A really good idea

It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

Boots was about six inches long when we bought him, with the sweetest face and long, soft hair. I don’t think we ever checked the size of a fully grown English shepherd. Or if we did, we must have read centimetres for inches. For soon Boots was the size of a Shetland pony, an enormous hairy beast. 

Jumping up and down in muddy puddles

Izzy’s hero Peppa Pig loves jumping up and down in muddy puddles. 

Quite how the UK’s broadcasters ever allowed this cartoon celebrity to trigger such an increase in the nation’s laundry bills is beyond me. I thought there were regulators who banned programmes that incite anti-social behaviour. 

“Let’s go jumping up and down in muddy puddles,” says Peppa to the rotund Daddy Pig, whom Izzy, rather unkindly, says looks exactly like me. 

Moving on

'We’ll never do it in time,' said Jo. 

‘Nonsense – it’ll be easy,’ I said. ‘We have four whole weeks, we’ll just do one room at a time.’ 

As if I knew what I was talking about. 

That was two weeks ago. We have two weeks left. 

If moving home is a nightmare, relocating from a rambling 17th century farmhouse back to our London place is a scene from a horror film. Our house is already a maze of black plastic sacks. There’s no sign of order or plan, but we’re on our third packet of plastic sacks. There are 30 sacks in each packet – that’s 90 sacks so far. I’m very friendly with the man at the tip. 

The first day of school

On Wednesday my daughter aged by about two years. 

It happened right in front of us, in an extraordinary transformation at exactly 8am. One moment Izzy was a fairy princess, dressed in pink and purple pyjamas whose only concern in life was Eric, her handsome prince; the next, she had become a schoolgirl.

Howzat! The village cricket match.

What a thriller. On a hot summer’s day, the match ebbed and flowed; the capacity crowd was at fever pitch to the very last ball. 

I’m not talking about the Ashes. That was humdrum stuff compared to the cricket match I witnessed yesterday afternoon. This was an even more fiercely fought fixture, one that pitched neighbour against neighbour, farmer against land agent, furniture salesman against vicar. 

The Middleton versus Hartburn village match is a highlight of our community’s year.

The road to a very expensive bill

Thirty five years ago I was in India, driving in a campervan on a dusty road, which had been confidently marked on the map as a motorway. It was called National Highway 7 and ran for 1300 miles to Calcutta. 

The campervan literally bounced its way for five days on the worst road surface I’ve ever experienced. By the end of the journey, my back was wrecked and my head sore from hitting the ceiling every time we encountered a bump. The car survived – I have a picture of it, covered in dust, beside a smart government road sign that reads: Roads Reflect The Culture Of A Nation. 

That was in 1979, so I imagine the Indian Government will have improved National Highway 7 since then. It’s almost certainly the smooth 6-lane highway the map promised. Unfortunately we’ve had no such luck in Northumberland.

Izzy's pretty house

Izzy is a little confused about the process of moving house. 

“Please can we take this house with us to Nana’s, but not the sky?” 

This took a little while to sink in. You want us to take the house to America? 

“Yes, because it’s so pretty and all my toys are in it.” 

“But why not the sky?” 

“Because the sky is nicer at Nana’s.”

The Naked Lady of Northumberland Revealed

She’s certainly a big lass, with deep lines rippling round her voluptuous curves. Her two breasts are more Titian than Playboy. 

“Is that a boobie?” asked Granny, squinting up at the prone giant silhouetted against the sunlight. 

“That’s the face, Mum – look, there’s her forehead and her nose.” 

Izzy giggled: “Daddy’s got boobies”. 

“Nonsense,” I snorted. 

“You really must go on a diet, dear”, said my Mum.

Cats That Go Baa

Izzy spotted them immediately. “Cats!” she shouted as the two fluffy black creatures stood quietly in the April sunshine. “No those are lambs, Izzy”, we corrected.

It was an easy mistake to make. Born just yesterday, our neighbour’s sheep are shaggy Ryelands. They are so tiny and fluffy, like baby yeti, they could just as easily have been moggies. Izzy shook her head at our stupidity: “No, cats”, she insisted. Sometimes it’s easier just to agree with a two-year-old. Pick your fights – save your persuasive powers for getting her to eat her lunch or not play with the carving knife.

