HEAR, FEEL, SMELL, TASTE, SEE

I just listened to ‘He’s In Town’ by the Rocking Berries on my hi-fi.  In my mind, it’s nineteen sixty-three, and I’m in the Oxford Galleries ballroom, Newcastle, at the Saturday morning dance for teenagers.  A girl from Dunston, called Lesley, shows an interest in me, a gauche and callow youth in a grey corduroy jacket and blue slacks.  I happened to mention to her how much I liked this record.  The following week, back at the Oxford, Lesley gave me the single, which cost her six shillings and eightpence, a fortune in those days.  I was overwhelmed by her generosity and there followed a brief and nervous courtship until I decided that Dunston was just too far away to travel on public transport.  The Oxford Galleries, is no more, swept away in one of Newcastle’s frequent road construction schemes.  Pity. 

Though I have long since finished playing cricket, I have a cricket ball mounted on a plinth standing in my study.  I was given it on the occasion of my retirement from the sport I played for forty years.  Whenever I touch it, which I do often, I am taken back to my greatest achievement, my first ever century, against Holy Cross Seconds, in nineteen ninety-four.  It was a baking hot day on the Meadows in Edinburgh, where several games were being played at once.  One of their players looked like a Bolivian, with a flattened swarthy face, high cheekbones and a pigtail. All he was missing was a bowler hat. He split his trousers and had to go off.  Most of my team-mates missed my one hundred not out – they were asleep in the long grass.  Amazingly, I scored another ‘ton’ the next week, on the artificial wicket at Stewarts Melville Seconds.  I never scored another one, despite playing for another eleven years.

There’s only one smell that I crave above all others.  Forget the smell of Brut or Chanel no 5, new-mown grass or hot bubbling tar.  It’s the smell of smoke and steam emanating from a steam locomotive.  There’s nothing like it.  I used to inhale that aroma as a fourteen-year-old boy by the side of Heaton or Gateshead sheds, or in Newcastle Central or Carlisle Citadel stations or once, by mistake, Motherwell. 

Every time I taste battenburg cake, which is like the Blackburn Rovers strip only in two-tone pink, and tasting of almonds, I am transported back to the old Wills tobacco factory pavilion, on the Coast Road in Newcastle, circa nineteen sixty-seven, when that variety of cake formed the staple sweetmeat for the cricket teas.  They had tea ladies in those days, and freshly laundered table linen.  Tea was a very formal affair, with both teams sitting apart at long tables.  The pavilion floor was wooden, and you could easily get splinters in your feet if you forget to put on plimsolls, for spiked cricket boots were verboten in the dining hall. The pavilion was demolished to make way for an industrial estate and a new pavilion and cricket ground were built at the back of the factory.  The atmosphere was never the same afterwards and the teas tasted different, and not for the better. Now the factory is a block of flats, and the cricket ground and replacement pavilion have all gone

Nineteen years ago, the last Citroen 2CV was imported into the United Kingdom.  They stopped selling it here because it failed to meet EU standards, whatever they were.  Maybe they'll start making it again after Brexit.  I was in Stenton last week with the dog, when I saw the back of a derelict Citroen 2CV Dolly poking out from a garage in someone’s back garden.  It was covered in moss and algae and looked a sorry sight.  I was instantly reminded of the early happy times in my mid-thirties when, for a few short summer weeks before I moved there, I drove back and forward to work in Blackpool from Wallsend in a jade green Citroen Dyane, which was the slightly posher version of the 2CV.  I had the stamina and optimism of youth then, and I ignored the shortcomings of its tiny two-cylinder air-cooled engine whose maximum speed was seventy miles per hour flat out.  Last year, I retraced my steps and undertook the journey again, in a modern MPV.  The distance nearly killed me.

A WALK ON THE DARK SIDE

Ron took an evening walk.  His influenza had cleared somewhat, though a low rumble sometimes emanated from his chest and his lungs occasionally sounded like a Turkish hookah.  The October evening was mild and breezy, and darkness was beginning to fall. Coleridge’s ‘The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out: at one stride comes the dark,’ sprang into Ron’s mind, though he had to look it up later, because he could only remember the first part of the line.  

The sky was heavy with cloud, but in a gap between layers of cumulus, he noted the comforting form of Venus, shining brightly, ‘setting its watch in the sky.’  A solitary aeroplane flitted across the sky like a silver moth, on its way to the airport, carrying its cargo of homecoming tourists. The street lights came on gradually, casting long shadows on the pavement. They were the new type of low-energy, high-density lights, and they were much more efficient than the old sodium lamps that had previously lit the town. Traffic was slight, but a couple of buses roared clumsily into the High Street.  They were more or less empty. Apart from that, unusually, the town was quite deserted, eerily quiet. ‘Soap time,’ said Ron.  The lights were on in the old corn exchange, but there was no-one within, not even the slow-witted caretaker.

He continued his walk up a gentle gradient out of the town, along the West Road. Mean new houses had sprung up like weeds on one side of the road and the ground on the other was being prepared for yet another estate.  Ron thought ruefully that this was no longer a rural town in its own right, but a dormitory town for the big city twenty miles away.

He made his way towards the old railway branch line that the council had thoughtfully turned into a metalled path.  It led back into town.  Part of it was in darkness.  Ron took out his mobile phone and put his finger on the torch icon.  A thin pencil beam of light lit the tarmac in front of him.  A hundred yards on, the street lights were working, so he switched off his torch and replaced his phone in his pocket. The wind strengthened, blowing the branches of the trees that lined the route.  This created grotesque shadows of dancing men on the ground in front of him.  Behind the trees on the right-hand side were yet more new houses, and he could look through the branches of the trees into the bare rooms where the inhabitants had by accident or design left on their lights.

