Monthly Archives: October 2014

30 years ago (well, nearly – 1985) I put my name in the front of a book at the radio station where I then worked.  The idea was that, whether the book was used or not, when its day was done, it would be passed to the person whose name was in the front.
The book was the Women’s Institute Calendar of Feasts by Maggie Black.   It contains some uncredited pen and ink drawings and information about how life was regulated, seasonally and by the Church, till the two crossed over and you had all sorts of feast days, something to aim for in the endlessness of rural work which nobody who hasn’t done it understands.
I can’t sentimentalise about land. I’ve seen it worked and it is unremitting labour.   And  – whether it’s our country or another, that’s where food comes from  – I have respect for the land and the people who run it.

There used to be a big hooley at the end of October – first All Hallows (October 31), then All Saints (November 1) and finally All Souls (November 2), only one of which now survives.   Three days of mystery meant you’d have a bit of fun and extra food, lots of teasing and magic (how much you believed was up to you) and drinks, hot and alcoholic.
The celebration of any of these now, in certain parts of the world, would mark you out for trouble.

Today’s shops are piled high with pumpkins but when I was a child, I think the only pumpkin I ever saw was in Walt Disney’s cartoon of Alice In Wonderland.   We used turnips.  We hollowed them out, fixed a piece of candle inside and several of us together, draped in black, used to go round to neighbouring houses, ring or knock and when the door was opened, line up behind the lanterns and mumble threateningly.
For this reason we were called mumblers.

Invited in we were given soft drinks or hot drinks, depending on how cold it was and invited to play bob apple – apples floating in a tub of water, two partners with their hands tied behind them, to see who could pick up the apple in their teeth.  There is an older version with the apples suspended and swinging but then you need something to hang the apple from and even houses then called modern didn’t have handy beams.

Once you had your apple, you were given a knife and had to peel it all in one.  If you broke it, it was no use.  If you got it off in one piece, you threw it over your shoulder and it fell, it was said, with the initial of your true love amid much nudging, shrieks and giggles.

If it was cold you might be given soup or a jacket potato – I have eaten jacket potatoes on every possible festive occasion but the best were cooked in the ashes of the Guy Fawkes’ Night bonfire on the common when I was about 10 – and I can taste them yet.

My nicest grown up experience of Hallowe’en was the first year in South London when three boys knocked at the door, yes, dressed up but not plastic heaven, two medium to tall – I’d say maybe 12 years old – and a smaller figure who may have been the same age but sounded younger.   I raced for chocolate, satsumas and 50 pence pieces which were received with enthusiasm.  “Wow” said the smallest figure “food AND money!”
They were kids.  It was lovely.

The following year I got in the chocolate bars but nobody came.  So I took them to the Coptic Church nearby, thinking they must have a Sunday school, and thus heard a fragment of truly beautiful and unexpected music – their service was in progress when I arrived.

Hallowe’en has not come to call since then.   I have heard increasingly uncomfortable stories about glass in Hallowe’en food, children expecting money, the Transatlantic “trick or treat” gone mad, the elders dressed up in every kind of Gothic gear, the youngsters in imitation.

I didn’t have any idea about what All Saints or All Souls’ night might be beyond
Mussorgsky’s “Night on A Bare Mountain” in (again) Walt Disney’s Fantasia.   My Hallowe’en is like all questionable anniversaries (New Year’s Eve is another): I treat it with profound respect, light candles and stay quiet.  There is much unrest and discord in the world.   If I cannot fix it, I will do my best to stay away from it in the hope that it will burn itself out, not burning too many of us on the way.

According to the paper, women who have overplucked their eyebrows to follow an earlier fashion trend can now buy brush on fake eyebrows for a thicker Paloma Faith/Elizabeth McGovern look.   I suppose it can’t be worse than a woman I knew whose eyebrows were so badly dyed ( and somewhere rather exclusive) that she looked like Groucho Marx.
But there is plucked and plucked.

Had I not commenced to pluck my eyebrows at the age of thirteen,  there would have been little shape and I’d have tripped over them.   Secondly I was deeply influenced by a browline running through my father’s side of the family from the lady known as “the Spanish grandmother” (black Irish actually, allegedly descended from the Spanish sailors in the Armada whose ships were blown off course when they reached the Irish Sea from round the north of Scotland, winding up wrecked on the west coast of Ireland)   Surrounded from an early age by fashion and film, I knew how I wanted my eyebrows to look.

I overdid it when I was 13 (I read that plucking a few hairs from the centre made you looked younger and obviously I was maturing fast !) which led to a year of Vaseline and brushing with the baby’s toothbrush then recommended for the eyebrow version  of “100 strokes to make them beautiful”, just like the princess brushing her hair in the story.

