Some of the reasons why I enjoy reading Edgar Wallace.
"…at that moment he wore the facial expression peculuar to managing editors at midnight — which may be likened to that of a man who has an engagement with the public executioner and is anxious to commit just another tiny little murder before he dies."
— from "The Caretaker In Charge," The Novel Magazine, August 1919
Amongst my Lamentations, I expressed regrets that John Betjeman was no longer Piet Laureate, what with the Jubilee and Olympics and what not.
"John Betjeman would be very, very old," said The Small Object of Desire.And by George, she was right."I know, but it would have been so jolly," I replied.
"Think about it," she said. "If John Betjeman had been around, he'd have Alzheimer's by now. If you think of Carol Ann Duffie as John Betjeman with Alzheimer's the world is suddenly a better place."
Well, I'm well under the cosh... (Caution: This post includes middle-aged bloke whingeing)
The Small Object of Desire is out with her mates again, having coffee and cakes and a gossip while I'm left behind cat-sitting again. Cat-sitting at Railway Cuttings mostly involves being sat on by The Cat I Do Not Have, in between its being asleep and its eating. It saves going out for a romp* in the garden for three o'clock in the morning and the moment the breakfast toast is just starting to singe. Yelling at the door for me to let her back in is saved for four o'clock in the morning and the moment we're trying to leave for work at the latest possible moment because it takes The Small Object of desire about four hours to wake up enough to be safe to drive. Tonight I had to rescue the silly pillock† from the wash-house roof (because it's raining and it didn't want to get its feet wet). Stone me, what a life...
The Small Object of desire has been abandoning me to wanton Fate quite a bit lately. The other day it was to go to a Johnny Morrissey concert, the local stop in his I Opened Chester Zoo You Know Tour. She was there amongst the crowd waving their Linda MacCartney vegetarian sausages, which he made speak a quirky commentary with a series of unlikely voices from the corner of his mouth. He's a game old bird and she came home happy with her "Surly Brute From Stretford" T-shirt so all ended well.
Me, I'm just pootling along. There's a phenomenal load of stuff going on at work at the moment, to silly deadlines, so I'm pretty much crashed and burned before I get through the doorway. Which may pass as half an excuse for the state of both house and garden. Somewhere out there there's about six pounds of boysenberries to pick, once I force my way past the roses, geraniums and boysenberry runners. Much to my surprise, and probably due to the vile weather, the gooseberry bush hasn't been ravaged by sawfly this year and we got a pound or so off safely. The downside to the sawfly leaving the leaves alone is that I forget that the bush has inch-and-a-half-long thorns (that's forty six kilometres in the new money), which gave me the opportunity to teach the new goldfinches a few new words in basic Anglo-Saxon.
And aside from all, next to nothing's been happening lately.
* "Going out for a romp." As in: "I'll just scrape my shoe on your doorstep, I trod in a romp on my way here."
† The cat, not The Small Object of Desire. She hardly ever gets stuck on rooves these days.
I was going to write a tribute to the late, great Eric Sykes but Scaryduck has written a blinder.
One of the earliest Sykes scripts I know of was a monologue written for Frankie Howerd on "Variety Bandbox" back in the days when the Light Service ruled the wireless. In it, Howerd had got work in a zoo and the first job he was given to do was to deliver an elephant to an address across town. By bus and tube. Frankie Howerd milking the fits of giggles generated by the mental picture of his trying to coax an elephant up an escalator is a joy and I wish I could find a copy to post on here.
Instead, I'll offer up a piece of gentle silliness from the 1963 Royal Variety Performance:
Up with the lark, tra la! -- so long as someone had coshed the lark with a sock full of wet sand -- to minister to the breakfast needs of The Small Object of Desire and The Cat I Don't Have. It is not a morning for delicate masculine sensibilities.
Looking at the state of the bath I wonder, yet again, that The Small Object isn't bald.
"You could stuff a good-sized middle-aged man with all that hair," I said.
