Round, with integral handles

This was the fulfilment of a long-held dream: in order to enable my daughter to learn to make baskets from willow wands, I had to join in too.

She has always been attracted to weaving and basketry and taken every opportunity a child could take to learn.  But I had to wait for her to grow taller than me before enrolling her on an adult course: this week-end, at a month shy of 14, she joined me, a friend and three other adults on a course at Woodchurch, Kent, with basketmaker Alan Sage.

So even I, who am no good at all at crafts, made a basket.  After starting us off, the ever-patient and generous Alan guided us through the stages of making the simplest shape of basket, round, which nevertheless seemed to offer an endless combination of possibilities.  I chose a large onion shape with integral handles while others made straight ones with bow handles.  My daughter embarked on a large, straight-sided handle-less version to act as her new waste-paper bin.

The task was not without its challenges.  Even once the basics were explained and demonstrated, the possibilities for error seemed multitudinous.  I only had to start chatting to someone for a weave to go wrong, and an agonised call would go up for help from Alan.  I don’t think I was alone but I may have been the one who needed the most support.  My onion shape needed to lean outwards before tilting in again, and at one stage my early effort leaned out so much I thought it had lost the plot entirely.  Alan guided the shape back in, I wove furiously and the result is surprisingly attractive.  In two days we’ve learned a lot and taken home two baskets to boot.

The challenge now is to remember how we did it and try again, with willow from our own woodland.  I will buy some books and rely on my daughter’s excellent memory to get going  as soon as possible.  With its combination of pure logic and three-D visuals, basketmaking is curiously addictive.

The “drop” command is a popular one in our house.  Pippin likes to fulfil his retriever’s instincts by grabbing anything within reach, even if that thing is attached to a person.  Trouser legs are nibbled, baskets are raided, paper is chewed and, or course, he still loves his favourite items, shoes.

He is allowed plenty of chewables such as his toys, empty cardboard boxes and lumps of wood brought in from outside.  The trouble is learning which ones he can’t have, and that is where the drop command comes in.

So here it is.  The voice deepens.  The tone, from baby-sweet, waxes serious.  Drop.  A bit sharper: Pippin!  Drop!  And again – Pippin! Drop!

No reaction.  The jaws clamp shut and a mocking half-growl emerges.  Socks are the worst because they stretch and threaten to tear, and he thinks it’s fun.  So now we resort to our ultimate weapon: the water spray – one shot and he’s startled enough to back off and drop his quarry.

This strategy has been in use a few days and now it is enough just to show him the spray bottle and say “drop” for it to work.  I’m hoping that soon, “drop” alone will suffice.  Meanwhile, his obsessive need to work his jaws has earned him the colourful title “Nippin’ Pippin” from the children’s music teacher.

He may look like a labrador but Pippin is also half collie, and predicted to learn quickly.  He already sits when offered treats or meals (including when these are not on offer but he would like them to be), and stays in a room I am leaving if I put my hand up and say “stay” or “down”.  He is intrigued by the chickens but will leave them alone when restrained by our voices, dropping to the ground in collie fashion.

But like a true labrador, he can’t always restrain his appetites when tempted by grain left behind by the chickens or by the tantalising contents of the dishwasher.  Still, there’s plenty of time yet.  At 10 weeks today, Pippin is a “nipper” in more ways than one.

Pippin the pup knows how to get attention from strangers when he wants it.   There is a special look of intense puppiness, big eyes, fast-wagging tail and licking tongue that some people find totally irresistible.  And what’s more, he knows it: he seems to have a sixth sense for spotting a person who will fall for him.

Time for a rest

Yesterday as I was closing the gate to our drive, two young men strolled past carrying tennis rackets and balls.  Pippin slipped through the nearly-closed gate and scampered after one of them.  As I called out “Pippin” increasingly urgently the young man in question noticed the pup, fondled him and walked back to me so Pippin would follow.  Today as I posted a letter in our village, Pippin stood in the doorway of the hairdresser’s shop wagging his tail furiously.  It wasn’t long before the shop’s staff were all over him.

