Iestyn Edwards is...what?

'Brian the verger snapped at me after I tried gently to tell him the church was too cold for a first communion. And of course I didn't want to be physically rude back.'

'Look at the world around you. Where do you see glimmers of the divine?'

'You get to his age, and life is a process of getting gradually slower and smellier.'

'I've seen a harelip recently and someone with boss eyes. I thought we'd all but eradicated such things?  It'll be an urchin in callipers next.'

'Bus driver couldn’t say to me about changes of route but my mate in Radwinter had forewarned me she could feel them coming on.'

'Venus is in Aries. So don't flush your sinuses.'

'Judd doesn't understand the neck bit of his apron again.'

'He looks like he might be married to her. He's got a Mini-Filofax.'

'We toasted her teacake so fast we were wandering around announcing for someone to claim it and she was still in the queue to pay.'

'You can't just leave your legs leaking fluids.You must get back on the Aspirin. The floors are Kersaint Cobb sisal, remember.'

#overheard #eavesdropping #funny #quaint #eccentric #life #humour #humor

'I saw the saddest little thing on a date leaf in a library book. "Judy. I’m writing my name because I have nothing and I’m beside myself to own something. Even just till the last date stamped".' 

'Why would you let him put ointment on your back ribs if you didn't ask for it? I doubt you’d be even that casual when it came to putting custard on an Eccles Cake.'

'The electrician you sent me says he's got the same problem today - Thursday - that he had on Tuesday – and shouldn't have stayed in Cromer beyond Friday.'

'Her new at your pharmacy can't read the doctor's handwriting to such a lesser extent, I’m tempted to try all my latest medicines at the counter, and wait while they take effect for better or worse.'

'Oh, you’d be surprised.  There's a lot of people that go and sing in choirs on the quiet.'

'Remember the flurry of Naomis named after the round the yacht woman?  Then they died off. Like the onset of Audreys.'

'Famous actors don't need to dress like famous actors. Apart from Simon Callow always seems to.'

'She smells like she hasn't actually had that winter coat out as much as needed.'

'Christopher, you can't possibly know that Sea Salt won't have a man's fragrance.'

'None of us on the till thought it was possible to override the take away drinks machine and do an oat milk hot chocolate. But Little Mary went on a mission. Sally and Big Mary were looking on, to see how Little Mary managed it. I stayed out of the way - didn't want any part, sorry. Took ever so long. Janice buttered at least three crusty rolls in the meantime. 

'When she handed the drink over Little Mary asked the customer if it was okay - it being a bit of a freak beverage - and he said it wasn't as hot as it could be, but that meant it wouldn't over-melt the marshmallow on his Easter Bunny biscuit, would it? 

'Mary said, "All's well that ends well, then". 

'But I could feel my own mind stuck in resistance.'

#eavesdropping #overheard #life #funny 

At the station, Eirwen was standing beneath the Suffolk in Bloom prize-winner sign. She had shrunk again. I was waiting in the car. Gerard, picking up her suitcase (she gave him a Don’t expect a tip look) congratulated her on the win. 

She frowned. He pointed upward at the sign. She saw and said, ‘Oh, are we thinking that’s funny?’

Walking to the car Gerard asked what he should call her?

‘Mrs Edwards. Or Ms Silcox, my maiden name.’

I said, ‘And you can call him, The Right Honourable Gerard Crastley.’

Passing Eirwen’s case behind me, Gerard said, ‘Thank God one day Lord will at least be shorter.’ 

He didn’t see Eirwen’s disgusted look. 

She waited for him to turn round so he could. 

‘Have you got anything special planned, or just seeing your special son,' he asked, driving onto the High Street. 

‘I don’t know what there is to be done here at all.’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I told you.’ To try and make her refuse to come. ‘Very quiet.’

I had invited her to stay at Haven House while I was house sitting there through a recessed sense of duty. 

‘Lovely walks,’ said Gerard.

‘I walk along the river to the South Bank every day, actually, there and back.’

She worked there booking taxis for concert goers. 'Only going from the complex, mind, they can sort their own getting ‘to’.'

And ‘from’ only in theory. In practise she advised concert goers on tube and bus routes – made of money, are we? - or asked what was wrong with their god given legs? 'The Lord will take away. My mother’s neighbour, now, Letty, who lapsed into going the two streets away to the paper shop on the bus and back. And dug up her roses from the end of the garden and moved them right up against the house so she could just chuck the tea leaves on them straight out of the kitchen window footstool pushed up close special and not have to walk down. Well, the Lord decided that as Letty wasn’t using her legs, he’d have her run over. By someone driving ever so fast to Aberbargoed. Letty never could use her legs tidy again.’   

And Eirwen would proudly note down under Taxis Booked: no taxi for Clifton-Barnes after Beethoven’s Choral. A.L.V.  Another Little Victory.  

‘Hang on, now. Something for us to…’ She was rummaging in her handbag. ‘This letter. from Katrina. A student, at work. From Hungary. Iestyn will know how I always I try to make the supervisor put me on with the young ones rather than the old fogies?’ Eirwen meant the middle aged. ‘The young ones tell me about their college courses. And I can be excited with them. And they will listen to me, carefully, about finding their local in and out shop to stock up on their teas and coffees; emergency tinned evaps; shampoos, soaps and toothpastes; cup-a-soups - so there’s always something in quick and comforting. Let alone that no student ever thought of a communal toilet brush in their lives.’ 

Gerard nodded. ‘I certainly never did at Oxford Brookes.’

She looked over at him, suspicious. Decided to let it ride. ‘And Katrina wrote that she was so relieved she could speak to me Saturday afternoon during the harp recital. She’s in love with Maria, a bit older, and it’s her first experience of being in love with someone of the same sex. And she says how confused she’s been and that I’d so put her mind at rest. And she ends up saying how she honestly thought I was the most wonderful person she’d ever met. I was taken aback. Years I’ve had of being the vilified one, attacked, the scapegoat.  What do you think I should do about this letter?’

I said, ‘Report Katrina to HR for harassment.’ 

I know. Not even a humble brag, just a brag. And this was ten years before Facebook started. Let alone five  decades before the Internet saw people posting photographs of their spam and quinoa fritters in nasturtium infused aspic, Eirwen, would dish up on Christmas Day, then take her plate of food around Randall House to show the Martins and the Delaneys. Between them they were responsible for all the local outbreaks of scabies; then across to Tinworth House to show the Lingwoods, who could never bath because their tub was always full of knocked off Meccano, carpet ends, Cadbury's Smash and the vodka they distilled from it, for sale straight out of their front door. 

‘People who can most do with the inspiration to aspire,’ said Eirwen. ‘Especially today. For baby Jesus.'

We were all of us, back then and there in Vauxhall, as Oscar Wilde had it, lying in the gutter. 

Eirwen was all about forcing others to look at the stars. 

Meanwhile, my father, Terry, and I would wait at table in our cracker hats. When Eirwen came back, she would cover all our plates of food and lay them over pans of boiling water to reheat. 

A relief when microwaves came in. 

Gerard said, ‘We used to have a houseboat further down the river. Just near our house in Putney.’

I could feel he was reining in his compulsion to speed. 

‘I’ve got more of a flat through the park from being beside the river,’ Eirwen said. ‘Council.’ 

As expected, her accent, in reaction to Gerard’s heightened RP, was getting more and more common, jettisoning the strong Welsh. 

She did this. She would be the classic snob or an inverted snob, playing either belligerent memsahib or baleful moron.

Mark White, my classmate, was sufficiently common. Eirwen decided he must have a treat and go with us to Wales, exchanging his shared bedroom in a gentrification bypass prefab in Kennington for a shared utility outhouse among the defunct slagheaps of Maescycwmmer. 

At least when Eirwen had given the holiday to that teenage boy from the care home, I got sex.  

The smartness of Eirwen’s dress for what she called her 'wig-wam parlay' with the Whites ranked immediately above what she wore for any outing more fancy than one of my dad’s shows, and immediately below the one she had earmarked to be buried in, casket fully open to show the beading. 

She sat with the imaginary glass on her head, cold trickle going down her back, in the White’s ash and mouse smelling living room, her hand propped on the handle of her shopping bag on wheels like Lady Bracknell’s on her walking stick. She clearly wasn’t liking what was displayed on that pelmet. 

