This morning the phone rang at work. It was a friend who, coincidentally (yes I know publishing seems to be all about who you know, but knowing me will not get you far) is the author of book we are publishing next year, on a deadline, sitting in a café, whacking out the last few thousand words of her opus. I had no sooner transferred her to higher powers when there was a second call, this time from yet another member of the Networking Bookclub of Yesteryear whose book we are also publishing next year (are you sensing a trend yet?) wondering when Mr T was free for her to stop by and visit. I found her a window, and relayed the message through the glass ceiling, where Mr T raised his head and said: 'Ah, so you’re having lunch out today.' It was a statement not a question, and I wondered how he knew that yes, indeed I was having lunch that very day with yet another friend who had recently submitted a novel for our consideration.
You would be forgiven for thinking that I only know authors. In fact I only know these three authors. The rest of my friends are, apparently, in hiding.
Before I could ask how he had a hotline to my social life, he announced: 'We’ve just given her a three book deal.'
'Oh,' I said, as I walked out in pursuit of a J5 sized Jiffy Bag to cushion my envy, no no actually it was to put a couple of copies of Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, just longlisted for the Booker and as a result in demand by every publication in town from Large Cat Weekly to Albinos Today. But then I stopped, and went back into the office for a PS.
I must just say that it kind of pisses me off that you’ve published books by almost everyone else I know who can hold a pencil but you turned my book down.
Twice, I didn’t say, but stood there long enough for him, perhaps, to remember the serial occasions it languished on his desk before I came to work here.
He hesitated then offered a thoughtful, measured and very professional response – smiled and lifted both hands and gave me the v sign.
I replied in kind.
Not something you usually do to your boss on which your livelihood and salary (if not your publication) depends.
What are you complaining about? He asked. You’re at Waddling Duck and they’ve got the whole machinery going for them.
I’m just saying, that’s all.
And why shouldn’t I publish them. They’re all talented, driven, ambitious and very bright women. He said.
Not arguing with you, Mein Bookmeister, but, so what am I? Chopped, rarely driven, liver, lacking in ambition woman of a lesser talent?
Truthfully I’d rather have the job than the contract with dear old Pedantic Press, and God knows, I wouldn’t want to be competing with all these brainy women in the Key Title stakes in the same publishing meeting, but the pangs of inferiority are like a twist of lemon in the Grey Goose vodka of rejection which I can't stop knocking back.
And then I have to drag my lumpen self off to have lunch with the three book pink Cosmopolitan girl.
It’s made worse by the fact that she’s little and slim and perky and pretty and connected as well as beautifully dressed in a little silk skirt that flirts around her knees like a Cuban after a passport in a Havana dancehall, while I look like laundry.
I woke up that morning and decided I would wear my new white t-shirt. Then couldn’t find it. So, then I thought, okay I’ll wear the black dress, and the black dress was too tight, and so then I moved back to another t-shirt – a flesh coloured one which needs a flesh coloured bra. Beep. Also missing (we seem to have a somewhat communal attitude to undergarments in my house which I only hope does not extend to the male members of the family), and so I ended up in a skirt that looked like a potato sack and a shirt that dripped rather than draped. The flip flops just added ankles to insult. I was, frankly, surprised when the staff at the Wolsey didn’t stop me at the door and direct me on to the nearest homeless shelter.
But no, they directed me to a table where my lunch date sat with her other important asset. Her husband.
He was having lunch with a couple of high earning, well maintained women in high heels and too-tight clothes on one side of the restaurant and she was having lunch with Help The Aged me on the other. In between was Trevor McDonald and Edwina Curry and Howard Jacobson. Not all together, I may add, but sprinkled like salt on different tables.
She told me all about her books. I whipped out a picture of my cover the way I used to do with my children, with about as much admiration.
'Oh it looks lovely' (not mentioning the cradle cap, infantile excema and baldness) while they then get out the studio shots of their own offspring, taken by David Bailey, in which they’ve all got blonde curls and hand shirred antique christening gowns. Yours is in a baby gro with pudding on the front and drool in strings from their mouth, and naturally still isn’t sitting up at 8 months while theirs is already walking.
Oh groooooooooan.
Books are just as exhausting as babies, believe me.
She chattered prettily and cleverly and animatedly and charmingly while I slumped.
'I’m so sorry,' she said, 'this was supposed to be us being miserable together, but I’m so happy about my books.'
'Oh I’m not miserable,' I said, defensively, making an effort to smile which turned me into a sort of Cheri Blair novelty bottle opener.
It used to be in youth that the danger was drinking and dialing, you know, the itchy finger in the taxi on the way home when you decided you really have to ring the ex-boyfriend and tell him how much you love him, despite the fact that you haven’t seen him in 12 years and the last communication you had from him was a restraining order.
However, now, in the absence of old boyfriends, or indeed new boyfriends, it’s drinking and dishing you have to beware of.
And this is how I start blabbing:
She sympathised.
'No, I’m fine really, absolutely fine,' I added, the voice faltering, the words disappearing into that hole between thought and speech and emerging like bad reception on the World Service from a wind up radio.
Nevertheless I had a lovely lunch, then I plodded like a yeti up Bond Street, stopping to try on clothes in Jigsaw that made me look, if anything, worse than I did in the clothes I was already wearing, but in wrap around mirrors.
Why did I need to do that?
Wasn’t I feeling bad enough without going into the changing room?
Apparently not.
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Monday, 21 July 2008
Elfophilia
It’s true then. White men really can’t dance. Not even if they are wearing pixie hats and ZZ Top beards, harlequin trousers and a Peruvian blanket. In fact, all those things seem guaranteed to ensure the wearer possesses no rhythm whatsoever and that even when standing in front of a stage of fantastic African musicians the best they can do is pogo up and down.
I mean, what is it about Ponchos? And ponytails? Are they innately and cosmically linked with music festivals? Is it a camping essential to wear a blanket with a hole cut out for the head? There are bands of them, all striped like woolly toothpaste with wide cowboy hats on their ponytailed heads, but, sorry, they just can’t pull it off the way Brad Pitt did in The Mexican. Especially in the rain. I'm wondering if there is a special shop out there like Blacks and Millets that sells Festival Survival Gear basics like felted hats that look like sperm and trousers made of old curtains. You know - primus stove, North Face Anorak, sock bells, his n' hers lime green elasticised capri pants and caftans... What exactly do those noble and dignified Ghanain musicians make of playing to a load of middle aged men shaking like they've got St Vitus dance in jumble sale outfits dressed as Hobbits?
I need answers.
And I’m not even going to get into why women over fifty wear tutus and fairy wings. The kids and the teenagers I understand, but the matrons? What’s wrong with my festival gear: two pairs of trousers, a waterproof coat, a Barbour, two t-shirts, a hoodie and flip flops?
It’s better for the rain than a woollen blanket, and believe me, I have personal experience of that.
Turns out that music festivals, even hippy peace and love music festivals, really are all about the rain. The lashing rain. The howling wind and the lashing rain. The clammy tent with condensation on the inside of the shell, the clammy sleeping bag with condensation on the inside of the lining, the clammy wellies that you slip your feet into in the middle of the night to stumble through the tent city, fall over guy ropes and eventually arrive at the beacon of light, the portaloos, and then discover you’ve forgotten the clammy toilet paper, howling wind and lashing rain.
There were times, notably listening to a 12 piece gypsy band from Romania who may, or may not, have been playing 12 seemingly different tunes very fast because they were hurrying up to get to another music festival in Cheltenham (though some were in more of a hurry than others) when the rain was coming down in sheets and pooling behind me on the chair, and running down my legs that I wondered how on earth I was going to survive.
And then Tom, camping expert, lit a camp fire and Nel opened the vodka and suddenly, it all seemed worth it.
This is how they endure the Russian winters, and it will certainly do me on a wet summer night in Dorset.
Actually, moaning set aside, just for a minute, on the tea plate of life, it was really really great fun. Not only did I endure but I went native. I didn't wash for three days, slept in all my clothes and by the end had my hair in bunches and wore a gold dress over several layers of clothing and green wellies two sizes too big. Then we fried bacon, ate vegetarian carbohydrates by the bucketful, drank boxes of wine - as perfected by one of our group - a very tall, handsome Brand consultant who had arrived at my house for the trip in a Puffa Jacket carrying a Bill Amberg holdall and a corporate golf umberella, then walked about with his wine box under his arm, just dispensing vino like one of those Syrian tea sellers (and used the rose to put the fire out). He was also wearing a powder pink shirt and overheard one of the gnome-men say to his gnome friend, that's a really gay shirt - this from a man with glitter on his face! We sat round our fire and listened to the cute Australian guitarist at the tent next to us practice as we ate chilli stuffed olives and Pringles, and laughed. And though some of the music was just sub wedding stuff in a different language (singing it in Croation guys doesn't make it world music, it just makes it Eurovison song contest) some of it was truly wonderful.
So I'm no longer a camping virgin. Nor a festival virgin. However, as I predicted, there was absolutely no need to take along any kind of protective outerwear unless it had toggles and a hood. Well unless you have a particular fetish for middle aged men dressed up as woodland elves, in which case you have bigger problems than birth control, trust me. But - it's true you certainly don’t want to add to the world population of such creatures.
And now I'm back. Feeling dirty.
