Janh1's Blog

The Thought That Counts

2009-10-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

A pal came back from a nice trip to Holland and presented me with a carrier bag full of stuff. She's too generous and wonderfully good at getting decent presents.

I snatched the bag gratefully. It's been a while since I got a prez.

“Ooooo. What's in here?” I plunged a hand in, feeling quite jolly excited. I hardly ever do cool, except with strangers.

I was hoping for cannabis cake. My fingers felt something round - a bit like a muffin but rather more solid. Maybe it had gone stale. I didn't mind if it was a week old.

It turned out to be cheese. Paprika gouda cheese. Oh well.

“Go on,” she urged. “There's something that'll make you laugh. Just your thing.”

My fingers found two little objects that clanked together.

A tiny pair of china clogs on strings. Kind of cute but not exactly hilarious and so far, no cannabis. I'm an ungrateful cow sometimes.

“It's probably in the bottom of the bag. Keep going” she said.

A tube of something.

“Oooh cannabis chocolate...???”

“It's just white chocolate, you noggin. You like white chocolate.”

Yes I do but sometimes I just crave an illegal substance. Never had one, but that doesn't stop me craving one. Chocolate is ok though. It contains nil calories as long as you don't pay for it personally.

I groped further in the bag. My fingers felt something knitted. A scarf. A scarf with a pom-pom?? Probably not a scarf, then.

Oh. A hat. A hat like the hat in the film “About a Boy.” A hat to engender sympathy from the soft-hearted but much more likely to attract raucous ridicule from those of sound mind.

You could have cut the anticlimax with a knife.

“See. It's funny isnt it? Do you like it?” she smiled.

“All the cyclists were wearing them in Amsterdam. They're really warm apparently.”

Subtext: “You're completely indiscriminate about what you wear so here's something to make grown men weep and small children roll in the gutter with mirth.” Bee-atch.

“Well, it looks warm,” I said. I pulled it on. From nowhere there were at least four phones produced so the owners could eagerly snap amusing pictures.

I did look completely ridiculous. The hat is grey and cream knitted woolly hat with a grey pom pom on top. It has ear flappy bits and woolly extensions like plaits dangling down past both ears.

I simply can't imagine what kind of woman would look good in it. I certainly don't. It makes me look like a Greenham Common woman with special needs or a Swiss weather clock girl who had been kept in a cupboard by her dad for so long that she lost all her fashion sense.

“Oh yes. It is warm. I'm glowing already. Thank you.” I doubt it sounded very convincing but at least I tried.

“You can wear it on your bike under your helmet or something.”

She means well and usually has impeccable taste but has revealed nakedly that she knows nothing about cycling or helmets or hats. Reminded me a bit of my Aunty Gerty who bought me a cap gun for Christmas when I was five. Dad thought she'd got the labels wrong and it was meant for my brother but he was incensed to find she had bought it for me. She worked at the toy factory and was ahead of her time, staunchly resisting sexist stereotypes. Dad gave it to my brother anyway.

I have accepted it in the spirit with which it was given – as a joke hat. I'll wear it on Bonfire Night, to a firework display at least thirty miles from home where no-one knows me. I'll wear a pair of dark glasses to make extra-sure I can't be identified.

Thereafter I will save it for my eccentric old age and wear it, along with a fur coat, while pedalling along on the Oxford bicycle I've promised myself with a big basket on the front carrying two Tibetan spaniels.

It will be clear where the hat originated. People will see the "Amster" knitted in large cream letters across the back of it (the dam is out of view over my right ear).

People might assume I've been at the tea and cannabis cakes. They might even be right.

Curlers talk.... costs lives

2009-10-18T02:45:00.000-07:00

I'm going to visit Aunty Ivy soon in Wales. She's in her eighties now, still lives in the same council house she's lived in since she was married and you know what? If I get there before midday, I bet she'll be in her curlers.

She used to tie a nice flowery satin head scarf over them if she popped down the road to the shops in her housecoat and slippers for a pack of Capstan or whatever she's smoking these days.

It makes me feel a bit guilty actually. I don't smoke and I don't use curlers. I don't even have a housecoat.

I'm failing in my duty to keep alive these proud family traditions; traditions which were alive long before Hilda Ogden was even a twinkle in a scriptwriter's eye.

I'm at that age where, by rights, I should have been in curlers for at least a decade and in nylon housecoats for five years.

All my aunties used to wear curlers – overnight and definitely for the morning. They smelled of setting lotion. Some of my aunties used to enjoy going out on the town, ballroom dancing, so the hair was an important part of going out.

My life is infinitely more boring then theirs. I work and cycle and DT man is not cut out for tripping the light fantastic so there is no call for glamorous high-maintenance evening hairstyles.

Mumsie was of the old school – although perhaps with the advent of Strictly Come Dancing it's a school that has built itself a glitzy extension for the millions of extra enthusiasts – she was a ballroom dancer so there would be an early bath and hair wash and the rollers would be in from 4pm.

She kept them in an old Roses chocolates tin – yellow, pink and blue for different quantities of curly volume on different parts of the head. I used to do the back ones for her, marching down the head to the nape of her neck. It was a kind of privilege, bring allowed to help with mum's curlers; one of those peaceful, intimate little gestures that re-enforce the bond.

Come to think of it, I'm probably the first woman in my family not to use curlers. My favourite nan didn't go for curlers often – preferring an intricate system of metal hair clips and clamps like miniature man-traps to seize recalcitrant waves and force them into position. I have a hazy memory of using one to inflict minor bodily harm on my brother but I carry not guilt. Low-risk torture in the home is merely preparation for life and anyway, isn't that what big sisters are for? Nan's head was so heavy with metalwork that a half-decent magnet situated out in the back yard would have held her firmly against the wall. That and the metalwork in her substantial stays.

My posher nan did curlers too but she went in for perms and wash and sets for the big occasions like funerals or when her church choir did a gig in another church further up the valley.

Long, straight, unfeasibly shiny hair (yes the hair models in magazines have “shine” solution ironed on to it) still seems de rigeur these days. No-one much wants the shorter waves of the incomparable Sophia Loren, the soft longer style of Lauren Bacall or the ditzy blonde curls of Lucille Ball.

Except in Liverpool, that is. According to the Post earlier this year the trend which Aunty Ivy has been keeping alive for all these years is coming back big-time.

Girls are once again going out in their curlers.

“There’s no shame in going out into town shopping in rollers; in fact it’s almost a status thing. It announces the fact you’re going out that night and intend to have the biggest, most gorgeous hair possible,” said Andrea Daley, a stylist at Barbara Daley Hair and Beauty in Lime Street.

“Putting curlers in gives the hair body and bounce, rather than make it curly, and it will give your style longevity helping it last through the night.”

Maybe it's time for me to eschew the hair straighteners and do battle with the styling lotion and some big fat rollers.

Then I just need to get a housecoat. Cerise nylon, I think. With a big patch pocket full of pegs. Oh and probably a plastic rain bonnet – in case I get caught by a shower as I'm popping to the shops in my fluffy slippers.

I have a responsibility not to let these traditions die – besides, Aunty Ivy will be proud of me.

Dear Diary

2009-10-01T14:46:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a book in them. I wrote my book when I was about thirteen. It was a chunky A5 size garishly-floral five year diary which I kept at the back of the bottom drawer.

I recorded my life. There were no statistics, no graphs, no pie charts. I don't do numbers. I do words and pictures. It was the roller-coaster of teenage emotions; as much a cliché and more so than that last phrase. Home life, school life, personal life, very personal life, meals, music, friends, enemies (there were none, actually but I was very afraid that psychotic first year Mandy Phillips who I saw every morning on the way to the school bus would one day catch my eye, take some mysterious offence and duff me up thoroughly).

I wrote in it every day and shared my innermost thoughts. It might have been a publishing sensation. I was a diarist of the Wilde school.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensation to read in the train,” he said.

Mine was no-holds-barred. No point otherwise. I wouldn't have taken the risk of reading it in public, mainly because it was so obviously a diary with its yellow orange green and black padded flowery cover.

So it was with some interest that I noted the review of a new book out today – Cringe: Toe-Curlingly Embarrassing Teenage Diaries, Letters and Bad Poetry, edited by Sarah Brown – a brilliantly simple yet amusing collection of teenage diary extracts.

This, from Pip Hawkes(14) rang a few bells. "I’ve just decided —– well — not decided — but found out — I’m nihilistic! God – Dad’s just come in and told me to tidy my room — it is BLOODY TIDY!! He must have had a bad day at work — WANKER. "

Liz Banks, at 15, was a little old to have written this, but I completely sympathise about Rob Andrew. "Why am I unhappy?

Because mum and dad row Because I have school work to do

Because Rob Andrew [England rugby union fly half] and Graeme Hick [England and Worcestershire batsman] are married Because I have GCSEs next year

Because I am ugly

Because Adrian didn’t fancy me

Because I’ve done no art [I was referring to art homework, rather than art generally. I think.]

Because I have no friends I like

Because my room’s a mess

Because there’s a Conservative government."

I like a lot of the extracts from this book, which is odd because I don't tend to have much empathy with other people's diaries. I didn't recognise the Adrian Mole thing. Similarly I couldn't relate to Bridget Jones (although I did enjoy the film) and the singleton's obsession with control over cigarettes and chocolate.

But I did recognise some of my old self – or should have been young, only partially developed self? - in these extracts.

The blindly polarised black-and-white emotions of my teenage years are all there, albeit expressed differently.

This, from Jo Wickham is a perfect textual strop. “I hate Mum. She said I can’t have a coat as I still fit in my old one. I’m gonna feel like a prick if I wear a coat everyone was wearing last year. She’s such a bitch. It doesn’t cost that much and I need a coat. She’s such a slapper. She’s only doing it coz I get most things I want so she wants to say no, so I’m not spoilt. She’s such a bitch. And I’ve lost my keys and she’ll have an eppy if she finds out. Oh I hate her and I hate myself for losing them. God I’m pissed off — I know it’s only keys but if I’ve lost them I’ll go mad — I hate losing things but I do a lot. Oh I’m soo mad.”

I was too much of a bolshie control freak to ever smoke or try drugs but Claire Bateson (18) illustrates the breathtakingly self-obsessed dream-world of LSD: “I am writing this on acid, the tail-end of a trip. I need this time alone with pen and paper to express myself. I feel really happy to be me – more gorgeous and beautiful than ever before, me in all senses. Feminine – oh so feminine – and the prettiest, most beautiful girl that ever lived. I am so pretty tonight, in the red light and the flickering of the candle. I am a goddess, and only James has truly seen and appreciated this.”

My diary was much more likely to have read “I hate my dad. It's so stupid having to be home by 9pm. It's sooo unfair. My brother is an idiot. I keep telling mum I hate kidneys but she keeps making me eat them. I saw Alison being bullied today and didn't do anything about it. I hate them smoking on the bus. It makes me smell terrible. Roger P. looked at me today, I'm sure he did. He is still wonderful. I wonder what his voice sounds like. Mr Davis has never heard of Bigbury. Mr Cross leaned over me again in Eng Lit, too close. I could smell his breath. Wrote a love letter to Roger. Finished my portrait of Elton John..... Steve gave me Enigma Variations. We were on the phone later for 94 minutes. A new record. Just as well it was free.”

I don't keep a regular diary now but if I'm emotionally fragile, the first thing I do is reach for a pen or the keyboard and write great wodges of stuff. Seems to work and I leave these scrolls hanging in cyberspace like so many Serrano hams – tasty chunks of perfectly expressed consciousness never to be found.

Distance, instead of lending enchantment, lends a particular ludicrousness. Reading back a month later always reveals the pathetic cow. There are still lingering traces of the bolshie teenager but I argue more with myself these days.

I was fond of writing in code for a while - code as recommended by the I-Spy Book of Spycraft. It held up the writing though so I reverted to plain old English.

The raw undisguised, uncoded truth proved to be my undoing. My sainted mumsie did the one stinky, misguided – and subsequently regretted - thing she ever committed in her life; she read my diary.

I got home from school one day and she confronted me, white as a sheet, zombie-starey-eyed, shaken and ranting incoherently. I gathered she had found the diary but she was unspecific as to which bits had particularly shocked or offended her.

It could have been one of several things. She'd led a sheltered life up until then and had mistakenly presumed I was doing the same.

She hadn't told dad, which was just as well. I asked for it back but she announced “I've burned it.”

I believe she did. It was that good.

All for the best though, probably.

This was back in typewriter days when a computer would have taken up the entire first floor or the house.

If it had been now, I would have been spilling my guts all over the internet. Oh what a foolish and regrettable thing to do...

And lastly, his sweetly illustrates the tribulations of the romantic cyclist:

Andy Foster (15) Sunday, February 23 [after church youth club]
"There was no push away when I put my arm around her. But ahhhh I didn’t get a kiss off Gemma at the end because I was on bicycle and couldn’t get off in time before she’d disappeared"

Veggie trouble

2009-10-01T14:42:00.001-07:00

Why bother to eat weeds then there are so many perfectly pleasant vegetables?

To stir-fry nettle tips, toss dandelion leaves in salads and munch fat hen from the woods (can't recall it's Latin name but it's definitely edible and salady) just seems unnecessarily esoteric when you can tuck into lovely pile of steaming runner beans and a jolly good King Edward-based champ, buttered swede and carrot or brilliant shredded Savoy cabbage.

And it must be said that sprouts are an absolute joy.

But who, in their right mind, would want to eat a thistle?

People around Roscoff love them. There are hectares of them growing in the fine sandy soil. Artichokes along with rose onions, are the local speciality vegetables.

Artichokes are outstanding architectural plants thrusting those proud green global heads skywards. The stems are enormous. They could have been designed to be Oberon's mace but Oberon would have to be a pretty beefy king of the fairies to hold one up without getting a bad back.

The leaves remind me a lot of acanthus, beloved of William Morris and used often in his designs.

So as I was taken out for a birthday supper in Roscoff, it seemed only fair to try the local produce and go for the artichoke starter before the seafood platter and (and I was hoping it would be good and it was) that gorgeously custardy Far Breton tart.

Of course I'd had previous artichoke experience. From memory, they were an inch or or long, a soft kind of leafy thing pickled in some kind of vinaigrette. I'd had them from various delicatessens. Tasty. I imagined they must be extracted from deep within the giant heads that we'd seen in the fields.

The artichoke the waiter placed in front of me was bigger than anything we'd seen growing outdoors. They must expand when they're cooked because this baby filled the entire plate; a substantial round of green bracts that looked like a half-closed water lily.

There was a small pot of mayo-type sauce alongside. DT man tucked into his “safe” choice of fish soup, much amused.

I cast a furtive look at the nearest diners. No-one else had a giant green vegetable in front of them. I would have to experiment. I gingerly picked at one of the bracts. It came away easily. It was far too tough to eat but there was a fatter bit at the base which was quite nice if dipped in the sauce first.

Mmm. Not unpleasant. I continued until there was a pile of greenery to one side and my diligent plucking had revealed a central boss that just looked odd - like I'd revealed a small alien craft which might fire up, lift vertically, laser me in the eye and shoot out of the window.

Think about it. If aliens are among us, vegetables would be a damn good place in which to hide. Especially if their craft can withstand boiling water.

By now, I'd lost interest in green things and was thinking about langoustine and another glass of fizz. I pushed the remains to one side.

I had sent a pic of the artichoke from my mobile to no 2 son in London. We send each other food pics to make each other envious. He was still at work. He was much impressed and even texted some advice on tackling it.

'S'ok.' I replied confidently. 'It is done. I have eaten it.'

I could have sworn that I had eaten it. The waiter had other ideas when he came to clear the plates.

“But madame...” he cried in consternation.

“...you 'ave left ze art!!”

Bloody drama queen, I thought. It might be art to you sunshine but seventeen leaves is enough for anyone. He was taking the Pissarro.

He shrugged and made one last desperate effort with me.

“But ze ART....ze art is ze best part!”

I waved it away and he took it, rolling his eyes (men have been doing that at me a lot lately but he was the first) and muttering Frenchisms under his breath.

“He's cursing you,” grinned DT man. He loves it when I upset other men. It helps him feel less victimised.

“E is saying 'ze bloody eeenglishwoman she knows nuzzink.'”

Wrong on both counts. I'm Welsh and I know when I've had enough thistle. Thistles are tricky.

Much easier to ask for a plate of onions next time I want to try the local veggie without getting into trouble...

t-t-t-t-t-testicles

2009-10-01T14:39:00.001-07:00

There have been developments on the fffffridge fffront. That chap who was so contemptuous of my interest in his fridge has capitulated and revealed all.

That just demonstrates the power of a blog. The depth of curiousity about fridge contents and the solidarity shown by my brothers and sisters here persuaded him that it would be churlish to withhold access for a moment longer.

He still thinks it's quite sad of me to want to know but hell, I can live with that. I'm quite looking forward to a visit to the Johnny Onion Museum very soon so that will represent new depths of freakery, according to the friends who have vowed never to come on holiday with me. But that is their loss. They will never know the joy of diving for the purple sea urchin.

So the contents started normally enough with UHT milk (Yuch!!!) and eggs "Unidentifiable date" - pretty well guaranteed salmonella, then.

He fished out something solid of irregular shape in a plastic bag. He dropped to the floor. It didn't even crack. He had no idea what it was.

"Quite dense," he said. "A bit scared to try that."

Tellingly (though obviously I didn't say a word) he put it BACK in the fridge!

Course, if he was a serial killer, he would say something like "a bit scared to try that" wouldn't he? Ah-haaaa. It would be quite a convincing cover story if the object was in fact a body part that he'd air-dried like serrano ham. I could just imagine him hacking bits off and devouring them if he gets the munchines while watching a movie.

An empty bottle.

Sugar. Peanuts. Precisely. Who would want chilled sugar? Just imagine your builder "Oh four sugars for me darlin' - not too warm thanks."

The sugar thing completely fits in with my theory that people who aren't really interested in food fill their fridges with other things like boxes of matches, packets of screws or in this case, an empty bottle and sugar.

The freezer was no better. A weird lump of leaves in cling film. An opened ice lolly and a bag of what looked alarmingly like babys' testicles. Dozens of small, opalescent white orbs.

"They are for soup."

Yeah right. Serial baby killer. Definitely. That could be the only explanation. There was absolutely nothing in fridge or freezer, apart from the ingredients for a hideously smelly and possibly fatal omelette.

Fortunately I won't be invited for dinner. Especially now if he reads about the "serial killer" thing. My curiosity is satiated but when it comes to appetite satiation, I'll go elsewhere.

Bloodlust

2009-05-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

Is there such a phenomenon as Bank Holiday bloodlust?

There might be something in it. The Mods and Rockers always used to enjoy a nice Bank Holiday punch-up at Weston-super-Mare or Brighton.

Cheese rolling ('Cheesy' yesterday) is a Bank Holiday tradition involving the Roman-style spectacle of lemming-people risking limb and life hurling themselves down the steepest hill I've ever seen.

Admittedly, it's a bit tame for the Romans what with the "catchers" waiting at the bottom of the hill to stop uncontrolled contestants impaling themselves on the fencing. The Romans would have had hungry tigers and lions salivating at the foot of the hill and the chasers might have needed determined prodding to go down. But the whole massed chorus of baying cheering hoi polloi struck me as the kind of crowd you'd get in on a big night at the colosseum.

The other big Gloucestershire bloodlust tradition hasn't been seen for many years. It was a good one; firing a woman out of a cannon across a river.

It must be twenty five years ago at least that a guy called Joe Weston-Webb would rock up to Tewkesbury on Bank Holiday Monday with his human cannon. It was a big black home-made job about the size of a fire engine. The human was a girl called Mary, who was no more than 17 and looked 13. She probably lied about her age. A slight, slip of a thing with no glamour about her whatsoever. Not for her the Las Vegas showgirl glitz, the Madonna brassiere, the skimpy bikini or humungous improbable implants and Tangoed body. She dressed in jeans and an anonymous baggy T shirt. She looked as though she was taking a break from the milking parlour.

