Author Archives: carolcooper

Back to School, and Not a Moment Too Soon

Posted in Family life, Writing by

The summer holidays begin full of promise, as ever. Karen has loads of ideas. It’s only when she begins to take her four kids on outings that she remembers everywhere is (a) crowded (b) expensive (c) leads to whining from at least three of them. Nothing ever changes.

Karen is a newly single mum from my novel One Night at the Jacaranda. She has one daughter and three sons.

At nearly 11, Charlotte is the eldest so she whines loudest and longest. Damon is 9 and his speciality this summer is sulking.

They go to Wales for a few days to a friend’s cottage, the cheapest family holiday Karen can think of. It’s a long drive in the ancient Toyota, with plenty of time for daydreaming. What might it be like to go off to the Gower for a mini-break with a nice man?  

Wales beach at dusk

Her reverie is broken by the youngest who wants to be sick, so they stop by the side of the road. Edward aims most of it into the plastic bag she holds out for him, but inevitably a few blobs fall onto Charlotte’s new pink T-shirt.

“Eeuw!” shrieks Charlotte, even though there are several spare pink sequinned T-shirts in the boot.  At the moment everything she owns, whether it’s clothing, a pencil case, or her duvet cover, has to be pink and have sequins.

Karen is concerned for the next mile or two in case there’s more vomiting but she needn’t worry. In less than five minutes, Edward pipes up “I want salt and vinegar crisps!”

When they get there, they find acres of soft white sand, perfect for jogging off excess fat, building sandcastles, and losing young children. There’s a moment or two on every holiday when Edward can’t be found. For a four-year old, he can go a long way in just seconds. Ashley, being a year older, is infinitely wiser and spends his time searching the sands for buried treasure. He’s sure there are shipwrecks around here, and he’s determined to find gold coins for his mum.  “Cos we need more money, don’t we?”   

shipwreck

Treasure hasn’t been found in Rhossili Bay since about 1834, but that doesn’t stop people looking. Karen is pleased to see her children so happy, even if Charlotte is channelling Lolita in her pink sparkly swimsuit. Only Damon, sitting hunched in the depths of his hoodie, hasn’t got into the beach thing yet.

They stay in Wales four days in all, during which Edward behaves and doesn’t try to run off again. Karen feels a mite guilty for threatening that big red dragons would get him, but at least he’s stopped having nightmares about them.

They return to London with a carful of sand, a carrier bag loaded with shells, and couple of pieces of driftwood. Now the children are playing nicely in the garden. Correction: the younger boys are playing while Charlotte is on the phone to her new best friend Belinda, and Damon sulks under a tree.

Karen is about to ask Damon what’s wrong when she sees he isn’t sulking. He’s reading! An actual book! With pages and words and everything! This has never happened before, so it’s quite a turn-up for the books. Literally.

book

Now Ashley is crying because Edward has peed into his toy wheelbarrow. When Karen tells Edward off, he says he thought it was a toilet.

“Rubbish” says Karen, even though it does look a bit like a loo.

It’s now the last week of the holidays and it can’t be put off any longer.  Buying school uniform and such is a hassle. They have to contend with umpteen other families looking for shoes that fit, while shop assistants try to fob people off with insoles. Karen steels herself for Charlotte’s inevitable hissy fit when she realises she can’t have pink heels with rhinestones.

But maybe some things do change, thinks Karen, because this year Charlotte falls in love with shoes that come straight from the pages of an orthopaedic footwear catalogue. Apparently they’re just like the ones her best friend Belinda has.

Back in the car with the shopping (and the sand, shells, and driftwood), Ashley says “You know what, Mummy? When it’s school-time I want it to be the holidays, but when it’s holidays I want it to be school-time.”

She smiles and knows exactly what he means. 

sea shell

How to Get the Best Restaurant Table

Posted in Family life by

My earliest memories of eating out en famille go back to holidays in Europe. Sitting down to eat had to be just so. There were usually five of us: Granny, Grandpa, my mother, my aunt and me. The child I was at the time thought those meals endless. It wasn’t so much the number of courses or the leisurely service, but the time it took to settle at table.

