When we moved out of London in the 1980s and bought a cottage in a Sussex village, we planned to grow organic vegetables in the large area of rough grass at the back. This overgrown garden had many years previously been a market garden, containing two old apple trees (Jubilee variety, perhaps planted for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee), and the earth was a lovely dark loam. My husband did most of the design, laying out and upkeep, but I assisted with digging, weeding, growing and transplanting seedlings, slugging etc. We had a very large area, growing a wide range of crops, from beetroot to sweet corn, broccoli to potatoes, saladings, courgettes etc.

After decades of cultivation, there wasn’t any treasure left to discover (it had at one time been the site of a mediaeval fair, I believe, so past gardeners may have turned over some interesting coins while digging), but during our ten years there, we did find a few tiny dolls’ heads, game counters, pieces of clay pipes, etc, even a bullet case, which may, who knows, have dropped from the skies during the Battle of Britain?
Towards the end of our time at the cottage, on an afternoon when I felt very low in spirits and in need of some sign from the God of my understanding that, essentially, all was well, and all would be well, I sent up a silent but heartfelt prayer while digging over a bed right at the bottom of the garden. The very next spadeful turned up a tiny china dove.

I cherish it still.

The American anthropologist Margaret Mead once wrote: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever does.

In the current climate, when so many of us feel almost overwhelmed by the cataclysmic changes occurring all over the world, many wise voices, Robert Reich amongst them, are urging us not to give in to the paralysing feeling that it’s all too much, and there’s nothing we can do.

One small change we have recently made in our house is to close up a loophole in our commitment not to eat factory-farmed meat. We have for years, as much as our domestic budget allowed, bought free-range meat, and have only used free-range eggs for decades now, but we had continued to eat meat when out and about in establishments where there was no claim made about how the animal was reared.

I won’t go into the horrors of factory-farming - there is plenty on the internet*- but share a couple of thoughts. To any woman who has gone through the intense tenderness of early breast-feeding, I think we can all empathise with a sow that is constrained in a metal pen while her piglets are allowed constant access to her teats, literally tearing them into a bloody state. And I recall an acquaintance who through economic misfortune was reduced, late in life, to collecting cracked eggs from a battery-farm barn. The smell was so overpowering, he said, that he frequently had to exit the barn to vomit.

We decided last autumn that we would henceforth buy organic meat wherever possible, given that organic farmers, committed to not using antibiotics routinely, have to give their animals more care in respect of room to breathe and roam etc.  This meat naturally costs more, so we agreed to eating smaller portions - no great imposition, as we are already a family that by choice generally has more veg than meat  on a plate!

When we bought our first organic free-range chicken, the flatness of the breast (no growth hormones!) was noticeable. It looked and tasted like the chickens we used to have on the table when we were children. It also had no red burn-marks on the legs from excreta-saturated barn-floors. It’s actually more economical to buy  a whole chicken and joint it for casseroles etc than to buy portions, and the carcass makes great chicken-stock for soups, rice dishes, etc.

The second part of our commitment was not to eat meat when we were away from home unless it was clearly labelled as free-range, so actually we just eat vegetarian most times. The Toby chain’s a good option when travelling - they’re all over the place, and you can have a lovely plate of fresh veg and the vegetarian alternative to the Carvery meats - there are usually three choices including a vegan one.

So a win-win-win result! Less cruelty to animals, better health, increase in self-esteem resulting from sticking to our principles, and lastly better taste: we tried some of Helen Browning’s Organic dry-cured bacon for lunch today, and Martin commented it was the best bacon sandwich he’d  ever eaten. Praise indeed!
 
*For an obviously authentically-researched fictional account of factory farming chickens, try Martina Lewycka’s novel Two Caravans.
 
 

​I've struggled to write my blog since the bombshell of the vote for Brexit in June, and in the face of all the suffering and upheaval around the world - not just in Syria, but in so many other places. I would sit down at the keyboard to write something, only to falter half-way through - my thoughts seemed irrelevant and simplistic. With the further shock, in November, of Donald Trump's elevation to President-Elect, I felt even more paralysed,  by the constant flow of bad news.

