alisongardiner1

Watching the Winter Olympics has proved to be an efficient way of working out which sports I will never play. Flinging myself headfirst down a narrow ice tube at 80 mph on a tin tea tray somehow doesn’t cut it. Neither will I whizz round on two knife edges, bum in air, aiming to perform a double Salchow while dressed in a hypothermia skirt. As these tiny skirts and skin-tight leotards are purely to pay homage to aesthetics, soon we will have ice hockey players in boardies and pads or downhill skiers in cocktail dresses, but perhaps not heels.

My first attempts at skating were as a child when rinks were rare. Years later, in Canada, we decided to skate in the New Year on a lake. Here I discovered that, astonishingly, lakes are not flat; less astonishingly, they do not have rails. I also found that although all Canadians possess skates, they do not all have my size feet. Found out what tenderfoot meant, though.

My husband thinks that we should try the two-man bob, or one-man-and-his-wife-bob.  I can imagine the pair of us flying down together, him steering, me perfectly positioned for backseat driving. ‘Look out! Ice wall…slow down…we’re losing: speed up… turn right at next bend… sorry, I mean left … careful, check for pedestrians… are we there yet?’

My Russian is improving, so I now know the Russian for hockey puck and cheers (Zdorov’ye!) Should I continue to watch the Winter Olympics, I expect I’ll bank the words snow, jump and another dodgy judging decision.

I mourn the loss of some of the demonstration sports that could have been part of the current Olympics, such as skijoring, where a skier is pulled along by dogs. They must make the course pretty boring: no trees or walls which have been recently been peed on. Dogs less than 25lbs are rarely used, so our neighbour’s shi-tzu would be de-selected, although my cat would probably get through. Fantastic sport; your co-competitor won’t argue back, nor fight to keep the medal. The downside is that he won’t pay for his own drinks either.

Winter pentathlon was demonstrated in 1948; composed of cross-country skiing, shooting, downhill skiing, fencing and horse riding. Riding on ice? What did this consist of?  Dressage? Horses sliding around with beautifully plaited tails and reindeer horns strapped on to add a wintry effect. Flat racing? On a course without corners, with a long skid run at the end, then crash barriers. Perhaps they had special horseshoes with little blades on them. Horse jumping? Probably not, as landing would be perpetually tricky, even without equine shoeblades.

Fencing on snow? Dressed in traditional white, fencers might have had a hard time finding their opponent on a snowy background, although the sliding and random poking farce could have been quite entertaining. Maybe the modern day luge owes it’s existence to fencing if a slightly deaf official was asked to put on a lunge competition.

The only sport I’m tempted by is curling. Embarrassingly, it’s not my dreams of Olympic gold that slide me towards the curling piste. I just fancy playing a sport with one slippy and one grippy shoe so I can walk or glide along the ice alternately. And not die.

A scale of likelihood of me taking up any other of the sports performed at the Winter Olympics would range between Desperately unlikely to Me? Oh, come on. I wouldn’t risk life – nor limb – trusting equipment that could give disastrously at any minute. Lost bolt or screw? Kapow! Wire breaks? Crash! A frayed knot? Splat.

So do I have Olympic dreams? ‘Fraid not.

Zdorov’ye!

alisongardiner1

15/3/14

This week I had a go at glassblowing at Stuart Wiltshire Glass in Weymouth: completely perfect on a cold English day to be cuddled up near a warm furnace or three. I thought that I’d probably have a natural advantage as I once had the lung capacity of a six-foot, 18-year-old male. I can’t imagine what I thought I might be blowing with that capacity. A life-size model of a whale? Copper?

My companions were a charming schoolmaster and a seven-year-old boy. We were given the choice of blowing two whisky tumblers, a vase or a bowl. The young one and I had chosen the tumblers and he was due to go before me. What, I thought in mild panic, if aforesaid child blows much better glasses than I do? Should a seven-year-old even be blowing whisky tumblers? Surely a football would have been more suitable? I was very tempted to choose exactly the same colours for my glasses as his, so that if my nightmare was realised, I could claim a radical mixup in the cooling chamber. I later discovered that Stuart intended to post mine, doubtless a cunning plan to avoid my swiping somebody else’s. It’s probably also to make sure that the comparison between my virgin works and his beautiful ones in the workshop wasn’t too unfavourable. Clearly he feels that his customers have feelings of glass, easily broken.

