Monday 13th February

While the thaw seems to have set in today, and they say we are in for some warmer weather, yesterday morning was still very cold.  I was up quite early and went for a walk and found everything was covered with a thin skein of ice.  It was really deceptive, what looked like slightly damp pavements were actually incredibly thin sheets of very clear and smooth ice.  Even in my rubber-soled walking shoes I was slipping all over the place.  Extremely treacherous, especially as the pavements were at last clear of the last remaining scraps of snow, you couldn’t see a thing, but you certainly felt it.  It must have been that the thin dew as it settled had turned to layers of deadly thin ice, that had no traction at all, made worse by the habit of our local council, who, in an effort to modernise our pavements have re-placed the old concrete slabs with a series of herring-bone patterned bricks, which are shiny anyway, so the ice here has become even deadlier.  Even the tarmac paths in the park seemed to wear a thin sheen of ice.  I soon gave up and came back home, I went out later and the ice had mostly evaporated with the warmth of the day.

And I realised that my life is much the same, deceptively safe from a distance, warm and dry, but lurking not far away is the danger zone.  And no matter how I think I am treading in safe dry well tried and trusted pathways, suddenly my feet skid, I lose my balance and nearly come a cropper.

And even my heart, my true and trusty heart that appears so warm and welcoming has before I have even realised, become a victim of the cold spell I am seemingly travelling through.  Though I am trying very hard to be open and giving, even the mirror does not lie; over everything there lies a thin skein of ice.

Sunday 12th February

Well, at last much of the furore about Fabio Capello has died down, and maybe a little time for some quiet reflection.  And what does a woman, and especially a woman like Catherine, know about football.  Not a great deal I would agree, but then what does anybody really know.  All I do know is that there is far too much money in the game, and that is one of the reasons that it creates such headlines, and also why at times it seems that the world has gone just a little bit mad.  I really do not know if Fabio Capello was a good manager or not; his record is a bit mixed; yes, he did get us to two Tournament Finals, mind you we normally do get there anyway, but the performance in South Africa was distinctly under par, even by our abysmal standards.  Who knows he may, had he stayed, have taken us on to win the European Championships, but it seems that anyone who by their own admission will be leaving after that, doesn’t have the same will to succeed as someone who will have to prove their ability to perform in the job however that particular campaign goes.  There was also always the language problem; whether Mr. Capello got his messages across succinctly to the players I do not know, but in any interviews he was clumsy and inarticulate and almost comical.  My biggest gripe though, is why anyone should be paid the ludicrous sum of six million pounds a year to be manager of England; they only play a handful of games a year after all; how hard can it be.  And it isn’t as if he does it all single handed, he has a huge team behind him, one actually wonders how he manages to fill in his week.  Even Managing Directors of large companies are seldom paid this sort of sum, bonuses or no bonuses.  Whoever the FA eventually pick, and can you imagine them not offering it to ‘Arry now, they should change the salary to reward success and make the manager work for the money.  The three most important abilities of the successful candidate should be, to be able to get the best out of every player, getting the players to work as a team, and being a bulwark between our voracious press and their expectations in order to just let the players play.  It really doesn’t matter what they know about football, because there will always be sixty million people watching who are sure they know better anyway.  Good Luck Harry, you’re gonna need it.

