Desert Island Discs

I suppose it's too late now; I am never going to be asked onto Desert Island Discs so the list I have kept in my back pocket all these years will not be needed. I have, however, thought of writing to Kirsty Young (who I think is great at it by the way) to suggest a new version of the programme for us terminally illers; it could be called Dead End Discs and you would have to change the details a bit; so you would choose records that you feel represent bits of your life as most people do now but have in mind that that they will probably get played at your funeral - so unfortunately I would have to drop Tutti Frutti and You're a pink toothbrush I'm a blue toothbrush from my back pocket list; the book would be the one you want to read before you die; the luxury what you want while you can still enjoy it and maybe we should throw in a new one - the place you want to visit while you still can. So to set the ball rolling I have made my own selection and who know's it might just catch on. (I find that I can only download a few videos at a time so I am going to do this is in installments; today will be the 1950s and one from the 1960s)


So for the 1950s and all those childhood bits I have written about earler in this blog I am going for You are my sunshine by Elizabeth Mitchell. My Mom sang this to me, I sang it to all my kids and now I sing it to Harry and Danny and they don't seem to mind


Moving onto my teenage years, that Chanel Suit and the early boy chasing times; it had a lot to do with the Beatles of course and I actually got to see them or at least scream at them when they came to Birmingham in 1963. This video features my lovely son, Joe on bass; he is the one bobbing around a lot just as his Mom does whenever she hears this music. So it's The Accoustic Beatles with Joe Trainor and his stage wife Charlotte on vocals, playing Things we said today


OK that's all for today and there will be more tomorrow, hopefully I will get all 8 in before I go back into hospital for Chemo 3 next Tuesday.

Things left unsaid

Stewart had sortingoutitis, he is in the garden now sorting out the plants having earlier sorted out the garage and yes actually thrown some stuff away. Last week he was sorting out what we laughingly call our office at the top of the house; once one of our kids' bedrooms it is painted from floor to ceiling in Gandalf and hobbits, a masterpiece of my Dad's that I am forbidden ever to touch by aforementioned kids. While doing this he found an old school diary of mine which we had found this time last year while sorting out my Mom's house, or my house really; it's where I was brought up.

It is the precursor of my blog; an almost daily record of what Jean aged 8 did next. I hope my literary skills have developed somewhat since then as despite being perfectly accurate in grammar and spelling, it's little more than, got home from school, played out with my friends, came in for my tea, played out some more (a social history there, all this playing out on roads with no cars and seemingly no fear of kidnap or worse) went in and went to bed. I fear I may have been playing to an audience a little, as I often mention helping my Mom but I was famously bad at that and going to church on Sundays. This may have been partly true as I did join the Girls' Life Brigade when I was 8 and you had to go to the church it was attached to or they threw you out. I mention my friends Anne, Lynda and Frieda a lot but there is another girl called Christine and try as I might I cannot remember who she was; the diary gives no clues as it just mentions she doesn't have a bike, maybe I made her up.

It also made me think about all the things I didn't mention in my diary that I now remember or have since been told. These include:

* I had been moved from my school the year before because my old school was going to be made into all secondary and I had to go to a new school a bus ride away; while writing this diary I was actually terribly unhappy at the new school because I was put into a class of second years when I was only a first year; also they were the B stream when I had been A stream and I felt I may never make my way back to where I was supposed to be; also the big girls bullied me which made my Dad rush up to the playground and tell them directly that if they didn't stop he would etc etc; he was no man for using official channels; my teacher was called Mr Hague and Dad use to write Don't be vague ask for Hague (a current advertising slogan for a blend of whiskey much beloved by my Dad) on the bottom of my school notes; you just had to learn to live with his idiosyncrasies.

* My Dad would at this time have been "seeing someone else" probably Margaret who later became a policewoman; he later told me they used to "see" each other behind the hoardings around the bomb sites next to the Blues football ground. She has unfortunately morphed into Princess Margaret in my memory as she too was dark and attractive and clearly a bit of a girl.

* I used to come home for my dinner (lunch to you poshies) even though Mom was not there as she was working as a dinner lady at my old school; so dinner was only sandwiches but better than risking the big girls in the playground; I was still not safe, however, as my brother's friend from over the road who was a big boy, ie about 13 used to come over to teach me how to kiss, his hand used to wander too. I suppose it was sexual abuse, I certainly didn't feel comfortable about it and soon drifted back to having school dinners. His lessons stood me in good stead however in those supposedly innocent playground games like kiss chase, and true, dare, kiss or promise that I excelled at as soon as I was returned to a class with my own age group and made some new friends. So much so in fact that when I left that schoool three years later, my teacher penned the following immortal lines in my honour:

An elegant schoolgirl named Jean
The love of Church Road boys had been
But no cupid's arrow
At Harrison Barrow
Only girls to be found on the scene

* Then there were the revelations that Aunty Vi over the road was having it off with the bloke who used to visit on a motorbike and sidecar; her husband, Uncle Charlie was after my Mom as was one of the teachers at my old school. No worries there my Mom was a bastion of virtue and anyway thought the whole thing was terribly overrated which probably explains, but does not excuse, the Margarets of our world.