The workshop had three furnaces at one end, with an enormous open door at the other, such that March could whistle straight through the entrance. Facing the furnaces, I began to feel like a salmon fillet in a frying pan; pink and slightly singed on the front, but with my back still cold. Yes, that’s how I cook…sigh…

Along with all the beautifully blown glasses and other objets d’art was a box labelled smashed glass. Reverse recycling; we all get rid of old glass, he sends for it. Maybe I’ll send him a box as a thank you. I can use some of it for my next Christmas present glassblowing experience. At this rate it will only be another two years before I have a set of six glasses.

One of the mysteries was why the yellow bits of glass (frit) added to clear glass made it go red. The other mystery is how you get into glassblowing. Presumably it’s a lightbulb moment, but where most people just see the light, the embryo glassblower wants to blow the bulb.

After we’d collected the glass on the pipe, Stuart started off the blowing bit. He blew down the metal pipe, put his thumb over the end and waited. After several seconds the blob of glass in the end of the tube puffed up, presumably owing to the expansion of the warm air within the glass. But why was there a delay? Physics should tell me, but I’m not sure I can be bothered to ask it. I should know, really, as I have three Physics A-levels. This sounds as if I have Physics, Advanced Physics and Yet More Physics, but it’s actually the result of my retaking it twice. This moved my grade up from that’s pretty poor to not bad, but still could do better and finally to Ah! That’s more like it.

 In the end I resorted to Google, putting in the question ‘why does it take several seconds for the glass to expand when you blow down a long metal glassblowers’ tube’, worried that it might just reply ‘why are you so verbose?’ It spat out this answer:

The delay is caused by a temperature differential in the glass. Near the pipe, the glass is cooled by the pipe head which is 1,000 degrees cooler than the glass. Some say the bubble is formed simply from the pressure of the initial breath, some say that air trapped in the blowpipe is heated by the hot glass and expands, forming the bubble. As gasses heat, they expand in accordance with “Charles’ Law.”

Yeah, right. Got it now. There is a problem with Google, though. You then have to look up Charles’ Law, then Charles etc and then it’s midnight and your children are starving.

That week, a 91-year-old had come to learn glassblowing which I thought was extremely sporting of her. Not many antiques are willing to wield six-foot metal tubes, poking them into glass puddles at about 1400°F, or face a furnace, clad only in indoor clothing and sunglasses. I imagine if she was open-minded enough to do this she has probably also got a computer, so might be reading this now. Yes dear, I’m talking to you… you with the slightly irregular rose vase… put it up to font 20…there you go… remember it all now?… thought you’d died and gone the wrong way…no, you don’t come back from there, especially with a rose vase.

The obvious extension of such an experience is to have a home furnace. The enormous advantage would be that if you had people coming round in a few hours and realised that you were short of a few glasses, or a bud vase, you’d be able to bang out a few. No peanut bowl? No problem. Doubtless the kids would want to use it as a chocolate blowing outfit in a bid to make their own Easter eggs. I’d want to use it at down times for heating croissants and Danish pastries. People might then start to wonder why my whisky glasses had flecks of pastry and pecan nuts embedded in them.

Was it fun? Yes, I loved it; totally blown away.

Glassblowing experience at Stuart Wiltshire in Weymouth http://stuartwiltshireglass.co.uk/

 Alison Gardiner March 2014

My husband has just had his second hip replaced, ending his foray into surgery as he’s run out of available hips. Well, more accurately, limped out of available hips. After the operation, they said that if he could walk and do stairs on crutches he could leave hospital. They may as well have put the words red rag and bull in the same sentence.  Armed with a high pain threshold, an excellent surgeon, superb anaesthetist and a large dollop of sheer cussedness, he was out of hospital within 48 hours. Not so much in-patient as impatient.

Hip replacements come with all sorts of delightful extras, some which were left behind at the hospital, like the catheter, and others which followed us home, like the raised toilet seat, regular abdominal injections and crutches. The anti-clot stockings cannot be put on by the patient so you need a serf, slave or wife. Having a shot at putting on the support stockings requires the determination and strength of a shot-putter. So far I’ve discovered 16 different techniques with which to not put them on. By the time he doesn’t need them any more, I will be at Edisonian levels of repeated failure. I’ll be so frustrated by then, I might be driven to reinvent the light bulb. It would probably be easier.

