I wonder. Which is an odd pair of words to start a column with. An odd pair of words, generally, once you start wondering about it, because unlike, say, ‘I run’, or ‘I paint’, or ‘I levitate’, together they have become a rather odd bit of language – bobbing about, like a boat without a rudder.

Which is a shame, because wondering’s brilliant. It’s one of the best things to do when there is nothing much else to do, particularly when teamed with a protracted bout of wandering. Do the two – wander, wonder, or, if you like, wonder, wander – and, trust me, you’ll never be bored.

So to last weekend (though I wonder on weekdays as well) when we were in Nice , by way of the alps, by way of Italy, by way of – ahem – another creative bit of work-life-balance planning. And though it’s a city I’m professionally obliged to refrain from calling nice, it’s a pleasant place to spend a couple of days.

And I wonder sometimes (there I go again) if I should write a nature column of some sort. Because, again and again, be it Nice, Nantes, or Nottingham, I find myself drawn to the natural.

God forbid that it should be anything preachy, though. No, just some ramblings about nature for the lay nature-fancier. The person, who like me, sees something, and wonders. And takes a photo, then another, and then tracks down some wifi, and spends time – in the best of worlds, dragging loved ones along also – finding out not just what they’ve had the privilege of seeing, but what it’s like, how it lives –  its evolutionary USP.

It’s not really surprising that I am that sort of person. I’ve always been a bit of a Charles Darwin groupie, and my museum of choice would always be the Natural History. But, to my shame, I had a male character in one of my early novels, and, because he was the also-ran, the dolt, the nice-but-dull one, I had him go on a country walk ‘clutching his trusty field guide to flora and flora’ and, worse, had it ‘bristling with post-it notes’. Ouch. Nevermore shall I malign IMG_484125198 such as him.

But I digress. Lunch on beach. Then nice post-lunch beach wander. And because you couldn’t miss it, I saw it straight away. This weird ribbon on the shoreline. This unexpected seam of blue. Not a sea blue or a sky blue – nailed to a post, I’d call it indigo. Which then resolved itself into something quite different. Not surf scum, or seaweed, or pebbles, or shells. No, more like tiny jelly fish, washed up on the shore, as if Triton, or Poseidon, or some other watery overlord, had come along and simply strewn them there, possibly while in a mood. Like jewels, they were – spangly. But also like boats. With deep azure hulls, that were almost opaque. And each topped with a perfect transparent sail.

“Wowee wow!” I said. “Woo! Isn’t nature amazing?” And almost as amazing was that in a long, inquisitive life, I had never seen anything like them before. Moon jellyfish, yes. We get them down on the Gower. But not these intense alien creatures.

It was all I could do not to wake the slumbering masses. Have you seen these? Are you not, like, amaze-balls about them? What are they? And where did they come from?

The surface of the ocean, apparently. These little animals (which are actually hydrozoans called vellela vellela) are adapted to live at the air-water interface, where their sail lets them travel on the breeze. Which is why their common name is the delightful ‘By-The-Wind Sailor’, and also why, since they are obviosuly at the weather’s mercy, they sometimes end up shorebound, and stranded, en masse.

And get this – there are left handed and right handed vellelas, the angle of the sail being apparently dictated by where in the worlds oceans they live. Righthanders off the west coast of America, mostly, while the lefthanders favour Japan and Siberia.

But on the med? I might be wrong, but as far as I can tell, this is uncommon. Which makes it noteworthy – which is why another thought springs to mind. I’m probably wrong about this too. It’s much more likely to be the sky thing. But how about this – that those tiny vellela vellela are the real reason it’s known as the cote d’azur? Azure, indigo – same difference, pretty much, after all.

So you think perhaps it could be?

I wonder.

First published in The Western Mail Weekend Magazine 7th May 2016

 

*after the brown one, that is 😉

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Anger. An emotion I don’t generally have a lot of use for. Which is something for which I’m obviously very grateful, even though I don’t know why that is. A blessed life? Some careful choices? A mostly equable disposition? If pushed to choose one, I’d probably plump for the last.

Yet last Tuesday, early morning, as I made a pot of tea, I experienced anger – proper punch-something, pulse-quickening anger – the like of which I’ve not known in a long time.

And the object of my fury? Jeremy Hunt. A man I confess I don’t know, and doubt I’ll ever know. A man who presumably is every bit as inclined to stroke kittens and love his mother as the next.

There I go again, dammit. Trying to empathise, while Rome burns. Well, if not Rome, quite, an edifice of similar emotional size. Our ground-breaking, life-saving, beloved NHS. That organization we all too often take for granted, but are so, so incredibly lucky to have.