But I can’t help wondering how you’d feel locked in a clinch with Mr. Wonderful with the risk of leaving fake eyebrow on his face ?    You see I am old enough to remember the Wandering Shoulder Pad of the Eighties , when your friend told you you looked so much better with the bigger pads in, of course they’d stay !  So off you went and had a lovely time till you caught sight of yourself – at the other end of the evening – shades of the Hunchback of Notre Dame or  more worrying still,  a third breast.  Shoulder pads went everywhere.

Years before, a woman I much admired but who dressed very plainly was chosen to play a rather more glamorous role in the local theatre and I went to see her.   She  looked wonderful, discreetly padded to fill out the strapless evening dress , well made up including false eyelashes and her hands emphasised by impeccably manicured false nails.   She was also very funny, sadly funniest when she flung out her hand in a magnificently cod theatrical gesture and all her nails fell off .

While my friend Wendy who had the most beautiful colouring – black hair, dark blue eyes and white skin and legs from heaven to breakfast – told about sharing a dressing room with a famously curvaceous  popular starlet about whom Wendy, a lesser mortal was a bit shy, until the lady arrived in the dressing room they shared and began to change, taking out of her well filled bra cotton and animal wool, several pairs of clean tights and a great deal of tissue.  Wendy couldn’t keep her face straight, the star was blessedly down to earth about it and they became friends.   But I wonder what she did on a heavy date ?

I don’t mind wearing a lot of makeup (this is as close to fake as I shall ever get) but it’s got to “fade “ nicely.   I can’t stand the black tramlines, false eye lashes like mucky park railings and other coloured constituents that blur and goo.   I think you’re really lucky if a man doesn’t mind but if I were him, I would.

The plain fact is we’ve got the fake mixed up with the real.  Most of the clothes and shoes (oh those horrible shoes) that have been in fashion for the last several years are standing still fashions and I don’t do much standing still.  Just as most of the make up is for clubs and cameras and pretty heavy handed at that.   Heaven knows, I don’t fall out of bed and wear nothing on my face any more but whatever I wear, I want to stay there and work for me, rather than end up on somebody else.

Why don’t you stop and make the best of what you’ve got instead of taking it down only to try and build it up again artificially ?
As mankind does to the environment, so woman does to her face.

“A real face, not a wreck”

Sitting in a French garden in the skin-strokingly warm dark of an early summer evening, something swooped over my head and I yelped.   It was a bat. No, I don’t believe in the legend that bats get in your hair.  It’s just that I have tried and I cannot like them.
I’d like to say it’s because I have read too many Gothic tales but it isn’t true.
I rarely read gothic tales because for me the partition between truth and fiction is hairsbreadth, it hardly exists.  The world is full of strange things and I lack the mechanism to say, much less believe, “It will never happen.”
Having witnessed a tall strong able woman in her late 20s regress into a frightened child before my eyes as she talked of parental abuse, the eyes are one thing, the ears are another.  And if there are five senses you know about and a sixth you suspect, odd can be real.

Bats.  Right.  The title is the origin of the word.  There is a derivation but not another dictionary synonym for bat.
We used to say “bats in the belfry” probably because of the “bs” but I can’t think of more than one or two belfries with which I have even nodding acquaintance.   And maybe that vocal device is part of keeping the whole idea of a very large order of mammals, the only one with wings and leather wings at that, at arms’ length.   My father’s maxim about “they’re more frightened of you than you are of them” wouldn’t console me remotely about bats.   I’d like them to be frightened.  Away.
I tried to watch a programme on bats recently, in a noteworthy cave (very deep and very old) in Mexico, the presenting naturalist reminiscent of David Attenborough enthusing over his pile of guano (bat poo to you).   But I knew I was going to get windy, jumping at every shadow for the rest of the evening so it wasn’t worth it.  I don’t like the look of them and I can afford not too.  I don’t live in the country where I would be more likely to come across them and I don’t live in the enormous chunk of the world across which they range.

