A Blast from the Past

My two favourite things from Harry Potter that I wish were real are Quidditch - well, obviously, who wouldn't want to fly around on broomsticks wielding rounders bats? - and Professor Dumbledore's Pensieve. In case you're not as Harry Potter-ed up as we are in this house, the Pensieve is the thing that looks like a font full of mercury and Professor D pulls memories out of his head with his wand (think spun sugar or candyfloss) and puts them in so he can return to each memory and relive it.

Now I realise that this would be a mixed blessing. Yes, you can relive the joyous moments again and again (but with repetition would they lose some of their gloss?) but I would certainly be tempted to go back to some of the less warm and wonderful and probably most embarrassing/humiliating bits too. And a goodly number of the latter happened in my mid-teens.

I moved to Yorkshire in my very early twenties and so have left the evidence - or rather, the witnesses - of the latter long behind me. But last night was almost like a Pensieve moment - a blast from the past - as they would say on Radio 1 in the nineteen seventies.

My beloved and I attended a significant birthday party of a friend from all those years ago when Coventry (yes, really!) was the most happening place in my universe. This friend also lives up here and our paths have crossed occasionally over the years so when he invited us to a party at which a goodly number of these friends from my misspent youth were likely to be heading north (and from various other directions) it had to be done.

Of course, with the invitation being months ahead of the party it didn't start to stare me in the face until the few days running up to it. And then, in the brief lulls between all the jubilee-ing going on in our lovely village over the weekend, I had contemplated some of the times when we had all last been together. Happy, sad, embarrassing and ungainly - definitely - but worth remembering. Friends, one in particular, no longer with us and other friends who have drifted away to be distant memories only.

Fast forward to getting ready and a proper wardrobe crisis almost on a par with those of thirty-something years ago. We had also been invited en famille to a party in the village last night so we arranged to start and finish there, leaving children 3 and 4 with their gang of friends whilst we headed to a pub the other side of Harrogate. On the way there in the car, I worried... would I recognise any of them? would they remember the embarrassing, awful moments that haunted my youth and remind me of them? would I be that ungainly, bashful girl, hoping to control my blushes and not say or do the wrong thing? My beloved, who was remarkably stoic about the whole thing with the likelihood of only knowing one other couple, assured me I would survive.

And as he had correctly predicted, as soon as we got inside the pub, there was a shout of 'Stiggins!' which was my nickname from all those years ago (my oldest friend, Alps, still calls me Stigs) and I was enveloped in hugs and memories and affection from all those years ago and, keeping my beloved in sight out of the corner of my eye, I chatted to some of the characters who joyfully populated my teens and remembered and relived some great moments. My beloved left me to it, uncharacteristically drinking water (whilst I most definitely didn't) and chatted with good friends who were clearly amused by my general jumping up and down, singing songs never made famous by a band once called Lavatory and subsequently - I suspect at the insistence of someone's parents - renamed Eric and remembered things that I haven't thought about in years. And gawky, unsure teenager I may have been in those days but we did have some good times.

So big thanks to Dave and Pam for inviting us, my beloved for being my wingman (in the manner of Top Gun) and to Chris Nought (because he has no middle name) Bailey, Patti, Mick (whose children will by now have congratulated him on refusing to go out with a woman who is definitely not the full shilling), Marcus (no, I can't remember you driving me home in 1972 and I am still wondering what happened...), Ali and lovely Bill Allen. Unforgettable...

Out with the Old

We've been having a bit of a clear out at the little house on the prairie. This, let me tell you, was very long overdue. There is a saying, 'Nature abhors a vacuum' and we appeared to have lived by that adage for all our 28 year marriage. We have a number of outbuildings which are, effectively, stuffed with things that we can't quite bear to throw away but can't find a use for either. Add to this, the fact that my beloved's family (and a few friends and acquaintances along the way) also use our outbuildings for storage when they move. They say things like, "Just for a few weeks till we're sorted" and then leave their Christmas decorations, filing cabinets, African wooden heads and pots and pans with us for years.

