SMALL PLEASURES Part I

In the early candlelit dusk of the year, there is nothing more delightful than a gentle trudging-round-the-lanes-and-back hack. Bloggiana and I take our steeds Nag and Dobbin and clamber aboard swathed in furs. Sunglasses are sometimes required but usually we regret not bringing hot water bottles and reviving flasks of Famous Grouse. Sometimes there are floods to deal with; gales are a frequent hazard; ice storms not unheard of. But in between, we can amble behind the snaking silhouette of Our Dog and enjoy the small pleasures associated with watching a season work its magic on the hedgerows.

Curiously, the small pleasures are more satisfying the more they are sampled. To see the dark grey W of the heron in the same place, again, at the same time. To see the dipper flicker up and down the beck in that hectic flight, chocolate and white and charming. To count out the ewes wearing their tell-tale Been-there-got-the-tup-mark on their bottoms. To catch perhaps a glimpse of the kingfisher, bluely flashing in the willow on the beck’s turn.

Even more refined, the pleasure of breaking down the pleasures. So we wonder if the heron will be the exact same bird; and will he fly in the exact same pattern to the other side of the field? Are those the berries that were once the honeysuckle that we so admired a few weeks back? Is that the ewe that we nicknamed Brunnhilde on account of her extremely low brows and her Prisoner Cell Block H demeanour? Look, there is the black cow again, with the exceptionally long eyelashes who seems to acknowledge us in a very Some-Like-It-Hot manner. And over there, the teasels once so majestic in that long row in that narrow field, now standing like so many old ladies queuing for a bus.

To wave to the man with the bottle-bottom glasses who sits in his window, cat on the table, eating cold baked beans from a tin. To listen in at the door of the bothy that belongs to the recluse once seen pushing a television along on the handlebars of his bicycle. To be made to jump by the dog that leaps up at the fence that leans into the road, guaranteeing you a near-falling-off moment. To walk through the ford and wonder if Our Dog will be washed over the weir again, like before.

Bloggiana and I trundle along more or less the same routes for days in a row. Our Dog leads the way, one ear up, one ear down, one large bramble enmeshed in his backside, one long corridor of sniffing and leg-cocking beckoning him ever onwards. Nag and Dobbin occasionally pull faces at one another, exchanging snippets of equi-chat whose meaning we can only guess at. A flurry of goldfinches rises from the hedgerow. A flock of starlings swirls overhead, waiting a week or so more until their true optical illusion formations can be unleashed on us.

We turn for home. Cold, wind-blown, wet perhaps. But already looking forwards to the next time.

NITS PART I

We are at the races. Me, Bloggiana, Jollyosa, Bloggiana’s children and one or two sundry others. Jollyosa introduces us to an international make-up artist with a radiant smile and perfect skin who comments sweetly on how pretty Bloggiana’s daughter is and how lovely she looks with that white hairband in her hair. Bloggiana’s daughter reacts to this pronouncement in an endearingly bashful way, turning her foot round and looking earthwards. Her mother too blushes at the compliment. Simultaneously, a horse roars past the finishing post; betting tickets fly; commentators climax; and a small black insect troops the colour across the middle of Bloggiana’s daughter’s lovely white-hairbanded forehead. The international make-up artist’s smile crumples. It seems it’s the first time she has ever been presented with a real live nit.

No one can be quite sure when our household first became infested with nits but but to be sure, the little critters took to us with gusto. Now it is hard to remember a time when we were not all, at some point or other, itching. From time to time, Bloggiana and I hold a nit-purge. We buy bottles of stuff called Nitwitz or NickerzToNitz or Nitz’R4Twitz and douse ourselves with a substance that is no doubt the equivalent of placing a gastric band around our braincells; then go to bed, our hair plastered chemically to our headz and dream dreams of a nit-free future, where we can hold up our hairbands high in front of international make-up artists, read aloud from the bible of the politically correct and march into school feeling somewhat smug.

But nits will out, as they say, and it is not long before our dreams prove shallow. Fingers are seen to drift upwards once again, towards the hairbands, into the depths of all that luminous nit-friendly growth; and to begin moving back and forth, back and forth in a manner strangely reminiscent of scratching.

Dismissing chemicals, we invoke the help of other mothers. Tea-tree, trills one, it’s the only way! Vinegar, vouchsafes another, never fails! Conditioner, crows a third, they can’t stick to it! Combing, croons a fourth in a voice that reminds us of some baddie from the Temple of Doom, only combing! So we buy combs. Some of them look like combs, some of them like garden rakes. We buy one, five, ten of the things. We sit on the loo, taking it in turns. Bloggiana’s daughter holds a piece of tissue to catch the booty while we eke each little darling out of its snug, delicious, because-you’re-worth-it nest. None of the potions can have made much of an impact because there are hundreds of them, small but immaculately formed. And not only that but there are eggs by the thousand, clinging on for their dear proto-lives, the microscopic birthing glands of their parents clearly inspired to have been nurtured in such an environment.

We comb until we can comb no more. Until each of us has cramp in her very hair follicles. We pull out more nits than we thought possible. Then we collapse exhausted into bed. And await developments.

To be continued.

FACEBOOK PART I

In her new post-divorce state, my friend Bloggiana has discovered Facebook. When challenged, she says it’s about time she conformed with a 21st century stereotype. She’s going to Parties, she’s Internet Dating and now she’s on Facebook. Soon she’ll be driving a brightly coloured very small car and having a wild affair with a man half her age, we tell her. Bloggiana looks rather perky at the thought.

Facebook, she tells me after a few days, is introducing Bloggiana to all sorts of new people. Her nephews are on it. Her daughter’s friends are on it. Her friends’ daughters are on it. Even her MP is on it. Should we point out the obvious? I ask my friend Jollyosa who is round for tea that day. But we bite our lips because clearly Bloggiana is having so much Facebook fun.

