Ray's Story

Z had taken the kids to the beach, but I’d opted to stay in the caravan.  After an hour or so, and having exhausted the entertainment potential of the newspaper, I dipped in to the small selection of books, leaflets and so on that reside in my bookrack there.  There’s a first aid manual, several quick’n’easy cookbooks, guides to walks and places to visit, and a few snatches of genuine local Pembrokeshire history.  It was one of those that captured me.

It’s a book of black and white picture postcards of Narberth, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Old pictures are, of course, always good to look at; but what caught my eye was the foreword, which heaped lavish praise and thanks on Miss Ray Davies, without whom the enterprise would never have happened. 

I knew her quite well, and I just wanted to set down what I can about a rather intriguing character.

Rachel, only ever known as Ray, was born in 1916 and died in 2003.  She never married.  It was rumoured that this was because her heart had been broken, just after the war, by a scoundrel in Belgium, where as a WREN she’d been posted for unknown reasons following service at Bletchley Park on the Enigma code-breaking project. (She was probably one of the Bombe girls, but I haven’t been able to verify that.)  I’ve seen a picture of her, in uniform, from around that time, and can only say that the Belgian heartbreaker must have been crazy.

By the time I met Ray, her focus had both narrowed and broadened.  It had narrowed to a compulsion to sort, identify and catalogue.  The broadening was in the range of material she did this to.  It started, probably, with stamps – she worked for Stanley Gibbons in the thirties – then expanded to archaeological samples, coins, Victorian fans, local history…  After she died we found dozens of exercise books filled with quite indecipherable lists of stuff, which of course we had no choice but to throw away.  Nobody would have cared.  The stamps and fans were sold, not for much.

What started me on this, though, was the local history obsession.  She became, I think, an infuriatingly avid supporter of the Narberth Wilson Museum (which has since closed down and then reopened; it won some ‘best museum’ award a few years ago, and we really should try and visit it next time we’re there.)  She put a few backs up during this late phase of her life, but the important things are that it kept her going, and that her efforts, however misdirected by her oncoming dementia, did get recognised in the foreword to that rather splendid book of old postcards.

Do I Know You?

I have to get a new passport.  Well, the current one doesn’t expire until July, but some destinations seem to insist that it must be valid for several months from your date of arrival, even though you’re booked on a ten-day package holiday; and anyway we have no idea where we might want to go in the next few months, so why not?  The new online system looks pretty slick (on the face of it…).  I have to attach a digital photo of my upper body (which they’ll trim to regulation), so we’ll have to take that soon, the main requirement seeming to be that it looks like me.  Hmm.

By coincidence, Z approached the same general topic from a quite different direction on her blog today, and it set me off thinking about recognition.  If someone had to describe me to another person who’d never seen me, what, leaving out bodily dimensions, hair, clothing and so on, in other words focussing just on my face, what would they say?  I have no idea; and equally I’d find it almost impossible to describe my brother’s, sister’s or indeed wife’s faces in words.

Border controls, of course, use biometric measurements to solve this, but we can’t all be expected to carry an app around in our brains to replicate that; and anyway the one they use is obviously in its technological infancy (aren’t they all?) if my experiences of it are anything to go by.  The queues at the fast track are far longer than the old-fashioned ones where a human glances at your passport and your face twice each and nods you through.  I once had to go back three times; turned out I wasn’t looking at the right green light or something.

I then wondered how novelists tackle it if they feel the need to describe a character’s face.  It is done, and no doubt you could cite examples of characters that you’d recognise in the street just from the author’s description, but I couldn’t come up with any, once I’d filtered out subsequent screen portrayals.  I did think of Mervyn Peake – I’d recognise Steerpike, Mr Flay, Fuschia, although interestingly not Titus, the hero – until I realised that he’d drawn them and then described his drawings.  Perhaps that’s the trick.

I once had a two- or three-minute conversation with a chance-encountered girl on London Bridge station, which was going pretty well until we both realised we weren’t who we thought we were.

 

It was a Haunting picture

We were staying in a cottage, inaccurately named ‘Coastal View’, in Porthgain, and we’d arranged to meet up with our friends for a meal at Harbour Lights, the restaurant across the square.  They were staying  in their caravan three miles up the road at Mathry.  I don’t remember the meal, but afterwards I know we went back to our place, had a few drinks and decided to go next door to the Sloop Inn. 

