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!

​On a recent trip to Wales, we visited an old friend of Martin’s family in the Taf Fechan Valley.  She and her husband are sheep farmers, and we were treated to a lovely meal seated at at a huge oak table, large enough, at shearing time, to seat sixteen!

En route we stopped off in Merthyr Tydfil to see Cyfarthfa Castle, and later parked  near Vaynor Church, at the southern edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park, to visit the grave of Robert Thompson Crawshay, known as the ‘Iron King’. His grave is covered with a massive stone, which our friends told us weighed seven tons. The lettering ‘God Forgive Me’, often assumed in modern times to be an expression of remorse for his action of closing the Cyfarthfa Works at Merthyr (thus making hundreds destitute), or his own moral shortcomings, was in point of fact not uncommon in Victorian times.
​
I know I am not alone in finding graveyards fascinating. As the historian George Trevelyan once said: “The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today ... once, on  this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.”

​

The church unfortunately wasn’t open but I hope to return sometime and attend a service there. We enjoyed reading the gravestones and visiting the earlier church, now a ruin, just a short walk away. One particularly poignant grave told of the Price family, and the grief that must have been the lot of Margaret Ann Price,  during almost a century of life. Her son Idris Lloyd died at 11 months old in 1921, her daughter Nancy Muriel at 5 years 9 months  in 1921, her son Trevor Glyn Price at 21  in 1940, and her husband William Henrey Lloyd Price in 1951, aged 68. She was to live as a widow for another 32 years, dying  aged 97 in 1983.

Thanks to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, I was able to look up the details of her son Trevor Glyn Price, who is buried at L’Herbaudiere, and learnt of another tragic story from the Second World War.

L'Herbaudiere is a hamlet of Noirmoutier-en-L'Ile, a small town on the island of Noirmoutier which is situated off the west coast of France. A causeway gives access to the island.

There are 40 Commonwealth graves from the 1939-45 war commemorated at this site, 22  unidentified. The majority of these forty were aboard the "Lancastria", hit by enemy action on the 17th June 1940 off St. Nazaire. All told about 4,000 men, women and children lost their lives when the ship sank 20 minutes after it was bombed by the Germans near the French port of Saint-Nazaire on 17 June 1940 , fewer than 2,500 surviving. The Lancastria was the largest loss of life from a single engagement for the British forces during World War Two and also the largest loss of life in British maritime history - greater than the Titanic and Lusitania combined. It occurred just a few weeks after the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from Dunkirk, when the Lancastria had been sent to help bring home some of the estimated 150,000 British servicemen still in occupied Europe.

​Following the sinking of the Lancastria, Prime Minister Winston Churchill imposed a media blackout, as the government feared the news would be a terrible blow to British morale. American newspapers  finally broke the story at the end of July. I wonder how long it was before William and Margaret Price received the news of their son’s death? And whether they were ever able to visit his grave on that small island?
​
For visitors to the Vaynor area, a remarkable sight locally is the ‘Spanish House’  - a now dilapidated but once stunning Italianate villa,  built I understand by a local solicitor and amateur astronomer in 1912 for his Italian wife. Our friend had been inside the house as a child, and recalled the beautiful Majolica tiles, the araucaria tree in its courtyard and an eagle statue. Local legend has it that after only about six months, the lady had had enough of Welsh weather, and returned to Italy, never to be seen again!

As an avid fan of anything to do with local history, I was delighted to buy a copy of Taf Fechan Valley: How and Why has the Taf Fechan Valley changed between the mid nineteenth century and the present day? which was researched and written by the Ponsticill Local History Study Group. A good read, which included many fascinating nuggets of information. It is likely that the lifestyle of those inhabiting the valley in the mid 19th Century was not dissimilar to that experienced there in the 16th, surviving by hard work and traditional farming, quarrying, and a range of rural crafts. The book details some of the changes since the construction of the reservoirs, the impact of the two World Wars, advent of the motor-car etc. Highly recommended!
 
Links:

Lancastria sinking:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-33092351
www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/56/a4103056.shtml
www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/72/a2334872.shtml

Taf Fechan Valley
welshwildlife.org/nature-reserve/taf-fechan-merthyr-tydfil/

​Doing my regular supermarket shop recently, and reaching out for the honey, I was struck by an item on the shelf above, and how the price difference, considering the quality of the foodstuff, was comparatively small.  I’m always fascinated to see what is in other people’s baskets at the till (but then as my husband will tell you, I was born nosey!).

Littleover Pure Organic Wildflower Honey costs £11.80 per kilo. Ingredients: Organic Wildflower Honey
Littleover says “We do not heat-treat or blend our honey, we are 100% chemical and drug free in all our hive operations, and we only use gravity filtration to ensure that our honey is in the jar in as natural a state as possible.”

