The selection of teams during games lessons probably ranks amongst the most humiliating experiences of anyone’s school life.
In Brynteg Comprehensive in Bridgend, not once was I ever chosen to be a captain and do my own picking; no, I was always among the last four – not the bottom of the barrel but the dregs under the barrel - and praying that I would never be last and have to witness the disappointment on the faces of the golden nuggets who had been snapped up first.
They were Susan, Alison, Mandy, Caroline – the girls who smoked in the toilets during break and mitched off lessons when the Radio 1 Road Show came to town. How they ran out of the school gates when news of Tony Blackburn’s arrival spread.
But their naughtiness counted for nothing when it came to the last double lesson on Friday afternoon, when teams were chosen and hearts broken.
It had nothing to do with how good you were at sport. I was a very fast runner and a pretty good hurdler, too. I wasn’t too bad at the long and high jumps, and I also remember scoring three goals during one hockey match and thinking that surely this would be enough to get me cherry picked first next time.
But not a bit of it.
I remember Mrs Davies saying to me, after my glorious hockey triumph: “You’re too competitive”. I was very competitive; I still am - but to me it has always been a virtue. I’m not saying that I missed my chances at the Olympics, but the only day I’ll hide my light under a bushel is when I’m six feet under – and even then, I wouldn’t count on it.
Was it a lack of competitive spirit that gave the Welsh rugby team their third Grand Slam in eight years?
Is it a lack of belief that has taken Cardiff City to both the FA and Carling Cup finals?
Is it reticence that is driving Swansea City up the Premiership when everyone predicted they would be back down in the Championship at the end of the season? Of course not.
It is competitiveness of the highest order that lies at the heart of each of these team’s successes and, at the helm, managers and coaches who know how to harness that competitiveness in something that we often lose sight of – team spirit.
Apart from Craig Bellamy, I couldn’t name one player who has played for Cardiff City, but I follow the team’s progress and still cried when they lost the Carling Cup penalty shoot-out.
I can’t name even one player in Swansea City but rejoiced when they beat Manchester City.
I can name all of the Welsh squad but think of them as an extraordinary collective whose closeness as a team is one of the keys to their success.
Being a team player is tough.
While you bring your individual skills to the table, you also have to know how to use those skills in order to best bring out the skills of others.
You have to know when to pass the ball – literally and metaphorically – and you have to be there for each other on the bad days as well as the good.
I was in New Zealand when Wales went out to France in the semi-final of the Rugby World Cup. When Sam Warburton was sent off, the stadium went silent; at the end of the game, we left like one massive funeral procession, our hopes and dreams already a distant memory.
The next day, I happened to be in the same bar as several members of the team, who turned up to watch the All Blacks/Australia semi-final. They were cheered when they entered and enjoyed celebrity status as fans gathered round to have their pictures taken.
They were dignified in defeat, humble in the limelight, and they were undoubtedly the team of the tournament. It felt good to be Welsh.
It still does. These are incredible times for Welsh sport and, in particular, Welsh teams. We know that young people hero worship sports personalities and now they have three teams to look to for inspiration.
Each one is a great symbol of hard work, dedication, self-belief and, in aiming to be the best, they show the importance and true meaning of competitive spirit: great team work.
During the two and a half years I spent in LA, I witnessed at first hand such a positive attitude among the people I met. They were undoubtedly competitive, in a town in which so many are competing for the ultimate accolade of living the Hollywood dream.
To me, if you don’t aim high, you’ll never know how high you can reach, yet back in Cardiff, I am constantly reminded of the adage with which I was brought up when growing up in Wales: Never hang your hat higher than you can reach.
Thankfully, and goodness knows how, I managed, and continue to manage to ignore it and, for me, I will always not just hang but throw my hat as high as I can, always in the belief that I will be able to leap to catch it even before it begins to fall.
You can never be too competitive.
Finally, in Wales, our sports teams seem to have woken up to that.
Now, they just need to spread the message to everyone else.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Escape From Alcatraz (The TV Show) 3/13/12
Alcatraz.
It’s one of those words that sends a shiver down your spine.
It’s that movie you vaguely remember about a bunch of blokes who swam away from the horrible guards on a rock in the middle of an ocean no one had ever heard of.
Well, it seemed like that when I was growing up in Wales at the time. But then the biggest excitement our parents allowed us in Newport was a Cadbury’s flake sticking out of a Mr Whippy cone of a Sunday afternoon.
I saw Alcatraz "The Rock" last year. I was living in LA at the time and, as everyone told me how much I would prefer San Francisco, decided to head up there for the weekend.
I hated it. If I tell you that Alcatraz was the highlight of my SF week-end, that will give you an indication of quite how much I loathed it. And I didn’t even get to Alcatraz. Just the view of it was enough to make me feel better after the horrors of SF.
No restaurants serving after 9pm, an attitude to women dining alone that was positively prehistoric, and by far the scruffiest, dirtiest place I had ever been in the US.
Apart from that, I loved it. Ha!
But I will go back. If only to visit Alcatraz. Which is more than I can say of the TV drama. That, I hope never to visit again.
It promised so much. Big hype, big sets, dramatic music . . . but ultimately never delivered. A better example of style over substance it would be hard to find, and in the absence of a decent script (barely any script, come to that), it relied on stereotypes against a glossy background (grey, of course – apparently, it’s the new black, amongst people who know about such things).
