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Yet another of those sentences I could never imagine myself writing, up there with ‘Why you should join a gym’ or ‘Buy fewer shoes’, although if my poorly leg doesn’t improve soon I may request amputation and have an awful lot of right, size 39 footwear to sell.

I went to bed the other night with a slightly sore leg; the sort of pain that you might get after walking a great distance, obviously something I have only ever read about in books. 2 paracetamols and think no more about it.

As I attempted to descend the stairs next morning to get some coffee the pain had become so excruciating that sweat began running down my face and I had to sit down before I vomited and no, it wasn’t a hangover. Something definitely not quite right.

Consultation with highly qualified chums (retired) resulted in the universally agreed view, a first with the medical profession, that I should ‘get it looked at’.  Part one of your re-vamped A Level maths paper is to work out the chances of that happening and part two is to estimate the prospect of getting an appointment within 6-12 months. (Show your working).  So, so wrong students.  There was an appointment that very morning!

It was with a locum who never once raised her eyes from the computer screen and asked some very peculiar questions.  She advised me to take my temperature every two hours in case it was sepsis and to keep prodding the leg in case it went hard in which case it could be a blood clot.  So not just a spot of sciatica Doctor?  I left with several prescriptions and hobbled off to buy an accurate thermometer.  She rang later  – another staggering first for a Doctor in my experience – to say that she had made an appointment for me at the local hospital for the very next day.  Either this is a woman with a LOT of influence or I’m at death’s door.  I spent a sleepless night having opted for the latter.

A chum who is already beatified (Look it up) drove me to the hospital and before she had even parked the car I was whisked in to see a lovely young woman in rather fetching gold flip flops who looked flabbergasted when I mentioned the life threatening options and said it was clearly a pulled muscle.  She even examined the offending limb.  Not having met me before she was further puzzled by my astonishment that pulling a muscle was even a remote possibility.  I left with five more prescriptions and a slightly longer life expectancy than the day before.

Now for the advanced sums.  Two of the tablets have to be taken once a day.  The next one is twice a day.  Number four is 1 tablet three times a day and the last one is two tablets to be taken four times a day.  This one with meals.  Got that?  Now draw a Venn diagram.  Being a woman of widely acknowledged wisdom I made her put this down on paper before I left so at least one of us knew what was going on, once you could make out the writing.  And absolutely no alcohol.

Finally estimate the chances, to three decimal points, of anyone getting the medications correctly administered before they are killed by an unholy cocktail of drugs mixed with confusion, temperance and despair.  I bet you wish you’d paid more attention at school, as belatedly do I, but on the plus side the pass mark nowadays is only 10%.  Consider swopping to drama studies and send flowers to the usual address.

It has been an unusually busy week, even for me, and not helped by evil Sluice Nurse persuading me to go the Festival Hall.  Not to see a concert; I should be most surprised to discover that she is aware that it is actually a performance venue, but to drink in their Skylon bar.  This was to gaze on the flowing waters of the Thames as we sipped a little glass of rose.  Unfortunately, due to the angle of the setting sun, the blinds were down so we had no option but to drown our disappointment in industrial quantities of gin. I hope she got home in one piece but let me know if you stumble across a ‘Body of elderly woman discovered in water after three weeks’ story in your local press.

I have also been parading my thespian skills in a film, playing the part of a judge (Obvious casting decision) but discovering too late to cancel that there was no 40 foot Winnebago for me in the car park and the costume/hair/make-up budget was not even a gleam in the producer’s eye.  There was, by way of a little consolation,  a great deal of cake.  Let me know ASAP if you want tickets for the premiere.

