gasping

When I was about 12, my most treasured possession was my little blow-up dinghy.  A give-away from a mosquito spray company, it transported me across the coral reef of the Caribbean in front of my house to the deep azure waters beyond.  In it, I could avoid the treacherous sharp coral, and more importantly, the black, spiny sea-urchins.  If you were unlucky or clumsy enough to tread on one, the black needles would poison before you could call for help and you would die a hideously painful, though mercifully swift, death.

I would skim across the reef, stiff as a board, with my toes pointed into the front, paddling furiously to keep as much of the bottom flat as possible.  My snorkel and mask were permanently welded to my head.

It was a strange song I heard diving out from the reef; the tuneful froth from my mouth as I dove, the scratching hiss of sand and broken shell moving rhythmically far below me, the squeak and hum in my ears as I sank deep below the water.

I took my little plastic oar with me to poke about and move things - we were not so ecologically careful in those days.  Or perhaps it was the innocent cruelty of childhood that led me to shove my oar, quite literally, into a dark hole.

It stuck and I pulled hard, my flippered feet swelling me urgently back and forth.  My breath blew like thunder.  It came free with a brown thing attached - I thought it seaweed, and brushed at it with annoyance.  It was the rubbery, prehistoric spiral of an octopus that followed angrily out and we hung eye to eye in the turquoise water as I realised what it was.  I had already lost an oar to casual beach thieves so my priority was to keep this one.

Lucky for me, the beast cared more about his privacy and huffily billowed back into the gloom, while I shot, bubbles rattling from my open mouth, back to the surface.

This week, I have written off a car, celebrated a birthday and negotiated a sticky, tricky conversation.

I'm whizzing back up to the sun now.  I think I've still got an oar about me.  And I know the urchins will only sting, not kill.

What is to be seen

With all the new schools, new countries and new mathematical systems, I am mathematically illiterate.  I thought, fleetingly, that geometry was beautiful and precise and that algebra was essentially solving puzzles, but the majority of it was hieroglyphics to me.  With fingers, I can do any sum under twenty.  Sixty if the bots are at home and I can be arsed to take my wellies off.

I ended up doing Maths Studies for Baccalaureate - it is essentially colouring in tessellations and predicting whether you'll get an ace of hearts.  One of the few things I remember is truth tables - or was it logic?  The two were sadly not always synonymous in my chaotic school life.

Either way, I rather loved the spare, clear elegance of if and then.  If I get 39 points then I can escape to University.  If I hide my lighter up my sleeve, then I can have a sly fag before drama.   If I read Walden to the end without stabbing myself, then I will discover, allegorically, the secret of solitary self-reliance.

Poor Rose is mathematically blessed and will be doing GCSE a year early.  This weekend, as a sensible antidote to teenage hyperbole and contagious hysteria, school has taken her group far away to a forest, in tents, with three tons of pasta each and a squirty bottle of golden syrup.

Last night it threw down buckets and today is blowing wild and sunny; that fabulous, illogical weather that polka-dots the pavements with blossom confetti and induces madness with jangling new leaves and gusts of blinding, sunlit rain.

They will be soaking and starving when they get back; they have no phones, only maps and notebooks. They have to record fauna and count wild ponies and species of meadow-flower.  Thoreau would approve.

Thank heaven she's good at maths; it would be a nightmare removing those great sodden boots every time she got to eleven.

Five things that make you crazy

Sit still.  

Ten more minutes of this 

while we pipe in a bit of Clinton Ford 

and you'll be right as rain and 

back running the country in no time.

This month's topic for BIO made me panic a little bit - how to distill those years of lunacy and the subsequent mending into only five things.

I have experienced both depression and mania and while I can't claim the former was any fun, the latter can be helpful. Set up a business in an afternoon, write a dissertation in days, renovate a house single-handedly.

But it's bloody tiring being bonkers, and so, after many many years of talking and reading and crying and rocking in corners and soul-searching and all the tediously predictable things people do in the search for peace of mind, and which, au fond, are only of interest to oneself, here are my top five ways to shred your sanity.

1. Being surrounded by unhealthy people
Especially if you are of a bent to mend and they are of a bent to drag along self-indulgent and self-inflicted drama.  Look closely - is it really such bad, bad luck all the time?  And is it really your problem or do you want to be needed too much?   Either way, when the curtain goes up on another act, politely excuse yourself and find a bathroom to clean.