So, we had the unshaven hunk with a mysterious air; closely followed by the petite, pretty, blonde, female cop, whose partner had (of course!) been killed; and then the proverbial Fat Bloke who, quelle surprise, got on rather well with said blonde, when she declared that she wanted him to be her new sidekick.
He could hardly contain himself (actually, that’s a lie: he looks as if he could contain not only himself but at least three families of refugees and a multi- storey car park). I predict his sad demise round about episode eight, series two, all providing the doughnuts and the Big Macs don’t get to him first.
Then there was the proverbial Bad Guy, who turned out to be running what appeared to be a cryogenics spaceship and . . .
To be honest, this IKEA showroom killed it for me at the end of the episode, because by then I really didn’t know where I was and, more importantly, didn’t know whose side I was supposed to be on.
For me, it’s important to know for whom you are rooting at the very beginning of a show, and Alcatraz didn’t have a clue. The hunk who drew us in turned out to be a nutcase and, worse, a nutcase convict from another era.
They missed a trick here and they should never have made him a killer in the pilot episode. There was just too much happening and they over-egged the pudding to such a degree that we had – and still do not have – any idea who the hero is.
Any show, TV or film, must address the fundamental question that any viewer or cinema-goer asks before their seat is even warm: whose side am I on?
After episode one of Alcatraz, I’m on the side of . . . well, any side that isn’t the channel it’s on.
Not only is it the poor man's Lost; it's the poor man's Lost behind bars.
A sad case of not getting my Rock off.
Or this jailhouse not rocking.
It’s one of those words that sends a shiver down your spine.
It’s that movie you vaguely remember about a bunch of blokes who swam away from the horrible guards on a rock in the middle of an ocean no one had ever heard of.
Well, it seemed like that when I was growing up in Wales at the time. But then the biggest excitement our parents allowed us in Newport was a Cadbury’s flake sticking out of a Mr Whippy cone of a Sunday afternoon.
I saw Alcatraz "The Rock" last year. I was living in LA at the time and, as everyone told me how much I would prefer San Francisco, decided to head up there for the weekend.
I hated it. If I tell you that Alcatraz was the highlight of my SF week-end, that will give you an indication of quite how much I loathed it. And I didn’t even get to Alcatraz. Just the view of it was enough to make me feel better after the horrors of SF.
No restaurants serving after 9pm, an attitude to women dining alone that was positively prehistoric, and by far the scruffiest, dirtiest place I had ever been in the US.
Apart from that, I loved it. Ha!
But I will go back. If only to visit Alcatraz. Which is more than I can say of the TV drama. That, I hope never to visit again.
It promised so much. Big hype, big sets, dramatic music . . . but ultimately never delivered. A better example of style over substance it would be hard to find, and in the absence of a decent script (barely any script, come to that), it relied on stereotypes against a glossy background (grey, of course – apparently, it’s the new black, amongst people who know about such things).
So, we had the unshaven hunk with a mysterious air; closely followed by the petite, pretty, blonde, female cop, whose partner had (of course!) been killed; and then the proverbial Fat Bloke who, quelle surprise, got on rather well with said blonde, when she declared that she wanted him to be her new sidekick.
He could hardly contain himself (actually, that’s a lie: he looks as if he could contain not only himself but at least three families of refugees and a multi- storey car park). I predict his sad demise round about episode eight, series two, all providing the doughnuts and the Big Macs don’t get to him first.
Then there was the proverbial Bad Guy, who turned out to be running what appeared to be a cryogenics spaceship and . . .
To be honest, this IKEA showroom killed it for me at the end of the episode, because by then I really didn’t know where I was and, more importantly, didn’t know whose side I was supposed to be on.
For me, it’s important to know for whom you are rooting at the very beginning of a show, and Alcatraz didn’t have a clue. The hunk who drew us in turned out to be a nutcase and, worse, a nutcase convict from another era.
They missed a trick here and they should never have made him a killer in the pilot episode. There was just too much happening and they over-egged the pudding to such a degree that we had – and still do not have – any idea who the hero is.
Any show, TV or film, must address the fundamental question that any viewer or cinema-goer asks before their seat is even warm: whose side am I on?
After episode one of Alcatraz, I’m on the side of . . . well, any side that isn’t the channel it’s on.
Not only is it the poor man's Lost; it's the poor man's Lost behind bars.
A sad case of not getting my Rock off.
Or this jailhouse not rocking.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
LA's Part In The Killing Of The Stuff Monster 3/6/12
Stuff.
It’s everywhere.
Books I bought but never read over 35 years ago when I went to university; clothes I have had since my teens, in the belief that I will one day grow into them again; an Apple computer cemetery in my loft, full of information I no longer need and probably never did in the first place.
I feel as if I am in an episode of Dr Who, as the Stuff Monster comes to get me from the moment I rise, to the moment I go to sleep. Then, often in the night, the Stuff Monster wakes me to tell me that there is Stuff I haven’t dealt with: bank statements, credit cards, mortgages . . . I can spend two hours in the small hours, moving money around online just to keep my head above water. Yet still I wake drowning in the Stuff mire that has become my life.
So, this week, I made a momentous decision: I am going to kill the Stuff Monster. I don’t want an interest only mortgage that I will never be able to pay off, yet have to spend the next seven years worrying about what happens when the bank comes knocking for payment in full when the term is up.
