Attracting the young

 The Long Suffering Husband has been worrying about his golf club for a while. The current owner has made noises about wanting to sell and has suggested that golf is a dying game. 

“We’ve got to attract the youngsters,” said the LSH, sounding like a very old man.

I’m not sure. It’s like Radio 4. Radio 4 would be dreadful if they started to attract the youngsters. It would stop being a place where you could accidentally listen to a very boring program about primordial slime and find yourself still thinking about it a day later. If you were making programs to attract the young then that one wouldn’t have made the cut. When you are young, you still have the energy to get up and change the station or know how to properly work your car radio.

I didn’t always listen to Radio 4 but I did always listen to radio. In my youth, I flitted. The Archers was my only concession to the old person’s station. Radio 1 and local stations took most of my attention. In my thirties I moved to Radio 2 and loved Soaps on the TV. It’s only now that I’m old that my Radio knob is stuck on the oldies’ channel. 

Maybe the golf club doesn’t need to attract youngsters, as long as young people are playing sport they will naturally be drawn to it when their knees are too old and creaky for football. (The step after is bowling)

Yesterday, I spent the day in Reading records office, reading autopsy reports and other interesting documents. After a while I looked round and realised that the other people there were all old ladies and wondered if History needed to attract some young people.  

Thinking about how to make sure there are old ladies sitting in record offices in the future I wondered what we need to make sure we offer to children. Is it good stories from the past or a rigorous school history curriculum? However, I suspect that it’s nothing except being human. History is what we go to when we become history ourselves. Living in 1882 has certainly made me feel younger. However, thinking about my sudden attraction to original source historical documents has now made me realise just how old I am. 

British?

 For reasons I can’t even explain to myself I decided to try the “Life in the UK test” which people have to pass if they want citizenship. 

I failed the first test. 

I was mortified. I’ve been British all my life and am pretty well read and deep thinking.

I took another test and passed - just. There were still lots of questions I didn’t know and many more I guessed. 

I took 8 tests in all and only passed four of them. 

I couldn’t pick out the Paralympian from the other athletes. I didn’t know anything at all about Ireland. My knowledge of composers and poets was quite good but who really knows the difference between Wordsworth and Browning? 

I know that there is no perfect system for granting citizenship but it does worry me that most people who are actually British wouldn’t pass the test.

It also worries me that they are teaching very un-British things.

One of the questions said, “What should you do when moving into a new house or apartment?” Quite vague, I know but it was multiple choice and the answer couldn’t  be, “Put the kettle on and make tea,” even though this would be the most British thing to do.

The options were:

1. Warn the people who live near you not to talk to you.

2. Introduce yourself to the people who live near you, so they can help you.

3. Tell the people who live near you not to make a noise 

4. Do nothing.

I chose option 4, which was wrong. The answer was the terribly un-British number 2.

These would also be good options:

5. Drop your gaze, so as not to accidentally make eye contact and be forced into an awkward conversation.

6. Walk around new house wondering why the previous owner took all the lightbulbs.

7. Clean frantically and tut that it didn’t look this dirty when you agreed to buy it.

8. Hover by the removal men as they get the box containing the family heirlooms out, just ‘knowing’ that they will break something. 

9. Discuss the rain with the removers and possibly the new neighbours if you accidentally made eye contact. 

10. Say, “Well, this is fun.”

Who knew that being British wasn’t about drinking tea, avoiding eye contact and complaining about the weather but was actually about knowing the exact numbers of Scottish Constituencies, where King Cnut was from (without sniggering at the spelling of his name) or knowing how few people live in Wales? 

I can’t believe there were no questions on innuendo, either. If there is one thing that marks out a true Brit it would be a love of signs like this:

Monkey Chatter

During lockdown, the troop of monkeys were quieter.  They only had one topic to chat about and none of  that was my responsibility.  In many ways, it was a relief.  But here we are again, back to normal life with everything to fit in and there's a whole shrewdness of gibbons living in my head again.

