This is as unexciting as it gets, but I like to keep a record.
If you are looking for something inspirational, please keep looking.

Day 1
Friday the 20th of March 2020. School’s out. Until further notice. I stare blankly into months of having two uprooted teenagers in the house. They don’t don’t yet realise how hard they are going to be hit by this, but I do. They don’t yet feel they have been robbed, but I do and I feel sorry and anxious for them. They are bursting with life and raring to go, they are not meant to sit at home at Google classroom they are supposed to live each day to the brim, and I am raging against all of it on their behalf.

Enough of that. Serious and sombre is not going to work for me. Never have.

Day 2
21/3/2020
Would the real corona-stricken spirit of Britain please stand up?

Whilst selfish stock-piling is an undeniable fact, our whole street has been on a mission to get a few oranges for Judy from number 47 (not her real number) who is on 12-week self-isolation due to age, strictly imposed by her daughter. By midday Judy has had enough oranges to start her own range of Norwood Marmalade.

Day 3
22/3/2020
As we are all at home all the time with precious little to do, Charlie our hedgehog, has been getting more attention than ever. He is hating every minute of it.

Mother’s Day today. A walk at Selsdon Park Nature Reserve. Chinese and Indian takeaway. Knives Out on TV. Well, not really on TV, as it was still showing at cinemas until they closed, but I’ve learnt not to ask unnecessary questions. Altogether a lovely day. Not ‘in the circumstances’, not ‘all things considered’, just a really good day.

Day 4
23/3/2020
8.40 am. School online registration time. Younger daughter fully dressed, post-breakfast, bed made to perfection. Older daughter invisible from under her duvet.

The younger one explains cheerily that she needs the routine to protect her sanity. The older one growls from her room, ‘You can only protect something you actually possess’. She turns over.

Day 5
24/3/2020

The headteacher offers us a quote from Lenin in her daily lockdown update email.  “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” A headteacher of a Catholic school quoting a Marxist leader. The world might truly never be the same again.

Still Day 5, later in the evening. We are treated to a spontaneous kazoo concert on the landing.

Day 5 still. Is 8.52 too early to go to bed?  Days have never felt that long. I have time for everything and nothing to do.

Day 6
25/6/2020
Provisions are running low. We cannot put off going to the shops any longer. I am wearing an impromptu face mask made out of Henry hoover bag, fastened with two safety pins and hooked up over my ears with a couple of matching loom bands. Remember loom bands? Not throwing them away all these years ago is paying off.

Day 7
26/3/2020
Watching Dirty Dancing with the family.
Alexia,14, hears ‘Nobody puts Baby in the corner’ for the very first time. Young people today learn everything so much earlier. I had to wait until I was 21 to watch it. That’s when the movie came out.

On the subject of watching. This week I watched all of Series 6 of Silent Witness, am now on Series 7, first broadcast in 2003, the year I got married. Amanda Burton in the lead role. London in the early noughties. Pure unadulterated escapism available on iPlayer.

Day 8
27/3/2020
Neighbourhood Whatsapp group is on a mission to buy eggs for Judy so she can comfort bake in her isolation. Neighbour after neighbour has reported failure to locate eggs within three miles radius.

On an off chance, out of curiosity really, I go out to our corner shop. They have everything! Eggs, toilet paper, milk, bread, and, wait for it, a hand cleaner!  I buy the lot.

Today I might have discovered the best way there is to cope with what is happening. It is not easy and it takes effort, but it works wonders, so I am determined to stick with it. Today I did not read a single news headline, and limited social media to sloth lovers Facebook group, and I feel the best I felt for weeks. I used to add a mix of Daily Mail, The Guardian and BBC News to my morning coffee, and then checked the headlines in regular intervals throughout the day.
No more.
From now on I am going to make not reading the news my new daily goal. I don’t usually bother with daily goals mind you, but everybody’s talking about doing something useful with all that quarantine time, so I am going to have a go at Not Following The News.

Day 9
28/3/2020
Saturday. Highlights of the week. Very few. For the first three days of the past week I amused myself by logging in to Ocado website, only to be put in virtual queue for two hours, whilst I could watch the little green lorry moving slowly forward, and the counter telling me I was now 230642 customer in the queue. Finally my turn came to book delivery, only to be told that there were no delivery slots available, and I was thrown back to the end of the virtual queue. That game lost its appeal after a while, so I stopped playing it. I popped in today, but the game has changed again, and the queue has been paused altogether.

Work. Yeah, about that. There is none.

What else. I’ve been going for my daily constitutional at the Crystal Palace Park most afternoons. Walking on the grass to keep my distance. It’s a big park but I am beginning to recognise every blade of grass there. I wish I could add something exciting about these walks but I cannot.

Funny place childhood. A minefield of memories, a goldmine of recollections, long gone, it lingers on, vibrant, and alive. Our mind plays tricks on us and distorts the past, yet we treasure its fragments, gloss over the cracks. What remains of our beginnings is patchy, and yet, we hold on to it, re-imagine it, keep returning to what we once were. The world that ended, yet never leaves us, as we search for the reasons of what we have become, and strive to save it all from the blackness of not remembering.

When I was about six years old, my parents took it upon themselves to redecorate our tiny flat and further decided that this necessitated packing me off to my grandma’s on my dad’s side, to spend a couple of weeks in her equally tiny, but paint fumes free flat on the other side of town.

Off I went, Mr Bear, the yellow teddy in stripy dungarees firmly head-locked under my arm. I was always jealous of his rainbow-coloured dungarees, and used to fantasise about getting an exact same pair as a surprise birthday present from my mum, because she must have known I loved them. Never happened.

Grandma’s flat consisted of a bedroom-living room, the world’s smallest kitchen, and even smaller windowless bathroom which smelt of clogged up pipes. I guess you could call it studio flat, except nobody did back then. The main room, which was five paces long four paces across, contained, miraculously, a sofa bed a desk a table a dresser a few chairs and two wardrobes. It was impossible to move around without holding your tummy in. Or crawling under the numerous items of furniture on all four, which was my preference. The furniture was dark mahogany, with crocheted napkins scattered on top. The look and feel was heavy vintage with a hint of past family grandeur crippled in equal parts by historical event of the twentieth century and personal tragedy.  To my small curly blonde self it was just the perfect size exotic paradise.