Hopalong  is not allowed to drive for six weeks. It’s January. It’s England. The windy South coast. Apparently it’s OK for him to walk two miles in a freezing force nine gale, stumbling over bits of rough pavement, at risk from cyclists, cars, (although luckily, not ice cream vans), overtaken by little old ladies on zimmer frames, yet not fine for him to sit at the wheel of his cosy automatic, tootling around the district, whizzing past polar gear shops. Currently, I’m dropping him wherever he wants to go, so running a male delivery service. I expect that he believes it’s first-class male, whereas I think of it more as damaged goods. I guess either is fine as long as his hip wasn’t classed as ‘opened in error’.

Not being able to balance without crutches has a distinct downside, as he’s not able to open a wine bottle unless I lean him up against a counter and take his crutches away. Yet the cost is worth the gain for such situations.

The very big upside is that he’s had to take on quite a lot of tasks that normally plop into my ethereal in-tray. After several days of his tidying the study, I’ve discovered that the carpet is pale green and there’s a fireplace at the back of the room. The main concern is that he may switch into male non-filtration tidying, essentially taking the contents of the cupboards and dropping them directly into the bin. Efficient, although it might cause a few problems later.

‘Mobile charger?’

‘Gone.’

‘Sunglasses?’

‘Gone.’

 ‘Cat?’

‘Aaahhh…’

 I’m hoping he’ll continue to enjoy new and exciting experiences like yesterday’s virgin attempt at sewing on name tapes.

The other upside is that he’s now symmetrical, with the scar on each side. I now no longer have to worry about whether he gets run over by a bus because at least he’s neat.

Once he’s recovered, we’ll throw a fancy dress party to celebrate his new pain-free status. The theme? Hippy.

Peace and harmony, cool cats.

Alison Gardiner 2014

My daughter was asked to write a sonnet for homework. I hereby discovered that I am not entirely cut out to write deep and meaningful stuff. My mind is inevitably drawn to the trite. It’s wot I write. She was clearly sunk before the words ‘So can you help?’ had left her mouth.

She said that there should be a twist in a sonnet, which was news to me. I had thought that one only had to bat on about roses, love, loss or death of a faithful anaconda, not realising that it was necessary to throw in a dead body or a hilarious banana skin mishap. Or a quince eating challenge. Well, I haven’t got a GCSE in English, just an Oh level.

Part of the problem of writing poetry with a child is that they seem to think the whole point is the rhyme and that the sense of the poem is of secondary, or even tertiary importance, coming somewhere after the rhythm.

‘What rhymes with maraschino?’

‘Put in cherry, child of mine, and then you can rhyme it with very, berry or something a little more tricky, like merry.’

I expected we’d end up with something to the effect of:

My favourite pie is ripe, red cherry

I eat it when I’m on a ferry

I began to feel echoes of Dr Seuss floating around inside my head:

Writing poems should be easy

But rhyming makes me feel quite queasy

It’s clear you must be pretty thick

Persisting if it makes you sick.

 But in your brain the lines get stuck.

 Goodbye; I’ll leave. I’m off to chuck.

My point is proved, it must be said,

I’ll have to stick to prose inst… because I really can’t hack all this rhyming stuff. Pass the bucket, Sophie.

In trying to lever some sort of twist into a sonnet without putting too much strain on the classical bent, I suggested that she considered adding either that the murderer wasn’t the butler or that the longing and yearning to be with some empathetic soul would turn out to be about her cat. It was at this point that I lost it slightly and, trying to stick to child mode, suggested that she could end with:

I love every one of your beautiful whiskers

Even though you do not smell of hibiscus

My love is thick; in fact it’s really quite viscous

I thought I was doing brilliantly in my paedi-write attempt; it almost rhymed, had a trace of rhythm but made absolutely no sense. Sophie coldly declined to use this, so I tried again:

Of my imagination you are not a figment

Your fur is so black it’s a very strong pigment.

Eyes streaming, bladder control in danger, I felt I’d cracked it. I checked out Sophie’s face.

Apparently not.

While I had been indulging in my dross attack, she had been writing quietly. It turns out I had underestimated my child:

 I asked my mum what rhymes with maraschino;

 She said to use cherry, but then what does she know?

The end, my friend.

Heave

Alison Gardiner 2014

I love the fact that something can happen recurrently and each time it happens we are surprised. This happens with English weather. Every year there are leaves on the railway lines in autumn, then snow, causing cancellations or delays. Every year the railway companies are astonished.

