Memories from a Box

I have been doing some spring cleaning this week and have been, in the words of Captain Kirk, boldly going where no man has gone before. Actually man (and woman) have gone before but not for a very significant length of time. I have been in the cupboard under the stairs.

Without boring you with the immense amount of swimming equipment we seem to have (snorkels, flippers, masks, wet suits etc) for children aged two to fourteen ie nothing that will fit the current crop, and other 'stuff' in the broadest sense of the word, I also found a wooden box which had, many years before my children turned this planet into a noisier but far more interesting place, been given to me as a wedding present by some lovely old bachelor friends of my parents. The box once contained a huge selection of dried herbs and spices and was a proud possession in my very first kitchen. The herbs and spices were obviously chucked years ago (be relieved if you've eaten here recently) and only the box remained, finding its place under the stairs.

A couple of years ago, I sent a Christmas card to one of these lovely old chaps who used to come on holiday with us, first when I was a child with my parents and brother, and later with my own family and mother. I sent Jack a card every year and he always reciprocated. On this occasion he didn't. And thinking about it sometime later, using the marvels of the internet, I found his obituary. It made me sad that he had passed away in April of the previous year and we had not known. He was a really lovely chap.

When we were very small, we ventured bravely (as this was the nineteen sixties) on holiday to Ibiza which was then an island with just two hotels and an airport which could only be reached by planes powered by very strong elastic bands which were pulled tight and then released from Palma airport on Majorca. We stayed in one of the two hotels in what is now the clubbing metropolis, San Antonio, and a group of rugby friends of my father's happened to be staying in the other. These friends were three charming bachelors - Hoppy, Jack and Tiny and my childhood holiday memories are littered with these three legends.

Hoppy was perhaps the most hilarious. To us, my brother and me, they seemed quite old - they were perhaps in their early forties! Hoppy had all sorts of inventions. He had a machine (which looked like a wooden box about the size of a cigar case) which made money. You put cigarette paper in one end and bank notes came out the other. Not only were we children transfixed by this but the rather less sophisticated locals could not believe that this Englishman could produce money out of a box. He also had performing fleas (which were, of course, invisible) and the star flea was called Alphonse. Alphonse would only perform after considerable amounts of alcohol had been consumed by Hoppy and the gang. He also sang (and whenever I hear it, he is singing it in my head) The Girl from Ipanema.

Tiny came (out, as it turned out) and disappeared and was only part of the first few holidays and was replaced by Harold or Ha'hold as we called him. He was the absolute king of the Nuttalls Mintoes and there were no occasions upon which Mintoes were not available. I swear he had a suitcase full of them on every trip.

But Jack was my favourite. He taught me to swim and we swam for miles every day (although he must have been swimming with some terrible hangovers) and we would swim out across the bay to the caves where the Dragontikas lived (like dragons but not as dangerous). He was also responsible for my first major drinking incident aged about eight when he was left in charge of me while the rest of the crew went for a walk and he introduced me to some local wine (bottled water not being available). When my parents returned I was sleeping it off under a tree.

Hoppy died and Ha'hold disappeared (but probably not for the same reason as Tiny) and Jack continued to holiday with us on Ibiza where he had a rather scruffy but endearing apartment with only one egg cup. Each year, he entertained my older girls when they were little as he had entertained my brother and me. He was rather follicly-challenged by then but that didn't stop number 2 daughter from tying what little hair he had into many multi-coloured hair bobbles. The sight of his rather rotund shape performing a perfect bomb into the swimming pool will be with me for ever. Not much water left in the pool after that!

So finding the box in the cupboard under the stairs brought all this back and Jack's picture is on our gallery on the kitchen wall so if you stop by, I'll show you.

By the way, if you are in need of wet suits for children, I seem to be the proud owner of a few and will happily part with them for a small contribution to the Vietnam World Challenge fund for a young man in our village.

