Tag: Childhood

197: a child’s Christmas in Wales

The build up to Christmas this year has been thoroughly miserable, weatherwise, and lemon juice is being rubbed into the papercut by my Facebook memories showing me snow photos from recent years. The torrential rain is bringing back memories of childhood Christmasses in Wales when the festive season was marked by the man from the council turning up with the gift of sandbags in case of flooding from the brooks that bounded our road. There were a few pub evenings when someone would come in and tell us we’d better get home before the road went under!

We’ve recently moved offices in our building from a ground floor that felt like a basement, tucked away at the back of the building, to the attic space with skylights. The rain, thunder and howling gales we’ve experienced this week have been hammering on these little windows and reminding me once more of my Welsh childhood…this time, though, summer holidays in caravans when you’re only separated from the weather (or tapdancing gulls) by a thin metal skin. Those days meant a trip to a town rather than the beach, and I was 40 by the time I discovered Fishguard didn’t exist in a permanent monsoon microclimate. Other rainy day destinations included Devil’s Bridge, Aberystwyth, or the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth where the coffee was made of dandelions or something – my dad was horrified.

Rain = learning, by this logic, so the new office makes me quite happy even though it’s a very long way up. The stairs are quite open, too (all 73 of them) and it took me a week to get past the cognitive dissonance caused by the very steep drop to the left of the door which told my mind was going to fall. It’s perfectly safe, but my heart skipped a beat every time I opened the door as I’m not very good with heights. The new office is cosier, and we share it with a small theatre company who have their own Welsh person.

I am now off until the New Year and have plans – such plans! – involving various craft kits, some fabulous fabric and a whole lot of naps.

Things making me happy this week

  • A good wander through the fields with Sue and the Bella-dog
  • Coffees with Heather and Miriam
  • A girly night in with Amanda, watching a Doctor Who Christmas special and then Weekend at Bernie’s
  • Finishing the crochet blanket I started two years ago (at least!) – see above!
  • Making more toadstools (all of which have gone to new homes) and giving in to the urge to add a door and window to one

The thing making me sad this week

Thirty-something years ago, in a pub called the Nag’s Head in Monmouth, an ex-boyfriend of mine introduced me to a bloke called Nigel. A few years older than me, he’d been in sixth form when I started at the local comp, so I’d seen him around but never spoken to him. We bonded over music (especially Mr Springsteen and a range of classic rock), books (shout out to Terry Pratchett) and shared a dry (at times I’d go so far as to say arid… desiccated, even) sense of humour alongside a horror of misplaced apostrophes. If I’d had a big brother, I would have liked him to be like Nigel, up to and including the ability to take me down several pegs when I’m taking myself too seriously. I know not everyone appreciated that about him, particularly his habit of saying the things that needed to be said on Monmouth’s local Facebook pages and his total inability to suffer fools gladly. He loved diving, and was delighted with the crocheted nudibranches I sent him instead of a Christmas card. He appreciated good cheese, good rum and bad puns.

Last year he did a round with cancer and we thought he’d kicked its arse. We’d planned an evening out in ‘that there London’ in October for his birthday this year but he’d been in hospital and was on antibiotics for an infection. It turned out that the bastard cancer had made an aggressive comeback. Two weeks ago he told me his prognosis wasn’t great, and – typically – that he wasn’t going to be starting any long box sets on TV. I offered any assistance that he and Caroline needed, although I drew the line at crocheting a giant life-sized Nigel as that was just weird. He laughed.

Caroline phoned me this week to say he was receiving end of life care, as he’d gone downhill very quickly. I woke up to a message from her on Saturday morning to say he had gone. It hit me in the evening when I saw a cartoon about fancy Christmas cheese that on any other day I would have sent straight to him. I will miss him terribly. 

All I can say is that wherever he’s ended up, they’d better make damn sure the apostrophes are in the right place and to put him in charge of the music, otherwise they’ll never hear the end of it.

Kirsty x

What I’ve been reading:

The Drowning Pool – Syd Moore

Hogfather – Terry Pratchett (Audible)

Lost Christmas – David Logan (Audible)

Sharon, Tracy and the Rest – Keith Waterhouse

The Dark is Rising – Susan Cooper (BBC World Service adaptation)

Past Lying – Val McDermid

132: last bastions of Englishness?

