Everyone loves to bash Health & Safety regulations - and I’m no different.

How could I forget the insane anarchy which was Jnr’s seventh birthday party at the local sports centre - twenty kids charged up on coca-cola and Haribo, screaming at the tops of their little voices whilst racing pedal cars around an echoing volleyball court like a hundred manic Mr MacHenrys, to the soundtrack of *Squirtle’s choice, Public Enemy - when we were gently advised not to play ‘musical chairs’, for reasons of health and safety. You don’t say.

I’m all in favour of protecting workers in the workplace, having grown up surrounded by tales of farmers gored and farm hands with arms torn off in agricultural machinery, but my jaw fell open when I was told that if I wanted the external walls of the house painted in spring, I could no longer rely on an odd-job bloke with a good ladder as previously but, because we have ‘raised gable ends’ (whatever they are) and the regulations have changed, I would have to hire scaffolding for a day; it’s health and safety.

Do you know how much scaffolding costs?  Somehow I think the place is destined to disappear under the slow accretion of green algae next year.

So, I was intrigued last week when Channel 4 screened Cutting Edge: The Fun Police, a programme about about health and safety inspectors. I watched idly, out of the corner of my eye (a dangerous place) at first, but a few minutes in and I was hooked; the inspectors were doing an experiment, on custard powder.

I’ve always been fascinated by custard powder, it’s **thixotropic - it runs, but you can snap it, it flows, but if you stab it with a spoon it goes rock hard - which is an interesting phenomenon to observe if making custard is the most exciting thing you’ve done all day - mmn, anyway - but I bet you didn’t know this: custard powder has coal flour in it, which is explosable.’

Fantastic. I watched as they duly exploded some under ‘controlled conditions’.

‘Did it work?’ the cameraman said.

‘There is no ‘work’, or ‘not work’,’ the dour Inspector replied, ‘there is only data.’

This programme was developing charm. I felt for Ed Friend, too, a health-and-safety consultant who seemed like a nice well-meaning chap, as he read from Richard Littlejohn’s Daily Mail rant against his profession. In one particularly sustained and vitriolic tirade, dear RLj describes the inspectors as akin to ‘Stasi’. Ed’s voice was full of wounded outrage.

So, the next day, when I listened to The Archers - okay, I confess, I do listen to The Archers from time to time - it may be deadly dull, but like hot water bottles, cocoa and cough medicine, it’s comforting; plus, I love to hate it - I had my health and safety head on.

Jill Archer got some ropey old outdoor lights from Mr Pullen at the recent swap sale. She’s donated them to brighten up the Village Hall for Christmas. Phil has checked them and claims they work, but they’ve already blown the fuse once and what with the Christmas panto coming up…

Commentators love to indulge in predictions at this time of year, so here is one of mine: Christmas Archers Special (look away now!) I predict - FIRE!

Imagine it: The string of Christmas lights flicker and fizz, sparks land on a bit of discarded crêpe paper and smoulder away whilst the panto cast are trying so hard to remember Linda’s instructions as well as their lines, and the audience are distracted by the scenery shaking in a strange way, that no-one notices the smell of smoke…

Clarrie the reluctant pantomime cow will be horribly scorched (’Oww, Eddie’); Brenda will be trapped inside and heroic Tom ‘meat products entrepreneur’ Archer will wade in courageously only to burst in the heat like one of his wretched boring sausages. Matt Crawford will stumble out like the sleazy coward he is, going up in a boozy haze like a purple flaming sambuca. The scenery will ignite and crash down to reveal - collective gasp - posh Alice Aldridge and Christopher Carter, the blacksmith, in a semi-naked stand-up clinch…

All that will be left will be Joe Grundy grunting at the smouldering heap which was to have been the Ambridge Christmas Panto, muttering in his lugubrious way,

‘Health and safety, see, I told ‘em, health and safety.’

Nah. It’ll never happen. Shame, though.

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* Squirtle: Jnr’s nickname when small. Squirtle is a Pokémon, a bipedal turtle with its most notable feature being the hard shell on its back. This shell forms and hardens on its back after birth. [Wikipedia] I.e. Cute, full of beans, but tough.

