What The Butler Saw

This has been one of those weeks where all the most boring practical elements that support life have got in a muddle. First it was the saga of the Sky engineer, and really that was rather minor compared to all the other stuff that has followed.

We had an email from our building insurers about cutting down a sycamore tree in our garden which is causing terrible subsidence through our house. The insurers said it will cost £6000 (yes, thousand) to cut it down (because the tree is technically owned by Network Rail, who have to oversee the tree surgeons as we live by a railway line). They also said our insurance may not cover this cost. And they said any costs they do pick up, we have to pay for upfront anyway. Oh, and then they told us they won't be insuring us anymore in future (could this have anything to do with the fact we have dared to claim on our subsidence policy?) Calling to explain that it is seriously impossible for us to pay £6000, whether or not it is covered and reimbursed, to have a tree cut down (and unfair, because we are meant to be covered for subsidence), I was told our insurance contact is on holiday for two weeks! So we and our neighbours are all quietly panicking.

But even that is nothing compared to the nightmare I've had as a customer of the ISP PlusNet this week. I stopped receiving emails on Monday and, although I am now seemingly almost back to normal, some emails are still taking hours to days to arrive and my email keeps timing out. This is obviously catastrophic when you've got important and urgent emails coming through.

You'd think that in this situation PlusNet would be 'all hands on deck' supporting and reassuring its customers, but, well, that's not what I've experienced. I've spent about an hour and a half trying to get through to someone there on the phone, and either found myself in interminable queues, or led through a maze of pre-recorded options and then brusquely cut off by some implacable women's voice telling me to logon to their website. As if I haven't been monitoring the website's service status information every ten minutes for the last two days! As if I haven't sent online questions to the technical support team which have gone resoundingly unanswered (typical response: Dear Ms G., Please refer to our website's service status information, Regards, XX').

It's like, fine, PlusNet, leave your customers with no email for two days, no problem. Don't bother apologising to them, answering your phones or responding fairly to their queries. No email? No human being you can get through to? What's the problem!

I just want my lost emails back and then I'm gonna probably leave PlusNet for good. They used to be a really good ISP with reasonable customer service, but recently it's gone so downhill.

Apart from this, everything's dandy though.

As I write this I'm on hold. Can't get on with writing up the interview I'm working on. We are having Sky installed (supposedly) and the engineer who was supposed to call us to make an appointment has not done so. Presumably, I am supposed to wait at home in eager anticipation in case he arrives at any time from 8am till 6pm. I wouldn't be that bothered, but I've been on hold trying to sort this out for 15 minutes or so now, and the 'customer care' person says he cannot call customers back - no, one has to hold on the phone - when they were supposed to call us in the first place. What kind of customer service is that?

OH MY GOD! I have just been cut off with no warning! The Vivaldi suddenly turned to bleep as the dial tone filled my furious ear.

What to do now? Try again? Call the press office?

Let's see, I'll try again...

"If it's HD choose 2...for SKY Plus hit 3.." Eh? Why have this stupid chirpy nonsense?

"Your call should be answered in under..." electronic pause... "seven minutes".

Oh, well that's fine then!

Now I'm being mercilessly bombarded by adverts. Do they think their customers are so stupid they want to have this pap pumped into their ears?

Come to think of it, I've never liked SKY as a brand, never seen myself as a SKY person. Always thought in my bourgeois way that having satellite TV was somehow morally suspect. Now, we have finally given in (Dave wanted more sports..), but I'm getting REALLY bad vibes.

OK, it's now 15 minutes later, and I have now have put the phone down, having just been informed by someone called Robert that "the job's not going ahead". No-one is coming today, the engineer is ill. Nobody bothered to tell us of course, but hey.

Oh, and Robert says this means we have been rescheduled for the 6th September. "I can only tell you what's happening on the system," he explained.

Right, I've now wasted about an hour on this and I'm fuming. I'm writing a letter of complaint! Update coming...

11.45am Update: Having written my complaint letter, I just got a call from some other random department in the SKY empire saying the engineer is stuck in traffic or some other totally meaningless excuse. They had no record of any ill engineer and said they will send another engineer over tomorrow. So why was I told the engineer is ill?

5.30pm Update: All is now well again. At 5pm, there was a ring at the door. It was a SKY engineer. I don't know how or why he came out of the blue, but I was rather pleased.

