Last Christmas

Last Christmas by George Michael 😢 💔

Oh how I hate that song! Every year for the last 39 years it’s followed me around, from mid November until Christmas Eve, everywhere I go: in supermarkets, smaller shops, craft fairs, or in pubs and restaurants, it’s playing again and again, and over again. It’s got so bad that I can’t even put on my kitchen radio during December in case they play it again.

Last Christmas I gave you my heart But the very next day you gave it away This year, to save me from tears I’ll give it to someone special…

Over and over again.

And I’m right back in time. Christmas 1984.

I often wonder how many people suffer the same turmoil as I do when they hear that song. I can’t be the only person who went through heartbreak during 1984. In fact I know that I’m not.

Empty Nest

I wandered around the house wondering what to do. Months of planning were over, my daughter Tracey was now married and away on her honeymoon. My son Paul had moved out a couple of years ago to shack up with a couple of mates. My husband had left me for younger model a couple of years before that. Even my cat had recently died. I was now living totally alone for the first time in my life.

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James Winterton

James Winterton. I came across his name when I was Googling something. It got me thinking about the James Winterton that I went out with when I was fifteen. I wondered where my James Winterton was now. Was he still even alive? So I Googled further. There seem to be a lot of James Wintertons in the world, but none of them sounded like my James Winterton. I tried finding him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and even Friends Reunited, all to no avail.

That didn’t mean that he was dead, of course, but he obviously didn’t use social media, nor had he achieved fame or infamy, neither of which surprised me. Still, I was curious about what had happened to him.

German Shedders

It was a lovely day here today, although a tad on the breezy side. I hung out my washing using extra pegs, so I wouldn’t come back to find my jeans hanging over the fence between me and next door or, worse, lying in the barked area of my garden that my dog uses for you know what.

I then walked my dog around the parkland outside my house, avoiding the small children, overseen by their dad, using the sloping footpath as a racetrack and the bigger children playing in the thicket nearby. Hasn’t anyone told them that they should keep a meter apart? Obviously not. Maybe the Coronavirus social distancing doesn’t apply to children. They apparently

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My Red Shoes

It was my thirteenth birthday the day I got my first pair of grown up shoes. They were bright red, with big brass-coloured buckles on the front and had tiny bit of a heel. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was absolutely thrilled. I had seen those red shoes in a shoe shop when I was with my mother getting shoes to wear in my senior school. I hated those shoes. Awful clodhoppers they were.

My feet had been growing fast so my mother decided I needed shoes that I would grow into. At the time I had size six feet, but these shoes were size seven and a half. I still only wear size sevens, so I would never have grown into them. They were horrible tan coloured lace-ups with thick chunky pale mustard coloured soles. When I was a bit older and stroppier, I used to wear these shoes when I left home and then change into my sandals when I was out of sight of my family. My mother was amazed how my awful shoes never wore out.

The Baronial Chair

Well, I have done the deed on Halloween and now I risk the haunting!

Many years ago my mother bought several items from a house contents sale at a medieval manor house in Ickenham. I was about eleven or twelve at the time, so it was in the late ‘fifties. Among the items my mother bought was the carved oak bureau, where I used to do my homework, and which got unceremoniously chopped up during our clearance of my garage. That had seen better days and was unsaleable. It had fallen apart being transported from my mother’s house to mine and was subsequently gnawed by my two young dogs. However, it housed a lot of my mother’s memorabilia, so it was useful in my garage.

Up a creek without a paddle

Picture yourself in a boat on a river. It is late on a lovely summer’s evening that was spent with friends. In this case it was on a very big river, the Thames at Twickenham, 1959. However there were no tangerine trees or marmalade skies, and certainly no diamonds in the sky for this Lucy. I was up a creek without a paddle.

That was way back, when I was a teenager. I often wonder if this day changed the course of my life.

Let me take you back to the late fifties, early sixties, before the permissive age.

School Uniforms

Brown! I hate brown. So depressing. Would I still hate brown if it hadn’t been my school uniform colour, I wonder? Would I now hate purple, my favourite colour, had my uniform been purple? I guess I’ll never know.

I have nothing against uniforms in general. They are a good idea. No-one can distinguish the rich from the poor in a uniform. Well, not in principle anyway. The fact that rich kids don’t wear slightly worn, second hand uniforms or hand-me-downs that don’t really fit properly, wouldn’t give the game away by any chance, would it?

Drifting into a career

Our school was an exam factory, an ‘establishment of academic excellence’. We were taught nothing about how to survive in the big wide world outside, just how to pass exams so that the school got a good rating for university entrants. We did actually have a good sports record as well, but I don’t think that was ever taken very seriously by the powers that be.

I was one of the lucky ones, who just drifted into an accounting career because I happened to be good at maths, and because my parents were both in accounting jobs. In my first long-term job I was a secretary/bookkeeper and I progressed from there.

Okay, so it was my own fault that I had to leave school just after taking my mock A levels,

School Dinners

I used to love my school dinners. Well, I suppose I loved any dinners. Still do. Being a Taurean, I like my food.