But the most hopeful messages I've seen of late, from the sane voices of people like Caroline Lucas, George Monbiot, and Brendan Cox, exhort us to do what we can, where we are. I've joined the Green Party this year, and made contributions, where able, to charities which are out there doing the necessary work on the ground, both here and abroad. I hope to keep an open mind, make an effort to be informed of the facts, and offer service, where I can, to help others.

I took down my kitchen calendar off its peg yesterday to copy the birthdays onto my new one, and as I went through it I was reminded, once again, that while the larger joys and sorrows of mankind played out in the wider world, I was fortunate to have my annual share of good things, the everyday activities that make my world go round: haircuts in the kitchen, yoga classes, visits to family and friends, and hospitality reciprocated, fellowship with like-minded others, shopping and cooking, reading and cinema, music, occasional trips to museums and exhibitions, walking and talking, feeding the birds, working and resting, the sadness of those who we have cherished passing away mixed with the celebration and shared love of my niece's wedding, an old friend's 70th birthday party - the list goes on!

I try not to take these things for granted, knowing that there are many who don't benefit in the same way. I write a gratitude list every night before I go to sleep, and in the last year the gifts of being a grandmother have featured - our beautiful grand-daughter shows us, as my son did when he was a child, a picture of what we so often forget: the wonder, merriment and joy of living in the now, of bearing no grudge or bitterness in the heart, the pleasure of munching on plump raspberries ...we adore her!

I write at least three things, and very often there are more, but what crops up most are the basic building blocks of life, that we all must surely need in common: a quiet, peaceful, warm, dry, safe home; three nutritious meals; good health (which, if we have it, we can count, if we are wise, as the equivalent of having won the lottery every time we wake); doing our allotted work as well as we can; and a loving, kind, tolerant, patient companion (in this case my husband) - with whom I share so much laughter, still, after 40 years together. Life is not all plain sailing, but these things have got me through the difficult painful times, along with the help, as I believe, of something far greater than myself.

Of all the Christmas films I annually cry over (including It's A Wonderful Life) which  encourage me to accept the things I cannot change, I naturally treasure most that which personifies my own cultural heritage and sums up the hope of finding redemption from darkness and hard-heartedness - Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol. Whatever your higher power is, or is not -  'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower', the love that will not let you go, or just what is larger than your individual existence, then I pray, in the year to come, as Tiny Tim does, "God bless us, every one". 

There were lots of things that scared the hell out of me when I was little: earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, tarantulas, and then perhaps the more likely things, in our corner of Kent, like the idea occurring to me of my mother dying. Then there were the books and pictures I came across on the shelves around the house. One of these which left a lasting impression was a volume of Hieronymus Bosch paintings - scenes of giant men cut in half with little demons sticking pitchforks into them. They held a horrible fascination for me.

When on a walking holiday in the Wildschonau in the Austrian Tyrol this summer, I popped into a small chapel at the side of the parish church in Oberau and found a series of truly gruesome depictions of the hell that awaited unrepentant sinners. Blimey, I bet these kept the congregation in line!

But for all the representations of the Devil and his works that mankind has pictured, surely the only true manifestation of evil on our beautiful planet is when human self-will runs riot. Events in the world so far this year have led many of us to wring our hands in despair -“What can we do about it?” But surely, each of us can do something, however small, each day, right now. For example, the Romanian nurse who, though very busy, gave her full attention to kindly soothing and aiding my mother yesterday when Mum, suffering from a chest infection, couldn’t breathe properly. 

It always surprises me when people say that if there is a God, how can he let things like famine, war, natural disasters and pestilence happen? Well, disasters and disease are part of the natural world, surely, and as for the other two - it’s not a Higher Being, surely, who hoards more food than he needs, who adjusts the price on the market so he can get a higher profit, or appropriates more than her fair share?

