More and more

They're bursting out all over.....

The day after the last lot, these appeared. Four black, one white and one fawn (hidden behind the black one on the left). I couldn't get closer because as soon the hen saw me, she'd run off. Even though I was making small friendly noises and gently spilling food around.

Next day I came home from moving stuff over to the new house and found a little black one dead near the gate. (I blame next door's cat. Mine was indoors.) It looked unharmed. And my neighbour, though sad like me, admits this does keep the population down a little. Both the new mothers aren't quite a year old themselves - these are the ones who were huddled in a sunny heap on my doorstep last summer. So if you do the maths, it won't be too long before the flock is more than one garden can support.

Since then, this black hen's managed to hold on to her remaining five. Which is good considering she repeatedly wanders into places the chicks can't follow. Like up the big stone steps. Or down off the wall. One of them couldn't even get out of a shallow tin bowl with some seeds in.

She is on the patio with three of them. Two are left on top of the stone wall three feet above her, cheeping madly in panic, and away she trots, oblivious. Muggins tries to catch the pair for her, but they run at a speed you wouldn't believe for such tiny legs. I'm trying to stop them half leaping half falling and breaking their legs. In the end I grasp them and away they run after mamma.

Next day all the chicks are together and the two hens obviously have a pecking order sorted out. Black hen keeps pecking brown hen's head. Remember who's boss around here. Sibling rivalry, I tell you. Brown hen doesn't fight back, just lowers her head and keeps eating.

Aerial view of doorstep and five to each hen - but which ??!1

But the chicks are all confused and when the two hens go separate ways there are three chicks left behind. Once again it's me trying to figure out what goes where.

It's becoming a habit, this Search and Rescue stuff. The dwarf bamboo is shrieking loudly. Three shriekers, at least. I can't actually get through it to catch them. I have to scare them to the far end and get the daft black hen to go that way too. It works. Eventually, she has the good sense to climb up a sloping stone bank to find the terrified cheepers, followed by her bewildered others.

It's such a consuming and wonderful thing, being a godmother. The new people taking over the house will have to get a full handover briefing. I'll have to tell you about their viewing of the house. At least they loved seeing the hens.


But wait till three in the morning.

Pitch dark. Nothing happening. Quiet night.

No reason for any disturbances. But without fail ...



"EVERYBODY ALRIGHT?"

"Yes boss we're fine."

"You lot over there next door, you alright?"

"Yeah we're fine. You?"

"We're great, alive and kicking. Bloody floodlight across the river woke us up."

"Huh. Same old excuse" mumbles grumpy hen. "I was fast asleep 'til you started bellowing."

She's right. This is always the cockerel excuse. It's a total fib. The floodlights across the river are usually on all night, steady as the moon, for reasons which will become clear after I've moved. Promise.

And oh dear God that's Foghorn Leghorn, the loudest of the lot. Absolutely deafening within twenty yards. Actually deafening through a brick wall. (He's another dumpee, originally living next door but thought mine looked a good billet. Neighbour was here one day and saw him through the kitchen door. "Bloody traitor!" she yelled.)

That's Geronimo now. He doesn't do the cock-a doodle-do thing. He yodels. With a croaky falling-off at the end. My mother said he had a sore throat. Didn't sound well at all.

Then two cockerels, for a long glorious minute, call repeatedly and simultaneously in a perfectly tuned counterpoint. (A major third, if you're wondering.) 
A beautiful progression, heard for this time, and this time only, in the whole history of chickens. One sound above the other, heaven to listen to, lying entranced in the dark.

Then I hear the youngest one. He's so proud to be grown-up enough to join in, still finding his voice.

There's the pure white one, famous for persistently trying to roost in the coal hole.

There go the twins, the ones with tiny heads and huge combs. I'm sorry, but they do look silly, and their current game is fighting to see who's today's winner. It changes.

Then - nothing. Silence.

They've gone back to sleep, until the dawn.

Springing forth

Guess what I found on the patio this morning ?!

 

Five gorgeous fluffy blobs

 

They're so tiny that two of them couldn't make it back up that brick step and needed a bit of help  - a lot of flapping, going nowhere.
I thought there were just three until mamma stood up and revealed four extra feet.

Bite Size

The latest bite size customers to Tesco’s Glossop on Thursday afternoon last week. Every little helps. I didn't buy duck. Not that day.

