Heaven and Hell

Once upon a time there was a beautiful island off the coast of Spain. It's still there of course but it has an interesting history which has changed what might once have been paradise into a mixture of money and greed, sexism and tourism. The island is of course Majorca.
Majorca was on the wrong side when the Spanish civil war raged.  And when they lost Franco decided that Majorca did not need any money, any input and you can still see the effects when you start off in a bus from Palma airport.  There are empty houses in the dry fields, there are long stretches of nothing much at all. As you go north the climate is wetter and there are wonderful trees, lots of olive groves, vines. Almonds and oranges are harvested here. There are two factories on the island which make pearls and in the north there is prosperity and when you get to Alcudia, right at the top, there is a contrast which startled me.
To the east there are 30,000 beds and the tourists from Scandanavia and Europe flock here because of the mild Spanish climate. But the old town of Alcudia is still there. The locals call it heaven and hell and it is easy to see why. From the enormous hotels which stretch forever only eight kilometres away there is the charm and the history which stretches back to the thirteenth century.

The hotel where I stayed. Gorgeous, good food, lovely rooms, excellent wine, if you are going with small children the perfect place to stay. Iberostar Albufera Playa.

I took a taxi to the old town. There is a wall which still stands most of the way around the little town. It was built in the thirteenth century by James II to keep out the pirates!  As you do, of course. As walls go this is the best and beside it one of those unforgettable churches, all blue and gold and full of the kind of pictures which you love at the time but you are glad don't follow you outside into the sunlight.

The beautiful wall.

Gateway

Church

The story becomes even more interesting. Small farms were given to the children when their father died, the boys got the good fertile fields, the girls received the fields on the coastline and so I thought how hard for a girl who doesn't marry or who is obliged to marry a man who is not a farmer's son and we all know what happened after that, don't we?
So which is heaven and which hell and perhaps greed depends on what you do with what you are given and a bit of luck and the times. I look at all those hotels and I think good luck to those girls who made their fortunes and to the boys they had their farms and so you can have both if the times are right, you can have the sun and the sea and the sand and then you can have Alcudia with its history and its tiny shops and its lovely lovely wall.

Little Miss Righteous

When my daughter was a small child her favourite book was Little Miss Neat, one of Roger Hargreaves' wonderful stories for children. Before she could read Katy could recite Little Miss Neat and how she found a puddle in the middle of her garden path, sorting it out with a duster after which she washed the duster, folded it, ironed it and put it into the drawer.  Little Miss Neat was a big part of my life but she has been overtaken by Little Miss Righteous.
I fee like the poor woman in Hilary Mantel's book, Beyond Black, who has her own spirit, a horrible sort of thing which plagued her, criticizing, never letting her think anything good about herself.
Little Miss Righteous nags at me if I don't hoover the floor. She makes lists where everything achieved has to be crossed off and more damned things get on to the endless list every day. She even points out where a few grains of salt have been spilt in an otherwise spotless kitchen cupboard.
She doesn't like me eating chocolate or drinking wine. She is so smug that I don't smoke. She hates my large bottom and my one breast and my twisted toes. She makes me be polite to people I don't like who bore me. She is even now going on about the unweeded front garden. I feel sure that if she had her way I would be in some very boring job, married to a man who spends his weekends ironing shirts.
At the moment every time I see her I thump her over the head with a frying pan, otherwise she takes control of my life. She loves a clean car, she likes long walks and lettuce and sensible shoes. One of these days I'm going to take her on a car ride and drop her off the end of a pier and come back and enjoy myself all the time. In the meanwhile I have to keep her happy and am off to pull a few weeds out of the garden.

A Man Desert

Coming back from the caravan, after a week of work, I was listening to Radio 4 and they were talking about how one in four families is now a single parent family with a mother around but no father. It makes me shudder the way that the government makes single parent families out to be something a great many of them are not but the thing is they have this in common - no bloke.
One of the hardest things in the world when you are alone with a small child is to find a suitable parent. Either the man doesn't like the child or the child doesn't like the man and we all have baggage. He may have children too. I once met a very nice teacher, when my daughter was eight, but he spent his weekends with his children who were both under five, so I scarpered.
It's hard enough finding a decent man. The good ones are married, apart from those who tell you they aren't married of course, single men who have been dumped by other women are a very difficult area. Men dump women for other women, women dump men because they aren't shouldering their responsibilites and/or are still behaving like they are twenty.
Then there are the men who can do everything, so what do they need you for, and the ones who can do nothing, so what would you want them for? And the hobbyists. My God, golf, painting tiny soldiers, shooting, fishing, sailing. It's okay if they regard this as a hobby but to so many of them they have work and a hobby and everything else is lost.
Some women have a tendency to hide their husbands. I can quite honestly say that although I have envied my married friends sex, companionship, somebody to help pay the bills and sort out the kids I have never ever fancied any other woman's husband. Marriage is not sexy, not to single people as they get older.
As for role models, there's not much you can do about it. The world is very unfair and for most women in many countries, men have taken everything and it's a fight even for decency, never mind education. So we bring up out daughters to get on with things and no point in hanging about waiting for a decent man. What you need is a good job with a decent income and some reasonably priced child care.
As for the single parent who is left alone once the children have grown up and gone -
the view I take is of the card I once bought - apologies to the genius who thought it up. I have no idea who it is  On the front there is a very smiley old woman and the caption reads,

