Here be dragons

They ask me sometimes what PMS is like, those people who don't have it. I never quite know how to describe it, though I can tell stories of skidding across a kitchen floor on the half a kilo of dried penne I had just thrown on it, of sobbing on a swing surrounded by a shredded loaf of bread, of spending an hour crouched on the floor cleaning the gunk out of the bit of the dishwasher you only see when the door is open, of learning the hard way never, ever to make major life decisions when the moon is swelling.

Basically, it's a random mixture of big horror and fixation with tiny details. You don't look forward to it, but hey, it's not boring. Yesterday I was down at the allotment by myself. There are a million things that need doing at the moment... digging, watering, hoeing, hacking at nettles, more digging... but the only thing I wanted to do was squat by the rocket patch and thin out the seedlings.

I'd left this a tiny bit late and it was a delicate job, stroking the leaves apart and feeling down underneath the little clumps to tease a stem away and pull it out without disturbing any of the others. It was hot and the soil was almost steamy (I worked out it was easier to pull out damp seedlings than dry ones) and it was kind of mesmerising. I was fascinated by my own fingertips and the things they can feel. It was restful to be focusing on a little patch of earth and not having to think about the rest of the big scary world.

And then I had a flash of a TV programme about hand transplants that I saw many years ago. It was disturbing, these men with someone else's hand sewn on the end of their arm, learning how to pick up coffee cups. One of them went all purple and had to be taken off again. Big, clumpy dead men's hands.

And then I couldn't thin the rocket anymore. An hour or so later, there was the little dark stab of pain that let me know it was ok to put my pyjamas on and curl up in a ball. No more dead men's hands for another month, hooray!

joella

"What is lawful is appropriate"

What a charming man Bill Cash must be. They didn't say I *couldn't* bleed the country dry, mum!

I picked up this story because my blog stats shot up suddenly. This has happened before and only ever means a surge of interest in my 2003 post about the equally charming Laetitia Cash. Booze soaked old school feminism remains a minority interest, sadly.

Still, it's great to have new visitors. Thanks Laetitia! Can I buy you a drink? Oh, hang on, I'm a taxpayer. I already have.

joella

Target Women

How did I not know about Sarah Haskins till yesterday? More on how I came to know about her another time, this is too good not to share. Enjoy.

joella

Cornwall: the verdict

Executive summary

Not at all like Lancashire. Well, maybe a little bit.

Full report

Pluses

• Fish. I first "got" fish in 1992. My Significant Ex and I were staying on Kovalam Beach in Kerala, which in those days wasn't much more than a bunch of £1 a night huts and some bars playing Santana. The boats would come in, the sun would go down, we would have a little fishy (from the tandoor) on a little dishy (made of banana leaf), and it would blow our tiny minds. I have been few places since that have had the same effect but Cornwall is one of them. It's turbot-charged.
• Cliffs. Where I come from, we don't have cliffs. We have epic stretches of sand that move almost seamlessly (give or take a few sand dunes full of shagging teenagers) into market garden-friendly terminal moraine. The whole of the Fylde coast is one long ribbon development, where the streets are wide and the bungalows are many. Cornwall has tiny steep sea apertures, where the gradients are perilous and the cottages are miniscule. 
• Industry. Well, ex-industry. I heartily recommend the Charlestown Shipwreck & Heritage Centre. It gives some wild insights into life in a china clay exporting tiny steep sea aperture (by way of mannequins eating pasties with big boots on) while also and fairly unrelatedly packing thousands of shipwreck, rescue and salvage-related facts and artifacts into old clay tunnels. It's passion-led preservation at its best. Go see it. 
• Enviro-art. You know about the Eden Project. It has its critics but I was charmed. I particularly liked the WEEE Man (though would have preferred a WEEE Woman, naturally) and the rainforest biome. It was getting hot in there. We took off some of our clothes. 
• Horticultural Victoriana. The ancient rhododendrons and gunnera in the Lost Gardens of Heligan (warning: shit website - why do people still use Flash like that?) will stay with me for a long time. The whole place seems to be decaying gently even as it is restored, but if you narrow your eyes you can just about imagine what it must have been like at the height of the Empire. 
• Beer. They do lovely milds (I am getting quite into mild, in my old age), and they do it all over the place. Pretty much every pub is excellent, in a real ale real fire dog-friendly stylee.  In winter I imagine you may find yourself stranded in one for several weeks, but I could also imagine many worse places to be stranded. 
  