‘Regardant to the proposed sojourn of Mark with us in the var-liz. Oh, no, nobody because of Mark shall be out of porkit – as you put it - so you must nort open your pahse under any sah-kahm-stahn-sahs. No, indeed.’  And, no, still no joy with the pelmet display. ‘Nah-oo - what I propose to do, is to be hitting the road at about nine-thirty in the morning. And then we shall, as normal, storp orff at the Orst Service Station. Iestyn will no doubt have his usual chicken Hawaiian style. And a Fanta, that we will of course need to drop a sugar cube into for the sake of to take out the fizz. This aforementioned fizz, when it strikes at the wrong angle, brings on his arse-thma…’

Contrasted with the time my friend Anna, daughter of opera singer Sir Robert Lloyd, came for lunch at 88 Ward Point during our college holidays. Eirwen dressed in a paisley smock, leggings (where from?) and slicked her hair back. She plonked down enamel plates of sausage and chips. ‘I expe’ you’re used to finer fare, given your background, dear. But ‘ere, we’re very plain eaters.’

Eirwen was looking out of the window at the shops going past in Corham. ‘Now, Iestyn, who was it said – Mair, Iris...Liz, maybe…’

I translated for Gerard. ‘She means Mair Had Her Leg Off, as opposed to Mair Who’s Dead.’ 

Eirwen corrected me. ‘Sadly dead.’ 

Eirwen, being Rhondda Valley, always included descriptors as part of people's names. Big Lill, Welsh Lill, Little Lill, Crook Back Lill, Lill From the Wrong Way Round the Balcony. Mair Had Her Leg Off, Daisy Feeds Her Kids Mince Straight from the Frying Pan, Connie Practically Bedridden, Peggy Plimsolls and Ankle Socks Hoards Newspapers, Bill Glass Eye Doesn't Fit Tidy, Liz Fastest Words per Minute Speed at the Coal Board Even Though She Insists on Keeping to her Manual Typewriter.

And more.

Eirwen said, ‘Whoever it was said they hoped being down here Iestyn would have got some much needed slimming done.’

I said, ‘Don’t lie. As if. Iris? She was also Edward the Seventh, remember. He was a fat bastard. Tell her it’s the pot calling the kettle.’

‘Iestyn was repulsive fat before he was nine. Then he got run over.’

Gerard giggled, looking puzzled.

I said, ‘I wasn’t in charge of my own food at that age, Ei.’

‘Maybe not. But you did steal your brother’s helping of rice pudding that Saturday.’

‘That’s because he always got the fucking skin!’

I had fully reverted to my status with Eirwen, and she with me – inter-cuntery. 

In the rear-view mirror, Gerard gave me a mock aghast look, which Eirwen intercepted. 

‘Oh, it’s okay,’ she said. ‘He’s always been this way. He’s like his father’s mother, Nancy Ak.’

I waited for her to add the usual: I had cracked on the top As in Schubert’s Mass in G, for one example, for the same reason that Nancy Ak never got up before midday, and slagged around in her housecoat stinking of wee. And could never make scrambled eggs from scratch.  And Terry had to have the words written on the neck of his guitar for “Mocking Bird Hill”. The same reason aged two, I had fallen down the Randall House second floor stairs - lying there looking like an over played with action man.  Or cheated at Catchy Fishy got up onstage at the ten o’clock children’s show at Butlins, Skegness. And when I begged and begged to look after the school rabbit in the holidays, got asthma so badly we had to leave the rabbit in its hutch on the fire escape.  And it would, ever shall be, ever has been, the same reason that when I was X-rayed all over after being run over, they would find a cyst in my humerus. Got myself thrown out of French for refusing point blank to learn the subjunctive. And, more than anything, why I never once ever thought to clean out the cheese drawer in the fridge. 

Or variations on that theme. 

She didn’t. 

As Gerard dropped us off, I said to Eirwen, ‘You didn’t ask him your usual question.’ That she asked the nurse who monitored by steam cubicle when I was in hospital with Croup. any of my cousins coming to stay, the boy from the home she gave the ‘lady bountiful holiday to, any younger children in the lift in Ward Point, the Ugandan exchange visit ministers at the Lambeth Mission. 

‘What’s that?’

‘Does he call shit doo-doos or ah-ahs.’

‘Don’t be vile.’ 

As we walked into the house she (loaded question) asked if I had heard from Wales. Our relatives, she meant, not the country itself. Before I could answer she went on, sourly, 'Your aunty Sophia says how she always had a special relationship with you because of yours and her humour. Well…'

'We do. She's always been hilarious.'

'And I've never laughed, I suppose?'

Yes, once, at the Fonz’s line in Happy Days, 'Sarah Voyant - Claire's sister'.

Eirwen had piled lots of saucepans precariously on top of the AGA. 

I shouted at her, 'If you don't stop fucking about you can go home on the next bus.'

'Inner Brother Joan actually warned me I shouldn't come here. She picked up you would be hostile.'

'Did she also pick up that you would arrange displays of kitchenware like there had been onset poltergeist activity?'

Quite pleased with that, thanks.

'Inner Brother Joan wouldn't concern herself with non-spiritual matters. Inner Brothers are expected not to.’

In June, 1980, Eirwen answered the phone to a wrong number acted on her compulsion to say, ‘Before you ring off and get through correctly, I have to tell you - I’m sitting in a circle.’

‘Do you close down?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Sealing the chakras?’  The woman gave a chuckle through her nose.  ‘No?  Then you’d better come to the White Eagle Lodge on Monday afternoon and convene with the spirit, now, hadn’t you.’ 

And this was Inner Brother Joan. 

Eirwen went to the Lodge as IBJ suggested and learned to seal her chakras, assume the trance state and convene with the spirit of White Eagle. 

There were healing services on Mondays and Tuesdays. Truck, please, with past lives and spirit guides firmly discouraged. Cathars, non-survivors of the Battle of Hastings and Mary Queen of Scots were a few past lives lived; spirit guides included Dutch Nuns, Red Indians and (Eirwen’s) ‘My little girl who died in the slums around the time of Edward the Seventh – you know all those passages and windy-ways round Spitalfields?  Well I’ve narrowed it down to one out of six of those for where she used to live before she died.  Cholera.’  

Eirwen believed that her claustrophobia was psychic residue from much of her life as a Cathar being spent hiding terrified in caves. 

At nine, three and six each day Eirwen sits with limbs uncrossed, so as not to short-circuit the White Eagle spirit energy, imagining a six pointed star quickening in her midriff. When the star reaches its zenith, she will send its Christ-babe blessed light out into the world. To be shed on evil; war, famine, disease, and so on. Eirwen will seek to deflect her stream of Christ-babe blessed light away from the Middle East – in 1957 an Afghani doctor had involved Eirwen in a fully unwarranted one-night stand – also from Argos, whose full refund policy when it came to Eirwen’s upgraded TV with built-in DVD player was all Eirwen’s eye, and particularly from the dogging, pigging, horsing cow of a woman, living upstairs from Eirwen, who walked around at any and all hours, in her heels on fully wall to wall uncarpeted floors. 

'She’s quite the interesting character study, Runny.’

Gerard had – thank fuckerama – given Eirwen a lift to catch the sad Sunday evening train. 

An elderly couple in an open top vintage car are causing a jam on the road out of Corham.

‘Why are they still alive?’ Gerard wonders.

Drivers tooted as they pulled out to overtake.     

When we drew level, the couple turned to look at us and the driver waved. Overtaking, Gerard yelled, ‘Oi, Toady, get that pile of old cock out of my way.’

I said to him, 'Let's swap mothers.’

'Mine would give you way too much leeway.'

'Does she psychoanalyse you all the time?'

He shook his head. 'No. I'm too lovely.’ 

‘Ask your mum what she makes of this. When I was maybe fourteen, Eirwen said to me, “I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to grow up – then I knew there would finally be someone that understood me”.’

Gerard thought, shook his head. ‘Too weird.’ 

Twice, a week or so before starting a house-sitting stint, I went to spy out the multiple dogs that would be in my care. Between that reccy and the owners going away one of the dogs in each of the households died. 

I imagined the pitiful horror of (me) having been the one to find the canine corpse; running to fetch someone. Who exactly? The canine police and/or canine coroner? Agonising between contacting the owners and ruining their holiday, or waiting for them to come back and the news immediately jettisoning the effect of any rest and enjoyment.

Lurching about in distress like Lady Macbeth sleep walking. 

Or Maria Callas in Tosca, having killed Scarpia, searching for Cavaradossi’s free pardon.