I don’t need John Fowles’s A Maggot, a book to which I gave a scathing review many years ago and have no intention of reading ever again; I don’t need the broken Apple laptop that now I am too embarrassed ever to declare that I owned, let alone be seen with in public.
I do not need the eight ladles in my cutlery drawer, evidence of my having lived, at one point, in four different countries at the same time. I don’t need the pine warehouse that is my entire downstairs – furniture bought in Camden market when the man I was going to live with told me how much he loved it and was looking forward to sharing when he left his live-in girlfriend after she lost enough weight so that she would “be attractive enough to meet someone else” (in summary: he didn’t, she did, and then he decided she was attractive enough to be worthy of him, after all).
I don’t need the drawers full of single ear-rings, the lone partner of a pair I once loved and thought that maybe, one day, I might happen upon, despite it having been 30 years since its sister disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Likewise, the single black Chloe shoe, whose partner disappeared on a Cardiff street after a rugby international under circumstances I have never fully been able to explain.
The recession has hit most people hard, some very much harder than others; and yes, I know that I still have a better life compared to most people in the world, let alone the country. But all changes in circumstance have to be addressed, and often we miss the obvious and lose sight of what it is that really matters: it’s not Stuff, it’s people.
We cling on to easily replaceable Stuff, mortgages included. In Paris, hardly anyone owns a property, and the rental market thrives. Many years ago, I made money on a property I bought at the bottom of the market and sold at the top; but property is not the sure-fire investment it once was.
When I sit down and really think about what gives me most pleasure in life, it is my friends and family and, a lot of the time, meeting new people. After two and a half years, I recently returned from Los Angeles, where I met so many people from around the world, all with different stories to tell. I loved the experience of living in a country that wasn’t a European one – much as I love our Continent, I had always wanted to experience the United States. While LA is not typical of the States as a whole, I thrived on the energy of a city that has been built on what I love most: film and television.
It has been wonderful to be back amongst the people I have known for decades, but of course there are things I miss about LA, not least the weather. But there are other things LA gave me that, being back full time in the UK, have made me realise that the life I had carved out before I left may not fit as well as it once did.
I am now 53 years old. I am single, have never married and have no children. I am a veritable tiny purse when it comes to relationship baggage. But as a woman of my age in Cardiff, the city in which I was born and which has developed to become a truly cosmopolitan European city, I find little to occupy me socially.
While I have many friends here, most are in partnerships and have children or grandchildren, and their schedules are hectic. After 28 years in London and also six in Paris – both cities that cater wonderfully for the single person of any age – I find booking meet-ups with friends a month in advance (and invariably having them cancelled half an hour before) extremely tiresome.
I know that people have lives and I am glad that they are content in living them to the full, having entered new phases of their lives; it has made me realise, however, that I, too, have entered a new phase and must look to what I do to enjoy whatever remains of my life.
Two weeks ago, a friend said to me: “Let’s say you have 25 years left; you have to decide how you want to spend that time.”
Twenty-five years. I recalled how quickly the last 25 have gone and how I regretted not having done so many things – learnt a couple of languages, travelled more, written more books.
It was a Eureka moment for me.
I don’t want to spend the next 25 years waking in the middle of the night to do sums and then spend the rest of every day worrying about why those sums don’t add up. I don’t want to be sitting by myself in a restaurant or bar, wondering what might have been if I had made different choices. I don’t want to die in a whacking great big house in Cardiff and nobody know I have gone until my editor questions why there is a blank page in the paper.
So, I am selling everything. When I announced it on Facebook, my friends reacted with horror, wondering how I could sell such a lovely house. But all I am selling is bricks, mortar and Stuff that has been clogging up my life for longer than I care to admit.
I made Stuff my emotional fortress, but it’s time to burn the drawbridge and return to concentrating on my first and only true love – my writing. My friends and family are still there, irrespective of whether that Etam dress I bought for £17.99 in 1973 goes in the bin.
It is time to shed skins and brave the world once more.
What’s the worst that can happen? I’m not even going there.
At the moment, I just think I have nothing to lose but my chains.
It’s everywhere.
Books I bought but never read over 35 years ago when I went to university; clothes I have had since my teens, in the belief that I will one day grow into them again; an Apple computer cemetery in my loft, full of information I no longer need and probably never did in the first place.
I feel as if I am in an episode of Dr Who, as the Stuff Monster comes to get me from the moment I rise, to the moment I go to sleep. Then, often in the night, the Stuff Monster wakes me to tell me that there is Stuff I haven’t dealt with: bank statements, credit cards, mortgages . . . I can spend two hours in the small hours, moving money around online just to keep my head above water. Yet still I wake drowning in the Stuff mire that has become my life.
So, this week, I made a momentous decision: I am going to kill the Stuff Monster. I don’t want an interest only mortgage that I will never be able to pay off, yet have to spend the next seven years worrying about what happens when the bank comes knocking for payment in full when the term is up.
I don’t need John Fowles’s A Maggot, a book to which I gave a scathing review many years ago and have no intention of reading ever again; I don’t need the broken Apple laptop that now I am too embarrassed ever to declare that I owned, let alone be seen with in public.
I do not need the eight ladles in my cutlery drawer, evidence of my having lived, at one point, in four different countries at the same time. I don’t need the pine warehouse that is my entire downstairs – furniture bought in Camden market when the man I was going to live with told me how much he loved it and was looking forward to sharing when he left his live-in girlfriend after she lost enough weight so that she would “be attractive enough to meet someone else” (in summary: he didn’t, she did, and then he decided she was attractive enough to be worthy of him, after all).
