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Hoots & Havers January 06
Recovering from various seasonally-induced distempers, one tends to fall semi comatose in front of the television. There’s a very useful class of programme - come to think on it, there are similarly benign films and books – that one can quite happily watch and enjoy with 10% of one’s brain while the rest of it fizzles in a desultory fashion trying to recall which synapses are meant to link which cells.
These shows meander through the schedules on an endless slow-mo repetitive tape and must be primarily designed to provide pensions for elderly actors. In earlier times such progs were usually set in the Mediterranean and starred a Wanda Ventham. These days they’re placed in rural England and often called Midsomer Marple. Usually folk are murdered in a Plum in the Library sort of way. Usually the victim and half the cast have faces that used to be someone, but you can never quite recall who. Invariably you can’t remember whether you’ve seen it before and, by the time you realize that you have, you’re quite content to let it ramble on as you’ve forgotten what happened anyway.
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We’ve friends who sort of farm. They’re high and remote enough to be dominated by a looming wind farm. They have 50-odd acres of grass and mud containing a curious assortment of sheep and cattle. The sheep are small and scruffy as are the cattle. This I am told is due to their various breeds rather than their environment. Much the same applies to their dogs.
They were given a new dog the other day. Rita – yes, t’was she, for those that know her – was sent scurrying down to the Borders to collect the creature, a collie, aged 10, whose sinews had stiffened under the hoary hand of time, and was being retired but would be perfectly adequate on the few acres and controlling the few sheep at her new home. Its owner was a gnarled shepherd, one of those who would call his dog a tool and pretend to treat it as such. When Rita arrived the dog was tied outside his cottage door. He refused to open it and conducted the final negotiations from within, his voice muffled by sniffs, hankie-harrumphs and clearings of the throat. The dog was named Meg. She had never been in the house. It was important that she was kept tied up for three weeks to stop her running off. She liked having her ears tickled.
Meg came north. She spent her days on a lead or in the car which she was reluctant to leave. She was taken round the animals and shown the cosy pile of hay in the corner of the barn that would be her new home. She remained distant and was not that enthusiastic about her grub. After a week, Rita decided it must be safe to let her off the lead. She was released and immediately gathered her skirts and took off across the fields heading south with her new owner bellowing after her.
Rita caught up with the dog as it was in the process of climbing the deer fence, which bordered the farm. She was out of puff by this stage and beyond bellowing. She had also slipped and fallen painfully on her backside and could only watch as Meg struggled up the fence, fell and climbed again. The dog managed to chin the top before crashing back to the ground. She lay at the bottom for a few moments, then rose to her feet and trotted back across the field to the prone Rita. The dog came up to her lay down beside her, put its head in her lap and gave a great sigh.
Meg hasn’t left Rita’s side since. She’s also very good with the sheep.
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Once I would handwrite articles and type them up afterwards. Then I graduated to a computer – a Commodore 64 was my first – and word processed. Computers are more expensive than a pencil if you write but I have found that a process which once took place inside the brain, takes place on the screen of a computer and it is impossible to return to a state of innocence once you have adjusted to screen use.
Computers are more complex and delicate as well as more expensive than pencils. Mine is making life difficult at the moment. Something has gone wrong with the keyboard and mouse and the machine is constantly being struck with paralysis. At the moment I am awaiting for a kind Irishmen with whom I connected on Ebay to supply me with new one of each. But just now I am toiling.
In the way I work, my keyboard is not static. It lives on my lap; I drop it on the floor, use it to beat the dog, prop open windows and such like. But, currently, it only works if I treat it as though it was a shallow bowl brimming with nitroglycerine. The slightest knock, the smallest upset and it freezes, demanding a complex series of ritualized taps, shoogles and appeasement gestures that may take ten minutes or more and sometimes include a restart. Then it usually works.
But there are occasions when nothing will put it right. I have to shut it down, walk away and hope it will feel better a bit later on. In fact it often just breaks off in the middle of se
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