Saturday 11th February

You shouldn’t always wish for things so hard, or so it seems to me.  I had been the first to bemoan there not being a real winter just a few weeks ago.  There I was, so confidently predicting that we would escape completely the ravages of Winter, we had had such a warm November and mild December, and January had crept in and out again with hardly a murmur that I had almost forgotten about February, often the most vicious of months.  Well I have truly had my comeuppance, as Grandma would say; Winter has us in its grip. But in fact we are having an easy time of it; most of Europe is having a harder time of it than we are.  There are reports of people freezing to death in Hungary and the Ukraine, and in the Czech Republic they have temperatures of nearly minus 40.  And we begin to ask ourselves if Global Warming has anything to do with it, three cold winters in a row may not be a record, but it might be a sign that the climate is subtly changing.  Along with the ever warmer summers we seem to hear reported each Autumn we are getting much colder snaps in the Winter.  Climate change has been knocked off the agenda of late, but possibly it is the greatest problem mankind has ever faced.  There are those doom-sayers who even predict that we are rapidly approaching a tipping point, where no matter how much we reduce our carbon emissions we have had it, the earth will simply not be able to cope, and will enter some sort of drastic end- phase.  Trouble is they cannot quite make up their minds whether we are going to boil or freeze to death.  I suspect that the truth is that we will blindly carry on with gradually increasing weather problems until someone comes up with a replacement for oil and gas that really works, and that slowly we will pull back from the brink.  I heard a brilliant quote on Newsnight recently by a believer in new technology who predicted that the age of oil was almost over.  When Jeremy Paxman asked what would incentivise people to give up oil and move to a new energy source when there was still so much oil about.  The man whose name escapes me, said, “Listen, the stone age did not end because of a shortage of stone.”  Meaning that it ended because a better technology, metal, came along

Friday 10th February

The other day I was on a tube train, minding my own business, when a fairly smart man happened to sit next to me.  He placed his briefcase on his lap, clicked open the two brass clasps, and opened it.  I couldn’t help but notice that inside everything was so neat and tidy, pens all filed in a row, laptop neatly folded in its little protective grey folder, his kindle in a smart black leather case to one side and a notepad to the other, and there were a few papers all neatly clipped with those little plastic coloured paperclips that are so common nowadays.  It was all as one would expect really, no surprises, everything neatly arranged, compartmentalised, a place for everything and everything in its place.  He checked a couple of papers, glanced at the large dial gold watch on his wrist, then took out his kindle, and gently shut his case, and relaxed.  By complete co-incidence just opposite me, a young woman dashed onto the train and slumped down in her seat.  She had a smart and large and probably very expensive Mulberry handbag, almost the size of a large carrier bag which she set down on the seat next to her.  Rummaging furiously she took out one thing after another, but rather than set them down beside her she tossed them back in the bag as rejects, in and out came her unprotected and scratched laptop, her case-less kindle, her credit card folder, her oystercard, her bulging purse, an umbrella, a bunch of keys, then she found what she was looking for her make-up bag.  Without any apparent embarrassment she flipped open the compact mirror, and proceeded to apply foundation, eye shadow, lip gloss, eye-liner, and a dusting of powder. Absolutely oblivious to any looks she might be receiving she performed this private ritual right out in full view of the whole carriage.  She then tossed the make-up bag into the large Mulberry handbag, then as if suddenly remembering something started rummaging again, this time for her mobile phone.

I am not saying that men are always organised and smart, or that women are all ditsy, and lack the most basic ideas of decorum, at all.  But men do seem to be able to compartmentalise their lives far better than we women seem able to.  Maybe we are busier, or are expected to be so many things nowadays to be successful, and of course men do not wear make-up.  But if they did I am fairly certain that they would plan to get up that half hour earlier to accomplish the task, and certainly wouldn’t dream of putting it on in a tube carriage.

No conclusions of course can really be drawn from this; it was after all, just one man and one woman.  But next time you are on a tube train, just look around, do a bit of people watching and see if you can spot the difference between a man and a woman.

Thursday 9th February

On the surface this is so simple; oppressed people are rising up against repressive regimes, demanding freedom and democracy, the very values the West purports to uphold.  And this may have been true in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, where there does appear to have been a groundswell of almost spontaneous protest.  However we hear little now of the troubles in Bahrain, where the protestors were put down with such violence,  lent a hand by the might of Saudi Arabia. And even in Egypt one could see the hand of The Muslim Brotherhood strongly behind things.  These two “Successful” revolutions appear to have taken the West by surprise, and in a way we have lost two faithful Arab allies, to a possibility of chaos, and in Egypt’s case maybe a retrenchment into a more fundamental politics.  Yemen seems to have descended into its own brand of chaos, nobody seems to care what happens there anymore.  Libya was always a bit more suspicious if you ask me, the West were just a bit too quick off the mark to intervene and I am almost certain that we were covertly involved for some time; in any case the outlook now looks increasingly uncertain, as tribal politics takes over.  Syria is another case in point, on the surface, no argument, an evil dictator is massacring his own people, but maybe here the picture is actually a bit more muddled.  The country is rapidly descending into civil war, and one has to wonder just where the protestors are getting their weapons from.

