A bit more family

My mother’s parents had more humble backgrounds than my father’s.  

Esmond Lloyd Rea was a Yorkshireman, from Wakefield. I know nothing about his early history.  He was employed by the Inland Revenue, which entailed being sent to wherever the job demanded, which is probably why my mother was born in the Welsh borders and fetched up in Bournemouth to meet my father there. 

Grandpa must have been allowed to stop being peripatetic, or perhaps to retire, because by the late thirties he had settled down and bought 66 Watcombe Road, just down the road from us.  He was a jolly man, who enjoyed his beer and his music.  We’d be taken down the road for Sunday lunches and record sessions, and sometimes sleep over, presumably when my parents had other engagements (which doesn’t feel very likely) or more probably just wanted to be shot of us and have some time together alone (though that doesn’t seem very likely either).  It was presented to the children as a treat – you’re going to sleep at Granny and Grandpa’s tonight, won’t that be lovely? – and of course accepted without question. 

Ethel Jones, Granny, had roots in County Cork, but I don’t think she was Irish.  It’s impossible to find out anything more from the internet – the surname doesn’t help – and no family documents that I know of have survived.  How she met Esmond in the Welsh borders is yet another unanswered question.  I’ve explained what I know of how he got there, but how did she get there?  Anyhow, they were in Coleford, in the Forest of Dean, when my mother (their only child) was born in 1907.

Forties (part 4)

I wish I could remember anything about my Latin teacher. Not because I’m interested in him as a person, but because I’m interested in how he managed to make this dead, irrelevant language important to an eight-year-old.  

I think it wasn’t actually about Latin as such.  More likely, he inculcated an interest in ordered structures, which grew and has persisted ever since.  The notion that a chunk of language could be broken down into verbs, nouns and such, then rebuilt into phrases, clauses, sentences and such – all according to a set of rules (or at least conventions) that could be codified and obeyed – that must have been deeply comforting to that insecure ungrounded infant I was.  

Of course, that was all drummed out of me when I moved on to the grammar school. (We can’t have them teaching grammar, can we?)

Forties (part 3)

Southbourne Preparatory School was what would now be called my primary school.  

It was housed in a rambling building, probably a former grand residence of some sort, up on the north side of Southbourne Road, just opposite Stourwood Road (where I would be moved to a few years later).  The plan was that I’d stay there until I was fourteen, when I would go to a ‘public school’ (I put the term in quotes, because they hadn’t been public since the seventeenth century).  The choice was between Canford or Bryanstone.  If I’d gone to either, my future would have evolved very differently, but it wasn’t to be.  The reasons for that were never spelt out, but I like to think that it was due to my own timid willpower.  

I was terrified at the idea of being a boarder. I was actually taken to Bryanstone to be interviewed by the head, who was very kind and solicitous; but I made it quite clear afterwards that I was incapable of surviving that regime.  Canford was the runner-up option, which wasn’t seriously pursued, so I ended up going to the local grammar school, of which more later.

I have scattered memories of Southbourne Prep.  The headmaster, Mr Morgan, was too decent to be the disciplinarian the role demanded. When I and another boy were caught bullying Shaun Kilkoyne, we were given the choice of being caned or apologising to Shaun.  We chose the latter, much to everyone’s relief, especially Mr Morgan’s.  (Shaun and I later became friends, to the extent of trying to play chess.)  I remember the music lessons, which consisted of everyone being issued with a tambourine, some castanets or a triangle and having to bang along to the teacher’s piano accompaniment.  And we were required to do sports.  Throwing the cricket ball was the only one I was any good at – except when I was required to do it accurately in an actual cricket match, when I’d usually fail dismally.

I obviously learnt a lot more at Southbourne Prep – some vestiges still surface and will probably do so as this narrative proceeds – but the only enduring lesson is Latin.

A Bit of Family

My father was the middle child of a Gloucestershire farmer and a well-to-do Jersey lady.  These bare facts exist, but the substance –  how they met and married, how and where they lived, had and brought up their three children, what their life together was like – all that remains a mystery, which will never be resolved.  Grandfather Frank Large died before I was born, and just after my sister was.  There’s a 1939 photograph of her in his arms, but there is no other record of him that I know of.  He’s buried in St Brelade churchyard in Jersey, so he must have lived there; but my father used to talk in some detail about his childhood in Lechlade, so they must have lived there in the early years of the twentieth century. 