That thing that is the envy of everyone, everywhere. And which, once, not long ago, we did NOT have. Some might still recall that, before Aneurin Bevan, if you were poor and you were sick, you were in trouble. Scrabbling around to find the wherewithal to pay a doctor. You often didn’t, because you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t, you sometimes died. And even if you didn’t pop your clogs then and there, your ‘health outcomes’ (to use modern parlance) were still poor, just like you, in every way.

And if you don’t remember, just take a look across the ocean, where the US health care system, though clearly stuffed full of fab sciency goodness, provides it at a cost – a very high cost – which leaves the poor in the same straits there today.

Make no mistake. Modern medicine is expensive. Just take a trip to a place where there is no free health care and marvel at how the tills all ker-ching. That emergency MRI scan? That precious ITU bed? That maternity unit at 4 in the morning? Complex science. Lots of medics. Lots of nurses. Lots of tech. All of which comes at a cost. A cost that is currently shared between all of us via taxes, which means everyone, rich or poor, benefits equally.

Take that away, though, and a shiny new regime will prevail. The rich will all pay for their own private health insurance. And the poor…well, the poor will obviously do what they must – struggle to pay, go untreated, get progressively sicker.

There is no point in my arguing points of fact in this mess. I’ve spent all my adult life married to a hospital doctor, and my second son is a junior doctor right now. So I know how it goes. I have first hand exposure. There is nothing you can tell me about stressful professions that I don’t already, sometimes gut-wrenchingly, know.

No points, then, just this. We are in danger. Forget the ‘7-day’ nonsense. Discard the ‘weekend mortality’. Disabuse yourself of any notion that this is progress. The first IS a nonsense – we already have it. The second is a lie, based on spurious stats. The third is not progress. It’s a cost cutting exercise – one wrapped up in soundbites, predicated on the idea that to get your bunions done on Sunday is something we can actually afford. (“How d’you like your doctors, ma-am? Oh, spread really, really thinly, of course.”)

Remember only this. British junior doctors now leave our world-renowned medical schools with eye-watering levels of debt. They do obscenely long shifts, back to back, nights AND weekends. They work for money that a business or law graduate would laugh at, and make life-and-death decisions as standard. They save lives, they have to tell people they are dying, and, when they do die, they have to go tell their loved ones they are gone. And at the same time while studying for the kind of higher professional exams that make GCSE biology look like finger painting. Oh, and pay to take those, as well.

No wonder they are stressed, and strung out, and striking.

But remember this, Jeremy Hunt, since this column is for you. They are also decent, highly motivated, highly intelligent, and highly qualified. And in demand everywhere on the planet.

And if you don’t listen to them, soon, you will lose them.

Or rather, we will. The NHS will. The NHS PATIENTS will.

Bar, of course, those that can afford them.

That’s why I’m so angry. Nye Bevan must be turning in his grave.

First published in The Western Mail Weekend Magazine, 30th April 2016

 

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I’m so sad about Victoria Wood’s death. She was one of my idols, and I went to see her perform live three times, the first back in the early eighties when we were both a lot younger, where, from my precious stalls seat, an unbreakable connection was made.

I laughed that night. So much.  Till my sides properly ached. And continued to do so, along with millions of others, at – and this is really quite something, when you think about it – everything she subsequently wrote or did. She just drew people in, didn’t she? With her talent. With her person. With some magical quality that is probably impossible to define, yet almost all of us instantly recognise. You saw (you will continue to see) any trailer with Victoria Wood in it, and you were drawn in, like a moth to a flame.

That’s a rare thing. And, God, Sixty two is no age to die, is it? Yet her flame has been snuffed, even so. Along with what feels like a tidal wave of others. It’s been a bad year, this, for death, has it not? Only April yet death is so much on our collective mind. As it would be, because we’ve already lost so many.

I’ve joked on social media. I should really find a new set of friends. Adolescents – no, pubescents, just to extend the safety margin. Just so that slew of depressing posts is no more.  Shiny, happy friends, who’d be wide eyed, unlined, and untroubled. Victoria who? Ronnie who? David who? (David WHAT?). Alan who? Sorry – Motorhead? That’s a band, right? Sorry, no.

The future for the living tends to loom in that way. My mum, eighty five, eighty six in a matter of weeks now, goes to funerals as often as I go to Waitrose.

“How’s your day been?”

“Oh, not too bad. Went to art class, then a funeral.” (When she starts going as often as I go to Lidl I’ll be on to the Queen, because she’ll obviously be due her telegram.)

And its not just all the death, it’s all the illness. This creaks and that leaks, and it really presses the point home when my sister, when we’re chatting about a forthcoming holiday, quips, “I’m so excited I’m going to have to find a Tenalady!”

Though, amusingly, my other sister, who lives in California, had to ask what she meant, because she doesn’t even know what a Tenalady is. Mind you, that’s not just about international branding. She’s not had kids. I think kindest to leave her in her ignorance. Or perhaps head to YouTube, where it would doubtless be the work of moments to find some sparkling piece of comedy on precisely that subject by who else but the irreplaceable Victoria Wood?

