Serious Moonlight

The weather has turned so instead of working in the garden Chris is upstairs tidying the junk room. I can hear things being knocked over and thrown around from downstairs and it's making me tense.  The clinking of glass and half mumbled half shouted exclamations of 'What the fuck?' are clearly audible. This will not end well and I will have to bite my tongue later when he begins to accuse me of hoarding crap.

Admittedly I probably don't need half a litre of fake blood, a navy blue, polyester, woman's jumpsuit from Debenhams and one and a half rolls of wallpaper with a brick pattern on them. Nor do I need right now the unused easel which is about four years old and has never left its box, the cheap costume jewellery, and the broken, hammered metal, table lamp from Habitat which I've kept because it matches the not-broken, hammered metal, table lamp from Habitat which I don't use anyway.

In my defence, and with the exception of the lamps, each of these things were bought to be used in the production of a play. The twelve feet of thick, white, yacht rope for example was a prop in Marina and the Clone and was last seen tying up the reporter in Marina Oliveto's Primrose Hill cellar.

Chris is as happy as Larry out in the garden, pottering around all day, moving planters, hiding gnomes and pruning things to within an inch of their lives. He's very much like Dr Doolittle with the animals and has regular visitors in the shape of the neighbours' cats. At the moment there are three everyday guests who turn up unannounced a couple of times a day, usually in rotation, sometimes together.

Naturally we've given them names, nothing too personal because, well because they're not our cats. There's Blackie, who is silky and jet black from head to tail, White Face a sturdy beast who is black and white with, unsurprisingly, a smattering of white fur across his face, and Black Face who is also black and white and who I'm considering renaming because it sounds slightly racist to my sensitive ears. My auntie Elaine used to have a black and white cat who looked just like Black Face, he was called Minstrel which I think, as names go, is probably no better.

Since we lost our elderly and much loved cat Gilbert, in January, we haven't got round to getting rid of his remaining food, and now with Blackie, White Face and Black Face brave enough to knock about in what was his territory, Chris has been feeding them. The wet food and tuna ran out ages ago and now the biscuits are beginning to run low. Chris wants to start buying cat food for them but I have to remind him that they're not our responsibility and they a perfectly good home and owners who feed them just a few doors down the road. They are clearly taking advantage of his good nature, he knows this very well but allows it all the same.

As part of the growing menagerie we're also visited by an array of birds. Some of these visitors, like the robins and tits, are more welcome than the likes of the pair of shitting magpies who have spent the last fortnight gathering goodies with which to build a nest, and the massive pigeon that barges its way onto the bird table and flings whatever bits of seeds or bread are on there, all over the lawn.

I was sitting out on the terrace on Tuesday afternoon, soaking up the sun, and watching Chris gardening. To the idle eye of a passer by I could have been mistaken for a reptile warming myself up on a hot rock, only I was snacking on pitta bread and hummus, not flies.

As I sloshed back the last of my Pinot Grigio I noticed the ladybirds were back, buzzing around in the warm air and smashing themselves into windows willy nilly. I later went inside and found two more of them under the dining room table, dead and cluttering up the place. I fear the warm weather has brought them out early this year.

I was born in 1975 so I don't remember the fabled summer of 76 with its never ending heatwave, villages reappearing after a hundred years from the bottom of reservoirs, and the ladybird plague that came with the heat. Until recently, as far as I was concerned, these little red visitors were cute. They were flying jewels which ate greenflies and made the garden look summery.

That was until a couple of years ago when they started invading the house. I'm not sure how they get in but I find tonnes of them in the bathroom, the bedroom and now in the dining room. These once charming creatures are now revealed for what they really are - devil worshiping beetles to be hoovered up at the earliest opportunity. I must get round to sucking up the two in the dining room.

I finally got round to dying Chris's hair the other day. He struggles with bleach because his hair has a tendency to go ginger rather than blonde, so he leaves it on for way too long. I'm no hairdresser but I'll give pretty much anything a go so I used the tiny little brush that came with his kit to slap a load of this blue, stinking gunk on his head. 'There you go,' I said, 'now pop the little shower cap thing on and give it fifteen minutes.'

