Jeni Barnett

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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For five years Maria Elia came onto Good Food Live. She fused and combined all sorts of crazy ingredients; served up everything from prawn and watermelon curry to artichoke ice-cream; turned our heads with her humour and perspicacity and impressed us with her feisty food, which is just like her.
For five years Maria Elia has nagged me incessantly to go to her restaurant so that she could cook for me.
For five years I had said I would go. Tonight, with no more excuses left, the table was booked for 9.00 and made ready for three.
It’s a bloomin’ good job I did go this evening because after five years of stupendous cooking, tonight was the final night of Maria strutting her stuff at ‘Delfina’.
She’s off to pastures new. She’s done her bit in Bermondsey and is now taking her culinary witchery elsewhere. Jim was doing his bit at the Globe and intended to meet us there later.

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Happy New Year.
It is now, according to the Jewish calender, Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty Eight.
The year, 5768, is calculated by adding up the ages of certain people in the Bible back to the time of Creation. God knows who did the sums.
Now, since there is no mention of the birth of the Cosmos in the Bible one man’s Creation is another man’s Big Bang – but as there’s no mention of the Big Bang in the Bible I’m assuming that our ever expanding universe, and the resulting matter that’s been hurled in all directions by that catacylsmic explosion, is merely the figment of a Boffin’s imagination, either way, it’s all ended up in my daughter’s bedroom.
I am Jewish by mirth, which means my knowledge of Judaism could be written on the back of a matzo ball, although I’m told my inflection is a dead give away.
On Saturday night, Yom Kippur, a listener called up LBC and indignantly complained that I was on radio and why wasn’t I atoning for my sins in a Synagogue somewhere near me?
In true Rabbinical tradition I argued she shouldn’t have been listening to me in the first place but rather should be atoning for her sins in a Synagogue somewhere near her .
Either way I’m sure both our sins have been absolved.

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September 2007 is nearly over and along with millions of others I’m SAD. We’ve not even had an Indian summer to speak of. I’m afraid you find me watching telly on a Thursday afternoon as the charcoal grey clouds over the Thames threaten rain and Joseph Cotton, who also looks a little Seasonally Affected to me, chases off marauding Sioux Indians in glorious Technicolour. Watching mid week tv in the afternoon has to be one of the most depressing experiences since doing a voice-over in a damp basement in Baker Street with an engineer called Karl who’se at the end of a telephone line in Norwich.
I had the notion, earlier, to go to a tea-dance at the Waldorf Hotel but I’m expecting an old chum at 4.00 so they’ll be no waltzing for me although I shall serve up a passable cup of Silver Tip Darjeeling with a custard tart. By which time Mr.Cotton, as Mr.Custard, will have stood his last stand with the be-feathered hoards. I must admit though, that ever since I helped Beth write her Native American project 14 years ago,I cannot watch a Cowie without my blood boiling at the re-inventing of American history even if they are well shot.
Talking of which…..

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There are definite advantages to doing a foodie programme.
The organic box company sent me a box of organic fruit and a bag of organic potatoes. I unpacked them, gave two punnets of pink strawberries, 6 peaches and a kettle of kiwis to the daughter. I then placed the excess 4 tons of fruit in a gigantic bowl, topping off the still-life with three big hands of yellow bananas.
The organic box company sent me a box of organic fruit and a bag of organic potatoes – AGAIN! I unpacked them, threw away the pink strawberries which were covered in a white furry mould, hunted for some more bowls to accomodate so much produce then ate a handful of bananas to make space in the living room. The flat still looks like a plantation in Baranquilla with more bananas than the monkey house in London Zoo whilst my assortment of plums will shortly become my raisin d’etre.
The middle apple tree in my garden, has a broken branch as the apples are so huge and heavy. So I brought 9 apples back to the flat. They are so big I can only hold one pomme in my hand at a time. Since I have no more receptacles to display me fruit in, I have stuck the grapes in the fridge put the nectarines on top of the plums and the pears on top of the apples.
I am the only one in the flat who eats fruit; the offspring, in Camberwell, is only interested in her new sound system whilst the husband, who is coming to the end of his Global run, has very little time for a fruity pear. All in all me perks are going a pinky brown. But I’m not complaining. These are the kind of perks I like. I mean what could I bring home if I worked for Dyna Rod?

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