Ron didn’t scare easily, but he was discomfited by the shadows and the sullen emptiness of the path and its surroundings.  He was relieved when he stepped out at the end of the railway walk into a street of solid, respectable, middle-class, semi-detached houses.  A narrow path led past a row of small modern cubist tenements to the old station and station yard, through which there had been no train in fifty years.

The yard is now occupied by a local radio station, a music studio and a number of small business units, all of which just about survive.  There was just one light shining, from the radio station, where a rather rough-and-ready disc jockey always broadcast long into the night.  The rest of the yard was dark and empty.

Half a mile further on, walking past the ambulance depot, Ron noticed three fire tenders in attendance, but no evidence of any fire.   The firemen, in full uniform, were chatting amicably to the late shift ambulance staff.  

When Ron finally reached his home, he found that his shirt was damp with sweat, and that was not purely a result of the mildness of the night, the influenza, or his exertions over three and a half miles.  He came to the conclusion that he didn’t much like the dark.

THE OTHER HALF

It was a glorious morning.  By nine-thirty it was already warm with the promise of the day becoming even hotter.  I try to find somewhere different to take the dog on our morning sojourns into the East Lothian countryside, so, on a whim, I settled on Dirleton. It’s a posh little village in the lee of North Berwick, and you feel embarrassed going there in a tee-shirt and shorts, no matter how clean they are. There’s a lovely piece of greensward over the road from the castle where a dog can chase a tennis ball with impunity. You feel equally embarrassed taking a little black spaniel to rub noses with all the posh dogs that cost two thousand pounds each, but it is allegedly a free country.

When tennis was finished, we walked along the dirt track that leads to the John Muir Way, across a farmer’s field where a couple of combine-harvesters were collecting the wheat and leaving the chaff to the sparrows and carrion crows.  The light was as sharp as d’Artagnan’s sword. Two women joggers shuffled past, chattering to each other.  They were middle-class English. They ignored us. We are easily ignored in a place like Dirleton.

The John Muir way leads through a deciduous woodland where, on a day like this, dappled sunlight shines through the trees and lights up the earthen floor.  In the wood we met a young, small, slender woman, just before a clearing which opens out onto Yellowcraig Country Park. She was leading a black Labrador.  My little spaniel growled at it, as it growls at all dogs. 

“So sorry,” I said.  I spend much of my time apologising for the dog’s behaviour. The woman spoke. 

“Don’t worry, she was being antagonised.’ An Irish brogue, lilting and burbling like a small stream!

“What a splendid accent,” I said, “Whereabouts in Ireland are you from?”

“County Waterford, next to Cork.  Been here a dozen years.” 

“Never lose that accent” I said, as we parted.  “I won’t,” she laughed, “It’s opened up several doors.” 

I didn’t enquire as to what she meant. The only thing I knew about Waterford was that they made crystal glasses and goblets there, but someone told me that the antecedents of film star Tyrone Power were born there. Power died of a heart attack, aged just 44, in 1958.  He made such remarkable films as “The Mark of Zorro” and “A Yank In The RAF”. Mercifully, I never saw any of them.

We turned back towards Dirleton, on a narrow footpath beside a metalled road that leads to the caravan park.  The footpath turns sharply right after a quarter of a mile and takes you past a weird and wonderful house, set in the middle of farmers’ fields, and of no particular architectural style.  I suppose ‘cubist’ might describe it.  Boxy and pure white, with some art deco features and a lot of glass, it stands out amongst the collection of wheat fields and copses that surround it.  It must belong to somebody extremely rich, perhaps a rock singer or an MSP.

We were on the extreme edge of the village, on the road, when a car came towards us.  I hastily put the lead on the dog.  The car pulled up alongside me and the driver wound down the window.  He was an elderly man in rimless glasses and a snow-white, extremely military, moustache.  He said, crossly, “There is a proper path, you know, behind the hedge.  The road's for cars, not dogs.” He waved airily with his right hand, wound the window back up, and drove on. “Thank you, Major,” I said to his rear view mirror.

We rested on one of the lovely pine benches upon which the Council has spent a fortune providing, to satisfy the wealthy. Looking across at the castle, I thought this must be one of the most picturesque spots in the whole of Scotland.  This picture of loveliness was spoiled when an old man came out of one of the million-pound houses that lined the greensward behind us.  He was pulling a sort of cylinder on wheels behind him, and carrying a kind of lance in his right hand.  He paused, twisted a nozzle, and started to spray weedkiller on the ground near the fence at the edge of his property.  Whereas you or I would have been on our knees, grubbing up weeds with a trowel, this man was using a thousand pounds’ worth of kit to remove four groundsel, two ragwort and a clump of clover.

“See how the other half lives” I remarked to the dog as we drifted back to the car and some semblance of normality.

