Fern Cottage
It’s been snowing for three or four days now. Today it’s been melting. The river beside us will rise inevitably, but the flood defences are good these days. There was nearly a flood in the early nineties, the water was only inches from the top of the loch gate, but our cottage hasn’t been flooded since the sixties.
We ate at Riber Hall last night, a good meal, beside a crackling fire. I ate too much and drank too much, indulged in a jelly dessert, so it’s my fault I slept lightly last night.
Along with farm animals, we see pheasants in the fields. I was surprised to see lambs in the snow. Bakewell is just down the road; I go there on my driving lessons. So is Chatsworth. Stags haunt the Chatsworth grounds.
I’m very sleepy. The cottage is warm and the smallest bedroom, our office, is the warmest room. We’ve been in for a month, but it feels like more, much more. It’s so peaceful here. A thrush is always singing outside. Blackbirds cluck the twilight home. Fat squirrels steal the peanuts I put out for the birds. The cottage has a good garden with herbs. The previous owner, a biker chick and tattooist, seems to have been a clematis freak.
We’re just inside the walls of a park, opposite a stream that flows into the river. The cottage was built around 1700, and the surviving internal wood is pink, a hard softwood with few knots, probably yew like the trees that grow nearby in the park and in the church at the top of the cliff. Yew is an ancient, pagan tree, a symbol of life, and a protector against evil spirits. Yew is always found in graveyards. Yew is poisonous. Sitting under a yew tree on a hot summer’s day is enough to give you hallucinations, that’s why it was used in pagan rites. Apparently it’s a lucky tree for Capricorns too, so good for me if I was ever mystically inclined.
For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to muster the guts to start writing again. Moving house curtailed my novel a third of the way through. Coming back I can now see what I’ve overdone and underdone, and all the clichés are leaping out of the page. There are gaps, but not enough room to fill them if I want to stick to my word count. I’m having trouble constructing sentences. They seem to get tangled up, too flowery with too many branches, like clematis. My latest displacement activity is cooking. My repertoire of stews is broadening.
People keep contacting me out of the blue, mostly writers. First it was Andy Oldfield. I was inspired to get in touch with Paul Lathrope, who I’m working around to seeing again. Then Graham Joyce wrote me an email. I thought it must have been jungle drums from Paul, but no, he was surfing the web for fairies and out I popped in the results, pure coincidence, especially as I had just started reading his latest two books. On the other hand, Clare Littleford is proving elusive, and Kim Lakin and I are enjoying a mutual embarrassed silence whilst we struggle with our mutual house moving and mutual writer’s block. London is a long way away.
People I don’t know keep stopping me in the street. “Have you settled in now?” they ask. New neighbours make me flustered. I’m concerned about being judged for not being local. In fact, I imagine Tubbs and Edward from The League of Gentleman peering at me in the local shop with the interrogation “Are you local?” Parts were filmed not far from here at High Peak, to our amusement. Sometimes, self-mocking, the local radio station uses the catchphrase. I giggle my way through these encounters on the street, embarrassed, and I’m sure the neighbourhood must have come to the collective conclusion that I’m mentally impaired.
The cottage is on a hiker’s and dog walker’s route. Everyone who goes past glances up at the cottage and gapes. I’ve hung lace curtains to ease the goldfish-bowl feeling. I’ve done some gardening and a lot of DIY. I counted nine individual clematis in the garden, and spent last Sunday trying to cut them back to knee height as you are supposed to do. Sometimes I think the cottage belongs to everyone else, and they will be annoyed if I take out a plant or decide to move the greenhouse. What if the bikers come back and don’t like our changes? New boiler, new wiring, new bathroom, new kitchen, new floors, new carpets… so much work to do that I don’t want to think about it.
It’s so quiet here. Most mornings I’m woken by birdsong that lulls me throughout the day. I woke this morning to find a thick white layer of hoarfrost cloaking the front garden. Perhaps it’s just a tiny bit lonesome sometimes, something missing. All the neighbours are in their fifties and I imagine them popping round to one another’s houses for tea and cakes. I like to imagine that somewhere around here there’s another girl my age struggling to write a similarly Gothic novel. I imagine her popping around for a cup of tea and exchanging notes and sisterly advice. Then I remember she lives in London.
