Saturday 19 February 2011

Live Reggae post + update

There are two musics which sweep me sideways no matter what I’m doing. Blues – the proper down and real blues – and reggae. Right now I’m watching Toots and the Maytals on BBC4 Friday night and my bum is jiggling and doing a sideways shuffle on the seat. 

It’s totally involuntary. How can I NOT respond to such joy and energy???!!  

I did my courting to reggae.

We danced. The trick was to move your hips sideways, but not back again until another beat had passed.  Two wiggles, then back, two wiggles again, on the offbeat. We were ‘allowed’ to attend a purely black club, Reno’s in Moss Side, Manchester, early 1970s. You arrived there about  9 pm on a Friday or Saturday (if you worked M–F like we did) and presented yourself at the tiny barred jail–type window in the heavy door. Facial recognition only. We whites were recognised for our loyalty, and we were the regular 'honorary blacks' for the night. It also gave them a chance to check we weren’t the drug squad. (Oh that’s another post, one day! A lot of history’s gone under my bridge and why I don’t have a criminal record is beyond me ...) 

We danced and drank a little, danced and drank a little more, always very well–behaved or we’d have been thrown out, and I know the odd spliff went round, and when they shut their doors around 2 am, we went back up to the street and into the chicken bar next door – a fried chicken chippy. Instead of salt and vinegar there was a paprika shaker on the counter top. That just made it. Refreshed and full of paprika zest, we moved on to a shabeen, which consisted of a terraced house with no furniture, crammed to bursting with people shoulder to shoulder, and two ceiling–high speakers in every room, but not much drink. A few bottles on a table in the corner. You were there for the music, the dance, the feel, the purity. You weren’t there to get off your face. 

Around 8 in the morning, we’d leave, and walk 4 miles south back to Didsbury. Beautiful summer mornings, alive and still kicking. Big breakfast, and bed till lunchtime. And then have the energy to extract as much as most normal people out of a weekend day.

One Friday night, I was in Reno’s as usual, and my friend Penny said one of our friends, Chris, needed help. I went up to him. He was one of the regulars. He was leaning back against a wall, his car keys held dangling before him. He needed some sensible person to take his car home somewhere, as he was beyond driving and didn’t want to leave it in Moss Side all night. Quite right. There were always a few bad-asses around. And they reckoned if you were dumb enough to leave your car there, you deserved what you got. I was above the limit so I said OK. At this point he was sliding down the wall. He gave me his phone number, to arrange getting the car back. I didn’t really know him, only by sight. And reputation. A bit of a firebrand. Give him a situation to deal with, he’d be in there head first, fists flying. 

So on Saturday morning I phoned. His mum answered. He was out cold. Could I call later?
I called later. He was still out. I went to do some errands you can only do with a car. It was precious to have one for a day or so. 

I called on Sunday afternoon. His mum said “Hold on. I’m going to get him up. He’s been asleep since Friday.”
I knew he was coming down off a week on speed. He was known for it. I kept my mouth shut.

He came to the phone, and we arranged a car return. He offered to repay me somehow. I really wanted to go to the sea, to see if I could get a job there. I felt like a fish out of water in Manchester. So I asked him to take me to Wales for the day and he agreed. 

The following Saturday morning I’d been staying overnight at Penny’s, and Chris turned up at 1000 as arranged. Her doorbell rang. But where was the little blue Volkswagen with the little yellow wheels ? Why was there a silver Jaguar E–type parked up? I didn’t ask. I got in and Chris gunned it down the road. Be cool, I thought. Don’t ask stupid questions. (He'd blagged it from his boss, to impress me, I found out later.)

(TV is now showing Bob Marley and the highlights of his life. I saw him at a concert in a ten pin bowling place in the early 70’s. Loved him so much I wouldn't have missed that gig for the world.)

