Bear before. Bear after.

Sophie-daughter thought I had thrown her favourite bear away. He was made for me before my birth so that makes him - as old as the Dead Sea Scrolls really, and equally precious! When I found him in a plastic bag at the bottom of a pile of junk I was appalled to see how he had degraded. Never a top-of-the-range bear - this was the end of the war (second - please!) after all, and the family didn't have much money but he had leather upper arms and paws, and a real sheepskin face which had become all moth-eaten and ghastly. I felt terrible; as though I'd neglected an elderly relative! I knew I'd never be able to make him better but my ex's wife (my sister-in-law?) is amazing at all things detailed and fiddly, has enormous patience, and by dint of taking a bit from one place and putting it in another, matching faded shades of fur, and using some spare trousering, he was reincarnated in time for Easter (appropriately enough.) There was a touching reunion.

Quiz

No prizes, but loud cyberclaps if you can tell me where the following esoteric items can be found under one roof:

SuperButts
Half Nock
Serving shifter
Pee Wee Doinker
BearPaw Jig
FatBoy
Easton Wrap
Kissers

Ghost poo

I wish this had never been invented. So mny of the orders for the shop come sunk into it and it's a total pain, flies everywhere, sticks to everything (static) and fills huge plastic sacks which I have to take down to the recycling because it fills the bin.

People change..

After my remark about my ex-husband's early apathy toward gardening I thought I should include these photos of his present efforts, encouraged by his second wife who actually likes gardening. It's not the best time of year for the shrubs and the larger perennials and it was a dull day Sunday but I think the snaps show the scope and variety of it - and the lack of a boring rectangle of grass! When they took over the house there was only grass, a few rhododendron bushes and large scruffy conifers in the acre or so around the house, which made the whole plot very dark and gloomy. Ten years later it's been transformed. They do have some help, but day-to-day both are out pulling up foolhardy weeds. There's a vegetable garden which produces huge quantities of Jerusalem artichokes among other things, and lots of currant bushes, black, red,and gooseberries.

A blether about gardens..

So far there are no ill effects, chez moi, from the volcanic ash or sulphur - whch I believe I did smell in the wind last evening - unless it was the Devil passing by! An asthmatic friend says her asthma is worse but there are so many trees and shrubs flowering now that it’s most likely to be them. Someone else said she thought the dust on the cars was ash - don’t think so myself. It’s very dry everywhere and the farmers are fine ploughing so clouds of soil are blowing across the roads. The dust on the cars is more likely to be that and the pollen from the trees in my opinion. The comment reminded me of our postman when I was a child and atomic bombs were being tested around the world. He swore one morning he had seen ‘fall-out’ on the blackberry bushes.

So well was I feeling today that I surprised myself by doing a little tidying up in the garden The combination of bending and wet earth usually has me floored, wheezing and groaning, very quickly, but not today. The time my daughter put in working to ease the pain in my back was worthwhile, unfortunately I think I’ve just undone all the good she did and will need another going over.

Whilst I was dragging out new weeds, grass, and dead stuff from last summer, I thought about gardens I have known and neglected over the years. It was a shock to me when I discovered my husband knew nothing whatsoever about gardening having lived all his life in apartments in Athens and London. Once this was clear we avoided gardens or, if strictly necessary, had someone in to keep it tidy.

I grew up in the country eating the wonderful fresh produce that my father grew, or from neighbours growing different crops and at a push, as a last resort, the the local farmers. Field peas were consider very inferior to the home-grown ones picked daily, podded and cooked straight away. I suppose we ate our share of DDT, the crop-saver of choice then, though I don’t remember ever seeing fields being sprayed. My grandmother was in charge of the flowers and shrubs which she grew mainly from cuttings she took surreptitiously from the posh gardens in the area when they were opened to the public. The last little house we lived in had a large, long garden with a beautiful walnut tree. She created a fine rockery and a shrubbery with help from my dad who did the digging and patiently shoved the little mower up and down the lawn in the summer. They had no help from either my mother or myself. I was given a patch to grow things in and chose Canterbury bells, nasturtiums, antirrhinums, wallflowers and radishes. I think the Canterbury bells grew quite nicely and wallflowers will survive almost anything, but I didn’t weed them much or water them, and the soil was heavy London clay so in hot weather it baked hard. I have always hated radishes anyway.

We had garden plots at school too in which we planted much the same assortment, along with onions and carrots. I really can’t remember if anything grew in mine.

