Today is an absolutely beautiful day, but for the next hour I shall enjoy it by looking at all the roses and geraniums in the flower bed that is visible through the open door to my side. I just wish my gardenwas larger, but then again, I am perfectly aware that many people have to content themselves with just balconies or the local park, to catch up with their share of fresh air and sunshine.
That was how it was when I was a child. If I wanted to go outside, playing in the garden was not an option. Balconies used to enchant me. I remember, a friend of my mother had one, in her small council flat, right out in one of those places near the end of a London underground line. I was allowed to water her balcony plants once, but only once. I think I must have watered a little too enthusistically, for she never asked me again. Not that we used to visit her very often, which was just as well really, because once I had exhausted the delights of her balcony, the beautifully-dressed Golly that sat on the sideboard, but I wasn't really allowed to play with, and certainly not take home, and the big seashell in which you could hear the sea if you put it to your ear, I became bored and restless, and probably a bit of a pain too.
There was a large garden behind our London house, but the only time I was allowed to go in it was to accompany my grandmother when she hung out the washing. Then I used to play in the waist-high long grass and make all manner of secret paths through it. I used to blow on the dandelion clocks to see what time it was, and there were plenty of opportunities to try again if the first one did not work. Dandelions would jostle with thistles and all manner of other weeds which thrived in that urban wilderness. My Grandmother always used to say "If you don't plant a garden, it will plant itself" and I had to agree with her.
Unfortunately, although she was only a tenant like ourselves, Mrs B. downstairs had control of the garden, and she didn't want me in it, or anybody else for that matter.
When I was about nine or ten, this same aunt who had the balcony, gave me an Enid Blyton gardening book. It was a bit cruel really, but I read it so thoroughly that I learnt a great deal about gardening. I knew all about how to dig over a flower bed, how to plant seeds and how to prune roses. I even learned about garden pests, and how to deal with them, but the book didn't give me any ideas how to deal with the biggest garden pest of all - Mrs B.downstairs.
Yes, I had actually had the temerity to dig over a bit of the wilderness and plant it out. Over the period of a few days I spent several happy hours out in the fresh air tending to my little bit of garden. Then one morning I came down to find that my plants had been trampled on and just for good measure, bucketfuls of weeds and coal dust had been thrown over everything.
I threw the book away. It upset me too much, now that my little foray into gardening was effectively brought to a close. But I think that incident might have been one of the contributary factors that lead my mother an I to leave London a couple of years later and try our luck in North Wales.
But there were still the Camden Gardens, five minutes walk away, even if you were not allowed to walk on the grass. People looked after things more in those days, and respected them. But the presence of a full-time park-keeper cum gardener definitely helped.
The flower-beds were not trampled on, no litter was left lying around and the actual playground at the end of the gardens, was locked up every night and painted at regular intervals.
From about the age of five, I used to go there on my own. There were always other children to play with once you got there.
There were no sandpits though, so I had to reserve my bucket and spade for visits to the actual seaside or till my mother took me to one of the playgrounds in Regent's Park or Kensington Gardens. There were no baby swings either and definitely only a hard asphelt surface to land on if you fell. But we never did. Not that I can remember, at any rate.
When I think of all the things we used to get up to it sends shivers down my spine. We thought nothing of hanging on by our knees to the bar of a big roundabout called an umbrella, and swinging out while the others pushed it round as fast as they could. Occasionally we even climbed right up to the top and sat on top of it, but that was definitely dangerous, and the park-keeper would then order us down in no uncertain terms.
With the big slide, one of us would slide down it with trailing a wax crayon behind them, with the result, when the wax had worked its way in, the metal slide became extremely slippery, and we used to shoot down it and right off the end, like bullets from a gun.
I think we had the most fun on the swings though. The chains were long, so you could swing really high. You could swing the highest of all if you stood up, especially if there were two of you facing one another. One sitting and one standing was another variation, as was swinging while the twisted-up chains unravelled, throwing you in all directions. The swings on either side had to be hooked up for this stunt, to avoid banging into them.
I have started talking about 'we' rather than I. Most of the time,especially when I was a bit older, I would come down with the other girls from our street. Somehow boys just did not come into the equation back then. I suppose they had their own groups and games. also, I think the girls in the street vastly outnumbered the boys, so, on the whole, we left them to their own devices.
Next time I will write more about all the games we used to play in the street. But right now, i have flower beds to tend to and roses to dead-head.