Bloggiana becomes increasingly attached to her laptop. Winds may blow and rivers pour through low-lying semis in Fluxcombe. The Lakeland District Council House Waste Management team may go on strike for weeks and in the local paper, the Spot the Dog competition jackpot may finally be scooped up after two years of accruing. But none of this deters Bloggiana. Resolutely, daily, hourly, she travels the by-ways of the Facebook networks, seeking out old friends, hunting down links to links to links, stalking her prey as resolutely as a Scottish traffic warden.

A few weeks on, Bloggiana bounces into the parlour and says Guess what? I have now got two thousand three hundred and seventy seven friends. No! I exclaim. Yes, she says, contradicting me. How on earth? I ask, frankly stunned. Easy, she replies and before I can pursue the matter, she goes on. AND among them is someone who knows someone who travelled with someone who travelled with me on the Trans-Siberian Express back in 1987. No! I exclaim further. Indeed I have, Bloggiana says, contradicting me a second time.

And indeed she must have. Because a week or two later, I hear Bloggiana on the telephone and she is laughing uproariously. Fragments of half-heard conversation slip into the parlour and they all seem to have a 1987 Trans-Siberian Express theme. War and Peace, I hear; that girl with the terrible BO who thankfully got off in Irkutsk, I hear again. Novisibirsk, Bloggiana blurts out with relish. Oh yes, and the honeymoon bride who, at our Mongolian champagne party, announced – to the tangible chagrin of her honeymoon groom – her passion for anal sex. Yes, howls Bloggiana, I’d forgotten all about that.

The TSE banter goes on for a while. Clearly that journey back in those heady pre-Glaznost days was an epic. Reluctantly I find myself wondering if perhaps there isn’t something to this Facebook malarkey after all. I leave Bloggiana shrieking into her handset. I sneak upstairs to the study. Hit the laptop. And register.

BARKING PART II

Teener, Bloggiana’s daughter looks distracted. I have just come into the parlour from outside where I have been picking leaves and branches out of the back of Our Dog and I am fractious and a bit smelly. Whatever’s wrong? I ask Teener, somewhat sharply. It’s Mummy, she blurts out. She’s gone barking.

I must admit I have been a bit worried about Bloggiana recently and Teener’s announcement strikes me as being entirely plausible. In the wake of her decree absolute thingy being decreed, Bloggiana has taken to being sensationally blunt towards almost anyone she comes across. When she walked into a petrol station the other day, she asked the attendant in a loud voice if he had a finger of fudge. Happily the attendant was a man of the world and took it well. At the pet shop, when the proprietor tried to offer her a Hamster Starter kit for her daughter, she was heard to ask What do I do with it? Add water? In the solicitor’s office, when she was presented with a bill for £575,000 for a telephone conversation with her barrister, she expostulated Blimey, is that all?

Then not so long ago, I found Bloggiana sleepwalking in the hallway. She was wearing full plus fours and a velvet kaftan and the pink wellingtons which Santa gave her last year. This all seemed to be a stage too far so I rang her old friend Doris who lives in the middle East somewhere and told him everything. Doris, I said, I really think you need to come over.

Now Doris and Bloggiana go back a long way. They were at university together, shared friends, lovers, car-crashes, broken dreams. Doris is most certainly in touch with his feminine side and as such, makes an excellent friend for a girl who dresses up in wellingtons before going to bed. When Doris arrived, the first thing Bloggiana did was to unthuck the Pinot Grigio and roll out an extremely incongruous lunch. Jollyosa came and Chumsky and there was a lot giggling about whisper therapy which involves Guy Ritchie going up to Madonna at random moments and whispering to him that she is sexy. (We kind of decided that the therapy didn’t work that well. Too much risk of saliva in the earlobe, was the general conclusion.)

After lunch, Doris, Bloggiana, Chumsky and I went for a walk in a park where the trees grow in a west wind blown arc, high above the neck of our river. The trees are the paralympians of trees, misshapen but unbelievably robust, holding their own over hundreds of years of buffeting. Doris and Bloggiana were walking ahead and there must have been a lull in the conversation. Perhaps Bloggiana looked sad or Doris sensed some dark moment clouding Bloggiana’s otherwise fairly cheerful spiritual landscape. Because the next thing we knew, Doris had stopped in his tracks, extended his neck and pointed his head up towards the bright orb of an autumn day-moon – transforming himself, it seemed, into a yappy dog. And now he was barring the path of his old friend and barking at her, for all his life’s worth. Bloggiana folded up in front of him, convulsed with laughter.

Ever since, when things have been a bit tricky, Bloggiana has taken herself off to the park. And that is why I think Teener is probably absolutely right. Bloggiana has almost certainly gone barking.

PARTIES PART II

We are sitting in the tack room after a particularly rugged canter round the lanes. Bloggiana’s hair is swept windily round her face and I have a high colour in my cheeks which is for once not down to last night’s intake of Pinot Grigio. Contrary to all livery yard rules, we are smoking. So Bloggiana, I ask, how were all those parties?

It is two weeks now since we waved Bloggiana off onto a London-bound train; and a good ten days since she returned. In between there have been a lot of bonfires to set and leaves to sweep and dead foliage to gather. The rats have been eating the eggs and the fox has been stalking the chickens and the mice have been stealing the butter (again) and the old house has been moaning under the weight of all that summer rain which has now soaked into its very skin and bones. Side by side, Bloggiana and I have pushed wheelbarrows through hock-high mud and walked horizontal into the rain to catch our ponies. We have hurtled back and forth to school, narrowly avoiding in these globally warmed weather conditions becoming the jam in an Eddie Stobart sandwich on more than one occasion. And meanwhile the subject of what exactly Bloggiana got up to while south has been deftly avoided.

