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I might have mentioned my deep dislike of the Easter season once or twice before (17 Times actually. Ed) and this year was well on course to repeat the pattern of every other one  – cold, wet, miserable and a week of weight gain and nausea to follow after consuming a few tiny bites of consolation chocolate.  On the plus side, as every writer knows,  bad news means good copy and I had a piece prepared that Mrs May could have used to reduce Mr Putin to tears, containing enough vitriol to strip your lamb-roasting tin clean in minutes.

Although the overall weather prediction, courtesy of the Daily Express, was for snow and rain on an apocalyptic scale, Good Friday dawned dry and bright.  Relatively.  This being the traditional day to get your pre-chitted  first earlies in (And, yet again, look it up!) I took myself off to the allotment and managed to do so before the first drops fell.  And mulch the asparagus with freshly harvested seaweed, tie in the raspberries and plant out the broad beans.  Aware from childhood of the need to eat hot cross buns or DIE, and mindful of my maternal duties, I had the following text exchange with Useless the Younger.

Me: Did you eat a hot cross bun yet?  You’d better not forget.

UTY: Ma.  I’ve been hanging from a crucifix all day!  No time for buns.

Me: Don’t argue with your mother, Jesus.  Eat the damn bun.

In the afternoon an old chum popped round for four hours of putting the world to rights and some dressmaking.  It was like being in one of the better chapters of Little Women. (Her Meg, me Jo.  Obviously) There was cake.

On Sunday I had a lunch party with an international flavour – French champagne and New Zealand lamb, followed by a Russian pudding – and the guests made the UN look parochial. Naturally we started with an Easter egg hunt (Not raining. For the second time this year.) and it’s a sorry comment on adults that even in my tiny garden it took them HOURS to find them, although in defence of the ladies I did catch one of the gentlemen hiding pink eggs in his pockets to give his team a shot at winning. On reflection I should just have put the blue eggs in socks then they’d never, ever have seen them.

It has been a week of revelations.  Boots the Chemist has started to sell Viagra without a prescription just before the Resurrection. Masterly marketing or what? The Pope has abolished Hell. And I’ve had a lovely Easter.

Whatever next?

 

While you were clearing snow off the windscreen I was looking forward, always forward people, to spring.  With the Equinox upon us, technically it has sprung and let us greet the delivery of the first shoes of the season, ordered during my darkest duvet days (January to March inclusive).

Another timely arrival was the first local election leaflet, this time in the form of a questionnaire.  How do these wretched people get one’s name? (The electoral roll is, on reflection, the prime suspect).  It asked, hardly surprisingly,  a number of totally asinine questions.   What did I think of the council’s policy on plastics?  Answer: a total waste of time, whatever it might be, when the government is trying to build yet another runway at nearby Heathrow which will dump millions more tons of toxic waste into the local air and I suspect a far higher risk of an untimely demise when, inevitably, a ‘plane crashes over our densely populated city than from ingesting an old Perrier bottle.

At least there was one joke amongst the questions.  Did I think there should be a 20mph speed limit throughout the borough?  Show me where the traffic ever gets to that sound barrier breaking velocity and I’ll take a view on it.  Given the average rush hour speed in London is now below 10 mph let’s not fritter away ratepayers money in an attempt to criminalise those who manage to exceed it.  Or was money raising not on your mind, Mr Mayor?

Is this not the very same council who have recently given permission for a school to be built for 400 pupils on the only road access to Richmond Bridge?  That’ll sort out any speeding issues and no mistake.  Add to this happy mix the fact that the school is going to be on top of a new supermarket –  something we are crying out for  in the borough – and local gossips would have you believe that planning permission was granted because of a sizeable contribution towards the cost of building the school.  As if!

The highlight of the week, on paper, was the fire evacuation training session.  (It was A listers only.  Maybe you’ll be invited next time).  However, contrary to expectations there wasn’t a single fireman there so although I can now empty a building  in under three minutes it was ultimately a bit of a disappointment and I think I speak for all the ladies who volunteered to take part.  Fake news.

Which leads me to the Russians.  I hope it has escaped no-one’s notice that their foreign minister made a statement which was a total copy of my blog.  You heard it hear first.  As usual.

I used to read my children a lovely book about a little monster who’s frightened to go to sleep in case there’s a boy under his bed which, by way of a largish, lateral leap, leads us to my thought for today.  The necessity of a collective bogey man in a modern society.  Actually in any society because a good way to keep the masses in order is to keep them in a state of terror.

