Farther and farther, all the birds

Ah, I return to one of my favourite themes - wildlife. Last weekend was one where I enjoyed the bucolic side of life. Lying on a bed in Dorset with the woods just across the road, I heard a cuckoo for the first time in years and then, hoorah that night I saw a badger! My first ever non-squashed badger.

It was if spring had forgotten to arrive and then rushed through the door in her best outfit. The sun shone, the breeze was soft, the flowers in the fields were abundant and the birds were so vocal I was reminded of the verse from Edward Thomas's poem 'Adelstrop' -

'And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire'

Then on arriving at J's after a trip out we discovered that two tiny swifts had become stuck between the static and moving parts of one of his ancient sash windows. Moving the sash upwards risked crushing their little heads and they flapped about impotently, their wings limited. Fortunately J moved in like Ray Mears on extra testosterone (is that possible?) with, characteristically, the tools for the job from his garage. The side of the window removed it was possible to release the beleagured birds who swooped off non the worse for their ordeal. As for J he could not have made me fancy him more at that moment had he danced in leather pants (no please, don't!). What is they say about spring and a man's fancy? Applies to we girls too you know!

Through a shop darkly

About six months ago a sign went up in Milton Keynes shopping centre announcing the opening of a new shop and calling for 'attractive' people to apply for jobs. As I imagined how humiliating it would be to be rejected for a shop job on the grounds of your unattractiveness, I also wondered what shop would insist on such a condition. It surely couldn't be Superdrug where fairly ordinary people ask you if you want any stamps with your waxing strips nor was it likely to be British Home Stores, where staff range from homely to unthreateningly attractive.

Soon I had the answer. The shop was part of the Abercrombie and Fitch empire called Hollister. It has been done up to look like the outside of a nightclub with bare chested young gentleman standing at the door to greet you or put you off, depending on your viewpoint. I had a feeling it wasn't a shop meant for me and avoided going in until Flora told me she had ventured inside and and found it staffed by more bare chested men and good looking women in skimpy outfits.

Intrigued, I brazened it out and decided to take my chances with the hostile looking and inadequately attired young men. What greeted me was an interior of Stygian gloom. It was as thought there had been a powercut and only the emergency lighting was on. As I peered into the dark recesses I could just make out what I thought were clothes but the prices remained a mystery. As I felt my way around the shop, I could just make out the attractive staff; what a waste, I thought, when you can't even see them. They could have employed cheaper, ugly people and we'd be none the wiser.

It may be that the lack of lighting is supposed to add to the nightclub ambience but I suspect it's mainly to keep anyone aged over 35 out as you need the night vision of a younger person to find your way round. As someone who had great difficulty seeing the name of a lipstick in the blaring lights of Debenhams, I didn't stand a chance in Hollister. I was like a mole, bumping into things and blinking into the distance with no hope of actually seeing anything.

I only hope M and S don't decide to follow suit as I like to inspect my smalls before purchase.

Get out or burn out?

I am starting to realise that morally I am not a big person. I will never make Archbishop of Canterbury or be Mother Teresa, I won't even be Anneka Rice. The tribulations of a typical walk through Luton town centre are getting to me and I am finding my patience wearing about as thin as it can get.

Last week, a walk to an appointment involved first avoiding a lorry on the pavement and walking into the path of a maniacal bike rider. This was followed by avoidance of eye contact with a crazed, hatchet faced young woman with the smell of drink on her, stepping round an insistent beggar with guilt in my heart and then coping with someone gobbing, with an enthusiastic expectorating sound, next to my leg. I stood there, my eyes pricking with tears, screwing my face up, thinking out loud 'Oh God! I hate Luton!'. Half of what I hated was myself for not being good enough to cope with it all, for finding all this human degredation unpalatable and insuportable, like some latterday Margot Leadbetter. I imagine I looked like a nutter myself but all I wanted was to knock my ruby slippers together and be transported away to somewhere more civilised and bucolic.

It made me realise that the only way you can cope is by becoming innured to it all and there lies danger. No wonder social workers start to miss things when each day they are coping with the shitty stick of life. If you don't shut some of it out, how will you ever cope? Even my cursory encounters with the underbelly of urban life leave me feeling sullied and disturbed.

So perhaps it's time for me to get out before it gets me! At least my colleagues understand. K told me her trip to an appointment recently involved negotiating a doorway in which someone was standing with an aggressive dog, avoiding people asking her for money and then walking passed a man sitting on a wall 'playing' with a chain saw! Welcome to our world.

Lark Rise to Far From the Madding Cider with Rosie

I've always fancied myself good at accents so when Flora was asked to play Mary Anning in a film, it seemed the ideal opportunity to teach her my one size fits all, Thomas Hardy adaption, any location on the South Coast rural accent. If I had been to drama school I would have learned it there but I learned it watching TV and, er, listening to family members.

I thought I could ask some of the proper Dorset people in my family to help Flora achieve some level of verisimilitude with her accent but my Dad professes himself too posh these days, having lived in South East England for over forty years, and my aunt, who still lives in Dorset, doesn't think she has a very strong accent. I would take issue with my aunt actually but that's how she feels. My Dad has loads of brothers all with strong Dorset accent but they are rather harder to track down.

Then there is J, who lives in Dorset, and fancies his chances with the old local accent almost as much as me. Much as I hate to tell him, his Dorset accent does have a faint Northern twang and therefore won't cut the mustard. My experience of the people he knows in Dorset is that there are very few people we could call on to do the proper accent although I feel sure he could dig someone up.

