Three big things, two gold rings, one resolution.

The ingenues in their early days. The lobster, scarf, wall hanging and cardigan are still with us. The gin, we drank. 

People say that bad news comes in threes. I think a lot of things come in threes, but maybe that's because I strongly prefer odd numbers (especially 3, 7, 19 and 23, which are also all prime numbers) and three is the first odd number that, to my mind, counts as a proper number. 

Here are three things that have been various shades of news to me over the last couple of years, about which I have and have had varying degrees of control. Not all bad, but all big. 

1. In 2018, M was diagnosed with bladder cancer, via the traditional blood-in-piss route. Do not ignore blood in your piss, do not. I can remember where I was when he called me to tell me about the blood, and I remember that I knew that the little squirt of (I'm guessing) adrenaline that I experienced, in the Northern Quarter of Manchester while preparing to buy fancy glasses to appear more employable as I'd recently been made redundant as a result of the sexual abuse and exploitation scandal at NGO X, was significant. And I wasn't wrong. He had low stage, high grade cancer. The tumour was removed, and then he was treated in the recommended manner, though the treatment -- BCG into the bladder -- had to be stopped early, as he had extreme side effects. He had regular follow ups - first every three months, then every six, all through the pandemic. It almost went away, just a thing he did. But then, after nearly five years, it came back. Cancer that has come back is a different beast. 

He's doing ok. But that was the first big thing. 

2. We got together in 1998, so 2023 marked 25 years of whatever this is. We'd talked vaguely about celebrating, having a party... we never had a party when we left Oxford in 2012, we meant to, but we had a lot on. We assumed we'd return and do it, but then my mum got ill and everything tilted around. And then we were trying to settle into our new life up north. There were parties, but they weren't our parties, not like that. We should, you know, we kept saying, but life just kept getting harder (see above, and also the Ecoville Food Wars / Brexit / Trump / losing my job). I did organise a big thing for my 50th, and it was a joy, but it was also in early 2020, and we all know what happened after that. My dad barely made it through, many, many other people's loved ones did not, the government got worse, everything got more expensive, the climate slid further into chaos, we all got, as Pink Floyd say shorter of breath and one day closer to death. 

A school friend of mine -- not a close one, but we were Facebook friends and chatted occasionally -- died suddenly in June 2022. Her funeral was in Blackpool on a bright sunny day. On the way there we had to detour because of a fatal road accident. We ran into the church behind the coffin. Afterwards, I gave her mum a card that contained messages from all of the school friends I am still in touch with, as I was the only one who could make it to the service. It was every kind of sad. After we left, we drove to the Promenade and went to look at the function rooms at the Imperial Hotel. By the time we got home, I'd decided we were getting civilly partnered in the Washington Suite, which is basically a Victorian ballroom that has Seen Some Parties. It took M a little longer to come around to the idea of a major life event happening in Blackpool (he would have preferred a mystical woodland glade), but I have my ways. 

And we did. We invited somewhere around 100 of our favourite people and we layered our party onto the decades of parties and it was great. We had our rings made by a jewellery designer called Myia Bonner, and they are recycled rose and yellow gold, and I love them. There was food and drink and poetry and vows and live music and dancing and speeches and laughing and all around a lot of love in the room. I learnt that fake flowers and real candles do not mix, but I learnt a lot more about the joy of celebrating things while you can. 

3. I've written about menopausing before. That's not new. But over the years it's been happening to me I've become increasingly aware of all of my senses, and not in a good way. Certain sounds especially, but also textures, tastes, smells and lighting that used to be mildly irritating have become almost overwhelming. I have found myself rocking, with my hands over my ears. I have found myself curled up in a ball under the duvet in the middle of the day. I have found myself unable to eat something too sweet, or too fatty, or too bready, or too anything, really. When M asks me what I want for dinner, I have become incredibly precise. I have given up underwired bras, most of my socks, anything that is remotely itchy. And occasionally, I have found myself shutting down. I've always had what I call Full Pyjama Days, but these are a bit different. I simply can't do anything for a while. 

At the same time, I'm still attracting the kind of feedback that makes me want to burn things to the ground. People read me as rude when I'm trying to be clear. Or assume I haven't done my research (I have almost always done my research) and tell me stuff that I have known for literally decades, that is so integral to my thinking that I don't bother to mention it. "I think you might have misunderstood..." is something I hear a lot, especially from men. No. I understand, I just think you're categorically wrong.

Long story short, I went to the GP. She looked tired. I felt bad, I wasn't ill. I think I might be autistic, I said. Well, she said, what makes you think that? I gave her the story. Honestly, she said, I'm surprised this is only coming up for you now, but I don't know very much about it. So we'll do a referral. 

