GILES: Patrick, the proper carpenter, came round yesterday while Mary was in London. He sized up the garden shed, which we’ve decided to refurbish rather than trying to build a graddexe (the new word for a home in the field for a Generation Rent graduate ‘child’ who can’t get onto the property ladder).
We both like the look of bicycle-riding, six-foot-five-inched Patrick who, at sixty-eight, with a bald head, grey beard and always dressed in a boiler suit with a bobble hat, seems to be an old fashioned type who knows how to do things properly. We have already seen him about the village repointing stones and building front steps, laying damp proof courses and generally being a jack of all trades, which suits us very well. I believe he is the same generation that might, like me, have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig, Future Shock by Alvin Toffler or Carlos Castaneda’s trilogy.
This book is all about rejecting the throwaway society and Patrick says he wants to reclaim the existing wood, repairing everything, making do and mending. He is even talking about reusing the old window frames. He rails against the heresy of built-in obsolescence and globalisation which sees us all as no more than passive consumers or producers. I have been quick to exploit this philosophy by asking him to repair two bicycle punctures and a punctured pneumatic wheelbarrow tyre. Why oh why can they not produce a wheelbarrow with a solid rubber tyre?
MARY: This morning Giles told me that he had ordered Patrick to put in double-glazed windows. Giles then, having had too much coffee (a Polish variety bought in the Uxbridge Road, which Virginia warned him might be at least half made up of ground-up Polish acorns as it was so cheap at £1.30 a packet), wouldn’t tell me whether he has ordered revolting UPVC-coated aluminium double-glazed windows of the sort that seal in foul air (sold under the catchphrase ‘say goodbye to external decorating’) and cause microbes to flourish, or attractive ones of the type used at formerly freezing Wiveton Hall in Norfolk, which consist of a panel of almost invisible Perspex that screws onto the window frame in winter. These are referred to as secondary glazing. And are the sort that would have been popular with Tom and Barbara in the Seventies sit com, The Good Life.
‘It’s a no-brainer that we should have double glazing,’ said Giles. ‘We are talking about a wooden shed in the teeth of the gales coming off the coldest windswept prairie in Wiltshire.’
‘But what sort of double glazing?’
‘I don’t know which sort he’s doing,’ said Giles. ‘Why don’t you ring him and ask him?’
‘But you were physically with him yesterday. Why didn’t you ask him or, at least, tell him we didn’t want them in bad taste? And how much did he say it would cost?’
‘I’m sorry Mary but I’m overstretched as it is. I’ll make myself available to these people you have commissioned to do your various fantasy projects but I can’t get involved in the details. As Philip Wetton [a polyglot, former diplomat neighbour] says “Ich bin leider überfragt”[I’m grossly overquestioned].’
With picturesque shepherd’s huts on wheels (dimensions six feet by ten) costing £16,500 I dread to think that even a ‘cheapo’ garden shed is going to turn out to be unaffordable.
I think we may as well take out a loan and have a proper building made. We might as well use credit to do it before we have made the money rather than after we have saved it up, which may well take us up to death stage.
GILES: Mary is not a believer in deferred gratification, the chosen method of behaviour opted for by our parents’ generation, though many in my generation, including Mary, are opting for deferred punishment with years of repayments stretching out ahead of us. In turbulent times such as these, the Woods have traditionally battened down the hatches and harboured meagre resources. I can save twenty pounds per week by giving up chocolate and crisps. Also, by personally choosing the cheapest available materials for the garden shed, I can monitor the runaway costs.
MARY: So I am none the wiser re the cost of the refurbished garden shed or what effect Brexit will have on my tiny savings. All I know is what happened the last time that Giles was ‘clerk of works’ when we had our extension built in 1999. In those days, I had a little office in an outbuilding attached to the Old Rectory further along the village. Our friends, the Sandersons, had moved in 1985 when the previous occupants went to heaven. They let me the office at a peppercorn rent and I went to work there each day. I had just been suffering from Legionnaires’ disease and was entirely unfit for any purpose other than writing articles. Giles spent his days winding up the carpenter of that time.
