Life Less Literary

Had a wonderful weekend. Friday night was Suzanna’s 30th birthday party. Gill was already down there, having spent the evening out of the house so that I could get on with some work (some chance). I rolled up about 9pm, just as the kids were getting knackered, and grabbed some of the dinner which the others had been eating - some aubergines cooked with garlic, then calzone with salad, and for dessert a gorgeous home-made tiramisu which we drenched with Italian brandy. Drank a fair bit of wine as this was going on, but after dessert Suzanna got the spirits out - I had some Sicilian herb digestif, which tasted a little like Mirto di Sardegna, then some grappa, which was jaw-tinglingly good.

Lola was knackered, so Gill carted her off home at about 11pm, I was intending to follow with Rowan about five minutes afterwards (the only reason I didn’t go with Gill is because I wanted to walk rather than take a cab), but then Harriet offered to take Rowan back to hers for the night, and I got caught up in interesting conversation and somehow ended up there until 2.30am, just me, Suzanna, Nat and Robin.

I’d never met Nat and Robin before - they’re a couple about my age, but have four kids aged 17, 15, 13 and 4. It took me a long time to actually take this on board, I don’t think of people my age as having kids that old, especially as they both look very young for their age, and Nat is very beautiful in a sort of bean-pole way. It was interesting talking about her kids and their various experiences at school - took me right back to being a teenager myself, and I think I managed to offer a bit of a teenage boy’s perspective on their various problems and challenges. And I offered to lend her my copy of Joe Sacco’s Palestine because her eldest son wants to spend his year off in Palestine and she’s scared shitless of the idea. Robin and I, meanwhile, hopped from coincidence to coincidence in our parallel lives… he programs computers, plays bass (started, like me, on a short scale bass and progressed, like me, to a fretless… which turned out to be a rather rash choice, as it was for me). He studied archaeology, although he was introduced to me as having studied psychology, like me. And he’d been to the archaological dig at West Heslerton where I scraped soil and unearthed Anglian pottery for a week in 1988. And lots more… I guess we even look fairly similar. Fun evening.

The next day I got up early, hungover but pleasantly so. We got our stuff together and headed, for the first time, to our new allotment - Cath came along with Beth, and Harriet with Emily, Lucy and Ruth. Had a wonderful day and the weather couldn’t have been better - more about the allotment and lots of photos here on my Life page.

And then Saturday evening we left the kids with Emma and Gill & I drove up to Marsden. Lovely drive across the moors via Holmfirth - all the windmills were still, seemed like an omen of the end of the world, but nothing could spoil that end-of-the-day glorious spring sunshine. I’d just burnt a CD of randomly selected MP3s which I’d rated as five stars in iTunes, so we never knew what was coming on the stereo next but it was all good (Björk singing swing jazz in Icelandic from Gling Glo: excellent stuff).

Martha’s mum’s house is just incredible - up on the side of the hill overlooking Marsen, a real country-cottage feel to the place. Moorland straight behind it (the smell of heather mingled beautifully with the rosemary in the garden it ). Town below and then another moor opposite with darker peaks behind. A small pond in the garden had managed to attract a male and female mallard. The table was laden with good food. Perfect. Almost. With the exception of the council state just further down the hill, from where we heard sounds of kids driving a banger around all night, and at one point crashing it into a tree.

Chatted away to a few of Martha’s friends, although not quite as much as I’d have liked because I got somewhat stoned which made me a little tired, shy and easily confused. Saw Bronwen for the first time in about ten years, but we got to speak to her far too little; at least I know how to get in touch with her now, so I’ll definitely be paying her a visit in London. Also met a really nice Israeli woman, Sharon, who’s doing a criminology PhD on solitary confinement. Would have liked to have talked to her more, but… yeah, I got a bit stoned. Still managed to just about last out until the wee small hours; I rember coming up with a lot of strange beer-food ideas. It was because people kept putting their beer glasses down and then finding slugs or snails in them. I said we’d better put beer traps down in our allotment, and then my mind leapt from this, via the greenhouse, to the idea of irrigating our vegetables with beer, so that we end up growing slug-free beer-flavoured vegetables. I also thought that you could leave edible snails to do their starvation gut-cleaning thing in a bucket of beer, so that not only do they die happy, they also die beer-flavoured. Hmm. Somebody also complimented me on my beard: “I’ve spent time in Calfornia and I’ve never seen a beard like that.” (Well, I assume it was a compliment). Gnarly, dude.

So another early start… out of the house by 9am, back across the (still beautiful) moors to Sheffield, and then out to the moors again. Woodcraft Folk were celebrating their 75th anniversary in Sheffield by having a hike and meeting under Stannage Edge. As I sat on a rock picnicking I was struck by a feeling of tranquility and love of nature, for the third time in two days. As I was sitting there, I heard a cuckoo: coincidental because yesterday in Marsden had been “cuckoo day”–a grand procession of cuckoo hats and decorated wheelbarrows, along with other fun and games.

I’m ashamed to admit that we didn’t hike, at least not any further than the couple of hundred metres from the car. I could convincingly claim that this is because it would have been hard work with Lola, but I think the fact that we were knackered, hungover, and I quite fancied getting home to see Jenson Button battle Michael Schumacher off the start line of the San Marino Grand Prix. Which I didn’t manage to do: I only caught the last thirty laps, which were unutterably dull but at least ended in our boy grabbing second place - not quite what I’d hoped for, but damn good all the same.

And then all the usual Sunday evening rush to get kids off to bed and everything ready for Monday and blah and… well, it all had to end somewhere, I guess. But at least it was good while it lasted.