It’s an educational odyssey-honest!

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                September. For many of us Northern Hemisphereites who are beyond the ties of dependent children or parents or day jobs this is the perfect time for slipping away to extend our summers. This year, especially, as the magic of the first warm, dry summer for seven years bursts in a wet bubble we have made our escape, along with a whole convoy of other wrinklies, besides one or two couples with pre-school children, capitalising on the cheaper prices, the quieter roads and the emptier resorts.

                Despite having undertaken a substantial amount of meandering in foreign territories for lengthy periods since I retired from the nine-to-five I still receive a barrage of remarks and expostulations regarding what I like to call ‘trips’. I describe them as trips for this very reason, since to call them ‘holidays’ would imbue them with an impression of hedonistic opulence and wanton enjoyment and this is not the idea I want to convey at all. I prefer to be conveying the appearance of undertaking some kind of research or undergoing an educational experience; activities more worthy and valuable than mere enjoyment. One of last night’s FB remarks referred to my ‘life of luxury’-and may or may not have been ‘tongue in cheek’.

                Luxury is a subjective quality. When applied to holidays-or even trips, it means different things to different people. For some, the epitome of a luxury holiday is to be pampered in an exquisite hotel offering complimentary champagne on arrival, chocolates, fruit and flowers and plump pillows. For many it is to be carted away on a floating gin palace, stuffed full of food whilst dressed in a designer outfit and disgorged at intervals for a hasty snapshot of a famous city-[as in ‘if it’s Saturday it must be Rome’]. For anyone in a demanding and stressful job, luxury can be slobbing around in bed on a Sunday morning in front of the TV with a cup of tea.

                I have friends for whom the ideal break is two weeks, twice each year in the same apartment on the Costa del Sol, lying on the same sun-beds, visiting the same bar. It is relaxing, they explain, that nothing has changed, that there is nothing to do. This is easy to understand.

                For me, the concept of luxury is also a simple matter. It is freedom. You wander where you want, for as long as you want. When you tire of somewhere or it rains you move on. If there is a lot to do, or the weather is wonderful you stay. It isn’t always simple. You have to research, you have to plan, you have to drive, shop, set up, pack up; but you are free to do exactly what you want. And that, reader, is my idea of a luxurious trip. What’s yours?

When You Know you are Out of Your Depth

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Amongst the plethora of entertainment, leisure activities and sports events organised by our town, which besides being a place of residence, I should add, is also a seaside resort and  tourist magnet, is a ‘long swim’. I was treated to a preview of this phenomenon yesterday evening during a ‘shortish’ cycle.

I am an admirer of those who are adept at swimming; those who are as at home in the water as they are with their two feet planted on the land. I envy them. They can dive carelessly from boats into the Aegean whilst enjoying their day cruises in Turkey while I can only watch from the safety of the deck and pretend I’ve a water allergy. They can fling themselves wantonly into the waves and disappear into the froth as they submerge, reappearing without spluttering, coughing, shrieking in terror or vomiting up the seawater they’ve ingested. This expertise all looks cool and elegant. Even in a hotel swimming pool fellow guests complete slow, unhurried lengths from shallow to deep and back, flipping over to view something or undertaking that mysterious ‘treading water’ thing that I’ve never mastered.

It isn’t that I am unable to swim. I can. In my twenties I spent all of one winter learning in a class of adults, shivering in an Olympic sized pool, taught with great patience by swimming teachers who understood the panic experienced by those who have lived all the way to adulthood without having mastered the aquatic arts. I kicked, I glided, I even dived with enough encouragement. But the incontrovertible fact remains: I do not enjoy the water. I do not like to have my face submerged. I cannot throw caution to the wind and submit my stature to depths deeper than its height.

In circumstances where the temperature is so hot I need to cool off I may climb laboriously down a ladder into the shallow end of a swimming pool, providing there are no more than about two other adults there-[no children-children splash ]. I might hang there, clinging to the ladder for a few moments before climbing out. I might even undertake a cautious flap across the width at the shallow end, within reach of the side, executing my undignified, unorthodox version of breast stroke which involves numerous, panicky gyrations with my head stuck above the water. On reaching the other side I grab whatever ledge is there, make for the ladder and thence to the safety of the sun-bed.