GILES: The result was Geoff’s legacy of passive aggression in the form of booby traps around the cottage. There are attic trapdoors that have lived up to their name, e.g., if you push them their unnecessarily heavy weight is designed to trap hapless knuckles and fingers. The cottage window seat is so heavy that only Geoff Capes could open it using two hands.
He built a cupboard to house my size-ten shoes but it’s only big enough to fit size six so they always have to be at an angle rather than in satisfying straight rows, and he built a bedhead in wood which he tried to screw permanently into the wall so we could never move the bed to a different position in the room. He snuck in MDF where we had ordered elm and he fitted the lights with painful metal stalks which hurt your hands when you tried to flick them on.
All by way of leaving his legacy and having the last laugh.
MARY: The weather was good but even had it not been, Giles would have spent the day in the garden as usual. It is colder at night and he lit a log fire.
We often don’t even look at the schedules on Saturday night knowing they will involve Nuremberg Rally-type hysterical mobs, shiny floors, flashing lights and irrational cheering, but Sunday nights are different, what with the soothing Countryfile invariably followed by something involving David Attenborough, Chris Packham or Ray Mears. Different for Giles, that is. I’m usually processing a chair full of newsprint while he shouts ‘Look Mary! Look!’ every forty seconds or so.
GILES: The new natural world photography available since the arrival of drone camerawork is mesmerising. I can never get enough of glacial terrains or the Australian bush. I probably watch slightly too many news and current affairs programmes, I admit. Like my father who stayed up every night to watch Newsnight in the days of Paxman, I feel that just by watching I am somehow participating myself in the corridors of power. Although our television screen at 21 inches is roughly a third the size of that watched by most other Britons, don’t forget the room itself is only 75 inches high and 144 inches wide, so I find myself powerless to resist it.
MARY: Yesterday, Giles and I attended the sixtieth birthday party of a magazine mogul we’ve both worked for on and off during the last thirty years. Giles, dressed in his Austrian version of a Nehru jacket, complied with the dress code ‘Black tie or similar’ and afterwards admitted how much he had enjoyed the party. I’m thinking that he’s definitely becoming less reclusive despite the amount of grumbling he does about social events.
GILES: There are times when our marriage enters such a tunnel of absurdity that the TV science fiction series The Twilight Zone comes to mind. I can almost hear the twangling, discordant music which accompanied it. Often a power struggle is involved, and one person is seen to bulldoze, Trump-like, their own agenda through the niceties of marriage. The ideal of marriage as being an equal partnership of two stakeholders seems to be kicked into the long grass as the battle rages.
Gug Six, the twenty-two-year-old Mary has recently been employing as a researcher-cum-factotum, has sat through many of the blood-curdling rows with a wide and appreciative grin on his face. He remarks that whereas rows in his own family result in the participants often sulking for days at a time, only thirty seconds after Mary and my rows have reached their noisy climaxes we are amiably discussing what we are going to have for supper that night or laughing over a ‘lookalike’ in one of that day’s newspapers.
Mary keeps a file of newspaper photographs of fairground mirror style grotesque versions of some of our nearest and dearest friends and relations. We both rue the day when we failed to act while having coffee one morning in Oxford’s covered market and saw a real-life version of one our best friends who has a high domed forehead. Let’s call him Dirk. Dirk Two’s forehead was double the size of Dirk One’s. His facial features were otherwise exactly the same as Dirk One’s. Neither of us had a camera at the time (it was the days before they were extant in all mobiles) and we couldn’t capture the evidence that Dirk was not just a one-off human being – Dirkness was a condition.