I was grateful -- GPs can be amazing, but they can also not take you seriously. I've been very lucky, on the whole, but my Significant Ex had abdominal pain dismissed in his mid 20s and ended up with an explosive gall bladder. And he's posh as all get out. 

Anyway, the first step was a one page screening assessment that they sent me in the post. I read it and it *had the answers* - it was actually designed to be asked by a practitioner. But I did it myself without cheating, and then I asked M how he would rate me. He only disagreed with me on one statement, which was basically "I collect lots of weird stuff" yes/no. But the stuff I collect isn't weird, I protested, and he rolled his eyes and gestured at the train tickets, the basket of wine corks, the Encona bottles, the drawer of veg box string and the tower of tuna cans. 

You've got a piano!! I said. 

But kids, it doesn't work like that. I passed/failed the assessment (depending on your perspective) and then I waited for my appointment with a psychologist. This took about nine months, which I gather is pretty good. When they got in touch, they said they wanted to speak with a parent. But I'm 53, I said. It's important to know what you were like as a child, they said. 

So I did ask my dad a few questions (he wasn't well at the time and he was nearly 80 ffs) and it was actually hilarious. "Well, you could read and write before you went to school, we only really sent you because we thought it might help you socialise. But it didn't." 

My limited memories of primary school really are "what is the point of this, I could be reading books", except for the fact that the food was excellent. God love my mother, but she was not a great cook, and those dinner ladies and their chips, and their carrot and swede mash, and their beefy sausages, and their chocolate sponge and peppermint custard: they made it all worthwhile. Chicken supreme, Manchester tart, mince crumble, pickled red cabbage, I loved almost everything that came out of that kitchen (except the roast parsnips). I also loved the parquet floor and the curtains in the gym / assembly hall / dining room, which were *exquisitely* 1970s, but I hated pretty much all the rest of it. A tiny example: I was cast as Snow White in the school play because I had the correct colouring, but I was so terrible an actor that by the time it was staged I only had two words left (a yes and a no), which I delivered with such vehemence the audience laughed, and it wasn't supposed to be funny. 

So with hindsight, maybe the signs were there, but no one was looking. 

But in 2023, they were slightly better equipped, and I guess I was doing the looking myself. And it turns out that yes, I am, by current diagnostic criteria, an autistic person. And with only a modicum of deeper research, it transpires that autistic girls with "low support needs" (who can essentially function independently if idiosyncratically) just pass as oddballs for years and figure that everyone else is better at normal life than they are (but don't care that much) until BAM!! hello menopause! The gift that keeps on giving! 

I'm glad I sought a diagnosis and I'm glad I've got one. A whoooole lot of things make more sense now. It's weird to see yourself as someone with a disorder, or even a disability, especially if you've secretly thought it's almost everyone else who's batshit. But then you look at the things you have tried and failed at over and over again, and the assumptions people have made, and the questions no one has ever asked, and the endless fucking battle to be seen, heard and taken seriously even as a middle class white woman. 

And it's kinda heartbreaking: not so much for myself now -- knowledge is power, mofos -- but for my younger self. She was so comprehensively thwarted, so many times, for reasons she did not understand. She was fucked over by people she trusted because she took things at face value. She was so often playing a different game, and didn't know the rules of everyone else's. 

But she's working on that, the grief. It's a thing, apparently. She's getting some help with that. She's going to be fine. 

All of this to say, though, I arrived in 2024 with a new prescription in my life glasses, man. There are some things that I started to write but stopped because I thought well... does this still hold? Am I still making sense? Where I'm at four months in is that I think I've never made more sense. To myself, anyway. And this is where I get to say my stuff, so. 

That's the resolution: to speak my mind. I always kind of have, but now I think it's even more important. 

joella

 

I hope the Tories love their children too

I wrote this before Lockdown Two but I forgot to post it. Still holds. 

If you know me at all, you'll know I'm a foodie. I have always been a foodie. My tastes have, it must be said, changed somewhat over the decades, but the basic principle is the same: good food makes life immeasurably better, bad food makes it significantly worse, and insufficient food is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and something we as a society, a species, should constantly strive to ensure does not happen to anyone. 

Which brings us, topically, to half term. When I was a kid, half term meant a trip to Lytham Kitchen with my mum. I remember it as just the two of us, but I'm guessing my sister was there too as I'm not sure where else she'd have been. By the relative sizes of things in my mind (Lytham Kitchen is still there, and not that different in most of the important ways - go there) she might have been in a pushchair. Anyway. The point is, it was a big treat, and I had spaghetti bolognaise followed by a Viennese whirl. 

