Julia Chalkley

Spaghetti Western

This is the smaller of the two vegetable spaghetti gourds we got from the plant.

We visited friends in Gloucestershire when lockdown eased enough to make it legal, and descended on the local plant nurseries like locusts. I’d had poor success raising seedlings for the polytunnel – well, I’d had the usual success rate, but as the weather in April was more like February, I wasn’t able to plant them out with any reasonable hope of them surviving, and most of them died. So I was pleased to be able to buy some plants – cucumber, aubergine, melon, sweet pepper, and a vegetable spaghetti.

Varied success. The cucumbers took over their plot and supplied thirty or forty cucumbers within the space of ten weeks – the peppers went beserk, but we can deal with a glut of peppers – the aubergine plants produced a single fruit the size of a hammered thumb and the melon plants managed one fruit each. Cheaper by far to buy the fruit at a shop, though not as much fun. The vegetable spaghetti plant was full of flowers, but not so good at fruit – they grew just two gourds, but they were so big that they dragged the vines off their supports. I’ve never seen spaghetti gourds in the shops, so I had no idea whether they were ripe (or how to cook them).

Thank Evans for the internet. We cut the smallest one in half tonight, scooped out the seeds and roasted it for 40 minutes, then dug a fork into the flesh. It dissolved into delicate threads immediately, and it tasted great. One half was enough between the two of us as a side dish, so I’ll be finding out how well it freezes. The larger gourd? I just really hope it freezes well, or I find a dozen veggie friends to invite to a meal.

Not so much success with the writing. I think I blew a fuse or sprained the writing muscle in my head with the Scriptly fortnight, but for the first time in seven years I have got as far as November 1st with no damn idea what to write about for Nano. Total count so far, 120 words of blather. Target, 50,000 words. Sounds like an ooops this year.

The Real Golden Rule

Tabby cat – photo by Jake William Heckey, Pixabay

I read a story earlier this year. Well, I’ve read a lot, but this one was my usual, science fiction. A man who grew up in America in the 21st century was talking to a woman who grew up in a different time and place. He said that he tried to treat people as he’d like to be treated himself, that this is the Golden Rule. She corrected him. Treating someone as you would like to be treated is the Silver Rule, she said. Treating someone as they would like to be treated is the Golden Rule.

I’ve been reminded of that tonight. We have two elderly cats – Max is sixteen, a recent arrival, and Sasha is fourteen. We adopted Sasha and her brother Tigger at very short notice – and I mean, ten minutes’ notice – in 2008. They loved people from the start. Tigger died of kidney failure in 2018, and we still miss his daft affectionate ways. Sasha is more regal, but no less affectionate. As time goes on, we’re more tolerant of her infringements of the rules; she is still not allowed on the table or the worktops in the kitchen – but if she takes over the chair we meant to sit in, we don’t have the heart to disturb her.

We have three ‘laptop’ tables – glazed wooden tops attached to cloth bags full of polysterene beads. The bags mould to our knees and our meals go on the wooden tops, so we can watch the news while we eat. Sasha has the habit of knocking these down, bag side up, and sleeping on the bag. And yes, we don’t have the heart to disturb her. The glazing has worn off one of them, and while Himself took the view that we should throw it away, I wanted to give Sasha her own guilt-free bed, so I insisted on recycling it.

Harder than it looked. The cloth bag was an underside of cloth glued to a cardboard rectangle, the cardboard glued firmly to the underside of the wood. In pulling the cardboard off the wood, I discovered that there was a hole in the cardboard… discovered that when I dropped the whole thing on the table and the polystyrene beads puffed out of the hole in the cardboard. You know those beads. Went everywhere, and static made them stick to the carpet, the table, my fingers… Picked up all the beads, dropped the half-dismantled board in the process, more beads everywhere… peeled off more cardboard, which compressed the bag and MORE beads escaped….

Eventually gathered the beads in a bag. Today, I sorted out my fabric scraps to make the outer cover of the cushion in which to house those beads. I wanted to use the original stiff blue fabric; then I thought a patchwork or a purple cotton cover might look prettier. But in the end I used a scrap of old shirt.