Grandma Emmeline Walker was certainly from old Jersey stock.  She was a figure of awe in my family, until she died at the age of ninety in 1960, when I was eighteen.  Emmeline is a good Victorian name that has been carried forward in the family.  Grandma was Victorian, and suitably formidable.  Her maiden surname is also my middle name, and I firmly believe (without a shred of evidence) that this naming protocol, which continues down the generations on the male side, may have been one of the conditions of my parents being permitted to marry.  The surname is still eminent in Jersey.  And now I come to remember, I had a work colleague called Arthur Walker who once mentioned a Jersey background.  The connection clearly didn’t register with me at the time (we were probably on about lunch pint four), but I now wonder whether we were related.  I’ll never know.

Grandma was evacuated to England before the invasion of Jersey, and she spent much of the rest of her life being shuttled between various relatives.  She was one of numerous siblings, which I guess is how the family fortune got dissipated.  Certainly there was an uncle called Oliver who absconded to the Argentine and lost a bundle on ill-advised railway investments.

She’d come to stay with us for some weeks during each summer, in the fifties.  This was a cause for domestic repositioning in our household.  My mother was stressed out for weeks beforehand.  And Grandma played to her strengths, more or less re-ordering things in her own image.  She was pretty good at that.

And yet, I remember her as mostly kind and wry.  You’d see that in her face.  Every late afternoon, she would retire for a while to her room; I later learned that this was for her gin.  She once criticised me for using too much toilet paper, making some joke about rationing. (How did she know?  Was she monitoring?)  And one year, it must have been about 1953, we kids had been allowed, on a hot summer day, to play in the garden with the hose.  This had to be stopped before Grandma came, but the evidence can’t have been fully concealed, because when she arrived she enquired what had been going on and elicited a confession.  I can hear her now, in her rich Victorian voice.  “Oh, don’t be silly, it’s very hot.  Of course they can play with the hose.  I almost wish I could join them.”

Her two sons – my father Ivan, and Douglas – had already lived in England all their lives, but their elder sister Ruth certainly ended her days in Jersey.  She didn’t spend the War there; she had married a Jersey man, Eric Hobson, who was in the RAF and died in 1941 I believe (but he’s not listed as a Battle of Britain casualty, at least not a decorated one).  But she returned after the liberation and moved back into the family home in St Brelade, a bungalow called Ipsilante, where she lived for many years until it became too much for her and she moved to a flat in St Helier.  Her only child, my cousin Rosemary, never left Jersey, except to travel, which she did a lot of in her later years.

Forties (part 2)

I seem to have been a sickly child, because my mother later kept telling me so.  In fact, I had croup when I was three, whooping cough a couple of years later, chickenpox at some point, and German measles twice (which wasn’t supposed to be possible).  My parents later told me that they’d shoved me into rooms with neighbouring kids who had mumps in the vain hope that I’d catch my immunity before it could do permanent harm, but mumps declined me (until I was in my forties).  The same ‘expose and immunise’ system was probably applied to other childhood ailments, like scarlet fever.

My body obstinately refused to comply.  I still haven’t had scarlet fever, as far as I know.  Again later in life (probably in my teens) I was reminded that my TB test – a ‘patch test’, it was called; it was conducted at Cranleigh Road school, and for some reason I had to go back and have it again because the first try hadn’t worked – had come out positive.  This meant that I was immune to TB.  Somehow this was presented as bad news.

But the by-product of that sickliness was reading.  Memory is a distorting mirror, but I do know – having been told so many times – that I was reading by the age of four.  How fluently I have no way of telling, but the breadth of my reading is fairly well established.  It was ‘Picture Post’ and ‘Illustrated’ magazines, and The Children’s Encyclopaedia.  

I was given the two magazines, unedited, to keep me occupied.  I was reading words I’d never actually heard or said.  I clearly remember wondering how that word ‘illustrated’ was pronounced.  I say unedited, because I have since looked back and there were some fairly challenging images in there; but I don’t recall being traumatised.  Perhaps the worst pages got torn out before the mags were dropped onto my bed, but I doubt it.

The Children’s Encyclopaedia, though, was another thing, and must have formed a large part of my early education.  I don’t intend to retrospectively flesh out my actual memories, but I will use the internet to check facts, so I am fairly sure that what I had was the 1920 ten volume blue-bound edition.  So I certainly learned about the solar system, and probably picked up some attitudes that may have taken a while to question and discard.  I wish I had those books now, because I’d love to revisit and revise that early education.

