Oh, My Days!

 I am expecting the arrival of a shark this afternoon. Not one of these… Where would I put it for a start? We no longer have a bath and I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t be happy living in a walk-in shower. There is a fairly substantial collection of rainwater at the top of the garden at the moment but come Summer time the ground will be rock hard and dry and all that will be available for shark purposes will be a collection of seven water butts. And then it’ll have to do battle with all the mosquitoes therein, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, let alone a shark. And all those teeth? Imagine the toothpaste it’d go through. Best not, I think. No, the shark of which I speak and await with eager anticipation is one of these… A Shark Hydrovac Hard Floor Cleaner! Oh yes! Goodbye, Mr Sloshy Mop ‘n’ Bucket. Fare thee well, Mrs Hands and Knees Scrubber. I have finally succumbed to the lure of the power cleaner for all my hard floor cleaning needs, which are great on account of the e...

  The journey home to Shropshire - because that is where my heart is at home now, not Kent - was smooth and uneventful. A slight hold up at the Dartford Tunnel, but that's par for the course these days; you just have to accept it and go with the stop-start flow. But that was all. We arrived home at 7.30 in the evening and dinner was provided by the boxes of left-over pub food which my cousin was keen we should take because he didn't want to be eating it himself for the next two weeks.  As we travelled, Lord Malarkey and I chatted, mostly about books and conspiracy theories. We ate biscuits and Werther's Originals, and we were blessed with calm and clear weather. In between our bursts of scintillating conversation, I sat thinking about family, because things like funerals make you mull over those kinds of topics. You begin to realise that family isn't a constant energy. It is a fluxing, abstract concept that is governed by inconsistency. Sometimes the changes are good. A...

  The weather continued wet and windy into Friday morning. My friend and I took our dogs, Nell and Barney, for an early morning walk and returned, all four of us, looking like drowned rats. But with no time to waste, we got changed and set off for the crematorium. I’ve not attended a funeral for a long time and I would rather this one was not happening. But it was and there was no question of me not being there for my wonderful Auntie Pollie. People began to arrive - familiar but older faces. Cousins, siblings, nieces, in-laws, friends. Heather had driven down from Staffordshire after work the previous day. It was good to have her there. We mingled together, chatted, swapped news. It stopped raining. The wind dropped. The sun strained to pierce through the blanket of clouds. I thought, Auntie Pollie must have had a word with the chaps upstairs. No bad weather raining on her final parade, thank you very much.  The hearse arrived, bearing coffin and flowers, and the tears began....

‘I’ve decided what music I want at the end of my funeral,’ announced Mum as we settled at a table in the pub for the ‘do’ after Auntie Pollie’s funeral yesterday. ‘Moon River,’ she said. ‘From ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’.’ She looked at me. ‘Well, write it down then,’ she said.  I duly made a note to put with the other funeral instructions she has given me over the last few years. I don’t think she is going anywhere soon, but then we didn’t think Auntie Pollie was either. Auntie Pollie’s granddaughters had chosen Elvis Presley’s ‘The Wonder of You’ for her final song. I thought that was spot on.  Lord Malarkey and I had traveled to Kent on Thursday. The weather was vile. Storm Whatever making its way across the country. We met it going down as it was coming up. It obscured visibility on the motorways - rain being lashed across the windscreen by feisty winds, spray flinging up from the traffic - and made for a horrible and stressful journey. Add to that a detour when we found the ...

  Yesterday, I watched the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as 47th President of the United States of America, and only because I thought, ‘I’ve never seen an inauguration before’ and it seemed a good thing to do, especially as the weather was a bit miserable. It was interesting to watch. I especially enjoyed the musical interludes that introduced the V.I.P types - all cheerful and ‘jazz hands’ style. I have no further comment about America’s new President, other than I can see why he is appealing to a lot of US citizens because he really, really seems to love his country (which is more than can be said of our personality bypass Prime Minister) and that I am enjoying the Left-Wing types getting in a high old nasty name-calling tizzy about him.  Anyhoo, I have a decision to make in the next two or three months regarding my mobile phone. Currently, I have an I-phone 6 which has been in my possession for around five years. It’s been perfectly suitable for my minimal mobile phone n...

 Recently, I spent a fractious morning rearranging my writing room. Fractious, because it involved removing everything from the room to another room, making decisions about where stuff would be relocated, and then moving it all back again. Normally, I would enjoy this kind of activity but Bambino insisted on helping, too. He isn’t a help. But I did it, and this is the view I have before me this morning…  I am lucky to have a writing room. Over the years, I have written whilst sitting on sofas, in the corners of bedrooms, at dining room tables, in my car and on park benches. I tried writing in a library once but it was too annoying, what with people coming and going and making a lot of noise whilst trying to not make noise. As a teacher, I’ve written in my classroom and whilst sitting at the back of really boring and pointless staff meetings. But it isn’t until recent years that I’ve had, as advised by Virginia Woolf, a room of my own in which to write. Virginia Woolf had a tow...

 Things I have learned this week (and it’s only Wednesday - just think what treasures the rest of the week could reveal!):  1) Frozen dog poos are easier to scoop up than unfrozen ones 2) My brother has NEVER watched the TV series ‘Gavin and Stacey.’ NEVER! A whole array of literary allusions have been lost to our conversations. This revelation came about because he’d bought a new set of oven gloves and I said, ‘Are they like the ones Mick showed off to Pete in ‘Gavin and Stacey’?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know of what or whom you speak.’ I was gobsmacked. I said, ‘You’re missing a treat.’ He said, ‘I’ll get over it.’  3) According to my recent reading of the books ‘Women Living Deliciously’ by Florence Givens and ‘Meditations For Mortals’ by Oliver Burkeman, I’ve been doing life all wrong for the past fifty nine years, two months and six days. I intend to set about rectifying these errors immediately, and then some.  4) The photograph on my new driving licence looks wa...