Keeping it Real

I've been giving a lot of thought to the kindle versus book debate and I think - though I reserve the right to change my mind at a later date - that I have reached a conclusion. You see, I can see that there are lots of good reasons for the kindle - portability, instant availability of titles and not least that you can whack up the type size which, as an optically-challenged older person, is obviously a huge bonus. But I think it is important to keep things real and that means buying actual books.

Curiously, it wasn't thinking about books that made me come to this conclusion. It was actually thinking about records, the demise of the record store and particularly, about the disappearance of the album cover. Hundreds of years ago, shortly after dinosaurs stopped walking the earth, when I was growing up, buying your first album and the subsequent ones that made up your collection and defined your street credibility amongst your peers was such a big thing. You went to a record store and looked at the covers, and the whole choosing thing was an event. An album purchase was something you could hold in your hand. 

And here we are now with books and bookshops. It is a small, but real pleasure to browse in a bookshop. To look at the book covers, see the illustration on the front, read the comments from the critics and a summary of the story and the feel and size of the book is still important. Do you buy a book in hardback because it's a book you'll treasure - or more often in my case, because I simply can't wait for the paperback to come out? 

Anyway, the more I think about it, the more that I worry that we may live our lives watching things on a screen. Yes, I know, I'm writing my blog on a computer and winging it into the ether but I like seeing things for real because when it is for real it becomes something which addresses more than one sense. Like the atmosphere at any kind of live sporting event which is vastly superior to the brilliant view that watching it on the television gives you - even with a very knowledgeable commentary, although frequently I shout as much at the television as I do from the stands. But there is nothing like being there. 

Live music is the same. You might be squashed up in an arena surrounded by strangers but the sound and the craic that you get from being there is unforgettable. I can remember every band I've ever seen from sitting in the second row at the Coventry Theatre for David Bowie on his Aladdin Sane tour in my mid-teens with my friend Adrian to the Christmas Lindisfarne concerts at Leeds Uni, every one of the times we have seen Phil Collins (which is a lot because he is a big favourite of my beloved's) and some rather more up to date than that. 

The theatre and the cinema are the same. I would always rather go and see a film on the big screen for which films are rightly made, rather than wait for it to appear on the rather smaller screen in the comfort of our sitting room. I have just seen The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel which is set in India and the colours and sounds had such intensity that you cannot possibly feel in your own home. A few weeks ago I took my mother to see the absolute god of comedy, James Cordon in One Man, Two Guvnors in the West End. We laughed almost till we cried and, as they say, you had to be there.

So of course you can buy everything through the internet, make all your choices through the screen - computer, television and so on. But there is nothing like feeling, tasting, touching and using all your senses to make your choices. I'm for keeping it real. Yes, definitely.

For the love of rugby

This afternoon, number 3 and I are headed north to Newcastle to watch what may turn out to be one of the last Premiership matches in the North-East with our beloved Falcons holding up the entire Premiership by some margin. We're off with our Irish chums, Declan and his lovely daughter as Newcastle are playing London Irish and we are very excited.

My love of rugby goes back to my teenage years with my father. As the youngest of four - the other three are boys and older than me - it became my duty to go with Dad on a Saturday afternoon to watch Coventry who were the Leicester Tigers or Saracens of their day, topping the league most seasons. A few matches in and I was hooked.

In the years that followed, I played a bit at college before our team fell apart when the captain went off with a photographer from the Sun (for all the reasons that are probably springing to mind!) and then I met and married two men (not at the same time) who were not interested in rugby. In fact, the first one turned out to love Bradford City more than he loved me and romance in the Shed End was something of a struggle.

Anyway, years went by and I only occasionally watched rugby on the tv and then in 2003 the rugby bug bit me again. England were immense - some of them rather long in the tooth but nonetheless immense and I ironed my way through the World Cup in Australia, nearly burning a few shirts at key moments, and numbers 2 and 3 started to get hooked too.

After the joy of the famous World Cup winning drop goal by you-know-who, I wrote on the downstairs loo blackboard that I wanted to see the best fly-half in the world play at Newcastle. Of course, I hadn't factored in that he might be injured most of the time for the next five years, after which he would quite rightly move to sunnier climes but number 2 bought me tickets to Kingston Park, home of the Falcons and actually by the time the great one did play we were huge fans of the whole team.