I know that I was drinking whisky of some sort, and so was Paul.  A few artists lived in Porthgain, still do, and Paul got into an argument with one of them, called Bryn.  Bryn was drinking brandy, and we worked out next day that the glasses might’ve got confused.  He did pretty good representational landscapes of the local scene, which Paul decided to challenge on the grounds that he was hypocritically exploiting the tourist trade whilst simultaneously decrying it and thereby squandering his talent, or some such stuff.  Paul is good at challenging when he’s in the mood, and Bryn was in the mood too. 

The pub ran a gallery in the back room in those days, and they dragged each other out there, getting a bit rough.  I was sitting at the bar holding hands with Caro, because she’d reached her weepy phase and I’d reached my amorous one, so I don’t know exactly what happened out there.  Reconstructions suggest that blows had nearly, possibly actually, been exchanged.  They wouldn’t have been very harmful by this stage, but what is sure is that a picture got knocked off the wall, and the frame got slightly damaged.  We popped in the next day and viewed it: an impressionistic depiction of a coastal scene – Druidstone, I think – in a rather abstract style.  Good, but certainly nothing to have a drunken conceptualistic fight over.  We all, Bryn included, laughed and forgot about it.

A few months later, V and I were in Narberth, visiting the old aunts, Margaret and Ray.  They still lived at home in those days, in the house in Spring Gardens that their father had built in the early years of the century.  The carers came in twice a day, did what caring had to be done, and left.  Ours was a duty visit, and the aunts were still just interesting enough for conversation, but there are limits, so we made our temporary excuses and wandered down the Drang and through to the High Street.  There used to be a nice gallery down next to the second-best butchers’, before it failed and got turned into yet another tat shop.  There in the window was the Picture.  We told Paul and Caro about this, and next time they were in the area they went to have a look, but it had moved on. 

On subsequent visits to Pembrokeshire, though, we all seemed to come across it every so often in various unexpected locations.  I don’t remember the details now, but it kept cropping up.  It was clearly stalking us.

That winter, we were invited to Paul and Caro's house for a meal.  When we arrived we were instructed to close our eyes, turn around, open them and look at the wall of the stairwell.

“Well, we had to, didn’t we?” said Caro.

Timbo gets a quality haircut

I’ve been going to Duke Street Barbers in Reading for about eight years now.  Prior to that, a ladies’ hairdresser called Diane had come to the house every six weeks, done Viv’s hair and thrown in a trim for me, but once that couldn’t be sustained I took a friend’s recommendation and ended up at Duke Street.

It’s definitely a gent’s barber’s shop:  it says, or at least implies, as much on the signboard outside the door, which even sports the once traditional red-and-white barber’s pole (which is, as I’m sure you know, a relic from the days when barbers were also surgeons, and so bandaged wounded limbs, evidently not very efficiently).  It has eight chairs and, as far as I can tell, up to four barbers.  There are a couple of long-termers, but apart from them the staff turnover is high.  I’ve had my hair cut by lots of charming barbers, male and female – the unisex rule applies only to the clientele, not the operatives – but rarely the same one more than twice.

So I wasn’t surprised to find a new guy bouncing out of the back room when I called in the other day for my usual light scissor trim.  (I learned a few years ago that this was what to order, having disastrously experimented with the various grades of razor cut – they run from one (bald) to eight (nearly bald).)  He greeted me effusively, which usually puts me off, as making small talk whilst being gently tortured doesn’t come naturally to me.  But this guy disarmed me straight away by telling me how much hair I had, and by implication how much he was looking forward to sculpting it.  I alluded to the cranial bald patch, and he pointed out that I’m fairly tall, so people won’t usually notice it.  I thought it best not to argue the point.

He was a damn good haircutter (I’ve been complimented on the job he did) but also a very engaging conversationalist.  He’d spent some time in Spain before coming to England, loved it, learnt the language, had I ever been to Spain?  Given another twenty minutes, I like to think he’d have invited me to accompany him on a holiday to Marbella, but that wasn’t to be.  Turned out he was originally from Morocco.  We need more immigrants like him.

The best bit was when the chat turned back to my luxuriant rug.  I don’t understand why blokes who have a good healthy crop choose to reap it all off with a number one.  “They think it makes them look hard,” my friend said.  “They’re right, it does,” I replied.  “Yes,” he said.  “But it doesn’t make them hard.”

