rockpool in the kitchen

Stranded 3. Update

2010-04-22T14:36:00.003+01:00

Granny has just sent this to the BBC: whether they'll publish it is another matter - but she'll just copy it here, so you'll see where we're at.

On the BBC news last night, it was stated that this crisis would sort out the good airlines from the bad. Indeed. Staying with me at my house in Lanzarote have been my nephew - a teacher -and his wife with 3 children under 6 and my son with his daughters of eight and 12. My nephew came over on Monarch, my son on Easyjet. When the crisis broke my nephew decided to opt for rebooking on Monarch rather than a refund. He was told to do nothing; he would receive news of his re-booking by email. He has heard nothing. As 17 Monarch flights were going out to different parts of the UK today, any of which he would opted for, he went down to the airport to see if he could get on to one of them. He was told by the agent on the desk - who also dealt with Thomson and Thomas Cook - that he should have inquired with them earlier. Not that they knew anything much. As far as they could see the earliest Monarch would fly him out would be April 30th -and more likely early May. The passengers being given priority were package travellers. He inquired if he re-booked on another airline would he get his refund from Monarch? They said no. He has now booked on to a Thomson flight on Tuesday for over 900 euros.

Monarch does not come well out of this does it? Not least the total lack of information has left the family - including a 13 month old baby - in a state of anxiety and my nephew's school in considerable difficulties.

My son meanwhile who had opted for a refund tried to book a flight on Easyjet on Saturday but was not allowed to proceed with the booking, at the same time as I, a new passenger, hastening home to aid a friend in crisis, was given my ticket, no problem - I was giving them new money. (They charged me 300 euros, more or less.) He managed to book himself on Ryanair tonight, for a reasonable sum: my nephew having delayed a little while he investigated re-funds from Monarch was too late. Ryanair would now charge him over 1000 euros, minimum, without their extras, to get himself home - and not before Tuesday.

The airlines have lost out of this no doubt. But holding booked passengers to ransom like this? Outrageous.

Meantime: some joys. Lovely afternoons on the beach; the enchanting baby - the cry of 'ca' ' as she pursued, crawling at speed, one animal or another, cat or dog, will be Granny's main memory of this alternatively nightmarish and delightful ten days since the crisis broke. Ash cloud, what's that?

The downside is that, given all this, will any of them want to visit Lanzarote again?
'
Not for quite a while,' said Granny's son... Quite.

Granny is off to tend her friend on Saturday. Who knows when she'll be back to the island, let alone this blog. What with one thing and another. She might try to write something. Sta luego

Stranded 2

2010-04-19T11:45:00.002+01:00

It all goes on. One family has gone to school this morning thanks to Mr Jonah and his wife. The other is currently freaking out down on the land - at least one bit of it is. (A beautiful and interesting child, this bit of the family, she is dramatic at the best of times and this isn't the best of times. Granny has memories of walking her round Kew Gardens as a screaming baby, years ago. What changes.) The poor kids are homesick and want their mother. The British government is bringing in the navy to help but meantime everyone has to wait; first get yourself to Spain. But how? Beloved son and family are on a flight to Madrid on Friday. But getting from Madrid is the problem. Granny and son spent nearly two hours this morning trying to book ferries, buses or trains to ferries: or alternatively to Paris. In vain. Websites where they were working at all would take you so far then throw you off. The Spanish bus site surpassed itself - once finally accessed - by refusing to take an English credit card for 3 passengers at once and when attempts were made to book singly the website promptly went down. So that was that.

It would all be easier if Granny and son weren't still suffering from the ocular bug. Granny's eyes continue to stream, so do Beloved son's, she coughs, aches and changing herself from lenient granny to quasi parental dragon at times is not difficult but painful, just the same. Beloved, meanwhile, continues to do his thing as ever, (turning out nice meals though, even if Granny does have to remind him that plain rice in children's terms means just that: ie no tossing in olive oil, insertion of various vegetables, etc etc, and expecting them to eat it just the same.) Granny is reminded of the satirical poem about the young Werther's suicide, where his fiancee, Charlotte, 'just goes on cutting bread and butter'.

Thia is a mini story in the scheme of things, even in the scheme of this particular crisis....but typical enough probably. Children are probably freaking out all over the world. Sta Luego.

Stranded

2010-04-17T11:58:00.005+01:00

Yes: Granny has been absent quite a while and a lot has happened. It has rained furiously at times - a lightening strike wiped out 2 computers and the router in her and her Beloved's house. The dread winter vomiting - noro - virus has passed through. There have been a procession of guests - none fortunately coincided with the heaviest rain or the virus though one pair of guests were unable to come because of their own infection. One of the two kids didn't survive the cold wet weather, despite four hourly bottle feeding by Granny and Beloved. Granny finished her book - on the one unplugged so not destroyed computer: it has had pretty favourable comments from her selected readers but needs much editing.

And now this: volcanic ash. As luck would have it, Granny's long-dead twin sister's family - beloved nephew, nephew's wife, two great-nephews and infant great-niece - are visiting. So is beloved son and his two daughters. Ten people in the house, in other words, all expecting to go back to England, either last week or early next, including Granny herself who is scheduled to return there to help a friend with a very sick husband clear out her about to be sold house. And all stranded. Lovely as it is having these particular visitors it does feel a bit like having prepared to run 15,00 metres and suddenly finding yourself committed to a half-marathon. The cooking! - and of course none of the five children apart from the omniverous baby will eat the same things... The tidying. The washing. .. etc etc etc. And there are only so many excursions to be found on a not very big island. But at least the families are not stuck in a hotel, let alone an airport, like most of the people in the same predicament - 20,000 of them in Tenerife alone; more than 4000 of them here. If the ash stays put - as it seems to be doing - will the government send ships to rescue them? Granny's nephew is a teacher. A lot of the other stranded people are teachers. The Easter holidays see more people on holiday simultaneously than any other season. It's not just the stranded holiday-makers have problems.

An adventure; kind of. Granny's sense of adventure though is severely curtailed by less welcome import, by the charming one-year-old, of a cold which sets eyes not noses streaming, but otherwise results in sore throats heads and general malaise. She is surveying what she is writing here out of very sore eyes.

WHEN WE ALL GET OUT OF HERE? When will the visitors get back to their homes and families? The children are already saying plaintively: we want to go home. Will Granny ever dare stay away from England while the volcanoes are erupting? But if she does stay there when she does get back at last, when will she get to see her Beloved?

There are lots of worse problems in the world she knows. Once her head clears she'll feel less sorry for herself.

Judging by the state of her blog stats, plunged low as a result of her silence, few people will read this Just as well. Greetings to those friends who do come by. 'Sta luego.

interims

2010-02-08T11:15:00.004Z

Granny is very aware of how unsatisfactory she is these days. Equally unsatisfactory in writing this: she is only doing so because, after a weekend away from her book and with a section ahead of her that she is not sure how to put together, writing this is a delaying tactic only. Sorry.

Still: she and her Beloved are, genuinely, very busy. There is a brief respite now following a fair amount of guests, mostly good company though the pair whose reading matter consisted of Dailies Mail and Express, plus Jeffrey Archer, were not as you might imagine the most congenial of these to the intellectually inclined/intellectual snobs, cum moderate socialists/raging pinkos - delete which ever description fits - Granny and Beloved, as you might imagine: though decorum, amiability, politeness and delicious breakfasts were maintained, as ever: this is called doing business. Granny should in this gap be washing cushion covers and making marmalade with Seville oranges carted back from the UK and now residing in her freezer. Is she? Hell no. She's sitting in her dressing-gown writing this at some quite unseemly hour and will, shortly, still dressing-gowned, be retiring to her office to wrestle with her deathless prose. Oh what a slob, she is.

Meantime the land is covered in wild marigolds - belatedly this year - the two motherless kids are back, now weaned, but still enchanting and much too friendly. Their liking to be cuddled will not be followed up any further. Beguiled by them, Granny duly obliged with cuddles and is now covered in flea bites.

So that's it, folks. Back to the empty page and laptop equivalent of pen-biting. See y'all later.

Never rains but..

2009-12-23T16:57:00.002Z

This will be brief. Rain, wind, significant bits of the electricity non-functional, poor Mr Handsome suffering after effects - plus court case - of road rage incident - one goat dead after giving birth to two female kids which are now being raised at the goat farm - no milk for them here - chickens suffering from eye disease so laying no eggs. Meantime it's Christmas on Lanzarote like everywhere else and having to do Christmas food shop through rain, gale, crowds, maybe marginally better than having to fight through snow and ice as back in Blighty but tiresome enough. Guests are here, being tolerant, fortunately. They need to be.

So this is just to say that Granny is still alive - just - and here wishing everyone Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. (Merrier, happier than this perhaps - no perhaps, certainly.)

Noone seems to love Obama any more. But she does.

So Merry Christmas to him and his too.

Let it blow/rain/hail less.

GREETINGS.

Granny's ark

2009-11-23T11:22:00.009Z

Look away all those who hate animals:

All this courtesy of Dear German friend - a much better photographer than she is: and besides, her own camera is kaput.

Noah of course has to feature first. Sorry about the intrusive hands...

Still busy

2009-11-21T13:19:00.005Z

Well well. This week dear German friends have been staying at Granny's house. Granny still managed to write a bit but mostly she has been entertaining friends and also doing the following: Christmas you have to realise is COMING. Plus Christmas guests, not family this year but commercial ones, so Granny has had to go back to doing the things she has become lazy about:

namely 1) making mincemeat for mincepies - including, first - you have to go back to first principles here - making the candied peel the surplus of which she will in due course dip in chocolate and take to Beloved Son for his birthday, because he LOVES this and she is a very good mother. (Most of the time. Though B S and his sister might disagree. It is anyone's right to disapprove of their upbringing and try to do better with their children. Of course.)

2) making Christmas puddings, one of which was given to Mr and Mrs Handsome. This had to be boiled for the requisite 4 hours. (Much steam - but easier than candied peel which takes up to three days to dry out and thus tends to lurk about the place, almost as much Beloved's goat products and bowls of chicken food lurk, all over the kitchen, all the time.)

Oh and 3) equally seasonal, if not so traditional, paying local taxes - done following visit to the town hall, and less seasonal but continual buying anti-flea stuff for cats on the other side of the island.

All achieved, before Granny departs for England on Tuesday to see the babies. Phew. (She wipes overworked brow.)

And on top of all this with dear female German friend, she does a circuit walk up and over and down of nearest volcano. (See above.) Hard work but magnificent. (She means the view, not Granny's efforts.)

Meantime. apart from one week, entirely covering the visit of one set of visitors, poor things, the weather has been amazing: it is still summer here. The problem with that is that with two days of rain only planting cannot be done and chickens all over the island, which like to see things growing so know that their putative chicks will find food are not laying anything. This includes Beloved's chickens: but they still have to be fed. When the eggs are finally laid they will be very expensive.

Meantime too, the ramifications of all the corruption cases on the island roll merrily on. Confessions are made and then retracted. Nothing changes there.

Sta luego.

Busy

2009-11-08T09:43:00.003Z

Sorry, dear all. No, Lizzy, Granny didn't run to or from the sea; she's rooted in her house, along with her Beloved, tending guests. Right now, next door, the sound of seven happy ones, breakfasting, talking to each other in a lively way and from time to time requesting more coffee.

When she manages to take off her cook/waitress/chambermaid/cleaner/hostess hats she does run away but only to her desk to write. She's deep in a new novel for yet more publishers not to publish. Perhaps, when she hits 80, steamy geriatric sex would do it??? None here, though.So forgive her please, if not much blogging gets done. xxx

Rapture

2009-09-26T09:57:00.002+01:00

Another quickie this.

They came, they saw, they showered - luxuriantly - and then they ate - how they ate, very slowly, savouring every bite.

There's one part of Granny - the puritanical Angl0-Saxon bit, brought up on the notion of eat to live rather than the reverse and generally surprised by the proportion of their income that those across the channel were prepared to spend on food - what about the starving masses? - etc etc - that thinks she ought not really to enjoy such gastronomic excess. On the other hand: since her long-ago education via the books of Elizabeth David and her successors she has learned, somewhat, to suppress this part of herself. (While not of course entirely forgetting the starving masses: time for another contribution to Oxfam or Africa Now, perhaps, that useful means of appeasing a guilty middle-class conscience..?) But the rest of her - and on such occasions - is quite able to quell that part. And how.

Gastronomy after all - she tells herself and you - is an art like any other. Making a meal at restaurants like this the equivalent of a visit to the Tate? Possibly. For the Waterside is particularly high art. Take the lobster Granny and Beloved ate - very slowly - its richness and even richer portwine sauce offset by a sprig or two of chervil, much subtler than parsley but not as blatant as coriander - very slightly liquorice, or aniseed, but not quite. It was a bit like that dot of white - like the glint on Vermeer's pearl earring - that turns a good painting into a great one. When the chef himself came round to greet them - it was that sort of restaurant - and Granny pointed out this perfect touch - he was pleased: 'my herbs are not for decoration,' he said. Quite.

And then there was the perfection of the restaurant choreography - a ballet of waiters, wine waiters, under-managers which outdid the Royal Ballet. After the lobster came a duckling. It was carved with marvellous dexterity by an under manager wielding a wide, glinting steel knife, while the vegetables were laid out -exquisitely -by a waiter - one of those who wore waistcoat and shirt sleeves, as opposed to the wine waiters' tail coats., turned temporarily soloist. 'You're doing a chef's job here,' Granny said to him. 'It makes the job more interesting.' he said. The duck was as perfect as the lobster, tender, a little pink, full of flavour, if a bit too much - in quantity - for Granny, who rarely eats meat. She gave some of her slices to Beloved.)

Now Granny is as fond as anyone of good food in more rough and ready surroundings - gastro pubs for instance. She doesn't always want to be part of a gastronomic ballet. Or only once in a very blue moon. But that once in a blue moon is heaven, at the time.- and for a bit longer, given the presents of jam, coffee and cookery books that she and Beloved came away with. (And now for the contribution to Oxfam to make it virtuous - sort of - as well.)

She got up yesterday and went straight to Stoke Newington to mind her beloved little lone twin baby for the afternoon. Who wailed in the park, when tired. Slept thereafter and then chatted and smiled as she does So that was alright. Real life - nice real life - restored.

Good.

Wonderful, golden autumn weather by the way. The kind she misses on her island, which doesn't do turning leaves only the rather inelegant browning and falling of the ever-green variety. To which she will be returning in 10 days or so. Next week she is off to see old friends in Somerset to see still more of the English kind.

Good.

'Sta luego, amigos.

Luxury

2009-09-24T17:15:00.002+01:00

More inter- cultural jottings - from London this time. Rasta man - hair tucked into huge beret - in the street behind Granny's flats with small child, evidently his own. He is jumping the child up and down to the child's delight. "Upsidaisy" he says, "Upsidaisy". Granny doesn't think that phrase ever came out of Jamaica. But it certainly came out of her long-dead mother's mouth long ago and from hers, with her children and now with her grandchildren. UPSIDAISY. Indeed. It belongs to us all. UPSIDAISY.

But this is all she is going to write now. She is currently sitting on a very comfortable and very big bed in an extremely upmarket and Michelin starred establishment alongside the Thames - she and Beloved will shortly go for an exploratory riverside walk. No, she has not come into a fortune suddenly. This is a final joint family present to her and Beloved to celebrate - belatedly - their mutual arrival into an eighth decade. They have been, drooling, reading the menu for the meal which will at 8 o'clock be placed in front of them.

'Like eating money,' said a very puritanical friend once of a similar establishment. 'But oh what delicious money,' Granny said, 'what a delicious money just the same.' She will, very shortly, experience - with her tongue, her mouth, her tastebuds, her belly. this lovely money, for herself.

Though you will be glad to know that she has - on ethical grounds - turned down the offer of foie gras.

Absences

2009-09-14T17:29:00.005+01:00

Granny is very sorry. No: she is not dead/disabled/eaten by shark/smothered by figs/drowned in the paddling pool/ whatever you choose - or don't choose to imagine. She is lazy/inadequate/generally useless. (Make a cross as applicable. Check all options if you like.) She has also been writing - really. Well, that's her excuse, so there. Otherwise she has been doing much as normal, apart from the fact that last weekend was the great yearly fiesta when the whole island descends on the village next to hers on foot and dressed in local dress. (Does Granny dress up in local dress. NO. Though she does walk there like everybody else: in her case it takes all of ten minutes so is not exactly an effort. And anyway, all roads closed to cars, it's the only option.)

Tomorrow is the date of the actual festival celebrated - the day of la Virgen de los Dolores Our Lady of Sorrows, if you prefer - one of the many gods of Catholicism - no more monotheistic than Hinduism as far as Granny can tell. Which means it's yet another holiday and all the shops and businesses are closed. And she herself is due to fly to London, to see the babies among other things.

So she hasn't much to say now, nor much time to say it in. Beloved is busy with the hassle of shipping a dog back to England - the Little Black Local Yokel - off to join his owner - which is worse than shipping a load of cocaine as far as Granny can see. Oh the jabs at the vet, the pet passport, the paperwork, the customs forms, the acquisition of a box of exactly the size allowed by the airline. Etc etc etc. Plus the cost: a lot. Plus all relevant businesses being closed for fiesta on the day everything was supposed to come together. Granny's advice to anyone thinking of shipping an animal back to Blighty is: DON'T.

Meantime a large amount of grapes arrive, thanks to next door neighbour - the grape harvest is finally over: but the large amount of pork Beloved was supposed to be buying from another neighbour doesn't materialise because the slaughter vet claimed the poor animal's liver was defective so that the whole animal had to be thrown away. Neighbour not pleased, nor Beloved, though Granny herself was a bit dubious to start with. (Neighbour's pigs have reasonable quality of life - more than reasonable - but aren't exactly free-range, so not quite happy enough pigs for her.)

Oh and this animal story: concerning the Beautiful Wimp who is NOT being despatched to England. No way. Beautiful Wimp is a mixture of whippet and Welsh collie; looks like a small rather pointy-nosed collie therefore. Granny was walking him along a local dirt road when up rolls a van with a group of what looks like Andean Latin Americans - Ecuadorian or Peruvian. One of them leans out, points at the Beautiful Wimp and shouts - and this is a moment of beautiful cultural, geographical, linguistic animal intermixing. 'LASSIE.'

'No. LADDIE,' Granny shouts back, imagining a village somewhere high up on the Alto Plano showing old old films to the local inhabitants. Much as she, years ago, staying in a remote Donegal village and attending the weekly fillum show in the village hall was treated to several episodes of Tom Mix: the even more antique serial where the good cowboy wears a white hat, the bad one a black. and the heroine ends most episodes tied to a railway line in front of an advancing train/about to be swallowed by a whale/fall off a cliff, whatever.

Hollywood is a great cultural binder. Especially in a world where people travel a long way from home. Granny included.

mysterioso?

2009-08-26T11:32:00.012+01:00

Disappearance of one of Granny's best - guest - pillowcases off the line. Why?

Local linen-thief? Blown off by wind? Beloved removed it? 'No of course not," says Beloved. So why did it turn up 24 hours later mixed-up with his clean washing?

Hour-long power-cut last night?

Overload here? No, whole island as seen out of window is black too. Inefficiency by electricity company? Of course not, heaven forfend... Except this is August and all utilities short-staffed. So: go figure.

Why are curtains suddenly all too short?

Mysterious clipper? Granny's eyesight? No, much too economical to use prohibitively priced cleaner, she washed them all; in cold water of course, very carefully. But.

Cats totally disappeared and/or making even more ridiculous noise than usual?

Cats kidnapped/unfed/growing ever more Siamese and neurotic? No: she has managed to teach them to use the cat door/ neglected to fill their water/food bowl/started cutting up fish on a surface above their heads.

Mysterious sounds of London police sirens echoing round her house?

Migration of London police cars to Lanzarote? Mysterious waves from outer space wafting London sounds down across the Atlantic? - no, though this is a bit more like it, thanks to Telefonica ADSL (broadband to you.) But all it really signifies is that Granny wastes too much of her time these days checking on the Trafalgar Square plinth online and feeling a little home-sick. Beloved never wastes his time like that: but that's Beloved for you.

So you see: Granny is hard-pressed for real drama. This is August after all on her island - when everything and everyone goes to sleep -or goes camping, though, due to recession, there are far less of them doing that this year. While all she does - apart from scolding Beloved and Mr Handsome for upping the water bills by doing ridiculous amounts of watering, rather than waiting to plant when the rains come like everyone else (they are beginning to listen: good) is wash/sort linen, sort jams/chutneys in date order, wash curtains, teach cats to negotiate cat-flap, tolerate dogs and manage without their cat tray -do you want to hear about all this any more than she wants to do it? OF COURSE NOT.

You are quite free to go elsewhere, even if she can't.

Roll on September.

PS. Life not so bad really if a trifle boring. Right now, here comes the sun... doesn't it? Or maybe not.

Old Macdonald....

2009-08-19T16:57:00.004+01:00

Singing Old Macdonald over and over again to Beloved Baby ('with a wuff wuff here and a bleat bleat there') reminds Granny all over again what noisy places farms are. Not that she needs reminding. Since she arrived back on the island, she and Beloved have acquired 2 new goats, 2 new cats and several new chickens. And all of them are vocal. This is not to mention the fact that the grape harvest is in full swing and the trudging of local growers back and forth on the other side of the wall sets the Beautiful Wimp into frenzies of barking, especially at weekends when the picking goes on still more. This is also not to mention that the politics/relationships of all 3 types of acquisition -within their own species and in regard to previously existing animals - eg dogs and other chickens - requires careful monitoring and constant negotiation. And generates still more noise.

The two goats are very pretty and much friendlier than previous ones (when the Beautiful Wimp is not barking at them that is, as he did at first). And also much more vocal. Both appear to be pregnant. But the smaller, older and black one - meet Caprine Elloise - has asserted authority over the brown and white and most friendly and most vocal - continuously vocal one- meet Caprine Harry - and given that Caprine E has some formidable horns and that Caprine H doesn't, Caprine E has to be carefully watched to see she does no damage.

The young chicks also have among them a bully - one that pecks her fellows at every turn. She's such a bully that one poor chick couldn't take it and died. Another was only just rescued from a similar fate. The bully was removed at the same time and both are now separated from the remaining two chicks- in due course, somehow, they will all have to be reunited but it's not quite clear how. Nasty creatures chickens. A bit like little girls - sometimes - when they're not being kind to each other. Older chicks despite it all can make a really rather nice noise talking among themselves; not just cheep cheep but something more like a melodious warble (granny thought a new species of bird had landed on the back patio until she realised it was the chicks.) The same cannot always be said of quarrelling little girls. Granny has had recent experience of that.

Nor would melodious be the word she would use to describe the voices of the two new cats: meet Feline Milou and her son, Feline Pink Floyd: both acquired ready-named from the local animal rescue place with a little help from the quarreling girls. Looking at the mother cat and hearing her son's name, Granny should have twigged, she really should. The blue-eyed mother looks and is half Siamese; her equally pretty son is a green-eyed marmalade cat, not at all Siamese looking. But what he has inherited from his quarter Siamese ancestry is the Siamese voice. Or rather yowl. Employed at full volume whenever (often) something doesn't please him: as when he's been fed the wrong kind of biscuit - or not fed any biscuit - or is on the wrong side (he thinks) of any door. Hence Floyd. Pink. Ouch. (Not a rock group Granny dislikes actually. But.)

Granny knows about oriental cats: she had Abyssinians for years - but has retreated more recently - with relief - to less demanding, more relaxed moggies. So what is she doing with these semi-Siamese felines - in place of the nice, half-grown moggy kittens she was intending to acquire? Pity that's what: silly old woman her. They were not doing well these two among the less aristocratic moggies at the animal shelter. Feline Milou was even wounded. Would Granny please take pity, was the import. More fool Granny she did: charmed too by how pretty both cats were -this was before she heard them - she took them home.

Compared to this farm with its yowling Siamese, cheeping chicks, bleating goats, barking dogs (at the cats among other things) and sometimes grumpy Beloved, Old Macdonald's farm sounds peaceful Granny thinks. Unless Old McD was grumpy too. Probably.

Family Holiday

2009-08-07T18:56:00.006+01:00

Well it went as these things always go. One parent got sick the day after arriving, the other the day before leaving. The two stepdaughters (10 and 12) fought endlessly. The baby has developed a mind of her own, part of which involved crying 'mummy' piteously sometimes when left with her ungranny - otherwise known as Grannyp. The two new cats yowled unceasingly, the two new goats bleated, ditto. The first week was intolerably hot, the second too cloudy, the wind never stopped blowing any more than Grannyp and Beloved ever stopped cooking- or in Grannyp's case child-minding. They are now EXHAUSTED.

In spite of which it was all WONDERFUL. Of course.

And now Granny is missing the thieves of herself like crazy; even though her house has today returned to normal and she's got her head and body back - why do they always go AWOL at such times, during such visits? -she more than half wishes they hadn't been returned to her, that the robbers were here still: but they aren't.

Hullo head. Hullo body. Hullo mind. Goodbye everyone else: goodbye Beloved Baby - turned little person these days - especially.

Hullo door-left open freezer breeding icicles - hullo strange things lurking within de-frosting freezer which have to be dealt with... real life has reappeared with a vengeance, the way it does.

(New cats? New goats? She'll get back to them next post.)

Home - sort of

2009-07-22T11:08:00.006+01:00

Well, Granny is back on her island. A bit bemused, torpid, unsettled- it's taken a week to get herself used to life here again - and with a mixed collection of memories from the past two months playing in her head.

Item: an aged and bare-foot beggar in Venice, clutching an asthmatic's puffer (yes: Granny did drop a cent or two into her hand, never mind she was a gypsy and sending their old and young to beg is a gypsy scam - everyone hates gypsies in Venice as elsewhere so what else legal - more or less - can they do?).

Item: a very large grasshopper in Calabria which interested Granny -nose to nose to it - very slightly more than the somewhat impenetrable ruins of an archaeological site her companions were busy deciphering.

Item: a Muslim woman on the Underground in London clad in all enveloping black, but for an elegant silver stripe in the cloth, and busy applying mascara. 'It looks good,' Granny told her, 'Thankyou,' she replied as they smiled at each other.

Item: many more smiles from beloved infant twin, as Granny, baby minder, sipped coffee in a cafe in Stoke Newington and made silly faces at her.

Item: the twin's two elder brothers upended over the pond in Beloved Daughter's garden after Granny and Beloved's 70th birthday party trying to catch infant frogs.

Item: a superfluity of wizards: - eldest granddaughter in Soul version of the Wizard of Oz, The Wiz, also in Bristol, playing the Lord High Something or other, and sporting fearsome make-up and a whip, and middle granddaughter in the original version in Kew, impersonating a Munchkin in a curly pink wig.

Item: beloved Son-Law, plus ukulele, leading everyone in a slightly risque song from the plinth in Trafalgar Square. Etc etc.

Item: final flourish - a scheduled weekend in Pembrokeshire - was alas aborted by the dear friend Granny was due to visit having been bitten by an adder- dangerous place Wales: evidently. (Dear friend is recovering, Granny is happy to say.) But you can't have everything. And she did take in two films instead.

And here? Well it has been mostly cloudy, windy, very humid, not exactly the island at its best, ever since Granny returned. Though today, for the first time, her part of it has emerged from the cloud sufficiently to see the islands for the first time.

Politically the clouds don't lift - whole place in total stasis, every town hall functioning with minority government, all coalitions with the suspect party which ran the network of corruption axed by the (slightly) more virtuous: meaning that no budgets can be passed, meaning that nothing can be done/initiated and noone can be paid. The Mr Big, leader of said party, who ran the whole crooked business from his prison cell via mobile and computer -the prison governor has since been removed for obvious reasons - is now languishing in a prison cell in Tenerife where he has no influence whatever, Granny is glad to say, so no privileges: he is liable to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell judging by the charges laid on top of the ones he's already in prison for. His claims, meanwhile, to have no income any more with which to pay his hefty fines, somewhat dissipated by the discovery- by the Madrid police while taking his house apart - of a million and a half euros stuffing a pillow: though alas they can't track down all the property he owns, distributed among the names of different 'owners'. In the island, on the other hand, he's still admired as the local version of Robin Hood: god knows why - as far as Granny could see the little people only benefited by the distribution of the odd television set when he or one of his trying to get re-elected. His entire party - a local nationalist island one - seems to have been set up so that he, his mates, his family, could get their hands on profitable political pickings. So Spain, so Canaries, so Lanzarote. British MPs, venial enough, claiming for moats etc are mere amateurs by comparison.

And now there's the panic about swine flu coming from Britain.... Don't start Granny on that. Said illness has been and gone in part of her family - Beloved seems likely to have had a touch of it - and so what? Flu, the odd death from flu, has always been around from time to time: Granny has had some unpleasant encounters with it herself. Illness, death in general are always around. Immortal we aren't despite the sterling efforts of Health and Safety. Elsewhere in the world they know that all too well. SO GET USED TO IT, Britannia. At the very least try and think about something else. GROW UP.

plinth

2009-07-09T10:24:00.002+01:00

What did Beloved Son-in-law NOT do? He blew bubbles, threw chocolate, recited poetry, played his ukulele, read Cromwell's speech on emptying out the rotten parliament of his day - very relevant - talked about the newly independent Greenland, phoned his parents and read his book club book. (If you want to see something else he did go here and scroll down towards the bottom of the page where you'll see a youtube video of it.)

Just off to mind Beloved Baby no 2, the little lone twin, so hurried now. But meantime.....does anyone want to share, for lowish rent, Granny's very nice, ex-council flat in West London, near the BBC? Ad went in wrong, about to be tenant defected.... And there Granny is.. looking out at birds, trees, sky - it's that kind of flat - all by herself.

Just a thought.

plinth

2009-07-06T12:22:00.002+01:00

Briefest of brief posts from a granny who has been spread very thinly - on and off toast - over the past few weeks.

Could this be the highlight though? Beloved son-in-law will be featured between nine and ten this evening on the Trafalgar Square plinth. His family including Granny will be there cheering him on. (Plus a bottle of wine - or two - of course...) It's scheduled to pour with rain - and there's also of course the possibility of his being dive-bombed by pigeons. Let's hope not.

Granny returns to her island next week and may be back here too. Or not. But that's all for now...

Updates

2009-06-03T15:14:00.005+01:00

Granny is back in London from heavenly stay in Italy with her three old friends and in two days will be off to Venice for Beloved's birthday. Life in betweenwhiles has been a whirl of seeing family - and most beloved babies- in the course of which, yesterday, she ran for a bus, fell over, banged one cheek bone, hard, but managed to avoid a black eye, but also fell on her right hand and has what looks like two broken fingers, currently splinted by Beloved's Beloved daughter with two strips of plaster and a kiddy wax crayon - very effective if odd-looking, but no odder than her swollen and bruised hand. Thank god for NHS Direct: when Granny rang it nice nurse assured her she was self-treating sad hand properly, provided she kept on stuffing in Ibuprofen and applying ice, so averting several hours in A&E. Modern times have something to be said for them, obviously.