Monday 28 July 2008
Saturday 12 July 2008
I started to write yesterday, but was interrupted by my husband coming home prematurely. And now it is lost somewhere in the murky depths of my computer. But things have a strange way of turning up unexpectedly.
These days, whenever I start loosing things, or rather failing to find them because they are no longer in the place where I had thought I had put them, I realise that it is time to have a bit of a sort out. I did this with my bookshelves in the spare room the other day, and lo and behold, what should turn up but my old stamp album.
I sat down on top of the pile of books on the floor and perused it. I had carefully stuck those stamps in country by country, set by set, all in nice straight rows. The late King George features in ten of my stamps, ranging in value from a ha'pny to tuppence ha'pny(as we used to pronounce it) I've even got three with the head of his abdicated older brother, Edward. I used to like the stamps of the young queen Elizabeth best. A whole set of stamps with her young portrait on them graces my album. As I said in my last Blog - It is pity that everyone, even queens, have to get old.
South African stamps used to come in pairs, one with Suid (pronounce sayed) Africa, and the other with South Africa. Zimbabwe was southern Rhodesia in those days, and on that page, I have four stamps of English currency, with the Queen's head on them, and the writing, Rhodesia and Nyasaland (which I believe is present-day Malawi) We used to have a gardener from Malawi when we live out in South Africa, and his name was Maxwell. How he managed to work so hard in that sticky, summer heat, I do not know. But that belongs to a much later chapter of my life and has absolutely no place under the present title.
For pure pictorial beauty, the stamps of Monaco and Hungary were hard to beat. I've got a couple which celebrate the wedding of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, as well as some lovely triangular ones from that principality. I remember watching the fairy-tale wedding on our small black and white television (already described in great detail in an earlier Blog) when the American actress became a princess. In hindsight, she would have probably been happier if she had stayed in America, where she belonged, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Visiting her tomb in Monaco's great cathedral was a sad experience for me. I was still feeling very subdued when I emerged once more into the sunshine. One day she was a princess, the next a corpse. What is life and death all about?
I don't know why the Hungarians made a point of producing such lovely stamps back in the fifties. Perhaps that was one area in which their Russian oppressors (or liberators, depending on ones point of view) let them have free rein and give vent to their pent-up creativity. Anyway, I used to love collecting them. and they had pride of placein my stamp album.
I remember when I was about seven, my mother's older sister came to visit us for the afternoon. In winter, she used to remind me of a big brown bear, with her long fur coat, fur boots and fur mittens. she even used to wear the furry, sanitized remains of some unfortunate elongated creature round her neck, bright,beady eyes shining and its tail clipping somehow into its mouth. My aunt Agnes used to fascinate me in more ways than one. She was a brilliant conversationist with a witty sense of humour, and even at that age she used to make me laugh. Anyway, on this particular visit, I must have been briefly the subject of the conversation. Directly I heard my name mentioned I started to pay attention to what was being said, as one does. "Why doesn't Josephine start collecting stamps. It is a very educational hobby."
So sure enough, a few days after this visit I got a pile of used stamps complete with parts of the envelopes they were still stuck to, and instructions about how to soak them off in a saucer of tepid water. I believe a packet of stamp hinges and a very small, album was included in the bounty.
My new hobby kept me occupied for hours one end. For the rest of my childhood, quite a sizeable chunk of my meagre pocket money would be spent on stamps, and I suppose I absorbed the rudiments of geography along the way. I began to realise that Australia and Austria were two different countries and that Jugoslavia could be spellt Yugoslavia as well. I learned that the French owned a place that had beautiful stamps called Camaroons and that the Seychelles were tiny islands in the middle of the Indian ocean, with lots of birds.
I remember one stamp, no longer in my possession, a small, green one that had 'Saar' on it. I really did not know where to stick it, so it had a special place in the back of my album. Years later, when learning about the Rhine Valley at secondary school, a small black dot, denoting 'coal' had to be put in, somewhat to the south of the Ardennes. This was Saarland, where my green stamp had originated. Little did I know at that time, that I would later spend the best part of thirteen years there.
We used to have fun swapping stamps at school and in each other's houses. Everybody seemed to collect stamps in those days. And dare I say, our knowledge of the kind of geography as to where countries and continents were, and what was the capital of what, was far superior to that of kids today. I put a lot of that down to stamp collecting.