 

 

Party Time!

No, don’t get too excited, it’s a local Neighbourhood Watch party, not a blog- or birthday- one. 

I haven’t had a party here for over three years, the last one being my 70^th in July 2012, which a couple of my blog-chums attended.  My house is, I’m told, the right size and shape, and also, in the words of my friend and neighbour (and fellow-co-ordinator of the Watch) Nigel ‘has a good feel for a party’.  I’m not sure quite what he means by that, but I’m happy to go along with it .  I always think a party is made, not by the location or even the food and drink, but by the people.  I must know some pretty good party people on that basis, because in twenty-seven years here I can’t remember a single bad one.  (Party, that is; person neither, actually.)

Anyhow, taking no chances, the following notice, suitably framed and embellished, will greet attendees as they arrive.

NUNC  EST BIBENDUM,

NUNC  PEDE LIBERO

PULSANDA TELLUS

If a quotation from Horace in the original Latin doesn’t get ‘em going, nothing will.*

* Look it up if you need to.  Oh all right, the loose translation from my Oxford quotations book is: ‘Now for drinks, now for some dancing with a good beat.’  Old Horace was clearly on the right track.

Here’s a useful thing

I used that blog title, or something like it, several years ago for a post about my pineapple slicer, which is a marvellous piece of technological design that exactly conforms to the cliché ‘fit for purpose’.  Or ‘does what it says on the tin’, or box in this case.  A box which says ‘pineapple slicer’ and contains a device that slices pineapples is a good box.

This morning’s discovery didn’t come in a box, and didn’t have an obvious purpose, though I didn’t know that at the time of its discovery.  I have a drawer in the table beside me which I think of as my ‘useful stuff’ drawer.  It’s full of stuff, some of which I use.  To be more precise (or rather, less imprecise), there is an assortment of pens; two or three old notebooks (kept because they possibly contain information that might prove useful at some point – indeed, one of them did just yesterday, reminding me of the HTML needed to embed a link in a blog comment…); a refill for my Cross pen; a device for fixing studs to golf shoes; a calculator; several pairs of defunct spectacles; a bumper sticker for Fender amps; a magnifying glass (4” diameter); much else.

The other day, I needed a rubber (that’s an eraser, for any Transatlantic readers) to facilitate my new passion for Sudoku, instilled in me by the awesome Z.  She can do it all in her head, but as a novice I need to write the candidate numbers in the cells, so a rubber is essential.  Eventually, I found one, which I’ve been using to varying effect, but it was a bit of a delve.  So this morning I decided that drawer needed a good seeing-to.

It still does, because one if the very first things I uncovered was this:

I inherited this curious little object from a distant relative-by-marriage about twenty years ago when his wife died and the family home in Narberth was cleared out.  Ivor was a taciturn Welshman whom I hardly knew but liked, perhaps, better than those closer to him.  When I was first introduced to him, in 1988, by his niece (later my wife), who had obviously had previous relationships, he was politely non-committal, but I later learned that his considered opinion consisted of a sniff and the words ‘Not bad.  Better than the last one, anyway’, which I took as unconditional approval. 

I knew that he repaired watches, whether as a hobby or a profession I never learnt.  So I’d always assumed that this tiny magnifying glass was a tool of that trade, though I couldn’t work out how it would be used in practice.  I stuck the picture on Facebook this morning, and was advised by my several expert friends there that it is, in fact, to quote Mike, ‘an inch glass, for a material worker to count the number of threads per inch in woven material’.  It should contain an insert in the base for calibration purposes, which is obviously long lost. 

So I’ve learnt something not very useful, but nonetheless fascinating, today.  Not, as you might suppose, the original purpose of this piece of early 20^th century fit-for-purpose technology; but that people were expected to use it as the tool of their living.  Not all day long, I don’t suppose; but still.  I can’t imagine that.  Or perhaps I can, but I’m not straying into that territory this evening.

And the drawer, of course, remains un-decluttered and full of useful stuff.