Forties (part 1)

I was born on Bastille Day in 1942, although I didn’t know that at the time.  I was later constantly reminded of this fact by my mother, Gwyneth, who needed her children to be important in some way.  Much later, she told me – this may have been after she discovered the loosening effects of alcohol – that I hadn’t been particularly noticed as being bright, until Miss Wade, my kindergarten teacher, did.  This came as a surprise to my parents.

In the early 1970s, I was involved in various different ways with three girls who in their various different ways contrived to draw me into the irrational sphere of astrology, which required very precise information about the minute, if not second, that one emerged from one’s mother’s womb, so I asked mummy exactly when I was born. She couldn’t remember.

I do know where, though.  Tuckton Nursing Home.  I can quite clearly picture Tuckton, a kind of nowhere zone between Southbourne and Christchurch, with some useful shops, alternatives to Southbourne Grove – but I don’t remember the Nursing Home.  Today, I have to wonder what one of those was, and how it could have a maternity ward; but this was 1942.

I remember Miss Wade, and where her kindergarten was.  It was on the corner of Paisley Road and Irving Road.  You walked a little way up Watcombe Road, turned right and then you were there.  Those streets (I use the word generically – Bournemouth is famous for being one of the few towns in England not to contain a single named street) were amongst the first things I ever learnt.

Another thing I learnt from Miss Wade was the technique of prevarication.  This came about when I asked her why you had to be married to have a baby.  It was probably when my brother was expected, in 1947; I certainly knew by then that babies came out of their mummy, and was just naturally curious about how this worked.  Miss Wade responded by referring me to Jesus.  That was probably part of the start of my wondering why people seemed unable to give simple answers to even simpler questions, a wondering that has only grown since.  But the few children I’ve known haven’t asked me awkward questions like that, so I’ve yet to be put to that particular test.

Christmas Card Audit 2019

Executive Summary:

·        Disclaimer: the scientific worth of a statistical exercise is dependent on the size of the sample and the selection categories used.  In that respect, this stuff is scientifically worthless.

·        Hardly anyone seems to believe in Santa Claus any more.

·        Glued-on glitter is making an unwelcomed comeback.  Just stop buying the crap, people!

·        I welcome the woodpecker!  (Yay, Caro!)

The full figures (2018’s, where applicable, in brackets):

Snow/Snowmen/Snowflakes:                 6 (6)

Santas/Reindeer:                                   1 (3)

Animals/Birds:                                      11 (10)

of which          

Robins:                                     3 (3)

Free-range reindeer:                  0 (1)

Horses:                                     1 (1)

Camels:                                    1 (1)

Sheep:                                      1 (0)

Owls:                                       1 (0)

Penguins:                                 1 (0)

Dogs:                                       2 (0)

Deer:                                        1 (1)

Turtle doves:                             0 (1)

Seals:                                       1 (0)

Woodpeckers:                           1 (0)

Landscapes:                                          0 (2)

Nativities/Wise Men/Angels:                 8 (5)

Christmas trees/Baubles:                       5 (4)

Abstract:                                              0 (1)

Mail-letterboxes:                                   2 (1)

Booze:                                                  1 (0)

Flowers:                                               1 (0)

Forests/woods:                                      0 (1)

Cute children:                                       1 (1)

Houses:                                                1 (3)

Holly/ivy/mistletoe:                              1 (0)

Skaters:                                                0 (4)

Townscapes:                                         3 (4)

12 days of Xmas:                                  1 (1)

Everything secular:                               0 (1)

Special categories:

Homemade/designed:                            4 (3)

Cards with glued-on glitter:                   7 (5)

Wonderfully weird:                               4 (0)

Posh yet restrained:                               3 (5)

Various animals wearing sunglasses       1 (0)

Tie for Card Of The Year has to be Chris’s cover from the Girls’ Crystal Annual 1967, and Mig’s animals with sunglasses.  Viewings by appointment only.

Bath Spa

Strangely, despite my bracketing of the country in my band days, I’d never been to Bath.  It had always been just an announcement on a train – Reading, Chippenham, Bath Spa, Bristol Temple Meads, etc – on my way home from work.  So when Winkie suggested we might take a day of our visit to go there, I was up for it.