Last Sunday I had an urge for some proper Sunday night telly – the kind of telly you need when you’re full of roast dinner and want something that won’t tax your brain too much. In the 80s and 90s it would have been Last of the Summer Wine or Heartbeat, something gentle and Northern. Saturday nights had Bergerac or Casualty (aka ‘accidents waiting to happen’) once The Dukes of Hazzard, WonderWoman or The A-Team were out of the way.

In the early noughties I became hooked on Midsomer Murders: an increasingly bonkers range of suspicious deaths committed in picturesque English villages, allegedly based on Slough (of all places) and with varying body-counts-per-episode. My all-time favourite death was the one where a bloke was squished in a printing press, complete with the lettering on his chest. And possibly the one where Tiffany from Eastenders got squashed by a cheese, unless I was imagining that one.

In 2011 one of the producers claimed the show was the ‘last bastion’ of Englishness and that he intended it to stay that way: the murdered and the murderers (and the forces of law and order) were invariably white and usually firmly middle-class. In recent seasons there has been more diversity – in 2021, the production company said that 37% of guest roles in the last three series had been played by people of colour. So, a good thing, right? Definitely more reflective of British society. Right?

Hope no one reads anything into this

But is there such a thing as toxic diversity? The episode I watched on Sunday, The Scarecrow Murders, was an exercise in conscious bias: a trio of murderers, one of whom was Black, one Asian and the other homeless. The trio of victims were… white and middle-class. Another episode was set up to suggest a Black suspect from the start, though it turned out he wasn’t whodunnit in the end. For comfortable Sunday night viewing this did raise a few questions, and I hope someone starts to rectify this as I really do love this series. While I agree that, with its constant round of flower festivals, village fetes, bell-ringers and rose-covered cottages, Midsomer may well be the last bastion of Englishness…. English does not, these days, equal white. And for those of you who care, I prefer Dudgeon to Nettles. So there.

This week, however, the ‘last bastion of Englishness’ – well, Britishness – award must go to the Queen’s funeral with all its pomp and processions. My beloved hurled himself in from the garden at 11.05 as he was ‘missing it’, annexed the remote control and settled in to watch the Queen’s send off. And some send off it was too: we didn’t watch the funeral itself as gazing on people’s obvious grief felt wrong. I carried on watching the proceedings until the coverage moved to Windsor, when it all got a bit silly and they started interviewing Alan Titchmarsh.

Later in the week I found myself at another British institution – the Children’s Society, which was formed by a man outraged by children from his Sunday School begging for food on the streets. The occasion was the launch of The Good Childhood Report 2022, which shows that children’s happiness continues to decline (for a number of reasons, and social media is only one of them) and in the context of the cost of living crisis this will only get worse. They made the point that the UK is the sixth largest economy in the world and we have the highest number of children living in poverty in Europe. Mental health is in decline, and 80% of NHS funding for this is spent at point of crisis rather than in prevention; swingeing cuts to all youth services mean children are slipping through the net.

There was hope, though: a panel of young people from all over the UK spoke eloquently and bravely about their own experiences. They stressed the need to be genuinely heard and seen by the adults around them and consulted about how they can help. My own daughter’s experiences with CAMHS supports this: the automatic recourse to CBT rather than anything actually helpful; the immediate discharge if they’re ‘not engaging with’ a counsellor; the waiting lists and the lack of child centred approach.

We also heard from the amazing Bernadette Eugene-Charlery who is working with police forces in Haringey and Enfield to ensure police dealing with young people are seeing the child as separate from the crime and making what is going to be a frightening and traumatic process as understandable as possible. The police at these stations now let the team know as soon as a young person is in custody with three-hourly reports, and they are provided with a support person who will explain what’s happening and what will happen next, who will listen to them and help them. More to the point, they are also working within the system to identify children and families who are at risk of being exploited – county lines and so on – and work with them to try and prevent them ever getting to the custody stage. I didn’t expect to end up quite as emotional as I did!

What I’ve been reading:

A Promise of Ankles – Alexander McCall Smith

Dishonesty is the Second-best Policy – David Mitchell

Life in Pieces – Dawn O’Porter

Sure of You – Armistead Maupin

What Abigail Did That Summer – Ben Aaronovitch