Today
I have just returned from a few days spent with Becky in London. On the last day we met at The Crusting Pipe in Covent Garden for lunch. There was a charming Cypriot waitress and we chatted about this and that. I told her that I was a Londoner by birth and she asked me whether I missed London.
Well, there's a question; I do and I don't.
In My Day
Being brought up in London would be meaningless if all it meant was knowing the few streets around your home and I suspect that has always been the case for many people. But, even as children, our London life included many of the amazing cultural, educational and entertainment opportunities.
We went to London Zoo, Battersea Park and Funfair. We visited all the museums in the Brompton Road many times (my especial favourite was the natural history museum) as well as the British Museum, Horniman's and, once, the National Maritime Museum. We had tea on the roof garden at Derry and Toms and at Lyon's Corner House on the Strand.
We were taken to shows, films, the theatre, operas and concerts. We went to Madame Tussaud's, the Planetarium, The Tower of London, the Monument, Trafalgar Square. I remember once going on an open-topped tour bus where a genial Cockney guide sent Daddy into uncontrollable guffaws with his commentary about St Martin-in-the Fields - "Coming up in the middle of the road..." as though the church were a giant Wurlitzer. We visited the parks, commons and gardens. St Paul's Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament were almost natural habitats.
This ease and familiarity with London spilled over into adulthood. By the age of twelve I was a regular Promenader and was spending my Saturdays and paper round money going to West End matinees. I used to visit all the art galleries., both public, such as the Tate, and private ones in Bond Street with my friend Lynda. With a youthful certainty about our cultural superiority we used to call such excursions "gallery crawls". David and I bought "Red Rover" tickets and travelled randomly on buses to more obscure corners of the city.
I bought student standing-room only tickets for the Old Vic and joined the Aldwych student group, going to see all that the Royal Shakespeare company could offer as well as the astonishing World Theatre seasons. I saw Shakespeare in the open at Regent's Park and at the George in Southwark. I haunted the V&A and grew fond of the Science Museum where I would draw the great Victorian beam engines and other machinery.
This was in addition to familiarity with all the great stores and the amazing specialist shops. There was less of a cafe and club culture than there is today, so there wasn't much of that and, anyway, we probably couldn't afford it.
So, do I miss it? Clearly, even with all of that, there was much I didn't experience. But you could live all your life in London and not see it all. And there are many other aspects to life. I have lived in the suburbs, by the sea and in a small country village and have learnt about what drives life in these places.
When I am in London, I feel energised by the bustle and the sheer variety of the place, but I think that a rounded life is one where there has been a breadth of experience and, right now, I love my wooded garden in a quiet village with woodland walks on my doorstep.
So the answer is, not really, not now.
Today
Yesterday I received a somewhat peremptory text from Beatrice, "when and for how long did you live in Crowborough? I told her and promised to remind her of the full story later. So here goes.
In My Day
It was late 1985 and we were in a muddle. Paul's "Barretronics" business venture had failed and he was finding it hard to get a job in Eastbourne. I was away in Southampton doing the computerisation of PAYE training. I had an inspiration. "Why don't we move to Southampton? Unemployment is low and there are plenty of properties for sale."
Selling 10 Montfort Close was easy, we found a charming house in Swaythling in Southampton, enrolled the girls in schools and were all set.
Then came the bombshell. The vendors pulled out, blandly saying that they had just wanted to find what they could get for the house and had no intention of selling. By this time we had a completion date for the sale of no 10 so we felt some panic.
At the last minute some friends came to the rescue. "Our parents live and work in Malawi", they told us "but they have an English pied a terre in Crowborough. You're welcome to live there rent-free - just pay for your utility bills." We jumped at the chance, put our furniture in store, packed up the girls, cats, dog and tortoises and moved in to what was a perfectly acceptable three-bed semi.
How unhappy we were! I was away much of the time and Paul was left alone with the girls to care for and without knowing a soul. The town seemed to exist in the cloud layer and a damp, foggy gloom settled over everything. Paul felt so lonely that he sometimes walked up to the shop to buy a packet of biscuits just so that he could talk to a friendly face. Initially we thought we would only be there a matter of three or four weeks so didn't enrol the girls in schools. But as time dragged on we had to find them some schooling. Rebecca, especially, felt victimised and unhappy at her new school.
The experience nearly broke us apart as I desperately tried to do my job in Southampton, keep house-hunting and give attention to my floundering family.
There were some lighter moments. Caspian, feeling aggrieved one day about some lack of attention, ripped open his foam-filled cushion. and was found by us, standing ear-deep in foam chippings, looking very foolish. Chippings popped up all over the house for weeks afterwards. Another time he escaped and spent the night feasting at the local chippy, arriving home dirty, fat and smelling of salt and vinegar. Paul took the girls to see "Back to the Future" and Lizzie spent many hours producing a detailed biog of Michael J Fox - it was a work of hight calibre.
With relief we moved to Southampton in February 1986, only to find that we didn't fare much better. One tortoise came off worst as the temperature at the Crowborough house was too high for him to hibernate properly and he then died when frosts came to Southampton. It took the move to Somerset to enable us to start rebuilding ourselves effectively.
We made so many false starts that I feel especially fortunate to have arrived where I am today, in a beautiful place with my family intact.
Today
There seem to be a large number of babies arriving among family and friends right now and I notice that some people have even adopted the American custom of "baby showers". In some ways it's a lovely idea with the baby being celebrated even before birth and the parents receiving some delightful and useful items.
