Julia Chalkley

Cutting Edge

It was an odd weekend.

We’d been so focussed on arriving on time for my aunt’s funeral that I’d put to one side the fact that I’d volunteered for the committee for my local woodland trust, with the first meeting due for this Sunday. While I was on holiday, the call for all hands went out, as the committee had applied for and received a huge stash of bulbs to be planted in the wood. The planting was scheduled for Saturday, filling up my weekend completely.

All of this clashed with home life. Over the last week the builders had ripped up the floorboards, dug out the excess earth and installed a damp-proof membrane and a basic deck of wood. We have a big empty echoing space fpr a living room right now, waiting for the floorboards to be sanded and oiled and nailed down on the deck; the dining room is crammed full of furniture from both rooms. In the style of Dodie Smith, I write these words sitting on the garden chair, brought into the living room to replace the sofa and chairs that have been evicted to the covered shelter in the garden to await the return of Floorboards. When the builders come back, the garden chairs can be folded up in a minute and carried outside to clear the room for further work.

Before the builders return, we have to repair the bodge previous owners have made of the house in terms of badly attached electrical sockets, dented wall plaster, broken skirting boards and a cement fireplace plinth built over the old floorboards. I’m not even going to mention that the downstairs power sockets are wired up as part of the upstairs lighting circuit – now the deck is nailed down, there’s no chance of re-wiring it correctly, as all of the wiring runs under this deck. We didn’t realise until we had to switch off the downstairs sockets at the mains to repair the damaged one, and found that we had to switch off the circuit breakers one by one until the power went off.

He’s been dealing with that on his own, as I’ve been off doing the tasks I agreed to take on as a committee member. Planting bulbs on Saturday, and attending a woodcraft workshop on Sunday. The first task was to build a bonfire, which I could have done without training; I’m the family arsonist. If the bonfire needs setting off, be it soaking wet or (on one famous occasion) topped with snow, it’s a job for me. Using a Kelly kettle was new, and I would not have whittled a spoon from a section of greenwood – me and sharp knives really do not get on, and they tend to win. But it was fun.

Hate to say it, but far more fun was Monday’s work in the house; rebuilding the cement plinth around the fireplace through the small gap in the deck. We have an adequate basic plinth in place now, and tomorrow we intend to finish the rest of the plinth to a good standard. By the time the builders return, they will have a squared off fireplace plinth to butt the floorboards up against, and we can replace the tiles above that level after they’ve left.

It’s brought home to us that we do not have Real Cats. A Real Cat would have waited till the cement was almost dry and ‘signed’ it. Our cats have spent this cold day fast asleep on the bed. Sounds like a plan for us on Wednesday.

Saying goodbye to my aunt

We were invited to take a rose from my aunt’s funeral wreath.

We returned from our holiday in Northumberland and Scotland and prepared for my aunt’s funeral. She’d reached the age of 100 and had her sons and their families close by for the last forty years, ending her life with a fall and a brief illness. Not the worst way to die.

Her sons, daughters in law, grandchildren and great-grandchildren all mourned her with varying degrees of intensity. My family were sad but practical – she was 100, she’s had a good life and we will miss her.

I didn’t say much, but I know I will miss her for the rest of my life. She was the woman I turned to for advice on everything, openly as a child and then privately when I understood how much that upset my mother. My aunt seemed to take life far less seriously than my mother did. Whenever I made a mistake, my mother would be cross and smug; “I told you, but you wouldn’t listen” and my aunt would say “That’ll teach you!”, with a roar of laughter and somehow sympathising rather than gloating that I’d messed up.

I’m in that odd state where I haven’t cried for her yet, knowing deep down that at 100 years old a person is counting down a very short time to a life’s end. One day, someone will say something that reminds me that my aunt is beyond giving advice, not at the other end of the phone any more when things get tough, and I will cry over the loss of that funny, sassy, practical lady who was my favourite aunt. It was great to meet up with my extended family again – including my father’s relatives on his mother’s side, whom we have rarely met – but you could see in their faces that the older adults knew they had all moved up one in the queue for death. Not an easy thing to face, even in your mid-seventies.

