I WANT A MEMORY HAT

Lloyd Lee as Charles Dickens

 We've been enjoying a Book Festival in the town this week and as a small contribution from the theatre we staged a one man show 'The Squire of Gadshill,'  in which Charles Dickens reflects on his life and work.  This took place last Saturday evening and there I was all togged  up in Victoriana to serve behind the bar.  Lloyd Lee (who has taken this show all over Britain) looks the spitting image of Dickens and I am tempted to say sounds like him too, though I don't know if any of us know exactly what he sounded like.  But Dickens used to put on performances in which he read extracts from his novels, which Lloyd re-enacts in this show.

As Dickens he also talks about his working habits and recounts being asked in America whether the Muse was 'always upon him - or whether he had to coax it?'   And as it happens this was a question that I discussed with the lovely Kath Eastman when I met her for lunch a couple of days later when she came over to Cowbridge.

Dickens replied that frequently he had no ideas at all about his writing and just sat at his desk making dots and doodles on the paper.  But, and I think this may be the crucial thing, he always sat there 'until his time was up.'  This, he elaborated, was from ten in the morning to two in the afternoon (or four if writer's block had given way to writer's inspiration).

In passing I find it strange that this phenomenon of 'writer's block' appears only in the literary world (or is this just my ignorance?)  Is there such a thing as 'painter's block?' or 'potter's block?' Did Mozart ever sit at a piano, his head empty of musical ideas? Composer's block? And what about the engineers among us?  Do they have bridge builder's block?

Anyway, I have decided, given the inspiration of winning the little Creative Writing Competition that was a part of the Book Festival, that I shall now consign the label business to the afternoons - and if necessary the evenings as well if we are busy - and so keep the mornings free for scribbling.  I have resurrected a piece of military history that I first wrote on a typewriter in 1983. It was never published then and no wonder as it is terribly clunkingly written.  But with the centenary of the central incident fast approaching I have decided to re-write it, hopefully in a shorter and rather more pacey style.  It seems a shame to let all that research go to waste and I always intended to return to it when I had time.  I am about two thirds of the way through and so this particular labour will not be a long one.

I shall then return to Boraya, the Chocolate Factory in St Petersburg novel that Kath keeps urging me to get on with and about which I think about regularly.  So it will be as well to get my writing habit well established: nine until one with a half hour break for a cup of tea and urgent emails.

The best plans, however.......for yesterday morning I wasn't at my scribbling desk in front of the laptop but instead was taking the laptop to an appointment with the Genius Bar at the futuristic Apple Store in Cardiff, where no-one looks real and where everyone seems to speak in a strange mid-oceanic dialect, though I have to say they are all über helpful and ultra polite.   Apple - the Company - have done something amazingly clever, but the result is that last week, not having the right up to date software apparently, I couldn't receive emails for three days (except in the most cumbersome manner) and the whole computer slowed up as though you had put a tablespoon of treacle in the works.

The man on the Genius Bar fiddled around helpfully and quickly and there I was: sorted. He didn't even try to sell me a new computer.  He suggested I might like to buy some more memory, which could be easily and cheaply done. Unfortunately, only for the computer, I, on the other hand, would have to make do with the ageing memory I already have.  Why can't you buy memory for the brain? You could wear a little memory hat with chips inside it. The brain seems to communicate with waves and just this week we saw film of a paralysed woman operating a robot with her brainwaves. So why not?  I might suggest it to Apple.

THREE HAPPENINGS AND A FUNERAL

Zvernec Monastery, Vlora, Albania

It's been something of a four weddings and a funeral week, though without the weddings exactly.  We assisted at a funeral though, and sent Ann Patterson Daniels - aka Aged Mother - off to the strains of Nimrod and Abide With Me.  By the agency of some ethereal intervention, Aged Mother parted the clouds and the sun shone all day.  She still seems not so far away,  I feel her presence, watching and waving; just itching to tell the story again of her grandfather, the Mayor of Harrogate.

Still one out, one in, as they say, though the timing was unfortunate.  Aged Mother missed the arrival of Butterbean by just a few days. Had one lived longer, or the other arrived sooner, they might have overlapped and said 'hello' to each other.  To explain, Butterbean is my Younger Daughter's second child, born last week, and both have just escaped from the clutches of the hospital.  Clazza is tired and still in some pain - like having barbed wire in your girdle - but she is mending.  'That's the trouble with childbirth, admitted the daughter of a friend once, 'it doesn't half smart!'