I hate to bang on, because I don’t want to spoil your breakfast. But sixty two. It keeps haunting me. It’s no age to die,  is it? Yet so many, famous or otherwise, all cherished, all missed, are snatched from us before either they or we are ready.

Which is why I’m mindful of my maternal grandfather, who I never met, much less  knew, because he died in his forties, just after the end of the war. In his case, via a brain haemorrhage, caused – or so goes the family lore – by hitting his head on a Belisha beacon while walking down the street with my mum, and pointing out that there were oranges in the greengrocers.

My mum was twelve, and she still cries to think of all she missed with him, but, more happily, has spent a lifetime reminding us of his wisdom. One mantra – live for today, and bugger tomorrow – has always been the go-to line in discussions with my bank manager. And though he shouldn’t agree, and has been called upon to help me out of many resultant financial scrapes, I can see in his eyes that he does.

And the other one is my grandad’s version of a poem:

‘I shall pass through this world just once.

Any good thing, therefore, that I can do, let me do it now,

For I shall not pass this way again.’

As a child, I’ll admit, I found those few lines somewhat daunting. Those few lines from a granddad, never known, but much missed.  Like Victoria Wood, taken much too soon.

But, sad that death makes me, increasingly I realise that contemplating our own is the only way to truly live.

RIP.

First published in The Western Mail Weekend Magazine, April 23rd 2016

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Oh, lord – my cats are being bullied. Which I appreciate might not be the most important piece of news you’ve heard this week, what with political tsunamis, rock musicians in the dock, and the tragedy of Lady Linda’s untimely death. (RIP)

Back at Barrett-Lee Towers, however (as I shouldn’t really describe it, as we’re blessed with just the one chimney stack, which is sub-let to a family of jackdaws) the issue of the cat-bullying has reached crisis point.

It’s an un-neutered tom – as you’d probably guess. A kind of tabby-tortoiseshell hybrid, but with a smidge of Bengal tiger/petty criminal/gnarly home-boy thrown in. And when our eyes meet, I know exactly what he’s thinking. He’s thinking he’s O’Malley, off the Aristocats, that’s what he’s thinking.   ‘Yo, mutha – beat it. Get outta my frigging face.’ (Except, being an alley cat, he wouldn’t use the word ‘frigging’.) He thinks he’s hard, but actually he’s just the feline equivalent of a pimply seventeen year old, driving like a moron in his mum’s old KA, thinking he’s sub-zero because he’s got his baseball cap on back to front, his windows rolled down, and Pillock FM turned to the max. That he’s a cat with some serious cojones.

Not that I’m blowing this out of proportion, you understand. But this invasion, for us as a family, is virgin territory. Well, I say virgin territory – strictly speaking it’s OUR territory, and he has no business rocking up, cocking his scabby tail and spraying his stinking cat-Hi Karate all around the place. Actually, scrub that. More generic supermarket-brand Lynx.

But that’s small beer, to be honest, because I’ve seen what he gets up to. Yowling. Lots of that. Proper blood-curling yowling. And going ‘rarrrrrrr!’ and getting his claws out. And generally harrying poor terrified Harvey (who is, of course, cojones-free, because we’re RESPONSIBLE cat-owners) till he’s a panting, quivering jelly. And for what? (Because there’s no room at THIS inn, buddy boy.) So he can stage a bloody coup on OUR Lola. (Who is also neutered, incidentally, so yah boo sucks to YOU.)

Funny business, being a cat owner, for all sorts of reasons. There’s the slavery aspect, obviously, and the pitying looks you get from dog owners, and that constant undercurrent of – let’s be honest – snidery.

Because there’s always someone, isn’t there? Someone who pities you for being such a ridiculous dolt. Get with the programme, they sneer, because YOUR CAT DOES NOT LOVE YOU!! They just know where their bread’s buttered and the pickings are richest. And where there’s strokes, because a stroked cat is a happy cat, obviously. And, no, since you ask, we are not prostituting ourselves. Stroking cats is right up there with Prozac.

Be that as it may (and this seems as good a point as any to point out that if you read my book Able Seacat Simon – which, yes, is still available on a high street near you – you will be rid of such tragic cynicism, and quite possibly cry). We DO love our cats, and we’re pretty sure they love us too, not least because little Harvey was rescued from a skip and Lola from a life among the dustbins of Merthyr Tydfil.

