The Postman's Pants

Never lend your husband’s clothing to another man. I did that last month. Leant a pair of gloves to the village postman whose fingers were perishing. It was the least I could do for a man who is my main connection with non-edible consumer goods of every kind. I confess, I am a catalogue queen. Whenever I feel guilty about this I remind myself how much money I am saving in petrol and parking (not to mention how vastly I am shrinking my carbon footprint – practically the size of a geisha’s). Garden supplies, children’s toys, soft furnishings, clothing, gadgets, everything, it seems, that we do not immediately consume (and even a fair bit that we do – Inverawe smoked trout and salmon— fight over the last morsel) can come to me at the click of a mouse.
When the phone rings I suffer from a sudden attack of familial deafness. When the postman or DHL man knocks, I thrill. A parcel. For me? How perfectly lovely. I like signing the little bits of paper they produce. It almost makes me feel as if I have a secretary. Print here sign there. Madam. Vanish flour dusted apron and cords, and yanked back hair; enter alternative me in a neat suit and bob. For that one moment I hold the pen.

And then there is the delicious menu of choices the catalogues afford. The Garden menu – David Austin’s Shropshire Lass or The Countryman on the terrace trellis? Those deep dark tulips from Parkers this year? Or the crimson? Followed by the clothing menu – Boden again – reliable with a light seasoning of playful -- or the slightly more exclusive if less about town Brora? Yummy skirts that make tweed flirt, cashmere to die for. (Or at least give up your monthly membership at the not quite local health club for). And the secret side benefit of shopping by catalogue -- you avoid looking at your thighs in a badly lit (by that I mean unflatteringly – shall I say brutally, lit) dressing room.

Which brings me back to the postman. Gloves were one thing. A simple act of charity. He returned them a few days later, silently, posting them through the letter box so that when I returned from wherever I was they could be run over conveniently by the pushchair, immediately at home again in their rightful chaotic mileu of childmud and floordust. But last week in our brief unseasonable pretence of summer it was shorts. Poor postman on laden bike rings, then in the shuffle of envelopes and packets, drops small parcel onto floor. Instead of getting off the bike, which is heavy and difficult to balance, he leans forward to pick up parcel still astride the bike. Either he has eaten too much curry last night or his shorts (that have not seen the light of day since last year) catch on part of the bike, because there is an audible rip from somewhere near his seat. Am just beginning to be grateful again for onset of familial deafness when I see his hand instinctively check out the seat of his shorts.
“Oh god, torn um haven’t I” he says.
Do I let this denizen of postal provision cycle off home in tatters, his smalls on show to the entire village? Perhaps I should have, but I do not. I glance at his girth, make a quick calculation about the size of my husband’s old cut off cycling shorts (not of the Lycra Rob variety) and invite him in to change.
I thunder up the stairs, have a quick rummage in chest of drawers and descend already wondering if I have done the wrong thing with a capital WR.
“Look, try this pair,” I say sliding my hand round the door of the downstairs loo as if he were my self-conscious ten year-old son in a high street changing room. Half chagrined and half relieved, he re-emerges, hops on his bike and speeds off, absentmindedly leaving his torn shorts behind him (more ten year-old there than I thought).

These same shorts I folded, left ready in the porch where they hung around waiting for the opportune moment. When out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a red bike go past the window this morning I hurried to the porch, grabbed the shorts and, wanting to catch him this time before he had gone, shouted, not very loudly, but loud enough.
“Here. The shorts. You left them the other day.”
There she was. Old Lady Marlow. All ears and eyes, all techni-colour memory and mouth of her. Right there across the road from me, stick, cardigan and sensible tie-up shoes included. With a cat that got the cream look written on her face. The rotten luck of it.