In My Day
I have already said in another blog how little I bought before Lizzie was born. This was partly down to poverty and a general tendency to leave things till the last minute, but I have to admit to a superstitious feeling about too much preparation.
My logical side tells me that whether the contents of Mothercare have been been bought or whether you have nothing this will not affect the outcome. I suppose I felt, and still feel a little bit, how sad it must be to have a fully-kitted out nursery if something then goes wrong.
I think that this is the real reason why I started out life with Lizzie with half-a-dozen nappies and a single babygro.
I still don't start on making my famous Baby ball and I don't buy or make a congratulations card until I hear of the safe arrival .
Of course, scan technology has taken a good deal of uncertainty out of this particular event, and anyway, I have already made two Moses basket linings and cut out a babygro in "Happy Houses" print. And in Ireland last week Wesz said that if I bought any more stuff Baby Donnelly would only get to wear each item once!
So much for superstition!
Today
Last Saturday, after a long and hot day we relaxed over a meal at Cafe Piano in Wells. Among the vegetables served with our dinner were some tasty little mini sweet corns. "I remember when I first ate mini sweet corn," I said to Paul "Do you?"
In My Day
In 1980 we took up a kind invitation to visit Canada to stay with my sister Carol.
One memorable day we visited Ohsweken, an Indian reservation dedicated to the Canadian Six Indian nations. There was a festival of dance, drama and song and we took our places to watch the description of Indian life.
Later we joined the Indians in dances to celebrate rain and friendship. As the skies darkened to evening we linked arms and chugged sweatily around the stadium just celebrating being there.
This was hard work and when all was over we were ready for some refreshments. There were many stalls, manned by Six Nations people. One of these simply offered sweet corn. Succulent mini corns were bubbling in a cauldron and they were just ladled into cardboard containers and offered to us. Delicious! I thought so then and think so still and am very glad they they are now readily available in our supermarkets.
I don't know how staged this event was or how much it was a representation of the reality of Canadian Indian life, but I've always relished the memory of that joyous evening and the ways in which it enriched my life.
Today
One of the pleasures of the hot weather is the abundance of fresh fruit. This morning I enjoyed a salad of banana and Cantaloupe melon.
In My Day
On our great hitch-hiking tour of 1969 my friend Angela and I decided to take in a few days at Avignon in France. The weather was glorious and the youth hostel overlooked the Rhone.
We made friends with other hostellers and one day went for a drive into the parched countryside with two French boys.
Late in the afternoon one of them said "I'm thirsty - I need melon!" When we asked where he was going to get it he declared that we had just passed a farm "They will have melons!" he asserted and walked down the track to the farmhouse.
After a little while he staggered back to the car, arms full of Cantaloupe melons. Roaring with laughter he went back to the farm, re-appearing with more - and more.
Apparently the canny farmer didn't do retail, only wholesale, and had insisted that he buy a minimum order of two dozen. We took them back to the hostel where we discovered that they are very nice sliced crossways and filled with red wine.
The following day we were setting off for Italy, so we packed our share of melons into our backpacks, so as not to waste them. After a difficult and long day getting to Grenoble we feasted on more melon, but eventually the smell of over-ripe melon and their weight in the backpacks was too much for us and we ditched the remaining few somewhere by the Autoroute.
I'd forgotten until this morning that they are the kings of melons, in terms of flavour and sweetness.
Today
At last, after many months of anxiety, I can enjoy my beautiful pond and stream. All kinds of life leap and lurk within it: toads, frogs, newts, caddis flies, dragonflies, water beetles and heaps more.
We've added to the variety with about fifty fish - grass carp, shubunkin, rudd, orfe and golden tench. The tench stay firmly on the bottom, but the others swim around in various groupings, clearly loving the sun-warmed water. Some people ask me if I feed the fish to make them tame, but I say "no", because there's plenty of food and I like them to be shy so that they dash for cover at the smallest noise or sign of a bird overhead. That way they have a better chance of avoiding any herons that pass by.
When we were in Kilcrohane last week we visited a local shop which had a large goldfish bowl in which were a goldfish and a very large shubunkin which swam in a perpetual circular motion, practically meeting its own tail, having no choice. Not a patch on my lovely "posse" of darting and diving free fish.
In My Day
It took a single visit to the circus when I was about eight to convince me that to coerce, restrain and encage animals purely for our enjoyment is wrong. At the circus, I didn't mind the clowns and was suitably impressed by the high-wire artistes. But to make horses gallop around on their hind legs (sometimes ridden by dogs also on their hind legs), beat and terrify lions and tigers into submission and persuade that most noble of creatures, the elephant, to stand on its back legs and catch balls, was ridiculous and humiliating to all concerned.
Add the fact that they spent the rest of their time in cramped cages that were driven all over the country and I lost all interest in circuses that use animals.
My favourite zoo as a child was Whipsnade in which at least some of animals roamed freely. It was a precursor of safari parks, which I very much enjoy visiting. London Zoo with its smelly, endlessly pacing big cats in tiny cages and other locked-up animals I always visited with mixed feelings. Only the penguins on their outdoor Mappin Terraces seemed have any sort of space in which to be comfortable.
I don't think its wrong to own animals and to have the pleasure of watching their antics, but this should be on their terms, not purely ours.