Tiny as ever, Butterbean still has no proper name, though as everyone seems to like Butterbean calling her something else seems now quite redundant.  All sorts of exotic appellations have been canvassed but the last I heard was that the hot money was now behind Isla or Alice.  Isla might reflect her Scottish roots and sit nicely alongside that of her second cousin, Iona.  If they call her Alice we shall just have to pretend that she is English and be on the look out for rabbit holes.  Should you enjoy punting on outsiders, though, you could still place a bet on Xanthe or Amethyst, dark horses indeed, but still under starter's orders.

And then suddenly it was my own birthday, which I am ashamed to say I rather let pass without even so much as taking a chilled bottle of Sancerre out of the fridge to the bottom of the garden and drinking a toast to myself for having lived so long.  Mind you the weather would have rendered the bottom of the garden experience distinctly soggy and it wouldn't have been only the wine that was cold.  My reading matter would have been limp and the wine no longer dry.   Besides, we were expecting a delivery of an order for 83 kilograms of DVD boxes which we still sell from time to time.

So instead in the evening we motored over to Marks and Spencer, dined at the Deli counter on Peking Duck and I bought a new linen jacket to replace an old friend that had started to look even older than me.  Friends though were very kind with cards, calls and messages of support.

If these were the major events of the week then there were some minor upturns too, including a telephone call on Sunday morning to say that I had won first prize in the Cowbridge Book Festival's Creative Writing Competition.  Wow!  The first time ever I had won something and the first practical indication that I may not totally be wasting my time if I try, as our little labels business winds down, to earn a few supplementary coppers from the keyboard.   So far I have entered four story and one novel competitions this year and the score so far is one success, one failure, and three to be determined.  Still, even one out of five can't be too bad, can it?  I am encouraged and cheered.

In closing I must mention an email from my marine biologist friend whose 75th birthday this week it also was.  (Not that I am 75 I hasten to add). The missive came from an internet café somewhere in northern Albania where he has been backpacking by himself in search of medieval monasteries.  Having worked all his life for international organisations he seems never to be content unless he is travelling and regularly takes himself off to distant corners of the world simply to be on the move.  He walks and stays in bed and breakfasts.  I have noticed the same thing in other people:  travel is like a drug, they have to keep moving, and while I greatly admire the spirit I know that I am a very different person and prefer to read about countries without maps rather than experiencing them first hand.Above all I need to feel a connection.

So I prefer to go to places that are familiar and to this end we are off at the end of the month again to the Mill where Jim and Rosie have kindly once again invited us.  I shall have to arrange a birthday celebration there.  The Sancerre is cheaper and there is shade under the walnut trees.

The picture (without which no blog is ever complete) is of an Albanian Monastery.  I cannot guarantee that this is one that my friend has seen and I am rather hoping that you haven't seen it (or any other Albanian Monastery) either.  I certainly hadn't seen any before and now that I have I am not sure that they are markedly different from other such medieval institutions, but of course you (and my friend) may disagree. 

WELCOME, BUTTERBEAN

Mother Clazza and Butterbean

My granddaughter arrived in the late afternoon of the 2nd May,  a grey day on which it didn't rain.  Mother and baby are fine.   The birth happened in the Heath hospital, a vast institution on whose site there has been some sort of establishment since Neolithic times.  It may well have been a hospital then.  Once something becomes a hospital the tendency is to continue, for why would you do otherwise? Each generation adds a bit or knocks down a bit until six thousand years later you arrive at what you have now. Anyway it was not to talk about hospitals that I began this piece.

Lacking a formal name - the naming pot is full of potential names but none has yet been extracted - she is called Butterbean since she was the size, well, of a butterbean, when first we learned of her existence.  (The Butterbean is a species of Lima bean apparently, whatever that is, or so I learned when I looked the name up).  When I did this I saw also that the name had been adopted by an American heavyweight boxer, otherwise called Eric Esch.  He wasn't born on 2nd May but on August 3rd and in addition to being a heavyweight boxer he is also a mixed martial artist.  He is probably a nice friendly chap in reality but his photographs show someone that you might not want to cross in a hurry.  If ever there was someone of whom it might be said 'he will grind your bones to make his bread' then Eric Esch looks to be he.