Now crazed with grief for our lost dog Phoebe, Mary has seen fit to enter into a conspiracy of three against one – herself and our two daughters versus me. She has made an appointment to meet a Tibetan Spaniel puppy breeder at the South West Tibetan Club show in Grove, near Wantage. ‘You cannot be serious,’ I hear John McEnroe’s voice whining in my ears. I have just destroyed the dog fence and given several dog bowls to the charity shop, and I have fed the remainder of Phoebe’s dog biscuits to local sheep. I do not intend to erect another dog fence for at least another decade – if we last that long, Trump willing.
My father, Godfrey, was also of the belief that his family were plotting against him in nefarious ways but he tended to lack evidence – primarily because we weren’t. I, by contrast, have proof of foul play.
For, once in a blue moon, I actually listened this morning to our landline telephone messages and picked up on a stranger’s voice leaving a message to say: Saturday 11th March 7.38 pm: ‘Oh hello. Good evening Mary. It’s Lynne. You rang this morning and left me a message regarding Blondie. I’m just returning your call. I’m in this evening if you want to give me a call back.’
This, message, left the night before, was the sort which I might have ignored had I not heard a sharp double yap in the background, suggestive of puppy breeding activity. Moreover, my heart was racing from a particularly nasty and bitter tannin-tasting coffee I had bought from a Polish shop in the Uxbridge Road. An irresistible £1.30 for a bag of ground Arabica but I suspect that it may have been adulterated as it had a crack cocaine type kick to it. (Not that I would know what crack cocaine is like.) The doctor has banned me from having more than one coffee but I find it necessary to get me going in the mornings, to raise me, Lazarus-like, from the dead.
While Mary was sorting her bag upstairs, packing it ready to go up to London for another party, I made contact by telephone with my brother, sister and mother, to appraise them of this breaking news. I needed to prepare them for my possible imminent arrival as a houseguest if there is a showdown over the puppy. I even began to charge my mobile phone in anticipation of a long car journey. A Premier Inn would have been an extravagance beyond my wildest dreams if it came to a showdown.
I then telephoned the puppy breeder and left a fair but firm message in the style of Margaret Thatcher. (The urging to ‘leave a brief message’ always prompts me to ramble at great length.) I said that Mary was not in her right mind and consumed with grief and that accepting a new dog into a household required unanimity of resolve and purpose which was far from the case at the moment.
Blondie, from her portrait as shown to me by Mary, is an adorable puppy, for a fading Hollywood actress, but not for us at this point when our lives consist of rushing up to London for a ceaseless round of sixtieth birthday parties and leaving garden gates and doors open for Patrick the carpenter.
Moreover, presently there will be a field of lambs for Blondie to sink her teeth into. These always occupy the field opposite the cottage in spring. I can just imagine the headlines – ‘Gogglebox puppy shot in sheep worrying tragedy’.
‘“I only looked away for a second,” gasped a tear-stained Mary. “I was looking in my bag for my mobile.”’
I could not have predicted that I would become so anti-dog since losing Phoebe the Tibetan Spaniel, but the scales fell from my eyes on an Anglesey beach at Aberffraw. On one side of the river was a procession of plodding glum dog owners being pulled along by their dogs. Damacene conversion against mutts came when I saw that, in reality, the dogs owned the humans and had enslaved them to the point of attaching them by string or rope.
MARY: At the moment I’m too upset to comment.
MARY: In the wake of Puppygate and feeling hostile towards Giles, I go to London to get sympathy from Gug One/Tintin, our first bed blocker.
Without wishing to downgrade now thirty-three-year-old Gug to the status of dog, he and Phoebe, our late Tibetan Spaniel, had a lot in common. They both served as highly-valued emotional props and now I’ve lost not only Phoebe but also Gug. He and his wife have decided to live in Florence for a year.
But he’s in London for a week. Tonight is the only night we’re both free.
We arrange to meet at fellow journalist ‘s party in NW1 to launch his book on Brexit. Then we’ll go to the Academy Club in Soho for a tête-a-tête over fishcakes.
The evening was a tragedy of errors. On the sensible grounds that we would be having our private bonding session later, Gug and I didn’t bother talking to each other at the party.