Everyone born, will eventually die. It’s what you do between the two events that matters, and boy, did my aunt pack in the life between her birth and death. The last bit of good advice from her comes from the way she lived; make the most of what life you have, be kind and encouraging as often as you can – leave everyone sad to have lost you and glad to have known you.

A Tale of Two Breakdowns

After a quiet year, chaos. I was due to meet friends in Scotland in mid-November, and we decided to drive up together with a stop in Northumberland for stargazing and a visit to Hadrian’s Wall. We took his Landrover and my very elderly car, so that he could return home before the friends’ reunion to let in the builders (long story… this old house is getting a new floor at long last) while I had a long weekend with the friends.

The Northumbrian trip went really well. The final day was rainy, and we didn’t find Sycamore Gap (and wouldn’t have been so keen to get out if we had), but we did visit The Sill, a landscape exhibition near Vindolanda. Worth a visit.

On Wednesday, we left the hotel and began the drive together to Melrose, me in the lead. As soon as we left the villages behind there was a problem. The turbo in the Landrover broke. Again. That’s the fourth time. This is a vehicle that was sent back in disgrace after 500 miles, and proceeded to eat its turbo, clutch and oil-cooler over a suspiciously short time. As the previous Landrover managed to survive my driving with no more than routine maintenance for almost 100,000 miles, this level of breakdown spoke of a Friday afternoon job.

It couldn’t be fixed at the roadside. The RAC tow-truck would take hours to arrive, and we knew from a friend’s experience that they wouldn’t take the driver home in the cab as they used to – that they would call a local taxi for him, if one could be found to take someone 250 miles. Worse, the Landrover risked being taken to an RAC regional border and dumped off for another tow-truck to pick up later, with my telescope and tripod locked in the back. No thanks. Instead, I escorted him home. Top speed around 45mph all the way and the acceleration of a pushbike.

Thursday morning, I set out again for Scotland from home in my Peugeot. It’s now 17 years old, third-hand and with 156,000 miles on the clock, bought to get me through the last few years at work and still plodding along. Nippy, reliable and battered enough not to attract unwelcome attention in a car park, I’m fond of it.

It was fine all the way up there, but the moment I pulled out of the parking space on the way home the brakes felt – wrong. Softer. I got it as far as the A1M, intending to pull in to the first set of services and call the RAC. If they dropped it off at their regional border and the car got stolen I would write off the loss of my dirty clothing and the car with a shrug and put the insurance money towards another old car.

What happens in a Peugeot when the brakes fail completely is that there’s a loud beeping sound and the dashboard lights up with a red STOP sign and the handbrake symbol. Luckily, just as I approached the turn for Newcastle. I sat in a layby on the road sweeping down into Newcastle for three hours in pouring rain, waiting for the RAC to find me and judging how dangerous it might be to still be sitting here after dark.

The RAC no longer operate a priority system for women stranded alone in their cars. I discovered also that the get you home policy has been amended to finding me a hire car somehow. The chances of me getting an unfamiliar car out of a busy city centre without a scratch is not great. I drive a battered old car for a reason. Even when I’m stationary, some berk is likely to play dodgems and take a stripe off the paint.

By the end of the three hours, with the cheery updates from the RAC telling me every half hour that they were still “incredibly busy” (understaffed), I was considering what we’d do next July when our membership expired. Not renew, after forty years of membership, and take our chances with calling a local garage if we broke down again.

What I got at the end of three hours was Ian, a cheery, competent man who pinpointed the problem in three minutes flat and towed me to the nearest garage with a chance of fixing the problem. He stayed to make sure I was okay there and nipped into the workshop to see them take the brake apart, then shot off to his next stranded motorist. The garage, Team Valley Services, did a fantastic job. It took three hours, but I left there with both sets of rear brake shoes and pistons replaced and a clear explanation of what had gone wrong. The piston arm had missed the brake shoe, shot out to its fullest extent and hosed the brake shoe with brake fluid – slippery and corrosive, it had removed all braking from one side.

I got home at 10pm, but with a fully operational car. The Landrover goes in on Monday to have its parts spanked yet again. How long it will run for is anyone’s guess. He shoulda bought a Peugeot.

