Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

...when they don't even cry?" (as my uncle used to sing). I was given the SpudBrush as a present - one needs to be careful not to sweep him into a saucepan among the rest. New potatoes here have been a bit disappointing this year, our local source has had nothing but great big ones, Tesco's supply has mostly been pre-washed and encased in plastic. Properly mucky, flakey Jerseys have been few and far between, we did find one wonderful lot from Waitrose that crippled the housekeeping. I have been using my new furry Welsh mint to flavour them, nothing nicer than that mint smell wafting in the kitchen as they start to boil. This local lot made a bowl of potato salad with onion and cumin, my contribution to next-door's barbecue, it was devoured in about five minutes flat and I didn't get a look-in.

I drove down on Sunday to see a friend in a south London hospital who is recovering from a broken hip. She has had surgery and is making a good recovery in a brand new rehabilitation unit. It is a companion site of a major teaching hospital in which she has one of only 15 beds available to an entire London borough for this type of nursing. Her care is assured and we are aware that she has been very lucky indeed to get there. This said, I can't tell you how shocking it was, on the way in to the unit, to see the degraded, decrepit state of the hospital buildings. It was like entering a Victorian slum.


Inside, empty hallways yawned, bits of tape closed off dead departments. Amateur notices were taped everywhere After 15 minutes waiting at the reception cubicle we were still completely alone and unguided; the closed departments had the lost atmosphere of of The Shining. The lift was of Fifties vintage, the stairs worn down, walls were marked by damp patches and peeling plaster. The entryway to the new wards was a disgrace.




Plans for demolition and rebuild of this site were shelved, then revived, then shelved again. Due for completion in '95, the place is still a ghost town, with builders working in parts of buildings. (Their lavatory was a sight to behold.) The place is being developed piecemeal, as money is available, I suppose.

Back home, I watched local news with its latest announcements of NHS cuts throughout East Anglia. Patricia Hewitt, the health minister, a huge pink rose on her lapel (which I found irritatingly jaunty under the circumstances), was grilled by a journalist outside the new Norfolk & Norwich Hospital (500 job cuts). She gave a rictus smile and blamed management. It just won't do as an explanation, it's fudge.

We are all asking. What has been done with the billions that have been ploughed into the system? Gone on the new NHS computer scheme, backing up ill-advised PFI ventures, or on over-egging GP's salaries, or new drugs and sophisticated therapies? All the combined health service bodies in England last year went £512m in the red - twice as much as the year before. Is anyone in central government going to get a grip on this?

I met I. M. Birtwhistle on a summer afternoon up on the Norfolk coast; driving through the village of Burnham Deepdale I noticed a handmade sign Gallery and pulled over. Parking was by a shabby old caravan full of canvases. There was a bell on the house wall opposite, an attractive girl answered and took my friend and I through a small garden into a series of conservatory rooms full of oils, watercolours and drawings. Many were hung, hundreds stacked against walls and still more in portfolios. Abstracts were dominant, but there were fine landscapes and life studies

I set about the piles with enthusiasm. Artists were represented often not just by one or two pictures, but maybe twenty or so, often working out a single theme over and over. I was absorbed and jumped when a deep voice said, "What are you looking at?" and I turned to see a woman in shades, black clothes, bright lipstick, a trilby hat and fingers full of rings. She stood in the doorway of a long book-lined room lit by small lamps.

"These by So and So (I forget the artist now), I like them but I think he should move on," I said, "he appears to have exhausted a fairly thin seam." She chuckled, "He won't be doing that, he's dead. Look at something else." She perched on a table and chatted, keeping up a dialogue about the artists that I named as I looked. "How do you find them?" "They come to me. I can feel if they're good. I am, of course, blind," she said quite crisply as an aside. "Good God, how extraordinary. I didn't know. Can you really judge by intuition?" "Something like that," was all the reply I got.