Which seemed to me to be the very antithesis of our Butterbean who is a mere scrap of a thing weighing in at just 5lbs and 10 ounces and very cuddly to boot.  She now begins the long road - actually a surprisingly short road if you are a grandparent - of putting on weight and filling out and learning to sit up and then to crawl and then to toddle and then to talk and then finding out how the world works and that water is wet and fire burns and it hurts when you fall over and the thousand and one other things that have to be learned before you can even set one foot in front of the other on your way to school.

As an aside, you'd think, wouldn't you, that by now we would have evolved some way of simply plugging the brain with 'applications' - maybe delivered by headphones during sleep?  Could you download how to walk, for instance, or to make apple pie, or a history of all the kings and queens of Britain?  After all, birds seem to inherit complex nest building patterns in their DNA.  They don't spend time learning under the mother's wing - the weaver bird just goes out and weaves, termites build vast citadels, bees talk, bats can use sonic radar, all manner of species navigate across the oceans while the human infant is still learning which end of the spoon goes where.

Still maybe she will do all these things too. For the moment Butterbean is just a gorgeous little thing with blue eyes and dark hair and a contented expression when her head is next to your heart.  You can practically feel some mysterious bonding process at work.  And though babies are common enough each baby is special and reminds us that we were all once in this small and vulnerable state with minds empty and vacant, waiting to be filled with all the wonderful world has to offer.

And she is fortunate to be born on 2nd May - the same day, incidentally, as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia and James Dyson, the inventor and vacuum cleaner man. The same day as Engelbert Humperdinck, the singer, and David Suchet, the actor; as Manfred von Richtofen - the Red Baron - fighter pilot, and Jerome K Jerome who wrote the funniest book in the English language (Three Men in a Boat).  And should Butterbean ever find herself in Poland then her birthday will fall on the Polish National Flag Day and she will find that everyone is saluting her.  Na zdrowie!

So you see it is quite true what the horoscopes say about people born on the 2nd May being full of artistic and intellectual creativity.  They make extraordinarily good writers of novels, apparently, and good artists, too, if given pencil and paintbrushes.  On the other hand they have little interest in making money; they would far rather do something that they love doing, preferably in one of those professions in which the flow of income can best be characterised as being in a state of flux.

I have discovered my mistake.  I should have been born a week earlier - on the 2nd - instead of, as I was, on 9th May, for which the omens are not nearly so good. Alan Bennett (who was also born on 9th May) is perhaps the exception and he has clearly exhausted all the artistic talent available to Taureans born on this date.  Instead, all the boundless stock of Taurean talent is invested in those arriving on 2nd May and so, dear Butterbean, we shall expect of you (naturally in an entirely unpressurising sort of a way) great things.

RIP AGED MOTHER

Mrs Anne Daniels aka Agèd Mother

Agèd Mother has just died at the age of 90.  She was the mother of a close family friend who, since her husband's death, had lived partly with her daughter here, and partly with her son in York.  So we got to see quite a bit of her and she enlivened any gathering with her stories about how she had first gone into service with Lady Fermoy and later qualified as a fitter to repair and test aeroplanes during the second world war.   I used to write about her from time to time and so here is a piece that I wrote about three years ago when she would have been 87 and wheelchair bound for most of the time.  Nevertheless, always game for an outing.

I am pushing Agèd Mother around Waitrose again. She, in her wheelchair, attentively scans the aisles as we go up and down looking at the whiskies and the toilet rolls, the yoghurts and the shampoos.

I have written about Agèd Mother before. She is 87 and is sadly now feeling the effects of age in her knee and memory departments. “I know I have seen something that I want,” she says, as we go patiently back and forth, her eyes alighting eagerly on some scrap of coloured packaging only to dismiss it with a “No, it wasn’t that! What was it?”

Being an even-tempered and long-suffering sort of person I resist the urge to mutter, “I don’t know you haven’t told me,” but can’t help thinking it all the same. I mean it is not even as if this was my mother, though everyone of course thinks she is. She is actually Helen’s mother, but I have been brought along as, so often on these shopping expeditions that J and Helen organise, I am thought ‘good’ with Agèd Mothers. I use the plural because Helen has two: her own and her husband’s with a combined age of 185.

