The Baby and I spent a couple of days with Lawyer Sis, about two hours’ drive south, before Baby was due to join her beloved cousin, Buggy, Lawyer Sis’s middle child, in LA.

On the first evening we had barbeque on the deck. Lawyer Sis and Brother in Law are on a low carb diet, but they cheerfully provided everything required for anyone who still believed in sampling the major food groups. We all ate on paper plates.

After dinner we made popcorn in the microwave, climbed into the SUV and went to one of the last drive-ins left in the state. I hadn’t been to a drive-in movie for thirty years, and definitely not since they’ve abandoned those speakers on poles in favour of tuning in your radio. It was a lot warmer with the windows rolled up. The movie was dumb, but at a drive-in I guess the movie isn’t really the point.

The next morning Brother in Law put on a suit and went to work, while my sister, in her pajamas, fielded emails and phone calls from the office while entertaining me and coordinating her kids’ arrangements.

Late morning she drove me to the near-by holiday town where our brother bought an investment property a few years ago and has since then been in litigation with the former owners and the realtor. We got back around noon to find the Baby had just got up and was casually eating cereal out of a paper bowl. I had assumed the paper of the previous night was in honour of deck dining, but Baby, who makes herself at home here, knew it was the house norm.

In the afternoon we rode a ferry, bought a hostess gift for the Baby’s upcoming visit, reclaimed my youngest niece from her Greek grandmother, and smuggled my little dog under my sweatshirt into the ferry passenger cabin on the return ride, because it was way too cold to follow regulations and sit with him outside. Fellow travellers who spotted my subterfuge only smiled.

Home again, and very tired, we ate cold cuts off paper plates and cancelled the bowling alley we’d booked, though my energetic sister was keen to introduce me to “cosmic bowling”. I think that’s bowling with music and moving lights, but no doubt I’ll find out eventually.

Instead we turned on the Olympics, and as I watched the first American tele I have seen in many years, I was struck by the prescription drug ads. We have nothing like that in the UK and I wondered how British GPs would respond to the repeated suggestion “ask your doctor”. I was quite taken with the drug that stops you needing the loo when you’re on an outing and thought even Her Majesty could use that one (I once heard that royal protocol dictates she has to be within a hundred yards of one at all times). Alas the side effects, which apparently they are required to mention (they start speaking very fast at that point), make it sound not really worth it: among others, dry mouth, headache, stomach cramps, liver damage.

It turned out to be pretty much the same with all the drugs they were recommending. As soon as one looked like it would just fix me up there were threats of heart palpitations, strokes and dizzy spells, not to mention the assaults on my poor liver, already well dosed with red wine. Since they announced that women shouldn’t take the drug for reducing prostates I guess they are required to list all possible contraindications too.

Meanwhile the Lawyer Sis and Buggy’s father exchanged breezy emails about Baby’s travel arrangements.

Now I know it is not polite to make fun of someone who has invited your sixteen year old daughter to be a houseguest for a whole week, but I’m making an exception, not just because his name is St John (pronounced, quite correctly, Sin Jin – and trust one of us to find the only guy this side of Jane Eyre called that), but because he denied his child until the Lawyer Sis slapped a paternity suit on him. (And when I tell you that in divorcing the father of her first child she got him excommunicated for good measure, you probably won’t be messing with her.)

Baby thought St John’s (Sin Jin’s) email about her upcoming visit was very funny:

Our place is an old Spanish house built up in the hills with a great view. It’s hot in Los Angeles and we have palm trees everywhere, so you’ll get to wear sunglasses and a cute dress when we head out to explore Hollywood. Don’t have sunglasses or a cute dress? Save your pennies and we’ll take you shopping. Vicki knows all the best places, whether you like the latest thing or really old grungy stuff. You’ll live like a rock star for a week! Well, maybe like a back-up singer anyway.

The next day we were up early to dodge the Saturday traffic. In the ferry line my sister and my daughter applied their make up. I felt a little underdressed next to them and fumbled in my bag to see if I had remembered the lip coloured, almost invisible, lipstick I sometimes wear. Nope. As usual I had forgotten it.

By the time we got to the airport Baby had all her gels, blushes, lotions and creams packed into a clear plastic bag, her British passport stowed and her American one ready to display for a picture ID and a note of her booking reference for her e ticket. Once again I was impressed with the poise and maturity of a child only just sixteen who travels all by herself so easily across oceans and continents.

We left her in the security line. She was in LA, almost a thousand miles south, long before her aunt and I, fighting Seattle traffic, were home.