So be clear. No-one messes with our moggies. But what exactly do you do about a large marauding feline, which has an absence of common decency re respecting boundaries and personal space? I don’t think he’s a stray. Much too fit-looking and cocky. He walks the walk of a cat that’s been GIVEN no boundaries. Honestly. Some parents today. He has the look of a cat with a sense of entitlement. Who’s been hand-reared on lightly poached Albacore tuna and has his own shearling fleece at the end of someone’s bed. But he is collarless as well as shameless and, though I suspect he might be micro-chipped, the chances of me catching him – let alone frogmarching him to the vets and asking to have his chip read – are something approaching 0.0000000%.

And even if I managed it, what then? Can you imagine the conversation? “Your cat’s being horrible to my cats.” “And your point is? He’s a cat! What the **** d’you expect me to do about it? Put him on a leash?” (And, yes, in my mind’s eye, this chippy cat-mummy is OBVIOUSLY Vi Kray.)

So what to do?

Type ‘my cats are being terrorised’ into a search engine, that’s what.

And so to Mumset. A LOT more of which next week…

 

First published in the Western Mail Weekend magazine, April 16th 2016

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I am lost for words. A word.  Which I’m not very often. But there you have it. I’ve been sitting here a good twenty minutes now, and I simply do not know where to start.bouquet

Not that I’m light on ideas. Because what is a wedding, if not a rich seam of anecdotal gold? So, even as Moss Bros said the immortal words “we’ve lost your husband’s suit”, I remember thinking what a paradox it was that such a major inconvenience could be such a blessing.

Heaven knew, I could write screeds about the business of wedding attire generally and how we flap too damned much about things that don’t matter. Pete needed a suit. Pete has several suits. And as Father of The Groom (and I think these were his actual words) nobody ‘would give a flying one’ where he even WAS, let alone what suit he was wearing.

Then, the next day – the day before the wedding, to be specific – I thought ‘blow me, this really IS a gift’.

Well, where ‘gift’ can be translated as follows.  ‘Driving to Oxford, via Bristol Airport, to collect Georgie and her boyfriend Llŷr offb and w luke and charlotte their morning flight from Geneva (they are both currently working in the alps)  but having them emerge through the arrivals door sans luggage. Then finding out that said luggage is still in Geneva and might or might not make it to the UK on a later flight, and if not, sorry an’ all – it’ll be Tuesday.’

How well I remember, even as I gaped at the airline’s idiosyncratic relationship with the term ‘customer service’, what a gift this little gem would eventually be.

How well I remember, as we begged for food in a local pub, on Mothering  bloody Sunday, how the five hours in Bristol would eventually become part of an ‘oh, how we laughed’ family treasure.

I even remember how amused I was when we finally arrived in Oxford only to discover that the contents of Georgie’s toiletry bag had so spectacularly exploded. Run over! We agreed. Either by a Geneva Airport trolley, or more likely – hahaha! – by an Airbus  320.

And then there is The Perennial Hair Thing, of course. I have hair. It’s a Wedding. I am Mother of The Groom. That I have some sort of ‘do’ is non-negotiable.

But is it? Now I’ve seen the photos, I seriously wonder.

Because EXACTLY the same madness overtook me for my own nuptials, in that not only did I rock up looking exactly like Mary Poppins (pie-crust collar, billowing sleeves,  prissy late Edwardian-chic), I was also persuaded that I should have a ‘shaggy perm’, which meant I spent the wedding looking like I’d put a finger in an electrical socket and the first weeks of my married life like a cocker spaniel.

And here I was again. This time persuaded  that an ‘up’ do would make me look glamorous. It did not. It made me look like an ageing American TV news anchor. Crossed with Joan Rivers.  Plus a smidge of Sarah Palin.

And when you throw in the nude courts and flesh-toned ‘shimmer’ hold-ups, I can hardly bear to dwell on it, even now. Ah, but, again, lots to write about THAT.

Except I can’t. Because, like I say, I am completely lost for words. I simply do not know where to start.

They call childbirth an everyday miracle, don’t they? And, perhaps because there’s less in the way of primeval screaming, a wedding – even your own child’s – a pretty everyday event.

Which is why, in my naivety, I thought I knew what it would be like. An amazing day out. A watershed. A jolly. A cause for celebration. A do.

An opportunity to dance the Macarena with your granny. An excuse to drink Prosecco before noon, wearing rollers. A photo opportunity. An Instagram splurge.

A coming-together of two families. A chance to hatch new mother-in-law jokes. To become one. To welcome a new, cherished daughter, officially. To have a little self-indulgent weep.

And Luke and Charlotte’s wedding has been all of these things. But what I wasn’t quite prepared for – what I wasn’t at ALL prepared for – was the overwhelming, all-consuming JOY of it all. A joy so much more than the sum of its parts.  Astonishing. Coruscating. Shocking.

You know that thing when your heart is so full-to-bursting that you can’t quite catch your breath?  Well, THAT.

And when I find the word for it, I’ll let you know.

