A limerick for the Reverend Richard Coles

(I felt bad for being amused when he confessed on Twitter that he couldn't track down someone's ashes.  So I finished the limerick for him)

I have lost some cremated remains
I have checked all the bins and the drains
But it's really alright
For the soul's taken flight
All that's lost is the dust and some stains

Feather forecast

We saw a kingfisher on New Year's Eve.  Zip.  Swoosh.  Shimmer. A bird made entirely out of onomatopoeia.  It was zooming down the river, under the bridge the foxes use to cross the road.  On Christmas Day there were three greater spotted woodpeckers chasing each other round the sycamore just past the end of our garden.  They came and had a peck at the food we put out, but in an ironic way, as if our bird feeder was a sort of avian McDonalds, not to be taken seriously, but handy for a quick bite while out and about.
Now it is icy and  the poor bramblings and chaffinches are having trouble getting seeds from the dispenser.  They can't cling on like the blue tits and great tits and coal tits do, so they hover like hummingbirds, surely using more energy vibrating their wings than they could possibly get from sunflower seeds?  I tried scattering seeds on top of the compost bin, but that is the squirrel equivalent of giving the date and address of a party on an unsecured Facebook account.

Moving to Coventry has introduced me to the suburbs and gardens and stuff, but more than this, it has introduced me to whole new times of day.  Walking to work at 5am, that's when I see the foxes.  It would never previously have occurred to me to consider a job that required getting up at 3.30.  3.30 is the night.  That is a time for going to sleep, not a time for getting up.  It is a strange unused time, a time for realising a party has definitely ended, for lying awake listening to the World Service,  heart-in-mouth hospital trips, confused visits to the toilet, waiting for Father Christmas, desperately trying to get something finished for the next day, or catching a holiday flight.  It's not normal.  It's doubly surreal to be using that time to put on a uniform and walk through the night to go and perform mundane tasks for a corporate employer.  It makes it kind of fun, because it's not real.  And you get to see foxes on your way there, and kingfishers on your way back.

Another memorial

A sad anniversary yesterday, a year since the death of my foster father Alan Shotliff.  There was much to admire about him, but his best epitaph came from the doctor:  "Thanks, but I'm afraid we can't use any of his organs for transplant.  He's used them all up."  That says more about him than I ever could  *raises glass*

I've got one art O level, it did nothing for me

It's a while now since we saw the Specials at the Ricoh Arena, but a couple of things have stuck with me.  One was the obvious and genuine pride the city has in its alumni.  It was a much-needed reminder that Coventry isn't London-only-less-good, it has a proper civic identity of its own, however fragmented and buried that may be.  Not all the Specials fans were from round here, but it was easy to see that all the 40-something rude boys and girls shared a little part of the story of why we're the way we are today.  It was also nice to join in the singing and dancing at the bar as we waited to get served, you don't get that at a Kasabian gig.  I imagine.
It was a thoroughly warm "welcome to Coventry" for me.
I did wonder though why you never hear the Specials on the radio.  Ghost Town excepted, they never feature on    nostalgia radio stations or compilations, even "alternative" ones (on which, generally, if you are lucky you will get the Jam and Bananarama).  I've genuinely not heard Rat Race or even the eternally relevant Too Much Too Young since 1979.  Why not?  None of the words have become any less valuable in 30plus years, and none of the tunes have become any less enjoyable.
Still, even though these days the Specials are Dammersless, they made a very large number of very elderly teenagers very happy.

Happy Halloween

Boring Gavin

by Cindy George

Gavin was thinking about his first love.  He was four and she was in his class, the lovely Corinne Turner.  She had been born with an extra toe on each foot and sometimes she would take her socks off and let you look.  Gavin thought this made her exotic and magical and showed his devotion by sitting quietly near her wherever she went.  It didn’t seem to bother her any more than toes eleven and twelve did, he was just there.