**Thixsotropic: the property exhibited by certain gels of becoming fluid when stirred or shaken and returning to the semisolid state upon standing. [Dictionary.com]

[Highly unseasonal, this one - sorry - but I'm following a thread of earlier posts through to their natural conclusion.]

There is no easy way to introduce a subject like this gently: I’m an advocate of assisted death.

Perhaps because of my personal history - blogged last week - perhaps partly because of age - several of my fortywhatever friends are now beginning to experience the terminal decline of their own parents - or perhaps because it has recently become topical, this subject came over the wire as ready for some exploration.

In 1979, when my mother died, the treatment of terminally ill patients and the care of their relatives was primitive. As she approached the end of her life, my mother was given pain relief, but proper palliative care was still in its infancy and to put it bluntly, she suffered. As a lifelong atheist/Humanist, not tied to Christian ideas about sin and suffering, I know that if she had been able to choose, she would have chosen an assisted death in a heartbeat, but that option, then, was not only not available, it was in the realm of *science fiction, positively taboo.

Since then, there has been a gradual shift in the public perception of the concept of the individual choosing when to die which can be tracked partly by the language we have evolved to describe it. ‘Euthanasia’ - with it’s suggestion of chilly vet’s waiting rooms and soft-pillow murder - became ‘assisted suicide’ - still tainted with notions of illegality, sin, and squandered vigour, before transcending the emotive to become the currently accepted term, neutral, accurate - ‘assisted death’. According to a press release from the campaign pressure group Dignity in Dying,

‘Opinion polls consistently show that at least 80% of the UK population supports a change in the law on assisted dying.’

As recently as October, Britain watched multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy fight to clarify the law around assisted death. This was followed shortly afterwards by the sad story of paralysed ex-rugby player, 23 year old Daniel James, who travelled to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland to put an end to a life which for Daniel had become unbearable, the youngest Briton so far to elect to do so. Most recently, 13 year old Hannah Jones’ bold decision to refuse a heart transplant galvanised the debate. Medical advances are bringing unprecedented pressure to bear on the issues surrounding quality of life at the end of life.

Dignity in Dying go on to state,

‘Although only a minority of terminally ill people would exercise the right to an assisted death, many will take comfort in having this choice. At Dignity in Dying we believe that assisted dying forms part of a wider debate around choice at the end of life.’

There is no getting away from it; death is the one universal human certainty. For a culture which considers itself humane and enlightened, which has at its disposal all the advantages of modern medicine and science, all the accumulated wisdom of centuries of philosophical and spiritual inquiry, to cross into the third millennium continuing to bumble towards this certainty still pretending it isn’t waiting for each and every one of us, is, it seems to me, a supreme collective failure of imagination. Sooner, or preferably later, death must be faced.

Some of us will have accidents, some of us will die as a result of ‘lifestyle’ choices, some of us will live to be very old and develop natural ‘complications’, some of us, the lucky few, will even die in our sleep, as my father did, and some of us, according to Cancer Research UK, ‘approximately 1 in 4 people’, will die from cancer. Whichever way, we are all going to die.

Surely, it would behove our culture to try to help us face the fact by enshrining an option for assisted death?

Hand in hand with the idea of assistance, as ‘Yea, though [we] walk through the valley of the shadow of death’‘, is the concept of the ‘good death’.

Increasingly, those who work with the sick and dying, those who counsel their loved ones, talk of living wills and the good death. In essence, this notion goes beyond the secular, scientific idea that death is simply a medical matter to be controlled by advanced palliative care, managed and endured; those who have been close to the dying know that some levels of pain simply cannot be ‘managed’, they are immune even to the most powerful opiates.

The concept of the ‘good death’ also swerves away from the passivity underpinning the major religions, that in relinquishing life, we must by definition relinquish all control and submit to - what? - the whim of a capricious god? - the falling out of good or bad luck? - the endurance of outcomes with stoicism and an eye on the ever-after?

