Beware the acne'd Northerner

Apropos nothing Rouchswalwe disapproves of computer dating. And I have a little story.

My adolescence was a mess and I howled at the moon a lot. My worried mother – off her own bat – enrolled me in an international male/female pen-pals scheme, a written precursor to RW’s antipathy. Surely, my mother thought, there was one young woman in the world who could convince me that being male was bearable.

It sort of worked. A trainee teacher from Essex sent a photo with a gentle note (“I should add I normally wear glasses.”), we corresponded and I met her on a couple of visits to London. The second time I was so horribly rude I cringe at the memory. If in the afterlife forgiveness is possible, she will be my first supplicatee. I devoutly hope she married a millionaire and now owns Madagascar.

Typical male crassness, but Jahway was lurking. I tried another pen-pal and received a photo of a handsomely brutal woman in Johannesburg. I sent off a photo, discreetly chosen to hide my acne, and she immediately broke off the correspondence.

Johannesburg was merely a deep wound. Essex was different. I wasn’t then ashamed of my behaviour - that feeling grew with time. Rather I regarded myself a poltroon trawling such a system. I became adult (I hope) by moving from Bradford to London and quickly meeting Miss T who became Mrs BB.

What is inexplicable is that while still yearning, futilely, for a woman’s company I was able to act so badly when temporarily granted this blessing. Does this deserve discussion?

CHEERIER NOTE I’m told I won an unofficial award for responding to others’ blogs. Does anyone know from whom? Or is Jahway at work again?

Not original but unexpected

How do love affairs start? Jana Nordmeyer, disfigured by naevus flammeus, has made do without love for much of her life until… well, that’s for those who want to read the book. And it’s been for me to solve. A more difficult task than you might imagine given that I’ve been her dominant, if unrequited, lover for the last eighteen months, finding it hard to let her suffer.

Carol Ann Duffy’s Rapture proved a useful handbook. Sixty-two poems, meant to be read in sequence, cover the beginning, middle and end of an affair, Sapphic but that’s beside the point. Love is love, although I wonder about CAD’s former lover, now engaged elsewhere (one hopes), yet able to read this monument to their shared passion at any time of the day or night.

They were modern lovers:

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
Your second, your third

look for your small xx
feeling absurd.

They were, thank goodness, uninhibited:

…We undressed,
Then dressed again in the gowns of the moon.
We knelt in the leaves,
Kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned.

And when it went wrong:

Learn from a stone, its heart-shape meaningless,
perfect with relentless cold; or from the bigger moon,
Implacably dissolving in the sky, or from the stars,
lifeless as Latin verbs…

Not that I wanted to poach anything from these powerful, unique reflections. Other than the idea that poetry and love might co-exist in A Stall Recovered. Not exactly an original idea but one which I could never have foreseen when I started writing. The first time I’ve felt grateful to a Poet Laureate.

BB returns WW to its roots

To fly in a light plane along a coastline that evokes WS’s “swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean”. To do it in France. To do it in good company. Our pilot Louis Kervoaze, who mediated terrestrial and celestial regions on our behalf, was our secular priest. I couldn’t fail to ask questions.

LK solo-ed after fifteen hours. Jana, hero of A Stall Recovered, did it in nine but she’s imaginary. A quick solo doesn’t guarantee a good pilot and LK remembered a youth who seemed ready after five hours. “But he never came back,” LK added. My rotten French turned this into a horror story whereas LK implied “for further lessons”. Fear was the reason.

Good pilots become old good pilots by remaining aware. As LK taxied from the hanger to the runway his head moved continuously, a series of tiny, jerky sweeps repetitively covering the whole of his visible world. The trick is never to be satisfied by not finding a menace or a discrepancy.

Immediately in front of me was the GPS display, quite unlike the Disneyish toy I use in my car. Serious kit with a flashing capital M. Standing for? Message, LK said, but he’d checked it ages ago.

As the Cessna 172 took off (A delightful French word: décoller, to unstick) the aerodynamic exterior needed changing from one which gave added lift to one which encouraged drag-free forward flight. A quick touch on a wheel labelled Flaps.