He kept me company today as I began tidying our overgrown front garden.  He hid indoors when the mower started but ventured out again as I raked the grass, the garden quiet now but for the the distant thump-thump of a neighbour’s sound system.  Rotted leaves had created a mulch along the edges of our drive where the couch-grass encroached and fed off itself.  The metal spade rang out against the tarmac as I scraped at the layer of mulch, making Pippin bark and snap.

He likes to watch us in the house with his brow furrowed quizzically, ears cocked at a playful angle.  His thin tail, curled slightly upwards in collie fashion, waves cheerfully above him whenever his head is down.  His appetite for shoes is undiminished and all footwear is now placed beyond his reach.  I would laugh at the sight of him making off with my old Birkingstocks if I weren’t so concerned about saving them.  As for socks, he won’t let go of them until sprayed with water, so we keep the spray bottle handy.

In so many ways he is changing our lives – and we haven’t started “walkies” yet.

Just when we thought the sleepless nights were over and the nappies done with, we take on a new responsibility.    A new responsibility with a wet nose, a wagging tail, two bright eyes and an eager disposition.

Pippin at nine weeks

Pippin is nine weeks old today and has lived with us for the past three days, a Labrador-collie cross from a farm in a nearby village.  I’m looking forward to long walks and games of ball throwing, watching him run with the children and the whole social life that revolves around owning a dog.

But right now he’s a pup (a necessity for a dog that has to adapt to chickens), not yet socialised or house-trained, unable to go out properly because his jabs aren’t complete, and missing his mum.  This explains why I was up at 6 this morning and 5am two days ago comforting a whining creature, why there is the occasional puddle to mop up and why, like in the old days of having toddlers, precious objects are being lifted out of reach.

He is a delight already, loves people who come to the house and will readily roll over for anyone who looks prepared to scratch is tummy.  He trails after me as I potter around the house and if I’m still, he curls up on the floor and watches my every move like a small black shadow.  He can be frisky too -  he loves to chew the furniture when he isn’t trotting off with a shoe in his mouth.

Shoes, chair legs, tissues, clothes, electric cables and human limbs are all grist to the mill, or to his teeth anyway.  I have had to create makeshift barriers out of cardboard boxes, paint chilli paste on sensitive items and even change out of flowing skirts to escape the shredding action of his small but effective jaws.

I’m assured he’ll grow out of the random chewing as well as of the occasionally painful habit of jumping up, but only if we train him properly.  The real work still lies ahead.

I grew up on dictionaries.  My mother placed a few in my cot to force my head lie on a particular side.  She had plenty of them because she was a translator: there was Larousse for French, Collins for English and and assortment of bilingual aids to translation, from the general to the highly specialised.  I still own a trilingual chemical dictionary in French, English and German, forty-odd years old, which I couldn’t bring myself to part with after her death.

There were also the tiny Collinses for going truly abroad to a country whose language none of us could actually speak.  I still have the Italian one in which my sister and I taught ourselves to count.  And now I have added more for the languages I have dabbled in since: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch.

Growing up bilingual meant that my sister and I learned our French and English more slowly than other native speakers.  We could deal with some topics only in one language until the other had had time to catch up.  Often a sentence begun in one language would call for a word we could only think of in the other, while the right word hovered on the edge of our consciousness.  Our mother, ever the strict matriarch, would not allow us to dodge the problem by talking Franglais.  Worse, some words in one language really do resemble words of the other while having a totally different meaning, and woe betide the girl who used one out of context.

As we turned constantly to our mother, the oracle of the right word in the right place in the right language, she grew exasperated and evolved a stock answer to all our languague queries:  “Look it up on the dictionary.”  This would have us reaching for the shelf and taking down the fat volume in which all the answers were inscribed.

This reflex stayed with me later on as I began to tackle the big questions in life.  Why are we here?  Is there a God?  Why do people suffer?  These existential problems plagued me, and so I longed to reach for the simple solution, the big book in which the answers were neatly listed in alphabetical order.

Whatever philosophers and theologians have written, there is no such book.  Study the Bible as I might, I still have to think for myself – growing up is the art of living with the imperfect, the tension between the ideal and the achievable.  There are no indexed answers waiting between folded pages, on a shelf in a corner of the lounge.