I have a computer, a vibrator and a pizza delivery man.  I need  never go out again!
  Perhaps the future isn't so bad after all, out in the desert.

Cop Shows

For me it all started with Dixon of Dock Green. I love cop shows. Z Cars, Inspector Frost, my special favourite Morse. I have watched Morse until I can recite pieces of it, a dubious talent, I realize. When I am having a bad day I reread the Rebus books. Now I have discovered a new talent, well, new to me.Mari Hannah. Boy, can this writer plot. The fun for me is that it's set in the North East of England and I am so prejudiced about the place but I don't think it would matter to anybody who loves crime stories.
Half the fun for me reading this kind of thing is that the whole thing is as mysterious to me as a film. I could never write crime.
The cops in these shows are always Mavericks and we love a Maverick best of all. The kind of person who doesn't fit in, or is smarter than the rest. I still love Rebus best with his faults and his failings but I love Frost, I'm reading Frost at Christmas and there he is the scruffy little man and all the characters I knew first from television and I haven't read any of the other Frost books yet. Oh joy.  Also Wycliffe, which again I watched on television first and I loved those but I can relive them again.
I suppose in a way all stories are cop stories, the goodies and the baddies, the goodies winning usually in some unobvious way and the baddies getting their deserts and a whole load of wonderful characters we want to see again and again so thank you, Helen, my friend who lives in Consett for mentioning Mari Hannah to me. For the first time I'm in on the ground floor here because she doesn't seem to have a huge backlist. Usually I am at least fifteen years later than everybody else in getting to these things. I'll be able to lie on my sofa and listen to the rain pattering on to the patio and go off into a world where Kate Daniels is looking out for us here in the north. Happy days.

I Need A Hero

This week it all got too much. I felt like flinging myself on my chaise longue ( yes, I do actually have one, I'm that precious), finding someone to put a cooling palm to my fevered forehead and lots of other bits of me which would be comforted, and telling me that I didn't have to deal with any more.
I can't think where it started now but the computer began playing silly buggers, the car tyres went down, the roof leaked so much in the back bedroom that I could hear the sound of the rain plopping into my favourite pan from my own bed with the damned door shut. The damp proof course in the hall has given up and  has yellowed the walls and all the paint is peeling off. I went to Sainsbury's for my present drug of choice, Prosecco, came back and some bugger chipped my lovely little car's windscreen.
Actually I am thinking of getting rid of the lovely little car but I cry when my cars go to the great garage in the sky so I'm putting it off.
Then I went to London to see my editor and my agent and my writing friends and somewhere in among all the work and play I turned into the sort of thing which makes a burst balloon look like a jumbo jet. I wilted. I moaned over my friends, I moaned over my daughter.
My daughter is a manager. She managed me so beautifully.
'Regroup!' she said. 'Sit on the sofa, watch films and eat pizza.'  Actually she didn't tell me to eat pizza but I'm sure she meant me to.
'Stop the social networking, put the work away.'
I retreated, pyjama clad. I watched John Wayne Films.  John Wayne was my childhood hero. There is something about a man who is six foot three or four or whatever which makes me melt  like chocolate in hot weather. I spent a lovely part of my childhood sitting in the living room with the curtains closed on warm afternoons, ignoring the world and there with my dad I entered the door of cowboy land and never came home. My dad used to take me to the pictures, buy me sweets and then fall asleep. He worked too hard. I got my love of films from my dad. When I was younger I wanted to be a film director. I don't know what happened to that, just that there was another part of me that said 'why not spend your life alone in a little room, staring at a screen and being relatively poor?'
There I go, moaning again. My job meant I was here when my kid was little, when she was ill. I got to walk my dogs in the mornings and afternoons. Now I am here for all those workmen who come and go, I am here when the Ringtons man comes and the guys at the door try to sell me things and those cold callers who think I might listen to them and sometimes I feel so sorry for them that I do. I can talk to the bloke next door and hear the little kids over the fence playing in the garden on the few dry afternoons we have had this year. I can choose when I work, and my friends put up with me being a whining moaner.
Rio Bravo is at present my favourite film. It has everything, John Wayne being the sheriff and Angie Dickinson, the girl who comes to town, there is a drunk who comes good and a grumpy old man and a young gunslinger and its set in one small town. The plot is wonderful and the dialogue is to die for.  The acting is brilliant.There is music and tension, it never slips for a second. Good old Howard Hawks for doing it and for giving me such pleasure. Best of all, for the first time, yesterday I noticed in the credits that it said, 'from a short story'. I don't remember who wrote it but all of a sudden I remembered what I did and why I did it.
Stagecoach, another John Wayne film, came from a short story by the best short story writer of them all, Guy de Maupassant. All you need for a good film is a brilliant story, fantastic actors, the best director and somebody with a lot of money. And that's why I watch John Wayne in the afternoons. Because only the best will do.

