As someone who never kept a diary I'm now discovering an unsuspected benefit of blogging: I can go to the archive and find out what was on my mind this time last year. Then, it turns out, I was finishing a book and looking forward to clearing my desk. Right now I'm clearing my desk and looking forward to starting a new book. So now I know, best time to catch me with my kit in good order is mid-summer.

This week my Projects in Progress file has continued to shrink at an astonishing rate. I feel like I suddenly emerged into clear blue water. Why yesterday morning when Mr F and I applied for our new swipeable travel cards we only encountered one glitch: we'd used the wrong form. Of course we had. So I leaned on his back to fill in the correct form, then he leaned on mine and we were stamped, filed and out of there in under ten minutes. Phew. I really wanted to get that one ticked off the list, because August 1st this town closes. I know I've said it before, Liberation Day, May Day, Any Other Old Feast Day, yadda yadda, but this time I'm talking about the whole month of August. Closed. Chiuso. Capisce?

Our favorite breakfast bar is shuttered till September. Likewise the shops where I get balsamic vinegar, candles and photocopies. By the skin of my teeth I retrieved my trousers from Trouser-Shortening Lady and got a hair cut appointment. Now we can look forward to four weeks in a ghost town. A kind of Tombstone, AZ with flooded streets.

Today, with that devil-may-care attitude of a person who has whole areas of her desk now accessible to a duster, I'm out to lunch AND dinner. Way too much socialising for this baby but what can you do. When friends are in town you have to grab the opportunity and see them. Tomorrow, I dust.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the past week things have been going spookily right for me. I'm sure an astrologer would have a field day. Every seemingly hopeless bureaucratic chore has ended in success. My absentmindedness on Saturday night, which might have left me with eight hungry guests and a ruined frying pan, produced instead a really delicious variation on the theme of spinach and cheese stuffed chicked breasts. A crisp variation. And my ineffectual flapping around for an actress young enough to play the ingenue in next year's pantomime - yes folks, you read it here, NEXT YEAR'S PANTOMIME - brought me a phone call from the very girl I needed. She doesn't know me, she's not even sure what a pantomime is, but she had the enterprise to call me and she's ready, willing and able. How often does that happen?

Even yesterday's hit-and-run gardening session at our mountain house worked out perfectly. We left at 6am, started work on the jungle at 8am and had everything shipshape by early afternoon. Okay, we left behind a lot of disgruntled, displaced insects, rudely awakened by the swishing of Mr F's scythe, but what's a person to do? The place was starting to look like a set from Hansel & Gretel.

The only occasion I've failed to profit from during this winning streak was last Friday, when the horse in which my son owns a tiny share finally got the hang of racing and came a well-run second. She'd been warned about the glue factory so maybe that woke her up. Whatever, she suddenly smelled victory and went for it. Her odds at the start were 25-1 and I didn't have a cent on her. Dang, dang, dang.

I'm not expecting this lucky streak to last. Pessimism is my natural plumage. Hope for the best but brace yourself for the worst is my motto. And still no rain.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's 8pm, the temperature is still hovering around 90 degrees and the weather report says humidity is only 49 per cent. Pack of lies. It's been a long, hot, clammy, contentious day. Time to let off a little steam.

I got up with a residue of day-old crossness. The UK Pension Office is chasing my late mother's estate for an over-payment of £52 retirement pension. She died Thursday night, I reported her death to them Monday morning, by which time her estate was £52 the wealthier. This from a country that loses £4 billion a year through welfare fraud. Maybe I'll make them wait a little for that cheque.

