Day of the Dead-Like Living

My friend Lyn was complaining the other day- about her 18 year old son. I know how she feels.

I have one too.

It’s the summer holidays and we await A level results. In the meantime our beloved offspring are getting on our nerves.

“He’s horizontal all the time, goes to bed late, watches TV , computer, X box and doesn’t see daylight at all. He came back from a holiday in Greece paler than before he left.”

Now I read the papers, especially the mental health sections, (I have a particular interest/need) and I understand that the teenage brain requires more sleep than normal. Something to do with their circadian rhythm and vampirish sleep patterns. Indeed some schools are advocating a later start to the school day to enable students to have better focus, impulse control, homework results, improved attendance, concentration, sociability, and alertness during the day etc...

Both Lyn and I have tried to extol the virtues of summer employment and the benefits, self – respect, discipline, cash etc to be gained thereof. All to no avail. Lyn even went as far as producing a list of exciting possibilities in the vicinity, washing up, shelf stacking, pamphlet delivering...It was discarded amongst the sweet wrappers littering his table as he blithely continued on Facebook. Mine was much the same when I raised the subject, again.

 “I don’t want a job” he retorted as he took my car keys.

Now I’m a reasonably intolerant kind of mother with a short fuse but even I have my pre-meltdown limits. This state of perpetual horizontalism in a twilight world has to stop.

In France a grande horizontale would at least be paid for her supine position and if she really made an effort and shook a leg or two there might even be a bonus in it for her.

Now I’m not advocating any kind of immoral behaviour here though a stint as a pit pony down a Welsh coal mine might make them appreciate daylight a bit more.

I have something else in mind. Something local, not too strenuous, productive in its way though probably not one for the CV.

Our local pick –your- own farm has vacancies, for scarecrows.

All we would have to do is rouse our boys, momentarily, fix them to a wooden stake, prop them up, slather their delicate palefaces with suntan cream , pop a straw hat on their heads and leave them in the field for a couple of hours. One look at their dishevelled hair, grungy clothes and that vacant gormless gaga shoot-em up X-box look in the eyes and the terrified birds would squawk off.

They could still be asleep, just vertical for a change.

 

Perfect!

Grape Expectations

Went to a wine tasting last week, hosted by a Master of Wine. There are only about 300 around. Fancy that!

It was held in a local church hall where, by some remarkable quirk of irony, the next room was booked for a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

You could spot the ones coming in to the tasting; they looked happy and full of expectation for a boozy good night out. The sad expressions turning left headed for the AAs knees up. We were under strict instructions not to leave any half bottles or undrunk wine hanging around, although the aromas wafting over next door on a hot evening must have seemed like the Temptation of Christ.

As I helped put out the cheese and biscuits the organiser’s wife ruefully looked at the gathered throng quaffing their tasting sample of a Spanish prosecco and commented-

“I wonder if some of us lot will eventually turn up next door”. Hmm.

Anyway, alcohol and stories do go together rather well and this chap was full of them, recounting an old codger at a port tasting, who, swilling a sample round his mouth and preparing to spit out, missed the spittoon and splattered the back of another chap in front of him. To cover his embarrassment he shamelessly exclaimed, “Corked!”

Apart from the speaker, nobody there was doing any spitting, but then they never do. When I tried it once at the choral society’s wine do I was roundly told off for wasting “damn good claret” by an ageing bass. 

By the end of the evening we were all pretty much singing from the same song sheet. As I listened to the speaker drone on about vinification, volatile esters and residual sugar, I wafted off into a reverie about my eldest’s career prospects. Now he works on the edge of viticultural possibilities, in a very prestigious wine emporium in London. 

Twirling and sniffing a delicious Chateauneuf du Pape I found myself stoked up with alcoholic ambitions for my offspring. All mothers do, but my matchmaking machinations would put Jane Austin’s mère Bennett’s in the shade. What if my little Pip were to marry some Estella with a couple of hundred premium hectares to her name? It would have to be a top end estate, none of your lower case Chiantis or second division Fleuries. Better Google the Bordeaux chateaux and research eligible offspring.

 I’m not having my boy marrying into any old plonk.

What, Wine snob? Moi?

No, no, not at all. I always go for quality.