But this morning, thanks to her pulse-raising mind-numbing bad-hair-day hurtle of a hack, Bloggiana seems a little more disposed to talk. Marvellous, she replies. Absolutely splendid. Do go on, I nudge keenly.

And it transpires that they were indeed auspicious occasions. At a singles party in Westbourne Park, Bloggiana was introduced to a jaw-droppingly handsome Ceylonese consultant (married) and a leonine Irishman of rugby descent (unmarried but uninterested). At a pub evening in Pimlico, she met up with strings of old friends who could not find one single restaurant to eat at so they all descended onto the floor of the flat of a man whom none of them had ever met before. In Islington, she played skittles; in Olympia, she dined with the very old; in South Ken, with the absurdly young.

Bloggiana pauses half way through her cigarette and blows a smoke ring which for a moment, I mistake for the emblem of the London underground. She has a misty look in her eye and is playing with something in her left hand which I later realise is her railcard. By the way, she says her-herming somewhat, would you mind doing the school run without me for a couple of days next week? Of course not, I answer, unable to avoid adding the needlessly inquisitive And where are you off to? Bloggiana draws deep on her cigarette and exhales wistfully. The smoke leaves the tack room, drifts in a seamless ribbon out over the muckheap and on down the drive towards the motorway.

Parties, she whispers guiltily, more parties.

LODGERS PART II

So Bloggiana is sitting wreathed in smoke at her table and Jesus the practising Christian - potential lodger and actual supper guest - is sitting opposite in his beauty parlour slippers, sipping cordial and trying to defend himself against queries about his paedophile status. He is dealing with the onslaught admirably, the answers almost perfect in their combination of tact and political correctness. Yes, he promises, I do like children. No, he avers, I have never been in trouble with the authorities.

Bloggiana keeps up the bombardment. In a few months, the hostess assures the guest, you do realise we will have you smoking and drinking again? Jesus smiles weakly but as yet, the hand clutching the stem of his cordial glass appears steady.

Feeling certain the deal is home on a duck’s back and that Jesus as lodger will any minute now be plugging a reasonably large hole in her weekly budget, Bloggiana moves towards the climax of her attack-moment. And you do realise also, she confides, that in the end we will almost certainly shed you of your belief status. What kind of Christian are you, by the way? Bloggiana tells me later had she known what a Branch Davidian was, perhaps she would have altered her course. But as it is, tumbler ahoy, she continues undeterred. For my money, religion should remain absolutely private and personal, she blusters, like sex. It is at this point that Jesus the practising Christian gives the first hint that all perhaps is not well. He gulps. But HMS Bloggiana is in full sail now, PG streaming through her pipes, Marlboros hot-firing her cylinders, and she interprets the gulp merely as a frisson of excitement at the mention of the S-word. After all, she reasons and probably not unreasonably, the practising Christian is almost certainly untried.

So the food is eaten and swearwords digested and the wine drunk and the butts cleared and Jesus in his slippers swept off into the night. Bloggiana goes to bed that evening reasonably happy with her day’s work. Tomorrow she will hear from the Christian and he will say I commit. I will live as lodger with you and your friends, I will do so as soon as possible. It will be a brilliant and convenient marriage, reasons Bloggiana, between the materially needy and the comfortably-waged-but-unloved.

Then the inbox the next day. Through a haze of after-dinner regrets, Bloggiana manages to decipher a fairly detailed missive from Jesus. It turns out that after all that, Jesus the practising Christian enjoyed a sleepless night. Turns out that all that smoke got to his lungs, that all that talk of being re-introduced to the god of PG had got to his soul, that he had woken up next day with “gloop” (sic) on his chest and a burning ache of doom in his liver. Turns out that Jesus was reluctant to be corrupted as it had taken him rather a long time to become pure. Turns out that unless Bloggiana could mend her ways at least in the smoking if not in the drinking, swearing and belief departments, Jesus could not after all commit. He was very keen to try, he said, but he would have to have undertakings. (my italics)

Bloggiana and I are now sharing a glass of tap water. I have one straw and she has another and we are hoping the waiter won’t charge us for the second. It’s been a tough week or two and she’s still no better off than she was. Bloggiana reaches into her handbag and pulls out a cigarette and lights it. Fuck it, she says, fuck it with gusto.

BARKING PART I

Among the various members of the part-wildlife, part-person commune which Bloggiana and I like to call home, one of the most psychologically challenged is our dog. Bloggiana’s friend Chumsky, an ideas specialist from World’s End, says he thinks Our Dog is actually not a dog but a human trapped inside a Bearded Collie Costume. Every time Chumsky comes to tea, Our Dog pops his nose into Chumsky’s lap and ogles him in a thoroughly android fashion. Sometimes he hums him a little tune which Bloggiana says Chumsky finds jolly disconcerting.

Our Dog goes by a number of names. Officially he is registered as Pride of Loch Lomond Audition for Troilus and Cressida. (His mother being the much-garlanded Kyle of Lochalsh Where Did you Put My Railcard Darling; his father the magnificent but rarely shown Drumnadrochit Compulsive Obsessive Hider of Random Objects). But the name that we use most and the one Our Dog is most likely to answer to is It Stinks.

It Stinks has a number of peculiarities. First and foremost, It Stinks stinks. Worse than a walking packet of skunk deterrent, worse than a sweaty 18th century goat-barn filled to the roof with scented candles, worse than the entire world supply of artichoke liqueur boiled down to resin, then mixed with guano. Grown men have been to known to pass out when It Stinks saunters into their airspace. Sommeliers, perfumiers and those who live by the nose tend to give our county a wide berth, just to make sure their most important professional tool is not contaminated in any way by Our Dog.