We approached the landing at right-angles to the end of the runway. LK took us in on a smooth descending turn with the wheels finally straddling the dotted line down the centre of the tarmac. I said Parfait. but it sounded cheap. What I meant was beautiful.

Cursed flight ends with great lunch

Finally! I watched Louis Kervoaze crank the Cessna’s yoke anti-clockwise against a port side crosswind and we were airborne in about ten metres flat for a 45-minute round trip between Lannion and Paimpol along the north Brittany coast. On the back seat sat Mrs BB and Lucy (with her ever-clicking Lumix).

Disappointment had seemed inevitable. I was misinformed by a tourist office and an aero-club, got the air strip muddled and had been threatened by strong winds that were whisking super-tankers out of the Channel and dropping them into the Place de la Concorde. On that very morning Lucy’s Tom came down with the lurgi and the phrase Le vol maudit (Cursed flight) was born.

But here we were inspecting the mussel beds from 1000 feet (yes, French aviators do use imperial terms), overflying an island acquired by a supermarket magnate and appreciating tide-out contours undetectable at sea level. The landing was a special treat: a deliberate stall whereby the plane in effect drops the last few metres on to the runway to the muted blare of the stall horn. I couldn’t remember the exact word to describe this experience other than it started with an e. Useful having Lucy around; she knew I’d undergone an epiphany.

Tom had recovered thank goodness and we met up with him for lunch at one their favourite fish restaurants in Erquy. Humdrum stuff like coquilles St Jacques, half a dozen oysters and a piquant white number from Gascony – almost a canteen meal you might say. Afterwards we were ushered into the presence of the famous Mol who I believe conferred her blessing. Oh, I should add: we did talk a bit.

Below: Lucy, Louis, Mrs BB with Cessna 172.

I don't remember the square buttons

All being well, as my Granny used to say, Mrs BB and I aim to take a little holiday in a foreign country, starting tomorrow. To mark this I intend to put up a post stuffed full of philosophical potential, something knotty which will leave passers-by testing their intellect and mourning my temporary absence. Trouser flies are my chosen subject.

Recently I ordered some casual trousers online and the world of fashion seems to have turned full circle. No zip, just four buttons. Access to what needs to be accessed is much slower due to the stiff new fabric. Luckily the country we have in mind is quite forgiving about accidents in this area which is just as well.

I was born into a Britain where all flies buttoned. Far more buttons than four, too. Did accidents occur? My lips are sealed.

I am also old enough to remember the buttoned-fly watershed. Starting during the war when Britain was invaded by military personnel whose flies zipped. Americans, of course. Weren’t they capable of a little patience? Hilarity ensued after a spate of medical incidents in which Arizonans and Vermonters had to be separated from their pants. Condign punishment for an unnatural desire to speed things up.

I had no sympathy – until it happened to me. Surely the most hideous male dilemma of all time. Metaphorically speaking, being required to retrace one’s footsteps. A double whammie in the lingo of those who suffered first. Ah my dear member: I envisaged a much better future for you than this.

Thereafter awareness of the zip disappeared. Down and up and one was done. Except for a final stage. Lack of awareness leading to forgetfulness. The gap that is the stigma of old age. There, something to chew on.

Miss Kappelhoffer came a long way

It is fashionable to mock Doris Day. She presently lives on the Carmel Peninsula in California (for which I profoundly envy her) and has latterly devoted her life to animal welfare. It was my impression she'd filled her house with cats but I accept The Crow's correction (see below) that the cats were dogs. As to her singing she’s probably remembered for bouncy inconsequential numbers like The Deadwood Stage, and Ya-Ya Roly Poly Bear. She appeared in a suprisingly wide range of non-singing movies of which intellectuals were wont to complain about the sexual ambiguities implicit in those with Rock Hudson

With the “professional virgin” thesis disposed of, I thought the Day/Hudson movies were quite witty, but that’s another matter. What is criminal is that her voice might be forgotten. A very precise and lovely instrument indeed capable of handling dross (A Bushel and a Peck), trades union negotiations (Seven and a Half Cents), great thirties standards (Bewitched, A Foggy Day, I’m Beginning to See the Light) and much more. It was said she sounded too healthy, too happy to be a great singer but, for goodness sake, she did Hollywood films.

