Gastro gravy

The Queen’s Head pub in Crouch End has closed for a refurbishment into a gastro-pub. We are quite excited about this development, but many CrouchEnders are a little more reticent, mostly because the Queen’s has a loyal clientele who appreciate its Sky Sports big screen and Thursday night rock bands. However, I love good gastro pubs and the more the merrier in Crouch End, as far as I’m concerned – the Victoria Stakes is a little out of the village, more Muswell Hill than local, and the Kings Head, with its eclectic mix of seventies furnishings, is always too crowded and smoky. In search of a perfect role model, we’ve been to a couple of quiz nights at a superb gastropub in Islington on Liverpool Road, the Duchess of Kent, where the candlelit atmosphere is particularly cosy and the food, though as gravy-soaked as in all gastropubs, quite delicious.
I do fear though that the Queen’s will just end up looking like every other London chrome and pine-seated wine bar and lose its traditional boozer appearance. It could certainly lose its crap carpet and fruit machines without doing any major harm, but the bar itself is of a fine dark wood panelling that you so rarely see in the capital nowadays. I did discover a really good old-fashioned public house with all its panelling intact last week with my friend Chris – the tiny Mitre, in the narrow alleyway of Ely Place, Hatton Garden – which had carefully tended Adnams on tap and the feel (including the miniscule scale) of my much-missed Blue Bell on Walmgate, York. But like so many of the oldie-woldie City pubs, the Mitre is closed on weekends and anyway, according to the pub's history, it’s actually technically in Cambridgeshire rather than London. Depending on how the Queen’s Head turns out, maybe our quest for a decent pub is just another sign that we should head out to the country.

Sack Captain Peacock

This week I have been subtitling the third series of Are You Being Served? Its surprisingly funky cash-register theme tune aside (“Ground floor - perfumery, stationery and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food...Going up"), it remains a truly dreadful television programme, which for some reason my brother and I fanatically adored as children. Watching it again now I cannot for the life of me see what we could have found funny – we were far too young to understand the innuendo (“My pussy got all wet – I had to let it dry out in front of the fire!”) and as our only television set was a decrepit black-and-white model that you had to bash on the top whenever it went off the station, you couldn’t even see that Mrs Slocombe’s hair colour changed vividly from week to week.
But what strikes me more than anything now is the appalling inefficiency, work-shy attitude and over-staffing of Grace Brothers, all old-fashioned notions that have been forcefully eradicated from most consumer-driven business sectors of Britain today – almost to an opposite extreme of overworked, undervalued and underpaid multi-tasking employees. No one emphases this point more than the character of Captain Peacock, who struts around the shop floor of the ladies’ and menswear departments until he spots a customer (of which there seem to be only three a day), whom he then asks, “Excuse me, sir/madam, are you being served?” (which they inevitably aren’t) and then, in his own words, “guides” towards an appropriate member of staff. This then involves the ritualistic question “Mr Humphries/Grainger/Lucas, are you free?” (which they inevitably are – cue excruciating catchphrase “I’m free!”) and Captain Peacock leaves them to serve the customer. He never once roots out a pair of trousers or a tie for the shoppers himself. His other duties consist of sucking up to Mr Rumbold and scolding members of staff for being late. Considering how cash-strapped Grace Brothers invariably was, surely such a pointless role should have been wiped out as an essential cost-cutting measure? And, while on the subject of people who don't seem to do any work, why did Mr Rumbold need a secretary? She never turns up at the frequent, unconstructive after-work meetings, neither to take minutes nor serve the much-requested tea and buns, and seems to exist merely as sexual candy for Mr Rumbold’s ogling goggles. (As an aside, I was astonished to learn last week that Nicholas Smith is still alive – he voices the vicar in the gorgeous Wallace And Gromit In The Curse Of The Were Rabbit.)

