In which it is, in fact, Saturday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I occasionally like to pretend that I am a tremendously good and kind person. In fact, I can be judgy and bitchy and as stubborn as twenty-seven mules in a box. I also have a fatal tendency to forget that not everyone sees the world as I do. I am prone to what my old dad calls 'making statements'. I can be frantically competitive. I really, really like being right. In other words, whatever I might like to think, I am not one of those properly good people, like Mrs March, or the mother in Little House on the Prairie, or Anne Eliot, possibly the goodest and yet least dull character in fiction.

In my fantasy goodness, I do, however, like to do those tiny acts of kindness that some people write about in small books that are sold by the tills of coffee shops. I am endlessly holding open doors for old ladies and letting people go before me in the supermarket queue and waving drivers on at roundabouts. I always smile at everyone in the street, and they give me doubtful or suspicious or pitying looks, clearly convinced that I have special needs, or am some kind of care in the community project. But today I did one of the minute acts of kindness and it really worked.

I went to Cirencester to run some errands, and it was one of those miraculous moments when everything you need is there, and nothing is out of stock, and the list has a long line of ticks against it. So I came back to the car park earlier than expected, and still had an hour left on my ticket. A pale young woman in a small beaten-up car was pulling into the space next to me. I waited, holding my tiny white ticket. I thought she might be alarmed by a stranger waving parking tickets at her, or need more than one hour, or find some other excuse to reject my offer. I have a cold and could not find my hairbrush this morning, so I did look a bit freakish, with my nose bright red, and my hair sticking up at the back, and my old baggy Nicole Fahri tweed with the holes in the pockets.

'I have an hour,' I said to the lady, as she emerged from her car. 'Would it be of any use to you?'

I brandished the paper, trying not to look too frightening.

The women smiled a beautiful smile.

'That would be absolutely brilliant,' she said.

I'm not sure which of us was more delighted.

I feel there is a moral in this story, but I have taken too much Benylin to work out what it it. Perhaps I should leave the last word to my friend the Two-Year-Old, who looked up suddenly in the middle of our most delicious lunch, gazed about the room, thought, smiled, and pronounced:

'It's not so bad'.

'No,' we all said in chorus. 'It really is not so bad at all.'

Pictures of the day are from the London trip. I grew slightly obsessed with herbs and flowers and a turquoise wall:

 

And, with slight inevitability, as a special Saturday treat, a quick reminder of what is awaiting me, five hundred miles north:

Have a marvellous weekend.

In which it is still officially Friday in my mind

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Because this whole blogging apparatus is very stern, the date at the top of this post will say Saturday, November 20th, and there is not one damn thing I can do to change it. The blogging apparatus does not understand about pushing deadlines or fudging times and dates or just giving an honest girl a break.

None of this would matter except that I have it in my head that there must be a blog every day. (Except on Sundays of course, because I am like those old stores that still shut up shop on a Sunday because it should be a day of rest, whichever deity you pray to.)  Today I did not have time, because life got in the way. Now I am lying in bed, thinking if I type fast enough, I can just get it in under the midnight wire, and no one shall be any the wiser.

None of this does matter, but I think it is interesting. Or at least: it is interesting to me, in my own tiny head, where entirely unimportant things take on a disproportionate, looming aspect. It makes me realise that even though I like to pretend all this blogging nonsense means nothing to me, that I do not care when people scoff, as they will, as they must, that it is all just a mere bagatelle, a whim, a caprice, it is of course nothing of the sort. It means enough that I must do it every day, and if I miss a day, there had better be a damn good excuse.

My excuse is that I watched Glee for the first time tonight and those of you who will have seen it will know that that it one episode of that is never enough, and that is why I am late to bed, and the clock has struck midnight, and it is not longer Friday.

On account of the hour, I have few salient thoughts. I like mostly to find some excellent theme for you, and amplify it; I like a coherence; I prefer, if possible, a beginning, middle and end. When there is this much family life, and I get tired and goofy, and I can only summon fleeting thoughts. Tonight those are:

1. I shall never get the Harry Potter thing. I try, because the entire nation and the people I love the most adore the books and the films with a passion. Each time I attempt to see the point, I fall short. I would say it is an each to each thing, except that for those ten of us who do not understand the appeal, it is not each to each at all. We are transgressives, and there is no health in us.  As a result, I find myself a little defensive whenever the subject comes up.