So readers you will have to imagine what I might be leaving unsaid in this my latest series of daily records; how afraid I might be; how close and how often I get to saying " well I wont be around much longer so you wont have to put up with x,y or z" and who fancies who, has fancied me or whether I ever ....

Mum's the word

It's Mothers Day in the UK today. Another day when the flower sellers and card makers expect you to buy something to show you love someone you actually love every day of your life. As a feminist I baulk at the idea, we are all parents aren't we? As a non-believer the fact that it is really Mothering Sunday and the something Sunday before Easter means nothing but the historian in me likes the idea it was the day girls in service were allowed home with their Simnel cakes and I hope they enjoyed it and today me and my Birmingham based kids will do something to celebrate the fact we love each other even though we feel it every day.

I no longer have to not by flowers for my Mom as they are a rip off but instead find some knick-knack she will like; she died five years ago. Now I am amazingly grateful that I don't have to burden her with my news. I feel for my fellow sufferers who still have Moms that are alive as I am not sure I could have borne her sorrow. She already had one child who died, my brother Johnny at aged 9 and she and I were not just mother and daughter but best friends as we grew older and I just couldn't have done it to her.

Reading back over the blog I see that my Mom comes over as rather harsh so I need to put the record straight. OK, she was harsh, harsh about rudeness, unkindness, injustice and the worst crime of all "having a bob on yourself". So yes it was her that taught me to be self-deprecating, that I wasn't pretty like Lynda ten doors down or tidy like my cousin or clever and neat like Anne over the road. It sounds terrible I know but that is the way it was; it wasn't just this horror of breeding a bighead that she had but also some deeply felt suspicion that if I got "built up" the Gods would intervene and I would disappear as my brother had done before me. Luckily I knew she loved me as it was pretty obvious but funnily enough after I had one of my own kids and she realised I wasn't going to make a complete hash of it and she could let up a bit, she got her best friend, my Aunty Vi, to tell me how proud she was of me. Mind you when about twelve years later I landed the job that doubled our income and set me on the path of my future career, she said oh good and then asked me if all the others had turned it down.

Alongside all of this placating the Gods of humility malarkey she was the kindest, funniest and bravest woman alive. She used to make plans to have a laugh and then hoot and guffaw with whoever was along for the ride. She put herself out constantly for other people. When she was in her 70s she would visit less well off relatives weekly, not just ours but Stewart's as well and still find time to come to my house, do all my ironing, pick up my kids from school and peel the spuds for our dinner, whether we wanted them or not.

She was a deeply instinctive egalitarian and brave with it. The best story, although I still shrink with fear at the idea, was when she was on the top of a bus with a fair few people, including a load of skinheads and one Asian chap who was being abused by said skinheads. For my overseas readers skinheads were a particularly nasty aberration of the 80s, people with heads like mine but by choice, ridiculous short trousers and bovver boots (Doc Martens). Their raison d'etre fell into line with the Klu Klux Clan and they had equally unpleasant attitudes and habits. Well everyone was studiously looking out of the window while these bovver boys shouted and threatened the one black person on the bus. All except my Mom who went and sat next to him and turned to this gang of racists and told them that was what they were and that this was a bad thing and didn't they have any humanity or feelings for their fellow man, how would they like it etc etc. I don't think she clipped them round the ear but the threat was probably there and miraculously they quietened down; if they hadn't she would have just carried on till they did.

And then before she was a beautiful young woman, an orphan or worse really, motherless with a father who left her to be raised by a Dickensian type aunt who just treated her like a slave; only to meet and marry my Dad who was the best Dad in the world but the worst sort of philandering husband. Thank goodness for Fred who gave her a proper marriage 30 years later.

So that was my Mom and I will think of her all day today as my children and their children celebrate motherhood; and we will give our old friend the elephant a piece of the pineapple upside down cake I am just about to make, because I can and want to and maybe he will let that be bribery enough to his Gods and go away and let me be and let me feel pride in what me and my Mom have achieved and keep me doing it every day for a very long time yet.

Bouncing bach

It was fantastic to feel like a human being again last night, no nausea or stomach cramps so we watched the weather forecast and decided to go to the seaside. If you live in Birmingham going to the seaside means going to Wales especially when the forecast tells you that the rain is coming from the east. It also means mixing seaside with ravishing countryside and once we had taken the Newtown Road, on the way to Machynlleth, (there is a hostelry there where we have had the odd excellent lunch or several in the past and we planned a return visit), the sun came out and everything was a vision of tiny bouncing lambs, glading snowdrops and rainbow coloured hillsides.