Dog look back in anger: Sam I evil? Yes I'm Sam!
The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part IV
Shoes. That’s what I think of when I think of Sam. Sam was our first and only boy Cavalier, and he was the last in the line of heirs to the Cavalier throne at Burton Road. This is possibly because after Sam, nothing could have persuaded us to get another Cavalier.
Sam arrived when Holly was still alive. He was probably a third of her size, though as they say, size doesn’t matter. My mother would apologetically refer to Sam as “a rescue dog” in front of visitors. This wasn’t entirely the truth of the matter. He was from a second cousin of ours, D., whose family had decided to up sticks and move to Spain. Sam was a pub-dog. He’d grown up above a pub and we soon learned that he loved curry more than anything else in the world. He was very attached to D., well trained, and would jump up on her knee and sit beautifully when she whistled to him. We don’t think he ever got over being left behind by her.
The Spanish move didn’t work out for D’s family. Apparently they got off the plane, started crying, and came back home again. But they didn’t ask for Sam back. In retrospect we should have forced the issue, but I think my mother was too charity-minded. She wanted to “help” Sam. Sadly, Sam was beyond any kind of help. We used to joke sometimes that the failed move to Spain was in fact an elaborate ruse to get rid of the dog, because Sam was Evil, with a capital E.
He seemed well trained and well behaved when D. arrived with him. Then she left. Sam wandered around looking a bit lost and confused. We talked to him gently, he was quite small and nervous and unsure of himself. He did the cutest thing, walking into the dining room with one of my sister’s Doc Martin’s held by the lace. He kept hold of that boot all night. At some point it became necessary to negotiate the replacement of the boot with another toy, so I stepped in and attempted a swap. I was unprepared for the roaring aggression I got in response. He bit my hand and drew blood. None of our Cavaliers had ever done that! I was shocked.
Over the next few days and weeks our peaceful family home became a war zone. Sam entrenched himself on the highest chair in the living room, dominating everyone. He barked aggressively whenever anyone entered or left the room, sometimes if we made eye contact, he’d come charging after us in the hopes of taking a chunk out of a hand or a leg. Why we kept him, I just don’t know. He made our life a complete hell.
He would get so wound up about guarding his chair that he would almost puke when anyone approached him. His eyes would go wide and his head would go back and his ears would quiver and start to spread like a gremlin and he would make a quivering little growl just under his breath. He refused to eat and would guard his food for days until he was so starving he had no choice. We were forced to put the food on his chair, or else the aforementioned fat freak Holly would eat it. We really didn’t know how to deal with him, and we did a pretty bad job of it. We even took to growling back at him when we went in or out of the room, and I guess that made him twice as mad.
“Sam I evil?” We would chant, paraphrasing my sister’s Metallica. “Yes I’m Sam!”
Shoes. God, that dog was embarrassing. He started humping our shoes. Not on our feet of course, but no shoe left around the house was safe. He’d sneak upstairs, pee on the bed, then steal a shoe for dessert. He made the most horrible straining sound when he humped shoes. So we had to have him done: snip, snip. Apparently he bit the vet. I think my parents regarded having him done as some sort of revenge. Sadly, it did not curb his aggression.
Sam’s defining moment was when he bit my sister’s boyfriend. Said boyfriend turned out to be a shit, so perhaps Sam was on her side after all. At the time, my Dad was so furious with Sam that he kicked him out the back door. Literally. Picked him up, removed him from the room, took him to the back door and kicked him up the arse. Sam remained completely unfazed and immediately headed off on a major “border patrol” around the garden, barking his crazy little nut off because he’d seen the fox. Sam chased the fox around the entire length of the garden then fell off the front wall. It was a three-metre drop to the road. How the little dick managed it, I don’t know. Said boyfriend’s father found him at the front gate looking dazed and confused. “Is this your dog?” A lesson in humility perhaps.
