Letting the side down

Catching up with Monday's incoming mail I find that the RSPB has sent me an Urgent Albatross Appeal.

If there's not a spare one in the airing cupboard I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint them.

Just because...

Sunday singalong

And keeping the running Kurt Weill vibe...

Paintbox

Presented as a public service...

Gamboge	Bice	Ultramarine	Saxe Blue
Chinese White	Purple Madder	Silk Green	Tyrian Purple
Primrose Yellow	Raw Umber	Burnt Sienna	Vermillion
Donkey Brown	Mandarin	Crimson Lake	Cobalt Blue
Persian Blue	Naples Yellow	Raw Sienna	Hooker's Green
Indian Yellow	Prussian Blue	Lamp Black	Paris Green
Vandyke Brown	Duck Egg Blue	British Racing Green	Pansy Violet
Scarlet Lake	Sap Green	Venetian Red	Yellow Ochre
Cerulean	Salmon Pink	Viridian	Japanese Imperial Purple

For some unaccountable reason I have an urge to dig out the Oxo tin full of pastels...

When was the last time you saw bice?

Back in the old days, back when hedgerows were fringed with the scent of Riley Elf and Jowett Javelin, small children would occasionally be awarded a paint set. In them days a paint set was a gaudy bit of tin tray holding a confectionary array of teeny-tiny tablets of watercolour paint, each one exotically-labelled. There would be Gamboge, an earthy orange fire that did the business for ginger toms and ice cream cones. Chinese White, always the colour of colouring-book paper, would be there, too. As would Silk Green and Primrose Yellow and Purple Madder. And Bice.

What was Bice about? It wasn't Olive Green, because that was over there next to the Raw Umber. Bice wasn't quite brown, nor green, nor yet yellow. It was that strange not-quite khaki that you only ever saw in paint boxes and the stairwells of government buildings that had been redecorated under the Utility Mark in the forties.

I haven't seen Bice since the early seventies. Nor yet Silk Green or Chinese White. Nor fiery, exotic Gamboge. They have gone the way of all things. We must enjoy our Vermillions and Burnt Siennas while we may, we shall not see their likes again.

Under the weather

Layers of regret

A friend. a good friend long since passed from us, once got more than usually annoyed with me when in her cups two hundred miles away and rang me in the middle of the night to give me an ear-bashing. She had decided, quite rightly, that in my timidity and cowardice I was damaging the feelings and self-esteem of a very attractive Scotswoman. And so I was and did.

(It is my way: my problem is that I actually like women very much. When I find my feelings moving from friendship to passion I'm afeared of ruining a friendship by saying something stupid and scaring the poor woman to death. I find it vanishingly unlikely that my feelings would be reciprocated and am consequently very hard work indeed and Extremely Trying To The Patience. The one time in my life that a woman has literally thrown herself at me in a fit of passion I thought she'd slipped on her high heels and that the subsequent tears of anger and frustration meant that she'd hurt her ankle. She reminded me of that for years.)

My friend on the 'phone had seen enough the previous weekend and wasn't going to shilly-shally any:

"Hello love, are you OK? Why are you ringing at this hour?"

"Ooh, you do annoy me! I've decided you need a good talking-to. Are you listening? Next time you see her this is what you do..."

"Oh. Right. Thank you for that. You know, if I'd ever done that to you you'd have given me a thick ear."

"If you'd ever done that to me you'd have deserved a thick ear. Now have you been listening to me? What have I just told you?"

And so on. For another half hour.

I don't know how we got into the habit. I'm not even sure which of us did it the first. Every so often when we'd get together one, other or both of us would bring along the current object of affection for approval. At the first opportunity, one would lean over to the other and whisper: "Well? What do you think?" We'd been doing that for a dozen years before I realised it myself.

My friend was a wonderful mixture of keen intelligence and apparent innocence. As wild as little strawberries, she was a humanising influence on me and she recognised that the attractive Scotswoman was both a civilising influence and somebody who'd put up with a bit of my routine stupidity without indulging me in it. And when I got that last, consoling, kiss on Blackfriars Bridge I realised, too late, that she was dead right.

My friend managd better. We all knew when she finally found the elusive "Mr. Right." As they told me stories of their adventures and their plans for adventures to come I leaned over to her, winked and whispered: "He's the one."

"Oh yes? How are you so sure?"

"You let him call you 'babe'."

Losing somebody at sea is a strange thing. It sounds like carelessness and there is no ceremony of closure. I find it difficult to let go at the best of times and the fantasy of its being an unfortunate happenstance with a happy ending was a difficult one to chase away. How long was Alexander Selkirk on that island? In my dreams I'd have a million-and-one questions, nearly all of which would already have been asked in wearisome and/or distressing detail. And in my dreams I'd just ask the one question: "have you time for a cup of tea?"

In a sane and just world she'd be surrounded by cats and kids and empty yoghurt pots with odds and ends stuffed in them. It isn't and she isn't and it is to be regretted.

Mirror, mirror...

One of those days where I realise that I've stopped playing at middle age as I'm fast approaching it.

Friday singalong

I've spooked myself: while chatting online with somebody about David Bowie records I suddenly realised that the singer from The Flying Lizards reminded me of somebody I used to know.

You can't fight fate...

