Towering infatuation

By the end of the summer we hope that there will be more of 88. We are having an extension. We have a wonderful architect but I have to admit that the plans are not what I had ultimately hoped for. Mr Architect has given us everything we will want with style and professionalism. But what I really want is a big tower and a spiral staircase and an open air viewing area at the top so I can look out and survey all before me. A cosy bolthole at the top with 360 degree windows would also be desirable. I didn't mention this to Mr A in the planning stages as I thought he might laugh out loud or more specifically our local planning department might expire from giggling and veto my tower....if they still drew breath.

I love towers. Give me a tall elongated building to climb and I am a happy person. I love the anticipation of the climb. As with jokes the best towers are the old ones with steps inside....spiral are best. Climbing round and round the anticipation builds. What will be at the top? Will there be a good vista? Who has climbed these steps before me? Then I emerge into the brightness. What can I see? Let me soak in the panorama.


If I had lots and lots of money I would buy an estate and I would build a tall folly tower. Of no use really other than for me to climb and survey. I'd let my friends and family in too - I'm generous that way. I was hugely disappointed at the Millennium and at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee that no towers were built in joyous celebration. Our Victorian forbears were much more imaginative, building towers left, right and centre to commemorate jubilees and battles and people - any excuse. The tower photographed was built to house the clock to strike the wake-up call for the mill workers. Not very romantic but I like it for its Rapunzel-like qualities. Actually I wonder if there is time just to tweak the plans for 88 just a little......well quite a lot....would anyone really notice one tower?

Wantonness

Siren. Femme fatale. Seductress. Temptress. Goddess.....

No it's Mabel or so I've christened her - a rather lovely statue in the grounds of my mum's (88) residential home.



Necklace - a teasing adornment

Earplugs at the ready

If you had to sit in a room with fifteen other people of roughly similar ages, what kind of amusements would you suggest to entertain you all? Bear in mind you are probably pretty immobile and don't have that much energy and have nothing in common with the majority of people in the room. It's quite difficult, isn't it?

Mum (88) lives in an elderly people's residential home and occasionally they get entertainers. According to my mum some are good, some OK and some just plain awful. Some are so bad she has her own ear plugs at the ready to block out the noise. Now it has to be said that mum would only be truly happy if the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band came marching into the residents' lounge or if 'Songs of Praise' came knocking on the door. Hallelujah! She is quite a demanding customer. But there again why should everyone like the same thing?

We popped in last Sunday to see mum. She was overjoyed to see us. Very overjoyed. We had come just in the nick of time to rescue her from the organ player, quite a sweet old bloke who in my mum's words "goes on and on". He did seem pretty bad. Mind you, Peggy who sits next to mum seemed to be really enjoying his tunes. Again in a room full of fifteen people you aren't going to please everyone.

It got me thinking. The government is worried about how it and we will pay for care for the elderly in the future. My main worry is not how will I pay for my residential care but how I will be entertained. What will I have to endure when I'm 88. I ain't going to be happy with a refrain of "It's a long way to Tipperary" or endless Elvis numbers (good as they can be) or a dirge on the organ. The entertainers who come seem to take their tunes from a songbook dated circa 1930 to 1959. I want Elvis Costello not Presley and a little John Martyn with some Emelie Sande thrown in and some Paloma Faith to cheer me up and keep me young. Seriously it won't be long before people born in the late 1940s will be the unlucky ones in residential care and I have no evidence at the moment that the entertainers are knocking out the Rolling Stones or The Who.

Perhaps in the future entertainment will be much more sophisticated or perhaps we will be much more tech savvy. We will tune into our ipods and watch the TV on our laptops or whatever the equivalent is in the future.  But I am a tad worried that I will have to sit there listening to Kylie Minogue and Steps and endless Abba impersonators. Now a little Kylie is great and Abba is just superb although I draw the line at Steps but endless renditions and probably poor ones at that sounds very unappealing. Still it'll all be OK - my 5 year old daughter has said she will come visit me. Perhaps she'll come in the nick of time and take me away.

Cinderella at the Italian

Well, it's started already here at 88....my daughter (all of 5 years old) has borrowed my stuff to go out in. We went for an Italian meal last night en famille as a treat. H wore her beautiful ballerina dress with sparkly shoes and of course had to borrow mummy's sparkly bag to go with it. What do you put in your bag though when you're 5 years old? No mobile, no money, no make-up, no diary. The answer: two little bottles of perfume ....well you never know when you might smell....and some tissues. You might even offer a slap of scent to your brother (C) if you think he could do with freshening up.