Her only protective clothing was a black helmet which could have been salvaged from the World War I.

Large crowds would gather alongside the River Avon after paying their groats or whatever was the currency in those days and Mary would climb on to the cannon and let herself gingerly down into the tube. The plan was to emerge head first.

There would be a significant delay of 45 minutes punctuated by announcements about delays for "important safety checks" while many hot dogs and beers were sold to the expectant masses.

Joe's henchmen had a net waiting somewhat optimistically on the other side of the River Avon.

Call it tension, call it boredom, but one or the other, or both would build until the crowd yelled along with the final countdown to blast off.

There was a minor explosion half as loud as a shotgun, wisps of smoke from the cannon and we would wait muttering "Oh my God. She's toast" until Mary's helmet appeared from the end of the muzzle. She would wave to assure everyone of her continuing health and disappear again for the cannon to be reloaded.

If we were really lucky, there would be another slightly louder explosion and Mary would be expelled, legs and arms flailing. Breaths would be held as everyone plotted her brief trajectory into the river. She generally popped up to the surface pretty quickly. Rescue personnel would heave her on boat their boat and take her to the bank where she'd clamber up to a heroine's welcome.

After at least two successive years of broken promises, there was a definite feeling that the crowds were calling out for more. Plopping into the river wasn't enough. After all, she was supposed to be shot clear across the river. That was the point. People don't like failure and lack of blood. It's tedious. No-one dared admit it but the ghouls had only turned up in order to see either a girl shot clear across the river or fodder briefly roasted inside the cannon.

I was told on the quiet that the stunt was quite safe as long as Mary landed in the river. The real risk was if by some quirk of nature, she actually did make the distance because, er, there was no direction-finder on the cannon, the net wasn't actually that big and it was much easier to miss the net than the river.

So imagine the brown trouser moment the Bank Holiday when there was really quite a large explosion (think a dozen boiled-dry eggs exploding in a saucepan in a small kitchen) and Mary flew in a perfect arc, (legs and arms aerodynamically trained by now) and cleared the Avon by an alarming margin.

It was one of those horrifying slo-mo sequences. It was looking as though, this time, this one time she was flying so far that she was also going to clear the net.

There was a choral "Ooooh..." then silence.

Some sensitive souls flinched and turned away. Mary ricocheted from the very edge of the net and bounced into the middle like a broken puppet.

The silence continued. She lay crumpled and still. Then she twitched, stretched and waved a cheerful arm with a fist clenched in victory.

She had done it. A roar of approval from the satisfied spectators. They hadn't seen blood but they had very nearly seen a tragedy. They seemed content. Jubilant, even. My knees were jelly and I felt a bit sick. For once, Joe had lived up to his promise. I vowed never to go again. Too traumatic.

I didn't need to worry. That was the last such event in Tewkesbury. I suspect that the fact that Joe had at last succeeded in his aim induced Health and Safety to step in and produce a thick raft of conditions which made a repeat performance impossible.

Joe went on with his shows elsewhere catapulting girls, wrestling crocodiles, racing goldfish.

I'm not sure he shot Mary ever again. It would be nice to think it was her swansong. She is fine, by all accounts because, dear reader, Joe married her.

I last heard of him on "Have I Got News for You" which reported a story about him using his cannon to fire chicken muck at unwelcome intruders. At least he's not firing the wife.... well, I don't think he is.. . maybe only on Bank Holidays.

Cheesy

2009-05-25T12:10:00.000-07:00

“It was never like this. This is mad. Absolutely mad.”

Capt. Sensible shrugged and frowned. He hates crowds. So do I, usually.

“It's unbelieveable.” said the son no 2's girlfriend.

“Random,” said son no 2.

We were among several thousand people gathered at Cooper's Hill near Brockworth, Gloucestershire for the annual traditional blood sport of cheese rolling. An eight pound Double Gloucester cheese is sent rolling and bouncing wildly down the slope, which varies between 1-1 to 1 in 3. People are invited to run and bounce wildly after it. They always do. The first one down wins the cheese. Hurrah.

There are four races for the chaps and one for women. In between, there are uphill races for youngsters.

Moving to Gloucestershire from Wales as a child, it was an amazing spectacle. Where I came from, the only Whitsun event was the church parade which involved wearing a new dress, white ankle socks and new white kid-leather shoes. The only danger was that of one of the banner-bearers fainting and small children being asphyxiated under a ton of heavily embroidered material.

It's a bit odd taking children to an event where the contestants might well snap a thigh bone bloodily in front of their eyes or dislocate a shoulder or break a neck. But I suppose people used to take the nippers to bear-baiting and cock-fighting before television came along.

No-one really knows how it started or when. I like to think it was a Morris Men's picnic near the flagpole at the top that got a bit drunken and lairy. Someone nicked someone else's handkerchief and a quite-cross Morris man kicked the cheese course over the edge in a fit of pique causing several hungry Morris Men to attempt to rescue it.

Today the interest was unprecedented. The usual route to Brockworth was completely jammed – so congested that the police had to close a major road and display warning signs and diversions on the M5. Knowing the geography, our party took a little detour and walked the scenic route to Cooper's Hill from the local Roman villa.

The sight that greeted us was most definitely Roman seasoned with a few Mexican waves. We joined a cheering, jostling, baying crowd of several thousand people clustered closely at the top, sides and base of the famous hill. There was absolutely no chance of getting to the sweet spot at the side of the hill where I used to sit with friends; a spot where you really appreciate the speed at which people are tumbling, tripping and falling as they rush headlong after those cheeses.

The crowd thickened. Not that it wasn't quite thick already. Why, for instance, do people take the tiny and defenceless to such massively popular events? A woman with nose rings and tattoos pushed through with a startled-looking prem baby in a baby carrier, his nasal tubes still connected indicating a certain vulnerability. Another woman pushed by thrusting a lost, tear-stained little girl in front of her. A man carried a petrified Jack Russell puppy.

Soon it was nearly impossible to move. Interesting to observe people at close quarters. The smelly, the pissed, the only vaguely interested, the foreigners, the relentlessly loud but witty young Ozzies. I mentally checked those people nearby who I felt would, in emergency, walk on my head without a qualm. I was jostled quite violently by a St John Ambulanceman proving that even the angels of mercy are not without their mean streak. I felt, to be honest, a bit kettled - even in the absence of the Metropolitan Police.

The going was good. Yielding underfoot without being slippery. From the bottom of the hill we saw the cheeses and the competitors bouncing and tumbling and lurching and falling and looking dazed as the crowd cheered and applauded. We had a grandstand view of the St John Ambulance persons and the casualties.

The races are open to anyone who says they're over 18. There has never been drug-testing, in fact, it's the only sport where it's an unwritten rule to get rat-arsed before the race. Alcohol dissipates any unwelcome self-preservation instincts which might cause jarring of bones. It makes you bounce more softly. At least, that's what some have told me.

Suddenly someone yelled “NAKED MAN COMING THROUGH!” The crowd did a simultaneous “Eeeew” and parted like butter under a hot knife. He was indeed naked. He'd chased the cheese wearing only a jockstrap and now some wags had stolen his clothes. Some people just so ungrateful for entertainment.

The paramedics called 'Make way!” and stretchered an unlucky competitor through the crowd on a spinal board. A woman in front of me raised her camera above her head and snapped a picture; a photo of an injured person who she probably didn't know. Something to show the girls in the office.

It didn't feel much fun to be standing with ghouls hoping for a good shot of a snapped bone protruding or someone with a suspected C2 fracture.

We'd all had enough by then anyway. We'd done the traditional Bank Holiday thing of being in heavy traffic, standing in a massive crowd watching a Great British Tradition.

We had sometimes watched it through binoculars from my mother's back garden in Brockworth, sitting in deckchairs drinking iced lemonade. On reflection that was probably the most civilized way to do it.

Home movies

2009-05-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

Films are one of the nearly-essentials of modern life. Books, music and art are the real thing but films run close because they just blitz the senses. Well, good ones do.

Even if you're not particularly enjoying it, there's no denying the powerful emotional impact of a movie. It can make you laugh, cry, or just plain nauseous. One film made me faint right off.

There's never sufficient time in life to take in everything you want to see at the cinema so we just joined one of those dvd club which send you a couple of films a month and you post them back, just to see how it goes.

I didn't think it would be much cop, to be honest. We Sky+ films and then delete them because there's no time to watch, lacking time partly because I feel you should see a film from beginning to end with no interruption to get the full flow and effect.

In the living room, no matter how comfy the sofa (and ours is lush) at the dramatic moments when you shriek, you shriek alone – not like the cinema.

In the cinema the absolute best moments are when the audience is more than the sum of its parts; the intakes of breath are positively choral, the squeaks of fear orchestrated to the split-second and the mass snufflings (I'm thinking final scene of Romeo and Juliet..and more recently Marley and Me) signal emotional upset on the grand scale. The Jaws moments, the Silence of the Lambs moments, the ET moments – all times when the experience transcended mere cinema and branded itself memorably on your soul.

But there are compensations when you watch at home. You don't have to be quiet or sit still. You can eat, drink and heckle. It's all very Shakespearean. We are like the groundlings, getting a bit lairy and raucous. Heckling and laughing and inserting lines which explain the action or which the characters should be saying in order to make it ridiculous.

We had a particularly good time with Van Helsing the other night. Hugh Jackman. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

Considering it's not my goblet of gore at all, it was astonishingly entertaining. Until his clothes all started to fall off, Jackman mostly wore big hat and a long dark coat and was accompanied by Kate Beckinsale looking demure and very like one of the great forties movie beauties.

I haven't watched that genre since Peter Cushing packed up so it came as a shock to realise that werewolves wear underpants before they go all furry. And when the fur comes off, the pants stay on. Decorous, I call it. Like the old days. Fangs for the memories.

The pyrotechnics in the hall of the Vampire in Chief were amazing – worthy of Merthyr Tydfil on bonfire night but without the blazing cars.

Then there was Kate Beckinsale shinning up a rope in a corset. Respect! I was always hopeless at shinning up anything. I have weak girly arms. But so has she. I can't help but think a special effects man was giving her a bunk up. Well he would, wouldn't he?

The monk made me laugh when he got an offer he couldn't refuse from a bawdy wench.

“But he can't! He's a monk!!!!” I exclaimed.

“He's just a friar” remarked DT man.

“And I think she's ready to sizzle.”

I lobbed a breadstick at the screen in disgust. You could never do that at the cinema.

Size isn't everything.

2009-05-17T02:45:00.000-07:00

I went in spite of the warnings. I had been told in no uncertain terms “Beware, for you enter that portal and the devil will take your soul and file it under “odds and sods.”

It wouldn't be inappropriate, me being both a little odd and occasionally, a bit of a sod.

It looked like an anonymous Government building. There was a barrier which indicated you had to be in the know to get into the car park. High black railings, spiky wire at the top.

It was the kind of two storey red-brick building with temporary single-storey off-shoots which might be used in Spooks or 24 as a place where anonymous Eastern Europeans beat the living shit out of double-dealers. The empty room, the chair in the centre, a smelly, unshaven John Prescott bearing down on the suspect with a dental wrench, blood on the floor.

At any moment, Jack Bauer could grab me from behind, hand clamped over my mouth, hissing in my ear his trademark “Trust me. I won't let them hurt you.”

Yeah, Jack. He's the man but you can't believe anything he says. Approximately four minutes after that assurance the woman is being buried alive in a ditch and he's half an hour late to the rescue, having made three personal phone calls to the President, flown a helicopter to drop a small atomic bomb in some desert and despatched a couple of villains within a ten mile radius first.

The main door had no intercom but I had to fill in forms before they allowed me in. I was instructed to leave my bag and belongings in a locker. They didn't make me wear paper knickers but, frankly, it was a worry, I can tell you. The other worry was someone coming at me with rubber gloves on. It might be their idea of research but it's not mine. Logically, though, there was more of a risk of a frisk on the way out.

The next trauma was having to leave all my pens (I have at least fifteen lurking in the darkest recesses of my bag) behind too. Only pencils are allowed. Thank goodness for my Shakespearean 2Bornot2B even though the lead is poor. They went for wit over quality but that's usually a fair swap.

I proceeded to the room where you could order up old documents and papers from the Strong Room. They don't let you in there to mess about amid their priceless archives but the very name sounds as though the walls are bent like sheer tensed muscle.

I waited in an airy room full of tables and chairs where the walls were packed with shelves of old books. Big sets of them; directories, year books, you name it. I ordered up my Old Stuff and settled in with a couple of volumes of 19th century Hunt's Directory and Court Guides; wonderful, detailed, absorbing and accompanied by engravings and advertisements.

Cheltenham for example attracted “wealthy and influential personages.” They were “the titled, the opulent and invalids of the more affluent classes, who during the summer season arrive in throngs, not only to behold the fairest essay of Nature's skill and care but to partake of its health–restoring waters and inhale its pure and genial breezes, the extraordinary salubrity of which has long been proved by the longevity of its inhabitants...” etc

Those Victorians. Never used one word where a dozen would do but I rather like it. It would not be unpleasant, I fancy, to take a course in Victorian language. If there was, perchance, a Victorian chatroom on the internet, one might venture to pass the time of day with persons of similar 19th century persuasions. Either that or rent a boxed set of period drama DVDs.

I kept an eye on the whiteboard on the other side of the room. When your name goes up there you know your Old Stuff is ready and you can collect it from the desk.

It's not unlike Argos. You are at the desk, the archive person goes to the shelves. But instead of waiting for a troglodyte boy to lurch about for ten minutes, inspecting the tickets on every single thing except the huge lawnmower box you're waiting for, the archive staff know their stuff and they are quietly efficient.

The expectation was intense. There were three of us. The first woman collected an armful of documents – remember the size of the class homework pile when you were at school? Say 38 pupils, a couple of sheets each. Well it was twice the height of that, tied in five bundles with old ecru ribbon and they were all tea-coloured. Maybe it was the class of 1648.

I had no idea what mine would be like. This was the first batch of three different lots of Old Stuff. In my experience documents are either A4, A5 or a map. Anything different is awkward.

Then one of the archive ladies emerged from a back room lugging a cardboard tube about eight feet long and a foot wide. She offered it to the guy in front of me.

Jeez. I thought. He's got a Swiss horn!! It was the exact same size. He'd have a job on his hands to drag it to the alpine pastures, though. He'd never get it past the stern lady on the front desk who was, in all probability, fully trained in martial arts and you could never negotiate a package that size through the small window in the gents.

Whatever it was, I was impressed. They lied when they said size doesn't matter. It bloody does. It was all I could do to stay in the queue and not follow him like a puppy as he dragged his quarry into a side room. I was jealous and a tad wistful. It was probably a map. A ****-off big old map. I love maps.

I swallowed my disappointment. It caught in my throat like the Vitamin C tablet that almost killed me once. Sweet irony. I hadn't read the “soluble” bit on the pack and it turned out to be precisely the width of my oesophagus.

Then it was my turn. The archives lady approached the shelf. Would mine be that pile on the top, or that thickly folded bundle with the red ribbon beneath?

She returned with a slim piece of cardboard. It had plainly been cut by someone who wasn't very good at making cardboard folders and tied with a faded pink ribbon. It was the smallest, slimmest thing anyone had collected.

I took it to my table, thankfully still unoccupied by anyone else. I didnt want anyone looking at my stuff. I'd actually been tempted to take some of the old books and build a kind of wall around my pencil and paper to keep prying eyes out.

I pulled at the ribbon, gingerly lifted the folder and out slipped several pieces of folded paper. Letters. The first was to a lady in Birmingham with several gentle admonishments about looking after herself and getting out and seeing people. There was another in similar vein. Both 1920's letters from and to people I'd never heard of.

They've got it wrong, I thought. Given me the wrong bundle. Maybe I'd got a number wrong. Then I unfolded another piece of paper. Flowing, exquisite script written with the finest nib and a fabulous signature with many flourishes. I recognised the name. This was it. Tricky to read but breathtakingly old, original and somehow alive in my hand.

I already knew enough of this particular gentleman to see him sitting at a particular desk near a particular window with a particular view. I just don't hear his voice yet. But I think that will come.

Just one small letter – not even A5 - but saturated with significance. Wow, wow and thrice wow.

A bell went, sounding the end of the session. Just as well they throw you out. I could live in that place.

Meanwhile mapman was probably struggling to get it back into his Swiss horn tube. Who wants a map anyway? Pah. Size isn't everything.

Kennedy

2009-05-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

You know how something seems a great idea and then life intervenes and the great idea relegates itself imperceptibly to the third division of not-great-enough ideas?

That's how it was with Krakow and Nigel Kennedy. The eldest boy had a Polish/American/French girlfriend whose mum had a flat going spare in Krakow, so he and the girlfriend used to go there for weekends.

And one day he mentioned, apropos of nothing “Oh we saw that Nigel Kennedy. In a bar. He was playing jazz when he happened to wander in...”

I wasn't sure the boy had got it right as I thought Nige lived at Malvern and was busy doing his viruoso violin thing in front of wealthy cultured folk in the world's largest concert halls.

He must have been doing that too, but unknown to most in those days, he was also escaping to the free and musically stimulating clubs of Krakow to enjoy jazzy jam sessions. It was mostly jazz in Krakow and mostly free, I was informed. You might spot Nige at the bar or Nige in his Villa shirt making music.

So I was dead keen to go to Krakow on the basis of good fortune enabling us to happen upon him in some anonymous, dingy dive. We never did make it. Eight or so years later, on Monday, however, the Nigel Kennedy Jazz Quintet made it to Cheltenham.

All eyes were on the band setting up on the Town Hall stage when long, low violin notes became evident and Kennedy walked slowly down the darkened aisle heralding the start of an unforgettable gig.

I've always admired Nige. He is a phenomenon. A true virtuoso and the world's best selling classical music violinist. The dynamic vivacity and the luscious sensitivity with which he plays classical pieces just knocks me out. The soul of Elgar inhabits him, no doubt at all. In Chelters on Monday Nigel provided further proof of an extraordinary assimilation of man and violin.

He plucked his electric fiddle, played it like a guitar, stroked it like a lover, abused it with vicious bowing. To me, he'd never looked more alive or released or relaxed or at home or at one with his fellow musicians.

We giggled as he sang his comical “shopping blues” and settled back for a set which sucked us into a mind-blowing maestrom – including a hint of Hendri, a smidge of Smoke on the Water – which displayed the exceptional talents of the keyboards guy, the saxophonist, the guitarist. Drummer Kryzychu Dziedzic was fabulously manic.

“We're keeping him out of prison” Nige joked. Dziedzic playing with such furious passion that he snapped three drumsticks and lost a fourth during the set.

Kennedy's bowing was sometimes blindingly fast too, the register ear-splittingly high at times but the magic was in the surprises; the tempo dropping to a pulsing whisper then giving way to a sudden sonorous, Vaughan-Williams style pastoral solo emerging pure and beautiful as sun piercing cloud.

There is always joy when Nigel Kennedy plays. Some might find him irritating and contrived but I like his obvious, childlike zest for music and life and most of all, the sharing of it. The enthusiasm was palpable at the Cheltenham. The crowd cried out for more (lyric, anyone?), there were two encores and the gig went on past 11pm.

We saw another side of Nigel Kennedy. It felt an intimate privilege, listening, watching his musical soul melting, fusing and fizzing with the brilliance of the others.

I found myself wondering whether any orgasm could improve on what Nigel was experiencing. Making out could only be second-best to what we'd just witnessed there on stage.

In-tents excitement

2009-04-25T08:18:00.000-07:00

Camping is going to be very big here in Britain this summer.

