It's in the trees...

Night of the Demon: what a great film. It's based on a story by M.R. James entitled 'Casting the Runes' and Kate Bush used the sound clip 'it's in the trees' as the opening line to the track 'The Hounds of Love' on the album of the same name.

These trees are in a wood in the Forest of Dean that we took a look around today. I learnt a lot about trees and a lot about forest management.

So now I'm almost as big a fan of trees as I am Bush (so sorry).

Elvis is in the building

Last Thursday, January 8th, would have been Elvis Presley’s seventy-fourth birthday. Elvis died on August 16, 1977 in his bathroom upstairs at Graceland. I’ve been to Graceland and you aren’t allowed upstairs. After being found on the bathroom floor he was rushed to hospital where they pronounced him dead. The coroner recorded his cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, which means that the heart was beating irregularly, and in Elvis’s case finally stopped. While strictly true the attending physicians kept quiet about the fact that what had apparently caused Elvis' heart to beat so irregularly, and then stop, was an overdose of prescription drugs which included Morphine, Codeine, Demorol and Valium.

Elvis is in the building

When I awoke they were sitting there quietly in the corner of my hotel room. I was pretty sure that they hadn’t been there the night before when, at around midnight, I’d left the bar and my pharmaceutical convention colleagues to continue drinking, and gone up to bed. At least I didn’t remember them being there, but then I was pretty drunk. As I stared at them I wondered if they’d been watching me as I slept, watching and waiting for me to wake so that they could dare me to wear them. I knew it was silly, but as I moved towards them I was sure that I could feel them staring and smiling.

How did they get here? Where had they come from? Had someone crept into my room in the middle of the night and put them there? They must have; after all shoes don’t walk by themselves. Perhaps that big guy on the desk was playing a joke on me; I thought I saw him give me a funny look when I’d checked in.

I crouched to inspect the shoes. They were suede, pastel blue, elasticated at the sides and with sharp toes. Not my shoes, not even my type of shoes. Elvis shoes, Elvis blue suede shoes. Yeah, it had to be the guy on the desk or one of the other hotel employees, they were having a hoot at my expense; very funny. Perhaps everyone in Memphis had a warped sense of humour?

Pressing down on my knees with my hands I stood up and looked down at them. They were nice shoes and they looked about my size. I was tempted to try them on just to see what my feet looked like in them. It was very tempting, and I wondered how they would feel on my feet as I continued to watch the shoes watch me back. Well, its one for the money, what harm could it do? Two for the show, after all they were in my room. Three to get ready, someone must have put them there. Now go, cat, go. Perhaps they put them here because they wanted me to try them on? On the other hand, perhaps not and this was some sort of trick. Or maybe it was a message and the message was that I could do anything that I wanted to do, but uh-uh, Honey, lay off of my shoes.

Maybe if I tried them on the big guy on the desk would know that I’d done it, rush in, knock me down, step on my face, and then go back to the lobby and slander my name all over the place for trying on his shoes. Yes that was it. They were his shoes and this was a test. He didn’t want me to step into his blue suede shoes and he’d put them in my room to test me. He didn’t care what I did so long as I lay off of his blue suede shoes and if I were to try them on; well I’d better be prepared for the consequences. No sweat, I was ready. Do your worst big guy…and stop right there! This was crazy! None of this made any sense. Why would anyone want to test me with a pair shoes? They might burn my house or steal my car, even drink my liquor from an old fruit jar; but testing me with a pair of blue shoes? It just didn’t add up.

I reached down and slipped on the right shoe, it felt good against my naked foot; I slipped on the other one, a perfect fit. These shoes didn’t belong to the guy behind the desk. These shoes didn’t belong to anyone who worked in the hotel, these shoes belonged to me, they were mine.

Picking up my samples case, dressed only in my blue suede shoes, I walked across the flat brown carpet to the bathroom. I knew what to do next.

Misty the cat - episode one.

What Cheshire cats do....

I’ve decided that I’ll include an occasional feature about Misty our cat in this blog. At some point she may even write her own blog, but she’s still too young to do that at the moment and besides you need to catch up on her story so far. That is a picture of Misty just a few months back when she was a fluffy, wuffy, cutey, kitten. Well, she’s not a kitten any more. At eight months Misty is a fully grown cat with only two settings, shred or kill. Nor is she a she, she’s a he. Despite this we can’t seem to stop calling Misty “she”, which might help explain some of her/his angst. Of course it could be that Misty is just going through those horrible, confused teenage years because at times she acts just like our daughter Holly.

