The Laws of Leaf-Raking

THE LAWS OF LEAF-RAKING

1. You clear a patch of lawn, turn your back and next time you look, you find a capricious breeze has covered it in fresh leaves. (Hold your curses, this is but baby steps as far as leaf-raking goes.)

2. Just as you are releasing a load of leaves into the garden waste bag, one side will flop inwards and they’ll land back on the grass again. (Okay, mild swear word is permitted.)

3. Never attempt to clear leaves off the rake by hand as it’s guaranteed that you’ll have scraped up some poo. (Fill in your own reaction.)

4. You build up a goodly leaf heap, pause in your raking for a rest and find your dog or toddler joyfully jumping in it and kicking leaves all over the place. (Adopt Joyce Grenfell tones as you shout, “Don’t do that!”)

5. You accidentally step on the rake. This could result in two things. A) Whilst your stiff boot sole prevents injury to your foot, the rake handle whacks you in the face, giving you a black eye and lump on your head the size of Snowdon. B) A trip to A&E for prong-extraction and tetanus shot. (Much swearing is now permitted.)

6. It starts to rain. You stop raking, promising to finish the job tomorrow. You wake to find foxes have played hide and seek in the leaf bag and ripped it to shreds and every leaf is now happily lying on its back in the grass laughing at you. You sigh, reach for a beer and then it snows and you know you won’t have to look at a leaf again for a very long time. Three cheers for Mother Nature!

OR…

7. You finish the job, drag yourself wearily in, looking forward to a restorative hot bath and drink, then spouse says smugly, “I have a gizmo in the garage that could have made the job much easier for you, if you’d only asked.” (Murder is now permitted.)

Book Title Trends

  

Thirty years ago, my very first book was published. It was called Sweet Temptation and was written under the pen-name of Caroline Standish. I hadn’t spent long agonising over that title. The publisher wanted something that sounded passionate and sexy and this was the first one I suggested. However, thinking about it now, I can see that it has no relevance at all to a historical romance set in the 1820s. I have renamed the revamped version The Earl’s Captive, which is much more relevant to the storyline and it should be up on Kindle soon.

Titles go through phases. In 18^th century Britain, the fashion was to name a book after the hero or heroine, hence Clarissa (Samuel Richardson), Tom Jones (Henry Fielding) and Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe). In the last few years, there has been a fashion for long titles that almost tumble off the cover: The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nighttime; After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings and Flew Away (Joyce Carol Oates). However, this is nothing new. I remember my shock, back in 1976, at seeing the unwieldy title, If You Meet Buddha On The Road, Kill Him (Sheldon Kopp). Of course, I read it just because all my friends had their noses stuck in it, and it was debated avidly after a few drags of wacky baccy. Well, it was the Seventies!

What is the purpose in choosing such long titles? Were they picked for shock value alone, to make the random browser intrigued enough to pick the book off the shelf? When I see a lengthy title, my innate book title prejudice kicks in and I think, ‘If the title is so over-wordy, I bet the contents will be, too,’ and I am instantly put off. Or I decide that the author is showing off.

There have been titles I’ve hated so much that I nearly didn’t read the book, even though the reviews were good. One example is Gone Girl, which struck me as being so ungrammatical that I expected the content to be lazily written. It wasn’t, of course, it was just my title prejudice at work at work again.

I have just been scanning recent book releases (once, it was only records and the odd animal that were ‘released’) and the fashion seems to be for descriptive titles that reflect the contents. There’s Vanessa Curtis’s amazing, heart-wrenching The Earth Is Singing; Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling, which I can’t wait to start; Peter James’s The House on Cold Hill; Kate Morton’s The Lake House; Bernard Cornwell’s Warriors of the Storm. Good, strong, unpretentious titles that lure you in by their very simplicity.

I wonder what will come next, in 2016? Titles containing foreign words and phrases? Kathy Reichs has already set this trend with Déjà Dead and Death du Jour. Literary quotes? Psychobabble titles? Computer-term titles? Ooh, The Keyboard Killer! I feel a plot coming on.

Scared Stiff?

