Being Me

I arrived back on Friday from a week in Wales with my son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren. (Just then, I typed 'groundchildren' instead of 'grandchildren', and soon you will see how ironic that is.) If you've been following this blog for a while, you'll know not to expect post-holiday descriptions of lush landscapes, snippets of pastoral poetry or anecdotes about my daredevil surfing exploits.  Oh, okay, then. Here's a waterfall. But that's all you're getting of anything postcardy.    The weather forecast, as we left the Midlands to drive to Wales, was not favourable. In fact, we had packed raincoats, umbrellas, wellingtons and a book entitled 'First Aid for the Drowning.' For most of the week, however, the rain lashed down during the nights, then in the daytime the sun shone, burning and shrivelling any exposed face or limb without mercy. We slapped on sun cream but not as fast as the sun slapped our cheeks and foreheads.   Oh, all ri...

Did you miss me? Sorry! I was away in Lanzarote. I KNOW!!  Here I am, wearing a cardigan and trying to avoid sunlight. Because that's why people go to Lanzarote, obvs. My sister invited me on the holiday. It was a lastminute.com kind of arrangement and I had about a week's notice. Had I been still working as a schoolteacher, I'd have been forced to say no. But I'm working from home at the moment - tutoring and writing and pretending to clean the kitchen properly - so, I was free to go. I wasn't sure she'd picked the right person for her companion. 'You do realise there are reasons I never go on holiday to hot countries?' I said to her. 'I don't do sun. I rarely do outside, frankly. That's why Paul and I head off to Whitby in Yorkshire each summer, where we know it will rain and we can safely wear anoraks with the hoods up.' She promised Lanzarote would only be 21 degrees at the end of January and I was guaranteed cardigan w...

The main legacy from our two summer weeks in Whitby, Yorkshire, appears to be that we have swapped to a different make of toilet roll. It doesn't have the romanticism of the usual souvenir, I know: the photos of surfers, the sand sculpture, or the arrangement of shells in a picture frame, or a fisherman ornament. We've been faithful to Andrex toilet rolls ever since we married. In fact, 37 years on, I think Andrex should have sent us a thank you letter or at least a card. Alas, we have received nothing, not even a free two-pack. This is despite the fact that, having brought up a family of three, we've provided employment for at least a hundred puppies. We've stuck with Andrex through 2 ply and 3 ply, literally through thin and thick, and through different patterns and perforations over the years. You'd think it would count for something, like war service, or a lifetime career in the NHS. But, no. Then, in August, in the bathroom of our holiday apartment in W...

We're in Whitby, Yorkshire, on holiday for a fortnight. We're in the second week now and the holiday's been pretty steamy so far. We'd only been in the holiday apartment for five minutes when we realised we were overlooking not only the harbour but the railway line and that, four times a day, we'd see steam trains arriving and departing. Here's what we saw. My husband received this news in a moderate and understated manner, leaping from sofa to sofa and yelling, 'Yippee!' and 'Whoop whoop!' and singing the Thomas the Tank Engine theme tune while waving his arms around. He's a steam geek. We used to own a record, back in the days when people owned records, on which each track was a different steam engine, setting off from or arriving into a station. To my ear, I wouldn't say the tracks were - er - varied. But I'm not a steam engine fan. People who aren't Rod Stewart fans, or Bob Dylan fans, probably say the same about the...

I guess you could call it a rite of passage, the first time you squeeze the toothpaste onto the plastic back of the toothbrush and not onto the brush at the front. It's a very different teeth-cleaning experience - not unpleasant, but odd nonetheless - so I'm not recommending it and it'll teach me to wear my glasses in the bathroom. Is 57 still middle-aged, or am I sliding inexorably towards the autumn of my life? How long until I experience the rite of passage that is washing my hair with body butter or trying to apply shampoo to the hard skin on my feet? A more significant rite of passage recently was my trip to Northern Spain with my daughter and her partner. It's over 20 years since I've flown so I was nervous and, after listening to various horror stories about imploding ears, had 49 fruit-flavoured boiled sweets in my hand luggage. As the plane lifted off the runway at Gatwick, I sucked the sweet as though trying to extract its soul, my cheeks falling in ...