2. I find it slightly embarrassing that, wherever I am in the world, and however much fun I am having, after about two weeks away I get as homesick for the mountains and my small stone house and my books and my desk and my dogs as if I were still eight years old, being sent away to school. I go all moony and start looking at the north east every time the weather map comes on and begin wondering how my little rowan trees are faring in the frost.

3. There is no way to say this without sounding sentimental or mawkish, but reading a bed time story to a two-year-old is one of the great pleasures of life. (Tonight we had an excellent one about Vincent Van Gogh, which left me a little weepy on account of his being entirely unappreciated during his life time, while the baby was flinty-eyed and ruthlessly concentrating on getting me to read Paddington as well.)

4. Today, my godson made me laugh so much that actual tears came out of my eyes. He is eleven years old. I think it is a great talent to be able to make anyone laugh that hard, however old you are, but at eleven.

5. I really should have a rule that I never write the blog after ten o'clock. Even as I feel my fingers moving over the keyboard, I sense that the words are not necessarily coming out in the right order.

In which case, there must now be pictures. This is what I saw today:

PS. As you see there is general slippage, and I am growing shockingly dilatory, so there has been no polite replying to kind comments. I have to make do with a blanket and heartfelt thank you. As always, they are charming and generous and make me smile.

Quick return

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Now back at my cousin's house. I am such an old lady that two train rides quite finish me off, so there shall be little typing. Tomorrow there will be exposition.

I have not been to London for many months. My brief abstract impressions of the dirty auld town:

All the taxi drivers can speak of nothing but the roadworks. When you ask about the Mayor, they go: Boris, pah. When it was Ken Livingstone, they all said: Ken, pah; so there is no change there.

The hotels and restaurants and bars are all full, as if there was never a recession, and the cuts to come are a mere figment of the Chancellor's imagination. In the full bars and restaurants, people are saying to each other: Ireland, how did that happen? People are saying: I don't understand; even when people explain it to me, I don't understand it.

I miss the days when you could buy a hammer in Westbourne Grove. It used to be junk shops and hardware stores and a newsagent run by the politest family in London. Now it's all high end shoe shops and empty boutiques and pointless art galleries (the art is bad, but expensive) and cafés where you may buy an organic scone which tastes of sawdust but if you ask for a Diet Coke everyone looks at you as if you are a Bateman cartoon. I know times change and things move right along and la di dah, but sometimes I miss a really good hardware store. Sometimes, I like buying a box of nails.

There is apparently a Saudi plutocrat who keeps an entire mansion in Kensington fully staffed and stocked at all times, the beds made and the kitchen on full alert, very much like a duke in the eighteenth century, even though he never visits. I dearly hope this is not an urban myth. There is something so excessive about it that I find it quite diverting.

I forget there isn't really weather in London. There is a blow of wind or a gust of rain, but it's not that great, raw, all out weather, that we get six hundred miles north. I'm not being superior about it, I'm just remarking.

Everyone was bored of the Royal engagement almost before the last television truck packed up outside Buckingham Palace. 'Don't speak to me of it,' they were saying, in the full bars and restaurants. 'Ireland,' they were saying. 'How did that happen?'

 

I am waffling now, so I shall stop. Here are a couple of pictures of the city, some expected, some not so much:

Oh, and go on, I can hear you calling for them:

That is the duchess, saying: if I read one more speculative article about why Kate Middleton is/is not/might yet be another Princess Diana, I shall do something foolish.

That is the Pigeon, saying: sod it, just throw me my stick.

Or not. There really was no excuse for that at all.

Hiatus

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Off to London Town, which is of course a great journey for an old bumpkin like me, so I shall be swishing about Soho for the next two days instead of blogging. Forgive the gap.

I leave you with the mandatory photograph of their ladyships, who are apparently making themselves very much at home on my mother's bed.

Oh, and may I say: especially lovely comments from yesterday. I'm so glad you all seem to love the trees and dogs as much as I do.

In pictures

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Yesterday was really an awful lot of words, so today there shall just be trees.

I have been banging on and on at my poor cousin about how we must go and see the arboretum at Westonbirt.

'The acers,' I say, about five times a day.

Finally, today, we went.

'Which way are the acers?' I asked a very capable looking woman in an official green coat.

She pointed in three different directions, and off we marched in one of them.

