Shagging in the Lilies

I've started avoiding the news. The hysteria this week over a certain government adviser has reached such a frenzy that I can't bear it any longer. Thankfully I'd booked the week off work and as the weather has been glorious I've been able to spend a lot of time outside in the garden.

Chris's lilies are about to flower, an event you'd think would be something to celebrate. Unfortunately the anticipation has been sullied by an invasion of red lily beetles which eat the stems, leaves and flowers. Battle lines have been drawn and Chris is not taking any shit.

"Chriiiiiis," I called across the garden yesterday, "there's another one!"

"Kill the bastard!"

"I'm not killing it! I'm a vegetarian!"

"I'm not asking you to eat it," Chris stomped across the lawn in his not so invisible socks and Birkenstocks combo, frowning. He meant business. "Where is it?"

I pointed to the pretty little gem of a creature twitching its antennae and wiggling its bum like it was doing the conga. "Look, just under that leaf. No that one. No, down a bit, down a bit. Up a bit."

"Twat." The expletive was directed at the beetle, not me, as he finally homed in on it. Grabbing it off the leaf, he plucked it from the plant, brought it towards his face so he could better see the culprit then squashed it dead, rolling its mangled body between thumb and index finger and flicking its lifeless and sticky corpse across the garden. 

"That'll teach it." He was triumphant.

"Yeah, it'll certainly think twice before coming back to our garden."

Chris won't tolerate anything eating his garden. The slugs have no chance as he goes through tub after tub of blue slug pellets every year, sprinkling them with gay abandon on the flower beds and planters. For those wily and deceitful gastropods that evade his obstacle course he has one last trick in store for them, a liberal sprinkle of blue dots in the cupped leaves of the plants themselves. He's like the Anti-Willy Wonka of the slug world.

One surprising shortage during the recent lockdown has been slug pellets, not that it's been a particular problem because it's been very dry, but you never know when we're going to have a damp spell, and slugs are devious.

"Why don't you try using beer?" I suggested. "We've got some old cans of Carling that someone brought to a party and nobody will touch. I'm sure the slugs won't turn their noses up at it."

"Isn't it cruel though?" Chris was more concerned about them having to drink shit lager than them shrivelling up and dying a painful death at the hands of the blue poison.

"There's two cans under the stairs somewhere. I think Mark and Darren brought them and we've not spoken to them for nearly five years so they might be out of date."

Chris declined and went out later that day to track down what I suspect to be black market slug pellets. The beer is still there.

While the garden has become Chris's hobby rather than mine in recent years, I've taken over houseplant duties. Only this morning he pointed out that my two avocado plants were in dire need of water.

"Again!" I whinged, "I'm having to water them two or three times a week at the moment."

"It's like a furnace in that window."

"They should be used to it! They're from Mexico!"

I have no idea if avocados are from Mexico or not, these ones are from Tesco in Stretford, I know because that's where I bought the fruit that I ate before spending months trying to get the bastards to sprout.

The fact of the matter was that the avocado plants were thirsty, their leaves were drooping, and after all the effort I put into getting them to be a foot high I wasn't about to let the buggers die, so I grabbed a watering can.

Much like Chris's slippers, we have a wide variety of watering cans, each with a different design and function, and each at a different stage of its lifecycle.

In addition to the hosepipe, which itself has a range of attachments from sprinkler, to handgun, to four foot wand, each with an assortment of watering options including jet, shower, cone and mist (for those early evening garden moments when you're feeling whimsical and pretty), there's the standard watering can with rose end for sprinkling, the small watering can, with its delicate nozzle and body the size of a cat's head for tricky to get to roots, and the comedy duck which was a gift but turned out to be most useful for small pots and planters. 

My weapon of choice this morning was the small cat head sized watering can. I grabbed the Baby Bio, read the instructions thoroughly, and carefully squeezed precisely ten drops of plant food into the water before doing a circuit of the house and making sure every plant inside was both fed and watered.

Feeding plants is an area where Chris and I have different schools of thought. I will spend time measuring the exact amount recommended per litre of cold water whereas Chris will give it a big squirt and hope for the best.

As the garden begins to flower, alongside his weekly slug pellet purchases he will begin buying Miracle Grow. He generally opts for the bright blue powder that you dissolve in a watering can as opposed to liquid feed or the slow release stuff you mix in the compost, and as with the Baby Bio indoors, measurements go out of the window. 

"One more scoop for luck." he'll say as an extra terrestrial, cobalt foam spews from the top of the watering can.

I'd never heard of Miracle Gro before I met Chris, why would I? I was twenty and more concerned with taking drugs and dancing than growing the best begonias on the street. How things change.

He's been a fan for as long as I've known him and every year it's astonishing just how well this stuff works. The bedding plants are monstrous, the hanging baskets gargantuan. Potted geraniums lean into you with a flick knife threatening to kill your dog if you don't do what they say; sweet peas hiss "I know where you live mother fucker!" as you squeeze by apologetically.