In better years, Kingston Park has been a fortress - Newcastle might not have been able to win away from home but on their own ground they were impenetrable and we watched them beat some of the best. One time, it was a whole family outing to see Northampton, not least because number 2 had a bit of a thing for Ben Cohen. The sound of the home crowd - including us - singing the Blaydon Races when they score a try is absolutely epic.

So today number 3 and I are going to have a brilliant time, sing the Blaydon Races - even though we only know half the words, the rest being in Geordie - and fingers crossed Newcastle will make a miraculous escape from the drop at the end of the season and we will have another winter of rugby to look forward to.

And in the meantime, there'll be a whole summer of tennis for us to enjoy!

PS Number 1 plays rugby too and I am sure much better than I ever did. I did a lot of running down the wing, mostly without the ball and only occasionally with it. Number 1 is really good and having looked at her team, hopefully no photographer from the Sun will want want to run off with any of them - fine though they are!

Later: Just back and Newcastle won so definitely worth the trip. Off to celebrate with a glass of red and some good friends.

Growing Old Disgracefully

Last weekend, we (my beloved and I) and a whole host of England rugby supporters headed north to beautiful Edinburgh. Of course, not everyone was there to celebrate my birthday (which has a number way too large to admit to) but celebrate we all did!

Our love of Scotland's fairest city goes back to when number 1, and subsequently number 2, played lacrosse there in the Scottish Schools Championship. Though not at a Scottish school, northern lacrosse schools were always invited to make up the numbers and we, along with some like-minded parents, decided this was an excellent excuse for a weekend away, especially when once it neatly coincided with the Calcutta Cup. The first year, we actually stayed in Melrose, well away from the clubs and bars of Edinburgh of which more later, and as the girls were only just sixteen we larged it in Melrose instead. Although this is over ten years ago, I still remember my beloved performing one of his classic turns - standing on a chair, surfing whilst singing the theme to Hawai 50. Anyway we emptied the restaurant - more of that later too!

Further epic trips followed for the lacrosse and included several tales which perhaps should never see the light of day but amongst which eating polo mints which were sewn on to a girl's sweater in Rick's cocktail bar is just one. So we were especially delighted when number 1 chose Edinburgh for her university career. For four years, we had the best possible excuse for heading north and we got to know the city quite well. We did, in the last couple of years, find a boutique hotel in the centre of Edinburgh in which each room is charming and different and named after a place. We have now stayed in Reyjavik, Atlantis and, most recently, Moscow. 

Four years ago, when number 1 was in her final year, we thought we would give the Calcutta Cup another crack en famille. We managed to secure four tickets (two and two) for my beloved and me, plus children 1 and 3. This is not to say that 2 and 4 would not have enjoyed the experience but 1 and 3 were selected for the team on that day. Number 3 and I went with my Scottish brother in law (sort of brother in law as he is married to my ex-sister in law and is part of our rather elastic family group) and my beloved went with number 1. We turned up, England didn't. It wasn't that they lost having been massive favourites, it was the manner of the losing. Scrappy without the S.

When I noticed in the autumn that my birthday and the Calcutta Cup shared the same date, it had to be done. My beloved got two tickets and on Friday we headed north in an absolutely packed train to Edinburgh. I say packed because we couldn't sit together and I shared (and I mean shared) my seat with a substantial Scotswoman with a handbag of equal proportions who spent the entire time chatting her way through her contacts list on her phone. I pondered whether if I included her randomly and rather unflatteringly in the TFN which I was working on on my laptop, she might notice but then again... she was bigger than me and she might have hit me. 

Checked into Le Monde (with a couple of complementary glasses of fizz), we headed into the very cold Edinburgh night to our favourite Thai restaurant. It looks fairly unprepossessing from the outside but it is a cracker. We ordered and ate so much that we scarcely managed to waddle back to the hotel but it was worth it. (Our children were as disgruntled about missing Dusit as they were about missing the match - that's how good it is!)