“Let’s sit by the open window” one of the grown-ups would say. “It’s such a lovely view.”

Geneva

As soon as we were installed, Granny admitted she wasn’t so sure. “I can feel a draught.”

So we’d let the maitre d’ show us to a table at the back. Once we’d sat down, Auntie might say “It’s a little warm here, isn’t it?”

“And maybe a bit too close to the toilets” Mum would add, wrinkling her nose.

We’d smile apologetically and they’d find us somewhere else, not too near the front or the back. Unlike Goldilocks, however, it took us more than three goes. Once installed, Grandpa would find something else wrong. Wasn’t this table a bit small for five? Or else it was too noisy here, what with his hearing aid and everything.

Up we’d get again. While we pondered our next move, the staff would think fondly of retirement.

The scenario repeated itself in every restaurant. I’m not sure why it was this way, as we were a decisive bunch the rest of the time. And once we’d fixed on a table, we’d stick with it, come hell or high water. Literally. lake Geneva

At a lakeside restaurant when I was about 10, my family insisted on having an extra chair brought to the table we’d picked at the water’s edge. Of course, the waiter didn’t place it quite where my mother had in mind, so she scraped it back and forth over the paving.

“That’s enough, Jackie” hissed Granny after several minutes of this.

This only made my mum more determined to position her chair exactly how she wanted. “There!” she finally said triumphantly as she sat herself down, tipping backwards into the lake.

The mishap caused minor modifications in our table behaviour for a little while, but old habits die hard. Fast forward a few decades, and Mum, Aunty and I were again abroad, this time with my three sons and two cousins, already hungry. Mum thought we should look at a posh restaurant she remembered from days gone by. It seemed a tad stuffy for a family meal, but what clinched it was Mum’s observation: “Not enough tables.”

In theory, people only need one table at a time, but by now you’ve got the idea. So we wandered down the road, passing several more restaurants on the way. There was something wrong with each one: only fish on the menu, too dark, or else so sun-drenched we’d all get cancer. By now we were crabby from hunger, which is how we ended up at a fast-food place, eating chicken and chips with our fingers off a greasy table located about 10 inches away from the bins.

bins

Left to my own devices, I would never behave like this. Only last week I went to a café by the river with one of my sons. We sat down right away. Well, almost, because the table he’d first picked was by the water, where the air was thick with midges.

We studied the menu. It was a huge piece of card but there wasn’t actually much on it except for over-priced hamburgers and Caesar salad. We looked at each other over the top.

“Sod it” I said, pushing back my chair. “Shall we go somewhere else?” 

restaurant tables

Is Beatles Music a Health Hazard?

Posted in London by

Exactly 45 years ago, photographer Iain Macmillan stood on a ladder and shot the iconic image for Abbey Road. Tourists from all over the world continue to come to London’s most famous crossing. They gawp, revere, take selfies and generally mess about, taking no heed of cars, vans or the 189 bus. This was the scene yesterday.

Abbey Road

Now Westminster Council is considering the use of a lollipop lady to keep people safe. I hope they recruit a lady or gentleman who looks the part in period 60s gear.

On that August day in 1969, did the Fab Four realise the poor example they might be setting for future generations of fans? I think not. If they had, they’d never have larked about as they did. And Paul would have surely kept his sandals on. It’s madness to walk around London in bare feet.

Pretty much everyone (not just Charles Manson) has their own interpretation of Beatles lyrics. While most people focus on the drug references, the songs may contain other menaces to health.

Beatles vinyls Sleeping in the bath is something I’d never recommend, yet that’s exactly what happens in Norwegian Wood. Luckily John doesn’t drown. But what does he do when he wakes up? He burns the house down. OK, so he was a Beatle scorned, but arson does seem a tad over the top.

There’s another fire hazard in A Day in the Life.  The track opens with John’s graphic reminder of what happens if you run a red light. But in a later verse Paul dices with death when he nods off on the bus with a lit cigarette in hand.

I feel like shouting the B-side of Can’t Buy Me Love (in case you don’t remember, it’s You Can’t Do That).