Even in my brief lifetime (What? Ed.) it has been never ending.  My parents had only just recovered from the very real threats of the Second World War when we were all cowering under the stairs thinking that the Russians were about to drop a nuclear bomb on our heads and thanking God that we’d never taken down the black-out curtains which would surely save us from an atomic fireball.

The Americans were so nervy of the prospect of Communist world domination that they spent years fighting the totally unwinnable Vietnamese war. Obviously they lost in entirely predictable fashion but staggeringly the world did not, as we had been warned,  instantly think Marxist Leninism was the way forward.  That didn’t get a lot of publicity.

There were decades of worrying about the IRA but as soon as they’d signed a peace deal up popped a World Wide Web of loonies – not a million miles from the Taliban, who if memory serves we had been supplying with arms in an attempt to rid Afghanistan of the Russians – and we all obediently began to submit to endless security checks in case they were lurking round the corner, ignoring for the time being that virtually all murders are committed by someone known to the victim.  Like the 2 women a week in Britain who die at the hand of their partners.  Not much publicity for that either.

There has been a brief respite while the lily livered Metropolitans warned that we’d be eating grass after Brexit but now we have returned to our old adversary, the Russians, bringing sudden death to a restaurant near you.

Here, we are led to believe, is a man who has been a double agent, whose wife and son have both met mysterious deaths and yet he lets his daughter travel to Russia and then decides to go out for lunch taking with him a parcel she’s brought back from Moscow.  A man who is an obvious target for both sides but has he changed his name, elected to live in a witness protection programme, moved to a country that he hasn’t betrayed or taken the most fundamental precautions when dozens of other Russians have met the wrong end of an umbrella?  No, reader, he has not.

The ‘passing’ policeman was hardly your average bobby on the beat either. Check him out.  And best of all they were handily close to the Porton Down research facility, the only place in England where you can obtain this obscure substance.  This must  explain why the local hospital happened to have supplies of the antidote which they administered within hours although the poison wasn’t identified for a week.  And I hear that only yesterday, Porton Down had millions of pounds of extra government funding slipped into their coffers.

No wonder Mr Putin is so dismissive. Perhaps it wasn’t him.

Exciting news and especially pertinent to the subject of motherhood.  I am in a child free home! (If by child you mean adult men in their late twenties and early thirties).  The silence is deafening, it is safe for the gin to come in from the cold (shed) and the only things in the fridge are tonics and champagne.

The telephone handsets are sitting smugly in their holders, and my iPhone charger is exactly where I left it.  The milk stays fresh in the fridge, no longer opting to end its life curdling in front of the unwatched television next to a pizza box and an ash tray.

Best of all my wallet is bulging with unspent wealth; unspent on Oyster card top ups and emergency fags.  We are, people, talking sunlit uplands.

Obviously it was only a matter of time before my new found freedom went to my head. ‘What a fine opportunity for a spot of spring cleaning’ I thought, a text book definition of impending breakdown if ever there was one.  Although I had long since abandoned the idea of raising the hygiene level of parts of the house above that to be found in a Nairobi slum, I have invested heavily in the necessary equipment.  A worryingly masculine trait that, being lured by things with a plug on.  Possibly transitional?  These devices have had very little use over recent years and the relevant instructions have long since hurled themselves into the re-cycling bin.  Again, not something that would bother a man for a single second but a grown woman really should have known better.

I started in the bedroomof Useless the Elder and having finally located the carpet I thought it best to have a bit of a go at it with the steam cleaner, just to loosen up the top couple of layers.  I then set to work with the vacuum cleaner until a strange smell filled the room (Or even stranger smell than that which had greeted me).  I turned round to find a huge ball of foam emanating from the Hoover, the result of suction on the wet, soapy carpet, and then it stopped working.  Which was probably a good thing.  (I bought a new, less temperamental one later that day).

On reflection I decided that the simplest way forward was total re-carpeting and instead set about burning the thousands of unopened, tear-stained letters from the bank to the boys, shredding them all not being an option in my anticipated lifespan.  Eagle eyed readers will realise at this point that I had probably over-inhaled the fumes from the carpet chemicals which is why the next thing I did was to melt an extremely large plastic pot doubling as an incinerator but at least it was outside.

And how does this tale of woe end?  Suffice to say it involves a sofa flying over a second floor balcony.  In a good way.  But sadly there are no photos.  I’ll leave the details to your fevered imaginations.

