A Desk Of My Own

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I am not a fan of Virginia Woolf but the writing ‘room of your own’ idea is definitely dear to my own heart.

She says you need money of your own as well, but for that I have to admit I rely on my generous husband. ( I think, if memory serves, Virginia had a bit of help from a rich family and wasn’t entirely dependent on her royalties to break out of the lentils and bread routine…)

Anyway, we have two spare bedrooms, and a study.

In one spare bedroom in one my generous husband has set up a history writing den as he decides how to create the definitively simple guide to European history so that we not only can know what the defenestration of Prague was all about, but what was also happening in say, well everywhere else, at the same time.

But let me not distract you with thoughts about how useful and entertaining that will be when it is published.

When he said he wanted that room for history writing, I said, that was fine as long as it could be easily converted back to a spare room – and that in return I wanted the study as my writing space.

Well, point number one is working out fine, but point number two never really did.

He never really left the study and I never really took it over.

So, dear reader, this could turn into a very long story so I will cut to what has happened.

I decided to move my writing to the other (by the way much smaller, but probably my favourite)spare bedroom but it lacked a desk.

A country auction is what I needed. Lots of brown – but lovely – furniture on offer. At least it is sometimes.

Sometimes, like charity shop shopping, there just isn’t anything you want. Should you want a miniature obelisk, or a Chinese inlaid cabinet or a set of wheel-backed dining chairs, you are fine but if you want something else, something particular and in the right size, shape and price you are out of luck,

We used to have a good auction house in Petersfield but it is now a trendy bar, so we have to go to Alresford where there is a (country) auction.

So, on the hunt for a suitable desk, I dragged the generous husband to the viewing and found I was delightfully knee-deep in potential desks.

To get the idea you have to imagine barns stacked with a lot of brown ( mahogany, walnut, oak etc – most of which will have been made by hand) furniture – very unfashionable – and pine furniture which, inexplicably, goes for a relative fortune.

Anyway, one of the ‘desks’ was mahogany and was really a wash stand – think servant in a good house getting up at 6, or maybe newly-middle-class girl thinking of making herself pretty, or given where we live, a farmer’s daughter – all in the the 18th century and with her wash bowl of cold water, doing her ablutions.

(If you are an imaginative sort, you could fly with a woman of slender means doing her pre-theatre abultions and hoping to get lucky, you could go with the widow fallen on hard times after her husband got killed in the Napoleonic wars, you can go where you want to – go for it, feel free.)

There was a fine Regency piece which had all the lovely curves and was originally a hall table and I liked that a lot.

It was not quite Beau Brummel’s standard I suspect, but he could have walked past it and maybe cast an admiring glance.

Those were the days when people had hall tables of walnut and hand-turned legs, dovetailed drawer joints and all hand- properly made.

Then there was another Georgian desk – and it was a proper writing desk, as defined by the catalogue, and who can’t love the idea of sitting down and writing at a desk which has been ‘written on’ for all those years.

Who was writing what to whom? Were there carriages rattling past the window as she ( or even he) wrote that poignant/formal/rebuffing/begging/entertaining/last letter.

I love Georgian stuff – it has the sniff of properly old stuff. I have three elm Georgian chairs, bought for a song and I love the fact that they are British elm – no longer available as they say – and have had bottoms on them since the 1700s.

As I say, there were other ‘desk ‘ options but they were not in the same league – they would have done, been serviceable, useful and would have rescued some ‘brown’ furniture which is always a good thing to do.

But they were not going to send me home with a song in my heart ( though what they went for would certainly have put a song in my generous husband’s wallet.)

We looked and measured and considered and all in all, the ‘desk’ I fell in love with was not entirely the best option – and anyway, it had a much higher estimate than the others.

So, the next day I schlepped back – alone – to the auction. They do a fortifying bacon roll and cup of tea before the kick off, so I had one.

As the lot number approaches, even now after all the auctions I have been to, my heart starts thumping, my hands grasp the catalogue, but I try to look calm to impress the auctioneer and other auction-goers, though god knows why because they don’t give a stuff whether you are a hardened bidder or sweating your knickers off.

