Lest We Forget...

It seems to me an extraordinary thing that we can, on the one hand, regard ourselves as the most sophisticated and advanced species on the planet and yet, on the other hand, still be fighting with each other all over the world. That said, at this time of year, I think a lot about the soldiers who have fought and died for this country since the Great War to the present day.

Usually on Remembrance Sunday, a group (I know, there will be a correct technical word relating to the number etc) of Army Cadets from the Apprentice College in Harrogate come to our village church. We look at them - their incredibly shiny boots, their immaculate uniform and most of all, their very young faces. I always wonder where they will be in twelve months' time - Afghanistan, Libya...? And my heart bleeds for these young men that they may not come home to their families, their mothers, their girlfriends. And when they read Laurence Binyon's words: "They shall not grow old..." I pray that my son will not hear the call to arms in his lifetime.

They read out the names of the fallen soldiers of our village. The numbers from the Great War are heart-breaking. Our village must have been quite small then, and every family will have lost someone close to them. How hard for that generation to pick themselves up and move on only to offer up their young men again just a generation or two later. Not young boys who wanted a career in the army but farm labourers, butchers and bakers who never thought that another war after the Great War could happen.

This year, there were no young cadets with their shiny boots as their commander had deemed it too expensive to transport small groups all around the area. We missed them and we thought of them nonetheless with their short hair and scrubbed young faces.

For the last four years, since child 3 was 11, he has played the Last Post on his cornet at the service. The first year he played, he was terrified. Afraid of messing up in front of soldiers and congregation, playing those extraordinary poignant notes that capture the emotions, playing the notes into the silence. Now he is still nervous on the morning but, I think, considers it an honour. And this year, without the young cadets, he no longer looked the small boy amongst young men but a young man himself.

When I sat down to write this, I looked up the whole of Laurence Binyon's poem. It still holds good for today and perhaps, those warmongers with young soldiers' blood on their hands should read this:

For The Fallen
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, 
England mourns for her dead across the sea. 
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit, 
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal 
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres, 
There is music in the midst of desolation 
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young, 
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. 
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; 
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn. 
At the going down of the sun and in the morning 
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; 
They sit no more at familiar tables of home; 
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; 
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound, 
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, 
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known 
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, 
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; 
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, 
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Postscript: Last year, my beloved and I went to Washington and it was hugely moving visiting the Vietnam Memorial. To see name after name after name etched on the stone only reminds me of the futility of war. How little we have learnt.

Sunday Night Club

Sometimes, weeks in this house are so hectic that I often say a prayer on a Sunday night before I go sleep that I will survive the week ahead without dropping the ball. Packed with commitments - work, school, sports, social - and all the time, I am somehow keeping a diary for everyone, ensuring that the resident children have the necessary kit for each day ahead - swimming things, tennis things, trumpet - with fingers crossed that they have assembled the correct homework.

When we get to Friday, exhausted, I think, 'ha! made it through again' and look at the commitments for the weekend - ours and the children's who still require ferrying about to work, cricket, golf, extra maths and their social lives. Each week, I promise myself that at the weekend there will be all manner of jobs done - in the garden, clean the car (actually that's not true - car cleaning, I would like to remind my family, is not and never will be in my job description), in the house, decorating and all the other stuff. Sometimes it gets done or at least part of it generally does but jobs are never finished which is why my house is like the Forth Road Bridge - always a work in progress.

And then Sunday comes, and once the ferrying about is done, weeds pulled and other jobs started (but not finished) and the ironing pile becomes less like Everest and more like Almscliffe Crag, my beloved cooks a very excellent roast and Sunday Night Club begins.

Now here are the constituents of what we now call Sunday Night Club - fabulous dinner (not cooked by me but probably involving Biblical amounts of washing up ... by me), red wine (no apologies for this, there is no Sunday dinner without it), children - resident and otherwise, a selection of friends and lodgers and games. There is also excellent and undemanding Sunday night television but we are a little confused at the man from The Post Office (as child 3 called Larkrise to Candleford) leaving his wife and a ridiculous number of snotty-nosed children to turn up as a hobbling valet at Downton.