Grandma was very old. She was so old I thought she might die during my visit, and then what would I do? Grandma had a big heavy black telephone, and I thought I might use it to call somebody to tell them that she’d died and to come and pick me up, but then I remembered that I would not know who to call in the event of her death. My parents had not had a phone line installed yet at the time. I could call my other grandma, I knew she had a phone, I’d spent hours on it listening to the talking clock, except I didn’t know her number.

Having ruled out calling anybody, I moved on to what I would do next in the event of Grandma’s sudden death, and decided that I would have liked to touch her hair, to check whether it felt the same that it looked, newborn chicken’s downy feathers, and then I would touch her deathly white face to find out whether it was naturally deathly white or did she use an impossibly pale powder to make it so, but then I thought, if she was dead then perhaps her face would have turned deathly white naturally, and then I would never know. I made a note to try and find an excuse to run my finger down her cheek when she was still alive to see what happened.

Many years later I looked things up and worked out that Grandma was 66 during my visit to her flat, not a hundred and twenty as I thought at the time.  She went on to live for another ten years, but when she did die, she did so alone in her flat, and that gave me guilty goosebumps for a long time, as I could not help thinking I brought this lonely demise onto her with my childish imaginings.

Grandma delivered a series of most extraordinary monologues during the two weeks I spent with her.  They were not conversations, because she could not possibly have expected me to respond in any meaningful way to the sentiments she expressed.  There was one particular thing she said that stayed with me for a very long time, truth be told it pops into my head every now and again even now.

‘I am sure your mother is a nice lady in her own way, but she just isn’t, never was a suitable person for our family. Your dad could have, should have done so much better.’

My grandma thought this was a perfectly suitable thing to say to a six year old me. She also thought it suitable to follow it up with a long look of despair mixed with tenderness. She must have felt acute regret of what could have been if only my dad had married somebody who ticked all suitability boxes instead, like her best friend’s daughter for example.
What Grandma said confused me beyond words. My mum not suitable for our family? My mum was my family, how could she have been unsuitable. What about me? Was I suitable? What makes somebody unsuitable for something and how did grandma know this?
Grandma entertained me with endless stories about her family history, my family history, during those two weeks. Proud tales of aristocratic connections, counts and duchesses, honorary titles, scholarly achievements, high ranking military heroes and medals for bravery seemed to have adorned several branches of our family tree down the centuries.  I found all this hard to follow and could never recall a single coherent story, but the overall impression was of impossibly grandiose lineage, long lost splendour, grand pianos and vast acres of land. Pitched against this background, my mum might have indeed appeared utterly unsuitable.

Mum was born in a small village on the Vistula river, in a modest wooden house, given to my great grandmother Helena by her parents on the day she married Jan, a local village teacher in 1911.  I have clear memories of that house, as it remained Jan and Helena’s family home until Helena’s death in 1982, coincidentally the same year my Posh Grandma died too.

Mum spent the first seven years of her life in the village, six of them taken up by the world war.
I can easily relate to the geography of Mum’s childhood because I too spent a bit chunk of my early years at the same place, same house, same views over the Vistula river bends from the top of the hill, same cabbage patch, same raspberry fields, same barn, same stables.

This story is not really going anywhere, I don’t have a neat ending for it. I could possibly make something up and go all nostalgic and even homesick about it, but all I really wanted to share was Grandma’s comment about my mother not being suitable for our family, which was one of those fleeting moments which happen to people and then they are stuck with them until they make a big deal out of them, and totally overthink them and try to make them sound like something significant and relevant, a defining moment, which contributed to shaping their lives. So there, I’ve done it.

Just for the record, below is my daughter’s entry to the short story competition I mentioned in my previous post.

A CHANCE FINDING

Novice palaeontologists bend a couple of rules, leading them to a once in a lifetime career break.

 

“Come on, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“We don’t find anything, we get caught, we get fired, would you like me to go on?”

Dan hesitated and then said, “No, that’s enough. James, aren’t you tired of just sitting in this office day after day, studying fossils that other people have found. If we don’t find anything, no one will even know that we went. There’s something waiting for us out there. I can feel it! And if we don’t go out there tonight, someone else will find it. Do you really want someone else to find our discovery?”

“Honestly, I wouldn’t really mind. Plus, does it really count as our discovery if we haven’t… discovered it yet?”

“Yet! We haven’t discovered it yet! Tonight is our night, James. Just put your negativity on pause for one night.”

“But why can’t we wait until we officially get sent out onto the field?”

 

“We’re fresh out of Uni, of course they’re not going to send us out onto the field immediately.”

 

The two of them had met in university. They did not appear to be the most compatible couple of friends at first glance, but they bonded over a shared interest in the intricacies of coprolite analysis which, funnily enough, was not the most commonly-chosen topic to base a dissertation on.

“James, you call yourself a palaeontologist but the closest you’ve ever been to a dinosaur bone is in the Natural History Museum; palaeontology to you is like watching a foreign movie without subtitles.”

“And I’m perfectly okay with that.”

“But we didn’t even get that close to Dippy the Diplodocus because there was that colossal tour group there that day!”

James contemplated Dan’s words for a few moments.

“I’ll do it,” he sighed.

“Tonight,” Dan said. It had to be that night. The rest of the team were on an overseas expedition, but they were set to return in two days’ time. This meant that Dan and James would have to spend their last day alone ensuring everything was in order in preparation for their return, leaving only that night available to execute their plan.

 

“You seriously want us to hike up there? In the dark?”

“No,” Dan stated, which left James confused and forgivably suspicious, “we’re taking the Land Rover, and then we’ll walk after the road ends.”

James’ eyes widened. Before he could start to refuse, Dan said, “Look, if we’re going to get fired we might as well have fun and use one of the company cars.”

“Or we could just scrap this whole idea and not get fired!”