Most people can swim these days, having learned at school or from holidays abroad. But I was raised in a small village by non-swimming parents. Our holidays were camping jaunts taken in farmers’ fields and a day at the seaside was an occasion involving buckets, spades, sandwiches, rolled up trousers and knotted handkerchiefs on heads.

There is one positive outcome of my land-lubbing childhood: it is that as soon as my own children could walk, and long before they started school, I ensured beyond any doubt that they learned to swim, so whatever sins of parenthood I may have wrought upon them they have no qualms about taking to the water.

Reading Life

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                Reading habits differ as much as tastes in TV or music. There are those who do not read at all, choosing to derive their entertainment from the screen. There are those who eschew books in favour of newspapers, magazines or manuals. There are those who consider fiction beneath them and opt for worthy non-fiction. Then there are issues of class or generation.

Years ago I was quizzed by a gentile, elderly great-aunt-in-law as to what my preferred ‘light’ reading tastes were and I responded with more enthusiasm than prudence, eagerly blurting out a long list that included lurid thrillers, shallow romances, juicy, explicit murder mysteries and science fiction. Her stony faced response was an impressive put-down as she shared her leisure time favourites- Jane Austen, George Eliot-and for more vicarious pleasure, Charles Dickens. I refrained from inquiries about her ‘serious’ reading choices, fearing I may have already become so far out of my depth my feet had floated out from underneath me.

I was a voracious reader as a child; the child who could not be torn from a book for anything, not to help with the dishes, to lift her feet for the vacuum cleaner or for sleep. There were books I longed for, having heard them serialised on the radio [a joy children are deprived of these days]. The Christmas morning I awoke to find that Santa had left a hardback copy of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ on the end of my bed is my most memorable. I still have it, along with many other beloved childhood novels- Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows and Eleanor Farjeon’s beautiful take on Cinderella, ‘The Glass Slipper’.

As a teacher of young children I managed to squeeze in enough time to indulge my enjoyment of children’s literature by regular readings of my own favourites as well as theirs-Roald Dahl and Dick King-Smith included. It was gratifying to see them coming in with their own prized copies of these novels, even those whose ability was not quite, yet, up to the task of reading the stories themselves.

Then there are the film versions. I have never been able to shake the compulsion to see a film version of a book despite knowing from experience that it is never going to match the depth and pleasure of its print original.

Even now that I am approaching my dotage I still come across novels that captivate me to a point where I become evangelistic about them, urging others to read them and feeling vastly disappointed if the response does not match my own. D. C. B Pierre’s ‘Vernon God Little’ was one of these. I eulogised ad nauseam over it but found no one to share my enthusiasm. When my frustrations at the dearth of post book analysis became overwhelming I joined a book club, only to find that within the narrow confines of those who enjoy fiction novels there is the same mismatch of tastes.

But whatever is read, one truth remains. The written word is the most wonderful invention known to man!

Too Rich and too Thin

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                The tale of Kate Moss’s meteoric rise to international supermodel stardom has been much related. She was ‘spotted’ at 14 years of age at an airport by a model agency scout. This is hardly a ‘rags to riches’ story, since young Kate was on holiday in the Bahamas, but still, doubtless provides fuel for hopeful adolescent girls’ imaginations. Since that time she has barely been out of the headlines of the tabloid press, either for her sense of style or for her wild party lifestyle and dubious partner choices.

                A cynic could be excused for thinking that Kate’s excessive over indulgences and subsequent exposure [photographed snorting cocaine, consorting with drug users] had done her no harm at all, since she continues to appear in ‘rich lists’, ‘super lists’ and so on; nevertheless there has been an outcry at the latest depictions and criticism of her inflated and imperfect physique as she holidayed in Ibiza.

                Kate has been lucky in most respects. Born with reasonable looks and being in the right place at the right time has been the catalyst for her success, then by cunning employment of the media and following the mantra that no publicity is bad publicity she has maintained a long [in supermodel terms] and financially satisfactory career. She is not the first or the last person to do this.

                But you should not expect to both exploit the masses interest in you and all you do and eschew all sense of responsibility. Having made a fortune from staying adolescent thin into middle age, using that look to get work and exploiting the media, it would be refreshing if Kate were to either retire from modelling or reveal the secrets of her bodily success; for in order to stay whip thin she must have loaded her system with myriad cocktails of drugs.

