Christmas 1998

Stratton,
Cirencester,
Gloucs. GL7 2HT.
U.K.

5.12.98.

Howdy Folks!

There is an American author who starts all his short stories with the phrase “It has been another quiet week in Lake Woebegon.....” and goes on to relate some bizarre goings-on in the little town........

It has been another quiet year in Albion St............hmmmm! This has been the year of the wildlife explosion in the shed......and I mean WILD LIFE! (gulp!)........the dreaded horde!....... TEENAGERS!!!!!!! (there! I feel much better now that I’ve mentioned the....“T” word!). Other people may have fairies down the bottom of their garden, but we have teenagers....well we may have both, it’s not polite to enquire!!!........ Sounds of raucous laughter and ribald comments float across the æther (and the smell of substances best not thought about too much!). Opening the door into this vision of hell you can feel the lung cancer creeping up on you..... cough!..... cough!....... wheeze! I guess the shed is no longer a winter repository for red spider mites! Clunk! Thump! (Sounds of smoked corpses raining down from the roof!......the tramp of exiting tiny feet.......the pinched little pale faces clustered outside the front door.........and that’s only Rupert’s friends!).

As you can imagine, this has also been the year of the dis-satisfied parents - if Rupert gets any A-levels it will be a miracle. Rupert has wildly inflated dreams of making it big in the music industry, and so ends up doing as little college work as he can get away with. He still plays gigs with ‘Practical Fantasy’, but since everyone is doing A-levels this year, enthusiasm is waning somewhat among the harder working members of the band. So, since Rupert seems to know lots of musical people, he went to a recording studio in Bristol last month to play the drums for this ‘signed’ band called Bug. They appear to only have three permanent members of the band and if they have gigs they draft in various friends to play the drums and sing some of the songs. This was a single they were recording, and they appear to be signed up to do another single and an album. Of course, all Rupert ever works at now is improving his drumming technique and that of his bass guitar - ho! hum! youth today .......... stereotypical parental moan..........he’ll never amount to much, etc. etc. (This probably means he’ll be a millionaire before he’s 30, and can keep his parents in the style to which they’d really like to become accustomed! - wishful thinking, Joy, old gel!!). Rupert, as you may have detected, is somewhat easily distracted, and his latest girlfriend Emma is such a distraction. She dresses in the ‘gothic’ mode - totally in black, including the hair and make-up. Rupert has dyed his long hair black, tries to wear black (fails owing to lack of cash and a dislike of shopping) and occasionally wears black make-up (******! It takes so ****** long to apply!). I think he might be pleased with the black lip-stick Santa is leaving in his stocking!!!

Tamsin also has a boyfriend (probably the third this year - I’ve lost count). Aiden seems extremely normal compared with Emma (short hair, never wears T-shirts, loves exercising ...........zzzzzz Èzzzzz! Bob just fell over in a dead faint!). Despite all that he’s a nice chap - he almosy whisks the plates away before you’ve finished eating! (Yours truly falls over in dead faint!). Tamsin now has extremely short hair - it’s been growing shorter as the year progressed. I think this was originally a reaction to not being able to fit it inside the goal-keeping helmet in hockey - the irony is that she has now given up playing out of school hockey. Her life seems to revolve around music, especially now that she is a member of the Gloucestershire Youth Jazz Orchestra or GYJO as it’s known to its friends. She’s very proud of this, even though she only plays 4th. trumpet - but she’s convinced that she’ll be promoted to 3rd. trumpet in the summer as lots of people are leaving to go to University (dead men’s shoes?). This has thrust her into the evil grown-up world of fags and booze down at the pub after rehearsals on Mondays - I’m often in bed before she gets home! Well and truly the jazz trumpeter’s lifestyle!

Because Tamsin is the only worthwhile trumpet player at school (she says!) she never seems to get any experience doing percussion, so we took her to see Evelyn Glennie as an inspiration. Contemporary music is definitely a visual experience - the two percussionists with the London Sinfonietta were obviously extremely fit individuals who not only rushed around like peas on drums (boo!), but played such interesting instruments (?!?) as large sharp axe on wood block (chips flying everywhere!), cane on pillow (thwack - ouch! - brings back painful memories), and banjo for non-banjo players (strum! strum! plink! plink!). Evelyn played superbly. Her encore was a 6-minute piece of drum rolls played only on the snare drum - everything was a blurr - you could not see the drum sticks! Having said that I think there were only 3 pieces that I would want to listen to again - you definitely have to be there. I’m sure Tamsin’s music teachers might get a little worried if she took an axe to school (No! no! It really is for percussion - honest!).

Tamsin seems to have taken to singing in a big way recently. We made the mistake of saying that we didn’t think her voice was particularly strong, whereupon she entered the school talent contest singing “I don’t know how to love him”, from Jesus Christ Superstar and sang her heart out! A strange vision, the like of which we had not seen before, appeared on stage looking so unlike our Tamsin, with hair cut really short, heavily gelled, lots of eye make-up, dark purple lip-stick, and the strangest combination of clothes - not unlike the prostitute she was supposed to be. She had ATTITUDE!! A gutsy performance. Now she wants to audition for the jazz singer’s job in GYJO - as well as the trumpet. Is there no stopping her? Actually, she did manage the final in the talent contest, but the winners were a couple of really talented dancers - you just knew they would win, they were superb!

