'S.U.M.M.E.R.'

‘It’s P.A.R.K. darling.’

Aurora wrote carefully on another strip of paper for the jar.

‘Well done. Next one: The Garden. 'The' G.A.R…….’

It was at this point that Maude appeared with untypical stealth.

‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s a new idea, darling. We’re writing activities and destinations on small pieces of paper and putting them into a jar – to be shaken each morning. The girls will take turns selecting a note.’

‘And you are helping your daughter spell out glamorous destinations like ‘the garden’ and ‘the park’. Why so wildly adventurous – why not ‘your bedroom’ or ‘the cupboard?’

Maude began to extract notes from the jar and scrunch them up.

‘It’s a little bit like your austerity ice cream. Buying cones and ice cream from LIDL and setting off a music box and pretending that a corner of the kitchen is an ice cream van. That was endearing for a while....’

Maude had continued to edit the contents of the jar as she spoke and I could see that it was now almost empty.

‘Now, darling. You can spell ‘art’. Next word is G.A.L.L.E.R.Y.’

Aurora has a flamboyant hand and struggled to fit two words on her notelet. She wrote ‘ART GALL’ on one side and flipped it over to add ‘ERY’.’

Maude was reaching the last few notes in the jar.

‘Since when, by the way, has ‘Joan’s Park Shop’ been an exciting and edifying summer holiday destination for your daughters?’

‘They love the crazy golf. Joan keeps the clubs in her shop – that’s the only reason it’s in there.’

‘It’s a five minute walk from here.’

‘What about Pet’s Corner at Jesmond  - or even a trip to the zoo. Aurora: Z.O.O. You know how much they love unusual animals ’

‘Joan does have a parrot.’  

One of the Girls

‘Well, let’s try and deconstruct it and I promise I’ll listen this time. But before we do, did you have a late night coffee? Or some cheese before it happened?’

‘No. No coffee, or cheese.’

Not since the very vivid Morrissey dream, have I shared such details with Maude.

‘So, every time I put my can of Coke on the ‘table’ it slides off. The others’ cans stay on. They all laugh. It's horrible.’

‘The ‘others’ being the poorer mothers who gather together and use a wheelie bin as a table after they’ve dropped their kids off.’

‘Yes. They chat and smoke. It looks like one of those high pub tables, only..’

‘Only outside. Yes, I get the picture. Anything else?’

‘Yes. Each time my can slides off…’

‘Yes, to peals of laughter…’

‘Yes. Each time, I bow down to pick it up I can feel big earrings bouncing on the side of my head and I can see the cigarette protruding from my lips. My voice is high-pitched, but I’m not saying anything I can remember. They’re all calling me something like ‘Cindy’ or ‘Shelley’. And I can feel my clothes.’

‘What do you mean exactly, you can feel your clothes?’

‘I mean that I can feel that I am wearing something tight and unusual. Then I look down to check.’

‘Let me guess, jodhpurs?’

‘No.’

‘Stone-washed jeans. Could be a flashback.’

‘No, not stone-washed jeans.’   

Maude was still chuckling at her ‘joke’.

‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously – it really was quite a distressing window on my state of mind.’

‘Sorry, what were you wearing in the dream that appears to have you all in a dither?’

‘Jeggings’

'Cool'

 

‘Why don’t you write a new blog entry – you’re letting your fan down.’

‘And who is my ‘fan’?

‘Well, don’t look at me. Isn’t there a guy in Cumbria who always comments on your stuff?’

‘Oh yes, there is. He’s always really positive.’

‘He’s probably in a hospice’

Maude, as ever, inspires me.

Rainy half-term days bring out my wife’s most inspirational/challenging traits and it was agreed that a trip to the local 'Waterworld' seemed like a remedy for the drabs.

It wasn’t.

‘I really don’t understand your sizing. It’s all in inches. What does that mean in terms of size 10, 12 and so on…’

The nice lady on the Waterworld reception admitted that she didn’t know exactly what the Speedo swimwear sizes equated to in the real world. There was a brief pause. Maude explained the situation.

‘The thing is, I’m only buying a swimsuit because my husband caused me undue stress when we were leaving the house and I managed to leave my swimming costume at home. Everybody else has got theirs.’

Aurora and Casta pulled up their tops to show the lady their costumes. I looked on.

‘We could lend you a costume from lost property. They’ve all been washed.’

Waterworld has a wave feature. A young man makes an incomprehensible announcement each time the waves are about to start. The very young and the infirm – e.g. me and Casta – are advised to stay at the very periphery of the waves. The bigger children and the men with tattoos throw themselves into the artificial spume with gusto. I was reminded of our misguided trip to Centerparcs a couple of years ago, as Maude carried Aurora and strode into the waves in a borrowed lime green number.

‘Daddy can paddle at the edges of life – he’s good at that.’

Returning home felt like a retreat to sanctuary. Maude had told Aurora that her new cap from the garden centre looked ‘cool’.  I found Aurora in the bathroom teaching Casta how to sit on the edge of the bath in a ‘cool’ way.