Balanced against the harsh reality of death, the best guides, the hospice workers, the pastors, priests and social workers, be they religious, Humanist, or psycho-social practitioners, recognise that it is possible to offset an assisted process, the lighting of a path towards acceptance not only of mortality but of ‘biographical pain’ - not exactly secular ‘confessional’, but akin to it - a way of accepting  and letting go of the psychic pain you have carried, the pain that others have caused you, the pain you have caused others.

A ‘good death’ means providing an opportunity, however short, however premature, however difficult, for the dying and their friends and family to come to terms with the inevitable, the end of a life. It is a bold ideal, but one whose time has come.  Individually and collectively, religiously or with secular commitment, ideally, we would all do well to prepare for a good death, but to do it, we need the assistance of a three-fold, interdisciplinary approach, a supportive and humane medical, spiritual and legal framework.

Strangely, I find myself quoting from a paper [2005] by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,

‘The right to be spared avoidable pain is beyond debate - as is the right to say yes or no to certain treatments in the knowledge of factors such as these. But once that has mutated into a right to expect assistance in dying, the responsibility of others is involved, as is the whole question of what society is saying about life and its possible meanings. Legislation ignores these issues to its cost.’

It really is time our litigators caught up with the public mood, moved forward, and helped us plan for our time of greatest need by embracing the concept of assisted death and wrapping it securely in laws we can all depend on. Should I find myself, at some dim and, hopefully, distant point in the future, ill, vulnerable and disempowered, I can state for the record - assisted death - I’m counting on it.

I would like to end this post with a joke about a doctor, a priest and a lawyer, just to leaven things a little here, but I can’t for the life of me think of one…  Instead, I’ll draw your attention to this:

Next week, on 08-12-08, BBC One will be showing I’ll Die When I Choose, a thirty minute programme about politician and Parkinson’s Disease sufferer Margo Macdonald. According to the BBC synopsis: ‘in this deeply personal film, she uncovers the truth about assisted dying, meeting those with illnesses like hers who are desperate to die, and exploring how British law could be changed to allow them to choose when they can.’

And finally, as we face the final curtain on this subject, returning to the mention of *science fiction, I remembered this scene from the 1973 dystopian cult sci-fi film Soylent Green. In a famous scene, Edward G. Robinson’s character, Sol Roth, elderly and tired of all the greed and corruption around him, takes his life to its natural conclusion; he enters a pre-paid contract to die by the administration of a lethal drug at the hands of a pretty nurse. In his last moments the planet he is leaving behind, the evanescent beauty of having lived on it, are vividly recalled through images and music.

The introduction to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is not the music I would choose, but you’ll get the idea…

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.

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Additional resources: mariecurie.org: End of Life: The Facts

Personally, I like nothing better than to see a bloke whacked with a plank, but Russell Brand’s recent walk-the-plank act left me stony-faced. He - and Jonathan Ross - were in the news again today, so I thought it’d be timely, given the last few posts, to take a detour down laughter lane…

(Christ! TFFT!)

Humour is a huge subject, probably too big to do anything like justice in an idle blog post - philosophers, academics, commentators and playwrights, have, after all, been trying to analyse humour for centuries and who am I to add my twopenn’orth? Well, I’ll tell you. You probably think I’m one of the serious sort and you’re not wrong, but I do strive for balance and what better reason to become familiar with the intricacies of comedy?

As a fortywhatever woman I’m sure I don’t need to provide an excuse for an opinionated rant, either, or give it any kind of context but just for once I’ll list my credentials for you.

Er… I’ve read The Name of the Rose? I really did LOL to Portnoy’s Complaint?

No. Seriously, I’ve been a fan of stand-up comedy ever since I was old enough to pay my own way in and I’ve seen a broad spread of acts over the years at pubs, clubs and festivals, ranging from the bland (sorry Lenny Henry), through Eighties political correctness (Jo Brand, Ben Elton etc.) via the downright offensive (Jerry Sadowitz, Bill Hicks, Ian Cognito) to the gentle faux air-heads like Eddie Izzard, Ross Noble and Alan Carr.  I’m even fairly up to date on the latest crop of  Noughties vicious irreverents - like Charlie Brooker and Jimmy Carr. I love L.D - oh yes - and - I taught Trevor Griffiths’ play, Comedians, for three years in a row to a bunch of 16-19 year old goths and emos. In Weston-super-Mare. What a hoot that was.