I don’t need the drawers full of single ear-rings, the lone partner of a pair I once loved and thought that maybe, one day, I might happen upon, despite it having been 30 years since its sister disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Likewise, the single black Chloe shoe, whose partner disappeared on a Cardiff street after a rugby international under circumstances I have never fully been able to explain.
The recession has hit most people hard, some very much harder than others; and yes, I know that I still have a better life compared to most people in the world, let alone the country. But all changes in circumstance have to be addressed, and often we miss the obvious and lose sight of what it is that really matters: it’s not Stuff, it’s people.
We cling on to easily replaceable Stuff, mortgages included. In Paris, hardly anyone owns a property, and the rental market thrives. Many years ago, I made money on a property I bought at the bottom of the market and sold at the top; but property is not the sure-fire investment it once was.
When I sit down and really think about what gives me most pleasure in life, it is my friends and family and, a lot of the time, meeting new people. After two and a half years, I recently returned from Los Angeles, where I met so many people from around the world, all with different stories to tell. I loved the experience of living in a country that wasn’t a European one – much as I love our Continent, I had always wanted to experience the United States. While LA is not typical of the States as a whole, I thrived on the energy of a city that has been built on what I love most: film and television.
It has been wonderful to be back amongst the people I have known for decades, but of course there are things I miss about LA, not least the weather. But there are other things LA gave me that, being back full time in the UK, have made me realise that the life I had carved out before I left may not fit as well as it once did.
I am now 53 years old. I am single, have never married and have no children. I am a veritable tiny purse when it comes to relationship baggage. But as a woman of my age in Cardiff, the city in which I was born and which has developed to become a truly cosmopolitan European city, I find little to occupy me socially.
While I have many friends here, most are in partnerships and have children or grandchildren, and their schedules are hectic. After 28 years in London and also six in Paris – both cities that cater wonderfully for the single person of any age – I find booking meet-ups with friends a month in advance (and invariably having them cancelled half an hour before) extremely tiresome.
I know that people have lives and I am glad that they are content in living them to the full, having entered new phases of their lives; it has made me realise, however, that I, too, have entered a new phase and must look to what I do to enjoy whatever remains of my life.
Two weeks ago, a friend said to me: “Let’s say you have 25 years left; you have to decide how you want to spend that time.”
Twenty-five years. I recalled how quickly the last 25 have gone and how I regretted not having done so many things – learnt a couple of languages, travelled more, written more books.
It was a Eureka moment for me.
I don’t want to spend the next 25 years waking in the middle of the night to do sums and then spend the rest of every day worrying about why those sums don’t add up. I don’t want to be sitting by myself in a restaurant or bar, wondering what might have been if I had made different choices. I don’t want to die in a whacking great big house in Cardiff and nobody know I have gone until my editor questions why there is a blank page in the paper.
So, I am selling everything. When I announced it on Facebook, my friends reacted with horror, wondering how I could sell such a lovely house. But all I am selling is bricks, mortar and Stuff that has been clogging up my life for longer than I care to admit.
I made Stuff my emotional fortress, but it’s time to burn the drawbridge and return to concentrating on my first and only true love – my writing. My friends and family are still there, irrespective of whether that Etam dress I bought for £17.99 in 1973 goes in the bin.
It is time to shed skins and brave the world once more.
What’s the worst that can happen? I’m not even going there.
At the moment, I just think I have nothing to lose but my chains.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Open, Sesame - I Wish 2/27/12
My Auntie Muriel died this week.
Well, I call her my aunt but she was, in fact, our next-door neighbour for seven years, when my family moved from Cardiff, where I was born, to Newport.
I was four years old and was excited to have new friends, the children of Auntie Mew and Uncle Les: Tim, Jeff, and, after a couple of years, Lynette. Tim was the closest to my age, and we attached long planks of wood to square pieces, fitted them with elastic bands and pretended we were The Beatles.
When I was eight, I drove Auntie Mew and Uncle Les (who passed away three years ago) to distraction one Saturday morning, when I played the entire Sound of Music soundtrack eight times.
We kept in touch until the end of her life, and when I last saw her the Christmas before last, she was amused that I still had the towels she gave me when I went to university 35 years ago: two bath towels (one orange, one lime green) and two hand towels (pink and white).
It is her funeral tomorrow and I am feeling unbelievably sad. I saw Tim when he brought his mother to Cardiff but haven’t seen Jeff and Lynette for decades. It will be good to meet after so long, albeit on an occasion tinged with so much sadness.
It is doubtless nostalgia that has seen me, today, looking through my stuff for evidence of that era. In 1969, my dancing partner, Janette (Under 16s Juveniles were allowed to partner girls in ballroom dancing) won two trophies at the national championships in Butlin’s Minehead, and I find a book from my grandparents to celebrate the event.
“To dear Jacqueline,” it says. “With love from Grandma and Grandpa, on the occasion of winning the both trophies for dancing at Minehead, Sept. 1969.” The attention to punctuation moves me to tears.
It is called “A Book of Girls’ Stories”, and one highlight on the dust-jacket is Kathleen O’Farrell’s story “about Jenny – who did not get her eleven plus but found out that she had a special gift of her own.”