But of course the big one has yet to blow; our strongest ally and friend Saudi Arabia is containing not only any protest but any reporting of unrest at all.  Why is it that though we in the West claim to support Democracy so much, we do nothing to persuade the rich and powerful Saudi’s or many of the other rich Gulf states to give their people freedom, and yet we almost totally ignore the only real democratic Arab state, Palestine, even doing all we can to appease the Isrealis in their shilly-shallying over any real negotiations.

And one only has to look at a map, and one can see that Iran may still be the ultimate target of all our machinations.  So wring your hands you politicians for the cameras, but look to the blood that is on them first.

Wednesday 8th February

I don’t often travel on the tube, or even the buses early in the morning, long gone is that daily trudge to work, but today I had to be in town for a meeting quite early. And I was just amazed at how downcast everyone looked, I know that it was a Tuesday and a long way from the weekend, but surely they couldn’t all hate their jobs so much; not a happy face amongst them. I suppose I am used to the mid-morning shoppers and tourists, families out for a day’s visit to the capital, not the nine o’clock brigade.  But even mid-morning lately I have noticed how glum people are looking.  Is it just the economic situation, or the cold snap of a late winter we are having, or a strange combination of the two.  Or is it something deeper going on in society, some malaise that has affected us all.  The secret knowledge that this is as good as it gets, or actually a few years ago was the best it would ever get, and we are now on some sort of inevitable slide, some downward slope with no hope of rescue.  Those days of constantly rising house prices have long gone, the best we can hope for now is that our property will not fall too far in value, especially for many who are staring negative equity in the eye, or at best, another twenty or so years of being stuck in a flat they do not love.  Bought in the frenzy of ever-rising prices; and everyone urging them to get on the property ladder before it’s too late, a mad sort of pass the parcel infected us all, and now we are left with nothing but a pile of paper with a forfeit or two lurking amidst the unwrapping.  And these are the lucky ones, those who rent face the prospect of never ever having their own house, but always the insecurity of six-month lets, and their meagre belongings sit in other peoples rickety wardrobes, and even the sofa they sit upon belongs to another.

The secret ingredient, of course, is confidence, or the lack of any.  And our politicians are simply adding to the gloom, heaping misery on us with each passing month, and they say the worst of the cuts announced with such confidence just over a year ago as the cure-all for our woes, a short sharp shock to the system, and then we would get back on track; these cuts which made us so gloomy at their announcement are mostly still to bite, the redundancy notices are being prepared as we speak.  And now, the realisation, that far from being short and sharp, they will be prolonged and increasingly futile.  What we need is a reason to be happy; maybe the Olympics will cheer us up for a while.

Tuesday 7th February

Well, I hope you liked my little beginning yesterday, just a snippet of my new story.  I am having to make this one up completely, whereas last time I had to only elaborate a bit, most of Catherines Story was real, although I know that Adrian would insist that he made it all up, that’s not really correct, I told him nearly all of it myself.  Anyway, he is history, and will NOT appear in the pages of my new book, at least if I have anything to do with it.  As you know he kept shoving his way in last time, and ended up even having his name on the cover, when I had written most of the book myself, as you must know by now.