A lost evening of inebriation was required to offset the increasingly gloomy and hysterical stories about B*****.  People, stop it.  The sun will still rise but all we hear is despond.  ‘There will be no lettuce, no medicine, no daylight’ shriek the Remoaners ever more shrilly.  Why, oh why, are there so few interviews with the 52% who thought it would be a Good Thing?  I have written to the ‘Today’ programme with that very question but have yet to receive a reply.  I did hear Ian Duncan Smith on the World Service when he got quite shirty with the negativity of the interviewer and only used the word ‘Poppycock’ to dismiss the horror stories, displaying a far greater level of self-restraint than I could have managed.

There are two sides to most stories but increasingly a given view takes precedence and no other opinion is tolerated.  B***** is bad, Remain is the only way forward.  All rich people are thieves and exploiters and everyone poor is an angel.  All refugees are fleeing from desperate oppression and no economic migrant has every landed here with the sole intention of exploiting the system.  Meat eaters are monsters and no sentence can be uttered or printed that does not contain the word ‘vegan’.

Tolerance, reader, is a two way street.  You cannot berate people for holding right wing views and imagine yourself to be a liberal.  If someone wants to smoke, eat only steak or send their child to a private school then it is none of your business.  None of these things are illegal and until they are don’t presume to tell other people that their preferred way of living is wrong.  I bet they don’t do it to you.

I personally am a great fan of the Flat Earth Society, White sugar in my coffee and don’t think that my recycling of paper and glass is going to make one jot of difference to the life span of baby whales.  You may well disagree.  Just have the good manners not to tell me so.  The sermon for today.

Step aside, the Brothers Grimm.  Here is a cautionary tale which at a stroke will turn your blood to ice.  I had intended to spare you the utter horror, gentle readers, until therapy had helped me come to terms with the total dreadfulness of the last few weeks but you demanded news, sadly compassion is way too draining to last for long and so HERE IT IS!

Mindful as ever of the Biblical tale of the wise virgins, I never leave home with all my credit, membership and store loyalty cards, motivated not so much by good sense as by the collective weight of them.  They are kept in a blue makeup bag on my dressing table and selected on a daily basis for the honour of a transfer to my very lovely Hermes wallet and the prospect of a trip out.

I would ask you to imagine the cold, blind, heart-stopping panic when that bag went missing if I didn’t think it might lead to more than a few heart attacks. (I tend to attract an older profile of reader, to say the least).  It was on a par with losing your only child at Oxford Circus station in the week before Christmas. But worse. Far, far worse.

First there is disbelief.  It must be in the room; it never leaves the room.  Then you recall the massive house tidyings that have preceded various social occasions and suspect you might have shoved it into a drawer or cupboard along with armfuls of other junk that all too clearly indicated that your devotion to the minimalism of Marie Kondo has suffered a recent slippage.  Certainly don’t want visitors knowing that, after all your preaching.

I went through every single nook and cranny of that room – followed by the entire house – at least twice.  On the plus side I discovered masses of things that had slipped off the radar and at least one pair of shoes (possibly two) that I have no memory of purchasing.  Result!  But of the cards, nothing.  Even the usual praying to St Anthony of Padua failed.

Breathing deeply into a paper bag on day three I started the Everest-high task of replacing them, starting with my driving licence.  Being a child of the times I googled DVLA lost driving licence and filled in the application form.  There were about five or six hundred pages and required details like your passport number if you wanted them to use the same photograph.  It was only in the clear light of the next morning that I began to have doubts, especially about the cost of replacement, £77.60, which seemed a. An odd amount and b. Expensive for a plastic card, swiftly confirmed by Younger Son, that this was not the actual DVLA website.

There followed an hysterical phone call to the passport office at 10pm on Sunday night where a disinterested official assured me that no-one could get a duplicate of my passport.  I referred him, possibly brusquely, to the experience of Elder Son who has managed to replace his lost documents five times with next to no evidence, twice in foreign countries.  I then phoned the bank to cancel my sole remaining credit card which I had used on the “DVLA” application.

In the morning I rang the DVLA (A top way to pass the time if you have three or four hours with nothing else to do and no drying paint that needs watching) where another bored official told me that this happens all the time and these website are not total scams devoted to selling your identity to people traffickers, that’s probably just a side-line, they merely charge you for the bother of applying on your behalf and apparently that’s not actually illegal.  Well it jolly well should be.