The shirt was a work shirt that finally became too thin and torn to wear even in the garden. There’s blobs of black paint on it, it would rip if you tugged it too hard and it’s a Grandad-cream colour with a green, gold and red check. But it’s clean, probably smells faintly of Himself and it is soft. It looks like a small child stitched it together of leftovers, but Sasha climbed onto it within a few minutes and is still asleep on it now. I would have liked to have made her a patchwork cushion that showed off my skill in colour and sewing, but that would be me imposing the Silver Rule on an old cat. She wanted something very soft, seamless and smelling of someone familiar, and she has it. And she loves it. At fourteen years old, she may have less than a year or maybe another decade, and I want her to have what she wants in whatever time she has left.

So good, we went twice.

I enjoyed the trip to Colchester to see Robin Ince, but the only way to buy a ticket was to buy a book. We don’t need two copies, and nobody in either of our families would appreciate a copy of the book, signed or not. So I went alone. I enjoyed the talk so much that I took Himself along to the next talk in the series – Stop 35, at Norwich – where tickets were £6 each and didn’t supply a book (though they were on sale).

I’m not criticising the Red Lion Bookshop for selling a book as the ‘ticket’ for admission, by the way. It’s an excellent independent bookshop with a major bookseller chain within metres of their front door and Amazon in the airwaves all around them. I was happy to buy a book that would be a small step to keep them afloat; Amazon didn’t send me personal messages during lockdown or organise daft games at a local book festival as Red Lion did.

I used to work near Norwich, and we both love the city. It’s original, distinctive and a great centre for arts, writing, performance. We walked from Tombland in the east to the Norwich Arts Centre in the, er, centre to hear the talk and reminded ourselves how lovely Norwich is. One of the shopkeepers told me that there are more surviving Green Man carvings in Norwich than in any other city in England, and that most of them are in churches – nice collision of the pagan and the church. They’ve kept three churches within two hundred yards on Benedict Street, one of which is the Arts Centre.

I was expecting to hear the same talk as I’d heard in Colchester, but no. Robin Ince genuinely hops from one subject to another, and about half of the talk was completely new. We heard more about Apollo 8 than maybe we should, and I found out why he found half a frog in his coat pocket after a primary school science lesson. Lucky man by the way, to have science lessons and nature walks in primary school.

The audience laughed and urrrrggged and gasped all through the talk and cheered Mr Ince at the end, and so they should. That was no scripted and rehearsed talk. That was one man with a deep interest in science and an enquiring brain just, talking. It was worth the long round trip – even the 40 minute divert on the way home – to hear the Norwich version of his talk, and so tempting to chase him around the country to hear the whole of it. But that’s stalking, not curiousity. Time to read the book.

And on the Scriptly front – well, I did it. I sent the 13th brief in on Saturday night and got the 14th brief, and almost ditched it there at the last hurdle. It was a simple brief, and the simplicity had me stuck. After a fortnight of briefs that asked me specifically for musicals, poetry, TikToks, infomercials with a narrow focus… the final ask was so wide ranging that I had no ideas at all. Woke up with no ideas. Went off to Norwich with a vague idea. Came home late and started to write. Tired as I was, I stuck at it. I knew that anyone who had gone the untimed route would have fourteen scripts to submit before 10am on Monday morning, and that the website would be chockablock in the morning. I finished that fourteenth script at 1.35am on Monday morning and sent it in. And done. I’m one of the 90 people who finished the timed route, out of 135 who started, but even if we’d all done the lot I would have been chuffed. I need deadlines for anything, and this one did me good.

Make ’em laugh, make ’em think

Normally, I’d shut myself away at weekends. Everywhere gets busy and I’d just rather be at home than fighting through crowds. Today’s been an exception. I’ve been attending a book club on and off for the last three years which is loosely attached to the Red Lion Bookshop in Colchester, an excellent independent bookshop with a varied stock and lovely staff. It’s a long way from my home in terms of traffic and parking obstacles, so I don’t go often, but it’s THERE. A huge comfort in lockdown, especially when they started Zoom meetings. An author talk with a cat fast asleep on your lap, what’s better than that?

