Stormy Weather

Porridge is on heat, so we went to the estuary with Lucy and Mol to try and shake off pursuit from her many suitors,


but you know what it's like when girls get together...






There is often one who tries to lead the other astray.





And then they find themselves out of their depth...








But the closest Porridge came to love was a spot of voyeurism from afar...






Meanwhile I said:



Look at those clouds and listen to that thunder rumbling...
I don't like storms...
We'll be struck by lightning...
I'm taller than the rest of you...
It'll get me first...
We must all lie flat on our backs...
But my nose is biggest...
I might have to panic!

And Lucy was very cool, calm, collected and unruffled...until she looked behind her...

And so we got quite wet.

And then we got dry again.

Because we walked a very long way.

We saw some very pretty scenery...

And I tried to take photographs of it, but my camera decided that the grass stem was even prettier and it wanted to look at that instead...

We walked so far that we had to sit down and have a little rest. Some of us sat on a bench:

But one of us was too big to do that, so she went and sulked under a bush...

The loneliness of the long distance housewife, cut off in her prime

The night of the storm, I unplugged everything, yes, absolutely everything, in a positively paranoiac neurotic/obsessive way. No one is going to take my Internet away, now that I’ve just got it back.

But since the storm, Internet is only available every now and again. All of my equipment is working just fine but I don’t think that France Telecom has anything left to plug back in…
I have been leaving my Outlook Express open and on patrol, and every so often it succeeds in dashing into the ruins of Orange and snatching out some emails before everything collapses again. There must be lines down and smouldering circuit boards all over the place.

I can’t communicate…so I will have a clean up. I decide to get my house in order before the wanderer returns with tiaras and bolts of silk for our saris. He will probably need a new store cupboard for his tea and spices. It is my last chance to throw lots of his stuff away without being caught in the act. I wonder whether he will notice that all the house plants have died. I will try and buy some new ones. Now where can I find an aspidistra?

The Bag Leaving Gene

A storm is coming. The hexagon of France is on alert. Don’t move unless it is essential they say. I call the family to action and Drummer boy suddenly decides that it is time to unload his drum kit from his girlfriend’s car and slouches off to watch her do it. Darling d is peeled reluctantly from the TV screen and we go outside and study the garden, looking for prospective flying objects.
“Why is there a large ladder against your bedroom window?” I ask, suspiciously imagining Rapunzel-like letting down of hair to visitors in the night.
“Dad…”, she replies.
He has been away for about 6 weeks, but I do vaguely remember him struggling with the chimney on the roof at the beginning of the winter, another battle in the continuing war with the wood stove.
The ladder is laid to rest on its side, two tables are rescued from the garden, and various objects are wedged around the wheel barrow and re-cycling dustbins.
I patrol the house checking windows, unplugging phones, internet connections and computers.

Sure enough, at 3 am, large creatures blow in from across the valley and start beating their wings on my bedroom windows. Something comes splattering down the unused chimney and I put the radio on to drown it. A crackly voice keeps telling me the same bad news at frequent intervals. Three and a half hours later, I get up with the teenagers for school and the creatures have moved down to attack the kitchen door. I offer to drive them down the hill to the school bus stop instead of leaving them to their usual healthy moan filled walk in the dark. It is raining. A lot.

We are all soaked in the few moments between house door and car door as we run for it. We crawl down the hill over assorted branches, none of them big enough to obstruct the route completely. At the bus stop, in my headlights, we see a bedraggled adolescent clutching his school bag eagerly anticipating the imminent arrival of the bus, disappointed that it is just us.

A small voice sounding quite unlike Darling d comes from the back of the car.

“Mum”
“Yes. What is it now?”
“I’ve left my school bag in the kitchen.”

Back in the warm, I log on to Internet and find that her father has done exactly the same thing at exactly the same time but on another continent.

Ee by gum

“Ee by gum that were a right good storm last night”. That’s what my granny Phillips from St Helens would have said. She was a northern lass from Lancashire, with a voice like Gracie Field, and her claim to fame was that she had been offered a job with a dance band but had turned it down to get married.
When I got up with the children for school at their usual unearthly hour of 6.15, it was too dark to see much, but I could hear my sweet H’s bamboo hedge thrashing about in the wind, and Porridge came back in soaking wet, so I pulled on my clothes reluctantly to drive them down the hill to the bus stop. Drummer boy was supposed to go in on the scooter, so that he could give a drum lesson to a little girl this afternoon, but I didn’t like the idea of him being blown off into the lorry lane. This required a complex set of arrangements for chauffeuring later on today, which only a mother with teenage children far from bus routes would understand.
I had spent the night sleepless and anxious with the usual pointless worrying about the future that can paralyse me in the present. Unable to work, I went back to bed and fell into a deep sleep. I woke up to a gloomy, cloudy sky.

Slowly I felt my thoughts focus and the possibility of concentration and work started to glow in my mind like a candle flame in a big black space. I raced back down to the piano, and there it was, a new idea, a melody, chords, relief, a gift…


I looked into the garden from the kitchen window and saw another gift hovering over the vegetable plot.


I check on the web before posting to see how to spell “Ee by gum” because I have never seen it written down, and find to my delight that it is the title of a song by Gracie Field.
Three gifts in one day, and it isn’t even Christmas yet.