At nine thirty, as the literary guests realised they had overstayed their welcome, there was a stampede to the door and, as the crowd thinned – or, as President Trump would have it of journalists, ‘the swamp was drained’ – our friends Cyril and Ursula came into focus.
‘What are you two doing now?’
‘We’re going to the Academy Club.’
‘Oooh, that sounds nice. Can we join you?’
Well, we like them very much so we said yes – knowing that as Cyril and Ursula used also to live in Wiltshire and are also maddened and delighted by Giles in equal measure, we could all enjoy discussing Puppygate.
But, since Gug had deleted his Uber app in Italy, we had to resort to a local minicab who needed directing all the way to Soho.
Wedged in the back with Cyril and Ursula while Gug directed the driver I couldn’t talk to him. One hour later we were all still in the car. The London traffic was at its usual London standstill and Ursula announced, ‘I’ve suddenly realised, Cyril, that you and I were in Russia this morning and I’m on antibiotics and I’ve been drinking, which I was told not to. I don’t think I feel up to the Academy Club.’
They jumped out of the cab.
At last Gug and I could talk. But no, the driver even needed guiding from Tottenham Court Road to Lexington Street. It was ten thirty when we walked into the club to find it empty other than for five, four of whom we vaguely know.
‘Pull up a chair,’ they urged. And so, at one end of the table I talked to a former colleague for forty-five minutes while, at the other, Gug talked to her uncle who he’d never previously met.
‘What a disaster!’ we agreed as we settled into the black taxi taking us back. ‘But at least we’ve got fifteen minutes now to chat…Did you give me back my debit card?’
‘Yes. I definitely gave it back.’
For the rest of the journey I searched through my bagwoman bag looking for the card with a torch. As we pulled up at Gug’s mother-in-law’s he found it in his own wallet. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s fine, but it’s meant that for the last fifteen minutes we could have been chatting but instead I was bumbling through my bags. When are you off to Italy?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’
When I got home the next day the tale elicited no sympathy from Giles who collected me from the station with an Annabel Grey oilcloth tablecloth taped to the rear windscreen of the Volvo. He refused to explain what had happened to the glass, as we drove home. Instead, he insisted that it was much more important that he got to the bottom of why I was ‘gallivanting’ in London in the first place, and in the second, why I had gone to the Academy Club for my private bonding session with Gug as I must have known we would know other people in there.
Worse, on entering the cottage I saw a clothes horse in the telly room festooned with ten socks and four shirts, and since I’d been away only one night, and the laundry basket was empty when I left, it was clearly another case of vexatious laundry. This time the outrage was compounded by what I call ‘Gorbalisation’ of the cottage, another of my trigger points.
Giles always feels happiest if he is fantasising about living in a butt and ben in the Gorbals and having to do laundry, eat and sleep all in the same room using the crackling log fire to heat it. He sees such a lifestyle as being ecologically correct because it allows him to efficiently husband the heat from the fire to help dry the clothes at the same time.
I don’t share this fantasy.
It’s always a mistake to confide your annoyances in your spouse to a female friend. Has anyone else noticed how many women seize on the confidence as a chance to be competitive over which has the least annoying husband? Such a friend often makes things worse (especially if she quite fancies him) by exaggerating Giles’s deficiencies.
‘It’s all passive aggression,’ emailed friend Zillah, ‘because Giles has watched too many late night violent films on telly and, since he doesn’t go out to work, and we humans NEED to interact with others to keep us sane, he has to save up all the aggression to download onto you as you walk through the door. And so while you’re in London working, he portrays it as gallivanting, and then he does all this unnecessary laundry to signal that he’s keeping the show on the road.
‘Poor you. I do feel sorry for you. You don’t deserve to be treated like this.’
GILES: It was an accident waiting to happen. Having designed my life as a stress-free zone, I’m not used to pressure and when it comes along, I tend to crumple under it.
Two separate events were on collision course. The first would be the epic appearance in our garden of a local man who, armed with crampons, harness and chainsaw, would be shinnying up a sixty-foot-high white poplar tree in my garden to eliminate it, lest it damage our garden hut – a nerve-wracking event for any landowner.