And yet I am still fond of browsing dictionaries.  I am often distracted, as I search for an entry, by the words in bold type at the top of each page that mark the searcher’s place in the all-powerful alphabet – filbert, overweening, purdah, thulium.  Such ill-assorted words rise to the surface of my mind as I move onto other tasks.  They may not have done much good in the cot but dictionaries remain a non-negotiable part of my life.

Padua Children’s Ward, at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent (UK), exudes a sense of permanence.  There is a parents’ room with comfy sofa, a TV, fridge, microwave, kettle and sink.  In the early evening parents are playing with their children in the side rooms, some with the radio on softly in the background.  A couple of hours later the little ones are asleep and all is quiet.  The place feels unhurried – to me anyway; staff are friendly and the other parents respectful.  For a place that is transient by its very nature, the ward has been made to feel like a home of sorts.

While I worked as a microbiologist at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH), I never saw the wards.  I saw plenty of little patients in lifts and corridors as I moved between labs in my white coat.  As GOSH takes only the severest cases, I knew that every adult I passed who wasn’t staff was the parent of a seriouly ill child.  This awareness was enough to sober me during my daily rounds.

So it was also a sobering experience bringing my son to Padua Ward two days ago.  We were assigned a “cubicle”, actually a tiny room with just one bed.  On our way there we passed a woman in tears outside another room where a baby squalled.  “She’s been like this for hours,” she explained to a nurse who was doing her best to comfort her.  Behind this ward’s calm façade lies the hidden drama of sick children, of parents condemned to spent long periods here, waiting, worrying, suffering.

I felt humbled as my son began to rally.  With his headache, fever, weakness and dehydration from nearly 24 hours of vomiting, he really did look terrible.  But as the time passed and he continued to keep his fluids down, I knew he was improving, and that we’d be home later that night.

Books that are made into film are rarely better in that form.  Too often a film races through complex networks of action and relationship, keen to get the story in a straight line and tell just enough of it to make sense.  In some the story resembles a series of ticked boxes as familiar events are assembled like hooks on which to pin the visuals, while the real sentiment is left out.  In others the action and characters are so altered that readers who have loved the books barely recognise their old friends.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is especially guilty of this latter sin, distorting the Elrond into a jealous father who wants to draw his daughter away from Middle Earth and leave its allied peoples to their terrible fate.  The stately Aragorn becomes lovesick and doubt-ridden, and even Treabeard the Ent withholds his help until he is brought face to face with the destruction of his forest.

But the Lord of the Rings has moments of filmic splendour that manage to transcend even Tolkien’s breathtaking vision.  One such is the moment of despair in The Return of the King when, just before the turning of the tide, all appears lost and hope seems at an end.

Denethor, steward of the city of Gondor and an angry and embittered man, sends his second son Faramir into a hopeless battle to punish him for the death of his more favoured older brother, Boromir.  Sadness and fear accompany the departure of Faramir and his army.  The wizard Gandalf watches in shocked silence while the women of Gondor strew the  men’s steps with flowers.  From this battle none will return save Faramir himself, gravely wounded.

As the army rides out Denethor is shown shut up in his great hall, occupied with peeling red fruits which he does not share with Pippin, the hobbit who has sworn him allegiance.  Instead he orders Pippin to do something that seems tragically inappropriate to the hour: to sing.  Pippin, while Denethor tears at the fruit with his teeth and lets the red juice run down the corners of his mouth, produces a song of melancholy sweetness that becomes the soundscape of the doomed fighters lining up to face the orcs.

The scene ends with Pippin in tears, unable to continue, while Gandalf sits in the courtyard weighed down with foreboding.

As an expression of injustice and despair, it takes some beating.

Every Wednesday my other half and I have a date.  We try and spend time at the local swimming pool to exercise our joints, muscles and lungs and if not actually increase our fitness levels, at least avoid seizing up altogether.

The trouble is, having grown up swimming in the open sea, I had pools.  This is one of the best in our locality, with good changing rooms and large lockers, a normal rectangular pool (no irregular beach) and lanes arranged for the lunchtime crowd.  I’m fine about the swimming, I just hate dragging myself to a pool.

