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It was when I looked down at my foot pumping a few ‘pumps of air’ into the inflatable that I noticed I’d come out in my slippers – “oh well,” I thought “not much I can do about that, other than abandon the visit to Cracklin’ Rosie” – and I didn’t want to do that ‘cos I was on a mission: fitting the new, stainless-steel, spurling pipe – a high priority job.

It was a dark and stormy day, raining. Hatches had to stay shut, so not enough light came down below. And the read-out window of the electricity-socket pedestal on the pontoon had shown ‘no-credit’ when I pushed in my card. I learned later that if you allow the card to get too close to a mobile fone, it wipes the chip clean! What a con!

As it turned out, it didn’t matter much anyway. On a previous visit I’d moved everything out of the forepeak, bed-cushions included, to clear the construction site; one of the unforeseen consequences of that was that my wandering light and cable was buried in a cupboard behind haphazard layers of tools, cushions, going-home clothing and tins and boxes of things that are kept in unmarked tins and boxes on all boats.

Anyway, I had to illuminate complex bits of the job with a torch, not very satisfactory. And it was cold. And my paraffin heater fuel-pipe was disconnected. And, of course, I had no electricity.

I struggled on.

When it got really dark, I downed tools and treated myself to a small tot of the amber liquid while I cooked dinner. Baked beans. Very tasty.

My ‘Vang’ sleeping bag is warm and cosy, about the only thing that was fully functional on board that day. At least the roof didn’t leak.

I slept all night.

The morning almost didn’t make it. More dark clouds and rain. I had a lay-in, a case of Vang-itis.

I got up eventually and began the struggle again, dashing out between the showers to fit, temporarily, the spurling pipe deck-fitting in order to accurately locate the pipe retaining collar on the deckhead and the lower mounting frame above the chain locker, without displacing the deck fitting.

By late afternoon the dark clouds had got darker. Dense showers of rain were sweeping across the sea, flattening the waves.

I’d had enough. “I’m going home.” I said to the wind.

I gathered my bits, tidied what was to be left in the cockpit and launched the dinghy. Only a couple of hundred yards to row against the wind and the rising tide. “The exercise will keep me warm” I said to myself. I got that bit right.

I approached the side of the concrete slipway as fast as I could row. I needed the dinghy to ground hard on the concrete so that it wouldn’t be blown off as I stepped ashore.

I thought I’d done it. I leant forward into a crouching position and, pushing myself upwards and forward, raised my right foot and thrust it over the bow of the dinghy, and down… into two inches of water and thick, black mud. My body, and my left leg, followed.

The dinghy, suddenly freed of the constraining weight of me, began to drift downwind – but it couldn’t escape, my left foot was still aboard. All I had to do was turn around and grab it (the dinghy, not my foot).

Ho! Ho! My right foot was mud-bound, up to the knee.

I spun around, anti-clockwise, lifting my left foot as I did so. The dinghy, suddenly released, made a run for it. Instinctively (Harrogate, Army Apprentice College First XV, 1958) I dived – nearly unscrewing my right foot from its leg in the process – and draped an arm over the runaway dinghy. The other arm went into the mud.

Now all I had to do was stand up.

Unwilling to release the dinghy to the wilds of Fareham Creek, I had to fold my left knee under my body and thrust that into the mud too, that allowed me to unbury my ‘free’ arm to grab the dinghy’s grab-line and make a couple of muddy steps to the slipway, dragging the dinghy behind me.

The drama was all over. I fetched the dinghy-trolley from the dinghy compound and stowed the dinghy. I threw an old sheet over the driver’s seat in the car and drove to the security gate. (We always carry an old sheet in the boot, don’t you?)

I had to get out of the car to hand in the dinghy-compound key. The security guard stared at me, obviously worried. “Are you alright?” he asked.

I suppose his concern must have been aroused when he noticed that I was wearing my slippers.

The Spurling-Pipe Deck-Fitting, on Cracklin’ Rosie’s foredeck, used to face aft, I’ve always thought that was a mistake. Having it facing aft might have reduced the chances of unwanted waves pouring down into the forepeak but it also made pulling out the anchor chain a lot unsmoother than it should have been. ‘So’ thought I, ‘now, that she’s on land for a spell I’ll re-align said deck-fitting to face forward’. I undid its four mounting bolts, took it off and brought it home where tools, and power, and coffee break stuff are more conveniently available.