TV TIMES

For a number of weeks now, the television upstairs has shown no pictures, nor from it has there issued the tiniest squeak. A sign on the screen invariably reads ‘weak or no signal.’ Rebooting the system and scanning the network has made absolutely no difference, despite several attempts, for in such cirtcumstances, one will grasp at the tiniest straw, no matter how unlikely the chance of success. One can delude oneself about anything, if one tries hard enough. Living in Haddington, surrounded by hills and tall trees, it is unsurprising that the signal is poor, but to have no signal at all….Reluctantly, I checked the mare’s nest of connections, including the one in the loft that is buried under three feet of Rockwool insulation.  I could find nothing amiss.  I did not want to talk to Talk Talk, who invariably keep one on the line for three hours whilst one is shuttled between Calcutta, Johannesburg and Woolongonga.  Instead, I took the plunge and rang the television man.  He came out the next day, complete with his long ladders and his box of electronic tricks.  He spent twenty minutes carrying out the same various checks that I had done myself the day before, then he erected his ladders and climbed up to the roof, where he carried out yet more tests.  He descended, glum-faced. “It’s your aerial, mate,’ he said, sucking his teeth in dismay, “It’s knackered.” He paused reflectively and added, unnecessarily, “you need a new one. Just so happens, I’ve got one in the back of the van.” “I thought you might,” I replied. Wearily, I commissioned him to replace the defunct aerial.  I retired to the living room.  Twenty minutes later he was at the front door.  “Job’s done”, he said, cheerily.  “How much?” I asked him.  He pulled a calculator from his pocket, tapped a few keys, and replaced it. “Three hundred and nine quid,” he said.  My jaw dropped in sheer astonishment. “Three hundred and nine pounds, to replace a TV aerial?”  He must have been well used to customers’ incredulity, for he carried on, unabashed. “Well, there’s the call-out charge, and that’s fifty-eight quid, and then there’s the dreaded VAT. Don’t worry, we’re a kosher company. You’ll get an invoice and we do accept debit cards.  That aerial will last another thirty years.” He looked me up and down.  “It’ll see you out, anyway.”  I paid him with extremely bad grace and he went on his way, whistling.  When he had gone, I looked out of the front window and saw that he had had the temerity to leave the old aerial in the street for me to dispose of.  I put it in the dustbin.  Later, I asked a friend who knows about such matters how much a new aerial might cost.  “Oh, I should say about thirty pounds,” was his answer.  So, for less than an hour’s work, the television man made a profit of £279. If I wasn’t so ancient, and didn’t have such a fear of heights, I might well go into that line of business myself. When I fired up the upstairs television later, I found that I could still only get the same channels as I did before, so no “Drama”, “Yesterday”, “History Channel”, “Quest” or “Dave”.  Still I can receive ITV 2 so I can watch that mischievous Kyle chap or that American woman judge who looks over the rim of her glasses and pronounces judgment on hapless American citizens. I suppose there are some compensations in life.

THE MUSIC OF TIME

Once again, the temperature climbs into the low twenties.  The sun bears down like a red-hot poker and burns the back of my eyes.  I try to find some shade, but there is none. The cool breeze has vanished with the morning and there seems to be no escape, save within the stygian gloom of the dining room.  The front lawn is the colour of straw, purged of its green tinge by the relentless sun.  I have been using old washing-up water to drench it, but it doesn’t seem to like soap suds that much and the brown grass is rapidly turning into clover, which at least stays green.

The last time I walked down to Haddington’s river, the Tyne, the water level was so low you could walk across it without getting your socks wet.  I try to read. ‘A Dance To The Music Of Time’ by Anthony Powell, is my current reading matter.  It’s a series of twelve novels, each of around 300 pages, so there are 3600 pages to get through.  Apparently, Powell introduces no fewer than 3,000 characters, almost one per page. This means I have no idea who many of them are when they reappear four novels later.  Goodness knows how the author kept track of them all. I started the first novel in May, which is why I haven’t had much time for writing.  I’m halfway through the last.  The tale started in 1915 and we’re into the 1970s now. I found the books in the telephone box in Athelstaneford, which some enterprising bibliophile has turned into a library by installing a few shelves, probably without the knowledge of British Telecom. The red phone box is an anachronism now, and despite several hundred visits by me, I’ve yet to see anyone use it for its proper purpose. It might just as well be used as a miniature library.  At least it’s not used as a urinal. The idea is that you donate a book and take one out. I withdrew all twelve at the same time, but I’m well ahead of the game, for the phone box is full of books that I have donated over the years, most of which no-one else has thought to withdraw (there’s been a marked lack of interest in my Miller’s Antiques Guide 2005 and Stanley Gibbons’ 1998 Commonwealth Stamp Catalogue).

After ten minutes of reading in the heat I feel my eyelids growing heavy and the arms of Morpheus beckoning. It’s most unedifying to be asleep on deck chair in the front garden whilst the children of the street, now on holiday, run back and forward with water-pistols, squirting each other and screaming like banshees. I put the book down.

I spent the morning in Port Seton with the dog.  A middle-aged woman with grey hair tied back in a bun was seated on the grass, reading a Kindle e-thingummyjig.  “Interesting book?” I asked. “Not really,” she replied.  “It’s weird.  It’s set in Charles II’s time but suddenly there are fairies and then some people called changelings, for heaven’s sake, whatever they are.” “They’re alien shape-shifters,” I said, having watched Odo in ‘Deep Space Nine’.  “I don’t know what they’d be doing in 1688,” she said sulkily, “But I’m determined to finish the thing, even if it is weird.” I left her struggling with the narrative and made my way back to the car.  The heat seemed to be turning people in on themselves and I wondered how long it would be before we saw blessed rain again.

FEATHERS

Oh what a holiday!  Whitley Bay, a land of unknown riches! For once, the weather has been glorious – a hot and hazy sun beaming down on this dreary and slightly careworn caravan park.  It used to be called ‘Feathers’ when I was a lad, but a conglomerate now owns it, and it now sports a rather more posh and inappropriate name.  The caravans in our section are old and faded, like ancient filing cabinets stored away in a long-forgotten files repository. The grass is long and neglected. It’s punctuated by great drifts of golden dandelions and coquettish daisies. There is hardly any space between the caravans.  You could reach out and shake hands with your neighbour in the same fashion as you could in seventeenth century London.  As long as the sun shines, and it stays hot, it doesn’t matter. 

It’s mid-morning.  In the distance there is the sound of a petrol strimmer, so the grass is getting some attention after all.  It drowns out the lusty warbling of the skylarks in an adjacent farmer’s field. 

Earlier, I took the little black dog towards St Mary’s Island.  The tide was in and the causeway to the famous lighthouse was covered with water.  We took one of the numerous trails that skirt the edge of steep cliffs that plunge a hundred feet down to the water’s edge. We ended up at Old Hartley, marked by the Delaval Arms, once a busy public house popular with bikers, now seemingly derelict.  It looked as if some work was being done on the interior, as a man in a blue sweat-shirt was up a ladder in one of the windowless attic rooms. 