Misty came from our friendly farmer’s farm up the lane in Wales, she’d been dumped along with her two brothers and our friendly farmer had taken them all in, feeding them and looking for homes for the three waifs. My daughter Holly had popped up to see them a few times, probably about thirty-seven over a single weekend, and begged us to go up to the farm and take a look at the tiny creatures for ourselves. At first we refused but eventually, simply to stop the noise of the buzz-saw, we gave in and said that we would take a look but that there was no way we were going to take one of them home as a pet

‘We can look but we can’t have.’ I told her firmly in my sternest most “and I mean it” voice.

I like cats. I always have. Our last cat Tia was with us for nineteen years and then a little over a year ago she slipped away. Tia was a Lilac Burmese and had become very important to usl, so it was very hard when she died. We tried to hang on to her but she became so worn and tired through age that she couldn’t go on and we had to let her go. She just wasn’t Tia anymore. Tia had moved on and was somewhere else. All we had was Tia’s tired old body that struggled to stand and eat. When it was time we all went to the vet with her and held her while the vet gave her the injection. She went to sleep very quickly and we cried for hours. Afterwards we all decided that we were never going to have another cat.

Never. Ever.
(I’ll tell you more about Tia some other time I expect).

And then we saw Misty.

I have to say that Gaynor tried to remind us how hard losing Tia had been and how we’d all agreed that we weren’t going to have another cat as a pet (never ever again). But Holly and I were Misty fans the second we saw her.

The following weekend we brought Misty back home with us from Wales. She wasn’t used to being indoors and once home immediately skittered away and hid under the big beech butchers-block. She hissed at us telling us “get away you big clumsy things that take your fur off and turn into aliens”, and when we tried to reach in and get her out she snarled “feeling lucky punks”? So we left her there with her knitted blanket. After all, it was safe enough. We agreed that we would keep her in the kitchen for a few nights as there was nowhere much for her to hide in the kitchen and the rest of our house had a lot of places where a kitten could hide; maybe even a few that so well hidden that our ghost cat didn’t know about them. (I’ll tell you about the ghost cat another time as well I expect). The kitchen was safe though, everywhere was visible and accessible.

Next morning I got up and went into the kitchen expecting Misty to still be under the butchers-block. I looked under it but Misty wasn’t there. I called her name again and again but there was no sign of her. When Gaynor came down a few minutes later we both searched for her. Then Holly joined in. But even with us all searching we still couldn’t find her. We searched high and low, literally. It’s quite a big kitchen, but not that big. We checked in the cupboards, on top of the units, in the baskets, behind the wine rack, under the block, I even dragged out the eight burner oven (thank God it is on wheels), but there was still no sign of Misty. If Misty had been a ship she’d have been called the Marie Celeste.

Soon it was time for us to leave for work and school so we decided to put down some very tempting tinned red salmon and wait for our vanished cat to get hungry and come out from wherever she was hiding of her own accord. We all agreed she’d be out by the time Gaynor got back from college after lunch, and if the food didn’t tempt her then the need to go to the loo would. Misty had litter trained herself immediately with no accidents, so we knew that she’d come out when she needed to go.

When I arrived home that evening Misty was still missing. Gaynor looked grim and told me that she’d been looking for Misty everywhere and thought that she could feel something stuck down deep behind the radiator…she’d tried to reach it but couldn’t get her arm down far enough…she had managed to poke it gently though…with a stick…it was soft…but silent. I tried reaching whatever it was, but I couldn’t get my arm down far enough either and to tell you the truth I was pretty relieved, I didn’t want to touch it and find a dead Misty; so I used Gaynor’s stick and found that she was right. There was something soft and kitten sized stuck behind the long white radiator and it was really stuck

What were we going to do? If it was Misty we had to get her out even if the worse had happened. There was only one thing for it. We looked in the Yellow Pages and called out…Emergency Plumber Man…no job too small…guaranteed twenty-four-seven…there within the hour…competitive prices…no hidden extras.

Emergency Plumber Man turned out to be a young smiling chappie who arrived ninety minutes later (not within the hour) with a big impressive box that we assumed contained plumbing tools. We told him about Misty and about our concerns for her safety, we told him that we thought she was dead behind the radiator; he smiled and continued to smile as he proceeded to drain the heating system. Once this was complete, and with a huge smile, he started to remove the radiator. We all stood around nervously not wanting to see a dead kitten fall to the floor as he lifted the radiator away from the wall. He looked over to the three of us standing open-mouthed by the sink, he winked and with a smiling grunt he lifted the radiator up and off the brackets as we stopped breathing.