Splish, splash, splosh, little autumn showers

I'm fairly lucky in that despite all the recent rains we're not overly likely to get serious flooding round our way. We're close enough to the Mersey in its juvenile stages for to get the necessary drainage. Which isn't to say that we get off entirely scot free: the roads are like rivers due to the council's cutting the corporation gulley suckers out of last year's budget. Each roadside grid is like a small, oily lagoon.

If I get the chance this weekend I'll have to tip some of the water out of the baskets and containers in the garden. My usual problem is under-watering the poor beggars; I don't think this will be an issue in the next week or two.

It's been a funny autumn out there. Everything seemed to stop flowering for a week in early October and I thought that was it until the winter shrubs kick in. Then, one by one, flowers started to pop up at random. All the roses are now in full bloom again, as are the snapdragons and sweet williams, and the fuchsias are doing better now than at any time so far this year. Really odd, but rather nice.

More disappointing are a couple of recent casualties. I had a really splendid witch hazel, just in sight of the living room window. For some reason that's died a death. And over the past two weeks the Olearia that had been doing so well in the far border has pegged out. A pity.

I'll have to grub both out this winter and have a think about what to put in their stead. I fancy some oriental poppies and a load of fennel.

End of Part One

Just after the hit radio show "The Burkiss Way" and before "Whoops Apocalypse," here we find Andrew Marshall and David Renwick writing the nice, genteel, drawing-room comedy that we just don't see any more...

True romance

My mother and father:

"Now what are you doing? I'm trying to read the paper."

"I'm holding your hand, love. Doesn't that send a thrill of excitement through your body?"

"Not especially. I hope your hands are clean."

"You used to like me holding your hand when we were courting."

"If I let you have two free hands you'd have eaten all my sweets."

Metronomes

The lack of trams across Manchester city centre has done wonders for my waistline and circulation as the two mile-long walks a day take effect but has had the side-effect of putting an intolerable strain on my powers of concentration. I have come to the conclusion that pretty young ladies with long legs should not wear black leggings, especially if they have long red hair pulled back into a pony tail. There appears to be a profusion of them and it is very distracting.

Chuggety chug

I've always had my suspicions that Passenger Focus was a bit closer to the industry than its stated aims might suggest. Its annual statements of the state of the travelling nation's railway experiences have never really chimed with my own, nor with those of anyone I know.

Up until recently the only time I'd ever been surveyed by Passenger Focus was about ten years ago. Mid-afternoon on a nice sunny day travelling on the slow train between Carlisle and Barrow.Which was a pleasant thing to do if you got the chance. I couldn't complain about the journey: it was very agreeable and it was on time. I can't help noticing that these days they've halved the number of journeys on this route and replaced the double-carriaged sprinter with a single carriage so that it doesn't matter what time of day you travel it's going to be standing room only and there's no space for bikes, buggies or wheelchairs. Such is progress.

They did a survey of passengers in Manchester the other week. A lady stood at Victoria Station, a rail terminus, handing out the forms. As hordes of passengers came in on late, badly over-crowded old and rackety trains, or arrived late because the previous train hadn't bothered to stop at their stations so that it could arrive at Victoria in that state of "On Time" that only exists in the minds of Railway Performance Managers, they were handed forms asking them for their opinions on their outward journey. These people had arrived. And Passenger Focus didn't want to know about their inward journey.

I asked the organisation if there was any way that passengers could flag up repeat failures of services. After all, there's a world of difference between a one-off cancellation due to exceptional calamity and a service that's routinely twenty minutes late or cancelled three or four times a week. The answer is no: they "want the train operator to have the opportunity to resolve the complaint first." "Resolve the complaint" in this context is "send a stock reply within a week or two of the complaint." So long as you get your fob off in the alloted time all is well with the world.

As you stand, crushed nose-to-armpit, hurtling through Suburbia at a steady two miles an hour in a rusty old egg crate that should have been mothballed permanently a decade ago, it's good to know that somebody, somewhere doesn't give a flying fuck.

Kissproofed

I'd forgotten it runs in the family. My father was telling my wee niece a selection of the usual daft stories when he reminded me of one I'd completely forgotten.

The 1960s for so many of us was more Sheila Delaney than Carnaby Street and it was all black and white up to the summer of 1968 when Mrs. Gmerek brought in some tubs of lime green and mandarin orange paints and infant class 3 tried to go psychadelic. By then we were living in the flats in the suburbs. Before then we'd shared my nan's terraced house in Old Trafford, five yards away from where it became Hulme and Manchester corporation rates. Times were hard but they had their sense of the ridiculous to help them get by. Which is how it came to pass that one day my mum and nan had the fright of their lives as an ugly old tart popped her head round the doorway and said: "Hello dearies! What's for tea?"

It was my dad, dolled up in my mum's Max Factor war paint and with granny's shawl round his head.

There it would have been, just another daft little thing in the scheme of things but for one unforeseen happenstance.

The lipstick wouldn't come off.

Max Factor industrial strength kiss-proofed carmine lipstick. (I have quizzed my mum about this and she says she'll tell me about it when I'm older.) Nothing but time would shift it.

Which is how come my dad turned up at the plumber's yard the next day with cute little red rosebud lips and two rouged circles on his cheeks.