More than that though, if you’re a parent, to some extent you have to work through your philosophy on humour. It’s all about those magical, fluctuating but important phenomena psychologists call ‘boundaries’. The first time you laugh at baby’s farts you can set the tone. Likewise, the first time you see baby slip in a paddling pool or walk into a door, watch out, you could be on your way to creating the next ‘class clown’.

Take my family. No really, please, take my family… in our house we’ve been having an ongoing debate about slapstick versus *scatology. Living with two males, one a schoolboy, the other… where do you draw the line? How low do you go? Often, increasingly recently, I’m driven to flip-out over one joke too far, especially at mealtimes. Is it an age thing? A gender thing? Moreover, which wins, slapstick or scatology, which is ‘best’?

You see, as I said at the start, I’m not averse to the odd bit of slapstick, that shiver of schadenfreude which makes me, in the eyes of my family, a bit of a sadist. Scatology and slapstick have in common that they both tap into your ‘inner child’ - gawd ‘elp you if you haven’t got one - I just prefer other people’s pain to their poo, is all.

I want to tell you a story: I had a boyfriend once who was outraged by my preferences. Mind you, he was particularly accident prone. We lived together in an old cottage for a while. The toilet was downstairs at the end of a narrow, twisty and steep staircase. He had a weak bladder, so he kept a piss-pot under the bed which he would empty in the morning. He also happened to be taller than the door jamb.

One morning when he was in a rush for work, carrying his piss-pot and negotiating the turn in the stair well, he whacked his head on the door jamb, slipped down the stairs and sent the piss-pot up into the air. It didn’t end there. Whoosh! The piss-pot came down again. On top of him. I saw the whole thing.

I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t stop laughing, not for about an hour. I mean, I ran and got a cloth, ice, a clean shirt, you know, tried to help, tried to commiserate, but… I don’t think he ever quite forgave me.

Slap and scat.  Crossover comedy? Not quite poo, but win/win, nonetheless.

Anyhow, back to scatology. Perhaps rather than an age thing, it’s a ‘family culture’ thing? (See boundaries, above.)

My parents were post-Victorians. They liked Music Hall, and The Goons, and Monty Python, but not poo jokes. J’s parents are post-Edwardians. In some respects the Edwardian era was a response to the Victorian one, and scatological humour was popular at the time, apparently, precisely as an antidote to Victorian primness, which may explain a chaotic informal parlour game I have privately come to call ‘Pee, Po, Willy, Bum, Fart’ which in essence involves my in-laws showing off in front of the grandchildren at mealtimes…

[Oh. The Youtube intro to Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, with the soundtrack version of Flanders and Swan's Pee, Po, Belly, Bum, Drawers seems to have disappeared. Will search for a replacement...]

See. Culture clash. Whaddya do?

It does help these kinds of marital misunderstandings if you can at least trace them back to something. If I were to get all serious again, I’d look to Freud.

In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, to paraphrase a learned friend, ’scatological (or ‘excremental’) jokes are a like ‘obscene’ jokes in general.  Freud seems to believe obscene jokes are a deflection of a sexual urge - you joke about sex because you want to have it - often with the person you’re joking with - but you can’t directly say so.’  (Which is perhaps why I find my in-laws jokes so disturbing…)

How can jokes about poo be ’sexual’?

‘Well, they echo back to the excretory functions which are attached to the ‘erotogenic zones’ (oral, anal, phallic) which are sexualised (because sensualised) during childhood.  If you think about it, excretory and erotogenic impulses persist in some adult sexual preferences…’

Whoa. I’ll stop there.

For Freud, excremental humour is an expression of an impulse that is both sexual and infantile and so it is a manifestation of infantile sexuality - ergo poo jokes are childish. Genius.

I’m not sure where that leaves slapstick, but according to that well known philosophical barrel of laughs, Theodor Adorno: Schadenfreude is the: “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.‘

Appropriate! No harm done. So does that mean slapstick ‘trumps’ poo? I win?

Anyhow, on to higher things.