What, I think, marks me out as a foodie is that I can remember this meal in such detail over 40 years on. The spaghetti was fat and soft, and came mixed in with the sauce, which was not particularly meaty but very juicy, so you would suck the strands up and it would splat on your face. It had grated cheese on it, which was in fat shreds, unlike at home, where my mum used the thin side of the grater. I don't think I was allowed to lick the plate, but I would have. The Viennese whirl was a piped shortcake biscuit that was half dipped in chocolate. I would eat the plain side first, and then the chocolate side, very, very slowly. 

It's always good to feed appreciative people, as I have learnt myself, and I hope it was obvious how much I absolutely loved these meals at the time (one hallmark of my early eating years was if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so I had this over and over again, and to be honest if they still served it I would have it tomorrow, only not the biscuit, and maybe with a glass of red). 

In the year my mum was dying, I would visit most weeks and sit by her bed, chatting to her about anything that came into either of our heads, wanting to acknowledge what was happening but without getting into the deep and dark places. She was not a great opener of cans of worms or boxes of Pandora, like many of her generation, and many of us Gen Xers have learnt to walk that line. But one night, the LKSB (Lytham Kitchen Spaghetti Bolognese) came up, somehow. And by this point there was a fair amount of morphine in the mix, and I learnt that the reason it was just me stuffing my face was because there wasn't the money for both of us to do that. 

This honestly never occurred to me at the time. I was max eight years old, so I can forgive myself, but additionally, she never gave much evidence of enjoying any foodstuffs as much as I enjoyed pretty much all of them. With soooo much hindsight, including knowledge of how her terminal cancer ultimately played out, I can see that she likely always had a vulnerable digestive system, and learnt to manage that by not really eating a lot. And we could get into the thin thing, which I will just touch on: I think my mum was a 10 because she smoked like a chimney for decades and also didn't eat much, then she stopped smoking and she hit like a 14, and then she got cancer and she went down to an 8 and then she died. She bought a tiny suit to wear to the funeral of one of her uncles who'd been a bit 'handsy'. It was her last 'fuck you' and I love her for it while also still dealing with the implications of all of that, not that I explicitly know the facts. She embodied them, as women so often do. 

*Anyway*. Half term to me means spaghetti bolognaise and Viennese whirls with your mum, or whatever the 2020 equivalent is, and to learn that life often gets worse rather than better for kids, over that time, makes me want to howl. And the thought that the government would enforce rather than relieve it, well. 

I look at those pictures of Marcus Rashford and his mum and I think, people like them should be making these decisions, not a bunch of boarding school educated posh boys, many of whom were deliberately starved of that kind of love in order to make them better heartless leaders. I live with one of those boarding school educated posh boys, and I think I can safely say they are a lil fucked up by the system, even if they never had to watch their parents choose between heating and eating. How are we still here, in 2020. 

What can you do? Well, we went swimming on Friday, then went into town and had noodles and a beer in our local Thai restaurant - use it or lose it, guys, and their Pad See Ew is *so good* - then went to Sainsbo's and spent our lunch budget on foodbank supplies, which can conveniently be deposited in between the tills and the exit. 

I have done a lot of buying foodbank supplies, and my general MO is to buy food I would want to eat myself, on the grounds that just because you are in need doesn't mean you want ham in a tin. (I will add that I never ever buy brown things for the foodbank, on the grounds that just because you're in need doesn't mean you should have to eat some do-gooders idea of healthy food). But this time I took my eight year old self shopping, and bought everything that she would want. Instant mash. Hotdogs. Tinned ravioli. Curly Wurlies. Sardines in tomato sauce. SuperNoodles. Jelly. Twenty five quids worth of joy, and I put it all in the collection box and then had a little cry on the way home. I'm so sorry. I'm so fucking sorry. 

joella

Making it through the rain

Some local snowdrops yesterday

I set great store by snowdrops. They hang out underground all year, then they stick their tiny heads up just when we need them most. Hey! they say. You've nearly done another winter. Well done you. It will get brighter later, but for now, see how much hope you can find in our bursts of tiny whiteness.

Around Ecoville there is abundant woodland, some of which we own and manage. After we moved in, we (not us personally, there are many sizes of we around here) cleared a patch of gloomy leylandii just by our houses and uncovered an old woodland garden stuffed full of bulbs. Some hundreds, if not thousands, of them are snowdrops, and they're almost ready to pop.