All I had to do was drill and countersink four new holes in the flange – which forms the base of the deck-fitting – for the shiny new bolts I’d already ordered. It needed new holes for the mounting bolts because the old holes are not symmetrically located around the flange. The alternative would have been to drill more holes through the deck and I didn’t think that was the best option.

But, marking the new holes’ locations was not as simple as it had first appeared. And the fitting had to match the existing holes in the deck – exactly, first time.

I took photos of the upside-down fitting, I measured and drew a plan (1971 ‘O’ level Geometrical and Mechanical Drawing) and I ‘finger-pressed’ an impression of the underside on a piece of card. I didn’t fully trust any of them.

My ‘engineering brain’ suggested that I should cut a ‘pipe sized’ hole in a piece of wood, which would represent the deck, mount the fitting on the piece of wood and drill through the existing boltholes into and through the piece of wood, then I could turn the fitting horizontally through 180° and accurately mark and drill the locations of the required new holes.

I chose a sturdy, hardwood plank and clamped it in the portable workbench, by the garage. Almost inevitably my ‘best fit’ hole cutter was not exactly the required size, so the hole I cut was fractionally too small. I’d anticipated that and had a roll of P80 sandpaper, a ‘former’ around which to wrap it and some elbow-grease already applied.

I started sanding.

Half and hour later I was still sanding. Slow progress.

Ida came out with a cup of coffee.

“What are you making?” She asked.

“A template for this deck fitting.”

“Looks like a long job to me.”

“Yes, I don’t have a means of increasing the size of this hole any quicker.”

Pause.

“If it’s only a template why don’t you cut it out of a thin piece of wood?”

There were no police anywhere near here last night. I was expecting them, and I had my story ready.

None came.

It all started a couple of hours after we went to bed.

It was quite frightening, being shaken awake to instantly face the most brilliant flash of lightning anyone has ever seen, and a massive, electrical explosion of at least five thousand decibels.

Once the awful sound that reverberated between my two ears had subsided, and my eyes had started to transmit something other than white light to my brain, the real problem took over.

The roof was leaking.

Badly.

It was leaking through the roof of the first-floor bay window, into our bedroom – from where, I learned a few panicky moments later, it poured through the floor and into the sitting room below.

Catastrophe. On two floors!

I was called upon to do something other than hide under the duvet.

Reluctantly – but with considerable haste generated by the chambermaid’s vocal encouragement – I got out of bed. The lightning still flashed and the thunder still roared, but it was quite clear that absence of a determined attempt to divert the south of England Niagara Falls would be considered a serious failure with equally serious consequences.

 In between the explosions, the ‘plip-plop-plink’ of water dripping into dozens of dishes and bowls melodicised the superhuman effort by the cleaning lady who had deployed them to save the carpets from permanent damage.

“Where’s the torch?” The tiny, ‘pretend model’ on my bedside locker is just about powerful enough to light the face of the bedside clock. I already knew it was ‘uncivilized time’. I needed something a little more powerful to go leak-hunting on the roof of the bay (new lyrics?).

First I needed some lightweight clothing. No hope of searching for anything light and waterproof in my wardrobe, that kind of stuff is in the back of the car, under the floor of the boot which is currently supporting various bits of boat and other sundries that we deem essential ‘in-case-of-breakdown’. So shorts and T-shirt was the only option.

I donned the operations attire, ventured out into the storm via the back door and was already uncomfortably wet before the rain-laden leaves of the Buddleia by the shed door ‘fluttered a little’ and filled in any dry patches.

I ‘oiked’ out the long step ladder and proceeded, bare-footed so as not to soil the carpet on the stairs, up to the bedroom on the second floor, where John, our youngest son rubbed his eyes theatrically and asked, helpfully, if anything was wrong and could he help?

“Go and make your mum a cup of tea” I said, (with just a modicum of sarcasm).

I went back down to ground level and resourced a waterproof sheet with which to protect the bed beneath the window that I would have to open. On my way past the shed I picked up my bike’s front light – brilliant flash of inspiration.