This year has seen our greatest assault on the interesting featurettes left to us by the former owners of our house. At least, I think it was our idea.... Anyway, several blokes appeared one morning and started to knock the back wall of the house about, wrenching out the very lovely(?!!) (but totally misplaced) patio door and cunningly sliding in a panelled door and sash window, claiming that we’d asked them to do it and presenting us with a very large bill at the end. Despite pleas from the National Museum of Tatty Kitchen Units, we have consigned many prospective exhibits to the skip and are fitting-up the last battered hunks of chipboard for a similar open-topped steel coffin, as and when the resident carpenter (guess who?) conjures up another miracle using only seven cubic metres of pine, a few screws, and many loud and rhythmic incantations (oh god, I’ve cut it 2mm short again.... What was this bit for??? Oh ****! the drill’s wandered off again! Where did I leave the tape-measure?? Snarl, snarl etc). ... We have now got a brand new sink unit (I wasn’t asked to attempt this - phew!) though this does have a tiny flaw - no work-top - that’s scheduled in phase 37 (or is it 43?). The master plan was walled-in during phase 11. Perhaps I shouldn’t have inscribed it into the plaster..... Our wildlife population has crashed (teenagers aside) and we are left only with a tiny but determined ant colony who are at this moment locked in unequal combat with Tamsin for the last of the honey in the food cupboard. The black fungus population has stabilized at last year’s high levels due to the re-positioning of a radiator (they just lurv that warmth!).

Apart from the extravagance on house improvements, we have also splashed (wait for it!) out on a HOLIDAY this year. This took the form of a sustained attack on the bridges and locks of the Monmouth and Brecon Canal with an eerily-quiet (electric), 4-ton blunt instrument. Faster than a speeding snail, we journeyed the 22 miles up to Brecon in peaceful stages between pubs, gazing at the beautiful scenery, panicking at the approach of obstacles (boats, bridges, pieces of weed, twigs) and having deep philosophic conversations with sheep in the rain ......baaa! ..........baaa! .........baaa!! (loudly!). The Irving family boldly went where the Irving family had never boldly gone before, boldly! Deep into the bowels of the earth ventured the intrepid family, shrugging off the encircling gloom that encircled us, smugly congratulating ourselves on the boat’s straight course ............crunch! Aaaaagghh! Who moved the ******* wall! Cunningly the engineers who built this tunnel had decided to liven things up by building what is known in the trade as a dogleg ........crunch! clunk! clunk! crunch! scratch! scrape! ....and other equally interes ting noises, until finally we emerged into the sunlight (minus several layers of paint!). Locks were exciting! The adrenalin flowed ever faster when various lurid tales were told to us of the extra hazards posed by battery acid when electric boats sank in locks. I wouldn’t say we were nervous wrecks ..........gulp! You do get such a thrill when you’re at the top of a staircase of locks .........What! I’ll never get the boat into that small space ............Stop! you’re hitting the gates! ......... More power! We’ll get stuck on the sill! As I said, locks were exciting! Tamsin spent her days writing to her (then current) boyfriend, and then getting us to yell at her down below when a postbox was coming up so that she could leap off the boat, post it, and leap back on - life is that slow (or tedious - if you’re a shopaholic 14 year old). Actually they both enjoyed the holiday, and wanted to go again ........faint! Cynics might say this was due to the interesting games of pool in the pub of an evening .........After congratulating ourselves on surviving for a whole week (apart from this strange rolling feeling I felt when on dry land) an added excitement (for me, anyway!) was, amongst the eerie quiet of the wharf-side, a sudden loud SPLOOSH! Knowing that 3 members of the crew were not on the boat at the time, I had my suspicions ..........Emerging on to the deck, I saw (not very well as it was dark) a flailing mud-covered creature emerging from the deep (well, the chest-deep!), and surrounded by boxes floating away in all directions. Once the bedraggled creature had struggled on deck (thank goodness the spectacles and car keys landed in a floating box!) we surveyed the damage. Poor old Bob had hit his head on the wharf, but was O.K. after having had a shower and several cups of tea. That 200-year-old smelly mud got everywhere - we had to carefully take everything out of his wallet and lay it on kitchen roll to dry. This took longer than washing out his clothes as Bob never throws anything away - his bulging wallet is famous - for having anything but money in it!

Bob will now tell you about the impending doom..........! Which is, of course, the end of my contract at Blackwells. So I am thrusting myself into the murky world of recruitment agencies with its various frustrations - job vacancies that evaporate as soon as you apply for them, employers who want 3 year’s experience in software that has been on sale for a year or 10 years’ experience but still under 30 years old!! At least I now have all the electronic aids, and sending an application via e-mail takes about a minute, rather than all the letter-writing, printing and posting there was before. I will be quite glad to leave Blackwells in some ways - the people I work with are very nice, but the work itself has been boring and depressing - running down something that you spent years building up is not fulfilling!! Watch this space for news of the new exciting(??) job!!!!

I am still working at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, becoming ever more involved in conservation. This is partly because we have a director who is interested in these issues and partly because about half a dozen museums in Oxford which belong to the University are putting in a lottery bid to fund conservation work. Suddenly, there is an increase in meetings and report-writing! I don’t mind, though, it’s good to feel involved in decision making. What is worrying is that when Bob finally leaves Oxford, I shall have to drive the whole journey there and back (gulp!) ........zzzzzzzzz ........I feel tired now and I only work 4 days a week!

It is now time to wish all of you folks out there a very happy Christmas and New Year.
Lots of love x x x x x x x x x.

Joy, Bob, Rupert and Tamsin.