They’re not far from home – the Glossop Brook runs right by the car park.

L C-P, "deux-ducks", this one's for you!

Thank you, Harvey G. & update

Once upon a time, a young lady married an absolute nutcase. Yep. You got it in one. I hear you laughing - “Takes one to know one.” Well I can't argue with that.


This nutcase was always dead keen to make a buck or two, above and beyond the nine till five. 
So, mid 1970s at the weekends, he would go out flyposting to promote various gigs for the Manchester music business. Good money, strictly cash. Our kitchen was usually shared with rolls and rolls of posters for this and that, and buckets ready for the paste, and brushes and what all. 


He was even known to do a bit of humping, if you'll pardon my language - the muscle required to shift the amps and equipment around. One Saturday morning at 7 o’clock somebody phoned him insisting he find half a ton of dry ice by that evening. Wtf ? Where the hell do you get dry ice from? And on a weekend? The original lot had come by an accident and vanished into thin air (sorry).

 
Apart from dodging the authorities, carrying a bucket and a roll of posters, and possibly a ladder, and having a lookout on each corner, there was much more fun to be had. This entailed defacing the posters put up by the opposition. Gig wars ? Definitely. Not between the bands or the venues – more a case of the promoters making sure every corner of the city was suitably informed, and the other lot’s gigs were second choice on the night. I think Harvey Goldsmith was regarded with respect, a bit like a local Godfather. He did live in the southern satellite of nearest Cheshire at the time, I believe. (I know, this is namedropping, but without him this particular story might not exist.) If he turned up at a gig in person (rare) we all got very excited. Would he put his influential muscle behind the band ?


I will not say he had a hand in all this cloak and dagger stuff but somebody, who considered himself a bit of an entrepreneur on Harvey G's behalf shall we say, made sure those posters went up. And if I've got things slightly wrong in the detail of the gig wars, well it was so long ago.........  but the bare bones of this are the gospel truth. I'm just trying not to libel or offend anybody. Especially not HG. He's probably got more lawyers than the Queen and doesn't deserve any offence from me.


Defacing tactics were nothing crude, such as ripping them down. Somebody gave the nutcase and all the other flyposters on the team a roll of self–adhesive stickers to put one each on the rivals' faces. Just to make them look a teeny bit foolish.


And it spiralled. They were just too good not to spread around a bit. Proper adverts got the makeover. The more serious and conservative, all the more inviting.  There were orders for reprints of the stickers, and some nice big ones for the full size billboards. Since the flyposters were required to run down to the Midlands or wherever now and then, you could rightly say it all went viral. Everybody wanted a sticker roll.


As I remember it, the word on the street got round to Lenny Henry. Now I’ve hit Wikipedia and Google, but there’s no mention I can see of the first sequence of events.  Maybe I haven't looked hard enough. You’ll have to trust me on this one. And in Manchester our legend is that Lenny Henry put the original Big Idea together.  If anybody knows him or wants to check this out and correct me, be my guest.


And because I am a bit of a hoarder, and suddenly develop a full appreciation of historical value when required to defend my hoarding,


 

I give you (drum roll please)

The original, First Edition, circa 1975–6,

doodled upon and stuck to the front of a battered file binder  –

So here's to Harvey G., just in case he invented the thing, and Lenny Henry, for carrying it through, and Richard Curtis et al.

Wonder if I could auction it off for Red Nose Day?

UPDATE ~

Have now answered own question since this post unfortunately went out as scheduled in the middle of the night straight after a terrible earthquake and tsunami.  It feels as though you can never give enough, so this would actually be a great day to win the lottery to send loads of money to Japan.

Mystified

Spent yesterday afternoon at mother's and doing more shopping for her and 'Barbara'. No second telly yet, but that's tomorrow. No problem. Things are going along nicely. Mostly. Don't worry, it's OK. My lip is buttoned. I'm off my high horse now.

Getting home around 8-30 pm, checked for phone messages. My mother had only just left this one. You could hear the smile on her face.


"Hello! This is Mother."  (All normal, so far, including the giveaway ever-so-slightly slurred diction.)  "I've had a BRILLIANT idea :-  that we should all get together and take the children to Chester Zoo because, at this time of year, as you know, it is beautiful. So will you give it some thought and then give me a ring and tell me what you think about it. OK, love? The giraffes are worth it if nothing else !"  Distinctly heard giggling.  "OK, 'bye, love. "


I just can't figure out whose children it is, exactly, she's got in mind?