Six foot under

The view from Housesteads Fort, northern wall – photo by Glynis Shannon

The night-time half of our holiday in Northumberland has been spent at Battlesteads Observatory, seeing the light emitted from stars and nebulae thousands or millions of years in the past. The days have been spent looking for the more recent past along Hadrian’s Wall, and it’s been just as amazing.

We went to Housesteads Fort on Sunday morning -a threatening-drizzle day with sunny patches and a stiff breeze, ideal for walking up the steep bank to the museum and the fort. The museum is tiny, but contains a lot of finds, information and a short film, along with a coffee machine and a range of books and postcards and souvenirs. And themed alcohol. Why not.

It was two hours full of wandering among the foundations, reading the information boards and imagining the life of the soldiers standing guard on the Wall nearly two thousand years ago. It did make me think of George Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ (Game of Thrones, if you prefer TV to books) and it was no surprise that his great ice wall and the soldiers who guarded against the beasts to the north was said to have been inspired by a visit to Hadrian’s Wall.

We were free all day on Monday, so we spent the time in Vindolanda, the archaeological dig around the area of the barracks / village that supplied soldiers to garrison duty at Housesteads. Finds were noted as having been dug up around the area in the 19th century, and from 1972 Robin Birley (picking up after his father’s deep interest) began a long-term excavation that is still going on today. Each year, volunteers spend time in summer digging deeper and further afield to find out more about the buildings, the water supply, the lives of the people who lived there. Volunteer slots opened online last week and were all filled within an hour.

The foundations show where the buildings were; the village outside the fort walls and the barracks, commander’s house and bath-house – and the toilets. The toilet at Housesteads claims to be the oldest toilet in Britain, though I bet there’s hedges and ditches that could tell a few tales of pre-Roman history. The illustration of three Romans sitting in the communal loo with their little wiping sticks in hand is going to stay with me for some time.

Having seen the explanation of the whole site in the entrance hall, walked around most of the site and heard the lectures at the listening posts, we headed downhill to the cafe and museum. Nice cafe, with good lunchtime food and a mural of Romans enjoying a party. Great museum.

There’s a display cabinet of shoes, and it brings home that these were people. Delicate sandals that cost a fortune, soldiers’ boots, child’s shoes. All with the imprint of the feet that wore them. There’s a cabinet of tools, of horse gear, of weapons. There’s a cabinet of coins, some of them bright and distinct as modern coins – and I remembered Lara Maiklem’s comment on coins, that she found Roman and mediaeval coins with the words and images still distinct, and modern ‘copper’ coins rusting into nothing after a couple of years.

The best part was finding out about the Vindolanda tablets. The film about them shows Robin Birley explaining that they dug down at the end of a year’s session and found a hole full of muddy remains of something. They marked the spot, covered the hole and returned to it the following year. And found a cache of writing on wood tablets, burned but not well enough to obscure most of the writing. It’s believed that the commander burned the correspondence and records in the second century AD, before the legion marched off to fight in Dacia, but that the Northumbrian drizzle put the flames out and the next legion just shovelled mud and clay over it, sealing the documents off from further decay. The letters are details of troop numbers, an invitation to a birthday party, an application for leave of absence and an appeal for friends from a soldier just arrived in the area, among hundreds of others. They’re people far from home putting ink to wood about their daily lives.

Our legs and backs gave up before we came to the end of it, and next summer there’ll be an army of volunteers digging up more finds, more buildings, more evidence of Roman life. Two metres down under our feet, the people who were here 1,800 years ago. We have to come back.

The man behind the ticket stall saw us leave and came out to ask whether we’d enjoyed our visit. He seemed genuinely interested. We chatted with him for another ten minutes about the lovely countryside, the history, the interest, the Wall, and reassured him we’d be back for the rest. We didn’t tell him how good it was to have so many people who really did hope you’d had a good day, and weren’t just saying the words because it was in the script, but I think that’s been the best part of visiting Northumberland.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

I should start by admitting that the photo above is not taken by me, but is from one of the contributors to Pixabay – which is where I get so many appropriate images while I hunt down the camera download equipment to download and display my own photos. But it is almost identical to the shot taken by a fellow astronomer on Sunday with what he described as ‘the cheapest bottom of the range DSLR I could get from Argos’.

