The Banker's Niece 31: The chat show

1990

‘What a tosser,’ said Hugh. ‘Look at him. Hair down to his collar, velvet jacket, lace on his shirt. Who does he think he is? Mr Darcy?’

    Jane paused in her chopping and glanced from her kitchen to the sofa where Hugh currently sprawled in front of the television. To her surprise, Terry Wogan’s twinkly face and large gut filled the screen. She wouldn’t have thought chat-shows were Hugh’s thing at all. He usually watched sport.

    ‘So tell me how it all started,’ said Wogan. ‘What set you on the road to fame and fortune?’

    The interviewee laughed and the blood rushed to Jane’s head. Oh no. Not again.

    ‘I think you know the answer to that,’ said the interviewee.

    He had his arm along the back of Wogan’s sofa, behind some blonde in a leather skirt and six-inch heels.

    ‘Tell us once more,’ said Wogan, ‘for the sake of those of us who mightn’t have heard about you.’

    The audience laughed this time.

    ‘I was on the rebound,’ recited the young man. ‘I had to throw myself into something and I’d always loved music so –’

    ‘You mean to say some woman gave you the push? I can’t believe it,’ interrupted the blonde.

    Jane wasn’t sure whether she was being sarcastic or not.

    ‘Afraid so.’ A shadow passed over the musician’s face. ‘Well sort of.’

    ‘Loser,’ said Hugh.

    Jane tightened her grip on the handle of her knife.

    ‘But you’ve not done too badly since then,’ said the jovial Wogan, ‘with the auld cheek-to-cheek, with the auld ladies . . . ’

    ‘Old and not so old,’ said a voice from the other end of the sofa.

    It was one of those new-style comedians. Jane couldn’t remember his name but she remembered seeing him on ‘Saturday Live’.

    ‘I s’pose not,’ said the musician.

    He sounded tired.

    ‘No wedding bells though,’ persisted Wogan in his teasing way. ‘None of them has ever got you down the aisle.’

    ‘No,’ said the interviewee shortly.

    ‘Oooh,’ said the comedian. ‘There’s a story there.’

    ‘But enough of all that,’ said Wogan, obviously realising he wasn’t achieving anything with that line of questioning. ‘Tell me what the band’s up to these days. Tell me about the new album, Too close to the sun . . .’

    Hugh muted the television and swivelled to look at Jane.

    ‘There you have a classic example of style over substance,’ he said waving the remote control to emphasise his point. ‘That man has no talent whatsoever. All he does is flash his hips and his hair.’

     She’d tried so hard to get it right this time - right background, right education, right amount of money, right height, right age, reasonably good-looking – so why, in that particular minute, did she find Hugh so utterly loathsome? Why did she want to seize his head and batter it against the wall?

    ‘And – what - talent - do - you - have?’ she asked slowly and deliberately, engine racing, foot hard on the brake.

    ‘Me?’ said Hugh, sounding surprised. ‘I have qualifications. I work at something real. I have a good job.’

    ‘As a lawyer in a multinational corporation,’ she exclaimed. ‘What good did that ever do the world?’

    ‘But I earn good money - ’ His face changed. She wondered how she’d ever thought him even reasonably good-looking.  ‘- money which you’re only too happy to let me spend on you.’

    That was it. She released the brake.

    ‘I have my own job,’ she hissed. ‘I pay my way. I’ve never asked you for anything. And whose flat are you in at the moment? Whose sofa are you sitting on? Whose television are you watching? Whose lager are you drinking? Whose food are you about to eat?’

    Hugh stood up, shaking his legs in order to straighten his trousers. ‘Well if that’s how you feel, perhaps I’d better go.’

    ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘Perhaps you’d better.’

    Bother, she thought, as he slammed the door behind him. There goes another one.

  

31 December 1999

Jane sat on her sofa in her new pink fleece dressing-gown and fluffy pink bedsocks, reporter’s notebook and pencil beside her. Her radio-controlled wall-clock (accurate to the millisecond, an ironic present from a friend who knew about Jane's love-hate relationship with time-keeping) showed two minutes to midnight. Periodic firework bangs as well as loud roars from the streets below reminded her how glad she was that she had elected to spend the occasion at home alone.