Has she hidden them in a kitchen cupboard for precisely this kind of opportunity?

Is she confusing me with some other daughter in a parallel universe? Is she, in fact, in a parallel universe?

Or would she just like to be taken to Chester Zoo? I think we might safely go for this option.

Especially since the only bona fide little ones we could round up are currently in Phnom Penh, Manila and Kathmandu. Tricky, that.

All Will Be Well

After my hissy fit yesterday, I have come to a four-part conclusion.


First is that 'Barbara' is actually just fine and the sooner I get her a telly fixed up, the better. Today. We're going shopping this afternoon anyway for other stuff. We had a long chat last night and I was so much happier after that. Everything I heard was good. All focused on mother and her needs and how to help her more. 

Second is that I am overprotective where my mother's concerned. I still have the notion that no-one else can look after her better than I can. Perhaps I confuse love with care, as absolutes.

Third is that it's early days, and I shouldn't be making judgements so fast.

Fourth is 'Barbara' was probably only doing what any experienced live-in carer would do - and has probably been trained to do - sort out the ground rules at the start. Unlike me who would bumble along in a meandering fashion and swallow my comments rather than force confrontation of any kind. I tend to vote with my feet rather than stand around arguing.

Perhaps the objective view would fall halfway between my reaction yesterday and my attitude today. I have no idea, just yet.

But All Will Be Well.

First hitch

Well there has to be one, doesn’t there? Wouldn’t be real life otherwise.

Yesterday afternoon, call from mother asking if I could explain to carer (whose name is not Barbara but I’ll call her that for now) how you put the scanning mouse into the back of the telly. No problem. 'Barbara' picks up the line : 

“I don’t do anything technical. My husband does everything like that.”  What, changing lightbulbs? But I keep that thought zipped. It's just something is making my hackles rise, ever so slightly. Something in the ether.

“You know what a scart connection looks like?”

“Um.” 

“Well if you look at the mouse cable you’ll see a long rectangular plug thing, and on the back of the telly you’ll see a socket just the same size. You just plug it in. It’s got one corner skewed so you can’t put it in the wrong way. You’ll see what I mean.”  I could tell her you can actually do it wrong if you’re hamfisted and shove it in half sideways and mash up the little pins, but consider it wise not to mention this.

“Which side of the TV?”

“In the back. There are only two of these sockets. One’s already got a plug in it. The other one’s empty. You plug the scart into the empty one.” (Aware that I’m talking as if to a three year old but don’t want her to have any wiggle room to pretend it’s all too complicated.) “You can’t miss it. And the other end of the cable has an ordinary 3–pin plug. That goes into the wall.” (There are two cables running from the mouse, you understand  – one to the power plug, one to the TV.)

“And I can still watch the TV can I?”

“Well not while my mother’s trying to read something with the mouse because the writing comes up on the screen. That’s the point of it.”  I thought she’d grasped that when I told her about the amazing magnifying scanning mouse the other day. (It has a little light inside and a camera lens instead of a ball or laser.) And of course I’m wishing I’d installed it before I left late the other night. But 'Barbara' kept saying “Oh leave that I’ll do it” about this and that and I was shattered by then.

“Oh. Well I’m trying to watch the TV.”

“What’s on?” I ask as innocently as possible.

“The sport.”

“Oh, the athletics?” Guessing, cos I’d seen the TV guide.

“Yes.”

“Well don’t worry about it. Once my mother’s tried to read something for two minutes she’ll give it up as a lost cause and you’ll get the athletics back. Or you could read out whatever it is for her.”

I mean THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF YOU BEING THERE……..

I feel like roaring like a lion. Instead I lie in bed at night grinding my teeth and trying to calm down.

It explains why she keeps muttering about how The Carer should have a TV of their own in the bedroom. I’m altogether a bit surprised at how much she mentions TV, generally. I’ve said I’ll try to fix something up. Funny how it’s the first I’ve heard of it though.  I don’t remember anyone at the agency saying anything. As far as they were concerned as long as there were a couple of drawers free and somewhere to hang up clothes, and a few bits of flat surfaces to put things on, that was it. The Carer was supposed to be doing whatever The Client wanted. With some time off, to be arranged between us. Fair enough.