I have been rereading recently Anne Lamott‘s 1994 book, Bird by Bird, subtitled “some instructions on writing and life”.  Except for Strunk and White’s classic (and very different) Elements of Style (my writing Bible since I was an undergraduate), this is the best book about practicing writing I know.  It is much more about how to get your head around doing it than teaching any technique or rules, but it is full of entertaining stories and good advice.

Early in the book Lamott discusses the fear we all have that the great idea we came up with daydreaming in bed turns out to seem really terrible when we face the blank screen or page.  And as soon as writers know for sure how very, very bad it is:

every form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout — the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the handwashing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias.  And especially the paranoia.

Lamott likes to read to her classes a poem by Phillip Lopate, reminding them that they can either be “defeated and disoriented by all these feelings” (and I would add demoralised), or they can, like Lopate, use the feelings to shape their work:

We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the sake of the collective.

Sadly, it seems, most of her students don’t get the poem. Lamott tries to teach them to focus on writing, rather than publication.  Writing, she says, “can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up.”

Then she tells another story, a propos of very little, but it is, nevertheless, like most of the stories in the book, quite good:

“My son, Sam, at three and a half, had these keys to a set of plastic handcuffs, and one morning he intentionally locked himself out of the house. I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper when I heard him stick his plastic keys into the doorknob and try to open the door. Then I heard him say, ‘Oh, shit.’ My whole face widened, like the guy in Edvard Munch’s Scream.  After a moment I got up and opened the front door.

‘Honey,’ I said, ‘what’d you just say?’

‘I said, “Oh, shit,”‘ he said.

‘But, honey, that’s a naughty word.  Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it.  Okay?’

He hung his head for a moment, nodded, and said, ‘Okay, Mom.’ Then he leaned forward and said confidentially, ‘But can I tell you why I said “shit?”‘ I said, Okay, and he said, ‘Because of the fucking keys!'”

For a while, when I called my mother and asked what she was up to, she would say, Oh, just looking for men on the internet.  Since she found her current husband that way, she’s a great believer in online dating and has been urging me to have a go for a long time.

I’m trying to get over my sneaking suspicion that only losers need to find dates that way.  I’ve been separated, and then divorced, for seven years and in that time I think I have met just one new, single, heterosexual man of appropriate age (soon known as my Stalker to the friend who introduced us).  I keep reading about skyrocketing divorce rates, and assume that for every divorced woman there must be a divorced man, so I don’t know how it works out that the world is full of single women and attached men.

Anyway, a year or two ago I set up a “profile” on a dating site, and then I immediately made my profile invisible.  I guess they have that option especially for nuts like me.  Now and again I logged in and edited my invisible profile.  When I got to the US this spring I edited it to change my location and to update what I last read.  (Often Trollope these days, since you ask; I need comfort food.)  Visible or not, you don’t have to pay money for this.  You can lurk, edit and update forever for free. 

Very late one night recently, when I had had a wee bit too much red wine, I clicked the button that said Visible to All.

About seven am the next day, I logged on to toggle it back to invisible.  I was full of remorse of the morning.  I had drunk too much and been foolish.  I wasn’t ready.  Internet dating wasn’t for me.  I would only meet creeps and losers.

Because of the way these sites work I knew for sure that no one Looking for Women within 30 miles of me was on line when I made myself visible late that previous night, and I reasoned that only a sex maniac would be Looking for Women at seven in the morning.  If I made myself invisible really fast I would be safe and I could go back to lurking for another year or two.

I logged on and in big red letters a message popped up that said You’ve Caught His Eye!

Oh great.  I have caught the eye of a sex maniac, Looking for Women at seven am.  I panicked and made myself invisible.  Then I thought, what if I like the sex maniac?  I made myself visible again.  And then I thought, what am I thinking?  I made myself invisible.  Finally I decided that these sex maniacs are going to think they are in an episode of Bewitched (at best) or (worst) that their potential date is a psychotic, the way she’s popping in and out.  I gave myself a lecture: this is Internet Dating.  You are meant to Be Visible.  That’s how you Get Dates.

Anyway, I reasoned, it was too late.  I had already put myself on view. I made my profile visible again and kept it that way. 

But then I didn’t check my email for a whole week, in case someone had sent me a message.  I know that makes no sense.  I know I am supposed to want to get emailed.  In a funny way the possibility of not being chosen feels easy – in that case they are idiots, who wants them?  But I can barely stand the idea of men looking at me and picking me as if I were some object.

