Shit !

I'm not really into cars. I like comfort, convenience, flexibility and anonymity. Until I acquired the Saab, I was always pretty happy with standard repmobiles so long as they started, worked, and didn't kill my back. I've understood that many other people do like cars, so much so that they form a major part of their lives.

My mate Neil's like that. He should have been a mechanic in a racing team, instead of which he's a very skilled and experienced IT project manager & consultant. He thinks cars, he races karts at weekends, and reads about the damn things. Earlier this year, he bought himself a nice new car, a dark blue one. It's got four wheels but only two seats. It's a Porsche Cayman S with lots of goodies, and even I admit that it does look fine.

On Saturday,Neil took me out for a drive. Hell's teeth the thing is fast. It's the first time I've been exhilarated in a car for many years and possibly the first time without being scared. In the country lanes to the south-west of Bristol we scraped corners and burned up hills, rounding bends like there were snakes behind us. He told me that he touched 100 on some straights. Ye gods, it's fast. And, it sounds good, too.

***********************

Apart from that, the weekend was ordinarily pleasant.
My best friend from school dropped in for coffee, whilst collecting his daughter from university. In all the 25+ years we have lived here, it's the first time that he has visited. I pottered around, went to the pub on Friday night with three other blokes, ate with Neil again on Saturday night, swam a couple of times in the lake and mended a puncture on a bicycle.

Oh, yes, and missed Moonface, who was grooving at Glastonbury, the dear old thing.
She arrived home at five a.m. on Monday morning, exceedingly tired and quite smelly. She's better in both respects, now.


:o)

Noxon

Noxon Farm is now owned by Moonface's cousins. It's a wonderful old farm in the Forest, dating back to at least the 13th Century. The lake is a fishpond, we assume, belonging to Tintern Abbey until the dissolution under Henry VIII. The location is quite unique in the Forest, with water in front and paths leading down to the mining area now re-covered by woodland. I guess, though, that the lake could also have been built to hold a reserve of wash water for those mines further down the valley. The mines are dangerous now, with the ground likely to subside at any time, as it has been known to do.

Noxon was Crown property for centuries, with the farmers only renting the house & land. When Dave lost his herd of cattle by foot & mouth in 2001, he was allowed to buy the house and some 30 acres as prices were depressed and he lost his income. Now, it's the perfect home, woth the possibility of developing some of the barns into ofices or an hostel. We'll wait to see what the family decides.

The Rules, by Michele Roberts

THE RULES

Hands must be washed
as soon as poets come in from the street.
Hands must be washed
before tasks such as cooking are commenced.
Slippers must be worn
inside the house at all times:
bare feet must never
make contact with the carpet.
Bare feet that make contact with the carpet
must be immediately washed.
Not more than three glasses of wine
may be taken in any one day.
Anger is not permitted on these premises.
All angry women entering these premises
must be immediately washed.
Desire is permitted to be exhibited on these premises
once a week for a period of twenty minutes.
Before and after
the female genitals must be immediately washed.

© Michèle Roberts

Michele Roberts' poetry is very positive, extremely female, and earthy.

I should read much more of it...Lacrimae Rerum is one of my favourites. I must look for it, sometime.

:-]

Perry

After a showery day and frustrating times at work, both Moonface and I needed to go for a stroll in the evening. We left home at eight thirty or so, then walked past the Prison, over the common and its remnant playing fields to the Wellington; about twenty-five minutes of talking and disengagement from the cares of the day.

Daisy served us with a pint of cider each, which we drank in the garden under the leaden clouds of the evening. After we had placed our order, we had spotted that the pub was serving perry, so I decided that it had to be my next drink. It's still very difficult to find perry in pubs,in spite of the resurgence of interest in ciders. They were serving Heck's perry, a single varietal from nears Wells in Somerset, at 6.5%, which is pretty strong. A pint was enough.

I still can't decide whether it's wonderful or the drink from hell, never mind Heck. It's a pale, translucent honey colour, which Moonface described less rhapsodically as like cystitis piss. Chemically, I guess it's a colloid, with lots of pectin & protein in semi-suspension. It's got loads of body and many identifiable flavours. Ones I can identify include cucumber, citrus and malic touches, and of course the traditional pear-drop iso-amyl acetate note. There's no head at all, with hardly any fizz. And the drink slides down so easily, as I guess that I would in a different way should I drink too much of it.

Wonderfully, I had no touch of a headache the morning after, not one bit.


:-p

Nepotism

People talk about businesses being "family firms", but one of the two companies I'm working for takes the phrase to extremes. I've worked in organisations where there are a couple of family members together, and it never really seems to work too well.

But this joint makes it a joke. Of fifteen (or fewer) employees, at least five are related.

There's the boss, whose sister is the training sales manager.
There's his wife, a trainer / guru.
There's his wife's two brothers.

At least I know about this early, so I can tread carefully when necessary.

:-)

The Old England

This is one of my favourite pubs of the moment.
Twenty years ago, it was the scuzzy haunt of hippies, but now it is pleasantly quiet, even on a Friday night. The juke box play quiet reggae, the few punters at normal times are relaxed, convivial and about 50/50 black and white. The beer is kept well, but to keep me as well they serve two types of good quality draught cider.

Out the back, where the pub yard abuts the old vicarage, there are cricket nets which still see regular usage. Apparently, having these nets makes the Old England unique in England.