Dan glared at James until he eventually let out a long sigh of defeat.

“Fine,” James muttered.

“Yes! Yes-yes-yes!” Dan jumped up and down, punching the air with joy, ironically enough.

 

And so, at 7pm, with the sun already setting, they locked up their office building, took all the supplies they anticipated they might need and got in the car. They drove up the long windy hillside roads until they reached the end of the road which was a short distance away from the main field.

Dan got out of the car first and ran to the other side to open the door for a nervous James.

 

“I’m not getting out.”

“Yes. You are.”

“No, I’m-“

“If you don’t take risks in life, then what’s the point?”

“Comfort.”

“Comfort is just a scheme created by the government to-“
James scrambled out of his seat.

“Fine! Fine! I’m getting out! Just, please, don’t make me listen to another one of your nonsensical conspiracy theories.”

Works every time, Dan thought to himself.

 

They took the bags out of the boot of the car and made their way up the rocky hillside. With the sun steadily setting and their surroundings becoming noticeably darker, the two of them had to guide themselves to the main field using flashlights.

About twenty minutes later, they reached the spot that was best known for its prehistoric fruitfulness. However, recently there had not been as much luck and some palaeontologists were beginning to lose hope, thinking they had found all that could be found in that area.

 

“The Promised Land!” Dan exclaimed.

“That makes me Moses and you… you are my… people!”

 

Dan spun around to James with a grin and almost jumped at the sight of his glare to end all glares.

“Or we could be co-Moseses?” Dan suggested, his voice suddenly an octave higher.

He cautiously turned around and kept walking before James could respond with another one of his cynical comments.

“So where do we start?” James called out.

 

“I assumed you would know.”

 

“D’you know who would know?” James taunted.

“Nope, but I probably should’ve invited them instead of you.”

James ignored that comment. “Our boss. Our boss would know where we should start!”

“Why do we need the boss when we have my gut feeling to guide us? I’m like a metal detector for prehistoric bones and fossils. I can feel it in my bones,” he smirked at the most overused pun among palaeontologists worldwide, and then proceeded to picture the bones they would find.

 

“Go on then,” James said, a slight smile tugging at his lips, curious as to how this would play out.

Dan started walking to his right, imitating the movements and sounds of a metal detector, “beep… beep… beep… beep… beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-“

“Please stop making that noise,” James said, but you could hear the smile in his voice, “You sound more like the Road Runner than a metal detector which would make me Wile E. Coyote, and that means I will soon be falling off a cliff. I get the point. We’ll start where you’re standing.”

Dan could not help but raise his eyebrows at the sight of James finally loosening up. He chose not to mention it at the fear of ruining the moment, but when they both turned away from one another and to the ground, they were smiling.

 

After a solid half hour of digging, Dan looked up from the hole he was gently scraping away at to look over at James who was a few metres away from him, “I feel like a right Indiana Jones, don’t you?”

James glanced up at him and laughed, “Indiana Jones was an archaeologist, not a palaeontologist.”

“I didn’t mean literally, I just… I’m starting to understand his vibe, you know?”

 

“Not at all. Also, you’re 5’6”.”

“Who’s to say Jones wasn’t 5’6”?”

“Probably everyone who watched the movies.”

 

Dan didn’t respond.

“Oh my god! Dan! Dan, I think I might have something!”

 

Dan scrambled over to his spot, tripping over his own feet with excitement, and they both started scraping away at the sand and dirt surrounding the small object hidden beneath the surface. James pulled it out and they both looked at it expectantly as though it was going to spring to life and congratulate them on their find.
“An ammonite,” they said simultaneously, and then both slumped down onto the ground.

“My 4-year-old niece found one of these at the park the other day,” James said.

“Don’t give up hope just yet, my friend. They said that there was nothing left in this area, not bones, not fossils, not anything. But here we are, holding an ammonite that they couldn’t find. This means that there’s more here! We just need to keep looking!”

James looked up slowly at the pitch-black sky and held in a sigh, “Well, there isn’t actually a guarantee-”

 

“Maybe I am a prehistoric bone and fossil detector…” Dan whispered into the distance, like a detective when they make their big breakthrough in a case.

James just rolled his eyes and they both went back to work.

 

An hour went by and they found three more ammonites between them. They decided to keep them for when they would inevitably be studying them in the office, as it was beginning to look less and less likely that they would return as – in Dan’s words – ‘legends’.

 

Out of the corner of his eye, James noticed Dan’s flashlight flicker a few times before it eventually turned off. He shook it a few times, hit it against the palm of his hand, and flicked the switch a couple times but it wouldn’t turn back on. They looked up at one another with a sense of defeat.

They agreed to make their way back to the car before the other flashlight’s battery died, and they would have to blindly guide their way back to the car over a natural obstacle course of small hills and ditches.

 

As they started to descend down the hillside Dan suddenly lost his footing and started tumbling forward, his bag flying off his shoulder, landing him in a small ditch.

James ran down to where he was lying down and knelt down beside him.

“Are you okay? What happened?”

“There’s something digging into my back,” he groaned, unable to appreciate his incredible play on words.

James offered him a hand and lifted him up. After Dan had dusted himself off, he turned to James, whose jaw had dropped. He followed his line of vision to where the faint flashlight was pointing.

Just where Dan had been lying a couple moments ago, there was a small, dirt-covered object buried in the ground, poking out slightly. There was the possibility that it was a stone, but there was no certainty until they checked. They both dropped to their knees and started digging desperately, their tiredness had evaporated, replaced by more energy than a nuclear power plant as they frantically dug in the soil. Once they had fully dug around the object, Dan grabbed it and pulled it out, wiping the sand off. A dinosaur bone. Unmistakably. The shape of the three-toed foot suggested a theropod, quite a small one, possibly a Velociraptor.

They each let out a sigh of both shock and relief, and then they both started laughing, breathlessly.

“Our first discovery,” Dan whispered, completely stunned by the chance of their finding it.
James let out a joyous howl up to the night sky.

 

“Our first discovery,” Dan yelled into the empty space around them.

