Flopsy's Gone

On the advice of our vet and the Wildlife SOS people, Flopsy has been released back into the wild this evening. We took him (or her) down to the edge of the forest. Unfortunately, he didn't adhere to the plan and skip off into the undergrowth but darted off in the opposite direction and across the road in front of a car during which time we all held our breath. Fortunately, the driver braked and missed him as we saw him moving at the speed of light up the path on the other side. Even the magpie which landed and took a peck at him couldn't keep up but goodness knows where he went after that. I walked back later with the dog and did see a small rabbit in front of the forest nibbling at the grass but I suppose it could have been him, at least, I like to think so. Having watched all this take place, I understand why they have a mortality rate of 95% in the wild. I hope we did the right thing .....

Flopsy Bunny

I've had no time to write today as it's been a little hectic here. Just got back from picking up my eldest son from the station to find that Marmaduke the cat had brought home a baby rabbit. It seemed to be too shocked to move and was obviously far from home so we've put it into an indoor cage with hay, food and water and a tiny cardboard box to hide in.

Supermarket Hell

Sloppy habits had crept into Susan’s life through the back door and were draped sideways over the three piece suite and making layers ring marks on the glass coffee table. She had trained herself to slump in the brown leather recliner with her feet up with large cushions either side obscuring any possibility of even a glance at the grime and hairs on the other furnishings.
Of course, it hadn’t always been like this but shortly after her sister had died, there seemed to be no polish left and she couldn’t find the dusters. In a cupboard, there was a vacuum cleaner but it had stopped picking up and a nasty sour odour deterred her from opening the door.
The only clear area in the entire house was the hallway, just in front of the door to the outside world. She didn’t want the delivery people to think that she was uncouth so once a fortnight, she would push the accumulated dust and fluff into the kitchen with a broom and shut the door quickly. Her library consisted not of books but take away menus and for her entertainment, she would shuffle them and surprise herself with the catch of the day. Although she didn’t make conversation with the drivers – and this would have been difficult anyway because they scarpered as soon as the exchange had taken place – she had her favourites and sometimes her selection of meal hinged upon her calculation of the rosters and who would be likely to appear on the doorstep that evening.

One evening, her meal arrived and things went wrong. And when Susan appeared in the doorway of the supermarket, it wasn’t just the onlookers who were taken aback. There was a man guarding the entrance, looking her up and down. He handed her a basket and waved her inside. The man was wearing a hot red uniform.
She wandered along the first aisle which housed an array of items claiming to be free from so many things that it should have stood empty. There were packets of what could be ham in one aisle and another place where you could watch it being wrapped up. Similarly, there were loaves of bread on the shelves in foil wrappers good enough for astronauts or you could queue up and ask for it to be sliced, for them to sigh for you, put it through a machine and then into a plastic bag. They had boxes of cream cakes or you could ask for the same cream cakes from an actual person who would put it into the box right in front of your eyes, no kidding. The frozen pizzas were ’buy one get one free’ which was curious because she wondered why they didn’t just make them cheaper. What if you only wanted one?
What if you only wanted one thing and you got to the checkout and yet you still had to answer all those questions about parking tickets, schools vouchers, reward cards from a disembodied voice floating around to the beat of a red light and a cacophony of bleeps. And this is just what Susan had to do. There were no cashiers to be seen anywhere and yet people seemed to be queuing up to pay. There were no carrier bags to be seen anywhere.
It was amazing how things had progressed since her last visit. The man behind her with a stack of disposable barbecues helped her scan her pizza. Beyond the checkout were four cubicles. You could swipe your ‘reward’ card to be admitted to the appropriate one; Protestant, Catholic, Muslim or other. Susan hadn’t been to church since she was a child and chose the last booth. Inside was a swivel stool and a selection of buttons.
‘You’re a dirty woman’ a female voice announced.
‘So?’
‘So give me the pizza.’
Susan thought about it. She looked down at the pizza on her lap. She’d made it through the self-service checkout, the barrage of questions and now she was going to lose the pizza after all. Now she understood why they had to give them away and she wished she’d picked up two. She hesitated. She was hungry. She posted the box into the flashing opening underneath the buttons.
‘Thank you. You may now press the redemption key. Your reward card will be credited.’
The swivel stool started to spin and descend towards the floor of the cubicle and Susan, weary from hunger, took this as her cue to stand up and leave. She looked for an exit but could see none so instead, she made her way back to the entrance. The automatic doors closed sharply in front of her and the gentleman in the red suit stepped forward and handed her a basket. Susan would have to go around the supermarket again. She felt like she’d died and gone to Hell.