The main reason that It Stinks stinks brings us onto Our Dog’s second principal peculiarity which is his abject terror of receiving any treatment that could remotely be described as cosmetic. If Bloggiana goes towards the room where the cupboard is that holds the drawer where we sometimes put his brush, It Stinks goes into a tailspin and howls to the moon. If she mentions the s*-word in his presence or folds flannels when he is nearby or if either of us even so much as daydreams about clippers, It Stinks has a fit. Quite often, his fit takes the form of doing a large dog-poo in the dining room. Sometimes, he does one in the guest room as well, for added effect. Should the pong get so great that either of us is moved to brave the whole grooming procedure, one of us has to close all the doors of the parlour while the other throws herself onto the floor behind the hatstand and, hope upon hope, catches It Stinks napping and unprepared. Usually for our troubles one of us gets slightly mangled and this is when we use It Stinks’s other name, It Bites Too. *soap

Chumsky came to tea again the other day and egged on by Bloggiana, he googled Bearded Collie on his Dried Apricot. As you would expect, there is a Bearded Collie Club and there are Bearded Collie Kennels selling Bearded Collie puppies, proffering volumes of Bearded Collie advice, dispensing indispensible nuggets of Bearded Collie history. You can have your Bearded Collie immortalised in art by any number of Bearded Collie artists. You can shop at the Bearded Collie shop. (How about an I love my Bearded Collie keyring, I teased Chumsky.) (He retorted How about an I love my Bearded Collie on top keyring.) (That shut me up.)

Finally we discovered that there is an actual Bearded Collie chatroom. As Bloggiana and I and Chumsky grappled with the image of a lot of Bearded Collies sitting at their laptops surfing the net, my friend Jollyosa knocked at the door. She had brought a friend of hers to tea as well. I was slow to go to the door and it was Our Dog instead who greeted them both as they walked in. I got there in time to hear Jollyosa saying to her friend, Good Heavens, that dog looks like your mother. Later I found a message from Chumsky in my inbox. Told yer, it said simply.

CHUTNEY Part II

So I have pinned my flag to the chutney cruiseliner, says Bloggiana. Which navigational chart do you think I should follow? We are sitting, Bloggiana and I, in a kitchen full of apples going dry or brown, full of special-offer dates and mouse-nibbled chillies and jamjars rescued from a healthfood shop that still sport a distinct tinge of organic rusting about their lids. It’s funny you should ask, I counter, because I was wondering the very same thing myself.

Faced with this mountain of fruit to peel, core and chop, with the looming deadline of her first chutney gig and the prospect of having to hand-write a lot of hand-written labels, Bloggiana and I decide there’s only one thing for it. Let’s go and indulge in a quick session of mid-afternoon google, we chime.

And what a world it is we open up. Wikipedia and Websters and Britannica and a host of others boast chutney write-ups. Amazon claims to sell five thousand six hundred and twenty-nine books on chutney. Google sports three million nine hundred and ninety thousand references to chutney. Did you know you can make shrimp chutney? Or peanut chutney? Or chocolate-cherry chutney? (yuk.) Did you know that back in 1998, a swashbuckling Fijian marketeer with an eye to the main chance caused a furore when he created Cannibal Chutney? (Does that mean he made chutney out of cannibals, we wonder aloud? Or that the chutney he made should be eaten solely with cold cannibal?)

Did you know that the word chutney comes from the Hindu word chatni meaning to crush? Or that it comes from the Sanskrit word for licking? Or that it has lent its name to many, many London restaurants and a thriving kind of music in Trinidad & Tobago? Did you know that according to the rhyming dictionary, the word chutney rhymes with whitney, jitney, cockney, baloney and mccartney? There is a film about a lesbian love affair called Chutney Popcorn. One K Raghavendra Rao wrote a critique on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children entitled The Novel as History as Chutney (sic). In Nagaland, they make chutney from fish.

Bloggiana and I are dazzled, nay confused by this welter of information. Many of the internet chutney contentions sound false, cribbed from each other, magnified, then spouted as chutney gospel. Recipes sound remarkably similar, stolen, bastardised, handed on, then stolen back. We canter through food websites and food blogs and foodie guides. We peruse as many of the 3,990,000 entries as our mid-afternoon window will allow. Finally, we retire exhausted, our parting gesture a game to find our favourite chutney name. Bloggiana likes the sound of Pudina Kothamalli Pachadi. Me, I’m quite excited by the sound of Mr Vikki’s Hot Banana. Either way, we figure, it’s time to return to the cruiseliner and set sail. Before the high seas of the wine-dark internet delay us any further.

INTERNET DATING III

So my friend Bloggiana, aka SweatyNun (her internet dating alias), has been contacted by 45 men. I think that seems like quite an extraordinarily high number and I say so. What are they saying to you, I ask with a hint of go-on-you’re-only-teasing-surely in my voice. Bloggiana shrugs. She says it must be that amazing profile you wrote me. So I am forced to shrug too and grope for my identity which somehow seems to have slithered out of me and is now cowering under the table. But really, how can SweatyNun have attracted 45 fans when I BigTitsBlondeHairLongLegs have netted a measly 19? To the resounding thuck of a cork being eased from its Pinot Grigio life partner, I challenge her. Are you absolutely sure, I ask, trembling gently.

We go online. SweatyNun makes me stand at the back of the room while she types in her profile name and password and I suspect secretly edits her matches before allowing me to have a look. I hold my wine glass with both hands and think dark thoughts like who on earth would want to be with a SweatyNun and why didn’t I call myself UpsideDownTracy or BlotchBabe or even IscratchLikeACatandScreamLikeABanshee?

At last I am allowed to step forwards and scrutinise SweatyNun’s inbox. I am disappointed to note she has now engaged a further five admirers and I feel myself begin to swoon slightly. We open her messages. TinklyToenails says Hi, loved your profile. Tx. HeadLikeATurnip says Hi, just thought I’d pop by, maybe you’d like to do the same to me?? (Brain like a beetroot, I’d say.) StrangleBungler says Hello SweatyNun, What a coincidence. I too am a Christian. Shall we meet?