I can tell. It's still three times more expensive to stay in a British hotel than a similar one in Greece or Tenerife with virtually-guaranteed sun and heat. So credit-crunched families are bound to be fatally attracted by the lure of canvas and cosy sleeping bags.

You practically have to fight your way through an igloo tent (part of a 'get it all for £99' deal) to get into Halfords and this morning, a brochure for all manner of camping goods fell out of one of the newspapers on to my lap.

Oh look a tent for £45. OK you can't stand up in it but who's complaining about a bit of kneeling and wriggling when it's cheap as chips?

But further inside of course it was a different story. Who wants to wriggle and kneel when you can have a very stylish and rather beautiful modern version of a tepee for a snip (ok £699 but it has got a Bath-style portico entrance which native American indians didn't have, strangely enough).

Sunny green fields gently sloping to a sparkling lake surrounded by verdant hills. That's camping.

Or waking to an indigo pre-sunrise sky, tip-toeing across dew-fresh grass to the loo block and on the way back seeing the sun scorching the horizon in a blaze of morning glory.

Or unzipping the tent door to an uninterrupted view from a clifftop of a fishing boat put-putting across a flat-calm bay in an early morning haze where soft grey of sea and sky are as one.

Or sitting outside a tent on a beach in the afternoon sun, frying fresh-caught mackerel on a one-ring camping gas stove while the fishermen lounge about with cold lagers waiting to be fed. That's camping.

Course, its hardly ever like that is it? Those memories are preserved precisely because they are were so startlingly lovely and unusual.

The harsher truth, as anyone who has ever been camping knows, is that camping is about bumpy fields and sharing toilet facilities. Cleaning your teeth in a basin with people doing similar either side or stripping for a wash and exposing you to the less-than-attractive pale rolls of flab that you really didn't ask to see.

It's standing naked covered in Olympic-size goose-pimples in a draughty, breeze-blocked shower cubicle beneath a reluctant luke-warm dribble.

It's about queueing up to do your washing up in a big sink a quarter of a mile away from your tent.

It's about braving a lot of cloud, grey days, wind and rain. Lots and lots of wet and wellingtons for everyone and feeling constantly damp, then more wet.....a kind of sticky, salty damp if you're by the coast and fully immersed in sea mists.

If it gets very windy in the night, you have to put clothes on (if you're not already keeping them on) and fix storm guy-ropes, stay outside and hold the damn thing down or all retreat to the car with the valuables and watch your encampment roll wildly into the hedge.

I'm not saying wet and rain can't be joyous. Oh puddle splashing and mud and getting drippily saturated are great fun in small doses if you are within earshot of a hot running bath and a hot toddy (in that order or contemporaneously). But if you are forced to repose with the cold chilling your bones and your nan's warnings about wet clothes and rheumatism ringing in your head, then frankly, it's a bit shit.

For years – some of them formative – I went on family holidays in our blue canvas frame tent. We were learner campers. We learned things like it's not a great idea to pitch in that lovely spot next to the flowering rhododendrons which no-one else has bagged. It looked scenic but we got eaten alive by midges.

Avoid a sloping site even if it has got a good view of the sea. Every morning you will wake up in a heap at the bottom of the bed and have to untangle yourself from the person you were sleeping next to. There will be much hopping on one leg to relieve the pain of leg cramps.

On one camping trip when I was 14 there was lightning, storm and tumult. The morning light revealed a lively torrent of water flowing in under one side of the tent and out of the other. My prized green suede handbag was soaked and ruined. I yelled and stamped around and declared I would never go on a camping holiday again. And I didn't. Not with the family.

I went camping again on a whim with the shiny new husband to West Wales; full of youthful confidence that because it was a hot dry summer with fires breaking out everywhere, as long as we kept a fire-fighting bucket of water outside the tent, we'd be fine. Obviously, the weather broke and we were deluged. Plus we had trouble with our luxury blow-up mattress.

Seized by a macho need to get it rock-hard, Captain Sensible overdid the footpump and blew two of the dimples right out, creating a mound like a goitre about nine inches high and a slow puncture. At least four times a night, it would require more air.

So, in the hushed early hours of the morning at the Pembrokeshire coast camp site, the silence was broken by the rhythmic rasps “Pfffffff-uuuuuuuuhhh” “Pfffffffff-uuuuuuuuuhhhh” “Pfffffff-uuuuhhh“ of the pump as Capt Sensible refilled the bed.

It didn't go unnoticed.

“Disturbed night was it?” a fellow camper asked Capt Sensible at the communal sinks one morning.

“Four times, we counted...

“Duw boy, fair play, you're only young once.”

Unexpected treat

2009-04-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Unexpected treats are always welcome. So when a jaunt on the bikes was proposed yesterday afternoon, I was stupidly happy.

The euphoria was short-lived though. A voice from the garage announced “Oh. You've got a flat.”

“Very flat?”

“Very flat. Back tyre.”

Arses.

The sky was blue, the grass was riz; there was but a warm and gentle zephyr shifting the tops of the silver birches. This was no time for messing about with punctures.

I spied no 2 son's abandoned Kona. Knobby tyres, grip shifts, Manitous (seized but whatever). Just needed a couple of pedals, the saddle lowering, air in the tyres and I'd be away. He forsook it, still muddy from the last ride (from the colour of the mud, I'd say Queens Wood, Herefordshire and yes, he should be ashamed) when he took his road bike to Uni several years ago.

“Quicker to fit a new tube,” ventured Captain Sensible.

It fell on deaf ears. I was captivated by the thought of an interesting ride on the Kona. Gripshift gears, after all. Why hadn't I thought of this before?

Pedals were no problem but the seatpost wasn't going anywhere. Three lots of squirty stuff later, I was tempted to clout it with a mallet merely to vent my frustration but it has such a nice saddle that I didn't have the heart.

Captain Sensible shot me a look that said “Ahem” quite loudly.

Doh. So ok. Back to the tyre. I guessed blackthorn and found the demon spine well bedded in. But it was still going to be a pain to get that out and get a new tube on. Yawn.

I returned to the problem seatpost hoping the penetrating lubricant had done it's stuff. The seatpost was still unbudgeable but how hard could it be? Four broken fingernails later, quite hard.

But lo and hallelujah – in the meantime, Capt Sensible had sorted my back tyre! I just had to fit it. Another 10 minutes and my hands were covered in oil. I had oil on my downtube, oil on the handlebars, oil on my cycling jacket. The spiffy LX gear thingy kept getting in the way of the wheel going back in. Then my brakes jammed.

By now there were three bikes in various states of unrideability (did i mention that Capt Sensible's pannier clip had snapped and he'd discovered the wall of his back tyre was shredding with age?) littering the terrace.

This was the moment where, in another life, I might have said “fuckit” and abandoned the lot for a glass of chilled sauvignon blanc and a comfy chair in the last of the afternoon sun beneath the apple blossom. It would be have been pleasant to languish, watching the frogs in the pond and forgetting about oil and things which were stuck.

But in addition to leg muscles, cyclists develop bloody-minded perseverance. And I could never abandon my lovely Orange. It deserves respect and tlc. We've been together a long time.

So after another 20 minutes, the difficulties were resolved and the bike was raring to go. All that oil may be messy but there are few experiences quite as beautiful as riding a smooth, silent, silky-geared bike.

Immediately we set off, I knew it had all been worth it. Who wants to languish when you can have the sun and breeze against your face on a nice downhill?

There, rising above the fields in the distance, was Gloucester Cathedral; all bathed in the golden glow of late afternoon.

The ride wasn't ambitious. Capt Sensible wanted to ride to a pub and back. Fair enough. It involved some track, some fields and a lot of canal bank. There was a testing bit involving a narrow track, much churned-up mud and the possibility of a swim with the moorhens if you didn't pay attention to detail.

We tarried outside the pub watching the canal, people, narrowboats, letting the sun seep into our bones. There was warmth, a nice view and a large gin and tonic.

It didn't really matter that the Capt Sensible's pannier clip had to be repaired a second time or that the tricky mud had to be negotiated in gloom observed by curious, luminescent swans on the darkening canal.

In the waterside thickets, a chorus of birds sung out the end of the day. Scores of grazing rabbits fled as we pedalled across the fields.

We wound back through some Severnside wetland just as the fat setting sun was turning dark reedy pools into pans of roseate quicksilver. A brief, transient, magical time.
Worth all the effort, and more....

...even taking account Capt Sensible's back tyre blowing half a mile from home.

Alchemy

2009-04-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

So there's this cyclist waiting at the lights ahead of me on the other side of a morning-rush dual carriageway in Cheltenham. Poised in the saddle, stationary, hand against the post, feet on the pedals, waiting for the green light to go.

I looked at him in the distance. I look at all cyclists. At them, their bikes, how they ride them, what they are wearing, at their shape, their speed, their whole attitude. I make guesses about their lives, what they do, how often they use the bike.

Anyway he was there, and there was something about him. His legs were very slim in the black cycling leggings. He sat with a relaxed stillness, yet his hands, legs, feet were arranged in optimal positions for an efficient take-off. I thought "Hmmm."

When the lights changed he moved off with such an ease that it seemed he was gliding on air. He wove silkily through the central lights/barriers. When he reached the path on the other side he instinctively rose out of the saddle, stood on the pedals to get some speed up again and pushed off in the direction of GCHQ.

And I thought 'Yeah. That boy can ride.' And I had a sudden frisson of pleasure appreciating the grace of his movement.

People ride bikes in all sorts of ways. Young kids pedal exceptionally fast; chins forward, elbows out and little knees like pistons. Some adolescents are languid, pedalling softly and slowly while they talk and trackstand. At least one of them might be doing an 'endo' or messing about bunny-hopping.

Women ride bikes in exactly the way they walk. There are those who hunch over the handlebars as though they are hurrying somewhere urgently, others are poised, prettily straight-backed and serious while there is a type of middle-aged woman who toils away with her shopping in a plastic carrier bag swinging on the handlebars.

Seeing a man in a suit on a Pashley-Moulton is always a treat. The economy of scale of the bike coupled with the smart dark clothes, shiny shoes and upright stance would be comic if it wasn't admirable and somehow terribly English. They never ride hard – wouldn't do to get a sweat on, after all. Not in that nice shirt.

A lot of men ride their bikes in a workmanlike way. The burly labourer often has a bike too small for him and a saddle too low so his legs are bent and his knees stick out on either side. He's in his work clothes and steel-toe-capped boots so the bike is merely a short-haul A – B device. It doesn't have to fit.

Some older men plod, making heavy weather of it on a bicycle with a dynamo that they've kept in the shed for 30 years to travel to and fro the factory where they've probably worked for 30 years. They look like they're pedalling through black treacle. Others let their bodies show the effort by dipping their heads and shoulders with every pedal-stroke. But their faces don't betray any sign of distress so the dipping is habitual; the cycling equivalent of overweight labradors puffing amiably on a walk.

Anyway, back to this guy at the lights. He was no labrador; he was a racing whippet among cyclists.

Very long toned legs and a slim-framed elegant racing bike adjusted precisely and correctly.

He was at one with his bicycle; an alchemy of grace, fluidity and power.

I didn't need to be closer, to see his face or how old he was or what, in detail, he was wearing. His form and the way he moved told me all I needed to know. He had style.

I suppose that frisson was not dissimilar to the kick I get from experiencing a great sculpture. You just wonder in amazement at the creation itself and the complete mastery of the artist. You can't stop greedily regarding it because you can't get enough of the loveliness of it.

It's not dissimilar from the unexpected wonder of some poetry; that moment when the rhythm and beauty of the words meld and conspire with your emotions to move your soul in ways the writer could never have anticipated.

So does it follow that cycling has parallels with great art?

It does for me.

Impenetrable Armadillo

2009-04-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

I haven't got a problem with walkers. A nice stroll in the sunshine somewhere scenic is manna for the soul.

I like walks but prefer to cycle and when I'm out to play on my bike, I find that walkers are the most accommodating of folk.

They hear the terrible rasp of me struggling to breathe on a climb and stand aside briefly wearing pitying, mystified smiles as I wheeze “Thanks” and pedal ever upwards. I hate climbs. I can see them wondering why I bother to go marginally faster than their crippled old sheepdog.

Walkers descending might hear the squeal of my brakes as slam everything on in order to pedal softly behind them. That usually motivates them to make a gap so I can proceed and there might be a cheery exchange of greetings.

Only occasionally have some highly-strung women shrieked and thrown themselves into a track-side ditch because they didn't realise I was cycling behind them, waiting for an opportunity to pass. Those aside, walkers display all the outward signs of nice considerate people having a pleasant time outdoors.

It's ramblers that are the problem. It's not so bad when they're moving but there is something sinister about the way they assemble in large groups and just hang around. It's disturbing. They come over all glassy-eyed and oblivious to external stimuli.

It's as though they have surrendered themselves completely to their leader and all their brain cells have seeped down into their thick woolly rambler socks. Like an army of zombies, they stand, vacant, waiting for further instruction. Somewhere in the centre is the Leader Zombie, wearing a chunky sweater with a plastic mapcase dangling around his neck. He's staring at a compass and doing calculations concerning walking speeds, stopping allowances and time of arrival at designated pub garden.

There was just such a group in the Forest of Dean last weekend. We'd gone out to play for a few hours. The Forest was renewing itself and looking glorious with acid-green shoots and clouds of blackthorn blossom. Everyone was out, kids, families, cyclists, walkers, ramblers, people with dodgy hips and legs sitting admiring the Mandarin duck colony at Cannop Ponds. Stick a Buddhist temple at the bottom of Bixslade and a KFC where the stoneworks is and it would be the spitting image of Beihai Park, Beijing.

So we were bowling along on the flat heading for a half-time bacon and egg bap and a cuppa when we found them. I thought they'd notice our approach. My companion was in dark green so could have been mistaken for a moderately lively conifer but I was in red, on my purple Orange, so reasonable visible to even the partially-sighted.

I thought they might stir, or part to give us the chance to pass by but they were all standing around over-dressed in cagoules and hats, fixed and glazed, like an Antony Gormley sculpture.

For clarity, we're not talking about blocking a pathway. There were about forty of them, blocking a track wide enough for the widest Forestry juggernaut to drive down. In fact it would have been interesting to see their reaction if a juggernaut was bearing down on them belching fumes at 15mph, roughly the same speed as me - only I wasn't belching, although on reflection, maybe it would have helped.

Would they even see it? Doubt it. The carnage would have been quite something, though.

No movement. No instruction from leader. Maybe he'd nipped behind a bush for a quick slash and the group had been left temporarily devoid of independent thought.

It's not that I'm an unreasonable cyclist. Consideration comes with middle age. I slow down for the elderly, for little tots and dogs. On a narrow path I give way readily to let young whippety mountainbikers pass me. I even slow down a bit for panting, thick-legged, lard-arsed lads on expensive Cannondales to give them the temporary illusion that they are way fitter than me. I'm that big-hearted.

So when a posse of ramblers refuse to give way for me, I find it perplexing. I'm pedalling towards them. Will they move or are they inviting me to carve my way through, shredding their shins with my knobbly front tyre and handing them off like Tom Shanklin surging forward for a try?

They gave all the appearance of one of those Roman formations – The Impenetrable Armadillo. Or maybe it was a tortoise. Mebbe getting mixed up with one of the trickier positions from the Perfumed Garden. Not totally sure.

Anyway, all those thoughts were coursing through my head as we approached, then a chink appeared in their armour. A woman with a dog broke free from the nearside edge and yes, there was space to slide through. How very considerate! There is hope yet, I thought.

But no, the woman hadn't seen us at all. She'd just taken it into her head to do a bit of ad hoc dog training and began walking in a tight figure of eight pulling her substantial little dog repeatedly to heel. It was a Staffie. She was wasting her time.

She and the dog presented a very effective moving barrier that the Romans – skilled as they were in tactical warfare – might have copied and found quite effective.

What were we supposed to do? Stop? Dismount, tap one of the statues on the shoulder and say “Excuse me. Would you mind awfully if we beg your forbearance for a moment and ask you to move two feet to your left in order for us to pass without harm? Or would you like your legs macerated?” That last bit would have been sub-text.

Thankfully, I didn't need to. The Staffie caught the scent of something enticing - a wildboar chasing a squirrel carrying his nuts? - and shot into the undergrowth, yanking his startled owner tightly up against a wire fence.

We seized the opportunity to cycle through the gap. On the other side two families who had been similarly obstructed milled about discussing whether joining the Ramblers was obligatory at that particular location.

A frantic four-year-old pedalled his trike furiously in concentric circles, elbows out, chin over the handlebars, mentally damaged by the unexpected hold-up. I knew how he felt.

I told my companion man to shoot me if I ever mention joining the Ramblers. I suspect that child will feel exactly the same when he grows up.

Not many girls on bikes

2009-04-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to blog today. I'm supposed to be getting down to other urgent tasks.

(I wonder why “getting down to” something which implies a solid serious job but “getting up to” something is always mischievous, intruiging and spiced with naughtiness?)

Anyway, a Guardian writer (who has clearly never cycled in traffic and may never have even been on a bike) is asking why there aren't more women cyclists, so naturally there are points which must be made.

According to Sustrans (the charity in charge of the national cycleways network), 79% of British women don't cycle at all even though 43% of them have access to a bike.

I suspected the Grauniad was only highlighting the issue because A Celeb has been spotted wobbling about on a bike and sure enough, there was a pic of Duffy, the Welsh songstress pedalling an outsize version of a three-year-old's pink bike in Los Angeles.

She hasn't got a helmet on, which isn't much of an example, but she looks as though she's not going to ride at more than 4mph so we'll forgive her this time, especially as she is Welsh (positive racism, like) and because I'm kind of addicted to her track “Mercy.”

Why women don't ride bikes?

1 They are scared. They never got to grips with the dazzling-white two-wheeled thing with a bell in the shape of a pretty flower and daddy point-blank refused to put the stabilisers back on. So they wait a while until they meet a boy with a car... Apologies if that sounded a tad crabby but my parents never did buy me a new bike. I don't like it rankle.

2 You can't be dignified on a bicycle.

3 Cycling messes up your hair.

4 You can't carry much shopping. (Hmm. This should have been number 1)

5 Punctures.

Those reasons are good reasons but they are all reasons which, with a bit of practice and taking oneself a little less seriously, can be overcome.

More women should cycle.

It's the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

It energises you from head to toe and you rediscover the hidden child in you. The thrill of speeding downhill and zooming around corners. On a good day, with the wind behind you and the sun on your arms and your gears in tip-top condition, you feel like you're flying.

It gets you fit without too much effort and keeps you fit if you keep doing it.

It will lift your mood, flooding your brain with fabulous endorphins.

It might get you closer to nature. If you pedal quietly through silent forests you will see deer and birds and you can justifiably collapse into the long grass and lie in the sun for a while listening to bees.

It's rewarding, getting places without using any fuel other than that sticky jam doughnut you scoffed at your friend's house.

It's perfect for thinking and if you're distraught, you can cycle and sob and no-one will know because the wind takes away your tears.

I'll be the first to admit you can't cycle and be dignified. The very instant you attempt it, fate will bite you on the bum. Your gears will start jumping or the chain will come off or you'll get a puncture and need to remove a grubby wheel with delicate painted fingernails.

Attempting dignity is fraught with hazards in the same way as attempting to be cool. That cute little bunny hop up on to the kerb will have you splatting face first into the pavement. That stylish speeding cornering on damp grass will result in you sliding indelicately into the pub car park watching by curious al fresco diners. People generally feel cyclists are impervious to pain. Those guys in the Tour are always bleeding and getting back on their bikes, after all.

And the hair thing. Well, that's non-negotiable. Hair is very important for women. If it doesn't look right, one feels self-conscious all day – and that's no way to live life. It's one of the reasons I can't ride my bike to work when it's raining. There's no rest room where I can sort the hair out. I usually straighten it into total submission but when it's raining or the air is damp it gets its own back and goes all Kelly McGillis.