When my beloved went on his annual trip to Las Vegas in January, this was a great opportunity for me to clean the kitchen cupboards out - yes, all of them, even the ones where you have to stand on a chair and you can still barely reach to the back. Because we both owned houses when we joined forces all those years ago, we had full sets of crockery, cutlery, pans etc, etc most of which we still own. So I piled it all up in my office whilst I decided on a plan of action.

Then granny decided that it was time I took ownership of various items from my teenage bedroom including some very nice china horses which I had saved up for as a child and some very much loved stuffed toys. All this I added to the pile in the office.

Then I started on the bedrooms of my own absent children, the ones who have flown the nest but left loads of stuff behind and seem equally reluctant to take it all with them (it would only be more stuff for my beloved to help them to move from time to time when they migrate from one flat to another). And, of course, the frightfully grown-up teenagers who have all sorts of things they have grown out of. Once I started looking at their favourite books (I can't get rid of Mog and Bunny because I read it so many times or The Queen's Knickers, come to that) it took me on so many sentimental journeys that progress ground almost completely to a halt. And the stuff under the stairs including several wetsuits, flippers, masks and snorkels. You can imagine it was by now a significant pile and that's not counting the books and clothes and CDs and vast amount of sporting equipment and, well, just stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, my beloved (very, very reluctantly) and I went to recce a car boot sale in a nearby town. After trundling round the stalls, my beloved pronounced: "Their tat is even worse than our tat!" so we decided to give it a go. Not the china horses which are selling quite nicely on Ebay at rather good prices, but pretty much all the rest. Joined by some like-minded friends who were, with us, raising money for a venture to Vietnam for some students from our school, we set off in a convoy on Sunday morning and lined up in a row in the appointed field.

Well, their tat might have been worse than our tat, but we probably had the wrong sort of tat for the most part. The eight-place setting china tea and dinner service (including vegetable dishes) from my beloved's first home generated no interest whatsoever. Likewise the very nice clothes from my various slender daughters (because slender was in short supply in the female form amongst the buyers). And no-one wanted the huge array of sports equipment we had amassed between us ("It's like Intersport!") covering football, cricket, swimming, hockey, tennis and a mile, end to end, of golf clubs. CDs, however, flew off the stall but clearly reading is not a popular pastime - I must have taken at least 100 books of which we sold about five. Shouting encouragingly, "Read a book! Expand your mind!" may not have helped, of course.

On a positive note, however, the African head has gone to a new home as has the old laundry basket, lots of electric cable and various knick-knacks and some dishes for snails (the sort you eat) which I successfully remarketed as egg dishes! And eventually, we packed up a ridiculous amount of stuff but not quite as much as we had started with and made our way home, in profit but not vastly and with a new perspective on selling. My beloved pointed out to me that I would have been fired on The Apprentice a few weeks ago when they did the 'selling tat' challenge. I am rubbish at it.

So this morning, remaining tat has been transferred out of the van and into the car and accepted gratefully by various charity shops apart from a few bits that we will sell online. And if you want to buy... old pans, golf clubs, wetsuits, complete eight-place setting dinner and tea service and the last remaining dishes for snails... er, eggs, I can tell you where I delivered them.

One of these Nights - Sixteen Years Ago

Sixteen years ago this week, I was in the Special Care Baby Unit at Leeds General Infirmary. Two babies, colour-coded by their blankets, were in cots next to my bed. One, the blue one, was the biggest baby on the ward by some margin whilst his sister, wearing an enormous hat to stop heat escaping from her very tiny head and with a tube up her nose to feed her, weighed only just over half what her brother weighed - a couple of bags of sugar, no more. They were our miracles.

Scroll on a few days and we arrived back at the little house on the prairie which had, for their arrival, been turned upside down - literally. Their first nursery was the dining room (now our sitting room) as we had been advised that there would be significantly less running up and down stairs if their world was contained on the ground floor. Two of everything babywise takes up a lot of space!