Helen and J each have each a trolley. I am the safe pair of hands on the wheel chair.  Actually I don’t mind at all. Agèd Mother, in her own way, is quite fun, and the whole quasi-Buddhist exercise of subjugating the self leaves one quite serene. I may very well be in the same helpless state myself in only a handful of years. If so I want to know I have credits in the Karma bank.

In small doses the very old and the very young are no different. All that is required is the ability to remain unembarrassed and an aptitude for one-sided conversations on Joyce Grenfell lines for which shopping provides splendid opportunities.

“Let’s look at the orange juice, shall we? Mmm, what sort shall we buy? Do you like orange juice? It can be rather acid, don’t you think, though mixed with olive oil it is supposed to be good for the bones, or rather the joints. Does that make a difference? I mean if it were good for the bones could one expect that it would be good for the joints as well?”

I pause for the response: “I don’t really know, dear - but orange juice, yes! Did I ever tell you my grandfather was the Mayor of Harrogate......” This is the signal for rapid intervention. The Harrogate story lasts ten minutes and is recited faithfully on each and every occasion we meet and sometimes more than once. I plunge in heavily to effect a diversion.

“Ah yes, Harrogate,” I say. “Beautiful town. But I wonder whether they drank orange juice there. At the mayoral meetings, I mean. You know, to wash down the toffee? Did your grandfather eat toffee, and if so how were his teeth?....” and so we go on.

If all else fails I recite Shakespeare to her: though to mutter ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings........,’ can serve to raise the eyebrows amongst the unwary.

Written down like this it all sounds horribly patronising, but it does work. She doesn’t know what we are talking about, but then neither do I really. But we both are, on the face of it, having an intelligent afternoon’s conversation. I ask her to hold a random carton of orange juice while we beetle off in search of J’s or Helen’s trolley to put it in.

We are having a similar conversation about bread flour which, I tell her, I need to purchase. “There’s flour here,” she says observantly from her position two feet away from where I park the wheelchair to browse. Indeed, she is right! Bags and bags of it. What a surprise! But this is Waitrose after all.

I am looking for a special flour, I tell her confidentially, one that has grains in it. I ask her opinion of granary flours. She considers the matter gravely and confesses she can’t tell, or doesn’t know, or has forgotten. But she says this most positively and we are both satisfied that this is a valid exchange.

We are joined at this point by a young woman holding a bunch of flowers in search of some Canadian extra strong, reinforced gluten, flour in a black bag with a red maple leaf, which happens at that point to be directly behind Agèd Mother’s wheelchair.

“Look at these lovely flowers,” she says to Agèd Mother, her attention temporarily diverted from flours to flowers. She thrusts them under Agèd Mother’s nose. “I couldn’t resist them.”

“Oh those are nice!” says Agèd Mother beaming. I move the wheelchair to one side and tell her we are looking for a flour with grains in. She replies not to me but to Agèd Mother (which makes me want to complain that it’s the people in wheelchairs that are supposed to be invisible not their hardworking pushers) telling her that the aforementioned Canadian flour is excellent because the strong gluten prevents pumpkin seeds with their sharp edges from cutting through the dough and ending up at the bottom of the loaf.

We are rapidly bordering surrealist territory. Agèd Mother enters the spirit of things by nodding sagely and opining helpfully, “Of course it does.”

“I suppose you’ve done a lot of cooking?” ventures the young woman wistfully, on the basis of those four words, which have now elevated Agèd Mother to the status of a sage to be deferred to on all matters of baking.

I will say this for Agèd Mother, she knows how to milk a situation. She stretches out an arm and says in a stage whisper. “I used to bake for Lord and Lady Fermoy, you know, Princess Diana’s grandparents.” And indeed she did when she was a girl in her teens and before she ran away at the outbreak of war to become an aircraft fitter, leaving the Fermoy kitchens bereft of her culinary talents.

But the Fermoy story and how she first introduced the name of Diana to the household is another well-scratched record. Luckily, at this point, fate intervened in the shape of the young woman’s husband. Grabbing a bag of flour, we executed a hand-brake turn and sped off to the safer pastures of the jellies and the jams.