Educating Kathryn

In the physics lab, iron filings took on sinister shapes. There were positives and negatives but I was never going to be drawn towards physics. Or chemistry. I remember growing a crystal in copper sulphate solution but I wasn’t going to be enticed by the blue lagoon either. And I was terrified of Bunsen burners; my fear of fire started after two boys burned down the school staffroom and library. They were sent off to Borstal. So I opted for biology, soft option. Little did I know how soft; the teacher had a heart attack and never returned. It was a mixed ability group with some of the most notorious delinquents in the school. Lessons were spent doing anything but biology, only the texts books and the appearance once every half an hour from the head of department dressed in a white coat would give any outsider a clue as to the purpose of the gathering.

The English teacher gave us Shakespeare to read which we did in silence and without discussion whilst he sat at his desk with a pipe hanging out of his mouth. His bald head , sideburns and narrow frame were dated, even for the seventies. He wore rubber soled lace-ups and sat cross legged. When he did utter a word, it was inaudible. I tried to get through my exams by reading Brodie’s notes alone.
The art teacher had bushy, black, winged eyebrows and almost white hair swept to one side. He reminded me of an owl, so piercing were his eyes. He wore neat pale grey suits, spoke in a deep voice with precision. His room was bare, almost sterile. I stopped painting exotic jungles when I arrived in his class and picked up a technical drawing pen, drew a punk pierced all over with safety pins joined by chains and handed it in for my O’Level. No one sensed the change in my work.

I was terrified of not learning to conjugate my French verbs. Moved out of a lower set to the top one, I was in a state of shock; the previous teacher had been off sick more than he’d been there, belonged to the National Front, drove a camouflaged vintage car and called some of the children ‘wogs’. My new teacher upheld grammar school standards, clearly flouting the prevailing laws of comprehensive culture and actually taught me French. He did this with a heavy Polish accent and it was only after I’d left school when I realised that the emphasis in ‘imperative’ should be on the second syllable and not the third. He was way past retirement age and dried runs of black dye were always visible on his neck. He called the girls ‘pretty ones’ and the boys ‘ugly ones’. He would make a chopping motion with his arm when anyone got their tenses mixed up and earned himself the nickname Chopper Kayley.
Maths was hard. I had worked my way up to the top set and hung in there by the skin of my teeth, trying not to be distracted by the teacher who would put his hand on his hip when writing on the blackboard. ‘Teapot’, that’s what they called him. But I was too frightened of maths to call him anything and concentrated on my calculus. Don’t ask me to do it now.

Most people keep one or two of their exercise books from school. But not me. I keep files from my days as a mature student in a special cupboard. They might be useful one day or I might want to reminisce about my days at university.
Cupboards were important places at school too. The humanities teacher drank whisky in his, the art teacher drank real coffee in the history teacher’s cupboard, probably because she was very refined, drove an Italian car and was the spitting image of Lady Penelope. They always shut the door but the aroma of the coffee and her perfume wafted around the nearby corridors. I can still smell the filth, even now.