There is another telly but it’s huge and doesn’t fit anywhere, and the only other aerial is in my mother’s bedroom. I’ll think of something, because The Carer's entitled to spend her time off watching TV, but in the meantime perhaps a shift in her priorities might be in order………  

GGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Am I overreacting? Have I missed something?

Catching up

This is turning into a bit of a blogging binge  – 3 on the trot ??? Suspect it’s a not-very-subtle tactic, an avoidance strategy, much more diverting than vacuuming or floor mopping. Or going up and down stairs all the time when my left kneecap hurts – I’ve no idea why.

Trying to spring clean – in fits and starts – to make the final clean–up easier when all my stuff’s shifted. There’s also the fear that since this house is back on the letting lists, there’ll be people coming to view. Dust bunnies and cat hair and an oven in desperate need of attention are not how I want to be remembered. I’m also trying not to play with my new toy, the bits and bobs I ordered from the excellent Cotton Patch mail order shop to add needle felting to my fabric mapping. Another string to the bow. Kept seeing textile artists listing it in their methods and wondered what it was all about – with everybody doing it, surely must be useful!  Damn good excuse anyway...

Collected my mother from the care home on Tuesday. Took an hour or so longer than expected because I was trying to track down 5 pieces of missing clothing. Numerous requests to the staff over past weeks had turned up zilch. I went down to the laundry and they were really helpful. The man there took me to the lost property room (no luck) and up to my mother’s old room on first floor (no luck there either) and back to the laundry where we went through all the baskets, and eventually I left them with a description of everything missing, hoping it’ll go past their noses sometime soon.

Assumptions that people know what they're wearing, theirs or someone else's, don't work when half of them have got dementia. Proud to say my mother threw a strop one day because the staff insisted an orange blouse was hers, just cos her room number was on the label. (On every visit I kept hauling out the same six items which weren't hers, handing them over to the staff. Next visit, back they were.) 

Finally, got the car packed up and took her home. Pulling up outside I leaned over and gave her a big kiss, unable to resist shouting Hurray!! Hard to say which of us was more delighted. Think it was me. We went in and cracked open the champagne. 

Two hours later I went off to meet first carer at the station. She will be just fine. Very competent, sense of humour, good cook, business-like and easy to get on with. “You two seem to be speaking the same language,” said my mother. The pair of us went off to buy new shower curtains, some extra towels and a trolley–load of food. Came back to flat, carer sorted out fridge while I unpacked mother’s stuff, we put up the new shower curtains, made beds, cooked dinner and generally sorted ourselves out. I came home at 11 o’clock, absolutely knackered after an 8 o’clock start. 

Had a bit of a wobble two days ago when I found out just how much my mother’s live–in carer was costing – i.e. £20 per day fee to the agency on top of her wages. Wondered whether I should stay here in the country where mother could come to stay for two or three weeks at a time, to take the load off her finances. The new house isn’t so accommodating for someone confined to the ground floor.

Then the signing of the new lease was stalled, because the retiling of the bathroom and a couple of damp patches in the front bedroom were to be completed before the inventory could be signed off. (Includes a detailed report of the colour of walls, cleanliness or shabbiness of everything including skirting boards, light fixtures etc. on a graded scale of 1 to 5.) 

Then my bank made a mistake about my credit rating. That was sorted out yesterday. It involved phone calls to the accountant I had in Scotland. (It transpires that my rating is also on the low side precisely because I don’t have any credit cards or HP agreements. I have one storecard. Credit reference agencies hate this! I don’t have credit cards because when they’re in my handbag they have the knack of leaping out when I’m anywhere near a craft shop, or IKEA, or a fabric shop …..  the combination of card and shops in close proximity is much too explosive and highly dangerous so best not have them lying around at all…..)

Yesterday the bank agreed they’d made a mistake and said it would be resolved by this morning. But this morning their computers are down. (I’ve broken it. I know.) Try again later. 

So in the middle of the wobble I phoned Friend One. HELP !! Am I being stalled for some reason the universe knows about and I don’t? Is there a message in all this? Can I really stay here with the pheasants and the hens and the rabbits and the waterfall and the endless greenery outside every window ? Can I continue to stare out of said windows when I ought to be getting on with something?

She talked some sense into me. 