Chris decided against the see through polythene hat and it wasn't until one whole hour later he disappeared upstairs to shower off the bleach - eyes stinging and scalp burning. He reappeared after rinsing it through and blow drying his hair and asked 'What do you think?',

'It looks great!' I said, 'Really, very blonde.'

'It's a bit yellow,' he said, 'put the rest of it on would you?'

So dutifully I slapped the remainder on and left him to potter about for another half an hour. Eventually the burn was too much to take and he rinsed the last of the bleach off his hair and scalp. I asked if he'd used the special conditioner after washing away the chemicals, so his hair didn't become too brittle. 'No need,' he revealed, 'I mixed it in with the two bottles at the beginning so it's been conditioning as it was going!'

He has a look of an early eighties David Bowie now, if I had to pinpoint it I'd say the Serious Moonlight tour, 1983. I told him this to his glee and he spent the rest of the day and night singing away to himself - 'Ground control to Major Tom.'

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd missed a bit and there was a faint but noticeable brown line across the back of his head. Like a little cranial skid mark that only I was privy to. I've since taken the clippers to his head as he felt like he needed a quick trim and the skid mark has all but gone.

I suspect that he's waiting for that 'roots' look to come through so give it another couple of days and I'll be there giving him a short back and sides again. As I already mentioned, I'm no hairdresser, but I've been cutting my own hair for at least ten years and as long as he doesn't want anything fancy, I'm happy to give it a bash. I only really know two styles - short back and sides and skinhead - but thankfully that covers the pair of us.

I've been toying with the idea of writing to an author I've been reading recently but I'm not sure how that would be taken. I'm not a stalker and I don't want to profess undying love to them or anything, I just want to talk about how they write and learn a bit. I also like the idea of being an anecdote they recount in a future publication when they write about this person they had to call the police about. You never know, even though they are an acclaimed author with an international reputation, and millions of pounds in the bank, they might still want a new friend and I could be the perfect stranger they've been waiting for.

He lives in West Sussex apparently but I'm not sure where so I don't know how I'd get my letter to him. I remember as a kid my mum wanted to write to the Queen fan club. Queen the band not Queen Elizabeth. She too didn't have an address and this being pre-internet she took a punt and addressed the letter to The Queen Fan Club, London. Not even an attempt at a postcode.

I might try this tack myself, after all I have a name and there can't be that many people in West Sussex called that. Someone is surely going to be able to direct a letter to the right place.

Disappointingly it didn't work for my mum and a couple of months after posting it her little white envelope was returned to our house on the hill in Oldham.

Address not known.

The People of Roebuck Lane

I grew up in the countryside on a narrow and windy lane called Roebuck Lane on the edge of Saddleworth. At one end of the lane was the Roebuck Inn, a typical country pub, well known in the eighties for the quality of it's restaurant (sadly not so now) and at the other end was a little shop owned and run by Joan Greenwood. Between the two were ten houses.

Starting at the pub end there was a lady whose name slips my mind but who kept to herself and was kind enough to give us 50p one bonfire night towards food and fireworks; on the other side was an old farmhouse which had been converted into two residences - in one side was Vinny and Mad Mary (so named by my mother for her tendency to feed sliced white bread to the cows in the field behind our houses and the fact that they kept chickens in an old broken down ambulance) and in the other side was Jean, Frank, Christie and Damian.

Next along the lane was a terrace of five houses the first of which I lived in with my brothers Robert and Matthew and our parents Hilary and Howard. We lived at number five. During the time that I lived there I remember three sets of next door neighbours, the first Kevin and his wife Lorraine. Kevin was, I believe, the tour manager for the Grumbleweeds - a comedy and music act. Next to move in were Howard Jones the sign maker and Brenda who shouted a lot at each other and on whose wedding night introduced me to the word bonking through a sign on their front door which read 'Do not disturb - all night bonking in progress.' I think he made the sign himself but I can't be certain. As family tradition dictated they were both given nicknames, Brenda was the poisoned dwarf and Howard was affectionately known as the ferret - but never to their faces...