Back up in the clouds a lightning duel was being fought with brilliant flashes of brilliance and very loud explosions.

I opened the window and lowered the step ladder onto the roof tiles. The feet of the ladder rested on the roof of the bay window which was pretending to be the bottom of a swimming pool.

I climbed out of the window and onto the ladder.

There was another brilliant flash and an almost instantaneous explosion. I didn’t feel anything except giant raindrops hammering into my back.

I stepped down into the pool. Up to my ankles.

I was show-stoppingly drenched in bright, white light and almost deafened by the noise – blind and deaf as well as almost being a part of a miniature lake.

Then it was dark again. I shone my bicycle front lamp hither and thither, but I knew where the trouble would be.

I imagined that by now most of the neighbours would have reported torchlit activities on the roof of 245 to the police.

Kneeling in the puddle I felt under the eaves for the unsuitably small drain. I pulled out handfuls of dead leaves and the decomposing carcass of a dead bird which had been stopping the water from disappearing down the ‘plug’ole’. The water drained away.

I stood up and looked around: no police cars in sight – too rough for them I s’pose. I bowed just in case I had an audience.

Then the rain stopped.

I climbed in through the window, pulled the ladder up after me and viewed the indoor effects of the storm.

The next day’s activities were already programmed.

Our next door neighbour is a policeman, I shall make sure he’s aware of the force’s shortcomings.

A long time ago a kind lady gave us some old dining chairs. She was ninety and she was downsizing. The chairs were classic. We’ve had them for many years. All of our family and most of our friends have sat on those chairs. Some of them have suffered from the increase in size and weight of the bums they bear, the chairs I mean, not the friends (although there are some options where the words might be appropriate whichever way around they’re written). The chairs have had to put up with the increased loading whilst not getting any younger themselves. One of them had developed a serious wobble. I decided to fix it.

The garage was empty. Empty of a car that is. Its usual occupant was convalescing after some serious renovation.

It’s almost pleasant, working in a dry, uncramped space – that’s a new word by the way, Google doesn’t recognise it and it’s not in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (but it jolly well ought to be!) and my two workbenches stand, vices agape, eagerly awaiting their limelight moments.

There were some rusty old screws in the fillets where the chair-seat-frame is attached to the back legs but they came out surprisingly easily. Any glue that might once have added strength to the joint had long since crumbled away, so the seat and front legs were quickly separated from the back and back-legs structure.

The dowels were all broken, so the two parts of the chair had been hanging together on the rusty screws. Of course there was no hope of removing the broken dowels and no means of perfectly aligning my hand-drill to drill out the old stubs. No choice but to do it by eye. First though I had to ‘get some dowelling’. A fairly quick search on Google identified quite a few nearby sources of 9mm dowelling rod but no 10mm. How strange I thought. Finally I had to settle for a pack of 200 40 x 10mm wooden dowels from, Screwfix. There are three dowels per joint, I only needed six.

But six dowels means twelve holes to be drilled. With some trepidation – but no choice if the job was to be done ­­- I carefully filed off the broken, sticking-out splinters and lined up the drill. I was amazed at how well that little exercise went.

Common sense says put the dowels in and see if it all lines up. I didn’t dare. The dowels were such a tight fit I thought I’d never get the joint apart again to paint glue onto the flat bits of the joint.

I laid the back of the chair across the two work benches, painted on the glue, and quickly, before the glue dried, lined up the seat-and-front-legs structure. I hammered it on with a two-pound lump-hammer. It seemed beautifully firm.

I breathed a sigh of relief, stood back and admired the finished product.

(see below)

That doesn’t mean that that the garden gate wrote this! Only that the roses that needed dead-heading are by the garden gate.

I’d just got up, hadn’t even had a cup of tea when I was suddenly struck by the urgency of the requirement to ‘dead-head’ those roses by the front, garden gate. They are truly lovely roses, a beautiful, pale yellow with a scent that would make Mr Chanel jealous.

 But once they’re ‘over’ they’re like Cinderella after midnight, they need to disappear. 