Off to bonnie Scotland for the Calcutta Cup and what larks upon the way!  I collected Junior Nurse from a house in Sheffield which I was slightly surprised to discover is not unlike Tunbridge Wells.  Whatever happened to the dark, satanic mills that my parents warned me covered the countryside north of Regents Park? Is there no relief from the creeping fingers of gentrification?   I was greeted at the door by a woman in hair curlers covered by a headscarf which unfortunately I assumed to be the normal local daily dress but turned out to be a post-Stalinist joke on cultural appropriation.  Fashion and despair.  Again.

We got to Staff Nurse’s lovely home to discover that another guest had arrived before us.  A gentleman of the road, as we used to call travelling folk,  who she had met whilst tenting in the Outer Hebrides.  How many, many times must I repeat the dangers of canvas related shenanigans?  It must be confessed that for all out metropolitan nonchalance we were mildly discombobulated to observe that he was wearing our hostess’s skirt and tights;  his clothes, including a negligee from Anne Summers,  having gone straight into the washing machine.

In the HUGELY unlikely event that I were ever to consider packing for a  cycling trip to the Cairngorms in a very snowy February, hoping to hone my igloo building skills,  this might be one item I could do without, what with weight being an issue but then what do I know of such matters?  Bear Grylls has a lot to answer for.

Having seen him safely on his way we decided to watch the England-Scotland rugby match in Edinburgh.  Arriving in the capital Junior Nurse insisted that she must do a tour of the city in an open topped bus, an obvious, first class choice for a mid winter afternoon in a location north of Moscow.  Being of considerably sounder minds we declined to join her and set her a second challenge: to locate us after her outing, should she survive it.  We then decamped at some speed to the Cafe Royal, which is a bit more like a pub than a tea shop, actually quite a lot more, if accuracy is required.

A first class afternoon ensued, which if truth be told did not actually involve going to the match, (This a plan we had abandoned some time earlier, not having tickets and it being extremely cold) but it was apparently viewable on a television somewhere behind the bar.  Thank God Scotland won which meant that the day ended with high spirits rather than mayhem as we were probably the only English people present and we still had just enough sense not to,start a fight.

Junior Nurse did eventually locate us, using the unexpectedly intelligent reasoning that we would be A. In a pub and B. Very close to where she left us. Respect, Sherlock.

If technology permitted I would have liked to have finished with a photograph of the bloodied axe on the kitchen floor, worryingly a true detail of a very surreal weekend,  but perhaps that’s a story for another day.

 

 

 

There are a lot of good and bad things about living in London. For the plus points, when the M25 is turned into a steel ringed border I’ll be safely inside it away from the barbarian hordes. There are also endless great things to do or move to Bradford.  Following my own advice (for once) I have been to several of the current crop of exhibitions including one at the British Museum about the Sythians.

Me neither.  The Sythians, it transpires, had a huge and influential empire back in the day in Siberia but clearly very poor PR skills as I’ve personally never heard of them which is odd.  My suspicions that they might just be an invention of a deranged and dusty professor in a museum cupboard  were further aroused because the maps on display seemed to suggest that Siberia included the Black Sea.  Not when I last studied geography it didn’t.  In fact Trip Advisor describes it as “Russia’s only seaside resort area”, not I imagine the sort of place when artefacts could be entombed in ice for centuries, unless the Russian idea of a day at the beach is decidedly different from ours and said treasures including what looked to my not wholly untrained eye exactly like a brown shag pile rug circa 1963.

The Sythians were nomadic and poorer than church mice but managed to amass enough golden treasure to start a very large shop.  Really? And not by the time honoured method of looting and pillaging but bespoke stuff in solid gold.  Hardly essential items, one would have thought, for people who ate grass and had to pack everything up and stick it on a horse every couple of weeks.  Not the work of a moment to explain why, for example, they would have needed several thousand identical buttons as they struggled across the icy wastes searching for food.

However, don’t spend any time worrying about it because it’s closed.  Get down to the newly tarted up Hayward Gallery and see the fabulous photos by Mr Grusky of this parish and don’t be put off by his slightly Sythian name or the fact that there is only one thing on the cafe menu that doesn’t feature copious quantities of kale.  Including on the children’s selection.  So, so last year people.

This week’s award for a top day out must go to the Cezanne exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Not his greatest works – never mind unfinished, more like barely started and way too many of his plain, unsmiling wife but, as ever, the beauty lies in the detail.  On one of the explanatory signs in a room with his later work it says that eventually he ended up just painting his neighbours in the south of France or, in curator speak that is an art form in itself, ‘generic stoic rustic peasants’, urban peasants being a bit thin on the ground.  A headline that puts ‘Freddie Mercury Ate My Hamster’ into thirdplace, trumping even ‘Fashion and Despair’.  Well worth a visit.