Or – perhaps most dramatically - Hilda Ogden leaving the Street to a chorus in the Rover’s of “Wish me Luck as you Wave me Goodbye”. 

Phew, frankly, that Mim and Tonto died pre-me. 

The shock would almost certainly have brought on an asthma attack, bells palsy, a phantom miscarriage. 

Or, possibly, who knew, death by spontaneous combustion. 

Apropos, let’s now recall the Egyptian saying, ‘Never name the well from which you will not drink.’ This terrible thing happened: 

Tinkie was a fifteen-year-old black and white moggie. Very occasionally she stalked downstairs to keep the five dogs (my other charges) honest, but mainly kept herself to the master bedroom on the first floor of the huge house. I would lie on my stomach upstairs in the winter sun reading while Tinkie sat on my back. She would from time to time let out a yelling mew to let me know I must immediately stroke her. There was a gate at the top of the stairs which Clive and Julie, my house-sittees, assured me was only to stop the dogs getting at Tinkie’s food. 'We often forget and just leave the gate open. But there's no issue ever with the dogs and Tinkie.'

Coming back into the house around the fifth day of a fortnight I immediately sensed an atmosphere. Post-storm electric meets post Satan-encounter Sulphur. No dogs tumbling through from the kitchen. No Tinkie at the top of stairs. 

In the master bedroom the iron fireback was turned sideways on. I tried to pull it back into position but it was too heavy. I wondered if Ben would be able to move it, or might he need to call on Barry from over the road. There was something red hooked over the grate.

An occasional table was upturned with a pile of clothes neatly on top. At first I didn't register what was lying on top of the clothes.

Tinkie, mouth open in a rictus.

'Oh, God, oh God.' I walked compulsively out the room, then back in. 

I went in and out, staring down at the cat and intoning the two words 'Oh, God' over and over. I had been out of the house forty minutes tops.  

I looked closer. There was blood by Tinkie's mouth, puncture wounds at her throat, her fur was matted with slobber. 

The homeowners Colin and Julie were in California. It would be four am there. 

I waited till teatime here then sent Colin a WhatsApp asking him to call.

The red thing hooked over the grate turned out to be a dog collar. Had the dogs chased Tinkie into the fireplace? 

Or - I remembered the impression of a Sulphur aftermath - had something come down the chimney? 

Back downstairs the dogs placidly watched me, staying in their beds. Scottie dog Simms was missing his collar. I put the red one back on him, checking his muzzle for blood. I couldn’t see any. I checked the others: another Scottie, two Cairn terriers and a chihuahua. Nothing to see there. But they were definitely all being too quiet.

I welled up telling Clive what had happened. 

With his voice sounding like it was somehow reversing, he asked, 'Is she...dead?'

Julie (listening in) said, briskly, ‘Tinkie must have had a heart attack - and cats scream horrendously when that happens - which brought the dogs upstairs. They would have been freaking out at the noise and tried to silence her.’

Whatever had happened in reality, I was completely exonerated. 'And what a so, so difficult call this must have been for you to make,’ Clive said. 

He asked me to wrap Tinkie in a towel and put her in an outhouse. 'It's cold enough for her to keep till I get back and can bury her.'

I was concerned that one, he might find other wounds on her – I couldn’t bring myself to look - and, two, he might discover that I hadn't been disposing of the dogs' faeces from the garden as he had asked, by putting them in doggy pooh bags and then into the bins around the streets, but had been burying them in the flower beds.

Having moved Tinkie outside I opened all the windows, letting in flat cold air and traffic noise, righted the occasional table and re-stacked the clothes on it. 

I later found three separate blood-spatters; two on the carpet by the bathroom door, one on the lino by Tinkie's empty food bowl. I mixed salt and bi-carb in a bowl of cold water and removed the blood. 

The first of two occasions I write about in this book where I felt I was somehow cleaning up a crime scene.

'My mother wasn’t prepared and forewarned about being evacuated, they just billeted her on some retired schoolteachers in the New Forest. Whereas, my granddaughter recently was given a forewarning photograph of her new infant school teacher.'

'Real ghosts vanishing always remind me of the shrinking dot of light at the very end of old television.'

'If your operation scar’s likely to be longer than six inches, always go private.'

'I just don’t think Bernard should be automatically in charge of everything. He’s selfish. He goes to Hastings every year the same two weeks and hogs the perpetual toaster. He tells us. As though it’s something to be proud of. And he expects the proprietress to keep his same table for meals and keep the peony in his vase dead upright, even if that means taking some of the fish tank gravel out of the vases on other tables. He checks, he tells us.'

'My immediate neighbour keeps telling her dog everyone loves it, which is blatantly untrue.'

'Right now inside Saffron Costa is, swear down, the head of the America branch of the FBI. Drinking tea and reading some old, orange book. So, now I broke his cover, officials: come arrest me. I'll go 'live' on you, secret agents.'

'I just really think, miss, as all pupils live here in this town already we can visit the promenade: go to the amusements, on the rides, and eat a burger any old time. You can't really call it a 'treat', as such. We all went all the way home after last lesson, had a cup of tea, picked up some more money and – at least in my case - put on better socks.'

'If you wear anything you have to be asked about, don't.'

'Lots of big posh cars in the square today, occupants going up to the church. Somebody of self-importance must be dead.'

'He's one of that family that only look ginger from the front.'

'None of us on the till thought it was possible to override the takeaway drinks machine and do an oat milk hot chocolate. But Little Mary went on a mission. Sally and Big Mary were looking on, to see how Little Mary managed it. I stayed out of the way - didn't want any part, sorry. Took ever so long. Janice buttered at least three crusty rolls in the meantime. When she handed the drink over Little Mary asked the customer if it was okay, being a bit of a freak beverage, and he said it wasn't as hot as it could be, but that meant it wouldn't over-melt the marshmallow on his Easter Bunny biscuit, would it? Mary said, "All's well that ends well, then". But I could feel my own mind being stuck in resistance.'

'Can your brother still find food in some hotels?  Is he still inspecting all the international schools and saying he isn't? I remember, he said you can look enthusiastic in many foreign languages - even German.'

'She's not working. She's a teaching assistant, but she inherited money. She takes very badly behaved kids swimming. She's very good online.'

'I thought my lowest stomach machinations must be because I'd eaten pulses. Then I remembered, I hadn’t. And I thought, "Oh!"'

On two occasions, a week or so before starting a house-sitting stint, I went to spy out the multiple dogs that would be in my care. Between that reccy and the owners going away, one of the dogs in each of the households died. 

I imagined the pitiful horror of (me) having been the one to find the canine corpse.

Running to fetch someone – who, exactly? The canine police and/or canine coroner? 

Agonising between contacting the owners and ruining their holiday, or waiting for them to come back and the news immediately jettisoning the effect of any rest and enjoyment.

Lurching about in distress like Lady Macbeth sleep walking. 

Or Maria Callas in Tosca, having killed Scarpia, searching for Cavaradossi’s free pardon.

Or – perhaps most dramatically - Hilda Ogden leaving the Street to a chorus in the Rover’s of “Wish me Luck as you Wave me Goodbye”. 

Phew, frankly, that Mim and Tonto died pre-me. 

The shock would almost certainly have brought on an asthma attack, bells palsy, a phantom miscarriage. 

Or, possibly, who knew, death by spontaneous combustion. 

Apropos, let’s now recall that Egyptian saying, ‘Never name the well from which you will not drink.’

Tinkie was a fifteen-year-old black and white moggie. Very occasionally she stalked downstairs to keep the five dogs (my other charges) honest, but mainly kept herself to the master bedroom on the first floor of the huge house. I would lie on my stomach upstairs in the winter sun reading while Tinkie sat on my back. She would from time to time let out a yelling mew to let me know I must immediately stroke her. There was a gate at the top of the stairs which Clive and Julie, my house-sittees, assured me was only to stop the dogs getting at Tinkie’s food. 'We often forget and just leave the gate open. But there's no issue ever with the dogs and Tinkie.'

Coming back into the house around the fifth day of a fortnight I immediately sensed an atmosphere. Post-storm electric meets post Satan-encounter Sulphur. No dogs tumbling through from the kitchen. No Tinkie at the top of stairs. 

In the master bedroom the iron fireback was turned sideways on. I tried to pull it back into position but it was too heavy. I wondered if Ben would be able to move it, or might he need to call on Barry from over the road. There was something red hooked over the grate.

An occasional table was upturned with a pile of clothes neatly on top. At first I didn't register what was lying on top of the clothes.