Anyway, so many lots at this auction had gone for diddly-squat – and, dear reader, they were lovely things like a walnut sideboard, a Georgian cabinet, dining tables for what you would pay in IKEA for a few candles – you could have furnished a house for two and six at that auction.

But of course, you can never quite believe that your lot will go for less than double the estimate – and you will have to go home weeping.

So, I had three lots – one after the other.

You just have to bid as they come up and hope that you get one of them and if not, you have to put it down to bad luck and keep looking.

In my case, I was lucky in that my favourite came up first – that usually doesn’t happen and you have to forgo bidding for your third choice to save your money for your first and of course…..

You will no doubt, if you have got this far, be delighted to hear that I got the favourite – the one I really wanted, and I am sitting at it now writing this – in the (spare) room of my own.

And it was a bargain.

Honours – a brief rant

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I need to make a couple of points up front here: I was not glued to the Olympics, and I think the British honours system is rubbish.

Our Prime Minister has said there will be no limit to the number and type of honours given to the British medal winners.

And I do appreciate the amount of hard work, dedication and effort it takes to make yourself an Olympian medal winner.

So, Prime Minister, make a new category of honours which are dedicated to sports women and men.

Make the lovely hockey team proud with a British Sports Honour. Make the dream cycling couple happy with the same. Give one to the man who won his medal at the age of 58 – and even to his horse. Make Bradley Wiggins or Mo Farrah give them out with the Queen alongside.

But heavens above spare us from more Sirs and stuff.

Awards are generally bought one way of another.

These sports ones were bought with £350m lottery money.

(A familiar number to those of us who were glued to the Brexit debate. Do you remember that amount was promised to come back into the health service very week?)

And the SamCam stylist. Oh give over.

I am sure there are still people who give a lot of unsung service to the country who occasionally get recognised but the system is generally weighted in favour of the friends of the great and good and rich – and it is just rubbish.

IKEA & The Empire

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I remember a time when I said I would never set foot in IKEA again – but of course, I have.

I said it because I was fed up with being seduced by cheap prices and buying stuff, more stuff & stuff we didn’t need and me, a second-hand shopper wants good, old stuff.

On the other hand, it is Scandinavian design and I am a sucker for that, but then again I would rather be shopping in Stockholm than Southampton.

(Shopping in Stockholm does require a more than modest lottery win, I need to say.)

So, we had a list of things we needed to get from IKEA including large mats to replace those we had bought several years ago and on which we could now could fondly trace the red wine spill, the casserole slip and various dog issues, as well as general grime.

To get me through this ordeal, I decided to think of it as I imagined some 19th century Empire-bound wife would as she planned setting up home in the tea plantations of Northern India or in the nice suburbs of Calcutta.

She would have been shopping in the Army & Navy stores – set up in 1871
to supply goods and chattels to army and navy ( not surprisingly) officers, and to supply them cheaply.

There was a stationery department ( always a favourite with me), a drapery department, fancy goods department ( I am not sure what was in that, but I do wonder what fancy goods you might need on an Empire posting), handily they also had a gun department (and as fancy goods go, a gun might work.)

They don’t have such departments in IKEA.

In 1890, The Army & Navy opened new stores in Plymouth and Mumbai. For all I know IKEA have stores in Plymouth and Mumbai, but it’s just not the same.

My best beloved has a dinner service which he bought from the Army & Navy before his first posting to Baghdad. The Foreign Office let you do things like that in those days so that you had decent, British, upstanding plates on which to serve food to grateful natives no doubt. ( We still use it – for less grateful Sussex natives.)

So from a store where you could buy supplies to take with you when you set off to bring civilisation and British values to the locals, the Army & Navy developed into a mail order service.

They had a massive catalogue which included everything from bars of soap to wedding dresses – both, no doubt, terribly useful in their own ways.

IKEA has lots of useful things too.

So, we bought a light fitting, had a long debate about toilet brushes, as you do, some cups of exactly the right shape for Nick – he is a man of habit and these cups are the exact right shape and he’s not to be deflected with other shaped cups.

It was relatively painless – and we did get some good large mats.

There was a mattress topper which we have to order online and that is fine, that is today’s world.