I turn to page 87 to find out what Jenny’s gift was. She was a girl with dreams, but someone who was put off from fulfilling them. “Perhaps . . . these other girls were right . . . If you didn’t dream dreams and make wonderful plans for the future, then you couldn’t be disappointed.”
Oh, dear. Page 93, and Jenny is already very, very depressed. I pray that she discovers her gift quickly. Phew. Page 94, having just passed a field, she is back on course: “No matter what happened, there would always be such things as lambs.”
Jenny takes Wuthering Heights out of the library for the second time (add masochism to that depressive streak) and arrives home to find that her mother has fallen down the stairs (please, please make her discover that gift quickly).
This gives Jenny the opportunity to write to her mother while she is recovering in hospital and, lo and behold, she discovers that she is, according to her mother “a born writer”.
She recalls Auntie Flo, who had been looking after the household after the accident: “It’s the door – the door Auntie Flo told me about – she said another door would open. And now it has.”
Well, let me tell you something, Jenny, old girl, publishing is in a dire state. The editor may love your book but then he or she will pass it to the 12 year-old people in marketing who know nothing and they will reject it. So you’d have been better off listening to your friends.
Then again, you could go down the path of Jenny in Barbara Ker Wilson’s Pony Mad, who finally abandons her donkey passion in favour of “dreams of becoming a world figure-skating champion”.
So many dreams – and for girls, too. Small wonder I thought big when I was growing up; small wonder I have been disappointed when life hasn’t delivered.
A Book of Girls’ Stories sits next to A Child’s Garden of Verses, Peter Pan and Wendy and, again, from my grandparents, for my 10th birthday, The Golden Treasury of Poetry. It was the book I turned to for a poem when I auditioned for the first National Youth Theatre of Wales in 1976, and, there it is, on page 30: A. A. Milne’s The Four Friends.
Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow,
Leonard was a lion with a six-foot tail,
George was a goat, and his beard was yellow,
And James was a very small snail.”
I rehearsed it over and over in front of my mother in our kitchen in Bridgend, where we had moved in 1969. I was successful and, in the production Oh! What a Lovely War, sang I’ll Make a Man of Any One of You.
Between the books sits my stamp album. Like everything else from my childhood, I have priced it (8/6), in my eagerness to preserve order in every area of my life.
I note my strange obsession with Hungary, and the precision with which I have mounted my favourite stamps with photograph preservation corners.
I can’t stop crying today. Yesterday, Wales won the Triple Crown, and I was ecstatic, but wept uncontrollably all night. It was six years since my beloved cousin Sarah died at just 34, and with Auntie Mew’s funeral tomorrow, just the sight of my grandmother’s beautifully curved writing makes me long to be a child again.
A child like Jenny, full of dreams and hopes, eyes gleaming in the knowledge that she may have a future as a writer.
A child who knows nothing of death and the inevitable difficulties that life will throw in her path.
A child whose Auntie Flo points her to a door that opens on nothing but an endless future, full of possibilities.
Well, I call her my aunt but she was, in fact, our next-door neighbour for seven years, when my family moved from Cardiff, where I was born, to Newport.
I was four years old and was excited to have new friends, the children of Auntie Mew and Uncle Les: Tim, Jeff, and, after a couple of years, Lynette. Tim was the closest to my age, and we attached long planks of wood to square pieces, fitted them with elastic bands and pretended we were The Beatles.
When I was eight, I drove Auntie Mew and Uncle Les (who passed away three years ago) to distraction one Saturday morning, when I played the entire Sound of Music soundtrack eight times.
We kept in touch until the end of her life, and when I last saw her the Christmas before last, she was amused that I still had the towels she gave me when I went to university 35 years ago: two bath towels (one orange, one lime green) and two hand towels (pink and white).
It is her funeral tomorrow and I am feeling unbelievably sad. I saw Tim when he brought his mother to Cardiff but haven’t seen Jeff and Lynette for decades. It will be good to meet after so long, albeit on an occasion tinged with so much sadness.
It is doubtless nostalgia that has seen me, today, looking through my stuff for evidence of that era. In 1969, my dancing partner, Janette (Under 16s Juveniles were allowed to partner girls in ballroom dancing) won two trophies at the national championships in Butlin’s Minehead, and I find a book from my grandparents to celebrate the event.
“To dear Jacqueline,” it says. “With love from Grandma and Grandpa, on the occasion of winning the both trophies for dancing at Minehead, Sept. 1969.” The attention to punctuation moves me to tears.
It is called “A Book of Girls’ Stories”, and one highlight on the dust-jacket is Kathleen O’Farrell’s story “about Jenny – who did not get her eleven plus but found out that she had a special gift of her own.”
I turn to page 87 to find out what Jenny’s gift was. She was a girl with dreams, but someone who was put off from fulfilling them. “Perhaps . . . these other girls were right . . . If you didn’t dream dreams and make wonderful plans for the future, then you couldn’t be disappointed.”
Oh, dear. Page 93, and Jenny is already very, very depressed. I pray that she discovers her gift quickly. Phew. Page 94, having just passed a field, she is back on course: “No matter what happened, there would always be such things as lambs.”
Jenny takes Wuthering Heights out of the library for the second time (add masochism to that depressive streak) and arrives home to find that her mother has fallen down the stairs (please, please make her discover that gift quickly).
This gives Jenny the opportunity to write to her mother while she is recovering in hospital and, lo and behold, she discovers that she is, according to her mother “a born writer”.