Minuses 

• Petrol consumption. It's kind of a nightmare to drive around, as the roads are miniscule and the parking impossible, but the geography means there's not a lot of alternative. And this was May - I would not like to get stuck on the main street in Mevagissey in August, you'd still be there in September. We saw the occasional intrepid cyclist, and some impressive bus driving, so maybe you could do it without a car if you were organised about it. There are lots of pubs to stop in, after all. 
• Time warp. It has a sort of stuck in the 1970s feel to it, and a lot about the 1970s was well worth leaving behind. Where there is money it is flashed around, where there is not it is all a bit bleak. Our hotel had something of the Grace Brothers about it, plus a disco on the Friday night that I seriously thought was ironic (I sat in the bar with my dad for an hour and didn't hear a single song recorded after 1985), but wasn't. I approved of the kippers for breakfast and original Armitage Shanks bathroom suites with matching tiles, however, and once you accept you're living in a world where chintz has never gone out of fashion and golfing clothes are normal, it ain't so bad. 
• Politics. You have to order the Guardian in specially. I think it comes by helicopter. 

joella

What we did on our holidays part 2: the Whitley Bay years

For a lot of the 1970s and early 1980s my dad was an officer in the ACF. He called it 'playing soldiers'. It didn't have that much impact on me, though I occasionally went out with him at weekends, and developed crushes of varying proportions on various boys (they were all boys) in uniform. I had my first 'nature wee' with the ACF, when we were doing something in a wood. I turned out not to be very good at it and my dad dried out the resulting yellow socks on the dashboard of the Austin Maxi.

In the summer, he would go off to play soldiers for two whole weeks. My mother often took us away on holiday at the same time, and for a couple of these years we went to Whitley Bay.

Now, I grew up about seven miles from Blackpool. Why we would therefore travel 150 miles across the country to stay in a seaside resort with an amusement park is still beyond me. It was certainly beyond my sister, who in those days used to get spectacularly travel sick. The first year we went, we got the coach, and then a taxi. Just as we pulled up at Mrs Cowan's, she vommed copiously over the back seat. I can still recall the taxi driver wiping sick off his vinyl while various women stood around wringing their hands.

Mrs Cowan's was a trad 1970s B&B, in that we had to be out between 9am and 5pm, the bathroom was down the hall, and hot water was only available for two hours a day. We shared scalding baths in the early evening before heading down to the dining room for a Three Course Dinner (thinking about it, it was a DB&B). The first course was always soup, reconstituted from powder stored in huge plastic tubs on top of the kitchen units, marked with things like Scotch Broth and Cream of Vegetable. There was tinned orange juice served in tiny glasses from a trolley. It was great.

After dinner we would watch TV in the TV lounge, and then head to bed so we could be up and out in the morning.

Which worked fine if it was sunny, and I impressed my first ever admirer (who was called Stephen - check him out!!) with a large crab I made out of pebbles. We went on a date to the Spanish City and he held my hand on the Waltzer when our mothers weren't looking.

But most of the time it was pelting down. We wandered between cafes and amusement arcades, making a dash for the beach or the climbing frames if the sun even threatened to come out. But a lot of the time there was no chance. Mrs Cowan generously relaxed the rules, and we spent long rainy afternoons watching TV and cutting things out of Richard Scarry books.

But one afternoon, my mother had had enough. Get your cagoules on, she said, we're going out. And off we went to the beach, to collect shells and seaweed in the middle of what Mick the Builder would call a Terminal Piss Down Situation. We were the only people in sight, not that we could see very far.

And then across the beach came a young woman in sandals, a summer skirt, and a far-from-all-weather coat. Trailing her was a miserable looking man with a large bag. They were a reporter and a photographer from the local paper, sent to find evidence of the Dunkirk spirit on what we later found out was "the wettest day in August for seven years". They took our photo, and ran it with some quotes about a little bit of rain never doing anyone any harm.

