Aaaah humbug!

Dunstable, it has to be said, is not the most forward thinking or exciting town in the United Kingdom. At times I feel as though I've been mysteriously transported back to the 1950s or at best the early 80s. A friend says she can almost hear the duelling banjos. However, if there is one thing that Dunstable does really well it's the lighting of the Christmas tree ritual in the Square.

Children from the lower and middle schools attend with their choirs as well as community choirs like the Priory Church Boys Choir and Dunstable Ladies' Choir. They all 'process' from the Priory Church, through the Priory Gardens to the Square. In a rare show of people power, the police close the A5 for a few precious minutes to allow them to pass; I always find this bit rather moving as for most of the year our town is dominated by the inexorable activity of the A5.

Next we all sing carols with the Salvation Army band and then comes the lighting of the tree and the appearance of Father Christmas (thankfully not Santa Claus - I refuse to acknowledge him!). Every year we sing the same carols, every year we all cheer for our local schools and every year the Christmas tree 'fails' to light up and we have to repeat the countdown.

Come rain or shine, crowds of people turn up each year to do exactly the same thing and for many, including me, it's the start of the festive season proper. Many a year I've stood in the Square with rain dripping off my nose and soaking my carol sheet enjoying myself despite my soggy condition. Then I look around me and everyone is making the most of it, a rare sight these days.

Last year the event was made more 'exciting' by the addition of a celebrity to turn on the lights - a real life, bellowing celebrity in the shape of Brian Blessed. I have to say he was good value for money and probably louder than the two celebrities we had this year in the shape of Letitia Dean (Sharon from EastEnders) and Sooty. Now Sooty really needs to up the ante in the bellowing stakes, he didn't say a thing you know! Whether he was the real Sooty or a stand-in Sooty I can't say but the children present seemed to find him acceptable.

My days of attending the lighting are fast coming to and end as Patrick refuses to come with me anymore and Flora will soon grow out of it. There may come a time where I'll have to borrow a child to give me an excuse to go along. For the moment though I'll continue enjoying this very traditional start to Christmas time, which is one of the few things of which Dunstable can be justly proud. Indeed, it almost almost makes up for the awful shops (many closed down and festering with pigeon droppings), terrible traffic, lack of entertainment, chavvy nightlife and Arctic weather. Well almost!

The truth about me and Colin Firth

I received an email from a friend today asking me if it was true about me and Colin Firth. Now in common with most of the female population of the United Kingdom, I fancy Colin Firth rotten. Who can forget him smouldering in 'Pride and Prejudice' and the scene with the wet shirt? However I can say now that Colin is a happily married man who has shown no interest in me. Indeed we haven't even met!

It turned out that a friend had overheard another friend talking about an incident where I met Colin Firth in the street, failed to recognise him as the famous actor and thought I knew him. Now this kind of did happen to me once but it was about 20 years ago and the man in question was Rupert Everett. I was walking along the King's Road in London and saw this tall, handsome and oddly familiar man coming towards me. So I smiled and said 'hello' and he smiled back and said 'hello' to me. It was only after he'd passed me that I realised that he wasn't someone I knew but Rupert Everett, the film star!

The whole incident, or rather non-incident, made me ponder the nature of rumours. How easy is it for a chance remark to become the truth and then to be embroidered and altered until it is nothing at all like the original story? In the case of the story about me and Colin Firth, it's funny and doesn't matter, but imagine if it was something that involved my reputation, my safety or even, God forbid, my freedom. We all know that stories become the 'truth' if enough people say or believe it's true. How many people are we misjudging because we based our understanding of them on rumours and hearsay? How many situations are completely misunderstood? The more I think about it, the more I see that 'truth' really is a construct, like meaning itself simply a product of what it's not but not inherently meaningful.

Of course you can't live your whole life suspecting people and questioning the truth of what they are saying but I think it doesn't do any harm to be circumspect and to realise that one person's truth is not necessarily another's.

Now I wonder when Colin is going to ring me about our hot date.