My first impression was of a rather upmarket shopping mall, canopied by high quality fake wisteria.  But then we made it to the Abbey, which is a huge perpendicular gothic structure that’s been rebuilt or refurbished countless times since it started off as some kind of church in about 757AD and became a precursor of its present form in 1616, after the Dissolution had trashed its previous versions.

The floor is, as always in cathedrals (all right, I know this isn’t literally a cathedral, but it’s near enough), full of dead people.  You can’t step a pace without treading on someone’s memorial stone, and so presumably walking over their grave.  Amazingly, the floor is being lifted, stone by stone, so that the sub-floor can be reinstated before it caves in and we all fall into the graves.  Then the memorial stones are being put back, so that they can be walked on and further eroded by future generations of Japanese day trippers.  Winkie’s friend Robin, later that day, wondered whether they were also in-filling it with more dead bodies.

After lunch, we went on an open top bus tour of the city, narrated by a charming man who knew his material but struggled with the commentary technology.  I was sitting next to him, and chose not to use the earphones; partly because my ears are the wrong shape for those nasty little plugins, and partly because there’s a delay, so I’d get his real voice in one ear and then a disconcerting echo in the other.

I sat on the wrong side of the train going back to Warminster.  I love looking out of train windows, at the trees and the fields and the sheep and the junkyards and the mysterious buildings – but I was facing west and the sun blinded most of it out.

My phone tells me I walked 2.7 miles that day.  I’m impressed with myself.

Caravan, August Bank Holiday

The entire population of the rest of the United Kingdom was clearly headed for Pembrokeshire for the pointless August Bank Holiday.  Well, a lot of cars were heading west down the M4.  This wasn’t a problem, until we got to Bristol, Junction 19, and the Smart Motorway.  At that point the signs lit up and the traffic slowed down.  The variable speed limit dropped to 50, then 40, then up to 60, then 40 again, then 50, all within about six miles.  For most of that way, we were doing 10 to 30.  Once we’d got past Junction 21, the Smart Motorway turns dumb, and the traffic gets back to normal.

The exact same thing happened around Newport, between 24 and 29, also a Smart stretch.  Are you detecting a pattern here?  (Clue: it happens on the M25 too.)  And they’re busy turning the M4 from Slough to Reading into yet another one – I don’t know the cost, but judging by the size and timescale it must run into tens of millions – whereupon, in 2022, a perfectly adequate motorway will turn into yet another traffic jam.

That’s quite enough about traffic, isn’t it?  So I’ll leave out the part about the A48 time-saving detour which added another hour or more to the trip, and my anxiety about running out of petrol before we could reach Carmarthen and locate the Tesco filling station.  Z was monitoring the satnav and warned me that there might be a slight delay around the Red Roses turnoff on the A477.  I didn’t think this would add much to the six hours we’d already clocked.

We’d presciently decided to stop at Pont Abraham and grab a bite of lunch (sandwiches, crisps and drinks).  We chose WHSmith’s rather than Costa, for reasons of morality.  I’ve probably written here before about the aptly-named latter company’s approach to their business, which can be summarised as ‘price up, quality down’.  Mind you, WHS can’t be absolved either: we paid over £13 for exactly the same stuff we’d bought at M&S two days previously for £8.40, the only difference being location – one on a motorway, the other not.

Once we got here, everything was fine.  Nothing had changed except the grass, which had grown a bit.  The six hour journey had made it too late to do anything with the rest of the day except have a drink, eat again, and absorb the sight and the smell of the sea.  That’s why I still come here, against all logic.

Sunday was a fun day.  We walked into Saundersfoot through the tunnels, had a pint at the Royal Oak, walked back.  That’s actually quite a lot of walking, especially for Z, who has a recovering but still slightly gammy foot, but also for me – I need to do something about my fitness level.

In the late afternoon, the usual bank holiday Sunday entertainment started up down the pub.  I usually hate being subjected to music I haven’t chosen, but these guys were pretty good.  I flatter myself that the guitarist sounded a bit like I might have done fifteen years ago.  (That’s high praise, in case you weren’t sure.)  And after that there was a classic Welsh boozy singalong, which politely finished well before lights out.

Today (Monday) we went for a walk up the valley then crab salads down the pub.  I‘m going to give the Wisemans Bridge Inn a free plug here – great location, superb service, good food, decently priced.  And they manage to satisfy up to a hundred customers all at once. 

Back to Reading tomorrow.  Back to, or from, the real world.

Oh, and I even managed to get a lot of work done.  That’s what happens when you don’t have internet.