My mother liked flower arranging. She was so good at it she actually earned money at it eventually. I think it was symptomatic of her troubled, nervy, melancholic nature to enjoy making these arrangements. It was the one area of her life in which she could feel some control. Dried flowers were particularly gratifying because the arrangements lasted so long. Toward the end of her life when she was very ill she had a nightmare in which she was trying to arrange her clothes tidily in a cupboard but I kept pulling them all out and messing everything up. Sorry Mum!

I had my opportunity to marry a farmer. The Young Farmer’s dances were one of the few social events of the year, apart from the weekly dances in the Town Hall in Maldon. I found the YF’s a dull lot who could only talk about fast cars, and though they were keen to take us girls for rides in their father’s cars they didn’t seem especially fast themselves. As an ‘early adopter’ of all things sexual I was a bit surprised and disappointed. Later when on teaching practice from college we were given our evening meals in Writtle Agricultural College. Though it might have been a welcome thrill at the end of the day to see a few boys I think we generally agreed they weren’t worth making any effort to get to know. I for one had become spoiled by the proximity of Cambridge and found high IQ’s more sexy. Now that farming is so chemical, and so little is left to nature, perhaps things have changed and the students are all top scientists.

An after-thought to reading about Agatha Christie and her passionate love of cream. At least half, maybe more, of the customers who use the Health Store - ours or any other Health Store - would probably prophecy for her respiratory problems, hardening of the arteries and an early death. Agatha lived quite robustly until she was 86 and I can think of relatives of mine who lived longer who had similar reprehensible and dangerous habits. Milk, when I was a child, was seen as a vital supplement for one and all; suddenly we learned that after a certain age humans don't digest milk at all easily. I was given cod liver oil (mercifully in capsule form) and Brewer's Yeast was a wonderful source of goodness; sul[phur tablets inthe spring to 'clean out the system' and that was that.

Brewer's Yeast swam into my life again recently when a young couple, who have just given birth to a premature baby, were sent to find the tablets to help the lactation process. They hadn't been able to find them anywhere and despite being shown the yeast flakes we do have in stoc, they've come back to ask for this magic formula (recommended by a midwife perhaps) that will make all things well. We will order it for them and my heart goes out to them - I hope it does the trick. In my day (fatal words, revealing great age) we were given Guinness and exhorted to keep drinking it daily to encourage the flow of milk. Same vitamins, with the added benefit of iron and, much more importantly, of relaxing the mother. Even now I feel a phantom 'letting down' of milk at the sight of a pint of Guinness! I suppose those days are past because of the growing disapproval of alcohol. A fear, part real, part moralistic, that seems to have crept over from the USA.

So fashions in healthy foods and medicines come and go, and mostly, as far as I can see, arise from our need to have amulets to keep bad things away.

I completely support any movement away from fast food, pre-cooked meals, and cruel farming techniques like battery hens. The goods in our store that help to counteract those evils I can fully and enthusiastically endorse. Supplements I am less confident about, and Homeopathy because it doesn't work for me, I have to stay silent on, but if it works for others then that's their good fortune.

Volcanic ash -

- falling on us. How exciting! I never thought THAT would happen. I keep sniffing but can't smell sulphur yet. A happy spin-off of the event has been the forced grounding of the RAF dduring one of their biggest training excercises. Very peaceful.

I finished reading Agatha's autobiography and am slightly depressed. Firstly by the vacuum it has left to be filled - no book as yet appeals. Secondly because she packed so much into her life and it makes me wonder how on earth I can have squandered my own with so little to show for it.

She was one of those women from another age who were cheerful, brave, feisty even, and just got on with things, making little or no fuss about the bad patches, of illness, infidelity, poverty - and in her case two horrendous wars. Agatha was, as far as the reader can tell, a lover of life who grabbed at all opportunities for new experiences whilst fully relishing small everyday pleasures (like drinking pints of half-milk half-cream at the end of a walk!) She also was quite clear about her own capabilites, knew she wasn't a 'highbrow' writer. She wrote to entertain and she achieved that really well. I have heard criticism levelled at her books because her characters are all upper middle class British. How could they not be? She was born in 1890 into a family that had money - and then didn't. Agatha, once she was married, wrote because she needed the money. She wrote about the world she knew and the people she knew and that was much more sensible than trying to set her murders in the slums of London or even amongst the grey, dismal 'lower middle classes' of which she could only fantasize and whose lives wouldn't have been nearly as colourful. I've always thought the books read as though they were written by a writer who was ejoying herself with her creations.

The past is another country.

Today I had to find something to read in the shop and found Agatha C's autobiography. I can't think why I haven't read it before. It's very entertaining and a social history to boot.