In the best comedy, though, the target of the humour, if not the comedian themselves, is diffuse, and the laugh which results from it comes at the expense of no-one in particular. There is no one single butt, just a we’re-all-in-it-together observation about the human condition in general, which alleviates (psychic) suffering and resonates with a laugh. Good comedians make this look easy, but it is actually much easier to crack a one-liner - linguistic trickery, it’s the way you tell ‘em - or to aim the joke at someone else.

Which brings me back to Russell Brand.

He’s clearly a clever chap, but his ‘brand’ of humour - increasingly popular, I know - leaves me cold. Instead of seeking to illuminate the human condition, he seems to set himself apart with sneers. I don’t get his appeal, not as current funny man-of-the-month, not as anti-establishment rebel without a cause (¿Que?) and certainly not as big-hair sex object. I wouldn’t have gone so far as to complain to Ofcom about his recent jape with Jonathan Ross, but I did think they acted like a pair of snickering schoolboys with their silly knock-and-run trick.

It was cheap and mean and sleazy.

But then, I’m not a big fan of the current fashion for ‘punk ‘em, prank ‘em and watch ‘em eat bugs’ either.

It strikes me that one of the dangers of the digital culture wherein every pratfall, blooper, faux-pas and drunken ramble can be captured, transcribed, blogged or posted on YouTube, is that stories like ‘Piss Pot’, above, could carry on haunting and humiliating the poor victim for years after the event.

Mmn. Perhaps if I’d had a camera phone back in 1996 I could’ve come away with the sofa and the stereo…

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*Scatology: n: obscenity, esp. words or humour referring to excrement.

Too long, this one. Sorry. Notes for something.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a teenaged male facing the hour of his examination has his own unique perspective on the amount of labour done to date and the amount yet remaining…

Next week is the Year 11 GCSE Maths exam. This week, J has been helping Jnr ‘revise’.

Dog has been under the table. Bel has been eating chocolate.

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Version I: The Delusion

According to Pilgrim’s Progress:

Jnr’s Year 11 Secondary School Prom approaches…

Some of his classmates have been planning their ‘dates’ since Year 10, but just recently things have begun to hot up. Careful pairings have been agreed, dresses booked. The number of remaining singles has dwindled fast. Meanwhile, Jnr, aka Mr Mañana Man, has dragged his feet.

In the last six weeks, on and off, I have been party to a recurring conversation…

Me: Have you asked C to the prom yet?

Jnr: Nah. Not yet, no.

Me: Has she agreed to go with anyone else yet?

Jnr: I don’t think so.

Me: She’s waiting for you to ask her.

Jnr: Nah.

Me: She is. I’m telling you. Just ask her. Why not ask her?

Jnr: Dunno. Not the right moment.

Me: Why not? She can only say no.

Jnr: Exactly.

Me: But she won’t say no.

Jnr: *I’m not going if I can’t go with her.

Me: Then ask her. He who hesitates is lost. She’ll think you’re not interested. She’ll find someone else.

Jnr: Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know.

Me: [Laughs] What are you waiting for?

Jnr: [Emits a low moan] A week when I haven’t been a twat in class, when I can get her on her own…  Like yesterday.

Me: And?

Jnr: We got talking and. [Emits another low moan] It just went out of my head.

Me: Aw.

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When I left school we were hardly aware of the date approaching.

The typical Seventies Comprehensive School Leaver’s Disco was a naff, disorganised, damp squib. The caretaker strung a few balloons and lights from a gantry in the drama room. There were no Goths, no Chavs, no Emos, no costumes, no concept of ‘dates’, definitely no limos. We put on our nothing-special glad rags - jeans mostly - applied a spritz of Charlie - tsssst! - gave our kissers a hopeful squirt of Gold Spot - tsssst! - a slick roll-on of cherrycoke lip-gloss (that stuff was like glue, if you ever did kiss a boy wearing it, he jolly well stayed there), hair - tssst! tssst! - were given a lift to school by our Dads, had a quick menthol ciggie behind the PE block, and crossed the threshold to adulthood, oblivious and entirely unnoticed. We cast off our school uniforms and left behind an important phase of our lives, feeling vaguely cheated, but not knowing quite why.

