Clarissa et al.

Since I posted on this subject last week I have been thinking about language acquisition and young children.

Do you remember the year that you were five?

I do. It stands out in my memory for one very good reason as it was the year that my father was Cleethorpes' youngest ever mayor. This meant that my parents were out a good deal in the evening, and my grandmother came to live with us to be a permanent on-site baby-sitter. It also meant that I got to do a number of things five year olds don't often get the opportunity to do like assisting my father turning on the illuminations. Although it was the last full year before I started to keep a diary I can be very accurate in my dating of these memories, not only because of Daddy's mayoral year, but also because we moved house before I was seven and these memories are almost all clearly rooted in place which puts six as the absolute oldest I can have been for any of them.

So what do I remember about being five?

For Christmas that year Helen and I were given a dollshouse which my father built while recovering after an appendicitis operation and with which Helen (not yet at school) had helped. For my sixth birthday I got my first bike - a blue and red Pavemaster with trailing wheels (as stabilisers were then known). We lived on the seafront: I cycled up and down the prom and played on the beach nearly every day from Easter to October and frequently in the winter too.

I saw the Mikado for the first time.
I saw Messiah for the first time.
I saw Twelfth Night for the first time.
And I loved them all. A couple of years later I went to my first pantomime and thought it, in comparison with these and especially with Romeo and Juliet which I saw a few months later, very poor fare.

I read - or rather had read to me - Little Women, What Katy Did, Five Children and It, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden (which I had already seen on television) and The Hobbit for the first time. By the time I was seven I had reread them all for myself - the first two only after my grandmother had exchanged her own nineteenth century copies with their tiny print and huge margins for modern (but still unabridged) reprints which wouldn't strain my baby eyes. My personal reading at five was 'The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes', 'Fun in the Frozen North', the 'Animal Shelf' books,'Cubbin's Farm', 'Jane's First Term' and 'Brian's Goodnight Book' - most of them not deathless literature, but a good deal more entertaining and demanding that Janet and John and Dick and Dora which we had at school.

I wrote my first letter to the BBC complaining about Valerie Singleton's use of the inexact phrase "in olden times" instead of specifying the date or, at least, the century. I also wrote all my own thank you letters that year on tiny pink and blue note paper with a picture in the corner which I had been given for Christmas. I ws very independent and didn't ask for help, hence the one which began "Dear Until Peter . . ."; by the time I had added Auntie Barbara and named all five cousins there was little space for thanks before we reached "With love from Lissa" at the end.

I wrote a book of poetry and stories called 'An Ouncey Book of Fairy Tales'. It was going to be called 'Once Upon a Time' but my father spotted the obvious spelling mistake as I was designing the cover, so (ever resourceful) I wrote a poem to start the book. This opus is now lost, but I recall that it began
"An ounce of sugar
An ounce of tea.
We went to the shops
Baby and me."
Not deathless verse (nor very accurate on the quantities to be bought), but not bad for five.
And talking of poetry, my favourites at this stage were 'Smuggler's Song' by Rudyard Kipling and 'Overheard on a Saltmarsh' by Harold Munro.

Overheard on a Salt Marsh

Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

Give them me.

No.

Give them me, give them me.

No.

Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.

Goblin, why do you love them so?

They are better than stars or water
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.

Hush, I stole them out of the moon.

Give me your beads, I want them.

No.

I will howl in a deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.

No.

A Smuggler's Song

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Running round the woodlump if you chance to find
Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,
Don't you shout to come and look, nor use 'em for your play.
Put the brishwood back again -- and they'll be gone next day!

If you see the stable-door setting open wide;
If you see a tired horse lying down inside;
If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore;
If the lining's wet and warm - don't you ask no more!

If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,
You be carefull what you say, and mindful what is said.
If they call you "pretty maid," and chuck you 'neath the chin,
Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been!

Knocks and footsteps round the house - whistles after dark -
You've no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.
Trusty's here, and Pincher's here, and see how dumb they lie -
They don't fret to follow when the Gentlemen go by!

If you do as you've been told, 'likely there's a chance,
You'll be given a dainty doll, all the way from France,
With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood --
A present from the Gentlemen, along o' being good!

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark -
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk;
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie -
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

My favourite games played with my grandmother included Telegrams - a game where a long word is chosen and a message made up to use each letter of the word in turn as initial letters of the message. e.g. TELEGRAM 'The elephants left early. Garage room all messy.' to which Nan would write a reply using MARGELET for her initials.