Away from rank commercialism she could move me as much as Ella, Sarah or Peggy and she was just as technically accomplished. Still think I’m a sentimental old twerp? Try Fools Rush In, exquisitely accompanied by the Andre Previn Trio – very slow with beautifully sustained, rock-steady tone control. Forget the anatomical impossibility line (“my heart above my head”) and dwell instead on those aching final words “and let this fool rush in.” Despite the richness of the voice the sentiment is expressed modestly, the gentlest of pleas.

Incidentally she is the subject of an excellent biography by A. E. Hotchner who, at the time, had just done Hemingway and thought he was above movie stars. But she said she’d tell him everything and she did.

BB's behaviourism lab

PORSCHE PREPARATIONS Once I’d driven it (see What’s a Good Present for a Hooligan?) I was regaled with stories about the difficulties of organising the project. Like the day Mrs BB inexplicably asked me to come out into the garden to see a withered dahlia while Younger Daughter rifled my wallet indoors, taking away my driving licence needed by the hiring company. And did I realise, I was asked, that my wallet lacked a driving licence for over a week? The two of them crowed about my inferior powers of observation.

Younger Daughter who was due to spend a couple of days with us, drove her Seat to the hirer to pick up the Porsche but was disinclined to take her cairn with her for reasons that can be imagined. Which meant that my first task was to drive YD to her home, 45 minutes away, in the Porsche to pick up the cairn. There must be something anti-canine about Porsches because the cairn appeared to suffer a nervous breakdown during the return.

CAKE QUESTION Elder Daughter and Peter stayed with us over my birthday celebrations and I was getting ready to take them to the bus station for their return to Luton when I was suddenly visited by a question I needed to put to Mrs BB.

How long does it take her to create those little cakes/buns that are done in paper cups?

Such questions arrive randomly but it’s no use telling Mrs BB that; she prefers to read between my non-existent lines and look for non-existent reasons. Thus I drove to the bus station (less than two miles), called in at Tesco’s filling station to pick up The Guardian, found they’d run out, drove back across the road to the main store, bought one there and then drove home. And you can guess what lay gently steaming in the kitchen when I opened the door. (Enhanced only with raisins I should add; the picture above came from Google).

“Have one while it’s hot,” said Mrs BB triumphantly. Delicious. But I must insist – however futile my insistence – that self-interest played no part in the question. Such questions crop up in my mind almost daily and the answers are filed away for random use (often in the novel) weeks or months into the future.

The answer is, by the way, twenty-five minutes

Booze isn't the only option

From eight of us round the coffee table (seen here, ten hours later) eight monologues rose in gathering incoherence. Soon Rusty Nails (scotch and Drambuie) would be served and thereafter madness. I asked: “Doctors. Men or women?” and for ten minutes I had their attention.

OS surprised me: “War correspondents. Women! It’s gotta be that hard one on the BBC.” Meaning Orla Guerin already mentioned on WW. Somebody said: “Priests?” and Peter, PB’s partner, said monosyllabically, “Men.” but he is of RC stock. I considered ski instructors. Mine had been Swiss and in all that mattered – build, seriousness, strength of leg, stubbornness – the sexes were indistinguishable.

OS admitted to reading more books by women than by men but we agreed this was an unfruitful comparison. A host of trades and professions – dentist, soccer player, police-person, politician – slid by gaining raucous single-word judgements which I failed to memorise.

The next morning Mrs BB and I vacated our bed early so that a young couple, who’d occupied couches, could take over. Peter was already up, reading his Kindle in the garden. I acquired pen and paper and returned to my first love, interviewing.

Doctors? Mrs BB: “I’d rather a female doctor was talking about my female bit (sic).” Peter: “It’s different for me. But then I’m not sure I’d want a man messing about with…”

News presenters? Mrs BB: “Female. Because I like Fiona Bruce and I don’t think women get as much cherishing.”

Taxi drivers? Peter: “I was going to say men but I know a woman (driver). She’s scary and she’d kill me if I said men.”

Prime minister? Mrs BB: “Oh male! The only female was an absolute disaster.”

A rowdy party? Call in BB to damp things down