Back on the island it's all go. A stray dog got in and killed the two adult chickens and large white-tailed cockerel. That's Beloved's drama. The island's drama is larger and is even big news in the mainland Spanish press. Madrid police have descended on various island town halls and on the island council - cutting off their telephone lines meantime - and on the prison cell of the island Mr Big Crook, who'd been orchestrating corrupt development deals from within. Large numbers of island politicians from his party and others, plus council officials plus developers have been questioned- at least eight have been remanded in custody. A lot of document shredding is going on in local police stations..... the local police being the ones who should have waded in and stopped illegal buildings going up: did they? Hell. All of this has been documented as the 'mere tip of the iceberg.'

Among others questioned has been Granny and Beloved's local mayor - whom they did not vote for.

The police operation called 'Operacion Union' is rumoured to have been instigated by one non-bent - presumably - socialist leader in the Cabildo (the Island Council) for political reasons according to his politicial opponents, especially those in Mr Big Crook's party - which contains most of the arrested ones. All of them, of course, are claiming 'no senor, not me, senor, don't know anything about it, senor,' despite big sting in which bribe money for one development was handed over to a middleman: this one provided by the police, as it turns out.

The story looks like it will run and run. Good. And about time too.

Granny will be flying...

2009-05-16T12:40:00.003+01:00

Granny is off tomorrow. She'll spend some of Monday with precious little lone twin then take off at some hideously early hour on Tuesday with 2 of her ex-Oxford group of girls for Italy where there'll join a third. All lovely except that the merry little group is hardly one of girls any more. The trip is to celebrate 50 years of friendship -help! - - and a 3 day walk they did then along Hadrian's Wall, none of them fit and none of them with proper footwear; but they made it, blisters and all. She thinks- hopes- they know better now.

This trip will be much more sybaritic: they're staying at a delicious-looking Calabrian B&B this time- as compared to very austere youth hostels and equal austere B&B's then, both kinds of hostelry freezing cold and latter featuring slippery brown lino and disapproving landladies. Much pasta will be eaten - the Italian landlady is a celebrated Italian cook - and much wine consumed. Fifty year old trip as Granny remembers was entirely dry. Oh, those were the days - all of us in love then, but the husbands in the process of being acquired are now all dead and gone. Women it seems live longer, so though old age is not exactly to be celebrated we can and do celebrate each other. We will. Bibulously for sure.

Granny is then taking Beloved to Venice to a borrowed flat to celebrate, belatedly, his 70th birthday and both of them are having a party in Bristol at the end of June to celebrate that and also her own 70th birthday in mid June. Family and quasi-family come to 20 odd in all and to that some very old friends have been added - plus some 70's music to groove to. It should be fun.

Can anyone suggest the odd hangover cure??

Granny will be glad to leave Lanzarote for a month or so anyway. Trade winds weather - wind everywhere, persistently cloudy up here - has set in and she is not at all fond of that. So no looking back longingly on volcanos. And anyway, if she was feeling volcano-less, she and the rest of them are flying to Naples first and visiting Pompeii so she can feast her homesickness on Mt Etna. Let's hope it doesn't erupt... Not that the four of them wouldn't make lovely ash-hardened fossils. Given that they are half-way there already.

'Sta Luego. She'll post again from London. Perhaps.

Sumer is icumin in...

2009-05-12T11:19:00.016+01:00

Sumer is icumin in.. no singing though. It was a song wasn't it, usually sung by greenery yallery people dressed up as mediaeval minstrels, all very prissy. (Well that's how Granny heard/saw it once, before mediaeval music got bucolic and rumbustious.)

Granny still sees her little Pili round every corner. She still kicks the washing-machine on passing which doesn't do the washing-machine much harm, but doesn't improve her big toe either - all fair enough really. A new cat will be acquired when she comes back here in July. Meantime the mice will have their way with things. And Beloved is back and Mr Handsome outside the kitchen window painting the house, even as she writes.

Apart from the grieving it was a good week. Much sun, little wind, dogs behaved themselves on the whole, Granny had nice lunches with women friends - minus all the men, life stories could be exchanged - and were. Some of her most virtuous friends seem to have been tearaway children: good. And she got back to her piece of fiction - up to 25,000 words now: she still doesn't know whether or not it's a lost cause/total shite or worth proceeding with: she might show it to critic friend back in the UK to get an idea.

Leaving aside all this solipsistic stuff, leaving aside the good weather, she has to report, sadly that the island is in bad shape. The unemployment figures in Spain are 3 times those in the UK, the Canaries the worst in Spain and Lanzarote the worst in the Canaries, 23,000 and climbing; 40% of the working population she's been told. It's not so bad in her area: people have gardens and access to land and they've gone back to doing what they've always done, that is growing things. Oh and bartering and exchanging crops, milk, eggs, etc the way Granny and Beloved do too, a bit, now they're part of the small-holding community.

In the towns there's no such recourse. And very little in the way of social security either. It turns out that few of those who worked in the now collapsed building trade or declining tourism were properly employed, or even on contract. They were casuals, ie 'autonimos' - ie self-employed: moreover, unlike in the UK, they cannot claim unemployment money when the work runs out. (There'd had been some move to change this before the recession broke, but that's now fallen by the wayside.) The result is that families are left without any income; the charities that used to feed street people are now feeding them too. The burglary rate is going up: burglars not only stealing things they can't afford themselves but food; lots of it. (And booze: the local supermarket has taken to locking up their stock of spirits.) Can you blame the thieves? It's dire. The better-off who can afford it are sending stuff to the charities, but of course it's not enough.

Oh and to add to all the good cheer, the water company on the island is bankrupt. Where all the money went, god knows, though one can imagine some of it went into political pockets, given that it's owned by the island council. (Not that corruption isn't universal: look at the news from the UK right now: tax-payers paying for MP's swimming pools? Oh come on.) The managing committee for water is made up of council members from the two parties currently in coalition, the numbers from each proportionate to their representation on the council. Currently there's a coalition between PSOE the Spanish socialist party and PIL a nationalist island party. They were falling out anyway and over the business of the water have fallen out totally. Meaning NOTHING is being decided, let alone done. Since the business can't be shut down - the island cannot do without water - and it can't be taken over, already belonging to the public, what now? God knows. Certainly the politicians don't. But then they never do, do they.

By the way: Granny and Beloved having become via their smallholding to be part of the community is a a good thing for them. In a country where democracy is comparatively young and where good of family/friends trumps good of the community - hence all the embroglios of politicians, developers, business men etc - one weapon of little people is the denuncia - which means literally 'report' rather than the more punitive English meaning of the word 'denounce.' But it works out the same. The denuncia can be anything: you've built an illegal wall/swimming-pool/extension, run an unlicensed business/unlicensed pig. your dog has grubbed up someone's garden, your goats/chickens are kept too near residential buildings. Etc. But once the report is handed to the local police - that's the procedure - even if it turns out unfounded it can cause you - and the police - a great deal of hassle in the meantime. Which is the point. Many expats living in rural areas have been hassled like this. Granny and Beloved have never been - but then they do know the odd thing about the odd illegal local pig etc, which might be a way of them causing problems in return. This helps.

(Ah Spain. Yahoo Espana has just reported an asparagus 3 meters in length. Sumer may be icumin but we haven't hit the silly season yet. Or have we?)

Poor Puss

2009-05-04T11:56:00.007+01:00

Granny sat outside this morning with her breakfast. She'd brewed coffee in a stove-top espresso pot with strong freshly-ground Fairtrade (of course..) coffee; toasted slices of bread full of seeds and walnuts from a German bakery: put out ricotta cheese - Italian - and her own home-made strawberry and balsamic jam. She had also picked two ripe guavas off the tree that Mr Handsome planted by the front gate. To her right on one side of the patio was a riotous display of nasturtiums, on the other an equally riotous display of morning-glory. The olive trees she planted five years ago were growing and healthy, she saw, the fronds of the palm tree that was small when she arrived and is no longer were waving benignly in a very gentle wind. To the far left, hibiscus bushes were in full flower. Such a sunny, relatively windless morning a relatively rare thing here, Granny sat comfortably, eating and drinking and reading an only half-read issue of the Guardian review. Bliss.

But no, actually. Not bliss. Granny was not - is not - very happy just now.

You know the comic shaggy-dog story about the cat that got shut in the washing-machine and washed? Well, she can tell you it is not a funny story really - not unless you like black humour -something fine on paper -or in the movies; but not at all fine in real life.

Yesterday morning she went to get the washing out of the machine to hang on the line. In the middle of it was the sodden, rigid, very clean, very heavy - being sodden - very dead body of Pili (otherwise Pilar Lorengar after the opera singer, because as a kitten she had such a sweet miao): Granny's half-calico, half tabby and much loved little cat.

Kicking the washing-machine shouting 'murderer' wasn't much help: the washing-machine is an inanimate object which was only doing what it's programmed to do: the real murderer - programmed to do the washing after all these years she might be, but Granny is not an inanimate object - was the one who closed the machine door and set it going: Granny herself.

She howled mightily half the day, but nothing could bring back her little cat, by now wrapped in large amounts of newspaper and two plastic bags and dumped in the rubbish: no grave no cat funeral here; the ground is too hard and dogs would have come along and dug the body up.

It was an evil collection of unfortunate circumstances; starting with the fact that the Local Yokel having not adapted to the cat like the other dogs, and continuing to hassle her, Pili had ceased to station herself in the dining-room in the evenings, on a chair and taken to hiding in cupboards etc - but never so far as anyone knows in the washing-machine before. Going on to the fact, that, having discovered the odd flea bite on one of her legs, Granny had that evening decided to do a flea blitz, had hauled the throws off the sitting-room sofas, sprayed the sofas - sprayed everywhere, dumped the throws in the machine - she hadn't shut the door, in case there was more washing to be found. (The throws of course would have smelled comfortably familiar to the cat who sat on them sometimes when noone was around to chuck her off. )

There was also, for the first time ever, another cat lurking down on the land; a black and white monster. Granny due to go to a concert watched it for a bit, hoped it wouldn't cause trouble then hurried to her office to look up the map giving her the whereabouts of the concert, remembering to put the machine on as she went.

She heard a cat scream in a little while; but put it down to the cat outside, hoping there wasn't some fight in which her cat would come off worst. When Pili didn't turn up for her breakfast in the morning she even went outside to see if she could find her wounded somewhere on the land. In vain, of course. Then she came back in and emptied the washing-machine....etc etc.

The cat's scream is what haunts her, especially. If she'd correctly identified its source, could she have got the machine open - could she have saved her? - the programme was a low temperature one, so couldn't have boiled her at least - one small comfort, of a rather black kind. Maybe even then it would have been too late. The sheer terror of the poor animal when the machine started turning is more than she can bear to think of. Your animals - like your children - are yours to protect and care for, not to condemn to horrible deaths.

Murderer Granny....felinicide - whatever. Aided of course by the lethal tendency of cats to seek out small warm, familiar-smelling places, especially when harried by a small black street dog - who isn't to be blamed either, though this disaster doesn't make Granny any fonder of the Local Yokel.

Granny didn't even get to her concert. Despite her investigation of the map before leaving, she still drove round and round an unfamiliar village and couldn't find it. Not an apt punishment for the killer of what must have already been a very dead cat. But something.

She will keep her washing-machine shut in future. And meantime, until another cat is found, later in the summer, the mice will be happy. Sod them.

(Pili would have been sitting on Granny's lap while she wrote this, in other days. She had a book on her lap at one point and almost thought it was the cat. She keeps seeing the cat, she thinks - or at least expecting it to come round the corner. She keeps on having flashbacks of everything - if only she had done this, not done that etc etc. That's how it always is with tragedies, big and small. Don't drop that handkerchief, Desdemona. Don't turn that machine on, Granny. Oh God. Oh God.

Oh dear

2009-05-02T13:08:00.010+01:00

Sorry. Granny has not taken the wings of the morning and vanished into outer space - nor has she descended to the uttermost parts of the sea. She and Beloved have had guests - one thing - also the novel she's been tinkering with for a while took off, to her excitement; she felt - as one writer friend described such things happily, mentally, pregnant and was looking forward to the disappearance of not only the guests, but also Beloved, off to do various bits of business in the UK. The day before the departures, alas, she made the mistake of reading through what she'd written and Granny's answer to Anna Karenina - or even to Joanna Trollope -revealed itself as the usual load of solipsistic shite: a baby with defects for sure. You know how it is. So here she is, all by herself, with all the time in the world, finding every excuse she can not to get back to this ungem of literature - yet another heap of paper for someone not to publish; today's excuse is writing this. Any excuse will do, boring or otherwise.

There's the laundry from the guests, for instance, then there's sorting out the bloody dogs of whom she is now in charge. (After a nice week in which the safely enclosed animals gamboled round their dog garden, the Local Yokel applied his teeth and claws to the usual effect - how Granny HATES that dog - a hole in the wire appeared and out they all came. Shit.) And then there's hoovering the rugs in the sitting-room - and washing the kitchen floor - and moving herself upstairs to what in the summer is her and Beloved's bedroom instead of the guests'. And yesterday there was a charity barbecue, attended by the usual expat display of bottle blonde and withered cleavage - often on the same person - not anywhere Granny fits very well, lovely as some of their owners turn out to be on closer acquaintance. She hasn't got a cleavage anyway after her unwilling encounter with a surgical knife and turning blonde would not suit her one little bit. She did encounter an extraordinary brown-eyed - and white-haired - Belgian woman with a very deep voice confined to a very high-tech wheelchair: despite which handicap she lives on the island in winter, IN A VAN - parking it on any offered garden. Granny heard herself offering her their carpark place in one weak moment - no she hadn't drunk anything: the prospect of having to move the truck out of a tight space and up a steep slope when she left the barbecue inhibited that. But she doesn't think the carpark place would be enjoyed much: too windy. Nor is she sure what Beloved would make of this unusual visitor. Contemplating which she ate far too much garlic bread - the barbecued meats were slow to arrive -before, with difficulty -see above -taking herself off home.

No such excuse today - though she does have to go to a concert this evening. Lunch then? Or siesta? Or back to the load of shite? Choices choices.

Actually no choice: after a gloomy morning the sun is out. It's her hammock for Granny. Literature? What's that?

2009-04-15T09:38:00.005+01:00

Yes well. Granny and Beloved saw. And the dogs escaped again - thanks to Local Yokel's ability to find weak spots in the fence. Beloved and Mr Handsome are again scratching their heads.

G and B meantime are proud owners of a simpering Barbie Doll. Gulp. Fact that Barbie Doll is clad in local costume, barely excuses it. What might do, somewhat, is that the simper comes courtesy of Aurora, owner of the libidinous billy goat that impregnated the unfortunate Ruby, leading to her demise; (not that was Aurora's fault or the billy goat's come that. Causal factors do not necessarily imply culpability: nature comes into it somewhere. Also sheer bloody bad luck not to mention the fate of femaleness: pregnancy is, can be dangerous, always has been, always be. Tra la la.)

Aurora also suffers from being female - ie lousy partners and too many children. She supplements her inadequate income and miserable health - she's a slave to arthritis which Beloved's offerings of cider vinegar don't relieve much, if at all - by various handicrafts: painting pottery plates, dressing dolls, making crochet hats and bags etc. Yesterday she brought around a plethora of Barbies clad in different versions of local dress, festive, daily and from different parts of the island 'Choose,' Granny ordered a bemused Beloved, who's barely been forced to confront one Barbie before - though this may change now he has a granddaughter - let alone several. 'The one with the striped skirt,' he said hurriedly. The striped skirt one now simpers on the dining-table, and Granny is 30 euros poorer.

'Is it too expensive,' Aurora asked. 'It's a lot of work.' Granny didn't have the heart to say it was too expensive - think of all the efforts - if subsequently dangerous - made by Aurora's equally hard working billy goat -and besides, it's not Aurora's fault either that the pound is barely worth a euro these days, and Aurora probably needs the money more than she does - more than probably. So Granny is 30 euros poorer today and will be even poorer if the TV man comes back to fix, finally the satellite dish; he didn't have the right bolts yesterday. Turns out the dish isn't on its last legs, the satellite is and will be replaced in due course. Meantime he can make do and mend, for a price; the way things always are.

It meant Granny was spared Gok Wan last night anyway. Granny approves of GW in principal but you can have rather too much of him - one episode or even half an episode is more than enough - so she got another lovely dose of the Wire instead. Tonight if she's lucky she might get more than Kevin McC's ankle. On the other hand, despite the wonders of Kevin, she'd willingly settle for The Wire and Dominic West yet again. That series is a marvel. Even Beloved admits it will just do.

She can still get the internet, though - so will point you to these headlines from the BBC news site: this and also this. Even though the headlines - 'Amazon ants abandon sex for a world without males' and 'Red Mercury hoax sparks Saudi sewing-machine frenzy... .- are, as always, a bit more intriguing than the actual stories, both, she thinks, add to the gaiety of things, at least as observed by her small mind. Enjoy.

Life goes on

2009-04-14T12:06:00.011+01:00

Beloved Daughter came: Beloved Daughter left; the usual thing with adult children: first joy then loss again. (Though, to be realistic, much as Granny loves her kids, she knows that like most people with grown-up young she would not want them around all the time. Once the nest flying time has come - and gone - the abandoned parent can enjoy independence too, and mostly does. It's an enjoyment Beloved Daughter had a whiff of, minus both husband and child for almost the first time since Beloved Eldest Granddaughter was born, so able to get on with her own activities, uninterrupted. She looked forward to being with them again, though, in the end. (She said she would be, anyway. Though not with the kind of enthusiasm that might have meant she'd also had enough of her mother - or the wind, come to that. She's tactful that way, Beloved Daughter.)

Good weather alas did not come; nor, by definition, did it go. It blew, it clouded, it rained a bit. Granny and the BD had a good time together just the same, walking, eating, appreciating the landscape, getting sun when they could. Though they did get some sun ( a little) most days, BD admitted wishing she had brought more sweaters and never once got to wear her shorts.

Granny who had still been melancholy when BD arrived felt a good deal better by the time she left, despite spending other parts of the happy week reading, with surprising pleasure Julian Barnes' semi-autobiographical dissertation "Nothing to be frightened Of". About a) his fear of dying and b), if incidentally, his irritation with his mother, it not only made her both laugh and think, she could also like most of us identify with both the fear and irritation. The more wryly perhaps because she is so much nearer to death at her age, and by the same definition much more likely to be the parent who causes the irritation than the offspring who feels it. All very commonplace as Beloved would say. But also all too real.

Currently she is waiting for a man to come and inspect their errant TV satellite dish. If he comes up with some solution she and Beloved will be denied the pleasure of watching a prolonged shot of, say Kevin McCloud's ankle, the picture having frozen there and stayed frozen for a long time. You can see Granny likes Kevin McCloud and Grand Designs. A lot. What she wasn't so so looking forward to last night was the prospect of wall to wall Henry VIII, not to mention the dread David Starkey - imagine a prolonged view of any part of his anatomy - so she was quite glad when the satellite did its disobliging thing and she and Beloved could settle down to the next episode of The Wire. Six episodes into that they are beginning to get the hang of it. Of such things are their windy Lanzarote evenings made. (Beloved doesn't do Darby and Joan evenings sitting by the fire reading... he thinks it's unsociable. A pity really. Joan would do them- but having picked, having got to love this Darby, she does go along with him, some of the time at least.)

And the dog fence? The hole has been fixed and all three canine horrors have spent the whole morning in their enclosure. "Maybe we've solved the problem," Beloved said over lunch on their most sheltered patio - the wind you see is still blowing even if the sun is out. 'That's what you said last time," Granny said. "We'll see."

Excuses

2009-04-07T18:45:00.007+01:00

No, Granny has not jumped into the sea round Lanzarote and waved goodbye for good. But she was beset by sinus trouble last week and she has got Beloved Daughter staying now - neither of these things leave much time or energy for blogging. In the course of the sinus she succeeded in backing the truck into a parked car and getting a ticking-off from the police for not reporting it to them: result yet another 90 euro fine.... turns out even such small things have to be reported to the police here. (So much law to run around when it comes to small things, so much seemingly licensed evasion on large ones; just look at all those illegal houses/hotels/car parks that won't be pulled down.) Beloved says their truck insurance will go up for sure. He was very nice about it though. He is nice about things like that - and all too inclined to back into things himself.

Meantime the war of the dog fence continues; the canines are finding ever more ingenious methods of getting over or under it - the most ingenious by far turning out to be the Local Yokel, his intelligence not highly rated up till now. But given that the LY is descended from street dogs that was probably a mistake: street dogs have to be pretty canny to survive, a cannyness passed on in their genes no doubt, which is yet another tiresome example of the equally tiresome - and ruthless - notion of the survival of the fittest. Much thought will have to be put into the latest - also tiresome - round of the contest between man and beast. Granny will keep you posted.

Oh and the winds have got up to welcome Beloved Daughter. They would, wouldn't they. One problem with the winds now is their effect on television reception. Once upon a time, only rain could interfere with the satellite signal. But they've moved the satellites around a lot and now high winds - or not even very high winds - do still worse and can remove it for days, more or less. Mr Surfer /Tellyfixer has advised building a wall round the satellite dish, but that will have to wait till next week: Mr Handsome has taken the week off, and Granny does not want Beloved to risk his neck on the roof even if he was willing to; which he is not, much as he does miss his Channel4 News and Time Team.... (Not that she'd wish Mr Handsome's neck in danger either. But Mr H does have somewhat more sense about such things and is a good deal steadier on his feet, besides. You know how it is.)

Granny and BD went for a good walk today in sheltered ravines along with the Beautiful Wimp. Unfortunately Granny forgot to take the mobile that was supposed to summon Beloved to pick them up and her attempts to use the public telephone were unavailing as well as expensive; not having used such an instrument in years she had forgotten about not hanging up between calls so long as there was credit left. She and BD had to sit in a cafe for a long time - an equally expensive activity - before Beloved turned up; fortunately he'd put the lack of a call down to Granny being out of signal range. So no problem there, apart from the vanishing euros and the thoughts assailing her as she watched another aged parent and offspring pair, in this case a Spanish speaking Englishman with an extremely ancient, skinny, clearly demented, but very tanned, beach-clad and sun-hatted old mother, sitting at the next table. Some people are much nicer and more patient than Granny could ever be, she thought. She tried not to think she might be like that herself before too long - the aged mum that is. Oh dear. Oh dear.

As must be obvious, Granny is in a hurry. Beloved's cooking - and the washing-up incurred thereby - is due for her attention. Night Night.

Chilly

2009-03-30T18:17:00.006+01:00

Well, Granny is back home, it's chilly and quite cloudy again and she has gone down with a bad cold. It's not clear who started it - both Beloved and Mr Handsome started suffering before her and each of them seems to think they caught it from the other. Well, it doesn't matter and Granny knows hers came from Beloved for sure. And this after arriving home feeling smug that she'd managed to avoid all the colds that were besetting her family in London... thinking that's it for the winter at least. But it wasn't.

She is still sad of course. Grief is like a baby that keeps waking in the night and making sure you know it's there and that you're ready to give it attention. It brings back to Granny the death of her own twin in particular - but then it brings that back to everyone, to her twin's children, especially, as all of them confront the loss of this other tiny, twin who, with her sister, was supposed to make the family feel whole again in a symbolic kind of way. But life is not that neat is it, and we shouldn't get our hopes up so ever. Serves us right. Except that hope it necessary and good and why not run with it now and then, even if you end up turning round and cursing it, more often than not? After all it does turn out to be the right feeling sometimes. Of course it does. (Granny is being hopeful again. Silly - or not so silly - her.)

Many comforts here, despite the - relative - cold. The garden is full of vegetables ready to eat; Granny picks peas, broad beans, pulls spinach, cuts artichokes, digs up fennel; all of it delicious. And today she made strawberry jam with local strawberries, some of them from her garden. And the island with its fuzz, its fur of grass these days after all the rain, and many flowers still and all the new life and re-tilled fields now that people have no work and have to grow things, is looking more beautiful - delectable - than ever. And the sea is an amazing blue and the surfers ride the waves - some much more skilfully than others - and birds are everywhere - including more than usual up here, because of all the food - so that is good.

Also Granny has been reading a perfect comfort book. One of those oddities, unlike anything else, called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. About the occupation of Guernsey during the war, terrible in parts, but also very romantic. Try it.

Also Beloved Daughter is coming to stay next Sunday for a whole week. Now that has to be alright, not to say good. It is.

Granny has a small glass of malt whisky alongside the computer, called a cold cure. That's all helping too. Skol. L'chaim. Prosit. Sante. Bottoms up. Whatever you like. (Though L'chaim might be best. It means to life. Yes. TO LIFE! She'll drink to all of you. She's drinking. Cheers.)

Twins

2009-03-24T11:10:00.003Z

A brief post from a partly sunny London.

Granny has seen them now, both twins, together still if only in photographs (photographs are encouraged these days and older brothers invited in; so different from when Granny's little brother died, aged one week, all those years ago. He was not shown to Granny and her twin, alive or dead. He might never have existed. Oh, but he did.) She has also seen and held the beautiful living twin; will see and hold her a lot more over the next few years. This twin was bigger at birth than her equally beautiful but no longer living sister, and looks very like Granny's twin. How, weird. scary, beautiful the passing-on of a family forehead, a family face, especially when revealed within the pathos of new born babyhood, in a child part of the world already, yet not quite part of it, gazing away, into some other place. Many tears around her. Of course. But families come together at these times which is as it should be.

Granny's lovely twenty-four hours with the other beloved baby - Beloved's granddaughter -was very comforting too.

So life is not all bad. If so so sad. So sad. Especially just now for Beloved Nephew and Niece-in-Law.

The inescapable fact of parenthood is that you cannot always protect or even save your children. A fact and a fear which lasts from moment you conceive - or at least from the first moment you feel the baby - or babies - moving and the real communication starts. And which won't end till you're dead yourself.

Back on the island the three dogs are finding ways of getting out of their run: the Tiresome Terrier climbs the fence, the Local Yokel squeezes underneath. Poor Mr Handsome scratches his head, and Beloved, on his way home now will shortly be scratching his too. Granny meantime is off to buy supplies to take back to the island; tomorrow she will be busy holding the beautiful two-in-one baby for one more time, before she has to return to the island herself.

A Japanese Yoga teacher said the very best thing of the lone twin. 'She will have the spirit of two.'

Oh yes. Of course she will.

Twin(s)

2009-03-17T12:37:00.006Z

Update: Beloved nephew rang last night. Twins have been born: one girl hale, healthy, perfect, the other not: she is not expected to survive for more than a few hours longer.

'But at least,' said Beloved nephew - of his two sons and the healthy new baby 'At least I've got three beautiful children. I have to be glad of that.'

Yes, indeed. But it isn't quite so simple. Two babies were in the womb for nine months, two babies came to feel like real people. For the surviving baby the non-survivor was her companion all those months - modern technology makes clear that twins in the womb do have a relationship that differs from pair to pair. When one of the pair dies shortly after birth, or even before it, that relationship has been prematurely swept away. Granny, a surviving twin herself belonged for a while to an organisation called "The Lone Twin Association". She did a survey of its membership once; more than a third had twins that died at birth, before it, or within a year. Many did not know till much later in life that they had been born twins, but had always felt an incompleteness in themselves. Granny herself knows of two artists - one a very dear friend - who only found out about their twinship as grown-ups but whose art, long before that, centred round objects or designs that always came in pairs.

And then there are the feelings of the parents - ready for two babies and now only tending one: loving the one, rejoicing in her, but still longing, grieving for the other. What would she have been like? Who would she have grown into? Noone will ever know.

Those who have only ever expected single babies - still more those who lost single babies and ended up with nothing- may find this strange: why should they mind? They have a baby. Isn't that enough?

But no it isn't. Not after nine months of gestating, loving, expecting two; that special thing. Granny a twin herself, may know this better than most. Of course she too is grieving, crying, as she writes this, but hers is a small grief compared to that of the parents, and, over her lifetime. of the surviving twin.

Update: the sick twin died last night as expected. Time for grief.

Stasis

2009-03-16T14:04:00.005Z

The goat you could say was static. Very. And after the Saturday morning efforts of Mr Handsome and one of his mates is now just one more dead animal in a site where everyone throws their dead animals and which - there is an article in the local press this very morning - everyone else complains about - that is anyone who lives nearby: you can imagine the smell. (Other dead animals just get dumped in the nearest bit of countryside for other people's dogs to find and roll in, which maybe is- it can be - worse: Granny, as you know, speaks from experience. Beautiful Wimp's latest dead goat reek has still not quite disappeared.)

So: one dead goat - what's to upset you - or her -about that? Nothing really. All animals die, after much shorter lives than their owners. Except it was Granny's - or rather her and Beloved's goat and most days she would go down to the goat pen and have a conversation of little huffs and grunts with the unexpectedly dear animal - you remember how anti-goat Granny was to begin with - the animal who is now one more smell of rot in an ever more smelly place and not conversing sweetly any more. This time last week she and Beloved were expecting to be the owners of three goats, one big, two little: now they don't own one. Nor will they until Beloved gets another goat or two in the autumn. No goat milk ricotta for breakfast, not any more.

Strange, hot times here, generally. adding to Granny's sense of unease. Apart from one chilly day when the wind blew from the north and the cloud surrounded them all day, there has been a calima, dust haze and wind from the Sahara, for over a week; unheard of. Such things never usually last more than four days. Add a two headed-goat or two and the odd comet to this disjointed season and it could really be Apocalypse Now - Granny hopes not. She really does.

Still no twins and she is still all of a twitch - 40 weeks of pregnancy today; she cannot believe the womb that encloses them will be allowed to any longer. She is off to London anyway on Thursday and since the visit is on the twins' account they'd better have arrived. (She can't leave it any longer because the fares between her island and the UK will start tripling, the nasty way they do when school holidays are in the offing. Meaning that if her family isn't feeling flush they and the grandchildren don't manage to visit: probably the twins never will, in the family of six they're going to live in. What a shame.)

animalia

2009-03-13T11:19:00.008Z

No twins - not of the human kind that is. Granny's agitation while waiting has been added to by Ruby the goat's production of her twins two days ago: both still born. Now Granny is well aware that the obstetric history of a goat on a Canarian island has nothing what ever to do with the delayed child-bearing of a niece-in-law in North East London. But that's pure reason. The anxious part of her is not reasonable and she waits the news with the heart in her mouth beating more wildly than ever.

Poor Ruby, the goat, meanwhile, is not a happy animal, lying there listlessly, not wanting to eat or drink; a sad sight. Beloved is going out, buying apples, whatever, mixing sugar salt and water, trying to persuade to take some nourishment. Granny as another female aches for her. Who says an animal doesn't feel? Maybe Ruby's loss of twins cannot be articulated in words or mind, but it is certainly articulated in her body: you only have to take one look. Granny and Beloved scour veterinary websites meanwhile to try and find out why goats abort like this. Does Ruby does have some un-obvious infection? Was she insufficiently nourished - she'd been fed high-calory goat pellets all this while but she doesn't like them much. So what?

No leaping kids this year, anyway. Woe is woe. Sadness all round.