Of Red Cabbages and Things

It has been proven impossible to cook braised red cabbage for less than sixteen people.  D. Smith’s recipe calls for 2lb of cabbage, 1lb of apples and 1 lb of onions.  She claims this serves four.  Even allowing for cooking reduction, that’s going on a pound per head.  Even without any other dishes, that’s a big eat, and you wouldn’t want a plateful of nothing else, would you?|

As it turned out, it served the three of us on Saturday, twelve or so on Sunday (not everyone chose it from the vegetable selection on the table), and there was still some left over. And, I understand, over again.  It’s a shame, because it’s a brilliant dish.  Trouble is, you can’t buy less than a kilo of red cabbage, and if you use a quarter of one, to serve three, all you can do with the rest is pickle it.  Which is fine, but not necessarily a job for the morning of a great big, great family post-Christmas/New Year lunch.

I know, it can be frozen.  But making too much of something and then freezing the remainder is all very well, but you don’t want it forced on you, do you?  Especially when your freezer is already crammed full.

In other things:

I saw a sign on my way to Norfolk, outside a café, which actually said ‘NO ARTICS’, but which I read as ‘NO ANTICS’, which momentarily put me off.  And coming back into Reading, one of those sanctimoniously patronising homilies they display when there’s no real traffic information asked ‘ARE YOU VISIBLE ENOUGH?’  You have to think about that, don’t you?

And, I’ve had my first try at Sudoku.  Or three tries, to be honest, all at the same puzzle, all ending in failure.  I’m good at deductive logic but bad at spatial connections, which means that, in this case, the latter frustrates the former.  So I’m going to persevere, in order to improve the latter.   I’ve gathered together the essential ingredients – a pencil and a rubber.  Oh, and a functioning brain.  One thing I’ve learnt (or re-learnt) recently is that one must keep on learning.

 

Velcro

Isn’t it wonderful stuff?  It was invented as a by-product of the early space missions, supposedly, along with non-stick frying pans and computers that sometimes work …  And Principia is without doubt going to yield comparable benefits, in healthcare, metallurgy, nutrition and other areas that will probably slip in through the side door unnoticed and unpredicted, just like Velcro did back then.

And it’s also yielded a rather splendid metaphor.  Each of the two sides of a Velcro connection exists in its own right – they’re different and self-contained.  Yet they are incomplete until they join together and seal the gap.  A bit like two humans.  Z and me, in this case.

Words on Words on Words

We were talking, as we seem to, about language.  Zee wondered why hair is singular, though there are lots of them.  This isn’t the case in other languages, like French, where they quite cheerfully say ‘I washed my cheveux’.  If you say that in English, it sounds a bit risqué.  I pointed out that there is a number of these sorts of confusion.

On my way back here through the drizzle and tyre spray, I reflected that I used to wonder whether I was the only one who did that.  Now I know I’m not.  There are at least two of us.  And there is a pair.

Gentleman? Moi?

Country Life magazine has published a list of 39 characteristics which define a modern gentleman.  I’ve always wondered whether or not I'm one of those , so I printed it off and scored myself, using a three-way marking system – ‘Yes’, ‘No', and ‘?’ (don’t know/ sometimes/ not applicable/can’t remember/not saying).

Here are my self-scores:

Yes: 1, 2, 4, 6, 8-10, 14-17, 21, 23-26, 28-30, 32-33, 36-38

No: 3, 18, 20, 22, 31, 34

?: 5, 7, 11, 12, 13, 19, 27, 35, 37

I left out 39, because it’s meaningless.

There are, of course, some qualifications, which you can have hours of harmless fun matching to the answers:

• Except Paris-Charles de Gaulle.
• I did once train a dog, not very well.  One’s gardener trains the roses, surely?
• Tweed suit?  Only worn by cads, surely?
• Nobody has yet died from eating one of my omelettes, as far as I know.
• What, pray, is the distinction between an emoji, an emoticon and a sticker?  Insufficient information.
• Rooks exist only in the plural, crows in the singular.  Or the other way round, I can never remember.
• What does a gentleman wear on his feet in Puerto Rico then?  Oh, no, sorry…
• I tend not to wear flowers, it’s not 1967 you know.

 

The Lodger

No, not the 1927 Hitchcock film (which I haven’t seen), or the many remakes (one of which I think I might have seen), nor even the original novel by, it says on t’internet, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes (which I’d guess nobody alive today has read).  No, this is the real thing.