Moreover, the fellow had boasted that he wasn’t insured. What if the brittle branches gave way under his weight? What if a neighbour from hell decided to videotape the spectacle for public consumption on YouTube? Poplar, after all, is known to be only good for matchsticks.
Meanwhile, a cavalcade of cars bearing the Gogglebox team was simultaneously heading down from London towards the cottage.
It had been originally timed so the two arrivals would be staggered but, in the event, Wiltshire men being time-fluid, and Mary having not kept me informed about the Goggle schedule before she went to London, the two parties became entangled and so did I.
First, two Land Rovers arrived: in one, the trusty Andy, my original chainsaw man, who had done his knee in, so ladder work was off the menu for him. In the second, the human monkey chum to whom Andy had subcontracted the felling work. Andy couldn’t resist supervising it.
Their Land Rovers blocked off the field parking option for the Gogglebox team.
As I said to Mary, later, the accident wasn’t my fault. The human monkey, who had already done a day’s work and played a game of squash before he turned up to tackle my 60-foot tree, arrived late. But then one of the Gogglebox team arrived slightly early – in my book a sin worse than turning up late. It’s a sin that poaches precious time that you thought you had to get ready.
Car parking spaces are at a premium in our village, and I quickly calculated that I could avoid a neighbour-from-hell situation by removing the outsize Volvo estate to a safe place, a field opening down the lane which serves as a passing place. It’s interesting that most neighbour disputes kick off over car parking spaces or boundary fences. It demonstrates that man is a territorial creature, so Brexit is not such a mystery after all.
So, to pre-empt any such territorialism, I reversed the behemoth into the hitherto overlooked passing place. But so wrapped up was I in parking logistics and a radio play that, like an over-pressured air traffic control officer at Heathrow, I made a mistake. I reversed into the narrow space slowly and cautiously but failed to turn my head around to check the blind spot behind me. Unlike my overweight chum Danny whose neck is now so thick he cannot turn it at all and has to rely on a reverse parking in-car camera, I can turn my head partially. Yet I failed to do so and within the blind spot was a blackthorn twig which gently poked the rear windscreen out with a sickening splintering of glass fragments. The blackthorn is prized by walking stick makers for its durability and its vicious thorns which have been known to even puncture tractor tyres.
It turns out that so-called ‘safety glass’ as it’s called, is also known as ‘tempered glass’, which means it’s designed to shatter into thousands of separate glass pieces with the consistency of wet sugar, slush or melted snow. There I was trying to be helpful to make space for others…and the gods punished me. No good deed goes unpunished. On the other hand, compared to railway scenes at rush hour in Bangladesh my little incident doesn’t even register.
Quite why I got my knickers in a twist is a mystery, since that morning I switched from two cups of caffeinated coffee to one caffeinated and one de-caffeinated coffee, as recommended by my German-born blood-pressure doctor.
But if Mary had seen the trouble I took to clear away the glass spicules – which cut my fingers twice (despite being called safety glass) – she might account for at least two hours of the day gone on ‘own-goaling’, as she calls self-inflicted and time-consuming accidents. I prefer to describe them, like the police do, not as accidents but as ‘incidents’, a term which implies that no one is to blame.
I hate broken glass: as a gardener I curse previous occupants who thought nothing of tossing jam-jars and perfume bottles over their hedges before the era of recycling. No doubt future generations will hate us for bequeathing them plastic bottles (viz, Henderson Island in the Pacific, the world’s epicentre of plastic waste).
But, more worrying was the huge pile of broken glass on the edge of my bio-reserve. I didn’t want to add to the problems of migrating frogs and can honestly say that I am the only villager, nay cottager, to have even heard of the major environmental problem dubbed the Global Declining Amphibian Phenomenon.