I have been in quite a few terrifying situations at various times in my life. I have been threatened with a knife twice; been at gunpoint once; been stuck on a steep, high mountain side with no handholds and my feet sliding away beneath me; had an attack of vertigo when I was almost at the top of a tall ladder; been in a descending plane when it had a near miss with another that chose to amble across the runway just as we had almost touched down...

There have been others, some even worse. Some so bad, I don't even want to talk about them. But, despite my terror, my fear for my life on each of these occasions, I have never, ever, been 'scared stiff'.

I suppose the expression was invented to describe a sensation of being frozen to the spot like a rabbit in headlights; of being so terrified that you turn instantly into a pillar of salt, an Anthony Gormley statue or a relief figure on the Elgin Marbles. Perhaps this happens to some people. Not me. Rather than being scared stiff, I am scared wobbly.

Yes, whenever I am truly terrified - when, walking home in the dark, I hear footsteps stealthily approaching behind me, or sounds outside my ground floor bedroom window at night - I am instantly transformed into one of our ancestors from millions of years ago, before bones developed, when we were still amoebae. I become a thing of jelly. I quiver. My leg bones turn into slugs. My heart flutters with the speed of a hummingbird's wings. I am utterly useless, but I am not stiff. Especially not my bottom lip!

Hang on... Did I say 'utterly useless'? That's wrong. In moments of sheer terror, one faculty has never deserted me and that is the power of speech. When I was dragged up an alleyway at knife point back in 1966 as I was walking home from a nightclub at 3 am, full of supreme confidence that my very youthfulness would protect me from danger (and still with enough energy to walk four miles), my tongue was my saviour.

Remembering something my mother told me when she was on the point of being murdered (be patient, all will be revealed in my memoir!), I started speaking to the young man who had seized my arm and was pointing the knife blade at me. I talked... and went on talking in a low, hypnotic tone, telling him he didn't really want to harm me and he knew what would happen to him if he did, until eventually the hand holding the knife dropped and I seized my chance and ran back down the alley to the main road. My tongue saved me from the gun threat, too. That's another long story and that, too, will be in the memoir.

Let's hope that if I ever get scared wobbly again, I'll still have the wit to use that ultimate weapon - words. When in a tight spot, talk, talk, talk. Or even sing!

Old Age Rage!

As I get older, I get angrier. More quickly and about more things. Such as:

*  Ten-foot teenage schoolboys barging ahead of me onto the bus.

*  Clothes shops that have special sections for oldies, stocked with ghastly pastel-coloured jumpers knitted in the kind of nylon yarn that gives your hair the mad scientist look when you pull the sweater over your head and which, rather than being soft to caress our delicate, ageing flesh, are set-your-teeth-on-edge hard and synthetic. They always plonk them next to a rack of polyester trousers in dark navy or e.coli brown, or a row of skirts in shiny nylon festooned with flowers in funereal shades of heliotrope and sludgy green. You know the sort. You, too, must have seen them and shuddered and, like me, scurried on to the Manta Ray or Wallis section, where you let out your breath in a relieved 'Whew!'

*  Coffee shops where the barista chats to the much younger person standing behind you in the queue, whilst she mixes your coffee on autopilot and takes your money without even looking at you. Add to that the food sections in coffee bars which feature a row of vomit-coloured egg mayo and cucumber sarnies when you craved the cheese and pickle one that was snatched from under your nose by a long-armed student standing behind you. Also add the barista who looks scathingly at you when you order a cappucino because she was just dying to show off her mastery of the pumpkin spiced latte.

*  Recipes that sound delicious and get you rushing excitedly around assembling contents, until you reach the point in the ingredients list that halts you like a horse stalling at the last fence after a clear round. Merguez? Tagliarini? Mesclun? No, I didn't have any grated blue unicorn hoof lying around in the cupboard, either.

*  Days that are too wet. Too windy, Too hot. Too cold. Make that Weather, in its entirety.

*  The wasp that sees me coming and sets out to annoy me, buzzing round me, invading my personal space with its whirring wings and threatening sting. It's no accident those annoying striped flying beasts are all males. The females recline in the nest with all six feet up, waiting for their servants to bring them nectar - which reminds me of a certain type of woman who makes me almost angrier than wasps do.