We flick through the remaining proposed candidates when suddenly Bloggiana screeches to a halt and says OhMiGod. Oh my God, what? We’ve reached a patron by the name of TrannieV. He looks tall and striking with a surprisingly good head of hair for a man who admits to being over 50. The strapline is a bit offputting, something about skirts and trousers but by now the PG has kicked in and I’m not really paying attention. Bloggiana looks a bit fevered. Something about the way the mouse keeps hopping up and down the screen like its tail is on fire. She reads through his profile, her moans low-key but audible nonetheless. Then she goes back and scrolls through his picture album which, unlike most, boasts a lot of photographs. She looks at one and then at two. At three and four and five and finally we come to ten and I see what all the fuss has been about. There is TrannieV, resplendent in a dress, his hair immaculately swept back into a pony tail, his paunch neatly disguised by a shawl.

SweatyNun! I exclaim. I know, she says. And not only that, she adds, he’s an old boyfriend. Lorks, I exclaim again. Bloggiana smiles at me in a watery kind of way. I sit down next to her. It’s time, we agree, to start re-writing. And pronto.

LODGERS Part I

This week, Bloggiana is finally going to be decreed her absolute thingy and then she will be faced with the full horror of being single (good) and broke (bad). We sip a shared latte and I say I know why don’t you get a lodger? You live near the university so why not see if you can attract a visiting professor or a postgraduate student or something. Bloggiana nods her head thoughtfully and disappears into her IT world, laptop fingers twitching.

A few days later, Bloggiana tells me she has been contacted by a man called Jesus who is a Learning Enhancer in the Information Department. How very excellent. She says he’s a practising Christian so he won’t be a threat to her or her children. She says he’s the same age as she is and single. I raise my head from the shared latte and we agree it might be wise for her to check out his references and make sure all in all that his paedophile status is zero or below. Next thing, Bloggiana invites Jesus for supper – so he can see for himself the environment he would be living in. She has put in her ad that the house is old and creaky, that her household is lively, that the dog is smelly. So she is hoping that Jesus will come with an open mind and that the deal is already a done one.

All goes well, says Bloggiana. Jesus manages to pat the dog without recoiling. He doesn’t seem to notice the straw on the floor or the mice scuttling by in the kitchen. He doesn’t wince too much when she swears, which she does with abandon, in a nice way you understand but still, more like a French mercenary than not. Even better, Jesus makes no mention of his belief system (Bloggiana had googled him so that’s why she knew) and he doesn’t even flinch when she says she holds quite a lot of parties and has no plans to stop, broke or not broke.

Jesus the practising Christian comes to supper again. He is hesitating about whether or not to commit but Bloggiana says at least come and meet my daughter. Then you can decide over the weekend and let me know. Bloggiana has just had the full court news that week and her politeness filters are switched off. She is smoking like a chimney, swearing incessantly, knocking back the Pinot Grigio. Jesus walks in with a polythene bag which contains some soft drinks and a pair of beauty parlour slippers which he says his sister stole for him from Champneys or somewhere. He sits down, pours himself a cordial, then puts on the slippers. Bloggiana, momentarily flummoxed, sits down too. Christ, I’m bloody knackered, she opens gamely. Then lights up.

To be continued

LODGINGS Part I

So Bloggiana and I find ourselves in a northern Cathedral city where we are due to spend four whole nights and five whole days. Something to do with Bloggiana’s outgoing spouse who is refusing to outgo so she has had to take the whole thing to higher authorities and battle it out. Bloggiana is poor and so am I and when we cast around for somewhere to stay, we find to our dismay that the local hotels are expensive and that there is no single B&B within easy range of the court. That is how we come to stay in lodgings.

According to the website for The Sobbing Buccaneer, which is the lodgings we choose, The Sobbing Buccaneer is not lodgings. It is a hotel. The Sobbing Buccaneer is a hotel because customers can come and go as they please. It is a hotel because breakfast is served, both cooked and cold. It is a hotel because, like Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried the proprietress, it has been up and running in the city for many years and boasts a reputation second to none.

Day one. Bloggiana and I do not as yet have our key so we arrive early and ring the bell. For a good few minutes, we stand waiting. We ring again and when Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried comes to the door, she is furious. Her bottle-white hair bristles and her slippers scuff along the parquet in onomatopeoic rage. Yes? she says, though somehow we cannot help feeling the question is rhetorical. Boldly, Bloggiana and I ask to be shown to our room, the twin room we booked, the one with facilities. Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried leads us ponderously upstairs. Behind the quivering tower of her C&A dress, we try not to sound impatient though Bloggiana is worried that our date with the judge is looming. We hurl our belongings into the room, noting in haste that the ong sweet facilities are so small, we might have to shower one limb at a time, then grab our keys from Mrs CBMHIST's reluctantly outstretched paw and run downstairs to snatch some breakfast.

Dining room. Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried seems to have transformed into a hologram of herself. She too calls herself Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried but she is short and thin and Gothic-black. When we ask for breakfast, she says Full English or continental. Bloggiana is polite enough to request a definition of the FE and is told sharply she may have eggs, sausage, tomato, mushrooms and toast. Would it be possible just to have the toast with a boiled egg? Bloggiana asks timidly. We’re not set up for that, comes the response. We don’t have the space on our cooker.

Day two. Dining room. This morning, there is yet another Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried on duty. Mrs CBMHIST mk3 is plump, a kind of Pilsbury dough-woman, with a pinny and a smile which at first we believe in. Would I be able to have a boiled egg? Bloggiana gamely asks. Mrs CBMHIST mark three looks appalled. Don’t do those, she replies. But I suppose I could poach you one, she volunteers expansively.