On the way back, on a different, narrower trail, I met a woman of fairly advanced years leaning on a rail at the edge of the cliff.

‘Don’t jump!’ I said to her and she laughed.

‘I’m just wondering if I can climb down those steep steps and let the dog have a run on the beach.’ ‘It’s easy to get down,’ I replied, ‘But you have to get back up.’

‘I’ll take it slowly, and one step at a time.’ She said it without irony. 

I had brought my camera, and had taken several snaps of the lighthouse on the island.  Most of my photographs are dismal and extremely tedious, but as I focused again, this time directly into the sun, a man wandered into view.  Both he and the lighthouse were in silhouette and the sea was sparkling and shimmering with the rays of the sun, so the context for the image was just right, so I pressed the shutter. Remarkably, when I later transferred the image to my laptop, it came out perfectly.

As we passed the car park, a coach pulled up and a phalanx of little children clambered out excitedly, eager to see the island and the lighthouse.  Their teacher lined them up into a crooked crocodile and gave them the signal for ‘Quick March’.  

‘They’ll have to swim for it’, I said wryly, to no-one in particular.

THE DAY REMAINS

Morning has broken, like Cat Stephens’s first morning.  I sit on the green bench in the back garden.  The wind howls in the trees.  Alfred Noyes’s remark: ‘The wind was a torrent of darkness in the gusty trees’ comes to mind. It’s surprisingly cold for the time of year. However, the ground awakens with the spring.  New growth appears everywhere. The sun flits in and out as clouds drift across the empty morning sky. 

I read.  The novel is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro who, for some reason, I get mixed up with Kyu Sakomoto, who sang Sukiyaki some 55 years ago.  The book concerns a stiff-upper-lipped butler named Stevens, an anachronism even in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. He is an anally retentive automaton who continues to serve his master, Lord Darlington of Darlington Hall, even as his father lies dying upstairs. He refers to his father in the third person even when addressing him directly, saying things like: ‘I hope Father is feeling better today.’  The novel takes place over just a few days, and consists mainly in Stevens’s journey from Darlington Hall to the West Country to find his old housekeeper, Miss Kenton, who has written to him stating that her marriage is now over and hinting that she might want to take up a position again at Darlington Hall, where she last worked several years ago. Stevens is telling the story twenty years on, and his mind constantly wanders back in time to give fragments of his backstory. The novel is a trifle slow, but fascinating for all that.   I recall a film of the book in the 1990s with the splendid Anthony Hopkins as Stevens and the delightful Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton. I haven’t read to the end of the novel, but I do recall from the film that Stevens is so hidebound by convention and the strictures of his profession, that, when he meets Miss Kenton at last, he cannot bring himself to declare his true feelings for her, thus his last opportunity for romance and fulfilment is lost.  He doesn’t even realise his total inadequacy as a rounded human being, as he is so blinkered in his thinking, mainly due to his upbringing and the ridiculous class system that existed in Great Britain between the wars.

I put the book down. I have read enough and my fingers are numb with the cold.  The pale blue flowers of the vinca are pretty in the sunshine.  The pink blossom of the ribes shrubs offers a neat contrast.  The garden looks at its best at this time of year. The horse chestnut is the first to show its leaves, then the two maple trees, finally the oak. The maple trees show their blossom before their leaves and it ends up all over the patio and the artificial lawn.  I spend hours sweeping it up.

Apropos of Anthony Hopkins, I have the final episode of series one of Westworld to watch on Catch-Up TV.  I have seen nine hours of it so far, and I cannot make head or tail of it, except I’m enthralled, especially by Mr Hopkins’s portrayal of Ford, the manager of Westworld.  This is a theme park in which people pay a fortune to be entertained by hosts (robots) in a Wild West setting.  I seem to remember going to the cinema in the early 1970s to see the follicly challenged Mr Yul Brynner play the original man in black, here portrayed by the equally follicly challenged Mr Ed Harris.  I still have no real idea from the television series who are the humans and who are the robots.  Miss Thandie Newton, a British actress of note, quite definitely plays a robot, but one who is developing distinct human tendencies, having had her source code rewritten by a Chinese fellow and a man with an unfortunate ginger beard. Miss Newton goes round slitting people’s throats and committing other atrocities completely at random and the whole show is so gratuitously violent and the language is of the lowest bar-room order that you cannot fail to be simultaneously impressed and outraged.  The Americans seem to do this class of thing very well.  It appears that, in series two, which has just started on Sky Atlantic, that the lunatics are about to take over the asylum. They presumably follow the mantra of Thomas Jefferson that ‘a little rebellion now and then is a good thing’. However, as the late, great, Ken Dodd might have said – ‘There aren’t many laughs in it.’op-kins as