​Just saying.

This summer on holiday in Niederau in the Austrian Tyrol I was amused to read the above sign put up by an exasperated farmer. It reads: This is my cows’ salad-bowl, not your dogs’ loo!  In that part of the world, there are still farms in the middle of villages, even towns, and our hotel was right next to this small area of pasture. The hotel allowed guests to bring their pet dogs, so perhaps some owners had been allowing them to soil the grass.

This week I went out with my trusty poop-scoop to pick up several small turds (to use a time-honoured English word), which an irresponsible dog-owner had neglected to remove after allowing their dog to defecate on the pavement. Further up the street, outside the home of a lady whose multiple sclerosis means she has to get about assisted by a mobile scooter, was a larger pile, right in front of her gate. Bad enough, you might think, that she has to steer her scooter out on to the road occasionally when thoughtless car-owners have parked their car across the pavement... (anyone remember that brilliant GLC infomercial from the 1980s featuring an old lady kicking a car off the pavement?).

Across from us, there’s been a running battle going on between a resident and an anonymous dog owner who leaves little plastic bags containing dog poo, neatly tied up, at the base of a lamp-post. Polite printed notices are pinned up, asking for them to be taken away, which only elicit more offerings. Who, for goodness sake, would do this? it’s hard to imagine exactly what form of sociopathy leads someone to leave health hazardous filth in their wake to be slipped on, smeared on passing pushchair wheels, children’s shoes etc. I guess it must be down, in the main, to sheer ignorance.

I’ll finish on a confession. When I was very small (maybe two?) I climbed up on to a wide window-sill and left a little present behind a vase. I can see it now. Perhaps I’d been caught short, or perhaps I was influenced by the tales my older brothers had told me about the witch who lived down the toilet bowl and came up when you pulled the chain!  Anyhow, I remember thinking that no-one would ever know it was me, or they would think our  Shetland Sheepdog  had left it.  I can’t remember the outcome, but it can’t have taken Sherlock Holmes to work out who had done the evil deed!

All of my adult life I’ve felt grateful for the safety of being part of the European Community. I woke yesterday, on Midsummer Day, to the truly awful news that just over half who voted in the EU Referendum had cut the rest of us out of the heart of our European family.

In our house we were heartbroken. I wept on my way to work. I had felt compelled to choose something from my wardrobe which I’d worn some years ago as I sat by my brother’s hospice bed, with my family, on the day he died. I found it hard to look those of my colleagues who’d declared themselves leave-voters in the eye, such was the strength of my grief. The world looked different, narrowed - and for the first time, I felt ashamed of my country. I’m not a nationalist, but I’ve always felt assured and comforted by the decency of most British people. Yesterday shook that conviction. It seemed like England had been diminished ... as someone said in an Italian news comment: “Little England won over Great Britain”. Shockingly, I’m hearing that some voters had apparently thought to register a protest vote, certain Brexit wouldn’t  actually happen ... seriously?

All day, I found myself  looking at people as they went by, asking myself how they had voted. I hope this will pass. Hate undoubtedly corrodes.  The Referendum has torn away the myth of a United Kingdom, its divisions starkly apparent: north/south, that old especially treasured chestnut -  class war, old/young. I went to a gathering of friends from different nations  last night, and was shocked by the anger of two young graduates, who were convinced it was the older (60+) generation that had let them down. Hold on there! I wonder how completely accurate this statistic is? Of my 9 work colleagues, 6 of us voted remain (aged 60,60,60,55,23,21) and 4 voted leave (aged 46,41,29,23). I don’t happen to know a single one of my personal friends around the sixty mark who voted Brexit.

A winning feature of the leave vote seems to have been contempt for the establishment, a bit of a joke seeing as this was mostly managed and manipulated by the right-wing. I recently read Richard Evans’s terrifying book, The Coming of the Third Reich, about the persecution of the German people which preceded Hitler’s rise to power. Even before the Referendum I was thinking about the parallels:  how the Nazis used the suffering which had ensued from the First World War, and the later global economic influences which ensured Germany couldn’t rise out of its 1920s/early 1930s chaos, to blame the establishment and whip up support for their own nefarious purposes; how the democracy of the Weimar Republic foundered and died before the Nazis’ onslaught.

