GIFFORD MORNING

I drove into dreamy Gifford early on 1 June 2012, a Friday.  I had to get away from the claustrophobia of the house and out into the fresh air, to smell the musky sweetness of the honeysuckle and hear the prattling of the exuberant chaffinch.  The rain had stopped, but a sheet of low cloud covered the sun.  The air felt chilly and damp. 

I parked in the row of limes that dominates the village green.  An old man was practicing his golf swing on the grass, watched by his dog.  The dog looked bored.  I strolled into the village, hands clasped behind my back.  A solitary painter was up a ladder, painting the windows of a cottage on the main street.  Outside the dishevelled vehicle repair garage, a car stood sideways against the kerb.  One wheel had caved in completely.  The car's suspension had collapsed on that side.

I went to smell the wallflowers on a strip of land at the junction of the Haddington and Duns roads.   On the wall was a plaque dedicated to some 18th century village clergyman who had signed the American Declaration of Independence, next to one relating to an MP who had represented the constituency in the 1960s and 70s. The busts of both men were carved into the bronze.  The cleric was portly, and wore a periwig, whilst the MP had wavy hair and sported a collar and tie.  

I walked into the graveyard of the prim white church.  I examined the grave of the 10th Marquis of Tweeddale, who is buried there with other members of his family.  His tomb was large, but plain.  I looked at some of the newer graves, and I was moved by the early deaths of some of those sleeping there.

I wandered up to where the old school had been.  It had lain empty for years, but some builders were repairing the boundary walls.  All of the outbuildings had been demolished.  I crossed the road, and followed a footpath that bordered a field of oilseed rape, its cloying smell attacking my nasal cavities as I strolled through. I turned left and headed back into the village.  A middle-aged woman limped out of her cottage and unlocked her car, only yards from the painter.  An old man in a lumberjack hat pulled an unwilling terrier on its lead. A huge lorry roared through the village, the noise of its engine grating, dysfunctional, unwelcome. 

I walked across a tiny bridge, over a stream swollen by the recent rains, and headed for the bowling green and the site of the old railway station, now a smart housing estate. The greenkeeper was mowing the grass of the bowling green.  Builders were completing an annexe to the pavilion.  Of bowlers, there was no sign.  I headed back into the village by way of a crescent of modern bungalows with flat roofs, these dwellings almost hidden away amongst the extravagantly sprouting spring vegetation. 

I returned to my car.  My walk had taken me an hour and I felt that it had achieved its purpose - my spirits had been lifted and I felt once more caspable of engaging with the day-to-day tedium generally accorded to the semi-retired.

GARVALD JUBILEE

They had erected a plain white gazebo in front of the east church.  A line of Union Jack flags hung from the apparatus, sagging slightly in the middle - a brave amateur attempt.  This was Diamond jubilee Monday in Garvald.  I parked my car next to an ambulance in the parking bay.  The ambulance had the legend 'transfer vehicle' on its side.  The morning was sunny, but cold for June.  There was no-one about.  I walked over the playing-field to the footpath near the stream. This stretch of water was bubbling away merrily, like a pan on an open stove.  Someone had piled up a load of old pallets in one corner, and these had formed a skateboard park. The dark, brooding forest occupied the opposite bank.  It dominates the pretty village, giving it an air of foreboding, especially on dank, chill mornings.  There was no foreboding this morning.  The firs and pines merely stood gravely to attention, watching over the village.

Garvald comprises mainly of a single street occupied by various cottages and bungalows, strung out in a pleasing higgledy-piggledy fashion like a line of swallows on a telegraph wire.  The gardens back onto the cottages on the south side of the main street, and these wend their way lackadaisically down to the footpath upon which I was walking.  They were full of blossom from clematis, broom and weigela. In the sunlight, it was hard to conjure up a more attractive sight. 

I crossed the main road and passed a weary old Land-Rover, complete with as many scars as a veteran of the Boer War, and made for the western churchyard. It is a pleasing sight.  The graveyard isn't level.  It meanders up and down like a Dunlopillo mattress, the graves seemingly having been dropped from the sky completely at random.  The west church is a modest but delightful affair, not much bigger than a modern detached house, but entirely in keeping with the charm of the village.