Now please get in the cake

‘Now please get in the cake’ he said and I just looked at him. By this point I was getting pretty cheesed off. I’d been bundled into the back of some ropey old car, hauled out again and marched through the corridors of a dump in the middle of nowhere. I’d been trussed up, passed through the hands of different men like butter at the supermarket checkout and packed off again.
Up above my head were some ropes, probably left over from the village panto and I tried to eye them up without attracting the attention of the ape who’d been responsible for my ordeal so far that day. I wondered what he had had to do with the other bloke, dressed in black robes. I sensed that there were others in the room and as I tried to calm my nerves by taking a deep breath my nostrils felt suffocated by the dank atmosphere.
The furniture was made from dark wood and I was surprised to see some embroidered cushions in deep red. I had the feeling that escape was becoming a fantasy, that this set-up was too organised, more so than I could have guessed from my journey there.
When I’d arrived at the first place, they’d removed the material covering my eyes. It had worried me because it could’ve meant that they were no longer trying to keep things secret. They were going to do away with me, I was sure. The man in the black robe seemed to be the ring leader; he had questioned me and then the weirdo next to me with the stupid grin. I couldn’t understand what he said, it wasn’t plain English so I just nodded and it seemed to keep him happy.
The next thing that’d happened was a high speed car journey to where I was now. The grinning idiot had been frantic, kept looking out of the rear window of the car to see that we were ahead of the others.
‘What’s the matter Fran?’ he asked, looking at me.
‘Oh nothing. After all, I do this sort of thing all the time. What do you think is the matter?’ I shouted.
‘I thought you liked surprises.’
I was speechless. Who did he think he was?
‘When you said that you didn’t want a traditional wedding, that you wanted to surprise everyone, I found the perfect answer. Now please, get in the cake’ he said, ‘We’re running out of time’.
‘Is it a fruit cake?’
‘No’
‘Well, that’s alright then’ and we jumped in holding hands and waited for the first guests to arrive.

A momentary lapse of reason

Let me count the reasons why I’m doing this.

1 No one wears coats.
2 I get to sit down.
3 I’m usually eating.
4 People know not to talk to me or telephone during this time, even the children.
5 I’ve done it for years; nineteen, to be precise.
6 I once bumped into them at Bahrain Airport.
7 I can criticise.
8 I can make predictions (even write the script).
9 I can watch people grow old, die or go to Brisbane.
10 I can watch people change and improve dramatically in the most improbable ways.
11 I can watch it whilst simultaneously trying to figure out why it is so improbable by recalling past storylines.
12 It has no beginning, middle or ending but it does have rhythm.
13 It slows me down, prevents me from doing too much.

So, as I lay on the bed watching a video of the omnibus edition of Neighbours, recorded by my husband for me today, having missed an entire week’s episodes, I ask myself why. I ask myself why I feel compelled to subject myself to one hour and forty-five minutes (minus the adverts through which we fast-forward) so late at night and wonder how much I will enjoy this hedonistic activity. I ask myself the same question as those who have regarded my addiction with such mirth over the years, incredulous that I am prepared to admit publicly to my little foible.
As we plough through the episodes, the answers coming to me are those above. Interestingly, it is a chore, not a pleasure and I feel rather silly. Therefore, I conclude that the real reason I watch Neighbours is because I don’t have to think for twenty minutes or so. Even someone as daft as I can’t not think for one hour and forty-five minutes.

Two buy Two

Mrs Noah is fed up of just holding the hammer. It’s a plumbing hammer left behind by someone at her mother’s house who wasn’t even a plumber. So she tries to wallop the metal tent pegs but its slippery, brittle surface just becomes more gnarled than it already is and spits fragments of orange plastic all over the cream canvas. But it’s the only hammer they’ve got. Yes, they’ve got a doormat, ten towels, waterproof trousers and spare socks but no proper mallet. No wonder the person who wasn’t a plumber didn’t bother to take it with them. It’s rubbish. They should buy a new one. Mrs Noah would like to hurl the hammer into oblivion. It’s raining.
Mr Noah is fed up too. Mrs Noah has to be told everything. She was never a boy scout. He thinks she’s more worried about the bits of orange plastic coming off the hammer than getting the tent erected. And it’s raining. Mr Noah is also fed up because his feet are wet and he knows that Mrs Noah is very likely to start nagging him about his choice of shoes. Mr Noah’s shoes have a hole in them and they are the only pair he’s brought. It is also very likely that Mrs Noah will see this misfortune as an opportunity to go shopping.
Mrs Noah thinks that Mr Noah doesn’t like being on holiday very much. She thinks that he needs to go shopping. She calls it ‘going for a coffee’. He needs some new shoes, anyway. They’ll do that tomorrow if it’s still raining.
Mr Noah is thinking about the amount of stuff that has to be fitted into the tent once it’s up. Packing anxiety, his wife calls it. He had the same trouble with the car and she always has to say ‘I told you so’ after he’s spent hours rearranging the countless useless items she’s insisted on bringing. And just why do they have to have two of everything?