Another favourite was Proverbs - in this the team (my three year old sister and myself would select a proverb, and the questioner would ask a series of questions the answers to which must include the words of the proverb in turn like a sort of verbal charades.
e.g.
"How old are you?"
"Not too old to play this game"
Have you got some nice toys?
"I've got lots of dolls and many teddies"
"What do you like playing most?"
"I like playing in the garden and on the beach and I like helping mummy when she cooks."
"Are you good at cooking?"
"Yes. I like to bake cakes, but mummy has to help me so I don't spoil them."
"What's your favourite cake?"
"I like home-made chocolate cake, and the little fondant cakes from Smiths."
"What else do you like to eat?"
"I like soup, specially tomato, scotch broth and cream of chicken."

At three Helen didn't cope with everything: she didn't play Telegrams, got confused by the names of all the characters in the books and sometimes needed prompting in Proverbs. She didn't go to Twelfth Night or Messiah, but she laughed so much at all the jokes in Mikado that the director asked my parents to bring her back every night to give the rest of the (more sophisticated) audience a lead.

Do you wonder that I believe in offering all children an enriched and demanding vocabulary when I was given so much?

Managed to get a bit of gardening done today, and spent some time taking photographs of which these are just two.

I planted two cowslips in the lawn nearly 20 years ago and now they are all over the place. Wonderful!

These self-sown marigolds have been blooming steadily in a crack on the steps since last summer, adding a cheerful splash of colour to the garden even through the snow

I was looking back over the past few Aprils in my diaries and in this blog; my real reason was to check whether spring had ever been this cold and this late, although we do seem to have reached something approaching a proper spring at long last.

Two years ago my cousins were gathering on Gabriola Island to celebrate the diamond wedding of my uncle and aunt. Now they are gathering again as both are ill in hospital - and he is very ill indeed. If you are of a praying disposition please remember Peter and Barbara in your prayers.

Re-reading my blog on their diamond wedding led me to wonder how many couples are together so long, or indeed celebrate their golden wedding? I have to say that my experience would suggest that such stability is almost a commonplace: both my older uncles and aunts celebrated theirs, while the two younger couples are already well past the ruby wedding mark and heading for gold (DV), while I can account for virtually every neighbour since my parents' childhoods in the 1930s, and the Parkers, Sparkes, Thompsons and Wringes all celebrated fifty years, while the Marfleets, Parsons, Vyses and my Turner great-grandparents (who lived next-door-but-one to my grandparents) all managed sixty. Even Tony (a longtime neighbour) and David must be heading towards fifty years together - they were an item well back into my childhood - possibly even back to the days when such relationships were punishable by law.

This is part and parcel of my whole life experience - friendship, like marriage, is a life-long commitment, parents remain best friends (and quite frequently neighbours) with their grown-up children, and dogs and cats grow old, smelly and loved in the care of one family.

If I wrote about this as fiction I would be condemned for writing about an impossibly utopian and idealised version of a bygone way of life. Realism, we are told, is harsh, brutal, dysfunctional and impermanent - and almost wholly outside my experience. I'm not saying bad things don't happen, but people always seem to be there in support at times of need.

I am shocked. We have had a complaint from a school that the language used in 'A Visit from Florence Nightingale' is too difficult for the children. (This comes in the same week that an urgent request came into the museum that I personally should go back to one school for a third time to deliver this workshop three times in one day.)

The title 'A Visit from Florence Nightingale' ought to give the teachers some hint that this workshop will not be delivered in populist modern slang, but in as near as I can manage to the langiuage of the nineteenth century, although I do quite often add 'In your time . . ." explanations.

If the title were not enough they are also sent an outline of the script with copies of a letter to be 'written' by one of the nurses at the dictation of an injured soldier and a truncated version version of the 23rd Psalm to be read by another nurse to a dying soldier so that they have time to prepare beforehand. If there are no readers sufficiently advanced to do this with preparation, then it is better that the teachers tell me so at the start so that s/he does not have to land children unprepared and unhappy with the readings.

We have had this language problem before with Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's Washday for which some teachers have in all seriousness asked if we could read from the Ladybird rewrites rather than the original Beatrix Potter stories. The answer is NO! If they don't appreciate the language most of the children do, and I am sure most of us can remember latching on to some unfamiliar word and repeating it over and over (usually as an alternative to fab or mega or super) - my own was 'soporific' from The Flopsy Bunnies. Children deal with unfamiliar words - some of those doing Mrs. T-W are only a couple of years from their own first spoken words, and those doing Florence many be not much further, but they have acquired vocabulary like a sponge absorbs water and continue to do so. If we taught them foreign languages at this stage the entire population would be multi-lingual - there is nothing they will not dare.