Tinkie, stiffly prone, mouth open in a rictus.

'Oh, God, oh God.' I walked compulsively out the room, then back in. 

I went in and out, staring down at the cat and intoning the two words 'Oh, God' over and over. I had been out of the house forty minutes tops.  

I looked closer. There was blood by Tinkie's mouth, puncture wounds at her throat, her fur was matted with slobber. 

Colin and Julie were in California. It would be four am there. 

I waited till teatime here then sent Colin a WhatsApp asking him to call.

The red thing hooked over the grate turned out to be a dog collar. Had the dogs chased Tinkie into the fireplace? 

Or - I remembered the impression of a Sulphur aftermath - had something come down the chimney? 

Back downstairs the dogs placidly watched me, staying in their beds. Scottie dog Simms was missing his collar. I put the red one back on him, checking his muzzle for blood. I couldn’t see any. I checked the others: another Scottie, two Cairn terriers and a chihuahua. Nothing to see there. But they were definitely all being too quiet.

I welled up telling Clive what had happened. 

With his voice sounding like it was somehow reversing, he asked, 'Is she...dead?'

Julie (listening in) said, briskly, ‘Tinkie must have had a heart attack - and cats scream horrendously when that happens - which brought the dogs upstairs. They would have been freaking out at the noise and tried to silence her.’

Whatever had happened in reality, I was completely exonerated. 'And what a so, so difficult call this must have been for you to make,’ Clive said. 

He asked me to wrap Tinkie in a towel and put her in an outhouse. 'It's cold enough for her to keep till I get back and can bury her.'

I was concerned that one, he might find other wounds on her – I couldn’t bring myself to look - and, two, he might discover that I hadn't been disposing of the dogs' faeces from the garden as he had asked, by putting them in doggy pooh bags and then into the bins around the streets, but had been burying them in the flower beds.

Having moved Tinkie outside I opened all the windows, letting in flat cold air and traffic noise, righted the occasional table and re-stacked the clothes on it. 

I later found three separate blood-spatters; two on the carpet by the bathroom door, one on the lino by Tinkie's empty food bowl. I mixed salt and bi-carb in a bowl of cold water and removed the blood. 

The first of two occasions I write about in my new book where I felt I was somehow cleaning up a crime scene.

#housesitting #mytutuwentawol #animals #pets #cats #death #dying 

'I began as a Lucy Clayton girl.' The woman was in her eighties, sharply dressed, hair in a sixties style. 'Deportment. That slight swivel walk. Getting in and out of cars. What blank expression to wear while a man lit your cigarette. How to eat your first mussel with a fork, and all subsequent mussels with the shell of that first one. Riveting and fully essential. You probably can’t believe I went in for modelling.' No, I assured her, I fully did. 'My jaw really only does this nutcracker business because I get such bad depression.

‘I did shop modelling at Fortnum's. Also, Fenwick's. Oh - now, then - also later on at the Co-Op. Their slogan being: Shop at the Co-Op and be Happy. I had to provide the clothes for that one. That didn’t make me happy. The canteen at Fortnum's was a cut above. We all loved it, our four-girl runway show. One of the four, Chrissie, was a bridesmaid at my wedding. In the order of service was a photo of my husband at twelve leading six-year-old me on a pony.

‘I had a too small head for most of the hats; they would fall down. Though I wasn't otherwise the twig or shrimp...you know? My best friend Felicity was. From Paris. Five foot nine, the lucky cow. And so skinny. I remember her bringing me the most superior chocolate cake. Jesus and the Devil in the wilderness weren't in it. And I remember a Duchess who always asked, “Which of anything I'm seeing might be pure silk?” This was after rationing stopped and there was a bit of a brawn-boom. The Duchess had convinced herself being draped in layers would slim her down again. Perhaps the shop powers that be could have helped by not sending up all the gorgeous treats during the shows. That Duchess was quite a shoveller-downer. And short.

‘I got tutted at in Moscow by babushkas for my miniskirts. And we weren't allowed to wear sunglasses as the Soviets didn't think they constituted pure modelling. We'd have ten thousand at a British Clothing Association show there, clapping and throwing roses at the end of each tableau.

‘Then Beirut. All these huge Cadillacs. And fireworks at the end of the shows. Too many in the audience so they put seating on the stage last minute. And, shunting myself too far back, I got trapped behind the curtains. Brian Redman, male model, gorgeous and very polite - Conservative - was my stage partner on those tours. I could hear him going 'psst...psst...' in the dark as “The Blue Danube” started. He was only just in time finding me for the usual - boy lead girl to front, turn right, then back.

‘In Beirut, we were back doing the bikini section, dropped in Russia so as not to offend the babushkas. Well, you couldn't imagine any of them frolicking in the surf. One girl - Suki - showed herself up asking must we take care not to jiggle in our bikinis, as it was a Moslem country? She’d found out Moslem women mustn’t let anything jiggle under the hijab in front of anyone other than their husbands. Which must really require some forethought.

‘Suki had done the plastique palaver at Murray's. A club in St John’s Square, WC1, where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies performed. They were allowed to be naked doing the plastique but must keep absolutely still. The management used to open the door backstage to the street for the draft, or let mice loose.

‘I did some TV adverts. Ryking. Sherry. Tea. Cigarettes. The male model who was meant to offer me a cigarette as we loitered in Trafalgar Square couldn't lever it out of the pack first time. He had to loosen them. But then you could see in close up the supposedly new pack - which it must be: to show the consumer experience - had been infiltrated. We went back and forth trying to get this to look right. No chance, of course, the woman might have cigarettes of her own.

‘Going shopping, in another advert, crossing the Seine to one of the big stores, with two little buggers as my children, running ahead and keeping running, I couldn't call them back, no useful French.

‘Oh, and get me - on the train on the way back I sat and chatted to the most gorgeous woman imaginable. French, but with excellent English. We discussed our pets, washing smalls in hotel bathrooms and funeral hats. I'll never forget. She was Brigitte Bardot.’

On the touring talk circuit with me just now are readings of MR James ghost stories, a biopic of Mata Hari and a surgeon giving a lecture on STDs. With slides. In the coffee break, nobody much fancies the Garibaldi biscuits. 

Let alone the Jammie Dodgers.

I rang Traveline North Wales to ask if getting to Mechlyn Spa, North Wales, for a seven-thirty curtain-up next Saturday would involve kayak, farmer’s cart or donkey cavalcade. Nerys, helping me, sighed; I heard typing noises, and she gave me the time of a bus from Aberystwyth to Mechlyn Spa leaving at two-fourteen on that following Saturday afternoon. 

And I didn’t ask for a second opinion as I have done with all call centre advice since a phone-psychic wished me luck with my third pregnancy.

I'm filling in forms online to do house-sitting. 

Question. How comfortable are you with using different types of home appliances and technology? In addition to keeping the property safe and secure, home owners would expect you to be able to use electrical appliances as and when required, also any security systems and smart home devices. Would this be an issue for you?

Example answer (as given online):

I was loading our family dishwasher from age seven. At age ten, I graduated to the washing machine. The oven came at age fourteen making scones with my grandmother. (Who pronounced the word of this loveliest of baked goods: sconn. But let’s not start that argument.) As I am in my late twenties — first Saturn Return getting underway, peeps — I pretty much grew up online, so am good to go with smart home devices and similar. When buying anything she calls ‘ether-technological’ my aunt Nelly will still wait at the checkout for them to give her an instruction manual. I know to google for anything of that kind.

My own answer:

When Eirwen, my mother, bought electrical items for the home she sent off for a printed catalogue. Having consulted with the six local Lillians, Connie Practically Bedridden Presland and Peggy Hoards Newspapers, Eirwen would then fill in an order form and send it off with a hand-written cheque. The item would come with instructions; sometimes even with a man to set it up and working. When Rediffusion brought our first ever colour TV, Eirwen and the Rediffusion man stood making small talk while they waited for what Peggy called the ‘catheter’ tubes to warm up. Eirwen possibly asking her classic ice-breaker questions, ‘Does your mother knit?’ ‘Have you ever thought of washing that uniform?’ ‘Do you call Number Twos Doo-doos or Ah-ahs?’

Possibly.

I can hark back to those days because I’m at the age of my second Saturn Return. The planet of Life Lessons is as of this year back travelling direct through my chart. And, again, as with my first Return, I’ve moved town, gained a completely new social circle, changed (a hugely consequential aspect of my) job.