 

A couple of days later, when the research team returned home to find the bones of a theropod foot mounted like a trophy on the front desk, they were greatly confused. James and Dan formed a two-man welcoming committee and greeted their colleagues with two matching grins.

They had realised the morning after their nocturnal escapade that if they tried to take credit for finding the bones, they would be charged with trespassing on the dig site without security clearance and fired on the spot for using the Institute’s equipment without their boss’s approval, so they had to come up with a back-up story.

“How did this get here…?” Their boss asked, cautiously, as he approached it.

 

“Well, we completed the work you gave us early, so we decided to finish off our paper on the importance of coprolite research in micropalaeontology. We shared our findings on a Paleo dot com forum, and, a couple days later, voila, this beauty came in the mail, sent to us as a token of appreciation from a team of palaeontologists from Utah, who believe that our paper helped them enormously in moving a step closer to a final break-through in their own research. The foot is ours to keep and to work on as we please.”

“Wow. Impressive. In these circumstances, bizarre as they are, I think it’s only fair that the two of you should be given the first chance to work on it. Feel free to sink your teeth into it whenever you’re ready, boys.”

Dan and James’ eyebrows shot upwards in unison.

 

“R- Really?” James stuttered.

“Of course. Many of my colleagues would gladly give an arm and a leg for this foot”, he gave them both a warm smile.

That night a lavish party was thrown in their honour at the Institute. Or at least that’s how their retelling of the story developed over the years.

 

Dan and James thought about using their adventure as a basis for a smug motivational speech on how to succeed in their chosen profession, but they soon realised that perhaps what happened to them should not be used as career advice for newcomers to the field. What they would have had to say was that sometimes you need to take chances in life, and that success may come when you least expect it, or even when you have given up on it, and you feel like you are going downhill and straight into a ditch; and that it is sometimes best not to be entirely truthful with your boss about minor details of how you achieve your results.

My daughter is taking part in a short story competition. She has got 8 days to write a story, three prompts, the genre, the character and the theme, and the 2,500 word limit. The prompts are randomly allocated and all participants are split into a number of heats, everybody in the heat responds to the same three prompts. My daughter got Comedy – Palaeontologist – Successful.  My first reaction was, come again?

Famously supportive mother that I am, I thought I’d keep her writing company and produce a short story of my own, sticking to the same three prompts. I then spent the next couple of days secretly debating whether or not to abandon the project, because if I gave up before I started nobody would need to know, and I could get on with my life as if nothing happened. But then I thought, I was not getting defeated by some stupid random prompts, and started writing. What I wrote has no artistic value. It is froth and nonsense from start to finish. What I found fascinating though was that even as I spewed out word upon word of pure tripe, I was still getting pulled into this dull pointless prompt-centred world I was creating, and despite having nothing to say on the subject I managed to come close to the word limit in hardly any time at all. Scary stuff.
When I finished I sent my daughter my story with a short note; Dear A, this is by far the worst story I have ever written. It is not funny, it has no plot, but it has a palaeontologist in it and about 2,200 words.

So in a moment, there will be nothing protecting you from the worst no plot no humour non-story you are ever likely to read. I am posting it here just for the record.

I learnt one thing for sure in the last few days, namely never to be tempted to enter a writing competition. The very thought of a panel of faceless jurors reading and judging the freshness and originality of my style killed both of them dead.  You have been warned.

Jurassic Crap – The Story

The day Jurassic Park came to his local cinema, Frank ripped off his cherished Take That poster from the wall and replaced it with a black and red silhouette of a T-Rex. The decisiveness of his action excited and scared him in equal measures. He was never big on spontaneity, so that was a new territory for him, but as he tilted his head to admire his new bedroom decor, he saw his whole future unfold ahead, with the clarity he never thought possible for somebody as prone to awkwardness and confusion as he was. Half an hour into the movie, and he fell in love with the majestic animals, the lush vegetation and the sweeping Mesozoic landscapes. He found the human characters in the movie an irritating distraction and he did not care one iota whether any of them survived to the end or not. This sentiment was to become an overarching principle in his life, whereby he cared significantly more about magnificent dino-worlds and their many visualisations than about the relatively uninspiring reality around him.

Fifteen years later, the T-Rex, was still there on the wall, albeit faded at the edges, and Frank remained faithful to his love of prehistoric world in the way he never managed to maintain an attachment to another human being. He had lived and breathed fossils all his adult life, to the neglect of nearly all other pursuits, and occasionally, basic rules of hygiene. He felt much more at home in the Cretaceous period than in whatever decade he was currently living, in fact, he frequently had to remind himself exactly which decade that was. Frank was at his happiest buried in the underbelly of the Institute, tenderly unpacking and dusting off new artefacts, photographing them, cataloguing them, and affectionately stroking their corners when nobody was looking, trying to piece together their history, before sending them off to the lab.

Despite an unquestionable dedication to his work, Frank’s successes were modest and professional recognition eluded him. His doctoral thesis had twisted itself into a knot of taxonomies, taphonomies, a few other -omies, and ground to a halt in a blind alley, where it was currently parked and where it was going to remain unless he did something about it and soon. If he were to be completely honest with himself, and Frank was adept at avoiding such candour, he would have to admit the possibility that his whole research project might be heading for a scrap heap, pulling his entire career in the Institute with it.

This morning however, he woke up thinking that all of it was no longer of any importance, as his life was about to turn the corner. Today was going to be the first day worth mentioning in his future resume. He was getting the break he’d been longing for.  He conveniently shooed away a question whether he deserved the success that was inevitably hurtling towards him.

There were two reasons why he believed fate was about to deal him a winning hand at last. Both landed through the letterbox on his doormat yesterday.

First was his brand new passport. Frank applied for it several weeks before for no particular reason, just in case, and promptly forgot all about it, so its arrival was a surprise, not an amazing surprise, but not an unwelcome one either.