Now if it's one thing my beloved does really well, it's my birthday. Presents, cards and out for a lovely breakfast and then on to the streets of Edinburgh for some shopping. After a few hours, he begged for Guinness and we found a great bar and listened to the craic about the match ahead from lots of really cheery (and confident!) Scottish supporters. The great thing about the rugby is that everyone is up for it in a really non-aggressive way. On the train, in the bars, on the bus and on the streets on the way to and from the match, the feeling is just one of 'we're having a great time, we're lucky to be here'. I cannot imagine such a thing at a football match, but perhaps I am wrong. It would be nice to think so. 

Murrayfield has a great atmosphere and we sat behind the posts looking down the pitch. Next to me was a young man who greeted me with a big smile and said, "I hope you shout - I do!" I think he knows now! Although he was an avid Scotland supporter, he and I had lots of banter and he was generous in his applause of the England scores as we were for theirs. The only discordant note in the whole day was the booing of Owen Farrell when he took the penalties. For goodness sake, he's 20, scarcely a man, at his first international. But he held his nerve - well done. And we were thrilled to see Phil Dowson get his first cap. We met him when he was at Newcastle and had dinner with him. He is a really bright guy who chose rugby over one of the top accountancy firms. He also introduced me to Jonny Wilkinson so he has a place in my heart forever!

Back in the city after the match, we met up with our chums from the village and had a fabulous night out. More Guinness, red wine and dinner at a tapas bar where we emptied the place and were asked to leave so the staff could go home. Then on to the nightclub below the hotel which is a really buzzing place. We could have queued for the Opal Lounge which is where the players usually go but Shanghai was packed and we braved the dance floor to show that even at our, well my, advanced age I've still got it. I made a new friend and I'm not going to say anymore about that - you had to be there! 

Yesterday I felt like hell. It was the worse hangover since the grappa incident in Cyprus a few years ago. I remembered asking my beloved for a soft drink at about 2.00am and he told me that a double Hendricks and tonic was one and got one for me. Apparently I didn't argue. Anyway we went for a brisk walk and emergency trip to the supermarket to buy painkillers, and one big fry up later I felt much better and well enough to squeeze onto the train home. 

So, hoping that this year continues to be as brilliant as my birthday weekend (but without the hangover) and fingers very firmly crossed for my friend to continue her excellent recovery from her major operation and that my children do as well in their exams as they deserve to (given the huge amount of school work currently occurring in this house). Have a good one!

PS Edinburgh was also the home for many years of the late, but very great Uncle Bill Hook, hero of Colditz and the most modest man I ever met. Gone but very definitely not forgotten. 

Phil: looking mean I think! 

  

The trouble with January...

The trouble with January is that it goes on much too long. This is my least favourite time of year - the days are way too short and the nights (which start at 4.30pm and end at 8.00am thus requiring me to take and collect my children from the school bus in the semi-dark) go on forever. Also, and I realise this may be personal to me, usually we are in that post-Christmas hangover - not literally - phase, and my beloved tends to be in the USA for a goodly chunk of the month, and, I am facing yet another birthday. None of this is good and there is seemingly nothing we can do about it. Or so I thought...

Here's the plan: without wishing to claim that this is an original idea - obviously someone in the Northern Hemisphere will have come up with this before - what we need to do is make January shorter. How would it be if we made January twenty eight days long like February (which is nearly as bad in my book but mercifully short) and then made three of the best months in the year which have only thirty days in them another day longer. Who doesn't love April, June and September? April, with all the anticipation of summer, long June evenings and September when the days are still fairly long and the weather tends to be better than August. Why not give them a day each and make January twenty eight days?

I've given this some thought and I realise that for a few people losing three days out of January may be a problem. Obviously for a start, people with birthdays on the last three days in January - but just think, you could have your birthday in April, June or September which is clearly a much better time for a party. And people doing their tax returns like my beloved who thinks he has got another eight days to do his, and mine, and to help child 1 with hers. He might be a bit stressed. But otherwise I can't see a problem, here at least.