Of course, there’s absolutely no reason to take anything one sees in Are You Being Served? as a realistic representation of department store life (or any life) in the 1970s. But the overstaffing and imbalanced distribution of duties that the series portrays do still exist in some corners of the world. Dave and I were in Cairo in February and everywhere we looked there were workers standing around doing nothing. In the supermarket in Maadi that we used to stock up for our overnight train journey to Luxor there were ten employees loitering around the baked goods section talking to one another, two of them lazily leaning on brooms, but there was only one person serving at the check-outs. In Cairo Airport, when we were awaiting our flight home, numerous men in uniforms hovered, idly watching the world go by, but only one man was operating the hand baggage X-ray machines, meaning that the queues to boardplanes were massive and every flight was leaving over an hour late through no reason other than gross inefficiency. Indeed, if one of the airport managers had sported a homburg, a red carnation and a snooty demeanour, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

Motion Adventures

“This is dance so remarkable, so daring and so perfectly achieved it brings you out in goosebumps.” (The Guardian, Thursday 20th October, 2005)

One and all rejoice as the marvellous and magnificent Mark Morris is back in town. Dad and I went to see Programme 1 at Sadlers Wells on Tuesday, and as usual we came out spellbound by the visual array of swirling energy his effervescent dance troupe had set before us. I have never seen anything encapsulate the spirit of a piece of music through colour and physical movement as perfectly as Mark Morris’s profound but uplifting choreography. Programme 1 featured the ever-tribal classic Grand Duo, and Somebody’s Coming To See Me Tonight, dances set to 19th century English folk songs, during which traditional country-dancing manoeuvres were transformed into an astounding, twirling art form.
It was a shame that Mark Morris himself is only dancing in Programme 2 this week, but at least he came on stage to take a bow at the end of Programme 1. Every time I see him I am struck by how he seems the absolute antithesis to a ballerina – his portly beer gut looks as though it should be more at home sinking pints in a pub than leaping fluidly across a stage. Last time he was at Sadlers Wells he had jet-black hair down to his waist; now this has greyed and been trimmed into curls and a Shakespearianly pointed beard has grown on his chin. The man is a genius, a dance deity, who deserves devout, prostrate worship at every available moment.

I’m double-jointed and spent my childhood having various doctors bending my fingers back towards my elbow and building up my shoes. Even now, physiotherapists can’t quite believe the range of movement I have in my hip joint, a skill which I’ve never really managed to put towards any constructive use. You might have thought that it would have led to a successful future in ballet, but sadly this was not meant to be. The first ballet teacher I had when I was three was so bossy that I wet myself during my first class with her because I was too frightened to ask to go to the toilet, and aged 13, I put the final nail in the coffin by violently dislocating my kneecap in a dance lesson at school, a sight so hideous that it reduced my classmates, 29 teenage girls, to hysterical screams of horror. Besides, no one bothered to give me a sense of rhythm, as anyone watching Dave and I attempting to waltz during the first dance at our wedding reception ceilidh will testify.
But Mr Morris, you have enriched my life. Please don’t stay away too long.

Drug wars

So the government have now given the green light for the revolutionary drug Herceptin to be prescribed to women with early-stage breast cancer in the hope of saving 1,000 lives a year. Despite the drug already having a UK licence for late-stage breast cancer and her illness being so advanced when it was found, the drug was never even suggested as a treatment option for Mum. She was however, prescribed the new oestrogen-suppressant drug Arimidex, which received substantial press coverage in December 2004 for having shown greater success than tamoxifen at preventing cancer recurrence in clinical trials.
Mum was the sort of person who was allergic to a pill before she’d even got it out of the bottle and so it was with great surprise that she tolerated Arimidex without any side-effects whatsoever. To our knowledge, her aggressive cancer type spread to no more sites during the time she took the drug. However, about six weeks before she died, her consultant stopped her prescription. He claimed it was better if she switched to a progesterone-based oestrogen-suppressant as it would stimulate her ailing appetite. One has to ask though whether it was simply a cost-cutting measure to save the Princess Alexandra Trust £1,000 a year, as Mum’s latest liver counts had still shown severe abnormalities and perhaps her case seemed entirely hopeless to the specialists by that point. Immediately after switching drugs, Mum sank into depression, became severely jaundiced and slid into a physical decline from which she never gained a moment’s respite. When admitted into the Isobel Hospice for the last few days of her life, she pleaded with its palliative care doctor to change her prescription back to Arimidex, but her last desperate cries for help fell on deaf ears. Nothing could have saved her life by that point, but we will always wonder if she may have lived for a little while longer if her oncologist had continued with her original regime. And whether Herceptin would have made any difference to her life expectancy will forever remain a mystery: her cancer may have been of the wrong type in any case, and as Herceptin can cause cardiac problems and Mum suffered from atrial fibrillation during chemotherapy, it may simply not have been viable.

