Being Me

One remarkable fact about my mother, who took her own life at thirty-one after years of alcoholism, and was in most respects disorganised and chaotic, is that she named all four of her offspring before birth. We all had a name ready-made, whether a boy or girl.  It's one of the few positive memories I have of her parenting. But you have to suck the juice out of some situations.  So efficient! That's the birth-name equivalent of having everything in labelled Tupperware, arranged on your kitchen shelves in size order. I can assure you, my mother's kitchen did not look like this. So, she wasn't consistent, but the name idea counts in her favour.  Here's how it worked.  I am Frances. If a boy, I would have been Francis.  My brother was named Leslie. He would have been Lesley. My sister was Christine. She would have been Christopher. My younger sister was Michaela. She would have been Michael. Have you ever heard of anyone else doing this? Usually, you hear people sa...

I've just eaten a chocolate eclair and it reminded me to tell you about Mrs Gough. Mrs Gough taught me to cook at the Warwickshire grammar school I attended in the 1970s. I think they called her subject 'Domestic Science' officially but it was 'Cookery' to all of us.  Now the subject is called Food Technology or Food Science or How to Grow Up Without Knowing How to Make A Stew. There is cookery involved, but there's also much scientific theory, assessment of nutrition, costing of dishes, market research, and other sub-topics that Mrs Gough would have sniffed at. The science, in 1976, was what the boys did, while the girls cooked them steaming sausage rolls to give out at break time in the hope of an invitation to the school disco to snog behind the school hall curtains. It's amazing what a 14 year old boy will do for a free savoury bite No, Mrs Gough was all about the pastry - puff, buttery rough puff, tough puff, shortcrust, longcrust, flaky,...

So, the Prime Minister has called his (already mop-haired) new son Wilfred. Sorry, Boris, but that name is taken. I think you'll find this is Wilfred. I quite understand, Mr Johnson, if you decide to change your little boy's name in the light of my photograph. It can't be easy, realising you've named your son after a giant stuffed duck with a preternaturally enormous beak. How about something more modern, anyway? Jake? Kyle? Connor? Horace, to rhyme with your own name? Maurice? Or, as these are more enlightened times - Doris? Readers, while the Prime Minister ponders over my suggestions and looks up my number so he can ring me to discuss the options, I will tell you instead the story of how this toy duck became known as Wilfred. My grandfather was called Wilfred and my grandmother Kathleen. The day before their 50th wedding anniversary - some time in the mid-1990s - I said to my husband, 'I am going to town to buy a Golden Wedding present for Gr...

Well, this is all very strange, isn't it? I'm at home, in front of the fire, with no English students to teach because the government, aided and abetted by the Corona virus, has cancelled the GCSE examinations and where there is no examination there is no need for a private tutor. Bye bye, bank balance! It was nice knowing you. When news first broke about the Corona virus, the image that I had in my head was that of a man who drove a truck around the streets of Warwick when I was a child in the 1970s. He delivered bottles of fizzy pop made by Corona. He sold Dandelion and Burdock which tasted like a mixture of liquorice, aniseed and disinfectant, as well as a sickly-sweet concoction called Cream Soda which made your body 97% sugar for a while and corrupted all your decision-making processes. Also for sale were lemonade, orangeade, cherryade and Band-Aid, although I may have remembered wrongly with that last one. What I didn't know until ten minutes ago when I...

I saw a news story about an 88 year old woman who had just learned to read for the first time. I wrote this short poem in response and it was published on a poetry website.  Once upon a time Once upon a time, all she could do was drift her hands along each silent spine or turn hieroglyph pages like a visitor lost in the streets of a foreign land, her forehead a frown of lines – a message of bewilderment she hoped others could not read. Then, like whispers, or baby footsteps, or leaves dropping like scraps of tissue kissed by an infitesimal breeze, shapes on pages birthed sounds on her lips - each day a new one, a tiny gift – and in her mind, dragons, heroines, castles, pirates, the sighs of reunited lovers. Here's the dear lady's story, if you'd like to watch the news clip. Can you remember anything about when you learned to read?  My father taught me to read when I was three years old. He wasn't the kind o...