The lilies were a gift from me to Chris a couple of St Valentine's Days ago. Our friend Nathan, who we met on holiday in Thailand in 2000 with his then girlfriend Sophie, ran a company that imported bulbs from the Netherlands and sold them in the UK and he would always look after us when we placed an order, popping in something unusual like the pineapple plant he sent which looked beautiful but had a habit of attracting big brown flies. 

Sophie turned out to be a horror. She lodged with us for a few months when we lived in London and I had to ask her to leave after she became insufferable. She once installed a phone line without asking so she could work from (our) home and invite clients back to our house when we were out at work. The final straw was when she secretly added herself and Chris to the electoral register and not me meaning that I was denied a vote in the Enfield local elections. I wouldn't have voted anyway but that's not the point.

I wasn't surprised to hear many years later that Sophie had been embroiled in some dodgy dealings with drug dealers while living in Bali and luckily, for her and her kids, had managed to divert attention and slip her way out of big trouble with police. Her husband, known affectionately as Gobby, was not so lucky and was held in police custody after they allegedly found 78 grams of ecstasy in their house. 

This was reported in Telegraph in 2012 and if you're interested you can read about that here.

Nathan on the other hand was a lovely guy. Generous, genuine and charming, a gentle soul, so I was incredibly upset to learn, when I got in touch with him about getting some bulbs for Chris, that he was suffering from lung cancer. The cancer, he told me, had metastasised and was now present as brain tumours. It was, he said, just a matter of time before he died and all the medics could do for him now was lengthen the time he had left with his wife and children by a few weeks. 

Nathan arranged for the box of bulbs to be sent and refused to accept payment. I wrote to him at the end of February to tell him they were all planted and asked how he was getting on. 

He replied, "Good work. I'm doing okay thank you. Had Gamma Knife surgery on my brain on Friday. That was fun."

He sent me a picture of himself with a clunky metal head brace on. It had what looked like two thin metal tubes going into his forehead on either side. 

He joked, "If I sneeze the holes in my head whistle!"

We chatted on and off though Facebook messenger for a few weeks. In March he developed pneumonia and one of his lungs collapsed. "Never a dull moment!" he wrote. 

He went on to say that he could really do without it as he had some other treatment due to start and he had tickets to see The Doves at the Royal Albert Hall which he really didn't want to miss.

The last time we had contact was at the beginning of April. He'd managed to get to the concert which he said was superb. Roger Daltry had made a surprise appearance. He sounded relieved and said, "It was just good to get out again, it's been a long time!"

Nathan died on 28th May 2019, a year ago this week, leaving three daughters, his wife, parents and brothers behind. He was 43 years old.

His bulbs flowered last summer and both Chris and I sent messages to Nathan's wife with pictures of the lilies and other flowers saying they were a reminder of him that we hoped would come back every year and keep him in our thoughts.

As you can imagine it's lovely to see them back again this summer and we're not going to let those bloody beetles ruin them. 

I looked over at the lilies yesterday and saw two of the red horrors, riding piggy back.

"Chris! They're shagging!" I yelled over to him.

"They're like that, the dirty little bastards!" said Chris as he stomped over, finger and thumb held aloft, to save Nathan's lilies.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

I wish I'd have been one of those kids that excelled at school, or even enjoyed it. As it turned out I was destined to mediocrity. 

At primary school I was always the smart kid, the one who would eventually do well, though how you recognise that in a seven year old I couldn't say. My grandpa used to say "When you get a place at Oxford I shall pop up from my grave and cheer!"  As it turned out I never went to university and thankfully Grandpa did not rise from the grave.

In order to facilitate my success my parents began by turning into masochists. They did this by insisting on my brothers and I wearing a school uniform at junior school despite there not being one. Uniforms in their opinion were the key to academic accomplishment so they forged ahead and invented their own uniform for us - black shoes, grey slacks & jumper and blue shirt. The other kids wore jeans or cords, tee shirts, wildly coloured sweat shirts with the A Team on them or a random year emblazoned across the chest. We wore polycotton knitted jumpers from Tesco with flannel trousers and because of that stood out like the proverbial sore thumb. Thus began the lifelong labelling of being posh and a snob - words that still linger now through no fault of my own.

I rebelled against the invented uniform in the only way I could at the time - with DayGlo socks. One pink and one blue, or maybe one orange and one sulphur yellow. I'd secretly put them on under my regulation grey socks when I got dressed in the morning then, once at school, whip the grey ones off revealing my true personalty through the medium of hosiery.

When I think about Greenacres County Primary School there are a handful of things that spring to mind. The odd embarrassing moment such as getting overexcited in school assembly and making a show of myself by shrieking "Let's sing Lord of the Dance Miss Wilson!"; taking a year out after a car crash when we lived with my grandparents and went to a school near Preston instead; the scandal when we got in trouble with Miss Wilson, the head mistress, after Michelle Henshaw accused me of fingering my friend Rebecca; and the thrilling moment when Rebecca and I told our mums about it and taking umbrage, they stormed into school to give Miss Wilson what for. 