Something grey and fluffy fell from behind the radiator...It was kitten sized...It was fluffy...and it was completely still and lifeless.

We looked through trembling eyelids. Was it Misty?

With a huge sigh of relief we realised that it wasn’t. It was an old cuddly toy rabbit, covered in dust and very shabby, quickly followed by an equally dusty baby’s bib. They must have been stuck down there for at least a dozen years. Typical of Holly! Even as a baby it was easy-come, easy-go.

Misty hadn’t climbed down the back of the radiator after all, she hadn’t met an unfortunate and claustrophobic end, which meant that she was probably still alive somewhere in the kitchen. Phew!

The Plumber beamed as he replaced the radiator and disappeared into the cellar to refill the system. He clanked about for twenty minutes, humming a jaunty tune as he contentedly bled the radiators one by one. It had taken him a little under an hour “not to find our kitten” and he charged us £125 cash for the “less than an hour he spent not finding her”. I paid him and he went on his way whistling a merry tune. I finally understood why he was so smiley. Needless to say we didn’t put him in our book of people to contact in an emergency.

Six hours later, and still in the kitchen wondering where on earth Misty could have gone, we heard a very faint scurrying sound from behind the kickboard at the bottom of the sink unit (the one by Gaynor’s foot in the photograph). I eased myself down onto my hands and knees, pried the kickboard loose, and throwing it to one side (almost smashing a bottle of wine on the wine rack in the process), I dropped my head to the floor and looked in.

And there she was!

Misty was cowering at the back of the space under the unit pressing herself firmly against the wall. I reached in to get her, just managing to grab her before she ran off. She scratched and bit a little (a lot actually), but I didn’t care, I was so relieved to have found her.

On investigation we found that she’d squeezed herself through a small gap beneath the dishwasher. The gap allowed the dishwasher door to open and close freely and was only a couple of inches wide. Kittens it would appear are very elastic. I taped some thick cardboard over the gap with parcel tape, it meant that we couldn’t open the door and couldn’t use the dishwasher, but so what? We had Misty back. For the next hour we fed her lots of kitten food and plenty of kitten milk. After another thirty minutes of cooing and kitten cuddles we tucked Misty safely into her wicker basket on top her pink fluffy cushion, turned off lights, carefully closed the door, and went up to bed secure in the knowledge that Misty wouldn’t be able to get lost in the kitchen again.

How wrong can you be?

To be continued…

George Bailey: ... and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair…

I think I may have already mentioned that painting is hard and that you have to do an awful lot of it to be any good. Last year I managed to paint five paintings in total. How pathetic is that? I also did a little sketching and tried some pastel work but I wasn’t really happy with anything I produced and threw two of the paintings and most of the sketches in the bin.

The paintings were experiments in acrylic and glue. I haven’t worked in acrylic much before and I have to say that I liked the medium but that it didn’t have the same textural quality as oils and I didn’t want to use it like watercolour, hence the glue (and a little sand).

All of the paintings were small. The largest was about thirty inches by eighteen and the smallest about eight inches square. The painting above is one of the smaller ones and actually looks a lot better here than it does on the canvas, perhaps I’ll take my brushes to it again rather than throw it away as I had intended. The problem I have with working small is that I get stuck into the detail and that isn’t what I want at all. For years I’ve been trying to paint and draw landscape that suggests rather than portrays. I know what I want to achieve, it’s just that I can’t seem to achieve it. I’ve come close a couple of times but ultimately it eludes me and I end up with a picture of something rather than something that looks like a picture. At some point in the painting process I think I’m almost there, but then I do a bit more, and then a bit more, and change this, and change that…and before you know it, its gone and I end up with a picture of something all over again.

When will I ever learn to stop?

Perhaps I need to go bigger, I’ve painted big canvasses in the past but even then I seem to end up painting a picture. I have a painting of a stormy day at Hell’s Mouth that is five feet long that everybody thinks is great and that I hate (well most of it, there are some small areas of paint that I like very much). Maybe I should throw away my artist brushes and get some four-inch house painting brushes and a roller. It might free me up to be loose enough not to focus on the damned detail.

They say the devil is in the detail. I think they are right.

I know that it is in me to be able to do this; I just need to set it free. In everything I paint I can find a few inches that I’m completely and totally happy with, a piece of sky or sand, a rock, a shadow on the grass.