But there is a bit of me, sitting on the veranda on a hillside in India looking through the Army & Navy catalogue and being delighted that they can deliver a kitchen range and linoleum ‘within 40 and 17 days respectively.’

The Visit

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We were told that our Oxfam shop was to be inspected by our area manager.

First off, I must say that she is a good woman who sees us (thankfully) as a very well-run shop and so, sensibly but a little exhaustingly, devotes her energies largely to shops that are having problems.

Occasionally she will turn up in Petersfield just to visit a shop that is fine, thank you very much, drink tea and just have a rest from sorting out problem stuff.

But anyway the rules are that we should, on a regular basis, cull books that don’t sell and ideally send them on to another shop for another chance.

Sadly, the last but one shop we were designated to send them on to closed. Then it was Bognor’s turn, but at risk of plagiarising a King George V,  Bognor is buggered. Or at least it is not taking our culled books any more.

Be warned dear reader, this is just the beginning of me explaining how we price books and run the shop so you can pick up a copy of Bedside Algebra (yes there is such a book – and we have it in stock) if you want something more riveting.

Anyway, the rules are that paperback novels should be culled every three weeks.

My great colleague Stella does that – and makes sure they are all in proper alphabetical order. And I mean proper order.

But that relies on having the stock to do it – and for the first time since I have been there, we are short on paperback fiction.

(So, by the way, if you live near Petersfield and have a lot of good quality paperbacks please bring them to us.)

The same three weeks lifespan, apparently, should be true of non-fiction, but really, give over. We just don’t have the stock.

But our area manager was due to visit us to make sure that everything was up to date, so we needed to make it easy for her to sign us off as being a shop that ‘does the right thing.’

At this point I should explain how this works:

Every book that comes into the shop has to be sorted – will it live or will it be put in a re-cycling sack? – what category should it be assigned to, will it fit onto the appropriate shelf upstairs before being brought down into the shop.

We have pricing guns that print the price and category. They are a bit old, hard to work and it took the manager being off ill for some time before I finally mastered how to re-load them with new rolls of labels.

It turns out that if you throw them across the room, they break easily and are a surprisingly expensive £50 to replace. It wasn’t me, but it could have been.

(Should you need to know, I can tell you each and every book category by heart. So, category 15 is for old and interesting and category 5 is hobbies and category 8 is travel – see what I mean.)

And then the week is put on in pencil. And that’s so that you can pick a book, any book, of a shelf and know how long it has been sitting there.

In an ideal world, you would have a culling regime and a small army of enthusiastic volunteers would take books off the shelf that had been there for too long (more than three weeks), and replace them with newly donated books, all checked, priced and sitting neatly on a shelf upstairs.

We don’t live in that world.

So, the point about putting the week in pencil is that if we want to leave a book to get another (rather more lengthy) chance, we can rub out the week and put another (later) week on it. (Should you be in the slightest interested we are currently on week 18.)

Because we are a) short of stock and b) short of people who do systematic culling, I decided to get every book in the shop re-labelled as week 16 – the week the area manager was due to visit.

I do realise that this is cheating. I do realise that the area manager is not stupid and she will know what is what. But also, I know that the rules don’t quite work if you end up with empty shelves. (I also know that our shop manager has to live by the rules so there are things it is better he doesn’t actively know about.)

Dragooning fellow volunteers into this plan, I had many a person armed with a rubber and a pencil to re-week for England.

Whoever had been putting the weeks on with a biro was soundly cursed – even though they may well have claimed that if culling was done properly, it wouldn’t need to be in pencil….. Yeah, whatever.

The shop looked really good. The day before the area manager was due , I got an extra shift out of one of my colleagues and, building on two weeks of work, we changed every front-facing book, re-did some books in the window (but knowing they were likely to sell quickly didn’t put them out until 4.30 so that they would be there when she arrived the following morning.)

I was on the till, he was upstairs rapidly clearing boxes of books – pricing them, tidying shelves, emptying bins, making sure we had chocolate biscuits – anything and everything to make the shop look Sunday Best.

Of course, dear reader, you will have guessed that an emergency came up and the area manager didn’t come.

I comfort myself with the notion that we are never one of her emergencies and the shop is now ready for us to manage the culling properly.