This is my Gran.  She was called Kathleen (her grandmother was Irish) and she died just before Christmas 2017 aged 95. We used this picture for the front of the Order of Service at her funeral. She always looked chipper in pink or baby blue.  She had three children: two girls and a boy. One girl was my mother, who died aged 31 after years tussling with alcoholism and unwise love choices. Another girl was my aunt, hurried into the graveyard at 60 by an impatient cancer.  Her son, my uncle, has visited Gran daily for years and years, and I suspect his car still noses towards the road where the care home is by instinct.  Since moving back from London to the Warwick area, where I was born, I've seen Gran once a week or so. When she was still in her own flat, I'd buy haddock and chips on a Saturday, puffing up the hill from the fish shop to her place. Sometimes we'd watch horse racing on TV or I'd pull out a crossword. Once she'd moved to the care home...

When I was about nine, I was invited to a fancy dress party. My mother, with little time or inclination for making or buying costumes, sent me as a domino. Method. 1. Take one naive, unsuspecting small child. 2. Take one old grey-white cotton pillowcase. 3. Take one indelible black pen. 4. Draw a horizontal line half-way down the pillowcase on both sides. 5. Draw large dots in the blank squares. 6. Undo half of the seam at the top of the pillowcase so that it can fit over the child's head. 7. Encase the child in the pillowcase. 8. Say 'Darling, you're bound to impress everyone. Have a super time.' 9. Send child to party. 10. Enjoy a quiet afternoon alone while your child learns that other parents make angel costumes or buy Superman outfits for their children and that sometimes life is the pits. A quick Google search tells me that, should I wish to repeat the experience forty-six years later, I could. I won't. The only other time I've ag...

It seems like an ancient craft now, akin to basket-weaving or the making of quills, but I learned to write Pitman shorthand when training for my first career as a medical secretary in 1979. (I also learned to type on traditional typewriters with their clatter and bash and 'ting' as the carriage went back and forth when one started a new line.) It's hard to imagine now, but in my role as a medical secretary, I would walk into a doctor's consulting room after he (in the 1980s, invariably 'he') had finished the morning surgery. He'd dictate fifteen or so letters to the patients' general practitioners or to other consultants, reporting on what he'd found or on a diagnosis, or referring patients on, and I'd scribble them down in shorthand in my little notebook in squiggles and dashes and lines and dots. Inevitably, mistakes were made in transcribing the letters back. Doctors often dictated so quickly - some while pacing up and down while eating...

On birthdays and at Christmas, while we were raising our kids, there was always one present that had to be opened first. It would be sitting on the dining table, ready to be unwrapped before breakfast. Why before breakfast? Because it was a valuable computer game or expensive toy that had to be opened immediately.  Because it WAS the breakfast. Yes, we always surprised them every year by wrapping up their Christmas or birthday breakfast. What was in it? It was a parcel of smoked salmon, syrupy pancakes and croissants. It was a box of sugary cereal. We didn't let our kids have sugary cereals on a day-to-day basis. They now, in their late twenties and thirties, swear that this was a form of deprivation. I'll just say this in my own defence. The kids still have all their teeth. And they also have a memory of a childhood ritual no other child in Britain will have ... The childhood ritual was this. On special occasions, we made an exception to the sugary cereal...