If you read about monkey brain (New Age thinkers, yogis and meditators talk about it a lot) then they all say that the monkey chatter is negative talk.  They suggest that it's the monkeys that shout, "You idiot, what do you think you were doing?  Can't you do anything right?"

I have a theory that everyone has different types of monkeys and apes that live in their head.  

A troop of chimps stand in one corner making stupid jokes and not taking anything seriously, while a flange of baboons concern themselves with chatter about bodily functions.  These particular simians get more noisy as you get older.  A tribe of macaques are always thinking about how to get out of doing things and a cartload of mandrills are sticking their huge noses into other people's business. A cup of capuchins chat about your coffee intake. A barrel of marmosets constantly consider your appearance, planning visits to hairdressers and beauticians that you really don't have time for.  A whoop of gorillas mull over your romantic relationships and a family of orangutans, thoughtfully mull over how your children are doing.  But that shrewdness of gibbons are the worst.  They are always making plans and have ideas for career advancement.  I keep telling mine that I don't really want a career: A part time job is fine but they never listen.  At 3am they come up with a new plan, a new idea, a new suggestion.  They are not a shrewdness for nothing.  These plans are genius, compelling me to suggest things I really don't have time to do.  

They are all capable of being negative because they want the best for their particular area of expertise.  However, my apes are positive most of the time but I'd still like them to shut up occasionally.

“Just tell them you’re busy.”

How do you quieten monkeys?  All I can think of at the moment is nuts. Am I nuts or do my head primates just need feeding?

Distraction notebooks

 I haven’t written a blog in a while. 

The world is a very strange and confusing place. Step away from the news. Don’t look at Tuesday’s Covid figures (never look at Tuesday Covid figures). Don’t think about the politicians. Don’t get drawn into discussions about women. Don’t worry about spiking or refugees or Michael Gove’s dance moves. And whatever you do don’t think about climate change or weirdos that think the Pope is in charge of all businesses.

Don’t think about whether dogs live past 14. Don’t navigate choices between steroids and kidney failure. Don’t question why you cook more for the dog than you do for yourself. Don’t forget you hate prawns. 

Instead get online and choose some new notebooks.

Don’t you just love a notebook?

My son bought me a Moleskin one for my birthday and it is a thing of pure joy. Stroke the cover, crack open the spine and stick your nose into the pages. You can smell the luxury, the possibility, the hope, velvety white pureness, waiting patiently for something, anything or even, nothing. That notebook doesn’t care what you put in it. It could be plans, ideas, suggestions, recipes, Covid figures, notes about death, life or drugs. It just loves you with its endless possibilities. 

So, instead of writing a blog that made any sense or filling any of my notebooks, I have trawled the websites of Paperchase, Papier, Waterstones, Smythson, Bookblock, Papermash ,Redbubble and too many others to mention.

I know it’s a distraction from the distraction of filling the notebook but sometimes it’s nice to just look.

Or it was until I came across this one.

Have I ever told you what my dog thinks of me? 

A bungalow of love and laughter

 The other day I wrote about the death of my brother and sister and how it might be linked to a feeling of sadness that I get on my birthday. After I had written it I feared that it sounded too sad; too ‘poor me’. 

Baby loss awareness week is really important. Talking about the fact that babies die is important. Not just this week but all the time.I love the fact that we have stopped calling it ‘stillborn’ and are also talking about miscarriage. 

It’s important that people can talk about their grief without fear of blame. There is a long history of blaming women that has lead to a feeling of shame. Our society is also really reluctant to talk of grief. It’s almost as though just talking about it will cause the sadness to swallow you whole.

It doesn’t.

Talk about it. It’s fine.

Writing about my feeling of sadness and thinking about what my parents had to go through has also made me appreciate the love and laughter that was around me at that time.

My early memories from before my sister was born, marked out by the fact that we lived in a different house are not consumed by grief and sadness. Instead, I lived in a bungalow filled with love and laughter.

We listened to the radio and danced and sang. Lily the Pink: while my dad, in a pink jumper ran round, pretending to catch me underneath it to my squeals  of delight as he sang, ‘Oompah oompah, stick it up your jumpah.’