I looked at some of the headstones.  Most of the graves contained the remains of farmers and foresters, the majority of whom were interred in the nineteenth century. Common names were Dods, Hogg and Foggo, which might have been a firm of ancient solicitors.

I made my way back to the church.  Two men had appeared from their houses and were deep in converstaion outside of the Garvald Inn.  One was short and bald, the other white-haired and portly.   The latter wore a blue and white striped shirt that gave him the appearance of a yachtsman who spent rather too much time in the bar of the sailing club than out at sea.

"You'd better blow your back tyres up," the sailor said.

"I was just about to do that," replied the other.   I noticed the bonnet of his car was propped open, and a container of water stood on the ground beside the car.  He was plainly going to do more than just check his tyres. 

Nowhere in the village did I get a sense of the Great Day.  There was no urgency, no-one scurrying about with jugs, dishes, bunting, or folding chairs.  Garvald seemed almost unaware of the occasion.  I returned to the east church and looked at the community notice board.  Amongst the advertisements for Zumba classes, gutter repairs and the minutes of the last community council meeting, was a printed notice which welcomed residents to a 'Diamond Jubilee lunch' which would be held in that self-same gazebo.  The cost was a reasonable five pounds, the food to be provided by the Garvald Inn.  There was a reminder that one had to bring one's own drink. After the meal, there was to be a tug-of-war, and then a service in praise of the monarch, finally, some sort of parade around the village.  I was thankful that fancy dress was not required.

I had spent a pleasant early morning hour wandering at will around the village, but real life once again intervened and with some regret that I wouldn't be around to partake of lunch, if not the tug-of-war or, heaven forfend, the parade, I climbed back into my car and drifted away.

SUPERFICIAL SURPRISE

'Come here, Jude, and you, Charlie.  No you can’t go to the park, it’s too wet.’
I had stumbled on a middle-class, horse-loving, bridge-playing mother and toddler group. That was enough to raise my hackles for a good half-hour.  I had fetched up in Stenton for some peace and quiet, and Jude and Charlie’s mother certainly wasn’t quiet.  Luckily, the group was breaking up and the mothers were all driving away in their very expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles. 
Despite this being early June, this was as gloomy a day as any in November. A great sponge of cloud hung dangerously over my head, threatening at any minute to disgorge its contents down the back of my neck.  I had no umbrella, no raincoat, no external protection of any sort. At least it was quite mild. 
I looked around the churchyard.  A builder was pointing the exterior wall to keep the occupants of the graves safe from cattle and sheep. 
Some of the graves were very old indeed.  I was moved by one little urn which read ‘Maisie Day, died 1945, aged 3 years 6 months’. Someone, a relative perhaps, had placed a couple of fresh flowers in the urn – one, a pink carnation, was broken and leaning at  a crazy angle. I wondered who had done this, for the girl’s mother must be about 90 and be long dead herself – perhaps a sister still had fond memories of the little girl who died so tragically all those years ago.  For poor little Maisie Day, there was no gravestone, just a tiny urn with a couple of desultory flowers sticking out of it to remember her by. 
The tower of the original sixteenth-century church was turned into a doocot in the 19^th century, when the new miniature gothic church was built, so that the villagers could have fresh meat through the winter.  Not for the first time, I felt revulsion at the thought of people eating dirty, scrofulous, stupid pigeons. 
Yards of bunting and several Union flags fluttered bravely in the rain-laden breeze, put up for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, now ended.  I wondered who had the responsibility of taking them down.  I presumed it to be the community council, the minutes of whose last meeting were displayed in the communal notice-board on the western green.  I read them, and they were full of the typical fussy and absolutely inconsequential nonsense that occurs whenever a caucus of people forms a committee to deal with anything.
The community notice-board is located near the Tron, where the farmers used to meet, buy and sell sheep, and trade in wool 150 years ago.  The ancient scales for weighing the sheep and the wool still stand in their original position, looking for all the world like a gibbet for midgets. Nowadays, the village is presumably populated by posh rich people playing at being country gentlefolk and engaging in mother and toddler groups. They have managed to persuade the Council to build them a Rolls-Royce of a playground for very few children, whilst the tarmac tennis courts in Haddington resemble a ‘C’ road in Albania. 
For once, in leaving a quiet, picturesque little village adorned with a bucketload of flowers and awash with the sweet scents of honeysuckle and wallflower, I was quite cross.