I’d promise to stay sober for the wedding and then look forward to bouncing a couple of first growths on my knee. And should granny’s babysitting duties be curtailed due to her increased instability, and the residual effects of imbibing copious Merlots over the years, well they can always send  me to a luxury nursing home. As long as I keep getting regular visits and deliveries of cases of my Grand Cru claret I’d be quite happy. Emulating old Lily Bollinger, I shall, “Only drink champagne when I’m happy, and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I am not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.”

They say the life expectancy is longer for those who occasionally indulge, rather than teetotallers. 

Well, best to shuffle off this mortal coil with a smile on one’s face. As long as I don’t end up like the Duke of Clarence, who drowned in a Butt of Malmsey.

Bet he wasn’t expecting to enjoy a wine tasting quite like that.

Tuscan Glow

 
Tuscan Glow, a pale terracotta, is the name of the paint I chose for my dining room walls.

 It’s also the colour of Tuscan sunsets. 

 I know. I was there.

The view from our hotel restaurant onto vineyards and olive groves was wonderful and the food exquisitely...expensive. During the first night’s dinner a thin, bird-like woman from New York had sat at the next table. She reminded me of that Spitting Image sketch of Joan Rivers – the blond- wigged, red-lipped skeleton who clashes her bony hands together screaming, “Make-up, make-up.”

A choking noise suddenly interrupted this Italianate idyll.

It was her. Everyone froze, whilst I dashed over and offered,"A good slap or the Heimlich manoeuvre?” At which she suddenly began to projectile vomit all over the silver, the crockery and her ultra-designer outfit as her husband, with his arm protectively around her, looked on horrified, at the mess and, at me, looming large over this grotesque tableau.

Then, this horrible parody of Monty Python’s Mr Creosote blamed “just a little piece of steak, honey” and yakked on, sitting in her own personal pool of vomit, as if nothing had happened!
Later,playing chess with my petit fours, I wildly guessed that an eating disorder was the problem, and wondered if Anna Wrecksick realised what she really looked like.

Ah well, to each his own mask.

Grotesque (originally the style in Nero’s palace/grotto) is the artistic definition of the friezes we saw in the Uffizi gallery in Florence. My first view of Florentine art from our minibus as we entered this birthplace of the Renaissance was wall graffiti which read-

“Why do they call it tourist season in this shit town?”  What provoked that I wonder?

Perspective gives an interesting viewpoint and our guide explained its artistic beginnings as we gazed on the paintings (Giotto and Duccio, both Tuscans, are credited with introducing depth and volume in their art).

Florence is famous for its statues. Apparently American tourists love Michelangelo’s David because, as our guide was once told,“ He’s huge and he’s a winner.” Japanese tourists are not so keen on this in –your- face nudity and prefer to see discrete, smaller, things. The Russians have their favourites, different, as well. Fancy that!

Ah well, you see what you want to see.

Last time I saw a copy of David was in the V and A museum in London with my friend Ruth who commented, “Griff, doesn’t it make you feel totally inadequate?”Which is pretty much how Bandinelli must have felt when his constipated-looking Hercules statue was displayed at the same time as David and ridiculed as looking like “a sack of potatoes”in comparison.

My favourite portrait was Lippi’s Madonna and child. The model, a Carmelite nun in real life, had an affair with old Lippi who was a monk! Yet she looks so deceptively virginal. And as for Titian’s Venus of Urbino with her forthright gaze, pink cheeks and hand cupped over her pudenda...
Well, I understand why it caused a scandal at the time. I know what I can see.

The last exhibit I saw was this-

The Latin reads “To each his own mask."


After our day trip, back at the hotel, I, the only pale-faced Brit, sulkily refused to get into the pool in front of the svelte American guests who looked like extras from the Great Gatsby. 


Who was more vain, me or Anna Wrecksick, I wondered.

I waited until they’d gone off to titivate before dinner and then the pool was mine. 

I did my favourite party trick ( well it would be if I went to those kind of parties) – floating, buoyant in the water, aided by a magnificent pair of lungs supporting architectural domes and layers of substantial adipose tissue. With my golden hair flowing around my chubby pink cheeks and my delicate size three feet afloat, well,I have to say, I felt like a cross between Ophelia and Brunhilde. 

Back home I noticed how my tanned arms blended nicely with the Tuscan glow paint in the dining room. 

Wait a minute!

I disrobe, upturn a cream plastic bucket (my marble plinth), extend and elongate my left arm just so, look heavenwards with a suitably simpering virginal expression and...

Now I’ve tried my best to paint a picture for you.

Do tell me...

What do you see?