We kids in the fifties and sixties were lucky enough to have proper cooked school dinners, cooked on site in our school canteen kitchens. In my mind I can still smell the aromas now that used to waft through the classroom windows as lunchtime approached. Meaty smells, mmmmm. Cabbage smells, not so mmmmm!

There would be two sittings. If we were lucky we would be in the first sitting. We would sit ten to a table,

Girl on a Motor Cycle

I’m back in Brighton at the Custom Bikes Convention October 2012

I’ve been a pillion passenger on many motor bikes, and had several scary moments in my life. Being a sixties rocker, my husband always rode a motorbike and I, like the dutiful wife, accompanied him sometimes, when I wasn’t too busy washing nappies or cooking and cleaning. My first sort-of-scary moment was when I got on the back of his bike one day when we were going for a ride down to Brighton.

Tinny

When I was at TCS in the late fifties, our history teacher was Miss Irons, we called her “Tinny”. I think she knew, but in hindsight I don’t think she really minded. I thought I caught a chink of a twinkle in her eyes when, at prize-giving, the senior girl who came first was receiving her prize and called her by her namesake by mistake. Other girls would never dare, nor I.

Tinny was ancient, old fashioned and very scary. She would come stomping along the corridor with her cloak flapping behind her, like a vampire. Perhaps she actually was a vampire.

A Midnight Swim

After two holidays during my childhood at a big manor house called Kenegie, near St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall,  and a third holiday there when I was eleven, we returned when I was sixteen, in 1961. We found that the family hotel had expanded, and there were three or four blocks of chalets in the grounds. I shared a chalet with my grandmother, and my parents had a chalet in another block. This was to be my most memorable holiday with the parents.

I was a bit of a rebel by that time, and during the first few days I

Busy Lizzies

This year I have planted my Busy Lizzies in my old dog’s chewed up basket, which sits in pride of place outside my patio doors. The tatty old basket serves not just as a memorial to my lovely old dog, Myschka, but also as something to cheer me up as I open my patio door blinds first thing in the morning.

However, I have an unusual memory of Busy Lizzies that I’d like to share.

Christmas Parties

Christmas parties, or more specifically office Christmas parties are usually a disaster. I’ve been to so many I’ve lost count. Something embarrassing usually happens during the course of nearly every one I’ve been to.

Once, when I was young and foolish and had just had a promotion onto the senior level of staff, I blotted my own copy book and got so drunk I had to be taken home by the personnel manager, who had to stop his car on the way to my house so I could be sick in the gutter. I think it took me at least two years to live that one down. I never did it again, of course, but the stigma lived on for years.

The next year in the same company, I was lucky enough to be

Autumn Memories

My favourite memory of autumn will always be of walking my dogs in and around our local woods, kicking up the leaves, and picking some late blackberries off the brambles in the late autumn sunshine. I never get tired of the ever changing scenery on our regular walk near our home and my children always say they will be scattering my ashes on my dog walk when the time comes for me to cash in my chips, as it is one of my favourite places.

On a typical sunny autumn day, I stop every few yards to take a photo of the

Brighton and Back

The day started badly when I awoke from a nightmare half an hour before my alarm went off at 6.00a.m. I was on the train to Brighton with four of my friends, but we had been separated from each other on the crowded train that we had arrived almost too late for, and I was having to stand outside the toilet, wedged between several portly men. I was worried whether my friends would know where to get off the train, as I had all the tickets and route information. Then I remembered I had forgotten to

Scary Moments on a Motorbike

I’ve been a pillion passenger on many motor bikes, and had several scary moments in my life. Being a sixties rocker, my husband always rode a motorbike and I, like the dutiful wife, accompanied him sometimes, when I wasn’t too busy washing nappies or cooking and cleaning. My first sort-of-scary moment was when I got on the back of his bike one day when we were going for a ride down to Brighton.

My baby sitters were standing at the gate with our two young babies, I was standing on the rear footrests of the bike just about to sit down. My hands were wrapped around two oranges in my leather jacket pockets. My husband opened the throttle at full tilt and roared off, trying to prove that his latest bike did 0-60mph in less than ten seconds. I think he proved it, but I was left sitting in the road outside my house, and he didn’t realise I had come off the back of the bike until he went to lean the bike around a bend, and couldn’t feel me behind him.

Car Salesmen

Car salesmen? I love them! A couple of car salesmen have met their match with me.

Years ago, I saw the car of my dreams on a second hand car forecourt on the way home from shopping. She was a beautiful Granada 4×4, sleek, kind of pink, although described as gold, and perfect for pulling our brand new caravan. So my business companion screeched to a stop at my request, and we went in to see if we could buy her. Mr Car-Salesman said, “No, sorry, she is already sold. Can I interest you in this green one?”

“No thanks,” said I. “I need

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My Lovebirds

I used to have a pair of turquoise blue, grey and black masked lovebirds, called Bibby and Bobby. They used to sit together all day long, preening each other, and were never separated for very long, even when they were in my community aviary. However, circumstances changed, and

Gone but not Forgotten

As I was in the area, I went to visit my ex-mother-in-law’s grave the other day, but search as I may, I couldn’t find it, even though I remembered exactly where it was – about twenty or thirty feet from the tree, in a direct line towards the chapel.