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.

All together now

I try not to think about the future very much.  I’ve got to be honest, I find it a little scary and it’s a fairly pointless thing to get depressed about because there’s nothing I can do about its imminent arrival.  Every now and then, though, I catch a glimpse of my mum when I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, and I realise that I really am quite old.  And getting older. 

One of the things that worries me slightly, if I let it, is the thought of spending any of my geriatric years in a care home.  It’s not the idea of a residential institution itself that bothers me the most, it’s the concept of being in the enforced company of others with whom I wouldn’t normally choose to spend any time.  Being permanently around people whose interests and attitudes are very different from mine I would struggle to just be myself.

Who might there be to chat to about obscure music?  About the youth cults of our formative years?  About similar comedy, books, art and films?  What if everybody else reads The Sun and wants to talk about Queen Kate’s latest dress and how they don’t like foreigners?  I don’t want to find myself swooning with incomparable delight because someone’s offered me a chocolate digestive (‘New recipe! Extra creamy chocolate!’), I want to be able to feel excited at something a little more edgy.   I don’t want to talk about the way the wallpaper matches the carpet oh so nicely, or how much Mrs Donnelly’s granddaughter’s new baby weighs.  I want to talk about how amazing spiders are, or what people thought about Bill Hicks, or why Never Mind The Bollocks still sounds good….

Which leads me to… what will the sing-songs and arthritic knees ups (knees-not-ups?) of our future be like?  There won’t be any "Pack up your troubles in your old kitbag”s or “My old man said follow the van”s any more, will there?  What will our generation be warbling away to in weary unison as an overworked assistant brings the tea and biscuits in before our afternoon nap?  Now that’s the bit that’s really getting to me. What if everyone wants to sing ‘The Lady In Red’ or ‘Wonderful Tonight’?  I don’t think I could take it.   So… do you reckon we could make a little deal, lovely readers?  If we all end up in a care home somewhere some day, can we make sure it’s the same one?

My favourite rendition of a favourite Smiths song.

I want to be like Doris.

I'm with the band

A slight smell of stale cigarette smoke lingers in the stingingly cold night air. The floor of the back of the transit van where I sit feels icy, even through my trousers. My back hurts, leaning against something hard and unyielding, its corner poking into my shoulder.

There are six of us – no, hang on, actually there are seven of us, trying to ‘snuggle’ down between amps, drums, guitar cases, backdrops and bags of leads and pedals, behind the cab, hoping to catch a little bit of sleep as the vehicle we’re travelling in rumbles down the motorway in the bleak early hours of a winter morning.

The guitarist, drummer and bassist, and their three girlfriends, one of whom is me, make up six. The vocalist and his girlfriend are sitting in the front with her brother, the informally appointed roadie. The seventh person in the back with us is a ‘fan’ who is cadging a lift back home after the gig. When everyone was packing up at the end of the night - always a long-winded and frustrating business - he’d asked, “Any chance of dropping me off in Hull?”  (or wherever it was).  With the band’s badges on his lapel glinting in the streetlights as he’d made his request, the bass player and self-appointed spokesman for the group could not have refused. However, the detour for this additional passenger takes us an hour out of our way back home and it feels like an eternity when we’ve got another 150 miles to go. But this often seems to happen at gigs; there is always someone in the van travelling back with us who hasn’t travelled out with us, and usually it’s someone who smells strongly of sweat and dope and farts, with long limbs and a bulky rucksack, taking up precious space and time. And space and time mean more than anything on the home-bound stretch, because everyone is knackered, hungry, dehydrated, cold, squashed up, uncomfortable and grumpy. Everyone just wants to get home as soon as possible, longing for deep sleep in a warm, soft, bed. But at least nobody can accuse the band of being ungenerous in that respect.

It was the early 1980s and this became quite a frequent event for a while as I travelled with my boyfriend’s anarcho punk band to an assortment of venues up and down the country. We usually tried to get back the same night, which in reality meant arriving home just as the sun was coming up.  A few times we stayed over, like once in a damp squat – a condemned terraced house with no plumbing (ironically it was in Bath) - and another time on the floor of tiny council flat in a high rise in St. Helens. That one had plumbing but, by strange coincidence, the toilet was broken. We had to use the bath.

My memories of those days are a melange of odd moments and images. From being stopped and searched by the Mets as we travelled home through South London, to seeing a cow giving birth as we ventured through the Cumbrian hills on the way to a gig near the Windscale (as it was then called) nuclear plant. From hearing rumours that British Movement skinheads were going to storm in and give everyone a kicking at Grimsby (they didn’t), to paddling in the sea before a gig in Fareham. There were the unkempt crusty/hippie children climbing on top of the van at Stonehenge, where tales of Hells Angels with knives made the place feel distinctly unwelcoming and the schedule got so far behind that in the end the band didn’t play anyway. And there was the punk in Burnley who was ‘wearing’ a condom, attached to his face between safety pins (one in his lip, one in his nose. It was quite a look.) It turned out he was the singer in one of the support bands, whose only memorable number was a re-worded demolition of Eddie Cochran’s ‘C’mon Everybody’ endearingly entitled ‘Fuck Off Everybody’.