Day three. Dining room, again. Mrs Couldn't-be-more-Helpful-if-she-Tried version 2 is back. Her lips look almost blue, they are so pinched. In her sweetest voice, Bloggiana says yesterday I had a delicious poached egg. Would I by any chance be able to have another one today? Mrs Gothic-blue-lips makes a noise inside her mouth like the sound of breaking molars. We’re not set up for those, she barks. But I could boil you an egg, I suppose. Only you’ll have to wait, she adds enigmatically. Our water can take a long time to heat up.

EQUESTRIANS Parts I & II

One of the reasons Bloggiana and I are friends is our shared love of the equine. This is a shameful confession. Some day soon, I hope to be cured. Some day soon, my secret, lusty, under-the-covers encounters with tack catalogues, pony manuals, Horse & Hound magazine and Dressage competition calendars will be a thing of the past. In that blissful future, I will be able to look at my Top Hat box without going shakey at the knees. I will wake up on a Saturday morning at 8am and not feel guilty that I have not already polished my pitchfork. I will go to the supermarket and not have large pieces of straw dangling from my person and that sweet but unmistakeable aroma of haylage emanating from my hands like steam. Some day soon, I will have cash for shoes. And the only septic tank clearance I will require will be the colonic irrigation I will be able to treat myself to, twice a week at least.

In the meantime, Bloggiana and I continue to love our ponies. They are our counsellors and our confidantes. They know our weaknesses intimately and they are too kind and sweet to make us suffer anything more than passing waves of shame.

For twelve years now, we have kept our beasts at the same livery yard. The yard is not particularly big and generally speaking, our co-tenants are a friendly lot. We exchange dates for hacks, first aid advice, tales from the competition frontline. Sometimes, I run my hand over a horse’s hock and suck in my breath knowledgeably. Or someone does the same for me and mine and we roll our eyes in frenzied fearful cash-poor anticipation because the only people out there who make a real profit from this business are the vets (of which more anon). Injuries, falls, run-ins with local farmers make us go ooo on a weekly basis. We rush off in posses to hear German riders tell us how it should be done. We come back and try and force our poor forgiving friends to replicate it, knowing full well that nothing is ever going to change except perhaps the sheen on our velvet topped safety helmets which sure as eggs does not enjoy the rain.

Last year our yard was thrown into a bit of a frenzy when for the first time in living memory, there arrived in the owners’ midst a man. Not only are men an endangered species on the middle-of-the-road livery landscape. But those few that do exist are often quite special. So into our lives came Stud. He said he had been a sniper at Goose Green and before that, had trained for MI5. He had shot in Belfast he said and in other foreign postings. His he said had been a brilliant career and at this, he would her-herm modestly, giving all comers a few moments to digest. Now, said Stud, owing to a series of unfortunate events, he was working as a long-distance lorry driver, living when he was not on the road in a rented one-bedroom flat in Barrow-in-Furness (cost probably £5 per week). All of which meant Stud had to keep his horse on full livery (cost around £90 per week) and could only turn up on Tuesdays.

Stud’s horse was called Mary Quant. She was a tall white plank on stilts with a head like a starter’s flag and a brain to match. Mary Quant was dangerous and anyone delegated to leading her out to the field often ended up in the local cottage hospital with contusions. Once in the field, Mary Quant would walk a small circle – possibly no more than 3 metres in diameter. Stud said she would settle down if you sat in the field alongside her – and he would do so, for hours at a time, on Tuesdays. For the rest of the week, she had to content herself with spinning like a top, unloved.

When Stud was not driving his trucks or sitting with Mary Quant in the field, or pulling up his britches which were extremely tight and anatomically really quite revealing, he would tell you his dreams. One day, he said, he would put Mary Quant in foal. He thought if she had a filly, he would call it Coco Chanel. And if she had a colt, perhaps Karl Lagerfeld. Or even Alexander McQueen, he would muse wistfully.

On Tuesdays, Stud liked to arrive well before anyone else. He would bring a bag of carrots and spend those first few hours before Mary Quant went into the field grating them lovingly. Sometimes at the end of the day, he would take Mary Quant for a walk – if you asked him why he did not ride her, he would become tongue-tied. Something about the horse bolting along a trunk road into the path of oncoming lorries. Something about her not having much of a mouth or much of a sense of self-preservation or very good balance when going at full tilt along traffic-ironed tarmac. If you pressed him, you could persuade Stud to confess that he did not so much as own a saddle. If you pressed him still further, you could persuade him to admit that in fact over the three years of their partnership, he had ridden Mary Quant just twice. (And after Mary Quant had put leader-outer number three into the first aid post with multiple abrasions, we began to see that perhaps his no-ride policy made sense.)

Finally Stud and Mary Quant were given their marching orders from our yard. They had lasted about three months, which is a relatively short tenure in livery terms. When I spoke to our yard owner about what had tipped the balance, she said it was not one thing but several. Firstly, she said, she had received an anonymous phone call alleging that Stud had enjoyed ‘inappropriate relations’ with his horse some time in the past. The livery yard owner said she gave absolutely no credence to the claim. But secondly, she said, she had always been worried by those britches. Thirdly, she said, Stud had got rather testy with her when she had refused to grate Mary Quant’s carrots. But finally, she said, there was the small matter of fear. She said over the years, she had dealt with some dangerous horses but MQ took the biscuit. She thought the horse sooner or later would kill. And she for one did not want to be there when it happened.

On the day of his departure, we waved Stud and Mary off and up the ramp into their future. It turned out he had stayed longer with us than with any of the previous fourteen yards they had sampled. And as he left, he was heard to say rather ruefully that it was the first time the horse had been the one expelled and not him.

WRITERS Part I

Bloggiana has a new grumble. She says nowadays there are far too many writers about. Take the other day, for example, she says. I am coming back from London on the train, minding my own business, peering into the middle distance, occasionally staring in awe at the man opposite while he negotiates the dubious pleasures of a tuna sandwich that is roughly the size of an Alice-in-Wonderland bungalow.