She seemed interested in talking about my work, travel, I felt a rapport there. I said politely "I shouldn't keep you. I have so enjoyed looking, but the pictures are too expensive for me." "We have a way round that," said Mrs. Birtwistle, "you may pay me in instalments as and when you can. I try to help people to have what they like."

At this moment my friend came in and I made the introduction. "Ah, and what do you do?" (in a rather haughty tone). "I work for the gas board, accountancy." said Mabe. "Oh you poor thing. I am sorry." said I.M. turning away.

I didn't buy a picture then or later and she didn't mind too much. She gave me wads of gallery postcards to distribute in Suffolk. Over time, I went back and saw her twice more. On my birthday this year I called, but she was too ill to come through. Yesterday in The Times I read her obituary and came to know her engaging story more fully, reading it I feel strangely bereaved.

G was quite cross about my self-portrait drawing, he rarely reads the blog, but caught a glimpse en passant. "For heaven's sake, that's nothing like you. I'll take your photo and you put it on there, otherwise friends will think you're dying of consumption or I've had you locked in a cupboard. Well, so much for my drawing skill and my self-image, I think I drew what I saw. But what does one see? I have a tendency to caricature; maybe that and my lifelong conviction that I'm quite ugly drove my pencil. In the hairdresser's, confronting my mug in the mirror for an hour I try to turn my gaze away, but you have to gaze hard and long when you study yourself for sketching purposes. An uncomfortable business and so public too in this case, and I think I'm about to do it again. Anyway, if anyone is interested, I'm feeling fine and am free to come and go as I please.

I am a latecomer to Sparky's and Natalie's marathon. Looking at my first attempt, I wish I hadn't arrived - what a sourpuss. It's a terrific idea, the galleries are browser's heaven. No good being shy about the state of one's kisser, nor lack of talent: just jump in.

If you remember my post on May 16th about the 15 ducklings swimming in a tiny pool, you might be interested to see the eight survivors. I know they are your bog-standard mallards, but I am always fascinated to observe their behaviour. This particular female has raised five broods here over three years and I am fond of her. She has done a brilliant piece of mothering considering the risks young birds face round here.

They are still wholly obedient and follow the her in line as soon as she gives the word to leave. They march from the pond next door for their four feeds a day. Sometimes their crops are so enormous that they look like a line-up of beige Pamela Andersons. Here they are on their way back - Mum leading, she takes them by a different route each time, a canny ploy to avoid predators who lie in wait.

We are having a lot of sparrowhawk strikes on small birds, one took a woodpigeon the other day and the feathers were scattered far and wide; it's a terrible death. We haven't seen the stoat lately, but it got in among our next door neighbour's hens and took some chicks.

We really have far too many mallards - seven drakes are always lined up waiting every morning for bread. I have to shoo them off after they have dined or they'd hang around like bored teenagers all day. I have also given short shrift to a young Egyptian goose who is incredibly aggressive around food - it even pecked a squirrel's backside.

M. Webberley Window in Plasmawr.

Jacuzzi - Italian version of a famous article by Emile Zola
Two-fold - beginners' origami class
Unscrew - French prison warder
Uncoil - French contraceptive
Precipice - push button lavatory
Parapet - an airborne cat
Metatarsals - a get-together at Geoffrey Archer's.
Tadpole - ever so slightly Polish
Wastrel - a very idle bird of prey
County Down - a popular Irish TV programme
Fart'ing - Irish for a star
Circumflex - take the end off a piece of wire.

I watched Joyce making a pair of wool socks for her son for his walking boots. The four steel needles clicked and the heel started to turn. "Of course, he'll have a hole in them within the month," she said. And I remembered the piles of mending that used to wait regularly for most women when I was young. It was an inevitable task given the fabrics of the time and the state of most household budgets.

Last week I was sorting out some old linen and came across two fantastic darns that Mum had made in a lace tablecloth; fairy stitches, almost invisible, achieved in the finest thread. The darn seemed to me more beautiful than the lace, it brought a lump to my throat. She had a vest, a particular favourite when she got old, it was light and soft and she couldn't find another one anywhere. When I found it in her drawer after she died, the beloved thing had become a demonstration piece of her skill, it was practically all darn and no vest. Patience, such patience she had for this, and the habit of industry, of making-do, preserving. It was a mindset.

