The Lost Core

The most compelling evidence for the existence of my stomach muscles is the fact that I am able to stand up.  A rounded tum has never bothered me, it's a good place to prop a book in the bath.  I had a school friend who told me she put salt in her belly button on the beach and dipped chips in it.  Picture her on the sand in Brazil, serenaded by Frank, short and pale and round and peckish, the girl from Chipanema...

Apparently Jennifer Aniston can bounce a coin off her stomach.  Once you've done that a few times I imagine you contemplate the emptiness of your life outside the gym and have a little cry.  I can rest a trio of loving heads and a bowl of popcorn on mine.  Forget apples and pears, bodies are either trampolines or beanbags.  Snuggle up.

Still, what I used to have, giving my tummy an elegant frame, was a waist.  This is what I miss.  Marilyn Monroe was a size 16, one up from me, but her size was poured into an hourglass whereas mine is sloshing about in a bowl.  I am in smock territory.  I do love the '70s, the waft of a kaftan, a shake of beads and a peace sign, but I actually suit the '40s.  I'm not laid back enough for hazy days of dope and tambourines.  I prefer a sentimental song and a stiff upper cocktail.  Swing through today in case we don't have tomorrow.  But I need a nipped in waist.

So I have joined a Pilates class to see if I can find one.  I am the youngest in the class by at least 30 years.  'You're very mobile,' said the teacher. 'You might have problems with that'.  My joints are hyperextended, she says, and I should try to keep them under control.  My breathing is unruly too.  'Pilates breathing is different to Yoga breathing.  It's the other way round.'  I have no idea how to breathe the other way round.

'Forget the breathing,' she said, 'Just do the positions'.  I try to connect with my core.  Don't talk about stomach muscles, it's all about Core Strength.  I need a lot more of it.

The pace is gentle - I'd like to work harder.  I can learn the moves and do them at home.  I miss the banter in my London yoga class.  Laughter is encouraged there.  Here, I'm not sure that interrupting the careful breathing with a joke would be welcome.  Someone might expire.

Still, I am pleased to be there.  I am using lazy muscles, I have to make an effort, despite the slow mood in the class.  The room overlooks the sea.  During the class the waves turn from grey to a kaleidescope of green blues.  A good place to breathe, any way round.  Outside seagulls are riding the north-east wind, bodies fluid in the raw air.  I have a long way to go.

Hair on end

The fizzing yellow of the oil seed rape has gone, all the flowers were knocked about by the heavy rain we had a few days ago.  A glorious storm at night thudding and flashing - no blinds closed.  It was like trying to sleep in a night club.  Little One in with us, as usual.  Hard to sleep anyway with so much electricity in the air - I was expecting to wake up with hair like Ken Dodd.  Not much different to my usual morning hair.

Then a day of thick fog.  Not sure if it was a haar, the sea mist we had at university.  Wonder if a haar is particular to the east coast of Scotland.  Is it the same as a fret?  Are these mists different in essence or just in name?  Anyway, it was a real pea souper and stayed all day and night into the next morning.  I was convinced the house was no longer attached to the world and we were adrift in time.  Then I watched a programme about the queens of country music and the life of Loretta Lynn brought me back.  My son came downstairs, scrubbing his eyes, hair tufty.  He'd had a bad dream and heard scary banging.  He sat with me and looked at Dolly Parton.  We went to bed and he lay in his soft blue gingham pyjamas, eyes wide until I got in next to him.  I watched his long lashes settle on soft flushed cheeks.  Very grubby nails, hands neatly folded and then one reached to hold mine.  How do mothers bear it when their sons leave to sleep beside other women?

The light of the sun setting behind the rape caught in the hairs of the stems and the field glittered like a frosty morning.  There are bright poppies in the field and all along the roadside.  They last for less than a day in a vase.  So don't pick them.

Welcome to the second half.

By Monday evening I was 40.  My nearly-godfather (he would have been officially appointed had mum ever got around to having us christened) left a message.  'I remember your birth.  Dear God!  I had black hair!'  His hair is white now but lots of it still.  And his partner of 50 years (also my nearly-godfather) is drifting into dementia taking all their shared days with him.  I have low stock left from that generation.  It was good to hear his voice.

Friends, with gloomy camaraderie on Facebook, sent greetings like people who have managed to haul another soul into the lifeboat.  Or asked if I've written my will.

'Welcome to the second half' wrote one of my favourite people.  I have often avoided the second half and gone to the pub.  During this show they let you bring your drink in with you and the plot's not bad.  I've got good seats.  If it's close to last orders I can always say I need the loo and sneak out early.

As I suspected 40 feels remarkably like 39.  I celebrated the change of decade with the man I want to be with when I enter the next one.  We avoided subjects that have proved touchy in the past, like whether we once had a beer with Satan and the existence of flamenco, and had an excellent evening at the Wiveton Bell.  Nice Chablis.  Lovely cheese.

Presents from the children were a small parcel of 5 pebbles from my son, a handful of glossy hazelnuts and a linen box for precious things from my daughter and rowdy singing from my little one.  And Mr P and the children gave me a poppy red Pashley bike with a springy seat.  It is the bike of my dreams.  On the front is a basket big enough for a child to ride in.  Or I could put a dog in there.  Or some cockles and samphire and a bottle of cider.  It got dented on the way but some new bits are being sent and I sense a summer of adventures on the open road.  A merry song, small smooth treasures and the promise of a journey.  A good birthday.

Dandelions

Days of sun and a night of heavy rain. In the morning dandelions are 

rollicking over the prim green grass, gypsy showmen swaggering round the village fete. 

I sit by the rhubarb thinking about where the vegetable garden will be. At the moment we have rhubarb and gooseberries and nettles.  None of them planted by us.  Our big golden harvest will be next year perhaps, if I ever stop reading about digging and start doing it.

Little Three is squatting in the grass examining the character of dandelions. 'A mummy one, a daddy one, a baba one, a crocodile one.' She looks up and runs towards me, scruffy yellow flowers tumbling from the turn-ups of her brother's jeans. 'I lub you mummy!' she shouts, wild hair, sticky hands. A shout to harvest and keep.

In the chair

I'm just back from having my teeth cleaned.  I keep running my tongue along sharp ridges instead of the smooth tartar that was there this morning.  I love going to the dentist.  I love the illusion of renewal.  Until the next bottle of wine I can believe that mine are teeth never furred with black coffee, fried eggs, fags.  When I was little, our dentist had a shark's jaw on his mantelpiece and as the chair tipped back you stared straight into the teeth of doom.  

My wisdom teeth were removed by a student at Guy's Hospital.  They hadn't lived up to their promise so they had to go.  From the chair I saw a magnificent sweep of the Thames down to Westminster.  It was like being stuck at the top of the London Eye with free drugs and a supply of that pink swill that tastes like Southern Comfort with a TCP chaser. Spit it out? A view like that makes you want to stay there drinking all afternoon.  

Someone I knew at university is now a dentist.  As a student he was horribly nervous which made his hands shake and sweat drip down his face.  When he was performing his first root canal his glasses slipped off his nose into the patient's mouth.  

This kind of story does nothing to relieve my husband of his own anxieties.  He used to drive 150 miles to see a reassuring dentist.  He is also a friend so at least they could go for a few beers afterwards. Actually Mr P has dreadful toothache today so it's his turn in the tilting chair tomorrow.   This morning he whacked his thumb whilst nailing wood to the wall.

  

'Wow, for a while that really took my mind off the tooth,' he said.  'My grandad often had toothache and he said when it got bad he'd just hit himself with a hammer.  It bloody works.'

The dentist we have now sticks postcards from across the world on the ceiling so you can see what exciting lives the other patients lead.  I was envying a picture of Verona today when the hygienist peered into my mouth, pulled up his mask and said 'It is the most appalling smell of rotting cabbage'.

'What?  Coming from my mouth?'

'Oh no, in the fields around Fakenham, I was finishing a sentence from before you came in.'  

His assistant, who is the wife of our plumber, started smiling. 'God, I thought you were being even less tactful than usual' she said  'like the time with the tomato seed.'  They both roared with laughter.  I guess some jokes are quite specialised.  

After scraping, chipping and whizzing the hygienist said 'Busy Mum of Three, you have a touch of gingivitus.'

For a moment I thought he was referring to my hair.

'Come in next week and I'll show you how to brush your teeth so you'll feel like this every day!'

Feel like what every day?  A woman with bleeding gums known as 'Busy Mum of Three'?  I must remember to book that in.

Lunch outside

A warm day.  The first sunblock day this year.  Ate beetroot soup and watercress outside in the sun.  Was going to read one of the instructional gardening books to see what could still be planted at this stage of the game but got side tracked by Derek Jarman and his sea bleached paradise.  Not too late for pumpkins - could have them ready for Hallowe'en apparently.

Spoke to the farmer who agreed to give us notice if they are spraying the field.  We can whisk the children away and take in the washing.  He was very accommodating so I am feeling less like Meryl Streep in Silkwood, at risk of contamination by invisible carcinogens.  Compared to where we were before, with the children's school playground just off the North Circular, I suspect breathing is safer now.  Still wouldn't want a face of herbicide but at least we can avoid it.  I think.

When we arrived last year the field was waving tides of green wheat.  This year it's oil seed rape which Dad hated.  But I am being hypnotised by the first sparks of yellow stoking the green to that blinding summer brightness.  Have been advised to drink cider vinegar or eat local honey to ward off hay fever but am tempting fate and not taking anything.  Maybe I don't have hayfever anymore? But rape usually gets right up my nose so will get some antihistamines in case.  I did buy some spiced apple vinegar but it smells like the nursing home where I was a tea girl.  Not a scent I'd choose to bottle.  

C and M coming to stay tomorrow.  Going to market for provisions and to pick them up from the station.  And maybe a swift half by the sea before showing them our new home. 

  

   

Sculthorpe Boulevard

Yesterday we went to a reclaimed timber yard to find floor boards for the holiday cottages. Heavy rain was muscling down all day.  The yard was on a desolate criss cross of tarmac and grass which used to be RAF Sculthorpe.  Lumbering bombers heaved into the sky from here in the Second World War.  Nan always called it 'The Last War'.  If only. Although she meant the war just finished of course, since the Cold War didn't count.  Too sneaky and no street parties.

Skeletons of half-demolished hangers and bunk houses haunted the empty paths.  We drove down one called 'Sculthorpe Blvd'.  It is big, it was the wars that got small.  Two men in acid green jackets were digging clumps of turf up by the side of the road.  By the black mountain of tyres we stopped to ask directions at a snack bar.  The snack bar was a small trailer where a wind-blasted woman was fighting with dirty blue tarpaulin, trying to weigh it down with rocks. She didn't know left from right but we followed her gestures and found the place.    

Enormous posts with sharpened ends, massive beams and piles of planks spiked with metal lay in the mud.  Welcome to the Somme.  We parked in a puddle and pulled Little Three out of her sleep into the gale. In an old hanger two men were cutting wood with giant circular saws.  One of them, in wet wool and a damp beard muttered "Picked a day for it". He might have been building an ark but in the meantime was using a portacabin.  I've run out of contact lenses so I was in my specs.  Useless in the rain, they steamed up when we went inside but I was holding Little Three so I couldn't wipe them.  Through my private fog I peered at floorboards, oak and pine, treated with wax, varnish or left splintery, ripped from derelict buildings.  Lucky Mr P can see and I hope he could tell the difference.  

Little Three examined some pages torn from a lads' mag and glued to the wall.  "A girl!" she shouted. "Girls!"  Someone dreaming of girls in red bikinis had built a Star Wars AT-AT Walker and put it on a filing cabinet.  

The guy in the beard and hat was a nice guy.  His firm had laid the floor of The Wiveton Bell using old boards from some other place. The first time we came to Norfolk The Wiveton Bell was our local for a week.  My feet were standing on those boards when I turned down a second gin and tonic, the first sign that Little Three was already with us, although we didn't know it then.    

We have found some boards at Homebase but think we'll go with these.  Less predictable - they will bring whatever they have at the time.  Inside some pine trees are streaks of sunset pink.  I like that they were cut and planed, laid and trodden and now they have been abandoned we will take them to use again.  We are buying our floors from the Battersea Trees' Home.  Without the bark.