Paul survives his bus journey. He still hasn’t kicked the tobacco habit two years later, though, because there he is holding a ciggie on that album cover. But the USA did some unauthorised airbrushing and removed the offending item from posters.

Other risky lifestyle choices advocated by Lennon-McCartney:

The Beatles will always be my favourite band, but as a doctor I’m concerned about an already over-stretched health service having to extract coins from noses, bandage injured feet and give whatever medical help is needed to those mugs who take their oeuvres too literally.

Beatles mugsOn Revolver we’re even told that you can call Doctor Robert day or night, he’ll be there any time.

In your dreams, John and Paul. Not in today’s NHS.

The thing that worries me most, though, is on the White Album. Yes, hotel rooms cost money, but doing it in the road is the ultimate in unsafe sex. Nobody’s watching you! So you’re even more likely to get killed by some motorist who wasn’t expecting to see people bonking on the asphalt.

I’m really hoping Westminster Council will be wise enough to install appropriate signage. 

An Evening at the Proms

Posted in London by

Geoff mops his brow as he steps through the doorway and into the shade. Glancing down at his ticket, he remembers the invariable rule of the Royal Albert Hall: whichever door you enter, it’s diametrically opposite where you need to be.

Albert Hall

He heads from door 4 to 12, stopping off at the café for a Coke Zero.

All human life is there already: young people with rucksacks, alte kakker in Birkenstocks, middle-aged women with sunhats. Only one person seems to have dressed up for the occasion, and she’s got purple hair, a pierced nose and a tuxedo ripped in multiple places. When did people stop wearing smart clothes to concerts?

Sitting next to Geoff, a middle-aged woman nurses a large glass of rosé. Every two seconds she looks up at the entrance.

Her date finally turns up. Rosé woman comes to life, falling over herself to greet him. When the man sits down, she babbles constantly and paws his wrist.

Geoff gets to his seat in the Choir (West). The lights dim and tonight’s fare begins with a Brahms piano concerto. So far, so soporific thinks Geoff, despite the energetic pianist.

inside the Royal Albert Hall

Part two is Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. It may not be a Mass, but it has everything else, Geoff reckons: choir and solo voices in some unidentifiable language, plus brass, wind, strings, drums galore and that massive organ which is almost in his right ear. Geoff studies the cellists. A fellow student once told him cellists were the raunchiest of the lot, as they were used to stroking a mighty instrument between parted thighs. He can well believe it.

According to the notes in Geoff’s lap, Janáček was keen on pan-Slavism, and his mighty work celebrates nationhood and peace.organ

That’s not something that Geoff can figure out from the music. There are noisy outbreaks from various instruments. Now the horns. Then the snare drums. Strings come in, and an exquisite harp.

Janáček, it’s also said, placed his nationalistic beliefs above the welfare of his own daughter. Geoff would have had words with him. Nothing on earth matters to him more than his son.

The conductor chops the air with his hands, then dangles his fingers like jelly fish. The orchestra hangs on every move of his digits. Then the organ erupts into a fantasia.

Nationhood and peace, muses Geoff. Chance would be a fine thing. The world could use a damn good conductor.

 

*For those not in the UK, the BBC Proms (or more exactly the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts) are an annual summer season of concerts in London, most of them held in the Royal Albert Hall.

 

 

 

 

Some of my Favourite People are Books (part two)

Posted in Writing by

It’s usual for a list of great novels to include

  • an inscrutable foreign masterpiece from the present-day
  • one Jane Austen title (choice depends on intellectual criteria, such as which film hero was most fanciable)
  • an angst novel (Philip Roth often fits the bill)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • Catch-22
  • and *drum roll* Anna Karenina.

bookshelf

Maybe you’re waiting with bated breath for Rosamund Bartlett’s new translation? Her Anna Karenina, due to be published in August, is already ranked about two millionth on Amazon (how does that happen? Tolstoy pulling rank again?).

Sorry to disappoint, but my choice of Russian blockbuster is by Boris Pasternak. When I first read it, I was neither a medic nor a writer, whereas Yuri Zhivago was both.

