Dear Readers, at the end of a long day in Dorset there is something so comforting about the chacking of rooks and jackdaws as they roost in the trees in  Dorchester. There are some venerable horse chestnuts and beech trees right in the centre of town, and these act as beacons for the corvids who fly in from all directions. When they land, they talk away to one another for a few minutes before falling eerily silent, as the sky turns from mother-of-pearl to sapphire. Their ancestors have probably been roosting round about here since before the Romans came. 

Earlier today I caught the bus back to Milborne St Andrew, where the service for Dad will be held tomorrow. I love sitting on the top deck of the bus and peering into the fields as we speed by. Today I noticed that three of the big fields on the outskirts of the village are now full of sunflowers. They must be a special variety grown for their seeds, because the heads are so huge that they hang shyly down, and the petals are insignificant. Is this for vegetable oil for human consumption, I wonder, or is it for biofuels? There’s a lot of maize around too, as noted yesterday, and I suspect that this isn’t because the people of Dorset have developed a taste for corn on the cob..

I meet up with a friend who is doing the cakes for the refreshments tomorrow – E made the beautiful cake for Mum and Dad’s 60th Wedding Anniversary Party, and although she is 88 years old she is up to her ears in coconut cake and lemon drizzle.

Cakes from Mum and Dad’s 60th Wedding Anniversary Party in 2017. Note the freesias!

Then we walk down to the church. It’s harvest festival on Sunday, and there are sunflowers everywhere,  proper ones this time. Fruit is piled on the window ledges and there’s a distinct smell of apples.

Outside, Mum and Dad’s grave is a little overgrown – my brother, who lives nearby, has been self-isolating after his family got Covid, one after another, until he got it too. But someone has some secateurs, and so it’s easy to neaten it up, and tomorrow E will bring some dahlias from her garden to brighten it up. I am reminded again of what a lovely village Milborne St Andrew is, and how lucky Mum and Dad were to live their final years in a real community.

By the time you read this, I will have given my eulogy, and the Memorial service will be over, and I’ll be back home. I will share how it went with you on Monday. It feels as if we’re coming to the end of one stage, and the beginning of another. It’s time to come together and to remember, grieve and celebrate.

‘Dwarf ‘ Buddleia

Dear Readers, apart from waking up in the night with a fever today I’ve actually had a pretty good day, so fingers crossed that it continues! Some of the highlights of today have been:

• Trying to do a lateral flow test. Oh lord I am fed up with tickling my tonsils and poking things up my nose but as little children are doing that every day I’m happy to suck it up once in a while. But why did my test come back void when I’d done everything right? Very disappointing. I shall have another bash tomorrow, but as I’m on the mend I suspect that my viruses are waving goodbye to me as we speak. Let’s hope they’re not heading off to infect my husband or we’ll have a wonderful week off.
• Look at the ‘dwarf’ Buddleia! I’d say it’s about nine feet tall. Everything seems to grow gigantic in my garden. It’s a beautiful colour, but the bees and butterflies much prefer the feral mauve one in the front garden.

• I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the Olympics, but I have been most taken with Simone Biles, the US athlete, who spoke out  vigorously when one of the coaches was convicted of sexually assaulting the girls. She isn’t the most graceful gymnast I’ve ever seen (says she, who can just about manage a forward roll if given a push) but when she jumps she seems to defy gravity, a characteristic she shares with some of the best ice skaters and other athletes. Apparently the Gymnastics committee can’t keep up with the complexity and daring of her jumps, and is consistently underrating their difficulty. To me, she’s an absolute powerhouse, and considering that the floor work finals in London in 2012 featured 8 white athletes, she will be a model of excellence for lots of little girls watching the Olympics. Just have a look at her here.
• And in other news, a Judoka from tiny Kosovo has won a gold medal in Judo. I’m always cheering on the little countries. Distria Krasniqi apparently took up judo after practicing with her brother, and she beat someone from Japan in the women’s 48kg final. Well done that woman!
• And because I’ve been spending so much time feeling sorry for myself in bed, I discovered these domino videos – people basically set up thousands of dominos, tip one and hope that the effect will ripple out. I find them strangely fascinating but also horrifying – all that work destroyed in two minutes! And who cleans it all up? Do the dominoes need to be sorted back into their individual boxes to be reused at a later event? It looks like entropy in action, but I do still quite like it. There’s an example here.
• And finally, in keeping with our musical theme yesterday (I agree with you all, it’s Elvis all the way for me, though Peggy Lee does a decent job), here is the unmatchable, incomparable Nina Simone, singing my theme song for today. Enjoy!