A confession: I prefer Dickens on TV

I'm currently watching the BBC adaption of 'Little Dorrit' by Charles Dickens. As is typical of the BBC, it really is a classy production with wonderful acting and superb writing by Andrew Davies. I really look forward to each episode and find the story touching and riveting.

But I have a confession to make, I much prefer watching Dickens on TV than reading it. That makes me sound a real philistine and I have tried to counter this by reading a few of his books. The stories are beautifully written, if slightly implausible at times, but I always feel he could get rid of a few chapters and it wouldn't do any harm. My friend Sara and I were discussing this the other day and decided it was because he wrote for serialisation and was probably paid by the word. Not only this but, of course, Dickens was very aware of the dramatic quality of his books and was famous for his readings.

One of the things I find most tiresome, and yet which works wonderfully in an adaption, are the legion of subsidiary characters. Trying to remember who Mr Cherubim Queermucher and Miss Fanny Throttledick are while keeping tabs on the escapades of Mrs Threnody Flaps and the Rev Stipend Mangrove is quite a feat. Not to mention the effort involved in recalling that Mr Scrote Dangler is the long lost brother of his ward Miss Matilda Flangewiper, who is herself involved in a fiendishly complex dispute regarding her inheritance with the aforesaid Mr Queermuncher.

OK I made those characters up (no surely not, I hear you say) but you get my drift. Dickens's book team with people and this is their charm but also my problem in reading them. Sometimes I just yearn for the elegance of Jane Austen where the cast of characters is restricted and inconvenient characters such as dead mothers are given a couple of sentences, if that. Or even Dickens's friend Mrs Gaskell, who peoples her own books with grotesques but they are somehow more human and less archetypal.

I'm hoping that the TV adaption of 'Little Dorrit' will encourage me to read Dickens properly. I don't hold out much hope however - copies of 'Martin Chuzzlewitt' and 'Bleak House' gathering dust on my bookshelves bear witness to past failures.

Adult ballet - it's just ballet for adults!

I've just returned from my adult ballet class. The phrase 'adult ballet' always causes a few raised eyebrows and snorts as people imagine all sorts of saucy goings on at the barre. However it is what it says, a ballet class for adults. We are a group of ladies, most of us over 40 and none under 30 who meet every Monday and simply learn ballet, going through a series of barre and floor work.

Some of the ladies were keen dancers as children and find their old abilities reawakened. I did a tiny bit of a ballet in my late teens and haven't any ability to reawaken. But oh how I enjoy myself. The movements are exacting, elegant and slow but make no mistake they are not easy, your body lets you know that the day after. Many of them require a level of coordination I've yet to master, I'm always closing front instead of back and using the wrong foot, and fine balance, something I have improved on since starting the class.

After a day at work venturing out to do a ballet class can sometimes feel like a chore but once I'm there I feel energised and I always leave feeling happier and more relaxed than when I went in. I love learning to move my body in a more elegant way to beautiful tunes, this term from the great operas. We do our Ronde de Champ for instance to music by Offenbach and our battement tendu to Verdi! The language of ballet is seductive and slightly mysterious (even if you do know French) and then there is a the laughter. While we all try our best, nobody takes themselves too seriously and much of the time we spend laughing like drains at our mistakes.

I think everyone should try ballet. You don't have to be the next Darcy Bussell and you don't have to wear a tutu but you will discover all sorts of things your body can do and have a lot of fun in the process.

Shock at awe

I am going to an all you can eat Chinese restaurant tonight. A pleasant evening out I grant you but not, as one of my younger colleagues said, 'awesome'. It seems that these days anything from going to the supermarket to visiting the ladies is worthy of the epithet 'awesome'.

Now call me old-fashioned if you like but I would say a volcano erupting is awesome or the basilica in Rome but not a night out in a nightclub or as many spring rolls as you can eat. How is it that this perfectly decent word has become so casually applied? Surely if we rake every experience up to this level of hyperbole, the word becomes redundant and we run out of words for genuinely amazing sights and experiences.