We now can go round systematically and cull based on the fact that week zero (or week 16) has been established – and more to the point, the only one of our volunteers who did proper culling in moving to Sheffield.

Of course, all of that relies on the good people of Petersfield having a clear out of books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surprising Sussex Housewives

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As I live longer in Deepest Sussex, I find that my stereotypes of housewives have been challenged – or at least I have found women who baulk at them.

I had a lunch to thank the people who had helped me with the village festivities pop-up bookshop and someone came up with a really good idea.

She said we should create a supper club and get interesting people to come and have a conversation with us.

(Sharing credentials here rather than living on past glories, I need to tell you that I once ran a supper club for ‘the generals’ who were really semi-senior military leaders who wanted, needed and got, supper and a conversation with someone they would never normally come into contact with.

The speakers didn’t need to be famous and the subject was hardly ever anything to do with the military, but they had to be an interesting speaker.

So, we had the Chief Inspector of Prisons, someone talking about amazing Medieval master builders, mother and daughter who walked to the North Pole, an ex-Taliban refugee, a bee Professor, a bishop, someone talking about enduring mental health problems, a magician and so on.

Diligent readers, and my friends, will remember that the Supper Club is how I met the ‘best beloved’ who shares my Sussex idyll.

Anyway, enough living on the past glories I said I wasn’t going to do.)

Back to the main story here, a few of us went to the local pub last night to make this idea happen.

( Thank you, Vicky.)

We will create a membership of like-minded women who will pay say £10 per month and get four suppers a year and a conversation with someone interesting.

The issue is how to get people to speak to us – for expenses only.

After all, you can get all sorts of people to speak if you pay them handsomely enough, but we need to make ourselves interesting enough for speakers to forgo a fee.

Ahh, I hear you say.

A bunch of pony-tailed, four wheeled driving women living in very nice houses and fitting in a Pilates class between the private school sports day and a lunch with the girlfriends in that great little place we love so much, during which  you mention the simply wonderful gardener you’ve found – that will, indeed, be quite difficult to sell as an interesting audience.

Well, and I am amazed to hear myself say this, we are not all bloody like that.

Here in Deepest Sussex, again I say with some force, at least some of us are definitely not bloody like that.

So, whilst I will admit that The Guardian does not fly off the shelves of the village shop and there is a whole strata of our local society which runs the various village societies with an iron rule and impeccably good manners.We are not all blood like that.

And scratch the surface and you will find smart, funny, interesting women ( some living in lovely houses and driving 4x4s ) who want to keep their brains stretched.

And we are going to harness them and make this supper club work.

We will find a way of describing ourselves out of the stereotypes and to show ourselves as the women we really are – smart, funny, interesting, as I said before  – and get all sorts of fascinating people to say, ‘Blimey, they sound like a great group of people to spend an evening with.’

And there may even be some smart men around who will be allowed to come – as guests you understand – as long as they ask nicely and agree to load the dishwasher for a week.

Daphne Du Maurier and Brexit

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“Emma, who lives in Cornwall with her retired grandmother, a famous retired actress, wakes one morning to find that the world has apparently gone mad:

No post, no telephone, no radio, a warship in the bay and American soldiers advancing across the field towards the house.

The time is a few years in the future. England has withdrawn from the Common Market and, on the brink of bankruptcy, has decided that salvation lies in a union – political, military and economic – with the United States.

Theoretically, it is to be an equal partnership; but to some people it soon begins to look like a takeover bid.”

This is on the flyleaf of Rule Britannia, written by Daphne Du Maurier in 1972.

I had never seen this book before – but as you, dear reader, know by now, Oxfam is a Pandora’s box of surprises.

(Yesterday the box opened to reveal an inundation of books – just when Duncan, an Oxfam stalwart if ever there was one, and I thought we had the shop all sorted out – and they were mostly recycling-sack fillers.)

Back to Daphne.  As a (deflated) Bremainer, I am sure that we are living in the phoney war period and the real fall out will come over months and then years.

Yesterday, I was culling the Old and Interesting shelves and although we give them a longer chance than say, gardening, there comes a time when all good things must come to an end, and they have to go.

