well, almost never. Ask a friend twice, if she is reading my Blog.

It sounds too much like begging.

When I first embarked on this mystery tour, I told everyone what I was doing and then hoped they would follow me. 

After a month of no response from a particular friend, I cautiously asked her if she were reading it.

"You're obviously a thwarted writer," was her tart dismissal. If she had said thwarted thesp, it would have been nearer the mark.

I've always enjoyed writing which is not the same as being a good writer, of course. And I have to confess that apart from keeping more in touch with friends, and appreciating their encouragement, I do get excited to see that I have readers dropping in from Russia, Ukraine, Chile, Georgia, Switzerland and Austria. This is in addition to my regulars in the USA, Ireland, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Poland and New Zealand. My British Bunion ( the one quietly developing on the other foot) welcomes you all.

I have to say that my children are fair game, however. They have a duty of care to evince interest and give support to their blogging mother. Dearest daughter, and grand daughter are avid followers; dearest son started off strongly, then leading up to  his holiday, went off the boil. As a forgiving parent, I desisted from talking about it, but thought I would send him a welcome home card.

Only because I had found the most excellent card in Marks and Spencer, reduced to a quid! Bargainous..

When he returned from his two week holiday, he called me. 

"Thanks for the card, Mum."

"Brilliant, wasn't it?"

"Well, it was a bit... off-colour, really,"

I had no idea what he meant, 'til he read me the caption on the front...

There, you can see for yourselves...

How my Blog-centricity could have blinded me to the whole horrendous buttock-clenching inappropriateness of the message, is the surest indication of all, that I am lost without a plot.

Memory replays purchase in M&S: furtive glance of young man at the till; me, beaming beatifically at my one pound bargain. Of course it was reduced - who else in the world would be sending a card like this (TO HER SON!) except some myopic, misguided bat who saw Blog in the title?

My viewing figures went up this weekend. Dearest son obviously has caught up. Nothing like a timely off-colour nudge, says I.

Raising alarms...

I'm quite bothered by student antics.
Not the usual stuff that we engaged in, rallies, marches and the like. That all seems positively wholesome, by comparison. No, what I am increasingly concerned about is the way in which free-thinking debate is shrinking. Political correctness is straight-jacketing intellectual discourse. If a speaker at a university has views that do not coincide with the students in residence then they are given no-platform. That this should be a growing phenomenon amongst our intellectual elite is evidence of an assault on freedom of expression.
Take the case of one Imogen Wilson, Vice president of academic affairs at University of Edinburgh's Students' Association. Apparently the association's rules (similar to those of other universities) require meetings to be in a "space that is welcoming and safe." I understand rules that prohibit discriminatory language, but not a prohibition of "hand gestures which denote disagreement."
Giving someone the Vs-up, as we used to call it, is, of course, very rude, and should be quashed. But this young lady raised her arm, apparently, in disagreement, invoking a response as to whether or not she should be ejected from the room. Hells bells, what is going on? Miss Wilson had spoken out against anti-semitism, and she felt that the "safe space" rule had been used as a political tool to silence her. The insidious increase of anti-semitism on our campuses is another cause for grave concern.
All this is a far cry from my own days at Stirling University. Now there was a hubbling bubbling political cauldron. I knew it had made news before my arrival, when the Queen met with booing students when she came to visit the new University in 1972.
Apparently, there was huge resentment amongst a certain faction that so much money had been spent on painting corridors, and apparently sound-proofing a toilet ( fancy that? surely an unnecessary expense) and signage whilst there was inadequate social space for students.
By the time, I arrived, a year later, the campus, in the most beautiful of settings was well appointed.
I was drawn to the McRobert Centre, a professional theatre, in the heart of the university, not the politics.
My maternal grandfather was a communist counsellor who served on Llanelli local council. I am sure he was the only one. According to my grandmother, he was true to his principles in that everybody had a proper bath installed before he did.
Both my parents were Labour supporters and Guardian readers; so I suppose, I regarded myself as one too.
I had not been at Stirling very long before a Rent Strike was being proposed.
I was staying on campus in a well-designed room, that was hoovered every day by a cleaner, and where the duvet covers were changed every two weeks with cries of, "It's downie day!"as we slung our discarded covers into the corridor. I had seen what off-campus accommodation looked like and knew what it cost. I thought our rent was very reasonable.
With the naivety of youth I stood up in the 500 seat lecture theatre, and in front of a Trotsky student union executive (which included John Reid, a later Home Secretary) I had the temerity to say that I thought we had a good deal.
"Daddy'll pay for it!" shouted a heckler.
At which point, granddaughter of Ernie Leyshon, made her point more forcibly, midst booing I have to say.
Thereafter, as I walked through campus, dressed in the long skirts, and crocheted tank tops my mother had made me, I might occasionally hear,
"There goes Princess Anne."
There were no trolls, no spite, no recriminations for having expressed my views...
Different times indeed.