My Wok Cradle and other necessities

Four or five years ago, before I got my new job, my pension and my insurance cheque, money was a bit tight and I thought, I don't need anything so what does it matter?  I can just afford to pay my bills, I have a decent social life, the car is still working, the central heating boiler is okay, I hate going on holiday, what more do I need?
Just after this Lakeland, who sell superior kitchen stuff, opened a shop nearby and I went in once and I thought 'who on earth buys all these things', who needs a special floor polisher and a cup cake maker and all these new bright shiny pans? All this has changed now that I have a few bob. I want everything.
I went to Lakeland this morning and my eyes were opened at all the wonderful goodies and they have put me on their mailing list. I had to buy a special drainer for the dishes because my new kitchen has exquisite wooden tops which must not have wet things or hot things or possibly anythings at all anywhere near them. I have turned into the kind of person who says,
'Don't put that down on there!'
Many years ago I bought a beautiful three piece suite for my sitting room in pale pink and a carpet in pink and white and after weeks of warning people not to drop anything on either I spilled half a bucket of red wine over the whole thing and I thought to myself, as we used to say in Tow Law,
'That'll learn yer!'
Perfectionists should keep themselves well short of money. Now I am haunted by the possibilities of my life descending into chaos because I care about things that I didn't used to. I can have my day ruined by a hot bottomed frying pan.
I want to go and buy a new car and woe betide anybody who puts a dent in it.
The source of all these problems was the wok cradle which came with my new cooker.
I said to Ian, the kitchen fitter,
'What on earth is that?'
and being very cool, as you are when you fit kitchens, he showed me how the wok cradle sat over the flame so that the wok could sit nicely in it and that is what my life has come down to - a wok cradle and a future where everything can go wrong.

The Magic of Kitchenworld in Durham

I came back from M&S today to find Ian, my lovely kitchen fitter, hoovering up the dust in the hall. I say 'my' because I have become a bit like this about the men of Kitchenworld in Durham. They were recommended by my most discerning friend. She's the kind of woman who is very scary if you don't know her and she would never recommend anybody who did not get things exactly right. In this mood, plus my insurance cheque, I went boldly up to the Arnison Centre where George runs Kitchenworld and employs wonderful professionals to help him. Smart guy, George.
The kitchen designer, David, gives you the impression that he has all afternoon to spend waffling around in your kitchen but beneath the polite exterior beats the heart of a real pro.  He had my kitchen sorted out in five minutes, he knew what I wanted, he dangled before my eyes the kitchen of my dreams. Yes, another smart guy.
Then came the army of professionals, Ian the perfectionist kitchen fitter, Jimmy, who has been plastering for twenty years and another perfectionist, Stuart who sorted out the gas for my lovely new cooker, the smashing guy whose name I don't know because he never hangs round long who carries the appliances in his huge van, Carl who did the flooring and the electrician, whose name I don't know because he sort of dashes in and out, whom I accused of mucking up the telly. I got Jimmy to go in and look at the telly the following day and typical of a bloke, he got hold of a piece of wire and back on it came. Why can't I do that?
Dave, the painter, is coming on Monday morning and soon after that the whole thing will be over. I have enjoyed it. I did get rather tired of ready meals and may never eat instant porridge again but I'm definitely going to get them to come back and sort out the bathroom and possibly the bedrooms when I have some more money. Must work harder!