When I finally checked I saw that several someones had emailed, and here’s where the next catch is.  You don’t know if it’s the hairy guy in a hat who is looking for a woman who can heat with wood and is willing to toil in the garden (it was) or the skinny bicyclist who doesn’t like fish (it was) or the screenplay writer who really did win Cannes a long, long time ago (it was) or the good ol boy looking for a good ol gal and he might mention what size of foot she should have but he doesn’t like to say in advance  (it was). Oh, and Dancing Man emailed too.

You know you’ve got emails, but you can’t read them or reply to them and don’t even know who they’re from until you pay.

My lurking days were over.  I paid.  I had decided to try this probably stupid idea, and if I was going to do it I had better find out who those messages were from and what they said.

So now I am a full fledged member for three months.  Not only does my (visible) picture have a big red border whenever I sign in that says Online Now! when I go off line it says Active Within 3 Days (or, worse, Active Within 24 Hours).  Now, that’s just gross, isn’t it? 

Meanwhile I have two dates, which I confessed to the Lawyer Sis who was visiting the other day.  I logged on to the site to show her my matches (oh damn, now it says Active Within One Hour).  She took a quick look and noted that the first one was missing a tooth and the second was a lot older than the 60 he was claiming.

I pulled off my specs, stuck my face an inch or so from the screen, and studied their pictures. 

Damn! I would never have agreed to date a guy missing a front tooth, if I didn’t have such poor eyesight.

I would like to apologise for the recent carnivorous tone of this blog, and to say, that although moose were undoubtedly harmed in the Manley Incident, all mentions of killing Fatted Calves were purely metaphorical.  (For which I guess I also ought to apologise, because I clearly promised no metaphors.)

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

A long time ago, when I was a better person, an Economist declared, in his charming British way, that he liked me because, for an American, I was remarkably uninterested in Consumer Gerbils.

Now, as a chat up line, that could probably win a prize. Also it was true, I wasn’t very interested in what the Economist was talking about, which after some moments of confusion turned out to be stuff like cars, televisions and washing machines (oh, I see, consumer durables). 

Reader, I married him.  I would like to say, for the record, that there were many advantages to being married to the Economist for nearly two decades.  He’d never mow the grass (on account of the opportunity costs) but he did teach me that it was okay to want stuff, that in fact under many circumstances I was doing good by wanting stuff. 

Nevertheless, on the whole, my wants are modest.  I like pretty things, but mostly I own trinkets, and I buy my clothes at outlet stores, final reduction sales or Costco.  I like housey things, but my life has been unsettled and nomadic for a couple of years so I no longer ever buy pretty cushions or crockery or candles, let alone consumer gerbils.

But the fact is, I like toys, and, for a long time my two favourite sorts have been bicycle stuff and telephones.  I guess they suit my peripatetic world.

A couple of Christmases ago, my gainfully employed elder son bought me a bicycle GPS thingy that tells me how far I have gone and what my heart rate was, and my speed and my average speed and how to find my way home, and I love it.  I never go on the bike without it.  This spring, when I quit my job my colleagues very generously gave me an Amazon gift certificate and instead of spending it on books (which I think they rather thought I would) I have spent almost half of it on a super light weight quick release seat post rack for my bike, a travel bag to fit the rack and a snazzy German made basket (good for groceries or poodle) – all extravagant stuff I never would have bought for myself.  I was so happy with my purchases that for a whole month I had the bike in the living room so I could admire these new accessories, stroke them as I walked by, strip away the velcro and pull the bag on and off, climb on the bike, balance the poodle and practice releasing the quick release lever.  The dog was very forbearing.

As for my other favourite: in England I had a phone, not a lovely sleek iPhone, but a great clunky thing. It didn’t fit very well in my handbag, but it did pick up email.  I tried to love it because it was a toy, and because of the email and because it was the very first (and only) thing I ever bought on ebay.  

I’m not normally a flakey sort of person (despite all evidence to the contrary) but I managed to lose the case (on my birthday) and afterwards carried the phone in a sock.

A couple of weeks later, I was racing (on my bike) in my lunch hour to the post office.  My daughter working for the VSO (British Peace Corps) in Uganda had sent an urgent SOS for knickers.  It seems that in Kampala there are no underwear shops, and, though she could buy anything else (including cell phones) on the street, she just couldn’t bring herself to buy underpants and bras.  Must be something about the way I raised her.