Next on the to-do list was an attempt to remember all the other cards that needed replacing but my advice if this ever happens to you is DO NOT attempt to do this on-line.  That way lies madness and broken iPads.   Either phone or do it in person.  I won’t go through all of them but a prize for sheer incompetence must go to the girl at the Museums Association who, on being informed that I had lost my membership card, asked ‘Membership of what?’  First day, sweetie?

I hope this goes some way to explaining the absence of a blog, it being hard to type when you are heavily sedated in a padded room and I haven’t even mentioned having to commit a little light breaking and entering aided and abetted by my friend Elizabeth.  That is a story for another day, perhaps even within our lifetime.

 

Aren’t we all in need of some good news and as usual, cometh the hour, cometh the blog?  For anyone who missed the announcement in yesterday’s Times, my younger son is engaged to be married.

He rang me on Monday to say that he had collected the ring from Hatton Garden where, it goes without saying he has a mate (Henry’s motto: Never pay retail) who had made the most beautiful diamond and sapphire ring.  Furthermore, and possibly even more gobsmacking that the actual news, H had asked her father’s permission the week before.  Is he turning into Jacob Rees Moger before my very eyes?  The time and place of the proposal was still a work in progress until, something less than 24 hours later, tormented by the thought he would loose the ring, which based on his previous was inevitable, he popped the question.

And the most extraordinary part of the story is that this lovely, talented girl said yes. (Bear in mind that at this point I am the only one of his family she has actually met – an unusually wise move on H’s part).  From then on it was like an avalanche.  By Thursday the venue and date had been chosen, dresses had been tried on and guest lists were a work in progress.  The groom has decided that, along with everything else, his father can buy him a Gucci suit which from the photograph appears to be made of satin in a large floral pattern. The happy couple appear to be floating about three feet over the Earth like Winnie the Pooh, held up by invisible balloons.

My own week has been a little more down to earth.  Having read an article by some interior designer declaring that halls should be painted in dark gloss colours I rushed round to the local paint shop to get something to match the dark gloss floor tiles, handily already in situ.  Passing the beauticians I spotted my friend having a manicure so I went in to share the news with her.  (About the paint; she’d already seen all the engagement photos).  The rather dour young Swedish man in the paint shop talked me out of the gloss, persuading me to settle for a rather more subdued ‘sheen’.  Me!   Trying subtlety!  Within 45 minutes the first wall was transformed and I sent my friend a text saying ‘I’ve just done this and I bet you’re still waiting for your nails to dry’.

Never put off till tomorrow etc.  Seize the day.  That’s how I roll.  And maybe that’s where my son gets it from …  I hope he is as happy as I am.

All truly great ideas are simple which is one of the reasons I will have no truck with Einstein.  Any theory so complicated that no-one understands it cannot be true and for those of you who have not studied it, his explanation of the universe has gaping holes and will, hopefully in my lifetime, be reduced to unicorn territory. But back to me.

Those of us who would given our first born child in return for never having to listen to one more word about Brexit have discovered that there is yet another circle of hell. Whilst the politicos were off stuffing their faces with chocolate over Easter the desperate-for-a-story media discovered climate change and have been attempting, possibly for a newsroom bet, to reduce us to the same level of self harming boredom on a second subject. But in yet another of my extraordinary revelations the solution has appeared.

The planet is in crisis, we have only months, probably weeks left and absolutely everything is on the brink of extinction.  (See Grauniad newspaper most days). What, gentle reader(s), is the source of all this misery and despair?  What is responsible for the destruction of our beautiful planet?  Us.  You.  Me.  It is people and by a leap of logic that should be obvious to everyone, all we have to do is get rid of the humans.  No more cars and factories poisoning our air, no more pesticides polluting our rivers and not a single fragment of plastic ever again.  And, as a buy one get one free bonus, world peace. Genius or what?