I mean, what is it about Ponchos? And ponytails? Are they innately and cosmically linked with music festivals? Is it a camping essential to wear a blanket with a hole cut out for the head? There are bands of them, all striped like woolly toothpaste with wide cowboy hats on their ponytailed heads, but, sorry, they just can’t pull it off the way Brad Pitt did in The Mexican. Especially in the rain. I'm wondering if there is a special shop out there like Blacks and Millets that sells Festival Survival Gear basics like felted hats that look like sperm and trousers made of old curtains. You know - primus stove, North Face Anorak, sock bells, his n' hers lime green elasticised capri pants and caftans... What exactly do those noble and dignified Ghanain musicians make of playing to a load of middle aged men shaking like they've got St Vitus dance in jumble sale outfits dressed as Hobbits?
I need answers.
And I’m not even going to get into why women over fifty wear tutus and fairy wings. The kids and the teenagers I understand, but the matrons? What’s wrong with my festival gear: two pairs of trousers, a waterproof coat, a Barbour, two t-shirts, a hoodie and flip flops?
It’s better for the rain than a woollen blanket, and believe me, I have personal experience of that.
Turns out that music festivals, even hippy peace and love music festivals, really are all about the rain. The lashing rain. The howling wind and the lashing rain. The clammy tent with condensation on the inside of the shell, the clammy sleeping bag with condensation on the inside of the lining, the clammy wellies that you slip your feet into in the middle of the night to stumble through the tent city, fall over guy ropes and eventually arrive at the beacon of light, the portaloos, and then discover you’ve forgotten the clammy toilet paper, howling wind and lashing rain.
There were times, notably listening to a 12 piece gypsy band from Romania who may, or may not, have been playing 12 seemingly different tunes very fast because they were hurrying up to get to another music festival in Cheltenham (though some were in more of a hurry than others) when the rain was coming down in sheets and pooling behind me on the chair, and running down my legs that I wondered how on earth I was going to survive.
And then Tom, camping expert, lit a camp fire and Nel opened the vodka and suddenly, it all seemed worth it.
This is how they endure the Russian winters, and it will certainly do me on a wet summer night in Dorset.
Actually, moaning set aside, just for a minute, on the tea plate of life, it was really really great fun. Not only did I endure but I went native. I didn't wash for three days, slept in all my clothes and by the end had my hair in bunches and wore a gold dress over several layers of clothing and green wellies two sizes too big. Then we fried bacon, ate vegetarian carbohydrates by the bucketful, drank boxes of wine - as perfected by one of our group - a very tall, handsome Brand consultant who had arrived at my house for the trip in a Puffa Jacket carrying a Bill Amberg holdall and a corporate golf umberella, then walked about with his wine box under his arm, just dispensing vino like one of those Syrian tea sellers (and used the rose to put the fire out). He was also wearing a powder pink shirt and overheard one of the gnome-men say to his gnome friend, that's a really gay shirt - this from a man with glitter on his face! We sat round our fire and listened to the cute Australian guitarist at the tent next to us practice as we ate chilli stuffed olives and Pringles, and laughed. And though some of the music was just sub wedding stuff in a different language (singing it in Croation guys doesn't make it world music, it just makes it Eurovison song contest) some of it was truly wonderful.
So I'm no longer a camping virgin. Nor a festival virgin. However, as I predicted, there was absolutely no need to take along any kind of protective outerwear unless it had toggles and a hood. Well unless you have a particular fetish for middle aged men dressed up as woodland elves, in which case you have bigger problems than birth control, trust me. But - it's true you certainly don’t want to add to the world population of such creatures.
And now I'm back. Feeling dirty.
But not in a good way.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Fading fast
I've been up to my ears in Frankfurt this last week, arranging Mr T's appointments for the book fair. This involves me sending emails to another woman in another foreign capital making dates in a diary for another person who is invariably a man. Most of the women, no matter how grand they are, will respond to an email and make their own appointments, even if they also forward their appointment on to their assistant. Once again it's another foray into the world of women and invisible men - booking travel, booking restaurants, booking hotels...even going to the shrink. All day long I speak to women about men. No wonder they think they run the world.
I'm also fairly invisible myself at work. A couple of the other members of staff were talking about the latest manuscript just in by one of our authors. Are you enjoying it? asked one of the other (and yes the author is a man).
I'm not sure about it yet, I need to read some more.
I asked what it was and one said, Oh Mr T sent it round so a few of us could read it.
I realised that I wasn't one of the few.
This happened before, just a few weeks ago with a comic novel that we later bought and which had everyone laughing enthusiastically. Except me. I just overheard the office conversation.
It's like the 5th Year Common room all over again. To quote The Sopranos: Nursing Homes are just High School with walkers. Publishing companies are High School with books.
I can see literary discourse is not one of my perceived strengths, still, I've had another offer for the Portuguese rights to my book, which the agent has accepted, and last week, a cover arrived.
What do you think about? said the editor.
I love it, I replied.
So far it's a picture of a woman in a pink coat walking off into the distance on a railway platform. Sex in the City meets Brief Encounter.
Mind you, I added. It would have been kind nice if they had got my name right.
It's Marion with an 'o' not Marian with an 'a'.
Even on the front of my own book, I'm not myself.
I'm also fairly invisible myself at work. A couple of the other members of staff were talking about the latest manuscript just in by one of our authors. Are you enjoying it? asked one of the other (and yes the author is a man).
I'm not sure about it yet, I need to read some more.
I asked what it was and one said, Oh Mr T sent it round so a few of us could read it.
I realised that I wasn't one of the few.
This happened before, just a few weeks ago with a comic novel that we later bought and which had everyone laughing enthusiastically. Except me. I just overheard the office conversation.
It's like the 5th Year Common room all over again. To quote The Sopranos: Nursing Homes are just High School with walkers. Publishing companies are High School with books.
I can see literary discourse is not one of my perceived strengths, still, I've had another offer for the Portuguese rights to my book, which the agent has accepted, and last week, a cover arrived.
What do you think about? said the editor.
I love it, I replied.
So far it's a picture of a woman in a pink coat walking off into the distance on a railway platform. Sex in the City meets Brief Encounter.
Mind you, I added. It would have been kind nice if they had got my name right.
It's Marion with an 'o' not Marian with an 'a'.
Even on the front of my own book, I'm not myself.
Camping tips for (big) girls
I’m going to a festival this weekend.
'Amazing, so look, I’ll tell you what you need,' says my very young, festival expert friend, and without pausing for breath she launches into a list:
'A hat for the sun, waterproofs in case it rains, well let’s face it, it’s gonna rain, so definitely waterproofs, wellies, flipflops, some cereal bars just in case you get hungry because although there will be food everywhere sometimes, you know, like you wake in the middle of the night and you’re just starving and you just have to have something to eat and you don’t want to be shlepping out of the campsite looking for munchies…'
(Munchies? I think, no – no stop right there girlie, I won’t be having that kind of snack attack, but she’s still talking)
'…toilet paper, moist wipes for your body, cleansing wipes for your face, suntan lotion, insect repellant and, oh wait a minute I must just go to the loo, I’ve been dying to go since I got in and…'
Finally, a word in edgeways from me as I tell her that I’ll ring back later but…
'No, silly, you’re on the mobile and so that means you can come with me… a blow up mattress, a sleeping bag, some of those eye patchy things if the early morning light bothers you (the voice becomes muffled and echoey as she enters an enclosed space and then there is, embarrassingly, a slight tinkling sound as I realise that while other people have phone sex, I’m having phone peeing)… lots of water, she says on cue…and'
there’s a slurred sound to her voice. She has me on speaker phone which is somewhat redundant since I can’t actually speak and she seems to be brushing her teeth, so neither can she but still the words come…
'…a mobile phone so you can keep in touch with your friends and lots of protection...'
Protection? What the hell do I need with protection? I’m a camping virgin and the only thing I'm going to bed with is a torch,' I protest while she spits.
'No, no, you don’t understand, you might get lucky – it’s definitely a possibility, lots of blokes, all loved up, chilled, a bit pissed, definitely take protection. You don’t want to get the chance and then find out you haven’t come prepared.'
'Trust me, I won’t need it.'
'Trust me, you will,' she said.
I mentioned this to my other abandonee friend Eve as we were on our way to an Art’s Council thing at the Hayward Gallery - an exhibition which was everything I hate about the debate between craft and fine art, plus speeches. Upstairs at the Hayward there are two rooms in which ‘makers’ have crocheted a whole coral reef.
As I remarked to Eva, some women have even less to do in the evenings than we have.
She is internet dating since her husband left a year ago for a life of gay abandonment leaving her try and pick up her femininity from the kerb where he kicked it as he minced out the door telling her that his departure was, of course, nothing to do with his now not-so-latent homosexuality, but because they weren’t getting on.
I wondered what she might have done that would have made them get on better and therefore kept him on the straight and narrow path of marriage. Grown a moustache perhaps?
Anyway, now he wears more jewellery than she does and is just back from renting a house in Ibiza for a month with ‘friends’ and has been impressing their teenaged sons with all the clubs he went to.
He is fifty.
'Oh who needs protection,' she says, laughing, 'all the men I meet are awful.'
We do a quick round up of who she has met recently. She has found the holy grail – one with hair – who sounds quite nice and there’s also an American who works for a US television channel who is coming over from New York and wants to meet her for a classical concert and dinner.