When I think of the appalling level of debate during the referendum with Gove voicing the view, “We’ve heard enough from experts”, I am reminded of the Chinese dictator Mao who, following the Great famine, between 1958 and 1962, when 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death, oversaw a Cultural Revolution that reviled all things intellectual and historic -  the young were encouraged to beat up, humiliate, even murder their elders.

We woke this morning, early, at 5.30am - we couldn’t sleep any longer, so deep was our sorrow at the awfulness of what has been done - not in our name by the way! I grieve for friends, family  and neighbours in the rest of Europe, struggling with huge problems in their own countries, and who now, through Brexit’s  xenophobia and ignorance, have been abandoned by what should have been the co-operating arm of Britain. The result of our referendum has helped the cause of the far right in other countries. Among the jubilant are Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Rupert Murdoch, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump - hooray (not)!

If the ground felt like it shifted under our feet yesterday morning, perhaps it’s the spinning in their graves of all those men and women who suffered in the many past wars fought on European soil, and who, having lost everything, might at least have hoped for their descendants the cooperation and peace which the European Community stood for, not just for Europe, incidentally, but hopefully also as a model for others. I feel enormously sad for our son and daughter-in-law, who will now be bringing up our beautiful grand-daughter in a world most likely made more unstable and less safe by victory of the leave-vote.

Until a couple of weeks ago, SATNAV was a technological development I regularly pooh-poohed. I like maps, and the first thing I do after booking a holiday to a new destination is to buy the DK Guide and start reading up about the region. I’m generally the tour-guide when we go abroad, as I love researching things and then winkling them out when we arrive! I remember my husband asking me, when we were walking through Prague, and I had a particularly purposeful stride, how I knew where I was going? I replied that having studied the city map, I was simply following a route I could see clearly in my head!

A young colleague with a university degree, about to start training as a teacher, told me recently that such was her dependency on SATNAV she would have had no clue how to make her way from Kent to Cologne with only a map for guidance.  I found that quite shocking.  I guess I took it for granted that any sighted person who has been through full-time education could read a map and simply follow the signs to a destination.

I also actually enjoy jotting down verbal instructions on the back of an envelope and following them - you know the kind of thing: “Take the A21 to Hastings, and just before the King George pub at Hurst Green, there’s a corner with a big oak tree and a red postbox on the left - take the little road and follow it until you come to a bridge, about a mile along....”.

Last time we went to Wales, however, even though we’ve driven along the M4 corridor literally hundreds of times to visit family, we got comically lost on every single drive around Cardiff’s surrounding country. It did, though, give us an opportunity to seek help from friendly locals, notably Phil, a Fish and Chip shop owner near Bridgend. Not only did he come out from behind the fryer, fire up his laptop, and search for the hotel we were trying to find, but went so far as to give us his mobile number and told us to call him if we got lost again and he’d direct us over the phone! Beyond friendly, as they say in the valleys of South Wales!

Another colleague recommended I use SATNAV when I recently had to visit seven coach companies in the Midlands and further North, all in unknown territory. It was, I admit, very useful, although I did end up in some odd places along narrow country roads when I inputted a postcode rather than the specific building number of the location. I was particularly grateful, when en route in Lancashire from Chipping to Oswaldtwistle, and I came across a closed road, to have the SATNAV’s re-routing facility to guide me on. Just popping in the address for the next stop, and the ‘time to your destination’ display, took all the stress out of the journey.
​
On my final day, after my last appointment in Cheltenham, my little friend directed me in a bee-line to the M4 via a hilly country road, and, perfectly timed for lunch, I came across the charming Green Dragon Inn at Cockleford, first established in 1675. I tucked into a plate of smoked salmon and crusty brown bread, accompanied by a  glass of cloudy apple juice produced locally, together with a few pages of Patrick O’Brian’s The Mauritius Command (my other trusty travelling companion) - a perfect combination for the weary traveller! 

