Daughter

It's hard to believe that she has been on this planet for sixteen years and eleven months. She has been a fantastic daughter and we love her to bits. Often she seems older than her years - wise, calm and compassionate - until you visit her bedroom which resembles either a frantic crime scene or the ramshackle interior of a shanty town dwelling on the outskirts of Sao Paulo - then you're reminded that she really is sixteen after all. I guess that today will live in her memory forever. At school, she received her long and anxiously awaited GCSE results. Any lingering anxiety evaporated when the exam slips torn from her envelope informed her that she had earned eight A grades, two B's and two C's. As Fred Flintstone would say -"Yabadabadoo!".... I'm so proud of her... our lovely Frances.

Beer

How many gallons of this amber liquid have I consumed in the last thirty five years? Surely enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool! They say that beer has been around for at least 6ooo years. In recent times, getting legless on ale has been a very rare event for me. Mostly it's a social thing - some lubrication - and when life has serrated edges, somehow three or four pints smooth away the sharpness. I have been in thousands of pubs and in my view "the pub" is something the British Isles should champion more loudly. Nowhere else in the world will you find such a phenomenon. The pub is communal and open to all from the most miserable gits in Christendom to those who are the life and soul of every party, from rich bastards with flashy cars and vulgar personalised licence plates to happy "losers" with nothing but coins jangling in their pockets.

Sadly in corporate Britain, we have seen so many great pubs closing in recent years and the rise of of homogeneous themed places where staff wear uniforms and beer isn't necessarily the top tipple on the drinks menu. Looking at my watch it's time to go for another bellyful of beer... "And it's guzzle, guzzle... as the beer goes down the muzzle..." or "I want a beer just like the beer that buried dear old dad..."

...So here I am back at the keyboard, four pints later. Met some chums. Laughed. Ogled. Tackled the weekly quiz. Put the world to rights. Why is it that the "authorities" always emphasise the bad bits - drink driving, fights, alcoholism, marital problems, obesity, liver problems.... you're only "allowed three units"... relaxing licensing laws will result in "Armageddon on the streets"? Beer is like mother's milk for grown ups. Let's chill out, enjoy our pints and support our local pubs - with apologies to American readers - especially those poor sods residing in Utah!

France

We - that's me and the wife - have just got back from an eight day break in France. Mostly we stayed in the Midi-Pyrenees region with my brother and his partner Suzy. They are modernising an old farmhouse there. It's in a very peaceful location looking south towards the Pyrenees - an ever-changing panorama where light and shade dance differently upon the mountain slopes and where at night distant thunderstorms will sometimes suddenly illuminate the horizon. We drank wine and listened to the cockerels, trying to ignore the hungry eyes of Pichu the neighbours' Pyrenean mountain dog. For part of the time, we were in Gruissan on the Mediterranean coast - such a contrast - with hundreds of Gallic holidaymakers promenading around the port as luxurious yachts bobbed in their moorings. I'll be using blogger to create a website for my brother's place which includes four gites - rental cottages. Watch this space! It's a great place to go if you want peace and undisturbed sleep - at least until the cock crows!

Boris

<-Cats Protection League

Boris is our cat. He came to our garden five years ago. Back then he was a stray - so thin and scraggy that my darling wife took pity on him, fed him and so of course he kept coming back. It wasn't long before he got his little black and white paws over the threshold. All I could think of was the twenty years of commitment, the fleas, the vet's fees, the cattery fees, the cost of catfood, the little "accidents" that cats will tend to have on your best carpet. He decided to join us just after we'd had expensive PVC doors installed - so no cat flaps. At night, Boris sleeps in his kennel - unless it's antarctically cold outside. In spite of myself, I have grown to love this furry animal. He miaows at me then walks away with his feline earholes pinned back, expecting me to follow. When he turns left he wants out but when he turns right he wants feeding.

Late one evening, I once saw him crossing a major road two hundred yards from our house. Why? Where was he going? I wonder if they make little video cameras that can be strapped to cats' heads so that one of the great mysteries of the universe might be untangled - What exactly do cats do at night?

Holiday

Made it through yet another year of secondary school teaching. Funny how people are always eager to pigeonhole you at a first meeting. .."And what do you do?" Why should work matter so much to us? I have made it a point never to ask anyone what they do to earn money. If it comes out then fair enough but whenever I hear that question... "And what do you do?" I want to say, "Well I lie on my back watching swallows dance in the air and I make up songs, take photographs, travel to new places with eager delight, stay up too late almost every night, cook mean stir frys which I eat with my family and I try to make sense of this life I'm living, hanging on to happiness and all the things that are important to me, like tomorrow..." And you know sometimes I do say things like that, not bothering if I'm breaking the usual social code where people are characterised via notions of the jobs they do. So what if I am a teacher?

Besides, many people think they know all there is to know about teaching because they once sat in classrooms. They don't know the half of it. Great, it's my holiday! Teacher's rest! But next week I will be back at work all week, making lists, ordering books, tidying up, turfing out old folders, salvaging worksheets, labelling boxes of exam papers, making policies and action plans etc.. How many other British workers go to work in their holidays?

Click on postage stamp for Beanotown.com

Old

She was born in May 1921. Holding her little brother's hand, she made an apocryphal journey through grimy South Yorkshire streets to live at her grandmother's house because her own parents were, rather unusually for those days, breaking up. She married in India during the second World War then bore four healthy sons, living the life of a rural headmaster's wife. She is my mother and today she made another apocryphal journey - from the cottage hospital to the old folks home but this time I don't think she will be coming out. It's the start of the last chapter. She's eighty four with two strokes behind her, a broken hip, a broken collar bone, several unrecorded falls, several bottles of cheap whisky and brandy, lots of tales retold... And when they asked me at the home what her hobbies are, I thought of all the hobbies she once had - reading avidly, basket weaving, glove-making, lampshade making, caravanning, crosswords, knitting, singing, baking - a human dynamo.... but now there are just shadows of the woman she once was, sitting in her high chair like an old cowboy on his verandah - looking out across the plains.

EastEnders

<- Click image for EastEnders website.

Finally, I have decided to come out of the closet to admit that I am a huge fan of the BBC soap EastEnders which explores life, love and tragedy in the fictional London borough of Walford. I have hardly missed a single episode since the show was first launched in February 1985. Smatarse critics who never watch the soap will often claim that it is "dour", "grim" or "morbid" - "No one ever laughs or smiles". This is all utter balderdash! Long ago, Shakespeare discovered that the best theatrical drama will emerge from life's trials and tribulations and not from those times when everything goes along quite swimmingly. I think the writers are generally good at mixing things up with Jim and Dot often seeming like Albert Square's answer to Andy Capp and Flo while The Millers echo Roald Dahl's "The Twits". This is a truly brilliant soap but you have to live with it week by week to really appreciate it as it moves between dramatic highpoints and bread and butter lows - necessary to meld the soap's ongoing major themes and issues together. I say - Stuff the Critics! Come on Walford! And thanks to the brilliant EastEnders team who have given me so much armchair pleasure these last twenty years!