A proper Sunday Night Club always includes games. This means that we have to be feeling not too tired and emotional from the Saturday night - this week I was just looking for a pile of leaves to sleep under until springtime but that's what being surgically removed from the dancefloor at 2am does for you. In the summer, we play outdoor games - croquet being a particular favourite. Of course, we don't play the conventional version; this is 'extreme' croquet with molehills, slopes, flowerbeds and water hazards. Child 3 is especially proud of his skill at attaching a hosepipe to a garden implement so that if your ball comes within five yards you are almost certain to get soaked. Croquet is particularly brutal and my beloved goes from mild-mannered and charming to a complete bounder the minute a mallet is put in his hand.

Now that the evenings are drawing in, we are playing perudo which, for the uninitiated, is a dice game unsurprisingly involving lying. Recently we were selected to play in the World Championships (at a lovely house near Bolton Abbey) so much practising has been taking place. We have a league table on a blackboard in the kitchen and child 4 is currently topping the rankings. You wouldn't know, of course, unless you understood that we renamed the children recently before England disgraced themselves in the World Cup. Child 1 is Shontayne (can't accuse her of disgracing herself as she scarcely played), child 2 is Courtney (suspended during the Cup for an illegal tackle - must speak to her about that), child 3 is Alfonso (I know, he plays cricket for Somerset but actually he probably would have been as good as some of the team we took to New Zealand) and Manu is child 4. Other key players are Uncle Max - my beloved and a keen fan of the Sound of Music and Arlidge - the Barnsley lodger. Arlidge is my favourite player in the World Cup so far as he played fly-half for Japan and looks every bit as Japanese as me! Anyway, he scored all Japan's points against the French and frankly I think he should try being English - like Manu.

So all are welcome here on a Sunday night, provided you don't want intelligent conversation. We'll be playing games, shouting at the television (well, X Factor and Strictly do call for a lot of shouting) and enjoying a big feed with lashings (as Enid Blyton would say) of red wine. Oh, and we recently had an American here for SNC proving that we are not just two countries divided by a common language to quote Winston Churchill but two countries divided by the knife and fork! I think I'll stick to our way.

"A time of innocence, a time of confidences..."

Over a year ago, I took the train to London and, in trepidation, met up for the first time in over thirty years two of my best friends from school. It was, in anticipation, a terrifying ordeal. We had been in touch on and off over the years but the three of us probably had not been together since our early twenties which, in case you don't know, is a very long time ago.

I heard something on the radio the other day about how, on the day you leave school, you really can't imagine never, never seeing your school peers again. I can't clearly remember my last day. There was no great hurrah for the leavers and I seem to think we just drifted away ... into town to shop or onto buses. We were uncelebrated and already surplus to the school. How unlike today with leavers' balls and special assemblies. We just disappeared into the ether - some of us (not many and not me, to university), some to college (quite different and for the educationally under-achieving - ie me) and some to the world of work. In the early 70s, all most of our parents hoped for was for us to marry well - as opposed to marrying often, but that's another story. A girls' school in the seventies was a very different beast from today with girls fast becoming the master race.

Anyway, we met, my lovely friends and I, in London and spent twenty four hours together reliving those years at school - the friends, the less-than-friends, the teachers, the pranks and the punishments. I left, feeling, well, relieved that I had survived the mini-reunion. I was, like most I suppose, not entirely happy either at school or at home in those years. And it was very stressful being a short, flat-chested teenage girl surrounded by what looked to me at the time like superwomen.

Since then, we have kept better in touch, shared jokes and experiences over the internet and become proper friends again. We know quite a lot about each other's lives now and how differently things have turned out for the three of us - all having our share of happiness and tragedy. And we are scattered across the country so we can only get together when a proper effort is made.

This year, and the point of my ramblings, is that we met at my mum's house and went to see our O level English play performed at Stratford which is, how appropriately, Macbeth. Now this production does not have witches per se, but for one night only, we three were there in the audience - if only they had known!

The other things we did included a very nice dinner at Lamb's on Sheep Street which I had booked, unconsciously, in my name - cue for animal impressions - and which seemed to cause amusement and, more importantly, we went back to school.