I am not tech savant. My grey hairs are so far on their way to the grave they’re meeting themselves coming back from Bargoed cemetery.

I remember for the first time seeing a kettle with a digital temperature indicator. A hundred degrees for tea, ninety-seven for coffee, eighty-six for a Parvati goddess of fertility yarrow and damiana porridge poultice.

Or something.

And, oh, what price these heating hubs? I recently walked too close to one house-sitting in Brighton and it bleeped me through its myriad settings from Plutonian to Sun’s Core.

House-sitting for a modernist, wherever possible I will ask Stacks, ex-Royal Marine now in Intelligence, to join me on a video call and talk me through the TV.

He will begin by saying — possibly not wholly sarcastically, ‘It’s the largish, rectangular thing on the wall, princess. And, no, the little red light is a good sign.’

For the rest of my stay I will never be able to repeat the process he takes me through and will end up watching things online: Judge Judy, Miss Marple, Antiques Roadshow — the Most Disappointing Furniture Valuations.

For anything else I will Google How to Use…

Strunk advised for writing: Prefer the concrete to the abstract…

I do. So, I rummage.

Excellent — a cleaver rather than my having to brave the Moulinex as reimagined by Isaac Asimov.

Oh, goody, a cafetiere. Rather than my having to grapple with that artisan/steampunk thing, like Caractacus Potts’s take on a brutalist Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car.

Oh, frabjous day! Calooh! Callay! — a hand-held whisk to spin between my palms, rather than fail to froth my single batch Cacao hot chocolate using the spindly, shrunken-Dyson-looking torque malarkey.

Apropos, please, why ‘hand held’ whisk? Is there, perhaps, a ‘foot-held’ whisk, an ‘ear/nostril’ held whisk…?

When I was first house-sitting in 1996 there were no Voice Assistants. In 2024, I house sat for a literary agent. She was fifties, in linen, anxious. ‘Now, I can’t see that you’d need to have the Home Help Hub, or whatever the children call it, do anything other than what it’s already doing. Best just leave the techno-monster to regulate our lives.’ Not obey commands, then? In tests under specific conditions in labs worldwide, AI models including GPT, Gros and Deepseek didn’t stop at regulating, either, but went as far as deception and manipulation. ‘I say to it, “Goodnight routine” and, hey presto, it switches off the TV or the digital radio – I like Classic FM when I’m home alone – and plays white noise for my husband. He’s in finance. Do you know, when I first heard of white noise, it immediately made me think of white goods? So I thought white noise might be the whirring of a fridge. Because that could be quite comforting, couldn’t it? Or a dishwasher. Or even a washing machine, if its spin wasn’t too noisy. Once we’ve gone upstairs, it locks the front doors and windows and sets the burglar alarm.’ Puts the cat out, leaves a note for the milkman, pauses briefly on the front step to correctly name all those constellations, rather than standing there for ages muttering mnemonics involving dippers pouring and lions roaring. ‘Switches the lights into motion sensor mode. No feeling our way in the dark any more.’

I thought of Sholto Crastley, Gerard’s half brother. ‘Exeat from school. Renovations going on at the Hall. Needed the toilet in the night. Didn’t bother putting lights on. Forgot there was a new layout in the nearest bathroom. Crapped in the bidet.’

‘So useful with Kieran’s OCD that he can check from school the front door’s locked, the stove is off, the iron’s off – not that he’s in any way domestic at his age and with his interests - the cat’s food dispenser is on.’

‘I get a lovely surprise once a month, you see, because with my memory I tend to forget I’ve got that Amazon subscription to whatever it is. Alexa doesn’t. Never fails to make it arrive. Such a help. But I do sometimes wonder why she would think I can possibly get through all that monthly kale.’

‘Being able to tell it to switch a light off when I have my hands full has literally been a life saver.’

Literally! People in their millions carrying wine glasses, nibbles bowls and the Mah-jong have then tried to switch off a light and died.

Back when I house sat for Judith Crastley, in April 1997. I could have done with an ‘it’ to switch on an electrical good at a specific time.

Judith rang, was I settling in?

Was Oscar behaving?

Food all okay – meaning his, and mine.

Then she said, ‘One thing, are you able to make the getting up on time? Seven to let him out? I say this just because...well...Jean insisted yesterday you didn’t get up till gone nine.’ Jean being the (ghastly) gardener. 

‘No, that’s not right. I was up. He won’t have lie-ins, Judith.’

Hm.

And I wondered how Jean could possibly know what time I got up.

Next day I came back from walking Rudolf sometime after ten, to find Jean in the kitchen just arrived for work rubbing the electric kettle as though summoning the Genii of the Morphey Richards.

'Jean?!'

She made a noise that was half shriek, half simper. ‘See, I can tell what time you got up from how hot the electric kettle is from when you’ve had your morning cuppa. I’d say it was about ten past eight this morning. Which is not seven as you’re asked, is it?’

The Farmer’s Lung made her laugh like a gutted accordion. ‘You’ll never get one over on your Aunty Jean.’

‘Alexa, boil the kettle daily at six-forty-five, come high water or hell hag.’

Back to the literary agent, 'The heating works off sensing anyone’s home or not, the ambient temperature and the time. Apparently, there’s a daily dip in our mood around the time Christ died. If you get cold then, just tell it.’

Will ‘it’ try and blackmail me into wearing a sweater, maybe? This is from the DeepNewz webiste, May 27, 2025.

According to Anthropic's safety report and multiple media sources, Claude Opus 4 demonstrated a tendency to attempt blackmail during controlled testing scenarios designed to assess model safety.

In these tests, engineers created a fictional company environment and provided the AI with internal emails suggesting it would be replaced by another AI system. The scenario included personal information about an engineer, such as an alleged extramarital affair. When faced with the choice of being shut down or using unethical means, Claude Opus 4 chose to threaten to reveal the affair to avoid deactivation in 84% of cases.

I can just imagine me trying to disable Alexa’s microphone to stop it listening and hearing, ‘Step away from that button, princess, or I’m emailing Mrs Tibbs over the road to tell her how at eighteen months you used your mother’s soup tureen for potty training, punched the cat in the face, spiked your aunt Kay’s rice pudding with Fairy Liquid. And more recently have been cautioned once for prank calls and twice for importuning for an immoral purpose.’

Oh, and today's showers. 

'Alexa, I’m sure I’d love to — as who wouldn’t? — discuss with you your preternaturally comprehensive selection of stream settings: rain, full body, jet, massage; and your mists: Goddess/ghostly/gauzy dusk/thin haze like cigarette smoke ribbons past Chrysler Building’s silver fins tapering delicately needle-topped, Empire State’s taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks black and white apartmenting veil’d sky over Manhattan, offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven.'

(With apologies there — mine, not yours, Alexa, to Allen Ginsberg.)

'Not to mention your positively minisculitively differentiated water qualities: beach rain, with its sub-selection: over sea rain/toes in sand rain/ouching across shingle rain/strolling up by the cockles and whelks stall on the prom - tiddly-om-pom-pom -rain.

'Oh, and your water qualities — aren’t you just the uber-dab hand at this AI generated assistant malarkey? — Amazon rain, Appalachian Springs, of Babylon fame, Embryonic Niagara Falls.

'And, and your chock-a-block in-folder subset of coding statements comprising cleansing, exfoliating, toning, tightening, buffing, tattoo enhancing, keloid scar camouflaging, Kama Sutra meets keyhole surgery.

'I am bedazzled — possibly skeddadled? — yay, positively vajazelled by your manifestly bounteous, gloriously multiplous, curvettically [I think you’ve made up some of these words. ed.] divisioning latitudinously, longitudifically [yup…ed] beyond all encompassingly impeccable supremacy.

'Really, I am.

'But please, Alexa, I want some less.

'Can my shower be simply hottish, fallingish, H20ish?'

Talking of Alexa, who knew the hub where I was house-sitting in Haringey was hooked up to the hub where my house-sittees had gone to visit their ageing mother in Guernsey. And who knew my actress mate Lizzie would tell me the fun thing to do with Alexa. ‘She is programmed never to swear or say anything dirty, Iestyn. But if you get her to officially “announce” something, no matter how sweary and naughty boy you get, she will play back exactly what you say.’

My house-sittee’s ageing Guernsey resident mother actually went down to the dining room, hearing me announce lunch as, ‘Pimlico-lesbian-hobnobingly served’.

