I heard them discussing tajine
So I asked them: ‘Just what does that mean?
Is it lentils, or lamb?
Or strawberry jam?
Or escargots in a terrine?’
They said: ‘It’s a posh word for stew.
And it’s ever so easy to do:
Take some ras-al-hanout
And chickpeas, to boot,
And lamb, if you like, chuck in too.’
Cried a flighty young lady from Rustington:
‘I’ve done all my chores, got my dusting done.
I’ll go out on the pull.’
Which she did – to the full!
Then returned with a smile, all her lusting done.
(One elderly lady to another in the ladies’ room at the Chichester Festival Theatre: “Of course designers don’t want instructions spoiling their, erm, designs, but I’m just thinking: ‘Where’s the handle?’”)
Which got me thinking…
I remember the loo. It was dependable. It sat there, foursquare in its hard porcelain whiteness that was freezing on the bum in winter. Above it on the wall a large greyish box from which a chain depended. You pulled on the chain and a cascade of water disappeared those things you wished would disappear. Sometimes. If someone had been in there before you, you had to wait an age before the tank would fill up again.
Of course we didn’t call it the loo back then; that was long before the chattering classes took their holidays in Tuscany, and a coy cry of gardi-loo had yet to be heard. We ‘Spent a Penny’, we ‘Paid a Visit’, the bold upfront ones announced that we were ‘Going to the Lavatory’. That was Mother’s preference: the lavatory. She disdained Toilet and winced at Lavvy – I was careful not to let my more bohemian friends name it in her presence.
But whatever you called it, it was there, unchanging – as I said, dependable.
Today we have low-level avocado suites and high-rise conveniences for the disabled. We have Turkish Holes in motorway service stations – not easy for the fashionista in her gold velour onesie. The chain evolved into a lever, and just as we got used to that, it too headed down the road to extinction.
There might be a chrome knob squatting on the streamlined cistern. Lift or press? Whichever you choose is the wrong solution. Even more daunting is the pair of recessed buttons, forcing the dilemma: does this deserve a big or a little flush?
Sometimes the very act of rising from the throne will trigger the flush, sometimes a mad flapping of the hand towards some concealed electronic eye will do the trick. And the Turkish Hole, of course, the superior kind, will ambush you with an automatic, roaring gush that, try as you might, always swamps your footwear. Well might that elderly lady bemoan the demise of the handle.
And don’t get me started on washbasins… You push the tap, you turn the tap, you pull the tap, you wiggle your fingers under the tap. Sometimes none of these will avail, and it sits smiling smugly while you search desperately for the answer. Ah, yes, the foot pedal. How silly of me not to know that.
We have a public loo in Churchill Square in Rustington. It’s a perfectly splendid loo: clean, warm, smelling inoffensively of pine. It wins prizes, I kid you not. It’s the loo that has everything. Apart from wash basins. Emerge from your cubicle and you will be confronted with two small recesses in the wall. Each has its mirror above, and below that a shiny chrome plaque with little drawings on it. Left to right: bubbles, a shower, a blow drier. Perfectly intuitive you might think, but no.
Place your hand below the bubbles, and… nothing. Place your hand below the shower and you get soap. Place your hand below the blow drier and you get water. And just as you give up in despair and turn away, shaking the drops from your hands, the blower starts up. It’s all very confusing for a Bear of Advancing Years and Very Little Brain.
Ah, me. Where are the loos of yesteryear?
Desert Island Discs
How I long to be left for a while
With eight favourite discs in a pile.
(No cooking! No chores!
No telephone bores!)
On a warm, uninhabited isle
I can think of several reasons for encouraging you to buy ‘Paw Prints in the Butter’.
You might enjoy it? Right.
It’s a perfect birthday gift for your elderly aunt who adores cats? Right.
It puts money in my pocket? Wrong.
This is where I tell you about Wadars, my pet project. Yes, pun intended. Wadars is an animal rescue charity based in Ferring, West Sussex. They find forever homes for abandoned and unwanted pets and rescue wild creatures in difficulty – wherever possible releasing them back into the wild. And ‘Paw Prints in the Butter’ makes a modest contribution to their coffers, every time someone has the extraordinary good taste to buy a copy.
Hate my book, but love animals? You can always contribute directly. Check out their website to learn about the work Wadars does, and meet some of the animals looking for their forever homes.
Propositioned, a trendy Madame
Said non to a randy gendarme.
‘It just isn’t chic,
Having sex with a flic,’
She explained with a trace of alarm.
Michael Flanders encountered a gnu
Not, as you’d expect, in a zoo.
Rustington by the sea
(where he happened to be)
Can seemingly boast of one, too.
There’s a bar in the town of Auxerre
That’s run by Barthélémy frères,
Where they’ll ply you with whisky
Until you feel frisky,
Then sell you their sister, pas chère!
My writing day began today at 3 a.m. I blame the worm.