As for me personally, Geography was one of the subjects that I always seemed to come top in, in secondary school, without really trying. I had a good pictorial memory, so I could remember maps and graphs fairly easily, but the main reason was, that my curiousity about our big wide world had been nurtured and nourished sufficiently during my formative impressionable years. And in this, my hobby of stamp collecting had definitely played its part.
We used fiddly bits of specially gummed paper called stamp-hinges, to stick them in.
These days, whenever I start loosing things, or rather failing to find them because they are no longer in the place where I had thought I had put them, I realise that it is time to have a bit of a sort out. I did this with my bookshelves in the spare room the other day, and lo and behold, what should turn up but my old stamp album.
I sat down on top of the pile of books on the floor and perused it. I had carefully stuck those stamps in country by country, set by set, all in nice straight rows. The late King George features in ten of my stamps, ranging in value from a ha'pny to tuppence ha'pny(as we used to pronounce it) I've even got three with the head of his abdicated older brother, Edward. I used to like the stamps of the young queen Elizabeth best. A whole set of stamps with her young portrait on them graces my album. As I said in my last Blog - It is pity that everyone, even queens, have to get old.
South African stamps used to come in pairs, one with Suid (pronounce sayed) Africa, and the other with South Africa. Zimbabwe was southern Rhodesia in those days, and on that page, I have four stamps of English currency, with the Queen's head on them, and the writing, Rhodesia and Nyasaland (which I believe is present-day Malawi) We used to have a gardener from Malawi when we live out in South Africa, and his name was Maxwell. How he managed to work so hard in that sticky, summer heat, I do not know. But that belongs to a much later chapter of my life and has absolutely no place under the present title.
For pure pictorial beauty, the stamps of Monaco and Hungary were hard to beat. I've got a couple which celebrate the wedding of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, as well as some lovely triangular ones from that principality. I remember watching the fairy-tale wedding on our small black and white television (already described in great detail in an earlier Blog) when the American actress became a princess. In hindsight, she would have probably been happier if she had stayed in America, where she belonged, but hindsight is a wonderful thing. Visiting her tomb in Monaco's great cathedral was a sad experience for me. I was still feeling very subdued when I emerged once more into the sunshine. One day she was a princess, the next a corpse. What is life and death all about?
I don't know why the Hungarians made a point of producing such lovely stamps back in the fifties. Perhaps that was one area in which their Russian oppressors (or liberators, depending on ones point of view) let them have free rein and give vent to their pent-up creativity. Anyway, I used to love collecting them. and they had pride of placein my stamp album.
I remember when I was about seven, my mother's older sister came to visit us for the afternoon. In winter, she used to remind me of a big brown bear, with her long fur coat, fur boots and fur mittens. she even used to wear the furry, sanitized remains of some unfortunate elongated creature round her neck, bright,beady eyes shining and its tail clipping somehow into its mouth. My aunt Agnes used to fascinate me in more ways than one. She was a brilliant conversationist with a witty sense of humour, and even at that age she used to make me laugh. Anyway, on this particular visit, I must have been briefly the subject of the conversation. Directly I heard my name mentioned I started to pay attention to what was being said, as one does. "Why doesn't Josephine start collecting stamps. It is a very educational hobby."
So sure enough, a few days after this visit I got a pile of used stamps complete with parts of the envelopes they were still stuck to, and instructions about how to soak them off in a saucer of tepid water. I believe a packet of stamp hinges and a very small, album was included in the bounty.
My new hobby kept me occupied for hours one end. For the rest of my childhood, quite a sizeable chunk of my meagre pocket money would be spent on stamps, and I suppose I absorbed the rudiments of geography along the way. I began to realise that Australia and Austria were two different countries and that Jugoslavia could be spellt Yugoslavia as well. I learned that the French owned a place that had beautiful stamps called Camaroons and that the Seychelles were tiny islands in the middle of the Indian ocean, with lots of birds.
I remember one stamp, no longer in my possession, a small, green one that had 'Saar' on it. I really did not know where to stick it, so it had a special place in the back of my album. Years later, when learning about the Rhine Valley at secondary school, a small black dot, denoting 'coal' had to be put in, somewhat to the south of the Ardennes. This was Saarland, where my green stamp had originated. Little did I know at that time, that I would later spend the best part of thirteen years there.
We used to have fun swapping stamps at school and in each other's houses. Everybody seemed to collect stamps in those days. And dare I say, our knowledge of the kind of geography as to where countries and continents were, and what was the capital of what, was far superior to that of kids today. I put a lot of that down to stamp collecting.