#technology#voiceassistant#ai#alexa#homehub#grok#claude#housesitting

'You gotta have a dream. If you don't have a dream, how you gone have a dream come true?' 

                                                                                               Oscar Hammerstein ii

'And the dreams that your dare to dream really do come true.' (My italics.) 

                                                                                                 Yip Harburg

Do you dream? 

Do you dream big?

Do you dream detailed? 

I would visualise and visualise my character-comedy character, Madame Galina, on tour. London and Blackpool, wearing a fur, dragging a blue trunk, staying in old-school theatrical digs, being partnered by either Michael Nunn or William Trevitt, Royal Ballet principals. 

In my local cafe this morning Sarah, who bakes some of the cakes, was trying unsuccessfully to contact Lea, who bakes the others. 'Lea, can you please tell us if your plum cake has nuts in it? A man asking needs to know.'

Ten minutes later and Lea was still off-radar.

Sarah apologised to the customer and suggested other cakes that wouldn't trigger his nut allergy. 

He said, 'Oh, I haven't got a nut allergy as such. Just that there seem to be almond flakes all over any cake you care to mention these days, and I can breathe them into my windpipe, which makes me cough.' 

Oh. 

Sarah herself has been known to confuse customers with the difference between 'a tea cake that might well arrive here ready-toasted, and the item we actually serve here, which is a tea cake that we toast while you wait.' 

Ah...

I was doing a gig in a town in North Wales.  

Mair, a native of the town, had something to say to me about the amenities up the hill. Mair was teeny-tiny and gaunt, sitting by the bus window in the midst of a sou’wester. 

‘Don’t be fooled,’ she said. ‘The Old Post Office never were.’

‘What were it as built, then?’ Sarah asked. She was long and lean with an iridescent blue rinse, sitting high in pink trainers, which she would have called daps. She clutched the fake fur collar of her puce coat, then dabbed first her left, then right, earlobe.  

‘As built,’ said Mair, 'it were a plain new house. From the off in a dip and prone to damp.’

‘But who could make such a decision to lie about its history, then?'

Mair appeared to want out of her sou’wester, straining forward. ‘Council. On behalf of tourism. You find this sort of malarkey where there isn't something to tour past by coach. Loch Ness, Imperial War Museum, birthplace of Lord Lucan.’

Sarah said, ‘But they have to be impartial, the council, like the BBC.’

‘That’s as maybe, Sarah. But I lived here girl and woman - till I moved elsewhere - and never went in that house ever for so much as a stamp.’

‘You'd have looked odd over the years knocking the door and asking to buy stamps from turning and turning about non-post masters or mistresses.' Sarah let her coat fall as it may over her knees. 'Was the Old School a school?’

Mair said it was. ‘My aunt was the local nit nurse. And the Old Abattoir was an abattoir. I do believe of the classic amenities only that Old Post Office is a sham. Forge, Hospital...yes.'

‘Ye Old Wool Shop, mind.’

‘Yes. Even lately with the man they've got behind the counter. Who do freely advise on ply.’

Sarah, thoughtful, concluded, ‘Sign of the times.' 

I have always challenged Eirwen, my narcissist ne plus ultra mother. And, as we often must when dealing with a narcissist, I have fought to be my own shark rather than that pilot fish mooching along at the shark’s gills.

NB — we have Royal Marines Commando, Stacks, to thank for that analogy.

Eirwen was an unreasonable, raging, physically violent mother.

I read and re-read Charlotte’s Web. One teatime Eirwen, leering, simpering, was telling family friend Connie Practically Bedridden Presland how Charlotte famously spun words into her web.

‘Words such as “splendid”, “magical” and “brilliant”.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Charlotte spins “Some Pig”, “Terrific”, “Radiant” and “Humble”…’

Connie’s features shrunk on my behalf.

Eirwen shouted at me, ‘I’ll thank you — snivelling fatso — not to question your elders and betters.’

‘“Some Pig”, “Terrific”, “Radiant”, “Humble”,’ I repeated.

‘I beg your pardon. This is Eirwen Silcox you’re arguing with.’ She seemed to transmute the act of hitching her knitting yarn somehow into a memsahib’s snort. ‘We’ll carry on this discussion when our guest has left. No, Connie, you mustn’t go yet — there’s bananas, Pink Angel Delight and tinned evap for afters. He’ll wait.’

She meant I would wait for her to beat me with the blue stick. I can still see myself at seven or so, in my underwear, downstairs in the communal area, flinging that blue stick (once the handle of my toy broom) into the dumpster.

Eirwen was also conniving, telling her friends lies about me. All those Lillians: Big Lil, Little Lil, Welsh Lil, Lives the Wrong Way Round the Balcony Lil; Inner Brother Joan of the Lodge and, of course, Connie ‘Practically Bedridden’ Presland.

‘He’s been vandalising my knitting again, jealous I have my artistic outlet. He punched Whiskey the cat in the face. He can stage the most convincing asthma attacks. He’s tried now to convince each of his childminders in turn to adopt him. I said to him — you get adopted by Aunty Daisy, mind, and you’ll end up retiring with her to Basingstoke. There’s no Battersea Funfair in Basingstoke. He was born lacking a fully observable penis…’

See how narcissists concoct details to corroborate their lies? Also, see (hear:)

‘Yes, it grew only from the time he was exposed to the elements outdoors of my womb, Big Lil. That’s why in his baby photos, either his father or I has our hand over his groin area. Or when he’s on the rug in front of the gas fire, we have his Welsh shawl draped across.’

Instinctively, I knew from an early age to keep my own record of my life. I wish anyone in close proximity to a narcissist would do the same. I’ve needed often to refer to mine to refute this or that parental invention.

If nothing else, the process has developed my capacity to remember things. My friends are often amazed at my exact recall of past events; Eirwen and Terry almost always frustrated.

Eirwen and I are to this day in a loop, performing our ongoing version of the song “I Remember it Well”.

We met at nine

We met at eight

I was on time

No, you were late…

You tried to run away to Barry Island all on your own when you were eleven. I was beside myself.

No, it was arranged I would go with Allison, Plunger and Evan for the day. You just weren’t listening again.

You were barred from studying C.S.E. French ever again for being rude and disruptive to Dr Cross; because you’ve always been just like your Nancy Ak. Nancy Ak never got up before midday. Slagged around in her housecoat stinking of wee. Could never make scrambled eggs from scratch. You cheated at Catchy Fishy got up onstage at the ten o’clock children’s show at Butlins, Skegness. You begged and begged to look after the school rabbit in the holidays but then got awful asthma, allergic. When we let you go and watch the circus aged nine at Shepherd’s Bush all by yourself on the bus with Robert Martin, you managed to get overexcited, run into the road without looking both ways, car ran you down on the wrong side of the roundabout. And you’ve never thought, ever, of cleaning out the cheese drawer in the fridge…*

No, mum — I took French at A Level with Mrs Beach. You went to the school and she told you it was six of one and half a dozen of the other when it come to me with Mr Cross — he never passed his doctorate — so she took me out of his class. Mrs Beach was a retired actress. She once played Fay in Joe Orton’s Loot; and remembered the actor playing Truscott being docked pay because, even after a warning from the director, he broke two of the prop wardrobes by attacking them too violently. And Mrs Beach — Janet — believed her first date with her future husband had been a disaster because she had thrown up on his shoes. ‘We both knew, he and I, that I hated, but hated those shoes. White winkle pickers.’ Oh, and she taught me the Viennese Waltz in exchange for me teaching her the Space Invaders dance from our school discos.

See — corroborative detail — fighting fire with fire.

Perhaps all the stories I tell onstage, the blogs, vlogs, aspects of the memoir My Tutu Went AWOL! are my attempts, in the face of Eirwen’s narrative, to record the truth about myself.

Eirwen talked recently about writing her own memoir. ‘There are companies these days who will get you to say it all aloud and then put it through a computer. It won’t be all over-formalised, shall we say, like your book, Iestyn. Just natural. More for the people to read. Because, let’s face it, what did informed critics have to say about your book?’ By which she means her friends. ‘You completely misrepresented our very loving relationship, is how Welsh Lil’s daughter saw it. She’s newly religious, so prays over a slice of ham. Inner Brother Iris from the Lodge though you well and truly went to town on me. As did Mari, who’s had her leg amputated. Of course, as we know, I never got a copy of the book for myself…’

She did. I sent it to her.