I went to a grammar school in the 1970s and part of the girls' uniform for the Lower School was a blue beret with a gold tassel. I was eleven when I first wore it. Here's a blue beret. Here's a gold tassel. The tassel was attached to the centre of the beret. It was long enough to lie across the top of the hat and then hang down over the edge of it by several inches, bobbing along as you walked. As a ridiculous piece of headwear, it rivalled this. And this. And - remember this? I'm not saying the beret-with-tassel made us feel conspicuous, but if the sun caught the tassel, a magpie on holiday in the Outer Hebrides caught the glint and started back. My question is: why would anyone do this to a child? I swear Freud wrote books about gold-tasseled hats and their effect on the adolescent psyche. He must have done. I'd heard rumours, before I started at the school, about what happened to new first years. 'The older kids ...

We walked into Warwick town today from our Leamington home. It's about two miles. I had to return some shoes to a shop. I thought they'd fitted me when I bought them last week but somehow by the time I got them home my feet had decided to become puffer fish. Stuffing them into the shoes was like trying to wrestle a baby back into the womb the way it came out. Had I had a bout of body dysmorphic syndrome? Why had I bought shoes to fit a pixie? I'd never felt more like an ugly sister, with a shoe dangling from my toes uselessly. Back to the walk. My husband said, 'Let's not walk to the shop down the main road. Let's take the scenic route by the river. It'll take about ten more minutes.' I checked my watch and started timing him. 'If this takes hours,' I said, 'I will have no mercy.' I am still smarting from a 'brief' walk he took me on when I was heavily pregnant thirty years ago and I thought I would have to give bi...

Twice now, we have accidentally had a Christmas barbecue, both times because my daughter-who-was-a-contestant-on-Masterchef has arrived at our house with the Christmas meat, over-estimating the size of our oven.  Once it was a piece of beef which was so big and boastful, we had to tell it to breathe in before it came through the front door, let alone the oven door. Last year, she brought a goose which had an ambition to be an Olympic shot-putter and had been undergoing intensive training before its hopes and dreams were cut short. Both the beef and the goose found themselves being barbecued in our back garden, there being no room in our tiny oven for roast vegetables and meat with pretensions. We took turns togging up in hats and coats to baste or check the meat, avoiding the twitchy curtains of the neighbours who wondered why, if we wanted a barbecue at Christmas, we didn't just move to Australia. This year, we went to our daughter's house for Christmas and, by design rat...

I went for a blood test on Wednesday at my local hospital's Phlebotomy clinic. I've been before, and learned my lesson, having had to wait up to an hour. This is so annoying, but more so when you've not taken a book with you/had a cup of tea/had a wee. You dare not leave the department for any of these reasons in case you miss the test. You're trapped, without hope of release, like wind in a sluggish colon. All there is to do is to look at other bored people. You're wondering what happened in Chapter 4, you have a tongue as dry as cardboard, and your bladder's like a sausage on a high heat and ready to pop. The Phlebotomy department system is that you take a ticket with a number on as you arrive. It's the same kind of ticket that you get at the meat counter queue at a supermarket, and that in itself doesn't bode well when you're awaiting a blood test.  So, prepared for a long haul on Wednesday, I went prepared with a crossword puzzle book, a...

I've eaten only two mince pies over the Christmas season. This is a miracle. Normally, I emerge from the festive period from beneath a pile of shortcrust pastry crumbs, more mince pie than woman, and with a heartburn so bad it's as though someone's having a barbecue in my thoracic cavity. But I was determined. I can resist Christmas pudding, and brandy butter, and salted peanuts, but once I see a pile of mince pies, I'm am to that pile what a wrecking ball is to a block of condemned flats. BOOM! All gone, but for the dust. Having lost a little weight before Christmas, I didn't want to put it all back on. And I knew the mince pies would do that. So, that's a 'Good girl' sticker for me. My kind of mince pie, with pastry so thick it's a medical emergency Today, however, I found a pork pie in the fridge I had forgotten was there. And, damn, or maybe it was 'Hurrah!' it was still in date. As we all know, pork pie pastry isn't mer...