It's difficult to find a perfect pub. If one is too popular, it becomes noisy and hard to find a seat. If a pub is not popular enough, the place will be too quiet, there will be no atmosphere, and besides there is generally some good reason for a pub to be deserted. The Old England falls into the gap between the extremes, with great atmosphere and spare seats, not too noisy to have a conversation yet not so quiet that one has to whisper; and it's lovely. So is the barmaid, for that matter.


x

The Concretes

Somehow, we went to the Thekla again for the third time within a couple of months, this time to see the Concretes playing. In contrast to the last time they played in Bristol, which was to a full audience at the Academy, there was a sparse crowd which was generally underwhelmed by the experience.

The band has changed, and not for the better. The previous two times that I saw them, the driving forces were the little blonde Lisa's drumming, and the lead singer's melancholy, Nico-like voice. Now she has left, and Lisa has given up the drums to become lead singer. It doesn't work so well. The hard, edgy power of her percussion was what held the band together, and it seems much looser and more diffuse now. And they have lost the power of the brass section which lent a grace and emotion to their music; now I fear that the Concretes is just another guitar band. It's a shame.

On the plus side, we had a relaxing drink on the deck of the Thekla before going below to the music, and the support band was fun. As is so often the case, the support band was as good as, if not better than, the main event.

Evening

Yesterday evening I enjoyed one of those quietly satisfying moments where everything seems well with one's world.

I'd worked effectively most of the day, had a cool swim to tire my limbs, then chatted a little with Moonface. She was going out to eat with students, and Tom was at work, so I cooked for two.

Rio and I ate in the garden, diffuse evening sunlight shining upon us. We ate steak, chips & salad, whilst I drank a glass or two of South African pinotage, warm from the bottle having been in the sun for while. We made small-talk, joked, argued a little. Beyond the birdsong from the gardens and the rare plane overhead, it was quiet and restful. The cats dozed on the garden chairs or nuzzled against our knees.

So I thought to myself: life's alright, really.

x

Oops !

Last weekend, Moonface, a group of mates & I were strolling home after closing time when I recognised an old girl friend outside the Kellaway Arms, embracing a man who was most definitely not the man she lived with.

"Hello F, " I said, "How are you doing?" .
"What do you mean, What am I doing ?"
"I said, HOW are you doing? !"
"Oh. I'm OK. Fine."
"Bye, see you soon."

A hundred yards on, we collapsed in fits of giggles.
F looked so guilty, so like a child caught misbehaving. Oh, these immoral fifty year olds!


x

Dorota

When Moonface returned to work full-time, as the children were growing up, she did so upon condition that we hire a cleaner once per week, as she reckoned that I was too idle and slatternly to undertake my fair share of the household cleaning. She was probably right.

Somehow, we hired a series of East Europeans who had immigrated here, and who were happy to clean for us. Perhaps "happy" is the wrong word for domestic cleaning; "content" perhaps. Remember, this was several years before the expansion of the EU to the former Bloc countries. One of the girls (and they were all women) was Dorota, who was supporting herself during a year or so's postgraduate study at UWE. She was an expert in Indian art, on secondment from Torun University, and we talked enough to stay in touch.

She has done magnificently in the years since she returned, having taken her PhD, written a book, obtained a teaching post at Torun, and made study trips to India. This week she texted me to say that she is trying hard to complete another three books, and is teaching at Warsaw University as well as Torun. I really must go out to visit her, now that easyJet & Ryanair fly out there so regularly. God, I'm impressed by her.

Lexical transference

Is there such a thing, or have I invented the phrase?

I was shocked awake in the early hours of Saturday morning, by Moonface shrieking repeatedly as she struggled from a nightmare into a whimpering, frightened wakefulness. I held her closely as she incoherently garbled about the post that was coming down from the ceiling to hit her. It didn't make sense, but that's what she told me. We snuggled together, and she drifted to sleep again.

Meanwhile, I lay awake worrying. What did it mean? Was it prescience of some sort? We had new roof timbers put into the loft about ten years ago. were they not installed correctly? Had Moonface seen the future of our house collapsing? Or was it a telepathic message from Rio, out on the town still at three a.m. ? Was Rio in a car being driven by a drunken youth, flying off the road and into a telegraph pole down some country lane? I lay awake and worried, until our bedroom curtains brightened with the dawn, and the first birds commenced their songs. I suppose that thereafter I dozed until a normal time to arise, and understood the dream.

It was representative: lexical transference. Moonface dreamed about a physical post, a trunk of wood, a massive pole. But I believe that she was frightened by a metaphorical post: a job; my job, the one that I started that day and the one that I was to start after the weekend. She has told me that she prefers life when I'm not working, and this was her subconscious telling us about how worried about how things will change when I'm working again and less attentive to her needs and or lives together.

Or, that's what I think.



Moonface rarely has nightmares.
The last time that she woke screaming was years ago; I can't remember exactly how long. On that occasion, she was scared of tigers coming down from the ceiling and onto our bed. I've no explanation at all for that dream - perhaps it's better not to wonder too deeply.

X

The Nova Scotia

The Nova is at the other end of the Docks from the pubs I frequent most often. It's downstream, to the west of the centre, and is located by the original locks controlling entry to the locks before the New Cut diverted the Avon away from the centre of town. Its walls are covered with old nautical charts and pictures of ships that have sailed past, and there is still a good smattering of boaties and old naval men here. Nowadays, in summer, the seats by the water are filled with trippers and cyclists for whom this is the closest pub to Leigh Woods.

When I lived in Clifton Wood the Nova was one of my locals, and it was one of the very first pubs that I went to when I first moved to Bristol, following a visit by a respected folk-singer from the North. I still visit occasionally, to meet friends from south of the river or just to enjoy the waterside.