My friend called me last week in desperation.  Could I put up her son for a while?  He’d been thrown out on the street at zero notice, and had nowhere, but nowhere, to stay.  I’m obviously not going into the background to how this came about, except to say that it was the fault of a very nasty person.

I’m almost ashamed to say that I hummed and hawed for a good five minutes before replying ‘yes, of course.’  There had to be negotiations about timescales, because my existing commitments meant there was a three day gap which he would have to fill in as best he could (which he managed); but I ended up welcoming him (on a strictly time-limited basis, three weeks-ish) last Tuesday.

Well, it’s working out quite well!  It’s early days, but we’ve laid down some ground rules, which are evolving and will be conformed to: the main one being that I’m In Charge around here.  Fortunately, we get on pretty well, and he’s a nice, sensible man who is, if anything, over-solicitous.  Let’s see how it goes.  I’ve made it clear that I need to know that he’s actively seeking alternatives, and I’m sure that’s happening.

He’s just got back from the pub as I write…!  He has a cold, apparently, so I’ve told him not to get too close…!   

Barbecue surprise

We had our annual local Community Barbie today, in the local Community Garden at the bottom of the road, which is a delightful local asset tucked unobtrusively between some ugly lock-up garages, the railway, and an inspirational view of the grey wall of the local Lidl.  Here’s a picture I took just before people started to arrive, which doesn’t do it justice but gives a flavour:

You can’t see the wildlife pond behind me (which I helped to dig fifteen years ago), the free allotments at the railway end where locals grow and share every conceivable kind of vegetable, from runner beans to exotic Caribbean squashes; nor the kiddies’ swings, doll’s houses and slides which over the years have been – I was going to say ‘donated’, but that doesn’t capture the true spirit of the place – let’s just say ‘put there’, by local people (some of them probably long moved away), just because they wanted to.

The barbecue was a great success, of course, they always are: but that’s not what I really wanted to tell you.  This is uncanny.

When I’d arrived at about half-eleven to help with setting things up, there were already a few people who’d decided to have a family picnic and were doing their own setting-up further down the garden from where we’d installed our barbies and tables.  I went over and introduced myself, explained what we were up to and suggested they’d be welcome to come and join in, mingle and use some of the cooking heat.  The young man I spoke to told me they’d come to England last year, loved Reading, were settling in nicely but thought the streets were too dirty…  So they did all that – cooking, mingling, kids interacting –  over the next few hours, but I didn’t actually get to talk to any of them.  For some reason I’d assumed they were from Poland.

Anyway, as we were tidying up at about four o’clock, someone told me this extended family (there were over a dozen of them by now, spread over at least three generations) were in fact Italian.  As you may know, I never pass up an opportunity to practise my rusty (arruginito) Italian, so I went over again, and introduced myself again, rustily.

Naturally, I was asked how I’d learnt Italian (‘parli ancora molto bene!’), so I explained how I’d lived in Milan for three years in the late sixties, been in a band, etc etc.  (Here comes the uncanny bit.)

A lady at the far end of the table, who’d been listening with interest to the conversation but not saying anything, looked up.

“You lived in Milano?”  I nodded.  “Where did you live?”

“In a pensione, in Via Lamarmora, near the Duomo,” I told her.  Her mouth opened silently for a moment, then she said:

“I lived in Via Lamarmora before I came to England.”  I didn’t want to ask, and I didn’t have to.  “Number seventeen.”

Weather Window

Sheila, whose eightieth it was, has four children, about a dozen grandchildren, and a good smattering of great-grandchildren.  As far as I could tell, they were all there, including the two youngest great-grands, five and seven weeks old.  Then there were cousins, nieces and nephews, friends from all over the globe, and hangers-on like me.  I’d guess about forty humans in all, plus the dogs.

Being almost all Welsh, they almost all talked almost all the time (all right, not the two babies, though I think they’re working on it), not too bothered about whether anyone was listening, which makes for a great party.  I talked to quite a few of them, I think, but don’t ask me what about – it’s called ‘craic’ in Ireland, ‘liming’ in Tobago, I don’t know what in Welsh or English.  The fun point is that the performance outweighs the content.