'I can't meet him as I'm flying off to Finland the next day. You could have him if you like.' She mentions his log-in-name on the site and tells me to look him up, to see if I like him.
'I’m going to New York myself the next day,' I say. 'I'll pass.'
Eva thought she would be married for ever. We met fifteen years ago standing outside the school gates, and on football fields where small boys raced up and down assiduously not kicking a ball. We took walks together when her mother died, and cooked for each other at dinner parties. We’ve spent new year’s eve together when husbanded up, and have been in the same book club for about five years. We’ve done exams together, and results together, common entrance together, and universities together, and now, like the whipped cream on the top of the big marital banana split, we’re doing divorce together.
'Hmm,' she muses, 'I remember when I was a girl and my mother told me that I had to be careful, because all men ever wanted was sex. What happened to that? Where are they now these sex-crazed maniacs?'
Clubbing in Ibiza darling, with others of their fair sex, or previously married to me.
'Amazing, so look, I’ll tell you what you need,' says my very young, festival expert friend, and without pausing for breath she launches into a list:
'A hat for the sun, waterproofs in case it rains, well let’s face it, it’s gonna rain, so definitely waterproofs, wellies, flipflops, some cereal bars just in case you get hungry because although there will be food everywhere sometimes, you know, like you wake in the middle of the night and you’re just starving and you just have to have something to eat and you don’t want to be shlepping out of the campsite looking for munchies…'
(Munchies? I think, no – no stop right there girlie, I won’t be having that kind of snack attack, but she’s still talking)
'…toilet paper, moist wipes for your body, cleansing wipes for your face, suntan lotion, insect repellant and, oh wait a minute I must just go to the loo, I’ve been dying to go since I got in and…'
Finally, a word in edgeways from me as I tell her that I’ll ring back later but…
'No, silly, you’re on the mobile and so that means you can come with me… a blow up mattress, a sleeping bag, some of those eye patchy things if the early morning light bothers you (the voice becomes muffled and echoey as she enters an enclosed space and then there is, embarrassingly, a slight tinkling sound as I realise that while other people have phone sex, I’m having phone peeing)… lots of water, she says on cue…and'
there’s a slurred sound to her voice. She has me on speaker phone which is somewhat redundant since I can’t actually speak and she seems to be brushing her teeth, so neither can she but still the words come…
'…a mobile phone so you can keep in touch with your friends and lots of protection...'
Protection? What the hell do I need with protection? I’m a camping virgin and the only thing I'm going to bed with is a torch,' I protest while she spits.
'No, no, you don’t understand, you might get lucky – it’s definitely a possibility, lots of blokes, all loved up, chilled, a bit pissed, definitely take protection. You don’t want to get the chance and then find out you haven’t come prepared.'
'Trust me, I won’t need it.'
'Trust me, you will,' she said.
I mentioned this to my other abandonee friend Eve as we were on our way to an Art’s Council thing at the Hayward Gallery - an exhibition which was everything I hate about the debate between craft and fine art, plus speeches. Upstairs at the Hayward there are two rooms in which ‘makers’ have crocheted a whole coral reef.
As I remarked to Eva, some women have even less to do in the evenings than we have.
She is internet dating since her husband left a year ago for a life of gay abandonment leaving her try and pick up her femininity from the kerb where he kicked it as he minced out the door telling her that his departure was, of course, nothing to do with his now not-so-latent homosexuality, but because they weren’t getting on.
I wondered what she might have done that would have made them get on better and therefore kept him on the straight and narrow path of marriage. Grown a moustache perhaps?
Anyway, now he wears more jewellery than she does and is just back from renting a house in Ibiza for a month with ‘friends’ and has been impressing their teenaged sons with all the clubs he went to.
He is fifty.
'Oh who needs protection,' she says, laughing, 'all the men I meet are awful.'
We do a quick round up of who she has met recently. She has found the holy grail – one with hair – who sounds quite nice and there’s also an American who works for a US television channel who is coming over from New York and wants to meet her for a classical concert and dinner.
'I can't meet him as I'm flying off to Finland the next day. You could have him if you like.' She mentions his log-in-name on the site and tells me to look him up, to see if I like him.
'I’m going to New York myself the next day,' I say. 'I'll pass.'
Eva thought she would be married for ever. We met fifteen years ago standing outside the school gates, and on football fields where small boys raced up and down assiduously not kicking a ball. We took walks together when her mother died, and cooked for each other at dinner parties. We’ve spent new year’s eve together when husbanded up, and have been in the same book club for about five years. We’ve done exams together, and results together, common entrance together, and universities together, and now, like the whipped cream on the top of the big marital banana split, we’re doing divorce together.
'Hmm,' she muses, 'I remember when I was a girl and my mother told me that I had to be careful, because all men ever wanted was sex. What happened to that? Where are they now these sex-crazed maniacs?'
Clubbing in Ibiza darling, with others of their fair sex, or previously married to me.
Monday, 14 July 2008
Love is short sighted
Blind dates. Or rather, short-sighted dates.
When you’ve only seen a rather hazy photograph of a person it’s not always easy to know who you’re meeting. But hey, I’ve done this sort of thing on a professional level. I know only too well what it’s like to walk into a restaurant or a bar and not have a clue what the person looks like or even who they are, although in case you think I’m coming over all Billy Piper, offering speciality services to those who prefer the older, more mature sort of hooker, stop right there. I mean that when I lunched for a living I often arranged to meet people I hardly knew. It made the business of eating less tedious.
Tedious? I hear you say, probably even more shocked than you were at the idea that I might be conducting a secret life of prostitution. And yes, tedious.
You would be surprised how dreary it is going out to lunch with the same person all the time. It’s sort of like marriage, pre-abandonment, when you are still taking each other for granted and you’ve already talked about the kids, the house, the summer holiday plans and then start bickering so that you forget what you ate or even if it was any good. If you’re having too much of a, ehm, scintillating conversation, you just don’t pay attention to the food. Going with a stranger means that you can both concentrate on what you’re eating, they get to bore on about all the other meals they’ve had and ‘Great-Restaurants-They-Have-Know, beating you into inadequacy with their superior knowledge of culinary terms and as a result you always have something to talk about. Or at least they do. Letting someone else patronize you is a great way to make a lunch just fly past.
This is how I came to go to a seafood restaurant with a 4’11”(I’m 5’10”in heels) Jewish chap from Golder’s Green who arrived in a red sport’s car, glanced at the menu and then told me he liked to keep Kosher and that shellfish were, of course, treif. This is also how I ended up sitting in a greasy spoon café with the comedian Phil Jupitus eating bacon and eggs. And, then again, how I found myself at a posh grill called cringingly ‘Grand Prix’ without another customer in the room, entertaining a boy of 19 who arrived in crutches after breaking his back in a, wince, car accident.
Happy days. Well one of them was, and I’ll leave you to work out for yourselves which it was.
So difficult and potentially embarrassing encounters with strangers are something I’m used to.
Nevertheless, as I entered the French café and looked around at the other customers I was suddenly unsure what the person I was supposed to be meeting actually looked like. Tall. I thought. But people lie about their height don’t they Mr Red Sport’s Car? So next distinguishing feature. Mmm – couldn’t think of one. He didn’t have a ginger beard like the last one who was pretty easy to pick out of the crowd. Nor was he black like the one before. Otherwise he had pretty anodyne features. But then I had a eureka moment and remembered that he had very short clipped hair, the sort of hairstyle, or lack of hair style that men adopt when they are approaching baldness and have got close enough to pick out the landmarks.
That ought to help, I thought scanning the room afresh.
Yeah – you would think, wouldn’t you?
Except that Sunday morning in the French café seemed to be the unofficial gathering of the West London Branch of Slapheads Anonymous.
There were three men in the café and they all had tightly clipped haircuts.
I happened to be standing next to one of them in the queue. He was incredibly good-looking, French, with shy brown eyes and the body of a fit thirty-five year old. So not him then. Damn it. But he smiled at me, beatifically, and I smiled right back, eagerly. Very eagerly, because one of the folicly challenged was looking at me, none to appreciatively and, god help me, he was dressed in tennis gear and wearing very, very, very short shorts which, from where he was perched on a high stool gave me a rather intimate preview - not what you want to look at first thing in the morning over a cappucino unless you've gone home with it last thing at night.
Worse, he rubbed his hands over his head and what I had thought was a tightly clipped haircut suddenly flopped over his forehead in a cascade of fuzz. It was, in fact, a stringy comb over just begging for scissors. Oh please, please not him, I prayed to the God of Lonely Hearts.
He leapt up out of his seat and strode over to the counter, still looking at me in a disapproving manner, jumped to the top of the queue and… handed over his bill which he paid and strode off. I was weak with relief until it occurred to me that he could still have been ‘the one’ and having taken one look at me, had decided non grazie.
Oh well, never mind, I decided I would get a coffee, sit down and enjoy the sunshine. And there was still another candidate. This one was squat, stout and worst of all, had a camera. The man I was supposed to be meeting had talked about photography being a favoured past-time but he hadn't mentioned he was built like Christopher Biggins. Nor was he looking around him with any sense of anticipation.
I was wondering if I should go up and say to him, ‘hello, are you Jack?’ when I turned round and yet another crew cut appeared, also with a camera slung round his neck.
Okay, so now it’s getting creepy. We're into West London Chapter of Slaphead Photographers.