We were joined for the first few weeks by a maternity nurse, Sister R, who had once been the supremo of Harrogate's only maternity hospital and where number 1 child and I had spent a few formative days - formative for her, reformative for me whilst I started to shrink back to the old me. Anyway Sister R had a lovely, old-fashioned approach to babies and routine and she quickly licked us into shape. She used to stay for three or four nights a week giving us desperate parents a few much-needed nights off to recover - and yes, I know we were very lucky to have her. Once in residence, she would spend the evening in front of the television with us with the remote control gripped vice-like in her hand, insisting (as if we had the energy to argue) that we watch medical programmes (yes, me the most squeamish person in the world and these were 'the bloodier - the better' variety), nature programmes (nature programmes with blood even better) and football - the only sport we never watch in this house. Anyway aside from the television, she got bottle production on a mass scale organised and dealt with 3 and 4 in the middle of the night whilst my beloved and I slept on.

When she left, we were ready for her to go and for us to face up to the task ahead. This involved my beloved staying up till late to do the last feed at any sort of sociable hour, then me getting up in the wee small hours to feed the one that woke up first, then waking up the second one (whether he or she wanted to be woken or not) for their feed. Sometimes, in tiredness and confusion, I wasn't sure whether I had fed one or both or perhaps three of them but we and they survived. I watched, in chunks in no particular order, The Commitments and, towards the end, the Olympics in Atlanta, which featured all those sports which only true aficionados, people who work night shifts (me) and insomniacs watch - women's weightlifting and synchronised swimming to name but two. Incidentally, anyone who thinks synchronised swimming and synchronised diving are in the same skill-category are way off beam. Synchronised diving is brilliant, brave and exciting and the stuff in the pool with the make-up and weird nose things is not, in my view, any more a sport than dominoes!

What was most wonderful was how the older two fell immediately in love with the twins. They helped brilliantly, changed nappies enthusiastically and were generally the proudest parents - apart from their own! And that relationship is still magic today and when they are all at home together - the messiest, loudest and happiest times happen. When war breaks out in this house, as it sometimes does, we need to remember how we are all lights in each other's lives.

When the twins were born in the early and very antisocial hours on May 3rd 1996, the song on the radio in the delivery suite was played by the Eagles. One of These Nights might have been appropriate and Take It Easy would have been nice and I can't, sixteen years on, remember what it was but this one is my favourite so here's the link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaO-kgG7eCQ

The Rain it Raineth Every Day

Morning all! I had to look up the quote in the title and, of course, was delighted to be reminded that it was from Feste, the fool in Twelfth Night which is appropriate since it was Shakespeare's birthday this week (on the same day at St George's Day) and I spent a lot of my teenage years in Stratford upon Avon, probably acting the fool myself. I'm not being picky about the 'upon Avon' bit but usually now when people mention Stratford, they are referring to the Olympics.

Anyway, back to the rain for which we must accept some responsibility in this house. You see, every time my beloved goes away for an appreciable length of time we get weather. Not the normal stuff we get which in Yorkshire is usually a selection of all four seasons in one day but proper, big stuff. When my beloved goes to Las Vegas in January, we generally have to dig ourselves out through the snow and now, on his first ever trip to Pittsburg, he has provided us with a month's rain in a week. In our house, where sport is very much a feature, especially at this time of year, we have been rained off cricket, golf, tennis and cycling and had it not been for pilates and indoor tennis there would have been climbing of the walls, by me anyway. We've also been carbooted off but that is, as they say, another story.

The other thing is that this is an old house and when it rains, it leaks. Earlier in the week, to cap a very tricky day - tricky because number 4 had to hand in her graphics coursework for her GCSE and the computer was not behaving in an appropriate manner - number 3 informed me that rainwater was running through the downlighter in the bathroom. Luckily it was running straight into the sink therefore negating the requirement for a bucket but with two leaks already in the conservatory and the boiler room leaking so much that large amounts of plastic are permanently placed over all the electricity controls for the central heating, this was not looking good. I half expected a selection of indigenous animals to be pairing up and lining up ready to join us for a cruise across the flooded plains of North Yorkshire.