But I wanted to write about the disappearing snow.  It always saddens me how quickly, especially here in London the snow dissolves, and this year more so than ever.  It didn’t start snowing till Saturday afternoon, and had stopped by the evening.  We had just one whole day to enjoy this deep lushness, to savour its pristine whiteness, its blanketing denseness, the silence of its descent, blowing this way and that, rising and falling and all the time the light refracting off its surfaces as each flake twists and turns before finding its own allotted place in the snowy landscape.  And am I alone in hating the grit, this muddy and salty brown sludge that does remove the worst of the snow from pavements and roads, but feels so gritty under your shoes, and leaves a brown-sludgy mess everywhere, can they not come up with some-thing a bit cleaner to help melt the snow.  Not that this time around it has needed much help, it was mild all day on Sunday, and in London at least it hardly got below freezing during the night, so already by Monday, most of the pavements were clear.  And now there are just a few desolate little patches of snow, rapidly thinning and melting.  And even those few splendid snowmen with twigs for arms and carrots for noses, that parents had helped their children build on Sunday are little foot high pyramids of ice today, the branches fallen and the carrot nowhere to be seen.  At least the foxes will have had something to eat.  .

Monday 6th February

1 – The first meeting

It never stopped raining that Spring, or so it seemed as I struggled with my finals, too much rain and gloom and I wondered whether the real Spring; you know sunshine, flowers, all of that stuff, would ever arrive.  But the gloom of that perpetual cold and drizzle was finally lifted sometime late in April, just after Easter in fact.  I had been home for the hols, a four week break where I was supposed to finish off my final dissertation, ready to be handed in the second week of May.  My tutor was always reminding me of the importance of getting it in early, ‘so we could revise and work it up together’.  Not that he could possibly interfere you understand, that would be quite unethical, but if he got a chance to see the way I was shaping the thing he might be able to put a few pointers in my way, help me to find a path to success.  And of course I knew only too well, that that would entail the inevitable rewrite of the whole thing.  And nothing seemed less appetising I can assure you. I was beginning to think that Law was a mistake, five wasted years when I could have been having fun, or at least studying something I liked, not this dry dead subject.  Most of my old sixth-form friends were out there working now, or teaching, or like Rodney travelling the world, actually doing something with their lives, while I spent my days burrowing into heavier and thicker and dustier old law books.  Was it really necessary to know so much anyway; how much of it could I possibly need?  And the worst regret of course was that I was simply doing it all for my father, not because I had the slightest interest in the law at all, not because it had been my desire, my choice, but simply to please my father.  I had spent my whole life trying to please him, and for all of those twenty three years of effort there seemed precious little to show for it. Nothing I ever achieved seemed good enough for him.  He still barely acknowledged my existence; whether I was back home or away at college seemed not to bother him at all, there was no pleasure when he saw me, no real conversation with me at all, a grunt, a nod in my direction over his paper, but nothing resembling any connection..  Did the old fool not realise I was doing all this for him, because he wanted me to study law, because I stupidly thought I would be pleasing him if I did well, he might actually be proud of my graduating, he might actually say well done.  He was in Medicine, but had definitely stated his opposition to my following him, “One Doctor in the family is one too many,” he had said, “Why not read law, you could do far worse than law you know.  Wish I’d had the gumption to become a lawyer, instead of looking at sick people and their flabby bodies all day long.  I would have been far better suited to a courtroom than a clinic.”

And so I had read law, without thinking of the consequences, and anyway what the hell do you know at seventeen.  Two years in and I was beginning to regret my hasty decision, I fancied banking, or business of some sort, I had a couple of pals whose dads were stockbrokers and they were already dabbling in shares, and I was tempted to chuck it all in and try my luck in the City, but as usual I flunked it.  No bottle when it came to it, I suppose.  All talk when I’d had a few pints but not a rebel at all I am afraid in the cold light of day.  So I felt I was sort of stuck with law, and some-days it wasn’t at all bad you know, besides, my Dad, for all his taciturnity and lack of any real emotion, wasn’t such a bad old stick, he had pulled a few favours in and I was already almost guaranteed a clerkship in a Solicitor’s in a small market town not so far from Norwich. “Get your head down there for a couple of years, take on whatever they throw at you, make yourself indispensable and, before you know where you are, old Jameson’ll make you a junior partner.  He’ll want to retire in a few years I’m sure, so he’ll be looking to get out and leave the practise in safe hands.  You mark my words, my boy.  Get in there and get your head down for a few years.”  And so, my whole future seemed planned out for me, why not go the whole hog though Dad and choose my wife for me, oh, and you’d better make sure and impregnate her yourself, you wouldn’t want  a little twerp like me to botch that up for you, now would you.