But this one doesn't hesitate. He smiles and stretches out his hand which grips mine in a surprisingly firm handshake.
Phew.
Of course it doesn’t make it any easier that I’m no longer blonde like I am in my photograph.
When you’ve only seen a rather hazy photograph of a person it’s not always easy to know who you’re meeting. But hey, I’ve done this sort of thing on a professional level. I know only too well what it’s like to walk into a restaurant or a bar and not have a clue what the person looks like or even who they are, although in case you think I’m coming over all Billy Piper, offering speciality services to those who prefer the older, more mature sort of hooker, stop right there. I mean that when I lunched for a living I often arranged to meet people I hardly knew. It made the business of eating less tedious.
Tedious? I hear you say, probably even more shocked than you were at the idea that I might be conducting a secret life of prostitution. And yes, tedious.
You would be surprised how dreary it is going out to lunch with the same person all the time. It’s sort of like marriage, pre-abandonment, when you are still taking each other for granted and you’ve already talked about the kids, the house, the summer holiday plans and then start bickering so that you forget what you ate or even if it was any good. If you’re having too much of a, ehm, scintillating conversation, you just don’t pay attention to the food. Going with a stranger means that you can both concentrate on what you’re eating, they get to bore on about all the other meals they’ve had and ‘Great-Restaurants-They-Have-Know, beating you into inadequacy with their superior knowledge of culinary terms and as a result you always have something to talk about. Or at least they do. Letting someone else patronize you is a great way to make a lunch just fly past.
This is how I came to go to a seafood restaurant with a 4’11”(I’m 5’10”in heels) Jewish chap from Golder’s Green who arrived in a red sport’s car, glanced at the menu and then told me he liked to keep Kosher and that shellfish were, of course, treif. This is also how I ended up sitting in a greasy spoon café with the comedian Phil Jupitus eating bacon and eggs. And, then again, how I found myself at a posh grill called cringingly ‘Grand Prix’ without another customer in the room, entertaining a boy of 19 who arrived in crutches after breaking his back in a, wince, car accident.
Happy days. Well one of them was, and I’ll leave you to work out for yourselves which it was.
So difficult and potentially embarrassing encounters with strangers are something I’m used to.
Nevertheless, as I entered the French café and looked around at the other customers I was suddenly unsure what the person I was supposed to be meeting actually looked like. Tall. I thought. But people lie about their height don’t they Mr Red Sport’s Car? So next distinguishing feature. Mmm – couldn’t think of one. He didn’t have a ginger beard like the last one who was pretty easy to pick out of the crowd. Nor was he black like the one before. Otherwise he had pretty anodyne features. But then I had a eureka moment and remembered that he had very short clipped hair, the sort of hairstyle, or lack of hair style that men adopt when they are approaching baldness and have got close enough to pick out the landmarks.
That ought to help, I thought scanning the room afresh.
Yeah – you would think, wouldn’t you?
Except that Sunday morning in the French café seemed to be the unofficial gathering of the West London Branch of Slapheads Anonymous.
There were three men in the café and they all had tightly clipped haircuts.
I happened to be standing next to one of them in the queue. He was incredibly good-looking, French, with shy brown eyes and the body of a fit thirty-five year old. So not him then. Damn it. But he smiled at me, beatifically, and I smiled right back, eagerly. Very eagerly, because one of the folicly challenged was looking at me, none to appreciatively and, god help me, he was dressed in tennis gear and wearing very, very, very short shorts which, from where he was perched on a high stool gave me a rather intimate preview - not what you want to look at first thing in the morning over a cappucino unless you've gone home with it last thing at night.
Worse, he rubbed his hands over his head and what I had thought was a tightly clipped haircut suddenly flopped over his forehead in a cascade of fuzz. It was, in fact, a stringy comb over just begging for scissors. Oh please, please not him, I prayed to the God of Lonely Hearts.
He leapt up out of his seat and strode over to the counter, still looking at me in a disapproving manner, jumped to the top of the queue and… handed over his bill which he paid and strode off. I was weak with relief until it occurred to me that he could still have been ‘the one’ and having taken one look at me, had decided non grazie.
Oh well, never mind, I decided I would get a coffee, sit down and enjoy the sunshine. And there was still another candidate. This one was squat, stout and worst of all, had a camera. The man I was supposed to be meeting had talked about photography being a favoured past-time but he hadn't mentioned he was built like Christopher Biggins. Nor was he looking around him with any sense of anticipation.
I was wondering if I should go up and say to him, ‘hello, are you Jack?’ when I turned round and yet another crew cut appeared, also with a camera slung round his neck.
Okay, so now it’s getting creepy. We're into West London Chapter of Slaphead Photographers.
But this one doesn't hesitate. He smiles and stretches out his hand which grips mine in a surprisingly firm handshake.
Phew.
Of course it doesn’t make it any easier that I’m no longer blonde like I am in my photograph.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Girl-talk
Actually it's been a week of lunches.
A dear friend who we are also publishing suggested I meet her at her club where, in mid-Marion marriage rant, she interrupted and gushed about her new best friend AA Gill whose comments on the meal we were eating (apparently the salad was 'an abortion' ie okay up to 28 weeks and available on the NHS) she conveyed along with just how much she loved him. I think I may have been supposed to ask about the circumstance of their new best friends status but to be frank, I didn't care. I was too busy settling myself into the self-pity express of my own life. I wouldn't have cared if she had told me he had split up from his partner - oh no - that's would be me. And apparently passing this news on is the one thing that elicited an email response from her friend and my acquaintance, Harry.
You told him? I asked.
Yes, she said looking really, really worried. Well it isn't a secret is it? I mean, I met Sarah the other night and she knew.
This is true, but I told Sarah myself. Sarah (ex-Posh book club member) and I are friends and sporadic keeper-in-touchers and I see her regularly on an irregular basis. I haven't seen Harry since Louise (another ex-Posh book club member) had her 50th birthday and that was three years ago, and before that, well I simply can't remember. He's all married up and laden with children now - he hasn't called me in living memory. Hearing I had split from my husband might be a good place to rekindle the friendship but no, my email remains Harryless. I suppose bad news is like flu, you just want to pass it on as quickly as possible and you don't want to hang around the person who's suffering from it.
'He was very shocked,' I think she said, but I can't be sure as I wasn't really listening, I was sitting feeling cowed at my little crumbling life being just another item on the In Brief column at the back of the Home Gossip Network. It's inevitable, I suppose, and there's no malice in it, only sympathy, but it still smarts to be the one discussed rather than joining in the discussion. It still really hurts to be the subject of a Cautionary Tale.
'Can you come to dinner next Saturday?' She asked.
I told her that I couldn't because I'll be under canvas at the Lammer Tree Festival, being all peace and love, mud and wellies, chemical toilets and world music, like blissed-out man.
'Well, never mind, she said. When I told Louise, she suggested that the four of us go out for dinner soon.'
'You told Louise as well?' I asked, my voice obviously betraying some shock, given the expression on dear friend's face who now just look like she wanted to shoot herself before I put my head in my hands and wept.
'Well she got in touch with me - it wasn't like I rang her or anything. She wanted me to sponsor her for a fun run.'
To me the words fun and run just don't go together, but then that's why Louise looks like Louise and I look like pre-Diet Fern Brittan, without the ever present smile. Mind you, I don't really know what Louise looks like (glamorous and thin as ever I assume) as I haven't seen her since her for years either.
However, I really didn't feel that she needed to be included in the bulletin of My Life as a Kicked Dog.
Nevertheless, she got the memo.
So for those of you out there who may have missed the front page advert in this morning's Guardian:
Yes, as previously stated. I now have an ex where I previously had a husband.
And depending on your next question, please just choose the appropriate option below
Answer 1: In a flat in Shepherd's Bush.
Answer 2: Yes
Answer 3: 42
Answer 4: Just like me but a lot uglier.
Answer 5: No, she lives abroad
Answer 6: No, he says he can't live there.
Answer 7: Almost two years.
Answer 8: No
Answer 9: No
Answer 10: Devastated
So I hope that deals with any queries this may raise, but feel free to get in touch if there's anything else you want to know.
A dear friend who we are also publishing suggested I meet her at her club where, in mid-Marion marriage rant, she interrupted and gushed about her new best friend AA Gill whose comments on the meal we were eating (apparently the salad was 'an abortion' ie okay up to 28 weeks and available on the NHS) she conveyed along with just how much she loved him. I think I may have been supposed to ask about the circumstance of their new best friends status but to be frank, I didn't care. I was too busy settling myself into the self-pity express of my own life. I wouldn't have cared if she had told me he had split up from his partner - oh no - that's would be me. And apparently passing this news on is the one thing that elicited an email response from her friend and my acquaintance, Harry.
You told him? I asked.
Yes, she said looking really, really worried. Well it isn't a secret is it? I mean, I met Sarah the other night and she knew.
This is true, but I told Sarah myself. Sarah (ex-Posh book club member) and I are friends and sporadic keeper-in-touchers and I see her regularly on an irregular basis. I haven't seen Harry since Louise (another ex-Posh book club member) had her 50th birthday and that was three years ago, and before that, well I simply can't remember. He's all married up and laden with children now - he hasn't called me in living memory. Hearing I had split from my husband might be a good place to rekindle the friendship but no, my email remains Harryless. I suppose bad news is like flu, you just want to pass it on as quickly as possible and you don't want to hang around the person who's suffering from it.