If you are a writer, you know the worm. It’s that little voice that pipes up just as you are drifting peacefully to sleep or – worse still – when you suddenly find yourself awake in the small hours. “Here’s an intriguing plot twist,” it murmurs seductively. “Here’s a snappy bit of dialogue. Here’s a character you never knew you needed.”
Of course I fought it. How I fought it! I played word games; I counted bunnies frolicking in a sunlit meadow; I tried to recall what my Spanish teacher said about imperfect subjunctives – that usually does the trick. All to no avail. I was wide awake, and I just had to get to my computer.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Getting up in the hours of darkness in our house requires negotiation. If it were just two of us in the bedroom, the exercise would be simple. Get up, creep downstairs in the dark, get writing.
But there is a third: our excitable and highly demanding Brittany spaniel. If I wake, she wakes, and thinks it’s time for a) food, b) a trip to the garden, c) cuddles. If I go downstairs I will be expected to feed her and then, like as not, she will dash upstairs and bounce on my sleeping husband with merry cries of “Get up and play with me!” Now my husband is a tolerant man, but this will not do.
And so my writing day, and it is a fairly typical one, goes something like this. I wake, as I have said, in the small hours. Ten minutes’ wrestling with the worm convince me that I simply have to write. A further ten minutes are wasted hoping I can sneak out of bed waking neither husband nor dog. Of course, this isn’t going to happen: Patrick slumbers on regardless; Purdey is up and at ‘em.
I silence the dog with craven promises of food, and we tiptoe downstairs together. I am careful to shut the bedroom door tight against later canine incursions. First to the office, to switch on the computer. Despite the wonders of modern technology it still takes a minute or two to warm up. Switch on kettle, feed dog, open the kitchen door for the dog to visit the garden, make a cup of tea. All the time the worm is nagging at me; my head feels like a hard-boiled egg as I try to retain all the deathless prose that is forming in my brain.
At last I am seated at my desk with a cup of tea and a (temporarily) pacified dog sitting on my feet. My fingers fall over themselves with urgency; they fly over the keyboard, spellchecker galloping behind me waving its fist. I ignore it – don’t bother me with details!
These are the moments that make it all worthwhile. Anyone who has tried it will tell you that writing is a lonely, and often a thankless business. I’ve done my fair share, and more, of sitting in despair in front of a lumpen piece of prose that simply won’t come right. No wonder I revel in the times when the ideas are pouring out faster than I can set them down and – for the moment at least – please me in the writing.
I type without stopping. This is the time to be indiscriminate, to put down everything just as it comes to me. I bounce from thought to thought, putting down here a snippet of dialogue, there a vivid description, there a note about how a plot could develop. I know that most of it will be dross, but I am hoping that at the end there will be the occasional small nugget as well.
After an hour or so I surface as if out of a deep pool, exhausted and exhilarated. The tea has gone cold, the dog has gone to sleep. Time for an intermission.
With a freshly made cup of tea I settle down in front of the television. If I am lucky, it is gone 6 o’clock so I can watch the news on the BBC breakfast programme. Charlie Stayt and Louise Minchin natter on companionably, but I only take in a fraction of what they are saying. It’s a spot of R and R before I get back to the real work of the day.
My TV break lasts half an hour or so. Usually this gives me another hour to work before the household is stirring. This second tranche of work is a lot more serious than the earlier, heady session. It’s time for a critical read of what I have been writing. Sometimes it will surprise me by being better than I had hoped. Often, though, it’s a case of reaching for the figurative blue pencil. Over-writing is every writer’s joy and bane. It’s fun to do, but it’s tedious for the reader on whom it is inflicted.
I spend an hour or so structuring, tightening and often re-writing. Paragraphs whizz up and down the page till they find their right place – whatever did we do before word processing?
By this time there are definite signs from above – the bedroom, that is, not divine inspiration – and I know it’s breakfast time. The morning routine is set in stone: breakfast, a little more time with the local news, then out for a walk with the dog. The day is filled with other demands, so I don’t usually get back to my desk until around 4:30, and then with none of the fine careless rapture that informed the morning’s efforts. The last push is the hardest. After a few hours away from my desk I come to it with a fresh eye: I polish, cut and polish again, ruthlessly, and, if I am really lucky, by the end of the day I have something I am reasonably pleased with to show for my efforts.
I count myself fortunate that I am not a novelist. Short stories, articles and the odd bit of comic verse satisfy the writer’s itch in me, and I doubt if I would have the stamina for a sustained effort. My writer’s day over, I can go to bed with a sense of accomplishment, and so to peaceful slumber… until the worm bites again.
Cried an angry young lady from Brest:
‘Physique-wise I haven’t been blessed.
And I’m tired of the fun
People poke at my buns
And the absence of curves on my chest.
So I’m off to a clinic in Nantes
Recommended to me by my aunt,
Where they’ll give me new lips
And curvaceous hips
And a silicone téton implant.”
