Oh, my hat!

I bought a new hat in Stanhope the other day at a lovely shop, which you must visit if you go there, because they have exquisite things to buy, gorgeous handbags in different colours of suede and leather, jewellery, scarves, those lovely smelling candles and the kind of clothes which make women of my age look better than they are, good materials, pretty colours.
It was a winter hat that I wanted. I lose hats.The first one I lost was a lovely black cloche hat which my daughter, Katy, gave to me. They have to be the same style, it's the only one I suit.
Well, I went to the opera at Castle in the big hall which incidentally has no pictures of women on the walls, which makes me want to spit anyway but I think I left it there. They said they didn't have it and I went to the other places I had visited that evening and nobody had found it.
So, as you do when you're in Milan, the last outing I had for my birthday, I spent 45 Euros on an exquisite black cloche hat but when Malcolm was so damned ill at the beginning of the year I was distracted and left it somewhere. I was going to go back to the restaurant where I thought it was but they seemed always to be closed and Malcolm was dying and Joan was nearly out of her mind with worry so I didn't get it back.
However, this spring I acquired another hat from TKMaxx. Purple straw. Katy says that  I must not go out in it, it's too bad. Too late, I wore it constantly when I went to Marjorca and it comes with me to the caravan at Stanhope all the time. But yes, I lost it.
I left it at the Gala theatre and this time I managed to get back for it the following day. They said they didn't think they had it and I said,
'Nobody's going to steal it,' and I was right. My daughter may have wished it a long way from us but to her chagrin it's now back at home.
So, considering the winter is coming I needed a new black cloche hat and I bought it the other day in Stanhope. It fits me perfectly - I have a very small head would you believe -  and has little black and white feathers to one side. Delightful. And only £14.95.  It will go with my two winter coats, one of which I have had for fifteen years, bought it at Next for a hundred pounds, well worth the investment, full length and it goes in the washer, the other is my pretend purple fur which my kids bought me for my sixtieth birthday. ( I get to hug a lot of men because they like my coat! Very good. )
I look forward to a lovely autumn and winter, three nights at the opera, good concerts at St Oswald's with the university orchestras and good meals and drinks with my friends. I shall try not to lose my new  hat but when I said to the lovely woman who sold it to me that it could not expect a long life with me she said,
'Stuff it in your handbag when you take it off.'
She was right. Better a rather dented hat than no hat at all.

The Best

What must it be like to be the best writer the world has ever seen?  Of course he didn't know it at the time but he became wealthy on the back of his talent and was also an astute businessman. I like to think there were many sides to William Shakespeare as there are to all of us. He was a big family man, he directed what he left to his children. He like the rest of us had his horrors. His son died young and there are many twins in his stories. You use what you have, except that you are the best wordsmith the world will ever know. You don't carry that on your back but the world is left with your legacy and it is rich beyond our dreams.
Stratford was bliss to me. I went there with my lovely daughter who did English Literature at uni and adores the stage and everything to do with it. Her husband takes her to Stratford for her birthday each year and they stay in a gorgeous hotel and dine in good restaurants and enjoy what Will has left us.
One of the things which struck me was that because his father had a business, he made gloves and helped to run the town council, that William went to grammar school and studied Greek and Latin.
I'm not with Michael Gove on such matters, I think it helps if a child and read English before she's eleven before moving on to such things but for writers Greek and Latin are a huge help. I only wish I had had the kind of brain which takes on such things. Latin was good while I could see the connection with English but I couldn't do it, I kept getting left behind.
In the little house where William was born there is a big window where many writers have scratched their names and it made me feel so humble that writers, who are not usually known for being generous to one another, had gone there in homage to him and enjoyed it.
William's birthplace is the same kind of dreadful little house as Wordsworth's house in the lake district and makes you glad you weren't around when there was no electric, no loos, well, nothing really, tiny rooms and too many people. Ghastly.
I did like Nash's house and the garden  but Anne Hathaway's cottage was one of the saddest places I have ever been. It didn't help that the rain poured down on the lovely garden or that we had a wonderful guide who told it like it was but to me it seemed that Will and Anne's lust got the better of them and that house is full of sorrow.
We stayed in the Falcon Crest, very old and had afternoon tea at the Shakespeare. We saw A Mad World My Masters, a Jacobean play by Thomas Middleton which was wonderful and we had dinner at Oppo's and best of all I had my kid with me. Thanks, Will.

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.