The second letter was from the Institute. Frank re-read his favourite part of the short note over his bowl of Weetabix, ‘In acknowledgement of your work for the Institute to date, which you always complete to extremely high standards and frequently demanding deadlines, we would like to invite you to an informal meeting to discuss a possible career advancement opportunity. Please contact…’

Frank tried hard not to believe in signs, especially since the last fiasco in that department, when he mistook Maggie’s blocking his number for a clear sign that she really liked him and was simply setting him a challenge by removing the most obvious method of communication from the equation. It was only when her new boyfriend turned up on his doorstep and crushed his septum with one well-executed blow that Frank realised that he might have misread the situation.

Today was different, though. With the passport and the letter arriving in his life at precisely the same moment, the writing was on the wall. He could feel it in his bones. His own bones, he added for his amusement, not the ones that piled in unopened crates in the corner of the room at work. He had a habit of adding palaeontologist in-jokes even when talking to himself.

He brought down a suitcase from the attic and decided to start packing straight away. He was not taking chances, in case they needed somebody who was available immediately. He practised his best casually smug facial expression in the mirror, ‘I’m ready whenever you are’.

Since he had no way of second-guessing which dig site they might have pencilled in for him, packing was proving tricky, so he checked long-term weather forecast for a number of possible countries scattered over four continents; better safe than sorry.
At 7.30 am he could wait no longer.

– Hello, Institute of Vertebrates, Professor Russel’s office, Angela speaking, how may I help you?
– Oh, hi, it’s Frank Dobson, I would like to schedule an appointment with the Professor, I received a letter inviting me to an informal meeting to discuss….
– Hold on a sec, let me log into Professor’s diary, is it urgent?
– Well – Frank put on his conspiratorial voice – you tell me, at the moment your knowledge about what we are likely to talk about is much more accurate than mine, as…
– I am afraid I have no idea what the Professor wishes to discuss with you, but he does have a last minute lunch cancellation today, so would you be able to come today at 12.30?
– A cancellation, I see. Rather a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? Seems like it is more urgent than I thought. Anyway, I don’t suppose you could lift the veil of secrecy, ever so slightly, just a little, and tell me if it’s Mongolia or …?
– Sorry, sir, you lost me. We shall be expecting you at 12.30, and the Professor will have 20 minutes for you.
– I guess discretion is a prerequisite in your job, fine by me, mum’s the word.
– Sir, I have another call waiting, so I am going to end this call, goodbye.
– Not to worry, I appreciate your professional approach, see you soon, nice talking to you.

Frank found himself delivering the last platitudes to the dull continuous phone signal, as Angela had disconnected.

Same day appointments with Professor Russell simply did not happen, unless it was a matter of life and death. Life and death of a fragile fossil site, Frank mused happily. The site which he was being sent to look after, secure and preserve to the best of his abilities. His reputation for being gentle with the artefacts must have been noted where it mattered after all. The only remaining question was, where was he going?

Still only eight thirty, plenty of time to take care of everything. He finished packing, went through the list of current projects the Institute had an interest in worldwide for the third time, made a cucumber and pumpkin salad for Jasper the gerbil, watered the plants, and then slapped his forehead as he suddenly remembered something. Cathy, his elderly next door neighbour was in.
– Hi Cathy, huge favour to ask.

Jasper’s and the plants’ survival secured, Frank strolled out of the door with half an hour to spare. It was only when he got to the bottom of the stairs to the Institute and was about to jump two steps at a time when he realised he was pulling the suitcase behind him. If he went back home now, he would end up being late for the meeting, so he carried on, slowly dragging his luggage upstairs.

– Frank! Thank you for coming so soon. Professor Russell outstretched his warm podgy hand towards him. Just wanted to run something past you. Oh, are you going away? Professor gestured to the suitcase.

– You tell me, Professor, Frank smiled, happy to play along.
If the Professor found his response a bit odd, he didn’t let it show. He carried on.

– I’ve looked at your work records for the last six months, and I could see that you spend most of your time sorting through rather large number of late Triassic fish bones. I hope it won’t put you off fish pie for life.
– I honestly don’t mind, Professor.
– Still, I thought you might be ready for a new challenge.
That was Frank’s cue to deliver his well-rehearsed line.
– I am ready Professor. Ready whenever you are, he added with a knowing nod of the head, overdoing the theatrics slightly.
– Right, right, good to hear. I must warn you though, the learning curve will be steep, and it might be unsociable hours.
– That’s an understatement and a half, Professor, if I may say so.
– Well, I wouldn’t…

– Alright, Professor, I like a bit of teasing just like the next person, but I don’t think I can keep this up much longer, please put me out of my misery. I tried to work it out for myself, I checked a number of our sites, but I am none the wiser, is it Mongolia? Because if it is, I just want to say I am totally fine with it, I mean Argentina sounds really interesting, and I actually got a decent grade in A-level Spanish. Not much use for Spanish in Mongolia, is there? But I think it would be amazing to visit the place, they say one in 200 men living today is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, so it would be like visiting my ancestors’ graves, unless of course I am one of the remaining 199 men who are nothing to do with him, is it Mongolia, Professor?  And please don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against any other places, I would not want to sound ungrateful, and I am not saying that I wouldn’t be happy about Tanzania or even Utah, because I would, in fact, by all means, Africa, the cradle of civilisation, that makes a lot of sense, I am not picky, so yeah, anywhere at all. I’ve heard we are about to set up camp in Antarctica, is that true, because if it is, I am your man, too, language would not be an issue, I am not sure people are too chatty in those sort of temperatures. Oh, shoot, I will need a visa for Mongolia, won’t I?

Professor Russell was sitting very still. He covered his mouth with his hand, his eyes darting about. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft and gentle, ‘What, for the love of God, are you talking about?’

‘Actually, you know what, let’s try something else, let’s see if we could pretend that this had not just happened, and that you didn’t just lose your, well, not sure what it was really, I can only guess we were not working from the same hymn sheet excuse the cliché. Anyway, where was I, before you felt like sharing a list of random geographical locations with me, oh, yes, steep learning curve.  What I had in mind for you was to give you a senior supervisory role in our brand new coprolite analysis department.  What do you say?