GRIFFITHS' AFFLICTION

I was surprised when I heard that Griffiths was studying medicine. With his occasional bouts of narcolepsy, which caused him to conk out completely for no apparent reason at crucial times, I didn’t think he was the man for the scalpel. I remember one lunch-time in the office, one minute he was sitting eating a bowl of pea soup, the next he was face down in it, looking like a recumbent Martian. He was badly scalded and when he came back from the hospital, his face was swathed in bandages, like the Invisible Man’s. He explained his affliction by saying, proudly, ‘It’s something about a genome. I’ve a thousand too few, or too many.’ Doctors tried to control it with mescaline, until Prentice grew wildly addicted to it and started writing poetry in Urdu, a language of which he’d had no previous experience. Finally, partial control was exerted by the ingestion of a daily vitamin C tablet and a regimen of unexciting food such as celery. I never thought that Griffiths was cerebral enough for the doctoring. One night we were out for a drink and chatting about the war. I asked him to name the source of the famous quote: ‘Dictators ride to and fro on tigers that they dare not dismount.’ He thought for a moment and said, triumphantly, ‘Gandhi.’ ‘Gandhi was a pacifist,’ I said. ‘It was Churchill. What on Earth made you think it was Gandhi?’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘Gandhi was Indian and they have tigers in India, don’t they?’ A few months later, I ran into Griffiths at the sports centre. He had been working on the weights and was in the foyer, in the process of sniffing his left armpit. ‘Do I smell?’ he asked. ‘Everybody smells,’ I replied, ‘that’s why we’ve got noses. If you mean do you smell bad, then the answer, fortunately, is no.’ I asked him how he was getting on with his medical studies. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘not too well.’ I asked him to elaborate.
‘I’ve made a couple of errors,’ he remarked. ‘They asked me to begin a treatment of depilation on a patient and I though that meant giving him suppositories. I nearly managed it, too, until the doctor asked what the hell was I doing cutting the chap’s hair at the wrong end.’ ‘An easy mistake to make,’ I admitted.
‘Then there was the time they brought someone in who had bad frostbite and I diagnosed athlete’s foot before giving him a shot of ether to dull the pain. He ended up losing four toes and I was reported to the Medical Council. I gave it up after that.’ The last I heard of him was that he’d taken up as a parliamentary sketch-writer. He fell asleep regularly, but so did his colleagues, especially after they had given the old liver a pounding in the Flying Pheasant on Old Queen Street the evening before. It could be said that finally there was one job where Griffiths’ affliction was a positive advantage to him.

THE QUARREL

Amberley and his wife were walking towards the hospital entrance. Parking was always difficult there. Amberley noticed that a small woman and a female nurse were having to push a wheelchair up the road to another wing, because the footpath was blocked by parked cars parked on double-yellow lines and right on the kerb. Despite his advanced years, Amberley felt his hackles rise as he saw yet another car mount the pavement and park. The driver got out. He was a large, belligerent-looking middle-aged man with a fierce beak for a nose and a pair of wilful piggy eyes. Amberley walked up to him and said “You should be locked up, parking here. Look at that poor nurse having to push the wheelchair up the middle of the road. See how dangerous that is?” The big stranger clenched and unclenched his large gnarled fist and set his large jaw. “Are you talking to me?” “Of course, I’m talking to you. You’re the thoughtless one who is endangering people’s lives by parking there.” The big stranger paused to take all this in for a moment then replied, with some asperity, “Listen, Grandad. I’ve been driving round and round this bloody hospital for fifteen minutes and this is the only place I can park. My son’s lying in there and this is the only slot I can find. I’ve as much right as anyone to park there.” Amberley’s wife tugged at her husband’s sleeve. “Come away, George, we don’t want any trouble.” Amberley reluctantly walked away but, as he did so, yelled over his shoulder “Go and park in the main street over there, and get out of the car park.” “Go to Hell in a hand-cart, you wizened old berk,” was the sharp rejoinder. Nevertheless, when Amberley and his wife returned, they noticed that the big stranger’s car was parked precisely where Amberley had indicated.