Men. Dont  read this before breakfast because it will give you indigestion and raise your blood pressure.  I am today a type far from unknown to many of you; a woman in full rant mode.

First a disclaimer.  I do not hate all the men in the world; some of my best friends are men, decent men do exist (I could probably even name a couple if pushed) but what the hell is wrong with the rest of them?

My normal level of deep apathy about most things has been breached this week by the story of the behaviour of men supposedly working for a charitable organisation in Haiti.  The country had been devastated and off the top of my head I expect the survivors wanted medical aid, food and clean water.  Perhaps eventually sanitation and housing. What they got was corruption and so-called aid workers paying a dollar a time to have sex with their children whilst simultaneously  issuing sanctimonious statements about third world poverty and colonialism.

How much longer are women going to tolerate this?  Harvey Weinstein, Presidents Parties and now even the self styled do- gooders.  In Margaret Atwood book ‘The Handmaids Tale’ she writes of a futuristic society where the state controls all the few remaining fertile women.  My advice, gents, is to get a move on with an improvement movement because it occurs to me, and I cannot be alone, that given we already have sperm banks our need for men to exist AT ALL is up for debate.

Imagine, Ladies, a world where you didn’t have to park your car somewhere you felt safe to return to after dark.  Where people didn’t constantly interrupt you, push ahead of you in queues, cut you up in traffic. Where you could get into a railway carriage without checking if your only fellow passenger was a dodgy looking male.  Where you could confidently leave your window open on a hot night without it being seen at a future trial as an obvious invitation to be raped.  And this is in 21st century Britain.  If I were to list the restrictions on women in other countries it would bring the internet grinding to a halt and  for the life of me I don’t remember signing up for the whole world to be run for the convenience of men.  Maybe it’s time for a bit of a re-think.

I was in a black cab the other day where the driver was giving us, his very captive audience, the benefits of his thoughts on Uber.  (An alternative taxi service that isn’t ridiculously over-priced and given to boring it’s passengers to death with its adolescent philosophy). My female companion, far too polite for her own good, did nothing to discourage him, the words ‘I wonder if you could possibly shut the f**k up?’ not springing as readily to her lips as they would to mine but bear in mind, lots of us HAVE had enough and increasingly ARE prepared to say so.

Sort yourselves out, men.  Make acting like a caveman as unacceptable as smoking indoors.  Be aware, very aware, that time is not on your side.

The best laid plans etc etc.  I had planned a thought provoking few words on water but that will keep.  Actually it was water that distracted me – another cold, wet, winter Saturday led me to spend the afternoon at the cinema seeing what is hyped as Daniel Day Lewis’s last film, God willing, which serendipitously allows me to use my favourite new phrase again.

Actually there’s not a lot of fashion and a good deal less detail about the couture process than I had hoped.   Despair was there in spades.  It cannot be denied that DDL is a great actor but there is something about him that just oozes pretension and this is not just based on the testimony of a chum who worked on ‘My Left Foot’ and told me that by the end of filming there wasn’t one of the crew who wouldn’t have happily chopped off both of his feet, or chucked his trolley out of a top floor window with him in it.

The success of a portrait lies in revealing the soul of the sitter.  Whatever you do,  it shows on your face and never more so than in big close-ups on screen and however well Mr Lewis acts, I can’t move very far beyond thinking that he doesn’t seem like a very nice person.  I could be wrong.  It’s not likely.

Other than Lincoln, which – plot spoiler alert – doesn’t end happily, I haven’t liked any of his films. ‘There will be blood’ would have been more accurately described as ‘There will be shouting.  A lot of shouting’. I didn’t see ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to discover that the rest of the tribe threw themselves off a cliff after the first day’s filming and ‘Gangs of New York’ was more shouting and fighting.  With gangs. In New York.

One of the few plots surprises in ‘Phantom Thread’ is not that his wife tries to poison him – I imagine she took quite a lot of persuading not to do away with herself at the end of the first hour.  Of several hours.  This film goes on. And on. And on.  Never mind retiring, I’m impressed that anyone lived long enough to get to the end.  Next time you get out your dressmaking scissors Dan, use them to chop out the surplus two thirds of this marathon.

Lesley Manville who plays his sister – and why is she called Cyril for pity’s sake? – is just pure Mrs Danvers but without the laughs.  His wife is very beautiful.