"Repairs to new place you knew about in advance. Saving money is still the right thing to do. Carting mother backwards and forwards is as likely to confuse her as anything." 

(She loves travelling and coming here, but takes a few nights to remember where she is on waking, Not a problem, really, I thought.)  

"Think more about taking her to nice places for the day. She’ll just be getting used to being back in her own flat."

Mother likes the first carer, who’s going to do a three week stint and hand over to someone else for a fortnight, then return after that. At least that’s the theory. So the diciest part has been OK. If she had taken agin the first carer, the whole enterprise would have foundered. 

In other words Keep Calm and Carry On.

Now stop burbling and go and do something useful. 

Scary stuff

My last post was from the newspaper at the end of WW2. I still laugh in sympathy for the poor bloke who didn't dare go home. I’ll get round to the best bits, to split up the blocks of print into a shape you can still read in this blog format. Some of them are quite interesting, like “There is still no sign of Hitler.” They thought he’d run for it. Sorry about the death reports in the clipping, but you know the saying – “in the midst of life etc …..”  

By coincidence I've been watching TV tonight – the wonderful Martin Clunes in ‘A is for Acid’, a WW2 drama about a serial killer who thinks that without a body you can’t be tried for murder. He’s such a lovely man in real life but he’s making a startlingly good murderer. The whole macabre business has just reminded me of the last year I lived in London, 1981.

I’d come down from Manchester after a sort of life–turning–around–watershed, determined to get a decent job and pay off my modest overdraft. I ended up almost immediately with two great part–time jobs, totalling 58 hours a week. I was planning to be a boat–builder, which meant moving to either Lowestoft or Falmouth. I thought of a sunny, happy, childhood holiday in Cornwall and went for the latter.

Had to go to Kentish Town job centre, nearest to where I lived, to apply for the 20–week course. Was required to take a maths test – could have put it off and revised but I felt fairly confident in basic maths so I went for it on the spot. There were fractions and lowest common denominators and by some magic the old formulas sort of came back to me, 12 years after I’d done them at ‘O’ level. Then I was taken into a small windowless interview room and told I’d passed the maths test and was questioned in detail.
He asked about my general circumstances, the path which had led me to boatbuilding, and about more personal stuff. 

“Where do you live?”
“With my brother’s family – they have three children – in Hampstead.”
“Oh, that’s alright then.” In a tone of voice like he’d been expecting a problem but been pleasantly surprised.

It struck me as an odd thing to say, given the strong emphasis with which he said it, but just one of those things you put down to individual expressions.
It was also odd that he seemed to dwell on the personal stuff. He spent a little while on that, on my personal history. The professional boat–related subject was dealt with in peremptory fashion. Then I was released from the tiny room (he sat in the far corner at a desk facing the wall while I sat at a desk on my own).

And off I went to Cornwall, six months later, and qualified as a boatbuilder.

A couple of years after that, it was all over the news.

A serial killer had been befriending gay men, and female prostitutes who by definition mostly lived in bedsits. He disapproved of any women living in bedsits, and prostitutes (male and female) were easy to meet.  It meant, in his eyes, that they were unloved and alone and not part of a loving family. He thought it was his duty to put them out of their 'misery'. He lived in Muswell Hill and had been stuffing the body parts down the drain, in the dustbin, all over the place including under the floorboards. He’d murdered so many he was running out of space. His name was Dennis Nielsen and he’d interviewed me in that tiny room. 

He’d pronounced a judgement on my lifestyle. I had passed the maths and a different kind of test.

Interlude

In the midst of sorting out stuff, spring cleaning, preparing to pack and move house, untangling a mysterious mess made by the bank, getting oil delivered and unpacking my new toy just arrived by post (needle felting stuff - more of that anon), meaning to post about my mother and everything, I was putting some family archive papers back in their folder and found this in a yellowed Manchester Evening News from 1945 (a special wartime edition) and had to drop everything else for a minute.

I've been trying, and failing, to get the cursor below the picture. Short of dumping and starting again (which takes so long on my broadband), this is the bit which was supposed to be underneath. It was only going to ponder on what you could get away with in print in 1945, and in all walks of life I'll be bound. Referring to 'coolies' (in the article above) was probably quite the thing back then. What would happen if you said that now? Also, by the by, funny how the fish market seemed to be flooded with mackerel but nobody wanted it.