School was bigger but smaller, much, much smarter, the same and very different. Everywhere was carpeted which meant that the thundering of 300 girls down the main wooden staircase probably doesn't have the same ear-shattering effect. But as we recognised the old bits, sometimes not in the places they used to be, the memories tumbled out and we laughed at our old selves. Standing outside what was the headmistress's office (feared but not loved) I remembered word-for-word the Horatius poem I had been made to learn, aged 12, for being late for a Latin lesson. I still know it. The terror of the time has embedded it in my memory for ever.

We have grown up, we three, very different and yet, when we get together, the years ebb away and we are as we were then - old friends.

With thanks to Simon and Garfunkel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPTOY8FrvNw

"Let's Roll" - Todd Beamer RIP

This time last year, my beloved and I were on a plane to the US on our way to what turned out to be a fantastic weekend jam-packed with meeting friends - English and American, sightseeing in New York and Washington and watching the men's semi finals at the US Open Tennis at Flushing Meadow. I have been similarly gripped by the tennis this year - at least I have, when it hasn't been raining.

But I've also be gripped by the documentaries about 9/11 and particularly moved by the immense courage of the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who gave their lives to prevent a further air crash in Washington on that fateful day. What brought it home to me at the time were the last words of Todd Morgan Beamer who, like many of the passengers on the plane which had been hijacked by terrorists, was using his phone to contact family and loved ones before certain death. His last call had reached the operator Lisa Jefferson and he reported to her that the hijackers had killed one passenger and had taken over the cockpit, wounding a member of the crew. He, like many of his fellow passengers, knew that the plane had turned south easterly towards Washington and he and the others also knew by then that the World Trade Centre had been hit by two hijacked planes.

Todd Beamer was just 32 with a wife and two young sons, Drew and David and his wife was pregnant with their third child who was born four months later - a daughter, Morgan Kay. He and his wife were Sunday school teachers in their spare time.

There were 37 passengers on the plane that day and 7 crew. Four of these passengers were terrorists. Flight 93 was due to take off at 8.00am which would have been at a similar time to the other 3 aircraft hijacked on that day. However, the airport at Newark was experiencing some congestion and the flight actually took off at 8.42am with all four hijackers seated at the front of the plane in first class. As news came through of the other hijacked planes, air traffic control informed the crew to be especially vigilant against passengers trying to get into the cockpit. The message was acknowledged by the crew and that was the last transmission made by them at 9.27am before the hijack took place at 9.28am. By this time both planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and Flight 77 was about to crash into the Pentagon.

The passengers and crew were moved to the back of the plane whilst the terrorists instructed them that there was a bomb on board and to remain seated. The remaining passengers made calls on their mobiles and on the air phones to family and loved ones and to airline officials on the ground. Then they took a vote on what action to take and, probably led by Jeremy Glick, a 31-year old sales and marketing executive, they decided to "rush the hijackers". Todd Beamer's last words were: "Are you ready guys? OK. Let's roll." and those were amongst the last words heard from any of the passengers before the plane crashed into a reclaimed mine at 10.13am at 563 miles per hour. All 44 passengers, crew and hijackers were killed.

The extraordinary courage of this group of passengers who did not sit back in their seats, hoping that by some chance a miracle would happen and they would be rescued, is so powerful.  Would we be as courageous and chose certain death over the smallest possibility of survival? I only hope that if we were ever called upon to do so, we too could find this sort of courage.

Todd Morgan Beamer, 1968 - September 11 2001- RIP

Practically Perfect in Every Way?

So far this week (and it's only Thursday morning) I have been to the chiropractor and the chiropodist. The chiropractor because I did something to my back when I was cycling on Sunday morning and it had been given the usual 48 hours to sort itself out and it hadn't, and the chiropodist because I have the most horrible feet in the known universe - ask any of my children and they will tell you this is true. And I realise, just as I am preparing to encase my entire body in thermals for another six months, that if one took the whole body maintenance thing seriously, there would be no time to do anything else - from a woman's point of view anyway.