“Why are all the lambs being born at the same time?” asked Sam, my 13-year-old. “Because all the ewes had sex with the ram the same week in November” I began confidently, eliciting an immediate and horrified “Dad, don’t”, as he put his fingers in his ears. Don’t they teach them anything about the birds and the bees in school?

Living on a farm in Northumberland has introduced me to several new discoveries. Not just the utter pointlessness of high street fashion – the mud covers the heels of any new shoe within seconds and even Jo admits designer clothes would look absurd down at the Ox Inn – but more important, fundamental things, like the natural cycle of life. Only now, after three years in the sticks, are we really beginning to appreciate the order that, with the man’s help, ensures that lambs are born after the winter snows and the tulips flower just as the daffodils begin to fade. To an outsider it’s like magic. I’ve not yet graduated to sheep farming, but I have been inspired to grow my own.

My former colleagues in L.A. would never believe this was the same me, dragging on ragged jeans and throwing myself into piles of manure. I’m learning by my mistakes. Like most townies, I abhor bare soil, so I tend to overstuff my vegetable beds to fill up space, not realising that peas and beans grow into vast overhanging forests, covering up anything you put next to them.

This year I’ve vowed to be more patient and have a goal: not to buy a single salad, vegetable or cut flower until the late autumn frosts. I’d be far too embarrassed to put my weedy little offerings into the local leek show – but I already understand just how easy and satisfying it is to eat with the seasons.

In the supermarket I eschew large but tasteless Spanish strawberries when my own bed is full of tiny flowers, waiting for June, and I positively cringe when I see someone pick up a packet of green beans from Chile. To me, “best before” is a meaningless concept: does it mean “unusable after”, “edible until”, or does it refer to its colour or taste? To me, “Best” is “still in the ground”.

So I was delighted by today’s reports that the government is thinking of scrapping “best before” and “sell by” labels on food, relying instead on the simple warning of “use by”, when food might actually be a danger to health. It would instantly cut down on the absurd waste of perfectly good food thrown away because of some printing on the label. Perhaps at last people will rediscover their senses of taste and smell to judge what to buy and when to use it.

Jo and I are determined that Izzy grows up to understand the importance of homegrown food. She’s already becoming a little gardener: armed with her toy spade, she insists on helping by heaping earth onto the heads of the dogs sitting patiently beside me as I dig. Mind you, I’m not looking forward to the moment, about six months from now, when I have to explain to her that the nice little “cats” in the next field have turned into lunch.

Snowvember

On Thursday afternoon I received a cheery phone call from the Mercedes dealership in town. The winter tyres I’d ordered weeks ago, in a quite untypical moment of advance planning, have finally arrived. Unfortunately I now can’t drive my car through the snow to have them fitted, as it doesn’t have winter tyres.




I’m resigned to leaving the wretched vehicle incarcerated in its white overcoat, like last year, until the first thaws of spring.

Enduring Northumbrian winters is like having children. The first is exciting, surprising and unbelievably beautiful. The second is just as attractive but, thanks to the experience you’ve gained from the first, rather more manageable. The third is, to be frank, just a bore and far too exhausting to enjoy: you just want it to do its thing and get to the next season as soon as possible.

This particular infant is about a month premature yet, far from being a meagre little weakling, is a big, bouncing avalanche. I can't remember the last time we had snow this early, certainly not to such an extreme degree. 8 inches landed on our drive on Wednesday night. It began falling shortly after I'd asked Jo to remind me to order some road salt from the builders' merchant. I guess they will have run out by now.

At first Izzy couldn't believe her wonderful new surroundings. She rushed round the garden kicking up white clouds and screaming "no!. no!" – she’s not very good at consonants yet. Now she's not so sure - after another ten inches dumped themselves on us last night, the snow is up to her waist.




The dogs are still excited, though I spend hours prising iceballs out of their ears. I've also been trying unsuccessfully to hack a path out for the oil lorry – we’re in danger of running out of fuel.







Meanwhile my Facebook wall is full of entries from excited friends in London swapping snowflake sightings. Their kids can’t wait to clean off their rusty toboggans and build snowmen: I just want to be able to drive to Waitrose without having to be dug out of a ditch by a tractor.

Within minutes of the first flakes’ arrival I demonstrated the typical demeanour of any Brit facing the first snows of winter: panic. Having to be in London for two important meetings, I watched the weather forecast with sinking heart and decided to fly down the night before. I knew I’d be OK, because I’d driven by the airport a couple of times and the snow wasn’t that deep.