2. Not getting enough sleep or exercise
Everything looks worse when you're exhausted and unfit.  Get out of your house and walk about; at the very least you can look for interesting new places to be glum in.  I guarantee you will feel marginally less so by the end of a brisk walk.

3. Eating crap processed pretend food
Make yourself soup.  Everyone can manage that.  Nourish yourself, body and soul.  If you eat rubbish, it gives you the absolute mean reds.  And its horribly inelegant.

4. Pleasing everyone else before yourself
I find martyrdom desperately unattractive.  I also find many martyrs want far too much recognition for their sacrifices than real-life saints would ever expect.  They are also often passive aggressive nightmares.  And frequently lack direction and purpose, so use the excuse of putting other needs first to mask this.  As long as you are not unkind or neglectful, following your own path will help keep you off the meths.

5. Spending time in the wrong place - mentally, emotionally, physically
Tough as hell to admit you're not where you should be, and often a nightmare to extricate, but really listen to your instincts.  You won't be the first person to have made a mistake. And anyone who judges you for it should be sent immediately to Coventry for a long long time.

Don't go too far though, there's a little bit of madness in all creative people.

The broad wing of time

Seriously? 

You look THAT much older 

than fifteen years ago.

Edward turned thirty the night we got our first Labour Government in 18 years.  It kicked off a period of almost-American hugging of strangers, singing in the street and crying in public.*

None of which I realised at the time, as I had got fantastic tickets to a lovely little play and sold my soul for a seat at the most fabulous luvvies restaurant for post-play deliciousness, expensive cocktails and shameless, libellous eavesdropping.

At the interval, having sat with a smacked-arse face through the first half, he announced he wanted to go home.  I had wondered how a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative would deal with grinning Tony and the un-English leaping and whooping, so I was not too surprised.

I suggested we went to the restaurant early and drown his election sorrows.  To my surprise, he declined, and mooched off along the river, glumly and silently ignored the pile of presents, and went to bed.

It turned out that he was gutted at the end of his youth.  Having previously skipped about in a state of Peter-Pan-dom, he could not believe he was a grand old man of thirty.  It took days for him to even realise that Labour were in power.

I will spare you the carnage that was his 40th.

He is 47 tomorrow.  We have a pile of hidden presents, some stashed fizz should he wake up with a smile and some very strong coffee if not.  The children know not to mention numbers and to exclaim hourly at how much younger he looks than last year.  I have planned nothing more elaborate than a walk on the beach with the dog.  We might stop for a piece of cake if the storm clouds keep away.

A new Government is, it seems, totally beyond any of us.

*Of the British public, you understand.  Not Edward.  In a million years.

The just and the unjust

You may laugh, but I've emptied a whole selection box in here, 

plus a couple of eggs I nicked from the bots 

and the left-over cooking chocolate.  

That should do me until Monday.

We had a delicious houseful over Easter - all arrived with chocolate and one with a new game of murder.  As we were to be together for several days, we each picked a name, place and object.  The deadline was 9pm Easter Sunday and before then, you had to get your victim into the place assigned and hand them the object - thus killing them.

There were several false starts - Edward insisted the pub was a viable location, even for the children, and Rose minded dreadfully that boys planned to be in her huge, perfectly-filed wardrobe with handfuls of raspberries and a football boot.

I was so distracted by hiding chocolate and refereeing the church refuseniks and the tradition-at-all-cost-niks that I was murdered within minutes.  'Mum, can you sign this for school, you need this green pen, ha! you're muu-uu-rdered!'

The others strung it out and showed remarkable ingenuity; a chili in the newsagent, reading specs in the shed.  There was an elaborate hoax involving a blocked sink and chisel and some jokes in very poor taste about nails and crosses.

The Pretty One and I went to church by ourselves in the end, pretending religious choice and freedom; in reality, cowards in the face of wrangling sleepy six-footers into chinos and clean shirts.

On the walk there we remembered the time when, as little girls, we got dreadful giggles at a bearded man snoring like a buffalo in our pew.   Our Granny was furious and worse, disappointed, and we walked home with downcast faces and hearts.  Just as we reached our drive, she pulled out a little packet of chocolate buttons and let us share them.