                With an obesity epidemic looming [or present], how helpful can it be for the huge, rich diet industry to keep focusing on the way we should look? Wouldn’t it be so much more helpful and motivating to encourage activity and show struggling dieters not only how much better they would feel by keeping within the average weight band, but how much more healthy life they could have.

                I suppose it must be more of a dilemma for those who, like Kate, have built a career around their looks, whether to ‘let it all go’ and live a normal life as they approach middle age. She could certainly afford to do this, although presumably the dieting habit would be hard to break and she famously told the world that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’.

                I must admit I quite enjoy the anonymity that being older bestows. I probably ‘scrub up’ reasonably well if the occasion demands it. Mainly, however I want to stay as fit as possible for as long as possible-and enjoy life, so I do my best to get regular exercise, then I can sometimes have a few chips with my lettuce leaves. 

Elvis and the Egyptian Odyssey

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                In the 1970s I undertook some independent, backpacker type travel to Egypt. This meant heaving round a large rucksack and using local transport, in the main, although when you are young this kind of travel seems adventurous rather than daunting. The trip involved flights to Athens, ferry from Piraeus to Alexandria [two days on a vehicle ferry, nights on deck in a sleeping bag], finding a hotel on arrival, moving on by bus to Cairo, finding a hotel, travelling to Luxor down along the Nile on a sleeper train and on to Aswan by minibus; five weeks in all. It was my first sojourn outside of Europe.

                Arriving to the port of Alexandria was a culture shock, since I had not expected Africa’s north coast to feel so alien, so exotic or unnerving. After a long, slow entry through early morning mist to the quayside past skeletal wrecks of long sunken vessels we docked, to be met by a teeming array of jostling, robed porters, hawkers and tourist fleecers. Alighting from the ferry there followed a brief, unseemly struggle to retain control of my rucksack but apart from this there was little to cause alarm or suspicion during the entirety of the trip.

                Everyone we met was eager to help, and not necessarily for remuneration. An enquiry re whereabouts of hotels would be met by offers to accompany us, carry luggage etc. On bus journeys, where the vehicle would resemble a termite nest we would invariably stand, but seated passengers would take items we were carrying on their laps. Conversations were struck wherever we went, with the local population keen to find out about us. There was no suspicion, threat or mistrust.

                The festival of Ramadan took place towards the end of our stay. We’d returned to Alexandria with a few days free to visit the beach and relax. Waiting for a bus to take us back from the beach to the town a couple in a car stopped and offered us a lift. “Did we know”, they asked us, “that Elvis Presley died today?”

                They were keen to chat, needing to pass the time until they could break their fast and eat. I fell ill with food poisoning two days before we left for Piraeous and was compelled to run the gauntlet of the doorless holes in the ground that amounted to the ferry terminal ‘facilities’. Despite this I retained memories of Egypt as a fascinating, beautiful country; packed with history, enigma and mystique.

                I have made one more visit to Egypt since that time-to the tourist Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh, for one week-and one week too many!

                I feel no more desire to return to Egypt now than to stick my hand into a hornets’ nest. Nor do I wish to visit any troubled Moslem countries. In the forty or so years that have passed since that innocent piece of travel those parts of the world have changed, become edgy, uneasy places at best-war torn hell holes at worst. Are we ever to move on from historic grievances, bury hatchets and let the by’s be gone? Or are we to be forever the ‘infidel’ and they, forever the ‘heathen’, locked into a spiral of hate and mistrust?

                Of one thing, however, there can be no doubt. I will always know what year it was that Elvis died…it was 1977.

Windows

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                I’m not sure of the exact meaning of ‘broadening’ the mind, but if it has something to do with stuffing facts, experience, skills and knowledge into it then it must be true that travel does this. But to learn anything by travelling I don’t feel it is necessarily a requirement to trek into the Antarctic, to climb Everest, canoe up the Amazon or swim with dolphins in Florida. While it is desirable to wander far and wide, I think it is entirely possible to broaden the mind with a simple stroll around the block, whether your neighbourhood is a suburban housing estate or the village green. All you need is to be naturally nosy and have voyeuristic tendencies.

                To wander an area on foot, wherever it is, presents a multitude of questions. Who lives here? How do they earn a living? What do they do in the evenings? How do they travel? What kind of tastes do they have? Where did they get their kitchen units? Do they garden? What do they grow? What on earth made them choose to paint the front door cerise? Why do they have net curtains? Why don’t they have net curtains?