SAVE COWBRIDGE CATTLE MARKET

Here we are preparing to set off

Every Tuesday big lorries loaded with bleating livestock descend on Cowbridge, destined to be bought and sold under the auctioneer's hammer.  The sales are quite a sight and visitors often go along to hear the incomprehensible babble so beloved of auctioneers the world over as your man in the Barbour jacket leans over a pen full of grey, recalcitrant sheep, occasionally poking at them with some species of stick and spouting his unique language.  Eventually the lorries and trailers that have been parked on the flat ground at the rear of the market come up again and the sheep, or what not, go off on return trips to new homes or, in some less fortunate cases, go off on single trips to the abattoir.  Welsh lamb being always at a premium

Of course, the market is not what it was.  Not since Foot and Mouth, not since the general decline in agriculture.  Nevertheless our market is one of only three in the whole of South Wales - the others being at Carmarthen and Abergavenney; and Abergavenney's market is under threat, we hear.

As indeed is ours!  That was why 'up to 1,000 people' - according to the television whose voice is always to be believed - led by the Mayor, the Town Crier, various elected notables and an ancient tractor - gathered yesterday to protest against plans by the Vale of Glamorgan Council to sell for housing and their own gain the land on which the market stands.

Now there has been a market in Cowbridge since medieval times.  When Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, in 1254 granted Cowbridge its first official Charter, he did so on the basis that this was a market town.  The clue is in the name after all, which is also reflected in our Welsh name 'Y Bont Faen,' which means 'The Cattle Bridge.'  In those medieval times the site now occupied by the Market, which lies just outside the town walls, was used for archery practice.  The roadway is still called 'The Butts'   The market moved here in 1954, seven hundred years later, (the yeomen archers having disappeared by then) and the land being in the ownership of the Cowbridge Rural District Council, the successors of the Council set up under Richard de Clare's Charter.

Sadly, twenty years later Cowbridge RDC became absorbed in a newly created Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council based in industrial Barry a dozen miles away, a town with which Cowbridge has always had an uneasy rural-urban relationship.  But the Vale Council, which of course is dominated by Barry with a dozen times the population of Cowbridge, now owns the land on which the yeomen of Cowbridge once practised their archery and on which generations of farmers have sold their livestock ever since; and the Vale is short of cash.  So it is proposing to sell the site for housing.

True, the Council has allocated land elsewhere in the Vale for a new market - but as no-one has money to build a new market, this isn't a real solution at all.  If the Cowbridge livestock market closes then the lorries full of animals will have to rattle away on a round trip of almost 100 miles to Carmarthen - which won't do the animals, or the environment, any good at all.

But beside these threats the town will suffer in a wider way if the cattle market site were to be sold off.  As you might imagine it is not easy to practise archery in small spaces.  So the cattle market site is actually quite large. This makes it easy on a market Tuesday to accommodate the lorries that bring the beasts here and then take them away again.  And as the market is usually finished by midday and only operates once a week, the market operators kindly make their acreage available to supplement Cowbridge's limited parking facilities by some 200 additional spaces.  All these would be lost if the market site were to be sold, making it even harder for shoppers and visitors to the town.

Moreover, our theatre is located at the furthest end of the Cattle market site.  (It is even called 'The Market Theatre'). The Council have generously told us that we can stay where we are - and so can the nearby Scout Hall - but of course they are proposing to take away our parking. Now many among our audiences are elderly and some are disabled. If we had no adjacent car parking we should not be viable any more.  Which sounds very much as though the Council wish to close us without obviously being seen to do so.  I imagine the same thing applies to the Scout Hall.

Here we are at the Cattle Market site.  Our Theatre stands on the far side of the cattle sheds

Next door to the Cattle Market site are the Town's playing fields.  These also the Vale Council has its eye on and calculating what they might be expected to fetch as building land.  They are not yet in any plan, but ask the simple question where people who bring their children to play rugby or cricket games on the playing fields leave their cars, and the answer is of course on the Cattle Market site and if this is sold and the parking lost then the utility of the playing fields is hit as well.  If they are no longer used, then, the Council will argue, why not sell them?  Already the Council have abandoned the upkeep of the public lavatories, formerly provided for those using the fields and attending the Cattle Market.

If only Cowbridge could run its own affairs again.  We have a lovely Town Hall and an oak panelled Council Chamber. In his ceremonial robes our Mayor looks like a medieval monarch.  We have aldermen in top hats that are the envy of any of our twin town visitors.  But this ancient council is powerless over anything more important than a park or a cemetery.  That they oppose to a man and woman selling the Cattle Market site is of no consequence.