Meanwhile, another dog has joined the Tiresome Terrier and the Beautiful Wimp. Let's call this one the Local Yokel - a standard little Lanzarote dog, black, with a curly tail and very short legs, the only thing distinguishing him from all the rest of his kind a bark as deep and reverberant as the hound of the Baskervilles'. Do not ask how this acquisition came about: let's just say it couldn't be helped. Among drawbacks: this dog has not yet learned that it is forbidden to sit on sofas. He is also much less continent than the Tiresome Terrier with whom he shares a basket at night: the TT, turning motherly, yips for him to be let out then yips again for him - and her - to be let in. At three in the morning this does not please Granny -she had a sleepless night or two until Beloved sorted that one out. What with the Beautiful Wimp having rolled in yet another dead goat and stunk the place out for over a week, despite Granny having bathed him three times, what with the Tiresome Terrier having eaten Mr Handsome's lunch out of his bag for the third time in as many weeks, dogs are not anybody's favourite animals just now.

"The dog learns more quickly than you," said Beloved to Mr Handsome of his lost lunch - not a particularly diplomatic statement one might say: Mr H didn't seem to think so anyway. Nor did Granny come to that.

On top of that, the bantams have taken to eating their own eggs and beating up the one hen who does not want to eat her eggs but sit on them.

Animals really can be horrible - when they are not sad.

The calima has covered everything in dust over the last few days. To calm herself down, Granny has been sitting quietly on the land, watching lizards sun themselves - snouts out, little hands set firmly on stone surfaces -or flicker in and out of the rocks: watching lizards is a very meditative activity, particularly at the moment: the lizards are in handsome breeding mode, iridescent green patches on their sides flashing in the sun. Beloved meanwhile has been hopping between his goat and his laptop - two kind German friends and visitors have been helping him remake the house website. Granny and Beloved have been cooking lovely meals in return and sometimes in holiday mode, visiting nice places with their friends, so all is not totally negative.

But oh poor bereaved Ruby.

And oh, where oh where are those North East London twins?

5.pm. Update. Granny visited Ruby after she'd written the above - came back to the house saying 'you should get the vet,' to find Beloved already looking up the number. The vet - nice Basque woman - appeared, pronounced an infection etc etc, large amounts of anti-biotics have been given and are meantime making the goat feel much worse - as the vet promised she would. "Animals don't complain,' she said. "You only know they're ill when they're very ill.' So much for sorrow. Except maybe sorrow helped make Ruby iller. Who can tell. Poor goat.

Update 5.15pm. Still worse. Beloved and Granny just went out to administer more treatment - goat no more. Dead. Not a good week.

Walls -

2009-03-01T13:43:00.006Z

Granny is in a bit of a twitch. Beloved Nephew - son of Beloved, alas dead, Twin Sister is about to produce ...twins....girls. Or rather his wife is. This can't possibly be genetic, the gene for twins - one Granny's family seems to have, alongside the breast cancer one - is passed on through females. But still. Beloved Nephew's wife is now 38 weeks pregnant, the twins weigh around 5 pounds each and they won't be left in there much longer. Granny has had her English mobile charged up for weeks, waiting for news. Well, you know. In this case she cannot but be affected. She is. Twitch, twitch. (Relieved just a little by Mozart on the radio just now, but that's not enough.)

Meantime she must amuse herself with the goings on on her island. Here is the next one, as promised.

Mr Jonah the headmaster is very proud of his school - which has its merits- and its demerits - but we won't go into all that here: enough to say that Beloved who does the odd bit of teaching there tries to be a bit subversive in a quiet way to make up for this and that.

To demonstrate just how proud he is of his school Mr Jonah has flags flying outside it - Spanish, British and EEC flags. Also on the waste ground between the in road one side and the out side on the other there sits a wide white buffer thing proclaiming - proudly - for all to see Colegio Hispanic-Britannico: Mr Jonah speaks fluent Spanish. Unfortunately, he has aroused the wrath of an 80 year old woman who thinks the land leading up to the school, including the buffer thing and the in-road and the out-road belong to her (she might even have a point - Mr Jonah was an estate agent once and who knows what went on; not that the land would have been any use to her or anyone else; it is arid and barren in the extreme, hers or Mr Jonah's, whatever. But neither would see it like that.)

Yesterday morning Granny and Beloved turned up there in their truck - Beloved runs a Saturday morning project club - to find the in-road impassable: two lines of rocks had been laid across it, while two men and a yellow bulldozer -moon-lighting it turned out from Rancho Texas, the theme park down the the road - were busy laying more. As for the proud white buffer, a rough stone wall had been built in front of it, totally concealing Colegio Hispanic-Britannico. On the rocks in the wall, and in the rocks on the road a big red N was painted. (It meant 'no' most likely unless the name of the 80 year old indignant one began with N.) Saturday was probably thought to be a non-working day: Granny suspects that the in-road might have been blocked too with N marked rocks, had the Saturday morning teachers not turned up. If so the blockade would have been complete and nothing should have been discovered till schooltime on Monday. (The men from Rancho Texas could have come on Sunday of course, but they'd have cost much more in expensive over-time.)

Mr Jonah who likes his Saturday lie-in did not get it. When Granny came back to collect Beloved, his car was outside the school, Mr J himself was on the telephone and the police had been called. She is dying to know what happened next. Was Mr J going to hire the men and the yellow bulldozer for himself to remove the rocks and restore his proud sign to sight, someone on Saturday afternoon or Sunday? - at a bigger cost in overtime? Beloved gives another class on Wednesday. Granny will find out more then.

She shouldn't laugh, she knows, but that hasn't stopped her giggling ever since. Pride you could say has come, yet again, before (behind) a ..wall.

(Sorry...)

Life on the other side

2009-03-01T12:41:00.005Z

Well well: the black hen, otherwise known as Ms Black, has started crowing this morning.....looks like it's a case of mistaken gender. His/her father started out as Daphne and ended as Damian so maybe showing true sex late runs in the family. And there Granny and Beloved were assuming the little eggs came from him/her. What a good layer, they told each other, thereby belittling the likely providers the two Misses Brown.For now it looks like Ms/Master Black did not lay them- not unless he/she is a genuine hermaphrodite. But then aren't genuine hermaphrodites infertile? Granny's not up on the mysteries of gender ambiguity. You tell her.

Let's have some other island politics - sexual and otherwise, concerning the growing organic movement on this island: organic pro-creation it would seem works for all species, vegetable and animal. Granny and Beloved have lost their source of free-range lamb - the delectable milk lamb that is the only form of meat that Granny, a vegetarian at heart, has ever really liked. Turns out that the provider, originally from Spain, arriving on the island quite a while back along with the Catalan lady who now runs the local organic shop, has had two wives since, producing 5 children all of whom live with him and are educated privately, by him. Since organic produce does not provide for such things he operates as an osteopath and faith healer in Germany - much more lucrative than Lanzarote - travelling to and fro every week. Oh and he also finds time for another girlfriend, or two. Something had to go, and in the end it was the goats and sheep that went, bleating pitifully in the back of the truck all the way down the very rough track that leads from the hill. What a shame. Someone else is now rearing goats up there and making yoghurt, but this goat lady is not into rearing and slaughtering lambs. So no more fetching small bagged-up corpses from a magic valley high in the hills: Granny will miss that. And Beloved is thinking of importing a couple of ewes to provide the lambs himself. But what to feed them on? And where to find a ram? Next week, Granny and Beloved will be seeking advice from Aurora the owner of the billy goat who impregnated Ruby the goat. She keeps about five goats, two or three sheep, god knows how many chickens, pigeons and a parrot in a very small area behind and illegally close to her house. Granny is not so sure of this possible venture: she thinks that there's quite enough livestock around their land already. On the other hand those delectable lambs.... oh dear, oh dear.

The dramas that turn up here never seem to end. She'll give you another one tomorrow. (Nothing to do with sex this time, though gender comes into it.) She imagines you can bear to wait.

Veni vidi vicimus...

2009-02-27T13:44:00.008Z

The guests came - they saw - and Granny and Beloved seem to have conquered - though they'll know that for sure when and if a review goes up on the Alastair Sawday website. What they do know - it was work work work - is that the guests stayed in for dinner, every night, never mind that the female of the species is a sommelier - wine expert - for a well-known restaurant - and had been a professional chef. 'Now you tell us,' wailed Granny handing out her amateur food the first night.

These visitors did not come for island delights - they saw very little of these - they came for a rest and for hanging out in the sun. WHICH THEY GOT. After the first drear day, the sun shone, the wind did not blow and the happy pair spent much of their time out on the back patio, very happily. Three of the four mornings they even ate breakfast outside, not a pleasure always available on this temperamental - weatherwise - island.

They left yesterday afternoon, after another morning in the sun. At lunchtime the storm clouds began gathering. 'We'll leave a little early,' they said anxiously looking at the sky, 'So as to get to the airport before it starts to rain.' And so they did, only the smell of their unguents, shaving cream, bath oil filling the room upstairs showing that they had come and gone - this business is all about passers in the night leaving no more than such traces of themselves behind. Granny too looked at the sky; and so elected to leap naked into the jacuzzi the moment their car left the drive getting out twenty minutes or so later as the rain began to fall. Which it continued to do, on and off, till 9.30 at night, culminating in a furious storm from 7pm on, thunder, lightening, deluge and all, leaving lakes in the sitting-room and the downstairs bathroom and a much bigger and still existing lake at the bottom of the land. Though that did for Granny and Beloved's hopes of chilling out in front of the telly all evening- NO SATELLITE SIGNAL BEING RECEIVED - announced the screen, severely, the thought of all that lovely free water - the water that wasn't sitting on sitting-room/bathroom/bedroom floors that is - cascading down into the water tank, for the first time this winter owing to the previous process of repair, more than made up for it. And this morning the flowers on the land were all raising faces as happy as Granny's - if smaller - one hen was laying, the birds were singing, you could almost write a hymn about it, if you felt so inclined -morning has broken, yet again, perhaps, something like that. (Or perhaps not.) Never mind the curious murk outside right now, the disappearance of sea and islands from sight, the sense of being on an isolated little plateau in a sea of cloud which is not so joyful in itself but given where it came from cannot be objected to: Granny objects not. More visitors due on Saturday week. But till then, the mice will play - or least this mouse - Beloved mouse is not too hot on playing - he doesn't see the point.

No doors on the stove yet. But it's working all right and since the wind is not blowing it does not smoke, meaning the doors are not strictly necessary. The visitors do not have a fire at home. This was another of the holiday delights with which Granny and Beloved provided them. You see how much they will to do to please..

Go go go

2009-02-20T11:43:00.013Z

It's all go here.....The water system is now fixed - ironic that all through the winter the lovely rain was wasted because the water tank was not in use- and now it is, now the tank could fill up with the free wet stuff, no rain; that's life. Ah well. But G and B now do have the tank, a valid water company account - the first bill just arrived - and grey water can be used to water some of the vegetables for free, more or less. Oh and there also was a new door for the stove - Granny says was....because supplier of new door clearly didn't understand about woodstoves and the heat thereof, and last night while she Granny and Beloved sat innocently warming themselves the glass quite reasonably objected to what the flames inflicted on it and exploded with a mighty crack, rent from side to side twice over- the rending of the veil of the temple was nothing compared this, she tells you.. Nor was it Beloved's or anyone's fault - other than local ignorance about wood stoves - a shame what with Beloved having admitted - kind of - that the slamming of the old doors might have caused the original problem (you're not going to slam these doors, are you Beloved? - his very subdued 'no', said it all: and more.)

So another broken door and Mr Handsome will be going back to the glass place on Monday - though Beloved and Granny are now arguing about whether the news door should be metal or much more expensive glass. Meantime Granny has actually managed to settle down to a new book - has characters, a plot and is all set to produce yet another heap of paper to join those that haven't managed to find a publisher. The dire way things are in the literary world she can't imagine this will find a publisher either, but heigh ho, she's a writer, so away she goes, plus all that entails - waking in the middle of the night to write stuff down etc (small hours always seem more profitable like that than big ones when she is actually willing to sit down at her desk but nothing wants to come: sod's law.)

And anyway she can't get to her desk: not as much as she'd like. Simultaneously arrive the first guests to be lured by Alastair Sawday....Sunday till Thursday - so she'll have to be off making beds, planning meals, making cakes etc etc etc. Luckily the cleaner turns up this afternoon. So no more slumping in front of the now again working telly of an evening for her and Beloved. He will be playing Mine Host and she will be clearing up - not a division of labour she minds too much - forget the traditional feminist gripes: she will have spent dinner talking to the guests and thinks they will have had more than enough of her by then and vice versa. Beloved, bless him, is much more socially indefatigable and quite happy to go on tippling with them. Good.

Fire places

2009-02-17T11:46:00.004Z

The wonderful woodstove which warms Granny in the evenings has two big reinforced glass doors. It also has a tiled base. The tiled base is full of cracks because Beloved will insist in hacking out kindling for the fire there before he lights it.

'Why can't you make your kindling outside, Beloved?'

'The proper place to make it is on the hearth. These tiles just aren't strong enough. We'll have to replace them with something stronger.'

'Meantime, why don't you cut the kindling outside?'

'No. This is the place to do it. I'll replace them soon.'

Granny sighs and takes to requesting Mr Handsome to cut kindling. Beloved claims it isn't the right kind of kindling and continues to cut his own, to the further detriment of the tiles, which are now more crack than anything else. Granny has prevailed on him to postpone their replacement till the fire is no longer needed. He claims the work should only take a morning but she doubts that very much and Mr Handsome backs her view.

The glass doors to the stove don't fare any better. Beloved never just closes, he SLAMS them. Granny remonstrates from time to time. A few days ago, watching the glass shiver, she said: 'You'll break it if you go on treating it like that.'

'No it won't, ' said Beloved. 'It's much too strong.'

Two days later, when she came into the sitting-room in the morning he said; 'Come and look at what's happened.'

Granny looked. One door is cracked from side to side. 'I warned you,' she said.

'You're making it up, you're always saying you've said things when you haven't.' (Beloved's form of defence, you have to understand, is always attack.) 'I'll get Mr Handsome to put a rivet in tomorrow, that will hold the thing together,'

That night, slam, slam as usual; the broken glass judders more than ever. 'You'll make it come out of its frame, Beloved.'

'No it won't. It's too well fixed.'

When the fire has heated up, Granny gingerly pulls the broken door open; it falls off its hinge at once.

'Now look what you've done?' said Beloved, before Granny can say 'I told you so.' 'You always are so clumsy.'

Mr Handsome has gone off this morning in search of new glass and, possibly, some strong slate to replace the tiles in due course.

Why is that your best Beloved is also the person who annoys you above anyone on earth? And vice versa?

Dreams

2009-02-16T11:33:00.009Z

Granny is a heavy dreamer. Something she only minds when she's sleeping badly and for a good part of the night catnaps rather than sleeps. Each segment of that restless dozing contains a dose of disturbing story that leaves her edgy and upset for the first part of the day. (Beloved is sceptical about this. 'If you're dreaming you must be asleep. How can that be disturbing? The dreams aren't real.' Oh but they are - both disturbing and, at the time, all too real; believe her.)

In general though, Granny likes this other world she enters as much if not more than she ever did; her vivid night life seems to extend her day life, even while, in real time, it shortens day by day, has her thinking to herself as she climbs into bed each night: 'another day older' - if not 'deeper in debt' (a freelance, most of her life, Granny has always avoided debt; to her relief now seeing what is happening to everybody else.) Her dreams undisturbed by such problems she enjoys her sleeping life a lot. At times it seems a good deal livelier than her waking one.

She enjoys it too for this reason: she is not old in her dreams - and nor on the whole is anyone else - neither the recognisable members of her friends and family, nor the total strangers she encounters and whose faces she can recall vividly for a while on waking. Last night for the first time she met and hugged her grandfather - an event unlikely in real life as he would have been ninety odd when she was born and had already been dead three years. And even he looked young - dark-haired, tall (in real life he was red-headed and fairly short) much younger than Beloved looks, for instance. The only person with gray hair was a woman she'd been working with cleaning public lavatories - really -Granny takes on some unlikely activities - for her - while sleeping - who suddenly decided to accept the marriage offers showered on her by her French boyfriend, called for some reason Thierry, and who appeared a little later in the dream still gray-haired but with bright red lipstick and some very sexy patterned green leggings. Explain all that someone.

Almost all Granny's dreams are narrative and all are in colour: she can hear, she can smell - she can even taste. One dream a while back provided her with the best coffee she has ever drunk. You can see why she likes dreaming.

Day life is indeed a little blanker at the moment. Yesterday she made a delicious rabbit stew - but that was yesterday; today she will make cauliflower cheese, reminded by Hugh Fernley Whittingstall that it can be delicious. (Beloved who claims cauliflower makes him fart is not so sure; we'll see. There's plenty of wind outside again for sure - cold wind this - though better is forecast.) Over the weekend everyone was out pruning vines: the smoke from the fires made for the clippings dispersed widely in the wind and the vines themselves are all dead gray stumps for the moment: with all the other greens in the flower-covered landscape that's no loss just now. Carnival is due next week and the shops are full of Harry Potter outfits, wizards, devils, supermen, etc etc. Though Granny likes the definite shape of the years here, turning on religious festivals mostly, she wishes they didn't come round quite so relentlessly: hardly is one over when it's back again. Sitting at her desk in the kitchen - warmer than in her workroom- she thinks she should be writing, but disheartened by rejections doesn't quite know what or if she dares, let alone where to start. Even though she knows she'd feel less blank if she did. Writers need to write you know, no matter what. It's what they do. But still, but still. Where next?

Let the dreams come. Maybe, one day, she'll dream a saleable story. That will be the day. The only problem is that stories that seem promising when asleep turn out not to be when you wake up. Pretty much like dreams in real life too - most of them. Shame really.

dressing gown stuff

2009-02-10T11:45:00.008Z

11.45 am and Granny is still sitting here in her dressing-gown after hard week, entertaining on and off a group here to discuss - wait for it - rat's whiskers. (Turns out they are the most sensitive whiskers of any animals studied and if replicated - if they can be replicated - by robots could be very useful in macro-cosmic matters - cleaning sewers etc and microcosmic ones - keyhole surgery etc.) 40 odd people, biologists, physiologists, roboticists, computer specialists funded by the EU, came from all over Europe, to pool their research on said, sensitive whisker. At some profit to Beloved who helped organise the event and acted as driver for the scientists' time out sightseeing, and also to Granny who together with him put up the organiser and his family for three days and cooked a lunch for the computer team yesterday.

All this on an island where the weather has improved - lunch was eaten outside yesterday; a group of mainly young scientists due to fly back to snowbound Sheffield that very evening sat in sun hats borrowed from granny (the runcible yellow one from Mallorca, the elegant straw from San Diego, given Granny by an American friend, the green baseball cap labelled Lanzarote -she kept the sun-defying Aussie one for herself) and couldn't imagine why she was talking about it's being winter here - they laughed. 'What do you mean, winter?' (Though maybe they would have appreciated the point better had they sat round the fire in the evening with Granny and Beloved and found themselves glad of it. But by that time they were being entertained by Monarch Airline. Lucky them. Granny is being ironic here. Maybe you didn't realise.) There was a lot of washing-up, afterwards. It's still being done.

Nice creatures, rats: in the right place. (No she is not being ironic this time. She likes rats: in the right place, ie not five feet from her - as they say - anywhere in London, or in the chicken run eating Beloved's chicks, or infected with plague-bearing fleas.) And very clever. Wherever they are.

As usual when visitors arrive Granny has had to shift her clothes round the house and now can't find anything, apart from said dressing-gown - and, of course, the sun hats which decorate the hall when they are not decorating her or scientists' heads. That's her excuse for slovenliness, anyway. She'll go and have a shower now and try and locate her knickers (clean ones, please note, nasty anonymous commentator on last post, now eradicated, she is not that dirty an old woman. So there, you dirty anonymous thing.)

Domesticity. And elsewhere all that snow and the unutterable horror of the fires in Australia. Thank god it's not in the area where Beloved not-so-little Sister lives - but that doesn't make it any less heartrending as far as those other poor wretches are concerned. Oh the fragility of life - yet still, on Channel 5, Neighbours in all its Aussie banality keeps on coming round just as if it wasn't.

On this island meantime, there are now more than 16,000 people unemployed. A large chunk of the indigenous population. Keep on coming scientists/whisker researchers and all: the island needs you.

drip drip

2009-02-01T17:28:00.002Z

It's raining, it's pouring, the old man's snoring - well actually he's not, that was last night, along with the old woman: right now he's in the sitting room trying to stop the fire smoking -difficult when there's a south-westerly gale - and trying to watch Time Team - also difficult when it's raining because the signal breaks up. There are guests coming tomorrow wouldn't you know, two parents and two children supposed to be inhabiting the fabulous guest room upstairs (fourposter bed, bathroom with palm tree, annex with bunk beds and windows with fantastic views - when it isn't raining.) Granny has been moving all her stuff downstairs all week, to accommodate them and now has had to move it all back up again, because there are huge winds forecast for tomorrow and that makes the upstairs room rattle and shake and liable to frighten any horse let alone human young; still worse the skylight leaks. So guests will be put downstairs in plainer but more reliable rooms instead, at least for the first night. (But isn't beauty always more difficult to trust? Or is that just Granny sour grapes?)

Meantime email from them bewailing British weather forecast. Maybe they won't get here anyway. Oh dear oh dear. Of course this predictable enough for the British climate. What is less predictable is the way the Canaries, so-called provider of summer in winter for suffering northerners, has this year been so afflicted, putting off tourists in droves, as if the recession, the dire state of the pound wasn't quite enough to be going on with. The pathetic fallacy has gone too far: skies stop weeping for us, please, please, please. So say all of us and that includes the local Canarian press.

But oh aren't the flowers lovely, and didn't Granny have two lovely days last week, sun little wind hammock and a drink on the patio at lunchtime. So it can work, this summer in winter. BUT NOT ENOUGH. Certainly not enough for the tourists shuffling round disconsolately the rest of the time as if this was Scarborough in a wet August.

Let's hope Granny's chocolate cake and the locally grown in season strawberries will recompense the travellers somewhat. If they get here that is.

Home again

2009-01-30T16:42:00.006Z

Well home again, assuming Lanzarote is Granny's home - which it is of course, not least because that's where Beloved is - but at the same time London is also Granny's home, has been for most of her adult life: you can see the schizoid tuggings of the accidental expat she is, no matter what. Home, after all, is not only where the Beloved is but also where the babies are - big and little babies that is. (On the other hand there are about to be babies here too; Ruby the goat's pregnancy advances fast. She is shyer when pregnant, does not advance to the fence, bleating, when Granny appears, though she does put her head and legs over the stall in eagerness to reach out to the fennel tops Granny carries with her. Fennel is the latest crop here and a good one too; another local pleasure.)

After two days of sun it has been raining all day till now. Water is the leitmotif of Granny's life this winter, it seems, after the problems with the water company and the aljibe on her island and the floods in her flat in London. And after the rain at - she was about to say home and abroad - but which is which when either is both? - to say rain both here and there will do. She does say it; here being Lanzarote just now. Of course.

Back in London Beloved Middle Granddaughter has advanced to a mobile phone; texting a good way of communication between grandchild and grandparent; particularly when Grandchild is a bit sad over exam failures. Granny does wish the exams were not being inflicted on her, due to inadequacy of state schools on offer, she is told. (This is more her no-longer daughter in law's view in fact. Beloved son would be much more sanguine to see his eldest disappear to a state paid-for establishment.) It's not an issue Granny faced in her day; a stern supporter of the state system, her, though Beloved Son did circumnavigate those principles somewhat, when, aged 14, a series of programmes about a certain public school so enthused him he demanded to be taken away from his comprehensive and sent to one. His father, more indulgent in such matters than Granny as well as richer, not to mention good friends with the headmaster of another public school agreed to his request, and so, over Granny's dead body - and dire warnings from her of what he would find there - off he went. Dead bodies have a habit of coming to life on these occasions, though. This one did come to life, when, after his first term away, Beloved Son complained bitterly about just the things Granny had warned him of and demanded to be allowed back to his comprehensive school. 'After all this you can bloody stay there,' she said -or words to such effect - and indeed he did stay right through to A levels, getting the reputation among his mini Tory schoolfellows for being the school Ken Livingstone - he'd gone old enough to have absorbed parental politics and to be far from shy about asserting them - and gaining various advantages he'd never have got at his previous school: the wonderful art teacher, for instance, who turned him into a good ceramicist, also several outward bound type trips yomping over bits of Scotland in not the least militaristic way with the school cadet corps - oh and a subsequent adventure with the National Schools Geographic Society which dispatched him to the Norwegian Arctic Circle to help in a scientific study of glaciers: all that was to the good. Though she does think it's a shame state schools can't offer just such advantages. Ah well. It was all a long time ago and in another country besides. And it's time, anyway, to take her dog for a walk in the after-the-rain cold. Ta ra for now.

floods

2009-01-19T10:40:00.010Z

Granny is sitting in London, bleary-eyed after an insomniac night, waiting for someone to come and fix a door. One of those between 8am and 1pm jobs: -as if noone has anything better to do than hang around endlessly for non-arriving workmen/deliveries etc etc. Yesterday was even better: two floods - one, in the morning, caused by her finally disintegrating washing-machine deluging downstairs flat (cue another morning wait later this week, while inevitable but expensive new washing-machine is delivered) one around nine pm, caused by upstairs flat deluging Granny's bathroom for no clear reason.

In between these unwanted dowsings, she took middle granddaughter to see lively production of Pinocchio: pretty good - children's theatre these days does not inflict the kind of parental suffering it used to. Though having sat through Disney's version of same story with yet another (non grand)child less than two weeks ago, Granny did feel slightly over-Pinocchioed. She prefers sometimes not knowing exactly what happens next. Beloved middle granddaughter had no such problem, fortunately. Good. BMG's sadness at rejection by secondary school of choice meant the pleasure was needed; as was application of Granny's grandmotherly comfort - wisdom - or what passes for it: only justification for calling it wisdom probably is that one pushing 70 has had a few more reverses in her time than one pushing 11, so knows that the pain passes; eventually. (it's the downside of having children and grandchildren, watching them learn that life can hurt: good for character, maybe, but not much else.) But what else are grandparents for, for goodness sake, other than sitting through productions of this and that kiddy theatre, good and bad, and offering the odd verbal crumb of comfort to downcast children. As in 'these things happen, you get over them and you know you're lovely really'.... same old stuff. (This particular granddaughter is in fact not just lovely in every sense the way all Granny's beloved granddaughters are, but actually beautiful -think young Emanuelle Beart eg - a face that certainly doesn't come from Granny's side of the family, she assures you, but you don't push that, do you? It will bring its own problems for sure - and dangers - not least vanity vanity and all that. Fortunately vanity is not this interesting oddball of a child's problem. Just as well.)

Bang bang bang somewhere is not door-fixers banging at Granny's door unfortunately. Shame. Yawn. But at least there's some light outside today. A week in grey London does make Granny realise the merits of her island. On the other hand it's nice to be warmer indoors. 18 centigrade feels, if not tropical exactly, like a greenhouse compared to her Lanzarote kitchen.

And tomorrow Obama is inaugurated. GOOD. Granny has dreamed herself present at these events three nights in a row. Obsessive or what? But, it is true, in a world where horrible things seem to be happening everywhere, this does seem to represent a glimmer of hope. A great man is definitely needed. And maybe, at last, we have one. But she does wish he didn't keep invoking Lincoln. And that today isn't, coincidentally, Martin Luther King day. Think what happened to both of them? And to Kennedy too - a day in Denver which Granny herself remembers all too well - arriving at a friend's house for dinner to find the butcher's aproned friend on the doorstep brandishing a frying pan and saying: "He's been shot." She doesn't want to suffer - want anyone to suffer - that agony again - it followed Kennedy-aroused hope not unlike that evoked by our now very own Barack. She was pregnant with Beloved Daughter at the time. Did these events have any effect on her? Who knows. (Cook friend by the way, made the mistake of removing asbestos coated stuff from his roof a few years later, and did not survive that experience more than ten years or so. A doubly painful memory. Ah well.)

Grandparenthood

2009-01-10T11:16:00.004Z

The family that arrived in the rain went out with it. Inbetweenwhiles it was pretty good on the whole, apart from Beloved Baby having a cold which disrupted its parents' nights, and which, this previously miracle sleeping baby having learned thereby the charms of receiving parental attention at two, three and four a.m, continued to disrupt their sleep; chronically. (Granny has dug into her grandparently memory and dispatched something called Tomi Starlight Dreamshow (sorry about that) that distributes dancing stars to the ceiling and gentle lullabies to the ears of the wakeful child to the home of Beloved's daughter, hoping that it will have the same miraculous affect on this step - as it were - Beloved Grandchild as it did on Beloved granddaughter number one some years back.)

Meantime Beloved has discovered one unwanted affect of Grandparenthood - and Granny has rediscovered it - the infliction of grandchildly ailments on the elderly relatives. Both of them are aching and sneezing and running at the eyes. She seems to have read somewhere, some time back, that the unawakened immune systems of the very young tend to pass these things on in particularly virulent forms and so it has happened. A new experience for Beloved if not for Granny - leaving aside all those colds, she once found herself with headlice - though even that cannot compare with the experience of poor Georges Sand in the 1860's who at the age of 69 went down with whooping cough; something, thank god that's not likely to happen now.

It was a good ten days all the same, if exhausting. Beloved's birthday went off perfectly despite the lurking family ailments: Granny cooked - occasionally falling over Beloved as she did so - Beloved does not take kindly to competition in the kitchen and nor does she - cleared, emptied and refilled the dishwasher, cleaned up all over and endlessly entertained, dandled, cuddled Beloved Baby, cold and all. When she had recovered from the cold, more or less, Beloved Baby reciprocated, obligingly, by rolling over for the first time in front of her Grandpa and Grannyp rather than her parents. Oh the clever girl. She also showed up very well, by comparison, with a visiting infant, Mr and Mrs Jonah's granddaughter - theirs was an altogether superior child, B and GP decided. But then they would, wouldn't they?

And outside the world went on regardless. Oh God, the Gaza situation - any small sympathy Granny might have had given those Hamas rockets- she has Israeli friends of longstanding - has gone out of the window to be replaced by horror and despair. (Hurry up Obama. Hurry up. Ban military and other support to Israel). Meantime on the home front those sterling familiar - stuffy -names of her childhood are all going under...

Good heavens - Viyella - those Viyella school blouses she wore: Good heavens, Wedgwood - her mother's precious oval blue plaques adorned with the raised white cameos of English admirals - Beloved Brother kept them, goodness knows where they are now. Good heavens Woolworths, of the echoing wooden floors and trays full of pick n'mix sweets or useless, highly coloured and highly desirable objects cheap enough to be acquired by pocket-money (1 shilling a week when Granny was eight - 5p - fancy that). Down they all go one by one, accompanied by more recent places she'd never heard (Zavvi? what's that? Maybe Granny does remember vaguely seeing their name up along shopping streets but never took it in exactly, a Tower Records person her, not that Tower Records exists any longer either.) Sic transit all of it, along with brothers, sisters, parents, friends, as the years pass by.

Sneezing Granny does feel old sometimes. The more so probably because Beloved Baby's insomnia has spread to her now, along with the cold; she's distinctly short of sleep. As for Beloved: he's retired to bed again. Aren't they pathetic?