The real difficulty, I suppose, will be the people in the Southern Hemisphere and I haven't come up with a solution to that. But then, global solutions are really beyond my mental capacity. It just works for me. So, all in favour - say "aye"!

Counting down the days...

For the last week or so I have been trying my hand at single parenthood and I am now totally in awe of anyone who has to do this everyday. In fact, I was feeling quite sorry for myself until a friend came for coffee yesterday - her husband works in Kosovo and only comes home once every six weeks! And here am I chuntering about a week and a half!

However, this is the longest time we have been apart in the last twenty eight years and aside from missing my beloved (apart from the snoring, obviously) there would appear to a massive black hole of things that I rely on him for in a practical sense. This would include anything to do with cars - I have no idea what goes on under the bonnet and frankly, as long as he comes back, I don't intend to find out. Then there is the computer. At the back end of last year, my lovely mac crashed and in the words of Craig Revel Horwood 'disaster daaarling!' This may or may not be the result of people other than me using my super hi-spec laptop and I am therefore now very edgy about anyone else getting their paws on my keyboard! Mental note to self: must back-up, especially TFN which, had it been lost, would have been 30,000 words down the swanny! The mac made a full recovery but I am now very territorial about my office equipment.

Added to this, I know nothing about how the heating or indeed how anything electrical works. In fact - and I suspect this is true for plenty of people who perhaps wouldn't admit to it - anything that comes with a manual. Whenever a new piece of kit arrives in this house with a leaflet translated into half a dozen or more languages, I go into ignoring-it mode. My beautiful cooker which landed here in early December came with an epic tome. So I waited till my beloved (who is a much better cook than me) and child 3 (probably ditto but not such a wide range of skills and recipes yet) had used it and I could surreptitiously watch them at work before tentatively trying my hand when there was no-one to watch. Of course, I am now fully competent but I do suffer from techno-fear. Do people really read instruction manuals from cover to cover? Or do they wait till disaster (more from Craig) strikes and then try to find out why in a panic?

The one area where, if things go wrong I really want to cry, is laundry. Because we've been married for eons and have far too many children, we are on to probably our fourth washing machine and probably tumble dryer. If one of these breaks, I want to lie on the floor and wail. The new tumble dryer (yes, a lot of things had to be replaced in the autumn but luckily not me!) has a water reservoir which has to emptied after each load. This is something that child 2 couldn't get her head round and she has been bringing her laundry home from her flat since early December - because, strangely, her washing machine broke! Between Christmas and New Year, this ended in disaster (I am now saying this like CRH in my head - how sad!) and we had to get the man round. He kindly replaced something like a thermostat - well, I think that's what he meant - because if you don't empty the water reservoir every wash the machine heats up like a kettle. Then last week, whilst we are watching something gripping on television, children 2, 3 and 4 and me, I hear the tumble dryer going and say "Did you empty the water?" and just the look on child 2's face was enough to have me running to the dryer. Just in time if the temperature of the outside casing is anything to go by - you could have cooked an egg on the top. Crisis averted but obviously child 2 has inherited my manual-averse, non-techy gene.

The other thing is more related to the children than the practicalities of life. I have never been one of those mothers who says 'wait till your father gets home', not least because when we play good-cop, bad-cop, I always end up playing the latter. But presenting a united front on all matters child-related is important and paddling my own canoe with children 3 and 4 is much more tricky. At one point, child 3 (yes you know who you are!) told me this week I was a 'rubbish parent'. But at least I am here and I guess that's what lots of single parents say - it's too tempting not to.

Anyway, hopefully we will survive the last few days before my beloved comes home. I will not be presented with any more dilemmas relating to what the children want to do which may or may not be appropriate, no equipment - cars or domestic - will develop glitches and I will enjoy a couple more nights of uninterrupted sleep. And most importantly, I will have racked up a very serious number of brownie points to be reclaimed later in the year.