'He was very shocked,' I think she said, but I can't be sure as I wasn't really listening, I was sitting feeling cowed at my little crumbling life being just another item on the In Brief column at the back of the Home Gossip Network. It's inevitable, I suppose, and there's no malice in it, only sympathy, but it still smarts to be the one discussed rather than joining in the discussion. It still really hurts to be the subject of a Cautionary Tale.
'Can you come to dinner next Saturday?' She asked.
I told her that I couldn't because I'll be under canvas at the Lammer Tree Festival, being all peace and love, mud and wellies, chemical toilets and world music, like blissed-out man.
'Well, never mind, she said. When I told Louise, she suggested that the four of us go out for dinner soon.'
'You told Louise as well?' I asked, my voice obviously betraying some shock, given the expression on dear friend's face who now just look like she wanted to shoot herself before I put my head in my hands and wept.
'Well she got in touch with me - it wasn't like I rang her or anything. She wanted me to sponsor her for a fun run.'
To me the words fun and run just don't go together, but then that's why Louise looks like Louise and I look like pre-Diet Fern Brittan, without the ever present smile. Mind you, I don't really know what Louise looks like (glamorous and thin as ever I assume) as I haven't seen her since her for years either.
However, I really didn't feel that she needed to be included in the bulletin of My Life as a Kicked Dog.
Nevertheless, she got the memo.
So for those of you out there who may have missed the front page advert in this morning's Guardian:
Yes, as previously stated. I now have an ex where I previously had a husband.
And depending on your next question, please just choose the appropriate option below
Answer 1: In a flat in Shepherd's Bush.
Answer 2: Yes
Answer 3: 42
Answer 4: Just like me but a lot uglier.
Answer 5: No, she lives abroad
Answer 6: No, he says he can't live there.
Answer 7: Almost two years.
Answer 8: No
Answer 9: No
Answer 10: Devastated
So I hope that deals with any queries this may raise, but feel free to get in touch if there's anything else you want to know.
Friday, 11 July 2008
Let's do lunch
Today I had a taste of my old life. The one where I floated out of a taxi with a scarf trailing behind me like Isadora Duncan and wafted into a Michelin starred restaurant my hand already outstretched like for the glass of champagne, lipstick carefully blotted ready for the air kiss of insincerity, waistband already loosened for the forthcoming meal.
Publishing, or at least the other end of publishing from the one at which I currently scrabble, is all about the lunch meeting, but I rarely do more than eat a sandwich on the top of the bus. But today was the long awaiting visit to the newly refurbished Connaught where Helene Darroze takes over the restaurant, complete with a lavish refurbishment of both the hotel and the dining room.
Sadly my entrance didn't quite live up to expectations. For a start it was raining. Monsoon weather in central London meaning no taxis and the Primark umbrella not quite up to the job of keeping the rain off, breathing in and out like a lung, a wet lung, its spindles straining to breaking point with every gust of sodden wind. I was also wearing a coat that makes me look like an Emo being that it's black and long, and shower-proof which apparently, does not mean waterproof, but merely that it will keep off a little light misting but soak up the rest like a slab of white bread on a bowl of soup. So I arrived soaked, flushed with the triumph of finally finding a taxi after I'd yomped half way to Bond Street, through puddles and the spray of other, more succesful hailers who smiled smugly at me through the steamed up windows of their own snug cabs. My forearms were both wet where the rain had trickled down the inside of my coat, and my little red shoes were black with mud and water.
Elegant indeed.
Nevertheless Paula led me into the dining room and graciously let me have the better seat facing into the room.
'You're entering a different world now,' she said, 'leave everything else outside.' I thought she meant cares and worries but in fact she was talking about the dripping mac and the buckled umbrella. I don't think India Mahdavi's interior design has been scotchguarded against the British climate. Mind you I expect most guests will drift downstairs with a tiara and a long frock. Followed by their wives.
I'd forgotten how terribly jaded I had become when I was doing this sort of thing full time. How tired, so tired, of all the soupcons of this and demi-tasse of that, and overly decorated plates in odd shapes with teeny weeny bits of food, of froth and foam, and creamy shot glasses with air and herb fronds and yet here I was about to land in the mothership of such things.
Imagine then the relief of seeing a little gold trolley shuggling towards us like a fat woman on tiny heels, bearing a large red enamelled meat slicer, from which, with an airy swish and a turn of a handle, tissue thin slices of ham appeared from the rare black Bigorre pig. Immediately I get filled with the same sort of excitement that other women feel in shoe shops and which, I admit, kinda passes me by - mostly because I can't afford to indulge it. Instead I get it in Green Valley, the Lebanese supermarket next to the Synagogue in Marble Arch. Other women think oooh, handbags. I think oooooh, hummous.
Excitement = good.
Food = even gooder (that's a deliberate mistake - going for some style over grammar here).
My main dish was steak tournedos, that I haven't eaten for ten years since I had a horrible experience in a restaurant that has probably closed by now, if there's any justice, and during which my companion, a Magazine Editor upset me so much with his snide comments that I burst into tears at the table and walked out half way through the meal.
No crying this time.
I could go on, about the pre-dessert of lemon grass pannacotta, or the dessert which was everything you can think to do with chocolate except actually painting it on yourself and licking it off, or the cheese (my god the Stilton!) or the petit fours (ginger ice cream with praline) but what would be the point in rubbing salt (sea salt milled from the thighs of freshly toiling maidens in the Pyrenees) into the wound of your lunch time Pret a Manger sandwich?
It's cruel. Too cruel.
Publishing, or at least the other end of publishing from the one at which I currently scrabble, is all about the lunch meeting, but I rarely do more than eat a sandwich on the top of the bus. But today was the long awaiting visit to the newly refurbished Connaught where Helene Darroze takes over the restaurant, complete with a lavish refurbishment of both the hotel and the dining room.
Sadly my entrance didn't quite live up to expectations. For a start it was raining. Monsoon weather in central London meaning no taxis and the Primark umbrella not quite up to the job of keeping the rain off, breathing in and out like a lung, a wet lung, its spindles straining to breaking point with every gust of sodden wind. I was also wearing a coat that makes me look like an Emo being that it's black and long, and shower-proof which apparently, does not mean waterproof, but merely that it will keep off a little light misting but soak up the rest like a slab of white bread on a bowl of soup. So I arrived soaked, flushed with the triumph of finally finding a taxi after I'd yomped half way to Bond Street, through puddles and the spray of other, more succesful hailers who smiled smugly at me through the steamed up windows of their own snug cabs. My forearms were both wet where the rain had trickled down the inside of my coat, and my little red shoes were black with mud and water.
Elegant indeed.
Nevertheless Paula led me into the dining room and graciously let me have the better seat facing into the room.
'You're entering a different world now,' she said, 'leave everything else outside.' I thought she meant cares and worries but in fact she was talking about the dripping mac and the buckled umbrella. I don't think India Mahdavi's interior design has been scotchguarded against the British climate. Mind you I expect most guests will drift downstairs with a tiara and a long frock. Followed by their wives.
I'd forgotten how terribly jaded I had become when I was doing this sort of thing full time. How tired, so tired, of all the soupcons of this and demi-tasse of that, and overly decorated plates in odd shapes with teeny weeny bits of food, of froth and foam, and creamy shot glasses with air and herb fronds and yet here I was about to land in the mothership of such things.
Imagine then the relief of seeing a little gold trolley shuggling towards us like a fat woman on tiny heels, bearing a large red enamelled meat slicer, from which, with an airy swish and a turn of a handle, tissue thin slices of ham appeared from the rare black Bigorre pig. Immediately I get filled with the same sort of excitement that other women feel in shoe shops and which, I admit, kinda passes me by - mostly because I can't afford to indulge it. Instead I get it in Green Valley, the Lebanese supermarket next to the Synagogue in Marble Arch. Other women think oooh, handbags. I think oooooh, hummous.
Excitement = good.
Food = even gooder (that's a deliberate mistake - going for some style over grammar here).
My main dish was steak tournedos, that I haven't eaten for ten years since I had a horrible experience in a restaurant that has probably closed by now, if there's any justice, and during which my companion, a Magazine Editor upset me so much with his snide comments that I burst into tears at the table and walked out half way through the meal.
No crying this time.
I could go on, about the pre-dessert of lemon grass pannacotta, or the dessert which was everything you can think to do with chocolate except actually painting it on yourself and licking it off, or the cheese (my god the Stilton!) or the petit fours (ginger ice cream with praline) but what would be the point in rubbing salt (sea salt milled from the thighs of freshly toiling maidens in the Pyrenees) into the wound of your lunch time Pret a Manger sandwich?
It's cruel. Too cruel.
Friday, 4 July 2008
Earthy language
Dinner was fish and chips at the Magpie in Whitby, sitting by the window watching the pastel coloured houses climb the cliffs up to the castle. Both Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker ,who stayed in the Royal Hotel on the western side of Whitby while he was writing Dracula ,has made this something of a haven for Goths. Goths and charabangs of pensioners. What a great combination.
I had another great combination - A crab and prawn starter, brown bread and butter, mushy peas on the side and cinder toffee ice cream for pudding, I could hardly move afterwards.