We drove to Wales. I swear there wasn’t a car he didn’t overtake. Talk about hormones. He was completely unfazed when I casually took off my jumper and replaced it with a teeshirt cos I was too hot and hadn't been sure what to wear. It was a warm day. And he reached for the cassette player. Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto, the musical meat behind Brief Encounter, the ‘most romantic’ of concertos. Chris? Speed freak? Don’t ask, just enjoy. 

We talked and talked and arrived at Conway Castle, and took a break. Walked down to the water, down a wooden boardwalk slipway. He kissed me. I kissed back.

We motored on, and had lunch in a pub, where he proposed, and I accepted.

A week later, sitting in our local pub in Didsbury, you’d have thought that two superpowers had merged, from the reaction we got. The girl who doesn’t stoop with the man who doesn’t bend.

We lived together in a rented Cheshire farmhouse, and married 4 months later in May 1974. 

But that, truly, is another story.

I leave you with one thought – my wedding is usually mentioned in the same breath as Sam Peckinpah. I kid you not. Another day………..

(Bob Marley is singing Exodus. Perfect.)

The update - thought I'd mention I was 19 when this happened. What did I know about men? Not a lot.
And I left everybody else to get on with the spliff stuff when I left my teens behind. Didn't suit me.
Thank you for listening.


Thursday 17 February 2011

more flag waving (and the aurora alert)

Was so busy in a hurry telling you some things about Glossop, clean forgot about the craft and sewing centre, the full-to-bursting art supplies shop, the fabric shop (like hen's teeth, they are, these days), furnishing fabrics shop, the ironing shop, umpteen hair and nail places (not my thing, big nails), cricket club (not my thing either but really English and nice to know it's there, esp as it houses the embroidery group once a month), swimming pool, 2 parks, all your banks and stuff, flower shops, holistic retreats and clinics, a proper vintage clothes place, wedding shops, photographers (yada yada yada)......... Oh and the sailing club. There's football, I think, but it's no good asking me about that. The Victorian style train station has been renovated - quite pretty and colourful.
In other words it's all crammed in to what is still a small town, I'm at a loss to think of anything major it hasn't got, and a cinema is the only thing I can come up with.


It says a lot that there is only one empty shop on the long High Street, and that might be a fault with the building itself judging by the scaffolding round it. My computer repair whizz and sales man has a shop in Handforth (south of Manchester) and another in Buxton. He wants to open a shop here. I think you can get repairs here in two places but not new or reconditioned computers.
But what's so good is that 98% of these shops are all independents, even the mobile phone place and, more to the point, they are thriving. Well to my untutored eye, anyway. There's a recession, I know. I have been paying attention.


An electrician called this morning to mend the transformer for the halogen lights in the kitchen. Said he'd lived in Glossop for years. He thought crime was probably the same here as anywhere, but I had a story to tell.
Just after I moved here, one Saturday evening about 6-ish, my car in a small supermarket's car park mysteriously lost its windscreen wipers, support struts and all, right down to the bodywork, wrenched off while I was shopping,


I pondered whether to bother reporting it. By the following Monday I decided I should. Insurance might want me to (though I didn't bother with that in the end) but mostly I decided my event might be part of a spate that night and might help the police to plot what had happened. I wasn't after any response, just to log it with them.


To my amazement a policeman came to visit that evening. He took the details. "Oh I know exactly which little tyke this will be," he said, and went on to elaborate on the lad's family background etc. He'd even checked cctv beforehand, but the cameras were on the building, not the car park. So tell me another county town where a policeman knows whodunnit like that, for minor car crime. Amazing. Well you might know one, so do tell!


And as a result of that evening's conversation, while he drank tea and was given my blessing to smoke his cigars but wasn't invited to partake in wine because he was on duty and driving, (what I actually said was "I'm having wine but you can't have any. Like another tea?"), I found out the best garage in the town to take my car for repairs. "Always ask the police where they take their own," he said.

Excellent.

Losing the wipers was probably worth it for finding a great garage, and the last time I was there for the MOT I came home with venison bacon and sausages too. They had a fridgeful for sale in the reception. Another priceless local connection!

Oh I do love it here.