So I decided to look 'awesome' up in my etymology dictionary. Awe comes from a Germanic word for 'fear', not something I often feel when looking at a selection of rices and other Oriental dishes. I might fear that the rice hasn't been heated adequately and may be about to give me food poisoning but that's only a minor fear that I manage to assuage with a quick test of the temperature of the hotlocks. Awesome denotes something that inspires feelings of awe, i.e. reverential wonder of fear, and it therefore makes me wonder how it became a replacement word for 'exciting' , 'thrilling' or even 'really rather good'.

I suspect the blame can be placed at the door of the United States who are lovers of words that end in the suffix 'some', such as winsome and lonesome. Anyway I am thinking of secretly sending my young colleague a list of alternative adjectives to describe her nights out - now that would be awesome of me.

Nanogeddon!!!

I entered the nanosphere last night, well intellectually speaking. S and I drove to Cranfield University to support our friend Julie Freeman, who is artist in residence at Cranfield. She has been working with the nanotechnology department and creating works of art that reflect upon the science and explore its implications and how it is perceived.

After the speeches we chatted with various people in the foyer, including a man from a local university who is an expert in nanotechnology. He has an amazingly vivid way of communicating ideas about nanotechnology and although I was often lost, being a non-scientist, he certainly made me want to go away and find out more. I learned too from Julie of the power of these tiny, invisible particles that give gekkos microscopic hairs that enable them walk on ceilings, drugs that will be administered to exactly the spot they are needed and socks that have silver woven into them (Julie has some from Marks and Spencer). Astonishing but scary - well not the socks - to imagine this invisible but potentially powerful world; it's human nature to be scared of what you can't see after all.

We then went on a night time tour of the university to see the posters that Julie had made and erected around the campus. Armed with a torch we trundled around in my little car, stopping at various points so that Julie could shine a light on the poster and explain the thinking around it. We were doing this in one area when we bumped into someone that S had been remonstrating with in the foyer about the fact that commercial considerations always seem to come ahead of giving people the space to experiment and that Faraday would never have made his discoveries if they had employed the cost benefit analysis principle in his day. We explained what we were doing as it did look rather odd but his expression suggested he had us all down as mad stalkers. I commented afterwards that we should have wound down the window and quoted in unison from one of Julie's posters: 'Without context I am nothing'. He'd have thought nanogeddon was upon us for sure!

One town, two hardware shops - an olfactory excursion to Shefford

Today I visited a little town that makes my home town of Dunstable - where tumble weed regularly floats down the High Street - look like the West End. It was a charming, quiet and, well, rather dull Bedfordshire town. However there was one exciting aspect - not one but two hardware shops.

I was immediately drawn to the first one I saw. Outside were yard brushes, metal watering cans and all sort of arcane paraphanalia. How I longed to go inside and sniff the wonderfully blended aromas of plant seeds, brooms, nasty solvents, nails and sandpaper. I went in (imagine bell tinkling as I open shop door) and was immediately transported to my childhood. Your average DIY shed can't compete with a hardware shop, where it feels as though you could buy anything if you just asked and the aforesaid smell wafts seductively around you.

As I made my way down the narrow aisles piled up with plugs, gardening implements and creosote, I sniffed deeply. Aaaaah, bliss! When the lady on the till asked if I needed some help I admitted I was there simply to enjoy the smell! She was unperturbed saying people often say that, it's clear my hardware shop fetish is not a lonely obsession then.

But my joy was not to stop there. Round the corner was another hardware shop that trebled up as a post-office and, er, carpet shop. Carpets, hardware and stationery - all in one place, I was in heaven. All that was needed was some dusty liquorice to make it quite perfect.

If ever I bring out a perfume it will be called Hardware Shop - I bet it would sell very well along with Petrol Station and Ironed Shirts.

This sketch from the Two Ronnies perfectly demonstrates the charm of the old fashioned British hardware shop.