Tim had to be up at 4.30am to pick up the fabled bucket of blood from the abattoir, but I didn’t have to be downstairs until ‘first job’ which was when Peter the shepherd was taking his rams over to the yews.
He came into the kitchen while I was having my tea.
‘Ahm odff weth them toups noo,' he said.
‘Are you ready then Marion?’ When Tim says my name it seems to have even more consonants than it usually does. We jumped into the Range Rover and drove over to West Blandsby Farm where Peter was already standing like a senitel in the field with his little sheepdog Kep at his feet, watching the sheep, exactly like the day before. As though they were going to do something interesting, like a handstand.
Three tups were jossling through a flock of over 100 yews – a Dorset, a Charolet and a Taxil. He had spread some sort of bright red dye on the chest of the tups who when they ‘covered’ the ewes, left some of the residue on their backs. The pink flanked ewes were the lucky ones. Not that they seemed to think they were that privileged, seeming not to think much of the Tups one minute wonder, before tugging themselves away with not even a backward glance, suffering the attentions like a wife with a headache who thinks the ceiling needs decorating, then going back to the much more serious business of eating grass.
I asked about black lambs.
I don’t like ‘em, said Peter. Thee dun’t match. He likes his flocks to look uniform and a black sheep just stands out, spoils the aesthetic.
As sex shows go it was pretty tame. I felt like the sheepdog, and would quite happily have laid my head on my paws and gone to sleep. I mean if you’ve seen one sheep jump on the back of another once, you’ve pretty much seen it all.
We got back in the car and drove up the hill to the pigs. This is where they keep their breeding stock – a mixture of Tamworths (the ginger one) Gloucester Old Spot, Saddlebacks, English Whites and one whose ears fell over it’s eyes like it was playing peek-a-bow with itself so it couldn’t see a damn thing it was doing (those were the muddiest ones)
A big boar was limping round the field, its eyes like slits, looking vaguely sinister, as though it had spent most of its life under a stone and just been turned out.
‘This is the shagging bit here,’ says Tim.
He’s been working for about a week and he’s worn out – probably slipped a disk, made himself lame. They’ve got to be strong these pigs. Whereas a sheep can be on for only about a minute, a pig can standing for an hour. The sow’s got to support him for that time.’
Poor sow.
We wandered round the field. Sows in various stages of pregnancy lived in communal Nissan huts (the shagging pens) and then the ones who are about to give birth get their own green tents, like a scout camp.
‘This is like the delivery room,’ says Kevin the Pig Man.
The pigs stay with their mother until they are about 6 weeks only and then they go off to be fattened. The best are kept as breeding stock. So you fuck or your fry.
The cows are kept at yet another farm, this one near to Scarborough. The herd is aver a hundred strong, The biggest Longhorn herd in Britain. Tim says that all traditional British cows are bred from oxen and you can see It in the shoulders. They are real Desperate Dan type cows with their curled horns, some a bit skew whiff, pointing hither and thither, the more pointed the more dangerous as they stab the other cows in an effort to knock them out of the way, and jab them in the rear.
A big bull – Dynamo - stands in the middle of the herd. He’s the daddy. No, really he's the daddy. All the calves in the field are his. And so are the heifers. ‘You don’t get too close in case he thinks you are after his ladies,’ says Tim. I make sure to keep a Tim or a Sarah between me and the cows at all times.
In a nearby field there are two herds separated only by a slim electric fence. One of the bulls is standing right up beside it glaring at the bull in the other field, bellowing at the top of his voice in a threatening way.
‘Oh he’s singing,’ says Michael the cowman at East Moor Farm . ‘E never shuts up.’
Tim isn’t sure he would have the confidence to put the two of them so close together – bulls love to fight. They both look like football players, American football players with their padded shoulders. I’m quite pleased when we drive out of the field. I mean, it’s all rather charming this macho, hoof stamping, rage but you’re never sure they won’t mistake the big black Range Rover for a rival.
Animal farm - it’s like a weekend in Ibiza on a club 18-30 holiday. Give the cows a soccer shirt and the sheep a short skirt, and you’re only a couple of tequila shots away from a wet t-shirt contest.
‘Oh yes,’ says Tim. ‘It’s all about sex, farming. No room for being squeamish.’
‘By the way Steve, did you get that bull’s dick back from the abattoir?’ He asks.
‘I believe the term is a pizzle,’ says Steve.
‘Aye well. I like to call a dick a dick. Them boys down at the abbatoir. You have to have a strong stomach to go down there of a morning?’ says Tim
‘Why, is it because of all the killing, the gore, the buckets of blood?’ I wonder
‘No it’s their language. Every second word is an f word.’
Farming daily
Of all the things I expected Tim to collect me from the station in, a Porsche was the last. Nevertheless, instead of a Jeep with a plough, six sheep and a dog in the back seat, a grey Porsche was indeed what he drove up in.
On the way to the farm he even demonstrated its powers of acceleration, speeding past three cars on a straight stretch of moorland, flattening me to the back of the upholstery before nipping back to his own lane seconds before I saw the eyeballs of the bloke driving the Vauxhall (oh yes, I was close enough to see the logo) coming towards us on the other side of the road.
We drove through what, if it isn’t James Herriot country, or as it has now come to be known, Emmerdale country, then it must be pretty close to it: tiny villages with winding streets of stone cottages, dry walled edged fields, hedgerows, rolling dales washed with trees, dotted with sheep.
‘They film that Heartbeat over there,’ says Tim pointing across the moors where the heather is just starting to turn and patches of purple are peeping through. ‘And The Royal’s at Scarborough, I think,’ he adds. Television as geography. Not that it’s any different back in London where I regularly tell Americans I live where they shot Four Weddings and a Funeral’ before I see the dawn of recognition break over their face that other descriptions like ‘world famous Portobello Road’ fail to reach. However, this countryside is a lot more of a photo opportunity than that bloody blue door (which they’ve now painted black to try and confuse the tourists – they aren’t fooled!)
We drive through Lockton then Tim stops the car. On a blind corner. On a narrow lane that you’d have to throw yourself off if another vehicle came towards you. There’s a deep wooded valley plunging down to an invisible river and across the gully a long flat field as smooth as though it has been ironed into the hillside, flecked with white sheep like hundreds without the thousands sprinkled over the grass.
That’s the farm over there,’ he says. ‘With that blue plastic on the roof’ he adds, breaking the romance. I later discover the blue plastic covers the new bathroom in his house where you can sit in the bath under the exposed eaves and hear birds chirping insistently overhead through the felt, and a few ominous rustles that may or may not mean there’s been a breach of security.
The village is called Levisham. And if Tim with his ruddy face, blue eyes and farmer’s girth is straight from Yorkshire Central Casting, then the tiny village is a location shoot waiting to happen. It’s a single street with lawns on either side, lined with golden stone houses, a little postbox stuck on the right like a red lolly on a stick and a square matchbox church on the left. A stubby horse grazes, head down, on the grass, unperturbed by the thrum of the Porsche’s engine. I’m sure it was put there seconds earlier by a stylist just to complete the scene.
‘Common pasture,’ explains Tim when I comment on the horse.
Facing us there’s a picturesque pub decked out with hanging baskets of geraniums in which I imagine red faced, multi-chinned countrymen, one wellie on the rail, one elbow on the bar, knocking back ale while their trusty shaggy dogs slumber by the fire.
‘It’s more of a restaurant than a pub,’ says Tim, ‘…unfortunately.’ And full of hikers in full-body Kagouls, dripping water and binoculars I see later, as Levisham Moor, where Manor Farm has grazing rights, is a hundred yards up the road and Levisham Station, a curling, ever descending, mile away on which they can arrive and depart.
Tim’s farm is a mere sausage’s throw away from the pub. I mention that he could have a good business frying up bacon sandwiches from his brand new kitchen housed in what used to be the pig sty.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking after my long Odyssey from London to Malton via Newcastle, which I forsee the farm hands will still be laughing about in ten years time. I’m never going to be able to live it down.
‘So you’re fond of Newcastle then?’ jokes David, the Farm Manager. ‘Why didn’t you get off the train when you found out it was the wrong one?
‘Because it was already five minutes outside the station.’ I answer.
‘I thought you must ‘ave fallen asleep,’ says Sarah, Tim’s fiancé.
‘No, that would have been mildly less embarrassing. I actually got on it, thinking, my there’s a lot of people going to Scarborough for their holidays.’
Ha ha ha ha. They all think I’m mildly retarded. Mildly retarded and flashing red sunglasses which I insist on wearing. I realise I need to get a label printed that says: Prescription Lenses – Legally Blind without them. But no matter. They think I’m a poncey Londoner, posing in her shades, so ditsy that I can’t get on the right train.
‘They were only three minutes apart,’ says Anne, Tim's ex wife who lives on his other farm with his mother. It's nice of her to try and spring to my defense, but it's too much fun to let me off the hook.
There’s what appears to be a large, none too clean mop hanging over the stable door leading to the kitchen. Then it barks.
A tongue appears, dangling like an unravelled belt, and big, big teeth in possibly the biggest woolliest face I’ve ever seen.
‘Big dog,’ I say (as I said mildly retarded).
‘D’you like dogs?’
See blogs passim. ‘I quite like dogs,’ I say, approaching reluctantly and see that it’s not so much of a dog as a bloody pony, with sharp claws on paws the size of saucers.