So I was sending emergency Marks and Spencer supplies, only I was late, and had the parcel on the bike rack and the phone in the sock and, well, I guess the phone fell on the ground (cause it was big and clunky and didn’t really fit in my bag).  As I was posting the parcel (where the guy in the post office shook his head and said this will never, ever, get there, but if you want to pay extra then they have to sign for it before they steal it), my friend, whom I was due to meet for lunch, was phoning to say she was going to be a little late.

Only I no longer had a phone.  It was lying in a sock next to my bicycle where it had fallen from my bag. 

Under normal circumstances I probably would have recovered my phone, in the sock, when I went back to the bike.  Not many people would want to pick up a sock lying by the side of the road.

But when the sock begins to play The Star Spangled Banner it is quite another matter.

I want an iPhone.  I really, really want an iPhone and if I get an iPhone I promise I will look after it and never, ever put it in a sock. 

And I don’t sleep in tents, were the words of my ex when I suggested, many years ago, that we take the kids camping.  So, though I camped some when I was a child, and a lot when I was a young woman, I didn’t at all while I was married.  After my ex and I separated I bought a couple of tents and for a few years took my youngest, with half a dozen or so other little girls, to a campground about five miles from home where we made makeshift somemores out of chocolate digestive biscuits and raspberry flavoured (because that’s all I could find) marshmallows. 

My daughter lost interest when she was about 11 and I hadn’t been in a tent since then when I got a call late morning on Saturday from the hippies on the Extremely Small Island.  There would be transport for me if I was waiting by the “marina” at noon.  I rummaged about until I found my mother’s tent, bedroll and sleeping bag, and threw together a few clothes.  I also grabbed a random, and largely inappropriate, stash of food.

The marina is really just a narrow rocky beach with a boat ramp, right before the spot where an ugly seawall inadequately protects a partially washed away road.  As I stood by the roadside with all my stuff – which the Americans elevated to “gear” and which I finally remembered the Brits would have called “kit” – a pick up cruised by, stopped, and reversed back to me.  Dancing Man leaned out of the window and chatted me up while I scanned the horizon for my ship coming in.

Meanwhile several teenagers and a couple of engaging eleven year olds, who I realised were to be my fellow travellers, arrived with their gear.  We all watched as finally the boat pulled in and tied off on the mooring 50 yards or so offshore.

It took a couple of journeys rowing back and forth to the sail boat before we were all loaded and headed for the Extremely Small Island under power of a put put motor, since we were too many to sail. 

Twenty minutes later we rowed ashore to find an impressive camp already set on the beach, with a large, communal kitchen tent draped over the picnic table next to the fire pit.  Strung along the beach was a row of other tents, and finding a vacant spot I pitched mine.

My orientation consisted of the question, Did you bring wine? (yes) and a guided tour to the pit toilets.  

The children (all boys) wandered off and the grownups drank and ate guacamole (good call my bringing that).  After awhile the four womenfolk set off in search of the kids.  Just one of us was mother to any of them, but we all understood her anxiety.  At high tide only part of the shore is accessible, and we quickly covered it.  Back at camp the mother became really worried.  Two years earlier, apparently, the kids, clinging to cliffs as the tide came in, had to be rescued by boat.  None of the rest of us thought they would do it twice, but the mother was insistent and a search boat went out. 

Not long afterwards, a group of very wet children, rescued for the second time, shivered by the fire and slowly burnt the rubber of their drying shoes.  The teenagers sullenly blamed it on the overweight eleven year old who had been found clinging to a particularly precarious spot on the cliff side.  If it hadn’t been for him, they said, they would have made it.  There were minor skirmishes between the teenagers and the drunker grownups.  I had never met most of the men and noted that they, and the children, had curious first names: Kent, Solomon, Titus, Keenan, Egerton. 

After awhile I worked out that a communal kitchen didn’t mean there would be any communal dinner or anyone taking charge of the fire, except to keep it topped with driftwood.  I monitored smouldering shoes, drank wine and ate tortilla chips.  I felt alone, but this time I didn’t feel strange and I didn’t feel sorry for myself. 

The tide continued to rise and one by one we drifted off to our tents, except for a young man who stretched out on the picnic bench and tried to sleep until dozens of field mice, waiting for quiet, ran all over him.

The next morning the party began to break up.  Guys remembered they had to be somewhere that day and teenagers had work to go to.  By late afternoon it was only the mother, her eleven year old son, a friend of his, and I who were left.  As he departed, her husband promised to come back to fetch us the next day. 