MARY: Giles kindly drove me to the high street of the local market town where I climb four storeys to the top floor of the White Horse Bookshop, the fountain of local civility, with its spectacular view over the, as yet, still not overdeveloped Downs. And then to the beauty parlour.
As a child I bitterly resented my mother’s weekly visits to the hairdresser. The house was vault-like without her and, on her return, her hair always looked worse – lacquered, stiff and helmet-like. Yet she always seemed so animated post-these visits and inexplicably full of details of the hairdresser’s drab life.
Now I myself have finally cottoned on to the joys of regular interaction with someone with whom you have nothing whatsoever in common, but with whom you have another sort of intimacy than what you have with friends or family.
Janine, the beautician, is someone who doesn’t challenge me with Big Talk – only small. I prefer not to give her my own news – too stressy to think about. But I love listening to hers, about visiting her Mum in hospital, having a run-in with a parking warden, giving a client a full Brazilian wax when they only wanted the bikini wax.
‘She said to me after, “I don’t believe it. What have you gone and done? I only wanted a bikini wax.”
‘And I said, “You said a Brazilian.”
‘She says, “Yeah, but I meant a bikini. I thought you would’ve realised that.”
‘I said, “You must of felt me putting the wax on all over the area.” And right back to the perineum, Mary, no way she couldn’t have noticed.
‘She said, “My partner’s going to be livid about this.”
‘And I said to her, “Well, I can’t put it back now. You make the best of it. Most ladies find they really like the feeling…”’
I’m thinking of my favourite female friends. None of them ever pampers me in a soothing manner while delivering an Alan Bennett-style talking heads monologue to which I can respond or ignore as I see fit. Indeed, most of my friends’ conversation, now that I think about it, is around the subject of how much we have to do, and how inefficient are all the providers of services.
By contrast talking with – correction, listening to – Janine is so relaxing it’s the conversational equivalent of the BBC Interlude films from our childhood showing a kitten playing with a ball of wool. The salon contains for me a parallel universe where blandness reigns and my only obligation is to unwind while Janine seems to be enjoying affixing the eyelashes.
And then I pay her and then we are all square. How often are you ‘all square’, metaphorically speaking, with a friend?
GILES: Mary has presented to me the ‘rest’ diary she has been filling in on my behalf. Any day in which no cash was earned is now coloured in with high-vis marker pen and the words ‘full day of rest’ scrawled on top.
She believes the diary provides proof that I suffer from Work Dysmorphia in the same way as some people with low self-esteem about their perfectly good looks suffer from body dysmorphia, and that the ledger will help me to get a realistic view of how much work I actually did over the last year.
But I would dispute her definition of what work is. For example, waiting for workmen to turn up is a job in itself. It could be termed ‘own work’, an expression coined by fans of the ‘citizen’s income’ – a scheme perennially suggested by alternative economists who wish to replace all state income, including benefits and pensions, with a standard issue weekly stipend for everyone. Those for whom the weekly stipend is not enough can then ‘top up’ with a separate income from gainful employment, without incurring penalties or stealth taxes.
I long for the weekly stipend to become a fact of life as I could then spend decades creating micro habitats for invertebrates and reptiles with a clear conscience that I was not ducking my responsibilities as a citizen to ‘produce’ or ‘consume’ or to be gainfully employed by brush or pen. Or indeed to feel the need to account for my hours in just standing and staring as recommended by the poet (and tramp) William Henry Davies:
What is this life, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
This is surely a poem whose time has come.
GILES: I met a man at another wearisome sixtieth birthday party. If seventy is the new fifty, is sixty the new forty? I don’t feel it, and nominal aphasia struck again. He greeted me with an enthusiasm which implied we were long lost friends but who on earth was he?
I caught Mary’s eye and she moved forward to the rescue.
‘Hello Pete. Do you know Blah Blah? Blah this is Pete Burrell who we met when we were staying with Sophy in Ireland…Pete’s an agent. He represents Nigel Farage and Frankie Dettori…’
Mary stared meaningfully at me as she addressed Pete. ‘Do you remember your idea for Giles’s TV show?’ she continued. “What the F*** Does Giles Do All Day?”