Of course I knew that most of the leaves would be gone, and because the minutes slide past us, and we had got away later than intended, the sun was setting and the sky was turning a flat pewter. I knew that probably in all the guide books it says: go in October, when the sun is high in the sky. But none of that mattered because it is such an extraordinary collection of trees, and their beauty is such that even with bare branches they still look like supermodels, and anyway, there were a few brave scarlet remnants clinging to the wreckage.

I sometimes think if there was only one more thing I was allowed to do in my whole life it would be to plant some trees.

 

One of the dear readers has very rashly asked if I have any archived pictures of the dogs I could put up. The dogs are not with me now (behaving immaculately at my lovely mother's house, apparently, and being walked diligently by the Heavenly Stepfather) so obviously I do not have the usual daily snaps. You will be amazed to hear that there in fact is some rare archival footage, and since I refuse to disappoint a reader, I present it to you here:

And I suppose I could stretch to a couple more, which I just happen to have on file:

It's almost too much beauty, really. Dogs and trees: that, and a kind word occasionally, and my cup is full.

Remembrance Sunday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

There is something tremendously levelling about watching the Remembrance Day ceremony with two small girls. As I get older, I grow more prone to moments of sentiment and even secret glimpses of patriotic pride. This may sound odd to those of you in America, where patriotism is a muscular thing. Here it is massively complicated; clouded by memories of Empire, tempered by the general British tendency to resist any kind of showing off, and hedged with old ideas of class and politics.

As I turned on the BBC to watch the massed military bands gather at the Cenotaph, and the old soldiers come out to remember their fallen comrades, and the royal family stand straight in their ornate uniforms, with their great wreaths of poppies, I grew grave and contemplative. It turns out you cannot be too serious when being observed by two small people. The eight-year-old eyed me with some astonishment as I stood up when Big Ben tolled eleven. The two minute silence itself was shattered by the two-year-old saying: Read Zog, Read Zog. (Not King Zog of Albania, it transpires, but some special children’s monster.)

Then of course I got very excited with the parade itself. There is almost nothing that moves me more than seeing the ancient warriors, all decked out in their Sunday best, resplendent with medals, spruce in immaculate bowlers, marching in step down Whitehall.

There was the Special Boat Service, in their green berets; all manner of Guards, from Welsh to Grenadier; the veterans of the wars in Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and the Falklands. There were the Canadians, and the regiment from Hong Kong, and the Oman Scouts, proudly wearing red and white keffiyehs. There were the FANYs and the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service and the War Widows, led by an amazingly elegant old lady in a floor length fur and a black patent handbag. There were the submariners; ‘of course,’ said David Dimbleby, who on days like today knows everything, ‘it was considered ungentlemanly in the First World War to use submarines to sink ships.’ At the head of one group was an upright fellow with snow white hair who had been on the Arctic Convoy at the age of sixteen.

The sonorous place names rolled out: Monte Cassino, Arnhem, Ypres. The list of marchers started to sound like poetry: The Bevan Boys, The Fellowship of the Trenches, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Evacuees’ Association, The Order of the Buffaloes, The Salvation Army, The Children of the Far East Prisoners of War, The Order of the Round Tables.

The Chelsea Pensioners get me going every time. ‘Look, look,’ I said to the children. ‘See their splendid red coats.’

‘RED COATS,’ roared the two year old. ‘Where? WHERE?’

I did that terrible annoying thing that grown-ups do, the trap I swore I would never fall into. ‘Now those are the Gurkhas,’ I said, to the eight-year-old, in my special educating-the-young voice. ‘Do you know where Gurkhas come from?’

‘No.’

‘Nepal,’ I said. ‘Do you know where Nepal is?’

‘No.’

The smallest person suddenly piped up.

‘Those men have no LEGS,’ she shouted, as a group of amputees wheeled past, stoical and smart in their chairs, very old veterans of ninety, and recent casualties of the latest wars. ‘Where are their LEGS?’ demanded the baby.

‘In the dust of Helmand and the fields of France,’ I said.

She contemplated for moment and then turned to me, very serious: ‘I have gloves with flowers on,’ she said. ‘And a HAT,’ she called over her shoulder, running out of the room.

A group of American marines marched past, followed by the military veterinarians, the RSPCA, and the National Horse Service. David Dimbleby, who always knows just what to say, intoned: ‘They fought from the jungles of Burma to the deserts of North Africa.’

I felt myself get a little teary. The two-year-old reappeared, wearing her gloves and a pink hat. ‘See,’ she said, beaming at me, holding up her hands for inspection. She pointed to her head. ‘And the HAT.’