Newcastle Airport responded by doing what airports do: closing down unexpectedly and telling its passengers nothing. So, having been summoned to the departure gate at the appointed hour, with a British Airways plane conveniently parked at the end of the jetty, we all sat down and waited to board. After an age somebody spotted that the plane in front of us was already full of passengers – it was the previous flight that had been waiting two hours for the runway to open. Our plane had apparently been circling patiently over our heads, but eventually gave up and landed in Teesside – neither plane flew anywhere that night.

Quite why the runway was shut on Wednesday afternoon remains a mystery – the weathermen had given us days of warning. I guess they must have been the wrong sort of snowflakes. It wasn’t a very good few days for Newcastle Airport as the following night a plane nearly skidded off the end of the runway. Maybe like me they’d forgotten to order their road salt. I took the train.

I felt sorry for the BBC Breakfast reporter the following morning. Sent out to report on the chaos up north, he parked his satellite truck by a busy roundabout and waited for cars to start spinning out of control. Every time they cut to him, instead of the carnage his journalistic instincts demanded, you could sense his disappointment when he could only film an orderly line of cars confidently steering through the slush. I guess they must all have had their winter tyres on.

Two Life-Changing Experiences

On the day the Iraq inquiry opened in London last week, coincidentally two palpable weapons of mass destruction were unleashing themselves at home.

Mabel was first. The younger of our two working cockers, she’s always fancied herself as a proper gundog. Now nearly two and despite having no formal training, she races across the kitchen to retrieve her favourite toy and deposits it, saliva encrusted, into whichever lap wears the most expensive trousers. The louder the shriek of the recipient the more she takes it as praise for her extraordinary talent. She doesn’t just wag her tail, her whole lower body heaves from side to side in jubilation.

But despite her golden spaniel cuteness, Mabel’s real ambition is to become a rabbit killer. She and her sister Truffle spend hours in the garden sniffing them out, and occasionally they stumble over one and give chase. Which is fine by me: rabbits are the scourge of any garden. Having just planted several hundred specimens from the Northern Ark nursery in Longhorsley (no imported polytunnel plants there, just naturalized Northumbrian herbaceous stock) I had visions of our local rabbits summoning the entire county to sample our juicy shoots on the first day of spring. Our problem is, despite running themselves ragged and trampling all the borders, our wretched dogs have never caught a thing.

Until last week. It was a wondrous sight: Mabel on the doorstep proudly straddling a monster over half her size. I accepted the gift with genuine pleasure, then shooed her away in case Jo threw a fit: my Californian wife has tolerated quite enough north east wildlife already, including mice in her bathroom and bats and frogs in the hall, without having bunny blood on the carpet. I watched Mabel outside, head held high, strutting the rabbit in triumphant circles round our big yew tree, with Truffle following miserably behind. When I went out half an hour later, they had obviously reached a compromise, because I saw Truffle carrying just the head. Gross, as Jo would say.

I was about to go over and retrieve the carcass when I heard a scream: “Tom, come quick”. Not another mouse, I thought, and dashed inside.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Izzy, after ten determinedly lazy months where she wouldn’t even turn over in her cot, had suddenly taken it upon herself to crawl. From the sitting position she keeled over and, instead of collapsing in her usual sprawl on the carpet, gave first one, then two wobbly little shuffles on her knees. She paused, look up at me and gave me the biggest grin. I broke into spontaneous applause and she giggled hysterically, then, as if to show this was no one-off achievement, proceeded to race across the room towards the television remote lying on the floor. Whereupon Jo and I realised life would never be the same again.

As I write this Jo is unloading gates, fencing, and samples of new carpeting to cover exposed bare boards throughout the house. The saucepans in the kitchen have been raised to a higher shelf – everything below three feet has been elevated out of harm’s way. The DVD player already has butter smeared around its slot and the cat has taken cover under the sofa. Mabel and Truffle are licking Izzy’s face in welcome to their new four-legged playmate.

What a difference a day makes. In one small step she’s left her innocence behind. I’m watching her now as she grabs the remote again and C-Beebies switches to News 24. Some pundits are discussing Iraq. I wonder what Izzy will make of the lies of our generation’s politicians when she’s old enough to understand. She grimaces, then bashes the remote until C-Beebies returns.

Joanna Lumley is going to be our neighbour!