*  The nurse at my GP surgery who gave me a shingles jab, telling me I'd only need the one as it would last for life - then I Googled it and found out it lasted five years. That really brought me down. It made me wonder if she knew something I didn't!

*  Financial institutions that won't give me a loan or a mortgage because I am 'too old'.

*  Travel insurance firms who double the price you were paying at 59, because at 60 you're suddenly twice as likely to have a heart attack whilst sipping your pina colada in Marbs.

*  All those special weekend and holiday deals which, when you read the small print, are for two people only. Am I never supposed to go away again because I don't have a friend or lover to accompany me? I have rung travel companies, begging and pleading, offering to pay more, but they have been implacable: the deal is only for two. Why? Grrrrr!

*  Scratchy labels in clothing. One of my pet peeves. I can't count the number of items I've damaged while trying to cut off the stupid label that has made the back of my neck red and itchy.

*  Cyclists on the pavement. Almost always male and not all youngsters. The other day as I strolled to the shops, I was nearly mashed by six mountain bike wheels, pedalled by a bulky dad and his two sons of about ten and twelve. Talk about setting a bad example. Pavements are for pedestrians, get it? If I'd had a walking stick, I'd have given them a poke in the spokes.

*  The conversational talents of hairdressers. It has taken me years to find a stylist who can actually talk about anything beyond, "Going anywhere nice for your holidays?" My current one talks about music, politics, books, films, psychology, restaurants, Ireland, Italy... She can pick up a conversational ball and run with it and score a goal by doing a fantastic job on my hair. Although it takes me an hour and a half to get to the salon, I shan't be going elsewhere in a hurry. I just hope my super stylist and colouring queen won't get lured elsewhere, or get married and preggers. Not for another five years, anyway. After that, if the practice nurse was right, it won't matter and they can all carry on queue-jumping, wearing nylon cardis, flapping wasps away and gagging on egg mayo and cucumber sarnies.

Lock, stock and watering can

I have just read an article in the Sunday Times property section in which Rupert Sweeting, head of Knight Frank Country Sales, said that only about 5-10% of vendors include the house contents when they sell their home, walking out with just their clothes and personal possessions. The new owners are obviously pleased to inherit the copper warming pans, carved four-posters, rusty suits of armour (I'd be peeping inside for skeletons - what a great place to hide the victim of an old murder!), oil portraits of obscure 18th Century merchants and china tea services that may or may not have belonged to Duke Didgery of Greater Dodging.

Country piles can contain all manner of interesting collectables, but what about town and city properties? Do vendors get asked, as a condition of sale, to leave behind the non-fitted wardrobe and the horrid brown sofa? I can confirm that they certainly do.

Of course, the buy-to-let brigade might be only too happy to buy up a house or flat and all its contents, as it will save them a few bob when it comes to kitting it out for tenants - providing they all have those labels proclaiming their fire-retardant properties still attached. (I don't know if you saw the recent TV programme on the subject of house fires, but even these labels can be faked. Terrifying thought.)

But how about people who are buying a property to actually live in - a pretty rare occurrence in London at present, so it seems, when investors outnumber genuine home-hunters by at least three to one, judging by my attendance at those ghastly Open House events over the past couple of years. If you keep your ears wagging, you will soon sort out the BTLs from the OOs (owner-occupiers). Of course, some are buying a place for their progeny to occupy whilst studying at a local college, after which they will let it on the open market. Then there are those who already have a place in the country and are looking for a Monday-Friday city pad. There seem to be few people like me, who want to get their belongings out of the storage unit or, in my case right now, garden shed, and create a proper home.

At every viewing, the men in brown suits are hovering. OK, sometimes it might be a dusty grey sweatshirt but you can guarantee it will be worn over trousers that are some shade of brown, ranging from beige to Brazil nut. They hang back from the rest of the viewers and they don't speak much. Often, they take a tape measure out of pockets that are bulging with phones and wallets stuffed with notes - for this type always carries out his business via cash in hand - and proceed to measure the rooms, although the printed details already state the dimensions in feet and metres.