Apparently if the UK was completely carbon neutral by next Wednesday it would make a whole 1% of difference to the overall problem so that’s a waste of time.  By way of contrast China currently has  13 million people employed in coal mining, which in their scale of things is the equivalent of the population of Builth Wells, but it makes rather a mockery of me re-cycling paper waste in suburban London.  If we stopped buying Chinese products all their smoke-belching factories would close and that might actually help.  Dear old Donald Trump may well be attempting this very result in his own ham fisted manner  by imposing outrageous import taxes.  Who had him down as a Green?

On to practicalities which I have yet to refine.  Do we kill everyone at once, or the oldest every year? We could just ban all new babies and the problem would be sorted in about a century.  Perhaps offer the prospect only to climate change supporters as they are most likely to leap at the chance of doing something that will make a real contribution.  Should we spare eskimos, Amazonian tribes and aborigines on the basis that they have damaged least and suffered most from ‘civilisation’?  There is a lot to discuss but I have never been one to get bogged down in minutiae.  Anyone can do that.  I merely give you an elegant and unarguable solution. Now, who wants to be first?

As a sometime resident of Brighton, and more particularly the Kemp Town area, I am no stranger to the notion of camping.  Even popping to the shops for tonic (I never run out of gin.  Obvs.) one can see any number of fey young men engaged in that very activity, in the style of Kenneth Williams at his finest.  It has however been brought to my attention that there is another reading of the phrase.  Step forward Staff Nurse who has at sometime in her life fallen into the clutches of the Friends of Baden Powell rather than Dorothy and has developed an addiction to life under canvas.  Unfortunately, like all zealots, she will not rest until the rest of us have undergone a Damascene conversion to the world of tent pegs and guy ropes. (FYI disappointingly nothing to do with male bondage).

Her latest attempt has been to send me an article listing no fewer that 8 different reasons why camping is A Good Thing, including the news that it is vital for one’s vitamin D levels.  Vitamin D is also known as the ‘sunshine’ vitamin which I would guess would have to involve the sun actually shining on the tent and it’s occupants, not an everyday event in Scotland.  Call me pessimistic but I would rather rely on a handy bottle of pills from Boots or a trip to the South of France.  Results a great deal more certain.

No mention was made of the origins of the article but cash money would suggest that it was from ‘Tenting Weekly’ or ‘The Backpackers Bible’ rather than Vogue and the eighth and final claim was that it would cut down on consumerism.  I beg to differ, Staff Nurse.  Am I alone in recalling the preparation for a recent trip, which I was unable to join as I had a reservation at a luxury hotel?  Did it not involve four of us spending hours, literally hours decanting what appeared to be the entire contents of your home into two cars.  Which were barely big enough?  And this for a trip lasting all of two nights? Not quite my notion of minimalism.

And in the interest of safeguarding your mental health, dear reader,  I am not even going to explore the full horror of the wardrobe options suffice to say that they would involve  ‘comfortable’ shoes and rubber wear, and again, not in a good or remotely entertaining way.

From the deep, warm, dry comfort of my hotel room I spent hours sending them pictures featuring the beauty of the bathroom, the fluffiness of the bath towels, the featheriness of the pillows (Continued on Page 94) to reassure them that I was not having too wretched a time on my own.  Sadly the news failed to arrive as there was no mobile phone coverage in their remote, desolate, cold, rainy and windswept field.  I rest my case.

 

I had a thoroughly successful day yesterday, fulfilling an intention to visit the restored Kettles Yard Museum in Cambridge which I read about last year.  (Charming.  Worth a detour)  Even though the route involved travelling the entire length of the North Circular – not something to be undertaken by the faint hearted – we parted the traffic as Moses did the waves, the sun shining on the righteous. And not before time.