This happened to me within the last week. No, not leaves or snow preventing me functioning normally; surprised about repeated reality. January guilt had struck my sports club, causing confusion and disarray. Yes, it happens every year and no, I should not have been caught out.

Normally we do static cycle training on a Saturday morning; class only half-full usually, so we don’t usually bother booking. Last week the place was absolutely wall-to-wall with people, but unfortunately not so with bicycles. Although on the reserve list, we appeared to be about number 35 and 36, so, having decided against bike sharing, we gave up and went to the gym.

The gym was fairly solidly packed with people; also packed with fairly solid people. If club-level January guilt gets any worse, the gym will become so full that it won’t be possible to exercise at all. Otherwise they’ll need to have an instructor standing at the front shouting ‘jump’ so we all leap together or ‘kick left’; a bit like sardines in a Zumba class. This would have the added advantage of making the place so hot and sweaty that it would act like a built-in sauna. Presumably the smell would be awful enough to put people off eating for days afterwards, so doubly helpful for weight loss.

Not that I object everybody else indulging in January guilt. I myself am a fully paid-up member. So far, to prove this, I have bought a bike and lost two pounds. Low-calorie me did cause a problem when we went to a restaurant recently. Nothing on the menu stuck out as an obvious healthy option (ok, it was an Italian restaurant). In fact the only obvious low-calorie option was the menu itself which I assumed, as it was made of paper, would have been high in fibre also.

It would have been really useful if they had listed the calories on the menu, somewhere to one side to avoid confusion with the prices (calories probably big numbers!). Having thought about it, I felt that many people might not want a menu with calories on, yet it would be very unsubtle to have to ask for a calorie listed version.

‘May I have the one with all of the… cough… extra information?’

‘Certainly, Madam. You mean the Fuller Figures version, I presume?’

Instead of having to ask, the other option would be to be automatically weighed and height scanned on walking across the doormat. Once your body mass index had been calculated, you would be handed a normal menu (BMI less than 25), with calories listed (BMI 25 to 30). If you had a BMI of greater than 30, you would be handed one with only celery listed; grated, chopped, Julienne or on toast. Not subtle, but a reminder that January guilt was still in full flow.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that we repeatedly make the same one. I’m not entirely sure when it’s respectable to give up on one’s resolutions, which unfortunately means that when I finish writing this, I’ll feel compelled to go off the gym, if I can get in. Presumably there is a sort of natural wastage, an attrition rate, a bit like radioactivity, so that a certain number of resolutions get dropped naturally as time goes on. I imagine it’s only the SAS of the resolution front who manage to get through to the end of the year unbroken. My main aim now is to get through January without breaking my resolutions, so at least 1/12 of the year has been respectably faced. If I make it through the whole year, after awarding myself honourary SAS status, I will have to think of a new resolution. The way I feel now, my new resolution will be to make no resolutions at all.

The children have no such problems with January guilt and have just turned out solid gold performances in a squash tournament, both winning their sections. Now, that’s the best sort of January gilt.

Alison Gardiner 2014

Until recently I had believed that our cat was monochrome. Black, jet, ebony, deep beetle; call it what you will. Not a hint of tabby, nor even one shade of grey. However, viewing him recently, basking on the window sill, sun streaming through his fur, I saw that although he is black at the roots of his body hair, he is dark gingery red to the tip of his tail.

My immediate reaction was obvious; he must have dyed his fur. The only other option was that I had been wrong about his hair colour for eight years; clearly that would have been ridiculous. Yet if he had dyed his fur, it would seem more logical for him to have gone for something a little more dramatic, perhaps becoming entirely blonde, or possibly shaving the fur from his face and given himself a green Mohican. Row of tiny bright blue ponytails down his back might have been quite attractive, or, considering the time of year, he might have gone for tinsel hair extensions.

At the very least, I would have expected him to dye his (very aging) few white whiskers out of pride. Pride, however, would have suggested leonine and although he is upsettingly good at hunting small rodents, I don’t quite see him being able to bring down an elk. Or reindeer, worst thought. There was a large life-expired rat on the patio on Christmas Day but considering the balance of probability, it’s more likely that one of the runners of the sleigh got the rodent than our arthritic cat.

