Good fortune

This morning, whilst rummaging around in the box where I put things that I don’t know where to keep anywhere else (necklaces I don’t wear but might one day, a promo postcard from a gig, that spare keyring, etc.)  I found a dog-eared scrap of notepaper with unfamiliar writing on it.  I’d kept it for about twenty years, tucked away in a ‘secret’ compartment and never looked at, until now. 

It took me back.  We were on holiday in a well-known English seaside town and it had rained every single fucking day.  I think we spent most of our hard-earned dosh that week on hot meals, trips to the cinema, coin pusher and candy grabber games.  Souvenirs from that trip included an emergency umbrella, a purse full of coppers and an extra half a stone in weight.  By Thursday we’d run out of decent things to keep us entertained so the Fortune Teller advertising his services in the small arcade away from the seafront was an attractive diversion from the rock-grey skies and the nauseating combination of smells from Dickie’s Donuts and Fanny’s Fish Inn.

The Fortune Teller was not as I’d imagined.  He was like a friend’s Dad – straightforward, ordinary looking and friendly in a slightly distant kinda way.  His service was like a Three-For-One supermarket deal; zodiac, palm-reading and tarot cards all in one package - I think there might even have been a sprinkle of numerology and a mention of the Chinese horoscope too.  He didn't go quite so far as to include rumpology which is just as well because I'm not in the habit of showing my bum to strange men.  Not usually, anyway.

So, without any hint of mystery or supernatural powers, he told me what was apparently in store for me in a very prosaic manner whilst his assistant, a young girl, jotted notes down for me to take away and reflect on later – and that’s the scrap of paper I’m looking at now.

I’m wondering:  do fortunes have a Sell-By, or even a Use-By, date?  Should all the things he forecast for me have occurred already, or could they still happen in another twenty years’ time?  The notes are like prompts so I’m thinking back to where my life has been in those two interim decades and, oddly, some of it's looking rather accurate.  There are some specific initials, places and predictions which weren’t relevant at the time but which have been since.   The initials get me more than the rest because they’re not common ones, so that’s a bit spooky.  I realise the other things could probably happen to most people: suggestions of travel and buying property, etc., so maybe they’re a pretty good bet for many folks, although one or two specifics in there seem strangely apt, if you want to believe that kind of thing.  And, yeah, I admit it: in a simple childlike desire to embrace some magical mystery, I do want to!

 (An edited highlight!) 

I remember his final words too - he said I was 'meant' to live by the sea.   In spite of some dreams and half-baked plans to do just that for our own reasons several years ago, we never quite achieved it.  Oh well, maybe one day – if the Use-By date hasn’t expired just yet.  I’ll put the scrap of paper away for another twenty years and see what happens.

Tony Jackson & The Vibrations: 'Fortune Teller' (1965)

Love it.

Once upon a time in the West

Dr Pumphrey’s cottage in the small Cornish village of Portscatho was our holiday destination in the early ‘70s.  It was the amiable GP’s* second home, and that must have been quite a rarity back then.  Second-home ownership is something with which I have some issues these days and if you got me started I could rant about it for a whole post - but I don’t intend to at the moment.  Still, whatever I think of the principle of it now, all I knew at the age of eight or nine was that it felt magical to spend a couple of weeks in Summer living in someone else’s house.  Especially one right by the sea.

From street level it looked tiny, but once inside it became Tardis-like; there seemed to be loads of rooms (and, I wished longingly, perhaps some secret ones) leading off from multiple staircases and corridors.  But the best bit was that the bedrooms were downstairs and the kitchen was upstairs, which felt very Alice In Wonderland - plus it had a breakfast bar.  I’d never known such a thing and I was instantly besotted.  Ricicles tasted so much better whilst perched on a high, slender stool at a Scandinavian style pine bench, than at the fold-out table at home sitting on a chair whose vinyl seat stuck to the undersides of my thighs.

Travelling down to Cornwall from Hertfordshire required major, strategic planning - and leaving the house at Ridiculously Early.  My sister and I were ushered out of our warm beds at 4am and, after goodbye kisses with Rudolph and Cleo (the cats), bundled into the back of the car with sleeping bags pulled around us like giant cocoons.  The gentle vibration of the car engine and the way the orange streetlights seemed to blink rhythmically as we passed them lulled us into a strange half-slumber for the first part of the journey, out of our dormant market town and towards London.  With the completion of the M25 still a few years away, we’d drive right through the city, and every so often mum would gently see if we were awake and point out some landmarks, now softly lit by the early, half-hearted sun of an August dawn.  I’m sure we made some odd detours to get close-up views of the futuristic-looking Post Office Tower and the dome of St Paul’s, which looked to me like a gigantic, fossilised blancmange.

It seemed an exotic trip across the Southern half of England.  After the high-rises and majestic bridges of the metropolis we traversed the mellow countryside of Berkshire, Hampshire and Wiltshire.  As the hours passed along with the miles it felt like we were crossing into other countries, with their houses made of stone, bricks and tiles of unfamiliar shades, and unrecognised place names.  On through Somerset, then Devon…even the skies looked different above these unknown hills and moors.  It took all day to get there and our final destination seemed the most foreign of all; Cornwall really was another world.

I’d never seen lanes so narrow, nor hedges so high.  Steep distant cliffs gave promise of secret coves and story-book adventures of hidden treasure, whilst the sea itself seemed bigger, wilder and far, far bluer than the one I’d seen before in the South East.

My memory is playing tricks with me.  If I believed it, I would tell you that I spent every day, from sunrise to sunset, down at Gerrans Bay amongst the rock pools, because that’s what it felt like.  I realise we must have gone to other places, and I guess sometimes the sun didn’t shine, and we must have sat in the car with cans of Cola, eating hardboiled eggs when picnic plans were called off due to rain.  But all I can really vividly remember is going down to the rock pools with my bucket and spending endless hours there, finding tiny prawns and blennies, furtive hermit crabs and fantastic anemones, exotic-looking shells, slimy seaweed and pretty pebbles, the sand between my toes and the salt in my hair.  These were all  things we just didn’t have in my world back home.  Then it was back to the topsy turvy cottage every evening, and the hope of still discovering a hidden room. 

Although it’s over ten years since my last visit, I have been back to Portscatho a few times.  Dr Pumphrey’s cottage was there, exactly as I remembered it.  I couldn’t help hoping it still had the breakfast bar, and that somewhere, in a secret room, there is a small collection of shells left there by a young girl in 1972.

* My mum did private typing work for Dr Pumphrey and he let us use his holiday home for free.  What a nice man.