She recalls Auntie Flo, who had been looking after the household after the accident: “It’s the door – the door Auntie Flo told me about – she said another door would open. And now it has.”
Well, let me tell you something, Jenny, old girl, publishing is in a dire state. The editor may love your book but then he or she will pass it to the 12 year-old people in marketing who know nothing and they will reject it. So you’d have been better off listening to your friends.
Then again, you could go down the path of Jenny in Barbara Ker Wilson’s Pony Mad, who finally abandons her donkey passion in favour of “dreams of becoming a world figure-skating champion”.
So many dreams – and for girls, too. Small wonder I thought big when I was growing up; small wonder I have been disappointed when life hasn’t delivered.
A Book of Girls’ Stories sits next to A Child’s Garden of Verses, Peter Pan and Wendy and, again, from my grandparents, for my 10th birthday, The Golden Treasury of Poetry. It was the book I turned to for a poem when I auditioned for the first National Youth Theatre of Wales in 1976, and, there it is, on page 30: A. A. Milne’s The Four Friends.
Ernest was an elephant, a great big fellow,
Leonard was a lion with a six-foot tail,
George was a goat, and his beard was yellow,
And James was a very small snail.”
I rehearsed it over and over in front of my mother in our kitchen in Bridgend, where we had moved in 1969. I was successful and, in the production Oh! What a Lovely War, sang I’ll Make a Man of Any One of You.
Between the books sits my stamp album. Like everything else from my childhood, I have priced it (8/6), in my eagerness to preserve order in every area of my life.
I note my strange obsession with Hungary, and the precision with which I have mounted my favourite stamps with photograph preservation corners.
I can’t stop crying today. Yesterday, Wales won the Triple Crown, and I was ecstatic, but wept uncontrollably all night. It was six years since my beloved cousin Sarah died at just 34, and with Auntie Mew’s funeral tomorrow, just the sight of my grandmother’s beautifully curved writing makes me long to be a child again.
A child like Jenny, full of dreams and hopes, eyes gleaming in the knowledge that she may have a future as a writer.
A child who knows nothing of death and the inevitable difficulties that life will throw in her path.
A child whose Auntie Flo points her to a door that opens on nothing but an endless future, full of possibilities.
Family F*****g Non-Friendly 2/27/12
Family-friendly.
They are two words I have come to loathe. I can cope with dog friendy, animal friendly, and even cyclist friendly (at a push – but gosh, they can be a pompous lot in their silly Lycra), but family friendly? No, thanks.
It’s a phrase that crops up on an almost daily basis now. There are family friendly tax perks, family friendly restaurants and, as I have discovered in recent weeks, family friendly sports clubs.
It wasn’t a problem I had in the US, where the LA Sports Club was an exclusively adult only zone. True, there were men who behaved like infants in there, shouting and jeering from their treadmills as they watched baseball on the in-built TV screens, but there were no screaming brats.
Since the New Year and back in the UK, I have been trying to find a decent sports club near where I live in Cardiff: one with a good gym, a pool, and a nice bar/restaurant to relax in after a workout.
First, I went to David Lloyd, where I thought I might take up tennis (although quite why I wanted to do so at my age is anybody’s guess – it seemed like a good idea at the time).
The cafeteria area was swarming – and I mean swarming – with children, running around yelling, while their parents sat drinking coffee, exerting no control over the monsters. On my tour, I was shown list after list of tennis leagues featuring said monsters, and, with a migraine fast coming on, I made my excuses and left. Game, set and match.
Another friend recommended the Village Hotel in Whitchurch. After driving around the car-park, trying to find a parking space for 20 minutes, I entered the foyer to find yet another crèche – even more screaming children and, worse, the disgusting, rancid smell of Starbucks coffee (is there no place left sacred from the infiltration of this vile chain?). I asked between what hours children were allowed in the pool and was told pretty much all the time. When I visited the pool, I swear a tap-dancing killer whale could not have taken up more space than the creatures in it.
Don’t get me wrong – I like children. I was one myself once. But it seems as if the whole of society is now so geared towards being family friendly that grown-ups wanting a bit of peace have no chance.
I have just endured yet another gross half term, entering every bar and restaurant to find dozens of little people screaming for burgers. I have battled with the Everest of push-chairs in doorways, queued behind fathers too lazy to take to take their kids to the park while their wives go shopping, and endured the screams at the end of the day from children bored out of their skulls watching their parents sit drinking.
Again, it is something I never saw in LA. On the rare occasions I saw children eating out, it was in establishments that specifically catered for them – in US terms, that means burgers and balloons.
The importance of the family unit has consistently been stressed by every British government, and the need to hold the family unit together by offering perks that benefit it is always close to the top of the agenda. But as an older single woman who, in Britain, is already made to feel consigned to the scrapheap of life, not being part of the family friendly picture serves only to intensify that feeling.
As a single person dining alone in LA, I was never made to feel like a second-class citizen and shunted off to a corner of the dining room, for fear of contaminating people who had managed to find their life’s soul mate. The same is true of Paris, where I spent six very happy years.
But in the UK and, indeed, most other parts of Europe, I am made to feel a nuisance even for deigning to set foot outside the door by myself.
Heck, I can’t even have the Chateaubriand or paella in a restaurant, because it is “for two persons only”.
I can’t take advantage of any Groupon or Living Social meal or holiday, because they, too, are for two people.
