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Before I am sued for breach of copyright, the following has no connection to the confectionary, possibly American and therefore litigious, of a similar name.

I was reading the Sunday Times when it occurred to me that it is now so insubstantial that the newsagent could probably fashion it into a dart and float it round.  Years ago Sunday papers had to be delivered on a sturdy cart pulled by straining dray horses and even then, when it was like reading ‘War and Peace’ once a week,  someone old told me they were thoroughly tedious and I was aghast – how could anyone be bored reading a newspaper?  Even the poor maligned Daily Mail affords an opportunity to feel superior and Metropolitan.

Boredom was what one endured every single Sunday as a child when you certainly weren’t allowed to read Fleet Street’s delightfully lurid outpourings (Frequently involving Welsh divorces which I will explain on another occasion.  Remind me.) and your presence was required at a minimum of one extremely long and tedious church service.  Or during the school holidays which lasted for months at a time and WE DIDNT EVEN HAVE iPADS.  Try getting that past a modern mini- Emperor. (A convenient cue to mention my recently published letter to The Times on the subject of a smacking ban.  I pointed out, not unfairly, that the modern parent rarely beats their offspring because they are too busy on their mobile devices to ever notice how badly their children are behaving).

I have now reached that age when all four pages of the Sunday Times bore me.  Even without clairvoyant powers I can predict their contents at New Year: joining gyms, losing weight, not drinking  (Don’t get me started) and then in a Damasene moment, it struck me that boredom is what kills us.  Except obviously in plane crashes, avalanches or murders.  Ignore those and focus.  As we age we’ve been everywhere and done everything at least twice before.  We are bored and this lowers our immune system and we get something horrid and die.  It could be the Alzheimer’s is extreme boredom with the brain simply giving up.

I think it’s worth writing to the Lancet and point out, not for the first time, what is staring them in the face.  The clue to longevity is not low cholesterol, it’s keeping yourself interested.  Just look at the Queen.  And I trust that the thirty seconds you’ve spent reading this has extended your life by a similar amount.

Finally, finally someone has missed me. (Thank you Jude).  I will cut the rest of you a little slack for not noticing the gaping chasm in your reading life, what with it being Christmas but I was beginning to have visions of the headlines in the ever inventive local rag.  “Elderly blogger eaten by pet cat”, that sort of thing, “Body undiscovered for six months in Twickenham tragedy”.

Talking of tragic ends  I came close to meeting my maker when packing away the twenty tons of festive decorations that had been cheering my normally minimalist home since, well , actually since last year, certainly for the ones that I couldn’t be bothered to take down in January 17. I went so far as to text a chum  a photo of the chaos that resulted from three hours of wrestling the fairy lights into submission.  “Pensioner garrotted in fairy light horror”.  It’s only a matter of time. She’ll probably put the picture on YouTube and make millions.   I can imagine the conversation over the (fairy light free) coffin.  “She’d have wanted to go like this.  She lived for those lights” . Cue sobbing.

However, on the whole things this year are going well.  So far. The ground floor sanding and sealing has been an enormous, life enhancing success and the life size papier-mâché bull’s head has been installed on the kitchen wall.  It is the finishing touch to a room that would be perfect if I could just get rid of the oven, although in its defence it is currently in a state of bliss having been restored to new by the boy genius with a portable acid bath who comes twice a year to erase all evidence of culinary adventures.  Mr Right or what?  It remains a mystery to science how so much carbon can be generated by the occasional mixing of cocktails in the same room.

And now all that stands between me and an idyllic New Year is the prospect of some lengthy and expensive dental work but I want you to think positively about that, as shall I.  At least I’m still alive and after the last month, that IS a miracle.

Happy New Year!

 

It was the best of Times, it was the worst of Times. (I may let someone else write the whole of this now that the idea occurs to me). The day of the choir’s concert dawned with us all still in shock from the tongue lashing we had had at the weekend rehearsal.  The piece we were singing was Faure’s Requium and in Latin.  The tension was palpable as we stared like terrified rabbits into the conductors headlights but we did it! He kept miming SMILE at us but that’s quite tricky when you’re trying to sing through gritted teeth and  as I had observed previously, the title ‘Requium’ doesn’t generally suggest cheery.

People were extremely generous with their praise and afterwards we drank the vats of mulled wine in unexpected celebration instead of the anticipated drowning ourselves in despair.