When you are young, children take note, you have far fewer issues in terms of maintenance. Yes, I know that lovely (and definitely p.p.i.e.w.) number 2 daughter does all the hair, nails, going to the gym, fake tan stuff and when I say, and only if I'm feeling daring, that I think she looks a tad orange, she will tell me that by tomorrow she will be the perfect shade. She always is, but only because I think all the residue has come off on my sheets. As you get older, there are just more and more things that need attention. For example, if you really were to do the job properly, you would be (starting at the top) having your hair regularly cut and highlighted, having a facial and waxing, paying proper attention to your eyebrows, checking on nose hair (I'm not sure about ear hair although I know for a fact that this is a man problem. Will someone tell me if I have hairy ears?), going to the optician and the dentist regularly, more waxing, manicure, pedicure and so on. And that's before you go to the gym, tennis, pilates, cycling, golf, running (not doing that anymore since my knees starting to make their presence felt in a big way) and so on. So it could be a full-time job and I am sure there are ladies out there who do all these things. How do they find the time?

It wouldn't be so bad if the issues didn't get worse as you get older. For example, take hair, it grows on your head, then it goes grey and the grey hairs are not the same as the other hairs, they have a whole twirly, wiry quality all of their own. Then there's all the other hair which grows in places where you don't want it and if you don't keep on top of it, then the only job option will be as an extra in the remake of Planet of the Apes. My doctor friend says he often sees ladies of a certain age with rather hairy faces - nice! But in defence of the hairy-faced ladies, when your eyesight starts to go, it's hard to see the hairs and it makes plucking/waxing even more challenging.

Which brings me to the issue of the eyesight. Last winter, the optician said to me that I would soon need glasses for driving. I told him I thought he was barking up the wrong tree - I can see a tennis ball perfectly well so why would I need glasses for driving? Anyway, I had a spare set of frames and we got lenses put in them and I ignored them for several months. But in the last week or so, I have felt the need to wear them and much as I hate to admit it, he is right. In fact, the whole eyesight issue is perhaps the most worrying of all. I can't see where I have hit the golf ball (unless I have dribbled it about 12 feet along the ground - which is most of the time).

Yesterday I did quite a lot of writing (writing chums, please note!) and by the end of the day my eyes were so tired that I couldn't see to do the crossword. Who made those numbers so small? Don't they know that older ladies with occasionally hairy faces like to tackle it in the early evening with inadequate lighting?

Then there's keeping fit. Whatever exercise I do for one bit of me doesn't seem to have any effect on the other bits. As I write this I am pilate-ing with various muscles in the certain knowledge that it won't help with my fitness for cycling up hills or my golf swing. I know I am somewhat obsessive about sport but each year, I am slower and less fit and it feels like pushing an avalanche up hill. However, I have promised to start zumba in the village hall next week and I daresay that might do the trick - ever the optimist!


So feeling more Nanny McPhee (complete with warts) than Mary Poppins -p.p.i.e.w. but soldiering on and waiting for the odd-job man to come and sort out the damp - which is a house maintenance issue, you'll be pleased to hear!

View from the Pointy Bit

A few days ago, I was standing at the end of the world. Or rather, the end of the world so far as Portuguese chaps in doublet and hose a few hundred years ago were concerned. And having stood there, I can well imagine why they might think that the point on the horizon where the sky meets the sea should be the end (after all, it's a long way to Boston, Mass. from there). We were at Cape St Vincent at the most pointy end of Portugal on holiday with our extended family (extended, that is, apart from the absence of the very lovely number 2 daughter who had to stay at home and work and look after the dogs). The team for this year's holiday was my beloved and myself, daughter 1 plus boyfriend (a very good sport in every sense of the word and therefore fitted in well), children 3 and 4, my beloved's brother and his two boys. An excellent mix of foodies, sporties and smarties!

The great thing about the pointy bit is that you can do gentle beaches and little waves on the south coast or you can go for the big waves and watching the surfing fraternity on the west coast and the mix of the two is, for us, a winner. Now I must at this point explain that we (the beloved and I) have been down this end a few times as we have dear friends who own a villa down there and have kindly invited us out to see this very special bit of Portugal which is as different from the Yorkshire-by-the-sea, golfing bit near Val and Quinta as the Dales are from the centre of Leeds. These dear friends were also there during our holidays with part of their extended family and the whole melange of brothers and sisters, half brothers, step children and sundry boy and girlfriends which we amounted to in total is magic.