My mum's irrational hatred of Miss Sutton, the snotty school secretary; a school trip to Castleton when chicken soup leaked into my bag and made it stink forevermore; and the time Lisa Jackson smashed all her teeth out on the ice in the playground - an event which led to the banning of slippy curries. A slippy curry was a patch of ice polished to a high sheen with the soles of trainers and, in my case, sensible black lace-up shoes, which children would hurtle towards and slide across the concrete on, for no other reason than it was fun. Health and safety didn't exist in the eighties.

 

Primary school whizzed by in a blur of Wham!, Christmas parties, scandal and milk bottle tops and was reasonable I suppose. Neither sensational nor unexciting, just ordinary. I didn't really pay much attention to it until the end bit when all talk turned to secondary school. 

My contemporaries were mostly headed for the local comprehensive, Breeze Hill, a school which had troubled times ahead but in the late 80s was merely just a bit rubbish. 

Some tried earnestly to get into Blue Coat, the church school with the good reputation in the centre of town. Often their parents would begin taking them to church on a regular basis a few months before decisions were due to be made in order to get a letter from God and ensure a prosperous future. 

One poor girl ended up at Grange School whose good reputation was a hangover from the sixties and by the late eighties was undeserved. No matter, Cheryl, her brother and their parents did the only sensible thing when faced with the fallout from such a calamitous decision, and moved to Australia after her first year there.

We'd moved house by the time it came to choosing schools and left behind Greenacres' neighbour, the deteriorating Clarksfield. Like most of Oldham it was made up of street after street of red brick terraced mill houses, built when that's what the town was known for. As my parents both drove and had cars, a rarity in those days in that part of town, they'd had the fortune to be able to move us to Strinesdale on the edge of Saddleworth. The house was essentially the same - two bedroom, red brick terrace, but the outlook was completely different as we were surrounded by fields rather than rooftops and people playing the trumpet a la Coronation Street.

Strinesdale fell into the catchment area of Counthill School but also, at a push, Saddleworth School - even then you'd have to assume the admissions board were in a very good mood, or high, if they were to let you study there when it was a half hour drive away compared to a fifteen minute walk to the other.

My parents however had other plans. Across town, about as far away from where we lived as was possible, was a two hundred year old grammar school called Hulme and they had this set firmly in their sights, after all I was clever and they couldn't possibly waste all my brainpower on a comprehensive. 

Hulme had an entrance exam for pupils, the equivalent of the old eleven plus, which tested verbal reasoning, maths and English, and ensured they only took on the kids most likely to succeed in this old fashioned, university focused, highly academic school. It was important, it seemed, that pupils knew at what speed the train on the southbound track would pass the train on the northbound track if it was going at fifty miles per hour with a headwind of two miles per hour.

In order to brush up on these skills I embarked on a series of excruciating private tuition sessions with Mr Abrahams. My folks clubbed together with a bunch of other high sighted parents to afford group classes and we'd get together on a Saturday afternoon to cram like our lives depended on it. 

I hated every second, after all why couldn't I just go to Saddleworth school with my next door neighbour Damian? I'd be happy there, it would be easier for everyone and I wouldn't have to waste my weekends sitting in someone's dining room with a slightly inappropriate private tutor with a wandering eye and an unseemly turn of phrase.

On the morning of the exam I trod in dog shit - an omen if ever there was one. Someone called out 'Muck for luck!' and after scraping the worst of it off my sole I trudged into the school, stinking. I passed the exam with flying colours, earning a scholarship and saving my grandparents (who'd kindly offered to pay the fees) a bunch of money. 

And so my fate was sealed and my resentment began. Hulme Grammar School for Boys beckoned with a curly finger and a crooked eyebrow.

The trouble with being a high flyer as a young kid is that when your pushy parents send you to a school full of clever children you're suddenly not so special any more. I'd been taken down a peg or two and I did not like it one bit. Practically overnight I'd gone from the golden child to a bit of a disappointment, and feeling like a letdown is not conducive to academic excellence.

I was still good at stuff it's just there was always someone much better than me. In a maths class my fellow students might be working out what X squared plus Y squared equaled, while I was left mulling over what 'my resentment' plus 'their disappointment' was and how I would describe it as a quadratic equation.

These were different times though and you weren't encouraged to talk about things, let alone how you felt about something. Emotions were best left to Americans. 

I'd sometimes find myself walking down a corridor between classes and, upon spying a teacher walking towards me, breaking into a maniacal, wide eyed grin, only to revert to a sullen frown and protruding bottom lip the second they walked past me. I must have looked mental.

I didn't have a gang or group at school that I hung out with more than another and I floated between friends. Some of them clever and destined to a gleaming career, others like me, bobbing along with the flotsam and jetsam of academia, desperately trying to make it through school without fucking up completely and incurring the wrath of out of pocket parents keen for a return on their investment. 