The painting above is the view from the road going up Yr Eifl as you look towards Pwllheli done from sketches and memory, no photograph. I call it (very pretentiously) Aspects 4. I like most of the sky, I think I’ve caught the light on the sea okay, I like the reflection of the light on the hill on the left and the texture (glue) of the mountain on the right; but I hate the middle distance, far too green, and why can you see any mountains and fields at all, and why oh why did I paint in those cottages and that cheesey wall in the close foreground? Just because they’re there doesn’t mean they have to be in my picture.

I hate it when I do that.

Okay. I have three five feet canvasses under my bed at home. They have been there nearly six years waiting for me to come and chuck a load of paint at them. Before my birthday in March I’m going to have painted one of them. I don’ know what I’m going to paint, but I’m going to give it a go. I may even just paint without making any sketches; perhaps I’ll just paint the sky or the wind, who knows? But I am going to do it and when it’s done I’ll post a photograph of it here.

Woolworths and Peter Lorre

George: Do you realise what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and
prison. That's what it means. One of us is going to jail - well, it's not gonna
be me.

The last Woolworth store closed yesterday for good and always. How can that be? In small towns all over the country there will be nothing to do on a drizzly Sunday afternoon but wander the streets; and where will we buy our pick and mix?

So what happened? How can eight hundred shops and twenty seven thousand jobs disappear almost overnight? There can’t be a home in the country that doesn’t have something that was bought from Woolies. I have radios, sheets, candles, screwdrivers, CD’s, video cassettes, towels, place mats, light fittings, paint, corkscrews, Buckaroo, electric screwdrivers, DVD players, things for holding cups in cars, a lava lamp, garden tools, an apple tree, Christmas decorations, sink plugs, children’s clothes, toys, light bulbs…the list goes on.

So what happened? Woolies stocked everything. How could they go wrong? Perhaps the very fact that they tried to stock everything was part of the problem. Perhaps by stocking everything from crisps to crepe paper, plimsolls to pudding dishes, televisions to tiddlywinks, they tried to please everyone all of the time and ended up not pleasing anyone much most of the time. I know that when I wandered into Woolies, as I often did, and couldn’t find what I wanted, that it was an outrage. This was Woolies. It should have everything. But thinking about it in recent years, although I continued to wander in as often as ever, I usually left having bought nothing. You see I couldn’t seem to make my mind up what they were selling and I found the Woolworth shopping experience very confusing. There were a few books, but not the one I wanted. There were CD’s, but I couldn’t work out how to find the one I was looking for. There was paint, but only in six colours. What were Woolworth’s selling? What did they stand for? What was their identity? It was all so much easier on Amazon, and you could search Amazon from your armchair.

Back in 1964 when my very young father took me to Woolies and bought me a clockwork boat it was very clear what they were selling; dreams and joy. My tiny speedboat had a red hull, a white cabin and a silver key sticking out of the top. It was made from shiny, rigid plastic and cost one shilling and sixpence (seven and a half pence in today’s money). We were on holiday. It could have been Mablethorpe or Yarmouth, I can’t remember, but it was one of those rare warm sunny days and wherever we were there was a boating lake on the promenade. I couldn’t wait to get my boat out of the box and into the water. I ripped off the cardboard packaging, wound the silver key, put my boat in the water, and watched it move towards the middle of the boating lake; where it tipped over and sank. It leaked and so did I, I cried. So my Dad took off his shoes, rolled up his grey flannel trousers, paddled out and got it back for me. He examined it and found that hull wasn’t completely sealed to the deck on one side. We tried putting some elastic bands around it to see if that would keep it watertight, but when we sent it “clicketing” off across the water it sank for a second time. By this time Woolies was shut so we couldn’t take it back, and for me the whole thing had lost its shine anyway, so we went to the early evening beach and built sandcastles instead.

A few years later, I was probably about ten or eleven; I spent an exciting, breathless couple of hours following Peter Lorre, the film actor who I’d seen in Casablanca on the telly the previous evening, into and around the Woolworth store in Aylesbury. He was wearing a black overcoat and a grey fedora and was obviously on a secret mission. He wandered around the store trying to look casual but he wasn’t fooling me; I knew he was up to something. After a long time he bought an Easter egg, left the shop and went out into the bustle of Friar’s Square. I rushed to keep up with him but before I could get through the red painted glass doors he’d slipped into the crowd and I’d lost him. I can only guess at what mystery was hidden inside that gold foil-wrapped chocolate egg. It may have been a secret message, or a bomb, or maybe even a small cellophane packet of multi-coloured Smarties. I’ll never know.

Good-bye Woolworths, I’ll miss you but I went over to Wilkinson’s a long time ago. I wonder how long they will last?

It really was Peter Lorre, wasn’t it?