It took years for us to learn how to handle Sam. The little bugger wouldn’t die either. All our other Cavaliers died young, but Sam just hung on and hung on to spite us. Perhaps it was because he turned his nose up at biscuits. Towards the end we had generally made our peace with Sam. He would still try to bite guests and could turn on any one of us unexpectedly, but gentle words and tactful placing of a dog bed on the living room floor did wonders, so he eventually gave up his throne on the Queen Anne chair in the corner of the room.
Sam’s death was the most slow and painful of all the Cavaliers. He developed some sort of horrendous skin disease. His skin turned red and his fur started falling out. Nothing the vet gave us worked, the poor little bugger was on steroids and all sorts. His skin became huge and loose and wrinkly, and no longer was he a pretty dog hiding an ugly personality. Like Dorian Gray, his sins became etched on his body.
The disease spread from one back leg to another, and down his side to a front leg. He looked a wreak. By this time I’d moved out. I came home to visit one Sunday, and I was shocked when I saw him. He was breathing heavily and seemed in great discomfort. He was exhausted and wanted to lie down, but it seemed he couldn’t breathe when he was laid down and kept having to sit up again. I ended up on the floor with him trying to support his body so he could get some relief. “Dad, this dog’s going to die, he needs to go to the vet’s.” The strange thing was, they’d become so attached to him that they put off the appointment until the next day, in the hopes that he would recover. Sam passed away the following morning in my sister’s arms, thus ending the reign of the Cavaliers at Burton Road.
Dog but not forgotten: Holly the hellishly hungry hound
The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part III
Holly had serious problems right from the start. She was just not normal. We bought her from a family who lived somewhere around Ilkeston or Long Eaton that had had a litter of puppies. We saw her mother – a loveable but insane Tricolour who ran around and around the room over and under the furniture like a mad thing, with Holly in tow like a dingy tied to a motorboat. We took her home and she sat in my lap on the way back and as I stroked her I noticed that her fur was full of bits. The bits bothered me. That evening I was still bothered about the bits and as I stroked her I took a closer look, and discovered they had legs – Holly was covered in lice. Thus began an intensive disinfecting and cleansing routine to remove the offending creatures, which she didn’t really like much and whined and cried throughout.
We bought Holly while Muffin was still alive and well. My first experience of Holly’s appetite was being told to make sure Holly didn’t eat Muffin’s food while my parents were out. I swear I saw Muffin eating her own food, but when my parents came back, Holly was discovered rolling around on her back unable to move with a belly the size of a whale and some serious indigestion. We just couldn’t understand it: when Annie and Muffin were full, they simply turned their nose up at what they were given. Holly, on the other hand, had real appetite control problems.
Holly was a very stupid dog in general, but sly when it came to food. She eventually learned how to jump onto the dining chairs without skidding off the other side (with her size and weight, she had a lot of momentum), and from there she would jump onto the table and gobble anything and everything that remained on there. We could not leave crockery on the dining table, and we could not leave the chairs pushed out from the table.
She was a nuisance at meal times – obsessed by every opportunity. Unlike sweet, polite Muffin, elephantine Holly would bark gruffly and thunder around the table, so heavy she rattled the china in the sideboard, plonking herself down at the side of someone and looking up expectantly as if she was brandishing a written legal right to demand food. When that didn’t work, she’d thunder around the table again and pick on the next person. The funny thing was, she had an obsession about going around the table anticlockwise. If the person clockwise from her position called her, she’d thunder anticlockwise all the way around the table again to get to them. Her brain was one dimensional, it didn’t work backwards.
Holly rapidly outgrew the full-grown Muffin, dominating and bullying her at one and a half times her size. Holly had a lot of aggression when it came to food. She would snap for Muffin’s biscuit, so eventually the only way we could give Muffin a biscuit was to throw one for Holly half way across the room and hope Muffin crunched hers down before Holly thundered back and swallowed it whole.