Having to de-rat the patio did make an interesting start to Christmas day. Or, more specifically, to my husband’s. Knowing that the ghost of an infestation (hopefully someone else’s and preferably working solo) lay outside my kitchen window, I instantly dropped all vestiges of feminism and decided that rodents with rigor mortis were definitely a male preserve; rat jam didn’t appeal to me.

I began to wonder if I had been foolish in thinking that Charliecat might have taken a fur-changing decision, as having his fur dyed blonde would have prevented him from efficiently undertaking his favourite current pastime, which is lying under the Christmas tree, disguised as a dark shapeless mass.

Until Christmas Day we had brightly coloured packages on a red background with an adjacent small furry pool of darkness. Present placement was elevated to an art, requiring leaving enough space for his favourite area, just under the low-lying fairy lights, also for them not to be stacked on top of each other or they could fall, possibly breaking him or the presents. This might have meant spending the entire of Christmas Day with a cat who smelled of Chanel No 5.

Far from dissuading him from taking up his present position, we encouraged him, as his previous favourite spot was the bottom step of the staircase. Terrified that somebody will come bundling down and not see him, I have explained to him repeatedly that this is an extremely Bad Thing and that he should pick his resting place more carefully lest this should become his final resting place.

Clearly he isn’t listening, which is odd, because he understands other words such as ‘food’, ‘breakfast’, ‘come’ and ‘Charliecat.’ I’m sure that he has specifically selected out certain words such as ‘no’; also entire sentences such as ‘stop yowling; I’m trying to get the lid off as fast as I can but the ruddy thing is stuck.’

So I must cast my vote. I’ve either been wrong for eight years and he genuinely is a polychromatic cat or he’s taken to dying his hair. I asked him bluntly just now and he answered me with a toss of the head. So it’s dyed. Because he’s worth it.

Alison Gardiner 2013

Okay, now I’m feeling Christmassy. Not so up til now, despite ordering turkey, buying presents, wrestling with wrapping paper and sending out roughly 200 cards. Yes, 200. I really should cross off Persephone who we met in Majorca 16 years ago, my mother’s friends and people who never send us one, but each year I lose the will to prune the list scientifically, so just keep writing. I suspect half the intended victims of my Christmas cheer have moved. Got that bit cracked though- we don’t put on a return address, so they can’t all flood back through our letterbox. Yet it’s gutting to think of my beautiful cards sitting in a morose heap on the post office floor with return to sender hastily scribbled on them. Perhaps we should bung on a return address for next year, then see if 199 reappear.

I didn’t even feel Christmassy when writing our round robin newsletter, which is a riot to write; great to look back at our family romp through the year. The only bit which has anything at all to do with why we’re writing it are the last few words: Merry Christmas to everyone. Might save a lot of time to write only those four words next time. Or is that why they invented cards?

Today, I feel Christmassy, because the tree has gone up. Even as I write, I can see my beautiful green spruce, bedecked in red and gold with three sets of lights, smelling wonderful. For clarity- it’s the tree bedecked etc, not me. The effect would be better if the hall wasn’t strewn with empty bauble boxes, non-functioning lights and broken decorations lying on a carpet of pine needles. Nonetheless, junk aside, it now looks and smells like Christmas.

We all approach Christmas differently. A friend of mine, who is an excellent cook, had a week off work and said that she would spend most of it cooking. I can’t imagine what she will be making. Even if I made everything from scratch, by three o’clock on the first day I’d have finished all the things that I know how to make. Her Christmas must be much more elaborate than ours, doubtless with her mince pies, stuffing, cake and pudding all home-made. I must mention to her sometime that all of these can come from the internet, with one click, pre-made. Marvellous.

On the 25^th, she even serves home-made Christmas pudding after lunch. I broke this tradition years ago when I found that after Christmas lunch they couldn’t squish it in. My friend says that her family carefully pace themselves through lunch, so that they have a Christmas pudding shaped gastric space left. Both my sons are over 6 foot, so the words careful and pacing are not ones that would naturally be applied to mealtimes. Though they eat big, they speak less. Succinct, my boys, at times when they’re not being voluble.

Recently when the register was being taken at my son’s school, his teacher asked for everybody to reply with something Christmassy. Most people replied with ‘Ho, ho, ho’ or ‘Jingle all the way’ etc. When he got my son, he called,

‘Charlie.’

‘Present.’

Now I must trail off to de-needle the front hall, bin the brokens, stagger to the basement clutching a ton of empty boxes, then make a few mince pies. Or maybe I’ll just gaze at my tree and send for the food.