So I’m all in favour of this newfangled ritual, the Noughties Prom. I’ve had debates with people who think the fad for the The Prom is all Me-generation sleb-style excess, a vulgar American add-on which pastes tacky glitz onto the miserable acned face of traditional British adolescence. I disagree. I think the way the Americans have formalised and framed the transition from High School to life beyond - as a positive celebration - hits exactly the right note.

I’ve watched Jnr and his friends begin to assume a new maturity as the Prom draws closer. For a start, the fact that they’re looking forward to it is focussing their minds. Even the exams, which are inextricably linked to the Prom whether they like it or not, are coming into focus. This has benefits for everyone, for the imminent leavers themselves, and for their parents and teachers. Fear is sweetened by fun.

Because of the Prom, the Year 11’s seem to realise the transition is a big event and sense that they have an important part to play in it. There’s pride, not dread.  The need for planning ahead has helped; from what I’ve observed, the complex social negotiations and group activities which lead up to a Prom demand some fairly grown-up skills. As the details are finalised, these nascent adults are beginning to take the next stage of life,  and themselves, more seriously.

For the boys and girls to be formal, to wear stiff evening dress and have to deport themselves with a touch of decorum during a rite of passage, I think is a good thing. It’s the start of learning a useful trick - how to slip into a role and behave - at least at the start of the evening - like model proto-adults.

As for the credit crunch doom-mongers - it’s not necessary to spend a fortune to do The Prom in style. The frippery is there to add to the mystery, to make the event memorable, to acknowledge a set of significant farewells and foreshadow a new phase. Prom night itself is intended to be a game of ‘Let’s Pretend’ and the elements of fantasy needn’t be expensive, they just have to decorate the gaudy gateway, help everyone to capture the moment of gauche precocity on the cusp, decked in glamour and dressed in fun.

Some have argued against the Noughties phenomenon of The Prom because it can be seen as a coercive heterosexist charade. There is a Barbie and Ken element to some of the clothing chosen, it’s true, but last year, one of the best dressed Prom couples at Jnr’s school was openly gay. It was scarcely commented upon. Having grown up in the Seventies and read accounts of the miseries endured at school by gay contemporaries on forums, I know this fact represents progress.

The sweet sixteens of 2008 may be a little dreamy about red carpets, for sure, a little dazzled by the X-Factor, but they’re not sleepwalking nihilistically into their futures with no demarcation line, the way my generation did.  They have a sense of direction and entitlement which will help them. If the more aware among them ask themselves, as we did, as they leave school and hover on the brink of what is looking like the start of another cyclical recession: **’What Do I Get?’ the answer in 2008 is - at the very least - you get to go to The Prom.

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Update. Jnr came home from school whistling yesterday.

Me: How was your day, then?

Jnr: I-astCeetothprob.

Me: What?

Jnr: I-astCeetothprob.

Me: What?

Jnr: I-astCeetothprob.

Me: Look. Slowly and clearly, word by word.

Jnr: I ASKED C TO THE PROM!

Me: Hurrah! [Waits. Nothing] And?

Jnr: SHE SAID [Pauses for effect] YESSS! - MACHOP!

Me: Great. That’s great. See. What did I tell you. [Sings] ‘Jnr and C. In a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G.’

Jnr: Shuddup. [Smiles]

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I was sixteen in the summer of the War of the Worlds - a battle raged in the UK Singles Charts between Disco and New Wave - there was Another Music in a Different Kitchen. Barry Manillo caved to Siouxsie Sioux. Take a Chance on Me wrestled Because the Night.  Donna Summer went up against Sham 69. On the outside there was no contest, I’d abandoned my purple Spandex™ flares for a pair of skinny jeans and a baggy jumper, but secretly in my heart I still loved a good Disco tune. I still do. This would have been my Prom classic.

*If I Can’t Have You: Yvonne Elliman

** The Buzzcocks

I was delighted yesterday to read an item on the BBC website vindicating the famous English custom of drinking tea.

Tea drinking is not, as was thought, a dehydrating, excessively caffeinated and bad-for-you experience, staining your teeth, your guts and your character, but (dare I say it?) a healthy habit full of potentially beneficial side-effects.