Holly’s first piece of legislation was “Toilet Tax.” The dog biscuits were kept on a shelf in the downstairs toilet. Holly’s trick was to listen out for when people used the toilet and go and stand in front of the door and block the way out. Believe me, she was big enough to manage this quite effectively. The only way to get her out of the door was to give her a biscuit, thus, “Toilet Tax.” It’s a wonder the peasants never revolted.
Hunger was not limited to proper foodstuffs either. She used to make me wretch by dragging snotty tissues out of the bin in the living room and eating them. We soon replaced the bin with a closed-lid affair, which she would manage to tip over and break into like a fox raiding a dustbin. We used to chase her into the dining room, where she would hold out, growling and barking and guarding her disgusting theft, suddenly able to run both ways around the table in order to escape from us. If ever she threw up (which she did frequently, from eating inappropriate things), she would growl and guard it and manage to gobble it back up before we could get to clear it away.
She was such a dumb dog. We always knew when she was up to mischief, because she’d go quiet and we’d call her name, at which point she’d growl guiltily and ferociously, pinpointing her location and incriminating herself in one fell swoop. She was usually in the dining room, having either got onto the table or was somewhere underneath it eating tissues or other disgusting items from the garden.
Maybe Holly was brain damaged. During her first Christmas I made the mistake of leaving my presents box unguarded. Holly clambered in and rooted out my two hundred gram bar of Bournville chocolate. Half dog, half pig, she scoffed the lot, foil and all, and we only caught on when we found tiny bits of debris left in the living room. That much chocolate should kill an Alsatian, and Cadbury’s is barely fit for human consumption, let alone hound. However it had very little effect on Holly who didn’t even appear to get ill. But I’m certain it contributed to her general state of mental retardation.
When she was a puppy she was stupid enough to eat a stick and get it stuck in her throat – Darwinism in action. Evolution would have wiped her out for the good of the Cavalier race, but the vet saved her with a surgical operation. For weeks on end she had stitches in her throat, which she scratched and managed to unpick, spewing cascades of clear body fluids from her wound all over the floor. Her bulging neck eventually healed, leaving her even more hungry and obsessed than before. I guess the throat operation could have damaged her thyroid, which would probably explain everything. It would explain her immense size, immense hunger, and even her stupidity.
We did manage to teach her a few tricks though. My horse-obsessed little sister taught her to jump over an obstacle course in the back garden. Holly panted so much I thought she would keel over, but she didn’t seem to mind it too much. Undoubtedly she got a biscuit or two out of the deal.
Then I did something wicked. I taught Holly to growl. She would sometimes do it by accident at the table or if there was food on the off. One night I was alone in the house, and the devil got in me, so I encouraged her. It only took that one evening to teach Holly to growl for food, which she did from that night on with great gusto. She didn’t mean it in an aggressive way, just in a hungry way, but it scared the willies out of guests. What a hoot.
In later life Holly developed bowel problems. Unsurprising really, considering a lifetime of eating tissues, plastic wrappers, garbage, chocolate and wheat biscuits. I guess that’s karma for you. The vet put her on a chicken and rice diet, but it didn’t seem to do much good. I believe she developed ulcerative colitis, or something equally nasty like Crohn’s. She had a very painful couple of months. One day I found her collapsed in the kitchen doorway, breathing badly, and couldn’t get her inside out of the cold. She was just exhausted. The parents took her to the vets a couple of days later. In spite of her many flaws, we loved her dearly, and we cried for her.
Dog leave me this way: Muffin the mooing mule
The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part II
Muffin is perhaps the most underrated of our Cavaliers, because she didn’t make a big statement. She was a gentle, sweet-natured tan and white Blenheim with long silky fur and short brown ears. When you spoke across the room to her she’d pop her ears up like a Mogwai. When she was a puppy she was so cute she looked like a squeaky teddy bear. It was hard not to scoop her up in your arms every time you saw her.
Muffin was simply beyond provocation. She would have been wonderful with small children. She was larger than Annie, with a pear-shaped rear, so we used to think she was fat. How little we knew: she was a sylph compared to our next dog, Holly. Muffin was so cute. She wasn’t very agile and often had trouble scrambling on to chairs. She’d set her front paws on the settee and turn her appealing teddy bear eyes onto passers-by in the hopes that they’d give her a boost up.