Giving it the old Razzle Dazzle

I have just finished de-festivising (is that a word?) our house and am sitting finally amid a degree of order and serenity which I had thought a distant memory earlier this week. Now that it's all over for another year there is always a sense of relief (that we have survived, of which more later...) and sadness and a creeping sense of dread about January and February which are my least favourite months. All in all, the festive season has definitely had its highlights (and low points but I am not going there at all). Anyway I thought I would share my highlights and remind myself of some top moments so that I can re-read this when I am wondering how to dig myself out during the snow which inevitably arrives here as soon as my beloved has driven off to the airport in our only 4x4 on his way to Las Vegas. (Meteorologists amongst you, please note that the snow will arrive probably on Saturday or Sunday and magically disappear approximately ten days later on his return so that my beloved can say helpful things like: "I can't see what all the fuss was about." "You could easily get the mini up the hill." and best of all, "What black ice?")

Without dredging up every detail of Christmas and New Year, or being overly sentimental about how absolutely fabulous it is to have all four of my children home at once and nobody arguing (surely a record year this year!), it never feels like Christmas for me until we have had my oldest friend in Yorkshire and his wife (who are also godparents to number 2) over for supper. This year, they came without their children, one of whom is so grown up that he has got married (!) and we had a lovely supper with other godparents and friends. I met my friend on my very first day working for an advertising agency in Leeds 34 years ago today actually. He spoke English which was a huge advantage as everyone else I met that day spoke either Yorkshire (thraped, throng, snapboxes, early doors, growlers etc) or some sort of mid-Atlantic (the managing director rather fancied himself as Madison Avenue meets Merrion Centre.) Anyway we have been great chums over the years and he and his wife were instrumental in introducing me to my beloved - a rather complicated story and way too long to go into here - so they must take some of the credit or otherwise for our 27 years of marriage.

Christmas Day always follows a similar pattern - very lengthy stocking-opening which we now all do together rather than the younger generation doing theirs without us and then revealing to us what they have had later in the morning at which point I must look surprised/impressed by the ingenuity Santa puts into the job. Then, after a large breakfast (ballast to get us through the next bit) we head off up the hill to our lovely Irish friends who host a drinks party for half the village. Actually this year our delightful (in every sense of the word) recently-retired pub landlord was able to attend and commented that he had wondered why trade was always slow on Christmas Day lunchtime and now he knows where all the drinkers are! Everyone comes with whichever relatives they have in tow and this year there were folks in their eighties and tiny people who were even more unsteady on their feet having only just learnt to walk. I don't drink champagne because I like it but it doesn't like me so my dear friends have a bottle of red ready just for me and after a couple of glasses I was happily performing The Old Razzle Dazzle from Chicago with my doctor's mother - perfectly, or at least it felt like it at the time.

New Year's Eve has been a home fixture for the last couple of years so with tables and chairs borrowed from the village hall and wonderful contributions (nibbles, puddings, cheese, wine) from our friends, sixteen of us sat down to a magnificent curry cooked by my beloved and child number 3. We had a musical interlude from three fine upstanding men of the community who combined singing (with varying degrees of tunefulness) with cross-dressing. I am reliably informed that there is a video so no doubt that will come to light in due course. I was laughing too much to be organised with camera or phone. One of our neighbours produced fantastic fireworks which he let off just after the New Year began and then my husband decided to set himself on fire in a celebratory manner. Actually he lent back on a candle and ignited his shirt (new) and then his back. I was jiving with the doctor and only noticed the flames when there were shouts of "clingfilm" which is apparently what is required on burns. So clingfilmed in the manner of Mark Addy in The Full Monty, my beloved continued to celebrate the New Year.

Yesterday morning, our house resembled the Somme and my dear Irish friend arrived at 9.15am to help us wash up and clear away - above and beyond, in my book and she deserves a medal. It took most of the day to restore to our home to festive order and now today we are back to normal and ready for the fray ahead.

Finally, New Year's Resolutions: to be absolutely there for a dear friend who is having a big op soon, to get children 3 and 4 through 20 GCSEs this summer and to finish TFN (one of those initials stands for novel and you can work out the rest...) Happy New Year to you!