I picked up a book on the history of the Liberal Party in its early days and was about to throw it onto the reject pile, when I thought again – for the very pragmatic reason that I didn’t have enough alternatives to fill up the shelf.

Now, that book has been there for months but blow me down as they say, half an hour after I had moved it from one shelf to the one lower down, a woman bought it.

I asked her if she was a political historian and she said no but her daughter had done a masters in international politics and was now working in London.

Then she reduced her voice to a whisper and said, ‘ She was so angry about the Brexit vote that she joined the Liberal Party. She would have joined Labour but there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment.’

(Whilst social and mainstream media is full of stories about vile threats and angry denunciations of Remainers and Brexiteers alike, in Petersfield it seems, we reduce our voices to a whisper when talking politics.)

And that young , likely-to-be-on-the-receiving-end-of-the-bad-news-about-Brexit  womanis right, there isn’t really a Labour Party at the moment and not likely to be one, or for that matter much in the way of a vigorous opposition party, for the foreseeable future.

So, with Trump dangerously likely to end up in the White House and the fallout of our referendum still to come, I am off to read what Daphne Du Maurier prophesied.

Jane Garvey & The Chair

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Recently Woman’s Hour asked people to tweet in pictures of what they were doing whilst they were listening.

My delight was pretty unbounded when I sent in a photo of the chair I was upholstering and Jane Garvey, no less, said’ ‘Someone upholstering a chair, I am very impressed by that.’

I was very nearly name-checked by Jane Garvey – it boosted my day no end.

I do realise that upholstery as a hobby is a pretty sure definition of a Sussex housewife, but I would like to say it is harder than you might think.

So, whilst not exactly stretching the grey matter to degree standard, it does require some thought and a lot of help from our teacher.

Most of the chairs I re-upholster get sold ( for a bargain pittance, I may add,) on eBay or Gumtree and the proceeds go towards Syrian refugee appeals.

If we had a retail outlet, I could charge more but then they would have to be shall we say, more perfect.

I am at the slapdash end of upholsterers. I am not sure that my tacks – which won’t be seen until the next upholsterer strips it back – need to be in an absolutely straight line, just by way of a small example.

An upholsterer friend said, usefully, one day,’ If a man on a galloping horse can’t see the problem, there isn’t one.’

I have that very nice chap in mind quite a lot.

But this brings me on to the local tip.

The tip shop is where I get a lot of my chairs – not least since the local auction house moved to smaller premises and no longer has the house clearance stuff that you could pick up for a song – or a last minute bid of not very much.

Anyway, chairs at the tip are usually ugly ducklings, and very cheap ones but they can be transformed with a bit of imagination and fabric.

But the tip and therefore its shop, was threatened with closure. A stupid idea if ever there was one.

It is very well run and very busy, and the nearest ones are about 12 miles away – fly tipping, bring it on.

As far as I gather, it has had a reprieve but the powers that be have come up with the nearly as stupid idea of not opening at the weekends until 11 and closing at 4.

There are queues to get in at the weekend – and that is when it is open at 9.

Anyway, I know all this because I have been haunting the tip lately – being an almost daily visitor – looking for a chair.

In this case not just any old manky small duck, but a button-backed chair.

Previously, I had absolutely refused to countenance anything which needed such an eye for detail, patience and a neat way of working – all skills which I possess in minute quantities.

But I found some fabric.

I am a cheapskate when it comes to fabric and like hunting down bargains and this was a roll of more than three metres reduced from £20 per metre to £1.99.

And, if I may say so myself, I am rather good at fabric choices – doing various bits of the chairs in different fabrics, contrasting piping and all that.

( Should you be at all interested, I have just mastered making piping and now don’t know why I made such a fuss about it.)

Anyway, I found a roll of lovely stuff which I hesitate to describe as pink lest you pull a face and think badly of me – suffice it to say, it is a very interesting shade of pink.

My plan is to do the chair in this pink and make the buttons a sharply contrasting colour – yet to be decided.

But can I find a cheap button-backed chair? No I can’t.

Up until I decided I wanted one, there were hundreds of them at the tip, in auctions across the county, going for nothing on Freecycle, being given away locally etc etc, but now there is a strange dearth.

Button-backed chair owners everywhere seem to have decided, unaccountably, to keep them.