    She could have joined in, of course she could. She could have gone out with a group of friends and mingled with the revellers outside. She could have travelled to Sussex and stayed with Lucy and Ollie and their three lovely children (and dog) and celebrated en famille. She could even have gone to Kent and attended one of her parents’ ghastly parties.

    But she hadn’t done any of that.

    It wasn’t that she didn’t like New Year festivities. Usually she welcomed them as a way to stave off the depression that came with the thought that while the year was about to be new she was the same old disaster and another year nearer to death. And it wasn’t that New Year was ‘just a number’ as the Scrooges said. It was far from that, as she well knew from things that had happened to her. And especially so this time round.

    Perhaps she was being masochistic, as was her wont according to some of her friends, but just for once, instead of avoiding the problem, she wanted to have a good hard look at her life, past, present and yet-to-come. This calendrical event was too important to waste.

    Hence the notebook, in which she planned to write down her resolutions for 2000 - a new year, a new century and a new millennium.

Anyway, she loved her flat. She treasured every moment she got to spend in it. Why should she go out?

    When she first returned to London twenty years ago (Oh God, was it really that long?), she stayed with Fee who’d returned from New Zealand resolved not to break up her lover’s family and had hooked up with another businessman – a single one this time. They were in the process of moving to the country ready for the appearance in four months of their first child, so Jane didn’t stay with them for long. As soon as she’d acquired a job, she found somewhere to rent.

    It was horrible. A damp dark basement in a seedy area where gangs of drunken men rampaged past her windows at night.

    Eight years later, her father – obviously resigned at last to the fact that some rich young man was not going to take her off his hands – offered her some money with which to buy a place of her own.   

    By then she’d risen from lowly editorial assistant to lofty commissioning editor with a good salary so she used her father’s money for a deposit and – much to his disapproval – took out a mortgage.

    She only hesitated for a moment before taking the money from her father. She hadn’t asked for it; it had been freely offered. Why shouldn’t she make the most of her advantages? To refuse would have been churlish, and made her relationship with her parents worse than it already was.

    And as soon as she stepped into her new flat, it was nothing to do with her father any more. It was hers.

    On the third floor and created from a former industrial building in the up-and-coming area of Clerkenwell, it was light, spacious, safe and centrally located. The kitchen, compact but well fitted out, opened to a sweeping sitting and dining area with balcony - perfect for entertaining (if she wanted to do any) or for spreading herself of an evening, reading and contemplating the view of London's skyline. She almost felt settled.

    And now here she was eleven years later.

A violent explosion shook the building and Jane looked at the clock again. Midnight. The witching hour. She picked up her pencil.

Resolution number one. She would not get angry with her parents – and then bottle up her feelings because she suspected that in any argument she would come off worst. She would at least try to express her point of view, even if she sounded like a two-year-old in a tantrum.

Resolution number two. (She suspected that this was connected to resolution number one, but had yet to find out.) She would do something about her migraines, even if that something involved the dreaded ‘complementary’ therapies. She had no choice about this as the drugs weren’t working any more and the migraines were starting to intrude.

Resolution number three. She would stop having meaningless relationships with men. Now she was in her mid-forties it was unseemly, and in any case she might finally have realised that she preferred her own company. She was swayed by pressure from friends and family who saw coupledom as normal. She liked the initial stages of relationships, the ‘being in love’ (whatever that meant), when deep down she knew she had no intention of making any of them permanent and that wasn’t kind. Men were an addiction, a habit she had to break.

Resolution number four. This was the one she’d been dreading.  

    She would not search for him in the media. She would not hunt out scraps of news, or the sound of his voice, or the sight of his face. What had started some ten years ago as a way to protect herself from random encounters had become an obsession.

    More than that. She would deliberately avoid all radio and television programmes or print publications in which he was likely to appear, even if that cut her off from a large portion of modern popular culture.

    She had to excise him from her life.

    It was her only hope of a fulfilling future.

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A nature reserve on the Somerset Levels

The Somerset Levels lie across the neck of land that separates Devon and Cornwall from the rest of England. Originally marshland, they were drained by monks in the Middle Ages and are now used mainly for grazing cattle. They do still flood, most notably recently in the winter of 2013-14 when the village of Muchelney was an island for several weeks and the inhabitants had to go shopping by boat.