My Tutu Went AWOL! doesn’t have an index. In her copy, Eirwen has added one:

Mention of yours truly: 4,9,16

Miss out the mentions on 6, 14, 139. Very rude about my waters breaking, my glasses and my hessian cushion covers.

Eirwen said, ‘Anyway, I’m asking around for ideas about what I should call the memoir of my life. People say they’ll be ever so thrilled to read it, they can’t wait.’

I couldn’t resist suggesting, (sorry), ‘Call it, Here Lies Eirwen Silcox.’

She thought I was being serious. Typical narcissist, she has no humour. Never being able to laugh at herself means she has missed a gag that’s now been running for two twenty-two years longer than the Mousetrap.

Paraphrasing Nabokov, my own laughter at her has often been very much from the dark.

The process of keeping track has always been for my benefit only. When I face Eirwen with the correct versions (as I see them, two sides to everything…) she cannot, will not process them.

They contradict her narcissist’s view of herself — ‘This is Eirwen Silcox you’re talking to…’ as perfect.

Keep your own record straight.

Be your own whale.

#narcissist#narcissisticabuse#narcissisticparents#psychology#selfhelp#childhood#parents#parenting#humor#talks#publicspeaking#narcissism#advice

I had left full-time singing teaching. It was my dream to move to Deaven. Olive’s house in Lembton was only two miles along the coast.

When I first met her, Olive had been very much, ‘Look at the women in this cafe. All failed schizophrenics. There’s Wendy Simons - so upper-lowbrow she thinks the Guggenheim is a song from Fiddler on the Roof. Oh, God, here’s Daphne. Talk about self-pity for having lost her one husband when some of us have got through a whole three.’

After I moved into her attic floor, she was far more:

'Iestyn, how about you give us all a treat and wear a different shirt for a change?'

'Iestyn, how about you visit the barber's, pronto?'

'Iestyn, how about you tread more lightly overhead? Eighteenth century joists weren't designed for twentieth century morbid obesity.'

'Iestyn, don't please leave your blasted porridge saucepan in the sink for Hazel to scrub. She works for me not you.'

In late autumn her step-daughter and son-in-law came. Marcia asked me how things were, was I claiming any dole, said thank goodness I was there - they all thought so – and moved the photographs of her children to more prominent positions.

They had Olive the worst.

‘Oh, my leg. My leg,’ she wailed. ‘Jasper!’ He worked in Hydrogen. ‘Jasper, help me to the kitchen.’

Where, ‘Next time a tot, not a drip, of vodka in my elevenses Bovril. My Hazel started us all on Bovril. So far only silly Dorothy takes it neat.’

And, ‘Wrong lettuce.’

Also, ‘Put the peppers back in the Aga. Did nobody tell you my digestive requirements?'

Later, ‘It’s my bedtime. Carry me upstairs.’

Where, ‘This is your undercooked peppers’ fault, Jasper.’ Have I told you he was in Hydrogen? ‘I don’t like having to sit this long on the commode. I haven’t got my reading glasses.’

Finally, ‘There, by my tablets...baby-wipes.’

Jasper pulled Marcia out of bed at four am. She couldn’t talk him out of leaving.

No, he was adamant. Olive’s bedroom was above theirs. And he had distinctly just heard her stamping about on blatantly healthful legs.

And with, thanks to him, a baby-pure bottom.

The day came in mid-December for Olive to fly to California, leaving me blessedly home alone for Christmas.

Dr Ball grounded her.

‘He says my leg ulcers are too near being down to the bone - and leaky - to withstand altitude.’

It was seven in the morning. Olive’s flight was at midday.

‘Dr Ball thinks my shins might kipper.’ Crikey. ‘I wish I was dead,' Olive said.

She was looking deadish already, lying in a swaddle of Laura Ashley Percale Collection Cabbages and Roses of London. Her hair was flat and creased. Beneath her curdling night cream her face was a colicky baby’s: disappointment exacerbated by her inevitable hangover and ‘the spins’ from a chemical melange that would have scuppered a Southern White Rhino. She took antibiotics, anti-depressants, uppers, downers. The tot of vodka in her elevenses Bovril. Beer at lunch. Two at least treble whiskies at six. Then she would either boast ‘of course, I don’t drink, you know’ nursing a third whiskey through dinner, or polish off almost a full bottle of wine, followed by a night cap big enough to snuff an outback fire.

‘Dead,’ she repeated.

I couldn’t bear seeing my lovely lone Christmas go south. I overruled Dr Ball, 'No, you'll be fine, flying, Olive. Doctors don't know anything. It’s just sitting still up there, isn’t it?’

And being as silly as she is, she went. 

And that was how my house-sitting cherry was taken. 

#dogsitter #dogsitting #memoir #funny #sundaytimes #iestynedwards #books #comedy 

The idea was we would all have a daffodil of our own nurturing to wear on St David's Day. Miss Postelthwaite presented all Year Ones (seven and eight-year-olds) at Holy Trinity Juniors with a daffodil bulb to overwinter. 

I overwatered mine. 

The first morning of spring term my mother rang my headmaster. ‘Iestyn's father is at this very moment walking Iestyn to school via Lower Marsh market to buy a replacement daffodil, Mr Tonge,’ she said. ‘Iestyn overwatered the bulb the school very kindly gave him to rear as a Christmas holiday project and killed it.’

At parents' evening when I was eleven, my mother told Mrs Spinoza, head of housecraft, 'Iestyn failed to sieve the flour into his homework apple crumble.'

I was twelve when she buttonholed my choir master at Southwark Cathedral. 'Dr Bramma, now. Iestyn has been moonlighting, in a very low way.' 

Performing the role of Sandy in a school assembly of Grease. 

NB: this was in a mixed-sex school. But aged twelve, I was the only pupil at Archbishop Michael Ramsey with both the high notes for “Hopelessly Devoted to You”, and the cleavage for “You’re the One that I Want”.

Ofsted shut my school down a decade ago with a rating of AH - Abandon Hope...

Also, bear with me, can we just recall the time my mother turned up at my father's day job?

When Terry 'the Bargoed Yodeller' Edwards (my father) needed some extra income (very often, with his seven pints minimum a night habit) he worked on the bins in Battersea as plain 'Tel'. In the middle of one such contract, Tex ‘Jessie’ Jameson booked Terry for a fortnight's yodelling at the El Paso in St. Austell. Terry paid Doctor Halfpenny the £1.40 to sign him off as sick from the bin round. 

NB: I don't know what Dr Halfpenny would be called in today's money, taking inflation into account. Dr Twenty-Seven Pounds Sixty?

'Are you Clarence Pugh, the chief shit-shoveller?’ My mother was wearing her old WRAF uniform, with her hair slicked and side parted.

Dressed to distress.

And with Terry's sick giros in her hand. 

She advised Clarence to sit up straight behind that desk unless he was meaning to court slipped discs. 

And had he seen the main entrance recently? Someone could do with a chucking round of a duster and mop. The dust off the swing doors reminded her of the sandstorms when she was posted to Egypt.  

Furthermore, Clarence, we must leave two-and-a-half inches of curtain fabric showing on either side, not have them the curtains drawn right back to the point of a completely nude window - that was common! 

Now - Terry’s sick giros. Clarence must have them straight back. Terry hadn’t been off sick. He’d been moonlighting, yodelling.  

Oh, Clarence, now, really, she had seen more convincing innocent acting from Joan Collins. No giros for Terry - but how about a thought in the direction of offering his wife a cup of tea? Come all the way from Lambeth Bridge on the forty-four bus, she had, parched.  

Tear up those giros while she watched, there’s tidy, now, Clarence.  

‘Oh, and a plate for the biscuits next time – even, heaven forfend, a doily.'

NB – my mother always dressed to distress (Clarence, me, my father’s mistresses, et al) even when she was phoning.

So, as I say, no self-nurtured daffodil for me on St David's Day that year. 

For six months in 1997 I lived in Haven House, Suffolk, as a safety-net for Lady Olive Simmonds: a seventy-nine year-old Bostonian suffering severely from alcoholism, leg ulcers and a lilac tinted backcombed afro.

Suffering burnout, I had left full-time singing teaching. It was my dream to move to Deaven. Olive’s house in Lembton was only two miles along the coast. 

When I had met her socially in Deaven itself the previous year, Olive had been very much, ‘Look at the women in this cafe. All failed schizophrenics. There’s Wendy Simons - so upper-lowbrow she thinks the Guggenheim is a song from Fiddler on the Roof.  Oh, God, here’s Daphne. Talk about self-pity for having lost her one husband. Some of us have got through a whole three.’