Flavonoids - what a lovely word - I think when they burst upon the tongue, they must look something (little perforations!) like this:

Tea - healthy - as good as water? Yes - the BBC says so!

As a two-cups-before-I-get-outta-bed kinda girl, my heart swells. Tea - that simple brown beverage made from old dry leafs* and boiling water - how I love thee. (Made just the way I like it, of course. Or it goes back.)

Whenever I travel anywhere, up the road to vist a friend (vegan/camomile/soyamilk friend), camping in Dorset, over the ocean to far-flung continents,  I’ve always popped some teabags in the old handbag. So frisk me, Officer, but, ‘Noooo! - please - don’t take my teeeeeeee!’

America? You call that tea?  Dude. You can keep your miserable tepid, tethered-to-a-string-like-a-tampon teabag, dipped in an inadequate cupful of lukewarm milky water.  Australia - iced is nice - on the beach - in the hot weather - ahyeah - but…

As for the rest of the world? Coffee can be good, too, but it’s… well, not tea.

Gone too far? Doctor’s orders. Flat coke and boiled white rice. But on day three, the spirit rallies. By crikey.

‘Bring me [whispered gasp, fumbles in ** handbag], please - [shaky hand passes carer a small brown parcel accompanied by a desperate smile] a nice cup of - ‘TEA!’

Historically, I’ve had no compunction about explaining in broken French/German/Spanish that,

‘I’d like a cup of boiling water, please. Yes, just boiling water. For [holding aloft a teabag] this…’

A teabag?

Or marching into the hotel kitchen, even. Beside a big, angry American on the verge of nutritional faint - who is, after all, asking for an entire second serving of food (when there clearly is no more chicken to be had because it’s Ramadan) because his plate was too small - a bit of hot water seems… almost humble.

Oh yes. Memorable times happen over tea.

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Sex

[Rainy day. Man and woman. Meeting. Tea shop. Flowers. Eyelashes lowered over the brew.]

‘Is the pot empty?’

‘Yes.’ [They both look up, startled.]

‘Shall we…?’

‘Go?’

‘Yes. Why not. Yes…’

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Death

[Rainy day. Bunch of friends and family. Front room of a house. Flowers. Eyes lowered.]

‘Terrible.’

‘Yes.’

‘Too soon.’

‘Yes.’ [Pause]

‘Shall we? - ‘

‘- put the kettle on?’

‘Yes. It’s what he would’ve wanted. Yes…’

—————————————–

But - oh dear - the BBC*** also says,

‘Tea drinking is most common in older people, the 40 plus age range.’

Older people?

Tea drinker I may be, but I can also say, ‘Recession? Three million unemployed?’ Been there.

Forget Starbucks, and Costa, and Cafe Nero. Tea! It’s cheap. It’s good for you. It cheers you up.

Bring back The War.

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* leafs - affected typo

** Sadly, Youtube have removed the five second clip link from The Importance of Being Earnest where Dame Edith Evans says, ‘A handbag?’ (violation of terms of use??)

*** No, not biased at all. ‘The Tea Council provided funding for the work.’

As you know, junk mail is one of my enemies, but a flyer popped through the letterbox yesterday which I just had to share. It was marked: ‘An Invitation…’

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Royale Porcelain Ltd.

Cordially invites you to our presentation of exclusive tableware from Limoges - France. [Ooh, exclusive.]

I shall be happy to personally welcome you to this unique venue: [A personal welcome? Pour moi?]

The Poshe Hotel

Antiques Town

Your Area

On: Friday 12th September at 4.00pm precisely [Hurry, hurry - pass my peignoir - musn't be late!]

and to offer madam [Madam! I like it.] a beautifully decorated collector’s plate

and the gentleman accompanying her a bottle of French wine.

Nicole

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Imagine it. A gentleman. And wine. I’m soooo excited.

Mmn. I might even be permitted to touch and handle such delights as this:

Or this…

Or even a ‘Love Box’ like this…

Pah! Time to change my postcode.