I do, as you will know by now, love the big family thing. And the pleasure that we get from being not just with the ones we live with all the time, but the ones we love and don't see very often is something that cannot be underestimated. The brother in law and his boys also live in a pointy place. They live at the furthest corner of England where probably similarly doubleted and hosed gents looked across and thought they were at the end of the world (clearly they would discount France on the grounds that in those days we owned large chunks of it - or thought we did anyway). So we don't see them often enough and it's a joy to get together and share months of experiences and humour all packed into a short space of time.

So that's it for another year and I sense that what lies ahead for me anyway is a series of challenges and changes for which I may, or may not be prepared. We'll see, but change is in the air and I shall be embracing it. And in the meantime, I am sustained by my lovely, big family and our gorgeous friends and all that they bring to our lives. Slushy perhaps, but true nonetheless.

And here's a picture of our own pointy bit - the amazing pyramid of this year's holiday team. Rather proud of this actually...!

Postscript: We had one very sad bit of news on holiday... The amazing Uncle Bill Hook passed away. The most modest gentleman who regarded his life as so unimportant in the grand scheme of things and yet was, amongst his many other achievements, the English translator in Colditz. He told us tales of meeting Rommel and his life in Colditz as a prisoner of war before he came home to marry the equally formidable Auntie Margot and become a Sheriff in Edinburgh. He was especially fond of number 1 daughter who was at university in Edinburgh and they became great friends including the daughter taking her 90-something great uncle on holiday! Amongst our many memories of Bill will be his attendance of number 1's graduation. We were only allocated two seats for me and the beloved but Uncle Bill said not to worry, he could get in most places. We were sitting in the gods of the McEwan Hall with the other parents before the graduation started waiting for number 1's arrival. No sign of Uncle Bill. Then the dignitaries arrived including a member of the Japanese royal family who sat in a magnificent chair like a throne. And in the next throne-like chair... Uncle Bill. Unforgettable and very much loved. RIP.

I think I may have blown my cover ... part 2

I’ve just read the blog I wrote earlier in the week which is not yet posted because I am still on my writing course and, as part of the isolation process, there is no internet access. If you’re reading these two blogs back to back, then you may be pleased to hear that things have moved on.

My fellow students are, as I surmised earlier in the week, terrifyingly brilliant. They are also very supportive and friendly with only one or two exceptions. I won’t write anything about the exceptions as I suspect that there will be a mass-sharing of email addresses and they might track this blog down.

Without naming names, some of them have been absolute heroes to me this week. The isolation, combined with the pressure of having to read stuff out to the assembled brains trust, creates huge pressure and earlier in the week, I cracked. I’d had a couple of occasions in the workshops where, like the Psammead in the Five Children and It, I would have dug myself a hole in the sand and disappeared without trace. Writing stuff about work is easy compared to this soul-searching process and the feeling of being judged was overwhelming. Also I blame my natural competitive instinct. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s that creative writing courses are, like Pilates, not for the competitive.

I’ve also learnt - big cliche coming up, no pun intended - not to judge a book by its cover. My breakthrough moment was sharing my sense of humour with the four chairs lady. Although she had unwittingly started the downward spiral into Monty Python-esque farce (to which the rest of the room were oblivious), when I told her, she roared with laughter and she then spent the next meal-time attempting to establish whether people in HongKong like Monty Python to see how far she could wind up the lady who lived in a cubicle. We were off and Four Chairs and I have shared some very unlikely moments of sheer hysterics - laughing at things that the rest of the crew have no idea about. Naughty, naughty. But the laughter has released me and I can now look at the rest of them without terror and even contemplate my reading tonight with only a slight fluttering in the stomach.

The last two nights (last night and tonight) we each read something we have written, up to 10 minutes in length. Last night, various people read things, most of which had been written before they came and some already published. The standard is phenomenal. Tonight it is me. I am reading something which I have written here and which is a part of one of the two stories I intend to write before the Alzheimer’s sets in. My effort, which I stayed up until the small hours writing, is not just new, but scarcely off the delivery table in the entirely medical sense of the word.

Wish me luck.

Postscript: the lady from HongKong is called Doris. My brother, who is currently between marriages, refers to his prospective girlfriends as Dorises. Why I felt the need to tell the assembled group this at lunchtime I have no idea. I may have to buy Doris flowers by way of apology. (Actually she offered to go out with my brother, making her the Doris Doris but that’s way too much to consider!)