And before I go :

in my list of reference sites on the sidebar, see the new one - over the next few days you can see whether the 15th Feb solar flare is going to show up in our aurora. Real time. I have their email alert and it's a red! But forecast says rain so..........

Thursday 10 February 2011

The jumping–off–a–cliff style of househunting


It was untypical of life, but typical of the times around me right now. It was scary but brilliant. Delightfully surprising.

I love Glossop, my nearest town, for its friendliness, its sensible shops, the fact that you can leave the greengrocers owing them 20p and they know you’ll be back to pay it, and that there are three bookshops, an incredibly cheap furniture place in old warehouse, great healthfood shop, a good library (not yet massacred and I have a feeling it will stay), the embroidery guild group, coffee shops, two delis, lovely indian, thai & chinese restaurants and chippies etc, a theatre even, an indoor and outdoor market, and once a month a farmer’s market, a Next, Wickes, Aldi, Co–op, Halfords, all that stuff, hardware and plumbing shops, cheap shops, a post office open on Saturday afternoon, fishmonger and brilliant butcher, and the fact that drivers on the main road stop to let you out of the side street even though they don’t have to. All the time. It’s catching, that one. I do it too. It’s expected of me. And a 24 hour Tesco just in case. There was such a defensible case at half past eleven the other night.

So I’m househunting in the town, saving money where I can. For someone so pathologically unable to cope with too many humans in too small a space, this is a bit weird. But it’s going to work out. I’ve decided. It will be so. It will be fine. Mantra mantra mantra often enough it will turn out that way. 

So on the first day of looking I arrange to meet the agent (my own, actually, Paul) down the town at 11 o'clock and we look at a couple of terraces. First is damp and poky and dirty and the couple who own it have just split up. I can feel the hate and the sneering arguments still ringing in the empty rooms. I think nothing less than a full exorcism would improve it. There’s not even anywhere to sit outside with a coffee. North facing ginnel only.

Second one I do quite like – there’s even a catflap in the kitchen door! "It's a Sign!" says Paul helpfully.  A quiet street. A bit of lawn, and clues that the owners are people I would like, but kitchen and second bedroom are very small, and the gas boiler’s in that bedroom, where I'd be sleeping. That would keep this insomniac awake and it takes up one precious corner.  Dangerous, anyway? And damned if I want another heating system I can’t sleep through, having just got this one fixed. Derelict industrial shed at the end of the road twenty yards away with planning permission for building new houses. I'm not in any hurry. I have appointments through the week with other agents. Including a small house among fields outside the town.

Is there anything else? I ask Paul. Osborne Place? No, that’s gone. (It was still on their website last night – as were 8 possibles with another agent, 5 of which had gone when I phoned this morning.) Hadfield? No, gone. Talbot Lodge? Gone. They are going so fast, he says. There’s only T St, he adds, but it’s a 3 bedroom, £100 more than this one we’re standing in. He agrees to meet me there in the afternoon. It wasn’t on the website yet so I hadn’t known. It’s at the absolute extremity of my new budget.

I turn up at 2.20 just as the previous viewers are leaving. It's a terraced house built of local stone. “Did they like it?” I ask him. “Yes, but they’re up from Dorset and it’s between this and one other. Going to make up their minds and get back to me this afternoon.”
Living room – wide built–in original cupboards with old fashioned drawers below, either side of huge recessed stone–hearth fireplace. No fire there but could get a fake electric woodburning stove like my friend has. Or turn it into bookshelves. Or just put a row of fat candles in there. Room plenty big enough for the baby grand and my single armchair and stuff.
Kitchen – masses of cupboard space, all new, pale beech sort of thing, and the tongue & groove unit up on wall seems to be the original top half of a welsh dresser.  Hidden walk–in understairs area. That's the litter tray sorted. It's a big kitchen – will easily take my 7 foot table.