And you know what? It didn't.

joella

What we did on our holidays part 1: the Spanish building site

Inspired by Jonathan Crinklybee's latest... I am only just beginning to realise that my childhood is now part of a different era, and has stories to tell.

I don't remember going on holiday before 1975, but to be fair I don't remember much of anything before 1975. That year was a landmark one: I started school, and we went on our first Foreign Holiday. We went to Majorca in low season, I think October, with some family friends who had children sort of the same age. I think it may have been their first Foreign Holiday too.

The first thing I remember about it is that the hotel we were supposed to be staying in hadn't actually been built yet. I think that was standard practice for the 1970s package holiday, and thinking about it it must have been horribly stressful for my parents, but when you're five you really don't notice these things. We were put in another hotel, and I loved it. I remember the checked bedspreads, the hot chocolate for breakfast, and tasting my first pistachio nut. Other good things I remember include having *lots* of different swimming costumes to wear (all but one of which had been borrowed from my friends), and some fat spiky cactus like plants that grew on the path down to the beach. There was also some spiny grass growing there, and I spent a lot of time snapping off spiky cactus, threading it onto spiny grass and making necklaces to wear with my many swimming costumes. This makes me sound like a little princess but the limited photographic evidence suggests I was a podgy pale kid having fun on a beach next to a building site. And why not.

I wasn't always wearing my many swimming costumes though (which was all more ok in the 1970s) and my #1 Majorca memory is of sudden excruciating pain between my legs. I remember screaming, and fighting with my mother, sudden cessation of pain, and some blood. Some years later I asked her about it and she told me that I'd managed - god knows how - to get a large pointy seed from the tall spiny grass stuck in my little vagina, and the cessation of pain was her hoiking it out. Maybe that's what did for my hymen, of which there was no sign when the time came.

Yeah, so I possibly lost my virginity to a grass seed in Majorca. Good start. Maybe I should count my blessings there was no one waiting outside a front bedroom in Blackpool 11 years later to hoist a bloody sheet up the flagpole as evidence of my honour.

joella

A girl can dream

We paid a visit to my Significant Aunt in Shropshire last weekend, and a lot of fun it was too, although the main purpose of the visit, the initiation of Project Skirting, was shelved. I have never been able to get my sewing machine to run properly, it keeps clunking and jamming. It turns out that this is actually because there is something wrong with it, rather than because I am unable to RTFM. Which was disappointing, but also a relief. I don't like to fail with machinery. We discussed making it with her machine instead, which is many years older, many times heavier, and works beautifully, but it didn't feel like the right thing to do.

So we did other things instead, including consume rather a lot of Stinking Bishop cheese, together with the perry it is named for, following a walk of just the right Sunday length along the Shropshire Union Canal. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen, which is huge, solidly built, beautifully designed and stupendously clean. My favourite thing in it is the rubber gloves holder, which was constructed from the poles of two wooden kitchen roll holders sawn off at a slight angle and mounted on the same base. But I also like the Aga.

The reason the kitchen is so bang-on in every respect is that it was decades in the planning. My aunt and uncle spent many years living in married quarters on RAF bases dreaming of the kitchen they would one day build. And now they have.

As I thought about this, I realised that for years I have been doing the same thing, but not for a kitchen. There is a dream bathroom in my mind, which slowly evolves and may one day take shape. Not in this house though... my dream bathroom cannot be accommodated in a Victorian terrace with dodgy plumbing. I am not even sure it can be accommodated in Oxford, as the water here is hard hard hard, and my dream bathroom has a lot of glass to keep clean.

I already pretty much have my dream bath, which is long and narrow and deep and made of steel. But in my dream bathroom it would not have a shower over it and serious grouting issues. It would have space around it and a view out of a non-frosted window. There would be a big radiator with a rail over it for my big fluffy towel, a shelf or table for books, drinks, snacks etc, and some large potted plants oxygenating the steamy bathroom air. The floor would ideally be painted and sealed wood, with a deep pile bath mat one could wriggle one's toes in. The bath mat would have its own place on the wall (or maybe on one of those ceiling-mounted clothes airers with a pulley and a cleat) so it didn't stay on the floor getting manky. The lighting would be bright, I am not one of those candles in the bath people.