Then I remembered. Around fifteen years ago, when reality television was in its infancy, Burrell, who had stayed with us for a week in an Irish house party, made an outrageous suggestion. This was that I should wear a headcam in order to record my ‘progress’ through my day in a ground-breaking project which he dubbed ‘What the F*** Does Giles Do All Day?’ It would be a permanent channel into which followers could beam at any time of the day or night. It might win awards.
But I remember Pete saying that in order to make any inroads with the yoof of today, the f-word would be obligatory. It might be cult viewing or not and it would definitely dovetail into the emerging slow movement – slow food, slow cities etcetera – why not slow television? Years later the spectacle of stately progress from a fixed camera on a canal long boat along the length of the Kennet and Avon canal was shown to huge acclaim. Burrell’s idea regarding creating a cult viewing platform featuring me was prescient.
With Dettori and Farrage under his belt, Burrell is clearly no amateur, but even were he to revive the idea now, Mary and I disapprove of swearing – especially on television. And so do 300,000 TV viewers who tuned off the Gordon Ramsay ITV Nightly Show debacle this week.
The new posh family of four Goggleboxers in Dorset haven’t sworn yet but I’m watching them like a hawk for lapses. The backlash against swearing has been evident for years as profanities, like a devalued currency, have by degrees lost their impact, although oddly not the c-word which still retains shock value. Colin Farrell famously used it in the cult film In Bruges, which I was not a great fan of.
I’m reminded that the late Alan Coren observed that, ‘Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.’
And I feel there may yet be a second career for me in the webcam arena if everything else falls through.
GILES: Invertebrates were on my mind today, and amphibians, when I spotted a hitherto unobserved tell-tale Hansel and Gretel snail trail of broken glass, the legacy of the windscreen mishap. It led from the layby to the field gate.
There is no CCTV in the village although I wish there had been today because I would like to have been caught on camera, for a ‘slow telly’ sleep-inducing hour’s worth of my road sweeping with dust pan and brush.
It was bob-a-job man’s work, as I explained to Mary, but none the less worthy for that – it was boring but important work. Noble work, indeed. Self-sacrificing.
‘That’s all very well but we can’t really spare the time for you to be doing noble work. It was a pity you had to have the accident in the first place. It wasn’t really self-sacrificing work. It was your fault, so you had to clear it up.’
‘It was nobody’s fault,’ I replied calmly. ‘Or rather, it was the fault of the projecting twig.’
Occasionally a really educational and worthwhile offering like Restoration of the Year comes up. Wasn’t TV meant to be a tool for education? Mores the pity that the powers that be have not yet submitted it for review on Gogglebox.
The programme went to Bavaria to source authentic panes of ‘period’ glass for early nineteenth-century Felton Park Greenhouse in Northumbria. This glass is made using traditional glassblowers’ techniques unchanged since medieval times, and is consequently full of hand-blown ripples and imperfections. One of the most pleasing features of this ‘imperfect’ glass is the tiny champagne-like bubble of air trapped in the solid surface.
Brittle greenhouse glass used to be available to the householder for window glazing ‘for less’. It dimpled and warped reality in a most pleasing and harmless way. Our cottage has such inferior panes in a few windows and herein is a clue to how I fritter many man-minutes away as the day proceeds.
By tilting my head this way and that I can turn the telegraph lines into a skipping rope; the cottage chimneys of the squat dwellings opposite swell into the size of small cars and tree branches get swallowed up in glass dimples like the gravitational pull of black holes only to flip back to normality at the slightest inclination of the head. Even the sheep can turn into grotesque monsters with practice.
No other cottager can achieve this legal high featuring a phantasmagoria of visual effects and distortions without recourse to hallucinogens or magic mushrooms. In the Seventies, we all read a book called The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil, proposing that man has always craved alternative states of mind; witness children in a playground spinning like whirling dervishes to make themselves dizzy. Yet modern safety glass in UPVC frames has ironed out imperfection and the charm of everyday domestic windows has gone to be replaced by a bland interface between the inside and outside world. So was the baby thrown out with the bathwater.