I remember the inter-band arguments, the waiting around at soundchecks, the sharing of bags of chips with chilli sauce at The George Robey, the listening in on fanzine interviews, and the way only Northern punks sported moustaches… Strangely enough, perhaps, the thing I probably remember the least about is the performances. They were good, though.  Of course.

So where are they now? The bassist founded a record company, the vocalist and drummer are fine and I met them again a few years ago, and the guitarist… well, he’s in the kitchen right now, making me a cup of tea.

Fifty shades of white

I LOVE painting snow!

The cat, the rat and the blackbird

Not much snow here really, and certainly not the apocalyptic blizzard that was forecast, so I won't be making any voluptuous snow-women like I did last year (she slowly got droopier and droopier as the temperature picked up until eventually her curvaceous appendages just dropped off...)

But the thing I love about a light sprinkling of the white stuff is looking out in the morning to see who's been around already, leaving delicate little tracks before my clumsy clumpy booted footprints spoil the canvas.  This morning I see evidence of Ratty (he's probably back under the car bonnet now as I type).  The blackbird and a neighbour's cat have left their trails too.  I can't help but get a picture in my mind of all three of them out there at the same time, setting aside their differences for one magical hour and going off together to build some snow-rats, snow-cats and snow-birds.  It's just a shame that they must have melted before I could find them.

96 tears?

Well I don't know about ninety-six tears, but I read somewhere that the average amount of tears a person cries in a lifetime adds up to around 120 litres. That seems an awful lot to me – equivalent to filling up six kitchen sinks! – but given my own propensity to cry at the drop of a titfer these days, maybe I can believe it. 

I’ve never been a cry-baby - never the girl sobbing in the corner at a party, or blubbing in the loos at work, unlike several women with far tougher exteriors whom I've witnessed in my previous life of office jobs and Christmas piss-ups.  I’ve never cried at leaving do's and I’ve never cried at weddings.  I’ve been thinking about the subject today though because I know I’ll have to deal with my runny eyes (and even more embarrassing runny nose) at the funeral on Thursday and I know I’ll be trying hard to hold it all back - I also know that I won’t succeed.

Well that’s fair enough, it's a sad occasion - but I do get that throbbing behind my eyes as those hot tears try to make their escape at the silliest things too sometimes, like simply seeing footage of, say, a beautiful bird in flight (especially if there's some emotive music in the background).  It's a strange response to something wondrous and happy and I don't really understand it.  I try to repress that prickling sensation from beneath my eyelids as if it's something shameful, but usually fail and then end up laughing at my own ridiculous-fucking-patheticness.

Still, I’m so glad I’m female and that I am at least “allowed” to cry.  It must be harder if you’re born with the Y chromosome, where there still seems to be that unspoken expectation to keep tears at bay at all costs (as well as to have emerged from the womb with an innate knowledge of how to put up a shelf / unblock a drain / maintain a car, etc...) purely because of your gender.   We all know what it’s like to fight those ‘stupid’ emotions, to try and swallow them away, and pretend that your eyes are a little glassy because you just sneezed, or your nose a little red because you just rubbed it….  But really, when you think about it: why? Why do we try so hard not to show how we feel when it’s as real, as universal and as valid, as any other emotional expression – like laughing, or smiling, or frowning?  

I’ve known more than a couple of men to get tearful at times (by which I hope you won’t get the wrong impression!) and I’ve found it both moving and endearing - a revelation of compassion and depth.  John Peel (bless 'im) openly admitted that as he got older he found himself crying more frequently and more easily than ever before, so it's not such a bad thing for a man to do, is it?!  Or maybe it's an age thing?  Whatever - each time I worry about that emotion creeping up on me and feel silly and embarrassed, I just remind myself of him and I don't feel quite so soppy.  I'm sure I still have a few more kitchen sinks to fill, and it'll probably be triggered by something relatively innocuous a lot of the time.  You still won't fnd me weeping at a wedding or puffy-eyed at a party, though....  now that's just far too girly!

I couldn't resist the tenuous link, seeing as I'm still musically on a Suede trip!

The Tears...

Rattus Norvegicus

Right, so I got the sad stuff out of my system, now let’s talk about something more cheerful.

Like…

…rats!