What worries me me is that it is sometimes the very people who are supposed to be educating them who, with the best possible intentions, lower their expectations and self-esteem.

We never get complaints about things being too difficult from private schools or those in thoroughly middle class areas which really annoys me - not the fact that we don't get complaints, but the fact that teachers' expectations are so much lower when dealing with children from poorer areas. Why do they assume that because the children come from poor backgrounds they must be low achievers? Of course there are some families which are pretty hopeless all round and remain poor generation by generation. However many are poor because of current circumstances and some will come from families new to England - their grasp of English may still a bit limited, but look at the waves of immigrants who escaped the pogroms, the nazis and the break up of the empire: did they remain at the bottom of the heap? Did they heck! Yet it is usually teachers from schools in poor areas who ask for the children to be fed pap rather than the meat of something approaching as near as we can an authentic historic experience. For Heaven's sake, stop being so patronising and encourage the children to grasp what is at the very limit of their reach. Don't work to the lowest common factor, but the highest. Don't try to make life easy for yourself by making life too easy for the children. I'm happy to give explanations of anything a child doesn't understand, and the teachers can always do likewise. It is what we are there for: not to baby-sit, but to educate.

I remember one laundry workshop where a helper first held down the hands of a child with aspergers who wanted to handle everything, and then took him out altogether. Yes, of course he needed protecting from hurting his fingers in the mangle, but if he got his sleeves wet dipping his hands into the tubs of cold water it would all be part of what is designed to be a hands-on experience.

I should add that I am talking about a minority of teachers here. Going into almost any staffroom you will find that the conversation is that of people who love their work and the challenges presented by the children they teach.

I went as Florence Nightingale to an independent school in Doncaster today, and as usual the AA had over-complicated the route in its final stages off the A roads and through the town streets. The directions the caretaker gave me to get back were much simpler.

I am actually rather against fee paying schools, but I have to say that this was one of the best organised visits I have ever encountered. Two men - the caretaker and another who was, I think, his assistant - carried Florence's numerous boxes from my car to the small hall where I gave the workshop. I was given a cup of tea both before I started and after I finished the workshop.

Most importantly the children were very well prepared - I thought at the beginning that they all knew so much there would be nothing new for me to tell them - and very well behaved. The group consisted of two classes - just 22 children in all aged 6 and 7. There was one little girl called, I think, Lena (but that could just be my interpretation of an unfamiliar Asian name) who had her hand up for every question I asked, and, when I chose her, gave very full, very accurate answers in whole, properly constructed sentences. She was not the only one. The little girl who had to read a shortened version of the 23rd psalm to the dying soldier coped with the language of the King James Bible admirably and very audibly, and the little girl who wrote the letter for Trooper Fred read it out with equal clarity. The boy I picked out to be the cook actually started reading the Alexis Soyer book I handed him with instructions to cook a nutritious meal from the (plastic) ingredients provided.

When the children had finished, they folded up their aprons, and helped the teachers fold up the bedding and nightshirts.

I sometimes complain about teachers who fail to prepare properly, but this school was a shining example of how much more the children get out of a workshop when the are well prepared.

Today is the last day of the school holidays. I thought that Jess was busy with horsey stuff, but she rang up an about quarter past nine to say that she was on her own (except for Joe still asleep in bed) and could she come down. A last day outing was deemed in order, so she rang (texted) Joel to invite him and Callum to join us, and thus we four set out for Far Ings Nature Reserve which someone had told me was a great day out. Well, it may be, but the visitor centre was closed and there wasn't a bird in sight beyond a few feral pigeons - we had a bit of a walk and went on to Normanby Hall (by way of Crowston's tack shop where Jess picked up some bit rubbers they had on order - don't ask: I don't know either.)

The children went to the Farm Museum while I picked up some paperwork, and then decided to have a play in the playground - Jess's last chance since she is 14 in a couple of weeks and thus will be over age for such places.