As for me personally, Geography was one of the subjects that I always seemed to come top in, in secondary school, without really trying. I had a good pictorial memory, so I could remember maps and graphs fairly easily, but the main reason was, that my curiousity about our big wide world had been nurtured and nourished sufficiently during my formative impressionable years. And in this, my hobby of stamp collecting had definitely played its part.
We used fiddly bits of specially gummed paper called stamp-hinges, to stick them in.
Friday 4 July 2008
Pause for a pacemaker
Apologies to all my readers for this rather lengthy pause in my musings. I have got half an excuse in that I have had a heart pacemaker fitted.
If you don't mind a short digression from the subject in hand, I don't mind enlarging a bit in delicate matters of the heart so to speak, if you do, just scroll down until you come to the line of asterixes (whatever the plural of that word is)
Let me start by saying, that I definitely do not belong to those who denigrate our British National Health Service in any shape or form. I think it is wonderful. My procedures must have cost many thousands of pounds, but the only time I heard money mentioned was when a nurse offered me a penny for my thoughts.
That was at the time when no-one really knew what was wrong with me, including me, and I was hooked up to machines which bleeped and blinked and had lots of tentacles which stuck to me and itched.
The first big test was the angiogram, which meant staying in hospital for the day. The procedure involved cutting into a big artery in the groin, and threading a catheter through it up into my heart. Yes, it sounds gruesome, but it wasn't. The theatre was so modern, that I thought, in my tranquilizedup to the eyeballs way,that I had been transported to an alien spaceship, with a technology far superior to ours.
The worst part about it was having to lie flat on my back for two hours afterwards. Or perhaps it was the awful sandwiches they gave us, straight from the fridge that was the very worst, especially as we actually ate most of them, having been starved since the night before. Yes there were four of us done that day, at hourly intervals, but we all made it safely home that afternoon.
Next came numerous blood tests, from the vampire department - tubes and tubes of the stuff .
And then came the fun of having a twenty-four hour heart monitor strapped to my chest. I was actually feeling fine that day, and was able to carry on just as I normally did. However, the verdict, when it came through was that my heart was missing beats and in general misbehaving itself. And that was without consciously even setting eyes on any particularly dishy male throughout the whole day. My husband sadly, does not come into that category any more although I suppose he must have done once. Getting older is a sad state of affairs, when you think about it.
So the result was, that I was hauled into hospital yet again to have a pacemaker inserted just under my left collar-bone.
The fun bit was, that I was conscious throughout the operation. I was as high as a kite, but more or less compus mentes. I would have liked to have had a mirror hung up to enable me to see exactly what was going on, but as it was, I had to make do with the reflexion of a shiny metal arm which gave rather a distorted image of things, to say the least. But I did get a blow-by blow account, as the surgeon had his mentor standing right behind him. I learnt that one wire was going into the right atrium and the other into the right ventricle. I did ask which one was which, but the surgeon was so busy telling me that he had never got round to discussing the polarity of the wires with any patient before, that I think he forgot to tell me, or I forgot the answer; one of the two. But I have got an excuse, I was only half way down from my morphine high.
They hadn't been able to get the local anaesthetic to produce the desired effect, so they had given me a slug of morphine as well. That had done the trick! I was away with the fairies for at least ten minutes, and when my mind made its tortuous journey down into my body again, I had the distinct feeling that they were operating on someone else, and not me at all.
I went home a day later, having spent the night with a strange man. He had had the same operation, and was in the bed opposite me. There is a great controversy raging about mixed wards, but as long as nobody snores too loudly, I don't really mind. It is more important to have someone who you can talk to and be a bit friendly with, than whether they are men or women.
It would be nice to have his and her bathrooms though. Men rarely remember to put the loo seat down.
That's was it really. I came down fully from the morphine the next day, and started to feel literally a bit down, as well as completely washed out, as my mother would have said. After all, all the excitement was over, and the pain, though not excrutiating, was definitely there. I had to devise tricks to put on and remove jackets, and anything else with sleeves, and I wasn't allowed to get the affected area wet for a week. Though I did remove most of the yellow antiseptic stuff that made my neck look as though I had some scary life-threatening disease. As I had no wish to be ringing a bell as I walked along the street, shouting 'Unclean, unclean!' I decided to wash off any remaining trace that would have been visible above my clothing before presenting myself in public.