But at least the hens have started laying again, in time to make a tortilla to feed to the departing family. And it least it looks like the big freeze is abating back home in London, just in time for her arrival there. She wasn't looking forward to that.

Never rains but..

2008-12-30T11:08:00.006Z

This is the jolly bit: Granny and Beloved's version of a Christmas tree, consisting of an agave - cactus - spike, which sits in their sitting-room all the year around and gets hung with coloured balls and Ikea lights (the environmentally kind, of course, you know Granny) over Christmas. Very nice it looks too, though Granny does wish Beloved had removed the grotty dog basket before taking the picture. Nothing to be done about the books of course - why should she mind those anyway - she has no objections to showing how literate she/they are. Another use for agave is making tequilla, she hears. Now there's a thought - though you have to be careful of tequilla: Granny got very drunk on her Californian host's lethal margarita a little while back - she only had one of them too. Ah well.

Now for less desirable wetness. That old cliche - it never rains but it pours - could have been invented on this island.

The skies broke here last night and are scheduled to go on breaking through tomorrow. Wouldn't you know it... these are the days Beloved's Beloved Family are all due to arrive to celebrate his 70th birthday (Beloved is one of those unfortunates whose birthday is on New Year's Eve: could be Christmas Day of course, still worse.) Not the best time to have water pouring through the roof: some of the repairs to the roof done in the summer seem to have held up, but new leaks have appeared elsewhere, and the leaks in the sitting-room are unavoidable. This room was once the courtyard - all old Lanzarote houses have courtyards at the centre - it is roofed over making a wonderful room, but the centre of the roof is a large glass dome and though Granny and Beloved have done much to strengthen it, when the rain really pours there's not much can be done to keep some of the rain out: the worst leak this time is stationed directly above one of the sofas, naturally. Expensive electricity is now blasting out heat from radiators, the stove in the sitting-room is lit, cushions and throws from the sofas stood and draped all round them. Normally Granny would be happy to have all that forbidden heat- but with the rain and wind coming from the south, it's not so cold as sometimes and she could quite happily live without it. Sods law that is...

It could be worse. A roof down in the main town Arrecife not only leaked, it blew in. Things were flooded down east, and still more in the centre of the island. Beloved is down there at this very moment trying to buy fish for the birthday feast, and he just rang up to report.

Otherwise the Christmas holidays wend their way on. Very different here - much less commercial and the day after Christmas is a normal working day - locals have their big meal booze-up on New Year's Eve so are able to stand up by then. (Though trying to get anyone to come and fix anything here between Christmas Eve and 7th January can be difficult... does drink flow in the water/electricity/postal/telephone utilities for the whole period? If so, why not? And everything chez Granny does appear to be working at the moment.) Fireworks have been let off as always here at any fiesta - there'll be many more at the new year - drinks and nibbles offered at the entrance by all the local shops, all the towns' Christmas cribs are well set up and much viewed - they get more elaborate every year, all the municipios now competing - oh and the lights on the big roundabout in Granny's town features two large twirling local dancers, serenaded by not so local cherubs. The depression - this island is very depressed indeed - doesn't seem to have affected things like this yet. It will be interesting to see what happens next year.

Granny and Beloved's B&B now features on the Alastair Sawday website. Only one enquiry so far. Wouldn't you know it, this is the year the great British public - of the sort can still afford holidays - are looking outside Europe because of the ever-continuing slide of the pound against the euro. Sods law again. Feel like a holiday anyone? Here we are...

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Mince pies and pea pods...

2008-12-22T13:45:00.002Z

The sun is out......the wind - cold - from the Sahara - but not bringing too much sand with it for once and certainly not bringing the cloud of locusts it carried in one memorable winter; memorable but not very nice.

Granny makes mince pies. Of an evening she sits by the fire shelling peas.... their neighbour Juan brought in his surplus yesterday, plus large amounts of pea pods for Ruby, lucky goat. She is going to freeze any she and Beloved can't eat tonight. An odd combination - winter, fire and peapods - to her English self, but preferable to brussel sprouts for sure.

On Wednesday - Christmas Eve - there will be the usual ritual exchange with Juan and his family; her mince pies and Beloved's lethal fig brandy against a plate of curious pasties filled with some kind of faintly gingery, very sweet gunge - Granny and Beloved don't care for these much and will probably donate the lot to Mr Jonah and his family with whom they are partaking their Christmas feast - a feast much augmented by goodies from G and B: Mr Jonah's cooking is not half as good as theirs. (This is not a boast. IT IS TRUE.) G and B are not crazy, either, about Juan's wine, even though it is made from the grapes which grow alongside their drive. The bottle they receive will probably be used for cooking. Whether Juan and his family likes the mince pies and the fig brandy any better isn't clear, but either way it doesn't matter. It is the thought that counts....Granny's cliche for the day. But actually Christmas needs its rituals whether recent or antique and Granny is as glad of this one as she is glad of the ritual by which she will make chestnut stuffing and weep to the sound of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from Kings College Cambridge between 3 o'clock and 4.30 on Christmas Eve. (Beloved absents himself throughout. But that's Beloved for you.) It's her time for remembering her dead -added to this year by the death of Beloved - if sighed-over - big brother. Sentimental. Yes. Who cares.

Enough for now. Time to be thankful for the fact she has water again, and a Beloved and a goat and a dog and a cat - time to wish the world was a nicer place elsewhere - time to wish everyone a Happy Christmas, if such a thing is possible. For all of you she really hopes it is...

Cat and mouse and..

2008-12-19T12:59:00.008Z

Little scene from Lanzarote wild life, viewed out of Granny's window while she's on phone to Beloved Daughter. Cat strolls along terrace with mouse in mouth. A little later she strolls back, mouse still in mouth and disappears out of sight. A little later still appears a mouse - almost certainly the same mouse: it's a very small one. It takes shelter under the side of a raised flowerbed and remains there -still - most likely it has died of fright. Cat viewed through the gate shows no signs of interest whatever.

Next up - friendly local kestrel swoops in, grabs and then veers off, the mouse dangling from its talons .. judging by the fact Granny saw it not two minutes later heading off mouseless the other way it must have made a very quick dinner.

The kestrels are everywhere here. This one hovers often over the sunken land at eye level with Granny working at the sink or at the kitchen desktop. It lifts her heart even on bad days. Having been brought up - as everyone was in her day - to learn poems by heart, a constant rhyming or not rhyming pleasure in her head, she recites Gerard Manley Hopkins to herself - 'I caught this morning morning's minion/kingdom of daylight's dauphin/dappled-dawn-drawn falcon in his riding/high there how he hangs on the rein of a wimpled wing/then off forth in his striding'.....etc - she suspects that's not quite right, the reams of poetry in her head have, inevitably at her age, corrupted somewhat, but there it is, even corrupted it's the best arouser and description of adolescent ecstasy she knows, which gives her a bit of that lift and shiver even now. She doesn't need to bother with the religious bit at the end of the poem: she's never much cared for that. The kestral-simple bit, the wimpled wing, the striding, will do for her. It does.

Yet again, you see, the kestrel with its wild yet so precise eye has made her morning. Good.

(OK, sorry - Pollyana stuff: nothing wrong with Polyanna stuff, though: at bad times silver linings can continue to look nice - especially kestrel-shaped ones. Granny is feeling better these days, anyway, in case you hadn't noticed; or even in case you had.)

A horse's ass...

2008-12-18T13:32:00.005Z

This is something might amuse you all over Christmas - sent Granny by an old friend.

Who would believe it....? It even seems pretty likely to be true.

ENJOY.

AN INTERESTING HISTORY LESSON

Railroad tracks. This is fascinating. Be sure to read the final paragraph; your understanding of it will depend on the earlier part of the content.

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England , because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England ) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specific ations for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a Specification/Procedure/Process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with it?' you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.) Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRB's. The SRB's are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRB's would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRB's had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRB's had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the wid th of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything... and CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.

In case you were wondering...

private life of chickens..

2008-12-16T12:05:00.014Z

Yesterday it rained on and off all day. Right now Granny looks out on sun and sea - though cloud also comes and goes. She is not feeling any warmer - currently wearing her warmest sweater with a fleece on top. But with floods in Somerset, snow in Scotland, ice storms in the North East of the USA she knows she has nothing to complain of really - she can, she will put her head out in the sun shortly - it's much warmer out there. Good. And so that's it for now for the weather report.

How about a report on chicken relationships instead? You think little girls are bitchy and have to be watched to make sure they are not bullying each other? Believe her they have nothing on barnyard fowl - not above dispatching younger birds if given the chance before turning to bully the mother of the murdered babe.

Three weeks ago there was a three month old bantam chick and its mother living in the coop on the back patio. To make room for the new batch of clipped beak chicks from the chicken factory they had to be moved to join the rest of the bantam flock, in one of the runs down on the land. Granny wondered - these days, from experience, she knows something about the morals of chickens - if that mightn't be a bit brutal, not to say a mistake? Beloved, the practical farmer, was having none of it. 'There's nowhere else for them,' he said. 'They will have to take their chance. We've got more than enough bantams as it is.' Inevitably now there is no chick to be seen and the mother is cowering in the corner of the run. Surveying such tribalism, such territorialism in chickens, makes Granny realise what animals - she is not using that word derogatorily just literally - humans still are. You only have to watch the news - national, local international - most nights to see it. Compared to all that tribal viciousness, chickens are just chickens after all. But she still dislikes seeing this hen or that one miserable down on her land. Sad hens are a very sad sight.

Water - ah water. Beloved this very moment is in the main town signing a water contract, she hopes. Their house and they will from that moment start to exist, though how long it will take the company to take the red tag off their meter and turn the water on is another matter.

But that is not the end of it. They got their water tank - the ajjibe - an Arab word relating to the days of Andalus and the Muslim empire - filled up last week by the big blue tanker. Good. Not so good was discovering as as a result that the tank is leaking, badly. Something they would have found out about long ago had they not been non-people in the water company's eyes. This means the tank has to be re-lined - a major and expensive operation, all the more so now that Granny's inadequate pounds are almost at parity with the euro. Plastic tanks will have to be put to use temporarily so that the newly flowing water does not drain off into their land. But at least the plastic tanks can be used thereafter for the grey water system with which they are proposing to water their garden and their vegetables down on the land. One way and another their water use will be on a much more ecological basis from that time on. Granny thinks this is one - or two - good results of Beloved's going to the water company, making her marginally less cross with him. On their mostly dry island she doesn't like to see water wasted. You know how virtuous, how environmentally conscious she is.

Such virtue though, means she will have to forget the interesting OU course she had picked out, to start her brain off with. The OU doesn't come cheap alas - the money not spent on her intellect will go a good way to pay for re-lining the tank. She can always study the set texts by herself, of course, she probably will. But she does rather wish that halos came that bit cheaper.

And by now wouldn't you know - though the view out there may be just as spectacular, the bloody sun has gone in.

POW!!!

2008-12-09T11:51:00.013Z

A good definition of depression that Granny came across lately: when inanimate objects have more energy than you do....

Which doesn't mean to say she doesn't, sometimes, try and confront animate objects, even beat them down. Yesterday she hauled herself out of bed, hauled the sheets, pillowcases, duvet cover off the mattress/pillows/duvet respectively, hauled them downstairs, washed them, hung them out to dry - yesterday was a much nicer day than lately - hauled them upstairs again, put them back on the bed. Wow. Clean sheets. A TRIUMPH. Believe her. This does not mean to say these inanimate objects, so-called did not inflict their energy on her meantimes. POW. WHAM. BIFF. SMOTHER. Linen does that to you - it can do. Trying to get a duvet-cover on a double duvet for one is like fighting an opponent with a lot of stuffing but no edges. At the best of times. This wasn't the best of times. But she won: just. A triumph, like she said.

So what's biting her?

1.) Getting old probably, among other things.

2.) Not being able to sell (good) work. (No getting her face onto the front of HELLO - or even the TLS - so where's the market?) Not even being able to sell a good piece on the subject of the market as censor of the writer - 'write about this, not about that'. (Guardian didn't even bother to acknowledge the piece: sod them.)

3. The upcoming of dread Christmas - not that anyone's coming out for this year - though Beloved's family are all turning up for the new year and his 70th birthday. (More wrestling with inanimate objects. The dead kind, that you cook. Granny has made some mincemeat, so far. But that's it.)

4. Getting a 90 euro fine from the local traffic police for merely advancing on - not entering - a closed road in order to ask them a question.....She could fight this probably, but, see below, the hassle would probably not be worth it; and most likely wouldn't even succeed. (Paying the fine, in itself involves hassle, wouldn't you know. Nothing is simple here.)

5. Thinking of exercising her brain and applying to Open University to do another degree and discovering that any degree pre-1971, no matter how good - let alone any interim experience - will not count as credit, and that you have to start from scratch with access courses. (Teaching you to write essays, etc...) How discriminatory is that? Even so, Granny does not know quite why this minor matter should have upset her so. But it did.

6. The credit crunch is biting hard, on the lives of some of her family, not least. Much more serious of course. Not to say worrying.

7. WATER. As in having no water. Oh God. Where does she start.

With this perhaps. That Granny believes in letting sleeping dogs lie. Beloved - alas - doesn't. He discovered recently that they haven't been getting any water bills lately. He doesn't know if they have ever had water bills here - no way of finding out, because it turns out he throws all bills away. The water's been flowing none the less - whenever it does flow, which is not always the case here - the water company is something else: all utility companies here are something else. Meaning that you confront them, get embroiled with them for any reason whatsoever at your peril. The local consensus in such cases therefore is: do nothing - if it's not broke don't fix it - always Granny's own activity of choice; you can see she has Spanish blood. Beloved does not have Spanish blood - merely Scots and Irish. He could not/would not let well alone. Suppose our predecessors have been paying the bills? Suppose they sue us? (Like hell they've been playing the bills. The predecessors are canny developers from Surrey. They do not pay other people's bills, even by mistake.) Oh we must go and see the gestor (a necessary fellow here who mediates between the consumer and bureaucracy - Beloved is always communing with the gestor; he loves things like that; though it costs him.) Oh we must get a lawyer to find out our position. (More expense.) Oh we must go to the water company and get it sorted out.

DON'T GO NEAR THE WATER COMPANY is stated loudly and clearly by everyone, all locals etc, who knows the score. Which might sound strange to you out there in places like the UK, USA, Oz, wherever, but this isn't even Spain, darlings, this is the Canaries, and they do things differently - very differently - here, or rather, as in this case, DON'T do them, very differently here. But Beloved is Scots, as said, and is not taking advice from anyone, least of all Granny. Off he goes. To be told there's no sign of a contract with them etc etc - in other words the water company have been supplying their produce all these years to some place that according to them does not exist, to people who according to them do not exist - this despite the very same company having installed a meter and the equipment via which the water is pumped in at the non-existent house and even, once or twice, having come and fixed the water problems from time to time for the people whom they claim do not exist. And now, guess what, they have disabled the meter and the equipment that doesn't exist: there's a big red tag attached to the water box at the bottom of Granny's driveway. Which means they have cut the water off. Without, of course, informing the non-existent people they are going to turn their water off. All Granny and Beloved knew was that, suddenly, there wasn't any water. This was/is awkward.

Now what? Endless hasslings. Vast bills. Take local advice, Beloved. Leave well alone in future. Please. He and some language assistance are down at the water company's ranch this very moment trying to sort something out. Some hope. Meantime it looks like their house will need a visit from the big blue water tanker - the resource of choice - an expensive one - for places and people that according to the water company do not exist; the equivalent of paying for your electricity by pre-paid meter and we all, in England, know about that.

But at least Granny doesn't for the moment have to wrestle with recalcitrant linen.

What a relief.

And at least it's raised her adrenaline to the extent she has managed to write this: which may or may not be a good thing. She couldn't say.

(And, by the way, she knows all these matters are trivial, mostly, compared to the wretchedness of many, at home and abroad. But she does just wish they didn't get her down so. As they do.)

The big chill

2008-12-02T12:36:00.014Z

Granny has just seen that snow is forecast in London today. Meaning that she has no right to complain really. The temperature in Granny's courtyard is currently around 12-13C by day and warmer outside in the periodic bouts of sun: mild enough weather, it would seem in London even forgetting the considerable wind chill factor (the wind has mostly been blowing from the north or north-east lately and feels like it comes from the arctic; most likely it has. The normally stalwart locals have been wearing fleeces and woolly hats to work in their gardens and complaining bitterly - this year they didn't have a summer, they say and the normally halcyon early autumn wasn't: now look at it. Beloved himself, a man who does not normally feel the cold, has been seen huddled up in the red fleece Granny bought him once, to his mild scorn at the time.)

Even so, out of the wind especially, these temperatures would not be too unpleasant for walking, gardening, going to the races, watching birds or football, playing golf, whatever outdoor activity people fancy. What is not so good is having similar temperatures inside the house. In Granny's office, one of the coldest rooms. the thermometer has barely reached 12C. She's wearing her sheepskin slippers and warmest sweater, is swathed too in the wonderful woolly shawl given her by Texan visitors three winters ago who were not too impressed by the year-round summer the island is supposed to enjoy. She doesn't possess either a woolly hat or mittens - but if she did she would be wearing them. (Is Father Christmas listening to this? If not, he should be.) Temperatures fine for working or taking exercise outside are not so good if you are sitting at your desk. Believe her. Even down in the much warmer south of the island it's cold, relatively. An expat Granny sat next to at a charity dinner last weekend complained the thermometer dropped to to 14C overnight. She didn't have the heart to tell him it's lower than that in her kitchen all day long. Back in London she tries to remember the environment - and her fuel bills - and keep the thermostat at 18C: a temperature that never feels warm enough to her there would feel tropical if the temperature reached that round her Canarian chopping boards.

The upside is the evenings when the wood stove is lit in the sitting-room. Oh the heaven of that blazing wood, those flames - even more heavenly than the sun outside when it shines and you're out of the wind. In front of the fire there's not so much as a draught disturbing the delicious warmth; such warmth Granny even removes her sweaters in due course and shifts her chair back a bit. Feeling too hot - what LUXURY - is better MUCH- than the 18C in her London flat .....where, watching telly in the evenings, she has been known to advance the thermostat to a naughty 20C - or even, let's whisper it, 21C. It's amazing how relative all these things are.

Still, it's rained a lot too. Good. All the plants are growing; even better.

No such luck with the incubator, the chicks. What chicks? The eggs turned out to be infertile, as suspected. The past-it cockerel, Damian Daphne, with his fat, waggling, epicene backside has been removed from the scene. Granny would happily have kept him as a pet, but the brutal farmer, ie Beloved, wasn't having any such sentimentality - 'we can't afford to feed non-productive animals' (how about the Tiresome Terrier then, Beloved?) So that was that. A new red cockerel with a dramatic white tail has been acquired for 6 euros, and six month old chicks- 4 euros each -bought from the local, disgusting, chicken farm. Attempts to get ones young enough not to have had their beaks clipped, were, alas, in vain. Beloved didn't want to get chicks from the farm for that reason, but Granny thinks that even with clipped beaks this lot will have a much much better life on their land, and that rescuing them from egg serfdom in the poultry version of a particularly nasty sweatshop is a kindness equal to acquiring your dogs and cats from pet rescue. They'll be good layers too, if they're anything like the last hens from that source. Good.

Nostalgia

2008-11-24T11:54:00.006Z

Wonderful what little things can cheer you up when you're down. Granny entertained herself this morning with dancing hamsters, laughing babies, cats with Hitler moustaches, a sneezing panda. She felt better then.... until on Radio 3, just in her ear - by now she'd moved on to sterner things and was reading the Guardian - they played a love song which used to be thought by Bach, called Bist du bei Mir. ("Are you with me?") And immediately she was back, forty-nine and a half years ago, sitting on the floor in first floor room in St John's Street Oxford with the sun pouring through the window - an undergraduate room, belonging to the man she married three years later, after a blip or two, father of her children. This was the song he played her that day, on a very beat-up record player, sitting on the floor in front of them. She was madly in love at the time - for the first time; (that madness, that up one minute, down the next, with only the rarest of bemused intervals, thinking - 'well here I am? what's changed really? - here's life, essays, teeth-cleaning, dirty socks, coffee-drinking, leaves on trees and off them.. etc etc etc just like before? -the way you do in due course, much more often, once you come down from soaring into the heights - the ceiling, the sky, the stratosphere.) 'Yes I'm with you, and this is how it will always be...' Oh dear, oh dear. All that contradictory life that has passed between then and now. Nearly fifty years. And yet how powerful the music remains. 'Bist du bei Mir?' "No actually, not for a long time'. For that you weep. And for your idiot, romantic past. Dennis Potter was once asked how he viewed his younger self. 'With tender contempt' he said. Oh yes. Oh yes. But where has all that time gone? Granny cannot imagine.

Come to think of it, there's music associated with all Granny's loves through her life. And most can make her cry with memory and loss of love and sweetness. As Du Bist bei Mir did this morning. What a sentimentalist she is. Not so now, though. Beloved has never played her music and urged her to melt to it along with him. Not a music man, this Beloved. What does she associate with him - what will she, if ever she has to be without him - she hopes not. The bleat of his goat? The maddening yip yip of some dog, just like Tiresome Terrier when she wants to come in? Or perhaps just the sound of his voice in her head saying "What are you talking about?' Or 'What's that noise, it's awful..' as he might well have said had he come in when she was crying to her music. But he didn't. As you can appreciate, he and Granny don't watch the X Factor together, either, though Granny might sneak a listen to the odd clip when she's alone..... not that this music makes her cry or is ever likely to.

Otherwise: local life. The three eggs in the new incubator don't look likely to hatch now. Has Beloved over-heated, hard-boiled them? Or is the old cockerel firing blanks these days? Or what? It's a shame though. Another melancholy non-production.

There are more productive things going on, though, down on the land. The onions are planted out - a second lot because rabbits got some of the first, before a fence went up. On an island of which the staple crop has been onions since way before then, it's amazing how hard it is to get the seed ones. There was practically a free fight in the shop which sells such things - people turning over the onions in their boxes to get nice-looking ones. Beloved trumped them by buying a whole box. But Juan their next-door neighbour went in too late and couldn't get any this year. They'd have given him some, but for the rabbits, but for now generosity will have to wait till the crop comes. The goat is visibly swelling. Let's hope hers is not a phantom pregnancy like the eggs.

Silence

2008-11-19T15:34:00.007Z

Sorry sorry sorry everyone. Granny ran hither and thither throughout her visit to London and scarcely had time to look at the internet, let alone add to it. And since she came back.....well having had her hopes raised for once, she received yet another rejection for Going Mental - not that editors don't want to take it....many of them LOVE it - it's their salesmen are the problem. She won't say more here: the implications of the particular rejections she keeps on getting on are depressing for reasons way beyond her personal disappointment. She has written a piece on this which she hopes will appear somewhere, soon. If not she'll put it up here, but not yet.

Meantime: Granny's mood has varied from blue to deepest black; hence her failure to write here, respond to comments, etc, etc, etc. SORRY EVERYONE. Especially sorry to Lin - who - among other things - asked her to spread the word about the dire Proposition 8 - the one that removes the right of gays to marry in California. Such a weird lot, Californians: they vote for the election of Barack Obama, and for the freedom of chickens - congratulations, you lot, on that. But when it comes to legalising gay marriage. NO. NO. NO. Lin asked her to spread the word; so she's spreading it.

(She wanted to paste the relevant section from Lin's appeal here, but alas, the system won't let her. So she will have to scream alone. If you want to scream with her - and publish this issue to all your readers, please do. Please do.)

So: what else in Granny's world?

1. A revolution. Really. For the first time in around twenty odd years, she is not the mother of a Doc Marten-ed daughter. Beloved Eldest Granddaughter has just acquired her first pair - mother 'n daughter Doc Martens? Well, perhaps no. Beloved Daughter has had to adopt another line in footwear. Pity about that. Sic transit. All too rapidly.

2. Beloved very nearly bought a gypsy caravan - a Varda - on Ebay - a charming idea. Beloved's ideas often are charming - remember that donkey? But in practice? He was proposing to park said varda in his Beloved Daughter's not very big back garden and live in it for extended periods during the summer: not a popular idea AT ALL; you can imagine. Appealed to by that other Beloved Daughter Granny had to inform him of the general thumbs down as gently as she could. As with all Beloved's wilder ideas - conveyed so enthusiastically too - disabusing him felt a bit like stamping on a kitten - even if Granny's does it with Croc-ed rather than booted feet. Pity about that too. But necessary.

3. Granny and Beloved headed for their cheapo tapas bar of choice this lunchtime, the one patronised by the local construction workers: a parade of concrete mixers was always lined up outside. But oh woe. It has closed. FOR GOOD. Is it because the construction workers have mostly been laid off? Is it because the owner disappeared mysteriously as while back and the bar had to be run by his minions. Or what? No means of telling. Granny and Beloved had, dolefully, to seek another, much less agreeable place. And will probably stay at home for lunch in future.

But at last our Barack is still on line to succeed, with or without his Blackberry. Which means that the days of Neocon sophistry, on the one hand, and Star Wars rhetoric, on the other, are pretty nearly over. That's one bright spot in Granny's minor, personal darkness (even if she still does have to listen to the Tory baby-faced extolling, yet again, pre-and post- Keynesian theory. Not so good that.) Good otherwise.

Wow

2008-11-05T10:31:00.002Z

wow

wow

wow

wow!!!!

Enough said...

2008-11-02T15:52:00.004Z

If Granny is not very communicative just now, put it down to arrival of Beloved Baby and parents. Beloved Baby is now 3 months old and, naturally, delicious, inclined to smile indiscriminately, which is very gratifying for as yet not very familiar grandparent (or honorary grandparent in Granny's case.) Beloved baby, like all babies, is of course basically, a little animal, an eating, sleeping, shitting machine, her sole evolutionary function, at this age, to survive: hence the built-in capacity to charm all in sight with toothless grins and different grades of gurgle, coo, small, refined shrieks and happy grasps at offered fingers. It helps of course, in this case, that she is a very calm and contented baby: one that doesn't yell unless hungry, a reasonable enough response, and of course part of the survival process.

Tonight, Granny P (for the first time, for this child she will actually, officially be Granny P) and Grandpa, otherwise known as Beloved are to be left in FULL CHARGE while her trusting parents go out to dinner. Doubtless there will much dandling, baby talk, nursery rhymes (nice thing about babies they are the only creatures on earth who seem to enjoy the sound of Granny singing) and even, possibly, the pro-offering of a bottle of expressed breast milk, by one or both grand or (un)grandparent.

This is of course the easy bit; still to come: teething, terrible twos, school phobia (possibly) adolescence etc. Not to say there won't be some pretty - very - nice bits in between, small children being what they are - especially when smiling. Not much to be said for adolescence, though, for the surrounding adults, let alone the adolescent herself. Granny's eldest granddaughter will be starting on that one next year. Which makes her reflect her again, looking at enchanting, Beloved, Baby, how pitifully short it all is. Life she means. Of course.

Wind continues somewhat: but it has actually been quite sunny today - rain pissing down all others - though the interruptions of sun and blue from time to time leads to some spectacular rainbows - a bit of a compensation these. Little shoots of green are appearing on the upper part of Granny's land. She is fighting off a cold (family, inevitably at this time of year arrived with one) and attempting to translate a medical report into English. Official translator who mostly translates legal documents and so would therefore most likely be resorting to Google, Wikipedia, English and Spanish, and to a large dictionary no less than Granny is having to, was proposing to charge an inordinately large fee: granny of course comes free. No, don't ask why a medical report has to be translated. This is life in one form or another - which comes down at Granny's age, often, to long-term problems regarding the care of elderly, sick and/or demented relations. Luckily for her she may be elderly but she is still very fit, mentally and physically. So though she may make her little offerings to the Gods - like sitting at her MAC all afternoon translating words like the Spanish form of haemoglobin into the English form - she can't complain really. She doesn't.

On Tuesday, election day, she goes to England, arriving late at night, turning on the TV and most likely not getting much sleep. For which reason she has kept Wednesday clear, like many others, she suspects. Oh God. fingers crossed: along with just about everything else.... roll on the day.

And what WILL she does with herself thereafter - once the champagne is drunk - or the bitter ashes eaten?

Sturm und Drang

2008-10-29T10:42:00.005Z

Ok, the above was all about Goethe and German CULTURE - in big letters - in the late eighteenth century - read all about it via Google, just like Granny did - but since it translates roughly as storm and stress, sturm und drang will do equally well for her right now: not just her ongoing pre-election angst, but the bloody awful weather; halcyon Canaries where art thou? Heading for the south Atlantic or something, or north, melting all the poles? Currently, the rain is lashing against the window: it has lashed against Granny too, twice, since yesterday, largely thanks to the Beautiful Wimp going AWOL - once when she took him for a walk, the second time when she was taking him down first thing this morning to get him to his day station. Along with the rain, the wind is lashing at the window, blowing the cat door in and out; she wonders if it will survive the winter. Currently the cat is curled up inside asleep not liking this weather any more than her, so Granny has closed the door, for a while, cutting off the howling draught. (Memo to self, remember to open it before she leaves the room so that the cat can get out to pee; or worse.)

Even with all this rain, Granny's part of the island hasn't greened up yet; plants needing to be hardy here, they don't seem to get round to germinating till nearer their usual time. Her dip of land is still stony and arid - apart from the north face under the windows currently being lashed, where plants have appeared well before their time- she feeds some of that green stuff to the goat which loves it; chomp, chomp, chomp. Up north though, the hills are turning green already and the long grass blowing, all this unheard of for the end of October. Granny's chief problem is getting her washing out: she doesn't have/use a dryer. Dryers consume hideous amounts of electricity and give out a lot of heat, an environmental disaster - so a washing-line does for her, even in London, where she uses the balcony to hang stuff out if the weather is good, dries them on clothes horses in the back room if not - or even in the sitting-room at a pinch. (And they do dry there, really, in not that much time, even when the heating isn't on - it isn't on mostly, during the day, even in winter. One advantage of a flat is that you are well insulated by your neighbours, above, below and all around.) Here, when the sun comes out - or even if it doesn't - the wind merely has to blow - washing dries in a flash on the line in the back patio. She used to hang it on the roof, which could be exhilarating, not to say dangerous in a northern gale, so they discontinued this practice some while back: Granny misses her wide views though, when pegging stuff up, despite the struggles to control the wild animal billowings of sheets and duvet covers, wondering if she and they together are about to be blown out onto the land. It can be quite a struggle to pin stuff down lower down, sometimes, but at least it's not actually dangerous even if it can feel like hard work. Oh what a virtuous, environmentally aware Granny she is (if you forget her tendency to take planes, far more than she should.)

A small comment here; please dear American friends, don't take offense at this. But Granny was quite surprised, given what a huge amount of the world's energy resources is used across the pond - and what a huge amount of the world's pollution is chucked into the atmosphere by said use - at how few washing-lines she saw when she was there. Apart from ex-nun painter friend and her friend next door - one of whom is English and the other who spent fifteen years in the UK, so they know about washing-lines - everybody had dryers and used them as a matter of course: she can't remember seeing any washing hung outside, anywhere. What? In California? With all that sun? Enough said. Granny, an avid inspector of labels, origins, liable to create a traffic jam in every supermarket she visits - 'why's that old woman getting in the way?' - was also surprised by the lack of fair-trade goods - coffee, tea, chocolate, cotton - on sale. And this in an economy that invented the concept of the farmer's market - (well actually they've always had them in France, Italy, Spain of course - but what of that: it took the US to get such things into the UK. And about time too. A pity they are so expensive though.) How about thinking of local small producers elsewhere too then? Why not?