Click.

Alison Gardiner 2013

Attending an intermediate life-support training day yesterday made me feel somewhat better that I was no longer ‘basic’, although it made me hanker for ‘advanced’. Yet to achieve this upper level I would have to spend two days attempting to resuscitate plastic dolls. Not only an excessive time input, but rather depressing, as I’ve discovered that you can never revive the dummies, however hard you work on them.

Way back, what we practised on were much more sophisticated pieces of kit:  living human beings, or at least recently living. We read the how to books on resus; the practical learning came when anyone was unfortunate enough to throw themselves onto our mercy; or rather more accurately, collapse onto our mercy. Years later, we moved on to very basic plastic dummies, such as the ones being used when I used to examine for the British Red Cross. These ones didn’t have a pulse, decent throat to puff oxygen down nor changeable rhythms, like the bodies beforehand or the sophisticated dummies available now. They simply had a mouth at the front for you to blow into and holes at the back to let the air out. Some of the people I was examining felt that these dummies were very realistic. I asked one candidate what they’d do at a real arrest if they tried to inflate the chest but blowing in the mouth produced no rise of the chest. He replied that he’d turn the body over and blow in the little air holes in the neck. Another described the circulation as going out of the heart, down one leg, then back up the other. Even in a Harry Potter world this would be tricky.

The CPR rhythm is the same as Staying Alive by the Bee Gees and Nellie the Elephant – but you need to stop after counting 30, so you can get your two rescue breaths in. If, while singing and pummelling, you go past ‘trump, trump, trump’ and have launched into ‘The head of the tribe was calling…’  your patient will become an unfortunate shade of navy. Oddly enough, frowned on.

One of the ladies of the course had an interesting little dancelike wiggle as she commanded the proceedings from the defibrillator box. Add this to my singing Nellie the Elephant, tap time on the oxygen cylinder and we’d have a fantastic rhythm going that we’d use about once every five years; more only if we were really unlucky.

Our ILS trainer had clearly attended a lot of arrests, including one on a plane when the man next to him arrested. Unfortunate for him, but distinctly lucky for the other bloke, who survived. The moral of the story is to choose your aerial companions carefully. Only ever sit next to someone who’s humming Staying Alive.

They train us in teams so that we’ll work well together. As luck would have it, I was trained with x-ray, which is three buildings away in the basement. If one my patients arrests, I’ll have to manhandle their carcase onto a trolley, run across a road and two car parks, down a corridor, shove the trolley into a lift, whistle round a corner to find the rest of my team. Pressing the emergency buzzer instead might avoid my trolley-flight induced cardiac arrest half-way across the second car park. Probably fatal, as no-one would understand me as I croaked out with my final self-initiated breath that I needed Nellie the Elephant.

Perhaps I will consider the next level of resus. I’m hoping for useful advanced skills like trolley sprinting, three part harmony or how to roll patients over to get to the three little holes.

Alison Gardiner 2013

Turkey: land of dreams, history, honey, pistachios and, as it turns out, wasps and volleyball. We have just spent a week there basking in warmth, also smugness that there were storms at home. My worry that the house might now have a tree-shaped hole in the roof lasted for several seconds until I decided that if our roof had blown off someone might have mentioned it somewhere, on Facebook perhaps, which is not so much a social medium, as a social enormous. Liking it might have been a pragmatic step too far. I’d need a dislike or a really very cross button for a negative roof situation.