Mum and I ate Heinz tomato soup and watched Mary Mungo and Midge at lunchtime and then tried to draw the testcard. The smell of my watercolour paints mixing with the tiny pots of enamel paint mum was using to paint toy soldiers. When they were dry we took them to the dolls house that Dad had made (with real working lights) and marched them around before stuffing them in envelopes to earn a few pence extra for treats.

There were Thursday presents; a cream cake in a box, a pack of colouring pencils, a comic: Endless hours with a xylophone and later a recorder: Enormous amounts of patience for clipping the toenails of a child with the most ticklish feel on the planet, which ended in proper tickles and zuberding (if you don’t know, zuberding is where you blow a raspberry on the naked tummy of a wriggling child): Laughing at the neighbours grumpy poodle who did white poos: Learning to ride a bike with Mum laughing as Dad had to run behind because I wouldn’t let him let go: Our dog Tess who knew it was walk time when the six o clock news came on.

The more I think, the more I realise that the list is endless.

That  little bungalow was full of love, life and laughter. The loss of the babies was never a secret and something that my parents never ‘got over’ but it didn’t stop them having the happiest of lives.

Birthdays, death days and chocolate

 There are lots of birthdays at this time of year. I’m sure there is absolutely no coincidence that we are about 40 weeks from New Year. I have always felt a pressure to celebrate that I didn’t always want. A birthday at the beginning of October is at exactly the right time for people to want to go out. It’s far enough away from Summer-Socialising not to blur into the endless round of picnics, outdoor drinking and general merriment and not near enough Christmas for people to be saving or broke. My Mum’s birthday was at the beginning of January and so she always missed out on her day. Everyone was exhausted by the whole Christmas/New Year extravaganza that her birthday was almost forgotten. My sister’s birthday at the beginning of December was similarly blighted by Christmas. It was always hard to find a birthday card in the shops as they would replace racks with Christmas cards for your Nan and the excitement of putting the tree up always had to be delayed until after her birthday (a tradition I still uphold)

For some reason, my birthday always makes me feel a little sad. It always has. I remember hiding in a wardrobe and crying on my birthday when I was only 3. You would think that I couldn’t know it was my third birthday but I remember being in that cupboard with Big Nanny standing outside telling me that I was a big girl now that I was three. She said that I couldn’t cry on my birthday because then I’d cry all year round and that I needed to  put a brace face on it and not spoil the day for everyone else. Iron fist in a velvet glove. When I came out there was a warm embrace waiting for me in her huge bosom and then we looked in the mirror together and she sang to me and tried to make me smile. In the end she fed me chocolate: a piece of Fry’s Chocolate Cream that she had in her pocket. If I’m sad now I still look in the mirror to check that I’m still there and eat chocolate, although not Fry’s chocolate cream because it’s disgusting.

This week is also baby loss awareness week and I’ve often wondered if my sadness on my birthday that year, that has stayed with me like a shadow of the unspoken was actually about death of my two siblings on their birthdays. We never really know what children take in because they don’t have the language or experience to express the thoughts but I do remember trying to run away when my mum was pregnant and being caught and told off by the midwife. As running away was a strong instinct in more recent griefs I do wonder. 

The morning before my birthday,  I woke up in a complete panic because I didn’t know the birth date of a fictional character I’m writing about. I logged onto FindMyPast and suddenly realised that I wouldn’t find it there because I made her up and she could have whatever day she wanted. 

FindMyPast is one of my favourite ways to spend my time and as I started to write this blog I realised that I didn’t know when my siblings were born or died. I knew that it was the most awful experience for my parents and that it was caused by Rhesus haemolytic disease and the babies had just been taken away immediately and when they died not even shown to my parents. I can only imagine what kind of state they were in. I just found out that my third birthday party would have been two weeks after the first death. 

Suddenly, I can taste that piece of Fry’s chocolate cream. The cloying stickiness at the roof of my mouth. Coincidentally, today is also the date of Elizabeth Fry’s (the prison reformer) death (176 years ago) Fry’s was her husband’s chocolate company and I believe her picture used to be on the packet. 