I didn't hang out with the cool kids but that was never a source of regret - they weren't half as cool as they thought they were anyway. I'd usually find myself with the interesting boys. The weirdos, the ones with something to say, and the funny ones. Granted I might have to dodge the odd Dungeons and Dragons game and put up with some out-there music but on the whole I chose good friends. 

Going to an all boys school had it's own specific set of obstacles to manoeuvre. Hulme Grammar had a girls school too but I rarely saw any of the girls in question. The two schools occupied the same building and were separated by an enormous wooden door, across which hung a heavy piece of fabric. The purpose of this was to stop horny teenage eyes from spying their quarry in the other school, through the door's glass panes. I have no doubt whatsoever that the iron curtain, as it was known, was solely responsible for significantly reducing teenage pregnancy rates in the school. That sort of thing didn't happen at this sort of school you see.

As far as I was concerned, from the ages of twelve to seventeen, girls only existed behind glass panels. Other than Rebecca, who, despite Michelle Henshaw's protestations, I did not finger, and my family, girls just didn't feature in my life for at least five years. I'd see them sometimes, pressing their noses up against classroom windows or squashed inside a bus near the school gates, while I waited to be collected by my mum after school, but there was never any reason for our paths to cross and they didn't.

The biggest problem about attending a boys school in the late 80s and early 90s was the potential to labelled gay. You could throw bleach in the eyes of a beloved pet, dismember a popular sibling or burn a busy orphanage to the ground and still expect to be forgiven at some point in the future but to be gay, or even suspected of it, meant absolute and swift excommunication, followed by relentless bullying and quite possibly the risk of being hanged, drawn and quartered on the steps of the town hall.    

This made it tricky when, like me, you weren't really sure who you fancied, and more so when you were curious to see what some of you teenaged classmates looked like with no clothes on.

The easiest way of diverting suspicion was to accuse other poor lads of being deviants, thus pointing the finger away from yourself, which shamefully I did on occasion. Mostly though I just kept my head down and every now and again make lewd comments about female celebrities that I'd definitely 'do'.  Michelle Pfeiffer and Julia Roberts were my best friends. 

This worked well for a long time and it wasn't until I was fifteen that my school world almost came tumbling down. I spent a weekend at my best friend's house while his dad was away, we got drunk, and one thing led to another. The first time I'd ever done anything sexual with anyone and it was with a lad - I did not expect that. 

I won't go into detail about what happened. Suffice it to say we didn't go all the way and with neither of us having any experience, we weren't very good. I learned at an early age that oral sex and fixed orthodontic braces were not a marriage made in heaven.

The next day my best friend stopped speaking to me, obviously regretting what had happened. He clearly didn't know how to handle it (bad choice of words) and, as emotions were for Americans, he opted for silence instead. I left his house, with mixed feelings. I was thrilled that it had happened, but I was confused too, and upset that he'd blanked me all morning. I didn't know it then but our friendship, which had been a close one, was over. An experience that went on to influence decisions for years to come.

Back at school, after the weekend, trouble began to brew when a mutual friend of ours told me, "Bob* says you get a bit gay when you're drunk. What's that all about?" (* name obviously changed to protect the not so innocent.)

With such incendiary suggestions I knew I had to take decisive action so I tracked down Bob*, put on my best threatening voice, and told him in no uncertain terms that if I go down (again, there's probably a better choice of words) then I'm taking him with me. 

It did the trick. The rumour was stopped in its tracks, Julia Roberts helped reestablish my heterosexual credentials, and Bob* and I had no more contact till we left school. He is now happily married with children - or something, I can't really tell from Facebook.

I hated sports when I was at school. I've never been competitive and didn't see the point of chasing balls simply for the sake of it. Despite my earlier mentioned curiosity to see some of my classmates with no clothes on, the absolute worst part of Wednesday afternoon games was the changing room. 

I would go to any lengths so as not have to undress in front of other people. I wore my sports kit under my school uniform all day to make sure my precious body was kept hidden from prying eyes when it came to getting ready for football, then as soon as the class was finished I'd dash back to the changing rooms, stick my head under running water to make it look as if I'd showered, and be back in my flannel trousers and blazer before anyone else appeared.

I disliked games and the changing room experience so much that, when later in my school career I had the opportunity, I swapped games for what was termed Community Action. 

Community Action was similar in many ways to Community Service. It wasn't exactly voluntary, more of a trade off, and you'd often find yourself in a humiliating situation for the benefit of others.

It could vary from spending one afternoon a week in the school library filing books in the Dewey Decimal System, to going out to the actual community to offer a helping hand.

I volunteered at a local primary school to begin with rocking up one afternoon with no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I soon found myself sitting in a room full of toddlers helping them jam different coloured plastic shapes into the wrong holes and point at books with very thick pages. 

Children, even as a teenager, were not my bag. I didn't have the patience required for what I regarded as lesser intellects. I was frustrated by how dim witted the kids were and how they prattled on about nonsense all the time. Needless to say I didn't last very long in that part of the community and I don't think the children noticed my absence when I eventually jacked it in.