BOREDOM

The rain falls, heavily, consistently, as it has done for days, or so it seems.  The barometer on the wall shows up 'rain and wind.'  There has been nothing else.  Outside, the sky is the colour and consistency of putty. From his seat, which he bought when he left his last full-time employment ten years ago, looking out through the French windows, he can see a bedraggled hedge sparrow slinking along the patio, looking for a morsel of food.  It pecks at a soggy digestive biscuit he threw out yesterday, on the grounds that the biscuit was too soft to eat. Water drips from his garden bench, his picnic table, the shrubs and the trees in his garden.  There is a pool of water at the back of the garden, beside the stone wall, where the soil is compacted. He pushed a garden fork into the ground earlier, but it made no difference. The puddle grows larger.  He expects a drake and a duck mallard to alight on it soon. He curses the garden, not for the first time.  Its inability to support any growth of any colour other than green is legendary. He had planted flowers and bulbs, but they never grew. He made his own compost, but instead of it being dry and crumbly after four years of gestation in a black plastic tub, it turned out to be like the giant molten jell-o man in 'Ghostbusters'. To add a little colour to the greens and duns of the garden, he invested recently in some bunting, which he strung out between two trees.  The prevailing winds there are from the west, so, every morning, he has to go out into the back garden and return the bunting to its original position, because the wind has blown it to the eastern  end of the string and the individual leaves? pieces? pyramids? strips? of bunting are jammed togethuer like shunting wagons, invariably almost out of reach of his flailing grasp. The outside temperature gauge shows two degrees centigrade.  This is 3 p.m. on Easter Tuesday. He cannot recall anything like this weather in thirty years.  The outside rain gauge is full, and is now a drinking vessel for coal tits. He picks up his book. It is a history of Canonmills and Inverleith and Edinburgh. He reads: "The Poppy factory had been established in 1938 in Tolboth Wynd, Calton Road, and moved to 129 Canongate in 1949 where they remained until their last removal, to Warriston Road, in 1968." "Someone save me from this drivel", he says, and flings the book down. In half an hour, he will place several baking potatoes in the oven. In an hour, he will similarly place a casserole dish of chilli con carne he prepared earlier on another shelf of the oven and there will be the evening meal.  He will have to fill in time until then. Across the street, the middle-aged woman who wears peculiar clothes leaves her house and climbs into her car.  She is wearing a blue raincoat, yellow leggings and a beret of shocking pink.  She looks like Bertie Bassett of liquorice allsorts fame. He never found out her name, even though she and her husband moved into the street three years ago. He tries to recall if he has ever spoken to her, and thinks he hasn't.  Her husband reminds him of Mr Pickwick.  He hasn't spoken to him, either.  He recalls how busy he was just a few short years ago and mourns, not for the first time, the cut and thrust of office life that was his raison d'etre for nigh on fifty years.

THE WRONG JAG

Ill since New Year’s Day. Influenza. I had the jag. Back in November. The pretty nurse said “That’ll protect you from the main strain.” “How many strains are there, then?” I enquired. “Forty-nine.” I felt like I’d contracted the other forty-eight whilst missing the one for which I had the jag in the first place. Coughing, sneezing, sweating, freezing, every joint and muscle aching like fury. The news came on. “Beware the Australian flu, it’s a killer.” Add New Zealand and Tasmania to that and that’s the flu I had. I’m not dead, yet. Now comes the feeble recovery. Every day a little bit better, a little bit stronger. The weather hasn’t helped. Freezing cold one day and furiously windy the next.

I drew a book from the library. I had to do something whilst recovering. I’m hardly capable of turning the pages unaided. It’s a travel book. I like travel books. You can imagine yourself in all manner of exotic places without leaving your armchair, and you don’t need to pay seventy-six smackers for a passport. This book’s by a middle-aged woman who sold her house in the north of England and bought a twin-hulled catamaran and floated round the Mediterranean islands for year, husband in tow. The book concerned their decision to sail across the north Atlantic to the Caribbean. Looking out of the window at the gloom and in my decrepit state, I envied them their freedom and spirit of adventure, and wished I could do something similar, until I reminded myself that I’d never ventured out onto the water any further than the stretch of the River Tyne covered by the North Shields ferry. I read on. The author kept writing that they’d ‘dinghied along to the quay.’ I can’t stand the lazy use of nouns as verbs so I threw the book down. 

There’s always the television, of course. A hundred channels and nothing worth watching on any of them. Then there’s the endless round of advertisements for stairlifts, electric mobility scooters, funeral services and life insurance, guaranteed to make you feel old before your time.

In my desperation to do something creative, I painted a picture, a watercolour of a nice bosky dell from a photograph I had. When I had finished, I threw the daub straight in the bin. It looked like a nuclear explosion imagined by a five-year-old who had just picked up a brush for the first time. Where the purple sky and orange fields had come from, I had no idea.

Today I look forward to my dish of Scotch broth for lunch, bubbling away in a pan in the kitchen. That might aid my recovery. The wind has rearranged the bunting in the garden, which I put hung between two mighty trees simply to add a little bit of colour to the drab browns and greens. I normally have to put it right every day because the wind always seems to be blowing here.

The tennis secretary rang me just now. “What are we doing for the Haddington 700?” he asked. It’s either 700 years this year since Haddington gained its Royal Charter or it’s 700 years since the first sod was turned and the first house built. It’s a big thing hereabouts and each sports club has been asked to do something worthwhile for the event. “I’m doing nothing,” I said. “I’m ill.”

“I thought you might want to write a piece about Samuel Smiles.” 

“Smiles? He had nothing to do with tennis. He wrote self-help books.”

“I know, but we have been asked to contribute something of a general nature. He is Haddington’s most famous son, you know.”

“Come back to me in a fortnight and I’ll tell you whether or not I’m fit enough to write. In the meantime, put me down to bake some scones.”

Life goes on here, drearily as ever.

CHRISTMAS POST

It is the thirteenth of December. The Town House clock shows me that it is seven-thirty in the evening.  It is so cold that the chill burns my face. The temperature is minus six degrees centigrade. The cars parked along the main street are thick with frost and ice. An old man tries in vain to open his car door.  It is frozen shut, so he gives up in disgust and goes back indoors. It is TS Eliot’s ‘A cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of year.’   The cold makes you feel like some disaster is about to befall us, such as the electricity supply failing.  I am suddenly reminded of Mr Disraeli’s explanation of the difference between ‘disaster’ and ‘tragedy.’  He used his nemesis Mr Gladstone to illustrate his case. ‘It would be a disaster if Mr Gladstone were to fall into the River Thames’, he pronounced, portentously. ‘But it would be a tragedy if he were rescued.’