‘No, no, no, no, no! Like this. This is cool’

Aurora perched on the edge of the bath and pulled the peak of her cap over one eye – chin resting in the palm of her hand as she awaited an imaginary photographer.

Casta tried to copy the attitude – forgetting that her  legs are significantly shorter than her sister’s.  I looked on from the door as she disappeared from view and fell into the bath.   

Low Hanging Fruit

My Project Management course began with introductions. There was a soldier, a Health Service person, a Business Analyst, a Spanish Chemist and then a whole raft of people from either the Tax Office or the Department for Work & Pensions. They all seemed to share a strange coded bureaucratic language, which they used to describe what they did and what their role was in their department. After the third of these types stammered his way through his introduction I looked around the room. His colleagues were easy to spot. They all wore public sector cardigans and they had all settled on a comfort hairstyle at some point in the late 1980’s. If there isn’t already a collective noun for people like this, it could be:

‘A Gloom’

or

‘An Awkwardness’

When the last of them spoke in a monotone, I settled on:

‘A Disappointment’

The course leader was, in contrast, very jolly. He breathed life into an intrinsically dull subject with anecdotes featuring his wife as the intransigent ‘executive’ of all of his projects. He kept my attention for nearly all of the 5 days of the training and coached us well on how to pass the exam – essentially by polishing off the easy questions as soon as possible to gain confidence. He memorably described the easier questions as ‘low hanging fruit.’

Although I tried to hang back in the corridor, the tide of course delegates sweeping towards the vending machines carried me along. I inevitably ended up stood next to the smallest man on the course – in fact one of the smallest men I have ever met. We chatted awkwardly and I tried not to bend to hear what he was saying. It was something about the fact that the machine was free.

I am unusually tall and meeting unusually small people is always tense – as we are both conscious of our difference. Very small people are the only people who don’t brazenly ask ‘how tall are you?’ I sat down and ranked the encounter close to the top of my list of embarrassing run-ins with unusually small people. I then recalled the encounter that still sits, unchallenged, at the head of the list:

I used to ‘work out’ at a gym in the middle of Newcastle.

The gym had an L-shaped changing room for men.

I once turned the corner of the L-shaped changing room and suffered a naked head-on collision.

I collided with a naked dwarf.

The man’s bald head brushed my genitals.

Thanks to the jolly course leader and the accelerated pace of the course, my learning about Project Management proved to be a much more positive experience than my last attendance on a business course. That course was led by a man called Peter - with a deep tan and very prominent cufflinks. He began by saying something along the lines of:

‘Everything you do is a project. Getting here today was a project that you had to plan, cost and deliver.’

Peter’s approach was to soliloquize for at least an hour at a time. He would then ask questions designed to expose inattention. It was about halfway through the course that Peter singled me out and asked me what I saw when I entered my house and looked up the stairs.

I realise now that midway through a training course designed to nurture positive business thinking  I was expected by the course leader and my fellow delegates to say something like ‘the future!’ or ‘potential!’. I disappointed Peter. I disappointed everyone. I answered:

‘The toilet.’

Normal Service

I paid a visit to my parents this weekend. My mother was being discharged from hospital after a hip-breaking fall and I hadn’t seen my father for a month or so.

I helped my mother negotiate her way around the house, and my father, with the aid of a new walking frame (with front wheels). My nephew had referred to her new transport as ‘that bad boy’ during a hospital visit and my mother had been amused by this.

‘Bring me that Bad Boy!’ she’d laughed, as I moved the frame into position.

My father had missed her terribly. He'd even made it to the hospital on two occasions to visit her.  His pining subsided on her actual return and he reverted to his default state: grumpy.

‘Your car was badly parked, so I moved it a few feet.’

‘It was not badly parked. Whose way was it in? Yours?’

My father is very slow-moving now, so my mother relatively sped past him through the doorway into the kitchen. The Bad Boy ran over one of Dad’s slippers on the way.

The fact that my virtually blind father had moved a car didn’t seem to trouble either of them, so I didn’t mention it.

A half hour passed and my mother asked me to locate her mechanical scales. She stepped on and was pleased to discover that the inertia of a hospital stay had not had a major impact on her weight.

Dad had been looming. He could discern the shape of the scales well enough to pad onto them in his slippers.  

‘What does it say?’

Before I could give my father the reading, my mother giggled and interjected:

‘It says ‘One at a time!’

Dad grunted.

‘It says eighteen and a half stone Dad. Do you want to know what that is in kilos?’

‘No I don’t want to know what that is in kilos.’ He hovered on the scales.

‘But you are fully dressed, Dad. Clothes always add a few pounds.’

‘I have never taken my clothes off to weigh myself in my life and I’m not going to start now.’

My father bumped past me to get back to his armchair. He sank back into it and began to press random buttons on the TV remote control until something that sounded like news arrived.

‘Sure that’s the lightest I’ve ever been,' he noted,'I’m wasting away.’