Faced with a return to the library, or worse, the hockey pitch, I took my final option and volunteered at an old folks' home down the road. It was a grand old Victorian building next to a park on Manchester Road, converted for elderly inmates and imbued with a sense of calm and barely subdued dread. 

Nobody wanted to be there, not me, not the staff, and certainly not the residents. I took it upon myself to inject some fun into my weekly visits in an effort to bring the place to life after what appeared to be decades of decay.

"Hey everybody! My name's Richard, let's play bingo!" I announced enthusiastically in the communal lounge on my second visit.

"Get out!" shouted Victorine, a wizened old crone at the back of the room. 

This wasn't a response to be taken personally. I'd learned on my first visit that Victorine sincerely believed the residence belonged to her and she had no idea what all these dribbling and mumbling strangers were doing in her house. Furthermore the entire contents of the building were hers, from furniture to flowers, the pictures on the wall to the carpets on the stairs. 

Victorine was clearly a skilled seamstress as she claimed too that she had crafted her dress with her own fair hands and knitted her elaborately patterned cardigan to boot.

I persevered and began what was without doubt the longest game of bingo in human history. Every now and again one of the staff would pop into the room and prop up a resident who was slowly but surely sliding out of their high backed, winged chair, or wipe up a bit of drool that was making its way down an unsuspecting chin. 

It was evident that none of the contestants gave a shit about bingo and I wrapped it up as quickly as possible resolving to consider something less taxing next time, like a beetle drive.

As I was packing things up after the game of misery-bingo, one of the staff came in to attend to a resident who needed the loo. 

"Give us a hand would you love?" she called over to me. 

Willingly I stuffed the last of the bingo stuff into the box of sorrow, ready to go into the sideboard of suffering, and went to offer my assistance.

"He needs a poo. Will you help me get him to the lav?" 

As we lifted him out of the seat the slack-jawed, elderly gentleman unwittingly let one go. The immediate area was filled with a brown cloud of filth and I gagged.

"Derek! You dirty bugger!" reprimanded Susan cracking a smile at me.

Soldiering on we got him out in the hall, to the nearest toilet. I was fully prepared to relinquish my disgusting charge and escape for the day when Susan said, "I'll just wait here while you sort him out."

"What?"

"You can tek 'im in there, you'll find everything you need."

"What?" I repeated, I was panicking now.

"It's dead easy, just make sure you hold him up under his arms while he's doing it so he dunt fall off the toilet."

"I can't do that!" I exclaimed, "I'm only a schoolchild!" I may as well have fluttered a fan and clutched my pearls.

"Your face!" Susan scoffed, "I'm kiddin' yer!"

With the revelation of her joke a wave of relief flushed my through body. It took every ounce of my being not to say 'You bitch!' but I held it together and escaped for the day.

I continued to visit the old folks' home for a number of weeks. Anything rather than reveal my teenaged body in the changing rooms of the sports hall. I never saw Susan again though; I sincerely hope she met an untimely end. 

With the promise of bingo and toilet visits I eventually talked my new best friend into coming along to visit Victorine et al as a way of evading sports classes. The novelty soon wore off though when we realised there was little communication between school and the care home and that by taking your school tie off you could get away with going in some of the local pubs to drink beer.

And so a chunk of my final year of school was spent in a pub near the entrance to Alexandra Park, a long way from the heady heights of invented school uniforms and not fingering my friend Rebecca.

Statistics and Death - the miserable post.

Statistics are funny buggers aren't they? I learned this many years ago when I worked for MORI, the polling and market research agency. I distinctly remember how careful you had to be when presenting your project findings because clients were apt to claim all manner of wild and wonderful things to make interviewee responses suit their product or business plan.

You'll have seen the TV adverts that claim '98% of people said this product made them more beautiful / gave them an IQ of 200 / elongated their whatever...' and then underneath, almost apologetically, in brackets, and tiny letters, you'll see (of eleven people surveyed), there was lots of that at MORI.

You'll forgive me then, I hope, for taking the cavalcade of Coronavirus critics, strutting their stats on social media, with a pinch of salt.

Opinions are like arseholes: everybody's got one, most of them stink, and I'd really rather you didn't push it in my face if it's all the same. For that reason I'm not going to go into where I stand on the plethora of stats coming from every media outlet in the world, suffice it to say I think it's too early to discuss who did what well and who didn't with regard to the pandemic.

The one source I look at regularly, is the Worldometer website's Coronavirus updates. It gives me a way to look at what's happening in each country, compare them and rank them by a number of different factors including number of cases and deaths per million. Still I'm not sure if these are correct figures, I've just read that deaths in the UK have surpassed 40,000 today and yet this website tells me it's less than 35,000. I can't possibly know but by using one source (which I assume is unbiased) it at least gives some continuity.

It's easy to look at these numbers and forget that every integer is a person. The Top of the Pops of which is the worst country this week suddenly becomes rather grim when you take that onboard.