I've been in Dorset for the week on holiday. Here's a flavour. Mint choc chip. Joke! I mean, here's a flavour of the holiday. In pictures and captions. You know by now not to expect pictures of fields or beaches or sunsets from my holiday pics, don't you? The saddest way to advertise a vacancy. I almost applied, I felt so sorry for them. So unfortunate, to get it right in the small writing and then bugger it up in the big writing. Outside the RNLI shop in Lyme Regis - a dog made of wellies. That's just genius. The worst case of misquotation ever. To be funeral directors was their destiny. We were on the top deck of a double decker bus, hurtling down 1 in 8 slopes. Skiing is so last year.  Two approaches to decorating one's beach hut. And, finally, you know that scene at the beginning of 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' in which Meryl Streep stands on the end of the Cobb in L...

We are on holiday in Tenby, Wales. Paul and I come here most years, renting the same house each time because it has an original version of Monopoly with the metal tokens such as the top hat, boot and iron. We also like the pretty duvet covers on the beds. And there's a sea view, which is also nice. It's a bit quiet this year - usually we bring some of our offspring with us. We are missing them. In part, this is because our she-was-on-Masterchef-once older daughter always does the cooking. We've been sitting around waiting for dinner to arrive before remembering she's not here and leaping to our feet to run to Tesco. I'd like to share some of my holiday pictures with you. Fear not. My holiday snaps tend not to feature panoramic views or cathedrals. 1. A sign seen in a Tenby shop.  2. Meet Colin and Caroline, in their usual place just outside our seaside house window. We named them about six years ago when we first came to stay here and each time we a...

If you haven't read Episodes 1 and 2 of the story of our holiday flood adventure and you wish to catch up on the details, they're here and here . Episode 3 - the final episode, including the arrival of the Giant Bee Dehumidifiers ... We already felt well acquainted with Wednesday when daylight broke and it was time to get up, as we'd discovered the flood at 2 am and the firemen hadn't left until 4. Neither of us had slept since then. Paul had been busy not-sleeping in a bed. I had been busy not-sleeping under a duvet in the living room. We felt disorientated. Did that all really happen? The flood .. the firemen ... the police officers ... the  surprise !  neighbour? No worries. Absent-mindedly walking onto the damp quarry tiles in bare feet soon jolted us into the real world. And we had proof that it had not been a surreal dream in the form of a fire officer's torch. Here's a quarter of Paul, holding the torch. On his face was a look that said, 'I...

If you haven't read Episode 1 and want to, it's  here Episode 2 of our tale of flooded-holiday-flat-woe ...... Four firemen followed me hurriedly into the holiday flat. (I'll say that again. I've always wanted to.) Four firemen followed me hurriedly into the holiday flat. Paul was waiting in the hall, surrounded by cascading water on all sides, as though he'd climbed into the Niagara Falls for a photo opportunity. We explained to the firemen that: 1. The flat was owned by the people upstairs. 2. The people upstairs were away on holiday. 3. There was another flat next to ours but we thought it was empty. 4. Yes, we'd dialled the number of the owners while awaiting the fire engine and had left a message, but no one had picked up the phone. 5. No, we didn't want to die. We pulled on coats and followed the firemen outside while they went to inspect the Big House. Outside the gate, the fire engine flashed its lights and kept its engine running...

The only other time I’d experienced flooding, before two o’clock in the morning on Wednesday, that is, was years ago while teaching a group of Polish graduates creative writing at St Mary’s College in Twickenham. There’d been significant rainfall and I was having a one-to-one tutorial with Eva, sitting together at a desk in a basement classroom. She kept looking down at the floor while I was giving her feedback on her writing and I thought, how rude! It surprised me as the Polish students were impeccably polite and very hesitant to interrupt or lose concentration. But she didn’t seem to be listening, and here I was, telling her how to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, drawing on my lifetime’s experience of such fame and fortune   by imagining what it must be like.  She looked down again. ‘I apologise to interrupt,' she said. 'Something very wrong on floor. There is water around our feet.’ Sure enough, the room was half an inch deep already in flood waters. We pa...

Thoughts from Cornwall on seagulls and pasties On seagulls. I am on holiday in Looe, Cornwall. Have you been there? If you're a seagull reading this, the answer is yes. In fact, you are probably reading it in Looe itself. Every seagull in the world is here, either as a permanent resident or on its own holiday. Very near our holiday home is the fish market. Every day the boats bring in mackerel or gurnard or haddock. The seagulls wait for their moment, flicking through their copies of 'Fish Burglary Tips for Birdlife' and then, in packs, like SAS troops, they pounce, hoping to grab as much as possible from the plastic ice boxes layered with the morning catch. The fishermen wave them away with their copies of 'How to Keep Seagulls from Stealing all your Stock' but back they come. It's like a war of attrition. When our son was five, we were in Tenby in Wales and he was eating chips out of a paper cone while we stood on the beach. A seagull swooped down, its b...