Aberdovey was our seaside destination and I managed a stroll on the beach while Stewart reminisced about camping on the sand dunes and being flooded by high tides, oh those were the days. He clearly listened in Geography because he was also heard eulogising about hanging valleys, screes and drowned river valleys as we wound our way through the countryside. I let this wash over me just as I had in Miss Day's class 45 years ago but I was searching in my own memory database for the first time I ever visited this neck of the woods. I was 13 and officially neither a Student or a Christian but me and my mates had found these holidays that you could go to without your parents run by the Student Christian Movement. Ours was in Dolgellau or Dolgelley as we called it and the amazing thing was we had to get ourselves there and back under our own steam, and it was steam part of the way I seem to remember; I know we had to change trains loads of times and we did it all on our own, four giggly girls who'd never been further than town before. When we got there there were new excitements like sleeping on palliases, lumps of straw to the uninitiated, and meeting a load of girls from Blackburn or somewhere who were 14, very streetwise and kept talking about finding local talent, and they weren't talking Eisteddfods I can tell you.

My Mom and Dad actually turned up to visit half way through just to check I wasn't being brainwashed I presume, which would have been OK except my Dad tried to chat up one of the "leaders" which was mortifying and looking back I suspect she was more interested in me and my mates than my embarrassing Dad; she used to stand over me and croon about how strong my wrists were as I wrung out the dishcloths (it was one of those sorts of holidays) well that was a first and I can honestly say no-one since has noticed this particular quality in my allure. We went on lots of walks and climbed Cader Idris and I expect we were shown moraines and cwms and all sorts but it was the tang of risk and wildness that we savoured and finding it by ourselves.

It's still there in Wales I am sure if you know where to look but today we risked no more than a barbary duck breast with puy lentils, a leek tart and a quick paddle in the sea. In 1962 all I got was a straw bed, a few spotty Welsh lads and wash day red hands. So this evening I say as the poet nearly said "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But NOT to be young was very heaven".

Sleeping and stitching

Still felt like a sickly rag doll yesterday but think there may be green shoots of recovery this morning, bit more get up and go. I did make it over to Hobbycraft yesterday to get some knitting patterns and wool. Julie, lovely and very determined daughter-in-law got me back into knitting while we were both in Dresden over Christmas. She had just learnt how to do it and had that very stiff, tight style beginners have and the most set jaw I have ever seen. Nothing was going to stop her learning and I felt quite benign and helpful with my 50 odd years experience of not being able to knit very well.

It's enjoyable and therapeutic and I managed to find a pattern that looked easy enough. It failed to say knit 6 rows, have a sleep, knit another 5 or so, drop off but what does it know. Hoping today to vary the pattern a little and get my tension right but whether I will be able to stay awake long enough to K1, sl 1, K1, psso (K to within 2 sts of marked st, K2tog, K marked st, sl 1, K1, psso) twice; is anybody's guess.

Flagging

Just want to sit around and do nowt today; I find this easy in the main but have the odd little voice in my ear: shall I just get the fish out and chop a few shallots for dinner? I could easily wield the broom on that bit of fluff and the crap that's come in from the garden. So far I have resisted and dozed a lot; done the Killer Sudoko and answered a few emails - just with holding replies: I will get back to you when I can be arsed in a nutshell.

Energy will return I know along with what work ethic I still have wherever ethics reside; but for now I'll just go and have a sit down.

March Hair

Went to Will's Wigs which is wonderfully alliterative. The woman I saw, who had a lovely knitted cardie on that I might try to whizz up for myself, had been doing wigs for 10 years; this was obvious as, although she brought in a big tower of boxes, it was the first one that she tried on that I walked away with. It's amazingly OK and I am wearing it now. It makes me look younger I would say and more like my sister-in-law Ruth (see picture) who is a super head (teacher) so she clearly knows a lot about head type things. The second one made me look uncannily like her, which started to feel weird as I like my brother-in-law a lot. So after telling me I had a very small head, not a lot to go in it you see, and doing a bit of trimming, the wig woman sent me off with my washing instructions and some spray and I am now slightly blonder and slightly bouncier.

Very bouncy in fact, I am beginning to wonder if I am pregnant, not cancer-riddled, as this morning I decided to clear out all the cupboards and chuck away all the very old stuff. I mean how many packets of Dry Toor Dhal and Gram Flour do the average pensioner couple need for a lifetime? Less than we had so the stuff from 2006 is now in the bin alongside sheets of gelatine that expired in 2001, granite like muscovado sugar and some strange Cappuccino stuff that I don't remember ever buying. I had to have lots of rests so I am probably not just about to give birth but simply basking in the steroid glow. I have stopped the course now so will no doubt be less enthusiastic tomorrow. But for today, the sun is out and and I have new hair and clean cupboards.