Thanks to the BBC for this map

They aren’t startlingly pretty or dramatic like other places in this country but I love them. I think this is because they give the impression of being closer to their natural state than most British countryside. There aren’t many houses, for obvious reasons, and keeping the water out is a constant battle – involving sluices, pumps, sea defences, ditches and dredging. It wouldn’t take long, one feels, for the area to revert.

    Because the Levels are so different from hilly and increasingly busy Devon, Frog and I often visit on our ‘days off’, having lunch in Glastonbury with its delightful eccentric inhabitants and then walking. One place we’ve never been able to walk however is a nature reserve that we pass on the road as dogs aren’t allowed – until last week when Frog’s recent retirement meant that we could go out on the dog’s day-care day. Now at last, I thought, I could experience the real wild Levels.

    Somehow though I was disappointed.

    Perhaps it was the fence around the edge keeping out predators like foxes. Perhaps it was the quantities of serious birdwatchers with their telephoto lenses. Perhaps it was the neat walkways and the signs everywhere telling you what to look for.

    I felt like a zoo animal, confined to an artificial re-creation of my natural habitat.

    Of course at the moment reserves are vital for preserving species, but I can’t wait for the day (which has to come) when the countryside is reversed, when wildness is the norm and reserves are where we grow our food. (For more on this see https://www.rewildingbritain.org.uk/ .)

Here, anyway, is what we saw.

We started off at the reed bed. The swishing noise of the wind through the reeds was lovely.

The reed walk

Then we walked past some ditches and pools.

A secret willow-fringed pool

Purple loosestrife, a damp-loving plant

I had to look up this butterfly when I got home as I don't know much about butterflies - and I think it's a painted lady. I knew the plant however. It's hemp agrimony -  another damp-lover.

Then we sat on a floating platform on the edge of a small lake which reminded me of the Norfolk Broads. (I had difficulty taking photographs because the sun was so high and strong that all I could see on the screen was myself. The picture below may be slightly wonky.)

The small lake

At one point we had to cross a track or ‘drove road’ as they’re called on the Levels. Drove roads look inviting but they aren’t public footpaths and are often blocked with gates, barbed wire and ‘private’ notices. True to form there was a big notice here warning visitors to cross quickly and not stray up the track - for their own safety and that of the cattle driven along it. Hmph.

The out-of-bounds drove road

We ended up at the bird hide and information hut. As I read the board, I noticed movement above. Oh how clever, I thought: there’s a moving exhibit. When I looked up I realised that it wasn’t just moving. It was alive. And, judging by the amount of droppings on the floor, had made the hut its own.
    But it wasn't an endangered species, and it certainly wasn't on the board's list of creatures to look out for.
    That's real nature for you, I thought - it doesn't follow the rules.

    It was the best bit of the walk.

The anomalous pigeon

Rolf Lidberg and his trolls

Two years ago Frog (with a little help from me) knocked down the wall between our bathroom and the smallest bedroom in our house. A year later the builders began work on our new, expanded bathroom. Now, two years later, the new bathroom is finished and I have begun sorting the debris that resulted from the building work and from emptying a bedroom.

Two years ago the bathroom and adjoining bedroom became one . . .

Because the bedroom was so small, it was used mostly by visiting children, with the pictures on the wall reflecting this. Among the debris I rediscovered these enchanting troll paintings, which last saw the light of day a year ago as illustrations for my series of blog posts on the visit Frog and I paid to Norway, the land of my mother’s mother. 

I have researched (and blogged here about) a Scandinavian print of my mother’s of which I have only a copy as all five of us children wanted to give it a home after my mother's death. I hoped to find an original print of my own but unfortunately I haven’t yet done so. 

'Happy families', a Scandinavian print of my mother's

The troll pictures are small posters which Frog and I found in an Exeter shop about thirty years ago. Now, after our visit to Norway and with my new-found enthusiasm for that part of the world – so beautiful, wild and uncommercialised - I wondered if we could do some research on these pictures too.
 

‘D’you think we could find original prints of these?’ I asked Frog last week, and the next day through the magic of the internet he came up with the name of the artist, Rolf Lidberg.