After this we went for a walk in the park, interacted with the sculpture there, and visited the pets' graveyard. Jess and Joel as teenagers wandered off on their own and kept jumping hedges, walls, banks and ditches - so much so that I had to threaten them with my whistle (attached to my work keys) - a threat of which they took precisely no notice. To be honest so far as I am concerned they could explore the park entirely on their own as far as I am concerned, but they aren't my children so I am responsible to their parents for their safety and I have to keep them on a tighter leash than I would if they were my own; moreover Callum tends to get anxious if his brother is out of sight when we are out.

After that it was ice-creams all round except for the driver.

You know how it is? You travel miles and miles to visit all sorts of places of interest, and never get to the ones actually on your doorstep. Joe and I went to visit the museum in Louth today - something we have been planning literally for years. It's a nice little museum, recently refurbished, with some very good displays.

I left my car for two hours in the Co-op carpark while I visited a museum, but I forgot to get my parking money back when I got the little bit of shopping I needed to be able to get some cash back in order to get coffee and a scone later - as well, of course, as qualifying me to get my parking money back.

It took about an hour to see the three-and-a-bit galleries. The first shows a copy of Brown's panorama of Louth in the early 19th century - the original in the town hall has recently been restored. It is an amazingly detailed piece of work showing the view east from the church spire. North-east it goes to Grimsby and across the Humber to Spurn Point, and south-east to Boston and the Wash. All along the coast is an amazing number of windmills - many, I suspect, for pumping rather than grinding corn. Cleethorpes shows as a distinct hill (Mag's Highland) on the flatlands of the coast, while many nearer villages are hidden in the slopes of the Wolds. Close to the detail of the houses and gardens - many still perfectly recognisible - is quite wonderfully detailed reminding us of what a hidden treasure Louth is - an historic town, beautifully kept with its street pattern and old buildings, but not artificially preserved in some sort of theme-park aspic to the detriment of the majority of inhabitants not engaged in tourism. Comparing the pictures below with that on Google Earth is a fascinating exercise.

I have posted these two pictures (both, like the one of the museum, 'borrowed' from the Museum website) the upper one to give some idea of the scale of the Panorama, and the latter to give some idea of the detail. I did have my camera with me, but a) I hadn't obtained permission to take photographes inside and b) once outside I disovered that my battery was flat.

Upstairs there was a small temporary display by junior archaeologists who have photographed signs (mainly historic) around the town and turned them into a town trail - an excellent piece of work which other museums and schools could well adapt for their own use. The children who did it are to be congratulated.

The second permanent gallery was mainly the geology, prehistory and history of the Wolds with well chosen objects displayed with clarity. Personally I can do without stuffed animals, but I do realise that the natural history of an area does need to be shown and that these long-dead creatures are probably the clearest way to do so.

The final gallery shows the industry and trades of Louth with a mezzanine in the centre showing very graphically the extent of and devastation caused by the Louth Flood of 1920 which claimed 23 lives.

After this we went for an early tea - well, coffee and home-made scones actually - at Perkins Pantry which has been a favourite of ours for some time and has recently won yet another Taste of Lincolnshire award. The proprietrix is Sue Locking whose husband Malcolm is very keen on family history and 'has gone back as far as records will take him'. I couldn't find them in the index on Liz's family history pages, but Liz tells me that she knows him and that he has gone back even further in his researches into his entirely unrelated family than she has managed. I also know about their late cat 'Perkin' after whom the cafe is named.

I came back to the car park to discover that I had a flat tyre - a small flint in the side, so I had to buy a whole new tyre!!! Of course, by the time I had got out my spare wheel it was raining hard. A nice man came to my aid and went home to fetch his electric pump by which time the rain had turned to hail and continued falling hard all the while he blew up my tyre so that I coulget to the tyre place; meanwhile I threw my spare tyre and jack back into the boot.

Where was Joe in all this you ask? Why wasn't he, a strong young man, helping his aunt in her time of need? Well he had gone to have a quick look round the church while I fetched the car to pick him up again - my car park time being close to expiry - and by now he was getting rather anxious waiting.

Anyway, at last I picked him up and we drove to the industrial estate, found Mr. Tyre - recommended by my rescuer - and got the tyre replaced.

I was so upset that I had to buy a pair of shoes to cheer me up! But I really did need them and I found them in the children's department so they were nice and cheap.

There is a point where being helpful topples over into officiousness; often the pivotal point where one becomes the other is the question - or lack of it - "Would it be useful if I . . . ?" It's is a mark we have all overstepped in our time; I know that - to my shame - I have.