But how else are we supposed to deal with what's happening if we let ourselves get tied up in the reality of every individual case. We'd surely go mad.

When faced with large scale death we must employ coping mechanisms, otherwise how would someone be able to continue living after a war or genocide? How could someone work at an abattoir or be a grave digger?

Statistics become a defence strategy. We can't grieve for everyone.


Yesterday my youngest brother sent me a message to say that our dad had fallen. When you get to his age you don't just fall over, you have a fall. Fall is no longer a verb it becomes a noun. Having a fall is an event when you hit three score years and ten.

I got as much information from him as possible - the who what where when and why protocol - assessed the situation and let my uncle know. I took the decision not to call my dad last night and instead phoned him this morning.  I assumed he'd be fed up of telling the story again, he'd be sore and crotchety, and maybe even a bit embarrassed.

When I called him this morning he seemed in reasonable spirits. His voice sounded feeble but then it always does now. I asked him how it had happened and he told me that the biddies, the elderly woman he pays to clean for him and her ancient mother, had put a square of carpet down to cover a worn patch on the floor, he'd not known it was there, tripped on it and fallen, cracking his knee on the bedside table.

Thankfully my cousin was only a few minutes away as she'd been round to run some errands for him. She waited with him, and got a carer to come to attend who determined there was no need for a hospital visit.

Since then social services have agreed to come in twice a day instead of once, giving my cousin some respite and possibly alleviating the biddies from some of their duties.

My mum died when I was in my mid twenties, and despite having been treated for cancer for the best part of a year, it was a shock. It felt like it happened very quickly. It feels to me now like my dad has given up and is just waiting for his turn. There's no fight or frustration, just acceptance, which I struggle to understand. We've had the conversation about his funeral and whenever I speak to him there's nothing to say. He's stopped reading, he doesn't go out (though I suspect if he wanted to he could) and despite a polite interest in what I'm doing, the conversation has all but stopped.

The speed that my mum went - four days after the final incident - was difficult to deal with but likewise this drawn out affair is tough. I just hope it doesn't happen before the country opens up again, I feel like I should see him again.

Tits and Tupperware in 1980s England

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there ~ L.P.Hartley

My childhood was one long string of parties. Trouble is they were my mother's parties and as she was a 1980s housewife living in suburban Oldham they weren't the kind of social events you or I would think of now.

The parties my mum went to were ostensibly for home shopping, usually fashion or homewares. They were tame affairs in comparison to the French knickers and dildo parties that were, at that time, about a decade away from the grasps of Oldham housewives. In 1981 the Ann Summers party was a brand new concept and not something you'd find in small town England.

TV shopping channels hadn't yet made it over from the states and the internet was a thing of the future, an article on Tomorrow's World perhaps but certainly not an option for shopping.

Home parties flourished and my mum's social life was, for a number of years, intricately bound up in them. These sorts of home retail schemes often bring to mind Tupperware Parties with their cut-throat pyramid selling and ever so useful kitchenware but mum wasn't big on household chores so her drug of choice was the Pippa Dee Party.

For those not initiated in the Pippa Dee Party scene, what would happen is each woman in a circle of friends would take it in turn to host; they'd put on tea and biscuits, possibly wine and peanuts (there were no rules surrounding this), bung the kids in bed then the others in the group would pile in to their sitting room and watch Dulcie, a local sales rep, go through the latest high street fashions. She'd inspire her audience with three different ways to wear the same culottes and wow them with the versatility of a two piece suit.

There would be much discussion, a little chitter chatter about the issues of the day, then the party goers would have an opportunity to try the garments on and if they wanted to, they could place an order with Dulcie. The host would get some kind of kickback - a discount or a free cardigan perhaps -  Dulcie would fill her order book and everyone had a great time.

Our family business had, by this time, moved to Inskip, a tiny village in Lancashire, slap bang in the centre of a triangle formed by Preston, Garstang and Blackpool - much like the Bermuda triangle but on a smaller scale and less given to killing mariners and bringing down aeroplanes. The distance from home meant that my dad would often be back late and my brothers and I, unable to be left alone at home, would escort my mum to the Pippa Dee extravaganzas.

In case you were in any doubt there's nothing very appealing to a seven year old at one of these events, apart from maybe the biscuits, and I'd often find myself wandering about someone's house aimlessly looking for something to entertain me. On one such occasion, when Jennifer (auntie Jenny even though she wasn't my aunt) was hosting, I had the misfortune of wandering into her dining room while taking a short cut from the sitting room to the kitchen.

It was one of those houses where you could walk through all three downstairs rooms and come out back where you started. With hindsight I really ought to have paid more attention to what was going on that evening and gone to the kitchen via the hallway, for without realising what I was doing I walked straight into the room which was being used as a dressing room.

The sight of a room full of bare chested women and somewhere between six and twelve breasts, wobbling away at just above eye level is still burned on my brain. Some of them had still had their bras on, some just out there for the world to see.

As I gasped and turned, in a panic, to make a hasty retreat I heard one of them cooing to me.