I can’t take advantage of special deals on the railways, because the really good packages are for families or groups travelling together.
Many package holiday deals continue to add “single supplement extra”.
Let’s get one thing straight: as a single person, who has never married and never had kids, I am likely to spend more than the average family. I don’t go into a restaurant and order a salad between four and a jug of tap water. I like good food and wine and am willing to pay for the best of it.
All I ask is for a pleasant, quiet, family free environment in which to enjoy it.
Is it really so much to ask?
They are two words I have come to loathe. I can cope with dog friendy, animal friendly, and even cyclist friendly (at a push – but gosh, they can be a pompous lot in their silly Lycra), but family friendly? No, thanks.
It’s a phrase that crops up on an almost daily basis now. There are family friendly tax perks, family friendly restaurants and, as I have discovered in recent weeks, family friendly sports clubs.
It wasn’t a problem I had in the US, where the LA Sports Club was an exclusively adult only zone. True, there were men who behaved like infants in there, shouting and jeering from their treadmills as they watched baseball on the in-built TV screens, but there were no screaming brats.
Since the New Year and back in the UK, I have been trying to find a decent sports club near where I live in Cardiff: one with a good gym, a pool, and a nice bar/restaurant to relax in after a workout.
First, I went to David Lloyd, where I thought I might take up tennis (although quite why I wanted to do so at my age is anybody’s guess – it seemed like a good idea at the time).
The cafeteria area was swarming – and I mean swarming – with children, running around yelling, while their parents sat drinking coffee, exerting no control over the monsters. On my tour, I was shown list after list of tennis leagues featuring said monsters, and, with a migraine fast coming on, I made my excuses and left. Game, set and match.
Another friend recommended the Village Hotel in Whitchurch. After driving around the car-park, trying to find a parking space for 20 minutes, I entered the foyer to find yet another crèche – even more screaming children and, worse, the disgusting, rancid smell of Starbucks coffee (is there no place left sacred from the infiltration of this vile chain?). I asked between what hours children were allowed in the pool and was told pretty much all the time. When I visited the pool, I swear a tap-dancing killer whale could not have taken up more space than the creatures in it.
Don’t get me wrong – I like children. I was one myself once. But it seems as if the whole of society is now so geared towards being family friendly that grown-ups wanting a bit of peace have no chance.
I have just endured yet another gross half term, entering every bar and restaurant to find dozens of little people screaming for burgers. I have battled with the Everest of push-chairs in doorways, queued behind fathers too lazy to take to take their kids to the park while their wives go shopping, and endured the screams at the end of the day from children bored out of their skulls watching their parents sit drinking.
Again, it is something I never saw in LA. On the rare occasions I saw children eating out, it was in establishments that specifically catered for them – in US terms, that means burgers and balloons.
The importance of the family unit has consistently been stressed by every British government, and the need to hold the family unit together by offering perks that benefit it is always close to the top of the agenda. But as an older single woman who, in Britain, is already made to feel consigned to the scrapheap of life, not being part of the family friendly picture serves only to intensify that feeling.
As a single person dining alone in LA, I was never made to feel like a second-class citizen and shunted off to a corner of the dining room, for fear of contaminating people who had managed to find their life’s soul mate. The same is true of Paris, where I spent six very happy years.
But in the UK and, indeed, most other parts of Europe, I am made to feel a nuisance even for deigning to set foot outside the door by myself.
Heck, I can’t even have the Chateaubriand or paella in a restaurant, because it is “for two persons only”.
I can’t take advantage of any Groupon or Living Social meal or holiday, because they, too, are for two people.
I can’t take advantage of special deals on the railways, because the really good packages are for families or groups travelling together.
Many package holiday deals continue to add “single supplement extra”.
Let’s get one thing straight: as a single person, who has never married and never had kids, I am likely to spend more than the average family. I don’t go into a restaurant and order a salad between four and a jug of tap water. I like good food and wine and am willing to pay for the best of it.
All I ask is for a pleasant, quiet, family free environment in which to enjoy it.
Is it really so much to ask?
Thursday, February 2, 2012
LA Not So Reverential 2/2/12
The horror! The horror! as Joseph Conrad wrote.
My ex-landlady (the Morticia of previous blogs) from Los Angeles reappeared to me in a dream. I have not seen her since our court date, after I successfully sued the rental company for money that had been withheld from my deposit after I left the apartment.
In the dream, she was showing a property to a European gentleman who was looking for locations to shoot his next movie.
Interestingly, it was Morticia’s obsessive updates to me regarding a European gentlemen tenant in the building that had been one of the main reasons for my departure, so there must be some unconscious connection there.
Anywhere, the nightmare – dream is way too nice a word for what was going on in my head – continued, when I discovered that I was moving back into my old apartment.
The old apartment with the dated cupboards, the crap cooker, the broken window, the grotty bathroom basin – the “very high end” establishment, as Morticia described it to the judge. Trust me: high spec in LA just means expensive. Never mind the quality, feel the width of your shrinking pile of cash.
Never have I been so grateful to wake. But it set me thinking about the things I DO miss about LA.
Obviously, now living in Cardiff, the second wettest city in the UK, I miss the warmer climate.
I miss walking to Santa Monica pier at the end of the day and watching the sun go down while sipping a frozen Margarita.
I miss my friends at Wine Expo, the Santa Monica wine bar and shop that boasts the best selection of Italian wine I have ever seen – on either side of the Atlantic.