It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,

Snow swept the world from end to end.

A candle burned on the table;

A candle burned.

I loved Doctor Zhivago for its action, its setting, its characters, its lyricism (and Omar Sharif). I even studied Russian and tried to write poetry. Then I figured out the real lesson: to avoid becoming as self-absorbed as Pasternak’s hero. Also, not to turn into a bloke, especially not one with a frosted tache and a balalaika.

Dr Zhivago

Catch-22 may not be on this list, but I treasure another novel that gave rise to a very current phrase. Yes, the past is a foreign country in L P Hartley’s The Go-Between. Twelve-year old Leo figures out the facts of life. He also figures he’s being used.

“Well,” he said, “let’s make a bargain. I’ll tell you all about spooning, but on one condition.”

I knew what he was going to say, but for form’s sake I asked: “What is it?”

“That you’ll go on being our postman.”

While the lad was naïve by today’s standards, the book is still fresh for 1953 and nicely captures Leo’s post-traumatic stress. By comparison The Shrimp and the Anemone is rather dull. Which is to say that I don’t recall any spooning.

My choice of modern foreign masterpiece is the perfectly scrutable The Yacoubian Building. If you haven’t read it, it’s a lively ensemble novel peopled by a doorman, his family, a gay newspaper editor, Islamists, and the other motley inhabitants of the building on Suleiman Basha Street. Here’s a passage about the womanizing aristo Zaki Bey.

From Lady Kamla (she of the inexorable appetite) he learned how to start and when to desist and how to ask for the most abandoned sexual positions in extremely refined French. Zaki Bey has also slept with women of all classes – oriental dancers, foreigners, society ladies and the wives of the eminent and distinguished, university and secondary school students, even fallen women, peasant women, and housemaids. Every one had her special flavor, and he would often laughingly compare the bedding of Lady Kamla with its rules of protocol and that of the beggar woman he picked up one night when drunk in his Buick and took back to his apartment in Baehler Passage, and who he discovered, when he went into the bathroom with her to wash her body himself, to be so poor that she made her underwear out of empty cement sacks. *

The story may seem a bit ‘told’ for some, but that’s probably the nature of Arabic literature. The book has special resonance for me as I’ve lived in Cairo, although Al-Aswany doesn’t describe anything as atmospheric as my first terrifying day at school when I screamed so much that I threw up onto the teacher’s shoes.

For a tale that moves at breakneck speed and grips like a novice on a rearing stallion, look no further than Dick Francis. Low-brow? Maybe. Formulaic? Sometimes. But brilliant all the same, right from the off. This is from For Kicks.

The Earl of October drove into my life in a pale blue Holden that had seen better days, and danger and death tagged along for the ride.

I’m not the only fan of his opening style. Here’s what writer and blogger Emma Darwin has to say in Straight proof: what any of us can learn from Dick Francis.

Dick Francis

After brooding Russians, a traumatized adolescence, Egyptian neighbours and skulduggery in the stables, what could I possibly have left out? Chick-lit, that’s what. If you’ve read Me Before You by JoJo Moyes, you’ll know that Will has a life-changing motorbike crash.

“So, Patrick,” Will said, perhaps sensing my discomfort. “Louisa tells me you’re a personal trainer. What does that involve?”

I so wished he hadn’t asked. Patrick launched into his sales spiel, all about personal motivation and how a fit body made for a healthy mind. Then he segued into his training schedule for the Xtreme Viking – the temperature of the North Sea, the body fat ratios needed for marathon running, the best times in each discipline. I normally tuned out at this point, but all I could think of now, with Will beside me, was how inappropriate it was.

 What have all these books got in common?

A cracking story. Lots of conflict. Great dialogue. Wit, of course. I’m pretty sure there’s something else too, but it’s hard to analyse when you’re in awe so I’m damned if I know. Ask me again when I’ve got more of my own books onto other people’s shelves of favourites.

 

 *I had to correct the grammar in the English translation by Humphrey Davies. Sloppy editing, HarperCollins.