The Molloys lived there next. Steve was a professional rugby player who played for Featherstone Rovers and Paula was a nurse who according to my youngest brother had a huge arse. They also shouted at each other a lot.

Clara and John lived at number nine with their grown up kids. Clara and Jean from number three, were good friends and I used to go with them and Damian on shopping trips to such wild and adventurous (to a young child) places as the Mosley Mill Shop with it's fascinating aquarium shop full of the biggest and ugliest fish ever to have graced a tank and Ashton Market where Damian and I wandered between the stalls while Jean and Clara shopped and where twenty years previous Brady and Hindley had picked up that poor Kilbride boy and taken him to the moors. For me, through my childish eyes, Ashton Market was not about that, it was about Cornish pasties and my ever growing keyring collection.

Number eleven was an odd one. Brenda lived there with her husband who I only ever knew as China man. They would spend a long time abroad every year and then we would see Brenda and their daughter for a few weeks before they were off again. I might have seen China Man once a year if I was lucky but he was very elusive.

On the other end of our little block of five lived Jimmy and Elaine. Jimmy was known as Mr Angry after a rather unfortunate instance of trespass on my and Damian's part.

Next along the lane was George Groves's farm. He always had a dog tied up in the yard at the front of the house. This dog liked nothing more than barking incessantly and went particularly wild when someone walked past. It was the most terrifying dog I had ever encountered. I used to try sneaking past the farm to avoid the rabid outbursts of this devil creature and woe betide you if the dog wasn't tied up! Grovesy was accused of feeding our dog Dylan rat poison. The poison made Dylan's stomach bleed and cough up blood before he would try to cool down in a bog in one of the fields across the road from our house. We had to have him put down. Grovesy never denied having rat poison on the farm, what he did say was that Dylan must have gone in one of his barns to get it and he shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Whizbang, our cat, was also ill with what we suspected was poison but he recovered. Our next dog Skipper, another Dalmatian but this one with liver colouring rather than black, also died from rat poisoning. Needless to say that we didn't have a great relationship with George Groves and as a young child he was almost demonised in my eyes. It was years until we got another dog and when we did we took great lengths not to let him out of the house without a lead.

Further along the lane was a little stone cottage in the corner of a field. This is where Connie lived. I couldn't begin to start telling you about Connie, all I can remember is that because hers was the nearest house to Joan Greenwood's shop she became know as her near Joan's which over time and with the assistance of Oldhamers' accents morphed into something altogether more unpleasant. Connie tragically adopted the name Hernia Jones and was known as such for ever more.

Finally we follow the lane around the corner and down a dip and reach Joan's shop. A right old treasure chest of goodies and necessities. Sweets of course were there in abundance. Great big jars of chewing nuts and midget gems weighed out and served in little white paper bags. The penny sweets in the glass counter which would make up our traditional 10p mix (an occasional treat for going to Joan's for your parents,) the cans of pop - the ever elusive cherry pepsi which I asked for relentlessly for years and years and she never sold, shandy bass, giant cans of coke the size of a lager can and briefly when i was a teenager, the nasty but fascinating Tab Clear; chocolate bars - Fry's chocolate creme, Terry's Pyramint, Hellas Bars. I don't know why I wasn't the size of a house.

Joan didn't just sell sweets and drinks. Damian's mum used to send him to buy her cigarettes there - something my mum tried with me on a couple of occasions rather unsuccessfully as Joan was not at all happy about selling cigarettes to children. She did though. There was a big bacon slicer in the corner, you could buy potatoes, cleaning products, wine, cat food, fire lighters... The list goes on. Joan had a real community shop. When the lane was cut off by snow in the winter, which it was most years, she stayed open for those brave souls that could make it through the snow drifts (usually us kids) until Holroyd, another local farmer, would dig the lane clear of snow with his tractor. Even when the snow brought power cuts with it she'd be there with candles burning on the counter helping us to get through it and of course flogging us the boxes of household candles that we'd invariably run out of the previous winter.