It was a lovely evening. Two children old enough now to stay seated. Our son can even read the menu now although the Italian did prove a tad difficult for both adults and child alike. In fact the only person to misbehave was dad who forgot a pen so we couldn't play hangman. Shock horror..we had to make conversation. Grazie!

P.S. The photo makes it look like Cinderella had to leave the restaurant in a hurry and leave her slippers and bag on the grass and run.....I'm sure David did pay the bill??

Warning:Older People at Large!

About ten years ago I was stuck in traffic with my mum. We crawled passed one of those triangular road signs, bordered in warning red, which has an elderly couple in black profile. Both figures are hunched over and the poor bloke has a stick with the woman clearly holding on for dear life. It's often got 'elderly people' written underneath. It's a warning sign that old folks are lurking and presumably may crawl out in front of your car.

My mum was technically old at the time in her seventies and neither did she have curvature of the spine nor walk with a stick. Nor did she have a bald head but that's probably taking the sign too literally. She objected to the depiction of older people as decrepit and slow, both in physical movement and perhaps by association even in brain function. She was an active walker, gardener, interested grandparent and generally alive and intelligent person. Why should older people be singled out?

She's now 88 and can hardly walk and in fact has a zimmer frame but I bet if I asked her she'd still object to older people being depicted as hunch-backed slowcoaches. She may take a while to get from A to B but she still sits upright in her wheelchair, alert and interested in the world and oh yes has wonderful thick white silky hair.

Handmade Histories 3: small linen bag

Small linen bag (Fruitique:Sonya)

E is 6 years old and was given the little linen bag for her last birthday by us at 88. She keeps in her bag the following:

ipod touch (pink) - lots of Abba but favourite at the moment 'Chasing the Sun' by the Wanted ( I am so not in touch with music these days I had to google The Wanted  - so unhip of me!).
notepad and pen which she uses to write lyrics down.
'grown up purse' from Asda with a zip for coins..very important the zip.
one ten pound note and two twenty pound notes (Christmas money) folded very precisely into squares.



E has to be careful where she leaves her lovely bag as she has a sweet but very curious two year old sister who would dearly love to grab her bag, empty it, examine all enclosed, then lose all enclosed. If the bag isn't with E, she keeps it high up on top of the piano and at night takes it to bed with her on the top bunk, far away from the sticky fingers of a much adored but prying loved one.

PS Not only is Sonya Fruitique a talented designer of all wares sewn, she's a wonderful photographer (her bread and butter business) - many thanks to her for the above bag photo.

www.facebook.com/thefruitiques

A happy pinta

We have our milk delivered. On four mornings a week two pints of milk and on Fridays some eggs too are left outside 88 under the hedge. They are left by Graham the milkman at some god-awful time in the morning and placed into a little wooden box, subdivided into six that my dad made me five years ago. One of the six compartments is slightly too tight for a milk bottle - it must annoy Graham when he has to gently nudge the empty bottle out of that section on a frosty dark morning.

I open the door and bring in the two pints. No tetra packs or plastic bottles for us. I duly pop my empties back out for Graham to collect. There's a cycle, a rhythm to the doorstep delivery.  And on Thursdays at 3.25pm practically on the dot Graham collects his money and we have a little chat and put the world to rights.

I have a history with milk. My dad was a dairy farmer and at one point a milkman. He would milk the cows and then go out and deliver the green top unpasteurised milk. I have two milk bottles as an heirloom to prove it. He stopped in the seventies actually delivering milk but I can still remember him bringing me an aero chocolate bar, a Jack and Jill comic and my mum a Turkish Delight after he'd finished deliveries on a Saturday morning. I drank milk morning, noon and night.

I can remember as a 5 year old helping my Dad heave two big silver churns full of the excess milk on the back of his green Morris pick-up van, drive up the lane and roll the two cans on a flat slab of stone on a wall by the main road, awaiting the big dairy to collect them. Then modern life hit and we had to install a bulk tank and the milk tanker would rumble up the drive for the extra milk and the magic was lost.

Support a British institution. Support your milkman....milkwoman...milkperson!