First published in The Western Mail Weekend Magazine 12th March 2016

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We were in rural Oxfordshire last weekend, there to celebrate Luke’s Birthday. (He was twenty nine last week, and is getting married this week. Which will mark lots of sniveling and my debut as a mother-in-law. Expect to hear a LOT more about that.)

Anyway, on this chilly February Saturday we were out for a wander when I spotted a large bird of prey in the sky. Which – and I seriously surprised myself, because Pete’s the one with the binoculars and the little bird book – I recognised immediately.

That’s a Red Kite,’ I told Charlotte, my lovely Daughter in Law to be. ‘See the angle of the wings? The red belly? The deep ‘V’ in the tail…’ (I know – I don’t know where the hell that all came from either. Go me!)

So we both stood and watched as it wheeled and dipped and hovered, because, heck, isn’t that the only thing TO do? (I don’t know about you, but I’m always just a little bit suspicious of anyone who can see a magnificent bird of prey performing acrobatics in the sky and just think ‘whatever’.)

But better still, walking on, we saw another. And then another, and another… Yes, there could have been some repeat sightings obviously, but when we saw several more driving home the following morning, I was moved to wonder quite where they’d all come from. Because, let’s face it, magnificent birds of prey aren’t exactly all over the shop, are they?

And it turns out that none of this is random. Far from it. It’s actually something of a conservation miracle, because, as recently as 1900, the Red Kite (which is up there with the best ‘woweeee!’ bird types) was almost extinct in most of Britain. Actually, it was. Go to England or Scotland prior to 1989, and you’d no more see a Red Kite than a Dodo. And that’s because (hard to imagine, this) it has been persecuted by humans for centuries.

It wasn’t ever thus. Back in medieval times, it was considered a valuable cleaner of ye olde thoroughfares, and, as such, protected by law. Slay ye a Red Kite, as I believe the legislation went, and be advised, sir, that thou woulds’t have an appointment with the gallows!

But, humans being fickle, this did not endure. By the modernist mid 1600s it was a very different kettle of fish, as the Red Kite (now so numerous as to be scavenging in pots and pans as well as kettles) became seen as a menace – like rats, say, or Justin Bieber fans (JOKING) – and began to be slain with impunity, right across Europe.

Which rendered it extinct, pretty much, as I said. Except in one place. A special place. A place with lots of hills and mountains. A place of incomparable rugged beauty, and lots of sheep.
No, not New Zealand, silly – it was Wales! Yes, a remote pocket of mid-Wales was the Red Kite’s last stand, being home to the only remaining 40 British birds, and still persecuted, of course – here an egg thief, there a taxidermist – because they were obviously now so rare. And, worse than that, was that it turned out, once they analysed the DNA, that they were the spawn of a single (and presumably knackered) female.

So there was obviously some concern about the gene pool. In Red Kites, of course, as in the film ‘Deliverance’. But bonkers banjo-playing birds were the least of their worries – the birds just failed to breed much at all.

Cue more urgent research, which finally revealed that, nice as the view was from Mynydd High-y-Draughty, the lady Red Kites, unlike party girls on St Mary Street on a weekend, weren’t up for it because they were just too blooming cold.

Isn’t science – come on, isn’t it? – just great? Because that piece of knowledge changed everything. And, quietly, efficiently, without so much as a tweet of self-importance, the RSPB (who’ve been toiling away at this since 1905, folks) joined the Welsh Kite Trust, Natural England, and Scottish Natural Heritage, and, having been given a bit of money, have reintroduced birds at sites all over Britain, and seen to it that the Red Kite is no longer in danger of extinction.

Which is why, when in places you’d never think to see them, you will once again – or if you’re young, perhaps for the first time in your life – enjoy the privilege of seeing Red Kites in the air.

And I think that’s rather wonderful. Don’t you?

First published in The Western Mail Weekend Magazine, March 5th 2016

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In or out*? That’s so obviously the question. I say ‘so obviously’ but I recognise I’m a little late in asking it, having been first alerted to David Cameron’s address at the European Summit while on a ski bus in the alps, by a nice Parisian man. Up till then, I had little idea what was going on.

Which is probably because I’m not very ‘political’. Which is why I have been astounded by myself these subsequent snowy days, not only in my need to be able to answer that question, but also  my even stronger need to be able to do so intelligently i.e. based on the facts, not the spin.

I want to be ‘all over this one’, as a hipster might say, weighing the true advantages and disadvantages, sifting the wheat from the chaff, understanding the ramifications – not just base my decision on the knee-jerk of instinct, augmented, as it surely would be, by the plethora of tabloid soundbites, much less fertilized by impassioned but not necessarily correct rhetoric from whichever camp, or camp-follower, it comes.

In short, at the risk of sounding like an EU directive myself, this is important, and I want to do it properly.