Because she was a very good dog when she was small, sometimes we’d let her sit at the dinner table. Her head was only just high enough to see. She was very polite and would never take anything from the table, not even if it was inches in front of her nose. We’d have to push it right up to her. She’d sit and watch every morsel of food going from plate to mouth. When she got frustrated she’d rest her head on the edge of the table and let out a lugubrious little whine: “mooooo….” Of course, we thought this was hysterically funny. Muffin always got very sleepy at the dinner table. She’d sit and sit, and her eyes would slowly close and her head would rock forward when she started to doze. Once she fell asleep so heavily and so fast that she lost her balance completely and I had to catch her as she fell off the chair.
The only time Muffin really got excited was when Annie wound her up. Annie would go outside and bark just for the hell of it, and Muffin would think there was a fox or a cat in the garden and go insane. She’d go on what we called “border patrol,” barking her way around the entire fence and doing double circuits around the garage where the undergrowth was thickest.
When Muffin was very small, one day the newspaper boy shoved the newspaper through the front door at a great speed and it hit her on the head. She never forgave the newspaper, and every day thereafter at four o’clock, without prompting, she would go and sit by the front door and wait for it. Every day we used to have to rescue the newspaper from her before she tore it to shreds. Mostly Muffin would savage the newspaper and leave it intact, but one day we went out and when we returned the newspaper had been torn into a thousand tiny shreds like confetti that covered the hall carpet, the kitchen and the living room. Not a single sheet was left. It must have been a very victorious day for Muffin.
Muffin’s cutest quirk was her ability to attribute life to inanimate objects. One time we heard all manner of whining and yapping and growling in the hall and went to see what was wrong. There was a dried honesty seed case on the floor, with two seeds stuck to it like eyes, and Muffin was stood growling and watching, hackles-raised. She was absolutely terrified of it.
Muffin’s other habit was “speculating.” She had very good eyesight and liked the taste of flies. Unfortunately, she couldn’t distinguish flies from tiny specks of dirt. Whenever she saw the smallest speck, she would pounce on it with a grunt and gobble and lick away in the hopes that it was tasty. The kitchen tiles had a speckled pattern on them. We’d point to little specks and she’d leap at them enthusiastically. She had hours of endless fun, pouncing and grunting and licking away. I remember there was a tiny dried speck of water soluble blue ink on the wallpaper above the settee. Muffin scrambled up the settee back and pounced on it, leaving a big blue smear across the wall for the guests to wonder at. Muffin was obsessive, from the newspapers to the honesty seed faces, to the invisible flies in the window. Apparently this is a Cavalier trait, called Fly Catching Syndrome, and it may be a form of epilepsy.
Sadly, Muffin didn’t live very long either. She was only about four or five when she died of leukaemia. Looking back I can’t help but feel a dog is meant to eat raw meat and bones – not overcooked tins of dog food and wheat biscuits, and I wonder whether it would have made a difference. Muffin lived for quite a long time when she was ill, she didn’t seem in too much pain though towards the end it was apparent she was becoming weak and exhausted. Our parents took her to the vet and she was put down, and when my Dad came back he just sat down and cried.
Dog today, gone tomorrow: panic stricken Annie
The Cavalier King Charles Obituaries Part I
Annie and Muffin were our first two Cavaliers. Annie was named after Anneka Rice. Don’t ask me why, that’s one of the mysteries of the universe and I fear I may have been to blame. Our parents bought Annie and Muffin from a Cavalier breeder when they were very young. Muffin was underage, only five weeks old (puppies are not supposed to leave their mothers until they are at least six weeks old), and Annie was only a couple of weeks older than that. Annie was a Tricolour – black, tan and white. Tricolours are supposed to be patchy, with a white stripe down the middle of their noses that forms a spoon shape on their foreheads. Annie was more like a screwed up Black and Tan. She was almost completely black apart from her white socks and tail. She had a black face with two furious Scotsman-ginger eyebrows. She was also completely nuts.