Almost every autobiography I have ever read if the writer's childhood was lived in the era of servants and the family were wealthy enough to have a few or many, the writer appears to feel embattled by possible criticism and has to pre-empt it by justifying their parents. They do this with assurances to the readers about how well the servants were treated , how contented and loyal they were and how much they loved the family. I don't doubt for one moment that the servants were often very content in what was a secure situation in days when such security was hard to find. So long as their employers were relatively agreeable it can't have been too bad.

On the other hand I would hate to be a maid or 'Nursie.' Would I have minded so much if I had lived in those times? Impossible to tell. I wouldn't have been the same person because I'd have grown in a peatier soil; prepared for my future station; had the alternatives made starkly clear.

Is there any point in trying to compare customs of other times with our own? Like the other Agatha I think meeting is for strangers and when we meet the past in memories we meet it as strangers. We're different people in the 'present' and have different ways of seeing life and ourselves; different expectations. I've been making a list of all the memories I have of childhood experiences that no child nowadays will have. It's a list that will move no-one but myself.


Later I just found an amusing bit in Agatha’s biography. When she was about thirteen or so her mother put her into a small ‘finishing’ school in Paris, belatedly thinking she should have some education after all. Agatha remembers walking with other young lady students through the Bois in crocodile formation, when a man popped out of the bushes, his top half properly clad in jacket, shirt, cravat and tie, but with his trousers significantly undone.

“We must all have seen him, I think, but we all behaved in a decorous manner, as if we had noticed nothing unusual - possibly we may not have been quite sure of what it was we HAD seen. Miss Dryden, who was in charge of us that day, sailed along with the iron-clad belligerence of a battleship. We followed her. ........ I may add that as far as I know not one of us mentioned the incident to any of the other girls; there was not so much as a giggle. We were all splendidly modest in those days.’

The scene as she paints it contrasts starkly with one that I may have written about before - so stop if you’ve heard it - but it stays in my mind as a triumph of sense over sensibility. It took place in the gardens of Cinquantenaire in Brussels one beautiful summer’s day, when my first daughter was 2 years old. A group of us, mothers and children, were gathered around the large sand pit thoughtfully provided for the children (and cats and dogs unfortunately; we built sandpits in our own gardens later once we had realised the danger.) One of the boys was older, five or six maybe, grew bored with infant games and wandered off into the bushes on an adventure of his own. We women were busy gossiping, eating cakes one of us had baked, and sharing coffee from a thermos, occasionally breaking off to wipe sand from the mouths of the fallen, so it took us a while to realise that several of the younger children had followed him and that there was a loud noise of squealing and laughter coming from a few yards away. We investigated hastily and were just in time to see a dishevelled, discombobulated flasher emerge from the bushes pulling his flies together, to the loud disappointment of his audience who were yelling ‘Show us your willy again’ whilst falling about in gleeful spasms of hilarity.

A much more effecive way of dealing with the situation than cries of horror and disgust and a visit to the Gendarmerie which might have resulted in it turning into a trauma. I'm also tempted to say it was a better way of dealing with the event than the way group consciousness voicelessly agreed upon in Agatha's day - 'don't notice this, it's too horrendously embarassing and shocking.'

Words.

I’m hungry for books to read at the moment and crime fiction has suddenly lost its appeal. About time really; I’ve been stuck in the crime loop for ten years. Before that it was a decade of tracts on esoteric philosophies or pop psychology, interspersed with Doris Lessing, and the occasional Aga saga as light relief. I don’t anticipate this deviation from novels lasting long but whilst it does it’s hard to know what it is I want so I spend a lot of time wandering round my depleted stock of books late at night, thumbing through this and that, trying to settle to something. Yesterday I re-read ‘The Family Reunion’ remembering the first time I was introduced to Eliot in the Sixth form. The English ‘A’ level group read it through together and I was always cast as Agatha. Though it was hard to understand I think I got as much from it then as I do now and I loved the enigmatic imagery. A lifelong love affair with T.S. Eliot and obscure poetry was born. I’m not a Pam Ayres fan for instance. I really like stuff I don’t understand but which gives me the feeling of being on the edge of understanding not what the poet meant but a new vista for myself. I love uncomfortable juxtapositions of ideas, warped ways of seeing old truths so they create some unexpected concept, or an insight I have never had before. It’s what all artists want to do, but few truly succeed.

From the Sixth form days I remembered these passages:

Harry: Changed? nothing changed? how can you say that nothing is changed?
You all look so withered and young.

