GETTING ON

The Old Girls’ Association magazine has just dropped through the door and Bloggiana – somewhat the worse for wear after her first New Year’s Resolution lapse of the New Year – is poring over its contents. The pages flick slowly and I, Piccalilli, rummaging through the drawers looking for something else with which to make chutney labels, am paying scant attention.

Outside Jack Frost is dancing in silver ribbons from tree to tree, slithering surreptitiously across the gravel in sheets of battleship grey. Owls twit-twoo but their shriek is tinged with an icy throatiness. The bats seem to have fallen still and the stars peer on as though they had nothing else to contemplate but a world descending into a deep chill. And since Our House is as cold on the inside as it is on the outside, I find myself moving across the kitchen in a skittish, bunny-like fashion, hoping upon hope that, even if I must jiggle simply to remain conscious, I will not thus restore my circulation to the point where I can once again feel my chilblains.

Then a shrill cry rents our parlour air in two. For a moment, Our Dog and I look towards the window. The vixen in the back paddock has been extremely vocal recently and perhaps it was she, posing once again as a rape victim, raising her rusty snout to the moon and letting roar. Our Dog and I must be enjoying an unusually symbiotic moment however for both our heads turn at exactly the same moment from a window-ward direction to a sofa-ward one. All at once, we both realise that it is not she vixen but she Bloggiana, browsing the pages of the Girlsville College, Camford OGA magazine, who has uttered the cry.

Christ, exclaims Bloggiana once again. Will you look at this?

Now before I go on, I should explain that Bloggiana’s alma mater Girlsville College Camford was once an all-women’s institution and in its day (and in Bloggiana’s) it boasted a population made up almost exclusively of Blue Stockings. (Not unsurprisingly, Bloggiana found herself somewhat out of place at the college and chose to amuse herself beyond her own college gates with university types more to her liking – Heavy-Drinkers-and-Smokers being her favourite.) So generally speaking, when the OGA magazine arrives which it does once a year, Bloggiana glances at the thing and then dismisses it to the rack in our downstairs loo where every now and again, stuck for something else to read, we plumb its improbably solid depths.

This year for some reason Bloggiana – first hangover of the year in full tilt – has chosen to give the thing some attention and while nursing her head on the sofa, has been reading the OGA magazine obituary pages. It seems she has got as far as the first paragraph of the eulogy to the late Jeannie May MacFadyen (née Ormée-Knott) and it is this that has caused the Old Girl to howl in such a disconcertingly vixen-like manner.

Christ, she howls again. And now she is holding the magazine out at the end of a shaking arm. Between hopping and label-manufacturing, I turn to Our Dog and ruminate. I think she wants me to read it, I say. And Our Dog, riding the crest of our unusually symbiotic wave-moment, nods back at me - and woofs.
To be continued.