I then did some research of my own and discovered from Wikipedia that he was Swedish and lived from 1930 to 2005. He illustrated five children’s books, whose English titles are: Trolls (1984), A Troll Wedding (1992), The elf book (1995), The Troll Valley (2001) and The trolls go fishing (2001). We think our pictures probably come from the last one. Cards of the illustrations and secondhand copies of the books are available but again, as yet, we haven’t found any prints.

My mother did read Norwegian books to us when we were children, translating them as she went, including a mysterious one about a Mrs Green, a Mrs Brown and a Mrs White, but the Rolf Lidberg books are too recent seeing as I was born in the 1950s so I never came across them. I also have vague memories of carved wooden trolls appearing on the table at Christmas, as well as small gnomes which my mother called 'nisse’ (pronounced 'nisser'). (It’s only recently that I've discovered that 'nisse' is a Norwegian word and that ‘Nissen Huts’ are prefabricated barrack-type buildings designed by a Colonel Nissen, not log cabins at the bottom of the garden suitable for little people as I had always imagined.)

According to Scandinavian folklore, trolls are scary human-sized creatures who live in the woods, but what could be more adorable than Lidberg’s trolls, with their patched clothes and sweet smiles? Lidberg himself, according to Wikipedia, was hunchbacked and sported a bushy beard. Was he modelling the trolls on himself and if so isn’t that a wonderful example of celebrating ourselves as we are and not worrying about conforming to conventional ideas of beauty?

It’s a shame that the word ‘troll’ has now come to mean something quite different.

. . . and here as it looks today is the same part of the bathroom as that in the picture above

Highly Sensitive People

Every couple of weeks since April I’ve been seeing a spiritual healer (Therese) - who works at a local health centre thanks to an enlightened doctor. Even though my physical complaints haven’t gone away, I feel much happier. This may be because of the healing and it may also be because of the conversations that Therese and I have. I can talk to her about all the things that really interest me and which you don’t mention in normal company for fear of being thought mad (such as seeing things, hearing things, writing, spirituality).

Therese has introduced me to the concept of the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) which is a newish definition and describes about one in five of the population. Even with this large proportion, sensitivity is not usually valued in our society and many HSPs struggle to fit in and become ill as a consequence - often chronically.

In order to address this, a friend and one-time pupil of Therese, Mel Collins, has written The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People, cover below.

There is a questionnaire at the beginning of the book, designed to help the reader discover whether or not they fall into the category, and I thought you might be interested in seeing it. (Excuse my erratic scanning and I hope Mel won't mind me reproducing part of her book.)

I don’t know about you, but I ticked every statement but one. That was number 19, and when I mentioned it to Frog he said I should have ticked that one too because he’s been insensitive in the past. (I couldn’t possibly comment.)

The concept and the book have been something of a revelation to me. They’ve shown me that I’m not deranged, or damaged – as I’ve always thought I was. The way I am is innate. I can’t change it. I can even be proud of it since HSPs have much to offer. Many of them are artists or teachers, in health care, fighting for social justice or against the mistreatment of the environment, animals and children. As the book says, sensitivity is a gift, not a flaw.

Do have a look if you’re interested in finding out more.

Incidentally, the Foreword is written by the broadcaster Jeremy Vine, an HSP himself.

Saying goodbye to THE BANKER'S NIECE (for the moment)

I probably won’t be posting any more extracts from the novel on this blog. This is because I shall soon start having to give away major plot points and this will spoil the novel for people who come across these later chapters without having read earlier ones.

About a third of the book is still to come. For those of you who’ve stuck with it so far, thank you. I know it’s hard to keep tabs on the plot when you’re having to read it in such a disjointed way but rest assured that everything in the novel is connected and everything is there for a purpose. All will be explained and ends tied up (I hope) – in due course.

When I’m feeling strong I might explore ways of publishing the novel as a whole. I’ll keep you informed.

That’s today’s position anyway. I may change my mind. It has been known.

In the meantime, here are three pictures from recent dogwalks.

Wild 'dog' rose in a field hedgerow

A misty view from a nearby National Trust park

A drove road (ancient track) on the Somerset Levels