The drive down the M4 on Friday was one of the worst in my living memory.  Driving through pelting rain and the resulting road spray and road blindness is mentally and physically exhausting, especially as most motorway users don’t know how to do it.  The journey back today was, if anything, even worse.  The M4 powers-that-maybe had decided to switch on all the ‘50’ signs, put up a message saying ‘POOR DRIVING CONDITIONS’, and (in my unfair estimation) pootle off down the pub.  The result, of course, is that Sunday drivers react to the signs rather than the actual conditions.  I have proved this theory over and over again.  As soon as the warnings of a problem disappear, so does the problem.

But miraculously, the 24 hours in between delivered the best weather Pembrokeshire is capable of.  The heavens shone on Sheila’s party.   I’m sure she noticed, but she didn’t remark on it, at least not in my hearing.  Most of the time she was too busy laughing.

Age Difference…

I’m going to my caravan neighbour Sheila’s eightieth birthday barbecue on Saturday.  I’ve been to one or two of these Welsh birthday bashes down there before, so I know what to expect.  The finale, around midnight, will be massed singing in which I will timorously join.  If I can still find my vocal chords, that is.


Anyway, I needed to get her a card, so on a racing dash round Waitrose this morning I grabbed this from the ‘age-related’ section, without really looking at it.

I’m tempted to give it to her anyway, to see if she notices, or feels complimented.  Probably better not, what do you think?

The best-laid plans…

New Year’s Eve is a time for looking back and forward; or, in this case, neither.

We were supposed to cross the triangular village Green to N’s house, for nibbles and vodka shots, at about half-six.  I’d then go back to the rented cottage to peel potatoes and turnips and heat up two or three haggises (haggi?) in time for a late supper, for somewhere between five and fifteen people.  I’d thought ahead, even brought my own masher for the tatties’n’neeps just in case the cottage didn’t have one (it did).

Around eight-thirty, it became evident that this wasn’t a plan any more.  The nibbles were running out, so we dashed back over the Green for an extra pork pie and a few more bottles.  At this point, the plan swerved into a visit to Kate and John’s house round the corner, where their son was running a tiny disco in his bedroom: only room for about five people to dance, let alone fifteen.  So fifteen of us danced.  The haggi were receding into the future.  I think it might have been around this time that I uttered my first profundity of the evening: “The Best Plan Is Not To Have One.”  Or something like that.

I got into a deep musical conversation with John, leading up to the crucial question: “So, what’s your favourite album, Tim?”  I was about to explain solemnly that it was Petra Haden’s a capella version of ‘The Who Sell Out’, and why, when he looked at his watch.  “Ah.  Excuse me.”

I think I heard a distant shout of “Kate!  Get your fiddle!  Now!”, but I can’t be sure because the next thing I knew I was about four places back in a Pied Piper’s procession across the Green towards our cottage.  John was strumming to Kate’s exuberant fiddle-playing, and everyone was doing that side-to-side splay-legged arm-flapping walk-dance that you can only do when intoxication and euphoria exactly coincide and merge into a perfect moment, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Just as we reached the space in front of the cottage, the church bells started ringing the Year in, riotously, joyously blending with our music (I think there was singing by then), and twelve struck – a momentary reflective pause – before Auld Lang Syne was sung and someone suggested we nip across to the pub for “Just the one.”

The haggi have been frozen, puir wee sonsie beasties, possibly to be regenerated around 25^th January.

 

 

 

 

Farewell to a good old friend

Graham Livermore, who died last week, was the trombonist in Dave Anthony’s Moods throughout their existence.  He was also, I think, my closest friend within the band.  All 1960s groups had their internal frictions and ours was no exception: it’s unlikely that eight randomly selected personalities are going to get on, all the time, all together.  So alliances would form, shift, split and realign.  But Graham and I, I like to believe, stuck together.

He was a talented musician; nobody who heard him would question that.  He could play anything you put in front of him, reproduce by ear a tune someone might hum or play to him, and (dare I say) improvise more thoughtfully than anyone else in the band.  His solos on ‘Summertime’, which became his showcase number, were always melodies in their own right – sung from the soul, as it were – and I don’t think I ever heard the same one twice.

These qualities were, I suspect, not fully appreciated, by either his audiences or his colleagues, because Graham was the antithesis of a showman.  The one time he had a crack at ‘mak show’, somewhere in the bleak Midlands, a stupid girl grabbed the end of his slide and did some damage to his trombone.  Typically, he laughed it off, forgave her, got it fixed and carried on.  I don’t think I ever saw him angry.