But actually that whole task fell to me entirely I am glad to say, my Dad never really met her until a month before the wedding and we had well and truly discovered that, little twerp or not, my equipment was in perfect working order, thank-you very much Dad.

Sunday 5th February

I reported a few blogs ago that I was suffering from writers block, and boy, was I.  It seemed as if whatever I was writing was going nowhere, maybe it was me but everything I touched seemed to turn to, well what exactly is the opposite of gold – mould?  Or rusty pig-iron, maybe.  In any case for the last few weeks, ever since Christmas really, I have been in the doldrums as far as writing is concerned.  I had started a second novel about a year ago, and had written what was in effect a long short story; too long for a short story, but far too short to stand on its own.  I had tried fleshing it out, but that just felt like unnecessary padding, so I tried to think about what would happen to the story further on down the line, after the crisis had been reached.  I tried at least three scenarios, but in each the writing seemed flat and forced, because of course, the story really had nowhere else to go.

So, I shelved that, even though I did think that some of the writing was quite good.  Just after new year I started another venture, and a different genre altogether.  It went quite well for a few days until I realised that I was writing absolute drivel, and was way out of my depth.  So, I stopped, put it away and actually stopped writing for a few days, except for this blog.  How could I let you my little audience down.

Then at writing class, last week it suddenly came to me, how to proceed with the long short story I had written for most of last year.  And that was to have the same story told by the four characters in the family.  Not a totally original idea I will admit, but maybe one which would work in this case, because of course, as what I had written was already a first person narrative, and what was now glaringly obvious was that whereas we knew exactly what Jane, my heroine, was thinking, we didn’t have a clue as to either the thoughts or the motivation of the others.

So, with new resolve I have spent a few days going over in my mind the different ideas, and ways of writing it, and then yesterday I put pen to paper.  And after a hesitant start it seemed to work, I could see how the thing would shape up; and good or crap as the writing might eventually turn out to be, I was actually writing again, and even better enjoying it.  So writers block is removed not by driving straight into it, or even by driving around it, but my going back and looking at it from a different angle.

Saturday 4th February

And now for a real political show trial – Chris Huhne, who until he joined the Government I had always liked in a way, is soon to be facing charges over perverting the course of justice, re: speeding points. And believe me the Law takes perverting the course of justice far more seriously than whatever the original offence may have been.  The whole edifice of Justice relies on people being truthful, and when they are found not to be, the whole panoply of the law is used against them.  Otherwise we might all think we could get away with lying, heaven forefend; the very idea. I bet he wishes now that he had simply taken the points and a possible ban way back in 2003.  It would all be over by now.  Strange how things you thought you had put behind you always return to bite you on the bottom.  But of course this is not really about speeding points or who took them, I mean who really cares about that, this is about integrity, with the added juice of a woman scorned. Not since Jeremy Thorpe have we had in a courtroom a Liberal politician having his integrity challenged.  And what on earth does Mr. Huhne think will be his defence; will he expect the jury to believe either his or his wife’s words over this charge, and she is on trial too for the same offence, so if she admits it, and he doesn’t what will that say about both of them.  I cannot in all honesty see anyone really believing him, and even if he is not actually found guilty, there will always be the whiff of dishonesty about him.  Of course, it is just possible that he is totally innocent and is now the victim of a scorned woman’s revenge.  Hard to really believe his former wife would go to such lengths purely out of revenge if there weren’t some fire behind the smoke.  She could have simply “kissed and told” her side of their marriage, maybe hinting at previous infidelities – you know, that sort of thing.  But how convenient for her that they had this little guilty secret between them! The fact that she, if Mr. Huhne is to be believed, has made the whole thing up only adds to the spice.  And now he is branded not only as a liar, but a cheat and a love-rat too.  Oh, how the mighty are fallen.  And of course let us not forget that he could so easily have become Leader of the Lib-Dems and Deputy Prime Minister too, now that would have been exciting.