I know what these guys are about. They are trying to calculate where they can put up partition walls in order to cram in the maximum number of beds and tenants. Then they get out their phones, switch on the calculator and do rapid sums to see if the projected profit would make this flat or house a worthwhile addition to their portfolio. They will then sneak up to the agent and offer to line his personal pocket if he will let them have it for £20k less than the asking price. The BTL brown suits tare one extra element amongst the multitude of huge hurdles, the worst one being people with lots more money than myself who offer £20 over the asking price, that makes buying property, in London especially, so hazardous, difficult and disappointing.

But back to my original theme, that of the strange things buyers ask sellers to leave behind. I have bought and sold eleven properties. My first was a first floor maisonette in Ealing, West London. The buyers, a pair of middle-aged newly-weds, told me they would buy it if I would leave behind all the curtains, light fittings and shades, wardrobes, cooker and fridge, the piano, one of the beds and in particular - their eyes glowing with covetousness - the sofa.

Now, this being the first property I had ever owned, I hadn't developed great taste. In fact, you could say that my choice of decor was hideous. I bought the flat in 1979. The '70s were without doubt the era of brown. Especially brown with orange and yellow flowers, a hangover from '60s psychedelia (thank heavens I was too young and poor to buy a flat then!). I had toffee-coloured carpets, I had painted the walls myself in a shade that resembled brown Windsor soup (or, to be utterly accurate, watery diarrhoea) and all the woodwork was glossed in a shade called Banana. Yellow, in other words. I seem to remember the curtains were brown with orange flowers. There was a cheap wooden table parked at the end furthest from the electric fire and resplendent in the middle of the carpet was a dark brown corner unit in shiny Dralon.

Remember Dralon? If you do, the words 'static' and 'slippery' spring to mind. Dralon was a fabric you sat on then slid off. It was stuff that, having sat on it for a while, you could then stroke the cat and see the poor mog's fur stand on end. This seating unit was curved and massive, and pretty useless because, being curved, you couldn't sleep an overnight guest on it unless they liked to sleep bent like  - well, a banana. But this couple had fallen in love with the cow-pat-coloured Dralon monstrosity and that was the chief condition of their offer: no Dralon, no deal.

So I sold it to them, thanking my lucky stars that I hadn't had the trouble and cost of moving it, as it would certainly not have fitted into my next property, which was a poky, but freehold, cottage a bit further west in Northfields. A few weeks after the couple had moved in, I had a phone fall from them. Did I know the flat had woodworm? Of course I didn't. I had lagged the loft myself with rolls of fibreglass, using a nylon scarf as a face mask, and hadn't spotted single bore-hole in the rafters.

"Where was the woodworm?" I asked nervously, wondering if the staircase had collapsed and Mr Buyer was phoning from the depths of his plaster-cast.

"In the cupboard on the landing," he said accusingly. "My wife opened the door and the whole thing collapsed in a heap of dust."

"I'm really sorry," I said, shaking with suppressed laughter. "I never used that cupboard so I didn't know." I hoped the woodworm had wiggled their way into the frame of the sofa... and did they ever encounter the resident ghost, the small brown and white terrier that often appeared in the living room?

I don't think I left anything behind in the Northfields property, apart from a propensity for the drain running under the kitchen floor to block from time to time, sending a whale-spout of water up to the ceiling. I suspected it was being affected by the roots of the weeping willow in the garden, but I never said anything as it was up to their surveyor to think of things like that, wasn't it?

In 2000, I bought an end-of-terrace ex-council house in Muswell Hill with a magnificent paved and terraced garden, complete with fish-less pond. I put it up for sale 18 months later as it was at the foot of a very steep hill, up which you had to climb to reach shops and bus routes and I'd done some painful damage to the ligaments in my left ankle. A young single mum made an offer and the conditions of sale were that I included the fridge-freezer and blinds, three rugs I'd lugged back from Turkey and everything in the garden including the watering can. I was happy to oblige.