Later he says:

Harry: You are all people
To whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact of external events. You have gone though life in sleep,
Never woken to the nightmare. I tell you life would be unendurable
If you were wide awake. You do not know
The noxious smell untraceable in the drains,
Inaccessible to the plumbers, that has its hour of the night;
you do not know
The unspoken voice of sorrow in the empty bedroom
At three in the morning. I m not speaking of my own experience, but trying to give you
Comparisons in a more familiar medium. I am the old house
With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning,
In which all past is present, all degradtion
Is unredeemable. As for what happens -
Of the past you can only see what is past,
Not what is always present. That is what matters.

In another place:

Agatha: The eye is on this house
The eye covers it.
There are three together
May the lives be separated
May the knot that was tied
Become unknotted
May the crossed bones
in the filled up well
Be at last straightened
May the weasel and the otter
Be about their proper business
The eye of the daytime
And the eye of the night time
Be diverted from this house
Till the knot is unknotted
The crossed uncrossed
And the crooked is made straight.


Agatha: Shall we ever meet again?
And who will meet again? Meeting is for strangers.
Meeting is for those who do not know each other.


Agatha: In a world of fugitives
The person taking the opposite direction
Will appear to run away.

And near the end:

Harry: I must follow the bright angels.

(He means the Eumenides who have thus far pursued him through his life and his fear of them meant he only perceived them from the corner of an eye, but now, in the place he hoped finally to escape from them, they show themselves fully so he knows he can’t pretend any longer. He leaves the place of his childhood where everythiong has stagnated, held in place by lies and the sleep of those who do not wish to see. He leaves, determined to embrace his Fates.)

Where does one go from a world of insanity?
Somewhere on the other side of despair.

Blissful day here yesterday. Daughter's birthday and 17 degrees (Where's the degree sign on the keyboard? Anyone know?) In the morning I enjoyed myself trying some new recipes. An interesting sort of Swiss roll scone with pesto filling was very nice, and a new muffin tray bought from Tesco cooked muffin mix with brazil nuts and a couple of Mars bars to produce chocolatey-caramelly goodness. We drank coffee and ate these achievements outside in the sun, looking across the fields to the Moray Firth and the misty hills beyond.

It's sunny today too so I'm wondering where to spend the afternoon. I want to see 'Ghost' and 'I am Love' (which has our local film star Tilda in it) but those expeditions will have to wait until the rain returns. There will also be some g'son days this week though I feel I have nothing to offer a nearly-twelve year old in the way of companionship. He has miraculously spent much of the last week with a school friend and they didn't fall out - much. As two 'onlies' they did need their own space from time to time it seems.

Flowering cherry trees are flowering in the churchyard, forsythia is blossoming in the back gardens. Spring is sprung.

Problem caused by deforestation.

Forgive me if you've seen this one but it did make me laugh.

Farmer's market and God stuff.

A beautiful day today and I managed to walk up to the other end of the town to check out the new-to-our-town enterprise, the Farmer's Market. It was in the playground of one of the schools this week, handier than its other venue across the bye-pass in a field and much more in keeping with the spirit of these events which I know caught on in England ages ago - in fact when did they die out? Strange to think that such markets seem like a sparkly new idea when once they were the norm. Not so long ago - maybe even less than a century - women carried their husband's catch of fish into Forres to sell in the market; the local and not-so-local farmers sent their produce many miles down to these coastal towns and drove their beasts in to sell at the auction houses. We are always re-inventing the wheel!

There weren't many stalls out; I suppose it has to catch on slowly. The veggies looked limp and unappealing but the local cheeses looked really good and the organic venison stall - well, I was almost sorry I have stopped eating meat. Another pause for thought since at one time there would have been nothing BUT organic venison. Nowadays the meat in the butcher's is usually farm-reared stock and can be less naturally pastured than lamb sadly.

I took this photo of my friend Jo the artist with her neat little barrow. I have two of her nice original woodcuts on my wall at home but her speciality is landscapes. The woodcuts were for a book published a year or two ago about the Findhorn River. My favourites - the two I have - were of a bird and a squirrel. The squirrel I chose is a vibrant red that has nothing to do with the real red of the creature. I love it. Find examples of her work at her web site: www.jodarlingpaintings.co.uk

'The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' arrived today. I read it in one gulp whilst shop-sitting (the FM had taken all custom to the other end of town today dammit!) and am still wondering what to make of it. Some bits confused me - what was he (Pullman never mind Jesus) trying to say? It's simplicity of style was rather disarming. The one part I could totally cheer along with was Jesus's bitter words to God before the crucifixion, also his prediction for the future evils to be perpetrated in the name of God by the church which he saw would be built by his sickly twin Christ (who doubles for the devil in one or two scenes as well as being cast as Judas Iscariot at the end.)