Joan was in the paper once. The Oldham Evening Chronicle (the chron) ran a story about her shop being robbed. Joan was threatened with a gun which the thieves shot into the ceiling (something I looked for every time I went in there afterwards but never saw) and cleared her till out. I seem to remember that they didn't get very much cash - bad timing on their part. From that day on Joan always peeked through the little glass pane in the door between her house at the back and the shop at the front before she came in to serve anyone.

Roebuck Lane was a good place to grow up - despite the guns, the poison and the scary neighbours - it's a shame that I don't have a reason to go back there any more but I suspect if I did I'd be disappointed so I'm happy to leave it where it is - in my childhood.

Rosemary

I used to work for MORI Telephone Surveys - or MTS for short. The offices were on the edge of Clerkenwell in London and I worked there for just over two years. They were interesting times and, without wanting to sound dramatic, they were also life changing times.

I was one of three people interviewed for two roles as research executive. They initially offered the jobs to the two other candidates and told me that unfortunately my services would not be required - that's until one of the people didn't turn up to work on their first day, or any other day after that... Not the best way to get a job but I took it all the same.

The woman who ran MTS was Rosemary. She had started her career in research - as far as I remember - working as Bob's assistant. I only ever met Bob once - an American who desperately wanted to be British or at least to have a knighthood or some such accolade. Previous to working for Bob's MORI I believe she worked at Colombia pictures with her husband Donald and also for Greenpeace at some point - but that was all thousands of years previous.

Rosemary had a wicked sense of humour and was somewhat eccentric. On my first day at work she took us all out and got me drunk - little did I know that this would be a regular occurrence - and when I say regular I mean most days. She smoked and if anyone wanted a cigarette we would go and smoke in her office with her - it was whilst smoking in this office with her that we saw the twin towers of the world trade centre come under attack and collapse after being hit by two aeroplanes. She had some funny stories - like falling down the back of a filing cabinet whilst trying to retrieve some papers and being rescued by the actor Sidney Poitier who grabbed her ankles and hauled her out. She used to have an office cat which lived in the bottom of the filing cabinet - and a range of spirits which lived in the top of the same filing cabinet. When one of Rosemary's cats- Trotsky I think - had developed diabetes she joined an online group called Sugar Cats, well who wouldn't? And who wouldn't travel to America to meet up with the sugar cats team and go sky diving with them?

Rosemary once invited us all for a weekend away in Walton on the Naze up in Essex. It was a boating weekend and was incredibly drunken.

Chris & I slept on one of the small boats in what felt like a coffin - my face was about six inches from the top of this box and condensation kept dripping onto my face throughout the night. - Chris was not happy. We ached the next day whilst sailing around the estuary the next day.

I remember Chris Downham playing his guitar and leading a sing along to Van Morrison & Beatles songs at sunset on the deck of a boat. It was a good time.

Rosemary died in the last year that I worked at MTS. She had travelled up to the forest in Essex where her husband was buried, sat at his graveside and injected herself with a massive overdose of insulin which she had kept to one side since his death. She had always said that when the time was ready she would do it herself and that she never wanted to be sick. It was her time and her way.

http://www.sugarcats.com/communications_area/message.asp?message=589309890&messageboard=967975216

Cat Concepts

I've been thinking about cats. Specifically about their outlook on the world. It's well known that cats have a problem with the concept of mirrors but it occurred to me this morning that they must have trouble with all sorts of things. Dustbins for example - I told Gilbert off today for routing through the bin in the bathroom whilst I was brushing my teeth without realising that cats just don't understand rubbish. To them it's just play things in a container - not that they would understand that a container is something to put things in...

What do you think they make of coasters or gloves or something really far out like tumble driers or Southport? No wonder Gilbert is constantly scared and Moochie lives in a perpetual state of confusion.

Splat!