‘Naw, big head, short legs,’ he says, unlatching the bottom half of the door and revealing the dog which looks not unlike one of those things you lie along the bottom of the door to stop draughts. But with four short legs. It greets me, shall we say ‘enthusiastically’. It’s oversized nose stuck in my bum in seconds.
‘It’s French. No manners,’ says Tim. ‘A hunting dog. Got a great sense of smell.’ It’s certainly checking me out. It’s like being hovered by a wet nose.
The room has a long oak table down the middle, big cartwheel kitchen chairs and a huge Aga at one end, gently radiating about as much heat as a baked potato. Mind you it is summer.
‘So what d’you want to do first?’ Tim asks.
In the absence of a bacon sandwich I ask for a tour of the farm. We walk through the yard full of barns, all of which are empty but for a tractor and a few other odd bits of machinery that look like instruments of torture. Lambs to the right of us (rejects – usually if a mother has more than two lambs she’ll reject the third, quite sensibly and worthy of emulation, I might think on a bad day), Pigs to the left. Most of the pigs are on another farm, but there are a few here, enormous Ginger Tamworths and a tank sized Saddleback, each with their own nissen hut. Tiny litters of piglets run in teams up and down the lanes. A lamb gets stuck in a fence trying to walk through it. Sarah lifts it by the neck and bum and throws it into the field.
Two men are leaning on a fence, chewing straw.
Okay, they are not chewing straw, but there’s a sort of implied bit of straw chewing going on.
Peter and Kevin.
Peter’s the Shepherd. Kevin’s the Pig Man. Kep is the sheepdog. The slightly cross eyed sheepdog. And he doesn’t look anything like Lassie. He’s brown and white and black in patches.
‘Aye t’colouring eets not t’ every folks teaste,’ he says. He has the most amazing accent, like a little hand organ, the words piping and wheezing out, like music, like humming. I want to get my tape recorder out and catch it like a butterfly so I can look at it later.
There is a huddle of shorn sheep, still with the razor marks on their pelts, standing in a pen, which the two men are watching, as though it was a job. Sheepwatching.
They’re the tups, I learn.
Waiting to go on ‘The Youws’ The ewes I must soon begin to call them as ‘lady sheep’ is not going to help my dwindling credibility.
I try to distinguish the breeds. The most curious are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, the two that look the most ‘built’ – think the Mitchell Brothers. Definitely the kind that are going to square up to you in a bar, looking for a fight, one nicer that the other (was it Phil or was it Grant?)
Here the lesser of the two thugs is a Blue Faced Leicester. A long, horse faced chap, taller than the others, while the ugly brute – something like a pugilistic Orc in the Lord of the Rings, is shorter, squatter, with what Tim tells me are good legs (got to be to carry all that weight – the bodies are bulked out like they’ve been going to the gym, pumping iron, and maybe a few steroids) and ‘a good arse’. The should be wearing studded collars and have a National Front tattoo on their forehead.
There are also Swaildales, smaller beasts with black faces and white snouts, easily recognisable by their round curling horns that in Vanuatu, where my daughter is, would be much prized as jewellery, and worth a fortune.
Dorsets are your nursery rhyme sheep, with sweet faces and round compact bodies, and Charolets recognisable by their pinkish ears, are also the sort you might use to illustrate a children’s story being more pretty boys.
All of them are scrunched together though the pen is large enough for them to spread out. It’s a gang. A shagging gang. All intent on rape and pillage. Up for it, as they say ‘oop north’. They butt each other, and scratch themselves on each other, and push each other, and tomorrow Peter will decide which ones get lucky with the ewes.
‘We see which ones run up to the front first,’ he says, but it’s all still carefully controlled to make sure the best breeders get to the best ewes, to get the best lambs.
‘We put a teaser in first,’ says Tim.
I look blank.
‘You know a castrated ram who’s firing blanks, so he has a good time and warms the ewes up, gets them going, and they start ovulating, then we bring in the big guns. No point in them wasting themselves.’
I saw it’s like a fluffer in a porn film.
‘What’s that then?” asks David, the farm manager.
“I’ll explain later,’ says Tim.
David still lives with his mother. Though he has a camper van they call the sex machine so conclusions need not be drawn!
‘So basically, these guys are all geared up for a sex holiday?’ I say.
‘Yep, farming is 30 percent sex and 70 percent violence,’ says Tim, smiling with the satisfaction of a proud parent.
‘We use these Texals because of their backside. Lamb is all about getting a good arse. You want a ewe with a good arse, to get a lamb with a good arse. It’s all about the back end.’
They could be starring in their own rap video.
'Baa baa got back.'
I say winsomely that I was sorry it didn’t translate into women.
‘Who says it dunt, Marion. All depends on your perspective…’
‘Aye,’ says Peter, ‘Ye’ve got te 'ave thee arse..’ It took me a second to realise he was still talking about the sheep.
So tomorrow is group sex day.
‘You should see them go. Some of these tups will do 20-25 a day, and they really give it all they’ve got. I’ve seen them have heart attacks going at it. They end up lame and everything,’ says Tim.
We come back to the farmhouse. I sit at the table and get my notebook out.
Peter, Kevin and Steve (Shepherd, Pig Man and Butcher) are sitting having their lunch, each with their tupperware box beside them. Kevin is reading BBC Good Food Magazine. Steve has a home made biscuit and a little cup cake in his.
'Do your wives do this for you?" I ask.
There's a chorus of ayes. It's like a junior cast version o f@Last of the SUmmer Wine'.
'Gosh, you're lucky, home baking as well!' I exclaim, impressed as all these wives have homes, families and jobs of their own.
'Dun't you pack lunch for your husband?' asks Peter.
'Oh I don't have a husband,' I say. It's the first time I've had to say it out loud and it's surprising how easy I make it sound while inside it's like swallowing tacks. Not that I ever packed his lunch for him. In fact the only thing I ever packed was his suitcase .
Steve the butcher who has been cutting up carcasses in the butchery next door is wearing a striped apron and a little grocer’s hat. He says something to Tim about a bucket of blood from the abbatoir, just as Brisket the dog disappears under the legs of my chair and reappears between my legs with his paws on my chest.
I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t had his mouth open.
I know I’m looking for some make companionship, but I had rather hoped it might not have a tail and dog breath.
On the way to the farm he even demonstrated its powers of acceleration, speeding past three cars on a straight stretch of moorland, flattening me to the back of the upholstery before nipping back to his own lane seconds before I saw the eyeballs of the bloke driving the Vauxhall (oh yes, I was close enough to see the logo) coming towards us on the other side of the road.
We drove through what, if it isn’t James Herriot country, or as it has now come to be known, Emmerdale country, then it must be pretty close to it: tiny villages with winding streets of stone cottages, dry walled edged fields, hedgerows, rolling dales washed with trees, dotted with sheep.
‘They film that Heartbeat over there,’ says Tim pointing across the moors where the heather is just starting to turn and patches of purple are peeping through. ‘And The Royal’s at Scarborough, I think,’ he adds. Television as geography. Not that it’s any different back in London where I regularly tell Americans I live where they shot Four Weddings and a Funeral’ before I see the dawn of recognition break over their face that other descriptions like ‘world famous Portobello Road’ fail to reach. However, this countryside is a lot more of a photo opportunity than that bloody blue door (which they’ve now painted black to try and confuse the tourists – they aren’t fooled!)
We drive through Lockton then Tim stops the car. On a blind corner. On a narrow lane that you’d have to throw yourself off if another vehicle came towards you. There’s a deep wooded valley plunging down to an invisible river and across the gully a long flat field as smooth as though it has been ironed into the hillside, flecked with white sheep like hundreds without the thousands sprinkled over the grass.
That’s the farm over there,’ he says. ‘With that blue plastic on the roof’ he adds, breaking the romance. I later discover the blue plastic covers the new bathroom in his house where you can sit in the bath under the exposed eaves and hear birds chirping insistently overhead through the felt, and a few ominous rustles that may or may not mean there’s been a breach of security.
The village is called Levisham. And if Tim with his ruddy face, blue eyes and farmer’s girth is straight from Yorkshire Central Casting, then the tiny village is a location shoot waiting to happen. It’s a single street with lawns on either side, lined with golden stone houses, a little postbox stuck on the right like a red lolly on a stick and a square matchbox church on the left. A stubby horse grazes, head down, on the grass, unperturbed by the thrum of the Porsche’s engine. I’m sure it was put there seconds earlier by a stylist just to complete the scene.
‘Common pasture,’ explains Tim when I comment on the horse.
Facing us there’s a picturesque pub decked out with hanging baskets of geraniums in which I imagine red faced, multi-chinned countrymen, one wellie on the rail, one elbow on the bar, knocking back ale while their trusty shaggy dogs slumber by the fire.
‘It’s more of a restaurant than a pub,’ says Tim, ‘…unfortunately.’ And full of hikers in full-body Kagouls, dripping water and binoculars I see later, as Levisham Moor, where Manor Farm has grazing rights, is a hundred yards up the road and Levisham Station, a curling, ever descending, mile away on which they can arrive and depart.
Tim’s farm is a mere sausage’s throw away from the pub. I mention that he could have a good business frying up bacon sandwiches from his brand new kitchen housed in what used to be the pig sty.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking after my long Odyssey from London to Malton via Newcastle, which I forsee the farm hands will still be laughing about in ten years time. I’m never going to be able to live it down.