I'd like to think she gave us wisdom too, but neither of us can remember anything she said, only the painful scrubbing we had to subsequently endure with a spat-on tissue to remove the chocolate evidence.

We are many decades on now, and so perfectly capable of removing, from our almost-50-year-old faces and fingers, the traces of praline and dark chocolate that we had stashed in our handbags with the collection fiver and savoured, smugly and secretly, on our walk home after the service.  Full of peace, laughs and Godiva,  the Pretty One was a sitting duck as we passed the bus stop.  "You've got the evidence all over your chops, quick, use this bit of loo roll.'  Murdered. Best bit of Easter.

ale poured out of an ugly hand

Get an arse on, Mary, before he comes round.  

Seven gins gives us thirty minutes. 

Get the car keys and his wallet and let's scarper.

At University, I had a boyfriend with a family house in Cornwall and an Alfa Romeo.  It was a silly relationship, based on drama and mutual disappointment, the sort you can only indulge in when you are young and have the hours to fritter.  Blinded by my love for Daphne Du Maurier, I accepted an invitation for a few days in Cornwall.

I did not drive and he thought I should.  On the way, we stopped half-way across Bodmin Moor at a deserted airfield, for me to take the wheel of his pride and joy.

More fool him.

After the lesson, which left us both shaking and hissing in inaudible fury, we stopped at Jamaica Inn. It's a low stone building that appears unexpectedly at the side of the road and had, to my imaginative eye, a brooding and ominous air.

It was empty apart from a parrot, a perfect authentic touch. The fog rolled in, the gin glasses emptied, the arguments grew more circular and obtuse and we were forced to stay the night.  I thought it would be an adventure.

More fool me.

I didn't sleep a wink.  The lightbulb in the bedside lamp flickered on and off; everything creaked or moaned or slammed.  I sat up trying to start more debate so I would have company; he snored on. I was probably a fanciful young lady, but I did feel chilled and afraid and was very pleased to leave the next day.  We broke up soon after.  I still miss that car.

The BBC have just done an adaptation of Jamaica Inn.  It has been slated by viewers unable to follow the plot; it is apparently full of indistinct mumbling and bad diction.  Reviews are full of irritated complaint at the way the incoherent muttering ruins the storyline and alienates the characters.  I remember the feeling well.

to hum and buzz

There are, apart from the obvious, certain things which set men wide apart from women.  One is the ability to follow a game of cricket.  Arbitrary rules and indolent play over several languid days, frequent breaks for tea-and-sandwiches, several changes of  all-white clothes, and indeterminate outcome? That pastime could never have been invented by the practical, efficient, gluten-avoiding, answer-demanding sex.

Similarly, the ability to wallow for hours in the bath, listening to commentary on cricket and perfecting the art of tap-turning-with-one-toe is for chaps.  Edward assures me that the addition of a sock, preferably a single gorgeous cashmere Christmas one, stuffed in the overflow to ensure maximum water levels, is sublime.  And invented by males at boarding school where the hot water was seriously rationed. I have pointed out that this is 2014 and he is a grown man with charge of the energy supplies to this house, but I think he still enjoys a quiet British rage against the machine, and who am I to deny him?

He was happily swilling about this morning, reading the Delhi Times online, when I wrecked the day by announcing I was going to cut the grass.  This too is a man's job and he was immediately torn. Relinquish the perfect, dangerously-filled bath or let someone loose on the lawn who may leave it with wobbly stripes? In the end, the bath won and I was allowed the key to The Shed.

I made a complete hash of it, of course.  I swerved round clumps of pretty daisies and went across instead of down and stopped to throw balls for the dog which left alarming bald patches because I forgot to stop the machine.  The MCC groundsman would have fainted.

I did learn, though, why men insist it's their job.  The sun shone, the smell of cut grass is legendarily sublime; the noisy mower meant I could ignore the squabble over who finished the milk that floated out of the open kitchen doors; emptying soft thuds of emerald cuttings into the compost heap was both delicious and satisfying; the smug cup of tea afterwards was heaven.

I've also developed a satisfying old-man grunt when I get up, reminding everyone that I've worked hard and I'm feeling a little stiff.  My turn in the bath, I think.