But one day my chair will come and for now, I am on very friendly terms with the men at the tip.

Syrian Preserves

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I do like to cook so I don’t want the reluctant housewife thing to suggest I am far too busy and cosmopolitan and interesting to be bothered with the stove.

Nothing I like better than pottering about the kitchen, but I never saw myself as a jam-maker.

Still, I had a tree full of crab apples and one of the builders doing our kitchen extension started nagging me to do something with them.

At the time he was dowsing with a wire coat-hanger to find our water supply whilst I was beating nettles out of the way so he could get a better fix.

He did find the supply and also told me of various ways to ensure the best crab apple jelly.

So I made some and handed it around the neighbourhood to the (few) people round here who don’t make their own extensive range of preserves. ( I am of course talking women.)

Last year we had more crab apples – that being the way of nature, though this year the tree isn’t well and is – thus far – in a crab apple sulk or perhaps feeling very under the weather.

Down the road there was also a tree laden with elderberries and of course, being the crunchyside, there were blackberries.

I had been re-upholstering chairs and selling them in aid of Syrian Refugees – see what I mean about being a Sussex housewife – and so decided to make a shed load of pickles, jams and preserves and have a party at which everyone was morally (and insistently) obliged to buy them for the Good Cause.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – it is a long and daffy process making preserves but I persevered. (sorry)

Courgette relish for burgers, elderberry vinegar which I have to say was rather the star of the show crab apple jelly of course – and it got rave reviews when it landed up in a Scottish restaurant via a friend, blackberry jam, pickled peaches for serving with ham – I could go on….

Then I caught sight of myself preening over preserves.

Panic-stricken at the thought of being that woman, I hot-footed it to an exhibition in London and read a book on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Still, the Syrians got a couple of hundred quid so all was not lost.

Stags, Hens and Bacon Sandwiches

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Although we had two free first class tickets, we decided to take the train which had no first class seating.

I won’t bore you with why we had the free tickets, but I will say that we chose to go to Cardiff the scenic route thus swapping (mild) train luxury for scenery.

The shame was that the best beloved slept through most of it – missing the White Horse etched on the hill, the great view of Bath, the pretty fields and sweeping countryside etc etc etc.

Anyway, partway through this journey we were joined by a stag party on their way too to Cardiff.

They weren’t wild, foul mouthed, pissed as skunks but they were loud – though even they couldn’t walk the BB from his happy slumber.

I was, at this point, thinking that taking the other route complete with peaceful first class carriages might have been the better idea.

Later I was to find out that Cardiff was packed with Hens and Stags.

In my day, they used to come to Cardiff from the valleys for a night out before the wedding, get very drunk, probably have a row, and go home – all on the same day.

Now they make a weekend of it and come from all sorts of places.

My sister tells me the same is true of York.

When someone (bizarrely it seemed to me,) donated a pink cowboy hat to the Petersfield Oxfam bookshop, she told me you could see about 150 of those in York on any Saturday afternoon.

Back in Cardiff, we bumped into a hen night in the pub opposite our hotel – one of those not gentrified in the changed cityscape.

There was a dedicated afternoon disco room and everyone had a sash saying who they were: mother of the groom, bridesmaid, cousin of the bride, groom’s previous lover – no, of course not the last one.

But in the bar were two nice men who I talked to about the changes since I lived there.

My BB said that I spent the whole weekend going up to complete strangers and saying, ‘Hello, I used to live here you know. ‘ He was pretty much spot on.

But the proliferation of stags and hens reminded my of the Big Chill.

My BB’s children gave us tickets to the festival as a birthday present and we went.

Luckily it was within a few miles of my mum’s house so we had showers, food, toilets etc etc within easy reach – we are not bring-it-all-on-we-don’t-need-anything-but-a-hole-in-the-ground-and-some-music types.

Anyway, we pitched out tent next to a circle of tents full of (not surprisingly,) young people and then after setting it all up realised we were just by the entrance to the main arena.

Despite these very nice young people telling us that all would be well and they would ensure we had a lovely time, we picked up the erected tent and moved it down the hill.

Settling on a nice spot a long way from the arena and sitting outside on a lovely evening,  we watched as the space next to us filled with young men all with pup tents.