Today’s author talk was so good it drew me out on a Saturday this close to Christmas. A K Blakemore was signing copies of ‘The Manningtree Witches’, followed by Robin Ince, appearing as part of his 100 Bookshops Tour with his new book ‘The Importance of Being Interested’. Book or not, an hour listening to Robin Ince is never wasted.

He was even better than he was on the radio. Fast-talking, wide-ranging, hopping from one subject to the next in seconds and never being the famous man talking to his fans – more like the popular bloke leaning against the beer keg at a party with a circle of mates listening. He over-ran by fifteen minutes, and everyone was still leaning forward, listening and laughing. From Charles Darwin’s false nose to the difference between American astronauts and English astronauts, we could have listened for another couple of hours. And now I have the book to read. I’m hoping that, like Billy Connolly’s books, it will read like Robin Ince’s voice bouncing from one subject to another.

That was stop 34, by the way, so there’s another 78 chances to catch him on his 100 Bookshop Tour. He’s a comedian, not a professional mathematician.

On the subject of numbers – Scriptly 13 has been submitted, 24 hours after the brief was issued. It gave me a chance to take a story I wrote for an earlier brief on to the next chapter, from a different point of view, and the chance to air a gripe about the almost amusing part of public service jobs. My father probably thought that getting my accountancy qualification and that senior post in Finance meant that I spent my time drawing up the accounts and budgets in ethereal silence. In reality, it was a job carried out in the centre of a crowded open plan office with sixty other people discussing numbers on their phones, a job composed largely of petty admin, of managing staff who did not see why they needed to work when they could be surfing FaceBook instead – and playing Reception Bingo. Reception would take a call from the public that didn’t have any clear home (or the extension was busy and the caller was getting angry), so they’d pick an extension at random and patch them through, and sometimes I’d be the lucky one. At any stage, I’d be persuading a furious resident that I wasn’t the best person to come down and fish a dirty nappy out of their pond, didn’t have the authority to arrest their neighbour for growing a hedge that shaded out their garden and wouldn’t nip round to empty their bin for them. In between, sometimes in the peace of my own home at weekends… I drew up the accounts and the budgets. It’s been four years since I gave up being polite to rude officials and residents, and they’d have to pay me double to go back to it. Both of my successors drew the same conclusion in a quarter of the time it took me, and I believe my old job is now vacant.

Another Stitch in the Wall

We picked up a leaflet last month for a textile art exhibition taking place in October 2021. I started making patchwork quilts when I was nine – made one, over a few years, then another at the age of nineteen – and, er, that’s it. I have stitched a few oddments like a cushion for my niece and a bag for Scrabble tiles as a present for a Scrabble-mad neighbour, but largely, there’s always other jobs to be done and the sewing hobby is last on the list.

Today we went along to see the exhibition. It was tiny. One room, roughly twice the size of our kitchen, with exhibits ranged around the walls and on the windowsill and tables. A lot of exhibits. The room was bright and subtly lit and the exhibits were incredible. We spent almost two hours examining each exhibit, discussing how they’d done this stitch or that knot, and took a lot of photos. The one at the top is my favourite (and sold before we got there) – a padded silk fabric picture that is soft and invites a touch but represents a section of flint wall.

Margaret Kay got the look of a Derbyshire stone wall down accurately in cloth – the fossils, the lichen, the ferns at its base. I envied a person who offered to turn the pages of the octopus books on the table, as she came equipped with a pair of cotton gloves. It’s hard to stop yourself from touching these artworks – stroking them, pressing the padded parts, twirling the ‘grassy’ fronds between your fingers. These are gorgeous artworks by people who are fiends for detail and in love with colour and texture. It’s an exhibition worth visiting. If you’re close enough to south Suffolk to get there before the exhibition closes on 31 October, get down to the Mill Tye exhibition at Great Cornard. I mean, you’ve seen my photos, but – you have to get nose to nose with these beautiful artworks to really appreciate them.