Annie was a literal stress puppy. We used to know a woman we called Wailing Aileen, because all she ever did was panic at the top of her voice and wring her hands. That’s what Annie was like too. I’ve never met a dog with a worse temperament. She was in a constant state of nervous panic. She was a complete biscuit freak. The dog needed Valium. She expended so much nervous energy she was as thin as a twig.
Annie’s developmental upbringing with my sister and I was a downward spiral of provocation/reaction. Muffin was as staid and calm as a miniature Buddha, but Annie could be wound up like a spring and shot off in any particular direction we chose. Because she was easy to tease with such rewarding results, we played with her constantly using sticks, balls, and bits of rope. Our favourite game was tugging-ears-and-paws. Tug the left ear, then the right, then the left paw, then the right, make the pattern random and continue ad infinitum. It drove her absolutely insane. She was a gentle creature and she’d yap and growl and mouth our hands as she tried to catch our moving fingers, getting more and more excited until she flipped and gave us a gentle bite. When we tried to play that game with Muffin, she’d just sniff our hands and look bemused.
They say dogs look like their owners, well Annie looked like King Charles II himself. Though the rest of her coat was short and wiry she had the longest black curly ears. They almost reached the floor, and they were always filthy from her dragging them in food and charging around the garden – sticky weed, what a nightmare, and in the winter she used to gather little snowballs in them. My dad took to giving her a haircut every couple of months to keep them under control. It gave her ears a lot of volume; she looked like a dog with a permed bob, late eighties style.
Because Annie was so excitable, the only way she could escape from herself was by hiding under the settee. Of course we tried to drag her out from under there, but she got very adept at manoeuvring away from us at top speed by crawling on her belly. Sometimes she’d steal my sister’s dummy and chew it under there, but when we tried to catch her, she’d turn upside down and propel herself away by pushing her feet against the bottom of the settee. Other times, she’d fall asleep and be so quiet when guests came around they never knew she was there, until she let out a huge rumbling snore that sounded like a fart and ruined any pretensions of class in our household.
Annie talked too. When people came to the door, she’d get so excited and yappy you could barely hear above her noise. Visitors would greet her with a “hello,” and she’d reply in a bow-wow: “haw-oooww!” usually followed by an excited sneeze.
Annie’s defining moment was at Colwick park. My sister and I were playing on the lake edge, and I walked out onto one of the corners of a T-shaped jetty. Annie was bounding around on the grass and I called to her. She came racing over at ninety miles an hour in typical fashion. I expected her to stop at the bank, but instead she leapt – sailed through the air, and damn her she almost made it. But only almost. She executed a resounding belly flop into the lake and swam out to meet me, howling and wailing in astonishment, before turning back and struggling up the bank. I was bent double in stitches. The amazing part was, she’d never been swimming before!
Annie didn’t live very long. She was only around two years old when she died. A classic tragic figure, it was the flaw of her own nervousness that killed her. She’d never been a good traveller. In fact, she wailed constantly and tried to hide under the back seat of the car and it made family trips extremely tense affairs. We went on holiday to Wales, and the journey back was on a hot day. She seemed fine at the motorway services; she drank water and walked around cheerfully enough, wagging her tail. But back in the car, Annie wailed and wailed and stuffed herself further and further under the back seat. The stress must have been too much for her. When we got home she seemed distressed and shaky, my mum carried her up the drive, and she says she just felt her go.
My mum laid her down in the hallway, and she didn’t know what to do, she was just panicking, I came in, Annie wasn’t breathing. I took hold of her and just shook and shook and smacked her back in a terrified attempt to shock her to life, and then my dad came in and told me to stop. He tried giving her CPR. Nothing made any difference. She’d shit herself. She was already dead. A heart attack, an embolism, we weren’t quite sure. We buried her in the back garden the same day. It was like losing a person. For two weeks we were in constant tears, grieving, simply couldn’t believe what had happened.