This morning I came down to find that my father had put the dusters I had left to soak overnight in wads about ten thick on the kitchen radiator. Experience suggests that the middle ones would be smelly before they were dry especially as the heater won't be on between 8.30 a.m. and 6.00 p.m. So I put them back in the bowl both to check whether he had washed and rinsed them properly this morning (he claims yes, but I have my doubts about the 'properly') and to hang them out on the line to blow dry. O.K., I know that it's his house and that he is much better at using dusters than I am, but all too many of these had been used by Joe to do silver and brass cleaning and were covered in black marks; moreover I seem to be the only person who knows NOT to put dirty dusters back in the cupboard, but to wash them out at once in very hot water and detergent so that any polish marks don't have time to set.

End of rant. However, what I don't understand is why my father saw fit to tell me that I was ungrateful when he must have known I wouldn't be pleased; my mother told him regularly over forty years that hanging washing up in bunches or stacking them wet is counterproductive, and I too have mentioned the matter over the years.

You never know when skills learned long ago will come in handy.

For some time we have felt that some of our clues in the History Detectives workshop needed replacing. One of the characters they research is Edith Ashton who was six years old in 1881. The children are asked to find her favourite toy, and up until now it has been a skipping rope. One of the few things we know for certain about Edith is that she had a bad back, which of course seriously confuses such children as are not already confused by the use of the word 'toy' rather than 'plaything' for a skipping rope.

At the last meeting it was decided to buy a rag doll for her, but apparently all those available on the internet looked much too modern, so I volunteered to make one and was offered two hours pay for doing so.

We now go back to when I was a seven year old in Mrs. Tuplin's class - the first year juniors when we girls spent about two terms making first a rag doll each and then a dress and apron for her. Mine was called Victoria, and when we came to embroidering the face it became clear to everyone that Liz was not merely the cleverest girl in the class, but also the best needlewoman. She - unlike everyone else including Mrs. Tuplin - knew how to do the french knots required for our dolls' eyes. I don't recall now whether she actually sewed all forty eyes, but I know she did my doll's two when my efforts ended in nastily tangled threads which had to be unpicked. In fact she was so good at everything that if she weren't my best friend, I would probably hate her - and frequently did in those days.

Anyway, using the pattern I learned then, I made Victoria mark 2. Nowadays I can manage my own french knots, and the whole thing took about an hour-and-a-half rather than two terms. The original's dress was a simple T-shaped shift pulled in at the waist by an apron. Because this doll is going to be handled by hundreds of children, I made the dress bodice an integral part of the doll, with a gathered skirt, sash and drawers all sewn on to her at the waist. The materials all came out of my rag-bag: the fabric for her body and her dress are modern (less than 40 years old), but her stuffing is strips of a century old pillowcase which disintegrated some long time ago, and her drawers are made from the tattered remains of an even older dressing table runner. Her hair, which I sewed today during the lunch break of a training day for a new workshop, is wool from Margaret's mother's knitting bag and differs from the original Victoria's hair by covering the back of her head (sewn from a neat central parting) rather than just plaits from the top and framimg the face.

So - meet Victoria II.

On a completely different tack, father was asked to stand for Chairman of the County Council, but has decided that at 81 into 82 he is too old for all the late nights and large meals this would entail.

The other week when I was blogging about Ground Rice Pudding I mentioned Derbyshire Pudding which is one of the, now largely forgotten, savoury puddings with which people at one time preceded the main course of their dinner and, of which, only Yorkshire Pudding survives as a popular dish.

Anyway, I cooked one today, and here is how it is made.

Derbyshire Savoury Pudding

1 cup of oatmeal
2 cups of coarse breadcrumbs
½lb suet
1lb finely chopped onion
1 heaped teaspoon dried sage
Salt to taste (really needs more than is healthy, but who's counting with that much suet in it already?)
Mix these ingredients together
Pour on
1 pint of hot milk
and stir together
When cooler (not cold) mix in
2 beaten eggs
2 cups of brown flour

Put into one or two greased dishes
Bake for 1 hour in a hot oven.

Serve hot or cold.
Excellent with cold meat, especially pork.

Swallow Bookworms' choice for April is Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks which tells the story of the plague year in the village of Eyam.

Of course this story has been much retold (as the author reminds us in her afterword) in numerous forms both factual and fictionalised. Her central character, Anna, is based on a single sentence in a letter by the rector William Mompesson "My maid continued in health; which was a blessing, for had she quailed, I should have been ill set . . ."