Everything is connected if you think hard enough.

What a Party

 The party conference season is over for another year. The jolly in a posh hotel at the tax payer’s expense is done. Karaoke and late night drinks. Rubbing shoulders with the right people. Rubbing genitals with the wrong ones (shush, don’t tell the wife). Time to get back to the serious business of politics.

This year’s speeches were wild. It’s almost as if they had to say something that would top Brexit.

Boris built back bitter/butter/beaver and talked  about how the pigs were going to die anyway. Dowden went in a rant about Peleton bikes. Nadine Dories got upset that her daughter had to work for her as she couldn’t get a job at the BBC because of nepotism. Patel smirked her way through making no apology for making people cross back over the Chanel in a rubber dinghy. Raab  got confused about a word that means hatred of women and said, “Misogyny is wrong, whether it is by a man against a woman or a woman against a man.” Therese Coffey cut universal credit by 20% and then sang karaoke, choosing I’ve had the time of my life as the most appropriate song to sing.

However, the most worrying of all was Sajid suggesting that government shouldn’t fund healthcare. 

The internet is a brilliant place to laugh at our politicians and they are making it too easy for us but I can’t be the only one that thinks it’s worrying that the BBC has created a department to fact check the Prime Minister’s words.

I’m glad they had a nice party but I’m really looking forward to when I can start using the internet in the insomniacal hours to learn useless facts rather than laugh at politicians.

As today’s insomnia has been longer than most I had time to do both. (This is almost as good as the penguin knee fact)

. The word Arctic comes from the Greek word Arktos, meaning bears,  so Antarctic is a place without bears.

The Great Hecatomb of Piggies

 This little piggy went to market

This little piggy stayed at home

This little piggy had roast beef

This little piggy had none

And this little piggy went wee wee wee all the way to the hecatomb.

I watched a lot of TV this weekend. Everything was bizarrely funny and has left me doubting my sanity.

The wrong person went on Strictly but that always happens at the beginning to a woman with a dance that requires her not to smile. We don’t like it. Women must smile at all times, even when they are being thrown around like a cape. Especially when they are being thrown around like a cape.

 I watched the news and wondered how we’d got to a situation where the police are advising women to resist arrest by their officers just in case another one is a murderer or rapist.

Then I watched Marr and saw the Prime Minister get angry because he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing. I know it’s bad but I really quite enjoyed it. I love learning new words and the Prime Minister is good for that.

When politics shows feature the prime minister talking like that it becomes very difficult to know what is parody anymore.  It’s the lack of a hetacombe that is about to cause the pigs in blanket shortage that threatens to ruin Christmas but it’s alright because the Prine Minisiter can obfuscate with a few classical references and tickle our toes and we are happy. He promised to save Christmas, so it will be fine. I mean look at last year. He promised that Christmas would go ahead as normal and everyone bought huge turkeys … Oh well!

What he actually said was,
“If I may say so, you know, um, what, the great hecatomb of pigs
that you talk of has not happened yet.”

Even the subtitlers gave up. Journalists were frantically googling hecatomb to find that it was a public slaughter of one hundred oxen and were even more confused. 

Finally, I watched Diana the Musical. Twice!

I loved it. Not quite sure if it was parody or bad it seemed to reflect life as I had watched on the news. The clunky rhyming appealed, too. ‘It’s the thriller in Manilla betwixt Diana and Camilla’ and ‘There’s him, there’s her tonight I defer to him to her’ are two of my favourites but when a half naked James Hewitt rises out of the stage on a mechanical bull to be introduced by Barbara Cartland before Diana sings ‘who knew a commissioned lad could give me more than I’ve ever had,’ I decided this was the best thing I’ve ever seen. So I watched again and was blown away by the costume changes and the song, ‘Revenge looks best in a FU dress.’

With that many changes I’m surprised she didn’t end up in one scene looking like the prime minister - dressed in shorts, a business shirt and leather brogues for the pre party conference run.

The world is weird right now. I really can’t decide if it’s parody or just bad.