In Texas, Oklahoma and Virginia, bats are on the state flag, invaluable farmers.  Fruit eating bats spread seeds, which is how vegetation survives and flourishes, and humans need it to.   In Tonga the bat is sacred, probably because of this idea of its helping to grow food, and ancient peoples in Central America saw it as a magical animal, like the jaguar, a bridge between dark and light.   Alongside the fruit eaters are the insect eaters, logically related.   And then there are those that hunt for smaller animals or fish.  You can still get your head round that, like an owl or other bird of prey.
And the vampire bats live on blood.
Although natural history records small incisions (and the Masai, distinguished nomadic people of Kenya and Tanzania drink blood the same way), we all know those apocryphal stories of Dracula, altered through creepy to dishy, from Louis Jourdan to Robert Pattinson, a hundred years of being consumed into alternate sexuality and the ultimate orgasm of death.   
Martin Cruz Smith may be best known for his breakout novel Gorky Park but for me his finest book is about bats – “Nightwing” – and it draws attention to the number of bats, the way they collect, their ability to change and grow and how intelligent they are.  It is very unsettling and it makes you think – and we have some thinking to do right now.
Because Ebola got its name in 1976 from the river in the Democratic Republic of Congo where the bug was first diagnosed, it was thought to come from fruit bats – which it did not harm – but the bug leapt to other animals including gorillas, chimpanzees, antelope and porcupine.  In Africa bat meat is bush meat, for human consumption.  And the bug spread through bodily fluids – blood, vomit, faeces, semen, breast milk, urine, tears, saliva and sweat.  About which many in the West are becoming increasingly careless.   (A friend told me about sharing the men’s room at a recent shoot with three other moneyed men and he was the only one who washed his hands.)
There is an old saying “An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure “.
Protection is not “it will never happen here”.  That cannot be guaranteed.
Protection is “it is less likely to happen here and you can make it less likely still by basic and unremitting hygiene.”  Wash, think, be careful
Protection has always been hardest to teach the public.
Perhaps the bats will do it.

People work very long hours.  Work has been extended through demand, insecurity and various bits of technology.   And I was brought up very short in an interview the other day when the interlocutor commented admiringly on my workload in the days of paid work.  But there is more to work than hours. There are different demands, different kinds of input and output, differing responses.   I learned that I would never see that kind of energy again the first time I worked with Pam the Painter.  Once the brush is in her hand, she is demonic, a driven Virgo and I couldn’t even interrupt her for a tea break because she doesn’t drink it.   This is not a criticism, she’s wonderful.  It’s just a different way of working, when you realise that what you have been doing may be perfectly enjoyable but it’s also tiring.

On Friday afternoon I shifted a lot of heavy and beautiful books from the inbuilt shelves in the corner because Pam was coming to repaint the wall stained by damp.  She had previously filled two offending exterior holes with cement and we had waited for the walls to dry, which took ages and was eventually passed as acceptable by the local old school jobbing builder. I covered the patches with stain blocker and watched the wonderful Neil Brand’s programme on The Music That Made The Movies (BBC4), definitely nothing like watching paint dry!
On Saturday morning I went off to the street market I love and walked back via to the supermarket I love less and less, ready to make a late lunch for Pam who will occasionally admit to hunger.   I am the commissariat – a word reminds me of my pa who would have been 120 this week – I cater.   Pam’s method of working involves hesitation, nit picking, worrying and finally a beginning, after which there is no stopping her till paint needs to dry.   That done, we ate and drank prosecco which is guaranteed to make both of us feel a lot more positive about numbers of things.
She had been back to where she used to work and discovered that there really was no going back – it was all changed, she had the best of it and surviving colleagues told her so.  After an insistent second coat (by which I mean she went at it till it was beaten into submission), we talked about equity release and the future and then she departed.

I cleared space to move, had a bath and, tired, waited for sleep to come.
It didn’t.   Neither an old favourite book nor half a proprietary sleeping pill worked.   So by Sunday I felt and looked like hell, lumps on skin, hair like bat wings, leaden.   But hanging about doesn’t help – I find waiting more tiring than ditchdigging.

So I went walkabout to an imaginative hardware store where I thought I might find spider spray.   And I did.   Before me loomed the door of Christies the auctioneers and because I was drawn to something in the window, I wandered in.  There was a woman in black with a clipboard and I enquired if I was permitted to just walk in. “Indeed” she smiled “encouraged” and told me a bit about the sale.  There was a lot of stuff that leaves me cold (I hear my mother’s disapproving voice in my ear saying “And who’s going to dust it?”) but there were some lovely old copper pans, a table, a chair and a jewellery department, Cartier eat your heart out.   The security man offered me a pass, “I don’t have light fingers “ I said with a smile and in I went to things of beauty  – how lovely to be able to admire instead of wrinkling your nose.   So I wandered around and came home to join battle replacing the books, which occupied me very happily till fish pie not of my making and Downton , both equally benign and digestible.

It may be hard, if you spent most of your life working Monday to Friday and occasionally extra, not to think of the weekend as special time, time off – but the living room wall has had a facelift, the books are back in a more thoughtful arrangement, the autumn has arrived (infinitely preferable to the sweaty hectic last throw of summer) and everyone should have a friend like Pam.   And last night “golden slumbers kissed my eyes”.  Lucky me.