Estate agents in Northumberland must have been popping the Cava this week. In a gloriously luvvie moment, national treasure Joanna Lumley declared that she had so enjoyed opening Morpeth’s new shopping mall, she was going to buy a house in Northumberland and come and live here.

Property values in the Wansbeck valley immediately doubled, although the following morning my bank manager wasn’t entirely convinced by my suggestion of a loan secured on the possibility that Ms Lumley might have been serious. I suspect she uses the same speech for every shopping centre she opens, in which case she must own a lot of houses. Mind you, she can probably afford them: the owners of the new Sanderson Arcade must have paid for quite a few bottles of Bollinger to entice her up here.

I know I shall ruffle some feathers, but personally I’ve never found anything I actually want to buy in Morpeth. For me, every self-respecting town needs three essentials: a Waitrose, a well-stocked delicatessen and a fresh fish shop; Morpeth has none of these. So, nicely designed as it is, I don’t quite get the point of the new arcade. It has a Marks and Spencer for underwear and for people who can’t cook and a Laura Ashley for people who like to pretend they live in the 70s. There does appear to be a very nice homemade chocolate emporium, but I’m supposed to be on a diet.

I’m happy for the new face of Morpeth to prove me wrong. In fact, on Saturday I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and was about to set off with my M&S card when I bumped into some disappointed friends who had just returned from the town having failed to find a parking space. Now that’s British planning for you: build a brand new shopping precinct, but don’t worry about the parking. No wonder Tesco and Sainsbury see Morpeth as a prime target for out of town superstores. According to my friends, normally reserved residents were desperately screeching round Morrison’s car park, screaming at each other for precedence over the elusive spaces.

Britain doesn’t really get shopping malls. In most civilised countries they build them on top of big multi-storey car parks; Morpeth’s is built around a bus station (or, as it’s now called, a “transport interchange”). This is despite the fact that most people like to go shopping by car – it’s one of the few benefits of the modern age. Towns that want to be taken seriously as shopping destinations should take note, particularly Newcastle, which is soon to open its new improved Eldon Square shopping centre. Having had the vision to provide the region with some of the best transport infrastructure in the country complete with a nice fat motorway streaming right into the centre, Newcastle goes and spoils it by having some incompetent planner inventing “No Car” lanes and making parking as difficult as possible.

In London’s Shepherds Bush, the BBC is located right next to the best-designed shopping centre I’ve ever encountered. You enter the parking lot and follow the signs for the store you want; a series of red and greed lights guides you straight to an empty parking space. I was admiring it earlier this week while I there to pitch a new idea for a television series in which rocket scientists and other assorted geniuses try to solve society’s most irritating problems. Top of the list would be how to find a parking space in Morpeth. The BBC loved the idea.

Rather than hiring a genius, there’s probably a simpler solution for Morpeth. Persuade Joanna Lumley to stick to her word and become a resident. She sorted out the Gurkhas: I’m sure it would take her just a couple of hours to sort out the parking.

A Woman's Place is on the Back Seat

On Wednesday Joanna was driving us along the Military Road, the Autumn sunshine making shadows across the fields towards Hadrian's Wall. We were listening to the news about King Abdullah's visit to London when I remembered a journey I'd made nearly thirty years ago on another dead straight road beside an icon of political power, the oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia.

A beautiful girl had seduced me into giving up my job, house and car. We bought an old Volkswagen combi van, added a cooker and a bed, and set out to drive to India.

In 1979, with my moustache and long hair I looked a bit like Robert Plant, and she'd floored me with her flowery hippy dresses and determination to meet the Dalai Lama.

Disaster struck as we camped in the car park of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. The BBC announced the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. We studied the map. Iran was now blocked as there was only one way through: South, through Syria and Jordan, and then along a straight line through the desert marked Saudi Arabia.

A couple of weeks later, we drove into the compound of the Saudi Embassy in Amman. There were about fifty other camper vans, all painted in bright hippy colours, and standing outside were about a hundred weeping Australians. It wasn't the rugby season: they'd been denied visas and now had to face the long drive back to the UK. Resigned to failure, Jilly made a cup of tea in the van and I took our passports up to the visa window.

The man behind the glass frowned, stared at both passports, then slowly softened.

"Geel-an. Your sister?" he asked.