In Italy, we’d share rooms at whatever pensione we fetched up in.  At our base camp in Milan, we evolved a system whereby the speakers were either side of the two beds, so each of us got his fair share of the stereo.   We listened to one another’s music: I brought ‘Smiley Smile’, he brought Ornette Coleman.  Later (once we’d been told to shut down the noise), he would use a set of coloured crayons to draw exquisite abstract visions, which he’d then screw up and throw away.

I haven’t caught the best thing about Graham, which was his dry, sometimes almost undetectable humour.  Once, after listening to Coleman’s ‘Double Quartet’, he looked across at me and, with a straight face, enquired “Why do they play like that?”  Another time, he pointed out that you could catch Coltrane, Davis and the rest repeating, recycling, the same licks in their solos.  “I do wish I knew what they were,” he remarked.  

When I was between marriages in the late eighties, we briefly became close again.  He hadn’t changed in the intervening twenty years.  He’d grown a lot of hair and beard, and was living in his parents’ house in what some might consider squalor.  It didn’t matter to me.

I spoke to Graham once, on the phone, about three years ago.  We had a nice little chat about music.  He was, he confessed, “a bit stoned.”  He spent his time, he said, making sculptures out of waste materials, which he hung from the ceiling. 

“They’re all different,” he told me.  I believed him.

I’m a bit cross

 Now that you’ve opened this post, I can expand on that – I’m fucking fuming!  How much lower can that bunch of filth-brained scumbags lower themselves?  (Just in case you hadn’t guessed, I’m talking about the Daily Mail.)  How dare they slander a good man (read his biography) in that scurrilous way, purely in the hope that some of their lies and innuendoes will rub off on his son, twenty years after the father’s death?

Congratulations, Dacre, you have shown your true colours.  Cameron can wriggle and squirm all he likes, but this may just have lost him the election.  You have to wonder at the stupidity, don’t you?

The Mail claims, by some kind of weird osmotic process, to speak for something it sees as ‘Britain’.  If this is the case, then I have to say that I, too, hate ‘Britain’.

In praise of 112

In case you didn’t know, that’s the number to call if the emergency doesn’t quite warrant a 999, or if you’re not sure.  The reason I now know this can be summed up in three words: anxiety, panic, farce.

Around midday today, Bee phoned me to share a problem regarding her broadband, which was that, after moving house, it didn’t exist.

What should have happened was that, once her physical line proved to be working, she’d call her ISP, who would then get her logical broadband connection switched across.  So that’s what she did.  It took a while, but eventually it transpired that, instead of doing this, BT (for it is they) had cancelled the link.  In other words, a request to provide a new service had been interpreted as a request to cancel any service.  Easy mistake, happens all the time doesn’t it?

Even more interestingly (and I know you’re now glued to the screen; bear with me, it gets better), it proved impossible to reverse this wee error (i.e. doing the opposite of what you’ve been asked to do).  Literally,  physically impossible.  So BT cannot, it seems, correct their own F*ups. 

The only solution, it turned out, was to set up a new ISP contract.  This obviously required some research, which nowadays can only really be done online, which … you get the picture.  So she phoned me for help. 

I had nothing better to do, and I actually thrive on an interesting research project, so I got stuck in and after a couple of hours identified what I felt was the best fit to her needs.  So I phoned back to pass this on. 

No answer.

We now move from anxiety into panic

Bee lives on her own, though we’re very close and share everything.  But we’re 25 miles apart.  She’d told me that she’d be spending the afternoon painting her study, but would have the phone by her side. 

After the first couple of tries, I started to worry a bit.  After three hours, I started to panic.  She wasn’t answering her mobile either.  What should I do?  I imagined all sorts of things.  Has she fallen off the ladder?  (Possible.)  Has she had a heart attack?  (Unlikely, but not impossible.)  She definitely won’t have gone out without telling me.  Should I drive up there?  (I almost had my shoes on at 6.30.)  Then I thought “this feels like an emergency.”  So I looked it up and called 112.

The police, to whom I was immediately put through, picked up on my concerns at once.  After taking the basic details, the first thing they said to me was “an officer is on the way up there now.”  There were loads of supplementary questions, but that at least took the wind out of my panic sails.

Here comes the farce bit.