Here's a list of things from the 80s I miss:

Come and Praise (I am not sure, but think that was what it was called - can anyone remember?)
A slim blue C of E hymnbook with a montage picture of a group of faces on the cover. Contained all my favourite primary school hymns like 'Autumn days when the grass is jewelled' and 'Lord of the Dance'. It vanished into the mists of time in my parents' house, along with so many other childhood artefacts.

Happy Families card game
It had the cutest illustrations. All the families were woodland animals, eg the hedgehog family!

Stamp collection that would today be worth thousands
When I was about six, some kind person (I don't recall who) gave me their grown-up child's stamp collection so I could take it forward through the 1980s. It was already a highly developed album containing many 1950s-1970s stamps. For some reason, I never realised it could be valuable one day, and neglected to take care of it. I probably gave it to charity. I just hope someone somewhere has made a mint out of it.

80s ice cream flavours
Seems bizarrely old fashioned today, but remember when raspberry ripple was THE taste sensation? As fresh and exciting then as Haagen Dazs cookies and cream was in 1991....ooh, and there was also mint- choc-chip, and neopolitan. And M&S's popular puddings were things like apricot roly poly.

Twinkle magazine
I used to read this lying on my bedroom floor popping those white milk sweets into my mouth. Have no memories about what the magazine contained today, I just remember being rather addicted to it. Then I moved onto Bunty, then Girl, then my older sister's old Jackies (they had the best photostories) and from then on it was a long descent into the NME and Just 17.

Merlin's Castle
I would still play this obsessively today if I got the chance, but sadly for me, the BBC text adventure games that were the be all and end all of 80s and early 90s computer lessons are now technologically beyond a joke. How much better was MC and the Lost Frog than the bam bam you're dead stuff children play today? Tons, if you ask me.

Bod, Pigeon Street, Bagpuss, The Flumps, Henry's Cat, Knightmare, Bad Boyes, We are the Champions (oh how I wanted to be on it and dive in the pool at the end)...oh, this list could go on for pages.
Bring them back for the grown-up generation! (Though when I did manage to watch an old episode of The Flumps a few years ago, I was very disappointed. Bagpuss is still good when you're grown -up though.)




That's actually it for now, but sure more things will pop into my head later!

I never got around to writing about my experience at Bennington College, Vermont, in June. Bennington is a college where you can get a degree in pretty much any arts subject, including dance, drama, literature and writing. Its creative writing MFA, run by TS Eliot fanatic Liam Rector, is very popular. My mother, a biographer, has been a visiting member of faculty at the MFA's summer term for a few years, and this year I was invited to join her to read from my book and talk about mothers and daughters who both write.

I could write so much about how idyllic the rural campus is, with its waving meadows of wildflowers in the total peace of the green mountains of Vermont, and how interesting I found all the kindly faculty and staff, but what I don't think I'll ever forget is how by living surrounded by people passionate about language and poetry for just five days affected me. Every night there were two readings of either poetry or prose, and the days were filled with workshops, lectures and, everywhere, constant discussion of words.

I didn't realise how heady this pure, poetic atmosphere was until my last night, when the American Poet Laureate Donald Hall gave his reading to a rapt, thrilled audience.

I don't know how old Mr Hall is, but he met TS Eliot as a young man, and his collected poems runs from 1946. I had never read anything he'd written, nor, as an ignorant Brit, had I heard of him till that day, but I guess I was expecting just another poetry reading.

The audience hushed, the grey-haired man, dressed casually in a baggy shirt and trousers, raised unusually twinkling eyes from the microphone.

'I thought a poem about poetry readings might be appropriate,' he smiled, and began.

To a Waterfowl

Women with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks
applauded you, my poems.
These are the women whose husbands I meet on airplanes,
who close their briefcases and ask, "What are you in?"
I look in their eyes, I tell them I am in poetry,
and their eyes fill with anxiety, and with little tears.
"Oh, yeah?" they say, developing an interest in clouds.
"My wife, she likes that sort of thing? Hah-hah?
I guess maybe I'd better watch my grammar, huh?"
I leave them in airports, watching their grammar,

and take a limousine to the Women's Goodness Club
where I drink Harvey's Bristol Cream with their wives,
and eat chicken salad with capers, with little tomato wedges,
and I read them "The Erotic Crocodile," and "Eating You."
...
And what about you? You, laughing? You, in the bluejeans,
laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father
who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?
Will you ever be old and dumb, like your creepy parents?
Not you, not you, not you, not you, not you, not you.


As he read the final lines, he was speaking directly to the young students laughing in the auditorium. Pointing, he said intimately to six of them in turn, 'Not you'.