Coping mechanisms...

The camera, it is fair to say, doesn't like me.
There are very few photographs of my maternal grandmother, Eileen, because she looked at them and tore them up. Thus primed, there are more of my mother because we never let her look at them long enough to enable her to do the same.
I have pressed the delete button on somebody else's phone as often as I possibly can. It is either a genetic predisposition, or it is a form of inverted vanity, I suppose. I never look as I imagine I look to the outside world. To be blunt, I look tubbier, stockier, and homely in the British sense of the word. I don't mind this in the slightest, but I am just choosy about which pictures should be recorded for posterity. You could say, I am not big on selfies. I regard with amusement the current devotion to them.
However, I have to say, that I read with awe last week about the airline passenger who posted a photo of himself posing with a hijacker. Well, I know it wasn't a selfie per se, but it was a remarkable thing to do nevertheless. He's come in for a bit of flack, being described on the one hand as "highly irresponsible" and on the other as providing the authorities with vital information regarding the supposed explosive belt. You never know how you are going to behave in a crisis. Only outcome will determine whether or not it was the right thing to do. Everyone survived.

It brought back memories of when my car, a Cambridge blue Mini was car-jacked at four o'clock in the afternoon in a street opposite my house. There was a gang of three youths who surrounded me demanding the car keys which I had in my hand. I told them to eff off, very loudly. Several times. But they snatched my keys anyway. I used my handbag as weapon and hit one on the head. Even as I did so, I knew it was a futile, even foolish gesture, but I felt I couldn't give in without a protest, feeble as it was. The bag  was then also snatched, so that was a success then. But I had had my moment of being a Granny from The Beano, as my precious wee car roared off down the road.

I wish someone had taken a picture of that moment. Of me. Not the car.

Ben Innes, Health and Safety auditor
and hijacker.

Sweet nothings..

I could say I don't know what possessed me. But I know perfectly well.
On Saturday evening, I dived fully-clothed into a very large glass of Campari (light on the soda) pre- dinner at the very lovely Hambledon Hall. It limbered up the tongue and relaxed the prefrontal cortex, the gatekeeper of common sense and restraint.
I confessed.  I told Dearest that I had written 70 entries on my Blog.
He was bemused. Bewildered. How could this have been happening for all this time under his very fine nose and eagle eye?
I hung my head. It was because I was retired.. Time hung heavy and it was so hard to get his attention as he was so immersed in work. I had needed some excitement, some sense of purpose, to feel valued.
Disregard the above. What he actually said was, "Blimey, your foot's better now. Surely there's not much more to say?"
There was a pause. Then he said, "You're not mentioning me are you?"
Now, why should he of all people, say that?
It was because, in my fury on Easter Sunday when preparing for whole family lunch I discovered Dearest had sloped back to bed with his i-pad, and I exploded with, "Thank God, I've got a blog." (Bet that shocked you.. Don't mess with me, I can hurl some really good abuse.)
But I smiled sweetly at him and said, "Now why on earth do you think I talk about you?"

Insta-Ham

A weekend of walking by the glorious Rutland Water has given the newly sculpted foot the ultimate road test. Mr Singh, I salute you. I give it a Gold medal.
The rest of the body gets a booby prize. Dear Lord, once I'd sat down I could hardly lift the creaking frame.