And I am so ready for them. I'm actually not minding January too much, it has a minimalism that I can get behind (we're eating a lot of Japanese food, clearing out cupboards, and generally being sober). It's December I'm needing to get over, December and all who sailed in her. 

I meant to follow up a little 'turkey and the patriarchy' rant last month, but I never got around to it, and it went off the boil. But it started simmering again when I heard an item on Woman's Hour earlier this month about the Irish tradition of Little Christmas, also known as Women's Christmas.

Essentially (and I'm not saying I don't approve) this is a day in early January when Irish women go off and do something nice together on their own, to recover from Big Christmas, on the grounds that it is, overwhelmingly, them (us) who take the emotional, logistical and physical responsibility for the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. 

Hmm. There are things I like about Big Christmas. I like the cards - not the ones you get from hotels you've stayed in or from financial advisors, but the ones you get from your friends, especially when you recognise their handwriting on the envelope from all the letters you used to write each other in the days when that's how staying in touch was done. I like sending them, and I like receiving them. I like carols, especially the ones with descants in, and I have a life-long love of fairy lights. And I remember the excitement of being a child at Christmas, decorating the tree, putting presents under it, staring at them for days. 

But I'd happily leave it at that, maybe minus most of the presents (I don't actually need anything and neither do most of the people I know). And I've kind of tried to, but I'm not allowed. 

Christmas is relentless - the build up, the pressure, the consumption, the long distance travelling when it's cold, dark and generally inhospitable time, the waste. The energy. You can do it on someone else's terms, as I suppose we all do when we're children, or you can take on hosting and organising yourself, which isn't for everyone, but does give you some kind of control of the situation. 

On the whole, I prefer the latter, and M loves to cook, so for the last n years we've done some version of that*, but the 2016 version wiped me out, and I put in a 2017 bid for ignoring the whole thing. And I honestly tried, but I would have had to have barricaded myself in my bedroom for the duration to avoid every festivity (which, you know, brings its own issues), so I did find myself in various Christmas type situations. 

And overwhelmingly, I observed (with varying degrees of grace) that they represent a shit-ton of work, and that most of that work is done by women. Now you could argue that we could all sit on our hands and eventually the planning, the shopping, the wrapping, the table-setting, the scene-setting, the serving, the clearing would get done anyway. And there are times when I deliberately do this. But I find it really hard, because I can see that there are things that need to be done, and I am amazed at the proportion of men (#notallmen, do not @ me) who somehow don't. 

I absolutely refuse to believe that this is nature rather than nurture, indeed I seem to remember learning it. And if I managed to unlearn it, I would only become part of the problem. 

But my real beef is why exactly are we doing this in the first place? Who benefits, exactly? I think pretty much the whole business is the Emperor's New Jumper, nothing but market-based tinsel-covered displacement activity, covering the gaping hole in our souls. 

And we let it control us, and deplete us, and we watch it happen, and we just somehow don't call it out. Well, I'm over it. I've said it before but I mean it this time.

Well, that's better out than in. Happy January! 

joella 

*ok, tbf there was a Christmas in a caravan a few years ago which was lovely. There's a way. 

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

Cultural capital

I'm just home from a rare night out with ex-housemate-once-schoolmate S, who doesn't get out much these days, and ex-housemate-once-schoolmate K, who gets out plenty, but not often with me.

We ended up wandering Oxford's tiny gay village (it's tiny, the gay people are normal size). It's not that we were specifically looking for a gay pub, just that they are the closest proper pubs to the shiny new Castle complex, where we'd eaten pizza. There are bars in there, but only an idiot would want to drink their uber-priced fizzy lager while listening to lowest common denominator music at ear-splitting volume. And I've never seen the point of drinking standing up.

We ended up in the Brewery Gate, which I'm sure used to be home to excruciating open mike nights, but which is now mostly home to low-key lesbians. And perfectly friendly with it, possibly because they mistook me and S for low-key lesbians ourselves. It wouldn't be the first time, it's been happening on and off since we were at school together in the mid-late 80s.

Not that I could give a monkey's arse, mind, but it did mean that once we'd finished arguing politics, we started reminiscing about how much fun that was and wasn't. The school in question recently held a '30 years since we let girls in' event. Doing the sums, you can work out that we were a relatively new phenomenon at the time, and there were some occasions when we wished they hadn't bothered.

In our year, though, the head of school was a girl. We wondered if that was the first time, but we couldn't really remember. The deputy head was a boy. I remembered being surprised they gave him the job, he was clever enough, and lots of people liked him, but they tended to go for the clean cut kids. He was a bit edgier. Worst of all, he was a smoker.