My little dog, in her fleece-lined coat, is warmer than I in my flak-jacket and woolly hat.  The discordant notes from Lieutenant Pigeon’s Mouldy Old Dough ring out from my headphones.  I am on a mission.  I have thirty Christmas cards to post and I have decided to post them in the General Post Office, not the handy little post box virtually at the end of the street. Apart from the old man with his car, there is no-one about in the town. The staff of the fish shop are given to rearranging the haddock and cod on the hot-plate for want of something better to do, for there are no customers.  I look through the window of a public house.  In the absence of any company, the barmaid is desultorily cleaning glasses, dreaming of the time when she can beat the boredom and go home to her warm flat. Further on, I can see the pieman making his pies for the morrow.  He is wearing his blue and white striped apron and his portly body is framed in the window above the pie shop.  As I walk along, I can hear the peal of the bells of St Mary’s Parish Church hanging melodiously on the still night air, even though the church is almost half a mile away.

The Christmas lights shine down feebly from the lamp brackets and from the wires strung between the lamps. The display is so poor you wonder why they bother.  It’s as if they are following Shelley’s lines: “When the lamp is shattered/The light in the dust lies dead.”  On the wall of the Town House is the legend in lights “Haddington welcomes you and wishes you a Merry Christmas.”  I am pleased that they have the grammar correct, for Haddington is singular, in more ways than one. 

For no reason, as I pass the Royal Bank Of Scotland building, a joke pops into my head.  A man and his wife are in bed.  The man is reading ‘Motorcycle Mechanics’ and the woman is deep in a philosophical tract by TLS Sprigge. Suddenly, the woman turns to her husband and says, apropos of nothing, ‘I want to be cremated.’  The man says, laconically, ‘Come on then, get your coat.’  I laugh out loud and am pleased that no-one else is around to watch a large pensioner guffawing to himself about nothing in particular. 

The large Christmas Tree outside the Corn Exchange flashes out a message of hope through its bonny coloured lights, but near there I almost slip on a pool of frozen water that someone has flung onto the pavement, having during the day washed a step, or a front door. I silently curse people who carelessly wash their steps or front doors in minus nine degrees.  

I think of the friends and relatives to whom these cards will be sent.  Some I have never seen for years, since I gave up the place of my birth to seek my fortune in Blackpool, then Caledonia. These cards are my only link with a dim and distant past. I still regard the recipients as fondly as I did thirty-odd years ago, though all have changed. Some are for more recent friends, people with whom I have worked, or with whom I conduct geriatric sporting activity on a tennis or badminton court.  They are the present, and perhaps the future, if anyone can foretell the future. 

Eventually, I reach the post box.  It is a huge brass and cast-iron affair with a wide letter-box that is let into the side of the post office wall.  The only problem is that it is sealed tight shut.  Someone has had the presence of mind to post a cursory notice that says ‘Post box full.’  I trudge wearily back to the end of my street and push the cards through the little post box I should have used in the first place. Such is the way of life; such is the way of Christmas.

RAIN

It’s almost two months since I wrote a single word. I haven’t felt like it. There’s been nothing much to write about. Life goes on. Who said it was easy? After a fortnight of clear, dry, cold, sunny weather, this morning is particularly bleak. The heating is full on. The house is roasting, in contrast to three degrees outside. I look through the french windows into the back garden, from my perch on my white faux-leather chair. Rain is falling copiously, splashing onto the garden bench and lying a centimetre deep on the patio. The poor bedraggled sparrows squabble amongst themselves for the right to peck food I put out every day into a number of coconut shells. A dunnock scratches around the flagstones for morsels of fat that the untidy sparrows throw out in their haste to snatch any food that is left. A tiny, mouse-like, tree creeper busies itself, running up and down the maple tree, searching crevices in the bark for insects. The ground is awash with leaves. I sweep the artificial lawn and the patio every day, only to find within fifteen minutes the same number of leaves on the deck as I have just swept up and binned. It’s like ‘Groundhog Day’ round here at this time of year. The sky is as grey as a horse blanket and, looking to the west where all this weather is coming from, there is no break in the cloud, so we can look forward to this rain all day. It’s on days like this that I wish I was still working. I took the dog out first thing. I wore my fedora hat and waterproof Barbour jacket. I walked for three-quarters of an hour. Rain poured from the brim of my hat as if from a leaking gutter. My sweatshirt was saturated because the Barbour proved to be somewhat less than waterproof. My shoulders were soaking, as if I had draped a wet towel over them. I could hardly move my arms. Needless to say, I cut the walk short. My glasses had steamed up, so I had to take them off. I’m like Mr Magoo without them, and I virtually had to feel my way home. Only the knees of my trousers stayed dry. Once I had squelched back to the house, I dumped my shirt and breeks into the wash and put on dry clothes. On sunny days, everyone gives you a warm and cheery greeting. “Nice day today”; “Looks like it’s set fair”; “Good to see some sunshine” - that sort of thing. On days like this, people avert your gaze and pass by with haunted expressions on their faces. Their optimism has disappeared, along with the sunshine. I had taken my camera in the hope of seeing something worth photographing, but the built-in light meter told me I would have to use the night-time feature using the ‘bulb’ setting. 

It’s filling in the rest of the day that’s the problem. I’ve got a casserole to make, and that will occupy some of my time later. I’m in the middle of a travel book called ‘In Siberia’ by Colin Thubron, whereby a day like this is to the Siberians like a day in the Costa Del Sol. I could start writing a short story, except I’ve had writers’ block since 1993. I could sketch or paint a landscape, except it would look like something created by an oran-utang. I could vacuum, which would use up twenty minutes. I could watch daytime television, except I’ve had a bellyful of Sun Alliance adverts and those ones from Royal London about funerals that look as though they’ve been made by a five-year-old from cut-up cereal packets. That’s not to mention the PPI advert from Gladstone Brookes where a chap with the build of a rugby three-quarter tells you you’ve only got until 2019 to claim for cash that you cannot fail to get, provided you opnly use the services of Gladstone Brookes. 