Health and safety has been the midwife to a lame new world of mediocrity and tamper-proof seals on milk cartons. Small wonder more and more folk are becoming depressed, it’s modern life itself. Although I’m quite happy with today’s relatively painless dentistry.
It seems every step of technological progress and subsequent legislation has involved the loss of charm or enchantment to some degree. Even jet bomber planes in the Fifties had considerably more élan and style than those of today. The sailing ships moored on the Thames gave contemporary writers of the nineteenth century the impression of ‘a forest of masts’. Now? Nothing. The world of foreign travel is similarly prosaic in the extreme. A summer visit to Venice or Dubrovnik makes you feel as though you are in a zombie movie by George Romero.
Some kind of mathematical formula must be invented to formalise this equation of progress versus disenchantment. Let’s call it Wood’s Law. Fortunately, we have paintings and photographs to record the past, and how enchanting the gas street lighting of Leeds looked in the reflected puddles in the street paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw. There was a catastrophic loss of beauty when concrete replaced stone. I saw myself how this wrecked the hand-crafted integrity of stone-built houses in the much-maligned Tenerife in the Canary Islands. In order to see how beautiful these islands once were and how the architecture enhanced rather than degraded the scene you will have to visit the Marianne North permanent exhibition in Kew Gardens…Steam trains versus diesel and electric show the same steep decline in enchantment, and how cunning of J.K. Rowling to plunder this rich vein of nostalgia and wonderment of past technologies in the Harry Potter series.
One mile from our village there is an annual steam fayre, with rows of vintage tractors and paraphernalia dating even up to the 1950s. It is laid on by the Agricultural Preservation Society, which is the beating heart of Wiltshire. Nostalgia in its rejection of the present in general and of Intensive farming in particular, is not a negative emotion but a subversive rejection of the status quo: a form of latent energy waiting to be harnessed by some rabble-rousing contemporary version of William Cobbett.
The dead hand of banality is even creeping into country lanes, drowning out the sound of a spring chiff chaff as a reversing bin lorry bleeps its inane progress through its three-point turn.
What if we woke up tomorrow with collective amnesia following an earthquake where every pane of glass was shattered? It’s an unlikely scenario, but supposing the recipe for making glass was lost? We take so much for granted; I only know that sand and silica are part of the process and the Romans introduced the technology.
There is a strong counter-argument against self-sufficiency: part of the joy of living in a specialised, interdependent society is to let someone else worry about glass recipes and trade with them for cash.
Now soap is a different matter. Anyone can make it from wood ash and animal fats steeped in home-grown lavender essence. It’s something I’ve wanted to try for years but have been too busy. Paper is not too hard to make either using basic materials or plant-derived materials but, again, I’ve been too busy to experiment.
I couldn’t live in Wiltshire if I hadn’t discovered the drastically under-read Victorian naturalist and novelist Richard Jefferies. He provides me with the enchantment that modern Wiltshire cannot.
The glass left by the ancients in their dwellings had long since been used up or broken, and the fragments that remained were too precious to be put in ordinary rooms. When larger pieces were discovered, they were taken for the palaces of the princes and even these were but sparingly supplied, so that the saying ‘he has glass in his window’ was equivalent to ‘he belongs to the upper ranks’.
And later in the novel: ‘The glass made now is not transparent, but merely translucent; it indeed admits light after a fashion, but it is thick and cannot be seen through.’
This is the sort of glass I would make if I turned glass maker. But what a shame you have to travel to Bavaria to obtain imperfect glass; there should be a campaign for ‘real’ glass. It is always up to us middle-class revivalists to set the trends. ‘What did Giles do all day?’ He gazed out of dodgy window panes, which cost him nothing but time, which is harmless enough unless you believe the despicable modern creed that time equals money!