Crazy Nottingham
Well, it’s definitely not like living in Nice. I haven’t been blogging because there has been so much disturbance in my life lately; my family live here and so do my friends, and I bought a plethora of hard to get hold of nutrition books from Amazon as soon as I got back to the UK, so this is how I’ve been spending my time.
Hen Triangle
We started calling Nottingham “Crazy Nottingham” about a week after moving in. In the four or five years since I lived here, Nottingham has changed a lot. There was some case law apparently, and it’s set a precedent. There are more pubs and clubs than ever, all with late licenses, and they are bussing people in from Birmingham, Derby, Leicester and Sheffield to fill them.
We’re living on Theatre Square. To our left is the notorious trouble-pub Long Island, eighties bar Reflex and seventies bar Flares, ahead is Mode, (who recently installed the most annoying outdoor strobe light), the Theatre Royal and the Concert Hall (where only two nights ago all hell broke loose with the visit of a big time boy band), behind that Rock City, and to our right are several karaoke pubs and The Cornerhouse building where pikey teenagers flock to watch Hollywood blockbusters.
In short, we’re in the direct epicentre of the entire Midlands Stag and Hen triangle. It’s like a blast zone. Every Friday and Saturday night a series of black or white limousines pull up outside the Concert Hall and let out hordes of staggering slappers dressed in L plates, wedding veils, nurse’s uniforms and devil horns. Different groups of hens get into fights with each other, pecking and flapping and squawking. We have a friend who lives in London: he came to visit us in Nottingham and he was shocked. He has never seen anything like this. They queue for miles here to be let in to the late-license bars. Groups of shaven-headed men on the prowl leer and jeer at the blubbery mountains of exposed thigh and cleavage, and take photos on their picture phones. J. has taken to staring out of the window in disbelief at the crazy folk outside. “Scum,” he mutters under his breath at irregular intervals.
The Displacing Foods of Modern Commerce (another rant)
Every time I get a decaf (the coffee drinker’s methadone) in Café Nero or Starbucks, I lose a little more hope. I watch a succession of mothers with buggies feed their children atrocious pieces of carbohydrate: low fat “skinny” blueberry muffins, sugar coated Danishes, pain au chocolat, fake-apple pastries (the gelatinous chunks are actually made of agar-agar from seaweed). One woman fed her boy an entire bag of chocolate coins followed by a muffin, which he threw on the floor. Another fed her boy low fat high-sugar yoghurt followed by a piece of chocolate cake. Jesus Christ, and they wonder why their kids are screaming. This didn’t happen in Nice. Children didn’t go to coffee shops; they went to brasseries where they were fed real food. Children were quiet in Nice, and if they weren’t, they were invariably the children of tourists. All of these children I see acting up in the coffee shops have the same features: poor bone structure, underdeveloped jaws, narrow faces, big foreheads. They look malnourished. It’s because they’re not getting enough fat-soluble vitamins. When these kids grow up they will need orthodontics to correct their poor facial development. Feeding your kids junk foods means they literally grow up ugly; undershot jaws, big foreheads, stub noses, asymmetric features, stunted growth. Contrast this to the Adonis-like beauty of the native Niçoise on their fat-and-vitamin rich diet. No it isn’t down to race. Ever wondered why the upper classes are so much more beautiful than the working classes? It’s all down to childhood diet. But no longer, now the entire nation is living on poverty food on the sad, outdated advice of the government. These poor kids will all grow up gawky or overweight, with the same personality traits: sugar addiction, moodiness and fatigue. These health-conscious mothers would shudder at the thought of feeding their kids a fry-up, but for all their fear of fat, they would be no worse off slumming it with the pikeys in Maccy D’s or BK. It all turns into sugar anyway.
Diabetes and Denial
I saw my friend K. the other day. About six months ago I told her to watch her father like a hawk, because he was an obvious candidate for type 2 diabetes. He has the family history, the classic diabetic belly, and a variety of other telling symptoms. A couple of weeks ago he was diagnosed with diabetes. I woke up with sweats in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep: the other person I told her was a candidate was my own father. He has the family history, the classic diabetic belly, and a variety of other telling symptoms. The difference is, my Dad refuses to listen to me when I tell him to get his blood sugar checked.