Not much fairtrade in Spain either. Granny brings her coffee with her from England - as for environmental concerns.....this is the land of the plastic bag. Granny carts her own shopping-bag when she remembers but her refusal of the plastic ones on offer is always met with astonishment. Odd that.

It has STOPPED raining. She'll put the washing on. (Oh no, she spoke too soon. Here comes another cloud; and more rain. No washing today.)

When the cat...

2008-10-27T15:57:00.006Z

One of Granny's correspondents has thought she was over-exercised about the US election. But she is not alone: here's a quote from a piece forwarded to her by a Californian friend.... by the sound of it this guy has it much worse than her (not least she has only a spouse (of sorts) rather than an ex-spouse to take things out on. And her Beloved has a broad and tolerant back.)

I can't take much more of this. Two weeks to go, and I'm at the end of my rope. I can't work. I can eat, but mostly standing up. I'm anxious all the time and taking it out on my ex-wife, which, ironically, I'm finding enjoyable. This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it's worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there's still a potential cure. With this, there's no cure. The result is final. Like death.

So: the days go on. The election draws nearer. Here the wind blows again, bringing with it a lot of flies and much cloud. Granny misses Beloved, but she also does things she couldn't do if he was here. Eg - lying on her sofa, listening to a Verdi opera (Trovatore) very very loud one night, rather than watching Gordon Ramsay, of whom she has sometimes seen rather more than she cares to. Or, on another evening, sitting up till midnight watching the video of an Amodovar movie, Matador: one of A's earliest, it's even more over-the-top than most of his recent output - 'Love in Death' a good summing-up, though not of a kind Wagner would have appreciated - or her Beloved come to that: she does not think he would have cared for it. (And actually it is crap. But high class crap. So there.) She does not miss, either, the continual complaints - 'you're whistling' - her hearing-aid, admittedly, has a tendency to go even more rogue than Sarah Palin, but she prefers not to be reminded of it by anyone else. She, after all, has to put up with the thing from the inside, unlike Beloved. And, with Beloved playing all too often Professor Grumpy from Lanzarote, it is, too, a relief sometimes to be spared his continual chuntering at the news - or whatever programme he is watching - about its scientific inaccuracies (eg: 'there's no such thing as human kind').

And finally, she likes being able to eat a lot of pasta - Granny loves pasta, but Beloved does not. Pasta at least involves the use of very few cooking pots, whereas Beloved rarely cooks anything that does not require most of the available saucepans in the kitchen. (This does not include Granny's private cache of saucepans, the ones don't have burnt-off handles, and burnt, no longer non-stick bottoms. Enough said.) Guess who washes up all those saucepans?

Beloved would probably say he likes not being snowed under by paper, when he's alone - and likes being able to get into bed and turn the light off instead of being obliged to read for a bit so that Granny can. And likes not having to listen to her music; his hearing very good, he seems able to hear it, even in the distance and through two closed doors. And likes not 'acting as her whipping boy' which is how he responds to her not always good-tempered complaints of such things as his never folding the washing he brings in from the line but leaving it in the basket all scrunched up, meaning that Granny has to iron more stuff than she'd like. And likes not having to eat pasta, ever, apart from the little rice pasta that he's very fond of and that doesn't seem to count as pasta for him. And likes being able to eat shellfish to which she is allergic. Probably there are a thousand other reasons he enjoys Granny's absences, just as she has quite a few of her own for enjoying his.

On the other hand: despite the pleasure both may feel in being alone sometimes, Granny is pretty sure that he wouldn't want her not to be there, mostly, any more than she would want him not to be there, mostly. Bad-temper, irritation and all it's called married - or in their case rather (un)married life. LONG MAY IT LAST.

Hope and apprehension

2008-10-23T10:58:00.004+01:00

Granny doesn't think she can be the only person waiting with her heart in her mouth (and realising exactly what that cliche means: it's more exact than most), wondering how she can get through the next twelve days before the election. More polls this morning - Obama improving in all of them, except one, which gives him precisely 1 point of advantage. How this discrepancy is to be explained it's hard to know: but it's disturbing - especially for anyone as wound up around this issue as she is.) And then there's all the things that can happen between today - 23rd October - and then - November 4th. Terrorist attack? Damning messages from Bin Laden (though an Al Qaeda website yesterday - not widely reported in the European press as far as Granny can see - suggested the Osama Bin Laden would be rooting for McCain on the grounds that his presidency was more likely to follow the policies that made American so disliked among non-Americans in general and Muslims in particular, so favouring his campaign - an endorsement McCain, you'd think, could do without)? Some barely true/lying snippet about Obama which would drive undecided voters back to the Republican side? Ballot cock-ups/fraud a la Jeb Bush? Oh and worst of all, the assassination of Obama? - though that might lead to a sympathy vote for the Democrats, this last is a thought past bearing. It is one fear barely mentioned in the press for obvious reasons, but voiced by Timothy Garton Ash in an article in the Guardian this morning, which goes on to say how increasingly Obama is measuring up to the role of president - in the steadiness as well as in the intelligence and the stamina he has shown throughout this campaign; the kind of US president we have all - not just Americans - needed and longed for all those years. TGA concludes with words that coincide exactly with how Granny is feeling about this whole election - that never has there been one that gives everyone such a deep downside of fear and such a high upside of hope.

Journalists - good ones - do get it exactly right sometimes.

Well, Granny like everyone else will have to get through these days somehow. Her uneasiness is compounded at the moment by being alone up here - Beloved left for a week in the UK first thing yesterday - and by the uneasiness of the weather - wind, rain, cold, coming and going across the wide island skies, bang, bang - lash lash - shiver shiver: she even needed her fleece against the chill of the wind when taking the Beautiful Wimp down to his station on the land this morning. (It's Thursday, day of the hunters: his job is to bark them off.)

On the other hand; Beloved's return will be followed almost as once by the arrival of his Beloved daughter, her partner, and best of all the BELOVED BABY. Baby sitting will be required; the prospect of which Granny views with such pleasure, it might distract her somewhat; even more than a little from what is going on in the big world outside.

obsession

2008-10-21T12:01:00.006+01:00

Granny is still obsessed with the US elections - hunting out every report, watching every video, still holding her breath.... etc etc. What will she do when it's all over she wonders? - what excuse can she use so as not to have to to face into her empty head, onto her empty screen?

Well, she'll have an excuse, briefly, she remembers - on election day she has to head to England for a quick visit to sort out one or two problems on the home front. In the meantime, here's a glimpse or two more of her US visit. She has always loved being in the States: half the time feeling completely at home, the other half as if taking part in a movie - but then her many misspent years in the cinema, watching US films, probably accounts for both sensations and maybe they are the same thing really, even though one gets emphasized over the other from time to time. In Southern California, especially, it's hard not to feel in a movie within sight of the Hollywood sign, or sailing down Sunset Boulevard, or heading for Burbank or passing the bottom of Mulholland Drive. And, damn it, she was staying in the very canyon where, in 'Six Feet Under', Nate, David and Clare's, ditzy new age aunt held her new age parties - and where Nate was seduced at an unpardonably young age by one of the aunt's friends....

All of which made the canyon and Granny herself feel more and less real at one and the same time.

No such issues in New York City; which Granny has adored since the first moment she set foot there. She was staying courtesy of an organisation that has emerged since her last visit fourteen years ago, offering bed and breakfast in private New York homes. Her billet - like, she suspects, most - was in an oldish apartment block, upper West Side in this case, the apartment in no way the glitzy kind you see in series like Sex and the City but as much as if not more typical of New York apartments in general, probably. Most of these blocks were purpose built in late nineteenth or early to mid twentieth century, and are of a kind rare in London (apart from Victorian or Edwardian mansion flats and a few twenties blocks). Many of them are also lived in by people whose family has rented them for years and years: so that even in sought-after areas - relatively sought after - we're not talking Park Avenue here - their rents are fixed and pretty low, not subject to the hikes of the passing rental market, let alone the sale one. Though landlords have been known to try and get the long-term tenants out, the law is against them and they don't usually have much success. Granny has been in several such apartments in her time: one belonged to cousins of hers. All are of a similar character: relatively cramped, compared to mansion flats at least, with white-tiled bathrooms and far from shiny, rounded white baths, most of the rooms opening out from the central one, and most of these rooms crammed with furniture: smart minimalism gets no more look in here than shiny luxury bathrooms and ditto fitted kitchens. Some are minimal in size- there's been comment lately about how small some London flats are getting , but the commentators have obviously never been in one of those New York apartments where a bathroom, a kitchen, a built in desk, a double bed and a built in wardrobe occupy the amount of space allowed for the average British hallway; some look out on a dingy central funnel and are very claustrophobic besides.

The flat where Granny stayed wasn't so small, and certainly not claustrophobic. It wasn't all that big either - not big for a flat in which two children were reared - it was crowded with furniture, had an antique television set - Granny got the Palin/Biden debate fuzzy and only with great difficulty - and the usual, typical kitchen and bathroom. But, on the eighth floor it had a good view: close at hand it looked over the back of the school attended by the Kennedy clan, further away you could see the Empire State Building. There were plants in all the windows and pictures on all the walls - some of them by the dead photographer, more of the fat guru-clad, born-American guru of whom Granny's hostess was an adherent. There were no animals - this was a relief. Granny's cousins, in a similar apartment on the other side of Central Park, had acted as an unofficial animal rescue centre, harbouring a collection of dogs so disturbed and neurotic you couldn't go into most rooms for fear of upsetting them (and getting bitten.) In another room lived a collection of legless or wingless or altogether limping pigeons. No disabled pigeons or neurotic dogs lodging in this apartment, along with the landlady, only an anything but neurotic American-Filipino friend, disabled temporarily by an operation and being looked after here by her mother. And also, of course, briefly, Granny herself.

The hostess, a dancer in her youth, had been married to a well-known now dead photographer, and as a dancer had worked with a company for which the likes of Rauschenberg and Oldenberg had designed - they were always hanging around, she said - had been taught art by Robert Motherwell and been a good friend of Willem de Kooning. Granny apologises for this artistic name-dropping, but en route as she was to MOMA, to view the works of these mid-twentieth century ikons, it was kind of startling: you can see. The landlady was, altogether, one of those typical, wonderfully nutty, aging women of which New York is full - a Jewish nut in this case, like many, though Granny's equally nutty and aged female cousins (the animal rescuers) were as Gentile as they come. The way this typical aging New Yorker adopted Granny, marched her off to MOMA on the one evening it let people in for free (New York museums are disconcertingly expensive, even allowing for the pensioner's rebate) took her out to dinner one night, cooked for her on another- none of this part of her job description which merely included bed and breakfast - Granny could forgive - even enjoy - the attempts to recruit her to the cause of the fat guru: for being scolded for sleeping on the wrong side of the bed - better Feng Shui, she was told on the other. She could even forgive her toothpaste being confiscated, on the grounds it was poisonous (she is now cleaning her teeth with a more innocuous variety pressed on her by her landlady). Her resistance to the fat guru was not held against her. Nor was her refusal of the invitation to an evening of ballroom dancing, dinner included - this was the only kind of dancing the dancer went in for these days - on the grounds that Granny's ballroom dancing - or lack of it - might embarrass her mightily (though not perhaps as much as if Granny had agreed to take part in the pensioner's chorus, the landlady sang with once a week: Granny is an even worse singer than she is dancer.) The two of them became fast friends in all events- Granny does hope they will meet again, very soon. Not least it might be an excuse to visit New York - wonderful New York - again. SOON.

Diversions

2008-10-14T18:00:00.002+01:00

Well: the weather has improved somewhat from its unseasonable excesses - Granny spent a happy hour in her hammock yesterday and Ruby, the goat, has returned from a sexy week with the billy. Describing just how sexy it was - plus gestures - was the only thing that cheered up the once raunchy neighbour who is suffering more these days from bad arthritis, broken nights, loneliness -and- this she doesn't say - an unsympathetic husband ('the other billy goat' she's been heard to call him.) A lively pretty woman in younger days, she was walked out on by the father of all her kids, many years ago, and not much better treated by his successor: the Canaries you see can be just like anywhere else. Granny's much more sympathetic Beloved is going to check her dubious arthritis medication with a doctor friend, but there's not much else he and Granny can do, except be friendly, which they are, though billy owner's indecipherable Lanzarote accent makes communication difficult sometimes, except when she is miming the activities of amorous goats.

Granny meantime is obsessed with American elections, raised up one day by good poll ratings for Obama, cast down next - as today -by doubt from one commenter as to whether this really means he's going to win, and by some detailed not very cheerful analyses of the racist factor, what people responding to the poll are not quite prepared to admit ...etc.

This obsession - chasing up every comment/article in every paper, US and English - could be partly - though not entirely - the election is serious stuff - a means of diversion from her need to get to back to proper - writing - work. It's a terrifying prospect after so long without writing much; she's plagued by every writer's doubt....'can I ever do it again' - and spooked by that awful hole in the world represented by the empty screen, or still emptier page in front of her.

To divert herself still further, she will report one or two conversations from her GREAT AMERICAN trip. All except one occurred during train journeys - where she encountered people quite different from her liberal, educated West and East Coast and New Mexican friends. This is is one reason she's always liked going on train journeys - and bus journeys too in the past. It's hard to understand the US and its huge cultural divide, without some experience of, what real distance means there and of the people who live amid such distances, a long way from anywhere. She spent an entire day once in a bus, going at 70 miles an hour, across a chunk of Wyoming: miles of nothing except, sometimes, fields of pecking oil donkeys; and now and then, many miles apart, odd stands of cottonwood trees appearing in the distance, denoting some archetypal little Western town: a short main street, of mostly one-storeyed buildings, rednecks in baseball caps sitting round the counter in its coffee-shop or drugstore, the Greyhound bus stand, some gas stations and fast food outfits, the inevitable body shop and its accompanying wasteland of dead cars, a few streets of those ubiquitous wooden houses with front and back yards and that's about it. She doubts if such towns have changed much, still. The voting decisions of grass-roots electors, seemingly so devoid of understanding of the world outside their town, let alone America, appear less weird after encountering a few places like this. It's a VAST country; the relative emptiness of large areas - and the endless urban sprawl of others can be hard for a Western European to grasp. (And even harder for one living on a very small and increasingly crowded island, the way Granny does these days. At times the contrast turned her head inside out.)

She sat in the dining-car during her train journey between Albuquerque and Los Angeles - another long ride through often empty and spectacularly beautiful country swept by storms and sun together across huge skies- opposite an ageing and stout farmer and his wife, from Kansas both teetotal (and somewhat surprised by Granny opting happily for a glass of wine after an alcohol-free few days in Albuquerque; not only drinking - but drinking ALONE). They had three sons -one of them a pastor - and eight or so grandchildren and were off on a rare and brief holiday to visit the wife's brother in Sacramento: the farm made it difficult usually to get away. The wife talked about her grandmother - "She came out to Kansas on a covered wagon - it took three months. She went back to the East Coast later, by stage coach. It took three weeks. Later still she went by train. It took three days. Finally she boarded a plane. It took three hours', the story, clearly recounted often, making Granny realise, yet again how close the USA may still be to the frontier, away from the coasts. Though politics were not mentioned, these people were, she reckoned natural republicans - yet altogether too decent and kindly, she suspects, to appreciate the extremes of current Republican election gatherings: she wonders whether they'll still be voting for McCain in the light of all that. Probably. She doubted if the young nerd from Portland, Oregon, sitting to her left would do so though - he was taking a holiday by railway before embarking on his second degree and seemed, long hair and all, a natural democrat. Next morning at breakfast she sat opposite an American Chinese lawyer from Pasadena who claimed - of the financial crisis - that it was in his view a matter of too much regulation rather than too little. He was obviously a Republican too; yet Granny cannot see him being fond of Sarah Palin and her racist rallies either. You see how complicated it all is.

Still no election talk on the slow train journey between Santa Barbara and San Francisco a few days later. Merely an ageing and very tiresome California beach bum, in beard, t-shirt, shorts and beer can, who chatted up every young woman in sight, accompanied or not - 'I'll be getting very jealous soon,' he said at any sign of affection between couples 'oh my go-d-d - oh my go-d-d,' though he met his match with a very demure and particularly young Amish couple - the girl's sleeves to her wrists, her skirt to her stockinged ankles, her head covered in a blue scarf. 'Isn't she pretty, your wife,' he said, but the Amish pair ignored him in a baffled way, sat, motionless, gazing out at the landscape, till called to the dining-car; he like the rest of us might as well not have not been there at all. The beach bum gave up on them. He didn't give up with anyone else, though. Granny realised there were some advantages to being old - he allowed her and the equally aged woman sitting next to her not so much as a glance, did not bother either of them, except to the extent everything he said and did bothered them. He went away in the end. A collective sigh of relief went round the lounge car, by now full of a pensioner group - maybe their appearance was why he went away - on a tour to Vancouver, via Seattle, returning to LA by boat and all complaining about the bumpiness of the train. Granny got two of the eldest - and most disaffected - over dinner: two widows in their 80's, they dreaded the bumpy night ahead and hoped the berths in the boat would be better. One of them came out to California from the Mid West, in 1942 aged 19, had never left.

The final conversation was in the cafe at the Metropolitan Museum in New York; with a woman in her thirties - unmistakably New York Jewish with a raucous Brooklyn accent. She had been to Europe - and Britain - several times, she said, but she was never going to come again, not with the way things were. 'All those Muslims, she said, 'All those Arabs there now, I wouldn't like it any more.' Granny didn't like to ask if she believed the websites claiming Obama was Arab. Though she did point out that many of the 'Muslims' - Granny can't began to reproduce her pronunciation of the word -got along quite well, in quite normal, day to day - and far from religiously defined - life; adding, a bit naughtily, that of two frequently appearing Channel 4 news commentators one was called Faisal Islam and the other Simon Israel. The Brooklyn one did not respond to this. She looked foxed.

catch up

2008-10-08T12:09:00.010+01:00

Sorry everyone. Granny is not in terminal decline - other than, currently, jet-lag- the result of three glorious weeks in the USA, enjoying trees of all kinds -to make up for the lack of them on her island - enjoying friendship, CULTURE (you know how big she is on that one) landscape, politics, god knows what else, in any order you like from Albuquerque to California, north and south, ending in New York. She alternated between quiet times - starting with wandering along the Rio Grande in New Mexico and hanging about among cotton woods, thereby renewing her old love affair with New Mexico - and hectic ones - especially the last few days, renewing an even older love affair - but how could New York be anything else but hectic? Though she did have some quiet wanders even there amid trees -still more trees -in Central Park close to where she was staying. Is there any other big city, anywhere, with a forest slap in the middle? Because that's what CP is, she realised, a forest - even to the ponds threaded through it. She never realised this before: it wasn't safe to wander about Central Park on previous visits. The evil Mr Rudy Giuliani does have something to say for himself after all, making it safe for her and everyone else, Granny thinks: though she does wonder what happened to the sad, now mostly tidied away bums.

No, she is not going to write much more here. Too much to do and recover from. Beloved has a cold coming, the goat is off to be serviced by the billy, the billy's owner presented him with a large bag full of almost over-ripe quinces which have to processed today (by guess who) or they will GO OFF, the rain has been falling more than usual at this time of year, etc, etc, etc: oh and Granny has been watching the latest presidential debate online, etc, etc, etc. (As she kept telling everyone in the US, curious at her intense interest in that matter, 'if you lot sneeze we all get flu'.... a fact illustrated by what's happening this morning in the money and stock markets. Interesting how heartland Americans - she talked to some of them on train journeys - don't get that. At all. No, folks, it's not just a matter of American pockets, American politics, American foreign policies - what you do affects all of us out there in the wider world. US elections 'r us too. And How. Sarah Palin, in particular, is currently chilling Granny's blood. Do you think anyone would notice if we Brits reached across and quietly substituted Michael - in wig and lipstick? Just asking. That's all.)

Some of you folks, of course, in there, and with votes, unlike her, she spent - wonderful -time with. She will be in touch with you shortly. Thanks thanks thanks for now. Meantime, take care. Big hugs to you and everyone.... 'Sta luego..

pins and needles..

2008-09-13T17:13:00.004+01:00

Granny has had a frustrating few days: today for instance she put the finishing touches to rooms ready for six young guests from Gran Canaria, all inconvenient enough to want single beds- and all come for Dolores pilgrimage, just up the road, the biggest fiesta on this island. Finishing touches included making a tortilla, putting together fruit, bread etc for their do-it-yourself breakfast in the studio room: - Granny and Beloved, off to Madrid first thing in the morning, are not able to give them breakfast in their dining-room as usual. An hour after they were expected comes the message. There's been an accident. Six people are not coming to spend the night. Granny returned the breakfast to the kitchen, sighing. Etc, etc. Oh the perils of being in the guest business.

Earlier in the week, Granny discovered that half the flights on her American itinerary had been cancelled: she'd been booked onto alternatives, one of which had her leaving Philadelphia 6 hours before she arrived there. Go figure. An entirely new itinerary had to be arranged - at a bigger price, it goes without saying. On the same day she had a call from a friend of the dear friend in Albuquerque who is the main reason for the whole trip - friend - very old friend - is beginning to lose her memory and Granny wanted to spend time with her once more in both their lives; thereafter, probably, saying goodbye for good. This kind of sadness happens when you're getting old (young old, she's told she is but still old for all that) - Albuquerque is a long way from Lanzarote. Friend is ill it seems - did Granny still want to come. Yes, she did - if she was wanted: indeed she was, but it might not be much fun. What's fun? Who needs it - this was the gist of what Granny said; so she is going anyway. She called again today and friend is much better, so maybe it will be alright anyway, if not exactly song and dance.

Oh and needles: try and find needles on this island... does anyone do any sewing? Not that Granny is going in for fine needlework, exactly, but she does have the odd button to sew on, the odd split seam to fix and she does need the wherewithall for that. You need a merceria, she was told, helpfully - merceria is the equivalent of a draper's shop.But such things have not only disappeared in the UK, largely, they also seem to have disappeared here. Not a merceria to be found in Granny's home town, nor in the one down on the coast where she goes to shop. She was rescued eventually by one of those ubiquitous Chinese shops which sells virtually everything for one euro. Thank god for the Chinese - whose Spanish, by the way, is no better than hers, judging by the limited conversation with the seller of her precious needles.

Off to the Dolores fiesta now - she will take some pictures and put them on here when she's back; though you'll have to wait till she's back - from seeing her friend, seeing Dotty Nana too. much later and other friends after that. Wey hey. She might get onto this at some point in the three weeks. On the other hand she might not.

(Oh and guess what she and Beloved are eating tonight: tortilla! And a lot of fruit.)

Spidery

2008-09-07T12:07:00.006+01:00

Beloved's robot is wowing them in Liverpool: though Granny fears it has got rather too hot competition with the spider currently moving through the city; which made it difficult to reach his hotel last night. But she doesn't think he minds. He too likes that spider. Still less will he mind when he goes down south and gets another visit with his new grandchild. Granny doesn't know which she is more jealous of spider or baby - spider maybe- she will, after all, get to see the baby before too long: meantime she has, as her mother would say 'to possess her soul in patience' a phrase Granny rather loves, archaic as it. Biblical probably. (Her mother said it very often, probably because she was as far from being a patient person as granny herself.)

But at least back here the weather is better. Even if the house does seem very quiet. Even quieter - deathly quiet - Granny thought at first, until she realised the battery on her hearing aid had run out. But she has Beloved's holey - as opposed to holy - t-shirts to take off the washing-line to remind her of him, plus the Lanzarote guide which sits on the driving seat in the truck in order to raise one buttock above the other...it helps his back, he says, in some way totally mysterious to Granny. Oh and she has his somewhat wistful dog, the Tiresome Terrier to remind her too and his workroom full of old brass and wood, more like an Oxford room than a Canarian one.

It has stopped blowing altogether for the moment; though not for long, judging by the forecast for later in the week. Meantime she's enjoying the quiet. And how. And tonight she will get to watch the Producers on TV - without having to argue the case. (But you saw it on stage? Why do you want to see it again on film? asked Beloved when she told him about it. Please explain someone. )

What a world. When Granny sees the horrors that go on everywhere - the brutality, the corruption, the short-term greed that wrecks localities and environments - plenty of that microcosmically on show here on this island - when she sees Sarah Palin and others of her like - she begins to think she hates people. But this morning she found the Liverpool spider on Youtube. And seeing that she thinks: but if people can do this, I love them after all. LOVE THEM. What a weird, funny, interestingly creepy, brilliant MARVEL. Three cheers for it. Three cheers for them. Yes -REALLY.

Rats

2008-09-03T12:23:00.007+01:00

Yes: on their island paradise, along with fleas, cockroaches, mice - against all of which Granny battles with varying degrees of success - there are RATS. No, not those nice brown ones from which everyone in London lives never more than a foot or so away, the dear things. The rats here are black rats: the kind that bought the black death, don't you know. Granny has only ever seen one, mind, and some time back and it was dead, having lost an encounter with the Tiresome Terrier. Black rats are much smaller than brown rats, and Beloved, the animal man, who should therefore have known better mistook it for a very large mouse, until disabused by Granny. 'Look at its tail,' she said. 'That's no mouse.' To which, after some argument - and the flourishing of pictures in the animal guide - Beloved was forced to agree.

There have been no more sightings, merely unmistakable signs of a colony under the chicken house in the back patio garden: the most unmistakable being the disappearance of two hen chicks - and the traumatisation of the third: no young hens then. Or eggs. It looks like the rats are stealing eggs too, meaning that Beloved is feeding his chickens merely to supply rats with food, helping them breed still faster. As far as the hen breeding is concerned, Granny and Beloved are buying an incubator. As far the eggs are concerned, new nesting boxes will have to be built, high up, where the rats can't jump. As for the rats: the only remedy is to take the hen houses apart from time to time and station the Tiresome Terrior to do more of what she's bred for: kill rodents, that is. The first such event is scheduled for after Granny goes away, to her relief.

Meantime you'd think this was the UK judging by the way that people are beefing about the weather. 'We haven't had a summer,' they shout. And it is true that the persistent wind and cloud have driven the campers from Granny's dog-walking/bird-watching beach much sooner than usual. She's grateful for that, even if they aren't. Up where she lives, cloud and wind in the summer is normal: while wind - as in trade winds - is normal everywhere; even when blowing a gale at some point most weeks. What isn't normal is persistent cloud across the whole island: hence the complaints. The weathermen on the other hand say it's pretty typical trade wind weather really, none of the unusual extremes of recent years - calimas and heat to equal India - rain-storms, tornadoes, whatever. (The tornadoes are slight exaggeration but you get the picture.)

Perhaps the moans are, in part, transference from the real cause for complaint: this island, like all Spain is in heavy recession and for much the same reasons: over-development, large amounts of unsold and unsellable properties, over-reliance on the building trade to supply jobs, all of which have now disappeared: a blanket freeze on mortgages makes the surplus properties even more unsellable. Building firms are going bust. There are more than 10, 000 unemployed on the island. One effect is that agricultural land is being put back into use - this is good, at least. Growing your own food - and selling it - once the mainstay of island life- is one good option for the unemployed with access to land. But this isn't any use for people in the towns with no land and no prospects of it. The illegals are in a particularly bad way; good workers - if you are an illegal, being a good worker in essential - they could always get jobs before. Now they have neither jobs nor any hope of social security. The number of burglaries down in Arrecife - the main town- merely to steal food has rocketed.

Against a fight against starvation, what's a bit - or a lot of -of cloud and wind matter...depressing as it is. Not much probably.

PS. Feline Lorengar is now using the cat door: to come IN. She hasn't quite cottoned on yet to going OUT. Granny, tired of pushing, if no longer pulling, lives in hope

towelling mysteries..

2008-08-30T13:20:00.003+01:00

The weather has improved - the islands are visible again - and Granny's black dog did not come a-biting after all. Use of her hammock, the hot-tub, swimming, soothed things: the visitors went away happy and Granny has been sorting out her linen with the (hoped-for) prospect of all the visitors to come once the house appears on the website of the prestigious bed and breakfast guide (she will tell you more about that, once it does...). Explain to her though....how do up five or six face clothes of assorted colours and at last one hand towel just DISAPPEAR? She can't believe visitors run off with them, why should they? Do the dogs eat them? The cat? The occasional cockroaches? Do they get blown from the line by the wind?

Beloved is sanguine. 'They'll just turn up,' he says. Granny, having turned out every single linen chest/drawer/cupboard in the house is not sanguine. Still, all this useful domestic labour and the conundrums resulting stop her contemplating the fact that she was a writer once and doesn't seem to be any longer. The black dog will appear in style, fast, if she contemplates that one too long...... So back to work - making cakes perhaps for the freezer? - or applying herself to the job of trying to persuade the cat, Feline Lorengar, to use the newly installed cat door. Why is it so reluctant? Is it just a stupid cat? No,' says the animal man. 'It's probably just very cautious.' Whatever the case Granny is still crying 'puss puss puss', rattling food bowls, pushing and pulling all in vain. Cat did enter once that way - her hopes rose - but fell when it refused to do so subsequently. And continues to refuse to do so.

In betweenwhiles Granny has been applying herself to the US elections, thanks to the somehow unlikely fact that she can get the BBC parliament programme on her island and it showed the Democratic Convention in full. She watched all Barack Obama's speech and was knocked for six. If US electors fail to put him in, she'll despair of them she really will. To find a politician who is clearly so sane and intelligent .... And then to elect - if they do - a 72 year old with an evil temper and a totally untried 44 year old pro-life woman - surely Hilary's pissed-off supporters won't/can't go for that? Can they?

In passing: Obama's kids.... Granny feels kind of sorry for them - and impressed. She can't see any of her grandchildren at any age, let alone seven, sitting still all the way through their dad's hour-long speeches. And then that endless waving from platforms....? what effect does that have in the longterm? Chelsea Clinton - still forced to do the waving and smiling - seems to have done OK. So maybe, maybe. But it's not exactly what you'd call normal childhood. More like short-term royalty and on this side of the Atlantic we know what the long-term version does to the real thing, don't we?

And while we're being political: Granny has some particular feeling for the Russia/Georgia situation after watching the Georgian national ballet in Edinburgh. The Georgian musicians supposed to appear live could not do so and Granny like everyone else clapped and cheered in support when the ballet's director appeared on stage wrapped in the Georgian flag. Nor does she have any positive feelings about the thugs in charge of Russia. But wouldn't you say there was something a mite provocative about suggesting NATO membership to two of Russia's closest neighbours - both formerly part of the Soviet Union? And even more provocative about proposing to park an anti-missile system - pointless as it may be - on the territory of yet another?

Just asking, that's all. And thinking - with a hopeful sigh - that maybe Barack Obama might manage not to be so stupid. Over to you, Americans. Granny will keep hoping. (Any moment now, what's more she will be among you for three weeks, hectoring... WATCH OUT!!)

robot reading

2008-08-24T15:31:00.004+01:00

In the light of curiosity about Beloved's robot, here it is. A literate robot, as you can see: unlike its inventor, though, it is programmed to avoid all obstacles as it runs around. Human bookworms like Granny - she has been known to collide with the odd lamp-post while immersed in a book - could do with having this robot's chip inserted into their brains. Some hope...