But how can a drug like Herceptin possibly cost up to £30,000 per person per year to manufacture? Are the ingredients so rare and the processes involved in its production really so delicate? AstraZeneca, who manufacture Arimidex, have just announced profits for the third quarter of this year of around $1.7 billion, a 49% increase, and, according to the Guardian, Roche, the manufacturer of Herceptin, has seen sales over the last three months rise 20 per cent to £3.88 billion, so one has to suppose not. It’s a disgrace that the pharmaceutical industry can be so profit-greedy that it can lead to the postcode lotteries and Russian roulette style of medication-prescribing that you read about in the press every other day. And this is before you even begin to consider their attitude towards the AIDS epidemic in Africa and how they will respond if and when a bird flu pandemic strikes. Pharmaceutical companies should have a moral obligation to make people – and that’s people anywhere – well, and not the priority of putting cash in the pockets of their shareholders.

REBECCA

The Smoking Room II

Great news! As the government continue to faff over their anti-smoking in public places bill, Holborn Towers have finally put their foot down with ECI and banned the company from allowing its staff to smoke on the stairwells. I can breathe in the workplace again at last.

Mountain Goats

Today I was tasked with reviewing the subtitles for the 2005 film version of Johanna Spryi’s classic children’s tale Heidi. It filled me with nostalgia for the 1978 German-made but British-dubbed TV series that I was addicted to as a child. Oh, grumpy Grandfather with his goat’s cheeses and permanently lit pipe! Oh, poor, blind Grandmamma who so longed for soft, white bread rolls from the city! Oh, evil Fräulein Rottenmeier who so loathed Heidi’s country bumpkin ways and was terrified of kittens! But this new film did little more than remind me how much more I’d enjoyed the original. It told the tale but didn’t make much effort to engage the viewer, and even writing in a narrow-escape-from-death ravine escapade for Heidi towards the end didn’t help. What was rather nice was that it had been filmed largely in Slovenia, with the capital Llubljana taking on the role of bygone-era Frankfurt. Dave and I had the great fortune to spend a week in Slovenia at the end of June and a lovelier, friendlier, cleaner and more beautiful or topographically varied country I think you would be hard-pushed to find on this earth. We stayed in a rustic chalet-style hotel high above glacial Lake Bohinj, overlooking the dizzying Julian Alps soaring ruggedly to the highest peak of Mount Triglav, and spent our days hiking through flower-dotted Alpine meadows to cooling waterfalls or exploring farmland valleys on horseback. It was a blissful, enervating time.

