Month: October 2007

We have a shed in our garden, it’s called ‘Le Shed’. One half is my writing shrine the other is where music gets written. Jim has a shed, it’s called ‘His Shed’. We have another shed in the garden full of cobwebs, gardening tools and mouse nibbled seed packets, it’s not called anything.
I bought a book, sometime back, about men and their sheds and gave it to Jim as a gift. All the photos were of men proudly showing off their sheds.
Interesting that men like to have a little hidey hole they can hide in. We women make do and mend! (“That’s b****x!” says the old man, “women have houses.”)
Jim is no exception. His hidey hole smells of wood and french polish. It’s jam-packed with boys bumph, peanuts for the birds, somebody elses drum kit, a television that takes obsolete vhs tapes, an old vacuum cleaner and a desk with picture restoring equipment scattered over it. Jim can do anything as long as he has a bit of this, a scrap of that and some wood glue.
The reason I mention this is because of Paolo Proto the producer of ‘Food Poker’. Half way between our final voice over session for the final show Paolo excused himself to take a very important call.

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Dear Colin, me YAK?! I’ve never yakked in my life – talked the hind legs off a donkey, now that’s different.
And dear Janey B, if it ain’t the foxes running amok it’s the geese that are giving you goose flesh. What swine they are, okay, what web-footed migratory birds they are. Have you thought of abandoning the rural idyll and setting up home in the grimy smoke stacks of Attercliff?
No? I thought not.
I’m sleepy and it’s only 15.00 hours.
The rain is teeming down, the heating is on, my Thai lunch is lying heavily on my conscience, not to mention my waistband, and Jim has just left for the country.
His term of duty at the Globe is at an end, I complete Food Poker tomorrow, and with the trust that all free-lance performers have in the God of Luvviedom, I await whatever the Universe sends to me.
I’m sleepy because the clouds have dampened all sound, I can’t hear the sirens, seagulls or scooters so after the curtain man has been, which he’s threatened to do since January, I am going to put my feet up, finish my book, and maybe catch a few zzzz’s.

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Dear Anne, you are absolutely right. The Great Storm was 20 years ago. I should know that because the kid is now 20. I should also know that because I am twenty years older, over the hill and away with the fairies. Of course it was 20 years ago because 1987 is exactly 20 years ago from now.
I wrote ‘ten’ not ‘twenty’ because I had a senior moment tinged with a blonde highlight.
Thank you for putting me right.
Janey, I know foxes can be lethal BUT I have a bit of a problem with a pack of baying toffs jumping over hedges, blowing their horns and holding up their prey not unlike happy slapping thugs. I welcome all your comments on the blog, a short sharp debate never hurt anybody.
Thank you all for commenting. I love reading your thoughts.
This morning the mist hung over the hedges and the sun was fighting to get through when Jim and I left for town. I was in a black mood. It was nerves about the radio programme.

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I can hear the fireworks from Rotherfield Carnival.
You can see the purple, red orange and white sparkles way up in the sky.
Back in the Great Storm of 1987 the spire of Rotherfield Church went through the roof.
You can see it from my attic window, although on that fateful night ten years ago you couldn’t.
So many trees came down our normal walk was impossibly impassable.
Monkey Puzzle trees went down on the road to TWells. It took over an hour to do a normal 5 minute journey.
Our little cottage shook from side to side, although B, who was ten months old, slept through it all. Jim nearly slept through it until I wakened him.
Dinah, our beautiful cat of the time, had panicked and was running rings round her tail, she was completely terrified I tried to open the window to let her out when Jim said in a voice, reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’
‘Nooooooooooooo.’ it had a haunting resemblence to ‘Heeeeeere’s Johhny’ in a somnabulent kind of way, the gale was so strong the window wouldn’t open anyway.
We lost tiles and bits of chimney pot but that was it. A massive oak went down in the bottom field, blown out of the ground, it looked like it had been weeded, pulled up by its roots.
That was exactly ten years ago now the spire is back and the little village is celebrating its carnival.
How time flies.

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Autumn in the cottage has to be seen to be believed. Johnathan’s Virginia Creeper is the colour of bergundy wine. The Beech trees are alternately brown and copper, the Michaelmass daisies are out and the smell of fungi pushing through the earth is so strong, when I drove through the lanes the loamy smell wafted into the car.
I think this time of year suits the cottage. The darkness drifts in making for a womby feel.
When I walked through the door into the kitchen Jackson jumped up, bit of an overstatement that, he struggled up, pushing on his front legs and finally balancing himself so that he could walk round me several times.
He always greets family with whatever gift he can find jams it firmly between his teeth then offers it up for a tug.
A leaf, a stone, Jim’s rogue sock, a pair of underpants, today it was a blue slipper, he then follows you around the cottage until he’s satisfied that you aint going nowhere.
Dear Old Jackson. His back legs are spindly, and if he isn’t careful he slips on the flagstones in the kitchen, he’s thirteen on October 22nd which makes him 91 in dog years, I know how he feels.
To be honest I really don’t know how old Emmy our cat is. She was given to us by a woman who bred kittens in the back of her sofa.
Emmy gets fed on demand, although she hates fish. So we buy assorted sachets of roasted meat, poultry meat, organic meat, all in jelly. Give her meat in gravy and she sniffily walks off.
Her purr is very quiet and her preferred sleeping arrangement is in between me and Jim on our bed.
When we’re not here she and Jackson sleep very close to each other. They touch noses when they meet and if Emmy is monopolising Jackson’s bed he waits patiently for her to vacate it.
She’s terrorised him ever since she was a kitten and Jackson is such an old blob he lets her do anything. He wouldn’t survive in the jungle, Emmy would!.

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I dont see the point in having regrets. What is done is done.
If I had given any energy to the numerous events that have happened in my life, which in the cold light of day make even me blush, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.
Of course there are days when a mountain of madness descends and after the fifteenth chocolate Hob Nob one regrets having opened the packet in the first place, but mostly I forgive myself and forget.
The reason I mention this at all is for Chrissie in Carcassonne who wants to know about the book launch I should have been attending this evening. (Pressure of work, a cloudy mist, and the inability to stretch an hour four ways, made it impossible for me to go).
It was for the National Hospital Development Foundation and the launch of THE BOOK OF REGRETS to which I was a contributer.
Several folk were asked to write about an incident from their past that, had they chosen differently, would have resulted in an alternative life journey.
Now since all our journey’s lead to the cemetary and none of us gets out of this alive, I agreed to write something.
In my case the difference between uttering ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’ would have resulted in a totally different life experience – or not!
Had I said ‘No’ I probably wouldn’t be sitting in my flat in Battersea preparing for a radio show on LBC with a daughter at London University, a husband from Leeds, a best friend who was an original Bunny Girl and a past that includes more mistakes than Mad Mick made. But then, if Auntie Becky had gonads she would have been Uncle becky.
Out of all the regrets I could have had, which of course I don’t have because I don’t subscribe to regretting anything, but out of all the regrets I could have had, were I to have one at all, is the regrettable incident that took place some 40 years ago.

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