There was a crescendo of laughter and foot-stamping applause. I found myself surprised by how much this man's poems had made me smile ruefully and feel closer to the audience around me.

The poems continued, each a masterpiece of intimacy, simplicity, honesty, humour and tenderness. It became clear to me that the poet's wife had died tragically, since many of the poems were grieving for her. Hall found it hard at times to keep the tears from his eyes and I found tears welling in my eyes too and in those of everyone around me as we listened and watched his painful pauses when grief apparently overwhelmed him. Then, this poem took my breath away:

Summer Kitchen

In June's high light she stood at the sink
With a glass of wine,
And listened for the bobolink,
And crushed garlic in late sunshine.

I watched her cooking, from my chair.
She pressed her lips
Together, reached for kitchenware,
And tasted sauce from her fingertips.

"It's ready now. Come on," she said.
"You light the candle."
We ate, and talked, and went to bed,
And slept. It was a miracle.


It was like he'd spoken thoughts out loud: just a simple wonder at life, and love. As the reading ended, everyone seemed tearful, overwhelmed and stirred full of emotion. Unable to face anyone with my tears welling so strongly, I went outside and sat alone on a swing in a big garden, overlooking a lake where frogs called to one another.

I couldn't stop crying, as if the days of being constantly read poetry, culminating in this final emotion-filled performance, had brought me to a massively heightened sensitivity. I felt supremely aware, strengthened, peaceful, intense, vulnerable and poetic, and I suddenly remembered how as a 14-16 year-old who wrote poetry, I had felt this way and then lost it somehow as an adult.

A middle aged woman in a long summer shift walked through the long grass towards me, and I really wished she wouldn't see me crying, because I was embarrassed and wanted to be alone. I knew she could see me crying, but instead of turning back, she kept approaching. When she reached me, she said: 'I know how you feel - I'm feeling it too.'

I dried my face, breathed deeply and smiled at her. Then we went to her house and had berries and cream and champagne.

Ok, I'm going to 'come out' here. A few days ago, I posted about how anti-semitism is threatening British Jews; I thought it was safer at the time not to be open about my own Jewish ethnicity. But having considered it, although it's disturbing that in this country a Jew still feels scared to publicly declare that they are Jewish in case they become the target of some kind of attack, I have decided this is no time to pander to such fears.

The thing I keep thinking as the latest 'Al Quaeda' terror plot emerges is how really Muslims and Jews are culturally very similar, and how bizarre it is that the world's current epicentres of war centre on conflict between our two religions. Once Muslims and Jews were part of the same biblical family; both religions place similar cultural value on ideals like family, education, hard work, ambition, respect, prayer, and doing good deeds. As a Jew, when I see the richness of the Islamic community in London, I don't feel remotely threatened; rather I feel close to it, at home with it, because I feel their warm Middle Eastern culture of family and education is akin to my warm Middle Eastern culture of family and education. In my relationships with Muslim friends, there's never once been the slightest hint of political conflict, so close are the shared values. Israeli music has a lot in common with Arabic music; religious Jewish women cover their hair as do religious Muslim women; even the food of the two cultures is similar. When I watch the news in Israel/Lebanon, the dark hair and olive skin common to both the Israelis and Lebanese makes them almost indistinguishable. It really is brothers and sisters killing one another.

Obviously I'm not talking about fundamentalists on either side, just about ordinary people.

So it is strange that a few ignorant people on both sides wage wars and hate all Jews or all Muslims.

As I sit here listening to Kylie Minogue's Turn it into Love after another day of pitching, chasing, research, etc, my thoughts inevitably turn to something that has been weighing heavily on my mind for several years now and seems to irritate me more every day.

Bad grammar.

It's absolutely EVERYWHERE. We all know about greengrocers' apostrophe issues, but recently I've been reading cringe-inducing bloopers in national 'broadsheet' papers and in massive advertising campaigns from FTSE-100 companies you'd have thought would get someone to proofread their copy before spending millions disseminating the bloody stuff.

And when I say cringe-inducing, I'm only too aware that it's me cringing, not the people who've written and published the errors. I suspect in most cases they have no idea what educated people think of their mistakes and how counter-productive this is. There is a tiny army of us who will boycott buying anything from companies who can't tell where an apostrophe should go.