We were taken to our island by a boat which had been named to harmonise with the sea, history and its abilities. My vision of Neptune is that he sits at the bottom of the sea surrounded by mermaids, thus the Neptune Express did not fill me with terrific confidence. Luckily, the name turned out to be totally erroneous: Neptune-free, we slowly approached the island, wind in our faces, beer in hand, stretched on a sun lounger with the memory of the microscopic legroom of seat 21A fading fast. The hoi polloi had found our resort; Vladimir Putin was spotted a couple of times, though neither on a windsurfer nor waterskiing. He was walking around, presumably in transit to Roman Abramovich’s yacht which was moored less than a kilometre away from us. My son and his friend kayaked out to the yacht, returning with stories of how friendly the crew were, although failing to offer them either tea or muffins. I indulged in a range of activities, especially lunch, but including aquarobics, which in the warm Mediterranean is completely lovely. Many of the ladies were rather well endowed in the bust department. Standing chest-deep, we created small tsunamis during the jumping exercises. We then tried water Zumba (presumably Wumba); fun although damper, as there was lots of arm flapping, soaking the until now dry upper third of your body and everyone else’s within 2 metres of your wingspan. After a shower to desalinate, I took to a sun lounger with a gossip magazine, reading about Kanye West’s son North. One has to sustain the all-encompassing hope that Kanye has no more than two further children, South West and East West, as West West would be ridiculous. Perhaps the fourth could be North by North West or South-East West. Or Go West? East meets West West? I’m sorry for anyone whose last name is Pole. Only two possibilities, although to have the surname of Bear could be fun, with Polar, Yogi and Born only scratching the surface. When we hit the market, it turned out that my bargaining skills had faded. At my first attempt to buy sunglasses, they lead with a bid of 11 Turkish lira (about £4). My ‘gosh, that’s reasonable’ part of the brain swept the ‘always haggle in a market’ section into a black hole. Paid 11 lira. Ashamed of my zero-rated bargaining power, I was tempted to lie to my husband about it. ‘They opened at 50, but I manoeuvred brilliantly…’ I improved on my next venture, by about 10%. However, with a few more carrier bags of experience, I began to pay about 50%. This doesn’t mean that I spent less; I still came home cleaned out and close to the excess baggage rate. Home now, washing machine in overdrive, brain in neutral, just calculated my body’s excess baggage: not good. Still, it could be worse; the roof’s intact and with my de-rusted negotiating skills, I might be able to do only 50 % of my work on Monday. Ok, 65%. Last offer.

alisongardiner1

November 2013

Alison Gardiner 2013

Last night I attended an agents’ party kindly organised by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, British Isles. I love SCBWI_BI and think it’s a completely fabulous organisation, but do wish they’d chosen their acronym to reflect less of who we are and more of something pronounceable.

This particular event was held in London; with 100 of us, who were lucky enough to get a ticket, with 13 agents attending. Maths has never been my strong point, but even I was able to work out that statistically I might leave with 0.13 of an agent. It wasn’t a lot, probably only their left foot, but it would be considerably more than the nought I had walked in with.

Having arrived spectacularly early, I needed to make a few running repairs, so I pulled in at a local hostelry and bought a drink as an excuse for using their facilities. The first toilet break was simple enough: change of shoes, hair brushing and mascara. Believing that a queue forming outside, people cross-legged and anxious, I cracked under the strain of trying to get everything done in one hit, exited the cubicle, reasoning that two loo visits covered by the same pot of tea almost smacked of economy, halving the cost per square of loo paper.

I found an enormous queue at the counter, which included three people who clearly had no idea how to choose a cup of coffee. Seems simple enough? Apparently not. It began to approach farce levels, played out on a backdrop of muffins, with two harassed baristas as unwilling stooges.

I ended up sharing my table with a charming young man who looked after my cup while I made my second toilet foray. I decided to name my unknown tea-guarder after the establishment we were in. Costa should be extremely grateful that we met where we did, not the Slug and Lettuce or Annette’s Diner.

One of the authors present at the event had dressed for the era in which she writes, the 1940s and looked thoroughly charming. As I write adventure fantasies set on a mythical island and detective stories set in modern times, my choice would be to dress like a wizard, an enormous fierce lizard-like creature or a shot victim. Head dripping blood might be dramatic but is not perhaps my best look. It would save two neatening up loo visits though as either way dishevelled would be de rigueur.

A publisher friend once said that all the publishers who turned down Harry Potter meet once a month in a pub in London to drown their sorrows and whine. Presumably it’s called The Potterless Fest. Doubtless a legend, but still a good story. If any of you are reading this, I can recommend somewhere with decent drinks and an extremely capacious dressing room with a handy white seat for one’s handbag.

I met several completely charming agents who were human, friendly, interesting. They all presented fluently, replying to the floor with extraordinarily helpful comments. Interestingly, the panel presentation seemed to be a request for submissions, which was sweet of them, as clearly in this market it’s them choosing us not vice-versa. I must now send a letter to see whether an agreement to read my work was just a canapé high or whether my work will be read, with perhaps even representation offered. After all, I don’t need an agent to accept all of me, just the bit above my neck and my typing hand: about 13% by my maths.

alisongardiner1

 October 2013

Alison Gardiner 2013