I put on some shoes and walked down the back garden path to get the plastic basket that serves as a trug. It was full. Full of dying bits of plants that our lady-gardener had failed to empty onto the compost heap. So, sighingly adding yet one more to the lengthy list of chores that I’m responsible for, I picked up the basket and walked to the gate in the fence behind the garage which opens into a little copse. Well, actually it’s a few trees bigger than a little copse, I think. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a copse as a small group of trees. Google doesn’t even know what a copse is!

Anyway, this group of trees is like a giant hedge, about four-hundred yards long and anything from fifteen to thirty yards thick and I can’t find a descriptive word that fits between copses and woods, but by now you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I looked through the fence. It was immediately obvious why the gardener hadn’t emptied the plastic trug. A little way beyond the gate there is a branch-path (in the sense of a branch-line of a railway network) which leads off the main path to the compost heap. The branch-path was impassable. Stingers have been prolific this year – here they were four feet high, leaning in over the path from both sides: jagged leaves, bristling with poisonous barbs, looking at me, smiling, waiting…

“Ha!” I said, “You don’t scare me!”

Not true of course, bravado. At least until I’ve got some protective clothing on.

I went back into the shed, dug out my wellies from under the workbench, behind two bicycles, asking myself as I did so why they can’t be kept in the middle of the shed floor where I’d left them the last time I used them. My stuff is always disappearing into drawers and cupboards. Anyway, that’s another matter.

I checked my wellies, for scorpions, by turning them, one-by-one, upside down and banging them on the floor – a habit I picked up in Oman when I worked there. Sometimes, it was believed, scorpions would crawl into one of your boots while you slept, with the intention of attacking your foot with a fatal sting when you put it in it in the morning (maybe that’s where the expression comes from?). Anyway, it’s worked for me all these years, I’ve never found a scorpion in any of my boots.

As well as putting my boots on I took thick gloves from the glove box and unhooked the old combat jacket that hangs on a nail in the shed wall and put them on. The issue with the nettles was going to be combat.

Armoured now, I turned the wheels in the combination lock, opened the gate and went through.

This time the nettles didn’t look quite so bloodthirsty, they’d lost a bit of their confidence. Quite right, I was dressed to kill.

I grasped the first three stems (traditional: ‘grasping the nettle’(s)) and pulled them out of the ground. They, and the rest of the avenue, and the dead and dying plants in the plastic trug raised the level of the compost heap a little higher.

Then, as I walked back along the branch path. I couldn’t help noticing that the main path – which leads on through the copse to the field beyond – was also overgrown and needed cutting back.

‘Well’ I thought, ‘I’m dressed for it!’ So that’s what I did next. It wasn’t a quick job. As well as nettles there were brambles, clumps of a fast-spreading, variegated green and white grass, ‘sticky’ chick-weed and even young trees.

Before I finished the cook called me in for breakfast.

I’ll dead-head the roses by the front gate tomorrow.

Early Morning Cup of Tea

I woke up four times in the night. The fourth time I took the hint and got up.

I went downstairs into the kitchen where I took the tea things – you know: mugs, tea bags and stuff – out from where they hide when not in use, and put the kettle on. ‘While it’s heating up’ I thought, ‘I’ll go and ‘dead-head’ the yellow roses by the front garden gate.’ I’d been thinking about that for a couple of days.

I opened the front door and was immediately confronted with the bountiful bough of beautiful white roses, which hangs down in front of the door. ‘That’ I thought, ‘is a higher priority than the roses by the gate.’  I needed to do something about pulling it up a little higher, so that the postman wouldn’t need to duck to push letters through the letterbox, but there’s a pigeon nesting in the cotoneaster bush which is next to, and intertwined with the rose bush, and I hadn’t wanted to disturb her. But… she wasn’t on the nest and I couldn’t see any eggs (which aren’t difficult to see in the loose pile of scruffy twigs that pigeons think is a nest), ‘so’ thought I, ‘I’ll do it now!’

I went down to the shed to get the folding steps – which would be necessary to enable me to reach high enough to move the wire hook that holds up the main branch of the rose-bough to a point further along the branch thus lifting the bough higher.

Now, the hook in the wall (hitw) – onto which the loop of clothes-line which is attached to the hook-which-holds-the-bountiful-bough-up (hwhtbbu) is hooked is an upward pointing hook so, as long as the pulling force emanating from the hwhtbbu was in a horizontal or downward direction all was well and the bough was held up, but, as you will already have gathered, the bough of beautiful white roses has grown, not just upwards but just bigger, all-around. And heavier, so it sagged.