"Aw look at 'im!" the Oldham accent elongating the double O and dropping the H, "Come 'ere love, haven't you grown?" 

A silent shriek of terror in my head was followed by a mad scramble for the door handle, and I was out of there. It was a mistake I only made once but one that could possibly have influenced my sexual orientation years later.


There were other parties I was dragged to which were less prone to the horror of ladies' boobs. You'd never see a bare tit at an aromatherapy party after all, and even when mum did take me to the odd Tupperware Party the group would be far more concerned with buying their make-your-own ice lollies kit than flashing their knockers, however unintentionally, at an impressionable child.

My favourite events by far were only loosely connected with shopping, they were the market research parties. It wasn't the party itself that I loved but the run up to it when our family would test newly launched household products. We might be given three boxes of breakfast cereal for example, all slightly different in taste and texture, and all delivered in mysterious white boxes with a number or letter on the front.

It was our job to try the product and note down which we preferred (mum would do that) then on the day of the party we would gather with the other guinea pigs, present our results and discuss them. It's difficult to explain the thrill of eating unidentified chocolate biscuits and being responsible for choosing which was the best tasting, but thrilling it was!

Another gathering I was often hauled along to was Weight Watchers. This was the least fun of all but thankfully I was unlikely to be faced with any bare bosoms. Instead, after the dreaded weigh-in at the front of Oldham Parish Hall on Rock Street, Esme, the head Weight Watcher, would hold court. She'd begin by congratulating those who'd lost weight and offering words of encouragement to those who'd not done so well.

"Brilliant work Helen over there," Esme would reveal Helen, who was sitting on the third row, like she was the star prize in a game show. The speedboat that someone was going to take back to Rochdale and park on their drive.


"Three pounds this week and I see you've got your two stone ribbon. Well done love. Everyone give Helen a well deserved clap."

Esme would beam at Helen as a ripple of resentful applause was issued from the group. All the while Helen blushing with self consciousness yet barely concealing a smug smile.

"And Janice... What went wrong love? You were going in the right direction. What happened?" Janice would sink back into her hard, plastic stacking chair, suddenly aware of forty sets of eyes now trained on her.

"Was it the cheese and onion crisps again? Oh a funeral you say? It's no excuse though is it? Your husband? Oh love, I'm sorry to hear that but look at it this way, you're back on the market now, all the more reason to shift those last few pounds eh?"

Once the name and shame was over Esme would invariably begin doling out slimming tips and parading dried up, crusty old dishes she'd made that week for her ever suffering husband.

"Look at this ladies," Esme naturally employed the Oldham long 'OO', "I made it for our Jack on Tuesday and he absolutely loved it!"

Esme would turn and from beneath a tea towel, unveil a dehydrated blackberry crumble with a corner missing where Jack had been given his ration. "It's in the book," another OO, "page 47. Try it with a bit of low fat custard."

Years later, rumour had it that Esme had met an untimely demise when she fell down the stairs at home. Those inclined to gossip even suggested that her emaciated husband Jack had something to do with it, no doubt sick of having to use pickled beetroot to add moisture to her desiccated 'tater hash.

I did a bit of digging on a Facebook group last year and learned that Esme hadn't actually fallen down the stairs and she'd lived on for years. A far less interesting conclusion to her life than I had hoped but all the better for her I dare say.





NB: Dulcie, Helen, Janice and Esme's long suffering husband Jack are all figments of my lockdown imagination but are absolutely based on real people.

Images by Martin Parr

Spying through the garden fence

I was sitting at the table in our garden yesterday, resting after having lunch in the sunshine, my mind wandering, when I noticed a pair of beady eyes watching me through a gap in the fence. In the split second that our eyes made contact they were gone again.

"Chris," I called, "I just caught Mary spying on me."

"It's not the first time. See those holes?" he pointed to where there had been gaps left by knots in the wood, lower down the fence, "I plugged them last week."

He immediately got to work finding something we could cover the gap with.

Mary is our 87 year old neighbour, we share a drive with her. According to her daughter in law she has Parkinson's and a touch of dementia. Chris says we could have worse neighbours, noisy kids or yobbos, so he puts up with her. 

She has a tendency to be nosy and loves nothing more than gossiping about people to the neighbours. When I recently cut Chris's hair in the garden she'd obviously seen me doing it and asked him if I was a hairdresser. Chris lied and told her I was and now the neighbourhood has been informed that I have my own salon.

Shortly after catching her peeking Mary called over the fence. "Chris, Chris! Lockdown ends on Monday!"   

She seems to have been oblivious to the rules of the lockdown since the beginning, trotting out to the shops two or three times a day with a scarf wrapped around her face, her crimson bobble hat pulled down tight over her head and her wrap-around mirrored sunglasses finishing the look. She's been sent home at least three times from the hospital for turning up unannounced and her family appear to have absolved themselves of all responsibility.