Tragic Dina
And then there’s Dina. “Excuse me, thank you for not ignoring me,” she says as I walk past her on Clumber Street. I know this is Dina’s begging line, because I’ve heard about it before. She doesn’t know who I am; she doesn’t know I know her name or her life story. She used to be a model. She’s pretty, with long dark hair, but her skin is ruined. Her parents are rich and live in a big house, but they don’t talk anymore. Dina is on heroin. She lives on the streets with her homeless boyfriend and his two dogs. I see Dina around Nottingham quite a lot. J. saw her from the window a couple of weeks ago involved in an altercation on Theatre Square. A man was following her, and she kept screaming at him that he was a thieving bastard, but he kept on following her up the street. Then her boyfriend appeared and set his two dogs on him. The result was a cartoon-like struggle and chase.
Smells Like Nottingham Spirit
We’re renting our penthouse from the poshest woman we have ever met. It has an old brick fireplace that smells like the fabled caves of Nottingham: musty, damp, sandy. Maybe it’s a particular strain of mould? The kitchen cupboards are too low and every time we bend over the cooker or the sink we bang our heads. There’s a place on the living room floor that springs like a trampoline when we walk over it (it’s getting worse). But apart from that, the flat is very nice. Shame about the location, and the neighbours.
Not a Pretty Woman Story
Two weeks after we moved in, a woman moved in downstairs. I first met her when we were woken at two in the morning by screaming, clattering and sobbing in the fire escape just outside our exit door. We could hear a man using his fists. We called the police. The police laughed when they saw her, because she was drunk or on drugs and staggered around in her high heels in the street. Her denim skirt was what my mother would call a belt. The police laughed because they thought she was a prostitute. This was how we met our new neighbour, KH.
KH is a kept woman, and she’s kept by the man who came around to beat her up. Her arms are covered in bruises, she has a terrible squint. She’s a pikey and she’s slim not from healthy eating but from malnutrition. Sometimes she’s as scared as a mouse. Sometimes she’s noisy and obnoxious and plays her R&B music late into the night. She has a habit of having loud, porn-star sex twice a week and keeping us awake. Sometimes she’s ultra-paranoid and knocks on our door asking if her quiet music is too loud, and claiming that she never has it on after nine o’clock. One night a woman came to visit her, and KH screamed at her from ten that night through to six the next morning. She leaves her pink frilly knickers hanging in the window.
A man stays who isn’t the man who keeps her. She has two boys who, after six or seven visits are still too dumb to figure out they can get out of the front door by pressing the button marked “press”, and that if KH doesn’t answer the intercom, it means she’s not in, not that they should spend the next three hours banging at her door. Are they expecting to find her in there? A man in a business suit and dark glasses called on our intercom asking for “Marteela”, or some other made up name. KH let him in. She giggled a lot, which seems to be her way of being charming. Then there was the party where KH had loud, porn-star sex (twice) while half a dozen men were in her flat. She was the only woman.
For the last two weeks, everything has gone very quiet. No music, no sex, no parties, no men. Not a peep. A couple of nights ago the police came. They said KH was in custody but they couldn’t tell us why. Just that they needed to search her flat. They debated breaking down her door. Now there is unopened mail lying on the floor for her downstairs; hand written letters from the inland revenue, a letter from Fletcher’s Solicitors (slogan: it’s never too late). I wonder what she did?
Update: The Rest of the KH Story
It turned out that KH was arrested for driving whilst high on cocaine. That’s why the police wanted to search her flat. We only saw KH once more; at least, we heard her and saw her television on the stairs. She was doing a runner.
A couple of weeks later we had a visit from a Mr G., who turned out to be the owner of the flat, rather disappointed to have discovered his incompetent staff had let it out to her. Apparently the flat was completely cleared out. She never paid him any rent at all. Her sugar-daddy abuser must have reneged on his deal. It turns out he has a wife back at home in Long Eaton.