We’ve been enjoying two nights of stargazing in Northumberland National Park, Britain’s first International Dark Sky Park. We’re staying at Battlesteads, which is – depending on who you talk to – a luxury hotel with an observatory in the grounds, or a dark-sky observatory with an award-winning hotel attached. I’d go with the latter. We booked the observatory first and took pot-luck on getting into the hotel. Though if you want a luxury stay in Northumberland, I would recommend Battlesteads Hotel. We will be back.

Saturday night was settling in, finding the observatory – a wooden hut about the size of a long double garage, two hundred metres from the hotel entrance, its purpose unmistakeable from the group of people on the deck being shown around the night sky. The hotel has red lights in its parking areas to the rear, to preserve night vision, and the path to the observatory is lit by a line of red lights.

We had booked places on the astrophotography course on Sunday. The course description said to bring your own equipment or just turn up and use theirs – we lugged the telescope and tripod up there, and our standard digital camera (we weren’t thinking of buying a specialist camera until we’d heard what the experts had to say). Of the six people on the course, one described himself as an expert photographer and expert amateur astronomer (he took the photos of the Andromeda Galaxy that built up to make an image just as detailed as the one at the top of the post, so I wouldn’t challenge that description) and the rest of us were keen photographers and enthusiastic stargazers.

Chris Duffy and his volunteer assistant Harry took us through how to find the best places to take good photos of the night sky, and how to get a better photo in areas suffering light pollution. He described the kinds of camera we could use, from DSLRs with detachable lenses to tiny CCD units whose only purpose in life was to be the intermediary between the telescope and the laptop. After all the inital theory was done, we went outside to try our luck.

We treated the course as a ‘watch, listen and learn’ course, though we did fetch our telescope up to the observing area to set up and do some viewing. Chris and Harry helped us to get the telescope set up, giving us some good pointers on how to star-align accurately. ‘Star alignment’ is getting the telescope’s ‘go-to’ unit to confirm where it is – once it has been told that Vega is in exactly this direction at this height, and Algol is in that direction at that height, it can point to any star, planet or object you ask with accuracy.

We tested it by asking for Jupiter, and got a clear vision of Jupiter, with its bands faintly visible and three of its closest moons shining pin-bright. Harry suggested I took a photo by putting my camera to the eyepiece, and I laughed, then tried it. The photo won’t win any awards, but it is going to be one of my favourites from this holiday. It’s a clear image of tiny Jupiter and three moons.

Another revelation was Tony, a quiet man who set up his tripod and camera next to ours. Our EQ-5 tripod is heavy and awkward but very stable – his astrophotography tripod was light enough to be carried in one hand, with the minature telescope/camera unit in the other hand. He takes his photos up mountains, so going back down for the counterweight and the telescope and the battery is not an option. And yes, he got brilliant photos too.

At the end of the night, Chris gave us a summary of good cameras, where to go for the software, what to be wary of in processing the photos and we left with a sense that we could do this, and without paying astronomical sums.

Yesterday’s session was a tour of the night sky. Ladies and gentlemen… cloud over here, cloud over there… and the lights of Newcastle illuminating the low clouds way over there. But Martin (assisted again by Harry, who gets home around midnight and gets up for his day job at 8am…) gave us a thorough theory session on stars and nebulae and meteor showers and where to see them before taking us out to the deck for a hopeful peek at the sky.

If you love astronomy, you have got to go to Battlesteads. The telescope is a Schmidt-Cassegrain with a refractor piggybacked onto it, a pair of dumpy cylinders that bring the universe down to the viewfinder in detail. It’s housed on a wooden deck outside the teaching room that is covered by a wooden roof. At a press of a button, the roof slides back over the teaching room roof and lets the telescope see the stars. I want one of those.

The clouds were breaking up enough that Martin was able to set the telescope to a few beauties and let everyone take a turn in seeing them – the Pleiades, Albireo, the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away, and the Ring Nebula. In between, he was spotting stars and constellations breaking out of the clouds and taking his chance to point them out and tell us their age, distance and the tales behind them. The session came to an end around eleven pm, although Martin was willing to answer questions until we ran out of them. We walked back to the hotel with the Milky Way clearly visible, Cygnus dropping tail-first into the western horizon and the Pleiades blazing high in the east.

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.