I unfolded the step, stood on it, and lifted the bountiful bough up with my left hand whilst unhooking the hwhtbbu with my right and moving it further along the branch. Slowly I lowered the bountiful bough until the branch rested in the crook of the hwhtbbu.

‘Just right’ I thought.

Then there was a ‘pinging’ sound. The branch slumped, lower than it was before, and the hwhtbbu dangled uselessly on the now limp loop of clothes line.

‘Of course’ I can hear you thinking, ‘the direction of pull with the hwhtbbu now further up the branch, in relation to the hitw, is now slightly upward so the loop was bound to slip off.’

I climbed off the step and fetched a pair of pliers from the kitchen tools drawer, (I know that pliers are not normally classed as kitchen tools but the term ‘kitchen tools drawer’ is as it is because it’s in the kitchen not because pliers are kitchen tools). I replaced the loop of clothes line into the crook of the hitw, and bent the hook shut. (That’s what the pliers were for, see?) “Now try and escape!” I said to the piece of clothes line. It looked quite sheepish dangling there, until my right hand grasped the hwhtbu and pulled it to hook it around the main branch of the bountiful bough, which my left hand had lifted to meet it, further up the branch than it was before.

I climbed down from the step and stood back to admire the results of my efforts. The approach to the front door was white with fallen rose petals, as if for a visiting deity, I walked up and down a couple of times so that the transcendent beauty wouldn’t be wasted, then I fetched a dustpan and brush, swept up all the petals and threw them in the compost bin.

The postman will only have to bend a little bit now. I will point out to him that he might consider the considerable time and effort expended, largely for his benefit, as his ‘this year’s Christmas Box’ in advance.

’Had a bad night. Not horrible, just one long, bad dream. Of course I know that dreams don’t last all night – or do they? People tell me that dreams only last a few seconds. And the ‘human science (or maybe that should read ‘human séance’) columns in the Sunday papers tell us that dreams are confined the REM periods in our sleep. Well, the human-realistic dream in which I played a prominent role, and didn’t come out of too well, went on all night. Or so I remembered when I woke up.

 In fact, I didn’t come out of it until I was fully awake. I opened my eyes just before what would have been, almost certainly, an ignominious ending and was relieved to see the sunshine peeping through the gap between the curtains.

I lay there for a few minutes thinking first about the dream, the memory of which, except for the basic outline and the potentially horrible ending, faded rapidly, and then about what I was going to do today. I wrote a rough, mental list of what I intended to achieve on this bank-holiday Sunday:

Master the controls of my new, DAB radio

Deal with everything in my ‘in-tray’.

Cut back the overgrown privet bush that’s trying to take over the garden.

Write another chapter of the novel I’ve been writing for the last thirty years.

First, whilst drinking my coffee and eating my slimming-sized-sliver of toast, I would read the instruction book that came with the new radio, which is a birthday gift from my family to replace the steam powered job I’ve been living with for the last fifty or sixty years. It was breakfast time before I’d learned how to pre-set the stations I intended to listen to, and a long time after breakfast before I’d successfully linked my iPod to the machine. “iPod”? my youngest son said, not quite scornfully, when he finally reached ground floor level. He thinks I should have linked my new smartfone to the set.

But, by lunch-time I’d just about got the radio where I wanted it. I’ll learn how to switch it on and off tomorrow.

Further inroads into my job-list were postponed when it was announced that we were about to set off to walk to the post office to post a parcel. It was I who discovered that our local Post Office, which is within a Co-op store, is open on a Sunday! That I discovered when I turned up and found it shut just after lunch on Saturday. ‘We’re open from 7am until 9pm on Sundays.’ I was told. I found it difficult to imagine people queuing to buy stamps or post parcels at seven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

On the way home we observed what we think are Ash trees which are suffering from ‘Ash-die-back’. Sad.