Well, said S, he got the race vote, didn't he.

What? I said. He wasn't black!

No, she said, but he was vaguely brown.

She had a point. Vaguely brown was the closest we got to black. I don't think there was a black kid in the whole school.

Hang on a minute, I said, I'm half Jewish! Why did that bring me no plaudits? Jewish has never been cool, said S. And what about me? I'm from North Shore. There were more vaguely browns than North Shorians. Also true, though that was more of a class thing than a race one. North Shore was the wrong side of the tracks.

I had sort of forgotten how clearly delineated those social slivers can be, how narrowly we defined our tribes. However homogenous a group of kids you are, you can always find a way to create a social hierarchy. Further back in time, at a primary school with a catchment area of basically one housing estate, I remember it mattering which end of the estate you lived on. Which cul-de-sac. It didn't stop us getting on with each other, even the vaguely brown ones, but it mattered.

And these were not down to choices we had made ourselves, paths we had taken, we were too young for that. This was 100% down to the hands our parents had been dealt, and the way they had played them. I've been mulling on this in a dark, premenstrual sort of way and I find it rather depressing.

joella

Honey, I burnt the heuchera

(I'm blogging by firelight in the garden. I've just singed half the perennials)

Twenty years ago, I went out with a man called Colin. I was 17 and he was 22; I lived in Lancashire and he lived in the New Forest. It was an enormously unlikely and ultimately unsustainable arrangement, but for a good few months it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

We didn't see each other very often, what with the 300 miles and my A-levels to contend with, but we wrote to each other in between what used to be called Nooky Runs.

There was so much I blatantly didn't know and couldn't pretend to, in those days, that when there was something I didn't know but felt that possibly I should know, I tended to keep quiet about it and try and work it out. I still do that sometimes. I'm still not sure what the Westland Affair was, for example, but I nod knowledgeably whenever it comes up.

Colin wrote me a letter which contained two song quotes. He didn't attribute either of them, presumably assuming I'd recognise them, and I was too proud to ask where they were from. I thought to myself, 'I'll hear those songs one day, and then I'll know'. There were no lyrics servers in 1987.

And I was right. The first one was
"I see you now and you are so very young, and I've seen battles lost, and I've seen battles won. And I've got this intuition that it's all for your fun."

This is from The Queen and the Soldier by Suzanne Vega, which I heard barely a couple of months later, when my friend N pressed a tape into my hands one Saturday and said 'you need to hear this album'. I already knew Marlene on the Wall, as I practically lost my virginity to it, and the rest of the album had me completely spellbound. The Queen and the Soldier is still one of my favourite songs in the world, though not specifically for that reason.

The second one took a couple of years, but come 1990 I was lying on a beanbag in the bedroom of my Significant Ex, a few spliffs worse for wear, listening to Pink Floyd's The Final Cut for the first time.

"I was just a child then," he sang (Roger Waters, not my Significant Ex). I sat bolt upright and said "Now I'm only a man". Then I said 'wow' a lot.

Patience is a virtue, I have always believed, even if I haven't always practised it. And if you've got this far through this post you clearly have it in spades, so I'll get to the point.

There's a book I've been waiting to find for years and years and years. I read it before I was 10 -- I think one of my primary school teachers lent it to me, I was a fairly precocious reader -- and little bits of it were seared into my mind, but I had no idea what it was called or who the author was. I remembered a lonely girl, Lilliput, bloaters and lots of weirdness. I had one phrase to go on, which was that she had 'eyes the colour of Marmite'.

I've been Googling that phrase since before there was Google, I remember searching Alta Vista for it, full of hopes (dashed), and Asking Jeeves (likewise). I've been waiting for the full text of all books ever to be there for the searching.

I'm still waiting. But I've kept trying (it's been my default search phrase in any new search engine, but it's never taken me anywhere).

Until today. Today I found the book. By pure chance my phrase is part of the first paragraph, and I found it quoted twice: once as part of a first sentence guessing competition, and once by a secondhand bookseller selling an early edition of it.

The book opens:

"Maria was ten years old. She had dark hair in two pigtails, and brown eyes the colour of marmite, but more shiny. She wore spectacles for the time being, though she would not have to wear them always, and her nature was a loving one. ...Unfortunately she was an orphan, which made her difficulties more complicated than they were with other people."

I always knew I'd find that book eventually. It's called Mistress Masham's Repose, and it's by T H White, who coincidentally (or is it?) wrote one of M's favourite childhood books, The Once and Future King. Tomorrow I'm off to get it out of the library.

The internet is a beautiful thing.

joella