I spent the first twenty minutes of this morning genuinely believing this was Sunday, until I switched on Radio Four Extra and ‘Dad’s Army’ came over the airwaves, and the realisation that, in fact, it was Monday after all.

HOME ALONE

Newcastle. First-class lounge. The benefits of travelling first-class. Free cappuchino coffee, comfortable leather armchair, parquet floor, mural on one wall, arched window looking out over platform 4, television on the far wall showing the news. A man cleans the lounge with a vacuum cleaner. He knocks over a stool. There’s only one other person here – a woman, seated at a table, staring into an i-phone. Plump, sixty-ish, dyed blonde hair, fancy spectacles, she looks a little like Mrs Slocombe. Daylight fades, leaving a lovely roseate glow in the west. No-one checks to see whether or not I’m entitled to sit here. My train is six minutes late. It leaves from platform 4. I had time to spare before entering the first-class lounge. I looked at some of the ancient buildings surrounding the station, including the castle and keep. I gazed through the window of the old parcels office where I started out my working life with British Railways in 1966. They made me start work at 6 a.m. so I soon gave that up. It’s no longer a parcels office, it’s now a stationery emporium. It’s a fine city, but Grainger Street looks a lot seedier these days. I wandered past the old water tower atop the works building that the North-Eastern Railway built in 1891 to service the steam locomotives of that era. It now lies derelict. I hope it’s listed, otherwise it will be torn down and yuppie flats will be built on the site, as has happened all over the city. Either that, or they’ll build yet more student accommodation. In my day, the university/polytechnic didn’t take up much room, now it seems to have devoured half the city.

 

This is more like it! A near-empty carriage, a single window seat and a much more comfortable seat position. Daylight has almost gone, and office lights and street lights of the city burn brightly. There is something enthralling about railway stations at night. The only staff are cleaners and men who go round tapping the rails with a metal stick. The passengers are so few you can hear their hollow footsteps ranging along the platform. The station lights give off an eerie glow and you are put in mind of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson standing on the dark platform of Carnforth Station saying their painful goodbyes in Brief Encounter. We stop at Morpeth, the first time I’ve ever stopped there on a main-line train. The sunset is beautiful. This is the best train to catch to go home, as all the passengers have long since decamped. The trouble is, they’ve shut down the trolley service and I won’t get my complimentary coffee and biscuits. I didn’t on the way down, either, because the trolley person had called in sick. Two armrests and an antimacassar, luxury indeed. We pass electricty pylons in silhouette, horses standing placidly in a field, darkness enveloping every leaf, every branch, every tree, every blade of grass. Forty minutes later, we see the lights of Berwick-upon-Tweed twinkle gaily. Dunbar is but twenty minutes away. I wander down the empty carriage and find an unopened tiny pot of strawberry jam. iIt'll have to do, in lieu of coffee and biscuits. I put it in my bag. It’s disorientating, not being able to see anything except the odd pin-prick of light from a far-away cottage. We pass the grey shoebox that is Torness and the Martian spaceship that is the Blue Circle factory, and we’re at Dunbar station. It’s good to be away, but it’s so much better to be home. Didn’t someone sing that?

SUMMER COLD AND AN EXTENSION

I have contracted that most despicable of ailments – a summer cold. It’s all there – hacking cough, blocked-up nose, streaming eyes, lungs wheezing like a pair of punctured bellows. I am so weak I can hardly lift a teaspoon. It’s a lovely day, too, the nicest in weeks, yet all I want to do is sleep. This morning, I had to sweep the back garden and take the dog for a walk, two tasks which have left me utterly exhausted. Today was the day the bin men came, so, feeling as fragile as a Ming vase, once they’d departed leaving their usual trail of litter on the pavement (reserved for people who don’t leave them a Christmas bonus), I had to go into the street and gather in the various bins and buckets, the contents of which are meant for recycling, but which probably all end up in the ground.

Andrew from across the street hailed me. I was trying to escape unnoticed, but I was obliged to lumber over and meet him. After all, that’s what neighbours are for.

‘You’ve heard about the care home, I suppose?’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied, not entirely truthfully, for I had heard some murmurings about the trustees of the care home wanting to build an extension.

‘They want to build an extension right in front of our back garden,’ he said, despondently. ‘They want to cut down all the trees.’

‘It would seem, then, that there are more and more old people clamouring to spend their last days looking into your back garden,’ I replied, drily. He gave me a blank look. 'I wouldn't know about that,' he replied.  Andrew never did have much of a sense of humour.

‘Aren’t the trees listed, like ours?’ I asked.

‘No. If there’s no ‘common view’, then they can’t be listed. Only we can see them.’

‘Don’t they need planning permission to build this extension?’ I enquired.

‘Yes, but we’re going to make it as awkward for them as possible.’

‘We?’

‘Everyone on this side of the street.’

‘Even the people at the top who are already looking out over the home?’

‘Even them.’

‘Have you been in contact with the home?’ I asked.

‘I had the director down. I didn’t like the look of him. His eyes were too close together and his nose would have burst a balloon. He was altogether too shifty to be a director. I mean, he didn’t even polish his shoes and he wasn’t wearing a tie, for Heaven’s sake. He looked more like a bookie’s runner. I said: ‘What about our view?’ He said: ‘You’ve no right to a view.’ He mentioned as an afterthought that he didn’t give a toss.’

‘Have you involved the local councillor?’

‘Jane is dealing with that.’

‘Maybe they’ll get fed up if you keep objecting and will call the whole thing off.’

‘I doubt it. I even told the director that I would go to the press and tell them that, for a Christian charity, they weren’t being very Christian with their neighbours. He said ‘Go ahead – I don’t care a jot.’’