We'd earmarked today to tidy up my mother's apartment ready for showing it to potential buyers. To which end Mr F began painting the walls of the terrace dining room a very pretty shade of pale bluebell. He'd almost finished when the condo administrator, sitting in an office several miles away, phoned to tell me we'd been denounced. Apparently pale bluebell on an outward facing wall is against condo regulations. He said it in a very sorry-about-this-but-I-can't-ignore-the-Gestapo manner. Five minutes later Mr Snoop himself appeared at our door, with Mrs Snoop hovering behind him in the stair hall, perhaps waiting to see whether I socked him across the jaw. I mean.
What grieved me about this snooping is that in all the weeks my mother was sick none of her neighbours, NOT ONE, rang her bell to ask how she was or to offer help. And after she died, though I did inform the condo gossip, I received not a single note of condolence. But start painting your walls and oh boy, they're all eyes and ears.
So that was my day.
Oh. The condo administrator dropped by too. We reached a compromise. The inward-facing wall can stay blue, the rest must be returned to the regulation shade of Grunge. Poor guy. He said his phone is jumping off the hook all day long with informants having hysterics.

But now for the good news. I'm going to take my third shower of the day, then, wrapped in a towel, I'm going to eat an icecream and go to bed with Dracula. I love that book.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 02:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back from Cornwall, where the rain it rain'deth every day, and Devon, where my Dartington Hall audience gave me a warm and generous reception. Thank you, Devon.
I'll report only the highs and lows of this sodden, wind-tossed trip. The lows first. English food, God help us. For a nation obsessed with celebrity chefs and swamped by gorgeous, inspiring cook books, the standard of meals served in generally affordable restaurants is dire. It's served in mammoth portions, which is why we're lumbering swiftly up the inside track to join America and Western Samoa in the Behemoth section of the human race, but it tastes of nothing.

And the pretentiousness! They've all been on menu-writing courses. They've all achieved the Recycling Old Salad Greens As Garnish Diploma. What a pity they never follow through and learn how to cook.

But now something nice. On Friday we visited the grave of John Betjeman, one of our favourite poets, and paid our respects. He's buried in the churchyard of St Enodoc. You drive to Polzeath and then drop south towards Rock, parking your car at Daymer Bay. We were the only people there without surf boards. The path to the church, with its strange stumpy little spire poking above the dunes, takes you across the fairway of a golf course. Sir John is just inside the lych gate, his grave marked by a slim, elegant stone, I think of Cornish granite. We sat on a bench, watched the surf rolling in and read a couple of his poems to him. I do hope he doesn't hate people doing that.

And because JB so despised plastic oak beams and all forms of Public House Naffery, I've written a final verdict on last week's meals in my feeble attempt at Betjeman-style verse. I hope he wouldn't have hated that either.

ENGLISH EATERIES

Peckish for a little something
Tired of laminated lies
Hearts in boots we try the King's Head's
Herb-flecked, farm-fresh dog poo pies.

Lite Bite options, may contain nuts,
Sun-blushed, char-grilled, pan-seared pap.
Garden-tender, Best of British.
Why does it all taste like crap?

Fair-trade, with a parsley garnish,
Creamy, dreamy, up-chuck flan.
Let's just flush it down the dunny
And cut out the middle man.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As dangerous recipes go, try this one on for size:

Take a British population of 180,000 (think Luton, if you can bear it) and mix into a 900 acre bowl of farmland, ensuring you have removed all dwellings bar leaky, canvas ones.

Before your mixture becomes too dry, tip a torrential downpour on it and mash until you have achieved the correct depth of liquid mud (about a foot should do it but don’t worry if it’s more like two).

Next, add an inadvisable quantity of alcohol and a stinking pit of human effluent. Whatever you do, do not allow your mixture to sleep, wash or sit down. Don’t be afraid to handle it roughly or make it queue for everything. You can check that it is irritable enough by charging it £2 for a bottle of water and £5 for anything edible.

Continue to regularly deluge with rain. Reduce the temperature and leave to chill for five days and nights.

You may imagine that I am describing a sick social experiment for Reality TV, designed to culminate in violence and pillage, demonstrating that a natural, savage streak lurks perilously close to the surface of the British psyche?

Not a bit of it.

Welcome to Glastonbury: a wonderful confluence of camaraderie, courtesy, diversity, fun, good humour, friendship, endurance and entertainment.

It was bloody muddy, though.

Posted by Laurie Graham at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)