Old Lady Marlow

Her other name remains a mystery. Old lady Marlow, with thin white hair and a face like a very pale prune. She has a small cottage three doors down with a still attractive though slightly going to seed cottage garden hopeful with snowdrops and a few budding tete-a-tete daffodils. She has, as I have observed, at least three pairs of sensible tie-up shoes and a series of hand-knitted cardigans. Always a cardigan, even in summer. And although I cannot observe this, she must also have a name. A proper name I mean, not the ‘old lady’ sobriquet leant her by Father Time, or the ‘Marlow’ given her by the late Mr Marlow when he married her long ago. There must have been a name he loved better than any other, a name he wanted to carve in the bark of a tree, something he whispered…. OK. Don’t go there. The intimate life of your near neighbour is never a good thing to let yourself imagine. And musty old pillow talk is perhaps better left undusted. Besides which I can’t quite imagine how it would have been. This is a woman whose main occupation seems to be curtain twitching, and the keeping of newspaper cuttings.
OK. Her snowdrops are a benefit to the village. I grant you that. At least they are a benefit to me. But on the way to school (almost late) with one child too far ahead on her scooter and the other one recalcitrant in the pushchair I could do without being accosted as I was this morning.
“That young chappie …” Leaning on her fence she sticks out her cane, actually sticks it out in front of you so you have to stop. How rude is that? At this moment I don’t care about the goings on in the property across the road. (What else can you call the round remains of a windmill, the poured foundations of an extension and an unsightly caravan? an opportunity?). In my tiny world of school bells and hastily packed lunches he is a total irrelevance.
“…he’s got another one you know.”
“Umhumm” I murmur, one eye on the child ahead who is growing more distant by the second, my hand gripping the pushchair hard.
“A disgrace.”
“Yes,” I say, “Um, my daughter?” I point to the speck on a scooter.
Old Lady Marlow is clearly from a generation when it was acceptable to let your only just turned eight year-old vanish out of sight.
“She’ll be needing this” I pat the blue canvas book bag that is hanging on the handles of the pushchair at the same time swiftly manoevring the front wheels of the pushchair into take-off position. “I’m so sorry but I really need to go”.
She lowers the stick. Slightly. Enough so that my departure doesn’t unbalance her.
I rush off feeling guilty.
Cross.
Guilty.
The two year-old thinks it is fun to run along the pavement. “fahter fahter” she shouts, not very good with ‘s’s’ yet.
One or two early mothers who have already dropped their children are coming back out now the other way. “Morning,” I call through clenched teeth, knowing that no matter what morning resolutions I make I will never be an early mother.
I could avoid the Marlow house, I reflect in the cool light of evening. But it never seems convenient getting both girls across the street and crossing back again just at the peak traffic time when all the outsiders come in from the market town to drop their children at the village school. Their parade of cars, large and little, transforming us, for about a quarter of an hour, into a spectacle of pulling out and parking arrangements that boggle the beholder. I am flattered, of course, to think that our little village school is the preferred option amongst non fee-paying parents for miles around. But is it really worth jostling for the absolutely nearest parking space?
When the two year-old wakes from her nap we set off down Black Bank towards the village nature reserve. There is a restored barn there with an old wagon in it and an educational display with a map of the reserve behind Perspex. She loves climbing on the wagon, which is high enough to be risky and solid enough, I reckon, to be safe, and fascinatingly full of angles, curves and edges. Much more interesting than the small paint-peeling village playground. I like to look at the map, read about the wildlife and plants I may expect to see. I am trying to learn the names of wildflowers. I feel slightly embarrassed about this. First of all, I feel as if I should already know them. Secondly, having to learn them reminds me that though I have been living here for years, there are still parts of me that don’t know the country like the back of my hand. Third, it seems such a small pursuit in the face of all the world’s urgencies. Is there anyone out there but me who considers this a worthwhile pastime? Why does it matter? A wood anemone will blush whether you call it by name or not. What’s in a name after all? The secret of things, maybe, I wonder. Although she is so old that no one in the village dare use hers, I hope one day I will find out old lady Marlow’s.

A country convert

I am a country convert. When my husband and I moved to our house in a village near a small market town in Cambridgeshire 11 years ago from the throbbing city life of Newcastle it seemed like we had arrived at the end of the world. Nothing happened here. Accustomed as we were to two incomes, two hectic diaries and no children, we were in the habit of dining out, up to date with the latest films, knew our favourite seats in the theatre and even caught the odd night out at the opera. We enjoyed the delicious titbits of knowledge that are the mark of the urban insider -- how to find those prime parking spaces in the city centre, the rat runs that avoided rush hour traffic, where the best coffee is to be had. Here, the only rat run was a game played at the village fete with an old drain pipe, a stuffed sock and a cricket bat. It wasn’t just the speed we missed, it was the lack of event itself. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, and every free evening we got in the car and raced off to Cambridge to find something approximating to life as we knew it.
The nearest market town really was a one-horse town. A black and white mare belonging to a gypsy, she lived in the meadow next to the cathedral, lazing under looming chestnuts and hornbeams, swishing her tail in the summer sun. One spring she produced a gorgeous piebald foal whose birth and growth became the subject of daily conversation amongst pram pushing mothers and idling shoppers on the path along the meadow. See what I mean? Nothing happened here. The birth of piebald foal was news. We saved our carrot ends for her. When we walked we had a destination now. We hoped she would deign to approach, nibble from our palms. The gangliness of her delicate legs was heart-stopping.
Looking back on it, that was when the country got its hooks in me. Those walks past the market town meadow now with cows, now with sheep. The horse in her corner, a jay on the water trough. We started going for walks in the evening by the river listening for the honk and splash of geese landing, thrilled by the skill of their v-formation, their feet extended like the undercarriage of a very small plane.
Living here has taught me again what I had in my childhood and lost – the ability to observe and the capacity to enjoy the simplest things. I do not just wait for spring, I watch for specific clumps of snowdrops that mark my daily route. Two at the churchyard lichgate, one in old lady Marlow’s cottage garden, three up Black Bank, a scattered handful in the hedgerow. My life is local now and I love it.

Moving house

The boxes have been arriving non stop since 7 this morning. Men with big feet and a pittance of patience all wanting different permutations on the tea theme -- one sugar, two, coffee, white no sugar. Feel could after all get a job at Costa down the road which is a good thing to fall back on since my last job-finding attempt failed spectacularly. Something about eye contact, no doubt, and misinformation and contracts not being properly drawn up. That kind of thing every happen to any of you? My good friend urbanchick is just down the road. And my new neighbours here at Purplecoo seem a jolly bunch. All wine and chocolates as far as I can tell. Which suits me just fine. As long as it Green and Blacks, and dry and chilled. When you've got your own boxes unpacked come on over and see the house all white and waiting, before I get any pictures up, before I've cluttered the place up with my bits and bobs and tags and counters and links. We'll have a drink. You choose -- the kettle or the corkscrew.