Carolyn Dilloway’s Torres and Julia Pearce’s Alhambra

I did manage to submit something for the latest Scriptly challenge on time, so I’m now eleven down and three to go. Challenge 12 arrived at ten o’clock this evening and it’s not as tough as the last five or six they’ve set. I can’t help thinking, though. Next up is Challenge 13, and they’ll surely have some wicked fun with that number – and then the final challenge, due to be fired at us at 10pm on Saturday night, for us to write up and fire back by 10am on Monday morning. I’m flagging. I am. I will finish this damn challenge, even if I write them the world’s first ever ten-second long script. Then I suspect I’d be tempted to turn my back on writing for a month – except that I’m due to attend a reunion of the OU writing group in a few weeks, and November is Nano month. I can’t believe I used to gripe over not having time to write.

This is probably a statue that Mill Tye really disliked…

Didn’t It Rain

The weather forecast for our area continues to promise temperatures above the average for autumn with the chance of an odd shower, and the skies are still emptying their bladders on our roof for hours at a time. It’s been raining on and off all day, and is still raining hard now. Appropriate, then, that I’ve spent the afternoon writing the latest in the Scriptly challenge series; this time, a script based on Hugh Laurie’s version of Didn’t It Rain. Trying to find some way of setting a script to Morecambe & Wise’s ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ in the thin hope that I can write us some good weather.

Today’s Scriptly brief has asked for something very twisty and original, and I admit to brain-fade. Maybe because I wrote a couple of scripts in ragged poetry, then a long and dark version of a prose story I wrote earlier this year into one script, and launched straight into a screenplay that was essentially set to music. Right now, I’m not capable of surreal and twisty. I might write them something obvious and simple – maybe a short script for very small children about a dog called Spot who has a big red ball to play with, and hope that none of their parents are veterinary surgeons with dirty minds.

In other worries, our escape artist tortie cat can tell the time. We have a curfew catflap that locks at a given time and unlocks at a given time. We like to shut them in at dusk and let them out around dawn to give the local wildlife a fighting chance, but Genie seems to know. She runs downstairs five minutes before the flap unlocks and is outside as soon as it does; she demands food fifteen minutes before the flap locks for the evening, won’t wait for any delaying tactics and is outside ten minutes before the flap locks shut for the night. So we shifted the time back by half an hour. Abracadabra – Genie wanted her food fifteen minutes before the new time. Shifted the lock time back by an hour… you guessed it. She scooted outside with ten minutes to spare and sauntered back soaking wet and skittery at half past ten. Full moon soon, and I think the little hunter is under its spell already.

Time I returned to the Scriptly struggle – ten down, four to go.

Scriptly Gets Inventive

We have been asked by the organisers of the Scriptly Challenge not to share details of the challenge on any blogs we write – to leave the exact wording of the brief vague. So I haven’t been giving the brief word for word, but it’s hard not to share the main detail. We’ve been asked to write around specific settings, to write a very short but still complete script (‘Waiting for Godot’ would be far too long…) and to write a short musical. Tonight’s brief is based around poetry. This challenge is starting to feel like being slung around in a bagatelle machine, but so far I’ve submitted a script on time.

Tonight’s brief feels tougher. First I have to find the kind of poetry the Scriptly folk are referring to and read it. Then, love it or hate it, I have to write them a script based on it. If I get all the way through this and submit all fourteen scripts on time, I’ll feel I have really achieved something. It’s been great at training me to form an idea, get stuck in and write.

I am really not sure I’m capable of their February challenge, though. Known as 28 Plays Later, it involves the same format but twice as tough – every day in February, a brief and a deadline to submit all 28 plays. Playwright Bootcamp, or what.

I’ve got how long, again?

Such a lovely day, and we spoilt it all by setting off our bonfire. We did make sure the wind was north-westerly, which means that the smoke went off in a south-easterly direction – next nearest neighbour to the south east is about a mile away, and the smoke is light, pale and dispersed long before it gets there.

We spent the day worried about our tortie cat, the sister of the black cat who was killed on the road in January. She didn’t come in for breakfast, as normal – didn’t come back for her afternoon food – strolled in full of pep and probably takeaway rodent at 8pm, and is now locked in for 24 hours.