“Haven’t you got a mind of your own?”  That was his mum.  “You don’t have to do everything that Corinne does, you know.  Tell you what, let’s go to the park.”  He loved those afternoons in the park with his mum, almost as deeply as he loved Corinne.  There were swans to feed and if you chased them they would flap their giant wings at you and chase you back.  He wasn’t allowed to chase the swans but sometimes he did it anyway.  Just to show his mum he did indeed have a mind of his own.  She was long gone now, of course, he was fairly certain of that.

Remembering his mum made him think of when he was older and had a proper girlfriend, pretty Marianne who was exquisite but had less brainpower than a catnip mouse.  She left him in the end for someone more exciting.  Steve, Gavin remembered; he had had a car and very nearly a moustache.  Gavin didn’t even try to compete with that.  He remembered wondering what had happened to Marianne, where she was now.

But the real love of his life had been Ellen, clever, kind and beautiful, with dark hair and light eyes and a smile that made him realise everything was well with the world.  Had there been anyone before Ellen?  He couldn’t quite remember.  But he knew Ellen had been beside him from the day they married in the crumbling sandstone church of her remote northern hometown.  She had borne his child, or maybe children, and he could picture her face perfectly, cradling a crying baby, shushing it and wiping away a tiny splash of milk with a soft pink bib with flowers on it.  Must have been a little girl he had then, thought Gavin, that’s nice.

Ellen was there on their holiday to Florida, and oh, they had two little girls by then, and they squealed and ran away from the pelicans just like he had done with the swans only minutes ago.  “This has been the most fun I’ve ever had, ever ever!” Ellen had told him.  “Well it must be very boring most of the time being married to me” he’d laughed.  She said if she’d wanted excitement she would have married an astronaut and they’d laughed for ages, even though it hadn’t been as funny as all that.

The girls had married as well, what beautiful weddings they’d been, he could still see Katie in her off-white gown with the lace-up bodice her mum hadn’t been too sure about but in the end it was perfect down to the scent of the bouquets but the best thing of all was her smile.

And when he was in hospital they were all there, so tender and loving. 

But then there was nothing, just a cold damp darkness. 

In one last tiny flare of consciousness, he realised he wasn’t Gavin Mason at all.  Just a lucky graveyard worm digesting the memories from Gavin’s dead brain.  The thought flickered and went out.

How to tell you are in Coventry

Londoners walk up and down escalators, regardless of whether they are working or not.  They're still stairs.  In Coventry, the escalators generally work, but when people get on them, they just stand there and wait to be conveyed up or down.


Londoners pile onto buses in this order: 1 - people who think it is their very own personal bus, 2 - people who think they may as well push in as everyone else is, 3 - people who are fully aware there will be another, less crowded bus along in a few minutes.  In Coventry, people form a neat line in order of their arrival at the bus stop, and enter the bus in the same order.


In London I had my hair cut in a nice 1920s-style bob, same length all the way around, shaved up to the bottom of the bob at the back to neaten and define the style.  In Coventry, it is compulsory to have the same haircut as everyone else, varying only in length.  When I first moved here, a town centre hairdresser layered it up the back for reasons I don't understand, leaving pointless wispy bits growing out in random directions over the back of my neck.  Four months later, having recovered from this somewhat, I made an attempt at a different hairdresser to have my style restored.  "I don't do shaving" she said.  This calls into question my entire understanding of the term hairdresser.  I left with the same unwanted style I went in with, but now with slightly tidier layers.  Apparently Coventry doesn't do horizontal lines in hair.  Must be some sort of council legislation.

Granny Thomas

The last few weeks have been so hectic that I've neglected to mention a major event in our little world, the sad passing of Paul's gran, Jean Thomas.  I'd only known her as a nice old lady who loved her family and her dog, and carried on knitting for charity long after her fingers and eyesight had let her down.  Only at her funeral did I get a tiny glimpse of the person she really was: the hiker, the war worker, the artist, the woman who battled to make a good life for herself, and to gift her son and grandchildren with her own strength, humour, practicality and ability to make things better for those she loved.  Paul is lucky to have had her as a gran, and I am lucky to have someone who's inherited some of her qualities.  I'll try and remember her as I never knew her.