Once inside the garden gate I was immediately invited go out again, to dispose of a basketful of weeds. That involved braving ‘stinging-nettle alley’. The ‘stingers’ have been prolific this year and those that line the edges of the short, narrow path to the compost heap deliberately lean in towards the middle. The best way to deal with them is to put on wellingtons and cut them back before negotiating the path carrying a staggering load of weeds. Of course, I’m male, so I don’t do that, I confidently stagger up the path – and get stung.

By the time I got back to my desk it was time for dinner. So I couldn’t start any more of the jobs on my job-list, but I didn’t publish or announce its contents, so the only person who knows is me. I’ll make another one tomorrow.

I walked into the sitting room.

The TV was on. Loud.

Wearing helmets and snug-fitting, silver suits, human-like people, with strange-looking weapons, fired lethal, green rays, that deleted (that’s the only word for it) scaly-skinned, non-earth-beings who also had strange weapons, but seemed not to have been very well trained in their use because they never seemed to hit any of the opposition. This was all taking place on a colourful battleground made up of sharp-looking, purple rocks, pools of pure blue liquid and a backdrop of dark, jagged mountains against an even darker sky pierced with a myriad of silver-white stars. The musical accompaniment to this one-sided battle was fast-moving and dramatic, punctuated by the pchiouw sounds of the green rays slicing across the scene to decimate more scaly-skinned, non-earth beings, and cries from male and female voices, in English, making comic-book battlefield noises like: ‘gotcha ya bastard’ or ‘die you galactic dungball’ (I made that bit up).

I took all of this on board in the time I spent looking past the just-opened-door and deciding I didn’t need to sit in my sitting-room armchair. I retreated to my little office in what used to be the lean-to conservatory at the back of the house. It’s comfortable there too.

I sat back and mentally revisited the TV scenario that was still bright in my mind’s eye. Then I projected my thoughts a bit further, towards stories I have read and films I’ve watched, and the plays and musicals we go to the theatre to see: ‘Midsummer Murderers’, ‘Non-Cooperation Street’, ‘East End Antagonists’, Macbeth, Les Mis, and, and, and so-on. Confrontation and violence the main ingredients.

Think about it.

So many of our heroes are gladiators, male and female, who win victories against the odds.

Should we wonder why children grow up to be violent?

Lift the filter jug and swing it over towards the open kettle, tilt it in the appropriate direction and pour enough water into the kettle to make a cup of tea. Simple – or should be. It wasn’t this morning.

Between the initial lift and pouring water into the kettle the jug had to pass the milk carton, either over it or around it, I chose ‘over’.

A tiny misjudgement of the height of the milk carton and how high I had to lift the jug to clear it was the direct cause of an incident.

As I swung it, the bottom of the jug caught the top of the milk carton – whose screw-top had already been unscrewed, removed and placed to one side so that, in the almost immediate future, a dollop of milk could be added to the tea that was about to be made.

I expect you will already have worked out what happened next.

Quickly I put down the filter jug and reached for the tottering milk carton. I caught it. I caught it! Before the tiniest dribble had escaped through the open neck of the carton.

Then the incident occurred.

In my mind.

A clash of two directions of thought.

1. I still have lightning reactions when there is no time for conscious assessment of the requirement.

2. My unconscious conscious judgement of the muscle power required to perform a physical task is inaccurate and, from previous experience of similar occurrences, always on the ‘too little’ side. Too many spilt milk situations.

Upon investigation I learned that the message from the brain to an arm or leg to perform a familiar function is based on what is known as muscle memory, which of course is a misnomer – muscles can’t remember anything, it’s the brain that remembers, and part of what it remembers is the power required for a specific muscle to perform the familiar task.

Now, if there has been a time gap between the last occasion when my brain memorised the muscle power requirement for lifting a filter jug and the current situation, and if I haven’t been maintaining a constant muscle-tone level, my brain might well have sent a message with a power requirement that would have been sufficient for a previous job, but not this one.

Which makes ‘muscle memory’ a double misnomer.

I call it ‘Brain Lag’.

(Of course, this morning, the filter jug might have had more water in it than the time when my brain’s memory of the lifting power requirement was last established.)

Gibbous Moon

Spreading and bulging,
pregnant with light.
the moon swells outward.

In a pool of light,
the path leads onwards,
calling us to follow
its twists and turns.

All things must change
approaching their zenith.

Linda Rushby 21 April 2021