Punctures. Yes, well. They happen but we've all got mobile phones and if you really can't ruin your nails because it's two hours before the night out, call a bloke with a car. Any bloke will do. A chivalrous male cyclist might even come along and mend it for you. Or maybe I just got lucky.

The author of the Guardian article talked of the unattractiveness of wearing cycling kit that looks like you've been attacked with a highlighter gun. I'd wager she has never ridden in traffic. Until last summer I too swore I'd never be seen dead in dayglo. But in morning and evening rush-hour traffic, there is nothing better for being seen. So I embraced yellow day-glo and found that it is good. (It's also nicely fitting and nipped in at the waist)

It's probably possible to be girly and imaginative and wear violently psychedelic day-glo with flowers in your helmet. Vivienne Westwood would be up to the challenge just so long as she remembers it's impossible to pedal in a pencil skirt.

Topshop are bringing out a womens' cycling range, apparently. Not sure I like the sound of the Topshop range, although, naturally, one will cast an eye over it. There is talk of them selling retro-style cycling caps.

Hmm. Prefer a helmet myself. I doubt a cycling cap would save a fractured skull if you go over the handlebars - not that that happens very often, girls.

A few sensible precautions like taking care to avoid hidden tree stumps in tussocky grass on the flat and large tree roots on the gnarly downhills and you'll never know what it feels like to see stars just like they do in cartoons.

Honest!

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

Nearly 5k

2008-11-16T08:07:00.000-08:00

His footfalls are regular

They echo mine

I hear his breathing

It echoes my own

Audible

not heavy

Our hearts pump in unison

Hot blood

Bodies pulsing

as they did so long ago

He's tall

seems taller;

his long-muscled legs

pound

in time with mine

He glances at me,

a checking-out kind of smile

a gentle enquiry

“You ok?

“Nearly 5k.”

Somewhere

behind distant memories

a bell chimes

The same question

resurrected

from the sweetest time

of wonder and surrender

when my body was his

and his

was mine

“You ok?”

Knees drawn up,

Breathing,

Braced against

the unknown,

ready to exert, endure, expel

unready

for the risky ride

imposed without consent

from within

“You ok?”

The release of

a cord; thick,

tight around his neck;

the putty-grey baby,

unopening eyes

whisked away

confusion and whispers

“What about him?”

“Tell me.”

“You ok?”

Waiting

Suffering

incalculable moments

accumulating eternities

of dread.

Silent pleadings

and desperate negotiations;

the alternative common prayer book

of the helpless

“You ok?”

More than.

Ridiculously astonished;

profoundly grateful

that

Thirty years on,

our two hearts

are running in rhythm

beating as one

feeling the life.

Exhibitors at Stroud Subscription Rooms

Turning point

2008-11-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

So it all started on a go-kart track.

Six-year-old Lewis Hamilton climbed into the go-kart, put his foot down, sped off around the track and crashed, injuring his nose. Instead of stumbling away blubbing about the nasty kart and pleading to be taken home, mini-Hamilton merely wiped the blood away and carried on driving.

His dad Anthony says he was impressed by his son's exceptional driving skills and determination.

Anthony Hamilton is a role model for pushy parents everywhere. Because if it wasn't for him nurturing, supporting and financing his boy wonder, Lewis Hamilton would definitely not have become the World Champion Formula One racing driver that he is today.

I'm reluctant to boast but it's a tale which reminds me so much of my eldest son. He too first took the wheel of a go-kart and astonished us when he was very young – six years old - precisely the age that Lewis Hamilton displayed youthful brilliance.

I can't remember the name of the resort where we came upon the go-kart circuit but it was an English sea-front, off-season in drizzly rain with limp grey waves splishing over the shingle of a gently-sloping beach. The dog had been swimming and was dripping and smelling and looking miserable as only wet spaniels can. We'd played ducks and drakes and we were heading towards a distant pier when we saw the go-kart circuit – just an area of tarmac promenade encircled by tyres.

There was no-one else on the go-karts. A chalk board offered a cheap price. No 2 son legged it towards a parked, locked go-kart and managed to climb in. By the time I got to him, he was steering wildly and without a doubt, heading down the home straight to a glorious imagined victory.

He was far too young to drive. Not quite four years old and legs too short to reach the pedals. But he was desperate and quite difficult to extract as he gritted his teeth and clung on to the steering wheel like a limpet. I winkled him out on the promise that yes, he could have a go-kart ride but only on condition that big brother drove.

So big brother had to be persuaded to take him. Big bro had no natural inclination for go-karting so had to be bribed with the prospect of a new Transformer.

Much like Lewis Hamilton's dad, I was unprepared for what was to unfold. I knew, at least, that the boys would be safe. No1 son was a strong character with a naturally cautious disposition. He could read well from an early age and was scrupulously law-abiding to the point of inconvenience and tedium. Once, when we inexplicably went off-track on a long walk (Christmas cracker compasses; never trust them) and needed to take a nifty short-cut in order to avoid retracing our steps for three miles, he point-blank refused to climb a gate into woodland signed “Private.”

Anyway, as there was an excellent bribe on the table, the go-kart track was deserted and there was only a disinterested spotty youth looking on, good-guy son grudgingly agreed to have a go.

Both boys donned too-big helmets and climbed into one of the machines. The youth gave son no 1 instructions for the accelerator, the brake and the seatbelts. Wearing his NHS black plastic-framed specs beneath the shiny dome of his helmet, the junior driver was silent, solemn and concentrated. No 2 son's face was hardly visible below his helmet but I could tell that inside his puffy anorak he was wriggling with delight at the thought of the thrills which lay ahead.

So there they were, belted, helmeted and squeezed together in the go-kart.

The driver tentatively put his foot down and, inch by inch, the go-kart began to creep forward.

I thought perhaps the accelerator was stuck.

“Put your foot down a bit Clive!” (not his real name) I encouraged. “Get it going!”

He took no notice but continued his silky-smooth acceleration until the go-kart was processing in a stately circular manner around the track.

The first time they inexorably crept past us (the two-strong crowd of go-kart fans going wedgwood blue with cold) I had the strong impression that Clive was taking some time to become familiar with the feel of the steering and the handling of the vehicle.

After all, when you're almost sitting on the floor in a sports car, even quite modest speeds feel a lot faster. I looked forward to the acceleration curve sweeping in an upward direction. No1 son had other ideas. He'd hit his cruising speed of approximately two miles per hour and he was sticking to it.

By the third circuit he'd adopted a hunched stance, as though his specs were misting over with the excitement of it all and he needed to lean over the steering wheel a bit to see more clearly. Perhaps he was concerned about the prospect of skidding out of control due to the drizzle. There were certainly no obstacles but you can never be too careful. Dead seagulls could suddenly have plummetted from the skies creating a sudden hazard or a dodgy water-main could have at any time burst up through the track like Old Faithful.

I was hopeful that the initial “orientation” laps would leave no 1 son confident enough to have a crack at smashing the walking speed barrier.

So did no 2 son. By now the little blob under the big helmet was shifting about trying to get hold of the steering wheel. Animated conversation was going on. A fight was breaking out, only quashed by sustained defensive elbowing from the driver.

The steering wobbled alarmingly for a few moments before the speed was adjusted accordingly until a safe crawling pace was reached.

The sight of them bickering and circling the track with the reckless verve of a knackered roadsweeper about to splutter clean out of fuel was too much. I had to turn away. It doesn't do to laugh at your own kids. They never understand.

A claxon sounded to indicate that time was up and I have rarely been so grateful for an ordeal to be over. My stomach muscles were aching and I had to try to look serious.

They climbed out of the car, divested themselves of their comedy helmets and left the track.

“What did you think of it?” I enquired, only choking slightly.

“It was ok,” replied Clive, with due modesty.

No2 son's face was reddening and contorted with fury.

He turned to his brother.

“Stupid. STUPID!!!!” he yelled. He dealt Clive a fierce thump in the stomach and burst into tears of abject disappointment.

So you see now just how closely I could relate to Lewis Hamilton's dad's memories.

Just like Mr Hamilton's experience watching his boy, watching my eldest negotiating that go-kart track was a turning point in my life.

I realised with a rock-solid certainty that he would never, ever in a million years be a World Champion Formula One racing driver.

Cyclotherapy

2008-11-11T13:03:00.000-08:00

Smooth as an ocean,

gunmetal tarmac

stretches and slips beneath my wheels.

Traffic roars in frozen ears,

a winnowing wind wipes all the tears

and an aching heart is numbed

by circular rhythms

soothed,

by the calm comfort

of concentration.

I'm sorry, I'll sing that again....

2008-11-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

So there I was earlier, identifying fungi collected in the woods and singing along to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I've always admired the Chili's for their nod towards paleontology.

I mean, how many rock bands famous for performing naked apart from socks would be interested in 500 million-year-old fossils?

Rock lyrics are not expected to make much sense but I've always joined in with that phrase on “Scar Tissue” “......with the Burgess Shale is the lonely view.”

I thought it was an inspired lyric.

Yes. No doubt it was lonely, not to say quite jolly exciting, up there in the Canadian Rockies, picking through bits of the Burgess Shale and finding evidence of what's now known as the Cambrian explosion – a bizarre array of marine organisms that bear little or no resemblance to any living thing on earth now.

So, having time on my hands (and difficulty identifying a particular toadstool with a slimy, almond-fragranced cap) I looked up the lyrics.

And I'm devastated to find that the Chilis aren't singing about the Burgess Shale at all. They are singing the hitherto unknown lyrics “with the birds, I'll share this lonely view.”

They are lyrics which, in comparison with the Burgess Shale reference, are prosaic and death-defyingly ordinary.

Listen to the track. It still sounds much more like the Burgess Shale to me and I prefer it. Anyhow, the Chilis have plummeted in my estimation and I may need to book an ear syringing.

At least I'm not the only one to mishear lyrics. Some favourite mishearings by others are documented here.

You have to know the tunes to get the most out of them, but the finest mishearing is possibly the late Robert Palmer's classic “Might as well face it, you're a dick with a glove.”

The Chilis again, “Can't Stop:” “Can't stop the ferrets when they need food..”

REM's Losing My Religion: “Let's pee in the corner. Let's pee in the spotlight....”

Madonna's “Like a virgin...touched for the thirty-first time.”

Nirvana's “Here we are now......in containers.”

Pat Benatar (performing the well-known Wii rock guitar classic) “Hit me with with your pet shark.”

The Beatles “Michelle, ma belle, some say monkeys play piano well,
play piano well...”

Not forgetting Creedence Clearwater Revival's chorus which sound like instructions on arriving at the b&b...

“Don't go out tonight,
“ cos they're bound to take your light
“There's a bathroom on the right.”

----

Oh. If anyone's interested, here are the standard lyrics, in order:

Might as well face it, you're addicted to love

Can't stop the spirits when they need you

That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight

Like a virgin, touched for the very first time

Here we are now, entertain us

Hit me with your best shot

Michelle ma belle, sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, tres bien ensemble

There's a bad moon on the rise

Recovery weekend

2008-11-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

This is a recovery weekend. Yep, after years of hard drinking I've finally dried out for good.

I jest. Good grief, I have no wish to be tee-total. Grapes, in all their wondrous and varied forms are my second favourite fruit.

No. I'm recovering from the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Actually recovery is the wrong word. Now I've caught up with sleep, I'm suffering withdrawal symptoms.

I'm staring wistfully at the bunch of used tickets littering my desk. There are more in my handbag.

I'd quite like to be looking forward to driving over there this evening, squeezing the car into half a space on the leafy Promenade and sprinting, late as usual, across Imperial Gardens, past the Holst fountain, skirting the book tent, jinking past the Garden Theatre and into the back of the Town Hall to land breathless and slightly dishevelled in my seat just as the lights are dimmed and the author is ushered on to the stage.

In addition to hob-nobbing with a couple of valued pals from this site, it was a hugely enjoyable and inspiring thing with very few disappointments. I was amused, entertained, I learned some things and had my mind opened to others, which is about as much as one can expect.

Not everyone likes Literature Festivals. The mother-in-law can't understand why anyone would be remotely interested in listening to an author and feels authors who go boasting about themselves on stage should be consigned to the fires of hell. She has a whole set of additional commandments waiting for ratification by the Almighty including thou shalt not wear nail varnish and make-up for such adornments are only for the vain and flighty etc etc.

She does have a point though. Why are we interested in the people behind the words? Why do the words not speak for themselves? Readers of discernment just like words, I'm assured. Nothing else. No images, no audio, just particular patterns of text which provoke, disturb and ignite the imagination. Yet the truth is the Festival is there to sell books therefore, like it or not, the author becomes part of the celebrity culture.

The MyT writers I met were just as warm, intelligent and full of interest as I expected yet writers can often be dull, weird or anonymous; the kind of people who blend into a crowd yet take in everything around them and mentally file it to be used later. Writing well doesn't bear any relation to being good to look at or being fascinating to listen to.

Yet I am intrigued by writers. Maybe there's an ancient conviction deep in my brain that if I get close to greatness, or touch the coat-tails of greatness, I too might be blessed with a fraction of their writing talents. I got pretty close up to the brilliant Richard Curtis but just stopped short of prostration. And I did make him smirk, even without the prostration, which was pleasing.

So many events. So many highlights. The outdoorsy afternoon at the Centaur Centre at the racecourse was excellent if short of practical tasks. Ray Mears and Bruce Parry both gave talks with a good hour between them – just in case there was jealousy in the car park with whittled pointy sticks.

I spent the interval sitting in the sun on the Tattersall terraces within sight of the finishing line staring at the splendid racecourse and the Cotswold escarpment and thinking up unlikely challenges for the two of them including the Greatest Survivor Contest subtitled Last One To Make Fire Using Only Wood and Newspaper Is A Sissy.

My money would have been on Ray. Some people think of him as a kind of Crocodile Dundee character. He recalled that one chap actually showed him how a revolving door works. The helper no doubt realised that in the wilderness, a revolving door is a redundant piece of tat whereas in the city they present very real hazards.

Bruce impressed less this time than last time I saw him shortly before he began filming his Amazon series.

This time his wholesome exhortations to grow our own food, consume less, save the rainforests blah, blah, sounded a tad lame in view of size of his own vast “green footprint” created while jetting thousands of miles with film crews and employing helicopters for local transport and aerial shots.

He talked of taking hallucinogens (which he insisted be kept in the programmes) vomiting copiously and tripping out in the expert company of friendly Amazonian villagers. It was a positive, mind-expanding and spiritual experience, said Bruce, and it was good to go to the “dark places” but obviously don't do it in your own homes, folks – only where the tribal shaman will hold your hand and keep you safe. Yeah right.

Being in the presence of at least some of the Blackadder creators was a joy. Richard Curtis, Tony Robinson and producer John Lloyd swapping memories of the making of the series, 25 years ago, originally titled “King Edmund and His Two Friends.”

The original scripts, Lloyd said, were the funniest things he had ever read. Then during the cast read-throughs, people would make them even more amusing, bejewelling and enriching them with extra wit from the likes of Stephen Fry and Rik Mayall. There was hot debate on the funniest vegetable – courgette or cucumber – but no arguments about halibut being the funniest fish.

I've always disliked Frank Skinner the comedian but being interviewed, he was much better than expected. He told stories too risque to repeat here with finesse and wonderful timing. I laughed so hard that it actually hurt.

The three-hour screenwriting workshop was excellent. Great shame that Carla Lane (Bread and Butterflies. TV series, not a sandwich) couldn't make it because the guy who took her place had a poor sense of humour.

He asked if there was anyone present who'd never read a screenplay. Feeling frank (who raised no objection), I raised my hand.Then he posed the question “You would hardly go to a novel-writing course if you'd never read a novel would you?”

Eeew. Was that a teensy weensy bit of a put-down? I might have retorted something about him being a disappointing replacement for Carla Lane anyway but I politely held my tongue. And in fact I did complete the screenplay for a short amusing film (really short....about ten minutes!) about two dogs. I am going to print it out, roll it very tightly into a scroll about two inches in diameter and send it to him with a suggestion as to where he might usefully put it.

Vesta Chicken Chow Mein enthusiast and neuroscientist Susan Greenfield was brilliant, as usual, propounding her theories with clarity but I'd really like to have seen her in debate with Rick Stein, who was not well liked by some of his audience who murmured “too commercial “ as they left. He and Susan could have a good spat over her assertion “Cooking. Why bother? It's all over in ten minutes.”

Ruth Rendell – I forget her Lords title, Baroness something - is a great writer but, as a person, a bit spooky. If I was an interviewer I'd feel nervous. She sits extremely still and straight, her hands resting on her thighs, concentrating on the floor of the stage just ahead of her, answering questions in an ascetic, economic, dry way.

She revealing that her latest Barbara Vine book features the latest craze for wealthy yet sexually jaded metropolitans. Called “adventure sex” it's a service offered by an agency where a guy pays £30k to have his girlfriend (who gives consent in advance, being of an adventurous nature) blindfolded, bound, gagged and taken to a mystery location where the boyfriend has wild sex with her.

Rendell – who's a well-preserved late seventies if she's a day - was gently probed as to how she dreamed up the details and replied:

“As you know, a writer of fiction doesn't need much to go on. Henry James said 'A young lady of talent has only to walk past the windows of the officers' mess in order to write a novel about the Army.'”

There was Richard Fortey talking about the little-explored backrooms at the Natural History Museum and the fake dodo which is made of cygnet feathers thanks to a member of staff who snaffled a swan from under Hammersmith Bridge one night. It didn't break his arm, either.

Edward de Bono tried to teach me some perceptual thinking using six hats. I usually enjoy trying on hats, especially big brimmed hats with ribbons or a snazzy flower but due to the lack of tangible hats, I must have succumbed to a long blink and so missed the significant of the triangle, the circle, the square, the lozenge and the heart that he was scribbling frantically on his projected whiteboard. I wrote the words 'Truth Paste' but I have no idea what they mean.

Dr Who producer and writer Russell T Davies, the man who made us hide behind the sofa cushions again, proved to be very Welsh and very gay displaying a hearty mirth that shook him from head to toe. He recalled the time he and a colleague auditioned the dazzlingly-toothed John Barrowman for the role of Captain Jack.

As Barrowman finished the audition, left the room and shut the door, they turned to each other and both went “PHWOARRRRR.” A sentiment echoed by the entire audience, male and female who seemed to adore him in equal measure. Jilly Cooper, Alan Carr and others..well I've droned on too long now so I'll spare you those.

I've written about the Miles Kington tribute already too but I've just remembered another idea he had which you could nick if you're finding a rainy Sunday a bit depressing....

"How Whingeing Can Work For You!” a self-help book about self-pity...

.....an ideal subject for a collaborative effort!

Miles Kington - a bit late.

2008-11-11T12:58:00.000-08:00

There aren't many people you encounter in life that you feel you could relate to on almost any level; a friend, a sister, a hot date.

That's how I feel about Miles Kington.

Such a pity he is deceased.

I should have taken more notice of him during his lifetime.

A bit late, I know for general worship and reverence but not too late for a tribute now, that I have got something of the measure of the man.

An event at Cheltenham Festival of Literature had the extraordinarily well-kept Joanna Lumley, Terry Jones, Maureen Lipman and Miles' widow Caroline talking about their memories of him and reading extracts from a book of the letters he wrote to his friend and agent Gill Coleridge when he knew he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The letters are comic, quirky, witty and not in the least maudlin. The affection for Kington was almost palpable.

I knew Miles Kington was a witty writer and always enjoyed what I read of his but I didn't actively seek him out, which is a shame because I find I like him a lot for many reasons.

He was a cyclist for a start. Cycled from home to Fleet Street every day. Cycled at weekends down in the countryside near Bath.

Miles: “I have often found that the mind goes into free wheel more easily on a bike ride than anywhere else in the world and you get some really good thoughts up there in the saddle.”

yeah.