It's funny the way things happen isn't it? Until two weeks ago I had never heard the word spork before. Now they're everywhere - I don't know what's going on. I saw them again today in a shop window at lake Windemere. I have obviously seen them before and also used them but I never knew their name.

Another repetitive theme of late has been road kill. Last Sunday on the walk to work I was shocked to see a cat on the side of the road which had been hit and killed by a vehicle. It's legs were stiff and sticking up in the air, there was blood and meat coming out of its side and the poor thing's face was split right open. It was, as I have written, shocking. The next day its appearance had changed. It was now missing anything that resembled a head and now looked more like meat and less like a cat. There were bones clearly visible - strangely lying separate from the rest of the body - and almost a smear of ginger fur over the double yellow lines. Bit by bit the cat has disappeared over the week. I think it's very sad that somebody's pet just didn't come home one day.

Since last Sunday I have seen a flattened fox, a stiffened squirrel, a run over rabbit and a splattered seagull.

Sugar Puffs

Gilbert - the cat - has black stuff up his nose. I reckon he's been in London for the day, riding the tube and doing a bit of shopping. He's quite accomplished when it comes to using public transport you know. I once bumped into him on the night bus coming back from Manchester to Sale.

Moochie - the other cat - is not quite as talented and regularly has trouble walking in a straight line.

Anyway - that's by the bypass...

Ghosts. Real or not real? Maybe we'll never know. I personally don't believe in them but having said that I am very curious. As a kid I would regularly take part in Ouija board readings. I always cheated and pushed the glass around the board - just to liven things up. One of my friends, Becki, would take it all very seriously and have all sorts of accouterments in order that spirits may be contacted. One of these was a glass of water which represented purity and was part of the safety net against evil spirits crossing over and getting us. I did wonder just how pure a glass of tap water from Clarkesfield actually was. Becki had a spirit guide when she used the ouija board - if I remember correctly he was called Bill. Bill had a sign with which he would indicate to Becki that it was really him and not an intruder. His sign was a figure of eight. I caused chaos on the night when I pushed the glass around in a figure of eight so that we could get on with it quickly and it turned out that Bill had changed his sign just the day before!

Becki had some right run ins with the other side - like the time that she told me about going into her bedroom and some malevolent ghoul had turned each and every one of her Corey Haim posters up side down.

I recently lived in a seventeenth century converted coach house where some friends of mine sensed things. I did not sense anything but they still put the willies up me by telling me about it. Two separate friends on different occasions and without prompting told us about a young girl upstairs on the landing which was odd.

As somebody with a very scientific outlook on life I have trouble believing in ghosts and spirits and the like but sometimes I would like to believe. I don't go to my mum's grave because of this. My cousin believes that her dad is watching over her and her family but when I go to the cemetery where my mum is buried I don't feel that and I just get upset at the thought that my mum's body is in a box under the ground. I get no comfort from going there.

On that miserable note I will leave for the evening but before I go - just one question... Have you ever noticed how Fizz on Coronation Street has an uncanny resemblance to the Sugar Puffs Honey Monster?

The Cats

I have been trying for some time now to teach Gilbert & Moochie both Spanish and French. The lessons began when Whiskers started printing the flavours of their cat food pouches in numerous languages on the back of the packet. A bit of poulet here, a sachet of lapin there and the odd morsel of canard or ton every now and again. Quite straight forward stuff really.

We rapidly progressed to more tricky conversational French but the Spanish was somewhat restricted. I decided that they (especially Moochie) needed some more vocabulary work and thought that the best way to work through this and to improve their all round skills was to invest in small desks so that they had a dedicated work space.

It was only when I tried to get them to write a short composition that I realised there was a problem. The cat's are really bad at writing - due to the whole thumb thing. I had to call the whole thing off and ebay the desks.

We're now back to chatting over dinner and I think everyone feels much better about it generally. Less pressure all round.

This morning Gilbert said "Le petit déjeuner était merci délicieux vous. Pouvons-nous avoir la souris la prochaine fois ?"

I replied "Vous êtes un chat ingrat. J'enlèverai vos cheveux."