"That had been my plan," she replied.Waving her off to work with a cheery smile (which prompted her to point out that there's nothing erotic in "a grimace and a lot of snot-filled grunting"), I turned to look at the hall. Railway Cuttings will never be an Ideal Homes photoshoot but even by my standards it's got a bit untidy so I took to giving the stairs a sweep with the hand brush. The look of disgust that The Cat gave me as she stalked out of the front door will haunt me till lunch time.
You've got to feel sorry for them… Back in the old days, F.A. Cup day was a bit of an event. It was the last part of the Spring triptych of sport, following on from the boat race and the Grand National. Back then, telly didn't even start until after Ed Stewpot Stewart had put his socks back on and was wending his weary way away from Junior Choice and we'd all finished reading that week's editions of "The Tiger" and "The Rover" and had stopped being giddy about Splash Gorton's penguin. After dinner we'd settle down quietly — or else! — and on would come the telly. Whether it was Grandstand or World of Sport that year the festival would always start with somebody baking cakes in the team colours and an interview with a dolly bird. Then there'd be a celebrity quiz or It's A Knockout or both and there'd be a quick cut-away to see the teams in blazers getting on the coach. By three o'clock we'd have exhausted Ralph Reader leading the community singing so they'd put on a game of football to give us all a rest.
That nice Pearl periodically uses the caprices of title selection by audio shuffle to read the auguries of the day. The serendipity of this appeals to me rather so I thought I'd have a shot at it during a tram ride to the Small Object of Desire's gaff...
The songs my iPhone threw out at me were:
Dear sir,
Kevin and The Small Object of Desire cannot come to work today because it is a nice day and they want to spend all morning in bed and then go and play out they are not well
Yours sincerely,
Our Mum (Mrs.)
Frabjous joy.
The small niece-child is learning a bit of Spanish at school, which I think is no bad thing. As is the way with these things, it is the purest accident: one of the teachers happens to be Spanish, it's not in the school prospectus. The idea of a school prospectus bewilders me slightly as I'm of that age when you went to your local primary school unless your parents were particularly keen Roman Catapults in which case you went to the nearest R.C. similar. And that was the end of it, none of this trawling through prospectuses, web sites and league tables and poring one's way through the Ofsted reports. Not that I hold much faith in the latter anyway: every school I go past in the course of an ordinary week has a big banner strapped to the front boasting of its Ofsted plaudits ("Sums were enthralling" — Harold Hobsbon). It pisses me off to think that the money schools are spending on Ofsted Plaudit banners could fund a medium-sized county library service book fund for a year.
Anyway… We went to our local primary school, which was good because it was within walking distance, which was good because hardly anyone had a car and them that did only ever used it for their dads to go to and from work.
Our local school was out in the middle of a big field just by the motorway. Over the years the field got bigger and became a school playing field as the wilder edges were given over to dutifully-manicured grass. At the end of the field, behind the first houses of the estate, was a particularly wild stretch full of mustards and thistles and the occasional haunt of lizards. Through this ran the brook which started off from out of nowhere near the cornflake factory and ran for a couple of miles before trickling into the Irwell at Barton. At the school end it was a bit sluggish and fed a small pond choked with water mint. Further up you could squeeze through the railings behind the builder's yard and look for sticklebacks and stray frogs. I wonder how many kids these days get to see a stickleback; it is a concern.
Over yonder, where the shopping centre car park is now, there was a field of Friesian cows, gently a-mooing and chewing their cuds. Behind would be Barton Power Station, a miniature edition of Battersea. I miss that almost as much as the annual air show, three days of random aerospace history to-ing and fro-ing to the aerodrome for the Sunday event. Gypsy moths and a Vulcan bomber were a given. Sometimes there'd be the thrill of a Hurricane or Lockheed Lightning and, just that once, a Spitfire and a Lancaster. Sunday tea time would see everyone standing in their front gardens to watch the Red Arrows and then it was officially over.