He wrote with an easy, witty panache. He had an extremely messy study, he was a musician and he had a liver and white English Springer Spaniel. He was entirely my kind of bloke.

The more I read of Miles the more I like him. He penned his collection of letters, collected in the book “How Shall I Tell the Dog?” after the time when he realised he would probably not outlive his spaniel, Berry.

He never told the Independent, for whom he was writing a daily column, that he was ill. So even when he was admitted to hospital for chemotherapy, he'd hand-write his columns in the morning, gave them to his wife Caroline and she'd take them home to type them up and email them to the Indie as usual. She did say that he hated all those columns because he disliked not having the opportunity to “polish” them.

Reading the book in a corridor at Cheltenham Town Hall, I found that he pitched the idea of a book called “A Hundred Things To do Before you Die” rather than the “1,000 Places to Go Before You Die” (written by some American woman) which I've always considered unrealistic to achieve especially if, due to indecision over dates and suitcase size, you have lost time and find yourself wheeling along the oxygen, drip and catheter bag.

Like me, Miles dislikes the whole Yank thing of travelling the world ticking off the sites of interest as they are bagged. He extols the virtues of doing all the things you ever wanted to do but didn't without even leaving home which is v achievable in spite of credit crunches etc.

He cites the essentials that everyone ever wanted to try but didn't get around to it, like Learning to Give a Piercing Two-Fingered Whistle. My Sicilian sister-in-law was very good at that. She could whistle her children in from a crowded Cefalu beach in high season. She tried to teach me but I think my fingers were the wrong shape. I envied her ability though.

I was with her at a dog-training session on the edge of a vast recreation area full of people playing Sunday league soccer. It came in handy when her large Doberman puppy slipped his lead and careered off into the distance to join them.

She put her hand up, wedged a finger in each corner of her mouth and emitted a whistle of jet-engine pitch and volume that simultaneously brought all four soccer matches to a complete halt.

Like meerkats, the players gazed in the direction of the whistle. The dog stopped dead too, briefly acknowledging the call before seizing his chance to snatch the nearest football and flee.

Some other valuable learning strategies proposed by Miles included:

How To Pronounce 'Macho' and 'Chorizo' Properly – Unlike Mark Lawson

Get – and Keep – That Space By The Beach Or Pool

How To Make Children At Adjacent Tables Burst Into Tears For No Apparent Reason

It's Never Too Late To Learn How To Shoplift

Beating A Duvet At It's Own Game

How To Do A Cartwheel

Of the wider list, I could only mentally tick off four, which is extremely poor.

How To Swear in Other Languages (I've got a neat little phrase book), How to Fix a Ballcock (you bend the ballcock thingy until it almost snaps and mostly does so you have to purchase a whole new section) and as for How To Make A Noise With A Blade Of Grass, I perfected that when I was eight. It's rubbish. Only useful for alarming pheasants.

As for Tossing A Coin, I can already toss a coin really high – something I had to learn in order to avoid looking even more stupid playing league ping pong.

Anyway, like him, I think there is a market for the One Hundred Things book. I'd buy it, if only to master the two-fingered whistle.

Miles also planned his own memorial.

“If there is any money accruing from any of the books which may be written as a consequence of these letters to you between now and my death, I would like you to arrange for a bench to be bought and dedicated to me along the canal.” (The Kennet and Avon, near his home).

He liked benches. They were useful for pausing to do up shoelaces and for sitting and scribble thoughts that had occurred during his bike rides.

He wanted the Kington seat to bear a plaque with the following words:

“IN FOND MEMORY OF MILES KINGTON, WHO HATED THIS SPOT
BECAUSE THERE WAS NEVER ANYWHERE TO SIT DOWN AND ENJOY IT FROM.”

'How Shall I Tell the Dog?' is a special book by a lovely bloke.

Maureen Lipman says it's a glorious feat of good nature, imagination and courage. I tend to agree. Worth a look. Definitely.

Sorry I'm not here to take your call....

2008-11-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

......if you'd like to leave a message after the tone I'll ring you as soon as I can.”

This isn't a blog about answering machines. They are old technology now and besides, it's been done to death the way you can tell personality types or social status from the kind of greeting message people leave.

The standard BT message, after all, belongs to the traditional reserved middle-class person who takes themselves very seriously and wishes to avoid revealing anything remotely personal.

Not for them the kooky family messages “You have reached the Mad House!!! Rory and Steph must be out doing the taxi service for Adam and Sophie. Either that or the kids have finally left home and we are comatose on Tesco's Finest chardonnay.”

It's more about the messages people leave. Some are normal, businesslike and to-the-point. There are others, of course, where you hear nothing but the Click of Frustration or a long protracted sigh and a muttered “not there AGAIN....”

Best of all are the messages where people treat the answering machine as a mute friend. My machine would record for 30 minutes if necessary, which was just right for my late lamented mumsie.

Her messages were epic; easily as long as our conversation would have lasted had I been there – occasionally longer.

It wasn't that she enjoyed the sound of her own voice. She always began with vital information to impart and once in full spate, savoured the freedom of not being interrupted.

Her monologue would ebb and flow as she paused briefly to collect her thoughts, and she delivered those thoughts interspersed with real-time observations about her immediate environment.

Because the phone point was still in the hallway (in its original location from the mid-sixties) mater could answer the door, collect post from the postman and continue her voicemail thread in a seamless flow.

Being Welsh, she was effortlessly articulate and never lost for conversation, especially when no-one else was involved.

“Janie? Are you there? It's only me...” she'd start.

“Oh. (pause) Maybe you're in the garden. (pause) But hang on. Ah. It's only 9.30am. Maybe you're still out with the dog. Oh well. (sigh, pause..... longer sigh) I'll talk to you later. I've been up since 5.30am. Done everything. Seems like lunchtime already. Ray is picking me up at 11.30 and we're off to Moreton market. Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to get?

“Anyway, I only wanted to remind you about Aunty Joan's birthday. It's Saturday. We usually just send a card. She never buys anything so don't feel you have to. We don't want to start anything now. Anyway, I've got her a nice make-up bag. You needn't get anything though. The last present she bought for you was when you were seven before we left Llanfach.

“Aunty Glad's never forgotten your birthday. She's always spelled your name with an extra 'n' but I never had the heart to put her right and it's too late now, forty or so years on. Anyway, it's not as if you mind.

“I forgot to tell you a horrible black labrador attacked our Buster yesterday. Bloody owner let it off and it came after Buster like grease lightning. I lashed out at it but kicked a tree. My toe's in agony but Buster had him. I'm still shaking now...”

.........and so on and so on.

I especially enjoyed it when she switched into real-time commentary to describe a sudden on-going event.

“Oh! Hang on. (pause) I'm sure that's Ken's car. What's he doing here? Ken's car's just pulled up across the road. He must be back. I told you, didn't I, that I saw him leaving with his suitcases three weeks ago? Josie left them outside. She'd changed the locks by then.

“She hasn't mentioned she's expecting him back. Oh dear. I'd better go over later and make sure she's all right....” etc

Absolutely the best voicemails. They always made me smile. The prosaic and the funny alongside the drama, the reminders, veiled criticisms, veiled sadnesses, the uncertainties, the diary dates, the disappointments were all there. Mater's monologues could knock spots off anything Alan Bennett ever produced because hers were utterly heartfelt and authentic.

Just occasionally, there would be a gem. Like the day the milkman called.

Mumsie was leaving me a complex message about holiday arrangements (she was dog-sitting for me and needed to know precisely how many pigs' ears a day would be required for Rolls) when the doorbell rang.

“Hang on. Milkman,” she said, clunking the phone down on the hall table.

I knew she'd opened the front door because of the jangle of the security chain. I heard her trill to the milkman “Hello. Yes. Won't be a second. I'll just go and get my purse. I'm on the phone.”

Footsteps to kitchen and back to door followed by prolonged jangling of security chain.

“Oh no. Sorry about this. Can't get the chain off. It's tangled.”

I could hear the milkman's mumbled voice.

“S'ok. I'll wait.”

“How much do I owe you anyway?” More fevered jangling of metal.

“Thirty-six pounds forty-two pence.”

“Right.”

Noisy struggles continued.

“I'm so sorry about this.”

Mater began to giggle apologetically.

“I dont know what's going on here. I seem to be making it worse. The chain's getting tighter and the gap's getting narrower and narrower...”

“This is ridiculous!” She snorted with laughter.

“I'm so sorry. I can hardly see you now........I'll just have to post the money through the crack.

“Can you take it? Can you see the ten pound note yet?

Milkman, laughing now: “I thought it was a fiver but yes, I can see the edge. Shall I grab it and pull?”

Mother, giggling hopelessly : “It's this stupid chain. It's got a mind of its own.

“Here comes the second ten pound note...got it?”

The milkman was choking with laughter. They both were.

“Got that? Here's the last one... Coming through. No, hold on, the edge keeps curling up. I'm trying my best to stuff it through....”

In a lull between hysterics, I just catch the milkman's voice. He sounds exhausted.

“Tell you what, Mrs R, let's call it quits at thirty quid.

“We'll leave the change until next time. I can't take any more of this. You've made my morning, though. See you.”

Mother finally regains her compusure and picks up the phone again.

“Oh my god, J. Did you hear that? That was embarrassing. He's usually a bit miserable but we were both doubled up. Oh dear.

“Right. I absolutely must go now (said in an accusing tone that indicated that I had been keeping her!!)

“I've got to get this damn security chain undone before anyone else comes to the door.”

Homage to Liam Killeen

2008-08-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

Oh dear. The Malvern Marvel Liam Killeen did it again; wiped out in the opening two minutes of the Olympic mens' mountainbike race.

In the frantic melee of riders trying to get a decent position before the track narrowed, his bike touched another wheel and he went over the handlebars. We've all done it (well, technically my over-the-handlebars-experience was due to a malevolent tree root and there wasn't a soul for at least fifty yards and it wasn't in a race but I was still well winded, I can assure you).

If Liam hadn't wiped and spent several minutes remembering who he was and getting the bent bike straightened, he might well have had a medal because, despite spending what seemed like an eternity before he got back on the circuit, he managed to zip through a field of internationally brilliant riders to finish seventh. Fourth place is first loser but his catch-up attempt was nothing short of heroic and we must look forward to success and stability for 2012 even if it means glueing his ass to the saddle.

As far as I'm concerned, his efforts were worth it because he inspired me to tempt DT man out for a lengthy mountainbike ride; an Olympic achievement in itself, especially as there was Very Important Lawn Mowing to do before The Rain.

In the true spirit of Olympic ideals – faster, longer, higher, wider, wetter, floppier etc – I devised a challenging route to test a whole range of mountainbike skills.

It included some busy road, some quiet road, plenty of off-road, a horrible hill, loads of lifting bike over gates and one ancient wooden gate, which when opened, disintegrated into pieces necessitating hasty, inadequate reassembling and sharp exit. Goodness knows how many miles we covered but it took more than three hours, what with refuelling and everything - much longer than the Olympic version.

There were additional, specially negotiated, obligatory elements of three pubs and a chinese restaurant. The pubs, as you can imagine, were especially gruelling, with their riverside views, g&ts, real ales and chips (not as scientific a diet as the Olympians, admittedly).

Interestingly, at the second pub, we were able to watch a proper tree pass by on the river which we'd noted from a picnic table vantage point at the first pub, upstream. Then the ex-swan floated past that we'd seen at the first pub too. There was some controversy about the swan. Without my specs, which were quite muddy, I thought it must just be head down and dabbling but remembered that swans don't dabble while heading downriver, upside down, at 4mph. The afternoon was turning into a giant version of Pooh sticks. I reflected that the Severn had undoubtedly taken a shorter, quicker route than we had, so we must have cycled quite fast – an achievement worth celebrating with a second round.

Then there were extra-hard elements which would have been too unreasonable to include in the Olympic course – impossibly steep uphill with the wrong sort of grass, long tricky sections of horsey-churned thick mud with lacerating brambles either side and then a further mud surprise at the top of the hill, just at the bit where one would normally pause to admire the 360 degree view of glorious Glos. Those geography teachers lied when they said that water percolates through rock and spurts out of little springs. It doesn't all do that. A lot of it falls from the sky and stays put. It reminded me of the Langdales where, on top of one of the mountains, my dear departed doggo went to an innocuous puddle for a refreshing slurp and promptly disappeared into a morass of evil black water. Moments later he struggled out and came to me for reassurance. Only a spaniel can look heart-rendingly upset before peppering you with bits of peat bog.

This time it wasn't a peatbog but wide, foetid green/brown puddles which are the unappealing consequence of farm vehicles carrying much animal excrement to nourish our wholesome organic crops.

As night follows day, this kind of terrain is always followed by a stony downhill which might be enjoyable if not for the hefty gobbets of mud flying into your face thanks to the self-cleaning action of the front wheel.

Faces and legs were liberally splattered. Being far too gruesome for dim sum, we decided to give the Chinese restaurant a miss.

And then it began to rain. DT man yelled something and put the hammer down, as they say in cycling circles. I didn't catch what he said but it could have been 'Last one home's a cissy' or “The mowing! The mowing!”

Anyway, as I watched his ass disappearing into the distance and a tropical storm ensued, I couldn't help thinking that final burst of speed had probably been inspired by Liam Killeen.

Like Liam, DT man didn't medal but he went one better. By the time I got in, he'd kettled and left me an Olympic-sized mug of tea.

Friends

2008-08-09T04:32:00.000-07:00

En guarde
Swords drawn,
they battle
those two young friends
dancing along a narrow seawall
in the bright yellow-blue afternoon

Fizzing, spitting energies erupt
lunging, clashing, parrying,
all burgeoning strength
and brimming aggression
until the loser falls
hard on to sand below

Time shifts.
Deeper voices ring out
Laughing across a midnight ocean
Long-muscled legs give chase,
tearing dark, closed water
to frothy shreds

A spluttering head caught,
plunged deep for silent drowning
until a hand signals release
Then the peace; the night swimming.
Beautiful reckless youth,
never to be reclaimed.

Toe curling

2008-08-09T04:28:00.000-07:00

Why does no-one ever blog about embarrassing moments? No idea. Anyway, mine was yesterday.

I have this bag. It has work files in it, backup tapes and other work stuff. It also has Classic FM magazines and sunglasses and cycling gloves and packs of oatcakes and a carton of fresh eggs and cards and pens - lots and lots of pens - and half-filled notebooks, letters and small parcels for posting and elastic bands.

No-one touches my bag. It's pretty heavy and it's big so it gets dark early down there in the deepest recesses. Well anyway, i'd finished the oatcakes and I'd planned on having a banana half way through the afternoon.

So I reached into the bag and groped around, as you do, (no point in looking in there as there's far too much stuff) and ew, the banana had been replaced by something softly yielding and warmish. It was still banana-shaped but had the feel of a soft leather pouch filled with batter.

It wasn't a good sensation and I realised it shouldn't stay there a moment longer in case it suddenly splattered over the important stuff.

I withdrew it with the same care I might give to an unexploded incendiary device and was astonished to see that while my banana hadn't actually exploded, it had definitely gone off.

It had not gone off to the extent of being freckled. To me, freckles are indicators of banana perfection and they are quite attractive on some people too. It had not even gone off to the extent of being a bit freckled but frankly quite brown. It had gone off to the point of putrefaction. It was an ex-banana. Completely black.

My colleague, Ocean (not her real name but how do kids cope with names like that?) who is so seriously weird that she loathes and detests bananas, began to retch in a melodramatic way.

"Oh Jan that's so gross."

Honestly, you'd have thought I'd piled elephant dung all around her naked body.

I was hoping she wouldn't notice the blackness of the banana if I held it kind of close to my black trousers on the way to the waste bin. But she did. And I was embarrassed. My protests along the lines of "Well, it was all right yesterday" did little to stem the growing suspicion that all I carry around in that bag is a ton of rotting fruit.

It's a strange thing, embarrassment. I spent much of my young life in a semi-permanent state of embarrassment. My blush mechanism was set on a hair-trigger to go off at the slightest thing or even imagined thing.

I blushed for Wales. People - particularly boys - used to compete to see how deeply profusely crimson I would become. It was a psychological handicap as tangible as a wooden leg. My shyness was there for all to see - vulnerably and hotly displayed.

Fortunately, as I got older, began working and became more worldly-wise and at ease with people, the tendency to colour faded and now, thankfully, I don't blush unless someone says or does something which takes me completely by surprise.

It probably helps that I'm not embarrassed very often. There are lots of "Ooops" moments but those are low on the embarrassment index. I feel a compleat twit when people point out my careless spelling errors but that's bearable too.

They don't compare with the truly toe-curling incidents.... like the time I got a bracelet hopelessly tangled in the back of some lacy underwear in a ladies loo. I'm right-handed so the bracelet was on the right hand and caught in a position where the left hand couldn't do a lot to help.

After much tugging and fiddling and getting hot and bothered, I had to emerge to seek assistance - into the wider ladies area not into the restaurant itself, that would have been pure attention-seeking. Anyway, I'd have torn said underwear to bits rather than be compromised in public but would still have been wearing a bracelet unusually decorated with finely-shredded designer knicker.

Several ladies tried to help but it transpired that on a night out, not many women wear the spectacles they need to see clearly. That could be the feminine version of beer goggles. Same result anyway. Finally, one woman with 20/20 vision disentangled everything successfully, bless her.

There was another loo-related awkwardness in Stratford-upon-Avon when I became so desperate that I raced into the nearest pub toilet, gratefully sought a free cubicle and reflected, rather too late, that I'd rushed past several machines on the wall offering packets of condoms. It occurred to me that perhaps the girls of Stratford upon Avon ladies were particularly forward-thinking with their contraception, able to choose from an eye-watering variety of Durex.

It might have been convincing if the smell had been right but it wasn't. There was a distinct whiff and I'm not talking Domestos. Then the voices confirmed my fears that, like a fool, I'd rushed in where angels fear to tread.

It was about 45 minutes before it was clear to escape without being seen. My saving grace was the start of a televised football match. The boyfriend hadn't even noticed my unnaturally lengthy absence being entirely occupied with in-depth lager studies and then the soccer. It didn't last.

Tender

2008-08-09T04:13:00.000-07:00

Not velvet

nor satin

or close-brushed silk

but fingertips

trailed

lightly as caressing feathers

of softest down,

tender as a baby's cheek

yielding as a fresh-sprung leaf

briefly,

briefly,

cool against the heat.

A shiver,

delicious,

in the shimmering,

secret dark.

Hurry with a flurry

2008-07-26T03:24:00.000-07:00

It was one of those rare afternoons at work when everything had gone to pot.

After endless arrangements and contingency plans because we'd lose the computer network for a couple of hours during an upgrade, it all went wrong.

It was all down to the cabling guys. They hadn't turned up on the day everyone had planned but we were assured that our bigger, better system would be up and running by close of play on Friday.

I guessed it might not be. But party-poopery is not supposed to be in my nature. Of course it was nowhere near finished. And being a Friday meant that at precisely 2.35pm - with three hours and twenty-five minutes worth of work left for the rest of us (plus an extra half hour for the couple on late) these guys were loading ladders back on to the vans and buggering off for the weekend.

So it was an anti-climactic afternoon. We had achieved not much for maximum disruption and it was hot, with only a slight whiff of humid air circulating through wide-open windows.

The conversation turned to muck flurries. I didn't like to say anything but they sounded far too much like the slurry flurry that the local farmer slings all over the fields near me. It leaves a lingering stench for two days or more.

My colleagues assured me that muck flurries are absolutely the thing to eat when one gets bothered and hot, which we all were in a strictly anti-climactic sort of way.

There are chocolate ones, strawberry ones and cornetto-style mint-choc chip ones. Several of the girls were openly drooling at the muck-memories.

Muck flurries were available at Muck Donalds, I was told. Never having been in a McDonalds (let's at least get the spelling right) and not having a clue, I got some directions and went on a small journey of discovery.

