Cornwall

I've been away; hence lack of blogging.  I went to Cornwall for a week with my mother and elder brother, to celebrate Mum’s 80^th birthday.  Cornwall was beautiful, as always, the weather was variable, again as always, and the peace and quiet and fresh air were all blissful. 

The journey down did not go well.  It had all looked straightforward on paper.  Mum and I were to meet at Paddington and get a morning train to Exeter, Stephen would meet us there with his car, and we would drive on as far as Plymouth, picnic at Jennycliff, then drive on to Polruan in the afternoon.  Simple!  Except Mum and I managed to get on the wrong train.

I’m still not sure how we managed to do it.  I really thought we were on the right one.  But we were spotted, and thrown off, because our tickets weren’t valid on the service in question.  The train was extremely crowded and by the time we had managed to get back on to the platform the train we should have been on had left.  Just to add insult to injury (at least in my own mind) one of my favourite actors was on the train and very sweetly helped us with our luggage, and I failed to recognise him and growled “No, no, I can manage, honestly what a bloody cock-up”, when I should have been smiling and saying “Thank you” courteously.  What a cock-up, indeed.  Hopefully not being recognised is a pleasure rather than a pain for the chap in question. 

No, not that actor, alas.  This was the lovely Samuel West.  Who turns out to be rather taller than I had imagined, and in fact damnably attractive in person.  Lovely brown eyes with crinkles at the corners.  Bah humbug.  If I had recognised him I would probably have made a perfect bally fool of myself all the way to Exeter, so I guess it was all for the best.

All this meant we were running late; Stephen rearranged his journey, and was able to meet the next train without undue trouble, but as this meant we arrived at lunch time instead of well before, we went down to have our picnic lunch beside the Exe instead of overlooking Plymouth Sound.  We parked outside St Clement’s church, below Powderham Castle; and Stephen promptly reversed into the church collecting box.  Which was built into a large granite pillar.  So the starboard stern bumper of the car looks as though it's been attacked (though luckily none of the rear lights were damaged).  Poor little Volkswagen; but at least it gave as good as it got - the collecting box looks as though someone tried to stage a smash-and-grab raid on it...

Then we went down to the foreshore with our food, and I sat in a large lump of tar.  Large enough, and warm enough (it was a very sunny day, and tar melts in the sun) that it went through my trousers, through my underpants, and onto me.

I now know one can get tar off one’s backside quite efficiently with a good squirt of WD40, so I learned something useful from this; but still, it was not a good start to a holiday.

From then on, though, things were okay.  It was almost like the old theatrical adage about a bad dress rehearsal meaning a good first night.  Nothing else went wrong, and pretty much everything went right.  We all caught up on some sleep, walked on the coast path and along the Fowey River and its assorted creeks, got a lot of wonderful fresh air, talked to cows, visited country churches, bird-watched, ship-watched, paddled, went to the Eden Project (fascinating but very expensive!), talked our heads off, drank a lot of gin and tonic, and ate too much.  Perfect family holiday, I think.

Sadly I didn’t manage to do much writing, as I was too busy doing all of the above (& too tired by the time I went to bed each evening).  But I’ve got stuck into it again since I’ve been back.  Only I do wish I were still in Polruan, with that clean, clean air to breathe.

Busy busy bee, encore une fois (or, busy poseur, perhaps)...

I want to say that I have been on the go for so long I feel slightly disorientated.  I want to have a little moan about that.  But that “for so long” refers to a period of about three weeks.  There are people in this world whose lives don’t provide them with a break and a decent rest for several years at a stretch, never mind weeks.  Heck, there are plenty of people who never get a holiday in their entire lives.  I should grumble.  Heavens, what a wimp I’m becoming.

Work has been busier this month, which is good.  The weather has been – well, British.  Since I last wrote any notes here I’ve been gripped and thrilled by a magnificent performance of “Peter Grimes” at the Proms (Stuart Skelton in harrowingly good form in the lead, the chorus practically blasting off the roof of the Albert Hall when they let rip, all this and the lovely Iain Paterson to boot); I’ve also spent a blissful afternoon at the Science Museum (no longer just for kids), I’ve written my arse off all the bank holiday weekend, and I’ve dashed down to Kent to help my mum celebrate a big birthday – you know the kind - one with a number ending in zero. 

