Get back in the shed, Ned

Quite bit of excitement in the our little Lane on this windy sunny Suffolk morning. My neighbour but one, let us call her... Sarah... has again been visited by The Authorities. Not quite the police, but then again, not exactly not the police. Very grown up people with folders and stern gazes and disapproving eyebrows.
News across the hedges is that this was a follow-up visit after the unfortunate incident earlier this year when Sarah was found to be hiding a man in her garden shed. A live one at that. In a town such as this you fully expect the odd body turn up in a hedgerow or an amputated limb being used as a flotilla by baby duckies beside the village green, but an agile virile live man of functional age being discovered in these parts is unheard of- until a few months ago.
It seems Sarah went off to France on a boating holiday and neighbours noticed snuffling and truffling and movement over the garden fence - quite unexpected given Sarah's absence and thus likely to be an intruder. As all good neighbours, parishoners, and general busy-bodies do, they immediately called the police and demanded the nice constable investigate.
Evidently the police arrived, voices were raised, pens were drawn and most disturbingly , clipboards were extracted from the squad car. A real to-do! Low and behold the intruder was not an intruder at all- much more terrifyingly - he was a foreigner! A proper foreigner, with an accent, a long elegant nose and insisting he was allowed to be there. (Don't they all, my dear? don't they all...)
It turns out that Sarah,was recently divorced. A situation which had caused her some considerable distress, to a point where she was hospitalised for a period in light of the devastation she had experienced and overwhelming loneliness. In the summer she felt better and took herself off to Prague where somehow, and this is unclear, she met a charming, handsome and slightly younger man. She was immediately enamored and arranged for him to come over to England and stay in her cottage in the lane.
At some point in this fiasco, but not before he had arrived, she began to question her decision to have a man she did not know take up residence in her one bedroom cottage. Worse than this, how would she explain him to all the Preservation Committee ladies, the lane's traffic Committee and indeed, Committees in general?
And so- quite sensibly as she saw it, she decided to keep him in the garden shed, and have him into the house (upstairs and downstairs) when loneliness required it.
The initial investigation centered mostly around the question as to whether or not the gentleman in question was kept in the shed under duress and "invited" into the house to perform willingly and was free to come and go as he pleased or, whether the Shed Man was victim to something more sinister.
Today was a follow up visit from The Authorities to make sure nothing untoward was taking place in the house or shed. Nothing was. And so the twitching curtains of the Lane flutter back against the windows and we all continue as if nothing happened and nothing was said across hedges and garden gates.

An Open Letter To Vuvuzela Haters

Dear Vuvuzela Haters
Please read this letter with with an open mind and an open heart. The kind of open heart that welcomes you to South Africa and invites you to enjoy the wonderful football festival.
Instead of being distracted and indignant and rational about the Vuvuzela and how loud it is and how many decibels and the direct mathematical level of interference on the game, please, instead, ask a human question. Ask this : Why do south Africans blow the Vuvuzela? Why do they need to?
This is why: they blow the Vuvuzela to welcome you to their country, and in a voice as loud and as powerful as an elephant or lion. A little bird's welcome is not enough, so great is their excitement to see you arrive on their shores. They blow the vuvzela because the love in their hearts and the excitement in their voice cannot be contained in the restricted area of the chest cavity. It builds and builds and all their love and open heartedness comes booming out. They blow the Vuvzela because despite the heavy, heavy price that has been paid for freedom in South Africa, its people wake up and get out and walk with pride and hope and happiness and the fact that South Africa is what it is despite its dark, dark history is reason enough to blow the Vuvuzela from roof tops and mountain tops from sun rise til moon rise- and so we do.
Our traditions are louder and bigger and brasher than yours because our lives and deaths are louder and bigger and brasher than yours. Our lives and futures are often fought for on a daily basis in shanties and down mines and in HIV hospitals. Sometimes just being alive and seeing your loved ones here is worth a bolting blaring blast from a Vuvuzela.
Please don't belittle and dismiss the voice of our joy and our freedom- we have fought long and hard for it and we have all lost something along the way.
South Africa welcomes you and your wonderful traditions to Johannesburg and Soweto and Capetown, we welcome your drunken dancing and singing fans. We welcome your Mexican waves and risque football songs. We love football more than you can know. We don't play in grassy fields or stadiums, but in the streets of Soweto and the beaches of the Transkei. We make footballs from rolls of supermarket bags that you simply throw away, or wind reeds round and around until we are sure it will hold. Football is in our blood and we want to share this joy with you.
With all our love and open hearts and we hope you will open your heart to us too and the voice of our joy.
Vuvuzela players of South Africa

In a caravan, my dear.....

The one aspect of selling high end doggie products to the public which continues to baffle me is the market/fair/ dog show/horse show circuit. It seem that for many people, often women, much of their annual income comes from trailing around one show after the other all over the country. They cart around their livelihoods in bags and boxes and then set up stall to flog their wares to the unsuspecting public.
No where more so than the more high end shows, awash with Panama hats, pashminas and monogrammed trinkets. There you will meet Lucretia Wanabee Von Snootsen Vlots, soon to be evicted, most devastatingly, from her family home, High Wicker Bottom. Heroically, Lucretia, festooned in silk scarves and almost always planning her next dash for a ciggie, is undeterred and has taken to high end carpet bagging to keep the family from ruin. She travels from Burleigh to Blenheim, The Highland Show to the Chelsea Dog Show, her trusty Volvo spiriting her along. Her husband called Pongo or Jumbo or Hugo (it doesn't matter) cannot be counted to help as he has fallen into a devastating depression since the untimely death of his favourite Springer Spaniel, Wellie.
So, there sits Lucretia, bedraggled and furtively sipping on her glass of wine, though leaping into action the moment a victim approaches. In order to drum up enthusiasm for her (made in Chine) wares she finds it necessary to Italianise all her adjectives so that everything is fabuloso or delicioso. They are in fact neither of these , in any language, which only serves to make the whole scene even more depressing.
The final blow to her self esteem comes when an elderly cohort of ladies passes by, wrapped in Barbours and tartan, one of them may even be her mother in law, and are heard to say:

Good lord... where DO all these sales people live?
In caravans in the woods, Dear.
But they are AWEFULY clever with all these things they make. Wherever did they learn to do it?
In prison, Dear.*

Lucretia crumples into her glass and misses an opportunity to pounce on an approaching group.

*verbatim exchange.