So in case anyone reading this is moved by our plight, which could so easily one day be your plight too, could they please write to the Vale of Glamorgan Council and tell them to leave the Cowbridge's Cattle Market site alone.  Because you want to come and visit, don't you?  And if you do come and visit I am sure that you want to be able to park your car.  And perhaps visit Cowbridge's Theatre.  And, you never know, you might even have animals to sell, too.  Or, in the middle of the night when the cars and lorries have gone and the site is just the big and empty square that it ever was, you might be tempted to take up your longbow again and practice your archery.

ON A BICYLE MADE FOR TWO

My neighbour Annie and I used to work for the same consultancy firm back in the nineties and we both became friendly with the firm's librarian and researcher, Verna, who worked in the company's Edinburgh office.  We all used to meet once a year at the Christmas Party - a dinner and disco affair at some country inn in which we (and spouses too) were put up for the night.  The party went on until lunch the next day.

I hadn't seen Verna and her husband for more than a dozen years, although we had exchanged Christmas cards.  She and her husband are great cyclists, or rather they are great tandemists, possessing two tandems (lightweight and heavyweight - obviously -) on which they tour, not only their own country, but other people's as well.  They have even ridden across part of America, I understand.

Thus far they have never managed to tandem into Wales however, so it was with great pleasure that Annie informed me that they had announced their intention to come and that she was putting them up for a couple of days. We all had dinner together last night and they asked me if I could provide an itinerary of about 30 miles for them to cycle around today.

We are blessed here in the Vale of Glamorgan with a wealth of interests.  What to choose? I sent them to a Neolithic burial cairn (two if they don't mind a small detour); a power station; an interesting old stone town and the site of Wales' first monkish university;  the castle bought and restored by newspaper proprietor Randolph Hearst which now houses an international school and has gardens that run down to the sea; the lightouses and spectacular seascapes at Nash Point; the village of Ewenny whence came the yew wood for the longbows for Agincourt and the interior of whose priory was captured in a painting in the 1780's by Turner and which hasn't change one jot since;  the haunted Pwllgwrach, around which you can hear foxhounds baying on windy nights in winter (legend has it that at the same time that Turner was painting his picture of Ewenny the then hunt master at Pwllgwrach was being hunted and torn to pieces by his hounds for the crime of getting a poor servant lass in the family way and, according to some accounts,  murdering her as well).  Until recently the house was lived in by the Agatha Christie's nephew to whom were bequeathed all the rights to 'The Mousetrap.'  

The house also boasts a quintail, which, in case you don't know, is a bit of jousting equipment - a white metal figure with a sword that can swivel around a vertical pole.  This you gallop towards with your lance under your right arm and the object of the exercise is to strike the quintail in its exact centre.  If you do this then nothing happens: you can count yourself lucky and proceed to the jousting tournament. But should you miss and strike the quintail off centre then the device swings around and the quintail clobbers you with its sword as you go past.   Thus at the price of a sore back you progress.

I did offer them the Roman silver mines as well, but as these lie on the A48 (which Verna thought sounded excessively like a main road) they eschewed them.  In fact you can't actually see anything; you have to be told that somewhere in that bank beneath the gorse bushes you may discover a drift, long since collapsed or filled in, where once folk with names like Caractacus and Spartacus hacked their way into the limestone in search of silver for their goblets and lead for their central heating.

We shall have to see how the intrepid couple get on.  They are coming here for aperitifs this evening and no doubt some tapas type food as well and if the sunshine continues we shall sit in the garden.  Judging from the clouds however the weather forecast may be right and at seven o'clock we shall be watching the rain.

I cannot leave the subject of tandeming, however, with mentioning that I once had a chance to ride (and unfortunately wreck) a four-wheeled tandem, made from two ordinary bicycles welded together and with some clever linkage that turned the handlebars in parallel.  It was like a four-wheeled tricycle, I suppose, and was painted a rich burgundy colour.  Sadly, one day when I was riding the contraption alone - my friend who had built it had ridden it over to my house - I went around a corner too fast, whereupon the wheels simply buckled.  The sensation (to continue with the jousting theme) was not unlike a horse falling beneath you. You see you can't lean over on such a four-wheeled contraption and a bicycle wheel has no sideways strength.  So that was the end of my tandeming career and I have never been on another multiple person machine, although Verna did say that she would let me have a go on hers.  I wonder if she should trust me?