Marshmallow Fluff costs: £9.39 per kilo. Ingredients:
Ingredients: Corn Syrup, Sugar Syrup, Dried Egg Whites and Vanillin.
 
There’s an increasing amount of media coverage about sugar. The following is one view:
 
"Table sugar (sucrose) has been condemned by dentists, nutritionists, and physicians for scores of years. It is the greatest scourge that has ever been visited on man in the name of food. Endocrinologists agree that the endocrine system of glands and the nervous system cooperate to regulate the appetite so that the right amount of the right kind of food is taken in. Sugar spoils this fine balance. Being almost 100 percent “pure”, this high-calorie dynamite bombs the pancreas and pituitary gland into gushing forth a hypersecretion of hormones comparable in intensity to that artificially produced in laboratory animals with drugs and hormones. Sugar is the culprit the endocrinologists have been looking for that has been throwing the finely regulated endocrine balance completely out of kilter."  
(Edward Howells, DDS Enzyme Nutrition)
 
We are advised by the majority of common-sense nutritionist sources that all sweeteners should be taken in moderation, even honey, but for value, taste and wholefood reasons, I think I’ll stick with honey!

One more example of choice I spotted in the same shop:

National Geographic Magazine - October issue - 148 pages
OK, now £5.50, but it’s a long, satisfying and informing read about, amongst other things,  fossils found in a South African cave raising new questions about what it means to be human; Laponia, one of Europe’s largest wilderness areas in the heart of Sweden; The Congo River in modern times; and beachcombing wolves which swim among Canadian islands. A truly fascinating and mind-broadening experience involving many happy reading hours.

Heat Magazine - 128 pages: £2.10 special offer including a copy of Closer
Articles include: Kourtney won’t let Caitlyn see her kids; Jamie is Fifty Shades of Hot on Hols; Kate’s Break up gets messy; and Posh Parties Very Hard.

I have to confess I’ve never read Heat or Closer. They appear to be a mix of celebrity gossip and real-life stories mirrored by similar television programmes. Given the close attention many people pay these publications, it seems that, like sugar, they are part of an epidemic of  fast-rush addiction, rather than the slow-digesting experience of  a read like National Geographic.
 
Here’s Julian Norman’s piece about Closer in The Guardian.

As the saying goes, you pays your money and you makes your choice.

When our son was small we didn’t have funds for theme parks, but we had no regrets about that - we had long, interesting walks together, played board games, enjoyed family meals with conversations about our days, and, of course, visited museums! Our idea of an excellent time was seeing Stonehenge, Avebury Circle and Silbury Hill over one weekend!

My parents-in-law did take us to Blackpool for a weekend, and we went up the Tower and thrilled to the acrobatic acts in the circus, but we didn't fancy the big rides. Even when I was small I wasn’t too keen on the Dive-Bomber or rollercoasters, though I was always up for the Dodgems. These days my limit is a turn on the Big Wheel or a whizz round on the Chairplanes!

No surprise then that my only visit to the best-known Paris theme Park (fronted by that world famous mouse!) was not a standard experience. If you don’t go on any of the rides you’re left with watching parents trailing overtired kids on a sugar-high looking for the costume characters, occasionally seen hiding round the back of buildings with their heads off, having a sly Gauloise! My favourite bit was watching house-martins flying in and out of their nests on the walls of the nearby TGV station...

I have, however, wanted to visit Futuroscope, in Poitiers, for a while, so was pleased to be offered a short trip there recently. We travelled by train, so some quality time for catching up on reading! We arrived in time for the evening laser show, Lady O, which takes place at the lake in the middle of the park. We sat on the open-air amphitheatre seats in the warm southern air, with a large enthusiastic crowd of all ages, and watched the spectacular display of light and music, relating a story about nature versus machines. Futuroscope is in a beautiful  setting, and has a uniquely French feel to it, with modernistic buildings, sculptures, and tastefully planted flowers beds and borders with aromatic Mediterranean shrubs, which waft their fragrance as you walk past. There are some lovely touches, like the softly-glowing red globes hanging high up among the branches of trees in the evening. When I described the large abstract sculptures of outsize females to my son he correctly identified them as works by the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. Fun and culture, what's not to like?