The latter is a bit of a “good grief, really?” moment for me; presumably a hell of a lot more so for her.  She never really seems to change that much, much less age particularly, and it is weird to realise how the numbers are still stacking up notwithstanding.  Well, I hope I have inherited her life span genes, and not my father’s. 

Mum’s birthday was fun, and would have been more fun if the weather hadn’t been so up itself.  It’s still August, for crying out loud.  What’s with the howling gales, persistent heavy rain and thunder and lightning?  But there was plenty of champagne, as well as both vanilla and maple-pecan fudge (she’s allergic to chocolate) and several kinds of cake, and curry for supper, and bouquets of flowers, and potted phalaenopsis, and a nice stack of greetings cards to prop along the front room bookcase.   And gin and Pringles, without which no family gathering seems to be complete these days.  Whatever did we do before the advent of the Pringle? 

Outings (it being way too dodgy, weather-wise, for the planned picnic on the beach either day) were instead spent partly sitting in the car listening to the rain beat on the roof, and pondering the intricate patterns very heavy rain makes on a windscreen in a very heavy & horizontal wind (like quivering water-lace; rather beautiful in a wet way), and partly indulging in the atavistic pleasure of blackberry picking.  So what with the dear UK climate doing its absolute nut, and the blackberries leaving all of us with lacerated burgundy hands, and champagne going to everyone’s head, it was a mad but very happy couple of days off. 

This weekend I’m cat-sitting (for the cat who is scared of farting – note to self, do not fart at the cat.  As if I needed telling.  But then, I’m no lady, me).  Then next Friday I’m off to Cornwall, for the second half of Mum’s birthday celebrations (I told you it was a big one) – a family week in Polruan.  Beautiful Cornwall, beautiful Fowey River, beautiful clean sea air and peaceful walking, silent country nights, lovely pubs, and good Cornish cider, yarg cheese, and pasties from Niles Bakery... 

Trying to catch up with everything that's gone on...

Well, it’s been a few weeks since I wrote...

Life has been hectic; it’s the run-up to Christmas, after all, but being a chump I went away on holiday and have now got dreadfully behind on everything.  I have just managed to post my UK Christmas cards, on the last safe posting day for second-class stamps – but I missed the last safe posting dates for parcels and for international post – by miles, in the latter case.  And I still haven’t finished dealing with the problem of Christmas presents.

I remind myself that Christmas isn’t about presents.  Or cards, for that matter.  The problem is, when you are not a churchgoer, and can’t really call yourself more than a fellow-traveller of Christianity, it becomes ridiculous to say “Christmas is about Christ”.  But the capitalist subtext (“Christmas is about spending and consuming as much as you humanly can!”) is thoroughly sick-making in every sense. 

So for me, Christmas is about the people I love; seeing friends and family, catching up on news from people I don’t see much of (because they have done outrageous things like going to live in another country); it’s about sending greetings cards to say “I am thinking of you and I hope life is going well & hope you and yours really do all have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year”.  So giving gifts (which needn’t be anything fancy - I am doing a strong line in socks and home-made jam this year) becomes a tongue-tied-and-terribly-British way of saying “Um er, and I love you”- mumble mumble turn-pink-and-look-at-your-shoes...  So I want to buy and send cards, and buy and/or make presents, because they are my annual “Um er I love you”s.

I’m off down to Kent tonight to do something practical and, hopefully, helpful; my mother always has a big, real tree, and lots of greenery and decorations all over the house, and really appreciates a hand getting this all done.  She also appreciates a hand with some of the grocery shopping.  She is 79, after all.  So that is my weekend sorted; lugging a wheely basket of bottles and biscuits back up the hill from Sainsburys; dragging the tree in and setting it up; cutting and gathering armfuls of evergreen from the garden; and decorating the lot.  With the final of “Strictly Come Dancing thrown in for good measure on Saturday night.  And, you know what? – I’m really looking forward to it.  Maybe this is one of the signs of adulthood - good heavens, did I get there at last?  Instead of regarding a weekend spent helping my mum as drudgery I am thinking “Great – this will be a lot of fun!”