I expected the place to be empty at 4pm on a warm Friday. But there were families indulging in chips and burgers and all manner of fried things accompanied by quantities of very small, narrow, dry-looking chips. Where I come from (Wales) the chips are invariably much more substantial and smell gorgeously of copious quantities of vinegar-soaked salt.

There was a United Nations atmosphere behind the counter where the temperature felt as though it was nudging 35 degrees or more. The guy who served me was very pleasant with a strong Far Eastern accent, possibly Korean, so I ended up indicating what I wanted by pointing to the large bright images on display, pointing and nodding with many reciprocating smiles.

He took a while to squirt out and decorate ten assorted flurries giving me plenty of time to take in the ambience. I was gratified to see that one can get an entire day's meals in McDonalds right through from your morning porridge and orange juice, to a light salad lunch before tucking into the seriously deep-fried delicacies on offer for later.

It's also a place where kids need much discipline which is handed out at ear-splitting volume by harassed-sounding mothers who have vocabularies of profane and obscene language far superior to mine - and mine is quite good, even though I say so myself.

Having taken delivery of several trays of ice-cold flurries, the next task was to get back to the office pronto. You've got to hurry with a flurry - especially in the kind of temperatures when they are most needed.

“Hey. They serve porridge in MacDonalds! I thought you'd all like jam with them,” I announced when I got back.

Everyone had been to McDonalds before. Everyone was very familiar with the set-up. I'd been there for the first time ever and was the only one to notice the porridge. How weird is that?

Anyway, there was a mass groan. They know I'm keen on soluble fibre and honestly thought I'd got them porridge.

But how sweet was the surprise when I revealed the flurries, and how touching the delight as they all turned into little kids again taking the plastic tops from their flurry cartons and extracting their weird squared off plastic flurry spoons complete with the hanger attachment.

Mine was strawberry. I was initially suspicious, still having the slurry flurry image in mind, but it tasted just like real strawberry - the kind you get in that excellent French jam. And the Italian-style ice-cream was still cold in the middle yet yielding and creamy around the edges. Yum.

All very surprising as I'd always refused to take my sons to McDonalds or darken its doors for reasons I've actually forgotten now but were probably vaguely to do with corporate world domination and not having proper china plates.

I'd lost my McDonalds virginity and, I reflected, slurping the quite delicious ice-cream, it had actually been worth it.

The other girls were in raptures.

“Better than an orgasm,” gasped one.

Hers must have been one of the chocolate flurries. No contest.

Cycling With Vegetables

2008-07-23T10:49:00.000-07:00

It's not to be recommended. Honestly. Take my word for it.

And I'm not talking about going for a Sunday run with the local cycling club. Today I mostly cycled with potatoes. Big Mistake.

I could have gone for the small bag of Charlotte spuds but I can never resist a King Edward and they only do them in 3lb bags so, dreaming of buttery, fluffy mash and golden roasties, I grabbed a bag.

I knew I should have considered more carefully when they plummeted to the bottom of the rucksack with a definitive thud.

The carrots didn't help either. Or the value pack of baby parsnips. Or the double pack of broccoli.

Then there was the work stuff it was essential to take home. (Note to self: Must take the 2006 and 2007 diaries out of the Filofax.)

We are told repeatedly that vegetables are good for us. But it was 26 degrees and I felt close to death on the draggy hill to home which is always the killer after a long ride.

The object lesson is don't cycle with vegetables.

There is nothing to be gained except exhaustion and fitness. Exhaustion isn't pleasant apart from the excuse to lie flat out on the bed like the Leonardo da Vinci's Vetruvian Woman and fall deeply asleep. (Yes I know it was Vetruvian Man but obviously I don't look remotely similar).

Fitness is over-rated.

The really unreasonable thing about fitness if that it hangs around for a bit just so long as you exert yourself almost every day. It'll let you have the odd day off for good behaviour as long as you promise to go straight back to some kind of exercise the following day.

But if fitness even gets the teeniest whiff that you have better things to do than get pink and every-so-slightly-glowing while exerting yourself, it does a runner, leaving you feeling like a person who's gained four stones overnight and has just recovered from 'flu.

So if you want to gain fleeting fitness by all means lug King Edwards about. Anyone who knows anything about Gloucester RFC will remember that was the preferred training method of England player (tight -head prop/hooker/ ?? can't remember) Phil Blakeway. He used to work out by carrying not only veg but fruit too, being a fruit and veg wholesaler.

For those of sensible dispositions who are not interested in scratching the back of fitness, here is my cut-out and keep guide to cycling with vegetables.

Say YES to cycling with Curly Kale, Salad Bags (but beware of the whole lettuces although Baby Gem lettuces don't weigh much), Cress, Parsley and sundry herbs but watch the weight of the root ginger, asparagus, teeny tomatoes, spring onions, those hopeless little beans from Africa which cost about £4 to feed two people, shredded cabbage (mostly air, anyway) ready-grated carrot (also mostly air, so fine but for maximum value for money remember to breath it in when you open the bag).

Say NO to cycling with potatoes, carrots, celeriac, kohl rabi, turnips, parsnips, onions (unless strung around the shoulders because that is a cycling tradition in France, I'm told), cauliflowers, cabbages, kings, and really massive tomatoes.

I wasn't going to mention melons because, strictly speaking they are fruit but everyone - men included - is advised to avoid cycling with melons. They can be unruly and you might overbalance. You know it makes sense. Your health is at stake.

Beau Brummel Rides Again

2008-07-20T02:04:00.000-07:00

As far as mens' fashions go, the 21^st century has proved to be tedious in the extreme.

What have we got? A well-cut suit if you're lucky, comfortable trousers, jackets, sweat shirts, polo shirts, cuff and collar shirts and sportswear and then you've got jeans which will do for almost every occasion....

oh, and T shirts.

Dull, dull-plus and bargain bucket supa-dull-with fries.

None of it sets the world alight. There are no extravagant wigs - except in the higher echelons of the legal profession - no pantaloons, no fetching Mr Darcy baggy shirts, no fabulously shiny knee boots.

Riding in Richmond Park recently, one couldn't help but notice the packs of dedicated, svelte, long-legged racing cyclists in training. It was a spectacle which called into question how anyone in their right mind could revile the wonders of Lycra but it also highlighted how tastes and fashions have changed.

Two hundred years ago when London and Bath were fashion capitals and the male form was celebrated and enhanced with more zeal than it is today, fellows like these would have been much feted and admired.

With enough cash and time on their hands, they could have been the Beau Brummells of their day.

Most of them , with a few exceptions, possess precisely the correct turn of ankle, calf and thigh which would have caused Regency ladies to swoon by the carriageload.

As the penny farthing didn't turn up for another sixty years to aid the requisite leg development, Regency gentlemen either had to put up with the leg and body shape determined by their genes or resort to artifice at considerable expense.

Where the upper body was concerned, gentlemen often wore whalebone corded lace-up corsets such as the Glasgow Stiffener for boxing, hunting and fencing. These corsets were not unlike weight-lifters' belts and designed to create the impression of strong, straight backs and deep chests.

If nature had failed to provide sufficient musculature in the leg department, the slim-calved gent would wear appropriately padded stockings.

For the desperate, a cheaper option was to buy a pair of false calves and strap them to their legs beneath the stockings. This was riskier , carrying with it the possibility of slippage and eye-catchingly swollen ankles.

Pantaloons were deliberately cut on the bias to emphasise the leg and thighs and had an outside seam to avoid chafing. They were tucked fetchingly into the boot at the calf or ankle.

The downside of all this splendour was the lashings of cash, time and downright cheating that it took to achieve.

Beau Brummell, the man credited with introducing the concept of the suit worn with necktie, sometimes took five hours to get ready to go out. If it started raining, he'd have to start all over again and change into a completely different set of clothes.

Not feasible these days and probably just as well.

After all, it just wouldn't seem right for a fellow to spend far longer on his appearance and grooming than his lady.

The sensible option in 2008 is to invest in modest racing bicycle and the right kind of lycra and join the beautiful people doing circuits of Richmond Park

Scary Tools

2008-07-19T22:57:00.000-07:00

When the nurse asked me to give her a hand to take some shelves and a cupboard down, I didn't foresee any problems.

The nurses' room at work was due for redecoration. I'm not DIY fiend but a screwdriver isn't beyond me. I even run to Allen keys.

But when she produced a huge box and took out a contraption that needed two hands to hold it, I suddenly had my doubts.

“That's a hammer drill,” I told her.

She's very good at dressings and loves nothing better than a nice deep wound but is undoubtedly woeful in the workshop.

“Yes, it is a hammer drill as well, I think.”

She sounded vague.

“It's a screwdriver too. It does lots of thing, apparently.”

It looked like a nuclear weapon masquerading as a screwdriver. It was heavy, you had to use both hands to lift it and the only part which looked remotely screwy was the phillips crosshead thingy at the front.

It didn't even have a power cable. Uranium-fuelled, almost certainly.

“It's battery-operated.”

Exactly the kind of thing Saddam Hussein used to tell the weapons inspectors.

There were several sets of dials bearing numbers and any amount of coloured tabs and switches which might or might not be “on” buttons. I wasn't touching it. It might go off in my hand.

She knew how to switch it on. It uttered a struggling throaty gurgle and undid three screws out of 16. We only removed one shelf and failed completely on the others and the cupboard. We left a note to the decorators “Please remove. Sorry, not very good at unscrewing. Thanks. The Nurse.”

I may be on the mailing list of our local specialist powertools shop - only because of buying a Dremel to file down my dog's nails - but power tools scare me witless. Walking into the shop made me feel like I was inhaling pure testosterone and everyone stared as though my skirt was tucked into my knickers by accident but it definitely was not (you always have to surreptitiously check though, don't you?)

Asking me to wield a hammer drill is like asking me to stand still while a moth crawls up my bare arm - only possible about five minutes after hell freezes over.

They are scary in every respect, the ear-piercing, teeth-tingling screaming noise, the weight, the potential for causing unwitting damage. They are undoubtedly a force for evil.

I wasn't scared of them when I was young. My father was the most capable and organised of handymen. The garage and shed were breath-takingly orderly. He even had little bureaux of different sized screws and nuts with the draws all labelled. Anything with a blade was oiled and sharp ready for use. He knew where everything was and he knew how to use it.

The little red hand drill felt nice and just purred when you turned the handle. The fretsaw was noisier but great fun for making my own crazy jigsaws.

It was later that the trauma set in. When DT man had to make his first forays into DIY, completely untrained and abandoned to his fate by his, in my view, frankly negligent, dad. They were the sort of forays where the instinct among bystanders was to take cover - not in the next room but preferably in a house two doors away.

Not that I was ever allowed to take cover because I was always required to hold something, measure something, mark something or clear the debris.

So I had to witness terrible things; the earsplitting noise and terrifying sight of a drill skittering clear across the surface of a newly painted wall at full belt; being covered with plaster and bits of ceiling when a foot exploded through the landing ceiling above me (the result of a small stumble on a joist in the attic) and a wall of recently hung wallpaper with so many trapped air bubbles that it looked like it had been pasted with giant-sized tapioca.

Then there was the way a humble plane - a benign, quiet well-behaved kind of tool with its sharp blade well hidden - wreaked havoc with a bedroom door which was a bit “sticky” over new carpet. In this case the door was transformed into a Western saloon-style door, having been planed with enthusiasm at BOTH ends ending up with ample ventilation and light at both the top and bottom of the door.

Left to my own devices, at least I'm methodical. I'm really careful when assembling flatpack furniture not to place spigot D into female member F3 and count out all my screws, flanges and cordwanglers with deft precision.

Polyfilling is easy, although Dad really wouldn't approve of my polyfilling method because I've had to use my finger since I mislaid his ancient putty knife. It's like cake icing only more boring and you must remember not to lick your fingers.

You are rarely required to pipe rosettes around the dado rail or write Happy Birthday in squirty letters on the ceiling, although it might be fun to have a go one day. The flattening bit is the same anyway.

You can even use royal icing if you are out of polyfiller, as I once did but you do run the risk of ants coming and eating your wall.

Increasingly, women are becoming more independent where DIY is concerned. A friend of mine and her daughter were delighted to have achieved a toilet seat fixing for the first time ever this week.

The new seat was comfortable, stable, straight - all the things it's reasonable to expect of a toilet seat.

The daughter's boyfriend visited and needed to use the bathroom.

“Who fitted that toilet seat for you?” he enquired afterwards.

“Us!” they chorused proudly.

“It's hopeless," he said.

"It needs to be fitted further forward. The lid won't stay up.”

Men eh? So quick to criticise. So hopeless at multi-tasking.

Cereal junk

2008-07-08T11:00:00.000-07:00

Deprivation is a subjective thing.

One deprived child might think he's hard-done-by because mummy and daddy won't get him the latest Will Smith film for his back-seat in-car DVD player.

Another might feel deprived because he's been forbidden Kinder eggs.

One might argue that deprivation can only be a good thing when applied to Kinder eggs and similar junk-sweeties.

But I always felt that the quotient of anticipation and joy that the buying of the much-wanted Kinder eggs (containing, most importantly a tiny plastic toy which could rarely be constructed properly) could whip up made it them worthwhile for a very rare treat.

I was talking to a pal today about the first commercial free gift I ever got - an orange plastic Big Ears out of a pack of Ricicles. It was a big deal when I was very young. Second only in status to my Noddy clock, which was a birthday present.

I had to eat a whole box of Ricicles (not in one sitting although I was a tad piggy) to get the next gift, a little blue plastic model of Noddy. Sadly, though, after Big Ears, Noddy wasn't as good somehow. Big Ears had attitude and a fair amount of gnomish testosterone. He had a beard and a tall pointy hat and stood with legs akimbo. Noddy was merely amiable and his hat was floppy with a bell on it.

My pal wasn't impressed. He was a tad sniffy, actually. He was never allowed such rubbish.

“We were make to feel guilty if we ever asked for crap like that.”

The fact that I was thrilled with a small plastic Big Ears might indicate that I was the deprived one. We had few toys when I was small in Wales. We had to go and play with coal and fashion pieces of wood with blunt knives or pick bilberries and attempt to catch lambs.

But actually I was very happy with all that and I feel my pal , although I wouldn't dream of telling him so, was actually the deprived one.

He never experiencing the thrill and wonder of lifting a small new model of Tony the Tiger from a box of Frosties or wracked his brains to think what marvellous mystery free gift could be lurking within the new box of Shreddies.

Taking a commercial break from the cereals for a moment, some of my first freebies were the PG tips collector cards. Every time mumsie opened a new packet of tea there would be another card for my treasured collection of British Butterflies or Birds of the World cards.

It sounds dorky now but I learned a lot from those cards and swapped with other sad twits at school until, joy of joys, the entire albums got completed - then I discovered the Gerald Durrell books and suddenly I was a confirmed amateur naturalist.

By the time my sons were old enough to collect free stuff, the “must have” were Top Trumps which were a lot less educational but did introduce us to the possibilities of supercars and in particular the Renault 5 Alpine Turbo.

I doubt today's youngsters would be impressed by such free gifts. Many of them have phones, stereo systems, TVs and DVD players in their bedrooms by the age of eight can no longer be impressed with bits of plastic.

Attitude to freebie junk toys might be a good indicator of class though.

My parents didn't care. They just saw it as harmless stuff which would give transient pleasure and be chucked out in due course.

My pal's mater and pater, in contrast were concerned that their children might be somehow tarnished by contact with common dross. They were probably right. There kids turned out to be far cleverer and more successful but didn't have as much cheap fun at home.

He turned out quite-posh anyway - uses the royal “we” and everything.

Actually we could all be using the royal “Wii” if only Nintendo would consider bringing it out.

It would come complete with ermine robe, orb, sceptre and throne. Not as physical as the Wii Fit but ultimately satisfying to sit in state as crowned head of your own domain. I know a deprived quite-posh person who'd be first in line for the prototype.

Paralysis

2008-07-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

Orange blossoms nod

beneath the first fat raindrops

from lilac thunderclouds.

Through wide-open windows,

languid trails of sweetness creep

and settle around her,

sprawled beneath a twisted sheet

a tangle of fair hair, a long pale thigh

opalescent in the gathering gloom.

A kind of paralysis, suspended

in the softness of sensations spent

Sweat on the pillow

birdsong seeping in,

the jarring squabbles of magpies

hasten the slow, thick return to being.

Happy Birthday Space Invaders!

2008-07-06T03:13:00.001-07:00

Happy 30^th birthday Space Invaders. I Ioved that game, but not with as much ardour as others of my acquaintance.

It was born in Japan in l978 and was immediately so popular that the Japanese had to mint extra 100-yen coins because so many were out of circulation in Space Invader game cash-boxes.

That's the trouble with games. When you start playing everyone's equally hopeless for a short while and then people start getting good. And those who are not so good have to wait such a long time for their turn that they grow beards and get shorter and eventually shrivel and wither away. Either that, or they go and find a cup of tea somewhere and something more interesting to do.

It was a problem with Trivial Pursuit. Some bright spark would hit a successful streak and everyone else would drift away from the board to the kitchen to raid the cupboard for further snacks and open another bottle of wine. The bright spark never noticed. He was too busy collecting cheeses.

And so it was with Space Invaders. Brilliant. I got very hooked - although nothing to compare with Tetris - but less and less interested as I had to wait increasingly long times for my turn as a consequence of DT man getting quite good, good, above average and then bloody invincible.

I blame the BBC. DT man was doing a spot of work for them at the time and they installed a Space Invaders machine in the bar. It was a sensation – so much so that once the local new bulletins was ever so slightly delayed because one of the presenters couldn't be torn away from the console as he was achieving a record score.

Another myth circulating at the time was that one member of staff actually clocked it. I don't know precisely how many levels that entailed but it enshrined him as the definitive Space Invaders superstar thereafter and it was the beginning of the Great Decline In Interest.

Holidays took a different turn if there was a Space Invaders machine in the vicinity. On one holiday in Cornwall there was one installed in a kind of large shed along with a couple of other games. Whatever time of day or night you walked by, the familiar bass “dum-dum-dum-dum” could be heard as Space Invaders continued their inexorable march down the screen to wipe out hapless players who foolishly had destroyed the very buildings which were meant to be their cover.

It was supposed to be for kids but there was often a forlorn little line of six to ten-year-olds queueing up along the path outside the shed as dads – who tended to be quite good and therefore one turn might take half an hour - ended up possessing it for most of the day while mums and the other kids were on the beach.

There's a new version of Space Invaders out at the moment, apparently, for something called PSP whatever that is and DS whatever that is.

I'm almost tempted to find out except that I know that if DT man ever hears that familiar “dum-dum-dum-dum” a maniacal gleam will appear in the eye and he'll be drawn to it once more like a moth to a flame. Civilisation as we know it will end.

Le tour - St Malo (Seafood and Eat It Stage)

2008-07-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

.....not to be confused with the Tour de France St Malo Monday 7th July (Stage Three)

Le tour (note small 't') was a week early for obvious reasons.

We really didn't want to do the whole public thing. I'm quite shy really and the thought of the big massed start with multi-coloured bunting fluttering over the roads, the barriers, the definitive route and all the attention was quite off-putting.

Who, in her right mind on a pleasant toodle through St Malo wants that crazy Devil character sprinting alongside her brandishing a trident and yelling inarticulacies?

Those spectators who dash into the road to squirt water over riders in the midday heat - they're a bloody nuisance, not to mention Phil Liggett - there every year droning on in his slightly nasal, know-it-all-twang.

How tedious, if you've just stopped off at a nice seafood restaurant and the waiter's brought a bottle of chilled muscadet and you're cracking your first langoustine if Phil or Gary Imlach were to thrust a microphone under your nose and ask searching questions about your commitment to the Tour, why you appear to have gone off route and when you were last drug tested.