Things I have realised about five ten twenty  thirty years later than I should have.  1. That 'Frances can be verbose' wasn't a compliment. A Junior School teacher wrote it on my school report and until I was thirty-nine I thought it meant 'good with words'.* 2. That the secret of looking confident is usually just that. Looking it. And most people don't get past that stage, and still manage. 3. That other people don't always appreciate you singing along, so my Granny was right to clamp her hand over my mouth in 1972 when she took me to see 'The Sound of Music' and I was screeching 'Climb Every Mountain'. 4. That in the middle of the night, a classroom seating plan or a phone call to a difficult relative is a Massive Issue, but at nine in the morning, can be calmed with marmalade on toast. 5. That the friend's mother who said I had a 'silly little face' in the 1980s wasn't exactly an oil painting herself ... .... ...

Someone sent me a link on Facebook to this video of a Russian ballet dancer. Something not to watch before you gorge yourself on sausage and mash. I watched it just before my evening meal, and I really wish I'd had a sardine salad planned, or perhaps a thin vegetable soup with a couple of herb croutons. The ballet dancer leaps around as though his body is made of cotton wool, staying in the air like a bubble, for much longer than seems possible, and landing as though the floor wasn't concrete, but a thick, soft Turkish carpet. And all I could think while I was watching was, in a minute, I'm going to tuck into a plate of pork accompanied by a hillock of buttered mash, and after that, I shall barely be able to rise from my chair, let alone fly halfway across a room like Peter Pan in nude tights. I do love dancing, though. I have a CD called 'R & B Divas' and when no one is looking - and I've turned the mirror to face the wall - I will career around the...

A friend saw the photograph of me I have on my blog (see the sidebar) and said, 'You look as though you have a neck problem.' And there was I, trying to look engaging and light-hearted. 'The blue tee-shirt looks nice, though,' he added, to compensate for suggesting I looked as though I had cervical spondylosis. I'm proud of knowing terms such as cervical spondylosis. It's all down to having trained as a medical secretary when I was eighteen. We had to learn medical terms with all the Greek and Latin prefixes and suffixes so that we knew the difference between hypothermia and hyperthermia and didn't condemn someone to an early grave by getting it wrong on the doctor's letter. When I first trained in the late 1970s, we didn't even have audio typing, let alone computers.  I went into the doctor's office and took the letters down in shorthand on a spiral notepad before decoding my scribbles and typing them up. Fran kept her fingers on the...

I ran away from home when I was seven. We were living in Singapore because my father, who was in the army, was stationed there. I can't remember what the row had been about, but I decided it was time to seek my fortune elsewhere, yelled, 'That's it! You are all dead to me!' and left the house. Five minutes later, I was back. I'd forgotten to take shoes and the Singapore pavements, in equatorial temperatures, had me hopping from paving slab to paving slab, my little feet toasted. Oh, the ignominy of it all, when you make a dramatic exit and then have to slink back. Years later, when I should have been wiser about the dramatic exit and its potential for humiliation, I argued with my husband. We were young parents, new to it. We'd never argued until we had our first child, and then suddenly there seemed to be all kinds of things about which to fight. Whose turn was it to change the nappy? Whose turn to fill up the steriliser? Whose turn to burp the baby even ...

I had an O'level Domestic Science teacher in the 1970s called Mrs Gough.  She's one of the reasons I love cooking pastry, puddings and cakes, although she owes me about £596.00 in weekly fees to Slimming World and Weightwatchers as a result. This was before Domestic Science, in wihch you learned to cook real food, became Food Technology, in which you learn to make a cake from cornflakes and melted chocolate, then write a year-long project for GCSE about its nutritional value and how you would market it.   One day, Mrs Gough taught us to make bread, but because there were so many of us in the class, some had to put their loaves on the middle shelf.  Half-way through the cooking, I noticed that Pauline Brown's loaf, at the top of the oven, was rising triumphantly whereas mine, in the middle, was as flat as Norfolk.  I opened the oven and switched them over.  Pauline, if you're reading, I'm really sorry about your loaf, and while I'm here, I also apologise abou...