In a week’s time I will be heading down to Kent again, for ten whole days off.  Ten days of peace and quiet with my family; eating decent homemade food, playing board games, walking by the sea.  It’s a time I always look forward to, and this year more than most, as I feel in serious need of recharging my metaphorical batteries.  The week in Cornwall, though it was lovely, didn’t give me as much of an energy boost as I had hoped for.   The picture at the top is one of my holiday photos and makes me feel very nostalgic - wintry afternoon sun over the sea, with the Trinity House daymark on Gribben Head in the distance. 

Part of the problem has been stress at work.  Things here have been over-stretched and understaffed for quite some time now, and everyone has got more tired and frazzled as the months wore on.  Then in late November we were told that the team I work in is being restructured.  In the end this has turned out less horrendous than some restructures I’ve heard about elsewhere, but it has still led to a very uncomfortable few weeks of uncertainty, not to mention the hassle of filling out all the forms to apply for new roles, or in some cases our own existing roles, again.  For me, matters were not helped by the fact I can’t find a copy of my CV (being as I am a nitwit), so I had to do it all from scratch.   I found myself earlier this week laboriously working back through my entire employment history, listing all my jobs and my duties in each, in order to fill in an application form.  Given that I’ve done some fairly odd things in my time, the end result does look a bit as if I’m taking the mickey.  They can’t see many cvs that include a degree in Fine Art preceded by being a chef, an actor in street theatre, an artists’ model, a cleaner and a furniture restorer.  Plus a lot of retail work.  I even know how to clean vellum book-bindings, courtesy of my first-ever job in Canterbury Cathedral Library...

Anyway, off for my weekend of hauling and decorating duties.  By Sunday evening Mum’s place should be bursting with good things to eat and looking like Christmas at Dingley Dell.

After the four days...

It’s hard sometimes coming back to work after a Bank Holiday weekend. I took an extra day off this time, which gave me four days to flop. The problem is that that’s enough time to begin to relax, but not really to recharge; one needs a few days to get right down the hill, as it were, before one can begin to come up again. So I came back to London yesterday thoroughly relaxed but not much recouped.

The gynae problems took advantage of my relaxing to come on again, and I ended up having to talk to my mother about them before I had planned to (I’ve learned over the years that presenting Mum with a problem without also having a solution in place is simply inviting her to worry, and then work herself into a state of misery trying to find a solution and force one to implement it). I think when my GP gets to the bottom of it (pun not intended, sorry!) the issue is probably going to come down to my age and my hormones; but as I’d feared, Mum is now convincing herself that it’s going to be cancer or coronary heart disease or some other horror. I’ve provided various samples to my doctor and have another appointment next week, at which I fully expect to be told that A) I have had a bacterial infection and B) my oestrogen levels are down. We’ll see, anyway.

It was still good to chill out at Mum’s and do very little.

My brother Steve collected me from work on Friday evening, in the middle of a dramatic thunderstorm. Strangely, despite the atrocious weather and the fact it was the eve of a bank holiday weekend, we had a very smooth easy drive down to Kent. This time last year, trying to do the same journey, the traffic heading south through Richmond and Kingston was barely crawling; after leaving Kew by 5.15 we found ourselves just outside Banstead at about 9.00pm, and parked up for a while in the large Asda supermarket there to get a sandwich and a drink, use the loo, and stretch our legs, before embarking on another two hours drive to Canterbury. Kew to Banstead, about fifteen miles, had taken us over 3 ½ hours - we could have walked it quicker. So this year we set off with a certain frisson of dread, and the speed and ease of the journey was all the more wonderful for it.