So we decided to avoid any unwelcome attention and walked the bikes off the 'Bretagne' ferry from Portsmouth a week before the circus was due to arrive.

The Brittany Ferries folk deem it unsafe for you to ride your bike off the ferry. The ramps are big enough and sturdy enough for juggernauts but not suitable to ride a bike over, apparently. There must be a good reason. Perhaps they have had experience of lemming-like cyclists who get half-way to dry land when they are compelled to take a sudden left and plunge into the sea.

It was good discovering a camaraderie among cyclists. Two guys were heading south with 65 miles ahead of them that day and had packed so economically they'd forgotten the map. A couple in their thirties were aiming for Avranches via Monte St Michel. We had about...well... fifteen to twenty miles, max. But ours was a pleasant relaxing kind of thing not some kind of endurance test; an opportunity to meander off course, wander along a beach or two, swim maybe, explore any interesting-looking places along the way.

A dead-easy mosey along thoughtfully-provided cycleways through St Malo continued east towards Cancale then turned north along a deserted lane to the coast and a couple of lovely deserted beaches before the Pointe de Grouin to watch cormorants fishing and listen to oystercatchers.

The views were good from our outside table at a restaurant close to the Pointe. During a couple of hours, the distant and mysterious blue cone of Mont St Michel way across the bay faded in and out of view in the deep blue haze over the Cote d'Emeraud.

You know how it is when you're not expecting anything special and suddenly everything conspires to produce a special moment?

So it was when, in search of the first destination, we freewheeled down a short, steep hill on the outskirts of Cancale, took a left and found ourselves by the sea at Port Mer, a perfect, pocket-sized French seaside village.

There was one hotel and a couple of bars on the front across a narrow road from the sea wall and then a clean, soft sandy beach, gently shelving beneath the clear waters of a sheltered bay where yachts and fishing boats bobbed at anchor.

I loved the hotel sign. I loved the hotel room even more with a tiny balcony complete with a table and a couple of chairs overlooking the bay. It was hot. We grabbed towels and books and joined the few families dotted about the beach. That first swim in Channel water which was impossibly clear, was just fabulous.

Sunday in Cancale, the oyster capital of Brittany, was a revelation. It was across a couple of headlands from Port Mer. Vast degustation platters of shellfish and seaweed were being served in dozens of restaurants strung out all along the seafront but the real afficionados weren't in restaurants at all. They were perched akimbo on the sea wall next to the oyster market where they'd bought lunch and were busy levering oysters open and slurping them as people have done for centuries.

Much, much later, there was the small matter of picking up the bags from Port Mer, discovering how steeper the hill had got in a couple of hours and returning to St Malo via the coast road, busier as it was a sunny Sunday and the French had come out to play.

Cycling was a breeze in France. The drivers were polite and gave cyclists a wide berth so it felt very safe. There were no real hills to worry about and where there's a bit of undulation at least you have the satisfaction of the swooping downhill, which, if enthusiastic enough, gets you at least a third of the way up the other side.

There were plenty of other cyclists too. One couple could not possibly have been less than seventy years old but there they were, pottering along on sit-up-and-beg bikes on Sunday nodding amiably as we passed.

The next stop was La Grande Plage, St Malo where an electic selection of French seaside architecture lines the promenade - a sought-after location for the summer residence - overlooking the wide beach and sea with the old fortifications of St Malo to the west a ten minute stroll away. A curious forest of thick tree trunks had been planted on the beach to protect the sea wall. Not a bad idea. They'd probably last hundreds of years.

We rode along roads which will be closed for Monday's Tour stage.

But in spite of our own tour of St Malo, I have to confess I'm still in denial about the whole cycle tour thing. I've never wanted to be a classic touring cyclist and still don't.

I'm a terrible apology of a cyclist; a real lightweight. I don't want to carry more than a rucksack and a pack on a rack. I loathe panniers and I feel sorry for those couples you occasionally see in faded waterproofs where the guy is grinding away the tarmac out front and the woman is a quarter of a mile back looking worn and miserable.

I really don't want to just bike from place to place in a determined fashion where achieving miles is more important than carefree exploration and exhilarating downhills generously peppered with stops to enquire, to observe and to loaf about a bit.

A French loaf is appealing on so many levels. Crumbs, you should try it.

Sleeping with Strangers

2008-07-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

There are those who aren't the slightest bit perturbed by the prospect of sleeping with a stranger. I'm reliably informed that some women actively seek out opportunities to do so.

I've never fancied the idea. I'm not the type. I require at least an introduction along the lines of a “How do you do?” or a “Do you come here often?” or a Majesterial “And what do you do?”

A small tincture doesn't go amiss either. It's only polite after all, to break the ice and put someone at their ease if you're going to spend the night with them.

But by the time I reached my sleeping quarters on Friday night, it was too late for introductions. I knew where I should go, because I'd checked it out earlier. But at 11.30pm the room was very dark indeed and I only managed to locate the place by taking a bearing from a now almost indiscernible painting on the wall of a French cottage.

That was my recliner, the empty seat by the aisle. But there was a man in the next recliner. He was a big bulky bloke built like a Toulouse prop-forward. Instead of sitting back and reclining in a disciplined way as in a chair, he had twisted on to his side, facing and uncomfortably close to, my seat, semi-curled like an enormous, unruly foetus.

He overflowed his recliner in all directions and was very soundly asleep. He looked like a professional traveller. He was wearing one of those Joan Collins eye masks which gave him the air of a burly cross-dresser. No doubt he had earplugs in too but if he did, they were hidden by a bushy thatch of dark hair. A blanket provided by Brittany Ferries was slipping off his legs.

I didn't immediately take to him. He looked like a man who was fond of food or beer or probably both so there was a strong probability of noctural eruptions. He might need to go to the bathroom at least twice, which would involve disturbing me.

The worse thing was that his great thick left arm was sticking out stiffly over my recliner; an over-hanging bough with a huge pale hand on the end with fingers pointing downwards stiffly like an inflated rubber glove.

Even if stopped breathing, sucked everything in to make myself as thin as possible and limboed silently into my recliner, I figures that like the Sword of Damocles, The Hand would be hovering approximately above the region of my breasts.

I''d never be able to close my eyes for fear of The Hand descending suddenly or lowering itself very very slowly, at the speed of the London Eye and making contact during the night. Whether it was by accident or design was immaterial; the prospect was too real.

The whole room was full of people breathing heavily. As my eyes got used to the darkness, I located DT man and disturbed him. He was unwilling to move, having consumed soporific quantities of very reasonably priced merlot. DT man's sleeping companion was a small slightly-built shaven-headed chap who was snoozing silently in a very disciplined way entirely enclosed within his recliner.

“A big man's got his hand over my seat” I hissed.

“Oh just nudge him,” DT man mumbled somewhat incoherently.

“He'll shift and go over his own side.”

Quite frankly, it wasn't the chivalrous response I was looking for. I was firmly of the opinion that squeezing in next to the Toulouse prop-forward was DT man's job, rather like putting bins out or using a power drill.

Gradually it became clear to him that the urgent whispering was only going to continue and sleep would be impossible unless we swapped places.

So he went over to sleep with the prop forward and I settled in nicely next to shaven-headed chap, who I decided was probably a Tibetan monk in civvies, unlikely to make any inappropriate lunges in his dreams about begging bowls and prayers.

I must have got a solid couple of hours before I was woken suddenly by the sound of a terrible prolonged groan/sigh which shook the room.

“Fuck,” I thought. “Someone's pegged it.”

Packing for three days on a bike in Brittany, I hadn't included the resuscitation mask which I usually carry. I shot bolt upright in my seat and scanned the darkness for signs of distress. No-one else had moved. DT man and Toulouse man were slumbering undisturbed. If someone was dead, it was going to be quite tricky to determine who. Should I creep between rows, silently poking people to check they were alive? Not a popular move. Maybe I'd dreamed that noise. Someone with sleep apnoea? Everyone else was still. I calmed down.

I must have drifted off again and I slept pretty well, except for the stiff neck and the not knowing what to do with my feet and legs, which seemed not to fit anywhere, as though I'd drunk, like Alice from the “Drink Me” bottle for especially long legs. Sometimes I crunched them up and sometimes I stretched out under the seat in front. It was not ideal.

I was sleeping very soundly indeed when the Really Useful Woman about three rows back woke me up by announcing to her poor long-suffering partner/husband/kid/friend “It's five past six. Did you sleep ok?”

Well I had until then. My shaven sleeping companion was still serenely breathing lightly in exactly the same posture he'd adopted seven hours before.

I looked over to see what the Hulk With The Hand looked like in the early daylight but he had already gone, no doubt in search of refreshment. A man of his stature would be needing an early breakfast before disembarking.

Stalking: could do better.

2008-04-22T02:46:00.000-07:00

Stalking is a bit of a specialist interest. If there was an NVQ in stalking, I suspect most people would fail miserably.

I certainly haven't got the aptitude for it. I lack the required level of obsession, have insufficient patience, don't like standing around in the cold unless some horses or blokes are about to ride by at speed and I have almost no pride in my one and only autographed celebrity photograph - of Stan Stennett.

The rot set in when I was eight. Along with 200 others from my primary school, I clutched a small union jack and was forced to stand at the side of the route the Queen Mother was supposed to take to open an old people's home in the village.

We stood for about an hour encouraged by thoughts of Her Royal Highness swathed in billowing Cartland/Barbie pink riding in a golden coach lobbing sherbet fountains to us joyous, flag-waving children.

She swept past in a big grey car to have boiled beef and carrots with the old dears without so much as a royal wave.

I haven't been able to get very worked up about celebrities since then. When a film crew descends on Gloucester or Cheltenham I feel compelled to go take a mildly curious look but not much of a look really - more a glance and a couple of pics.

It was snow joke in the centre of Gloucester yesterday (I refer to the magnificent centre which is the Cathedral not the actual centre, which is deadly 60's concrete). They'd obviously had a bit of weather. The Cathedral close and Millers Green were blanketed with snow. Dr Who was in town and they were filming the Christmas Special.

I find myself slightly more interested in David Tennant than I had been in the Queen Mum. He's a man with sharp, mobile features, penetrating eyes and more charm than any individual person deserves. There he was, in his Dr Who startorial splendour of flowing brown coat over ill-matched pinstripe jacket trousers and trainers.

He only took notice of the hundred or so stalkers gawping from behind barriers when someone shouted his name - then he smiled winningly. I told you he was charming.

Acting is a weird business; a bit of fake snow-blowing, horse movement, a lot of standing about, looking, watching and waiting; a few seconds of “action” and it's back to the standing, watching and waiting.

Riveting, it wasn't. I managed a whole twenty minutes though, which is my new stalking record. I only managed five minutes trying to catch a glimpse of Alan Rickman years ago when they filmed the first Harry Potter in the Cathedral cloisters and ten minutes at Gloucester Docks when “Amazing Grace” was being filmed - but that doesn't count as I was snapping the beautiful tall ships, having been told that Ioan Gruffudd and David Jason had been and gone.

Some stalkers had been diligently following the Dr Who filming for much longer. A cheerfully woman in a wheelchair rocking a baby in a pram had been there for nearly five hours.

“My daughter loves David Tennant,” she remarked “but I haven't seen anything from here.” She'd been shoved under a hedge. Certainly a stoic, undemanding granny to be treasured.

I told her she hadn't missed much. The tardis stood impotently beneath a nearby archway, wrapped in tarpaulin and tied up with string. Why the daleks didn't think of tarpaulin and string, I've no idea but it seems to immobilise it very successfully.

David Tennant didn't do anything dramatic. He failed to dematerialise or even attempt to wrestle a lost-looking cybercreature to the ground and there was no sign of that cool pen/screwdriver thing which he uses for tightening bolts and stunning people - though not at the same time, I've noticed. Surely a design flaw.

He stood and watched, and waited, had a coffee from a cardboard cup and had a bit of a chat with several people including David Morrissey (the merest recollection of the excellent Sense and Sensibility tends to give one the vapours) who seems happiest in period costume and was also well-versed in standing about.

The most exciting thing was a stunning Victorian hearse drawn by six magnificent, gleaming horses wearing jetblack plumes.

And the most extraordinary thing was that, in spite of the standing around and members of the crew and minor cast being encased in arctic-quality puffa-coats, David Tennant didn't look cold or remotely bored.

It's encouraging. It means he has another string to his bow.

If the acting ever dries up, he's got the stamina to make an excellent stalker.

Short Story

2008-04-20T07:38:00.000-07:00

Emily lay naked in deep warm clear water, her back flat against the floor of the bath, her knees raised. An extravagant nebula of russet hair arranged itself in a static swirl around the part-submerged pale face with its faded freckles. Her eyes were closed. She breathed gently, her nostrils just clear of the water.

She lay still, a heavily pregnant Ophelia without the water crowfoot, listening to anonymous abdominal gurgles and the vague swishings of the baby shifting; silkily cocooned, intensely female.

Her hands rested flat against the slopes of her swollen belly, embracing the active infant cavorting within. She felt a pointed elbow, the rounder nub of a knee, the force of a small foot exerting astonishing pressure, then a whole body turn, stretching the mound alarmingly out of shape and, fleetingly, tiny pebble-like lumps which could only be toes.

Fingertips sensed the smooth hard curve of a back, the rounded solidity of a head. She imagined the eyes closed in perfect symmetry above perfect nostrils which had not yet drawn breath and perfect lips which had not yet suckled. A closed and secret beauty but not for much longer.

Could it really be true that she would have to do nothing but bear pain and bear down, down to expel this child? That her body would deliver this child without consultation or collusion?

She yearned to talk to her mother, the one person who would tell her honestly; the person who had felt her move inside her as she now felt this not-yet infant shift and struggle.

That was the dream, anyway; the normal dream. The trouble was, the normal dreams didn't seem quite real. It was the other dreams which were much more real - the dreams which terrified her.

The imagination is wild and imperfect when there is little nourishment for it. When she was young, she had imagined her mother as a pianist, a painter, a lady of leisure, a hard-working bread-maker, flushed and damp in a hot kitchen. But like a painter's palette where colours individually so vivid twist promisingly before merging to sludge- grey, so the images she conjured of her mother melted and fused themselves into a faceless indeterminate creature which only made her sad.

The nuns were her first mothers. When when Emily was ten a thick-set man with a florid cheeks and a thin dark moustache claimed her as his daughter. Heather was grateful for a home at last. Although she did her utmost to avoid his belt, for some reason her quiet convent discipline was never good enough for him.

When she tentatively asked about her mother he would not speak of her at all. It wasn't until four years later, six months after the funeral of her father that she ventured the question to her step-mother Dot, a shrewish, nervous woman. Dot told her that yes, she should know now that her mother was alive somewhere, probably in England, in a mental asylum.

The words had meant nothing to Emily. She scribbled them on a scrap of paper and looked them up later in the library at school. An institutional home for the mentally ill. The mad. The insane. She had been late for double Maths.

The thought remained, shut away in a corner of her mind. She was the child of a lunatic. For the most part, during the days, the thought crouched in its corner but at night it rose chased her through disturbed, boiling dreams.

Just recently, the same thought had invaded her dreams along with another dream of looking out of a bedroom window watching torrential rain drenching a garden. Fingers of thick green fatsia japonica leaves spread trembling under the deluge. A brook turned into a frantic torrent yet a sly flat edge of quiet water crept towards the puddles lying on the uneven old lawn until it merged and spread so that there was only a flat expanse of mud and blood. She woke up, sweating, her own blood pushed urgently through a thumping heart.

So there was always a dread. For some unknown reason she had blurted out the dread to Jenny, the tall chirpy midwife who dressed like a hippie in long patchwork skirts and clanking strings of noisy beads. It was her 24 week examination. The small clinical room smelled of disinfectant. Jenny, bending to wrap the blood pressure cuff around her arm, had asked the usual questions.

“Everything all right with you? Any problems at all?”

Emily should have said “No. All fine” which was the established reply. She could have said “Well, I've been having a few headaches” or “I'm starting to feel a lot heavier” or one of the other responses within the “normal” range.

But she said “I've been having terrible dreams again. Terrible dreams.”

And then she'd told Jenny everything; about her mother, how frightened she was, how no-one knew and how, more than anything else, she wanted to stop the dreams. Sometimes they were about the flood. At other times they were about the baby but in her dreams it was a blind gargoyle which opened its red gaping mouth and screeched because it was incurably insane.

Jenny held her hand and finally put an arm around her, absorbing some of the pain of those shuddering sobs. Reassurances and tissues were all she could offer.

Emily continued to see Jenny for check-ups. Sometimes they didn't talk about the dreams because the time was taken up discussing the practical considerations of being a single-parent mother - the baby's father had indicated his intentions quite early in the pregnancy by moving in with another woman.

At other times Emily couldn't not talk about the dreams. She became convinced the baby did not want to be born, especially when she went over her due date and had to attend at the maternity unit with a small overnight bag at 9am on a Saturday morning to be “started off.”

Emily's friend Mandy, who already had two young children, accompanied her twittering platitudes which Emily didn't hear.

Locked in silence, Emily lay on an examination couch, legs in the air, bare ankles held in stirrup slings, as the doctor's head dipped between them to insert an instrument. Something twanged numbly. Warm fluid, a gush reducing to a trickle. Mandy said she'd have to pop off to give her kids lunch in half an hour. Emily couldn't speak. She was cold; possessed by a recalcitrant lump.

The drip brought agony, as they intimated it would. Waves of agony doubled and re-doubled. Mandy had gone. Emily was alone, clutching the back of a plastic chair, colour returning to her knuckles as the pain diminished and the muscles softened again, just for a few moments.

“How are you doing, then?” The voice was familiar. Jenny. Tall and different; prim even, in her navy blue uniform with her hair fastened tightly in a bun.

“I didn't think...” Emily started, surprised.

“I didn't either but I managed to swap a shift. So I'll be seeing you through to midnight. Plenty of time I should think. Let's have you on the bed and see how things are.”

----

Jenny laughed later, as a different Emily, a bright-eyed, pink-cheeked, brimming-with-delight Emily sat up in her hospital bed thanking her over and over again.

“Reassurance and tissues - that's all I've given you. She'll give you the rest. You're all she's got.”

Beneath a light, white honeycombed hospital blanket in a clear-plastic crib, the baby rested, a miracle of exquisite construction, eyes closed beneath a suggestion of eyebrows; a smattering of short, dark hairs lying flat against a perfect head.

Everything had gone much better than Jenny expected. She'd warned the team that there might be trouble because Emily's medication had been kept deliberately low during her pregnancy. The baby had been quiet after delivery, moving her arms and legs, flexing tiny fingers and making astonished, quizzical faces in the dazzling light.

Jenny had laid the baby at Emily's naked breast. Emily's nightmares were dashed and broken by the reality of the fresh loveliness, the heart-wrenching vulnerability. The baby shifted and blinked away her mother's salt tears as Emily held her, laughing and crying.

The new-mother euphoria would dissipate quite soon. Heather's feelings would change. Her volatile mood swings would need to be watched closely. Jenny knew all that and she'd already had a chat with the health visitors.

She would stay in touch with Heather for a year or more... just as long as it took to make sure that mum and baby got along.

Hotter 'n hell

2008-04-14T09:30:00.000-07:00

Surely eating spicy food is a bit like riding a bike; once you've had a go, learned a lesson or two along the way, you can always do it?

Well everyone makes mistakes.

And my first was believing my own homespun claptrap.

In my late teens, I used to be able to put away a Madras, albeit accompanied by two gallons of water, without any problems.

A couple of years ago, a bunch of Indian waiters who warned me against a “very-very-hot-madam Jalfrezi” had a bucket of raita and a fire extinguisher at the ready in case of distress. It was delicious. No problem.