The car battery died yesterday (oops, sorry – I was going to steer clear of the death theme this time) and when we lifted the bonnet, there on the lifeless battery there was, no, not a rat sitting looking up at us twitching its whiskers, but certainly evidence of one.  A perfect little rat turd, in fact…  What’s Ratty been doing under our bonnet, though, I wonder?  (Apart from the obvious…)

I’ve been finding perfect little rat turds in the compost bin lately too.  He obviously likes mouldy carrot peel and  lettuce hearts.  And probably the worms that live in there too -  those rats, they’ll eat anything.  Mind you, we’ve had rats in the composter before; a nest of them one summer.   Once I opened the lid to find a rather surprised little baby – very cute.  He didn’t know what to do as he couldn’t see an escape route and got himself into a bit of a panic.  Stupidly I thought I might be able to catch him, in whatever I could find nearest to hand, which was a small bucket.  I started to try and lower this bucket over him and he went absolutely nuts, leaping up at it and, well – have you ever heard a rat scream? This one certainly knew how to make a big noise, shrieking and screeching like a thing possessed.  It sounded a little too human and I seriously worried that the next noise I would hear would be the screaming of a police siren, summoned by a neighbour fearing that a violent murder was being committed three doors down…   I gave up and left Ratty Junior to calm down and burrow back through the decomposing cabbage leaves and broccoli stalks.

Being out here in the country, surrounded by fields, it’s obvious that brown rats are everywhere.   I know they can spread disease but I think these country cousins must be fairly clean-living or surely we’d all be going down with Weil’s Disease – especially if it’s true what they say about always being within six feet of one.  It’s obvious that they’re extremely social, intelligent animals and they’re really quite a pleasure to watch.  However, not wanting them to become too comfortable round here in the past I hoped I could relocate them but my attempts at using a humane rat-trap (not a bucket) failed miserably – no amount of tempting bacon hanging inside it was going to fool these clever characters into stepping anywhere near a metal cage, it was if they knew exactly what it was for.  Unfortunately lovely Mr Blackbird didn’t, though, and one morning I found him inside, confused and exhausted but unharmed.  I was very glad to be able to release the catch and gently lift him out, whereupon he made that little clucking noise and flew off to reinstate some ruffled feathers, not to mention his pride.

Since the population of cats has quadrupled round here in the last few years I’ve seen very few rats venture into the garden, but before that they used to be quite audacious, scampering down the path, climbing up the hollyhocks and shinning up the bird table. Now it seems they’re keeping a much lower profile.  Either that or they’re so intelligent they’re secretly getting to grips with the workings of our car engine, probably gathering out there under the bonnet at night in their hordes whilst referring to a Haynes manual.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  Now, if they could just learn how to use toilet paper…

(I love this film!)

For MB

Sorry to be a little downbeat here but sometimes when you’re thinking about silly things like the timer on the oven not working properly or the fact that bread has gone up by 5p a loaf, something pulls you up short and puts a few things in perspective, and that happened today. 

A friend of ours died this morning.  He had leukaemia and had been unwell with it for over a year, but during that time he’d had an admirable and incredible stoicism and positivity about him.  A month or so ago he was upbeat about the news that the NHS had received funding for his third bone marrow transplant.  In spite of being told it only carried a 5% chance of success, it was a hope he wanted to cling to.  However, he never became well enough again to actually have the operation. 

I’m so glad that the last time I saw him was on a really beautiful day.  Even though summer had long passed and the evenings were getting chilly and darker, that Saturday lunchtime when Mr SDS and I plus some other friends met him at a pub was like a Mediterranean July.  It was so hot that we sat outside soaking up the sun, the ice melting in our drinks, and the back of my neck even got a little burnt.  Our friend was in great spirits and, whilst a little weak physically, you’d be hard pushed to tell at first glance just how ill he really was. 

This pub is in one of the more upmarket, touristy villages round here – ok, if I tell you that it’s owned by Marco Pierre White you’ll get the idea.  There are pictures of MPW inside and apparently if you eat there you can go home with a postcard of him to put on your wall.   Whoop de doo!  We didn’t eat there.  When we saw the drinks bill it was obvious we were paying a premium just to be served by somebody who might have wiped the bar with a cloth that MPW’s PA may once have touched.  I think lunch for the six of us would have cost as much as that bone marrow transplant.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it was the price of the drinks that made our friend a little unsteady on his feet rather than his condition.  In fact, when he ordered them,  his speech was a little slurred too. Ever one for a mischievous comment he explained to the barman, “It’s ok – I’m not drunk!  It’s just the drugs...” 

I’ll remember him as a truly larger-than-life character – charming, funny and spontaneous, with a very real twinkle in his eye.  He’d lived quite a rollercoaster life, full of experiences that most of us can only imagine. 

We’re going to raise a big glass to him tonight - here at home.  We’re not paying those pub prices again.  Our friend would understand.

For MB, who loved Bowie