Anyway, today my beloved returns and already the skies are lightening - although I believe the pitch is so waterlogged that there will still be no cricket again this weekend ... though there might be tennis - so clearly he is responsible. Incidentally, twenty eight years ago tomorrow it was a wonderful, hot, sunny day and we are about to celebrate yet another wedding anniversary. This will be followed next week by the twins' 16th birthdays - unbelievable, how did that happen? And then number 2 will have her birthday the following week, but she is feeling a bit sensitive about her age to which the only response is clearly: wait till you get to fifty something.

So off to walk the dogs now (who are fast developing webbed feet) and resisting the urge to wear any of the several wetsuits which are still on my office floor because we couldn't carboot them last week due to ... yes, the rain cancelling the carboot sale. Meanwhile I have been enjoying a spot of Fawlty Towers on Youtube, so here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcliR8kAbzc. Any similarities between members of the cast and our dear friends who run the best B&B in the Lake District are entirely ...um... deliberate!

The peace that passes all understanding...

On Easter Monday evening, we (my beloved and I plus three of the four children and one granny) found ourselves at our local pub for an early supper. Our lovely friends from our village had decided to do likewise and were there with two of their three offspring plus a brace of grannies. They, like us, had realised that they really needed not to cook another meal. In fact, they had totalled up that they had served over 50 meals during the Easter break and we were probably not far behind. In fact, my beloved was quite happy to rustle up a curry on Monday night but I couldn't face the ensuing mess in the kitchen and so we ate out on the largesse of the resident granny.

We are usually packed to the gunnels at Easter and Christmas with all four children home plus a boyfriend and a granny. Luckily this time no-one brought their pets as well because that does precipitate a sense of humour failure on my part. Anyway we had also had a visit from the other granny and her husband so we had done the family thing big style.

Today I put the granny on the train back to the Midlands and I and my little house on the prairie heaved a sigh of relief that we are now back to normal population-wise - two parents, two teenagers, two dogs and yes, daughter number 2 who has come back home for a while. And although it is Easter and not Christmas it made me think about the innkeeper in the Nativity.

Imagine, if you will, you learn that thousands of people are about to turn up in your town and that you are the proud owner of Bethlehem's equivalent of the Hotel du Vin. Great, you think to yourself, we'll spruce up the rooms, maybe slap on a mud hut extension and then we'll pack them in for the great taxpaying weekend and make a pile. And then, of course, you hear that your mother-in-law will be coming and will need a room and that is quickly followed by all the members of your extended family who all have to be in Bethlehem for the taxation jamboree. Suddenly your great moneymaking enterprise in which you have already made a considerable investment in art deco light fittings and shower attachments is being overrun with relatives who expect to stay gratis. So when the very expectant lady in blue and her rather harassed husband turn up you wonder which of your relatives you can turn out of their luxury accommodation, only to realise that, actually, if anyone gets asked to move there will be the mother and father of all family rows. Personally I feel sorry for him. And if any more of Noah's relatives had turned up we probably wouldn't have zebras (actually if his sons had been single, we probably would still have unicorns).

So here we are, after another big family weekend which was great fun, relaxing back into what passes for normal in this house, and very nice it is too.

So a quick update (in case you missed it on facebook) of the annual Easter egg hunt: 96 eggs were hidden in the garden very early on Sunday morning, after the church service on the top green in the village at 6.15am and breakfast in the small hall. Child number 4 was the runaway winner with child 2 coming in second and complaining bitterly that her younger sibling had been aided by the official referee. The stewards' enquiry rejected that accusation and the result stands. Number 1's boyfriend came a very creditable third - but he is training for the London Marathon and so is fairly nifty on his pins - with number 1 returning in fourth place. Child 3, however, proved that last year's win was a complete fluke and failed to find his quota of eggs which means there are more for me to find when I'm gardening for the next few weeks.

We are now rushing headlong into the tennis, cricket and GCSE season and are hoping for success in all three - it may kill me!

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.