Dear Readers, after feeling as if I was on the mend yesterday my fever has come back with a vengeance today. What the hell is going on? Maybe that quip about malaria isn’t so wide of the mark. Anyhow, at least I’m not working so I can crash out in bed with my teeth chattering. There are different schools of thought on whether you’re better off bringing the fever down, or letting it run its course – the fever is the body’s way of fighting the infection but it doesn’t make it a lot of fun for the battleground (i.e. me). So, I am holding on for as long as possible and then taking paracetamol when I can’t stand it any more. Hopefully it will all sort itself out. It would be heavily ironic to have a week off and be sick until it’s time to go back to work.

Anyway.

What I wanted to say was that I never miss my Mum so much as when I’m sick. I feel myself longing for her instinctive way of comforting and coaxing, her patience and those lovely cold hands on my forehead. She was always at the ready with a tin of Heinz tomato soup, or fish with mashed potato and a parsley sauce, or a boiled egg with soldiers. Best of all were the chilled tinned peaches with Bird’s custard. She could persuade anyone to eat, my Mum.

Sometimes when we were children we’d have what were described as ‘bilious attacks’. These generally involved vomiting all over ourselves and the bedclothes. My long hair was a particular challenge. Mum would change the sheets, wash my hair, change the pyjamas, put me back into bed and sing a medley of songs from the early sixties. She had a great fondness for Ghost Riders in the Sky, I remember, and also ‘The Girl in the Wood‘ – clearly Frankie Laine was a favourite. Generally, an hour after we’d gone to sleep we’d do it all over again. I never had the sense that Mum was the slightest bit irritated, but of course I didn’t appreciate it at the time. I remember that poem about love’s ‘austere and lonely offices’ by Robert Hayden, and it seems to me that that is what love is – the things that you do when you don’t feel like it, the little things that no one even notices at the time. I remember those nights, with Mum singing in the semi-darkness as a kind of magic. It seemed to me that she could heal anything, and I had absolute faith in her ability to know what to do. What a responsibility, and yet it felt like what she was born to do.

I still miss you, Mum. I always will.

Dear Readers, is there anything more pleasant than to walk amongst the oak and hornbeam trees on a sunny morning, minding your own business and enjoying the song of the birds? Well, if you went down to the woods in the past few weeks you might have gotten more than you bargained for, because here in Coldfall Wood we’ve had one chap exposing himself to women walking past, and another man bursting naked from a bush to confront a woman going for a wander by herself.  Personally, I think we do ourselves no favours by ignoring these events on the basis that the person is  just a mildly comic ‘flasher’. As someone who was, as a young woman, barged into a ditch in a wood in Winchester by a completely naked man and then chased through the undergrowth after I managed to get away, I can vouch for it being terrifying. I can still remember how he smelled, and how I got welts across my arms after running through nettles and brambles. I remember thinking that I would never see my parents again, and that they wouldn’t know what had happened to me. When I finally found some people and told them about the attack, they remarked that there were some very strange people about these days, as if I’d come across someone talking to themselves or wearing a funny hat. It still makes me furious to think about myself as a young woman,  shocked and bloodied, being told that what had happened to me was so was so insignficant.

Even if you are not touched, to be suddenly confronted by someone performing a sexual act that you have no wish to witness. let alone be part of, is a kind of violation, and I suspect that the shock and disgust that it engenders is part of the thrill for the perpetrator. I know of women who’ve responded wittily and disdainfully to such events, and well done them, but in my experience men who have these kinds of compulsions will choose the mildest, most inexperienced and often the youngest of women to torment. Ask your young friends, your daughters, your nieces what’s happened to them. You might be horrified.