The yard is quite long, concrete flag, south facing, plenty of space for all my plants in pots and my wooden table bench thing. A few bits of flower bed I can use. A brick shed next to kitchen with a loo next to that! Very handy for visiting mothers and people like me who drink too much coffee.  Nice wooden doors. A trellis up the side just crying out for sweet peas. Or climbing nasturtiums. Or climbing anything.

Back inside, stairs and upstairs all carpeted immaculately in mid grey – quite liveable with. Bathroom going to be retiled next week. One large bedroom then one medium. “This room would make a nice workshop,” I say. South facing, overlooking the yard. Paul interrupts “But you haven’t seen upstairs yet!” Now bear in mind this is the same agent who does a three–monthly inspection of my current premises, and he knows exactly how much stuff I’ve got, and he knows what I mean by workshop. For that very reason he also thinks it’s a scream, my downsizing. My friends have been rolling around on the floor legs in the air, helpless laughing.

Up to the attic floor, still carpeted.

Oh. My. God. The idiom was invented just so I could use it today, for this very room.
There‘s even space for the twenty foot pine board shelves. From front to back of house with a big velux skylight both sides, views of the hills in both directions, and that’s that. 
My heart is still in a fog but my head is saying If You Don’t Take This Right Now You Are STUPID

As a girl who lets her intuition be heard, cos it’s usually correct, I’m wondering why I’m not fainting on the spot and scrabbling around for my cheque book. Is it disbelief? Is it the fact that the yard is overlooked by half a dozen upstairs windows? Will I get used to that? Will I care, even? Is it that although I usually know immediately whether something’s right or wrong for me, I'm conscious that this househunting exercise may require serious compromises and this is £100 more a month than I planned? Big decision, the thing you ought to give some thought to? Happening too fast? Or not used to being sensible, for a change?

The clock is ticking. Somewhere in Glossop are two people who might phone back any second and tell Paul they want this one. Think. Quick, think hard.

Recap.

The fronts have little gardens. You’re set back on a quiet road. There are old trees around. There’s a church and a primary school on the road. Civilised and all that. Wonder if you can listen to the bells on a Sunday morning? That would be nice. A park with a brook round the corner. I walked in through that front door and said Oooh this is nice! I saw the kitchen and said this is great! I liked the yard. Sun all day long. (NO MIDGES on summer evenings!) Quite a distance between my back and the backs of the houses opposite, over their gardens. The upstairs, and the big loft room with 7 foot head height for most of it.. So my feelings were instinctive. Happy words fell out of my mouth without premeditation. FOR FUCK’S SAKE GIRL WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

Paul went off to do another viewing. I went to the agents and parked round the corner. Took out my mobile. Phoned them. Was astonished to hear my voice saying “T St…  I’ll take it, please.” Was in their office ten seconds later, collecting the forms to fill in. Got the forms back to them the following morning together with a fees cheque. Spoke to Paul and it's really real....


I’ve been and gone and done it.

Still can’t believe it. Am in mild state of shock.

After spending all last weekend and some more evenings trawling websites and printing out details, listing salient points, google earthing and everything, it happened in four hours, start to finish.

I’ll even be within walking distance of a hot sausage roll….

Haven't told the hens yet. 

I need a lie down.

But I’m too excited.




Monday 7 February 2011

180º decision making

It has not been a great success, my mother living at the home.

There have been some dicey moments, like the time she decided she was going home and did the nurse have a car? No? Well, order me a taxi. She was sitting in the lounge with her coat on, refusing to cooperate about anything, including taking her pills. Eventually she was persuaded to take the antibiotic but nothing else, and only conceded going to bed at 11 pm, still refusing pills including her sleeping pill which is Unheard Of. And next day she was fine when I visited but I didn’t mention the night before. Red rags and all that.

She had just moved from her initial 1st floor room in the mixed ‘normal’ & mild dementia area, to the purely residential ‘normal’ downstairs. We think it was the combination of being moved and the fact that she wasn’t well and therefore acting oddly which brought that on. But now she had a room which opened on to the garden so she could have the door open on summer days, and the layout was helpfully identical to her previous room. And with the weather being better, she’d be going out more with them and with me.