"I can imagine some philosophical smartarse of a priest in years to come pulling the wool over his poor followers' eyes: 'God's great absence is of course the sign of his presence', or some such drivel. The people will hear his words and think how clever he is to say such things, and they'll try and believe it; and they'll go home puzzled and hungry, because it makes no sense at all. That priest is worse than the fool in the psalm who is at least an honest man. When the fool prays to you and gets no answer, he decides that God's great absence means he's not bloody well there."

I hope PP doesn't mind me reproducing this piece of text - I do so with respect because it spoke to me. I also like very much the message on the back cover of the book:

'This is a STORY.'

Grumpy old lady here.

The last virus just won’t let go, leaving me perpetually tired and asthmatic. It’s a total pain. Customers who are at least 10 years older than me are still tripping lightly through the door and marching up the town for their shopping, full trolleys rumbling merrily behind them. I, on the other hand, have hardly left the house since the weekend and then it was to go to the garage , get into the car and drive to Tesco. In the evenings I’ve been going to sleep in front of the telly - probably the best thing to do really but deeply unsatisfying to the soul.

At least I don’t wheeze, so tight are the lungs. Wheezing exposes me to ‘helpful’ suggestions from folk who have guidance from above (airy hand-waving usually expresses where they think it comes from) and want to pass this on to any sitting duck . I hate being classed as a potentially ego-gratifying duck and can spot the likely perpetrators coming so, as recently happened at a dinner party (yes we do still do dinner parties up here) I cut them off at the pass with suitably flattening remarks like: ‘Thank you for your concern but I’ve been having this asthma since I was a year old and have learned when to fight and when to try to roll with it. I’ve spent thousands of pounds on therapies that don’t work and that’s money I wish I could get back. I don’t intend to spend any more.’

i.e. I’m not coming to you for the latest brand of hocus pocus you’ve just learned on a weekend course, nor, in the case of the last would-be saviour, am I taking your advice on homeopathics when you’ve had no training whatsoever and I haven’t been introduced to your spirit guide.. .

Sour puss that’s me.

The best laugh this week was from the three gulls I spotted doing a sort of circle dance on the greensward opposite my window. Their little legs were beating up and down as though to some pretty jazzy rhythm. Every so often they lunged forward to catch the poor worm who had peeked up to see if it was raining.

Happy Easter/Passover/Spring

Not much pictorial excitement here. Sophie's visiting so there have been family gatherings and eating - far too much eating. Walks on the beach for the fitter animals and shop-sitting for me happily combined with reading on the really horrid days in the middle of the week when more snow fell and there were no customers. I've read "Solar' by Ian McEwan and been properly impressed by it. He's a versatile author which means, as far as I am concerned, that sometimes I like his books and someimes I don't. It depends on the subject, the 'argument' and the setting I suppose. This one I found surprisingly gripping though rather depressing. Human nature is generally deeply flawed and personal gain or personal safety both influence all areas of our lives, marriage, sex, politics, arts, and now, potentially disastrously, he shows it also affecting science. The the scientists, who as personalities are often supposed to be the most rational and least emotional beings amongst us, the one faction who could help us through the climate change crisis, have feet of clay after all and will fail us because they too have emotional lives which take precedence over all else, warping their focus and direction.

I re-read the Millenium Trilogy, was as engrossed by his characters and enjoyed the detail of his narrative as much as before, even when it apparently slows down the action. I've decided not to see the film now out. Graphic sexual torture is one thing in a book - I can slide over it taking in only what I need, but in a film it's much harder to dilute and I'm told the director has relished it which makes sense because that's the sort of stuff that sells films, sadly. It's necessary for the story but could be spoken of and flashed onto briefly but these days it's getting hard to find something to shock the viewing public so this is a bit of a gift.

I've ordered 'Lourdes' which looks like the best of a bunch of otherwise unpleasant films currently out. Might manage Alice next week with grandson.

I've also ordered the new Philip Pullman. It will be interesting to see what that's like. I'm re-reading the Northern Lights trilogy to limber up for it and read an interview with him in the Independent in which he says that though he is anti-religion he's a pro-Jesus man!

So really no news. My world is full of the columns in the Inde and their April Fools day joke about the proposed use of the Circle Line for another Hadron Collider. The possibility of a black hole opening up somewhere under Westminster was obviously popular with many readers.

Also this new maxim: If at first you don't succeed don't try sky-diving!

And after all that waffle I've totally forgotten to mention the miracle that occured Wednesday (even when prompted by thoughts of the Lourdes film.) G'son is walking on two feet again. Dancing around shouting jubilantly and even cycling the 3 miles up to his g'father's house. I think we are all a bit scared of what might happen next.... there's been too much history to just blithely assume that's that! All the same - finger's crossed....