Thirty minutes later, the phone rang.  It was Bee.  She’d been anxious because I hadn’t called back with the broadband info, then the police person knocked at the door.  Turns out that, in spreading the dustsheets for the decorating, she’d accidentally dislodged the phone connection.  The police person was very nice about it.

I said: “Can I call you back in five?  I want to pour myself a very large gin and tonic.” 

Which is what happened.

 

“Not before time!”

Well, how very rude!  Luckily, I wasn’t there when a passing neighbour made this remark to house-painter John up his ladder.  I’m pretty sure I know who she was though, in which case I know there’d have been an accompanying sideways smile and she’d have paused for a little chat.  Plus, she was dead right.

I’ve been trying to get the outside of this house decorated for two years now.  Actually, ‘decorated’ is over-ambitious; I didn’t want décor –  pastel stucco, Laura Ashley front door, Cotswold stone-cladding –  I just wanted the crumbling sills and rusting Crittall casements salvaged, given a bit of TLC and painted: white.  Easy, you’d think, especially in these hard times.  Over the course of 2012, I was given some acceptable quotes, and reasonable quality assurances, all of which I was happy to accept – until I asked the fatal question: “So, when can you do it?”  Hums and hahs and head-scratchings would ensue.  I’d play a key escalation card: “This year?”  “Oh yes, almost certainly this year.”  “Almost?”  More scratching.  Often a mobile would ring about now:  a ploy, I decided.  Notebooks would be consulted.  “We’ll have a look at the schedule and get in touch.”

As the wintery summer wore into the bleak winter and then the heartlessly withheld promise of spring, I forgot about it.  A diary note for mid-April: ‘Decorators.’  My sigh wasn’t written on the page, but it might as well have been.

 

One Sunday morning three or so weeks ago, I was seeing a friend off when I was hailed from a ladder across the Close.  I’d noticed him on and off over some time, painting, repairing, tearing down overgrowth in the garden of the empty house.  He climbed down.

“D’ye wanname ta tek a lookit?  I ken see it needs a wee bi’ o’ TLC.”

I agreed with what I thought he’d said.  He took a look around, poked his screwdriver into one of the kitchen windowsills, a large chunk of which fell to the ground.

“Aye, bit nesh, that’ll need a remake.”  He shook his head.  “At least two tins of Tupac.  I’ll get that.  And a gallon Weathershield.  And the undercoat.”  Another headshake.  “Ye’re lookin’ at one-fifty.”  I thought silence was the best approach at this stage.  “An’ then there’s the labour.”  He broke out the huge grin I would get to expect over the coming times, and uttered a number I thought I must have misheard, until he repeated it and then, looking around again, revised it upwards by £200 “because ye never know till ye gei underneath,” and offered his hand.

I shook it, then asked the question.

“Ah well, I haftae finish up here, then I’m on a holday tae the Gambia wi’ me daughter in April … so I’ll need some spendin’ cash fe that … so – nex’ week?”

 

He completed the job on Good Friday, whilst I was away.  When I got back I noticed he’d painted the gates.  He came round this morning for his money, and explained.

“I was hangin’ about fa Robbie to finish, and I dinna like doin’ nothing.  And I thought I cannae leave it like that, not wi’ that black paint in the can.”  The grin came.  “Nae extra.”

John, who’s 67, says he can’t bear not working, and will go anywhere.  I have his number.

goblldyeokoeb, or something

Please rearrange these letters into a meaningful sentence or phrase, or word - or letter even:

'Adaptive behavior is a type of behavior that is used to adjust to another type of behavior or situation. This is often characterized by a kind of behavior that allows an individual to change an unconstructive or disruptive behavior to something more constructive. These behaviors are most often social or personal behaviors. For example a constant repetitive action could be re-focused on something that creates or builds something. In other words the behavior can be adapted to something else.
Maladaptive behavior is a type of behavior that is often used to reduce one's anxiety, but the result is dysfunctional and non-productive. For example, avoiding situations because you have unrealistic fears may initially reduce your anxiety, but it is non-productive in alleviating the actual problem in the long term. Maladaptivity is frequently used as an indicator of abnormality or mental dysfunction, since its assessment is relatively free from subjectivity. However, many behaviors considered moral can be apparently maladaptive, such as dissent or abstinence'

OK, I'll do it for you:

"GET OVER IT, GET ON WITH IT!"