‘So you’re fond of Newcastle then?’ jokes David, the Farm Manager. ‘Why didn’t you get off the train when you found out it was the wrong one?
‘Because it was already five minutes outside the station.’ I answer.
‘I thought you must ‘ave fallen asleep,’ says Sarah, Tim’s fiancé.
‘No, that would have been mildly less embarrassing. I actually got on it, thinking, my there’s a lot of people going to Scarborough for their holidays.’
Ha ha ha ha. They all think I’m mildly retarded. Mildly retarded and flashing red sunglasses which I insist on wearing. I realise I need to get a label printed that says: Prescription Lenses – Legally Blind without them. But no matter. They think I’m a poncey Londoner, posing in her shades, so ditsy that I can’t get on the right train.
‘They were only three minutes apart,’ says Anne, Tim's ex wife who lives on his other farm with his mother. It's nice of her to try and spring to my defense, but it's too much fun to let me off the hook.
There’s what appears to be a large, none too clean mop hanging over the stable door leading to the kitchen. Then it barks.
A tongue appears, dangling like an unravelled belt, and big, big teeth in possibly the biggest woolliest face I’ve ever seen.
‘Big dog,’ I say (as I said mildly retarded).
‘D’you like dogs?’
See blogs passim. ‘I quite like dogs,’ I say, approaching reluctantly and see that it’s not so much of a dog as a bloody pony, with sharp claws on paws the size of saucers.
‘Naw, big head, short legs,’ he says, unlatching the bottom half of the door and revealing the dog which looks not unlike one of those things you lie along the bottom of the door to stop draughts. But with four short legs. It greets me, shall we say ‘enthusiastically’. It’s oversized nose stuck in my bum in seconds.
‘It’s French. No manners,’ says Tim. ‘A hunting dog. Got a great sense of smell.’ It’s certainly checking me out. It’s like being hovered by a wet nose.
The room has a long oak table down the middle, big cartwheel kitchen chairs and a huge Aga at one end, gently radiating about as much heat as a baked potato. Mind you it is summer.
‘So what d’you want to do first?’ Tim asks.
In the absence of a bacon sandwich I ask for a tour of the farm. We walk through the yard full of barns, all of which are empty but for a tractor and a few other odd bits of machinery that look like instruments of torture. Lambs to the right of us (rejects – usually if a mother has more than two lambs she’ll reject the third, quite sensibly and worthy of emulation, I might think on a bad day), Pigs to the left. Most of the pigs are on another farm, but there are a few here, enormous Ginger Tamworths and a tank sized Saddleback, each with their own nissen hut. Tiny litters of piglets run in teams up and down the lanes. A lamb gets stuck in a fence trying to walk through it. Sarah lifts it by the neck and bum and throws it into the field.
Two men are leaning on a fence, chewing straw.
Okay, they are not chewing straw, but there’s a sort of implied bit of straw chewing going on.
Peter and Kevin.
Peter’s the Shepherd. Kevin’s the Pig Man. Kep is the sheepdog. The slightly cross eyed sheepdog. And he doesn’t look anything like Lassie. He’s brown and white and black in patches.
‘Aye t’colouring eets not t’ every folks teaste,’ he says. He has the most amazing accent, like a little hand organ, the words piping and wheezing out, like music, like humming. I want to get my tape recorder out and catch it like a butterfly so I can look at it later.
There is a huddle of shorn sheep, still with the razor marks on their pelts, standing in a pen, which the two men are watching, as though it was a job. Sheepwatching.
They’re the tups, I learn.
Waiting to go on ‘The Youws’ The ewes I must soon begin to call them as ‘lady sheep’ is not going to help my dwindling credibility.
I try to distinguish the breeds. The most curious are, perhaps not unsurprisingly, the two that look the most ‘built’ – think the Mitchell Brothers. Definitely the kind that are going to square up to you in a bar, looking for a fight, one nicer that the other (was it Phil or was it Grant?)
Here the lesser of the two thugs is a Blue Faced Leicester. A long, horse faced chap, taller than the others, while the ugly brute – something like a pugilistic Orc in the Lord of the Rings, is shorter, squatter, with what Tim tells me are good legs (got to be to carry all that weight – the bodies are bulked out like they’ve been going to the gym, pumping iron, and maybe a few steroids) and ‘a good arse’. The should be wearing studded collars and have a National Front tattoo on their forehead.
There are also Swaildales, smaller beasts with black faces and white snouts, easily recognisable by their round curling horns that in Vanuatu, where my daughter is, would be much prized as jewellery, and worth a fortune.
Dorsets are your nursery rhyme sheep, with sweet faces and round compact bodies, and Charolets recognisable by their pinkish ears, are also the sort you might use to illustrate a children’s story being more pretty boys.
All of them are scrunched together though the pen is large enough for them to spread out. It’s a gang. A shagging gang. All intent on rape and pillage. Up for it, as they say ‘oop north’. They butt each other, and scratch themselves on each other, and push each other, and tomorrow Peter will decide which ones get lucky with the ewes.
‘We see which ones run up to the front first,’ he says, but it’s all still carefully controlled to make sure the best breeders get to the best ewes, to get the best lambs.
‘We put a teaser in first,’ says Tim.
I look blank.
‘You know a castrated ram who’s firing blanks, so he has a good time and warms the ewes up, gets them going, and they start ovulating, then we bring in the big guns. No point in them wasting themselves.’
I saw it’s like a fluffer in a porn film.
‘What’s that then?” asks David, the farm manager.
“I’ll explain later,’ says Tim.
David still lives with his mother. Though he has a camper van they call the sex machine so conclusions need not be drawn!
‘So basically, these guys are all geared up for a sex holiday?’ I say.
‘Yep, farming is 30 percent sex and 70 percent violence,’ says Tim, smiling with the satisfaction of a proud parent.
‘We use these Texals because of their backside. Lamb is all about getting a good arse. You want a ewe with a good arse, to get a lamb with a good arse. It’s all about the back end.’
They could be starring in their own rap video.
'Baa baa got back.'
I say winsomely that I was sorry it didn’t translate into women.
‘Who says it dunt, Marion. All depends on your perspective…’
‘Aye,’ says Peter, ‘Ye’ve got te 'ave thee arse..’ It took me a second to realise he was still talking about the sheep.
So tomorrow is group sex day.
‘You should see them go. Some of these tups will do 20-25 a day, and they really give it all they’ve got. I’ve seen them have heart attacks going at it. They end up lame and everything,’ says Tim.
We come back to the farmhouse. I sit at the table and get my notebook out.
Peter, Kevin and Steve (Shepherd, Pig Man and Butcher) are sitting having their lunch, each with their tupperware box beside them. Kevin is reading BBC Good Food Magazine. Steve has a home made biscuit and a little cup cake in his.
'Do your wives do this for you?" I ask.
There's a chorus of ayes. It's like a junior cast version o f@Last of the SUmmer Wine'.
'Gosh, you're lucky, home baking as well!' I exclaim, impressed as all these wives have homes, families and jobs of their own.
'Dun't you pack lunch for your husband?' asks Peter.
'Oh I don't have a husband,' I say. It's the first time I've had to say it out loud and it's surprising how easy I make it sound while inside it's like swallowing tacks. Not that I ever packed his lunch for him. In fact the only thing I ever packed was his suitcase .
Steve the butcher who has been cutting up carcasses in the butchery next door is wearing a striped apron and a little grocer’s hat. He says something to Tim about a bucket of blood from the abbatoir, just as Brisket the dog disappears under the legs of my chair and reappears between my legs with his paws on my chest.
I wouldn’t have minded so much if he hadn’t had his mouth open.
I know I’m looking for some make companionship, but I had rather hoped it might not have a tail and dog breath.
Thursday, 3 July 2008
Ticket not-to-ride
I went to Newcastle yesterday. I’ve never been to Newcastle before. In fact, strictly speaking, I still haven’t really been to Newcastle. But while daydreaming at York station waiting for the Scarborough train to transport me one rural stop to Malton, home of the Ginger Pig Farm, I ran (or a close approximation thereof) to Platform 5 as instructed, leapt on to the train and threw myself gratefully into a miraculously vacant seat as the engine chugged away from the platform and the tannoy announced: This is the 12.04 North Eastern Service to Aberdeen calling at… yes, you’ve guessed it… Newcastle.
Damn it.
All hopes of efficiency and professionalism lost.
The guard took pity on me and didn’t charge me for the round trip. Even offered me the use of his mobile phone to call the person who was waiting for me. And on the way back, the conductor, all ‘eeh bonny lass’ Geordie, patted my arm and said: ‘aye, you’ve had a bit of a roundabout trip to Malton haven’t you lass? Make sure ya Dinnie get on the wrong train again, then.’
And so, exactly two hours later I found myself, once again, sprinting towards platform 5 this time hoping to get on the right train.
Damn it.
All hopes of efficiency and professionalism lost.
The guard took pity on me and didn’t charge me for the round trip. Even offered me the use of his mobile phone to call the person who was waiting for me. And on the way back, the conductor, all ‘eeh bonny lass’ Geordie, patted my arm and said: ‘aye, you’ve had a bit of a roundabout trip to Malton haven’t you lass? Make sure ya Dinnie get on the wrong train again, then.’
And so, exactly two hours later I found myself, once again, sprinting towards platform 5 this time hoping to get on the right train.
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