I think Mr Toad would have enjoyed SATNAV, and embraced it with something like my own newly-minted enthusiasm, but it’s not an unmixed joy - on our way back from a family funeral in Llanelli last weekend the OH, Honourable Son and I headed for the Toby Carvery at Pontprennau for a fortifying evening meal en route. The SATNAV led us round a long circuitous route to a spot beside a high fence enclosing a business park. We could see the Toby on the other side, but there was no way through. We had to drive back to the motorway roundabout and enter the business park that way, and got there finally after seeking human assistance from an ASDA petrol station attendant. So, useful though SATNAV is, I think I’ll keep my map/road-sign reading skills in regular use.
​
An elderly lady once told me that during the Second World War all the road signs were taken down in order to confuse the enemy should they succeed in invading our sceptre’d isle. I like to think that both her generation and mine could still navigate our way using the geography skills we’re taught at school, and a good map (but then presumably so could roving spies!).

Dominick Tyler, in his beautiful book Uncommon Ground - A Word-Lover's Guide to the British Landscape (a Christmas gift from my son Tom), includes this reflection on Welsh landscape: "... I began to appreciate the descriptiveness of Welsh landscape language, and how well-suited it was to communication about places and routes. The fact that the bulk of the Welsh lexis predates mapping goes some way to explain this descriptiveness, since journeys must have been  shared in telling, rather than drawing, for centuries."

​I guess that famous uber-long Welsh ​place name must be a brilliant example of this: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, meaning  roughly  "St Mary's Church in the Hollow of the White Hazel near a Rapid Whirlpool and the Church of St Tysilio near the Red Cave".

Some years back, when a Toby Carvery opened in the village where my mother-in-law lived in South Wales, we approached hesitantly. Perhaps  the word ‘Carvery’ suggested to us a caveman-style meat extravaganza - we were pleasantly surprised by the reality! Not that there weren’t other places to eat on our regular visits from south-east England, but even a Welshman and his (Honorary Welsh) Saxon wife can tire of fish and chips, Indian takeaways, and griddle meals at pubs.

We’ve never ordered a la carte at a Toby, or drunk a bottomless soft drink (it’s nice to have your own teeth!), but the main course carvery, always at an amazing price (generally around £6), is a wholesome  offering that can be relied upon. Mam was happy to choose a portion of food that didn’t overwhelm someone of her generation, and we were happy eating a variety of freshly-cooked vegetables with our gammon/turkey/pork or beef. There’s always a tasty and imaginative vegetarian alternative too.

It’s still a good deal, at a great price, a real boon for school groups out on trips, where it’s good to offer the kids something other than pizza, burger, chicken nuggets etc. (though a bone of contention, for me, is above-mentioned bottomless drinks - not great for anyone’s health, let alone our children’s). Whenever  travelling in the UK, for pleasure or work, I tend to look up the nearest available Toby. If you’re not sure what time you’re arriving, or how much time you will have to eat, it’s really convenient to know you’ll get a decent meal without having to hang around. Recently, venturing North, I located one in Bolton near my accommodation.  They usually seem to be housed in 20th century pubs, so I was knocked out when I drew up in front of a stunning Gothic building in Crompton Way - wowsers!

Apparently Watermillock House, a listed building, was originally a gentleman's country house, designed in the 1880s by Messr JJ Bradshaw and John Gass of Bolton (the architectural practice is still going) for Herbert and Thomas Thwaites (master cotton bleachers). It’s in Tudor Gothic style, with wonderful bat motif gargoyles and griffins as corner pinnacles, beautiful stained glass and arched doorways. Its interior is stunning  and includes a fireplace with de Morgan tiles.