Uncontrolled hiccups are the only drawback with Indian dishes above a certain heat threshold. They usually kick in during a medium jalfrezi but if one attempts to remain lady-like it can be dealt with swiftly and easily by swigging several jugs of water. If they persist, one can always invite one's dining companion to do something unexpected and startling but this is always an unsettling last-ditch strategy. Besides, a high-pitched squeal unnerves other diners.

Hiccups are never a problem with fiery piri-piri chicken in Portugal and the usual home-made chilli con carne includes a fair smattering of chopped bird's eye chillies, seeds and all.

Son no 2 is big chilli fan and used to delight in bringing home hot sauces from his travels, which we'd try together on breadsticks until someone's eyes turned red.

So my seasoned palate was well up the challenge of a piri piri chicken salad in some restaurant named after an unhappy Abba tune - Chiquita or such-like - the other night.

When I ordered it, the waitress looked and said enquiringly, as of a simple-minded person who's not safe to be let out alone, “Is hot?”

She struggled over with a two gallon jug of iced water and dumped it down on my side of the table. Not a good sign.

The salad was unremarkable - your ordinary boring green salad leaves covered with halves of baby tomatoes and strips of char-grilled chicken. It was all liberally drenched in a browny seed-laden chilli sauce.

The first mouthful lightly excoriated the tip of my tongue.

Coming from a nice polite Welsh family and not wanting to appear in any way wimpy, I was reluctant to reveal my true discomfort so as not to disturb other diners.

The second bite lacerated the insides of my mouth.

By the third piece of chicken - well-scraped of sauce now - I was convinced my tongue had doubled in size. The pain began to come in waves.

This stuff wasn't hot. It was straight from the fiery furnace of the seventh legion of hell.

I tried water. It made no difference. This was suffering. Suffering worse than casually rubbing an eye with a fingerful of chopped chilli juice - and THAT's suffering.

“Is my face ok?” I asked my dining companion. By now my lips were tingling - not in a good way - and were effectively anaesthetised. They felt swollen, like one of those pop-art blow-up sofas.

“It's a bit pink,” he said.

“Is that very hot?” he smirked, tucking into his not-very-hot chilli con carne.

Under normal circumstances, I might have been irritated by his smugness but millions of cells were already irritated so I was clean out of irritation - which might have been irritating itself it I could summon any..etc you get my drift.

The pain was increasing inspite of regular dousings with iced water.

I was tempted to try the breathe-through-pain techniques that helped me through childbirth but I thought the panting might be mistaken for that scene in When Harry Met Sally. You remember?

Sally's convulsing, hair all over the place, banging the table with her hands gasping “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The woman sitting across the restaurant says “I'll have what she's having.”

Any such panting or discomforting behaviour on my part would be been horribly misleading though.

No-one in their right mind would actually want what I was having.

Not even me.

Hero Worship

2008-04-05T14:45:00.000-07:00

I don't pretend to know the psychology of it, but hero worship is a powerful attraction which hooks you into utter adoration without ever meeting the person concerned.

The catalyst for the adoration can be music, a voice, a photograph, a fragment of writing.

It's the reason teenage girls went wild for the Beatles. The image of those young men in the peculiarly tailored jackets and the sound they made stirred the already heady mix of swirling, multiplying hormones. A sure-fire recipe for mass hysteria.

I was too young for the excitement of the Beatles in their hey-day. My hero worship was music-based, deeply personal and lavished exclusively on James Taylor and Reg Dwight.

I dreamed of the places they described. The subtle slide guitar behind “In My Mind I'm Going To Carolina” took me to unfamiliar territory, the wide-open spaces of the US and the lyrical calm exuded by JT. With “Sweet Baby James” I needed to know where the Berkshires were and see what he was seeing when he wrote the words. “You Can Close Your Eyes” offered a touchingly simple tenderness.

An integral part of the idolization of these people and their music was the urge to somehow know them.

Too young to work out my feelings in anything but art, I studied their images and reproduced them in assiduous, loving detail. My bemused and bewigged art teacher Mr Davis must have known. Obvious really. I expect he'd seen it all before. The inspiration of a fevered frustrated youth expressed in coursework.

The image on the cover of the album “Sweet Baby James” mesmerised me. I produced at least ten portraits of James in different mediums. I needed to study his beautiful 'lost apostle' face, see exactly how the eyebrows formed, look at the precise relationship between the generous eyebrows and the pupil of the eye. The eyes themselves were crucial, looking at how they reflected, endlessly guessing at what they reflected. His mouth was good with sensuously curved lips stretching broadly. James never did do teeth and it didn't matter.

I watched, listened, drew, played his music on the guitar. Apart from being in his physical presence, which quite frankly I don't think I could have survived without suffering the vapours, it was the complete hero worship experience.

Similarly with Reg. I churned out sheafs of pencil and charcoal studies of him.

“I'm surprised you think so much of him,” my mother declared.

“He's podgy. And he drones on and on.”

I never tired of those cool squarish tinted specs, the dark blonde, slightly wavy hair. Deft and yes - pudgy - fingers on the keyboard. I brushed up my keyboard skills to play Your Song, Rocket Man, Border Song in workmanlike ways and plonk my way through the rest of the Elton John songbook.

Then a flood of other music took over my consciousness. I didn't listen to James Taylor for years and was mostly disappointed by Reg's output after Yellow Brick Road.

A couple of years back, I was taken to a concert for a birthday treat. It was a surprise. I had no idea who was on the bill.

Looking at the older people strolling to the NEC in Birmingham, I had a horrible feeling that it would be one of those deeply sad sixties nights with the original member of Showaddywaddy (a band I detested with a passion) plus a handful of sound-alikes.

It was actually JT himself.

He walked on stage bald and gaunt in a drab suit which hung from his bony frame; a shocking image a lifetime on from the lost apostle I adored. I almost wished I'd forgotten my specs and he'd remained a myopic mystery.

Then he sang and nothing mattered. The voice was still perfect. The voice I'd listened to as I lay on the floor of the living room sketching, the voice which was the source of miraculous, disturbing dreams.

Hero worship persists, as I found out, there in the darkness of the NEC as I closed my eyes and was submerged in the sensations of being a teenager again. There was the curved polished wood of my parents' 1950's radiogramme which, thanks to dad's electrical wizardry, housed the record deck. A warm late afternoon sun slanted through the windows on to my bare feet as I sat on the floor against the sofa, hugging my knees, intense, listening to “You've Got a Friend” alone with James, ready to be furiously resentful of any unwelcome intrusions by my little brother. Real but unreal. Deeply pleasurable.

So listening to those old classic tracks is still very special, as was seeing JT on Jools Holland's TV programme the other night.

Not hero worship as such, but I had a frisson of something akin to it recently; a sudden uncontrolled, unconscious reaction that was very similar - a teenage sensation that reached out suddenly from the past and grabbed me.

It was good, so hallelujah.

Winter ride

2008-04-05T14:35:00.000-07:00

A murmuring gunmetal ocean

stretches and slips beneath my wheels

Traffic roars in frozen ears

a winnowing wind takes all the tears

and an aching heart is

calmed by fiery circular rhythms;

soothed by the comfort

of concentration.

Singalonga Sound of Music?

2008-03-31T08:58:00.000-07:00

The brown paper packages tied up with string and the girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes had several things in common.

They were all standing sipping lager and wore lace-up shoes with colourful socks below naked, hairy calves.

The packages rustled noisily as a stiff breeze made their untied edges billow.

The girls in white dresses only had to make sure their long golden ringlets didn't get into their pints.

When you're over six foot tall with two-day stubble and built like rugby lock forward, you tend not to be too concerned if your dress blows about a bit.

There was a late flurry of nuns rushing up the road, crosses bouncing on ample bosoms. One paused to hitch a red garter higher on a meaty thigh while her friend took the opportunity to call someone on her mobile phone.

Meanwhile a bloke in a calf-length tunic decorated with paintings of jam and bread strolled passed various lederhosen-clad groups of people with undisguised arrogance.

You could almost see his thought bubble of contempt. Takes no imagination, after all, to hire lederhosen whereas he'd used true artistic flair to do the bread and jam thing with a nod towards the freedom of expression of Jackson Pollack.

There were whiskers on some kittens and one cream-coloured pony but no wild geese flying with the moon on their wings or (disappointingly as I was quite peckish having missed dinner) schnitzel with noodles.

They were all assembling at a local theatre for Singalonga Sound of Music - an event which proved a gloriously rip-roaring, mind-numbing, toe-curling combination of art, drama, audience participation and the worse excesses of the colosseum.

Apart from the lederhosen and the nuns (the nun with the red garter turned out to be a Les Dawson lookalike aged 70 suitably named Sister Farty of the Immaculate Orgasm) some of the costumes were inspired.

One of the biggest cheers of the evening was for the large bloke in a white shift holding a small carrier bag at arm's length.

“So what's in there?” asked Mavis the compere - a heady mix of dominatrix and Mrs Merton - trying to peer in.

“A goat turd.”

“Eeew.”

After a puzzled pause, he elaborated.

“A lonely goat-turd.”

He'd obviously found it high on a hill. Don't worry. It only makes sense if you're a dyed-in-the-goat-fleece Sound of Music fan.

The film began and the audience were unleashed to sing the soaring heart-warming numbers, to boo and yell insults at the nazis, to jeer openly and loudly at the sickly sentiment and let off party-poppers en masse to mark the moment when Julie Andrews snogs Christopher Plummer.

It was as though every single person there had taken the Chemical Brothers' “Don't hold back” adage to heart.

They were going to climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow in the pursuit of a wild night out.

Trouble is, having experienced audience participation in its purest sense, it's going to be quite hard not to heckle at the cinema in future. The lost possibilities will haunt me.

“Behind you!” in Jaws.

“Don't worry. It's only a toy with big eyes” in ET.

“He's a ghost, you eejit!” in Sixth Sense.

I might think of more but in the meantime, so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye...

2008-03-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

Sinewy, muscular arms;

practical, clever,

elegant, expressive hands

Long strong fingers

grasp, cling

guide and hold fast

Sensitive, fast fingers work

intricate melodies

commit ideas to paper, thoughts to text

they innovate, instruct, create

they touch, claim,

explore

adore.

Roly. RIP.

2008-01-14T09:50:00.000-08:00

This will all sound completely bonkers to anyone who has never owned a dog and to those who can never conceive of an animal being considered as an integral part of a family.

But my dog Roly died suddenly on New Year's Eve and I feel compelled to write about him because I'm possibly still in shock and definitely missing him badly. It's not surprising really as I've spent more daylight hours with him over the past eight years than any other single person.

He was a gorgeous, soppy, stinky dope of a spaniel who was utterly joyful, lifted my spirits, kept me fit and was always game for a walk, a run, a car ride or a cuddle. His sudden absence leaves the house seeming empty, sterile and less of a home. Even the garden and pond look duller.

It was Monday afternoon that I had to give my vet permission to put Rolls to sleep. He suddenly became ill with complicated pancreatitis which, in spite of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories, raged in him so strongly there was no pulling back.

So who among you would miss a great big pain-in-the-ass of a dog? The kind of dog who would plunge into the deepest puddle, swim the mankiest pond, gulp down disgusting stuff before you could get to him - then come up to you with the proudest look on his face before doing you the honour of a comprehensive, detritus-spattering shake?

He'd drool on your trousers, ask for a chew, paw your leg to remind you to take him for a walk, even climb ponderously on to your lap to get up close and personal or just lie flat out on the floor snoring loudly.

Some people asked “What kind of dog is he?”

“An English Springer Spaniel.”

“Oh. A bit big for a springer isn't he?”

“Yes but he's from show stock not working lines.”

“Ah” they'd say with doubt in their eyes.

One countryman-type was determined to force the issue.

“He's no springer, my dear. He's a Munsterlander. Definitely too big for a springer.”

After lengthy discussions, we eventually agreed on a runty Munsterlander and he went away happy and satisfied with his superior dog knowledge. It was the quickest way to deal with it. He wasn't going to back down and I wasn't going to get on with the walk unless he received full agreement.

If I was writing, Rolls would be under the desk, snoozing warmly draped over my feet, occasionally expelling some noxious fart. If I laughed he wanted in on the fun and would lick my elbow approvingly. If I wrote for too long, he'd pointedly go to the door to indicate time was running short for walkies.

He liked baths because they were followed by a bull-fight style game with old towels in which he'd leap into the air and try and catch them before they were teasingly snatched away. Being a trophy-winning show dog in his early years who had his day at Crufts, he enjoyed being trimmed and groomed.

Handsome? I thought so. A lovely head, as the judges used to say, well-sprung ribs, legs which were strong in bone with a well-set tail, albeit docked, which showed unquenchable enthusiasm for everything and everyone including the vet. Much more than looks, though, he had a boundlessly joyful personality. Every time I unlocked the front door if he wasn't at my feet bursting to get in, he'd be capering about the hallway and would have to bring the nearest slipper or toy as a greeting.

He was exceptionally expressive; as demanding as toddler. My mother reckoned he could almost talk. As we chatted at the kitchen table, Rolls would demonstrate his best, straightest, most attention-seeking sit, waiting to catch mater's attention with purposeful brown eyes.

We used to wind him up by ignoring him but eventually mum would cave in and ask “So what do you want?” He'd go immediately to the cupboard where the chews were kept and stand with his nose pointedly against the door, tail wagging madly until she relented.

He knew the times of his breakfast and dinner and he knew if we'd forgotten to give him his epilepsy meds. Epilepsy appeared when he was two but it was controlled with meds so his fits usually happened in the night - a tolerable inconvenience.

I took him virtually everywhere with me and he came on most holidays. We walked together on the Malverns, in the Forest of Dean, in the Cotswolds, swam together in the sea in Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, walked and biked on vast windswept beaches and the centre of London where we found an absence of doggy bins near the MI6 building for understandable reasons. He was a model guest in hotels including the Hilton in Leeds where, on the eighth floor, he'd sit waiting for the lift and rise to his feet when the “ping” indicating the doors were about to open.

His literary career was still in its infancy but he managed to be a Featured Blogger here at MyT and his blog about the Tour de France last year earned him a prize, which has to be some kind of bizarre record for a canine.

Away from the keyboard, simply watching him bounding away across the hill or bouncing up into view intermittently in a field of long grass was uniquely life-enhancing.

Against all the best health and safety dog advice, he liked to fetch sticks - the bigger the better. His most ambitious was a small tree about seven feet long complete with branches.

It would take him a while to balance the larger timbers. He'd put the thing down and pick it up again at a different spot a couple of times before getting it dead centre and would trot along head high with his prize as though doing a lap of honour.

Watching him trying to get his tree through the bottom of a stile was a lesson in dogged persistence. There would be a lot of concentrated knocking and bumping and manoevering as he experimented with the best tactic and then suddenly, he'd be racing towards me brandishing his precious tree with undisguised glee.

His neck was strong and he would have been good at carrying game, if he had been bothered. He was essentially a show dog of limited working ability and never got the hang of enthusiastic retrieves or flushing. He didn't move fast enough and had a high boredom threshold when it came to retrieving dummies. He'd do five max and then look as though to say “I've done the same bloody thing five times in a row. Throw it again if you like but just don't expect me to get it.”

He loved to come out with the bikes, trotting along on the extending lead or galloping with the lead bike on cycleways. Passers-by grinned watching Rolls pelting along, tongue bouncing up and down and ears flying back in the wind.

His big problem was a gargantuan appetite sharpened by the epilepsy meds. He'd steal food from anyone anywhere. He raided some family's barbecue last year - fortunately the family were all happily lager-sozzled and laughed heartily. He also burgled two picnic bags in the car on consecutive days while we were at Hay Festival. The first time he got the zip undone and cleared the contents, crunching his way through plastic boxes to get at the goodies. The second time, the zip had been secured, so he simply ate a hole in the side of the picnic bag and dragged stuff out.

Not to be outdone, I drove nearly 50 miles to get a dog-guard with the aim of separating Rolls from the rolls. The nice Halfords man assured me it was suitable for all dogs.

“Even a totally ravenous springer spaniel?”

“For ALL dogs, madam.”

Yeah. It took Roly twenty minutes to dismantle it. We tightened it further. It took him ten minutes, then three minutes as he warmed to the challenge. In the end, it was only a zoo-quality professionally-fitted dog guard which suceeded in protecting us from his appetite.

Roly was larger than life and the best company. That's the trouble. There's so much of him to miss.

Roly's Tour Diary

2008-01-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

July 2007

Until yesterday, TV coverage of the Tour was exceptionally tedious. Don't get me wrong, I like proper cycling but that programme they keep watching just can't compared with Dogs with Jobs or Animal Planet. So I was dozing nicely when she suddenly shouted “Someone get that damn dog off the course!”

I glanced up to see some brainless labrador wandering among the riders then Marcus Burghardt ran straight into him.

A very embarrassing incident. That dog was definitely in breach of regulations. It wasn't wearing a number or a helmet and everybody knows you should wear both during a race. What was he even doing there? He'd be a hopeless climber - far too portly (although I suspect he'd have a momentum advantage on the downhills).

I blame the owner. It wasn't lardy-boy's fault that he wandered amiably among the frantic competitors. No doubt he could see that crumb of power bar which I spotted by the opposite kerb.

He wore a sheepish “Ooops sorry mate. Am I in trouble?” look as Burghardt sprawled on the tarmac. Just as well Burghardt wasn't seriously injured.

My extremely mean owner keeps me on a very tight lead at races or if there's food lying about at nose level. You know the sort of thing, dead seagull, horse manure, half-eaten burgen, the odd chip - all very desirable stuff. She's very boring.

No doubt they'll be glued to the box again this evening but I prefer the real thing. I remember the road races. Full days out in the fresh air, food, long walks, stopping for her to hand a bottle or two, a fragment of banana bar if I was lucky and then the joyous greeting at the end.

What cyclist who's just ridden 60-80 miles doesn't welcome an exhuberant springer spaniel reception party? Forget the pecks on the cheek from the dolly girls on the podium - my welcomes much more effusive and the exactly the same if he'd finished 40th or 1st.

I don't get out cycling much these days. The last time we went mountain biking in the Forest, I beat them on the climbs and I don't think it went down too well. The words fat and old spring to mind while I am ripped and in my prime.

Sex and food excepted, there's nothing to compare with the exhilaration of racing alongside the lead bike at full pelt, ears aerodynamically flapping in the wind.

They haven't taken me for some time though, ever since I made the wrong turn at a forest junction and went off with the wrong bike for several miles. The guy had to turn round and take me back to my people. Course, I couldn't explain it had been a sharp left and I was blinded by my ears at the crucial moment.

So cycling expeditions these days are a bit tame - a quick one down the cyclepath to the Farm Market and back AND I still beat her on the uphills, which occasionally has attracted comments from pedestrians.

She keeps talking about wanting to see Chablis and drink Tignes (or was it the other way round?) and I've got my own EU passport now.

I live in hope. I'll show 'em who's boss on those climbs.

Born to be Wild

2007-11-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

Those were the days, when children were allowed to play freely without over-protective parents getting in the way.

This was wild Wales and that's me with my first boyfriend Paul Smith. I think we were about to take off for a day on the beach. The buckets and spades were probably tied to the back somewhere.

If we got bored playing in the shed with dad's lathe or hunting for elusive rarebits among the scrub and bracken of the mountainside, we'd grab the keys and go for a spin.

It was a joy to get on a bike in a pair of dungarees and a T shirt instead of having to kit up in claustrophobic leathers and superhero helmets. Without even being aware of it, we were adopting the style of Steve McQueen, a man whose dungaree habit was strictly private.

Paul's looking distracted. His bladder control needed fine-tuning if I recall, whereas I was dry at six months according to my mother.

Only having reached Series II Book 1 of Janet and John, I wasn't the best at maps and signs so the destination was always a surprise, but one of the nice things about Wales is that as long as you head south, you'll hit the coast sooner or later.

We could go anywhere we liked as long as we were back for a cup of warm milk and our afternoon nap at 4pm.

******