‘It’s pink,’ I said. ‘It is very marvellous indeed.’

A young major just back from Afghanistan was reading out a letter from his great uncle, written after the first day of the Somme: ‘Am the only officer left. Have not had any sleep for over fifty hours. Am not worth much.’

The marchers keep marching. The band breaks out into There Will Always be an England, followed by Colonel Bogey’s March. The eight-year-old takes my photograph. ‘I’m not sure I am ready for my close-up, ‘I say, aware that my nose is a not very fetching shade of red.

On the television, David Dimbleby says: ‘Unconscionable horrors.’

The two-year-old has disappeared again. She returns quickly, this time wearing a spanking white sun hat.

‘This is my OTHER HAT,’ she says.

The camera shifts away from the parade to a war memorial in Herefordshire. There are engraved there the names of the men who fell in the First and Second World Wars, and the newest name, that of Rifleman Will Aldridge. He is remembered in the village of Bredenbury, where he was born. His mother drives past the stone cross that bears his name every day, taking her two younger children to school.

‘My hat,’ says the baby.

The BBC returns to Whitehall. And suddenly the band stops playing and the camera lingers on the last of the marchers and David Dimbleby falls silent and that is the end, for one more year, the last name hanging in the air that of Rifleman Will Aldridge, killed in Afghanistan, at the age of 18.

I turn off the television. ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Now I am going to cook your lunch.’

The small people look up expectantly.

‘It’s chicken,’ I say.

‘LUNCH,’ shouts the two-year-old, with the gleaming, beatific smile that makes her look as if she has just stepped out of a story book.

The eight-year-old looks politely relieved that I have returned to my normal, more practical self, although still slightly wary that I may yet ask her more questions about Nepal.

‘And polenta chips,’ I say, aware that I have frightened the horses quite enough for one day.

The eight-year-old grins, forgiving me.

‘I like those,’ she says.

Two more things

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Meant to say: deep thanks for the particularly kind comments you have all left this week. Have been useless at replying but DO NOT THINK THIS MEANS that I do not read and appreciate them all. There are days, in fact, when I crave comments, in a slightly worrying way.

And: I have a horrible feeling that there were some commas in the wrong place in the last post. There is nothing I can do about it since my brain has lost all rigour and even if I squint and stare I cannot see the error. I just know it is there. From one pedant to any of my fellows out there: I apologise. I know it's a beautiful thing for humans to embrace their flaws, but a misplaced punctuation mark can put one in an ill temper for hours.

Stopping now. Really.

In which I finally take a new photograph

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Oh I have been rotten at blogging this week. I know there was the journey south, which in my case uses up inordinate amounts of mental energy and inner reserves on account of having to do the packing three weeks in advance and checking the long range weather forecast every half hour and planning for two punctures and one stalled traffic jam. I know that I am surrounded by children, which means there are conversations to be had about gruffalos and how to say I demand in Latin, and the colour pink. I know that I am away from my desk, and working cross-legged on the bed in the manner of Carrie in Sex and the City, only without the interesting fashion sense. But still.

It's not as if I can offer you anything glorious today.  I would rather love to tell you about my trip to the delightful market town of Cirencester, and the charming young fellow in the camera shop who knew all about pancake lenses, and the nice man in the farmers' market who gave me a free carrot to eat. I would love to describe my delicious lunch with my very old friends Paul and Ondine, and their extraordinarily articulate and funny daughters, Sasha and Amber. My friend Amber is the one who adores pigs. It turns out she also knows about string theory. Most grown ups don't know about string theory. Luckily I once had a bit of a crush on a physicist, so I was able to keep up with Amber once the conversation turned to science.

Anyway, I would like to tell you about all that, plus what I think of the Phil Woolas case, the rise of China, the outcome of the G20, David Cameron's new haircut, and whether the Archbishop of Canterbury was right to say what he said. But I can't. I've been making minestrone for my poor bruised godson (there was an incident with a wall, in which the wall won) and I can't really concentrate on much else after that.

However, because I did finally manage to get to the camera shop, I have a new swanky lens, and so, after a whole week, there is finally a photograph of the south.

Cirencester:

 

The excellent market:

And back at the house, some of the things I can see from my bedroom window:

Have a happy weekend.

Oh, and actually, there is one more thing. A special bonus shot of Virginia the Pig in moody sepia, especially for the person I know who most loves all things porcine: