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Bring Me Sunshine!

25/4/2015

The sun has taken its hat off and has been shining down on us for well over a week now, a situation I find very tolerable, although I’m suffering a little earlier than is normal for me with hay fever symptoms. I suspect the pollen situation must be high this year as even Judith was violently sneezing a few days back and said she thought she was coming down with a cold - no cold developed but she’s still sneezing a lot! I guess that’s what happens when acres and acres of Kent countryside are turned over to oil-seed rape. You know, I really could launch a personal vendetta against that particular genus of plant!

The last week or so has been fairly uneventful. We went to a jolly good organic farm shop the other day and we plan to stop shopping in supermarkets quite so much and lend our support to these people who are doing a good job at a fair price and making the world a bit greener and healthier in the process! I daresay I’ll be writing more on this blog about Cherry Gardens Organic Farm Shop in the future.

The second draft of the follow-on book to Niedermayer & Hart is busy underway at the moment and I’m really enjoying it. Mrs J gets given the completed chapters and really doesn’t have a clue what it’s about yet; of course she recognises themes, characters etc from N & H - but says she trusts that I’ll bring the whole thing together satisfyingly by the end (poor deluded fool!). I hadn’t previously discussed anything about the book with her, she didn’t see a word of the first draft, and so she’s experiencing it now completely ‘blind’ as it were. I personally find this is a really good opportunity for gauging response - and so far, so good! I stopped writing for over a week while we had some guests staying from Amsterdam, and although I was happy to get back to work, I didn’t in any way resent stopping work for our lovely relatives. It was fun spending time with them and we especially enjoyed having a toddler about the place, Tee hee hee! Actually they were model house guests. Judith’s Mum is the little-un’s Great-Great-Grandmother - now that has to be a pretty rare five-generations photo opportunity!

Keep smiling whether the sun is shining or not - might as well!

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Easter Mondays!

9/4/2015

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Dad was very proud of his Austin

The sun made a sudden and unexpected appearance at a happy family occasion held on Saturday last and I’m delighted to say has remained present over the ensuing days. It seems like years since sunny weather might be anticipated at Easter time in the UK with any kind of reasonable expectation. However, when I was a boy/teenager in the sixties and seventies, unless memory misleads, the British Isles seems to have enjoyed far more agreeable weather.

The Johnson family acquired its first car, an Austin A30, around 1964. We were one of the first families on our road in Gowerton, near Swansea, to own a car and my father would have been forty-two by the time he set about learning to drive. In those times if you left the car parked on the road you had to leave its side-lights on, which played havoc with car batteries. I remember Dad was forever charging it and topping its cells up with distilled water. Mam never learnt to drive and always cited the skill as one of her most regretted non-accomplishments. In conversations with her right to the end of her life she (an Aries!) maintained she would almost certainly have made a very good driver. She most definitely made a damn fine driving instructor - as my father often experienced, “You went round that bend a bit fast, Danny!”

Most of the time Dad remained stoically good-tempered with his ever-present advisor alongside; but very occasionally he’d snap, “Do you drive, Mair?”

She would respond dismissively, as though this small fact was simply an irrelevance, “No.”

“Well shut up then and let me get on with it!”

A tense hush sometimes descended upon the front of the car at these times. In such difficult moments, awkward looks were exchanged in the back seat between me and my friend Keith, who was almost guaranteed to be present if we were on an outing to the seaside.

At Easter we invariably headed for the coast, regardless of the weather. If wet, we browsed our way slowly through the town’s Woolworths, hoping climatic conditions might soon alter for the better. Perhaps this was the reason why I felt so genuinely sad when these stores finally closed down a few years back - they were such a powerful icon from my childhood. However, if the sun was shining we’d be on the beach with our buckets and spades, and when Mam told us, teeth chattering, tinged blue and shivering from head to toe, to get out of the sea after an hour’s joyous splashing, we’d always insist we weren’t cold at all. She’d generally have to bribe us in some little way to get us to come peacefully, thereby probably saving us from being hospitalised with hypothermia. If we went to Porthcawl we’d have faggots and peas (this is a meatball akin to haggis and not to be confused with the North American definition for a faggot) in the fair for our lunch, or, Mam’s heavily salted cucumber sandwiches with a chunk of cheese, always ingested with large quantities of sand. There was generally an ice cream or two to be had on an Easter Bank Holiday Monday and if the destination was Porthcawl (Mam’s lifelong Mecca) it could only be a Fulgoni’s cone. Last thing, as the sun was going down and everyone started heading for home there was always a bag of fish and chips, scalding hot, served up in newspaper, always smothered in salt and dripping with vinegar, to be eaten as we made our way back to the car. Lovely.

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Bring Me Sunshine!

Easter Mondays!

M J Johnson

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