So there's nothing for it. She will have to do the Lark Rise to Far from the Madding Cider with Rosie accent, on which I am the country's leading dialogue expert. Oooooh Arrrrrrrr!

When quilts were continental

I was the first person to have one in my family, in my extended family, perhaps on the whole of the Harebreaks Estate. I speak of a duvet. Except in 1971 it wasn't a duvet, it was a continental quilt; a name which evokes how radical the duvet was in bedding terms. Yes, in the early 70s the now ubiquitous duvet was as foreign and sophisticated as Edith Piaf, existentialism, baguettes and spaghetti bolognese.

My continental quilt was much admired with people coming from miles around to see this new, European alternative to Welsh blankets and a candlewick bedspread. Look now easy it is to make the bed, they exclaimed. How do you put the cover on? Or behind their hands, why was my mother engaging with this Frenchie nonsense, wasn't it bad enough that we were in the Common Market without having to take on their strange quilts.

The reason I was the pioneer in duvet terms was my asthma. My mother quite rightly thought it would be better for me than blankets and the aforementioned candlewick bedspread. Of course the fact that my sister, who shared a bedroom and therefore dust mites with me, still used the bedding of the ancien regime was not lost on our parents and soon she too was sleeping like a European.

From there, or so it seemed to me, continental quilt use grew exponentially and they morphed into the duvet. No longer continental but actually quite British now. The duvet had swam La Manche, dragged itself soggily on to the beach and found a place in the heart of we Brits. Even my grandmother gave up her traditional Welsh blankets for one, sad really as today they would be ultra chic.

Today we are so much part of a global culture that those times when continental quilts were outre, Vesta meals the height of daring foreign cuisine, Angel Delight was a treat and we still had the remains of an air raid shelter in our garden seem in many ways as distant as the nineteenth century. Yes, we are all continental now and I like to think my little duvet lead the way, in our family at least. So Vive La Duvet!

My cubicle pitch

I love people. I'm happy chatting to old ladies on the street, little children, teenagers, men on building sites. I can chat to anyone, make friends with people easily and find people warm to me quickly and me to them. Why then do I hate networking so much? Isn't 'networking' just a posh name for chatting?

The song 'You will always find me in the kitchen at parties' pretty much applies to me. Despite having a very gregarious, warm nature (I flatter myself), I find parties nerve wracking and my coping strategy tends to be to get as drunk as possible. The same goes for networking where, in the absence of an opportunity for drinking, I usually just hide in the toilets.

I think the difference between my happy interactions with random people on the street and my nervousness at parties and networking events is that talking to people in an everyday setting is serendipitous whereas you go to parties and network with a mission to 'meet' people. At parties I often feel as though everyone is far cooler and more interesting than me and are no doubt finding me deadly dull, actively plotting their escape from me to be reunited with their fascinating friends. Similarly at networking events I always worry that the other person is far too important to talk to the likes of me and is probably looking over my shoulder for someone more worthy.

Interestingly I often meet some great people in the toilets and while I may not have the much vaunted elevator pitch taped, I may just have a 'cubicle pitch'. There's something very levelling about meeting someone in the loos. No matter how glamorous or successful you are, we all need a wee. Similarly at parties, there's often a more relaxed vibe in the kitchen and it gives you a reason to be there, eg: refilling your glass or searching for the Twiglets,

The fact that there are 'gurus' out there earning a fortune out of telling others how to 'network' indicates to me that I'm not alone in loathing and fearing the whole thing. Personally I find professional networkers annoying. The most successful and delightful networkers seem to be those people who look as if they're not even trying - and probably they're not.

So if you want to speak to me, come and meet me by the wash hand basins in the ladies. I'm bound to be there. Bring your own Twiglets.

Where is my Wales?

As a very small child, I knew where Wales was. It was the coal yard down the road from my little Welsh grandmother's house. Even as an under five I associated Wales with coal even if my geography was somewhat parochial - the coal yard was in North Watford!

As I grew up I had a slightly more accurate idea of Wales athough it remained for me a mythical place. It was the location of my grandmother's stories of washing her brothers in tin baths when they came up from the pits, of speaking only Welsh at home and learning English at school, of people with mellifluous names and tragic stories. My grandmother was a great story teller and prone to repeating herself so that the stories, the mythology of her Wales, became part of the warp and weft of my life. My Wales, her Wales, was no doubt the Wales of the 1920s and 30s and for a child with hopelessly romantic soul her tales were irresistable.

It was this week, now in my forties with my grandmother dead for almost a decade, that I visited the village of her childhood: Tumble, the place with the slightly comical name that literally is/was the Land of my Fathers. I was on my way home from Pembrokeshire, a place of pure soft light, glittering seas and secluded inlets. Tumble is on the way home and I felt a real desire to visit this place that was so much part of my life yet which I had never seen.

So it was that at about half past eight on a Sunday morning I parked on the steep high street. I so wanted to love Tumble and yet I was filled with a terrible sense of sadness and, dare I say it, disappointment. This was not the staunchly working class mining village with bucolic tendenies of my imagination. It looked bleak, the houses were grey and eyeless and my overall impression was one of a place that had been a victim of de-industrilisation as much as its people, and my relatives, were a victim of the mines that once supported it.

I couldn't wait to get back in the car and leave. It's the people that make you love a place and for me whereever my dear grandmother was it was 'Wales', with whatever that meant for us as a family. We definitely had our own culture, our own mythology, words and ways and she was the centre of that and so much of what I am today is because of her influence and loving presence. So I'm going to content myself with the Tumble of my heart but I do hope that behind those early morning windows there was warmth and happiness and maybe people with whom I share the odd gene!