(The head, in case, you're interested, is Indian, a much-loved present to Granny from an old friend, years ago. He travelled to Edinburgh and back and is about to travel to Liverpool for another book fest. Stern warnings have been issued. If he got broken, not much might be left of Beloved either.... Oh: and the book he is reading is Beloved's magnum opus, reason for all the fuss.)

PS. Granny has just been watching the Olympic handover..... Boris Johnson, amid all his other disadvantages, turns out to have KNOCK KNEES!

catch as catch can

2008-08-22T15:21:00.006+01:00

So: Granny is home at last. ..after weeks of heavy culture and even more rain. (Which she quite likes, you understand, living where she does..as long as she doesn't get too wet.) The standard in Edinburgh, whether fringe or festival proper, was phenomenal - she won't try and list any of it; there was far too much of it, not least. It has all been somewhat overlaid, anyway, by the rather uncomfortable curiosities of the journey home, via Madrid, Barajas, not twenty-four hours after a plane, identical to the one she and Beloved were to travel in, and run by the same company, burned most of its crew and passengers to a frazzle.

The airport showed no outward signs of the tragedy. But the checking-in staff were somewhat sombre - and as for the crew - who did a very professional job, in a shadowed kind of way - what did they feel, whose friends were made toast, who might themselves have been among them, but for the vagaries of their work schedules? Not good Granny suspects; and could feel it too, watching them check doors, demonstrate safety equipment, hand out drinks, the way aircrews do. The plan of the plane on the safety card was exactly the same as the plan shown on the newspaper reports, she noted. Well it would be, wouldn't be, being the same model of plane. Oh dear: oh dear, Sitting with Beloved in the airport, close to the same gate probably - most of the Canary planes go from one or other of the same gates - listening to the same announcements as their ill-fated predecessors the day before -felt pretty creepy, she must admit. The king and queen had come by earlier in the day, but there was no sign of them by then, no hint of anything untoward whatever, despite the havoc of so little time before. But that was almost the creepiest thing of all.

Oh the poor poor families. Just suppose it had been theirs?

But they got home safely, of course. Unlike all those poor toasted others. It is hot, windy, so humid from the low cloud that everything on this island is growing mould, where it is not withering up. Sometimes it is doing both at once. Granny has been too busy preparing for some unexpected (paying) guests to descend into her usual state of post-travel melancholy yet- Beloved is much better at re-entries than she ever is - but she will quickly expel the black dog when it does show up, very soon. She just wishes her family didn't live so far away that's all..... It's good to be warm again, though. And Beloved has made a little fountain in the courtyard in the front. Lovely him. Good.

Wicked month

2008-08-10T10:08:00.005+01:00

Who was it said 'August is a wicked (in the old sense of wicked) month'? - Edna O'Brien did for sure, but someone must have been there before her. But no, you don't have to take the word wicked literally in Granny's case. If she was spending her August being a wicked lady the wickedness would be of the crone not Mata Hari type; no seductress Granny, these days (a relief really; seduction is such hard work.) Aren't fairy tales ageist though? The bad fairy in the Sleeping Beauty is always the crone one....only the good fairies are young and beautiful. On the other hand ...think how boring a life Sleeping Beauty would have had, but for that diabolic crone. No cooks covered in cobwebs, let alone beautiful young men impaled on thorns: no story come to that. There are definite virtue in cronedom. The merits of old age - such as they are - don't begin and end with bus passes. And Granny should know.

But if not wicked she has been idle mostly - yet another way of handing her life to the devil, of course. Though she did spend some far from idle days walking the baby about to give her mother a break and cooking a lot for the freezer to give both parents a break. The food was/is delicious - but not half as delicious as the baby, who is not of course for eating - Granny isn't that kind of old crone, after all. She is besotted. Naturally she is besotted. And she wished the baby well not ill, for all the good that does, this being real life not fairy tale.

Otherwise she has been sitting in London doing practical things in a desultory way and - for the past three days - watching the Olympics - all those amazing aesthetically or athletically well-drilled Chinese. Every Olympics she gets into gymnastics....how can people do such things with their bodies: AMAZING. And there as usual are the dear Brits doing well enough but not quite to medal standards despite the commentators' hype.

So how is a blog to get going in all this? Fat chance. Nor will things improve. Granny is off to Edinburgh tomorrow. She may or may not get to a computer over the next ten days. Beloved is running a robot in the Bookfest. Fun should be had by all. And a lot of culture. Beloved goes free because of his robot. She is not, so travelling up by bus: because it's cheap. Oh the joys of old age.

Wild cackle. She's hooking her nose and chin, hoiking up her broomstick, wishing the baby more useful - even wicked - qualities: wickedness does have its uses sometimes. AND THEN SHE'S OFF!!

PS. Go and see Man on Wire. Not just rivetting, a work of art. As is its tightrope walker. Really.

bopping grannies

2008-07-31T12:49:00.002+01:00

Sorry sorry sorry. Too much going on for update till now. Yes - the baby came - a girl - still nameless! - her parents' it turns out have different ideas on what constitutes nice ones. A very pretty baby to judge from the pictures. Granny hasn't yet seen her, because, the baby born in hospital, her services were not immediately required. So she hopped off to join her family at WOMAD in Wiltshire - the second musical festival of her life - the first one was WOMAD too. The nice thing about world music is that it attracts entire families - how about a camping trip with some good music attached? - the families ranging from grannies - practically great grannies - to babies - practically new born ones. Ever since her children were about six, the mere movement of one of Granny's feet into dancing mode - let alone the smallest wriggle of her bum - filled them with such embarrassment and horror she had to keep it cool when they were around. But surrounded by other bopping grannies, she had no such problem - so bop she did, whether her family was in sight or not - to French - American - African music, you name it. One of the sets was by Mavis Staples of the Staples Singers - civil rights veterans - protest singers - friends of Martin Luther King - now pushing 70 herself and not only a historical monument - definitely - but also a bopping granny to beat all bopping grannies. Beloved eldest granddaughter was watching this singer too. 'Something to tell your grandchildren', Granny said. 'You watched and heard someone who knew and protested alongside Martin Luther King.' The closest she had been to Martin Luther King herself, the thrill was hers, as well.

The problem was: it was VERY HOT. And much worse, eldest granddaughter had such asthma she had to be taken home early. Then Granny herself proceeded to go down with a terrible cold which cut short her own festival going and meant she couldn't go down to the see the baby and do her Granny bit on Monday as arranged. This meant that Beloved did get to see his first granddaughter before she did: this was probably right. Snuffling, snorting, feeling very sorry for herself for days all Granny could do was offer granny advice over the telephone. Which she did. But only when asked. (You have to be careful about such things. Grandmothers, real or surrogate, tread on very thin ice.)

She is still snuffling and coughing somewhat. Serves her right for all that bopping perhaps. But as she is no longer infectious she is off this afternoon to baby worship, bearing cooked offerings of one kind and another. She could cook at least.

See you later.

London life

2008-07-23T11:09:00.003+01:00

Well... the baby is on its way, slowly, reluctantly - forcing its mother into hospital, instead of leaving her happily at home with partner and birthing pool. Meantime Beloved is chewing his fingernails and so is Granny. Waiting is the name of the game; and hoping that all will go well in time; as they probably will - you know how these things are.

Granny will take herself swimming shortly to keep herself occupied. Meantime here are two little snippets of London life.

1. Some unfortunate people in West London found one day that they had a nice Muslim near neighbour, a woman with several children. No problem - they are Jewish but not prejudiced in any way. Shortly after the street was full of press and police: the Muslim husband had arrived. He was none other than Abu Qatada: not quite so fine. He is only allowed out two hours a day, but goes shopping when he does. Meeting such a man in your local shop brandishing packs of diet coke on the one hand and loo roll on the other, is all very well, but when said man is on record as wishing to exterminate you and your race it might get a little uncomfortable.

On the other hand even firebrand Mullahs need to keep their weight down - maybe - and certainly have to wipe their backsides, preparatory to washing them the way their religion enjoins. Such normality may be comforting. On maybe it isn't.

2. Granny was walking innocently through the Shepherd's Bush Market the other day surrounded by A Q's decently veiled co-religionists, among others, when she was accosted by a nice young couple, one sprightly, blond and female, the other carrying a movie camera on a tripod and male. 'We are from Channel 5,' they said, 'And making a programme about sex and attitudes to sex. Would you like to take part?'

Granny declined, politely. She did not want to talk about her attitudes to sex, let alone her sex life past and present on television in general, let alone on Channel 5 which tends to be superficial about such things. Judging by the heavy sighs of the two questioners they had received similarly unhelpful answers before meeting her. They were a very nice, polite, well-scrubbed young couple, and she was sorry to disappoint them. But even so. Looking about her she saw a pair of obviously Somalian women - should she suggest these nice young people ask them about female circumcision she wondered? That might put the subject in perspective. But no she chickened out of that too. Of course.

Meantime a passing Indian, deep in conversation, was surging his companion to stay put in his job since it was 'a cushy number.' 'Cushy numbers' are not to be sneezed at,' he said. Precisely.

Oh the hazards of London life. No one on Lanzarote has ever asked Granny's views on sex or anything else. And Abus Qatada, Hamza, whoever, are unlikely to turn up living next door cultivating maize and keeping goats. What's a relief.

heads bodies legs

2008-07-20T12:58:00.006+01:00

So there is Granny, sloping round London - sometimes rained on - sometimes not - looking at people's FEET for some reason. So many of them - and of so many different ethnicities - ethnicity only revealed knees downward where the wearer is dressed in long robes and even then you need to look upwards to ascertain more. She started her foot fetish - whatever it is - while in the tube, one day, jammed against someone's back. Looking upwards meant gazing straight into faces at too close quarters; feet/legs altogether less embarrassing, that's where she directed her gaze; bare legs, jeaned legs, skirted ones, fat ones, thin ones, long ones, short ones, brown ones, white ones; trainered feet, sandalled feet, ballerina-ed feet, booted feet; new shoes, old shoes, smart ones, shabby ones, buckled, laced, high-heeled, low-heeled. On the tube, though, you don't tend to see the expensive kind of footwear - the Jimmy Choos, the LK Bennetts. Their wearers presumably go by taxi. Nor do you often see ethnically/religiously revealing ones; the enveloping robe wearers, much more local, seemingly, in Granny's part of London, go by bus. As Granny does now it is all free thanks to her advanced age, and - thanks to dear departed Ken - efficient too, as well as more friendly. People talk to each other on buses - when they are not talking into their mobile phones that is.

One day, on a bus, she sat next to a robe with wholly-covered face - eyes only on view. She had to talk to the eyes - 'I'm getting out next stop - shall we change seats?' The eyes blinked, the head nodded, there was maybe a smile under the cloth: but hard to tell. Very disconcerting really - how does one pick up signals without facial movements? Granny's psychiatric friend says she finds most evidence in the eyes - but maybe you need to be a psychiatrist to read those as well as she evidently does: Granny got off the bus realising she needed much more practice. Communication had been achieved to the extent of she and her neighbour changing seats; but more? How could she tell.

Faces. If it's feet on the tube, it's faces on the bus. Older faces - and younger ones. Many more children and old people travel by bus than by tube. And such faces. Years ago, in Jerusalem, a friend told her to look out for faces on buses there; the wondrously carved faces, strong cheek bones of men and women from east of Poland, north and east of Turkey. Now London is like that; full of faces you'd expect to see sitting outside coffee shops, in the Middle East or Kurdistan, or Bulgaria. By comparison the few British faces on view appear oddly edgeless, undefined; Granny's too, most likely.

London landscape is heads, bodies, legs; so many they can drive you mad, threading your way along any pavement, particularly wet ones, particularly when dodging umbrellas. But given that in Lanzarote the range is so much more limited, Granny enjoys the crowded hodge-podge while she can. Waiting for a baby which does not come yet. Limbo time.

Oh and this. Mamma Mia - the film - is just as cheesy as the critics sniffily say. And didn't culturally superior Granny despise Abba in their glory days. But now....in a gloomy moment - it was raining hard, for one thing - she trotted off to her local cinema. She enjoyed every single minute of it and came out singing. So THERE.

Nature Notes

2008-07-14T10:25:00.008+01:00

1. Billy the Kid has been spared ending up on the plates of goat-eating locals. (Among whom you may include Beloved but definitely NOT Granny.) He has been taken on by 80 odd year old neighbour who cultivates the large field over the wall - he wants a billy goat to service his nannies. So in due course dear little Billy will be doing what comes naturally, smelling to high heaven the while and looking very far from Granny's charming baby. Macho cabrios are not attractive animals. But who cares about that. Meantime he is sharing a corrall with a cockerel and a duck: there is a grand romance it seems between these two, to the extent that the cockerel is not interested in hens. Granny wonders how they will enjoy being butted by Billy. She also hopes that he will not get his species confused the way the cockerel has. Attempted coition between a goat and a chicken - or duck? Heaven forfend.

2. Bats. Granny doesn't know if there are bats on Lanzarote - but there are definitely bats in Bristol from where she's writing this. Beloved son-in-law has a small machine which translates the very high echo-seeking sounds made by bats into audible click clickety-clicks. Standing outside in a summer night watching a bat or two flit around and listening to their direction finding is magical, not to say unearthly; like close-up messages from outer space.

No babies yet. Or not ones related to Granny, though Clare over on Boob Pencil now has a ten pounder called Oscar. CONGRATULATIONS to her. The first Bookarazzi baby. Good.

Rain

2008-07-10T10:24:00.006+01:00

For someone living on a dry Canary island a good English rainy day should be a luxury. Well sort of. But Granny is not sure that trudging round Kew Gardens with a runcible umbrella is the best way of enjoying it. Which is what she did yesterday - friendship sums up the reason for this, which, just possibly, justifies such masochism: but not entirely. She made up for her soaking later by sorting out - virtuously - boxes full of papers but that didn't do a lot to raise her spirits either. It wouldn't, would it. Virtuous or not. But at least it's done.

Big brother has been buried for two weeks nearly. Granny is beginning to think that what one mourns in these circumstances is not just what was but, still more, what wasn't. She loved her brother by default really, probably the way he loved her; bemusedly - how did he happen on such three entirely - by his standards - pinko sisters? Or she on such a Daily Telegraph-reading old-school brother? What would it have been like she wonders to have had a brother with whom she had more in common, to whom she felt really close. Yet she did feel close to Big Brother while he was dying, even though at times, listening to his views she did grit her teeth. If not views, opinions, outlooks, they had a past in common at least. And his weakness roused in her such maternal, sorry feelings, she wanted to hug and love him like a sister and so she did. In ways that through her angry youth and exasperated middle age she wouldn't have believed she wanted to. But oh she did; and oh she loved him. never mind everything else and thought regretfully of all the times she hadn't rung him, written, arranged to visit. Too late now - it always is. That story is over and done.

And now, in the way of things new ones are beginning: babies popping out to right left and centre: virtually, via the internet: in her own real life. The birth Granny is waiting for in England is that of her Beloved's first grandchild: she's ready to help when/as/if wanted. That's another thing she realises changes with age - not only prejudice towards the views of other members of her family wanes - or at least prejudice towards the holders of such views - also the passionate need to know the ends of stories wanes, for obvious, temporal reasons. The only way of knowing the ends of the stories of these new arrivals would be for them to die prematurely - the last thing she or anyone would want. She will hope to watch all these young things get born, grow up, certainly, but she will never know what happens to their lives beyond that.

In her days of working with mentally ill old - and still, now, happening on down and outs in the streets - she used to try - tries - t0 imagine them as babies, toddlers, hopeful schoolchildren. Now, too, she looks and will look at the babies, children, her grandchildren and try- or rather perhaps - try not to imagine them old. Wishing passionately that they too would not have to encounter what they cannot begin to imagine now, the withering of their flesh; the age spots, falling hair, creaky limbs - wrinkles - bloody wrinkles - general sagging of absolutely everything that begins to take over. That is taking Granny over, hard as she tries to avert such things with creams, potions and healthy exercise etc etc. As far as the children are concerned how she is now is how she's always been. Old family photographs - Granny has been going through family photographs - of her and siblings as stomping about toddlers, clear-skinned children are for them pure myth, not real really. What a shame that in time they too will realise that such changes happen to them too. Not the welcome changes of GROWING UP. But the much less welcome ones of GROWING OLD. Well, well Granny won't live to see that at least. Much as she likes, in general, to know the ends of stories, she is perhaps grateful to be spared such things, to be spared too their confrontation with the long-term effects of global warming etc, another storyline that will keep on running without her, whether she likes it or not. Leaving aside those ever more uncomfortable, worrying thoughts for more local ones, there's a limit to the amount of flesh you want to see proving that it's grass. Shame really that the only way of not seeing yourself that way - or not seeing much of it - is dying early. And no, age spots, wrinkles and all, ageing is better than that.

This uncomfortable thought too. There will come a point when storylines in the Archers will have to work themselves out without her ever knowing what they come to either.... horror on horror. Just imagine that. She's assuming of course that the Archers will go on for ever, global warming and all. Now that's a comfort. Well, sort of.

Signs of life

2008-07-06T10:52:00.008+01:00

Well, well. The adrenaline is subsiding, the grief not gone but relieved, the heavy days of scrubbing over, the travelling - for the moment - done. On a cloudy Sunday, Granny is sitting in her London ex-council flat, listening to Radio 3 and looking out at grey skies, grass, green leaves, roof tops -anything more different from the wide, sometimes widely sunny - skies, the burnt land, the almost ready to be harvested vines, of her other, smaller island, would be hard to imagine. She has just made herself breakfast, is knocking back her second bowl of virtuous - ie fair trade - ...coffee. Shortly she will retire to the kitchen to clear up and listen to Antonio Carluccio on Desert Island Discs, then take herself swimming, afterwards spend the afternoon leaving activity to Federer and Nadal as she watches them battle it out - weather permitting. A film later? Maybe. Last night she went to a concert in which her beloved Lucy was playing in the orchestra that backed Natalie Clein and the Haydn cello concerto - such deep-toned ecstasy coming from the Clein cello you wouldn't believe - one of Granny's favourite sounds at the best of times... and this was beyond pleasure. A life of leisure you see - no figs/aubergines/tomatoes needing to be processed here. To hell with the heaps of paper needing her attention: she will deal with them later in the week.

The funeral was as all funerals - getting together the unlikely collections of people only ever seen under the same roof at funerals - or weddings: the more so when someone has been married as many times as Big Brother (not that Granny can talk.) All four children from the three marriages were there, of course, plus five grandchildren. Wife number one turned up with her stepson from her third - now ended - marriage. Wife number two turned up by herself. Wife number three did not turn up - to the relief of all. But her mother did, her two sisters, her brother, her sister-in-law, and various nephews/nieces. Plus there were other relations by marriage - one of whom features sitting in a pram with big brother in an old family photograph - plus fellow-golf players, fellow local politicians, plus childhood friends of Big Brother's Granny has not seen since then, plus the naughty ex-wife of one of his very best friends - very dumpy/respectable these days -best friend has turned reclusive so did not appear. Invocations of past, of future, time rolled into a ball, all mixed up. Weird.

Plus the funeral was a replica of Granny's dad's. Didn't she say Big Brother always wanted to be his Dad? Even his dead Dad it would seem. The readings and the hymns were just the same - Granny loves the hymns at least - all her family goes for good tunes - the only thing missing was the Eton Boating Song played on an electronic organ at exit of coffin. (Youngest nephew did want Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline here, but was over-ruled. Why? On hearing this Granny told her children, firmly, they are to play the Rolling Stones singing Get Off My Cloud, at the end of hers. Strange how any such event at her age, gets you planning your own funeral, and wishing you could be there.) Nieces read the familiar pieces. American nephew gave an eulogy, ending with wishing his dad a heaven that included a permanent Tory government, a golf course and an ice-cream parlour. Granny read a piece sent from Australia by little sister, which grieved for the two of them and made her cry even as she read it. A lot of wine was drunk, before and after; a lot of crying done. Oh and a bemused grave-digger wondered where everybody was - the funeral service was held in a church not attached to the graveyard - and hoped - in the broadest of broad Sussex accents - that this was not another occasion where he'd dug the grave in the wrong place so would have to dig another in a hurry, the congregation inside the church put to singing ever more funeral hymns till he was done. Shakespeare should have heard him. Maybe he did. But all skulls remained firmly underground: Hamlet was not among those present.

Laugh and cry together. Of course. Whatever else?

Catch up

2008-07-02T12:49:00.002+01:00

Sorry sorry sorry. It's been quite a week; between flights, funerals, imminent births, football championships - watched by G and B in local bar cheering along with locals and fed free booze thereafter - and very encouraging visitation by inspector, that involved much work beforehand, writing lively prose, or at least trying to has not exactly been on Granny's to-do list lately.

And tomorrow - after making yet another batch of strawberry jam and fig compote to feed what MAY be a flood of guests, depending on the inspector - but it looks hopeful - she is off back to England to await the birth and catch up with her family.

She will write properly from there. Cheers.

Vine leaves

2008-06-22T13:41:00.005+01:00

The politics of a place in which everyone, no matter their party, is related to everyone else means nothing ever gets done here - unless it makes someone a lot of crooked money. The island auditorium has had a site allocated - even a sign put up - for nearly ten years now. The sign has collapsed already; no sign of any building still. The plans for improving the island capital have been shelved, yet again. Despite much talk, the illegal hotels show no sign of being legalised - where the illegalities are small - or demolished - where the illegalities put crooked man, on crooked road, in crooked town to shame. At a guess tourists will still be staying in these illegal, theoretically even demolished edifices in ten years time. This is a small island, darling. Disinterest? civic virtue? what's that?

Oh and in a month's time it's August. The whole island shuts down then, apart from tourism. Wouldn't you know. The tents and caravans are already heading for Granny - and her dog's - nearest bit of coast. Noone, anywhere, lives more than twenty minutes from the sea, but that doesn't stop people liking to get up close and personal, spending all the many fiestas/holidays from Easter to October. parked right on top of it, on various grottier - ie non-tourist beaches, (Granny wouldn't mind if only her dog, the Beautiful Wimp, wasn't so fond of rooting about in the garbage left hanging around - he's a greedy animal with disgusting tastes: this does rather disrupt their walks along her non-tourist, grottier beach of choice. One of life's smaller problems maybe; but you've heard the one about the hair - or rather straw - and the camel.... how many hairs - or rather straws - does it take?)

Some things work though in all seasons - neighbourliness for one - provided the weather is cooperative - provided it doesn't, for instance, send a calima and temperatures of over 40 degrees when the grapes are near to being harvested as it did last year. At the moment all is well. Granny and Beloved's neighbours are pruning the vines so that the grapes get their ration of cooperative - not over-heated - sun. Pruning the grapes means guess what, vine leaves: dolmades, thinks Granny - she likes dolmades. Certainly not, says Beloved. The leaves don't grow big enough here. Granny experienced this for herself - she did try to wrap the leaves round their rice filling: in vain. The goats on the other hand are quite happy to eat vine leaves raw and without stuffing; so that's alright. Not that she and Beloved grow grapes, make wine, you understand, but all their neighbours do. Juan down the drive delivered at large heap of vine leaves one morning. Domingo on the far side summoned Beloved to fetch another big load from him. The goats are delighted. Billy the Kid, in particular obviously a gourmet child, has developed a passion for the green things. What next, Granny wonders? Will he be demanding Crepes Suzette? Pommes dauphinoises? Possibly. He might not go for oysters, though: goats are herbivores, after all.

On Tuesday, Granny is heading back to the UK for a haircut - and Big Brother's funeral on Friday- then heading back here the following Sunday for an inspector, then back to UK on Thursday for a baby. Carbon footprint what's that? Oh God. Sackcloth and ashes more like. Sorry environment. Sorry everyone.

Art...

2008-06-17T12:39:00.013+01:00

Art - what's that? Between beans, tomatoes, aubergines, dust, getting to places cleaning normally doesn't, etc, not much time for art round Granny these days. The island on the other hand... how about some island art...As you can see we're not talking Almodovar here, we're talking something much more indigenous. There's some theory the artist responsible is German, but that's hard for Granny to ascertain; she's seen him around several times - a small, not very clean, battered and rather
toothless man, but since he never speaks, how to tell. His size and squareness are Canarian enough for sure, whether he's German or not.

How to describe this weird work? Impossible really. The 'work' - whatever you call it - surrounds a house on the outskirts of Teguise, the old capital, a mishmash of sculpted figures and found objects placed, heaped, jumbled together and added to and altered all the time. The main plaster figures, for instance can change colour overnight, become all colours or one new colour all over; figures can have hats one day, not hats the next. As for the rest.... whatever he finds goes in. At one point you could go inside the house, Beloved said - the lavatory bowl inside the door was always full of sweets. But ever since Granny has been getting out of her vehicle to take a proper look the gate is always padlocked; the padlock and its chain are rusty, what's more as if never taken apart in a long time.

The overall effect is naive art/primitive art rather than the high stuff, but no less effective for all that. It's also very sinister - if anything says the artist is German, this might. Granny thinks of early illustrations to the Brother's Grimm, of an equally grim Germanic kind of surrealism. No more talk. Judge for yourselves. This is only a small part of the whole, she promises. But it will do for now.

Scrubber Granny

2008-06-14T17:07:00.007+01:00

No no not that kind of scrubber. The literal kind - Granny on hands and knees with scrubbing brush, cloth, bucket of water and (environmentally friendly of course) detergent, preparing for the arrival in two weeks of Alastair Sawday's inspector. Not that such a title mightn't bring more visits to her blog, visits from those people who arrive after clicking granny something as in Granny porn, expecting much more raunchy things. (Judging by her newly installed and interestingly informative site meter there are more than a few of those around....not that they stay l0ng: Granny's ?demure form of grannydom is not what they are after. Poor things.)

Still it's Granny's birthday today; and presents come in all forms, even merely in raised (if misplaced) statistics for her blog. Beloved took her out for a ?demure lunch and that will do her nicely too.

To get to less raunchy matters: Pedro Almodovar; as promised.

Some years back Granny took part in two of Graham Vick's community based opera productions in Birmingham (playing a mixture of bit parts from aged whore to psychotherapist to rather tipsy lady in a pink hat. And no, she did NOT sing.) Over weeks of rehearsal she watched with fascination idea brought to life: shape/order appearing from no shape/no order, from steps backward/forward, sideways, to afterthought to non-thought. She was reminded then of Indian creation myth - the Brahma breathing out a world from within his head, then breathing it back in again. She was reminded of it again on Wednesday watching the scenes shot on her favourite beach between an arc of sea and an arc of cliff; though obviously in this case the ideas had taken shape much more fully already: they have to if you've got to produce, organise, deal with a film crew, actors, extras, etc etc.

There are always surfers on that beach; sometimes there are wind surfers, sometimes there are kites, sometimes people playing beach tennis, taking part in surf school exercise, going for walks, sometimes there's a dog or two running around madly barking. But today - and it was really choreography as much as film-making - there they all were; the kites like butterflies, a myriad of them flying overhead, three huge wind surfer boards, the surf school stretching and bending, the ball players, the children, even the little dog (Granny thought this might be an accident, but no, there suddenly was its trainer, putting it on a lead) - and there was the film crew and the odd important actor followed around by someone with a sunshade and there was the director's chair and the sound men with their furry cylinders held high and the directors of the extras with their loudhailers - and there was the rather distinguished Mexican-American cinematographer in a loose striped shirt climbing a ladder to his camera and there came the crackly sound of the intercom phones and loud voices shouting instruction and there was Pedro himself in his little trademark straw hat, his white shoes, his striped t-shirt - tight enough to show all the bulges round his substantial middle- sitting in his director's chair, giving orders, displacing the camera man and climbing up to have a look through the view-finder, running down to the beach to instruct an actor, then at last breathing out as it were and setting everything in motion; over and over and over; bringing his world into life.

And such a beautiful life: the butterfly kites dipping and soaring, the choreographed wind surfers, the movers on the beach, the dog jumping and barking; but above all the sea, the cliff, the light, the parts even Pedro couldn't direct, the sun coming and going, the sudden, brilliant flare of turquoise and azure over the sea, the white surf, the rocky solidity of the cliffs changing colour in the changing light. Or maybe, turned Brahma for the day, he did direct it: 'Action, sun. Cut, waves. Try and make it livelier, sea....'

Lanzarote is beautiful - more beautiful than ever looks likely, in this film. Granny can't wait to see it: whatever happens God, she begs, let her live long enough (the same feeling she has when she sets out on a book of her own.)

Not surprising she managed little sleep the night after? All too much.

Tears

2008-06-12T13:04:00.012+01:00

No no not tears of grief this time. The relentless produce of the garden continues ever more relentless: right now it's aubergines in over-abundance and Granny has been chopping them up all morning for chutney along with onions - very strong onions - and fresh chillies - also breeding excessively - hence the tears pouring down her face.

She is also tired: very. She caught up with the brilliant Pedro Almodovar at last yesterday on his trawl around the island for his new film. She will write about the cinematic choreography he achieved on her favourite - the most beautiful - beach, when she's less exhausted: for now she'll just say the experience was so wonderful she was still humming and hopping mentally and physically when she went to bed. The humming and hopping was promptly exacerbated by Beloved asking probing philosophical questions as he is wont to do in bed sometimes (she's happier when he confines his over-large brain to his beeping chess machine at that time of night, but if you live with a retired and somewhat eccentric professor such mental probing has to be expected, now and then.) The questions this time related to Beloved's new subject of choice - and a probable book: sleep - something he used to study in sheep among other animals. 'Does time seem to go faster or slower when you are awake or when you are asleep?' he wanted to know - he is aware that Granny dreams copiously, most nights. Granny has to think rather more about that one. Awake she is in a different dimension from when she is dreaming it seems to her, and you cannot measure the experience of one dimension against another. She's not sure he quite got what she tried to say - or if she got what he was. If any of you out there - lurkers or commentators - have any ideas of your own on the subject, let her know. He might be grateful, even if she isn't.

Anyway the net result was she barely dreamed at all last night: she barely slept and ended up reading through the small hours rather than, more wearisomely, writing books - or blog posts - in her head, which she does when she is insomniac, thereby driving sleep yet further away. Early in the morning when she was dropping off at last, the air was rent by howls - goat howls - kid howls - bleat-type howls - because Billy the Kid had got himself stuck behind the shelter in the goat enclosure. Little billy goats quite as prone to be over-adventurous as little boys, the ongoing din, his protests ever louder as Beloved attempted to free him, woke her right up again.

You can see she is still on her island. Big Brother's funeral is delayed another two weeks. She's going to have to rush over for that and then rush back: the Alastair Sawday inspector is due - most likely - to arrive a day or two later to inspect Granny and Beloved's hospitality efforts. Another but different cause of tears, possibly - more that are not caused by grief exactly - they might even be caused by joy. But before then she'll re-encounter no doubt the real kind of tears when confronted by Big Brother's lead-lined - because of travel - coffin.