The kids paddled about in a canoe, and the mother and I walked and panicked when, briefly, we lost my little dog.  We watched eagles watching us from the top of tall pines and hoped they didn’t fancy poodle for dinner.

The four of us (and the dog, phew) ate together beside the fire and the kids made somemores of the genuine variety.  We competed for the perfect toasted marshmallow while the fire slowly burned low.  As the tide came in a tug boat with lighted mast pulled an enormous tanker through the strait.  One of the kids said, sticking his marshmallow into the embers, It’s so nice to be here, with no one getting drunk.

I woke before dawn to the sound of another tug.  We breakfasted on what food was still left, rationed our water a little, and lolled in the sunshine.  I had forgotten the two things I love most about camping – the sheer grubbiness of it and the sitting around doing nothing, getting just enough too much sun to make you sleepy.  Along with my standards of cleanliness, my literary tastes plummet.  I happily read a really lousy thriller – it might be the first thriller I have read since a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada in the seventies when The Onion Field (a good thriller, as I recall) gripped me.

We broke camp sadly, watching our pick up boat slowly drawing closer.  The kids rowed back and forth with the gear, and as they returned for a final trip were swamped by the wake of yet another tanker.  We baled the canoe with plastic food tubs leftover from camping feasts, climbed in with the wet children, and paddled one last time to the boat that sailed us to the world of running water, real beds and email.

I want to go back!

Despite trying all day and into the evening on the Fourth to get one of the hippies, drunks or Democrats to come back and fetch me so I could join them on the Extremely Small Island, I failed.  There was nothing for it but to go to the other party.  The invitation said 6:30 and by then it was half past seven.

I cut flowers from the garden and made a sweet bunch of poppies, snap dragons, toad flax, delphiniums and peonies (everything is late this year), threw together my salad contribution and grabbed a bottle of wine.

The party was at a beach house with a panoramic view across the water – so wide that the hostess (who just about knew who I was after I told her my name) told me that this time of year they could see the sunrise on the right edge of the horizon and the sunset on the left.  Alas, she seemed unimpressed with my posy wrapped at the stem in wet paper towels and cling film.  I guess hers was more an exotic hothouse plants from the florist sort of world.

I added my bottle to the shared table (where, unpromisingly, it was one of two) and poured myself a large glass. (I was right in predicting it would be the only glass I would get.) Passing a table laden with salads, chips (crisps), and rows of red white and blue cupcakes topped with mini American flags, I tentatively wandered over to the tail end of the barbeque.

As he deposited a hotdog on my paper plate the cook said, pointedly, “So glad you could come,” and I realised at once that he must be the host and that he was quite sure I had crashed his party.

I ate my hot dog and chatted a little to the few people I knew or recognised, including Dancing Man whom I had spotted from an internet dating site (where I occasionally lurk but never have the nerve to post a profile myself).  I didn’t let on that I knew he was Dancing Man.

Most people had eaten and, for something to do, I helped clean up. Then, beginning to feel sorry for myself, I sat alone and watched the sun set.  Across the water firework displays were getting going, and from the next door house, hidden by a bank of trees, there was an occasional bang.  The several dozens of guests at this party pulled up their chairs to the water’s edge and waited.

After a very, very long time two young men rowed out to a barge loaded with fireworks and lit a fuse.  Loudspeakers began to play The Star Spangled Banner and the first rockets went up.

There’s nothing like being abroad for thirty years to bring out patriotism.  It has been at least a couple of decades since I was in the US on the Fourth of July and the anthem with the rockets thrilled me.  But I am afraid my enjoyment of the show ended there.  The music became increasingly loud and the lyrics increasingly aggressive and unpleasant until there was one that seemed to be saying we would put a bullet in your butt courtesy of the red, white and blue.

On the way home I caught the tail end of a much better display on the other side of the island.  I went to bed feeling sullied and fell asleep to the sounds of distant bangs as my fellow Americans celebrated on into the night.

In England I used to annoy my neighbours by hanging an American flag out the window, but for the first time in forever I am actually in the US.

I’d forgotten what a deal patriotism is here.  Presidential candidates are fighting over who is the more patriotic, the radio is playing Sousa marches and flags are flying from lawns all over the place.  In England on the Queen’s birthday we get a verse of God Save the Queen just before the 8 o’clock news and there are a few discreet Union Jacks on government buildings and pretentious hotels looking to attract foreigners.  It isn’t a public holiday, nor are the other two possibilities, St George’s Day (for England at least) or Guy Fawkes Day.