It was Frank’s turn to sit in open-mouthed silence. This went beyond his most daring hopes. Instead of digging in dusty Mongolian steppes or sweating in bug-infested Argentinian pampas, with no guarantee of any significant find, the Professor was inviting him to dig in the actual excrement of actual dinosaurs, without leaving the comfort of the Institute. He was asked to devote his days to peeling off outer layers of mineralised crust to reveal the most precious core, the digested content of the stomachs of those beautiful beasts, oh, my, this was the closest he would ever get to taking the glorious creatures of his dreams for a walk and scooping their poop after them. Life did not get any better than this.

‘People never cease to surprise me’, Cathy told her church choir friends later that week, between sips of aromatic green tea. ‘Take my neighbour Frank. Maureen, you met him, the geeky fossil man. He tells me his boss dropped him in a heap of dinosaur shit, and I mean literally, mind you they have a fancy word for it, crapo-sphere or something, and Frank, bless him, happy as larry about it, calls it promotion, his highest professional achievement. I call it a pile of crap.’

 

Being a part-time writer part-time interpreter part-time wife and mother and all time over-thinker of everything leaves me with precious little time for anything else.

This week I am focusing on overthinking the number of words I should be writing a day if I wish to continue calling myself a writer, as well as the number of hours I should realistically devote to producing the self-prescribed daily word quota.

Having invested, or to be more accurate, wasted, a considerable amount of cognitive time on trying to solve this dilemma, I then made an effort to remind myself that perhaps I should aim for quality over quantity at all times, and if I ever manage to write something remotely reminiscent of one of those beautifully crafted  passages of prose which constrict the reader’s throat and cause a tear to slowly well up in the corner of their eye, then perhaps it really doesn’t matter whether I manage to adhere to a self-inflicted regime of two thousand words a day or any such similarly regimented madness. The only thing that such discipline would achieve would be the confirmation that I possess an abundance of will-power, but would not necessarily make me a writer, never mind a good one.

Or perhaps it would? Is the mere act of churning out words onto paper or screen enough to call oneself a writer, or is the quality of how these words sound when strung together a necessary deciding factor? I have now produced over 200 words writing this piece, which is probably borderline excessive for what it’s worth. I leave you with one of my favourite literary passages of all time. I have a collection of those, but this is the one that comes to mind whenever I think ‘writing perfection’. A few passages from the Bible fall into this category too, but quoting the Bible is spiked with complications, and I don’t want to lead anybody to a conclusion that I am a deeply religious Bible quoting person, because I am not that person at all. But the quote I have chosen is much safer, I hope.

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

– James Joyce, Dubliners

 

 

People often have a thing about the sea. Obviously not all people, some people don’t feel anything about the sea, nothing at all, and that might be because they are mountain people, or river people, but some definitely have this thing about the sea, and they go overboard about it, they mythologise it, worship it, talk about its endless appeal, they look at it with reverence and with awe, and see it as a vast infinite mystery of creation and the key to understanding the world, human soul and everything else. Personally, I think they are overthinking the sea, but each to their own.

What follows is a true story. As true as I can make it several decades after it happened. When I was seven years old I went to the seaside for the first time. I went with my mother, her friend Zofia, and Zofia’s daughter Goska, who was a year older than me.  The sea was some 400 kilometres away, so it was the furthest I’d ever been from home at the time. It felt like a massively exciting expedition and I couldn’t wait.

I managed to keep several surprisingly clear memories of that trip. One image I have is of the four of us walking to the beach through the village. The village the way I remember it consisted of long winding dirt track with wonky wooden houses on both sides of the road. The houses looked uneven, in a wavy sort of way, as if they moments from collapsing. I remember dark wooden planks glistening in the sun. I am not sure why they glistened, whether it was rain or a shiny varnish reflecting the sun. This is one of those useless but persistent memories that have stayed with me through the years.

The year was 1974, the year of World Cup final in West Germany. Poland was doing well in the tournament. My mother and Zofia threw themselves into the football and watched all the games on a small black and white TV, with tiny convex screen, like a giant eye of an alien insect.   They both smoked a lot, laughed a lot, shouted and swore every time the game was not going well for us. I remembered being utterly horrified by their behaviour. So much so that I decided to run away. I told Goska. She listened with a serious expression, nodded thoughtfully, and then she said to me, acting like the older and wiser person she was, ‘fair enough, if that is something you feel you need to do, then go ahead and run away, but I am not going with you, I like it here’.  I was furious with her. I felt betrayed and angry. The responsibility of going it alone made me panic and soon my plan was abandoned. I wanted to tell my mother that I was not going to speak to Goska the traitor for the rest of the holiday, but that would no doubt prompt further questions, so I just pretended nothing happened.

My final memory of the trip is of the journey home. We were changing trains at Kutno. We all got onto the connecting train, only to realise that we were on the wrong train. Zofia and Goska picked up their bags and got off the train in time. My mother was dragging our suitcase down the corridor when the train started moving. I knew we were on the wrong train so I sprinted to the nearest door, jumped off the moving train, and rolled onto the platform next to Zofia’s feet. As I got up, I remember seeing my mother leaning out of the window and waving at me vigorously. When we all got reunited a few hours later, she told me she was not waving, she was shaking her finger angrily at me, but I couldn’t see it clearly, as the train was gaining speed by then.

So there, this concludes my memories from my first holiday by the seaside. Dark wooden houses, football and jumping off a moving train. Nothing at all remains of the actual sea, the beach, the sand. No images, no smells, no sounds.  I have not a single photograph of the trip either. I never went to Łeba again. I am told it is quite pretty round there.

Today is going to be a good day.

People are persuaded to tell themselves this line, and it is supposed to change the course of their day. I don’t know if today is going to be a good day, but today is the day that I am going to recommend a book to you. This book was a very long time coming, and that is still an understatement.

The way this world works I am going to say that this book was written by somebody I know well, and it tells a story, or rather several mini-stories of court and police interpreting, as well as telephone interpreting and interpreting in social care and medical context.

The stories are entertaining, the book is enjoyable, even if I do say so myself. I would like to recommend it to you. If you do end up not only buying it, but reading it too, please write a review, I would be most genuinely interested to know what you think of it.