Betweenwhiles

2008-06-09T12:19:00.007+01:00

The limbo of waiting-for-death has been followed by limbo of waiting-to-hear-when-the-funeral-will-be. Big Brother's body has to be repatriated which explains the delay. When the news comes Granny will have to leap to her laptop to buy a ticket, thereby adding to her carbon footprint - yet again - but what can she do about that? Apart from moving back to England for good, not such a simple move just now, with the island economy slowing down, a high unemployment rate, all new tourist development stalled (good) and barely a house selling anywhere - mortgages not currently on offer. (Bad)

Beloved, always proactive in such areas (a bit too proactive in Granny's view) is leaping into action. Though Granny is happy to leave it to him - the only kinds of financial activity she wants are those that involve large sums of money turning up in her account with no input whatever from her, except of the literary kind -some hope- she wishes sometimes he wasn't quite so proactive. She can't keep up.

'Beloved, didn't we agree we'd do x only if all else fails?' she asks plaintively as he outlines how not only x is being set up, is almost arranged but y is following on fast: as he threatens to rearrange her tax status in ways that if he's not very careful will end up in her being taxed both in Spain and the UK. 'I've explained it all,' he says crossly, 'Sometimes I think you must be stupid,' 'Of course I am,' says Granny, 'when you are galloping ahead like this.' But she might as well save her breath. He's proposing other manoeuvres now - ones affecting her less directly - that involve him moving money round accounts, so making it unnecessary to change sums from one currency to another, given that the pound appears to be in free fall against the euro. The problem is that these days, because of terrorism, even such relatively innocent operations are picked up and can give authorities the wrong idea - that you are avoiding tax or much worse. Such activities are fine, she points out, if you're a large corporation that can afford large numbers of cunning lawyers and accountants to get them around all sorts of things meaning that they end up paying ridiculously small amounts of tax relative to their worth. (Attend to this Gordon. NOW. But of course you're too chicken, you won't.) But certainly not worth the hassle for Mr-and- Mrs-Small Accounts-in- two-different-countries which is where Granny and Beloved are at. Big sigh. Granny hates to deflate Beloved's enthusiasm. But.

To think people make careers - and fortunes - out of playing with money. Oh how BORING. No wonder Granny is not rich, nor ever will be - nor Beloved for that matter, for all his efforts - she's not sure financial sleight-of-hand is one of his talents; she might love him less if it was. Pause here: by the sound of it Beloved is about to leap into her room with yet another burst of ideas and sheaf of papers. Granny would rather do the crossword herself. Not that it's profitable in any respect, socially, financially, culturally. Never mind. She enjoys it. As she also enjoys reading detective stories, which she is off to do now, a French policier in this case, translated into Spanish, which does at least add to her Spanish vocabulary. Noone is going to employ her to manage hedge funds are they? Good.

Besides, there aren't any hedges on Lanzarote; merely stone walls. What could any accountant do with them, she wonders?

Goodnight

2008-06-04T17:37:00.007+01:00

Big Brother died peacefully yesterday afternoon after a far from peaceful weekend, seizing a moment - as often happens - when none of his family was with him.

Like everyone else in the family - some, of course, his immediate family, more than others - Granny is grieving.

She thinks of her father, aged 80 odd, at the funeral of the last and youngest of his siblings, in her 90's at the time. Granny was out of the country, but her twin reported that their dad sobbed loudly, throughout. 'It was excessive,' she said. Granny at the time agreed that it sounded excessive.

Listening to music today - to her preferred grief music - she wasn't quite so sure. Twenty-five years on, she's learned the hard way that as you grow older, as the deaths mount up, each one comes ever more freighted with past deaths, old griefs, with whole lives lost in the past; lives leaving little but photographs behind them- the odd object - the odd reminiscent piece of music - to remind you of how things were. At that funeral her dad was, she's sure, weeping not only for his sister, but for his long-dead parents, for his two much older brothers swallowed up in the killing machine that was World War One, for his wife, her mother, dead at 53: for all those lost lives - his lives - that theirs contained. At such moments the past reaches away behind but is also very close, close as the stratified layers in an archaeological site: whole centuries lying one on another, a mere whisker or two apart, in a single wedge of earth.

Granny's music was what it always is at such times - has been since her own twin died - Purcell's chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, written to be sung by schoolgirls and containing feelings well beyond theirs. It swells in the end through cello chords - or viola da gamba chords if the instruments played are old ones - and into Dido's Lament, one of the most wonderful pieces of music ever written. Its last words - 'Remember me, but forget my fate....' are a good epitaph besides for those who, as in Granny's family, die all too slowly and miserably of cancer. The tears well up when she hears Dido at the best of times.... as for days like today - you can imagine. This is all very self-indulgent of course, not to say sentimental but SO WHAT? The music isn't either of these things - far from it - even when accompanied by the tinny crowing of the bantam cockerel outside that Granny doesn't think Mr P ever intended as part of his orchestra; the bantam didn't have a clue about singing in time, let alone in tune. The wind in the beams and doors played better; whereas the blessedly silent sun through the high glass did its thing regardless, just like the bantam, flooding granny with light and warmth at the most inappropriate moments.

"Remember me but forget my fate."

Tragi-comedy all of it: tragic because life really is so short and we are each of us so insignificant- comic because we persist for long in thinking life is long and that we are, each of us, at its centre. Big Brother's life did not seem so long today, for sure, even though it was at the centre of Granny's, of his family's thinking, without a doubt. He was a pain in the arse in certain respects - but then all in her family can be pains in the arse, all are obstinate idiots - including her - but still a living breathing man with a wealth of good qualities, a not always happy life - far from it - and with four lovely kids who could be as maddened by him as his sisters could be, but who loved him to bits none the less. It says everything important, everything that was good about him, that they loved him as they did, that they are who they are, every last one of them.

Goodbye Big Brother. Granny too did love you after all. She does so wish you were still out there, playing golf and bridge, despairing that England had turned socialist, being your own true self: that you'd been given a few more years to enjoy your life in the sun at last. She hopes there's chocolate mousse up there for you - and a golf course or two. Sleep well.

aftermath

2008-06-02T13:35:00.008+01:00

This time last week Granny was, excitedly, also nervously, heading for the airport to meet Beloved Granddaughter and Beloved Goddaughter. Now instead, she is missing them. No fears realised - weather good, girls did not decide they hated each other and fall out - far from it (they had not known each other that well before so anything was possible) - Granny drove them safely hither and thither in her little hire car, despite her worries about that. Only problems were Beloved Granddaughter suffering mild sunburn despite all precautions against such things and Beloved Goddaughter catching a cold - she claimed - noone else caught it and this is a child inclined to hypochondria so who knows. The only real casualty a large fish the children caught in a rock pool and placed in the kitchen one, where it expired within the hour.

This was the case anyway, until Granny took her unaccompanied minors back to the airport.... where it turned out no airport guardian was available to mind them airside, accompanying relation had to do this, proving her identity with a passport - which Granny didn't have on her of course - compounding the problem by being no relation to one of the minors. It took half an hour of battling with officials all saying different things till they let her and them through but not before she and the children had had to traipse hither and thither, from uniform to uniform - police with caps - officials capless - from office to office. Sigh.

Tomorrow Granny was supposed to go back to Malaga. But Big Brother's two daughters are now with him, Granny definitely is not needed. BB still close to death - closer - despite rallying on Friday, sitting up in bed and eating large amounts of chocolate mousse. Which all goes to prove Granny's observation from long experience - too much of it really - that the dying are still in life, can still enjoy it, and that this is quite as significant as the lurking skeleton with his scythe. In this case BB did enjoy it, very much - the chocolate mousse she means: obviously. Good. As for now.... She waits to hear. You can't keep on ringing people to find out what slow stage of consciousness/unconsciousness someone has reached now . BB will go when he goes and she will sit here thinking of him and missing the children and listening to the wind making music with the house. As usual.

As in life...

2008-05-30T10:32:00.003+01:00

Granny you can imagine has been busy... Beaches have been visited and swum from, ditto swimming-pools, cute children in Canarian dress singing and dancing Canarian songs have been viewed, as have white tigers - magnificent - along with performing parrots and sealions. Icecreams and pizzas have been eaten - also chilli con octopus - visiting goddaughter is a much more eclectic eater than visiting - eldest - granddaughter. Granny is half on holiday, half heavily at work. Every now and then as she drives her little hire car round the island she sweats at the thought she has the lives of two family jewels in her steering-wheel encumbered hands. For that reason only she will sigh with relief when the red-headed girls take off tomorrow... otherwise she will miss them like crazy.

Beloved is taking them rock-pooling today and cooking a meal with them, using food from the garden... no, not the kid, don't worry.

Meantime new and premature great-niece in Australia is doing very well and Big Brother is nearing - very close to - his end. The phone goes - emails fly - Granny's pleasure is tinged with deep sadness. But isn't it always like that? No need to quote the Bible. Then as now it's just the same, always has been, always will be. Us beasts may live longer than Billy the Kid is likely to, but we too are mortal.

Buzzing Island

2008-05-24T15:40:00.007+01:00

Life - of sorts - on this island can be defined by main event of this week; island Mr Big (in political and crook terms) sentenced to 8 years in prison for corruption has had his Grade Three Prisoner status - meaning he only has to sleep in the prison - revoked. Theory is that this status was granted via the ruling socialist party; in return Mr Big's local nationalist party was willing to work with it in running the Cabildo - the island council - and the town council of Lanzarote's capital. Result of the revocation is likely to be political chaos - or at least stultification: nothing will get decided about anything, let alone done. Not that this is an unusual state of affairs. The swimming-pool in the main town, completed a year ago was only opened this week.

In other respects - as above - the island is humming with activity. Today is the Ironman race - the crazy event for crazies - 3,80 kilometres swim, 180 kilometre bike ride and, as cherry on the strenuously-beaten cake mix, a full marathon. Judging by the melee at the Sports Centre where Granny and Beloved swim, the Ironmen and women - many of them looking as if they are really made of iron - are not only crazy but rich; they were surrounded by kiosks selling £6000 bikes. This morning they were riding the bikes - even the new ones possibly. Their efforts made Granny and Beloved's trip to the northern market along much of the same route adventurous, not to say circuitous, not to say slow.

Add to this that tomorrow is Corpus Christi (click if you want to see last year's version): meaning that half the population will be out this evening making salt pictures in the street. Beloved considered joining in with a picture of the local church - his version - but has decided, to Granny's relief, to give it a miss; she didn't particularly fancy an evening up to the elbows in salt as his assistant. Do you blame her?

On Monday Beloved Eldest Granddaughter flies in along with Beloved Goddaughter. They do not come alone. On the same day - possibly even on the same plane, from Madrid - arrive Pedro Almodovar and his crew to spend three weeks filming part of his next masterpiece - Abrazos Rotos - or Broken Embraces - on the island. Granny is wondering - half-hoping - that the Beloved Girls will emerge from the arrivals hall alongside Penelope Cruz.

Meet Billy the Kid

2008-05-21T17:16:00.010+01:00

Granny found her camera: and the battery charger: and the lead connecting camera and laptop: miracle of miracles of miracles

So here we have HIMSELF, below. And, above, Beloved and friends...

Granny with baby below- and, right, the baby closer up.

Isn't he a duck of ducks? Well okay, if you must - we mustn't confuse species must we - not in the house of an animal man - isn't he a kid of kids?....And by the way he can't half butt. He's getting horns... which makes him a match for any troll already. If there were trolls on Lanzarote that is. But I think we're mixing up our continents as well as our species. This is Africa, dears (almost) not Scandinavia.

Mondays

2008-05-19T12:48:00.009+01:00

Beloved doesn't believe in days of the week; 'I do the animals every day, he says, 'I write every day, what difference does it make if it's Sunday?' Well there is a difference down on this farm, whatever he says. Because Granny does believe in separating the days and hers are NOT all the same; even the weekdays are not all the same.

Tuesday, for instance, is the day she goes shopping - or usually goes shopping - because that is the day the Organic Shop - the Tienda Verde - gets its organic produce in from Gran Canaria - on an island, you see, everything not grown here has to come in by boat. While Saturday is the day she goes to the market at the north of the island which has an organic vegetable stall selling produce entirely grown on the island - less and less as the summer wears on - more and more of it through the winter and spring. It is staffed by a man from the mainland and a woman from Yorkshire, daughter of a Quaker farmer imprisoned during the war for conscientious objection and one of the first to keep growing organic crops when all the chemicals came in and Britain's farmers were commanded to go for quantity rather than quality. Quaker daughter has spent most of her adult in Switzerland with a German husband and arrived in Lanzarote two years ago for reasons Granny can never quite make out - except that on a holiday visit she saw a house on a hillside and said 'that's mine.' (Perhaps most expats arrive here on such whims. Granny did in a way, if you can describe Beloved as a whim; well, perhaps not.) Quaker daughter is a very nice, if very serious lady - like all Quakers Granny has ever met. Granny likes Quaker ideas: she even went to a Quaker meeting once herself, but sat through the silence and the not very intellectual discussion that followed - something about rabbits - really - feeling like a parrot - too bright and much too noisy - in a flock of a quiet brown birds. Quaker daughter fits that mould entirely; even if feeling like a parrot - again -Granny likes her, just the same.

There is another organic stall staffed by a man from - Salamanca? - possibly - but certainly not from the island - the very same man from whom Granny and Beloved buy their organic lamb: in the market he sells organic yoghourt, cheese from his goats, and, sometimes vegetables from his garden. It is striking that none of the organic growers seem to originate from the island itself; something to do probably with the hard - and hard growing - life the Lanzarote farmer have always had; hobby farming theirs is not - it's just the means they use to live, and if sprays make their lives easier, that's alright by them. Granny can sympathise a bit and she does buy their produce too at the Sunday market, the entirely local one just up the road, where the few handicrafts sold are also all local ones. The northern market, by comparison is largely run by German and mainland hippy types who moved to the island years ago and make their living in handcrafts of one kind or another - as weavers or painters or silver-smiths or woodcarvers - or organic farmers. Naturally the voices of the didgeridoo and the call of the man who does instant silhouettes up north are not heard at the other, Sunday, market- merely Canarian folk music, canned. While the cakes and biscuits sold there are all local - over sweet - Canarian ones. At the northern market alongside such cakes and biscuits - and a local man who does sell delicious raisin and walnut bread - stands a plump and jolly tri-lingual German woman switching between German Spanish and English to peddle her hefty but delicious German rye bread along with lethally rich loaves drowned in cheese, croissants, pains chocolats and the best cinnamon whirls Granny has ever eaten - known as caracolas - snails - here.

Ah the caracolas. This is one way in which Granny marks Sundays. On Sundays she persuades her Beloved to eat breakfast later than usual. She makes scrambled eggs for them both, and eats her wicked caracola, very slowly, afterwards, along with her coffee. Then she and Beloved go to the local market (Aurelio's wife smiled at her today - no hard feelings, evidently - and Aurelio himself presented her with a bag of tomatoes and an aubergine for free) and afterwards to the newsagent to buy the Saturday Guardian with its wonderful book section. Not feeling obliged at any point to wrestle with her own prose she then retires to the sofa or her hammock with the paper more often not. THIS IS HER DAY OFF.

The problem with days off though is that they followed by DAYS ON. Starting with Monday. Oh dear - if you take Sunday off, Monday has to be faced in all its awfulness; back to the daily struggle - or failure to struggle, almost worse. Still it gives the week and time a shape of sorts. The way time goes, the way each day passes, the way Granny climbs into bed each night and thinks 'yet another day gone' - or 'yet another day older' (if not deeper in debt) she's glad to feel some pattern in its relentlessness - its awful relentlessness.

Granny wishes she could be like the kid that jumps and bounces joyfully in the new paddock at the back of the land - she can see it from her window - having no notion of time whatever, let alone any idea that its time might be up in less than two months now. Poor little thing. Actually she wouldn't want to be that kid, come to think of it. Better to be Granny climbing into bed each night thinking 'I've lived a long time.' And trying not to wonder how much longer she's got - and in what condition. That's a thought to be avoided on the whole. (But not a wholly unavoidable one, nonetheless, particularly given that her Beloved - who is a wise virgin, in this sense - unlike Granny - spends a lot of his time and energy planning for their incapacity, on the one hand, their demise on the other. Beloved likes plans. Granny who doesn't has got herself as far as two wills- one English, one Spanish - and a living will besides - but that's the size of it. Oh dear.)

(Plea to Haloscan - please show comments.... there are some... so what are you about?)

Blank notes

2008-05-16T12:04:00.014+01:00

Blank blank blank. Skies cloudy - trade winds failing which brings up ever-present spectre of global warning - headlines in papers from China and Burma horrendous. At Granny's end, temporary excitements are over, stats have sunk back to normal torpor, no word on whether film option for Charlotte Sometimes is going through - a long story - or whether agent has actually submitted Going Mental to any publishers yet and if so which...... There's a limit to the amount of interested but not-too-hassling emails you can write to someone for whom you are never going to be the kind of milch cow agents - relatively new agents anyway, without a strong backlist - need these days.

So Granny waits in patience; not very patiently. Sadly too. Big Brother has relapsed and still lives out his final days in Andalucia, driving the workers in his hospice mad - so mad they sent him home at one point: Etonian arrogance doesn't go down well with otherwise patient Spanish nurses who get more than they want these days of non-Spanish speaking expats unsympathetic to their lack of English. Big Brother is very sick and very confused so not entirely to be blamed for bad behaviour; you could see it too as his version of not going gentle into that goodnight.... a phrase Granny concurs with mostly....but still. She herself is booked to go and see him again in early June; he might live that long, he might not. Meantime a lovely South African carer and BB's youngest daughter are with him, she is not needed. In fact she'd be in the way.

Now she sits listening to Robert Plant and Alison Krause - a beautiful CD sent her by Beloved son-in-law. Its mixture of jiggy and melancholy fits her mood better than classical music today. She is supposed to be working on something her agent wants her to work on - namely a book version of her blog - a very distant version it must be said. She is reluctant: ageing is tiresome enough - especially when people are dying all round you - without spending her entire life writing about it.

Still the little goat grows and jumps a lot, the bantams can't be stopped going broody meaning yet more bantams.... what to do with them? - and in 10 days Beloved Eldest Granddaughter and Beloved God-daughter are coming for a half-term break, which will be interesting. Very.

Oh and Eldest Granddaughter is now lead singer in an otherwise all boy band - of 12 year olds - singing songs they write themselves: she's the lyricist: songs about obsessive/freaky boyfriends, wouldn't you know - except at twelve the idea of a freaky boyfriend is one with a ring in his nose....thank god for that. They've even won a prize!! - which means a session in a studio recording their songs. Granny hopes EG is not going to turn into Bristol's answer to Amy Winehouse - well not in certain respects. Let's see. For the moment this news really does cheer her up. In due course she'll even get to hear the songs....she will report.

alphabets

2008-05-13T11:43:00.007+01:00

Two of the many respects in which Granny and Beloved differ entirely is firstly their capacity - or lack of it - to get out of bed in the morning and secondly the nature of their eyesight.

Take the first. 'When I wake up I get up, whatever time it is,' says Beloved, the lark. And indeed he does, jumping out of bed without hesitation, no matter how cold it is out there. Later, very often, he says: 'I've been up since 5,30 - or 6 - and disappears to have a siesta.

Granny, a nightingale, is not like that. If she does wake up so early, she looks at her watch, groans, and tries to go back to sleep. Even if she doesn't sleep, she stays there, enjoying the warmth, the sense of relaxation. 'What a waste of time,' says Beloved (whose use of such ungodly hours is a total mystery to Granny, though she thinks he enjoys the time to himself, and is sympathetic to that. She too like - loves - time to herself.) 'Not at all,' says Granny, who has difficulty in dragging herself out of bed even when she wakes at a more civilised hour like 8 o'clock. The thought of the cold air - even in summer -is agony. Even extracting her hand from the covers to look at her watch can sometimes seem an effort too far; how much more so the thought of all the things she has to do when she does get up- reaching out for her glasses is only the start. Oh the agony of it - of facing the cold, finding her clothes and putting them on, shoving on face-cream/sun lotion, cleaning her teeth, let alone of all that going out into the air of the open courtyard, down the stairs into the main house, heading for the kitchen, digging out implements, squeezing juice, heating milk for her coffee, trying not to fall over the importuning cat as she does so: etc etc etc.. A whole range of mountains to climb it seems while she is lying there, trying to persuade herself to throw back the covers and face this daily horror.

Meantime, today in fact, she has re-discovered one diversion, another excuse for idleness with which she can amuse herself, so delay the inevitable still further.

Granny is, has been all her life, very short-sighted. Till the age of 30 she wore the heaviest of heaviest, thickest of thick glasses, which did nothing for her sex-life (it's not quite true that 'men don't make passes' etc, she after all did manage two fiances, one of whom turned into a husband, but even so, until she put on contact lenses, her success in such areas was limited.) Beloved on the other hand - this is the second difference between them - is very long-sighted - it is his main excuse for never cleaning the stove, leaving the kitchen surfaces covered in smears etc: that he can't see it needs doing. (Granny did subsidise a pair of varifocals to get round this problem as well as that of his never being able to find his reading glasses- but he claims they are useless and won't wear them. Big sigh.) Back to Granny's short sight. As a child though not able to see anything in detail beyond a yard or two, she did have - still has - the advantage of microscopic sight, of being able to see close-up detail that most people can't. Though this is not such an advantage these days when surveying her ageing skin, she likes this capacity on the whole. As a child it gave her, among other things, the language of the blankets. If you're short-sighted and also old enough to have slept under blankets you will know what she means by this- the little hieroglyphics of the threads that stick up from the blanket weave looking like an unknown script, which you can read in any way you like. She used to divert herself for hours deciphering that alphabet, through all the ever-more frantic shouts of 'get up Penelope you're going to be late for school' etc, etc.

In the days of duvets that language seemed long-gone. But this morning, lying in bed under not only the duvet but the bed-cover - trade-wind nights have been chilly lately - she discovered that it offered a smaller version of the same hieroglyphics, of yet another alphabet, and ecstatically, a child again, started deciphering them once more.

She did not think Beloved would be sympathetic when she told him at breakfast that this was yet another thing had kept her in bed this morning. She was wrong. 'I used to look for animals in the ceiling,' he said, reminiscently - 'Or on the walls.' This was something short-sighted Granny hadn't been able to do, of course, not without her glasses on. But she was delighted he had his own version of her distraction, lark as he is. You can see that she and Beloved do have things in common after all. Well of course they do.

There is a black chick arrived in the hen house. There was a brown chick too- Granny held its little palpitating life in her pocket while transporting it to the nursery coop, but that was about all the life it had. Either the mother took exception to it, or else it didn't have the yolk left to keep it alive. Did you know that chicks come provided with enough yolk to nourish them for a day or two after hatching and if they don't have that they die? Granny didn't. What it is to be attached to an animal man. How many more hidden languages are there out there, she wonders, how many more?

Hundreds and Thousands

2008-05-09T16:03:00.002+01:00

Odd thing the internet. Granny whose blog stats are usually modest has suddenly, by her standards, been inundated by hits. More than two thousand since this time yesterday. Now she knows that is NOTHING compared to sites like Petite Anglaise which attract 30,000 hits a day, but it is still a lot for her. Judging by the comments which have also come pouring in it all relates again to Charlotte Sometimes - someone somewhere with much bigger readership than hers has put in the link. Granny cannot establish where but she has discovered in the course of this that there is an American pop singer called Charlotte Sometimes who calls herself that specifically because she loved the book and the Cure song, both. And that there was once a rock group in Wales called Charlotte Sometimes too; now alas it is defunct. There is also a film called Charlotte Sometimes which in subject and story seems to have no connection whatever to her book; but maybe the title was taken from the song: who knows.

Granny thinks back to when she first thought up the title for her book. She can't remember doing it exactly, but it probably came in the night, just like that - most of her good titles do. But it wasn't altogether liked at first. An early reviewer liked the book a lot all except the title which she dismissed as 'coy.' Well never mind that, given what's happened to the title since. 'You should have trade-marked it,' Beloved says. 'Trade mark a title?' asks Granny. 'I mean - you just don't. It would be a waste of money. And, anyway, most titles turn up all over the place on different books.'

But this one hasn't. Whim or not, coy or not, here it still is. While Granny herself who has spent the week processing tomatoes - sauce, pickle, chutney - why when you grow stuff does it all come AT ONCE- feeling rather like her domesticated mother rather than her undomesticated self - doesn't feel like a writer just now AT ALL.

Not that she minds being reminded she was a writer once. Maybe, one day, she will be a writer again.

Un besito...

2008-05-06T11:33:00.004+01:00

Beloved buys his red wine mostly from a local farmer called Aurelio: a nice man with very dark - rather beautiful in Granny's view - eyes and not-so designer stubble, who wears, while selling his wine and his vegetables up at the local market one of the ubiquitous local trilby hats. Beloved is probably Aurelio's very best customer: when he and Granny are running a workshop or have many guests, he buys Aurelio's wine in bulk. He is such a good customer that he and Granny have even been invited to very solo private tastings at Aurelio's Bodega - his wine-making workshop -invited to bottle some of his wine to see how it is done. It is good wine, if drunk young. The only good red wine they have encountered here, it costs 3 euros a label-less bottle, less when bought in bulk. You can see it is good value. For obvious reasons Aurelio is fond of Granny and Beloved and very chatty around them, seemingly oblivious of the fact that Beloved understands nothing and Granny only a little - Aurelio's local accent is as impenetrable as most.

Beloved went up early last Sunday to acquire his supply - he always goes up early: Beloved does not do queues. Granny followed later - she does do queues - or rather she's not prepared to hustle herself to avoid them. She did her business at the stall she always patronises run by a grandmother and her daughters and sometimes too by her granddaughters (Granny herself supports the women every time - she's a seventies feminist isn't she?) Afterwards she headed up the line of stalls, past the smelly dried fish stall the one only patronised by locals for obvious reasons, past the plant stall, the cake stall, past Aurelio's stall. For once there was no queue there. Aurelio saw Granny passing and rushed out to greet her, grabbing her hand and pulling her closer to him - 'Un besito,' he said, 'un besito' - a little kiss - kissing her chastely enough on the cheek, surprising her a little but not unduly: Aurelio is a good friend. Very promptly, up came a woman - a rather wide woman with short dark hair - having seen her selling vegetables alongside Aurelio, Granny had more or less assumed this was Aurelio's wife, a fact that is now affirmed, firmly - very firmly - by the wide, dark-haired woman. 'You know who I am,' she says. 'I am his wife' - pointing at Aurelio. Granny nods in agreement. 'Hola,' she says smiling. 'I am his wife,' wide woman says again, taking Granny's hand, 'So,' she says, 'It's alright to shake his hand like this' - she shakes Granny's hand vigorously, 'But kisses, no.' She is smiling. Sort of. She is joking sort of. But she is not joking entirely. Granny has been given her orders. Siren Granny - can that really be how Aurelio's wife sees her....- it seems unlikely, they are both women of more than a certain age - maybe it's more a question of macho cabrio - Billy goat husband? - ?siren Granny smiles sweetly at both of them. 'Sta luego,' she says and removing herself and her vegetables, takes them meekly back to the truck.

Local life. Going on otherwise in its normal way. After four halcyon days plus sun and without much wind - happy guests - the trade-winds have started blowing and the clouds persisting up in these parts the way they do in summer. Billy the kid grows and jumps, jumping on his mother's back sometimes, on Beloved's back even, when he is milking. Two bantam hens are sitting on four hen's eggs: the question which will be established shortly is whether the young cockerel is doing his job fully or just firing blanks, The old cockerel, Damian-Daphne meanwhile is lonely: not only is he allowed no access to the hens while the latter is established, the young goat with whom he'd shared his quarter has been returned to the flock from which her mother came. When first put together, goat and cockerel were not friends, far from it: the goat chased the cockerel round the enclosure, the cockerel pecked the goat. Latterly though, they established a rather charming friendship, snuggled up against each other a bit. (Maybe when noone was looking they even exchanged besitos. Without a husband or wife in sight, why not?) Poor lonely wife-less cockerel - he can't even be let out to roam the land because he gets in among the vegetables. What should be done with him? He'll be much too tough by now to eat.

sun, wine and catheters...

2008-05-02T13:14:00.005+01:00

So Granny is back. Just about. (You know that feeling when half your head still seems to be elsewhere..) Beloved's bad back is better and the goat....the gravid goat...has given birth; at last. To twins, one of which died shortly after. The lone twin is flourishing and very pretty but alas, male, which means his life won't be long either, unless someone decides he'd make a good daddy; but he won't be pretty by then, his smell will be worse and he won't be on this land. For sure.

Birth then; and death - or pending death. As in life you know.... Something Granny knows all too well after her trip to Malaga - or rather somewhere near Malaga where her brother lives in the sun, in his expat enclave. A week which was a strange mixture of the sybaritic, the farcical, the very sad and the bizarre. But isn't all dying like that - the prolonged kind of dying Granny's family go in for? - when you are reminded continually of life and living and still more so when as here the illness takes place in a perfect climate, sun, no wind, not too hot, cool at night; swifts, blackbirds, hoopoes, palm trees, jacarandas, a glass of wine and gambas pil pil at the pool bar. A foreign place just about, which made the excess of English furniture imported by Granny's brother from their shared childhood - sideboards, French-polished dining-tables, china cabinets, bookshelves full of Bulldog Drummond, the life of Churchill, of Margaret Thatcher - crammed into a small Spanish townhouse the more evocative on the one hand and comic on the other.

To all that add catheters, wheelchairs, groans, confusion. Big Brother, as is to be expected in such circumstance is not a well man. To lung cancer add colon cancer - the later cured but the cure has left him very weak, add an infection spotted by Little Sister (not so little sister) a nurse, add anti-biotics - and a night in a ritzy Marbella clinic - B B, is a BUPA man - and he will be better for quite a while. He was in fact so much better that the evening after he came home he even got up his stairs aided by this sister and a carer, had a bath and slept in his own bed. Such things are triumphs in such circumstances. In the meantime Granny and Little Sister had a crash course in various forms of Spanish private medicine and the problems, much talked about, of what happens when the ageing British, non-Spanish-speaking expat population on the Costa del Sol get sick.... Difficult. In the to-ing and fro-ing - not least to acquire Big Brother's Daily Telegraph - she stubbed her toe badly. The dramatic bruise lingers still to remind her of it all. A very minor malady, for sure.

Big Brother who is a man very much of the right in everything (compared to him Granny's old-fashioned Tory Dad was, in retrospect, almost socialist) just about forgave this sister for introducing that red rag, The Guardian, into his house ('that paper makes me sick') when she managed to acquire for him a good English Sunday roast. No, BB doesn't care for any kind of Spanish food like garlic -'disGUSTING' - or what he calls 'grease' meaning olive oil, as opposed to his daily full English breakfast type grease - funny what a very English life you can live in Southern Spain these days, surrounded by other expats. Who were, by the way, very kind, mostly very helpful and very fond of Big Brother, dinosaur as he is. They all helped him get his furniture into the house for one thing. 'You can't move in there,' they said, laughing fondly. And it is true, you can't, though sensible little sister had made some changes, banishing parts of the clutter upstairs.