But how can an advertisement with a heart-stopping, critical grammar malfunction still be running if the advertisers know about it? I can only assume that no-one has told them; and if this is the case, it must be because hardly anyone has the education to notice. Similarly, the plonkers writing the bad copy are so ubiquitous that one can only deduce that there is now a whole multi-generational society of people under 30 who neither know nor care what a comma is, let alone the subjunctive.

I'm trying very hard here not to name any names, but some of the kind of mistakes I've read recently in the highest levels of the mainstream media include:

- Palate for palette ('The painter's rich palate of hues')

- 'This lovely contemporary house' (Contemporary of what - 1500? Contemporary does not mean modern!)

- 'Celeb hairdresser XX does wonderful girl's haircuts' (How difficult is it to distinguish between singular and plural exactly?)

-'It didn't phase me' (Hello, faze as opposed to phase, anyone? Anyone?)

-'The tiger was grinning, it's teeth beared.' (Two shockers here...)

'The tiger bared its teeth, the tiger then started moving towards me.' (Ever heard of semi-colons or full-stops? Why do so many people insist on starting sentences after commas?)

I know from personal experience that a lot of people my age (27) were never taught any grammar at school. My education was unusual in that (a) growing up, I read classic books by great writers with dedication and out of choice, (b) I was taught English, Latin, French and Spanish grammar at a school where you were considered a failure if you didn't get an A star at GCSE, and (c) I loved words and delighted in learning new ones.

But the real reason people no longer seem to know basic vocab and grammar must be because they do not read and rarely have. Whether or not you are taught Latin and English grammar and all that at school, so long as you read good books and are reasonably bright, you pick up words and how to use them.

This is what comes of a dumbed-down culture where schoolchildren no longer have to read pre-20th century texts. Instead, they watch the DVD or, more likely, simply get taught a totally 'easy', undemanding novel written in the last 10 years. Anything to let them off the terrible expectation that they could be capable of grasping 'big words' and 'complicated grammar rules'.

I despair over this - I truly do.

Last week, while visiting my parents, I found my old copy of Virginia Andrews' Flowers in the Attic and reread it for the first time since my original Andrews marathon at the age of 12-13. I realised VA really is a very strange phenomenon.

If you ask a man if they have heard of this writer, they will probably say no. The books, technically written for adults, are in fact the sole preserve of adolescent teenage girls (and of grown women who haven't quite grown up and still like to induge teen fantasies of beautiful, innocent 13-year-old heroines, vast wealth, precious ballgowns and men in tuxedos).

I first heard of the VA sagas when, age 12 and in my second year at secondary school, I saw a much-thumbed copy of the classic VA, Heaven, in the desk of the wildest girl in the class. (I knew she was wild because she'd had boys visit her in her bedroom at home.)

The book was passed around the class and we devoured the bizarre story of the young heroine Heaven Leigh, who grows up the most poor and beautiful girl in the Kentucky mountains, and gets sold by her father, before finding out she is descended from a vastly wealthy family, setting the stage for a 5-book saga of family secrets and lies.

Soon I was reading the final installment, the prequel Web of Dreams, in which tour de force Heaven Leigh's descendent discovers Heaven's mother's story of why she ran away from her luxurious mansion home.

I'll never forget reading that book at just that age. VA, for all her vulgarity and trashiness, had a special ability to tap into the 12-year-old female heart.

After reading the Heaven series, I ended up devouring VA's Dollenganger series (which starts with Flowers in the Attic and ends with prequel Garden of Shadows) and the standalone My Sweet Audrina. I was so entranced that I drew family trees of the characters in my diary. Years later, at Cambridge, I dipped into the ghostwriter 'The New Virginia Andrews', in between Coleridge and Swift. The 'new' ghostwritten books were entertaining, but a pale imitation of the real thing.

But on rereading Flowers in the Attic as an adult for the first time last week, I realised there really is something odd about these books. Basically, they're mainly about incestuous love! I don't really know how VA got away with romanticising such a massive taboo: her books are bestsellers all over the world.

I've also discovered there is a huge web community of VA fans who are frighteningly knowledgeable about her work and even role-play the plots of her novels online to strict timetables (like, 'Joanne, you're playing Tony Tatterton, so you need to be online at 7pm EST on Sunday!')

As young teenagers, it was the fantasy of being unspeakably wealthy, beautiful, virtuous and glamorous that my friends and I loved about VA's heroines. I'm still fascinated today by 13-year-old girls, as they always seem so romantic and full of potential, as I once felt.

I feel naughty even writing about VA, because she's such a trashy writer and the kind of person one doesn't like to admit to liking, but I think I'll always be a fan.