Why couldn't she have left it there with that one fictionalised character fleshed out against a background of known facts? Why did she have to replace the fascinating characters of William Mompesson and his wife Catherine with improbable and melodramatic nonsense about Michael and Elinor Mompellion?

The history of the plague village is dramatic enough without adding layers of witchcraft, child abuse, adultery and - worst of all - a silly tacked on Epilogue when we are told what happened next to Anna.

The sad thing is that this is quite a well written book and a genuine page-turner: if only she had had the courage to explore the real people and not - in her own words - fed on 'short rations' by the factual record.

There was also the possibility that she could have put in all the stories she wanted to and just not called the village Eyam, but allowed that her fictional village was inspired by the history of Eyam, but was a work of complete fiction. It was the unhappy marriage of fiction tagged on to history and thus marred which so annoyed me. I am happy with historical fiction in which real people and places make appearances which are in keeping with the known facts, but all the central characters are fictitious. I am happy with fictionalised history where one fictional or little known character tells the story of real times, places and people. It is the replacing of real - and quite well documented - people which really irritates me and spoils the whole book.

Elsewhere in Britain we are told they woke to snow again this morning.

Here we have bright sunshine and bitter cold. It looked like a jacket morning, but a nose out of the door proved it to be a coat, scarf and gloves day.

Now - quarter-to-three - it has just started trying to snow with a few reluctant flakes wondering whether they should make the effort to reach the ground.

I have just looked at Liz's blog and seen her snow - much like ours of two weeks ago.

Monday

It snowed overnight, but settled, not beautifully as two weeks ago, but old before its time, wet and discouraged on the exposed grass, shunning the lea of buildings and trees, and hardly touching the bushes in its silent slither to the damp ground.

Yesterday the nominations for various councils were announced. There are seven candidates for the seven places on Swallow Parish Council so I am once again elected without an election and am now the second longest serving member, although - worryingly - still either the youngest or second youngest (I'm not certain whether I am younger than James or vice versa, but it won't be by much either way). This was all right when I was first co-opted when I was in my early thirties, but twenty years later it does make me wonder why there are no younger people in the village who are interested.

Heaven knows I am not exactly a political person myself and have no allegiance to any political party - a 'conservatively liberal pacifist Christian socialist with greenish aspirations' would probably best describe my political views - but parish council is not about political parties, but about doing the best you can for the community in which you live. I honestly do not know which parties my fellow parish councillors support although I suspect that all but the chairman are broadly to my right. It doesn't matter - what we represent are the people of Swallow and Cuxwold villages.

People complain enough about the way we are governed, but too few vote and fewer still are willing to give their time even to this - the lowest rung of local government. In the late sixties/early seventies everyone joined various socio-political campaigns long before they were old enough to vote. What became of this eagerness to be a part of the movement to change things for the better? How was it swamped in the deadly mire of Thatcher's and Blair's Britain?

I'm not asking for revolution in the village - just for one or two younger people to express an interest.

Remembering the date, I was going to wind my dear papa up with a long and circumstantial story about a series of phone calls while he was out. I didn't do it as a real phonecall pre-empted anything I was going to say with the genuine and sad news that one of his oldest friends, Jacob's godfather, John Ward died last night.

Maybe I'll write some more later, but this is one of those cases where the old platitude of its being a 'merciful release' really is appropriate as he had had cancer for a long time which had invaded and weakened his whole body so that in the last few months the slightest movement was liable to leave him with broken bones, and morphine was a constant companion.

When I say 'oldest friends' I am guilty of a serious inaccuracy. Father's three oldest friends are, like him (touch wood), hale and hearty in their eighties. John was considerably younger. Two of his is three grown-up children are now with their mother, while the third is on his way home from Canada.

I set up two April Fools for other people to fire off: one for use in the village concerns a proposed planning application for a ski lift up Limber Hill from the heart of the village to the bus stop on the by-pass.

I left copies of it with Veronica (in her capacity as Clerk to the Parish Council) to pass on to those members most susceptible to being wound up.

The other, which may or may not have happened (probably not), arose from a conversation with John on reception at the museum. We were discussing the generally well-crafted but artistically dull paintings in a recent art exhibition, which led to a discussion of modern art, which inevitably led to heaps of bricks and unmade beds . . . you can see where this is going . . . and I suggested that he leave a wastebin unemptied and put in in the middle of the foyer with a label couched in meaninglessly pretentious terms describing it as a work of art and social comment. My guess is that my plan ended there. It is now school holidays and I wasn't at work, though we do have an all day meeting tomorrow.