I made my own attempt to be Heidi when I was but 19 years old, when I went to work on a Swiss farm for a couple of months during a gap year. I’d had romantic notions of skipping through grassy pastures with Peter the Goatherd, twirling around like Julie Andrews to the melodies of calmly clanking cowbells, whilst picking flowers and sighing over the views. Instead I ended up stuck indoors, where every Swiss woman apparently belongs (at that time they had only got the vote in certain cantons less than a decade before), vacuuming radiators, scrubbing sinks and floors, peeling potatoes and trying to get a MacGyver-addicted three-year-old boy to stop kicking me. Not a Peter the Goatherd in sight, just a portly cigar-smoking farmer and the occasional visit from soldiers at a nearby army base whom the farm supplied with potatoes and sugar beet. The cows were kept locked up in a barn, bell-free, and the only flowers I picked were a kilo of dandelion petals (which is several fields’ worth) to make jam. The countryside around was flatter than your average lowland country and so the farmyard views were largely of the pig shed next door or the gigantic manure heap on the doorstep. On a clear day, of which there were approximately four during my stay, you could just about make out the snow-capped summit of Mont Blanc shimmering in the haze, and however small Switzerland may be, it felt like it was a million miles away. It can’t have been much fun for the family who had employed me either - as an au pair I was quite spectacularly awful. I had never really spent much time away from home before and therefore (being a thoroughly unhelpful teenager) never had to do much cooking or cleaning. I’d turned up simply wanting to improve my French, whereas every previous jeune fille they’d taken on had been preparing for an apprenticeship à ménage, learning how to keep an orderly, perfect Swiss home. My French skills were found to be sorely lacking in the right vocabulary – after two years of A Levels spent discussing Racine and the greenhouse effect I suddenly needed to find the words for “broom”, “dishcloth” and “Put that knife down, you stupid fucking little shit or there’ll be no MacGyver for you tonight.” The farmer, Pierre, spoke French that was more grammatically incorrect than mine – every noun was masculine in gender and he had a thick Vaud canton accent. He did however like to take me out on Saturday nights to yodelling and Alpine horn concerts so I did get something of an authentic Swiss experience from time to time. Pierre suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack from his tractor while harvesting his potato crop in 1997, but I still swap Christmas cards with Genevieve, his wife, who now has an ever-expanding crew of grandchildren from her three grown-up daughters. Cédric, the little boy, is now, appropriately enough, training to be a butcher. I’ve even met up with Genevieve in London and been back to the farm once during an interrailing trip not long after Pierre died.

But despite my own ill-fated mission to Switzerland, one thing Heidi has left me with is the notion of curative mountain air. After seeing wheelchair-bound Clara learn to walk after a sojourn in Grandfather’s chalet high up in the alps, I have this resolute belief that a mountainous atmosphere is a cure-all for any ill. I have been lucky to have grown up in a family that hails from the Lake District and I spent nearly all my childhood holidays there. Having lived in London for six years now, whenever I go up to Grasmere to visit my staggeringly determined, impossibly resilient, non-stop cake-baking and simply amazing 91-year-old grandmother, I get knocked over sideways by the strength of the air. My body goes into shock at being given so much oxygen in one go and I fall into a stupor in front of the crackling coal fire every evening from which it is virtually impossible to awake the following morning.

Suddenly now I find I want more of this elixir-laden air. I don’t want to die young like Mum did, and whilst you cannot predict the unpredictable, I want to do everything possible to fill my body with goodness and health, from home-baked bread and organic home-grown vegetables to lots and lots of hill-climbing amidst breathtaking scenery. The time has come when I need to stop breathing in this choking, traffic-laden, filthy London smog and find my own little garden in the country. The Lake District is probably too much of an opposite extreme since I probably would spend 85% of my time fast asleep and put on 20 stone in three months with Nanna’s almond slice just so close by. But where our next home will be is now a relevant and pressing issue for us, and there has to be a happy medium. Perhaps we should start learning Slovenian. But wherever we go, we will have to take our beloved Crouch End with us.

Children's Stories

As promised, here are some of my favourite stories that Mum told me about the children she taught over the years. She started out as a primary school teacher (with the aim of one day training to be an educational psychologist) but moved into teaching children with special educational needs after a career break to have children. Subsequently Mum specialised in teaching children with specific learning difficulties, usually dyslexia, and worked as a county specialist teacher, based in Stevenage and travelling round various schools giving individual help to the pupils who needed it most. She loved her job, however stressful and uncertain it may have been at times (in the '80s and'90s special needs teachers were always the first to be evicted in any government cutback). She wasn’t always terribly PC about it. “He’s not dyslexic, he’s just thick”, she’d not hesitate to say about a pupil, at least to us round the dinner table at home. I’ll keep names out of these tales to avoid any potential lawsuits. Not that anyone is reading these pages: I haven’t paid Google enough.