Behind the school was the freight line that fed goods to the western half of what was then Europe's biggest industrial complex (that was the reason why we were semi-rural as far as the rates were concerned). Just the other side was a scabby field of scrubby grass, home to partridge, lapwing and many a courting couple. That's concrete now, with a warehouse stuck on it.
Now it's all cropped green fields, car parks and triple carriageways serving the shopping centre. The quiet Sunday afternoon walk behind the church and round to the main road is an expensive leisure complex. And kids trapped in the school run are taken round the shops to socialise them.
I'm under no illusions as to just how rough things were really in the sixties. But the brook at Longford, now culverted and covered over by concrete and beer cans and old mattresses was once lively with yellow flag irises and water boatmen and I don't think much of the swap.
Judging by the overgrown state of the near side of the garden we won't be short on wild garlic or boysenberries this year. The damson has just come into bloom and there's quite a lot of sturdy growth on the blackcurrants. This year I shall be paying a but more attention to the gooseberry bush; between the attentions of gooseberry sawfly and a rambling rose I thought I'd disposed of two years ago it had a fret time of it this year.
All this will no doubt be superintended by Hugh, the cat I do not have. Hugh's current sleeping quarters vary between my front doorstep, under the lilac tree and under next door's car. All this despite the fact that next door went to the trouble of buying it a covered cat bed and putting it inside their wash house doorway, well away from wind and rain. I am assured that This Is How Cats Are and it accords with all my experience of the beasts. Having been acquainted for nearly two years it surprised me that I've only just noticed that Hugh is, in fact, a little kiddie's cartoon cat. He really is a rectangle with little stubbly legs and a bit of a tail stuck on one corner.
The Small Object of Desire asked me if I was excited about a big work's project finally coming on stream. I confessed I was not. Puzzled, she asked why not. She thought I'd be relishing the challenge and the opportunities to get a pile of problems finally sorted. And so I should be.
But I'm bored with it.
It took ten years to get off the ground and this preparatory stage, which should have been two or three months tops is nearing it's first anniversary with every final end in sight being just an ephemeral dream.
If this project were Sim City I'd be at the stage now where I'd be fighting the urge to introduce an influenza epidemic to town.
As per usual, the garden is in a bit of a state. In part this is down to my lassitude; in part due to spending half of each week over at The Small Object of Desire's gaff. And then in January we decided to set to it:
Which is where I came a cropper. A particularly egregious bramble shoot ran from the bramble patch on the railway embankment, shot up the air, wrapped itself round a branch of the conifer about twelve feet up and then descended into my garden, rooting itself along the length of the back border. So I decided: I'm having you, you bastard.
And that's what I was doing when I fell out of the tree.
Luckily, no bones broken though quite considerable pain and a full Robert Newton Long John limp right up to the beginning of last week.
In the meantime, the garden's been full of snowdrops and crocus and a cluster of double hellebores has been doing the business since Christmas. Not one daffodil yet, dammit. The big pot that should be chock full of Salome and February Gold has been waterlogged all winter after an ants' nest clogged up the drainage holes (silly buggers). I have hopes of the venerable clump of King Alfreds under the big rose bush but I reckon I'll be doing some bulb-buying come the Autumn.
I intend filling all the gaps with foxgloves and ox-eye daisies.
When I get round to it.
Prudence, Caution, Deliberation.
The Hermit points to all things hidden, such as knowledge and inspiration,hidden enemies. The illumination is from within, and retirement from participation in current events.
The Hermit is a card of introspection, analysis and, well, virginity. You do not desire to socialize; the card indicates, instead, a desire for peace and solitude. You prefer to take the time to think, organize, ruminate, take stock. There may be feelings of frustration and discontent but these feelings eventually lead to enlightenment, illumination, clarity.
The Hermit represents a wise, inspirational person, friend, teacher, therapist. This a person who can shine a light on things that were previously mysterious and confusing.
I must have been doing the cat's shoelaces
when this lot came a-calling.
What Tarot Card are You?
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