No rabbits.  But the local wasps are very friendly.

Benefits of Brexit

It has been pointed out that there needs to be a Government publication to counter the leaked Yellowhammer report about the dangers.  They’ve had a good 45 minutes to come up with it, but they’re clearly not up to this simple task, so I’ll do it for them.  I don’t have any spads to help, so forgive me if I’ve missed some out.

1. 1.     We will all become free.
2. 2.     We will trade on equal terms with the US, Mexico, China, Brazil and India (as long as they trade on equal terms with us).
3. 3.     However, we won’t have to trade with any frogs, krauts, eytiyes, dagos or spics. Or micks.
4. 4.     We can have our own faceless bureaucrats.
5. 5.     Our Parliament will be able to take back control of whatever it is they didn’t already have control of.  (Nobody knows.)
6. 6.     The Red Chins in their millions
7. Will overspill their borders
8. And chaos then will reign in our Rael (©Pete Townshend)
9. 7.     Unless we fight a war against them.
10. 8.     Which we will obviously win, because we won’t be vassals.
11. 9.     We will compete with all the other offshore islands and principalities in the world’s greatest industry (moving money from place to place without spending any of it).
12. 10.  Except Singapore, of which we will become a colony.
13. Technology will solve all our problems.

I've left intact blogger's weird interpretation of a Word numbered list. It seemed apt.

Caravan Diaries, latest

There wasn’t a lot of activity this time, due to Z’s broken leg.  (All right, foot. Oh, all right, toe.  But you can’t prance around on the clifftops with a socking great surgical boot on.)

So instead we concentrated on eating, drinking and sitting.  The eating is the only interesting part, so I’ll tell you about the three pub lunches.

The first was at the Dragon in Narberth.  It’s one of at least six pubs that are still alive and well in this small Welsh town.  (There used to be about 165, I’ve been told, though that was by a Welshman.)  it doesn’t look much from the outside – indeed, I’d never been in there until a couple of years ago – but it has a lovely scruffy garden and does perfectly decent food and beer.  We had calamari and chips.

On Friday, we drove across to Angle.  It’s a remarkably popular nondescript village at the end of nowhere on a muddy cove on the south side of the Milford Haven sound.  There was an extraordinary amount of traffic on the increasingly tortuous road from Pembroke – quite a lot of it going the other way to us. (Of course, you don’t see the traffic that’s going the same way as you, unless you’re stuck behind a tractor, which happened a few times.)  “Have they already had their lunch?” Z wondered.  It was twelve o’clock.
Our target was the Old Point Inn.  This is a little 16^th century pub that can only be reached at low tide via a very car-unfriendly track.  You have to find the right right turn in Angle, which is clearly not that easy – I’m a good navigator, but I’ve got it wrong every single time I’ve tried it, so far.  It’s worth the journey, though.  Excellent (though expensive) food, and a fabulous setting, with great views of the oil refinery across the sound.  I think I’ve put pictures on here before.

Lunch #3 was, of course, dahn the pub.  That’s the Wisemans Bridge Inn, which is the most popular pub in Pembrokeshire.  It’s an easy walk down to it, a less easy walk back up.  Z struggled a bit in both directions, I think, but she’s pretty resilient, and wasn’t going to let a mere broken leg/foot/toe keep her from a decent pint.

So that’s the lunches.  Shall I do the dinners?  [Ed: No.  Me: O alrite.]

In other news, the mirror door on the bathroom cupboard had managed to fall off and break in half.  I had to smash up the remnants with a big hammer to bin them.  That was fun.

Jersey

We’d both been there before, and had our own memories, so I thought it would be interesting to go back together, compare and contrast, maybe explore the areas that didn’t overlap.  That’s what happened.

My plan was to revisit beaches.  Z’s strongest memory was of Plemont, mine was probably St Brelade.  So we went to both.  I have to vote for Plemont – it reminds me of Traith Lyffn, a low tide beach in Pembrokeshire with flat hard sand, rocks, and a challenging climb down and up manmade steps.  It’s unspoiled, and not even the worst efforts of Jersey corporate avarice can touch it.  St Brelade, although I have childhood memories of picnics and obscure family reunions, is now a strip of sand fringed with places to eat and drink (both of which we did, very nicely and not always as expensively as I’d anticipated).