A sonnet in honour of Bakewell Tart ice cream, written after last week's holiday in Cornwall. I bought you from an ice cream stall in Looe. The day was balmy. Seagulls screeched above. You cost me two quid which I thought was steep until I tasted you. I fell in love. I ate you by the harbour, looking out at boats, and children crabbing, while my heart expanded with a flaming passion, hot for ice cream tasting like a Bakewell Tart. My previous loves - vanilla, toffee fudge, or rum and raisin - these would all, I knew, be tossed aside, rejected, bade farewell, in favour of the ecstasy that's you. Since tasting you, you haunt my nights, my dreams.  You are the crack cocaine of Looe's icecreams. The moment Fran realised that all other loves, so far, had been inferior, and wondered how to tell her husband that she was leaving him for a dairy product.

A couple of days ago, just like Alice in Wonderland, I found a small door. However, unlike Alice, I hurtled through mine without any trouble at all. Here's a picture of the door. You: 'That doesn't look like a small door. That looks like a very big door.' Me: Look carefully and you'll see that within the big door IS another, smaller door. That's the one I hurtled (hurdled?) through, having not noticed, because it was 10pm and dark, the lintel at the bottom. I can't think of a better phrase than 'arse over tit' for what happened. 'Head over heels' is another, but not half so satisfactory to say. I was with my friend, Deborah, at Keble College in Oxford, and we were coming home from our evening out. (The door is the one at the entrance to the college, by the Porters' Lodge. During the day, they open the big door. At night, just the smaller door.) Deborah's a writer, too, and we'd booked two nights' bed and breakfa...

Yesterday, a woman on the train who had no teeth was noshing her way through a whole Scotch egg as if it were an apple. (For the uninitiated, a Scotch egg is a hard-boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat and breadcrumbs and fried.) If you'd given me the choice between watching her eat a Scotch egg and not watching her eat a Scotch egg, I'd have plumped for the latter. But she was directly opposite me, and I admired both her skill and her total lack of self-consciousness. I didn't take a photo (one can get thrown off trains) but to help you imagine, here's a picture of a woman with no teeth. And here's a picture of a Scotch egg. This egg is a world-record beater for the largest Scotch egg made in a restaurant. The one she ate wasn't quite that impressive, but, to her, it may well have seemed that way. There are other tasks that could be compared with a woman with no teeth eating a whole Scotch egg. a) Someone eating a whole joint of roast beef...

We've just got back from our holiday in the Cotswolds.  I learned some things on an afternoon out and the advice may be helpful to you should you also attempt such a bus journey. 1. What you think is an ice cream van pulling up at a country bus stop may in fact be your bus.  Keep your reactions to yourself.   2. Before buying your £6 return ticket to a Cotswolds town you'd like to have lunch in and then explore, check that the timings of the bus will enable you to spend more than fifty minutes there. 3. When you find out that in fact you are on a tiny bus to a Cotswolds town in which you will be spending only fifty minutes, make the most of the hour-long journey.  You have paid £6 to view all that green and brown.  And appreciate each sheep you see in a field.  Wheat can get tedious. 4. When you are eating your £1.20 cold cheese scone in the street for lunch while trying to make the most of your fifty minutes in the town, remember that sitting in a ...

One of my favourite parts of a self-catering holiday is writing in the guest book, and seeing what everyone else has written. Once we stayed in a house where it was clear there was a competition going on, a bit like this...... Mr & Mrs Williams, Devon.  'We saw the squirrels and the rabbits twice in the garden.  Lovely weather, despite a little rain.  Fish & chip shop really recommended.' Mr & Mrs Smith, and Daniella, Yorkshire.  'We saw the squirrels and the rabbits twice, and also spotted a fox.  Not a spot of rain all week.  Loved the pizza restaurant - real Italian food.' Pete and Sandy Brown, Essex.  'We saw squirrels, rabbits, a fox and a badger.  Weather incredible. Could have been in Alicante.  And we really recommend the French restaurant, the escargots in garlic and parsley butter especially.  Bon appetit!' The Baker family, Cardiff.  'We saw squirrels, rabbits, a fox, a badger, a herd of wildebeest, ...