                It is helpful to anyone wishing to pry if the subjects have neglected to pull the curtains and left all the lights on. I love this. I especially love the basements of residential London streets, where they may have converted the space into a kitchen or a living area or a playroom, a library or a dungeon.

                We have travelled more ‘on our own doorstep’ here in the UK than in any year I can remember since I was a child. This is in part due to family events, of which there seem to have been many and divers, and also due to the summer weather, the first for many years not to be beset with rain, wind and low temperatures. We have visited all four parts of The British Isles.

                The British countryside is beautiful. The trees, especially are graceful, majestic giants in full leaf and laden with their seeds or fruits.

                We are in the Yorkshire dales in the aftermath of a family gathering; staying on the periphery of a small market town, where many of the homes’ entrances open directly on to the street, their windows allowing plenty of nosing to take place. As we walk I conduct a casual survey of the inhabitants’ attitudes to tourists’ prying eyes. Many have wisely installed blinds or net curtains, but some provide ready-made interest in the form of a display; shelves of antique toys, a beautiful plant, a revolving glass mobile, a partly written love poem in an ancient type writer.

                The spell has broken and it is raining, reverting to summer as we have come to know it. In a couple of weeks school will be in and it will be time to head south in search of warm weather without the hoards. Next month, Southern Europe. Santé!

Hair today and wrong tomorrow

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                Although she measured about 1 metre and a half in any dimension my grandmother was a formidable woman. She was forthright, unlikely to hold back on any pronouncement lurking in her head, without troubling over the outcome of such utterances. Despite her morbid obesity and lack of mobility she remained vigorous and lucid to the end of her 99 years and 10 months, continuing to bestow the benefit of her judgements and critiques to anyone who fell into the circle of her radar. After the last time I visited her she rang me, ostensibly to thank me for the visit, but in reality she had vital advice to impart upon the subject of my hair.

                “I had to ring you to tell you about your hair,” she said. “I thought it looked awful. Don’t you have it arranged?”

                There was more. There was a diatribe about colour, style, suitability for age and so on. I thanked her for her advice. I felt strangely calm and unaffected by the criticism, whilst appreciating the terminology-‘arranged’, I thought was a quaint and wonderful word to use. But she was right.

                The fact is I do have my hair ‘arranged’ whenever I visit the salon-roughly every 6 weeks or so. The ‘arrangement’ lasts approximately 12 hours, after which it returns to its former state. This state is akin to frayed string, or a recently harvested field of wheat, where the rough hewn stalks of chaff stick up like ancient, chewed bones.

                I love the salon. I love the wait, when I can wallow in the seldom enjoyed indulgence of ‘Hello’ magazine and wonder who all the slebs are. I love getting shampooed, made tea and consulted over my dishevelled locks. The cut and the dry never takes long enough for me, as it turns me to mush, rendering me incapable of coherent answers as to what I might be doing at the weekend. The final flourish, the mirror showing me the back view and the brushing off of the stray hairs is all part of the pleasure. I am always delighted with the result [the stylist has been dealing with my hair for several years]. This feeling of joy lasts until the next morning, by which time the frayed string will have re-emerged.

                I have never mastered the art of blow drying, where the act of a slow pull of a brush with one hand and simultaneous blowing with the other produces a sleek, shiny cap. I either get the rounded brush stuck in my hair [having to resort to scissors on occasions] or am unable to engage it altogether, so that I end up looking like shock-headed Peter.

                But I am as I am-outdoor/garden/camping sort of woman, and we camping type women tend not towards supermodel grooming. Might decide to be a man next time round.

The Rock and the Hard Place

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                Gibraltar is an absorbing place. If you are driving there, as we did, you must first negotiate one of the most unattractive parts of the Mediterranean coast of Spain, consisting mainly of a gigantic oil refinery at Algeciras, then deal with crossing the ‘border’-a matter of sitting in a vehicle queue for an extremely long time [even more so at present] and often in very high temperatures, followed by having to drive across an airport runway, which is at best an unnerving experience.