It has taken a month for my old zest for life to return, but return it has. I want to do things again, and am strong enough once more. But I have to admit, I did my fair share of moaning in the meantime, as my friends and family would testify. (Given half a chance)
I think it is time for the asterixes.
* * * *
The trouble is, that I don't feel like writing any more today. But now that I have got into the swing of things again, there will not be a very long pause, so keep watching this space.
If you don't mind a short digression from the subject in hand, I don't mind enlarging a bit in delicate matters of the heart so to speak, if you do, just scroll down until you come to the line of asterixes (whatever the plural of that word is)
Let me start by saying, that I definitely do not belong to those who denigrate our British National Health Service in any shape or form. I think it is wonderful. My procedures must have cost many thousands of pounds, but the only time I heard money mentioned was when a nurse offered me a penny for my thoughts.
That was at the time when no-one really knew what was wrong with me, including me, and I was hooked up to machines which bleeped and blinked and had lots of tentacles which stuck to me and itched.
The first big test was the angiogram, which meant staying in hospital for the day. The procedure involved cutting into a big artery in the groin, and threading a catheter through it up into my heart. Yes, it sounds gruesome, but it wasn't. The theatre was so modern, that I thought, in my tranquilizedup to the eyeballs way,that I had been transported to an alien spaceship, with a technology far superior to ours.
The worst part about it was having to lie flat on my back for two hours afterwards. Or perhaps it was the awful sandwiches they gave us, straight from the fridge that was the very worst, especially as we actually ate most of them, having been starved since the night before. Yes there were four of us done that day, at hourly intervals, but we all made it safely home that afternoon.
Next came numerous blood tests, from the vampire department - tubes and tubes of the stuff .
And then came the fun of having a twenty-four hour heart monitor strapped to my chest. I was actually feeling fine that day, and was able to carry on just as I normally did. However, the verdict, when it came through was that my heart was missing beats and in general misbehaving itself. And that was without consciously even setting eyes on any particularly dishy male throughout the whole day. My husband sadly, does not come into that category any more although I suppose he must have done once. Getting older is a sad state of affairs, when you think about it.
So the result was, that I was hauled into hospital yet again to have a pacemaker inserted just under my left collar-bone.
The fun bit was, that I was conscious throughout the operation. I was as high as a kite, but more or less compus mentes. I would have liked to have had a mirror hung up to enable me to see exactly what was going on, but as it was, I had to make do with the reflexion of a shiny metal arm which gave rather a distorted image of things, to say the least. But I did get a blow-by blow account, as the surgeon had his mentor standing right behind him. I learnt that one wire was going into the right atrium and the other into the right ventricle. I did ask which one was which, but the surgeon was so busy telling me that he had never got round to discussing the polarity of the wires with any patient before, that I think he forgot to tell me, or I forgot the answer; one of the two. But I have got an excuse, I was only half way down from my morphine high.
They hadn't been able to get the local anaesthetic to produce the desired effect, so they had given me a slug of morphine as well. That had done the trick! I was away with the fairies for at least ten minutes, and when my mind made its tortuous journey down into my body again, I had the distinct feeling that they were operating on someone else, and not me at all.
I went home a day later, having spent the night with a strange man. He had had the same operation, and was in the bed opposite me. There is a great controversy raging about mixed wards, but as long as nobody snores too loudly, I don't really mind. It is more important to have someone who you can talk to and be a bit friendly with, than whether they are men or women.
It would be nice to have his and her bathrooms though. Men rarely remember to put the loo seat down.
That's was it really. I came down fully from the morphine the next day, and started to feel literally a bit down, as well as completely washed out, as my mother would have said. After all, all the excitement was over, and the pain, though not excrutiating, was definitely there. I had to devise tricks to put on and remove jackets, and anything else with sleeves, and I wasn't allowed to get the affected area wet for a week. Though I did remove most of the yellow antiseptic stuff that made my neck look as though I had some scary life-threatening disease. As I had no wish to be ringing a bell as I walked along the street, shouting 'Unclean, unclean!' I decided to wash off any remaining trace that would have been visible above my clothing before presenting myself in public.
It has taken a month for my old zest for life to return, but return it has. I want to do things again, and am strong enough once more. But I have to admit, I did my fair share of moaning in the meantime, as my friends and family would testify. (Given half a chance)
I think it is time for the asterixes.
* * * *
The trouble is, that I don't feel like writing any more today. But now that I have got into the swing of things again, there will not be a very long pause, so keep watching this space.
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