The rides include Dancing with Robots, where some of our party (non merci!) were whirled around by a giant robot arm to music by Martin Solveig in dance-club lighting, and plenty of 3D simulator experiences. We laughed a lot on the Time-Machine ride, which features Les Lapins Chretins (the crazy rabbits), not least while queuing for entry, where the walls are covered with versions of famous paintings featuring aforementioned crazy rabbits,  which included Munch’s The Scream and Botticelli’s Venus Rising from the Sea. This is just one example of the wit and  imagination that characterises the whole park. I tried one more ride, but it was all a bit too much for me, and I sat on one of the static seats at the side for Arthur, the 4D Adventure! Our guide quipped that a lot of teenagers  consider themselves cheated if they don’t feel queasy after a ride...  There are also some great open-air play areas and games in Children’s World, which I’m certain it would be hard to drag younger family members away from.

My personal favourites were the IMAX films, which I’d also been looking forward to most: Cosmic Collisions,  and Deep Sea. It was really relaxing to sink into the comfy seats in the dark and become immersed in stunning, narrated films about outer space and  the ocean depths - an opportunity to see things I’m unlikely to experience in the flesh. I learnt that our moon was formed in just 4 weeks from the debris which circled Earth after a massive asteriod collided with our planet. Always nice to find out new things, and  be reminded of our place in a huge universe!

I hope to go back to Futuroscope - there are always new things being developed, and I’d really like  to see the rest of the park, particularly Mission Hubble, where visitors join the rescue mission to repair the Hubble space telescope, and Journey into the Dark, where blind guides take you through three areas in the dark, which give you a sense of what it is like to make your way without sight - from the Louisiana bayou to New York city, and up to the highest Himalayan peak. This last is the only attraction in the park which incurs a cost - a requested donation of 5 euros per person which goes to charities aiding the visually-impaired.

There's a marvellous passage in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's A life in Letters (Penguin Classics), in a letter to his father, dated 17 October 1777, about Stein, a man who makes pianos:

'However I attack the keys, the tone is always even. It's true, he won't part with a pianoforte like this for under 300 florins, but the effort and labour that he expends on it can't be paid for. A particular feature of his instruments is their escape action. Not one maker in a hundred bothers with this. But without escape action it's impossible for a pianoforte not to produce a clattering sound or to go on sounding after the note has been struck; when you strike the keys, his hammers fall back again the moment they hit the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them. He told me that only when he's finished making a piano like this does he sit down and try out all the passagework, runs and leaps, and, using a shave, works away at the instrument until it can do everything. For he works only to serve the music, not just for his own profit, otherwise he'd be finished at once.

He often says that if he weren't such a great music lover and didn't have some slight skill on the instrument, he'd long since have run out of patience with his work; but he loves an instrument that never lets the player down and that will last.'

When I read this letter I made a note at the back of the book (reprehensible habit, my husband has chided, writing in books): 'P 186 Stein - like my Martin, a maker of good things!'

I have in the past accused my husband of being a perfectionist, but in truth, it is, more than that, an essential part of his being that he loves to make things as good as he can get them, while acknowledging that there is a point at which he is happy to sit back and say to himself - that's good enough.

He trained as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but eventually, like so many actors (they say only 3.5% of actors work are lucky enough to be in full-time work), that work began to dry up.  Over the years we have been together, I have seen him work at all kinds of things with an increasing capacity for stamina and perseverance, often with no more instruction than the careful, thoughtful study of publications like The Reader's Digest Complete DIY Manual or Geoff Hamilton's Organic Gardening! 

In our first home he built shelving and cupboards. In the next he replaced a whole floor of wood-wormed planks, built kitchen units, and dug out a concrete bomb-shelter that had been buried in our Hackney kitchen. When we moved to Sussex, he cleared, designed and laid out two gardens, one with a huge vegetable patch, where he grew brassicas, legumes, roots, sweet-corn, squashes. In our current home he has renovated virtually the whole house, and recently re-pointed the gable end of the external brickwork, laid some beautiful brick paths and low walls. And when I look at our son, now expecting his own child, I see someone who shows the tangible benefits of having received constant good fathering.

For the last few years I have also seen my husband's energies turned to something flowering later in life: writing. Again, the same dogged determination and love of creating, polishing and getting something as good as possible, is being applied to the art of writing what he likes to think of ripping yarns. He doesn't aspire to be a great writer, though he loves to read them (Charles Portis is a current joy!) - but there's nothing more gratifying to him than a new review or communication from a reader who has throroughly enjoyed one of his books.

Lacking interest from the established publishing world, and even most book-sellers, we have published Niedermayer & Hart and Roadrage under our own imprint, Odd Dog Press. Consequently, even with the help of the internet, no mass-marketing means that it is a struggle, in the face of an ever-growing book glut, to encourage readers to nudge the books onto their book-pile.

But here's where the perseverance comes in - Martin is writing the sequel to Niedermayer & Hart, and labouring hard at making it something that the former's fans will enjoy reading. Working to serve the writing.

And in the meantime, also finding time to perfect his recipe for onion bhajis (see picture)!