                Most people know Gibraltar to consist of one enormous great rock sitting on a peninsula which protrudes into the Mediterranean just before the rounded corner of Spanish coastline where the East meets the South. For some complicated, historic reason dating back to 1704 when it was captured by the Dutch and the British it actually belongs to the UK. Its area is only about two and a half square miles, but the population, which inhabits a crowded area at the foot of the rock, is 30,000.

                This population is remarkably mixed, for a UK territory, but consists of a vast number of Spanish, among others. Despite this Gibraltar retains a strong colonial flavour, sticking strongly to what used to be British traditions, cuisine and customs-more ‘British’ than the British. As you stroll along the shopping streets you could be forgiven for thinking you’d been teleported to Exeter High Street or Swindon town centre-with a few flourishes of Whitehall from the odd palace or mansion house flanked by plumed guards and a forest of flags, plus red telephone and post boxes.  All this is peppered with Ye Olde British pubs plugging pints, Sunday roast with all the trimmings and fish and chips whatever the weather.

                There is a cable car to get you up to the top of the rock, where you will have to dodge the marauding Barbary apes in order to catch what is a breathtaking view- the distant African shores and the sparkling Med dotted with myriad oil tankers. While you are taking it all in the bandit monkey gang will be mugging you for everything you have whilst spitting, baring their teeth and even biting in a most delinquent manner should you dare to remonstrate.

                All this renders Gibraltar a small gold mine in terms of tourism, but still more, it is the online gambling hub of the world and offers cheap fags, booze and petrol as well as being the gateway to Africa. So little wonder the Spanish would like it to belong to them.

                I fail to understand why countries should continue to own small bits of other countries far away, when the reasons for their ownership are so entrenched in the distant past. Spain itself owns Ceuta, a small bit of land sticking on the end of Morocco. The UK insists on hanging on to The Falklands. Yes, we all know it’s all about resources, and the inhabitants don’t want the change, but the handover can be over a period of time, as with Hong Kong, to give everyone a chance to adjust.

                Colonialism should be firmly set in the past. These days we ought to know better, oughtn’t we?

To Eat Meat or not to Eat Meat, that is today’s question.

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                Whilst the news that beefburgers are to be grown for our consumption is not really a surprise I was unable to suppress a grimace at the thought of such comestibles. Since developing countries are now demanding the quantities of meat that we are used to, supply will not be able to keep up with demand. Presumably folk in the developing countries that are craving this meat will then become prey to the diseases that scoffing big lumps of meat on a frequent basis allegedly causes the rest of us, the time honoured over-consumers of flesh.

                If I sound like a rampant vegetarian I confess that I am not. Meat is something I do not want to give up. I like nothing more than tender steak, fragrant roast lamb and crispy pork. But I also like fish and I am happy with vegetarian fare, provided-and this is the crux of the matter-it is not some nebulous, bland substance masquerading as meat. The vegetarian sections of supermarkets are crammed full of such fabrications; veggie burgers, vegetarian sausages, hot dogs, chicken-style pies, cottage pie, schnitzels, chicken-style nuggets. Why?

                If you would be a vegetarian, why do you want meat-style products?

                In our house we do a fair amount of cooking from scratch-probably more than most. I believe that to eat healthily as a vegetarian a great deal of culinary expertise is required. You have to ensure the protein elements of the meal-not easy if there is to be variety. You have to concoct tasty, nutritious items from nuts, beans or pulses. If you do not undertake these time-consuming practises you will be stuck on an escalator of cheese pizza, cheese pasta, cheese nachos, jacket potato with cheese and veggie burgers-not especially healthy fare, but there are limits to fast food options of the veggie kind.

                I suppose it all comes down to the reasons for vegetarianism. For some it may be a simple aversion to the taste or texture of meat. Fair enough! For others it may be a protest against the horrors perpetrated against cute, furry animals. And for a third group, it is the fact that the world could be fed adequately if the land taken to raise beef, lamb, pork, chicken etc were used to grow crops. This, to me is the most powerful reason for vegetarianism.

                But surely we would all fare better if we took a third way. We humans are omnivores.

noun

  • an animal or person that eats a variety of food of both plant and animal origin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                The clue is in the word variety. I’m not prepared to conjure cunning treats from ‘tofu’ or make mouthwatering meals from pretend mince, OR eat meat made in a petri dish. If you’re going to make a vegetarian meal-use vegetables!

                That’s all. I’m off to the supermarket.