ELLIE BOWMAN RETURNS

Devlin bought the old mill for well below the market price. He took a risk. Risk was his business. It was no longer a mill. It was operating as a builder’s storehouse. The roof on the west side had fallen in after a fire, and the brickwork of the mill chimney, which stood a hundred feet high and was a ‘B’ listed building, needed urgent repair. The mill looked decayed and sad. To Devlin, the sadder, the better. He intended to transform it into a number of premium apartments and to make his fortune in so doing. He knew the history of the place from his grandmother, who had worked at the loom a half-century before. She had described the clanking of the machinery, the noise, the dust, the smell of hot oil, the painful skin rashes from the raw wool, the darkness, the long hours, the camaraderie between the mill-hands, the severity of the owner and the bowler-hatted managers, the pittance of pay the workers earned. There had been several tragedies at the mill over the years, but none worse than that which befell young Ellie Bowman. Ellie was a young woman of about twenty-eight. She had to look after four machines and had to be very nimble and quick to move timeously from one machine to another. On the fateful day, the mechanics had oiled the motion of one of the machines, and had left a patch of oil on the stone floor. Ellie dashed forth as required, slipped, became entangled with one of the looms, and was strangled to death before anyone could come to her aid. ‘They do say,’ said Devlin’s Grandmother, ‘that she appears from time to time, especially when there is some great change afoot. One of the contractors saw her clearly when he was removing some of the machinery.’ Devlin dismissed this as fanciful nonsense. He viewed his new purchase one frosty evening in February. He stood in the long, low basement area that had once housed all the machinery and he fancied he heard the whining of the Brammer belts and the clatter of the looms. A full moon lit up the ruined, and open, western end of the mill, casting a brilliant light. He prided himself on his temperament – he was a man of steel, a man with whom liberties could not be taken. To his great surprise, he watched as a woman, head tilted back and arms thrown out in front of her, apparently in supplication, beseeching someone, appeared from the shadows and stood in front of him. Her face was suffused and purple and her eyes seemed almost to be out of her eye-sockets, so protuberant were they. Devlin watched this phenomenon for several seconds and then, being a man of steel, took to his heels so quickly and so far that he did not halt until he reached the next town, five miles away. The next day he put the mill back on the market.

HAPPY DAYS, HAPPY TOYS

I see a civil servant from Plymouth put up for sale at auction his collection of 7,500 McDonald's Happy Meal toys because his wife said that they took up too much room in his house and that either they, or she, would have to go. He agonised for a week and got rid of his wife. No - only joking. He reluctantly shipped the whole collection of Happy Toys to the auctioneer. Apparently, this most civil of servants visited McDonald's every week for twenty-five years until he got his sense of taste back. According to Wikipedia, that utterly authetic encyclopaedia of Hard Facts, Happy Meal toys have become increasingly elaborate in recent years. Whilst initially they were little more than cheap plastic trinkets such as frisbees or balls, they have gradually been replaced with increasingly sophisticated toys, many of which are aligned to some existing toy line or contemporary motion picture. Between 1996 and 2006, this was usually a Disney movie. That was when old Walt came to his McSenses and decided that he wasn't going to put his name to any more grub that did not accord with his own views on healthy eating, i.e. two lettuce leaves and a nutmeg sandwich, brown over easy. The degree of sophistication of contemporary Happy Meal toys is such that today each one comes with a wiring diagram and a full socket set. Surprisingly, the civil servant had to go back round to the auction room in his Ford Thames van, because there were no takers for his collection. No-one met his reserve of £10 the lot. I find this an incredible state of affairs. I can only assume that most people prefer their wives.