‘If that’s his general attitude, I wouldn’t fancy going there to stay when I’m in my dotage,’ I said.

‘That’s a thought. I could spread the word that they don’t feed the old people properly and they leave them sitting in chairs in draughty corridors for days on end. That ought to put a few people off. I said I’d make it awkward for them’

I wanted to remind Andrew of the laws of slander and libel. Instead, wearily, I shook my head and returned home. I was grateful that I live on the other side of the street. All I have to worry about are the four massive, brooding deciduous trees that keep the back garden in permanent shade, suck all the goodness out of the soil, and prevent anything from growing, even mint. As Whistler remarked: ‘Nature is creeping up.’

I reflected, in my enfeebled state, that I would probably swap with Andrew – he can have my listed trees (a £20,000 fine if you dare to chop one down) and I’ll have his extension. At least, three million leaves don’t drop off an extension in the autumn.

NEVER INTERFERE

My first boss, name of Alex Hastie, an irascible old scarecrow of a Scot with a billiard-ball for a head and a hawk’s nose, who always wore a trilby in the railway ticket office where I worked, gave me some useful advice.  He said, responding to a report that someone had seen a severed head on the railway line: ‘Never interfere, laddie.’  I should have remembered that tonight when I took the dog for her evening walk.  At the top of our street lies an agricultural machinery business on a large site.  Its compound contains some extremely expensive equipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.  When I saw two youths clamber over the wire fence and into the yard, intent on mischief, I decided to act.  They saw me straight away, but they were in no way nonplussed.  They just carried on clambering over the combine0harvesters and seed drills that lined the yard.

I scrabbled in my pocket for my mobile phone, no easy task when holding a dog lead in one hand.  This phone is about the size of a bathroom tile, and I have cursed it ever since the day I got it.  It is especially mulish, never seeming to respond to any of the commands I give it.  

I held it high in my hand to show these hoodlums that I meant to call the authorities and have them apprehended.  You can imagine my surprise when the older and taller of the two, climbed nimbly back over the fence and walked breezily towards me.

‘What you takin’ photographs of me for?’ he asked, with a swagger.

‘I am not taking photographs of you.  How dare you suggest such a thing!  I was about to call the Police.’

‘Yer a creep, takin’ photographs of me. Creep!’ 

I lost my temper and lunged towards him.  He stepped back, the look of nonchalance disappearing briefly from his face.  

‘You..You… blackguard!’ was all I could think to say.

‘Go on, then,’ the youth said, recovering some of his composure: ‘Ring the Police.’ 

I looked at him for a second or two.  He was skinny, poorly dressed, with untidy unkempt hair.  He looked like James Bowlam might have in the part of Terry Collier from ‘The Likely Lads,’ at the age of thirteen.

‘I’ll show you!’ I retorted, and pressed the phone icon on the glass cover.  The torch came on. By now, young Bolam’s companion in crime had joined him.  He was about eleven years old and sat astride a decrepit BMX bike.

‘He’s got his torch on,’ laughed young Bolam: ‘He can’t make any phone call.’ It was then that I remembered that I hadn’t a clue what the number of Police Scotland was. I knew you couldn’t ring 999 for something as trivial as this and I knew there was another three-digit number that you could ring that put you through to the communications centre in Loanhead.  In the dim and distant recesses of my mind, I had an idea that the number was 111.  I pressed the icon again and the numerical keypad appeared.  I dialled 111. 

‘NHS 24 Scotland,’ came the reply.  I hung up.  

‘What’s keepin’ ya, creep?’ Young Bolam asked. 

‘I don’t know the blasted number of the Police,’ I rasped, angrily.

‘It’s 101’, he said, helpfully.

‘Thank you,’ I replied.  You must never forget your manners.  I dialled the number. 

‘Police Scotland’ a male voice said.  ‘How can I help you?'

‘There’s a couple of hooligans giving me lip, having broken into Henderson’s the tractor place.  I ordered them out. They’re standing next to me now.’ 

‘Can you describe them to me?’

‘One’s lanky, skinny, and undernourished, with gingery hair and freckles.  He might be thirteen or fourteen.  The other’s smaller, swarthy, mucky and younger, about eleven.’

‘Are they threatening you?’ I looked at the malnourished figure of young Bolam and the dirt-smeared visage of his mate and replied, softly, ‘No, they’re not threatening me.’

‘Did they cause any damage, break a window, anything like that?’

‘No, but from the way the leader’s speech is a little slurred and the blatant cheek of his attitude to me, I should say he might have been smoking cannabis.’  

He might have been smoking turnip-tops for all I knew, but I thought it might impress the chap on the other end of the phone. The Police representative seemed to lose interest at this piece of information.

‘Hold on to the line, sir, while I make the Police aware.'  I waited a few seconds whilst he tapped a few keys on his computer. 

'That’s it done, sir.  Where are the boys now?’  

They were where I thought they would be, speeding off in a westerly direction as fast as they could travel. 

‘I’m afraid that by the time a patrol car gets here they’ll be well away,’ I said. ‘They’re racing away towards Herdmanflat Hospital. Besides, it’s their word against mine. I’ll let the chap from Henderson’s know about it in the morning.  He can check to see if there’s any damage and he’ll let you know if there is.’

‘The Police are aware. They will respond. Thank you, sir, goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, officer’ I replied.

It was only when I closed down the call (I couldn’t turn off the torch, no matter how wildly I stabbed at the screen and it’s on even now, as I write) I realised I could have been stabbed or hit with a brick or suffered some other dastardly fate. Then, as I recalled the swagger replaced by blind panic when the pair of them realised I’d been as good as my word and had phoned the Police, I knew those two couldn’t assault their way out of a wet paper bag.  

I turned the corner into Dunbar Road and I suddenly recalled old Alex Hastie’s advice never to interfere.  

I made a mental note of it for next time.