The picture, I am afraid, is not from the family collection but is courtesy of the ever dependable Wikipedia

ON SALMON FISHING AND CHILDREN

The Wild Atlantic Salmon

There's a trailer doing the rounds for a film out shortly: 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.'  I drifted into a charity shop on Monday and quite by chance saw the book there and bought it.  And then consumed two afternoons sitting in this week's glorious sunshine reading it. A most marvellous book, combining the mysteries of migratory fish with high (and Middle Eastern) politics. 

I recommended the book in turn to a friend who used to be a UNESCO colleague and who is a marine biologist and without quite realising what was happening we had an exchange of emails that could have come straight out of the book (which is full of emails).  He told me that there had been attempts to introduce Atlantic salmon in all sorts of places and that the farming of Atlantic salmon was now established in places such as Patagonia and Chile.  Indeed, he told me, that salmon had been released in a Chilean river and had returned to spawn, though the reproduction, for some reason, had not been successful and the authors of the project had returned to fish farming.  I would have thought (in line with the book) that sport fishing would have brought in more income than commodity salmon fish farming and, moreover, would have been less harmful ecologically.  That must remain a subject for debate. 

Salmon fishing is something that hooks you, if you will excuse the pun and though I last caught a salmon forty-two years ago on the river Conon near Dingwall in the north of Scotland whither my grandfather used to invite me and my sister to fish,  the romance of the noble fish and its capture has never left me.  He, my grandfather, was always a great fisherman and in his spare time became a Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Edinburgh University.  In one memorable (and just possibly apocryphal) three day period he was summoned to three grand houses where the wife of the laird lay in the throes of childbirth.  All three babies took adequate periods of time to arrive; adequate anyway for him to change into his fishing gear and take himself off to the river (of course there weren't such things as mobile phones in those days) and catch a salmon.  Then he would come back and deliver the baby.  His account at the end of three days thus read: three babies, three salmon, three thousand guineas.

Yes, a thousand guineas was the fee apparently for delivering a baby in those pre-war days.  It seems a very great deal, (maybe £50,000 now?) which is another reason for wondering whether the story - like all fishermen's tales - may have been 'stretched' - a little.   Nor do I know the identity of any of the babies, though I do know that he delivered Magnus Magnusson.

Magnus (who will forever be identified with the upmarket Quiz Show 'Mastermind') once found himself in the spotlighted Black Chair, facing questions himself.  He was asked, he once recounted, quite a simple question: 'What was the name of Marilyn Monroe's first husband?'  But although he knew the surname was 'Miller' - the first name that intruded into his thoughts was 'Douglas,' rather than the correct 'Arthur.'  Afterwards he said that he had had a total blackout and had found it impossible to think of any Miller but his mother's doctor (my grandfather) who had by this time become a family friend.

One consequence of the fine weather is that children want to play outside and not only outside but with water as well.  Theo, my grandson of three, had invited his little friends - boy of three and girl of five - around to play and watering the garden while supervising adults tried to engage in a sensible pastime of a summer afternoon glass of Vouvray in the shade of an ivy hedge.  I think everyone enjoyed themselves, though the plants seemed to receive precious little water most of which found its way into the children's clothes.  This might bode well for a potential future career as fisherfolk.

As the Vouvray seemed to have gone down well I made some canapés of humous and paté and meanwhile finding the children some interesting activity indoors.   Recently I have been removing from the shelves reels of old labels that had lost most of their stickiness (labels do have a shelf-life).  But these actually make excellent playthings.  While we adults were enjoying the sunshine, the children, gone quiet for a moment, had decided to 'paper' and when we looked again the hallway was a mass of fluorescent yellow labels, that fortunately, having lost their adhesive power, came off easily.

I'd like now to bring this blog to a tidy close by reporting that we all then sat down to a dish of fresh rod caught Atlantic salmon.  But we didn't.  I fear sadly that my grandfather will prove to have been altogether more efficient as a guide in the salmon fishing department than I will ever be to young Theo.  The Atlantic Salmon is under great threat from fishery of the stock on the high seas and from the capture in vast quantities of the sand eels and other minor forms of marine life on which it feeds for processing into fish meal.  When Theo grows up the sight of wild salmon leaping in British rivers may long be a thing of the past.  If you'd like to know more have a look at the Atlantic Salmon Trust    website from where I have taken the photograph at the head of this piece.