Then, she says, as we reach halfway point or so on the the west coast line, a man comes and sits facing away from me on the other side of the aisle. He looks distinctly like a junior car showroom executive and has a curious breathing habit which causes more than one of my fellow passengers to ask if there is a problem with the air conditioning.

Imagine my surprise, continues Bloggiana, when the man pulls out of his bag not the Morning Star or the People-Carrier Monthly, not a nasal drug delivery device or even a packet of tissues. But a laptop. And begins typing. Naturally, I go from standby to red-alert, she says. I peer over his shoulder (long-sighted, thankfully) and see that he is typing a script. Death and the Hairdresser. By Scrip Triter. Now I am gripped. I text the name to a brand new friend who I know is online. I ask is he a playwright? BNF says not only that, he’s an actor. He’s had a walk-on part in Emmerdale and comes from Blackpool.

Even more gripping. So I continue my stalking of Scrip, says Bloggiana, and watch for an hour or two as he painfully, laboriously transcribes his text using just his index fingers. The breathing is mesmeric, loud but rhythmic happily and I nearly relapse into hibernate mode, she admits, watching the birth/death of the hairdresser which seems to involve someone called Wiggie and dialogue sentences that look a trifle long for my money.

But horror of horrors, as Warrington Bank Quay becomes little more than a memory, Scrip's laptop screen goes blank - except for the words Fatal Disk Error which glint menacingly out of the winking blue. Bloggiana watches Scrip bring his hands to his head. She listens as the breathing reaches new crescendi. She thinks she hears swearwords or at least imprecations to the god of all things IT. She finds herself feeling sorry for Scrip and is almost ready to brave the breathing and offer her services, such as they are.

Happily before I do anything quite so reckless, breezes Bloggiana, the prayers or the wheezing or the close-lid-open-lid strategy take effect and everything is up and running again. And this is when I see Scrip’s screensaver, she announces. Did he write Truth or Dare? she texts brand new friend. Friend comes back, not only did he write it, he starred in it. He played the lead role. No, she says. Friend goes quiet again, then texts back more. Friend has found Truth or Dare review. In which reviewer said he would rather spend 90 minutes chewing his toenails than watching Truth or Dare. Friend goes quiet again, then comes back with the coup de grace. Turns out Scrip is new to acting and writing. Turns out he spent 25 years in the second hand car industry.

Bloggiana says she thanks friend and he logs off, just in time for his next class in Creative Writing Studies.

PARTIES Part I

Enough, said Bloggiana. I have had enough. Enough of these radiant autumn days where endless copper light glints on newly browning chestnut leaves, while mists hug the valley bottoms and the days dawn slow and amber. Enough, she said. Enough of the yellow wagtail who says good morning every day from under the sycamore while the smell of woodsmoke creeps into my nostrils and reminds me of days sweet and slow which I did not know I had lost. I am tired of it all, said Bloggiana, of the perfection of it, of the sheer Wordsworthian poignancy of it. Tired of waking up to the glow of it, tired of going to bed with its magic etched onto the carbon paper of my memory. I'm off, said Bloggiana, to London.

At the station platform, goodbyes are made, besides the hub of murmuring into mobile phones, to a chorus of the plip-plip of falling leaves. No rain, the only moisture a rising haze as the sun settles into its early morning task of lifting the dew; and the slightest hint of a tear in Bloggiana's daughter's eye as she wishes her mother godspeed. Bloggiana pulls her pashmina tight around her person and rattles off in the west coast pendolino southwards, she says, towards Parties.

For three whole days, we do not hear from Bloggiana. Her daughter and I pick apples which are falling by the dozen. We notice that the swallows are going, that the midges are enjoying this last gasp of summer, that there are roses still blooming in the hedgerows, that the grass continues to grow and the frogs to commit frog suicide on the lanes. We tootle back and forth to school held up at times by tractors and silage trailers or by hedgecutters or by men from the council armed with strimmers and face-masks who are still trying at this late stage in the year to hold back the wilderness. In the evenings, we draw the curtains against the longer nights and wonder if tomorrow will be even more sensationally lovely than today.

At last, she rings. I do not speak to her but she chats to her daughter and I can hear from the other side of the room that Bloggiana sounds elated and exhausted in equal measure. She will be back tomorrow, I am told. She has had a wonderful time, kicked up her heels, met scores of friends old and new, gone to bed inadmissibly late. Bloggiana’s daughter and I chew reflectively on our venison rissoles. In the morning we will collect her again from the station. We are looking forward to hearing all about it.

Internet Dating Part II

So then we decided Bloggiana and I that the internet dating thing should be taken a step further. How would we represent ourselves? I know, said Bloggiana, let’s look up some women and read their profiles. Wise already to vicissitudes of the sport, we browse them at a canter. Tigerlily flashes past. Angelinababy and Hotlusciouslips and Finepairofassets and Booksbooksbooks (or was that BoobsBoobsBoobs?) and FellsPixie all come and go. Tricia and JaneyMartin and BabsJones seem to us to have missed the point about the anonymity thing. Amy who uses the name Amy and the strapline Amy seems to have missed the point of almost all of it. SueDoNim seems to be quite sparky though and we find ourselves curiously excited by the project. It’s time to get down to some real self-marketing we agree.

And it all seems to be relatively easy. Bloggiana decides to call herself SweatyNun. I demur slightly at this and at her strapline which is something along the lines of making a habit of glowing. I think it all sounds a bit seemy and maybe she won’t attract the type of men she’s hoping to attract. But Bloggiana is her own woman and it seems as though the mutual nature of our internet profile writing is having to be re-jigged somewhat. I decide on the other hand to call myself BigTitsBlondeHairLongLegs. This is all patently untrue as I am a slim short brunette. But if I have learnt anything from the Minstrelfinger experience, it is that a name can do it all. My strapline says always joking which I hope will give the more gullible types out there a wee hint as to exactly the kind of internet dating game I am playing.