Mary and I don't see eye to eye and I won't take any of her shit but I'm conscious of her age and condition and despite what people think, I am compassionate given her situation. I was the one that turned the hob off and alerted her when I smelled gas billowing out of her back door, and when she fell in the bath and was covered in bruises I offered our services if she needed anything from the shops. We're not mates, and she torments me, but I'm not a monster.

Mary is clearly aware of the lockdown but I think it's safe to say she doesn't completely grasp it. What little she reveals to us is, I suspect, taken from headlines in The Sun. Our warnings to her have been ignored or forgotten and her family are nowhere to be seen. It must be lonely for her in the house on her own but I suppose this is nothing new for her as she's lived alone for years.

I think her sons should be doing more, but maybe they're on the phone to her every day and I shouldn't speculate. It's hypocritical of me to judge them anyway, after all I've not seen my dad since Christmas day and I only speak to him once or twice a fortnight. He too lives alone, though he is less mobile than Mary, and less inclined to tell the neighbours that I'm a hairdresser.

Part of the reason I haven't seen my dad is because he doesn't live down the road and we don't have a car. I planned to go over for his 70th in March but travel restrictions kiboshed that. His life has shrunk noticeably in recent years but the lockdown has affected him in different ways. He's been unable to get Tesco deliveries because of increased demand so now my cousin goes to see him every day and takes him a hot meal. She's been a superstar and arguably the lockdown has worked out better for him because of her efforts.

Chris's parents are royally fucked off with staying at home. They're in their eighties, and very mobile, so not at all happy with being told to stay at home. They did as was advised and expected for a long time but recently they've decided to loosen the self imposed reins a little.

They appear to have the same weird fascination with supermarkets that Chris has, so they've been doing the rounds. Sainsbury's, Aldi, Waitrose, M&S Food and Tesco have all been visited in the last week. God knows why they need to go to the supermarket so often. Maureen recently revealed to me that they currently have 63 toilet rolls at home, tins of beans and salmon coming out of their ears, fridges and freezers filled to bursting with ready meals, bleach like it's going out of fashion and more cereal than can be made from the wheat fields of East Anglia. On top of that they have a milkman delivering fresh dairy a couple of times a week. 

This isn't unusual lockdown hoarding, it's always been like this. They had no concerns when the supermarkets were being stripped bare a few weeks ago, they were sitting on a pile of groceries that could've filled Marks and Spencer twice over. None of it ever wasted and all of it accumulated on a rolling basis over a number of months.

I can appreciate how frustrating it must be for them having to stay at home. I have the benefit of continued work and the Government advises that I can leave the house every day - and I'm bored shitless. They are being told to 'shield' themselves by not going anywhere till June.

Maureen especially needs more human contact than WhatsApp and the telly can offer because she's looking after Brian who suffers from Alzheimer's. He still retains much of his character, he's charming and funny, but the difference over recent years is noticeable.  He's always checking his pockets for his car keys, he's very forgetful and often repeats the same comment or question over and over, a favourite being 'How's life in general?' He has a habit of drifting off.

He wouldn't be able to look after himself any more and so Maureen has taken on many of the things Brian would once have done. For the time being at least he can still drive short distances with Maureen as a passenger but I think this is likely to come to an end sooner rather than later. I've not spoken to them about what happens then; they live on a small housing estate with not much within walking distance and Maureen doesn't drive.

The obvious response would be to give or sell the car to Chris and we can spend more time helping them out but I don't think it's as easy as that. The car is a symbol of a much bigger thing and giving it up, as they will inevitably have to do, will mean giving up their independence. The longer they can keep using the car, even for the little things, the longer they remain self reliant.

I've not had a car for four years and you find work-arounds but I live somewhere well serviced by public transport, with lots of amenities within walking distance, and I'm not 84 years old.

So back to the lockdown - is it worse for the elderly? In many cases yes, just look at what's happened in nursing homes and care homes around the world. I have a friend whose mum is in a home where four people have died from Covid 19 and who is battling it herself right now. I can't begin to imagine what that's like either for mother or daughter.

Under normal circumstances my dad would probably be better in a home but I'm glad he isn't right now. He has his emergency call button if he falls, my cousin sees him every day and he has some social care from the NHS. Right now I'm happy with that and thankful he isn't in a more vulnerable position.

The lockdown is obviously different for everyone. It would be wrong to assume those over a certain age are all in the same boat, yet the Government guidelines have done that to some extent. That being said I think it was inevitable given the timescales and level of knowledge about the coronavirus they had at the time the guidance was issued.

Many people are unhappy about the way the Government have dealt with the situation, and that's understandable. I wonder though how anyone would have done it and if a different Government would have managed it better. One thing's for certain, we'll never know that.

This Government and its response will be judged in the fullness of time, probably in comparison to other countries, and then eventually, many decades from now, it won't matter to anyone who was in charge, it will have become a piece of history about our country, to be learnt from or otherwise.

Right now though, before this pandemic becomes historical fact, and before it goes through the rigmarole of politics, it's about the people that are living it and that's why, when I caught Mary spying on me, I let it slide.