So here goes. No further ado.

Introducing View from the Dock, Diary of the Court Interpreter by Cordelia Novak.
I hope you like it.

 

Last word from me on the subject, before I move on to Christmas. And that’s a promise.

A sense of post-voting deja vu has descended.
On the morning of the 24th of June 2016 I woke up to the BBC news ticker ‘UK votes to leave the EU’. I let out a short shriek of joy, threw my arms in the air, laughed, jumped up, laughed a bit more and couldn’t wipe a disbelieving grin off my face all day. In the evening I went online with the intention of sharing my celebratory mood with like minded friends, but I was stopped in my tracks by a deluge of doom and gloom status updates from the other side.

I decided it would be wise to stay silent for now. I kept my happiness to myself. It took me nearly a year before I dared come out as a Leave voter for fear of hurting the other side’s feelings. I never actively lied about which way I’d voted but I let people assume. It was easier that way and it meant avoiding being called a dumb naive idiot and worse by complete strangers online.

Today I feel this recent history repeating itself. The side I backed won again. This time the victory has been emphatic and, please let me say it just once, it felt bloody fantastic!
Still I feel that what is expected of me is to stay silent, again. I feel forced to show restrain in celebrating the election result for fear of hurting the feelings of those who backed the losing parties last week. I feel bullied into silence and restraint by those who wish to claim moral high ground just like they did three years ago. I am not sure I want to oblige this time, because I am really excited about what the future holds.

The sad side of it is that if I make my views known, I run the risk of being blocked, muted, unfriended and deleted by several people I have known for years, only because we hold different political views. Politics divides today like never before in my living memory.

When I first arrived in the UK I didn’t know how the majority of my friends were voting, they might have hinted but that was all. These days people from all sides wear their voting preferences as a badge of honour and use them as a starting point, and in some cases the only criteria whilst assessing another person’s intelligence, compassion, and decency.

Today, instead of white Christmas, I am dreaming of the day when this is no longer the case.

.

Now that dust begins to settle, I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on my unlikely, borderline surreal stretch of electioneering in North Cornwall. Unlikely for several reasons; not my constituency, not my usual choice of activities in the run up to Christmas, and, last not least, not my party. For those of you who have not heard from me in the last couple of months, I was helping my son and his team in the final stages of their campaign to elect their local candidate to Parliament. The location was Launceston, the party was the Liberal Democrats, the candidate was Danny Chambers, a vet and one of the nicest people you are ever likely to meet.
It is possible that I am still drained by it all, my muscles certainly still aching from all the walking, my brain still processing the experience, which makes coherent reflection difficult. As I look back, all I can see is a series of stubborn images that just won’t go away, so I will share these highlights with you.

**

On the first day of heavy leafleting I was paired up with an extremely dedicated lady, wisely covered in waterproof clothing from head to toe. She strode across the housing estate with the drive and focus I am not used to seeing often. At the end of our round, as we were waiting by the car for the others to return from their deliveries, I thought I’d have a go at small talk.

– So, what do you do?
– I am a politician.
– Oh, really? Where do you work?
– In London. I sit in the House of Lords.

**

Phone banking at HQ 48 hours before polling day.

Phone banking in campaigning terms has nothing to do with setting standing orders and paying your water bill, but is simply cold calling unsuspecting voters, interrupting their afternoon naps and dinners, to ask them unapologetically intrusive questions, such as what their voting intentions are, and why on Earth it is not going to be Lib Dem this time.

– Hello, is that Margaret? My name is Ania, and I am calling from the Lib Dem office in Launceston, I am working for Danny Chambers…

– Oh, I know Danny, he came to my door last week. Such a lovely boy, isn’t he. I am 93 years old, but I can see why they chose him, I can see how lots of young women will fancy him. It’s always good if a politician is good looking, isn’t it. It’s important that they are pleasant to look at.

Margaret gives out a naughty giggle, which puts a smile on my face. Not for long.

– Hello, is that Julia? My name is….
– I am sorry but I cannot possibly vote for your party, you want to cancel Brexit and I cannot accept that. Do not call this number again or I will report you for harassment. Goodbye.

– Hello, is that John? My name is Ania and I am calling…. Would you mind telling me how you intend to vote on Thursday?
– Well, I was undecided until now, but since you are the only party that bothered to call me, then I guess I need to return the favour and vote for your chap.

And so it goes, until my fingertip hurts from punching the digits on the office phone.

**

Matt, the campaign manager proudly says to the small crowd who gathered for final Sunday night motivational meeting, ‘every time I go to the pub I tell people something new about Danny, and recently they told me that they feel like they know all about him now’
– Yeah, about that Matt, perhaps you could stop doing it, says Danny in his typical slightly self-conscious hesitant way.

Alright, maybe you would have had to be there to appreciate this one.

**

Early afternoon. Leaflet deliverer comes back to the office after three hours in pouring rain.

– Cup of tea?
– Yes, please, a quick one, and then I will be on my way again. I thought I would do another couple of hours and then jump on telephone banking for the rest of the evening.

I look at the volunteer, and think to myself, what drives you, girl? You and nearly 200 others like you who keep walking through the unassuming yellow office door every day. What unspoken hopes they bring with them, what silent frustrations push them to extremes of physical endurance. One of the volunteers clocked up 70,000 steps on her Fitbit the other day. This is more than I do in a fortnight. I feel not only like an outsider and an impostor that I am, but also like an intruder, a gate crasher at their special celebration of what is best in their community.

**

Wednesday afternoon at Launceston town square. Rain, wind, Danny on a soap box, making final speech of his campaign. A handful of us listen, passers-by give him no more than a hurried glance and walk on. Danny speaks with his usual passion, as if addressing a crowd of thousands, mentions his local Lib Dem predecessors and how he feels honoured to continue in their tradition, how he believes we need more scientists in Parliament, he vows to fight child poverty in the region. This heart wrenchingly modest event feels moving in an understated, dignified way. On the short walk back to the office, I find myself willing North Cornish voters from places I have never heard of until a few days ago, to vote for him despite Brexit, despite Jo Swinson, despite myself.