Which means putting time in, because the issues are extremely complex.  Which is why I spent an unlikely hour pre-dawn the other morning, in downloading and reading the government’s policy paper on the subject, followed by the analyses of political journalists from right across the spectrum, and the comments (some astute, some pugnacious, some frankly ignorant) that those screeds of words obviously attract.

So that’s a big tick for me, then.  I am packing some heavy knowledge! But also a second impasse, as I have very quickly realised that the more I know the more I appreciate how much I don’t know –  of just how big a gulf stretches beyond the edge of my understanding and the lush forests of comprehension on the other shore.

I thought initially that the failing was strictly of my own making. That dithering – thinking this, and then that, and then the other – was a difficult-to-admit, weedy, shameful thing. You don’t know? You SHOULD know! Where’ve you BEEN all these decades?

And then it hit me.  That the opposite might be true. That in understanding how much you don’t know you are at least striving towards wisdom, unlike so many I have – chillingly – heard pontificating on the subject, despite not seeming to know anything much about the facts at all.  Or, rather like the enduring Euromyth about the EU meddling in our bananas, bending the facts to fit the shape they would most like them to be.

And that’s the most scary thing of all. We might despise our politicians, and justly accuse them of all sorts.  Of adopting positions based on spurious motivations. Of fudging the issues. Of evading the questions. Of being – as one person pithily put it – a bunch of self-serving, power-obsessed, dishonest scoundrels, without a scrap of  human decency between them. And some mean stuff about  Jeremy Corbyn’s clothes, as well.

But I’d take most of them, any day (I stand firm on Farage, who chills me) over the people-power that is a public referendum.

That this is a complicated, multi-factorial issue, is there for all to see. It’s provoked a rift in the Cameron/Gove BFF partnership, and put George Osborne in the same camp as Diane Abbott. It’s got Paddy Ashdown and David Owen waving handbags at dawn, and Leanne Wood tucked up in (an NHS?) bed with Jeremy Hunt.

And when something is that serious, one thing at least is clear. That, for all that we don’t know, the one thing we do know is that, whatever spin pitches up on the front pages of newspapers (and the internet babble, and the ten o’clock news) they will all – you can be sure – know the facts about Europe.

As opposed to many of us, who have known little, and cared less.  And who must now base our decision on whichever ‘cause du jour’  that previously – and sporadically – floated our ‘taxpayer’s money’ boat,  or our instinctive post-war fear of being ‘swamped by ‘Johnny Foreigner’, or our simmering resentment of money going to  ‘madcap euro-money pits’,  or of untrammelled waves of immigrants stealing both our jobs and our benefits,  or of ‘bureaucrats’. Which is almost like a swear word.

The same ‘we’ who hold the power now.  Who’ll make that life-changing decision. Which feels like a terrifying responsibility.

*in.

First published on The Western Mail Weekend Magazine 27th Feb 2016

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As they so often say in matters of fundamental importance, there really is no time like the present. No better time than now to take committed, decisive action. And that’s not only because your sense of right and wrong surely demands it, but because (to the best of my knowledge, which is obviously, ahem, extensive) there are only a few still remaining in the wild, and the time will all too soon be upon us when the last surviving member of this critically endangered species will be on a high security reservation somewhere (probably on Madagascar) while a desperate search ensues for a synthetic one for it to breed with.

I refer, of course, to the semi-colon. Which you probably already guessed, didn’t you? What with me being so, like, wordy, and all.

And I do so because last week I stumbled upon an essay, in which, having chosen a number of famous books, the author removed the words, and just displayed the punctuation. Which made for some pretty cool wall art for the literati.

But he then also did a bit of funky analysis to show how different authors not only have different relationships with words, but used punctuation differently too. But what I mostly took from the article was this news just in. That, according to this study, the poor old semi-colon’s days are numbered. So much so that I cannot even give you an example of one here, the semi-colon being a punctuation mark not generally in tune with this magazine’s ‘house style’.

And I fear that this house is not alone, because I am beginning to see much the same everywhere these days – the semi-colon fast becoming the punctuation-fancier’s version of that old quilted jacket you no longer wear, because you’ve realised it makes you look like your granny. Increasingly, the semi-colon (or ‘semicolon’, for those of you who REALLY hate punctuation marks) is the unwanted, dad-dancing, cool-challenged crusty who no longer has a place at the party.

Being a grammar pedant (if one with occasional lapses, because, truly, for all my exams an’ ting, I still couldn’t define a dipthong on the hoof) I care mightily about hanging on to the marks between words, and abhor what the computing age has done to us.

I deplore dodgy writing, even if I do sometimes unwittingly practice it. No person in history, ever, ‘WAS stood at the bus-stop’. They either stood there or were standing there. How many times must I SAY that? But I especially deplore how the written word, as practiced on innumerable modern keyboards, has led to the widespread mismanagement of the comma, which people chuck about the place as if – oh, how to best put this? As if – there you go – it WAS A FULL STOP.