She still gets confused now and then. It’s the way her brain is rewiring itself, with fewer and fewer connections. The other day her neighbour from the flat asked her if she’d seen my brother recently. She answered that Yes he’d called in on his way down from Scotland, but hadn’t come in. He stayed in the doorway.



?????

He hasn’t been in Scotland for forty years. He sat with her for two hours on his last visit just before Christmas. When I saw her on New Year’s Eve, she never twigged that it had been my birthday the day before. Considering we’ve always spent that day together …….  I didn’t mention it. She would have been really upset to know she’d forgotten. Would have compounded her feeling of losing control of her life.

But.

A few nights ago she was asking again when she could go home. She was completely fine, on the ball, contented and amiable, but in no doubt that she wasn’t staying there. It was as though she’d served her penance for drinking 3/5ths of a pint of brandy and not knowing she’d done it. Still doesn’t know. Might try telling her again when things have settled down.

We drank some red wine and chatted away, and I said I would set up a live–in carer. “Well if that’s what it takes, just sort it,” she said. At last!!  (Went down this road two years ago but she dug her heels in at the last minute and refused. They had to send the cheque back.) Have always promised her she would never be made to stay anywhere she wasn’t happy, and I said it again. She replied “Well I am bored to tears”.

Perhaps the staff don’t have the time to sit with her and explain what’s on the telly, or who’s winning in the snooker, which she followed with a passion, or the football, ditto, or to keep encouraging her to take part in things, because she writes off just about everything, declining politely. She knows she can’t see anything or hear it clearly, so she’d rather not bother. Was under the impression that there was no point being in the lounge because “there was nobody to talk to”. And the telly’s a bit loud anyway, which is hopeless for talking when you’ve got hearing aids, even good ones. She goes back to her room for a nap instead. Depends on naps to keep the energy up. As it should be. She had attended a few things there, like a little concert, but nothing worth mentioning. Even when there’s a talk by somebody, anything like normal speed speech is too fast for her to decipher. Hopeless.

Oddly, leaving there that evening about 9 pm, I immediately felt lighter and happier. Hadn’t realised how much fretting there was about her being there. Although it was great to know she was safe, warm and well fed, especially when everybody was snowed in or ill or otherwise out of action.

And there I was, about to move into her flat.

I wrote two posts about it. They’re in the bin. It’s kind of why you haven’t heard from me for ages. So much happening, the wind changing, the landscape shifting, all moving on.

It was hurting to leave this beautiful place, but with savings vanishing, it seemed the sensible thing to do. Plus her flat shouldn’t be empty all the time. And you’re thinking the obvious thing is to move there with her.
Well, uh, actually, no. Been tried and doesn’t work. Not going to bore you with the details but suffice it to say I would end up in her old room at the home, on the dementia floor, very quickly. It used to be feasible when she stayed with me in Scotland but there was my ex to take up the slack. Last time we tried it, here, I was a basket case after 7 weeks and my friends were horrified at the sight of me. Wrecked. Even with carer support, which has also been tried, it’s not happening.

Going to be a professional live–in carer on a fortnight on fortnight off basis, by a company who specialise in this, keeping a core of two or three girls at most so there’s continuity and mother would get to know them. Plus she gets the veto on whether they meet her requirements. Any sign of a personality clash and hey presto the carer gets changed, apparently, no questions asked.  My friend’s mother used this company and they’re well recommended.  Said friend is meeting me at the flat on Wednesday to go through the spare room and sort out some space. It’s a bit of a chuck–it–in–here room just now.

But the savings are still dwindling, and I still haven’t done any proper creative work recently, let alone sold any, too unsettled, feeling permanently as though there’s something else I should be doing. The best thing all round would be to find somewhere cheaper, get my mother sorted out at last and relax into the work again. Have been her carer since I moved down here from Scotland, one way or another, and it will be great to have someone to share that with, and knowing she’s in her own place again.

Keep your fingers crossed.