Hoover Dam
One boy, who suffered from ADHD, had decided that he was a car. He’d run round and round the classroom driving (no pun intended) everyone to distraction. I went to primary school with a couple of boys who used to pretend to be a different type of car every day, the slicker and sportier the better, but the crucial difference is they kept their buzzing engines, grunting gear changes, honking horns and squealing brakes to break-times and lunch hours, whereas this child was at his most active during lessons. Anyway, eventually, the boy in question’s class teacher worked out that if she took him outside into the playground to “park”, he would then sit down, be quiet and get on with some work for a while. However, before long the child cottoned on that this ploy meant he had to be well-behaved indoors so he came up with a new strategy. He became a vacuum cleaner, leaving no rational means of making him keep still in the classroom whatsoever. Other than perhaps unplugging him.
In a similar vein, a child in another school had to perform the entire spin cycle of a washing machine before he would answer a question. Household appliances clearly rock in the world of learning difficulties.

Shagging the Axe Man
In Mum’s early teaching days, she taught in some pretty rough parts of Manchester and Liverpool. Miraculously though, back then teachers afforded respect, no matter how grotty a child’s background. Nowadays it seems that a child can’t put a foot wrong in their parents’ eyes and teachers can get verbally abused and physically threatened if they dare to chastise someone’s child for misbehaving. Of course, schools have security measures to assist in these situations - my cousin who’s a primary school teacher says she’d rather have a violent parent any day over the classic middle-class, pushy mother who simply won’t accept that a teacher is doing enough for her darling son or daughter. Anyway, when Mum started out, you were still allowed to use corporal punishment. One day she came to the end of her tether and hit a child who was doing something either unspeakably foul or foolishly dangerous and who would not be told. The child went berserk and screamed that he would get his dad up to the school to beat Mum up in retaliation. Mum was terrified, particularly as during one of her Monday morning “What I did at the weekend” story-writing sessions, a different child had drawn a picture of his father chasing his mother round the kitchen with an axe. But when the child went home and ranted to said father about being belted round the ear by his teacher, the father just clouted him again and told him off for being naughty at school.
These formative years in Manchester and Liverpool also led Mum to keep well abreast of children’s slang. This probably all started when one girl complained to Mum that a fellow pupil had said the word "shag”. Mum, terribly shy and naïve in the ‘60s, didn’t have the first clue what “shag” meant. “Naughty boy” she scolded him, and then went to ask the headteacher for a definition. “Oh, yes, tobacco-ing,” he said.
Later on, having two foul-mouthed kids of her own probably helped Mum to keep her colloquialisms current, and she always insisted on watching Grange Hill and the like with us, not in the censoring role of most normal parents, but to see all the pranks she could expect from her own pupils over the following week.

Shit
And children are nasty creatures at times, let’s face it. One particularly poignant, if dastardly funny, tale involves a class teacher finding the word “shit” written on the cover of a severely dyslexic pupil’s exercise book. She called the child in question over and asked him if he knew what the word was and why it was there. The child responded brightly, “Oh, yes, miss! John taught me how to write my name!”

CB Soliciting
For a few years, Mum taught in a not particularly inspiring girl’s secondary school. Teenage pregnancies and terrible twins galore and a couple of particularly depressingly wasted individuals who Mum could not see living much beyond the age of 20. One, at the age of 11, was already on the game. This predated mobile phones by a good ten years so the girl used to smuggle a CB radio into school to take calls from clients.

Life skills
In one of the special schools that Mum taught in, she was tasked with teaching the pupils, all of whom had severe learning difficulties, some basic life skills so that they would be able to function to some extent in the big wide world outside. One of these skills included learning how to write cheques. To Mum’s great amusement, a few years later, she read in the local paper that one boy she’d taught had just been sent to prison for cheque fraud. So she was clearly doing something right.

There are undoubtedly many more stories, which I’m going to try really hard to recall and record as time goes on. Mum loved the children she worked with, and they loved her. She helped so many children, many of them initially frustrated at their lack of literacy and numeracy skills despite their obvious intelligence. After Mum died, we found lots of handmade cards that various children had sent her over the years, particularly after their county-allocated period of help had come to an end. One summed it up perfectly: “To the lady who changed my life.”