I deplore that, increasingly, people fail to understand narrative layout, despite correct narrative layout being there for all to see. In every frigging novel on every frigging bookshelf! Yet so many persist in ignoring it.

And why? Because as soon as we start writing, the computer says no. As if Jobs/Gates/Berners-Lee were the new holy trinity, and having ‘a gap between paragraphs of the same style’ was set in some crazy-bonkers statute.

I deplore that Twitter has bent what we say out of shape, too. And not because we can’t access spellcheckers (jeez, they bloody stalk us) but because someone told us we can only use 140 characters, and, hey, why would we waste them on boring dots and dashes when we have so much of such great wisdom and importance to say?

You know what, though? Even as I drone – and I fully recognise that I do drone – I am mindful that, for some people, this is of entirely no account. That there will be folks reading this who have no particular standpoint on the deployment of the ellipse or the mid-sentence dash. Who are happy to go with the linguistic flow and accept that language simply evolves.

In fact that’s probably the best way. Remain sanguine that, in not using it, we lose it. C’est la vie.

Except when it’s an apostrophe, of course, when it’s obviously more a case of ‘use it appropriately, damn it, or lose any last vestige of unambiguous comprehension and, as a consequence, pave the way for misunderstandings on a grand and dangerous scale, possibly bringing about the downfall of civilization as we know it, you mark my words!’, and so on.

Or perhaps I should just emigrate to Madagascar.

 

First published in The Western Mail Weekend magazine, 20th Feb 2016

 

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Oh, February, how glad I am to see you. Such a fine month for sloughing off the harridan that is January, with its grey chocolates, grey skies, and frankly misguided attachment to hosting the most miserable day of the year. No wonder I have such a spring in my step.

And I do, because it’s already being so bountiful. Not only has Sam Cam (who I cannot not love) won her bit of Sport Relief Bake Off, there is just so much good news to share.

First up, a liberating and joyful revelation. That I have resolved not to dwell further on fashion. Fashion should never be dwelt upon by sentient animals. As with thistledown, dust, cooking aromas, and Kate Moss, it should waft in, waft about a bit, and then waft right on out again.

And yet, and yet. There is a thing called a Paper Bag Waist Trouser (or pant, if you are minded to come over all American about it) which is, apparently, very much ‘on trend’. And yes, I know regular readers will be despairing right now. Because, yes, it’s true. Once a year – perhaps twice, if I’m feeling liverish – I can’t stop myself filling columns that could be filled with important recipes, say, or my thoughts on developments in particle physics, with small explosions of incredulity about the lunacy that is fashion, and the folly that it following it about the place. Though I can’t say I’m sorry.

 

Anyway, here’s what you need to know about the Paper Bag Waist Trouser. It’s been described as ‘difficult to wear’, ‘tricky’ and – love this one – ‘challenging’. (‘I am a paper bag waist trouser and I DARE you to don me!’) To which duty obliges me to add a translation into English. They mean ‘do not buy’, ‘do not buy’, and ‘do not buy’, respectively. Unless, of course, you aspire to look exactly like you have styled yourself as a person wearing a ‘cinched’ paper bag round their middle, and are five foot thirteen and a size six. (Honestly, it’s not rocket science, is it?)

I see Cardiff has slipped out of the top ten of cites that are happy, lovely, chummy, jolly, fun, exciting, financially appealing, career-enhancing, comfortable, fashionable (God, here we go again) and generally perfect places to work in the UK. Indeed, a recent survey, by some kind of psychological profiling/PR-ish/ ‘supporting your business needs since 1642’/consultancy kind of outfit – FOMO, or OMG, or WTF or something – tells us that it couldn’t get much worse. Apparently people in Cardiff come out bottom (just below Glasgow) in that only 64% of Cardiffians reported being happy, as opposed to a positively euphoric 77% in Norwich. Which make YOU happy, no? Because this is probably an excellent time to start looking for a flat in the Welsh capital. Or, indeed, selling one. Or just cracking right on with your life, as another very important survey will be along shortly.

I could not be more thrilled to learn that I need never go to the gym again. I was never going to go to the gym again anyway, to be fair (and said as much, in a public place, over lunch, just two days ago) because of all the things I’ve spent half my live either a) doing extremely grudgingly, b) not doing, extremely guiltily or c) railing against, usually at parties, as a kind of terrible first-world canker, it has to be the most vile – even above quinoa. So that news that after the first couple of minutes, you might as well go home again and watch Homes Under The Hammer, for all good its doing you, is good news indeed. This is TRUE. Which is why I’ve written it in capitals.