Wednesday was the ITN Christmas lunch, always an occasion of dignified restraint. Ho Ho Ho! I managed to arrive home without my overcoat but at least this year it was only outerwear missing …

Last night I was supposed to be at another carol service but being a woman not yet quite mad enough,  I decided it would be a Good Idea to have the kitchen floor sanded and re-sealed.  By the time the men finished for the day it was too late even to creep in at the back of the church so I went round to my local Italian restaurant and, already light headed from  a day inhaling sawdust and varnish fumes in industrial quantities, rather overdid the Puglian red which brings me neatly to my latest hangover cure.  You are meant to consume this before retiring but messing about with a Nutribullet does not seem terribly sensible if drunk.

Take some milk, maple syrup, porridge oats, peanut butter and a banana and whizz it all together. I tend to add vodka – that’s up to you but recommended if you can’t find the other ingredients when reeling about the kitchen at two in the morning. Works a treat.

One of the downsides of going out and about during the festive season is the danger of getting stuck next to the sort of person you would normally cross the road to avoid – joggers, estate agents, remoaners.  It’s a worry.  Last night someone bored me for half an hour with his views on “the oppressed poor”.  Nothing patronising about that attitude. Normally we British nod and smiled wanly at these types and practice irregular Latin verbs in our heads to make the time pass more swiftly but on this occasion I wasn’t in the mood for lily livered nonsense.

”Are you aware that in X, a typical London borough, it is a FACT that one third of people don’t pay any council tax, thereby putting it up 50% for the rest of us? The police estimate that one in ten cars on the road has no road tax and therefore no insurance, the consequences of which also fall on those who do. Every day gas, electricity and water companies try to collect unpaid bills from people who have moved on without leaving a forwarding address, providing that the debtors have had their Human Rights letter first. (And I’m not making that up!)  Ditto with TV licences. That’s not oppression. That,  sweetie, is theft.”

There are children starting school who are not toilet trained, have never held a knife and fork, a book or a pencil,  who can’t speak in sentences. And it impacts on your child who’s in the same class.  I don’t care if you send them all to Eton; they won’t all come out the same because some of them are already 18 months behind by the time they start school. That’s not oppression. It’s bad parenting.

And spare me your thoughts on evil companies who don’t pay tax.  Does the government, of whatever persuasion, do anything about it? No doubt you use Google and Amazon and banks so you are part of the problem.  If you hate them so much why don’t you boycott them and bombard your M.P with letters of complaint? In fact, become an M.P yourself.  Do something!

As for the latest Blue Planet-inspired hatred for plastics in the sea, the overwhelming majority of it comes from just 10 rivers and none of them are anywhere near Europe so putting a deposit on my recyclable bottle of orange juice is going to make precisely bugger all difference and it’s not actually my fault.”

I hope I made myself clear.  Unless you are personally working on a solution I don’t want to hear that the problems of the world all directly attributable to me and my opinions.  The Complaints Department is closed for the holidays.

 

You may find it somewhat unnecessary for me to provide evidence of yet further derangement, given the overwhelming amount already available in these pages, but reader, a decline there has been.

Yesterday, lengthy pause, I want to the West End. I know, I know – why would you at any time. But a weekend in December?  Never mind the fish knives, Norman, get down here pronto with the straight jacket.

In my defence to the Mental Health Tribunal it will be stated that I had momentarily forgotten it was a Saturday, given that at my age most days feel like Saturdays, except Sunday which I continue to hate as a tribute to the 52 days each and every year of my childhood when I was bored beyond reason.

Should some film director at any time wish to recreate the last hours in Saigon as the Americans left, let him/her/it look no further than the queue for the lifts at Covent Garden underground during the festive season.  There was even an announcement warning people not to attempt to leave by the stairs as we were at the depth of a 15 storey building.  Information positively guaranteed to calm a claustrophobic crowd.

There are two reasons for this sudden decline.  Like most/all women I spend hours rummaging through the depths of my handbag whenever my mobile rings.  Even if it’s a tiny clutch bag.  Over the years I have on occasions managed to find it before the caller has given up but they are rarer than Edinburgh panda cubs. So how much crueller is it that now my iPad has started to summon me with bells too, at a stroke doubling the odds that I will never reach the appropriate device in the allotted five rings?