Saturday – what did we all do on Saturday? Lie in, lazy breakfast, bit of light gardening, lazy lunch, walk by the sea, tea and cake, large G&T, supper with a bottle of wine. Sunday? The same, with a giant crossword thrown in. Monday, which was Mum’s birthday, same again, only with Stephen and me doing all the cooking. And Tuesday?- still more laziness and another walk by the sea, and for me another G&T (Steve was driving). Then the drive back to London, which again went off smoothly and in excellent time.

Now I’m back at work, and the weather is okay, and I was able to spend my lunch break today sitting in the sun eating rice cakes and melitzanosalata among the magnificent semi-hardy tropical flowers of the Duke’s Garden. The taste of melitzanosalata takes me back with a lovely sensual swoop of memory to Greece, and reminds me that in ten days I’ll be flying out to Thassos for a week. The weather in Kavala (nearest weather station the BBC link up with) at the moment is hot and dry – averaging 28 degrees with about 30% humidity and clear skies. The place I’m staying is five minutes’ walk from the magnificent beach of Chrisi Amoudia. I will swim and read and paint watercolours, and sit at beachside cafés, and relax again… for a whole week… and I can hardly wait.

Happy Easter, everyone!

... I'm off to spend a few days with my mum in Kent. A peaceful lunch out tomorrow, a peaceful Good Friday walk in the countryside; then probably gardening and cooking proper home-made hot cross buns on Saturday, eating them on Sunday, another healthy walk on Monday... Peace and quiet and open air, in the springtime, in my mother's garden. Bliss.

Last night I was at a tremendous performance of Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande" at the Barbican. Favourite Baritone was on stunning form and the rest of the cast were also terrific, especially the small parts and Laurant Naouri's deeply intense and quietly terrifying Golaud. I started off thinking quite calmly and intellectually "ah, this beautiful music, those delicate scintillating sounds, ooh the strings..." and was gradually, inexorably swept up into a semi-stifled, rapt tension that left me shaking. Wonderful (& such a relief that it was a concert performance and so not buried under directorial concepts).

FB has been in the wars again, though; it appears he's broken his left (dominant) arm for the second time in less than ten years. Poor, silly chap, he is an accident-prone numpty - but his voice and his artistry are still second-to-none.

More snow...

I’m meant to be going to my Mum’s in Kent this weekend, to help her with Christmas shopping and planning, getting the tree indoors and the decorations up, and so on. I’m about to set off; but it may turn out to be a bit of an adventure getting there…

Over the course of the day we’ve had a series of alternating bursts of heavy snow and sunshine. Bizarre, and very pretty at times, but the result is that today heads into evening the ground is fast refreezing, with a mixture of snow and ice, and more snow on top of the ice, and I think I can safely say this is not nice.

I felt a bit silly, first thing this morning before the snow started, putting on my proper walking boots in case the forecast icy conditions came along by the end of the day. Boy, am I glad I did, now.

As far as I can tell from the BBC and from assorted travel update websites, trains in the south east are still running fine at the moment. More snow is forecast for the weekend. I will set off, and travel hopefully – and hopefully arrive (& hopefully get back again, too).

Wish me luck, and have a good weekend, everyone!

Yawn...

Holiday now over, sigh.

Cyprus was very hot and sunny. Far from doing lots of day trips and cultural things, we spent most of our week on the beach. Not that I'm knocking a beach holiday with Mum! - hot, hot sun, sitting under palm trees, swimming in the sea, eating tahini and garlic dips, salads toppped with olives and grilled halloumi, ice cream sundaes and bags of nuts, and drinking ice-cold beers at lunch and Brandy Sours at sunset. It was gorgeous. But based on the weather forecast I'd packed light-weight trousers, cardigans and cotton shirts, and only threw in some shorts and a couple of bathing costumes for the hotel indoor pool at the last minute. I spent most of the week either in the sea in one or the other of my swimsuits, or in the shade with a cold drink, wearing the shorts and my lightest tops.

So although not quite the planned holiday, it was a lot of fun, and perfect Girl Time with my Mum. I think the completely relaxing break did her the world of good, too. It's just such a pity one has to come back to Britain in the middle of the night to a thick fog and a hard frost; a temperature drop of about 25 degrees celsius, brrr...