But what is saddest, and what is sometimes difficult for people who haven’t had such an experience to understand, is that such events have long-lasting effects. After what happened to me, I could never again enjoy being on my own in an open space without being vigilant. Believe me, when I’m in the woods I know if there’s someone around, if they look suspicious and if I’ve seen them before. In a way it makes me feel closer to the animals for whom this is their everyday reality – no sparrow or wood mouse can afford to relax their guard, and it seems that the same is true for women. I’m not saying that I’m terrified of harm every time I walk out of the door, but the possibility of something happening is real and present to me.

Nor does it stop me doing what I want to do: I walk where I want to walk, when I want to, and if sometimes I have to steel myself to get out of the door, then so be it. I made a decision all those years ago that I would not let someone stop me from enjoying the thing that gives me the most solace, the natural world. And maybe these days I’d be one of those stern women telling the miscreant to ‘put it away’. We need to reclaim the woods, because I think some men take it for granted that they are the normal inhabitants and lords of these places, and that women are an anomaly. The woods actually belong to everyone, and we have as much right to walk unmolested as anyone else.

It’s important to report incidents of indecent exposure to the police – sometimes people need treatment for their compulsions, or you may stop someone from graduating to doing something worse. Believe me, if someone does this to you, the chances are that they”ve done it before and are going to do it again, and the next person might be even more vulnerable than you are.

And chaps, if you’re walking in the woods and you see a woman on her own that you don’t know, think twice before rushing up behind her unexpectedly, and be sensitive about engaging her in conversation, especially if there’s no one else about. You might only be being friendly, but she is probably already  considering you a potential threat, however lovely you are (and I know that the men reading this blog are kind and gentle human beings). Just be thankful that, generally, you can walk in the countryside without anyone waving their private parts at you, or trying to elbow you into a ditch. You don’t know how lucky you are.

Dad at the Marina close to Minnesota

Dear Readers, whatever happened to whistling? When I was growing up, everyone seemed to do it. Paperboys whistled on their rounds. Van drivers wolf whistled out of their windows at any female between 11 and 65 (these days they yell obscenities which is hardly an improvement). To attract a friend’s attention, you put two fingers in your mouth and emitted a startlingly loud blast (which I could never do, but was impressed by those who could). Nowadays the paper boys (those who are left now that we all read the news online) listen to music on their phones rather than making it, and I suspect most people never learn to whistle in the first place. The only living things whistling on my street are the starlings.

Dad was a long-established whistler. He would put a Nana Mouskouri or Demis Roussos record on the player, and would tap along for the first thirty seconds. My brother and I would wait for the inevitable. Dad would pucker up and join in, invariably half a bar late and with a tune that only roughly approximated what was actually happening. Sometimes he would stop and give it another bash, and on other occasions he would rush to try to catch up. We were often in silent stitches by the end of the performance, but Dad would always look quietly content, as if the race had been difficult but he’d got there in the end.

I don’t remember the last time I heard Dad whistle. It might have been around the time that he was diagnosed with COPD, but for years he’d barely had the breath to sit in his reclining chair comfortably. As his health, and Mum’s, declined, there was precious little to whistle about. But when I had lunch with him in the home in March last year, they were playing Spanish music and serving Spanish food, and I saw him tapping along with Julio Iglesias. He puckered up at one point, as if about to start, but then the Spanish chicken turned up and he set to with enthusiasm. It was the last time that I ever ate with Dad, or had a proper conversation with him, because he died on 31st March. The tuneless whistler was finally silenced, and there will never be a performance like it again.

How amused Dad would have been to hear that there is such a thing as a professional whistler! I thought of him when I read this piece in The Guardian yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:

‘Sitting by the deathbed of the Hollywood veteran Harry Dean Stanton, professional whistler Molly Lewis delivered her most poignant performance to date. The Australian-born musician whistled otherworldly versions of Danny Boy and Just a Closer Walk from Thee, the gospel ballad Stanton croons in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke. “He kissed my hand – it was such a beautiful moment”, remembers Lewis of her intimate 2017 performance”.

So, naturally I had to have a listen myself. For your delectation, here is the video for Lewis’s 2021 single ‘Oceanic Feeling’. I think the sound is utterly beautiful, but it might be better listened to rather than watched – it’s difficult not to be distracted by the comic appearance of someone whistling.  See what you think!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6vuWFxvGM