Being the sociable one of the two of us, I engaged them in friendly festival conversation and found out they were there on a stag weekend.

The idea of upping sticks, or erected tent, and moving again was just too much like hard work and if all else failed, my mum was only a few miles away.

But do you know what, it was delightful.

Of course, we didn’t stay up all night helped by various illicit substances though we did have an encounter with a dental nurse from Bristol who was dressed in a large white fluffy dressing gown beneath which she had secreted the bladder of a box of white wine and she was very generous with it.

And the stag group next door were quiet as mice.

The next day I got up early, as is my wont,  and went in search of sustenance.

I presumed nothing would be open but hey, of course, some people were just coming home as it were.

To my surprise, the groom-to-be was also awake and he and I strolled up the hill to find tea and bacon sandwiches.

We did that every morning.

He told me that he had promised his wife-to-be that he would be good, so he had decided two pints of cider a day was all he would have, and he always liked early mornings not least because you met people you wouldn’t otherwise meet.

I thought she was a lucky woman to have found him – I am not sure I would say that of all the brides-to-be whose grooms-to-be were in Cardiff last weekend.

The Days Of Typewriters

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It was a trip down memory lane and it was hard to realise how much older I am now than when memory lane was just day-to-day life.

We went for the weekend to Cardiff.

When I lived there,  journalists – and I was one, hard to believe though that might be, dear reader – used typewriters.

Indeed you didn’t have your own typewriter so if you were late into work you might find yourself landed with the upright black one dating from about 1925.

‘E’ is the most popular letter in the English language and the ‘e’ on this machine had worn out.

So when you finished typing your story – on two sheets of very thin (as in cheap,) paper with a piece of carbon-paper sandwiched between so that one copy could be kept in case of legal action – you had to go back over it writing in all the ‘e’s.

We had one mobile phone for the whole newsroom and that was so bulky you needed to have the only office car to take it anywhere.

Its range was hardly more than shouting distance so taking it anywhere was usually a waste of time.

If you wanted information you rang someone and your contacts book was your most precious belonging.

If you wanted older information you went to the newsroom ‘library’ where you would ask a surly man for the subject you wanted and he would bring you a cardboard envelope, called a packet, full of cuttings from the paper on the same issue – if you were lucky.

This was the library which still held the lovely Western Mail headline when the Titanic went down: ‘Welsh people die in shipping disaster.’

It also held packets and packets and packets of coverage of the Aberfan disaster.

I was a trade union activist – hard to believe though that may be, again, – and I used to have to go and talk to the printers.

Though they were the newspaper equivalent of horny-handed sons of toil, they were much better paid than us effete journalists and one day I will tell you about going to meetings in their Bedford HQ and beef wellington and generally how it so differed from the journalists’ union HQ – suffice it to say at this point, they had considerably better surroundings.

Anyway, I was in my early 20s in those days and one of those days, I went downstairs to talk to one of their union officials.

I got wolf-whistled which wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but their union leader shouted for it to stop saying, ‘She isn’t a girl, she’s the Mother of the Chapel.’

It never seemed odd to my feminist-atheist self that the terms Mother and Chapel as a description of a woman union leader was anything other than perfectly reasonable – I bridled, though, at being called a girl.
Enough, for now of my journalist stories though I could tell you about flunking my first National Council for the Training of Journalists exam because I argued with the examiner about what was realistic in the aftermath of an all -ut nuclear war – in those days that seemed a possibility – though not like the examiner had suggested.

I could tell you about the lovely Inn on the River known locally as the Pub on the Mud where I spent many a happy Sunday lunchtime. And whilst on the subject of pubs – we were journalists after all…..

I could tell you about The Philharmonic (The Philly) a pub where we adjourned after a late shift before getting a Cardiff speciality – chips with curry sauce – from Caroline Street.

(To my delight, there are still places selling that Cardiff delicacy in Caroline St even though the new, posh Brewery Quarter is there too.)

Actually the brewery, Brains, has moved. It used to belch foul, or at least unattractive, smells of hops being transformed into Brains beer across the road to the Western Mail.

The brewery has moved and the paper has moved too.

Just a little stretch of memory lane left.