Holiday...

The end of another busy week, and now I'm away on holiday till the fifteenth. Yay!

My regular pattern of having the week of my birthday off as annual leave has had to be discarded this year as I was planning to go away for some Serious Girls' Time with my mum and then she got landed with a hospital appointment in the middle of that week. As it's one of her eye injections and the window of opportunity for these is fairly small - they can be moved by a couple of days but no more - we had to change our plans. So last weekend I booked a trip back to Cyprus, flying out at 9am on Sunday morning. The forecast at the moment says sun, sun, sun...

I must just share the results of my latest tangle with spell-checker, though. It picked up the extra "s" I'd managed to stick on the end of "business", which was good, but then it got its teeth into some botanical names:

Pinus nigra = pin-up n*****
Heliconia rostrata = Helicon prostrate (bit tough on the Nine Muses, who are supposed to live on Helicon)
Thuja standishii = Thug sandshoe (surreal picture)
Zelkova serrata = Slovakian serrated (perhaps a kind of dragon?)

and my favourite, the beautiful Sacred Lotus, is
Nelumbo nucifera = Encumber Lucifer.

Three day weekend, four day working week...

I had a wonderful Late Summer Bank Holiday, walking, cooking and relaxing on the beach (shingle, so don't get any exotic mental pictures!) in Kent with my mother and my elder brother Steve. The weather has suddenly improved almost beyond recognition, too. Apart from a spectacular rainstorm while we were walking across Dungeness (where there is no shelter whatsoever!) we had wonderful warm sunshine otherwise, all weekend and on Bank Hol Monday.

Please, please may we have a full-scale Indian summer? August has managed to be both chilly and muggy most of the time; nasty.

Peace and quiet and open air...

I had a wonderful weekend. I went to see my mother. She’s having some health problems and I was afraid she’d be depressed and hard to cheer up, but I found her quite buoyant, working hard on seeing her glass as half full and not letting herself worry about things she can’t control. We had a pleasant lunch out on Saturday, did a giant general knowledge quizz (nicely tough) in the afternoon, and spent most of Sunday sitting in her back garden in companionable quietness, reading and drinking cups of tea.

Sunday was a bright day, sunny but not too hot, and the garden was full of the hum of bees and the flutter of birds’ wings in the trees. Dozens of butterflies, gatekeepers and small whites, tortoiseshells and red admirals, were looping about between the fennel plants and lavenders and the last, spicy-scented Frau Dagmar roses. Goldfinches flitted about in the cypresses, chirruping constantly to one another, and the thrushes came down to the terrace steps to bash their snails, and paused to give us the leery eye, and went on bashing. A lawn mower buzzed a few gardens away. Flying ants were climbing up grass stalks and launching themselves, and a handful of gulls soared high overhead, picking them off. At about four pm a blackbird began to sing in the top of a neighbour’s apple tree. Then at about five thirty the man in the house at the far end came into his garden and began to do his accordion practice, adding a layer of soft, sweet folk music in the distance.

It was one of those days of simple magic, a day that just is; when one steps aside from the bustle of busy life and mental chaff, and the strong and gentle stuff of a deeper reality comes in at every pore and through every sense. Whatever one conceives the divine to be, he, she or it is intensely present on such days and in such places.

The air was warm, perfumed with the old roses and the resinous pungency of herbs and conifer needles. The birds chattered and sang and the breeze murmured, but there was no traffic, there were no aircraft going over, no trains passing. It could not have been more different from my dear, but very noisy, little bit of London garden, hard up against the embankment of the District Line, and half a mile from the Heathrow flight path.

I do love my bit of Chiswick garden, though, despite the fact it isn’t a patch on mum’s huge and peaceful haven of towering green and crowding life. I love my local birds, though I can’t afford to keep four different birdfeeders all topped up (she has fat balls, sunflower seed, peanuts and niger seed; a veritable birds’ deli counter). I love my lavenders, though they are a fraction the size of hers, and my very ordinary lobelias and pansies and petunias, and the urban fox cubs scuttling among the buddleias along the railway line and yipping at one another in the dusk… It isn’t the home of my heart, I know, but it is home, and I have dearly loved having the caring of it for this time.