Then we write our full profiles. What exactly do we do? (Good question). Where do we live and how are we placed financially (another good question) and do we want more children and what do we believe in and what do we eat. Are we thoughtful (hmmm) or funny or intelligent or caring or independent or provocative? It all reminds me of my sister saying once when she was very young that you can get shampoo for greasy hair and dry hair and flyaway hair and tinted hair but where’s the shampoo for dirty hair? There do seem to be one or two crucial elements missing from the list. I for one can be grumpy. I can be hyper and unbelievably giddy and my inner blonde is frequently on show, particularly when I’m reading a map. I don’t mind putting this down but there is no inner blonde box. So I tick just one or two of the edgiest adjectives on the list and hope that no one will feel I’ve tricked them. Bloggiana says she is daring and wild and I think that the SweatyNun proposition is becoming more and more complex. In the last column, we are invited to admit how honest we have been. Bloggiana says very. I say totally. I am not sure that we aren’t both a bit awry there but we upload our photos. And run.

Chutney Part I

Chutney. So we went to stay with some friends and their kitchen garden was overflowing and my host said what do I do with my unfeasibly large marrow and I said I know, let’s make chutney. The Olympics were on. It was wall-to-wall women’s weightlifting which seems to be a riveting triumph of hope over reason intercepted now and again with archery which we all found fascinating and remained glued to whenever we could. Tearing ourselves away from the screen was hard but the chutney carriage was about to leave and I was holding the reins so off we went to the village store and cleaned them out of malt vinegar and raisins and brown sugar. Leaving the Koreans to win the gold medal, again. Gymnastics when we got back but my hostess and I were absorbed in our own world of mega- pickling so we didn’t look back.

An afternoon of peeling, spooning, chopping, slicing. Blissful hours of stirring and weeping at the onions and licking garlicky fingers and stirring the brown soup as though this were the elixir of life, which indeed I think it could be. Progress was slow – the hob was not too hot but who cared, now it was gymnastics and what better excuse to remain indoors hooked up to a screen than the need to keep an eye on one’s latest and dearest project. Eventually a narcotic aroma of brown sugar mixed with vinegar, spices and fruit curled out of the kitchen and up round the house so that even the boys playing with their handheld devices in rooms with the curtains closed were forced to lift their noses and go aaa as though they were taking part in a Bisto ad.

Next the bottling. In the motley recesses of my host’s pantry, we found kilner jars by the dozen with just enough foxing on the glass to lend the entire endeavour a satisfying frisson of shabby chic. The unfeasibly large marrow had whittled itself down admirably and with its friends the currants and the onions, it snuggled down into a mere eight jars which we then had to label, which of course is the best part. I decided to vary the labels. After all, you never know who you are providing for and this is chutney to be given away. Slogans seemed a good idea and another joyful afternoon in front of women whirling around on parallel bars and men doing implausibly high flips in skin-tight leotards was passed coming up with all the suitable (and unsuitable) chutney legends I could think of. My favourite was “Because you’re worth it”. “Vorchsprungdurchchutney” was another. In the context of the Olympics and their mission statement, “one world, one chutney” also seemed remarkably appropriate.

A few months later and now the credit crunch is crunching and the city boys are blanching and the eco-warriors are telling us to watch our carbon ps and qs. And all I can say to that is that there in my friends’ kitchen during a damp but sporting August, we came up with a solution to at least a few of our problems. What else uses waste product, preserves for the long haul, requires little or no energy input and is utterly completely delicious? One world, one chutney. Amen.

Internet Dating Part I

My friend Bloggiana has decided she would like to start internet dating. She is fresh from a messy divorce and is desperate to kick up her heels. We decide to do it together, so to speak, to become mutual internet profilers. I will write her up, she will do me. This is a no-fail policy, we decide, and off we go.

Before we start, we think: market research. Let’s buy the Guardian and the Sunday Times and let’s google a few and let’s see what’s out there. No point coming up with reams of psychometric data about oneself if most of the people out there can’t read. So she takes page 17 of the Guardian’s Saturday guide and starts making ticks and crosses. And I take the travel section of the Sunday Times and do likewise. Then we go online and start surfing a few websites. Turns out you need to come up with a name for yourself, to preserve your anonymity of course and to give those lovely kind men out there an inkling that you are lovely and kind too. We flick through forty-something men within a 50 mile radius of Lancaster. Man after man after man. I am a bit worried about some of these men. What on earth does Minstrelfinger think he is trying to convey? And how about FriskyBiskit? Why in a month of Sundays would CasanovaSyrup think he is onto something with a name quite so tangibly offputting?

And then there are the straplines. Cockadoodle says he would like you to ‘pop in why don’tcha’. Coffeepot says ‘try pulling down your eyelid and blowing your nose’. Kruschev claims to be ‘half man half biscuit’. The names are bewildering in their display of varying self-image and the straplines are equally bewildering because most of them don’t seem to mean anything much at all.

Undaunted Bloggiana and I read on. We look through some profiles in depth. And the funny thing is, we both conclude, that there are an awful lot of identical men out there. They’re all kinda laid back. They all love to travel (really?). They all like wine and most of them cook and all of them want to walk more and light log fires. We browse through profile after profile. The names may be scarey and the straplines scarier (and take it from me, some of the photos can give you bad dreams) but the people are all the same. They want someone tactile (sorry but I just think that’s a jolly nasty word). They want someone with a GSOH. They say they themselves have a GSOH which is a sure sign they don’t. They say they want nights out and nights in. Bloggiana and I look at each other. This is going to prove a greater challenge than we had anticipated.