Cambridge was perfect; gentler sunshine, prettier rivers and fewer tourists that Venice and an opportunity to eat at the delightful Harriet’s Tea House, full of Japanese people thinking this was how the ordinary British lived on a daily basis. A note to other visitors: beware of the bicycles.  They swoop down on you like manic snowboarders on the piste.  Terrifying.

However, the highlight of the outing was the drive back to London (Am I the only person who breathes a sigh of relief whenever they see ‘London’ on a road sign?) Having  disappointingly not seen a single Eddie Stobbart lorry on the outward journey we saw no less than FIVE going home.  And God had smiled on this venture by sending me a co-driver who was capable not only of spotting a large lorry hurtling towards us at speed but was able to take a photograph in less than twenty minutes. Needless to say that this was not Sluice Nurse who I frequently think should not be driving AT ALL given her inability to see other vehicles and her lamentable reaction times, to say nothing of her motoring convictions.  I may have to consider her position.

Beside this success the rest of the week pales into insignificance.  My son’s birthday, helping to choose the perfect plant for a friend’s fox infested garden (Cordyline in a rather fetching pot) and a visit to the theatre to see ‘The Portrait of Dorian Grey’ which, although excellent in many respects, did not feature a lead actor of breath-taking beauty which is rather the point of the story.

But with 5 Eddie’s in the log, the ducks settled on the pond and a letter in ‘The Times’ nothing can lower my spirits.

 

Frankly my heart said ‘Game over’ as soon as the happy clappy American preacher overstayed his welcome at Harry and Meaghan’s wedding. She might be forgiven for not having mastered all the rules so early on but Harry knows better.  Royal occasions run like clockwork and you don’t try to upstage the Archbishop of Canterbury by your crowd pleasing antics (The Duke of Edinburgh and the Princess Royal just two who were rocking with laughter) and certainly not in front of his (earthly) boss, aka Her Majesty the Queen, head of the Church of England.

There had already been murmurings about the tiara tantrum on an Elton John scale, Meaghan not having grasped that you don’t parade about in diamonds given/taken from somewhere that is now beyond the pale. ‘What Meghan wants, Meghan gets’ said Harry, hammering in the final nail.  Novice, novice mistake as the Queen doubtless pointed out when she called him in to ‘discuss’ it.

I have heard two versions of the fraternal fracture.  Some say the wives don’t get on but I think Kate is way too savvy to make that obvious and the other story going the rounds is that Harry doesn’t approve of his brother’s friendship with a certain Turnip Toff, given their parents unhappy marital history.  Who knows?

Toss into the mix the cost of their home renovations and talk of a home birth away from the nosy British public (Who fund these things) and it is game over.  There’s a reason that the Queen allegedly has cereal served in a Tupperware box and allows a single electric bar fire be spotted in photographs.  Learn from someone whose been doing the job since 1952 and is still loved.  In Britain we don’t hold with the notion that is you’ve got it, flaunt it.  That way lies the French Revolution.

So the men in grey suits have come up with an unarguable suggestion.  Ship ‘em off to Africa.  They are always banging on about how much they love it, although if memory serves Harry’s initial interest was sparked by an earlier girlfriend rather than by humanitarian aims.  We’ve all been on holiday and thought how wonderful it would be to live there full time  but let’s see how long it is before the magic wears off.  You don’t sign up to be a princess to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to go and very few opportunities for dressing up.  I certainly wouldn’t!

Doubters gave the marriage a life span of five years at the outset.  I’d wager that the odds – and the length – have shortened quite a lot.

I realise that we are all worn down, exhausted by a tsunami of boredom after – what is it? – ten years of B*****,  but even so I am appalled by how low we have now sunk as a nation.

I went to a quiz last night (Yes, my team did win.  How sweet of you to ask) and there was a round on the novels of Dickens.  That was hard work despite the fact that I am probably one of the few people living who has actually read ‘Little  Dorrit’, verily a rival to B***** in length and tedium if ever there was one, and it occurred to me that we are probably the last generation that will be remotely familiar with that style of writing, unless Disney decides to turn the miserable, dwarfish and sanctimonious heroine into some sort of Hollywood princess.