Latest medical...

Well, yesterday I had my glucose tolerance test; results should be available either tomorrow or the day after. My left arm was sore for the rest of the day after having needles stuck in it by the very nice but rather heavy-handed nurse. This morning I have a spectacular blotchy pair of bruises in the crook of my elbow. I look as though an elbow-fetishist vampire has had a go at me.

Meanwhile, though, there is good news from Mum. She went to see the eye specialist at the local hospital and discovered that her mild Dry Macular Degeneration has suddenly morphed into Wet Macular Degeneneration, which sounds nasty but is treatable (unlike the Dry form, which just quietly gets worse over the years). The treatment involves having a series of injections into her retina, through her eyeball, which she is horrified about, but it's apparently a very good treatment with a high success rate. Because it is most effective if done quickly she is having her first session later this week, so at least she doesn't have time to get herself too worked up about it, and the friend who is taking her to the hospital had his cataracts done six months ago and is being very reassuring about how easy and painless eye surgery is.

So I am still concerned about myself, but very much relieved for Mum.

Mixed blessings...

Or rather, to be precise, mixed blessings and things-where-you-have-to-look-hard-to-find-the-blessing-if-there-is-one-at-all-and-sometimes-I-do-wonder-about-that.

It rained last night, and the weather has cooled off enormously. Very refreshing; but being British I am already catching myself thinking "I hope I don't get rained on on my way home."

I am going to WOMAD in ten days time. Going to WOMAD is great, but I am now worrying about the weather (see above).

My Mum is having eye problems and her optometrist wants her to see a specialist; she is desperately worried and unhappy about it and there is nothing I can do except say reassuring things and listen while she worries.

And my blood sugar levels are Not What They Should Be, and I have to take a glucose tolerance test (which involves drinking a whole bottle of lucozade - a seriously ugh situation) to see if I have developed type 2 diabetes. I'm in the low-risk group, except for being overweight. So I'm hoping that it will turn out to have been a blip of some kind in the initial test results. Really, really hoping. Diabetes is manageable, and properly managed it doesn't have to have that much impact on one's life - after all, Steve Redgrave is a diabetic, and it clearly hasn't held him back - but it is a progressive and irreversible condition, and a diagnosis is truly a life sentence. So I am really, really hoping it turns out okay. And I am pledging myself firmly to go on working to shed the excess weight accumulated during my broken-wrist-inspired months of comfort eating, comfort drinking, and cheese-indulging, this past winter.

Feeling a little low, and determined to find the good in it. Not sure what good I can find in Mum's woes, though, and I hate seeing someone worry themself sick. If only there were something concrete I could do to help.

Short break...

Tomorrow is my mother's birthday (I don't use this date as a password anywhere so I feel safe revealing it!) and I am off to Canterbury to spend some time with her; hopefully chilling out, relaxing and doing similarly easeful and peaceful things. That's Canterbury Cathedral in the picture, by the way, since I don't have any electronic pictures of Mum's beautiful garden or her rather ordinary house.

Work has been rather hectic this week, so I am tired and a little tense. Then yesterday evening, when I tried to switch on the laptop to do some writing, it had hiccoughs and wouldn't turn on. Aargh, more tension straightaway. Every time so far that this has happenend it has been fine again a few days later, so I have total faith in it. Yes, I do. Total faith.

In an illogical panic reaction ("Total faith" I said, hmmm) I am now carrying the floppy discs of "Gabriel Yeats", "Ramundi's sisters" and "Fortitude" around in my handbag, as I feel they are somehow more safe with me. I am taking a bundle of good old-fashioned file paper down to Kent too, so I can go on writing the normal way.

Hoping for decent weather and the chance to take a picnic to the coast a couple of times... I've packed a sketchbook and my watercolours too. Really looking forward to a break from work.