 

 

 

 

Some of my Favourite People are Books (part one)

Posted in Writing by

How do you choose a favourite book? It’s almost indecent, like whispering the name of your favourite child (kids: if you’re reading this, I love all three of you the same).

All the same, the evidence is on my shelves. It’s no surprise that I like novels. Preferably as real books. While Kindle has a place, usually in my carry-on luggage, only a physical book has pages that smell, that hide things only to fall out years later: the label from a dress, a map of Sorrento, a shopping list, a few pressed petals.

bougainvillea pressed

Unlike real friends, books don’t send you jokey emails, forget to call you, or tell you you’ve gained weight. So here are five of my BFFs.

You’re expecting The Group? Well here it is, my first Best Fiction Forever. Mary McCarthy’s iconic novel shocked a lot of people when it first appeared but it also taught readers about relationships. And recipes. Margaret Drabble claims the book taught her to cook. Here’s a passage about playwright Harald.

His specialities were Italian spaghetti, which any beginner could learn, and those minced sea clams – terribly good – they had the other night, and meat balls cooked in salt in a hot skillet (no fat), and a quick and easy meat loaf his mother had taught him: one part beef, one part pork, one part veal; add sliced onions, pour over it a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and bake in the oven.

But sex and food are not enough. I need laughter too. Enter Tom Sharpe. If only he’d made Porterhouse Blue a tad more outrageous, it would have evoked my own undergraduate days. It’s still fun though sadly it now seems very old-fashioned, especially when it’s in tiny print on yellowed pages.

There was a hangdog look about the Porter that caused the Dean to wonder if it wasn’t time he was put down before recalling that Skullion was after all a human being and that he had been misled by the metaphor.

Also in my BFF list is Coming From Behind. If you think Cambridge is riotous, wait till you get to the Polytechnic, Wrottesley, as described by Howard Jacobson. Here’s what the staff are up to.

Sefton Goldberg, on all fours above her, his knees and elbows glued with the perspiration of effort and anxiety to the polytechnic linoleum, as naked as Noah but for the academic gown and hood which Mrs Shorthall insists he wears, it being degree day, hopes to God he has remembered to lock his door.

I can’t leave out master storyteller Harlan Coben. So he isn’t exactly Tolstoy, but then his protagonist isn’t Vronsky, as any fool can see. The opening of Darkest Fear is a real doozy, as Myron Bolitar might put it.

An hour before his world exploded like a ripe tomato under a stiletto heel, Myron bit into a fresh pastry that tasted suspiciously like urinal cake.

“Well?” Mom prompted.

Myron battled his throat, won a costly victory, swallowed. “Not bad.”

Brave man. But how would the Jersey Boy fare against Jackson Brodie, Kate Atkinson’s erratic empathic detective? Her books are to me an irresistible mix of crime story and emotional drama though people can’t always agree on a definition. The quote on the front of One Good Turn calls it a literary novel, while according to a review on the back, the same book is a ‘detective novel that is better than a whole shelf full of literary fiction.’

Did I mention Brodie is also hapless?

He had never been in a jail cell before. He had put people in them, and taken people out of them, but he had never actually been locked in one himself. Nor had he journeyed from a holding cell to a sheriff court in the back of a Black Maria, which was like travelling in a cross between a public convenience and what he imagined a horsebox would be like.

No, One Good Turn may not be literary fiction, but it’s pacy and witty. I love her use of multiple viewpoints, which I believe allows more plot intricacies and development of lesser characters. No great coincidence that I chose to write One Night at the Jacaranda from more than one point of view.

old books

Are these some of your best friends too? In part two, I’ll reveal a few more of my favourite companions.

 

The Not-so-Secret Game of Sevens

Posted in Dating, London, Writing by

I’ve been tagged by alternative historical fiction author Alison Morton in a game of Lucky Sevens. 

It’s a bit of online fun for writers that pulls us out of our sheds, studios or beds where we sit scribbling away for hours on end and lets us reveal a little of our current work in progress.