The waitress told me that  in earlier incarnations the house had been a pub, an old people’s home, and was used as a military hospital during the World Wars, at one time specialising in the care of  pilots with horrific burns, among other casualties.  Between wars, in 1937, it had served as a hostel for refugee Basque children evacuated from Bilbao during the Spanish Civil War. I understand that local people did their very best to make the children feel supported and cared for, and funds were raised by colleges, schools and universities to help them. 

It occurred to me this would be a fab place to have a tour of in Heritage Weekend - and I see after a quick google that Bolton has many other wonderful sights to see - think I’ll aim for a repeat visit in the Autumn!

Finally - here’s my other Toby collection!  Two were modelled on my father James Hayter playing Friar Tuck, but my favourite is the hand-painted Kelsboro Ware version of him as Mr Pickwick, which I also think carries a better resemblance.

My son is an artist and an art teacher, and one of his favourite artists is Pieter Brueghel  the Elder. We both love the painting entitled Children’s Games, and much enjoy identifying the different activities.

When I worked at a large girls’ school which boasted an excellent library, I was known by the librarians for checking out the weighty tomes which, more often than not, no pupil or indeed teacher had ever borrowed. One such book was the acclaimed study by Iona & Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, which took me weeks to plough through, but not without reward!  One of the things that interested me was their conclusion that the learning of  games in the main by-passes adults: it is mostly children who communicate and pass them on to other children.

When I was a girl, it was fashionable to hold seances, and I remember the time I set up a circle of letters round a glass in my older sister’s bedroom (most of the family were out), and I and two cousins began to summon the spirits. As the glass started to move we rose as one and fled screaming from the room! Later in life I met a 1960s alumna of above school who recalled the time when a seance had been organised in one of the dormitories.

“Is there anybody there?” was asked.

At this, the glass began to move, and after affirming that there was, spelt out the word F-I-R-E. Seconds later, the school fire-bell went off, and it transpired that at that moment a fire had been discovered in the Domestic Science block, formerly the great house’s stables. Needless to say, the girls were terrified, and the story spread round the school rapidly. The Bishop of Dover was summoned by the Headmistress and spoke at Assembly the following Sunday on the evils of tampering with the dark arts of the Ungodly.

Reading Pepys’ Diary last night, I was delighted to come across a mention of a lunch-time game we played at Tunbridge Wells Grammar School in the late 1960s/early 1970s, which was clearly being played by children at least 400 years earlier. I recall six of us standing around another girl, who lay on a table in the empty art room. We went round the circle, ceremoniously uttering in turn the words:

“She looks pale.” This was followed, one line at a time, and each reciting by rote, by the following:

“She is pale.”

“She looks ill.”

“She is ill.”

“She looks dead.”

“She is dead.”

And with this, we each slipped one forefinger under the prone girl and, together, lifted her several feet in the air with seemingly no effort at all, as if she was weightless.  We had no idea how it worked, but it did work, and it afforded us great satisfaction!

So when I came across Pepys’ entry for 31 July 1665, I called out to my husband: “Listen to this!” (he had also, I knew, played the game at school):

This evening with Mr Brisband speaking of inchantments and spells, I telling him some of my Charmes, he told me this of his own knowledge at Bourdeaux in France. The words these:

Voicy un Corps mort
Royde comme un Baston
Froid comme Marbre
Leger comme un Esprit
Levons te au nom de Jesus Christ.

He saw four little Girles, very young ones, all kneeling, each of them upon one knee; and one begin the first line, whispering in the care of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first. Then the first begun the second line, and so round quite through. And putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead. At the end of the words they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach. And he being there and wondering at it (as also being afeared to see it - for they would have had him to have bore a part in saying the words in the room of one of the little girls, that was so young that they could hardly make her learn to repeat the words), did, for fear there might be some sleight used in it by the boy, or that the boy might be light, called the cook of the house, as Sir G. Carteret’s Cooke, who is very big, and they did raise him in just the same manner.
 
Fascinating, eh? Love to hear from any of you with your experiences and stories about children’s games - comments welcome!