Add to this unhappy mix the fact that the cat chose to projectile vomit over the carefully written Christmas card envelopes, which she had thoughtfully knocked to the floor to ensure that the majority were hit.  Never mind nine lives; Miss Kitty is now in a negative liquidity situation even before we toss the smashed Art Deco clock into the mixture.

Talking of cards a girlfriend, well known for her inability to move at speed except when going down a one way street in the wrong direction, boasted to me that she had finished writing all her cards by December 1st. ‘That’s very impressive’ I acknowledged, ‘Now you just have to crack on with the ones for 2017’.

Don’t even start with your complaints, at least not until you’ve heard mine and you’d better make yourself comfortable.  It’s a loooooong list.

Highlight of the week was to have been lunch with my new editor – not even an ITN old boy, just the son of one.  Happily apples don’t fall far from the tree and they certainly hadn’t in this case.  We met for lunch at 12.45 – what is it with restaurants and their 15 minute time slots? – and only stumbled out into the dark as the early-supper-before-the-theatre crowd left.  A thoroughly respectable length of time for a meal but it did make me late for the pub quiz so the team only managed a feeble third without me.

Given the need to be Ahead Of The Game at this time of the year I spent many hours writing my Christmas card envelopes, a task made considerably more difficult by the antics of the bloody cat, who has taken to living in the study, and who was determined to empty the ink bottle over me and the carpet. Having failed despite DOZENS of inventive attempts, she took her revenge the following night by knocking the neatly stacked pile to the floor and puking all over them.

Doubtless she had heard on the radio about Brexit reforms to animal protection laws and thought they would cover her. Wrong, so wrong, Miss Kitty. No turkey for you this year/ever again.

I may have mentioned my choir at Strawberry Hill.  We started off as a few people who fancied a sing-song with our very jolly choirmaster but over the years he has turned into Svengali, a merciless monster and has dragged us, kicking and screaming, into being quite good singers.  God knows why he ever thought it was possible, or why he hasn’t given up  many times along the way, but there we are, happily singing requiems and arias in Latin and German.  Sometimes in tune.

This week we were bullied into taking part in a competition of the musical variety against other choirs.  Having previously performed only in front of our nearest and dearest (A small, forgiving crowd) we were terrified, especially as we were the penultimate of the many choirs to perform so there was ample opportunity to see how much better they all sounded.  However, as we came off stage our pianist was, as they say in sporting circles, over the moon with our performance and given we were the only people to have even attempted any Mozart, we thought that the trophy for ‘Best Classic’ was in the bag which it would have been if the judges had not chosen to define ‘classic’ as a fondly remembered sixties pop song.

Pipped at the post, people.  The final group was made up of local youngsters with various disabilities.  Their singing was not of the first order but boy, was it enthusiastic and did they have fun on stage.  You have never seen people enjoying their moment in the spotlight so much and to seal the deal they ended with a break dancing display.  The audience went wild and obviously they won.  But we’ll be back, winners, and next year we’ll be ready.

So, it’s now verboten to start a sentence with ‘so’.  So, so simple to reduce John Humpries to speechless rage with a single word. So, we were taught at school, was up there in crime level terms with talking in the corridors – but there was a brief halcyon period when its use was considered acceptable, even a little edgy.  A bit Channel 4, slightly beret sporting. The dahlia is in a similar place as we speak but it faces an inevitable return to the compost heap as the moment passes and it is no longer ironic, just passe.  On the plus side  I don’t find ‘so’ remotely as irritating as the awful, thankfully ended vogue for peppering every utterance with ‘like’.

I am reminded of the man who wrote a leader in The Times hidden in  which was the name of his mistress (Was it Peter Jay?  Someone must remember) and James May who was fired for concealing something rude about his editor in a piece in a motoring magazine.  There is a temptation to do something similar with ‘so’ but don’t waste the day searching; in case you haven’t noticed it is no longer June.  We’ve stopped wondering whether it’s too early to cut back the daffodils. No time available for linguistic buggering about.  It is practically Christmas and wrapping must start NOW.

And card writing which HAS to be done with a fountain pen leaving you with indelible stains on your fingers and bleeding eyes from the hours updating your data base with all the hatches, un-matches and dispatches which have happened since last year.  (And – another no-no starter). Too late and too busy now to start a campaign to have slightly fewer, smaller trees in the house – that window of opportunity should have been opened by August.  Absolute latest.