And I wrote the next brief for Scriptly. What the… I am asked to pack in dance, music, humour, script… within a fifteen second limit? Bring back the horror brief, I say. Actually, no. I got something written and submitted (that will offend EVERYBODY if it’s ever filmed) and now they have asked us for… oh, get real. Seriously. Even horror and chicklit is better than this.

Take me to the beach

The weather is still forecast to turn colder soon, and I’m giving up hope for a late summer. It’s been annoying, hearing the national newscasters giving us advice on how to stay cool in this heatwave, week after week, while we huddle down in fleeces and hope it’ll stop raining before the house floats away. We’ve had perhaps twelve or fifteen hot sunny days this year in East Anglia, and can’t easily book a sneaky week somewhere hot without worrying that the rules will change before we land.

We made the most of this reasonably warm day. We went out to the beach. Two beaches. The first, we’d never been to; the second, we visited once, over thirty years ago.

First off, Walberswick. We parked up in an almost empty car park and went for a long trudge along the beach. An excellent beach it was, too. Soft, clean, pale sand and long stretches of deep, loose, large pebbles, the kind it’s difficult to walk through but really satisfying – loud and crunchy. When we reached the ferry, we’d reached the end of the world as far as Walberswick was concerned – muddy banks, a narrow river and the ass-end of Southwold on the other side. The ferry was a simple boat large enough for a dozen people and a man rowing it. It would have taken him less than five minutes to reach the other side, and it did look like fun.

Maybe we missed something – or maybe Walberswick is tiny. Two tea-shops, two pubs, two gift shops and a village hall – plus, some of the smallest cottages I’ve ever seen on the Suffolk coast. Definitely not tourist central, though from the quay we could see Southwold’s water-tower and lighthouse across the river, about a mile away and I’d imagine their streets are still busy.

The best part about Walberswick is the people. Complete strangers passing us said good afternoon, smiled, laughed at our jokes about their dogs thinking of following us home. We felt at home, and who knows, we do have a lottery ticket running so we might be able to afford one of those two-room cottages next week. Walberswick is a relaxing place to be.

Next stop – Dunwich. We came here in the mid-80’s with the bike club, and it hasn’t changed at all. We could still see Southwold’s lighthouse flashing every nine seconds or so, and a red boat on the shingly beach that seems to appear in every postcard and photo of the beach over the last decade. The chip shop had closed, so – definitely a repeat visit.

Home, getting caught in the rush hour and very glad not to be slogging home in it every night.

Home to struggle with the Scriptly commission. Horror. Not my thing. The piece I’ve written isn’t really horror, but if they wanted true horror they should have asked Stephen King. If I thought the horror was over… I do not even understand the brief for Day Five’s script, so they are about to get Gar Bij from me.

He loves us… he loves us not.

Up early to take Max for his annual MOT and booster jabs. There’s been talk of animal vaccination supplies – especially cat vaccinations – suffering a shortfall. Priority is being given to first-time vaccinations, so some adult cats are having their boosters cancelled. I think Max would have preferred that. Instead he got taken into the surgery and checked.

He’s lost weight since last October, apparently, but that’s understandable. Losing his last cat ‘brother’, and being kept in a pen while his owner was on the edge of hospital or care home and then waiting to see whether her family would adopt him… he’s a sociable lad, and he must have been very lonely and stressed. On the other hand, he is running around more now and that’s a great way to keep the podge down. I should, I know, I should.

Back home, he sat near us for an hour or so, not quite sitting close and cuddly, then curled up on his favourite cushion and shut himself down for a long snooze. He’s forgiven us now and is sitting on my husband’s lap, bolt upright, thinking senior cat thoughts.

On the writing front – still ploughing through the screenwriting challenge. The third day’s challenge was a peculiar one, and my mind went blank of ideas. I put in something, so I’m still on track to complete the challenge. The Literal Challenge people who set these briefs did promise an easier challenge for Day 4. Easier. It arrived in my inbox at 22.00 hours as usual and… the genre is horror. I’ve changed my mind about my worst-ever genre. Give me chicklit, give me romcom, but pleeease, not horror.