What do I hate so much?  Perhaps it’s the smell of feet which this pool can’t seem to shake off.  Or maybe the fast American pop being pumped out at us, with a thumping beat some swimmers apparently need to keep them in rhythm.

Once I start on the lengths there are always problems with speed.  I have to deal with slow old ladies hogging the intermediate lane and whom I overtake three at a time, and with large men thrashing past me, eating up the lengths, displacing as much water as an ocean liner and making me gulp the pool water.  Much smoother are the sleek women, hatted and goggled, streaking ahead in the fast lane.  One strange bearded man performs the front crawl with paddles strapped to his hands and barely  moving his legs.

I’m sure I seem just as strange to others.  I like to vary my stroke between the sedate breaststroke and energetic backstroke and front crawl.  I also like to do stretches in the buoyancy of the water, dodging the determined length rats between bouts of exercise.

I can take about 20 minutes of this.  Afterwards I will smell chlorine on my hands for the rest of the day.  The best part of the pool, barely visible through my perennially steamed-up goggles, is the large clock telling me it’s time to leave.

It’s tough being a Londoner these days.  It’s trying enough having to wait for a bus that never comes, in this inclement January weather.  But then when it does come, it expects you to make your mind up about God.  200 of London’s buses are carrying the slogan of an atheist advertising campaign that was launched last week:   “There is probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

A further 600 UK buses are to be thus anointed at a cost of £140,000, raised by the British Humanist Association.  The campaign, endorsed by such luminaries as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry, aims to give people permission to be openly atheist and to celebrate freedom of speech.  We are assured that between 30 and 40% of the British population have “non-religious beliefs” and apparently, these people need to be given a voice.

It’s hard to believe this when atheism seems to be considered the only respectable position among the British chattering classes, particularly at The Guardian and the BBC.  After hearing writers, presenters and interviewees out-do each other in chalking up their atheist credentials, I find it amusing that anyone can still imagine they belong to a beleaguered and voiceless minority.

Even more amusing is that little loophole, the word “probably”.  It conjures up a vision of them all arriving at the Pearly Gates and saying to St Peter:  “We did say probably, please let us in, please…”.

At least the Christian response has been in like style.  According to The Guardian, the think-tank Theos sees the slogan as “a great discussion starter”, presumably for disgruntled bus passengers.  The Methodist Church has even thanked Dawkins for encouraging “a continued interest in God”, as though it were afraid he might fall by the wayside if the atheists didn’t keep an eye on him.

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking of  better uses for £140,000.  More buses perhaps?

Look, no rubber:  the world’s most incompetent artist has drawn a bird.

The inspiration – and the skill – for this feat came straight out of a book called Draw 50 Animals by Lee J. Ames.  I have purchased this book for countless children this Christmas and, having successfully used it to produce a tortoise, decided we needed one for the family.  Now my daughter has drawn a horse, my son a wolf and I this creature resembling a bluetit.  It feels like a small seasonal miracle.

I have always mourned my total inability to draw.  As a child, how many pages did I fill with rubbish while others created perfect, life-like pictures, until I finally got the message?  I have zilch artistic flair and just have to accept it.  And while it’s tempting to dismiss such skill as being of no value in later life, the truth is that many jobs depend on the possession of a good eye, floristry and hairdressing to name but two.

My daughter discovered this young when her dissatisfaction with the way I arranged her hair led her to take over this responsibility from her earliest school days.  I have barely been allowed near her locks since she was five.

True, I have always been able to “draw pictures” with words and express my feelings for landscape in poetry.  But his cuts little ice with a child who wants her mother to draw her a duck, as I was once – only once – requested to do.  The duck, or let’s call it a head with a wing and a couple of legs, went the way of the hair and said child took over the task herself, far better ducks emerging repeatedly from her more inspired hand.

Now Lee J. Ames has breathed new life into the old drawing arm.  As I understand this, you start with a circle here and an oval there and build up with extra lines, and assuming the original shapes were placed correctly, there on the page is a recognisable bird.  So stand by National Gallery, here I come.  Or maybe I’ll just start saving credit-crunch money and cut hair.