Before I'd finally collapsed in a heap, however, we had strolled round the Lincolnshire town of Stamford. A beautiful weekend's sunshine showing off its elegant limestone buildings dating from 17th century.
I still love it.
Even though it was this town that brought my acting ambitions to an abrupt halt.

In 1994 the BBC made a production of Middlemarch; Stamford provided the perfect setting.
My brother was the First Assistant and Anthony Page was directing.
I was starting my career as a supporting artist, or Film extra as it was called then. The children joined me on this shoot and they too had the pleasure of dressing up. Dearest, in case you're curious, chose to be their chaperone, as fancy dress has never been one of his idiosyncrasies.

The Hustings, which if you are familiar with the book, is where Arthur Brooke (played by Robert Hardy) takes a pasting from the crowd who pelt him with ripe plums.
It probably comes as no surprise to learn that most actors are protected (and their costumes) when it comes to doing a reverse shot on the crowd.  The job of walking the Robert Hardy walk was delegated to my brother who had to walk across the stage carrying a large wooden board so that the crowd could go mad with the plums.
Well, that was how I understood the direction.
Imagine my unalloyed joy at being given the opportunity of slinging squishy plums at my kid brother, and being paid as well...
I was giving it some, when I saw Anthony step down from the stage. And heading towards me.
Apparently he had said to my brother, "Rob, is that your sister down there?" At which my brother, nodded with a heart that must have plummeted...(No other way to describe it.)
He wended his way through the crowd, took me to one side, and said, "Lesley, you're going a little Yoko Ono with the plums, darling.."
Dear readers,  this little Yoko curled up with mortification at his kindly intervention. Over-acting? The cringe-factor was beyond over-statement.
Some six weeks later, my brother bumped into Anthony coming out of an editing suite. He said he had just been editing the Hustings scene, and that his sister was really rather good. (I italicise to rub salve into fading scar.)
I was grateful to hear that. I now know what was meant when Anthony Page had been described once as an "actor's director".

I don't believe my brother made it up. Because you'll know, if you've been following these ramblings, that my brother doesn't believe in buttering me up. No, not at all...

Stamford 1994   

Douglas Hodge (remember him in The Night Manager?)

Mere pectoral doesn't thrill me at all.....

I'm in a funk.
Not the first-day-of-a-diet funk (sadly not), and not the I've eaten-too-much-chocolate-this-week kind of funk (sadly so). The funk, I can only attribute to a weekend looming ahead without "The Night Manager".
I have to confess that I am not one of the millions of women publicly slavering over the variously exposed body parts of one Tom Hiddleston. Comely young man, I grant you.
Dearest spent some of the time wondering if Jed (Roper's leggy girlfriend) was actually attractive. He wasn't sure. When I saw him wavering on the plus side, I slapped him down with, "Well, if it's androgenous, you like?"
I can see I will have to get a wiggle on with the blonde experiment. Diary date made with hairdresser, by the way. It's the leg extensions that worry me.
Beauty pageant aside, it was an entrancing piece of television, and made by the BBC. Just goes to show what splashing the cash can achieve in the right hands. Directed, I see, by the Danish Susanne Bier. Also interesting.
The script creaked a bit at times but it was James Bondage after all.
Love Hugh Laurie. Actually met him once, on a shoot at the Epsom race course, over twenty years ago. I was all dolled up in a flouncy borrowed hat and it started to rain. As a principal he had the costume department running circles to cover his  outfit and his precious head, whereas  lowly extras were left to drown. He called me over to share his umbrella; for the sake of the borrowed hat I was immensely grateful for his gallantry. When I returned the, thankfully unsullied, hat to my friend, she was more impressed that it had been addressed by Hugh Laurie than that I had handed it back in one piece.
Anyway, so my pin-up, Hugh Laurie was wonderfully convincing as the Demon King: he couldn't have been playing more against type. Like the chameleon, Tom Hollander who is currently demonstrating a formidable range of dramatic prowess. And  dear Olivia Coleman with burgeoning belly- two beautiful performances for the price of one. Love her. Love them all, actually.

Always thinking of others...

Let's hope that Tom Hiddleston doesn't become the next Bond. Not because he wouldn't be perfect, but merely because he could simply phone it in.....