For a moment I looked blankly. Then, just as I opened my mouth to correct it dawned on me. My middle name is Gillan. The name on my girlfriend's passport was Jillian. To an Arab unfamiliar with Roman script, the words must have looked similar. The others had been turned back because the women were neither married nor related. So I nodded and the officer cheerfully stamped us through.

At that moment I grasped what the rights organisations mean when they talk of gender discrimination. In the Saudi kingdom, a woman is defined only by her relationship to a man: sister, wife, mother, daughter. With no identity of her own, she has no right to passport, vote or driving licence. Women can't drive in Saudi Arabia. They sit in the back like dogs.

As we joined the baking desert highway that led dead straight for more than two thousand miles, Jilly climbed into the back seat and stayed there for three days. At petrol stations, she closed the curtains and covered herself in a veil. When we passed through a town, Saudi men crowded round the vehicle to peer at her, like flies.

Every fifty miles or so we passed a little village, carved out of the brown desert dust. Beside each one was a neat pile of wrecked cars. Not old bangers, but brand new Mercedes and BMWs, driven at breakneck speed, dented and abandoned. Driven by men in a country that doesn't permit a woman to drive as much as a golf cart.

Beside us ran the huge pipeline carrying the welath that supports both our own civilisation and the Saudi regime. It's a country formed by an unholy merger between the feudal and the fundamentalist. A country without freedom of expression, religion or association, without political parties and where justice is articulated by brutal capital and corporal punishment. This is the regime which gave birth to Al-Qaeda, and to which our Queen and Government have once more pledged eternal friendship.

Back beside that other symbol of Western civilisation, the Roman Wall, I reflected on our democracy's fundamental freedom: to believe what we like and say what we believe. I guess that's why you can read this today.

Baked Potatoes and Peterborough

I'm somewhere near Doncaster, on my weekly train to London, finishing my scrambled eggs. Breakfasts on the train haven't been the same since they took Robson's Craster kippers off the menu.

Soon I'll be looking sympathetically on the poor people boarding at Peterborough and wondering what on earth made them live in such a dull flatland of a region. Because the geography of a region is directly reflected in the creativity and sense of humour of its inhabitants, I'll be basking in the superior glow of someone who knows just how lucky he is to be returning to Northumberland tonight.

Last week's London trip brought a meeting with Peaches Geldof to talk about a new TV programme idea, then an afternoon at ITV, trying to persuade them to buy a new gameshow. It took us six weeks to plan the pitch, and precisely half an hour for them to turn it down. So Jo and I took solace in the ultimate home of comfort food, The Ivy.

I have a friend who flies up from his home in Provence twice a year just to join me at The Ivy for their French roast chicken. I was there during the famous Ivy lock-in, when the police refused to let us leave because the IRA had planted a bomb in the next street. The owners opened champagne and all the celebrities danced on the tables singing hits from the shows. I've only once had an unhappy evening there, which was with my ex-wife on our first and last wedding anniversary. Julie Andrews, sitting at the next table, complained to the manager because we were rowing so loudly.

Last week's experience was much more pleasant, though the only star sighting was Andrew Lloyd Webber holding court with his Connie/Maria girl.

Later, I thought I caught sight of the back of Monty Don's head. A year ago I wouldn't have blinked, because to me gardening was as dull as a London football derby. When I was young, my parents had an allotment. There, in sub-zero temperatures, they would prise frozen sprouts from their stalks on Christmas Eve. Why they couldn't go to Walter Willson's like everyone else was beyond me. But now, having relocated from Southern California (which grows only dry, fire-ready scrubland) and Hampstead (where an allotment is called a patio), I have my very own vegetable garden and I've discovered the meaning of fresh. We now have enough potatoes to last us through till Christmas Day.

But only just. Jo, who as a Californian is enduring her first Northumbrian autumn, offered to help me with the harvest.

"Just brush off some of this soil before we bag them", I said, doing my Monty Don impression. Twenty minutes later, I walked into the kitchen to find the sink completely full of drowning King Edwards.

To say that there was a strain in Anglo-American relations would be an understatement. I know little enough about gardening, but on Gardeners World I had distinctly heard Monty say "lift and dry potatoes and store in paper sacks in a cool, dry, dark place".

"They're supposed to be dry", I hollered, and stormed out to the spinach to cool off.

Half an hour passed, and I went back inside. There on the kitchen table was a huge mound of potatoes and Jo meticulously drying each one -- with her hair dryer.