Every shop in Britain has bedecked its windows with rusting tinsel and faltering fairy lights and even the undertakers has got a floral window display with holly and ivy.  That will be a comfort to the festively bereaved, I imagine.  Nothing worse than planning a December funeral surrounded by dusty Easter eggs.

 

You sense bitterness, reader, barely disguised hysteria.  You detect the tell-tale signs that, fingers scraping into the ice, I, like all women, have started the inevitable slide into the annual abyss of rage and despair that is the Festive season.  So even that’s started early.

My decision to leave the Christmas decorations up is now vindicated as tomorrow the clocks go back and we are yet again plunged into the long, dark night of the soul. Winter not my favourite season you’re guessing but at least I won’t be wobbling about on a ladder with the tinsel.

Before I retreat under the duvet with the sloe gin (No concession for the change of season, you’ll note) I had hoped to delight you with the shenanigans at a wedding I went to last week.  Nothing like a family occasion for a rich source of copy in my experience.  I once arrived at my local to find the doors bolted because all out war was happening inside at a christening party.

Excellent!  So it was with a spring in my step that I set off for the nuptials which had all the elements in place for a complete disaster.  Plenty of ex husbands and lovers, accompanied by suspiciously attractive new partners with Rent-a-Date written all over them,  squabbling siblings, unwelcome guests and lashings of booze.  There was even a steep set of stairs down to the dining room with a surface slippery enough for ice skating.  Bring on the broken bones!  And the father of the bride was overweight and scarlet faced.  Fingers crossed for a defibrillator incident for a grand finale.

The mother of the bride had not touched, not been in the room with, solid food for months and two weeks before the wedding had still not decided on an outfit.  There was even an especially low moment when she floated the idea of a perm.  She swept in looking so amazing that there was a clang as our jaws met the glassy floor.

In fact everything was perfect.  It stopped raining so we could drink champagne in the garden.  The photographs didn’t take hours.  The bridesmaids had beautiful dresses.

My last chance for a story was the bride and groom but nothing doing.  She had organised everything with terrifying precision, even providing dozens of pairs of flip flops for when we failed to squeeze back into our new shoes after dinner but did she look haggard and stressed? No readers, she looked radiant and calm and the groom clearly adores her.  They may just live happily ever after.  I hope so.

It would be foolish to visit the Lake District at any time of year and not expect rain.  That is how God fills up the valleys to make the Lakes in the first place and in yet another fruitless attempt to convert us, no less than 8 inches fell in one single day. To put that into context for those whose meteorological knowledge is minimal, and I do mean you, Junior Nurse, London gets about 30 inches A YEAR.  My thanks to all of you who sent messages of concern, mostly not read because the wi-fi at the Cottage was set at a level of parental control that barred access to anything more controversial than the weather forecast, something we were well able to do without, what with having eyes and windows.

There were expressions of concern that we may have acquired trench foot but given the level of alcohol and cigarette consumption of the party we were far more likely to succumb to trench lungs and trench livers.

There are photographs of  the ash tray (bucket) and the bottle recycling mountain but both are too disgusting for a dainty blog like this.  I did send  copies to Mr R. D. Davies of this parish together with the information that I had completed the Telegraph prize crossword in record time. Clearly green with envy he replied as follows:

“Not surprised – those photographs suggest a first class mind fuelled and supercharged by booze and fags.  Well done.”

There was to be little danger of foot related injuries.  Junior Nurse whined constantly about wanting to do more walking, or wading as it turned out, but as Staff Nurse somewhat tartly rebuked her,  “In order to hike you have to firstly get out of your bed and secondly remain awake once you have done so.” neither of which seemed within her grasp.  However using our well honed mathematical skills we were able to estimate that she was doing a good 10 k a day going backwards and forwards to the Co-op for essential supplies, a needlessly long distance when the prettily named‘Bargain Booze’ emporium, stockist of all our daily requirements, was at least 50 metres closer.

Somebody – possibly not Harvey Weinstein – once said “Keep a diary and eventually it will keep you” and I can assure you that further details and pictures are in a safe place.  Forward the usual postal order if you would like the full story of ‘The Incident at Rhydal Bridge’ – definitely a Bridge Too Far in more ways than one.  It involves cake.