I also had to visit St Brelade because my paternal grandparents are buried in the churchyard there.  I’d found their grave when I last visited with my sister in 2008, but I felt an atavistic need to do it again.  We wandered around for an increasingly thirsty time – there must be more than two hundred graves in there, spread over twice as many years and ten times as many square yards – until I finally said enough, started to walk down the path between the graves  towards the lych gate, glanced to my right, and there they were.  Frank and Emmeline, 1939 and 1960.

We managed to take in the four main tourism destinations, which I’d managed to evade during about fifty years’ worth of previous visits – so here they are: Jersey Museum in St Helier (entertainingly spooky); the Botanic Gardens (beautiful, lovingly curated, great flapjacks in the café); the Durrell Jersey Zoo (confusingly organised, loads of invisible animals, but we found the orang utans!); and the War Tunnels (sorry, no comment, I can’t take on that much emotive content about the War).  I meant to provide links, but frankly, it’s too complicated.  Just goggle them if you want to know more.

Oh, finally, the Ommaroo Hotel.  I’d booked us in there on a whim: having stayed there several times, I thought its whimsical, lightly tatty charm would appeal to Z.  They’d refurbished, but enough of that charm remains.  You still have to watch out for the trip traps in the corridors, where one level ascends or descends to a slightly different one on the same floor.  And there’s an outdoor swimming pool: if you ever stay there, see if you can find it.  I did, on our last day.

It Was Sixty Years Ago Today

Well, yesterday actually.

I’d wanted to mark the anniversary in some way – not because anniversaries matter particularly in themselves, but more because it was an excuse to recall some Young Emotions (that was Ricky Nelson, btw) and share some superb music.

But it had to wait until today; I would gladly have shared Buddy with everyone, but it doesn’t work that way unless you’re prepared to selfishly hijack a family get-together, which I wasn’t.  

So here are the five tracks I chose for us to share this evening (you’ll have to find your own spotilinks):

1. True Love Ways
2. Rave On
3. Learning The Game
4. Everyday
5. and of course That’ll Be The Day (That intro was the first thing I ever learnt to play, after skiffle chords).

Christmas Card Audit 2018

Executive Summary:

·         Many species of animals and birds have become extinct.  I have allowed camels to debut in this category, even though they are being ridden by magi.

·         There are a few more snowflakes than last year.

·         The continued reduction in the volume of glued-on glitter is, as ever, to be welcomed.  I expect making it illegal to be a high priority of the next Labour government.

·         I have felt it necessary to introduce a ‘Politics’ category.  One of them (self-created by its sender) says ‘Happy Brexmas’; the other is a highly sentimentalised picture of the Houses of Parliament.

The full figures (2017’s, where applicable, in brackets):

Snow/Snowmen/Snowflakes:                6 (4)

Santas/Reindeer:                                   3 (3)

Animals/Birds:                                     10 (12)

of which          

Robins:                                     3 (2)

Free-range reindeer:                  1 (3)

Horses:                                    1 (1)

Camels:                                    1 (0)

Sheep:                                      0 (2)

Wrens:                                     0 (1)

Owls:                                       0 (1)

Penguins:                                 0 (1)

Dogs:                                       0 (1)

Nuthatches:                              0 (1)

Deer:                                        1 (0)

Turtle doves:                            1 (0)

Landscapes:                                         2 (3)

Nativities/Wise Men/Angels:                5 (6)

Christmas trees/Baubles:                       4 (4)

Abstract:                                              1 (4)

Mail-letterboxes:                                  1 (1)

Booze:                                                 0 (1)

Flowers:                                               0 (1)

Forests/woods:                                     1 (3)

Cute children:                                       1 (1)

Houses:                                                3 (1)

Holly/ivy/mistletoe:                              4 (0)

Skaters:                                                1 (0)

Townscapes:                                        4 (0)

12 days of Xmas:                                  1 (0)

Everything secular *:                               1 (0)

Special categories:

Homemade/designed:                           3 (4)

Cards with glued-on glitter:                   5 (8)

Wonderfully weird:                              0 (3)

Posh yet restrained:                              5 (1)

Card Of The Year is this picture of some people walking along a footpath in the snow beside some woods:

If you turn it upside down –

It’s a goods train going over a viaduct.

* This 'Everything secular' card depicts, amongst other things, a Santa, a plum pudding, mistletoe, baubles, a snowman, a Christmas tree, bells, holly, a star, snowflakes, and, weirdly, a mug of cocoa - but no booze!!!

Fundaments of Music – Rhythm

Heart, Lungs and Feet.