I have long suspected that we have collectively abandoned anything remotely intellectually taxing and this was confirmed beyond reasonable doubt yesterday when I rang the National Gallery.  I had read in The Times that there was to be an exhibition of the works of Sean Scully, a favourite of a chum, so I went to the NG website to find out more.  Naturally I went first to the section concerned with shopping opportunities to see what the book of the exhibition was like and if there were any prints of his work available.  It was almost certainly easier to find the Minotaur in the maze than locate a given artist so I turned to the trusty landline and rang them.  Old enough to remember  that as a choice?

I feel that only the extensive use of capital letters will do justice to the horror that I am about to reveal.  Stop reading now if you are under 18 or of a delicate disposition, not very likely but one wants to avoid being sued.  I enquired of the hapless youth who answered how it was possible to find the works of a given artist as the prints were displayed by title or popularity with no sign of an artist’s name.  He said that they had done ‘extensive research’, which is youth-speak for ‘Googled it’, and discovered that people weren’t interested in names.  The most preferred option was to search by COLOUR.  I swear this is true.  Look at the website for yourself and there is an option to find something you like the look of by clicking on a COLOUR.

Let me remind you that we are not talking about something you might buy from Ikea to match the curtains in the spare bedroom.  This is what is on offer from our NATIONAL gallery.  I can’t swear to this (Google it if you can be bothered) but I would be staggered to find this happened at the Louvre or the Prada.  ‘Are you’ I asked in what may have sounded a slightly arch tone, ‘selling art or wallpaper?’

Readers, even with my seemingly indomitable, Dunkeresque optimism in the face of overwhelming odds, even I despair.

 

Men get a bad press nowadays (often from me) but I’m prepared to stand up and say some of my best friends are men.  And both my sons, of course.  So let this be the week when we sing their praises and of course the word ‘singing’ is a very handy lead in.

Last Sunday was the Big Concert.  We had sold about 900 tickets for a performance at Cadogan Hall and all we had to do was produce something worth listening to.  Step forward Maestro Michael McLoughlin, who has given blood, sweat and literally tears in his attempt to turn us from a cats’ chorus to a choir.  God alone knows why he didn’t give up or how he ever imagined that we could succeed.  His belief was up there with people who think Brexit will happen in our lifetime.  But it did.

I will be the first to admit we weren’t the absolute perfection he was aiming for and it must be said that the audience, almost entirely friends and family, might have been on the partisan side. But.  But.  We were a bloody triumph.  Two standing ovations and we took six bows.  By the end my back was hurting almost as much as my throat.  So thank you Michael for believing in us against all the available evidence.  He also gave the bouquet he was presented with to ‘a very special woman’.  It was Mothers’ Day and his mother had flown over from Ireland to be there.  God knows how she didn’t just die of pride on the spot.  He deserves a medal.

Also on my list for Birthday Honours is Bob the Builder.  Hearing through secret sources that he had a free day I managed to lure him to Kastle Kingston to tackle the million and one defects that drive me mad on a daily basis. (And you were wondering what caused it?  Look forward to days, possibly weeks of serene sanity). I now have functioning taps, flushing loos, working door handles; the list of things you can find for a handyman to sort is almost endless but – and this is TRUE – somethings he merely scowled at things and they started behaving.  A living miracle worker and no, you can’t have his number.

Finally to my own little miracles, my two sons.  Is there any better thing in the world for a mother than to know that her children are well and happy? The Holy Grail of parenting, people.  Henry managed to miss my stella performance (He slept through it and not even in the Hall) but more than redeemed himself with a card he gave me later.  It said on the front ‘Happy Mother’s Day.  Luckily I turned out awesome’.

And inside.  ‘I know the irony won’t be lost on you’.

My work here is done.