When it comes to moving house, plants can provide a sticking point. Some people like to take their favourite pots and plants with them when they move, but I have always been happy to leave them behind (as well as pianos - I have abandoned three). You can always plant another clematis or a rosemary bush. I sold a Kentish Town flat with every pot and plant on the terrace included. And my last pair of buyers, in East Finchley, wanted the wardrobe, a chest of drawers and the kitchen table, but not the beds, even though I offered them. When somebody doesn't want something, it makes you question your taste. What was wrong with my lovely pine bed frame which I had painstakingly drag-painted white, to create a calm, Zen look in the white-walled bedroom?

I sometimes wonder how long it took them to discover something else I had left behind - a redundant, rusty TV aerial sagging from the chimney, which creaked like a haunted house door every time the wind blew. I asked numerous firms to remove it for me, but nobody would, so I hope they didn't blame me for their sleepless nights. At least they couldn't blame my beds!

Flad earns his keep

I wrote this on May 19th and never got round to posting it. I thought I had, but have just found it in Draft form. Here's what I wrote, over a month ago now. Hankies at the ready...

Last night, we had to get our beloved, adorable Flad put to sleep. This has been one of the worst days of my life. I keep looking for him in all his favourite spots in the garden. I think I see him under the table, but it's only my partner's slippers. In reality, he is buried in his favourite late afternoon sunning spot, next to the rose bush planted by my partner which bears the name of his late wife, who died of breast cancer the year before I met him.

An unkind person said to me that I had no right to be so upset because it was 'only a cat'. So I want to tell Flad's story and show how he won my heart.

I still have his fur on my clothes.


It's time I resumed normal service now. Things have been pretty shitty since Flad passed away. You know how grief goes. One minute you're OK, and have been for several days, then some little thing acts as a trigger and whoosh! You're overwhelmed by a tidal wave of misery, a seventh wave that swooshes over you from behind, breaking over your head, swamping you, leaving you gasping and spluttering, battered and shaken and trying to catch your breath and keep your balance.

A moth at the window was all it took. A large one, at dusk, beating its wings against the glass of the patio doors. My mind flashed back to when we first saw Flad, leaping at the glass, catching moths and eating them. He wasn't more than seven months old. Half-grown, pot-bellied with what I first thought were kittens, but when we noticed he was male (though minus his bits) we realised the distended belly was a mixture of starvation and worms. He had been living wild, under a hedge we think, sneaking out to steal the scraps we threw out for the foxes. Poor little thing.

He was terrified of humans but my partner gradually tamed him by crouching on the grass and holding out tempting morsels that a starving kitten couldn't resist. We started leaving out a saucer of cat food and within weeks of getting proper food, his belly slimmed and his coat grew glossy and he was a different cat entirely.

We already had two adult cats, also black and white, so Flad was an add-on. Originally, I christened him Felix but his brow was a peculiar shape, giving his face a flattened look as if he'd been squashed in the birth canal - you know how some babies are born with odd-shaped heads that soon go back to normal? As Flad filled out, his face became more rounded but by then it was too late. I had called him Flathead one day and my partner seized on this name with great glee, and it stuck, though it was gradually shortened to Flad.

"He's never coming in. He's an outdoor cat," decided my partner, Mr Grumpy, even though Flad had mastered the cat flap by now, after watching BC (Bastard Cat) and Trollop to see how they did it. (Bastard, Trollop and Flathead... yes, I know!) One morning, I was first up and saw a strange sight through the glass of the side door. "What on earth's that?" I asked Mr Grumpy. It looked like two furry ears and a tail. Flad was sitting nearby, looking pleased with himself.

He burst out laughing. "It's a squirrel's arsehole!" Indeed it was. Two back legs, a tail and an, er... well, you know. Flad had eaten the rest. That night we had a peaceful night's sleep as the squirrel that had got into the inaccessible part of the attic had ceased to disturb us. Flad must have been lying in wait as Mr Squirrel shimmied down the creeper for his breakfast, straight into an open feline mouth.

"He's earned his keep," said Mr G. "I think he can come in, now." And so suddenly, there were three black and white cats on the sofa at night and no room for us at all.

Flad on the left, always the clown, and neat, tidy little Trollop

TO BE CONTINUED...

Coming soon...

Bear with me, please. It's been such a miserable week that I couldn't write a word. But I promise I'll be back soon with The Story of Flad and I'll try not to ruin my keyboard by splashing too many tears onto it.