REBECCA

Hospice Movement

Yesterday, Dave and I accompanied Dad to the Isabel Hospice annual service of remembrance and thanksgiving, which this year was being held at St Michael’s Church in Bishop’s Stortford, my home town. The Isabel Hospice is in Welwyn Garden City and is where Mum spent the last few difficult days of her life. She had also attended a couple of support sessions at their day-care centre in Bishop’s Stortford, where aromatherapy massages and art therapy classes were on offer. She found such group support quite a strain psychologically as she didn’t like to be reminded of the illness that she was suffering from and the future she faced – or didn’t face, as it turned out.
Mum was originally admitted to the hospice in late March for a few days of respite care. She had been knocked for six by radiotherapy sessions on her eyes and brain and had become quite jaundiced by the cancer growing again in her liver. She was becoming noticeably weaker as each day went by. Once admitted to the hospice, sadly this decline continued and she went rapidly downhill, surviving for only ten days. But the hospice did everything they could to ease Mum’s suffering by offering a caring, supportive environment – not only for her but for us as well. The facilities were outstanding, the staff infinitely patient and wonderful, and the atmosphere calm and restful. There were friendly, comfortable lounges and a peaceful garden for us to sit in when the intensity of being in a room watching somebody die became too much for us to bear. For all they did, I gave profound thanks yesterday afternoon.
And watching somebody die wasn’t the Hollywood movie ending that you might envisage, with everyone sitting around holding hands, saying their farewells and telling the person dying how much you had loved them during their life and all that they had meant to you. Perhaps you can only do that when someone has lived a long and happy life and is ready to go. Mum wasn’t. She was very distressed, frightened, and terribly ill. She got upset when too many people came to visit her and didn’t even seem to want her close family around, not her husband, her children or her sister. She would not and could not accept that she was dying and whenever we tried to say anything meaningful or emotional, the words choked in our tear-filled throats as the reality was just too harsh to face. The time for important, significant conversations had passed – right now, all we could do was tend to Mum’s needs as she struggled to retain her dignity as her body and all its functions failed her. The hospice of course did their utmost to assist her in this process.
So many cancer patients die in agony and entirely morphine dependent, and I am at least grateful that Mum wasn’t in any pain and passed away drug-free, suddenly one morning. Being Mum and always keen to be early for everything, she went far sooner than any doctor had predicted, which sadly meant that we weren’t with her. I was buying sandwiches in Marks and Spencer’s in Welwyn at the time and felt wracked with guilt that I could have been involved in such a bloody useless, mundane activity as Mum left this earth. But nurses in the hospice told me that even if we had sat by her bedside in vigil for 24 hours a day, she still would have picked the sole minute to die that we nipped out to the toilet or to make a phone call. They said that people so often prefer to go alone.
The hospice deal every day with people dying terrible deaths, but its staff remain loyal, devoted and cheerful despite it all. When we were shown the books of remembrance at the memorial service yesterday, there must have been over 100 names for April 2005 alone. Some would have been much older than Mum, at the end of long and fruitful lives, having seen their children, their grandchildren and even great-grandchildren grow up around them. Others would have been younger and even more tragic losses. When I asked a nurse how she coped with working there, she said, “I love my job. I love having the time to spend with the families and the dying, which I would never be able to do in a hospital. We are a great team here. But last week, a woman died aged only 31, leaving three-year-old twins. And that was a hard day.” We know that another person died at almost exactly the same time that morning as Mum – and, strangely, also on their wedding anniversary, as Mum had done. At least Dad knew that it wasn’t just him that these cruel things happened to. We were aware of other families around us in the hospice as we visited each day; we saw tears and hugs, and long, drawn-out, unbearable waiting. There was some solace in knowing that we weren’t alone. And yesterday at the service, seeing others in grief, I perhaps felt sadder for them than I did for myself. Or maybe it was because I was seeing my own emotions reflected that it was so upsetting, empathising completely with how others must be feeling. An extremely dignified-looking man in his late ‘60s or early ‘70s sat in the pew in front of us, alone. During a hymn he broke down completely, and my tears flowed with his own. I do not know he had lost or when, but I guessed it could only have been a wife that he had been utterly devoted to.
So long may the hospice movement continue. When a disease has robbed you of everything and there is no return to the life you have known and loved, to at least be allowed to retain a sense of grace and beauty in your final moments is the best gift anyone can offer you. The Isabel Hospice did this for my mum, and helped me in the process to accept that death is as natural a part of life as birth.
REBECCA