Feet probably came first, because we tend to walk in 4/4 time (although see below for the waltz).  Breathing is two to the bar – in, out – and the heartbeat is tempo rather than rhythm (it’s no accident that the catchiest riffs are at around 120 bpm, twice the average pulse rate).

So the breathing would tend to synchronise with the footsteps, and sooner or later sounds – grunts, probably, to begin with – would naturally get uttered.  In pre-agricultural societies, there was a lot of group walking, so the grunts would get synchronised within the group.  Once they stopped for a rest, someone would still have those grunts and that walking rhythm persisting in their head, and eventually they’d start to slap their thighs, or clap their hands, someone else would laugh and join in… and you have the start of music.  The roots of rhythm, as Paul Simon beautifully captured it.

Oh, and that 3/4 – I don’t know about you, but that’s how I tend to get up a steep slope.  One leg does the heavy lifting, then it’s the other one’s turn.

The Fundaments of Music

I was sent towards this by a friend’s quiz asking us to name some young rich musicians, which took us via a fairly long route to musical styles, which led Z to nominate ‘techno’ as one style she couldn’t deal with, which pointed me towards Underworld and then, back from there, to Terry Riley and ‘In C’, five of its intriguing 35 minutes’ worth we listened to….  And now, here I am, wondering what makes some sound into music.

I used to think there were three fundaments, but I’ve just expanded that to five.  Here they are:

1.      Rhythm

2.      Melody

3.      Harmony

and the two new ones:

4.      Structure

5.      Texture

It’s not impossible that I might expound on each of these in the future.  After all, what are blogs for if not to burble away to oneself?

Clue: ‘In C’ exploits 1 and 5 at the expense of the others.

Did you know that 100% of your calls last month were successfully completed?

That’s an extract from a text I received today from my beloved mobile phone provider, who are also, they inform me, consistently voted the best mobile phone provider in the universe, exactly by whom or how is less than lucidly clear.

Anyway, the above quote intrigued me purely from a semantic point of view.  To take the easy bit first, what do they mean by successfully?  Assuming they’re not actually listening in, it’s more than possible – nay, it’s probable – that my attempt to contact the right department at the local council to ask them why they hadn’t swept the leaves from their trees from the pavement outside my house, even though it’s December and the rotting leaves are a pedestrian skid hazard, was entirely unsuccessful.  But they clearly assume that the mere fact that the call had a beginning and an end – the latter not caused by them – equates to success.  They obviously don’t include the ones that didn’t even start because there was no signal.

More substantially, 100% of what?  100 is a very big number, so I could be tempted to imagine that I’d made a lot of calls, all of which were ‘successful’.  Actually, there were probably five.  100% of five is still five.

And finally, why are they so needy?  This message had zero value to me – it was entirely and only about them and how wonderful they find themselves.  Why do they need to tell me so?  I’ve met blokes at parties who do that, and I tend to nod, smile and after five minutes look over their shoulder and catch someone else’s eye.  Is that what whodavone (for it is they) want me to do?

“They can talk too, but they won’t.” *

Hello, remember me?  My blogging mojo has been on strike for a while now, but I’ve resolved to resuscitate this dying art – in fact, I’ve so resolved many times over recent months, but I’ve always been stalled by the lack of anything to actually write about.  Unlike more prolifically creative bloggers, I find it hard to just start writing without a topic, or a story, or both.  But this evening both landed in my lap.  I said to Z: “You should blog about that.”  She said: “No, you should.”  So here goes.

If you’ve visited the Zeddary, you may recall that between the dining room and the hall there’s a window.  It was actually part of the original Tudor fabric of the house, formerly an external window up in the roof space somewhere, which had been bricked up for many years.  It had been reinstalled where it is now, years ago, as part of a major extension/refurbishment.  It serves no particular function, apart from being beautiful and entertaining the cat.

Eloise Cat loves ducking through this internal window, flaunting her prowess at avoiding any delicate objects that might be stood on the sill.  Usually this isn’t a problem, but a while ago we put up a pair of heavy curtains on the hall side, to prevent her doing this when we were away and triggering the burglar alarm.  They’d been left closed last time, though they didn’t need to be.

This evening, as we were eating our dinner, Eloise Cat decided to investigate the corner cupboard where the best glasses and crockery are kept.  The door was open a crack, but she obviously couldn’t get in there.  But she was amusing herself, and us, by trying.