Another film showing this weekend is ‘Coco’ which I though might be about Chanel until I checked.  It’s actually a Disney cartoon but on reflection I wish I’d seen that.  Probably not such good acting but certainly prettier dresses and a good deal less despair.

Yet again it is the morning after the night before, more specifically Burns Night which we failed to observe on the actual date, Thursday, what with it being a school night.  It was decided that it would be celebrated on the earliest following Saturday and, with all the good taste that you have come to expect, it was re-named Napalm Night, that being more gender neutral.

The usual suspects met at Campaign HQ, my house, for a pre-match sharpener, the table not being available until 6.00 and the pre-sortie nerves to be calmed.  There had been talk of wearing Vietnamese Dress but nothing came of it.  Not the easiest style to source in West London in January it transpires.

Having donned lashings of suitable camouflage make-up the patrol made its way under cover of darkness across the mighty Mekong/Thames and into downtown Hanoi/Richmond.  Very little action on the bridge.

There followed an extremely pleasant evening at our favourite eaterie where the staff now know me well enough not to keep pestering about food orders but set up a chain of tireless waiters to pass bottles from the bar to the table.  Planning, logistics, supplies – these matter even more than raw courage when you’re on the front line, men.  Make a note of that.

Now obviously a D Notice and a surplus of the local bamboo brandy prevents me from relating most of what followed but I do recall one joke.  ‘A woman is standing by a river when she sees her husband and her divorce lawyer swept by a fierce gust of wind into the churning water.  What does she do next?  She must choose one.  Lunch or shop?’

Both of course, just decide in what order.  Simples.

Following slavishly in the footsteps of tradition we decided that only a visit to the local nightclub would round off the evening which mercifully we were dissuaded from doing by the kindly doorman who could clearly see that we were suffering from combat fatigue, possibly shell-shocked and urgently needing to be airlifted to a place of safety.  I have to report that we lost two men/women re-crossing the bridge.  They will be remembered, certainly by the rest of the travellers on the night bus to Hounslow.

Back to HQ for a quick de-briefing, in the military sense, and a final emptying of the hip flasks before retiring to our quarters for a few hours of well earned rest.  I was woken at 0530 by Miss Saigon, the regimental cat, performing her daily trampoline practice on my bed, her secret code for breakfast time.  I promise I will get up and feed her as soon as those helicopters stop making that infernal racket inside my unfortunate head.

 

Let me confess immediately that fashion has nothing whatsoever to do with this week’s subject, although I may touch on despair.  It is, apparently, the title of some very learned acedemic tome and sounds even better in the original German.  I think it is perfect but then I have always been a sucker for great headlines.  I intend over the coming months to work it into conversations relentlessly. As usual, I urge you to copy me.

I had intended to start with the old phrase, now clearly long forgotten, that it takes a village to raise a child. To raise, to supervise, to protect.  Whose blood was not chilled by the story of the 13 children in California kept in captivity by their loony parents?  Home schooled by devout Christians – doesn’t that covers  a multitude of sins in a few words?

One of the best reasons for compulsory education is that it gets children out of the home and into public view five days a week.  If a child appears to be starving, beaten, covered with cigarette burns or just missing, in theory someone will notice and, even better, do something about it.  If you choose to keep your children at home in this country you get regular visits from an educational welfare officer.  Someone I know who did this said that the parents always appeared to be on the far end of the crazy spectrum and the children were at least two years behind their peers.

So let’s put a stop to this now.  If you have a child between 5 and 16 ‘the village’ wants a good look at it on a regular basis.  Not rocket science.  Easy.  Sorted.

Even more chilling, much more, were the comments from the family’s neighbours and this is where I start to despair.  One man said that he often came home from his late shift at work to see the children marching around a room in circles in the early hours of the morning.  However, having given it a bit of thought, he decided that there was ‘never anything to suggest that I should call somebody’. Granted, we are talking about a Californian here but really!  Just went indoors did you and thought that looked perfectly normal?

Another caring neighbour saw the children routinely scavenging for food in bins but decided that it ‘didn’t prompt intervention’.  Shame on you.  Shame on all of you in that street.   If you see a thin, frightened child, or a woman with yet another bruise on her face, I trust that everyone I know would get off their arse and do something about it.  Not give an interview to the papers when the bodies are found – ‘They seemed like a nice family.  They kept themselves to themselves’ – but get on the phone now, today and do something about it.  You may be wrong but better that than do nothing.  You being wrong doesn’t matter a row of beans.   If you are a parent of one child, you are a parent of all children and you should start being responsible for them.

Let’s be a village again, wherever we are.  Start now.