As for the rest - coastal Andalucia.....oh God. BB's own enclave is pleasant enough - even very pleasant - though reached via a trip past the local sewage works and the cemetery and threatening to be engulfed by grotesque, terracotta, half-built golfing resorts. But the rest of it burgeons in a way which is Disneyland at best, at worst just avert your eyes, provided you're not driving: Costa del Golf indeed. One effect is that finding your way anywhere is impossible: so much of it is recent there are no maps. Granny and her sister spent a lot of time driving round in circles trying to look for this place or that. Granny loved the birds, the flowers, the trees, the lack of wind, true, but back in real life on her much less built-up island she can see its relative merits.

She has been writing this piece for 3 days: life since she returned on Monday has been overcome by the stomach bug roaming the island, by two bed and breakfast guests from Tenerife, by a visit from Beloved's Beloved Son - a philosopher - meaning that the air was thick with discussion of philosophical zombies and something called the the 'Jackson-Mary problem' - no, don't ask - Granny didn't; she retired to the washing up. The weather after a furious hot wind which has dried up everything, including the grapes according to worried locals, has turned almost as benign as in Andalucia. She spent yesterday afternoon in her hammock. Some things remain good. Oh and little sister since this morning is a granny too. As in life once more. How it goes on. Granny returns to Malaga in June. For now she will live her life.

Hullos and goodbyes

2008-04-20T12:15:00.003+01:00

Granny's life is deep in her extended family just now. All week it's been cousins, filling her in on bits of family history she didn't know. In her family it's especially complicated: owing to the early deaths of mothers in all generations and the level of divorce - mostly in hers - the numbers of half and step relations are considerable and constantly get added to. Strange how one's view of one family problem gets turned back to front in the light of further knowledge from another part of the family. (Eg 'she left because she was no better than she should be' becomes, 'no she didn't, she left because he was the naughty one'. Etc. Etc. Or 'her name was X/no it wasn't it was Y'. Etc. Etc.)

Tomorrow Granny is off to Malaga, to join not-so-little sister and very-poorly brother. Her brother her sister says - she keeps forgetting this is their brother they are attending and calling him 'dad' - is like someone from an earlier generation: their dad's in other words. Among other effects of Big Brother's refusal to get to grips with the present is that computers/the internet do not come within his orbit: short of an internet cafe Granny will be out of communication for a while. She will try not to call BB 'dad' but who knows if she will succeed. It's strange how different siblings can be. She and her sister have managed to enter the 21st century, more or less. Big Brother remains back in the 20th - in some respects the 19th century - hard as his own children have tried to bring him up to date.

Meantime Beloved has put his back out and the goat has still not produced her young. She is so big that it gives Granny the chance to use that lovely word 'gravid' - this goat is, definitely, gravid - very. But the weather at least has improved: the cousins have brought more sun, less wind than for weeks. The cousins are all out, Granny will retire to her hammock shortly.

Back to cleaning up the kitchen, meantime. How meals do go on, not to say lurk. Guests it's called. Cousins may be cousins but they are, also, in terms of domesticity, still 'guests'. And guests mean a) work and b) no slobbing out with a glass of wine in front of the telly. Let alone in the jacuzzi. Jacuzzi, restored at last after two months' to-ing and fro-ing over need for new cover, has been full of gleeful cousins all week.

Very expat thing, a jacuzzi. But very pleasurable all the same.

See you all later.

Death and Co

2008-04-12T11:38:00.004+01:00

Beloved is a man of many bags - up to twenty of all shapes and sizes, most of them black. This makes for certain confusion....'Where's X, Beloved?' 'In my bag.' 'Which bag?' 'I'm not sure...' etc. One black bag, however, that rolls out rather than opens with a flap or clasp is quite unmistakable; it contains a cleaver, a hammer, and a number of lethal looking knives, all of them made of stainless steel. These are Beloved's butchering tools; at the moment they are laid out on the table - yet another poor little lambie has met its end. Yesterday it was gamboling happily, today its corpse lies ready for the knives, cleaver, hammer, very soon it will be dismembered, wrapped, labelled and in the freezer. It is organic lamb, reared and killed half an hour's ride away. Granny and Beloved may eat very little meat - Granny doesn't like it much. But what they eat - mostly when friends are round - is good.

One way and another death seems to be all round Granny just now - it always is, she guesses, but it isn't always so brutally forced upon her notice. Last week, despite her cold, she went to dear old friend's memorial service and as usual after such things was left wondering about the many things she had not known about that friend revealed in the various eulogies. 'I must ask her about X'.... comes to mind in distracted moments; followed by instant realisation that short of an effective medium - if such people exist - which Granny doubts - her friend is no longer available for such questions.

The next day Granny and her friend with breast cancer - doing very well, thankyou - are sitting together with another friend, making three out of four of their still tight-knit university group. The telephone goes - it is, coincidentally, the one missing member of their group reporting that her long-ill husband has died. This husband is the last of the four men their group met and married out of university: all of them - ex-husbands in two cases - now dead of cancer, none at much over 70. (Granny discovered, via an obituary, something she did not know about this dead man too; that he was in his youth a whizz dancer - think Fred Astaire.) The women, on the other hand, remain in pretty rude health, give or take a rogue tumour or two. Granny admits she would miss these women even more than their husbands - perhaps even more than her own ex-husband; but she wishes they hadn't all found themselves so prematurely - a bit prematurely - mourning. Other men survive happily to eighty odd and more. Why none of theirs?

The day after that, Granny plus very good haircut, is walking down Marylebone High Street when her mobile rings. It is beloved Australian sister: their brother with lung cancer is going downhill fast, much faster than expected. The upshot of this, several days and many phone calls later, is that on Monday week Granny will be joining beloved Ozzie sister in Malaga to spend time with their dying brother. One sad consequence of sisters living continents apart is that they tend to meet over or subsequent to deathbeds -this is the fourth. Granny loves her Ozzie sister a lot, she'd love to see much more of her, she does so wish it wasn't like that.

Meantime she is preparing for the visit of a cousin and his family. She has only met this cousin three times - twice, guess what, at funerals- but she is sure it will all go well. What with that, what with grief - surprising grief given how poles apart, she and her brother were, are, how little they saw of each other - what with mourning all this dead and dying past, it doesn't leave much time to sorrow for the poor little lambie being dismembered behind her; no funeral for it. No worms get to to eat it either. The still-living humans make sure of that. Life goes on, all too brutally, doesn't it? How it does go on.

Good hair. bad hair

2008-04-08T10:45:00.009+01:00

Sunday April 6th.

8.30 am. Granny prises open an unwilling eye. Still snuffling and hacking somewhat, she has not had a good night but today is leaving day.... so -
8.32 am. she crawls out of bed with reasonably good thought that everything is packed and ready and even better one that she is going off to breakfast with Beloved Son and middle and youngest granddaughters a short bus ride away.
8.33 am. She merges into the sitting-room, pleased to notice a kind of brightness the other side of the curtains. Sun?
8.33.30 am. She flings open the curtains. No sun. It is snowing. She thinks of retreating back to bed.
8.34 am. She resists the temptation.
8.34-9.40 am. Granny washes, dresses and performs various tedious tasks like filling in her proxy vote form for London Mayoral Elections. (Keep mad Boris out at any cost including this one.)
941.am. She gathers up her keys and goes into the kitchen. Notices left-over fruit to be taken to Beloved son and puts keys down again. Also notices bags of garbage garbage and one of recycling garbage, gathers them up along with fruit bag and puts all three in hall.
9.41-5. She finds waterproof coat, puts on boots, hat, puts bus pass, mobile phone and sundry bits of loose change into the pocket of waterproof coat, gathers up bags in hall. shakes pocket, is reassured by jingle - keys in then - opens front door, goes out of it, hesitates a moment, shuts it behind her.
9.46. Worried thought. She had picked up her keys, hadn't she?
9.47 She roots in her pockets - all of them - coat, jeans, fleece jerkin. No keys. Roots in all 3 bags, including both garbage ones. No keys. Ghastly, resisted truth dawns. They are still inside empty flat. Along with luggage, passport, tickets, etc etc.
9.48. She takes out her plastic bus pass and tries the opening-yale-lock-with-creditcard-trick (yes she does have some disreputable skills.) Vainly. Card snags on draught excluder, can't get through to lock.
9.48. She calls on-holiday flatmate to get mobile number of other flatmate supposedly back in London since Saturday - but so far absent. On-holiday flatmate's mobile is of course switched-off. Both holders of spare keys are away. (This is not only Sunday, but the first Sunday of school holidays.)
9.49. Next door husband turns up with two snow-covered and excited small boys. She explains her plight and gets invited in.
9.51. Given welcome cup of coffee she calls Beloved Son who finds numbers of two locksmiths and calls her back. She calls one locksmith. No answer.
9.52. She calls second locksmith. He can be with her within the hour. Quotes £120-30 + vat, for privilege; this is Sunday, ie emergency call-out, darlings. Granny gulps. Would it be cheaper to wait for arrival of flatmates and ditch her ticket? Probably not. This is the beginning of school holidays, remember, the chances of getting a ticket home to Lanzarote this week - short of one costing £800 minimum from BA - small. She agrees.
9.55. In vain hope she rings flatmate no 1 again. Mobile still switched off.
9.55-11.25. She sits making small talk to neighbours - all previous curiosity about neighbours well-satisfied - elderly next-door woman turns, out to be Bosnian mother-in-law of the young English mother of the small boys Granny has encountered at times over small matters of broken balcony doors etc. Elderly woman and son are Bosnian Muslims who arrived as asylum seekers after her husband/his father was killed by the Serbs. She doesn't speak English. He does, volubly. He works for Harrods, he tells her all about it. All very interesting. and Granny is delighted to know some asylum seekers are or were decently treated. On the other hand she would have much preferred to be given this interesting proof of a) decency, b) multi-national London's ethnic diversity in more salubrious circumstances. It has stopped snowing. At last.
11.25. Two-three phone calls later taciturn locksmith in woolly hat arrives. He too is defeated by draught-excluder. States he will have to break in. Can he save lock? He will try.
11.30. He's broken in. Hasn't saved lock. New lock necessary. Cost? Around £300 odd. (This is Sunday, remember.)
11.40. New lock fitted. New keys left with nice, mostly Bosnian neighbours, so that flatmates can get in.
11.41. Granny enters flat to look for credit card. Finds keys where she left them in kitchen. Bill presented. In all £430. Granny could have got to New York and back for that. It would definitely have been better to ditch her ticket home and hung-about on standby. Taciturn woolly-hatted locksmith says that had it not been for - guess what - Sunday - the work, including parts, would have cost £190 merely.
11.43.a.m. Very much poorer Granny decides that she and her family have all obviously spent their lives in the wrong job. Note to Beloved Son. Change profession. NOW.
11.45-am-1.50pm. Talk among yourselves - Granny finishes up, gets taxi to Victoria, takes Gatwick Express, arrives at suspiciously empty Easyjet Counter. Guess what? Flight delayed at least 4 hours. A fact she'd have checked on internet, but for problems. (See above.) Had she hung on in there, who knows but flatmate might have arrived to let her in, she might still have got her plane. And not have been £430 poorer.
2.15 pm. About to enter security, she can't find her wallet or her mobile phone. Retires to hunt through baggage. Finds both. So that's alright.
2.45-3.45pm Granny gives herself good lunch, plus glass of her favourite wine (Sancerre.) It costs her £30 - peanuts after the morning, so what the hell. And doesn't she need it.
8.15 pm. Plane - at last - takes off.
1.00 am April 7th. She arrives home. Switches on mobile. Text from flatmate no 1. Flatmate: no 2 safely in flat. Bugger. (Granny is selfish here. She is not thinking of conveniently arrived flatmate but of her own pocket.)
12.55. She unpacks her handbag to find she has lost her set of keys somewhere between flat and Lanzarote. Now what? Change all locks including the new one? OUCH. She will definitely tell Beloved Son to change professions. Yesterday.

END OF PERFECT DAY.

(And no it was NOT a 'bad hair day' - even leaving aside the fact that this is an expression she can't stand, she had a very nice haircut on Saturday and the one good thing was that every time she happened to catch sight of herself she could see it was a good hair day - pity the same thing could not be said of her ravaged face.)

atchoo...ooo

2008-04-02T22:19:00.006+01:00

Snort, snuffle, hack, atchoo. Hack, hack, hack, snuffle, ATCHOO.

The sounds of Granny in London. She has THE COLD in other words - along with practically everybody else she meets/has met. She is feeling sorry for herself. Serves her right for not staying at home on her island with her Beloved and his goats, he implies - but doesn't say. He does say that the pregnant goat shows no sign yet of giving birth, and that the bantams are getting at Granny's nasturtiums. Damn. But it all seems a very long way away. From within her headful of catarrh even London seems very far away. Snort, hack, snuffle. Etc.

Even though she is NOT going outside, Granny may or may not be gone a long time. See you all later.

Nostalgia

2008-03-26T17:50:00.004Z

Granny in cold London dreams of her past, of the open common on the top of a hill near her old home. She takes the path up there she always used to take, but found it had been built up; that there were shops along the driveway to her house; all of them there so long that they were already half in ruins. She wakes up melancholy, mourning her childhood, her dead parents, all those past places not seen in how many years. She hauls herself out of bed, goes into the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee to cheer herself up.

Then this; she opens the cupboard to get out a cup. At the top of it stand two frail-looking glasses with a machine-cut pattern on them -a very thirties design, the remains of a wedding present to her parents. There was a whole set of them once, champagne glasses, sherry glasses, wine glasses, the lot, mostly broken, long ago. In the next cupboard sit two hexagonal blue and white plates with gold edges - very art deco: another wedding-present, equally up to date for its time. Granny's parents - her mother at least - were, evidently, escaping the Victorian taste with which both had been brought up. Granny never saw her parents as up to date exactly, but evidently they were, for their time, or saw themselves that way. Now their stuff not only looks dated , it fills her too with a sense of loss; such glasses, such plates appeared from her mother's cupboards, throughout her childhood - from that time gone for ever and yet still, here, disturbingly familiar.

More past: in one of the cupboards, close to the glasses stands a sturdy brown mug which came from Granny's second husband - quite possibly it was the very mug out of which she drank the first cup of coffee he ever gave her, after their very first night together. (Something she also remembers well.) Next to it are two Habitat mugs he and she bought in the course of their marriage. In the saucepan cupboard on the other side of the kitchen are two saucepans which were wedding presents to her and her now dead first husband, father of her children.

This layering of time on time, these strata of family and kitchen archaeology are both touching and sad: she can only reach such times now through objects, through memory - she wishes she could run back to again, just for a moment, even to the times she run away from, - and not just through holding the curve of handles, the bowl of a glass, the weight of cast-iron saucepan lids. She feels so sad that all are gone, gone, gone like too many of the people.

There were pigeons courting on the balcony as she sat, drinking her coffee (and yes, thanks, it did help assuage her melancholy a little.) The male pigeon puffed up its neck feathers, teetered to and fro in as much of a dance as it could manage on a narrow ledge. The female, mostly, played hard to get, turning her head from time to time. Twice she let her suitor get close; put her beak into his beak as if she was feeding him. In the end she flew away; he followed after a little while. Granny does not know if the courtship ended successfully; she could not see them any more. She did notice, though, that the pair looked very alike - mostly black pigeons with purple necks. When she looked up their courtship on the internet she discovered that pigeons do tend to choose mates that look just like themselves.

Interesting that. She doesn't think the same thing applies to humans . Her parents' mutual attraction did not mean they looked like each other, even if it did garner china and glass when they got married. Granny certainly did not look like either of her husbands either. Nor does her Beloved resemble her the slightest, not in any respect. Interesting that.

between islands

2008-03-22T15:41:00.004Z

Granny is off again tomorrow to spend some time in England with her friend with breast cancer. She leaves a slightly depressed Beloved behind her. There's a financial crisis on, didn't you know, the pound is going down against the euro and his income, like Granny's, is reckoned in pounds - something probably true of most expats in Europe these days. Granny too is aware her money goes less far here than it did. But she is less of a worrier than her Beloved and has had many a skint period - relatively skint - in the past; she just sets herself to spending less that's all. On the other hand: given Beloved's family problems, his need to support someone in care down on the coast his expenses are much greater, the descent of the euro more serious for him. He talks of selling the farm, in consequence, he is looking all over for somewhere else to live.

On the other hand, again, Granny's Beloved is always thinking of selling-up, moving: he never wants to stay in one place for one single minute; but it doesn't mean anything much ever happens, so Granny just lets him get on with it, leaves him prowling round the sale notices, round the different parts of the island he thinks he might like to live in to his heart's content. She's quite happy where she is for the moment. Financial problems - the euro - allowing, she intends staying here as long as possible.

'Where will you keep your goats, Beloved if we move?' she asks him very sweetly.

St Patrick's Day is over - no Granny did not go down to the coast and hang out in an Irish bar, wearing an orange wig and a bright green t-shirt - heaven forfend. Good Friday is past too - no she did not process behind the local priest, wearing black, chanting dismally. Nor, tomorrow, will she be eating Easter Eggs: she will be sitting on a plane heading for zero temperatures and even SNOW. The wind may be cold here just now. But even so. On the BBC website this morning there was a photo of an Easter Bunny made out of snow. Lunacy, she thinks.

Notoriety

2008-03-19T12:58:00.005Z

Well well: Granny's island made it into the Guardian yesterday - and not in the travel pages, either, though the story is, predictably, related to tourism and the profits to be gained therefrom and - equally predictably - the inevitable corruption this attracts. A third of Lanzarote's hotels are illegal - as if we didn't all know -and should be demolished: as for two of its mayors..... Granny has banged on about this often enough, so she'll spare you - if you are really interested you can go here. All she'll add is that the chances of the demolition gangs going in any time soon are small, except in the case - possibly - of the two most outrageous hotels, right on the coast, on top of one of the most beautiful and supposedly most untouchable beaches on the island. As for the mayors ending in prison....which they deserve. WE SHALL SEE.

She, meantime, has sorted out - or rather her Beloved sorted out for her - her two most intractable problems; the mysterious disappearance of her master card, and the sudden refusal to work of her new printer. Can't you guess? The one had, somehow, got sucked up inside the other....but not till yesterday did the latter deign to spit the former out. It did spit it out; neither seeming much the worse for wear, she now has her card and a working printer. Very satisfactory. One of the odder accidents of life lately - if your workroom wasn't such a mess, said Beloved....he might have a point.

One goat, by the way, has disappeared to its maker - otherwise known as its breeder, so don't get worried, it's alive and kicking. The young one is keeping its pregnant aunty company and will only be moved on if one of the kids at least turns out female too. Goats don't like to live alone - something else Granny has learned lately. Oh the education of living with an animal man.

Meantime Granny has been busy persuading the animal man, her Beloved - a man to whom all religion is a total mystery - that this is Holy Week, the most significant festival in Spain, that the shops shut on Thursday and Friday, that it's no good going down to the school where he runs a project club each week because it too will be closed all week. 'Look at the campers, Beloved,' she urges him, what would they doing there except for Easter.....' He believes her in the end, but only reluctantly. 'Why?' he asks. 'What's it all about?'

They have this conversation every year. To give Beloved his due, this year Easter has arrived particularly early - the earliest since 1907, or something; but even so.

Hurry hurry. Granny and Beloved must go shopping. They can't wait till Saturday to eat - the vegetables in the garden aren't yet ready and they can't live solely on bantam eggs and potatoes, let alone the marmalade Granny made over the weekend with the Seville oranges given by a neighbour some time back and stashed in the freezer up till then. Potato and egg pie with marmalade sauce, anyone? Perhaps not; not even with their own thyme, basil, marjoram mixed in.

Holy week..

2008-03-17T11:19:00.005Z

Foggy this morning - another instance (frequent) of all the weather reports getting this island totally wrong. It's not supposed to be sunny as the fog lifts either; but it is. And the wind is supposed to be briskish - and from the north east. It's far from brisk; and from the south west.

What is predictable is Semana Santa - the festivals have come thick and fast this year - the 3 Kings followed hot foot by carnival, now to be followed by Easter. Hard for everyone to keep up, in a place where everything and everyone turns on religious festivals; - even if that does mean, for many, an excuse to get pissed. What is predictable - school is always out through Holy Week and many people take it off too - is that the campers are lined up down at the mudflats at La Santa, rather disrupting Granny's daily trips there with the Beautiful Wimp. The birds aren't that keen on the campers either, but the BW loves them - campers mean garbage bags and he is a greedy dog: hard to persuade him that trying to catch fish is as interesting as smelly garbage -as far as he's concerned, it's no contest.

One piece of good news as far as Granny is concerned; the local cheese factory will take unwanted goats- so maybe slaughterer's knife will remain unbloodied and Beloved will have to remain without leg of goat for his dinner. Granny's heart bleeds for him (sort of) even if the goat isn't going to. What a relief.

On the other other hand it looks like she's going to be without a car from now on, sharing Beloved's truck with him - a rather cheaper arrangement. Might that lead to blood after all then - on the floor? Let us see.

2008-03-13T11:27:00.003Z

Granny is sighing/contemplating/struggling with thoughts of a new book. Going Mental has been further revised - considerably revised; you might notice it's gone from her sidebar and that's the reason. The editor friend whose comments led to this has pronounced on the new improved version. 'It's terrific' she says. New Improved version has now been sent off to unenthusiastic agent who hasn't yet pronounced on it - it's not surprising she lacks enthusiasm, given what she had to sell before, given dire state of publishing market which likes its characters/protagonists/authors young, glamorous and celebrated for nothing very much, often, except big tits and loud - sorry bubbly- laughs. Granny would oblige these ways if she could - how she would oblige - but alas she cannot turn back the clock, publishers will just have to take her as they find her: most likely won't. What fun.

Back to a similarly gloomy subject,the slaughter of goats. This has still more -bureaucratic - complications. Granny may like goat's milk ricotta but she doesn't like goat meat any more than publishers like sagas about the toothless mentally ill and she doesn't want to be involved in any way. Non-productive goats, on the other hand, are now consuming quantities of expensive fodder. "Pasture them on your land," says local friend. But Granny is not -NOT - having her wild flowers decimated: that's her one input here. The rest is Beloved's problem - they're his goats. Let's hope the pregnant goat's kids aren't both male.

Apart from the crop being a wild one, it's 'farmer and the cowboy can't be friends' all over again, it's Cain and Abel all over again, to go back quite a bit further. (Not that Beloved will be bringing out his cudgel. He doesn't mind the wild flowers and he is even fonder of of Granny than of his goats. And so, says she, he should be. After all she is fond of him too.)

Territory it's called. Speaking of which, there's a report in the Guardian today saying that Iraqi asylum seekers are now to be told to go home - 'it's safe enough now' - or be left destitute.

Granny doesn't usually do politics on this site. Even here - assuming the report is true - she will limit herself to expressing outrage. OUTRAGE.

We Brits are supposed to be decent people. But the asylum policy of our dear Government here and elsewhere is INDECENT. And worse. Much worse. Sending gays back to Iran. Sending the tortured back to places that tortured them. Imprisoning children. And now this. To hell with the Daily Mail.

Browning

2008-03-13T10:19:00.004Z

This post is not about a poet - let alone about gravy. What it is - among other things - is a reflection on almost a month without rain; the miraculous spring green fading, the land returning to its normal shades of brown despite the flowers till bravely flowering. Once upon a time these wild flowers were all there were on this island. Once upon a time, when spring was over the land was monochrome, shades of yellow and brown and ochre throughout, apart from the greens of maize, potatoes, vines, pumpkins lingering on into mid summer: apart from the bursts of leaves from fig trees all the year round. The leaves on fig trees here come and go with abandon, regardless of season. The figs only come once but also with abandon - along with fish and rabbits they used to be the only wild food to be got, except for grass seeds. The grass seeds were turned into the local flour - gofio - mixed with wheat, maize, whatever other grains were or were not available over the year. For the poorest sometimes, ground-up grass seed was all it ever was. Gofio, dried and salted fish, dried figs are still dietary staples, available everywhere. It is hard to avoid the stink of the fish at the markets, in the supermarkets; though it tastes even worse the locals buy lots of it: the taste may be hard to acquire but is also long a-dying.

That was how it is was then; no water, no flowers. But now they are everywhere according to season: poinsettias, hibiscus, geraniums, bougainvillea, roses in some places, morning glory, flowering shrubs of all kinds, depending where there's shelter from the wind. An easing of the island, you could say. It has time, money - water - for such fripperies these days.

But still Granny sighs for the passing of miraculous spring; the wild ones.

Bureaucracy

2008-03-11T12:54:00.003Z

Well, the water came back - after four days - both Granny's kids rang her on Mother's Day, and this weekend Zapatero's electorate voted with all its might and he got back in. The red PSOE boxes standing everywhere now have stickers posted on them saying 'thankyou' - and the local mayor here - only would-be senator - can get back to his job of being mayor; whatever that means.

Meantime, Granny and Beloved do what they should have done a long time ago; they have registered themselves officially with the Spanish police; meaning they can get cheap travel and all sorts of useful things. Some of them - like cheaper water and electricity - they had already, Beloved being proud possessor of a residence card: he lost the card a long time ago, but who was to know that. Hearing the hassle involved in acquiring such a card, Granny herself had decided to pass on this one; not least the hassle would have had to be repeated five years on. And she could get her cheap travel with her residence document from the local town hall, so that was alright.

However Spain is in Europe now - and yes, she knows that it has been for a long time now, but, you know, this is Spain, the bureaucracy takes some time to catch up. It has caught up. Last time Granny attempted to get cheap within-Spain travel, her local document was not enough. Time to register - a much less complicated procedure than getting the residence card, she was told, and anyway, if you too are a European citizen this document is a whole lot simpler. But - this is Spain, darlings - not that simple.

She and Beloved headed for the police station down in the main town last week, clutching their passports, local registration documents. All they succeeded in collecting at this point were several forms supplied by a nice young man. To register, they were told, you had to get a 'cita', an appointment, something you could only do between four and six in the afternoon. Oh and all their documents had to be photocopied; several time. This was eleven in the morning and the main town is half-an-hour's drive away. Clutching their forms G and P decided to call this one a day and went home.

Yesterday, clutching their now filled-in forms, their photocopies, they drove back down to the police station. And oh yes, they got their 'cita' - but was it for that day? No, it was not. This morning at 9.15 they went back again - through the rush hour - and after a wait inside, clutching their documents, were called to the table of the same nice young man who told them that all was well - except that they had to pay for their documentation at the cashier's. Was the cashier in the police station? You guessed right: it was at a bank, ten minutes walk away. Oh and the bank didn't accept cash payments for the documents after 10am. It was now 10 minutes to 10. Granny and Beloved drove there - hoping to find a parking space; which they did - and after another wait behind other customers with complicated transactions, got their documents paid for and authenticated at around 1 minute to 10. Loud gasps.

Back to the police station; back - after, you guessed it, another wait - to nice young man, who handed back their documents, asked them to submit them to nice lady with computer on desk opposite: nice lady after a little while, summoned Granny over and said she'd written down the names of her parents wrong on one of her documents; on nice lady's computer (Granny was on it, because she has had for a long time, her NIE number - the financial identification number without which you cannot so much as open a bank account here) Granny's parents were called 'Robert and Carol. Granny's parents definitely not Robert or Carol, Granny can only assume that these names were supplied in an imaginative moment by the other nice young man who had acquired the NIE number for her. She remedied the situation - not without a brief panic she was going now to have to supply her parents' birth certificates - you can be asked to do this in some circumstances; nice lady smiled, fortunately, and saw that all was good. Five minutes later Granny and Beloved were marching out of the building clutching their 'papeles verdes' and with a sense of relief almost as big as if they'd emerged from some police cell to the rear.

After five years in this place, she is now official; far more official, than she's ever felt in England; she doesn't possess any such document there. And now, flourishing her papel verde, she can travel to Spain on cut-price fares. Whoopee.

All she wishes now is that the bloody wind would stop blowing, bringing cold - very cold - air, a plague of flies and a lot of dust. The only comfort is that, except for the flies, things sound even worse back home in England.

Oh and news just in, via Beloved; her car's packed up. WHOOPEE AGAIN.

Food - and Wind....

2008-03-09T11:53:00.007Z

Granny is lucky in having a Beloved who is a good cook.

On the other hand...

After years of having cooked for a family, in the middle of writing books, she is of the school that slopes into the kitchen around 6 o'clock thinking, oh god, what are we going to eat tonight? - and proceeds to look in the fridge and the vegetable rack and then get on with it. Of course it isn't always quite so spontaneous; - she has shopped, looked at this or that - thought this or that would make a nice this or that - but she hasn't thought much further till the six o'clock deadline when she just hopes that any extra ingredients for the particular this or that are hanging around: if not improvisation is in order.

This is not the way Beloved cooks. He has things planned out for days ahead; stews this, stews that, marinades the other, makes stock with something else. All very laudable of course - and it makes, usually, when he is not being just a bit too experimental, for some very nice food. The only problem is the way the stocks, marinades, bones, flesh, leaves, all lurk meantime. They lurk on the stovetop, in the fridge, on the worktops, in the bowls/saucepans/frying pans Granny wants to use for her more spontaneous efforts. They lurk alongside the equally lurking bones, leaves, pods, scraps, designated for this or that animal - all very virtuous; little organic waste from this household goes into landfill.

Granny admires this. In general she admires Beloved's way of things a lot.

On the other hand....she does sometimes hanker wistfully after a Nigel Slater do-alike who can wander into the kitchen around the time she does, find a beanpod or two, a tin of tuna, the odd salted almond, some rice, say, and within half an hour turn it into a gastronomic delight. Not least it means he must lurk less around the kitchen less than Beloved does - Beloved's lurking preventing Granny from lurking herself and listening to Radio Three on the their digi-box, while writing this, for instance. Damn it.

Also it must make for A LOT LESS WASHING-UP. Enough said.

*******

Now for something completely different; well mostly different - politicians do, after all, fall into categories as different as those of cooks. Don't they? It is general election day today in Spain. If Granny isn't out there it's because a) she's not allowed to vote, even though the machinations of any Spanish government can affect her life, and b) because the wind has been blowing furiously for the past few days and she's had enough of it. So she keeps herself and her post subject indoors. Strange really - wind has no sound of its own, it creates sound in conjunction with solid or not so solid objects - like trees - but there aren't many trees here. It has to do what it can with the products of trees turned into windows, roofs, doors. And doesn't it do just that - swoop, swash, bang, crash, rattle, wallop. Wearisome.

As for the election - made melancholy this time by the ETA murder of a socialist politician in the Basque country - though not as melancholy as by the Madrid bombings last time - she does hope Zapatero - the Socialist - gets back in. The 'conservative' candidate, Rajoy, is a bit too conservative for her and charmless besides. She can vouch for the fact he doesn't do charm, relaxed, flexible having seen him in person, complete with embarrassed almost manic grin when a local fisherman's straw hat was dumped on his head at a rally here for last summer's local elections. Charm, relaxedness. flexibility does not necessarily make the good politician, let alone statesman, but boy when you have to listen to him banging on, it sure helps.

Also Rajoy is of the 'don't talk to the bastards' (ie ETA) school - and this we know, in the face of Israel and Hamas does NOT.

Vote with 'all your might' Zapatero has been urging his followers from every PSOE poster. Please do, please yes.