Staying with fitness, According to my Fitbit (other kinds of computerized tyranny are available), last Tuesday I did one million, one hundred and eighty nine thousand, eight hundred and ninety three steps. Which I’ve worked out – since I slept for a portion of last Tuesday (and the Fitbit never lies) – equates to 74,000ish steps an hour, which is 1,200 steps a minute, which is 20 steps per second. Go me!

But the net result? A calorie burn of just 1,734. And if that’s not reason enough to abandon your exercise regime, ladies, I really don’t know what is.

Unless, of course, you aspire to wearing a Paper Bag Waist Trouser. In which case, keep on stepping, with my blessing.

First published in the Western Mail Weekend magazine 6th Feb 2016

 

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This Much I Know

Lynne Barrett-Lee

 

There’s a reason people post pictures of kittens on social media. And that’s because, when the kitten-pix get knocked off the top spot, it can so easily all become a bit ‘pfffft’.

It’s only Wednesday as I write and already I’m knackered. People mourning Bowie. People not mourning Bowie. People being chippy about people who are ‘over-mourning’ Bowie, particularly when they’ve provided insufficient evidence of their right to be mourning Bowie in the first place. People posting pictures of their prehistoric Bowie album collection and/or ticket stubs to concerts that they, like, ACTUALLY WENT TO.

People flagging up (or, in social meeja speak, ‘just saying’) that the airtime that’s been allocated to showing people publicly mourning Bowie has officially gone beyond the realms of what’s morally acceptable, given that there’s, like, SYRIA going on? Like, hello?

People berating people who seek to cast aspersions on people over-mourning Bowie, on the grounds that, like, actually, there’s, like, FLOODS, like, OVER HERE. Then there’s journalists, specially those known for contrary opinions, hurrying to press, possibly hitting each other with limited edition Bowie singles, to deliver said opinions to the ‘still-on-the-fence-re-the-Bowie-positioning’ masses, so that their status as being contrary in all things remains intact.

There’s David Bowie’s milkman. And a posh lady who once shared a flat with him. And Paul McCartney, who is kept on a retainer for the purpose and can always be relied upon to say something sweet in the event of a fellow icon passing on. And the plethora of pugilists, whose weapon of choice is to quote increasingly obscure fragments of ancient Bowie lyrics in order that their ‘no greater Bowie love hath any man’ credentials remain secure, and also smug, in perpetuity.

And don’t get me started on the junior doctors’ strike. No, wait. I’ll just say this…

No, no. DON’T get me started. If you know me well, you’ll already realise that I might never, ever stop.

Anyway, there’s that, too. Around which we’ll quickly draw a veil. Because, grr. Because, arrgh. Because, pffft.

So back to kittens. And specifically to the subject of this unashamedly kitten-hi-jacked column, which is a kitten turned cat, of a naval persuasion. Name of Simon. And, no, you couldn’t make it up.

And as it happens, I didn’t need to, because Simon is/was a real cat. The only cat, (do keep up) to have been awarded a PDSA Dickin medal, which was named after their founder, the social reformer, Maria Dickin, and which, since 1943, has been awarded to a variety of animals, for gallantry and devotion to duty.

And what of it, I hear you say (particularly if you are still busy trying to identify obscure fragments of Bowie lyrics). Well, I mention Simon because for the past year, he and I have been in cahoots. Though it’s less a case of ‘Lynne the ghostwriter, ghosting the story of an inspirational contemporary human’, as the ghost of Simon, inspirational naval kitten, inhabiting me, following the joyous occasion of my being asked, and in all seriousness, ‘would you like to write a grown-up novel, based on a remarkable piece of dramatic naval history, and – this the clincher – from the viewpoint of a ship’s cat?’ (The ship in question being HMS Amethyst. The event, the 1949 Yangtse Incident. The cat, a stray plucked from a small Hong Kong harbour.)

You might suggest (specially if you are still down a blind Bowie-lyric-themed alley) that such an offer was one to be, if not outright refused, at least considered with a modicum of caution. After all, who in their right mind, over the age of about seven, would want to read a book from a cat’s point of view, with all-the-twee flibberty-jibbertiness that must imply?

So I thought for a second (with special emphasis on George Orwell). And I looked at all the animals on social media today. And I said ‘yes, indeedy’, and began my cat-life right away.ableseacatsi_hardback_1471151832_72

And this week, with the novel published – of all the weeks it could be published – I am feeling content. Think about it. Androgynous. Long-haired. Slightly scary. Bonkers lyrics. Wrote a song about a laughing gnome AND EXPECTED IT TO CHART? Who in their right mind would like David Bowie?

So there you have it. I hope I’ve contributed to the sum of human kitten-joy, and that my old Brixon mucker, David, would approve.

 

Able Seacat Simon, The Wartime Hero of The High Seas, by Lynne
Barrett-Lee, is published by Simon and Schuster.

 

First published in The Western Mail Saturday Magazine 16.2.2016

 

 

 

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