I remarked that we should open those curtains.  “She used to love going through there, and now she can’t.”

Eloise Cat turned away from the corner cupboard and looked at me.  “You reckon?” she said.

*A quote from Clive James, originally about dingos.

The Caravan is having an early snooze

It usually gets put into hibernation in October: the site is officially closed from the end of October until Easter, although Joseph has been known to mutter, in a diplomatically deniable choice of words, that were someone to turn up during the officially closed season, ‘I probably wouldn’t notice’.  About ten years ago, his mother celebrated her ninetieth, in the January, and the site was apparently packed out.  (I wouldn’t know for sure – we weren’t invited.  Sniff sniff.)

This year, for reasons too complicated to go into here, the shutdown had to happen last week.  But for other reasons, equally complicated and even more boring to relate (think plumbing), it couldn’t completely get done, so I’m relying on Joseph to complete the job – and then, of course, reinstate everything in the spring.  I’ll probably phone him sometime before the first frost, just to pre-empt my anxiety – an unworthy thought, but which comes first: his promise or my anxiety?  I know my answer; and of course I’ll do it very diplomatically.

So that’s Pembrokeshire taken care of for yet another year.  Long term followers of this blog might recall that I’ve been going there since about 1949, so can claim to be an older inhabitant than many people who were born there.  But it wasn’t until relatively recently that I really got to know the county.  When our parents took us to Saundersfoot and Wisemans Bridge for those family holidays, it was all about the beaches of south Pembrokeshire – Barafundle, Broadhaven, Marloes and the others.  The west and north coasts were largely foreign lands.

So it was a surprise when I finally began to discover those parts, about twenty-five years ago.  They’re very different.  A bit more rugged, wilder, perhaps a bit more dangerous.  I remember randomly driving down a ridiculously narrow winding tree-lined road to emerge at a dizzy view of the Irish Sea; and equally randomly down another to fetch up in Porthgain.

If you ever go to Pembrokeshire and don’t visit Porthgain, you have missed something unique.  Is it possible to be unique in many different ways?  If so, this place achieves it.  I’d taken Z there a couple of times before, but we managed this time to climb up the steps at the end of the quay and wander across the cliff path, past the intriguing brick built industrial ruins and the disused slate and granite quarries, almost as far as the great low tide beach at Traith Lyffn, (about which I’ve blogged here before).  We didn’t go down the steps.

Toothsome

Although ever fewer.

We’d run out of bread (how?), so Z suggested muesli instead of toast.  I haven’t eaten muesli for about twenty years, so I was clearly happy to try a drastic swerve away from habit.  It was delicious.

About a third of the way through, I thought ‘that isn’t a nut’.

It was a tooth – or to be more exact, a metal cap that had, many years ago, been glued onto what had remained of a tooth after the dentist had filed it down to a thin but firmly rooted spike.

Unfortunately, whereas usually if a cap comes off the peg is still in place and so the cap can just be simply glued back on again, in this case the peg had snapped off too.  I knew instantly that nothing could be done, so of course I phoned the dentist to book an urgent appointment to confirm that.  They offered me 11.15.  Z kindly drove me to Norwich, on the grounds that a) if something unlikely could in fact be done, it might involve anaesthesia or sedation or anything that might render me incapable of driving and so entailing inordinate complexity and expense, and b) parking’s really difficult around there.

Andre, our brilliant expensive dentist, confirmed my self-diagnosis – nothing can be done – but filed off a little rough bit anyway.  No charge!  But it was a wake-up call, or a heads-up, or a JFDI.  I’ve been procrastinating for nearly two years now, mainly with the excuse that, hey, I won’t be able to chew on that side, will I? – but now I can’t anyway.  So starting next month, I’ll be getting two whole decks of new teeth, or more efficient and durable equivalents.  I’m not sure whether I want to distress you with the details of this ‘procedure’ (as medical people tend to euphemise major invasive surgery), but I don’t see why I should be the only one to suffer, so here goes.

Firstly, the remnants of the old teeth are pulled out, and holes are drilled into the jawbones.  Threaded implants are then inserted into these holes, and the whole thing is left for three months to settle down.  If that all goes well (I haven’t conducted a risk assessment, yet), pegs are screwed into the implants, synthetic teeth are glued onto these pegs, and after another settle-down period chomping can recommence.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, given the cost of a decent small family car, I hope the answer is ‘nothing’.  But I’m going to check out any relevant insurance cover.