**

24 hours to go. The Girl with Purple Hair, a keen volunteer, has just had some positive feedback from last minute canvassing and is performing an impromptu victory dance in the office, hands waving, hair tossing, the works, ‘we’ve got it, Danny’s got it, woohoo, we’ve got it!’.
Lip-biting silence greets her, our faces a study in guarded non-committal, as we know that the chances of winning here have always been slim at the very best, but nobody has the heart to snatch this moment of elation from her.

**

And finally. Just so it doesn’t all sound too saccharine sweet.

I never thought it was possible for a human to develop a mama bear level of protective attachment to a printer but I was proven wrong. My offer to assist one particularly zealous volunteer with printing a batch of 3000 polling day Good Morning leaflets was met with ferocious rejection.

– May I help with the printing?
– No! Absolutely not! I need to print them myself!

That was the only moment in the whole impossibly intense week when I felt a sense of perspective slipping away from the Launceston Lib Dem office.  My self-preservation instinct told me to walk away, and off I went into the relative calm of the raging rain and howling wind to deliver the final fifty letters, handwritten by the candidate.

**

Election night. A few minutes past midnight. North Cornwall dream all but over. Exit Poll and Blyth Valley result are greeted with shocked disbelief by my hosts, and then it only gets worse by the hour. This is when I part ways with them,  but it’s not until half way between Exeter St. David’s and Reading that I allow myself to celebrate the biggest victory since 1987 for the party I have supported all my adult life. And even then, the feeling is not as punch-the-air joyous as it would have been if I had spent the previous week buying last minute Christmas presents on Amazon Prime like a normal person. Damn you, Launceston!

Politics has been a topic of interest in our family for years. My son has loved the idea of being a politician on and off for the last 15 of his 25 years, or at least ever since he read First Among Equals, a classic politician’s handbook by Jeffrey Archer. Channelling Chuka Umunna, or Churchill if we want to go slightly overboard, he went through a couple of parties until he found his perfect fit with the Liberal Democrats.

I myself went through a phase of dabbing in and toying with the idea of having a go at politics. It never amounted to much in the end, and my political involvement to date at its highest was manning a Conservative Friends of Poland stall at a party conference several years ago. I did also go to one, yes one, meeting with local party chairman to discuss the prospect of me running for Tooting. So there, the extent of my once self-delusion, on a plate.

Looking back, it was so laughable that I am no longer sure whether that meeting actually took place, or did I just make it up, the way we all imagine ourselves in situations which are never going to happen, and then re-run these scenarios in our heads until they seem plausible? Well, this now sounds like one of those.

In the event, Dan Watkins took ‘my’ place and lost badly. So, in true Marlon Brando style, it could have been me, I could have lost to Sadiq Khan. Twice.

These days I limit myself to getting embroiled in futile political debates on Facebook. The moment I read that I didn’t know what I was voting for and that I was fooled by a promise on the bus, I am in. Common sense, better judgement, maturity, all forgotten. I don’t do Twitter, though. Small mercies.

The level of our family’s involvement in the actual nitty-gritty of it all goes up and down.
Right now I would say it’s up, what with my son working as a campaign manager for Danny Chambers, the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate for North Cornwall, and my youngest daughter writing emails to her mate Caroline asking her to help her persuade her mother (me) to let her go on another climate strike at the end of the month.

We didn’t know anything about it until Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, wrote back; ‘Dear Alexia, thank you for your email, however, I believe it would not be appropriate for me to ask your mum…’ thanks Caroline, at least one thing we can agree on.
Alexia is 14.

The rest of my family adopt a more laid back approach to politics, but it still doesn’t stop my husband from pointing out every gaffe and inconsistency of Boris Johnson’s government with a glint in his eye and reminding me several times a week what his exact opinion on the idiocy of Brexit is.

My middle daughter reserves her judgement, or simply has better things to do with her 17-year-old life.

So anyway. I am mentioning this because in the view of all the above, I might not be best qualified to assess the level of political awareness nationwide, and I might make assumptions judging by what goes on under my own roof, and what shocked me today beyond belief, perhaps shouldn’t have.

Today work took me to an out of the way West Sussex town which shall remain nameless.

Even after all these years, whenever I go out of London I am still surprised by how friendly people are and how much they talk to one another. Today was no different.
A friendly Irish woman in her early thirties started a conversation with me;

– Oh, so you are an interpreter, what language do you speak?
– Polish.
– Oh, I see, you must be busy then, lots of Polish people around here.
– Yes, I am busy for now, but it might all change after Brexit, they might decide to go back to Poland.
– No, no, no, Brexit was cancelled. It is not happening any more, I am pretty sure of it.
– Eer, no, I believe it is still happening, it’s just been a few delays.
– Oh, ok, I thought they cancelled it. What is Brexit anyway, I don’t understand any of it, do you?

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I stated the obvious that Brexit meant that we, Britain, the country, were leaving the European Union.  She said she didn’t understand what that actually meant, and then she asked me if I knew whether the word Brexit had any specific meaning or was it just a made-up word.

I began to wonder whether we were on some sort of candid camera wind-up or whether she was seriously asking me that. I told her that Brexit simply meant British Exit from the EU. She was amazed to hear that. She took a couple minutes to digest that piece of information, and then she thanked me for educating her what Brexit was. She was visibly pleased with herself, well, well, well, she said, I learnt something new today.

She then decided that since I was such a fountain of knowledge, she might as well milk me for all I got. What happened to the woman, she asked, they sacked her, didn’t they? We established that she meant Theresa May. She asked me a lot more questions, and she seemed genuinely fascinated by each answer. The highlights of our conversations were what is the EU, was Thatcher a Conservative, and what are we voting for in December.

After lunch, when I thought I was done with politics for the day, another lady, English, middle-aged, started chatting to me. She said she couldn’t help overhearing my earlier conversation. She then told me that Boris Johnson was an American, as he was born in New York, and grew up there, and that’s why he was going to sell our NHS to America.

Who needs the Russians.