Just after six a.m on Thursday there was all
this crazy, vicious screeching from the garden. That awful cat Ralph from three
doors down had ambushed Bernard Socks as he shot out of his cat flap into the
garden. When I hurried out I found them clawing at each other, chests pushed together
in a nasty clinch. I flung a mugful of water and they sprang apart, dashed down
the garden and started fighting again. I refilled from the pond and tossed a
mugful of poor, squirming tadpoles over them. Both cats fled over the fence and
I had five horrified tadpoles swishing at the bottom of my Oscar Wilde mug and
felt just terrible about it.
Socks slunk back indoors, up to his blanket box
at the bedroom window, where he felt sorry for himself the rest of the day. Jeremy
and I were relieved to find no marks on him.
*
Thursday and Friday were really about cracking
on and getting through a draft of chapter three of my new novel. Afterwards we
got our groceries in, and I talked to Mam on the phone about her night seeing
the Eagles tribute band the night before. They had good seats because
wheelchairs go in the Royal Box at Darlington Civic. She said how the whole
place was on its feet, and how it was great, and how much she wishes she could
get up and dance. Then she told me Ken Dodd is playing in the autumn, and we
pledged to book tickets straight away. We’ve meant to go to see him for years.
I phoned right away and, when the man in the booking office asked if I’d booked
by phone before, I said no – but I wanted to say: your theatre was the first I
ever went to. It was 1975 and ‘A Bear Called Paddington’, in which the man
playing Paddington towered over the other members of the cast. I’d never seen
anything so amazing in my life as that show.
*
Saturday was our road trip with friends up the
coast in the sun. We walked on the vast, wide, sea-less beach at Lytham St
Anne’s, wandering round broken bits of pier. Why is it the feel of sand under
your shoes becomes instantly relaxing? Even the ground feels softer than usual. Then we were shoving ten pences in
those daft machines, and having pie and chips in the Italian café. The
speciality of the house turned out to be foot-long chocolate éclairs. They
seemed to have dozens of them on display in chiller cabinets, glossy with dark
chocolate and oozing confectioners’ cream. We ordered one and split it four
ways, ruining our appetites for fish and chips later.
In Morecambe we visited the dark, cluttered
bookshop with its children’s books spilling onto floors; its tiny rooms stacked
to the roof, stuffed geese looming out of the stacks and local newspaper clippings
about vintage murders on the mouldering walls. We tried to get into a junk shop
but the woman was just closing. She was all excited. She only gets out twice a
year and tonight was one of her big nights. It was Burlesque Night at the
Winter Gardens. We avoided being dragged along to that, and went to the Midland
Hotel in search of tea. We sat outside on their glitzy terrace, underneath this
amazing Art Deco edifice, which I remember from the early Nineties when it was
a wreck and there was a gay bar in the grounds, at the end of a pier, where
they’d have lock-ins and on stormy nights it was like being in the Poseidon Adventure
during a disco as the ship went down.
We paid our respects at the Eric Morecambe
statue and watched old ladies have their photos taken, linking arms with him
and striking the same silly pose. It seems such a shame they never put an Ernie
next to him. Would it have hurt? His own statue’s in a little town in Yorkshire
called Morley, standing alone in the shopping precinct, listing slightly on its
podium.
Then it was home down the motorway and Jeremy
lighting his Moroccan stove (as it’s become known) and candles in the garden
and sausage sandwiches and the last of the gin. We were sitting out as late as
we could, defying the chill and willing the summer to come. Jeremy and the
others ripped up cardboard and out of date TV mags and made the stove go crazy,
playing with the flames like boys always do. Bernard Socks was pretty furious about
all the smoke from the Moroccan stove. He kept shooting out of the cat flap,
shouting stuff, and pelting down the garden to the Beach House, where the fairy
lights were on for the first time this spring.
Comments
Post a Comment