That’s almost word for word what Alison said in her blog.  I’d love to go the whole hog and copy all of her fiction writing so I too can enjoy her amazing success, but back at school the nuns drilled into me that envy was A Bad Thing and that plagiarism was even worse, and the two together were The Devil’s Work and would ensure I never met St Peter.  Ever.  So I’m only copying a little eeny bit of Alison’s homework.

Here’s how the writers’ Game of Sevens goes:

Go to page 7 or 77 in your current manuscript
Go to line 7
Post on your blog approximately the next 7 lines or sentences – as they are!!
Tag 7 other people to do the same

Now, a lot of people have already done this, so I’m not tagging automatically, but I’m inviting any writers who read this to dare to do the same.  Just let me know if you do and I’ll add your name to this post (free advert!).

Alison posted seven lines from AURELIA, based in Roma Nova and the Germanic Federation state of Prussia and set in the 1960/70s. As I said, I’m not a complete plagiarist, so you’ll have to go to her blog to read her excerpt.

My seven or so lines are from my forthcoming novel CAMDEN PASSAGE. It’s set in London and follows on from my novel ONE NIGHT AT THE JACARANDA:

Dan had never been on radio before. And this was live. Which explained why his heart was leaping around in his chest long before he arrived in the studio. satellite dish

The building had a massive atrium that was all shiny marble and glass. So this was where the license fee went. No wonder they weren’t paying guests anything.

He’d made a tray of his new monkfish parcels. They’d be OK cold, especially with a light garnish of red amaranth. Each one was roughly bite-sized, with a toothpick through the middle.

A woman in the lobby barely looked up from her desk to tell him to take a seat. It was the kind of seat designed to make you uncomfortable. So there he sat, balancing out the foil-covered tray on his knees, staring at a bank of silent TV screens for what seemed like ages. Lucky old people on TV.

Well, not that lucky, because one of the programmes was a hilarious reality show in which children were meant to humiliate their parents. Dan supposed Jack would do much the same when he stopped being a cute little baby and grew into an egregious adolescent.

Egregious. It was Dan’s word of the day. He rolled it around in his mouth, still not sure he’d use it on air.

Let me know if you too want to take part of the writers’ Not-So-Secret Game of Sevens.

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers, INCEPTIO and PERFIDITAS.  Third in series SUCCESSIO is out now. 

How to Go Up in the World in Just Four Steps

Posted in Dating, London, Writing by

Now that Dan’s out, he’s on the up. going up in the worldFirst off, he needs to find work.  The snag?  How to explain away six years at Her Majesty’s pleasure.  Inventing a job abroad might fill that big gap on his CV.  Lucky he’s got a good imagination.  You don’t get very far without one, in his experience.

Dan is one of the characters from my novel One Night at the Jacaranda.  In this post I’m letting him out to share his current MO with you.

Dan needs to learn stuff.  That’s step two.  He reads a quality paper every day now. Cover to cover.  At the public library, if it hasn’t already been nicked.  Or he might find one in a bin.  Some days he has to pay for one.  newspapers

And he listens.  You can learn a lot from people, especially when they don’t even realise what they’re saying.  That’s when you discover things.

He chooses his own words carefully.  From a dictionary he got at the charity shop.  That’s step three: not sounding like a lag anymore.  Course, when you’re inside you want to sound like everyone else, because bad things are even more likely to happen when you don’t fit in.

Oxford Reference Dictionary

A lot of his new words are adjectives.  Easier to slip into conversation than nouns.  How the fuck would you shoe-horn a word like behemoth into a chat with the bint on the till at Iceland?  Yesterday he just about managed to use contiguous.

definition of contiguous

That was when the old biddy behind him pushed her shopping right up next to his on the belt.  He’d have let her go first, especially seeing as she only had a pint of milk and a packet of Rich Teas, but then he wouldn’t have been able to say contiguous. So he just put a divider up on the belt.

Today’s word of the day is egregious.  Means outstandingly bad, but so far he’s only managed to use it once, even though he waited an age for the 16 bus and when he got on it ponged of rotten fish.  Which is about as egregious as it can get.