I had my workbox, and my pile of stuff too and one of those funny little mushroom things; used to cobble my school socks together. But I lived in a family of professional sewing women (I nearly wrote sewers) and so got away with murder. I was so bad at it that they would 'tut tut' and snatch the hole away. My darns were made in big, ugly stitches to get the hated thing done quickly; often I used to sew the garment inadvertently to my skirt and have to unpick it. Lord how I hated unpicking anything, how awful to have to do the damned thing again when I could have been reading. I always pricked my fingers too and got blood on pristine things.

But I loved to see them, mother, aunts, sister when they were sitting mending, perhaps listening to the wireless, heads down, hands moving. The little plucking sounds of the needle, the click of the thimble, mum's face bent sideways as she bit off a thread. The neatly folded pile of completed work would grow; new buttons stiffly shanked, nylon stockings with snakes of brown chain stitch, the metal hooks of new suspenders poking out from the bottom of the heap. And seeing them I knew that I had something missing from my drawer of womanly arts and I was always sorry that I could not dredge up pleasure in such making and repairing.

Anyway, time brought me my alibi, for now clothes are made to be thrown away when damaged. Who darns any more? Yet some whisper of the old way still lives in the brains of older menfolk. G said the other day, "This woolly is really still quite good but the elbows are gone thin, I suppose I'll have to throw it away." He sighed and I knew for sure that he was thinking longingly, and no doubt comparatively, of his Mum and her clever needle.

We passed from the River Wissey into the Great Ouse, chugging down to Denver. On my lap lay a sleeping Jack Russell, the sun baked my feet propped up on the stern and two young swans escorted us out into the wider river.

More at flickr....

What one gets up to on the first fine morning for three weeks.

I usually jot down some of the team's efforts in the Definitions Game; they were very naughty and funny this week. I regret that a couple may be impenetrable to non-Brits.

Problematic - a loft conversion that's gone wrong
Feckless - celibate in Ireland
Catharsis - bums on seats at Mass
Wormcast - a downloadable worm
Shambolic - a false testicle
Aggregate - farming scandal
Stifling - Scottish dance for pigs
Rambling - jewellery for sheep
Pubescent - intimate deodorant
Tissues - important matters in Yorkshire
Definite - " Can't hear you, man."
Dipthong - fondue underwear

'That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!' Browning

For three days, from sunrise to dusk without a break, a male song thrush has taken up position in the highest branches and let rip. His song is so complex that I thought at first it was a nightingale; trills, long notes, guttural phrases and a soaring melody. It has been so puzzlingly intense that I rang the British Trust for Ornithology in Thetford to ask what he's up to. I spoke to the songbird department who thought it rather late for the bird to be seeking a mate. They had seen songthrush fledglings already. But there again, the man thought, with such a magnificent repertoire it was strange that the thrush hadn't attracted a female in the first place. Apparently the more complicated the song, the more the ladies like it. (Well, I can understand that.) Perhaps this bird had lost his first mate and was advertising for another?

Whatever the reason, I have never, in all my years here, heard anything to match him. I was up for the dawn chorus yesterday and he was one of the first to tune up. At first I sat listening outside for ages, incredulous: now I am getting a tad fed up for he is going on a bit and making me worry for him. I think the simple explanation is that there are just no females about. Thrushes have vanished from our garden over the last three years, once there would have been two or three pairs feeding about the place. This may be just a stray male migrant from Northern Europe - a lucky break for us, but a lonely summer for him.

It's awful to hear him knocking himself out to no effect. It is 9.45 p.m. and he has only just stopped. I'll resist the temptation to draw an analogy with humans on the pull; I wonder what the equivalent male effort would involve? Stuck up a tree for three days solid, singing the equivalent of "Bohemian Rhapsody" six thousand times.