I haven’t yet got definite plans for my day of patriotism.  The crowd I usually hang out with, the drunks, hippies and Democrats have all decamped to another island only accessible by boat.  I stayed home, partly because of the cat, but mainly because I thought I could rent out my bed-no-breakfast that I am doing for some extra cash over the summer.  (I didn’t.)

Meanwhile the well-behaved, grown up, hip replacement gang have invited me to a sober potluck on the beach.  I don’t know any of them, really, but it was kind of them to ask.

Either way there I shall be sure to do my patriotic duty to eat barbequed hot dogs and to ooh and ahh at fireworks.

Yesterday was the Fire Department open house and an island event not to be missed.  Besides the fire fighters, the Disaster Preparedness Committee were out in force.

There were free hotdogs, crisps, pop, juice and cake.  For the kids there were free tee shirts, fire hats, colouring books and those throwing discs with a hole in the middle that are kind of like frisbees (what are they called?)  There were free bicycle helmets on display with the motto: “Need a helmet, grab a fireman.” 

Now I have been to a lot of village fetes in my day (you Yanks have seen these on Morse or Midsommer Murders) and I have paid good money to guess the colour of the towel and the name of the teddy bear and the weight of the pig, but I have never, ever been given anything free, so I took what I thought I could get away with.  I really wanted a tee shirt, and judging by the size of some of the kids, there were plenty that would fit me, but I didn’t dare ask. 

And I can tell you, this island is prepared for disasters, including volcanos, featured on the publicity for this event although we are a really, really long way from the nearest dodgy mountain.  There was a whole trailer full of stuff – blankets, cots (Brits nb: not baby cots, camp beds), portable kitchen, pots, pans, propane, first aid kit, cleansing stuff and a whole lot more, not to mention the defibrillator and the oxygen tanks on the fire engines.

There was also a lot of really scary literature, and I started to feel guilty that I didn’t have a Family Plan in Case of Emergency and had never assembled a kit placed by the door containing food and water (a gallon per person per day for three days), radio, torch, battery, hygiene stuff (like toilet paper but no guidance as to how many rolls per person per day), sturdy shoes, coats, jackets, hats, mittens, blankets, whistle, kitchen accessories, pots and pans, tools, maps, hearing aid batteries, nappies, dummies and a white flag. 

Nor have I conducted twice yearly family drills, but if I had I would know for sure by now that I can’t carry that kit.  Meanwhile, I probably would have been sued several times when visitors fell over the kit on the way into my house.

Never mind.  I got a great picture of me and Smokey.

My housesitter opens the post and emails me about anything I need to know. In one of his occasional updates he mentioned that Her Majesty’s Revenue Collectors were “a bit unhappy” about the National Insurance I owed them, and would I like him to forward the letter?

Since I don’t owe them any money I wasn’t too worried. A few weeks later I guess he thought I really ought to see the letter so he scanned it and sent it to me.

My British email provider decided it was junk. Well, of course.  It was bound to be fake; Her Majesty’s Revenue Collectors would never use such intemperate language. The letter was headed “Warning of legal proceedings”.

When I finally retrieved it during an occasional trawl of the junk folder more than a month had passed since the date of the letter. I did think my housesitter might have given me clearer warning, but it was my own fault — I ought to know by now that “a bit unhappy” is strong stuff.

I telephoned the number they offered, in friendly British way, in case I knew any reason why they shouldn’t begin legal proceedings, or if I needed “help or advice”. It’s one of the things I like about the Brits. They never really expect you to be competent about your tax affairs.

A man with a beautiful Edinburgh accent answered the phone. After a few moments discussion he said, “Ah, now there’s where you went wrong Miss – “ and then he pronounced my name so beautifully that I wanted to work out how to change the spelling so it could always sound like that. Meanwhile he twiddled with his computer a bit and said it was all fixed. So it seems I will not be helping the police with their inquiries or detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure.

I wasn’t expecting the Scottish accent, though. The tax office is on Tyneside, near where my ex husband’s family comes from and where I expected to hear a version of Geordie, the local accent.  This accent is still distinctive, although many of the dialect words are vanishing, except among the elderly. When their father’s uncle talks my kids just smile and nod. I’ve heard them tell Americans emphatically, “There is no way you could understand our Uncle Bob.”

For Yanks who don’t know Geordie, here’s a recording from the British Library archive. This man is a generation or two younger than Uncle Bob and speaks much more slowly and clearly, but I bet even so you have to concentrate.