Fourth and most important of all:  he’s looking for a woman.  Nobody said these four steps would be easy, but he’s got a good feeling in his bones.

Yep, there too. 

Mega Monday: We’re influential bloggers!

Posted in Writing by

It’s lovely to have such an enthusiastic response to the Influential Blogger Award, as well as to my novel. Now I’m looking forward to discovering these new blogs.

thewriteromantics's avatarthewriteromantics

most-influential-bloggerThank you to Carol Cooper who awarded this badge to the Write Romantics.  We already loved Carol for inviting us to review her wonderful novel, being interviewed for the blog and for agreeing to write the introduction to our anthology, but now we love her even more.

IOne Night at the Jacarandan case you didn’t know, Carol is a doctor, teacher, writer, broadcaster and mother, whose debut novel, One Night at the Jacaranda, has received a wealth of rave reviews on Amazon. Carol is also a successful writer of non-fiction books, mainly on child health and parenting, and is The Sun newspaper’s doctor. As well as being a great friend of the Write Romantics blog, Carol has a fab blog of her own. If you’ve been missing out on Carol’s beside manner up until now, then you really should check out her blog.

Now we’re passing on the award to ten other bloggers. They…

View original post 856 more words

Three Things I Learned This Week

Posted in Family life by

I’m not a fast learner. It took me ages to memorise the 12 cranial nerves, and I only achieved it thanks to a dirty little mnemonic, much loved by medical students.   Maybe that’s why it took me a while to learn these three lessons.

1 Windscreen wipers work fine until it starts raining. windscreen wipers

Then you discover that they smear, they’re harbouring mouldy cherry blossom, they’re stuck in one position, or else they fall off without notice.  They only pull this last trick when you’re belting along a dual carriageway in torrential rain.  At night, when there’s no hope of finding them again. 

At least this time the inside of the windscreen was in good shape. In my VW Beetle, the interior misted up all the time.  Some advised me to rub the inside of the windscreen with a cut raw potato.  Lesson learned long ago: potato stops the glass misting up, but you still can’t see out.

2 If you look hard enough, there’s usually chocolate somewhere in the house.

Are you familiar with chocolate hunger?  You’ve consumed a 4000 Calorie meal, but there’s a little recess of your stomach that’s screaming for cocoa-based confectionery, and the noise gets louder until you appease it. 

You’re dreaming of Lindt 70% cocoa, or maybe Green & Black’s.

Green and Blacks

 

But the shops are shut.

Start searching and you’ll probably unearth some chocolate flakes in the back of the kitchen cupboard, or if you’re really lucky a milk chocolate Hob Nob.  What about raiding your child’s lunchbox?  You can stop off at the petrol station tomorrow on the way to school and replenish it.  Or there might be booty in the depths of the sofa (usually the caramel one from the Cadbury’s Roses that nobody wanted).  I once hit the jackpot in a coat pocket: a distressed packet of Maltesers from a visit to the cinema.

This time? Zilch. I’d even checked the car. Nothing but mints and empty wrappers.

Then I remembered.  Hadn’t one of my sons left a couple of things behind when he’d moved out?

cash cow

Yes, the expiry date was decades ago.  I said you can usually find chocolate. I didn’t say it would be edible.

3 Quizzes are nothing but ritual humiliation. 

I entered the village hall full of optimism.  A table of 8 middle-aged people, including one teacher and two doctors?  We were bound to scoop the big prize (a motley assortment of goodies including a jar of stuffed olives and a sleeping bag. No, I can’t explain it either). But we failed to identify one of Lady Gaga’s hits, and went downhill as the evening progressed.  Dressed in academic gown, the quiz master repeatedly tapped our table with his pointer. 

SaturnUnfortunately there were no questions on cranial nerves, just posers on chemistry, Nobel prizes, and astronomy. And why does someone always have to shout ‘Uranus’?  Especially when it isn’t.  

Our score was pitiful.  Sir threatened us with an after-school detention. 

Old dogs can’t learn new tricks. They have enough trouble remembering the old ones, especially since they sell bottles of wine at quizzes. But I quite fancied a sleeping bag.