Strangely, I miss the long-haul flying. Twelve hours without a mobile phone is a long time in media land, and I used to welcome the peace in the air, doing nothing but watching films and taking advantage of the many goodies on offer.
I miss the Virgin Atlantic and Air New Zealand cabin crew.
I miss Thierry in the Air New Zealand lounge at LAX.
Most of all, I miss the optimism of LA. I loved being in a city whose very heartbeat was film and television; and while there were undoubtedly many hangers on in that environment, I will repeat what I have said many times: Hollywood may be bollocks, but it’s still the best bollocks in the world.
Today, the sun is shining in Cardiff. I have just enjoyed a great four days with my mum staying with me for her birthday - the only downside being Maddie the bichon frise emptying her bladder (again) on my lovely rugs. I adore the dog, but now suspect that in some strange part of her brain, she thinks she is “rewarding” me for giving her copious amounts of chicken and gravy.
I have also just had lunch with my very pregnant friend Jane, who is about to drop at any second; in fact, I thought that her broken waters were about to join Maddie’s urine on the carpet, so was relieved when she had to leave to go to pick up her daughter.
Both occasions were reminders of why I returned to the UK: friends and family. I made a few friends in LA and remain close to them, but even some of them still find the distance between their new life and people they have known forever, difficult to cope with.
At some point in the spring, I will go to Paris for five days, and that will be another reminder of why I returned. From King’s Cross, my favourite city in the world is a little over two hours away on the Eurostar.
On a Sunday morning, I will to the Café Philosophe and listen to an incomprehensible debate in French. I will cross the road to the Bastille market and move between smells of melons, roses, cider, cheese and bread, and I will cry with joy at this glorious onslaught on my senses.
I will go for lunch in Bofinger, where they will remember me from past visits and sit me in my favourite part of the restaurant under the stained glass, domed ceiling.
I will see the friends I made during the seven years I lived in this great city and think how blessed I am to have all this on my doorstep.
And I will remember LA and everything that is great about it.
But I will know, in my heart, where my true love is.
My ex-landlady (the Morticia of previous blogs) from Los Angeles reappeared to me in a dream. I have not seen her since our court date, after I successfully sued the rental company for money that had been withheld from my deposit after I left the apartment.
In the dream, she was showing a property to a European gentleman who was looking for locations to shoot his next movie.
Interestingly, it was Morticia’s obsessive updates to me regarding a European gentlemen tenant in the building that had been one of the main reasons for my departure, so there must be some unconscious connection there.
Anywhere, the nightmare – dream is way too nice a word for what was going on in my head – continued, when I discovered that I was moving back into my old apartment.
The old apartment with the dated cupboards, the crap cooker, the broken window, the grotty bathroom basin – the “very high end” establishment, as Morticia described it to the judge. Trust me: high spec in LA just means expensive. Never mind the quality, feel the width of your shrinking pile of cash.
Never have I been so grateful to wake. But it set me thinking about the things I DO miss about LA.
Obviously, now living in Cardiff, the second wettest city in the UK, I miss the warmer climate.
I miss walking to Santa Monica pier at the end of the day and watching the sun go down while sipping a frozen Margarita.
I miss my friends at Wine Expo, the Santa Monica wine bar and shop that boasts the best selection of Italian wine I have ever seen – on either side of the Atlantic.
Strangely, I miss the long-haul flying. Twelve hours without a mobile phone is a long time in media land, and I used to welcome the peace in the air, doing nothing but watching films and taking advantage of the many goodies on offer.
I miss the Virgin Atlantic and Air New Zealand cabin crew.
I miss Thierry in the Air New Zealand lounge at LAX.
Most of all, I miss the optimism of LA. I loved being in a city whose very heartbeat was film and television; and while there were undoubtedly many hangers on in that environment, I will repeat what I have said many times: Hollywood may be bollocks, but it’s still the best bollocks in the world.
Today, the sun is shining in Cardiff. I have just enjoyed a great four days with my mum staying with me for her birthday - the only downside being Maddie the bichon frise emptying her bladder (again) on my lovely rugs. I adore the dog, but now suspect that in some strange part of her brain, she thinks she is “rewarding” me for giving her copious amounts of chicken and gravy.
I have also just had lunch with my very pregnant friend Jane, who is about to drop at any second; in fact, I thought that her broken waters were about to join Maddie’s urine on the carpet, so was relieved when she had to leave to go to pick up her daughter.
Both occasions were reminders of why I returned to the UK: friends and family. I made a few friends in LA and remain close to them, but even some of them still find the distance between their new life and people they have known forever, difficult to cope with.
At some point in the spring, I will go to Paris for five days, and that will be another reminder of why I returned. From King’s Cross, my favourite city in the world is a little over two hours away on the Eurostar.
On a Sunday morning, I will to the Café Philosophe and listen to an incomprehensible debate in French. I will cross the road to the Bastille market and move between smells of melons, roses, cider, cheese and bread, and I will cry with joy at this glorious onslaught on my senses.
I will go for lunch in Bofinger, where they will remember me from past visits and sit me in my favourite part of the restaurant under the stained glass, domed ceiling.
I will see the friends I made during the seven years I lived in this great city and think how blessed I am to have all this on my doorstep.
And I will remember LA and everything that is great about it.
But I will know, in my heart, where my true love is.
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