Baths are solo things, though we usually share the water to avoid enviro-guilt, but there would be a walk-in glass shower enclosure with two showers in it so two people could shower at the same time in the morning. This is the bit our plumbing could not cope with. Megaflos and power showers are even worse for the environment than baths, and also a maintenance headache, and electric showers are just a bit crap, so it would be a case of a decent boiler, a large hot water cylinder and a large head of pressure. Am sure it's possible.

The basin would be a classic, with two taps and a pedestal and a plug on a chain. I do not have this European insistence on mixer taps, I hate pop-up wastes, and I am fine with visible pipework, as long as it is elegantly done. It would have a normal mirror over it, plus one of those cool adjustable magnifying ones for detailed facial scrutiny, but there would otherwise be no mirrors in the room.

There would be two WCs, part of the bathroom but in separate alcoves. I am not squeamish about these things, but I like the idea of having my own toilet. If they're next to each other, with changing room-style swing doors, the plumbing wouldn't be overly complicated and there would be no arguments about who gets to go first or who left reading material about avant garde 20th century music all over the floor.

Finally, there would be a raised platform, ideally with a view out of the same window as the bath, which would be carpeted and which would have a couple of comfy armchairs and a small table for more books, a radio, snacks and drinks. This is where one would recline while waiting for the bath to fill, or to talk to the person who was in it, or to curl up afterwards wrapped in towels.

There would be lots of hooks on the walls for dressing gowns etc. And there would be lots of pictures on the wall. There would be minimal tiling, apart from splashbacks around the bath and basin, and lots of tongue and groove in seaside colours.

I have never seen this bathroom. I am rather hoping I never do until I get to make it myself. It would be very hard to appreciate my own bathroom once that had happened, and my own bathroom does its best with what it has.

joella

Not so much about the workers

Ten or so years ago, when I was young and shiny and we believed in our political leaders, M and I got up (or possibly stayed up, I have done it both ways round and can't quite remember) for May Morning. It was a glorious dawn, and on the way into town we bumped into two of our friends, heading in the same direction, and we all parked our bikes together and walked up to Magdalen Tower.

These two were rarely seen out together, as one of them was married to someone else at the time. I don't approve of That Sort Of Thing, but I'd only really ever known them as a couple, and who was I (or indeed am I) to tell other people how to manage their relationships. It wasn't the first liaison of its kind, I did know that, and I assumed there was some kind of tacit 'arrangement' in place.

We were early enough to find a great spot, listened to the singing, squeezed into the very unfashionable Mitre for a couple of pints, wandered down to the Covered Market for a drunken breakfast and then parted ways.

It was the perfect Oxford May Day experience, except for the fact that when that week's Oxford Times came out, there we all were on the front page, beaming up at the tower. Whatever kind of arrangement *was* in place, I can imagine it didn't encompass appearing together in the local press. Rumour has it someone went round buying up every copy of that week's edition in West Oxfordshire. I still have mine.

By the time it came around to falling on a weekend again, we lived on the other side of the bridge (which is always closed from around 4am to stop drunken students jumping off and braining themselves on shopping trolleys other drunken students have thrown in the river). We wandered up Cowley Road around 5ish, stopping to pick up various friends on the way, feeling like we were calling for them on the way to school. We stayed east afterwards as well, drinking Guinness at the Temple Bar (still in its pre-makeover formica and urinal cakes phase if memory serves) then back to ours for kedgeree and Bloody Marys in the garden.

It's great, is May Morning, if you do it right. There's something deliciously transgressive about going to the pub before breakfast... it sort of reminds me of Lytham Club Day in my teens, when the pubs were open ALL DAY. Hard to imagine now what people used to do between 3pm and 7pm on sunny bank holidays.

And if you're only here for a few years, then yes, clearly you must get up and get out there. If you live here though, and you don't have a thing for Morris dancing, and you have to go to work afterwards, and you're SO not a morning person, then all you get is the aftermath... girls with smudged mascara and bleeding feet, boys who have been drinking for so many hours that every civilising vestige of their expensive education has been obliterated and you just want to drive a stake through them and their can of Red Bull.

On balance though, I wouldn't be without it.

joella