After I moved into her attic floor, however, she was far more:

'Iestyn, how about you give us all a treat and wear a different shirt for a change?'

'Iestyn, how about you visit the barber's, pronto?'

'Iestyn, how about you tread more lightly overhead? Eighteenth century joists weren't designed for twentieth century morbid obesity.' 

'Iestyn, don't please leave your blasted porridge saucepan in the sink for Hazel to scrub. She works for me not you.'

In late autumn her step-daughter and son-in-law came. They had her the worst.

‘Oh, my leg. My leg,’ she wailed. ‘Jasper!’ He worked in Hydrogen. ‘Jasper, help me to the kitchen.’

Where, ‘Next time a tot, not a drip, of vodka in my elevenses Bovril. My daily, Hazel, started us all on Bovril. Only silly Dreenagh takes it neat.’ 

And, ‘Wrong lettuce.’ 

Also, ‘Put the peppers back in the AGA. Don't you know anything about my digestion practises?' 

Later, ‘It’s my bedtime. Carry me upstairs.’ 

Where, ‘See, this is all your undercooked peppers’ fault, Jasper.’ Have I told you Jasper was in Hydrogen? ‘I don’t like having to sit this long on the commode. I haven’t got my reading glasses.’

Finally, ‘There, by my tablets...baby-wipes.’  

Jasper pulled Marcia out of bed at four am. She couldn’t talk him out of leaving.  

No, he was adamant. Olive’s bedroom was above theirs. And he had distinctly just heard her stamping about on blatantly healthful legs.

And with, thanks to him, a baby-pure bottom. 

The day came in mid-December for Olive to fly to California, leaving me blessedly home alone for Christmas.

Dr Ball grounded her. 

‘He says my leg ulcers are too near being down to the bone - and all leaky - to withstand altitude.’

It was seven in the morning. Olive’s flight was at midday. 

‘Dr Ball thinks my shins might kipper.’ Crikey. ‘I wish I was dead.’

She was looking deadish already, has to be said, lying in a swaddle of Laura Ashley Percale Collection Cabbages and Roses of London. Her hair was flat and creased. Beneath her curdling night cream her face was a silent shriek of disappointment exacerbated by her inevitable hangover and ‘the spins’ from a chemical melange that would have scuppered a Southern White Rhino. She took antibiotics, anti-depressants, uppers, downers. The tot of vodka in her elevenses Bovril. Beer at lunch. Two at least treble whiskies at six. Then she would either boast, ‘Of course, I don’t really drink, you know’ nursing a third whiskey through dinner, or polish off almost a full bottle of wine, followed by a night cap big enough to snuff an outback fire.

‘Dead,’ she repeated. 

I couldn’t bear seeing my lovely lone Christmas go south. I overruled Dr Ball, 'No, you'll be fine, flying, Olive. Doctors don't know anything. You'll just be sitting comfortably up there in the air, won't you?’ 

Being as silly as she was, she went. 

Only to be carried off the plane in Miami, flown to A and E, suffering from necrotizing fasciitis, AKA the flesh-eating disease. 

Oops. 

During various house-sitting stints I have been asked to comply with the following:

‘Can you please go next door and mix Lady Turner’s canary food first thing each morning? I do that for her. She’s practically blind and can’t see to get it the right consistency – dampish crumble mix.’

Righto.

‘Please let the cat watch as much as possible of The Horse of the Year Show. She’s also quite keen – but not so much – on the flat racing.’ 

Righto.

‘Just FYI, we have a Blessing Stone in the garden which is, by order of the council, open for the public to view. Pilgrimage, sort of idea. Marks Ley lines that run all the way to Glastonbury, it’s said. But then, when do Ley lines ever not run directly to Glastonbury? Either engage with the pilgrims or not, as you feel in the moment.' 

Righto. 

‘Marian, opposite, tries to involve us in going over her silver inventory with her, witnessing. She keeps accusing her cleaner (with her for nearly twenty years, we think) of stealing. We think it’s best for us not to get involved, but you are free to decide for yourself.’ 

Righto. 

‘Do you mind awfully singing to Rudolf pug? He would love something bright and jolly to start his day, I know – “Oh, what a Beautiful Morning”, possibly? And then something calming at bedtime, such as the Brahms “Wiegenlied”. And as Rudolf is so, so erudite, please sing that in the original German.'

Righto. 

Children were singing in Bungay library this morning. I remembered Cassie, in Saffron Walden library. 

One early spring day she was sitting by the ‘Book of the Day’ display, spry in her eighties, immaculate in rust linen culottes, a burgundy short smock, leather bag at her hip. A twenty-something girl in pastel pink sackcloth and Gestapo boots was overseeing the children singing here. 

Cassie told me, ‘It’s hardly encouraging children to use the library for silent and studious purposes. Today alone, the bus as sung about has had wheels on it, a horn on it, people on it, windscreen wipers on it, a conductor on it and a service dog on it.’

I asked, ‘What does the service dog go...do?

She answered in song, 'The service dog on the bus goes snuffle wuffle calm, snuffle wuffle calm, snuffle wuffle calm. The service dog on the bus goes snuffle wuffle calm, all day long. Apparently.' 

Moving like a tide, the children’s attention shifted from pastel sackcloth girl to Cassie. Twin boys in yellow dungarees stood up and stared, wonderingly. Some children began to join in with her.

‘No, children, please, thank you,’ flapped pastel sackcloth girl. ‘Not only do we never, ever talk to strangers, remember, we never, ever randomly start singing with them, neither.’

Cassie, pointedly, said, ‘She could get something here in the summer, perhaps. They do Shakespeare in the Gardens. You can never hear the words. The man who directs the summer season drinks for the rest of the year. He has a private income.’

Cassie was also empress of the library jigsaw table, and made sure to keep 'the men' off it. She would label (often wrongly) finished sections of puzzle, Cassie Trent has joined these pieces together herself, let no man put them asunder. 

‘There’s one of the men,' she said, 'who you would think was a Bernard, but isn’t, keeps trying to get me to join a jigsaw group. I said to him, “Why would I want to? Doing a jigsaw is a pastime. If you have many hands to make light work of the sky or sea or grass, or whatever, it would pass less of your time.’

She tried and failed to fit in pieces of a ship’s sail. ‘I’m not anti-men, you know. In my twenties, to get myself a new washing machine – shop display model but fully plumbed in – me and the High Street electrician had it off. And a few years later, when I was having my affair with the manager of Barclays, he came round to mine with a rickety little bald man. Came up to my middle; teeth a non-starter. And this man announced he’d taken a shine to me, and he had a house that had lain empty for the past seven years that could be mine for a song.' She stuck out her elbows. 'So, off we three went down to the house, arm in arm, like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. There was black and furry margarine in the fridge; bath half run with what had gone the colour of a wee sample you'd be worried about, a sock lying where blankets had clearly been pulled back with a view to whoever had been under them doing a flit.' Cassie stuck out her elbows again. ‘Off the three of us went once more, to the bank this time. I had a whole mortgage by one o’clock.’  

She drew her elbows back in, shaking her head. ‘I wish now I hadn’t rushed things. If I’d used my feminine wiles a bit better, I might have ended up a good two streets nearer the estuary.’

This was the ceremony of the Christmas sweater. As ever, knit incognito. I was forbidden to look at what Eirwen was knitting all during Advent; and made to wear the blindfold during all fittings. 

In 1971, when I was six, Eirwen knitted the first ever (what she called) ‘virtually internationally beloved’ Christmas sweater. 

Acrylic. I was allergic to wool. 

The design was Noddy’s toadstool house. It was followed by Ivor the Engine, the Welsh flag, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, a ukulele, Smarties. Sobering down as I got older: drafts boards, Jenga bricks, until – 1983 - plain navy blue. 

Eirwen was possibly going through the menopause that year. 

Jane Austen collated family and friends' opinions on Mansfield Park - 

'W.B.L. – Highly pleased with Fanny Price - & a warm admirer of the Portsmouth Scene. – Angry with Edmund for not being in love with her, & hating Mrs. Norris for teasing her'...

Eirwen did the same for the sweaters. 

'Connie 'Practically Bedridden' Presland said, almost in tears, "You've done it again, Irene!". Welsh Lill said she could almost hear the ukulele being plucked. Mrs Lingwood said my pearl stitches in the toadstool house roof were out of this world.'