Meantime, here is a much more appealing fantasy…

I’ve been having a clear-out. Here are some of the things I came across:

1. One dusty, silk-lined, brown leather glove.

As part of a pair, that glove was warm, a good fit (I have small hands) and half of a not inexpensive ensemble. But what use is one glove? A lone glove is a sad thing, a constant reproach to the absent other. Guess I could never bring myself to throw the survivor out. I kept thinking, hopefully, that I’d stumble across its mate.

2. An envelope with ‘Those Purple Things’ written on it.

Inside was a handful of tiny hard brown spheres. What the…? Seeds. One day, years ago, I saw some pretty flowers growing on a railway siding. I want some of those in my (future) garden, I thought. I had to climb a fence and cross two sets of rails. I picked them, dried them and harvested the seeds, but I never found out what they were called. At the time, I fantasised that ‘gardening’ was going to happen to me, like maturity, or wisdom, or wrinkles, suddenly, like a lightning bolt striking at an age-appropriate moment. Ha.

3. A glass-stoppered jar decorated with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones, bearing the label: ‘Very Deadly’.

This, I inherited. In a time of lenience, before the legislation on domestic pesticides changed, my father, who liked nothing better than to burn, poison, chop, electrocute*, or otherwise ‘kibosh’ nuisances, spent half a lifetime gathering an impressive array of lethal substances. When he sensed his mortality approaching, I imagine he pictured me going about his empty house, like a dazed Alice In Wonderland, holding bottles up to the light, dipping my pinky in strange powders, sniffing liquids, naive and curious. He got busy labelling. Very. It’s quite a trick to make someone laugh when you’re long gone.

4. In the back of a cupboard, in a flattened plastic bag, under a sediment of flesh coloured dust, I found what looked like a crumbled plaster cast, or clues in an episode of Stargate. What the…? Oh yes. That bra.

Christ. I made that thing a quarter of a century ago. It was one of my attempts at feminist Pop-Art. I took one of my old bras, filled the cups with newspaper, suspended it on a coathanger and dipped the whole shebang in plaster-of-paris, and, when it was dry, painted it shiny baby pink, covered the edges in red loops and the rest in polka dots. It was a good idea, a talking point, but… really, the world was waiting for Sarah Lucas.

Out with the lot of it!

…………………………………

* Electrocute: When I was eight we had a resident rat. Being an engineer, my father made an elaborate electrical trap out of a piece of three foot by five foot hardboard covered with a tinfoil circuit. It took him weeks to perfect. This Deadly! electrical maze glinted across the whole top of the kitchen table downstairs and was switched on with direful warnings for my benefit and excessive ritual every night. The rat, of course, just jumped over it.

For the last three weeks I have been living behind a thick wall of glass. Wherever I was, inside or outside the glass, life has seemed to be on the other side.

Inside, on the surface, time has passed as usual; visitors have come, children have been fed, wine drunk, adults have laughed, dishes have been washed. Inside, underneath, the only moments which seemed real were the wavings-off, when I traced the endless English summer rainwater with a fingertip, cold, against the glass, and mouthed, ‘Goodbye, see you soon’.

Outside, the world has carried on. Holiday postcards, emails, letters have arrived, bills, threats of court action over the deadwood in our trees. Workmen have called, drunk tea-with-two-sugars and dangled from ropes near my window. None of it felt real, not even the sense of giving in, nothing except perhaps the muffled sound of chainsaws, of cracking, the crash of falling limbs.

Meanwhile, through fumbling searches on the computer, through phonecalls, texts and emails, numb, behind a thick wall of glass, I’ve been watching a nightmare unfold. Again. Learning certain words. Again. Adding unfamiliar, type-specific subsets to an ever-growing list.

The list is arcane and some of it, taboo. It goes like this: biopsy, diagnosis, tumour, mastectomy, oncologist, stage, lymph nodes, genes, hormones, secondary, metastasised, Herceptin, prognosis.

This nightmare is happening to my friend.

On one side of the glass, the side that counts, I am positive, encouraging and hopeful. What else can I be?

But on the other side, on here, scrawled like a graffito, where hardly anyone will see, I can trace the secret word.

AFRAID.