Stop thief

I don't have the world's best memory for faces, but today I was the first to spot him: yes, the Erudite Space has its very own shoplifter. He slopes in, shambles around the shop, and puts small books in the ample pockets of his tatty, unappetising mac. He's particularly fond of Observer books and anything about transport. Let's call him Oswald.

Every bookshop in town has banned him from their premises, but I don't know how that works: I wonder if their own Security Guards, or the Police, march him bodily out into the street, and then I wonder how they stop him from just wandering back in again. I don't think he's ever been arrested. We don't have him banned for some reason, perhaps because we're a charity and we're just supposed to be kind and put up with that sort of thing. So someone has to follow him round the shop, firmly but gently taking books from him and putting them back on the shelves, and answering a string of questions, each one of which makes sense by itself, but which have no logical sequence, are often repeated, and don't really constitute a conversation.

I'm not sure he even knows where he is most of the time. I'd always wondered how long he had been like that, and what horrible trauma in his life had started it all.

A chap I'd earlier directed to the Computing section overheard me warn the Boss of Oswald's presence. And, incredibly, then said right out that as a ten-year-old train enthusiast he had often seen Oswald, then in his twenties but still trainspotting. It was apparent he couldn't fully look after himself even then: perhaps he'd lacked the sense of what other people are, ever since birth. The classmates had assumed he was the sort of person their mums had in mind when they told them never to talk to Strange Men.

All of which means that for the best part of half a century a succession of people have had to provide shelter, food, protection from arrest and accident, and protection of others from inadvertant harm, from Oswald's blithe irresponsibility. In all this time no-one has had the courage or the wherewithal to sieze the initiative and change matters for the better.

Which puts Oswald in unlikely company: the latest campaign by the charity who run our shop is highlighting the effect on the poorest people of a system that has provided shelter, resources and legal protection for large financial institutions, while struggling, and now failing, to protect others from being harmed by their actions.

Sometimes I think that it's time we should all stop just quietly putting the books back on the shelves, and start making arrests.

Advanced motoring

There is a beautiful, tree-lined bike-path along the river, which forms most of my 15-minute trip into "work" at the aforementioned erudite space. The trees are protected by order of the City Council. Geese sit around and watch you glide past. Even the dogs are well-behaved. It is a total pleasure to cycle along: so much so that even getting caught in a hailstorm on the way home isn't too terrible.

There is only one road junction to get through after all that delightfulness, and it has helpfully been provided with one of these advanced stop-lines: a special green breathing-space for cyclists.

Of course, this is incredibly inefficient. Putting all those cars whose makers boast of how rapidly they can go from nought-to-sixty (because they haven't been allowed to boast of top speeds on car adverts since round about the time England won the World Cup) in a queue behind those of us who might, just possibly, make it from nought to six by the far side of the junction (on a good day) could be construed as a criminal waste of horsepower. But the Council is one step ahead: they've been listening to American physicists talking about waves. Who have found, interestingly, that rapid acceleration is one of the things that causes traffic jams: waves of still-ness, in the intervals between futile acceleration, propagate backwards along the road, bringing everybody to a halt in apparently random, unexpected places.

The people campaigning for a 20 mph speed limit on the city's smaller roads are beginning to use this to argue that a lower speed limit on roads which are at or beyond capacity can increase traffic flow...a bit like easing-off the tilt angle of a wine bottle so that the wine flows out smoothly and doesn't "glug". It would also help stop people driving as if they were late for their own funeral.

So there I was yesterday afternoon, sitting waiting for the lights to change, noticing once again that drivers are not always alert enough to actually stop before they end up in the "advanced" bit, because I've had to go all the way round to the front of some posh black thing in order to come to a halt on the small remaining bit of green space...when the full implication of the car's length, blackness, shininess and large floral display in the back window sinks in.

Erudite space

It must rank as my favourite shop in town. And they're looking for people to work in it! Payscales are purely Imaginary, but in this case that's not the point.

I picked up a form and took it home to fill in. It took me days to get round to it: after all, what possible skills could a lapsed astrophysicist with a sideline in environmental campaigning bring to bear for working in a bookshop? Two weeks later I returned the form, with something vaguely convincing filling in the blank space. Then nothing happened, and I forgot all about it.

Until about a month after that, when a voice with a gentle Edinburgh accent arrived on the answerphone asking if I was still interested. I returned the call and fixed up a visit.

The funny thing about shops is the contrast between what you see on the orderly, presentable floor-space, and what lurks beyond. It's not unlike Backstage at the theatre, and in this case there are two whole floors of it. A dumb-waiter links them with the shop area, landing discreetly behind a revolving display of witty postcards ("Why should I tidy my room when the world is such a mess?"). In an office piled high with brightly-coloured former displays, shelves of incongruous objects (flower-pots, weighing-scales, lampshades...) and stacks of recycling-type boxes lurching under their weight of donated books, we arranged my shifts. I was to come back the following Tuesday morning.

The most straightforward thing to do is stock the shelves. Starting with "Politics", "Philosophy", "Business and Economics", "Science", "Sociology"... the weird thing about this is how many of the books turned out to be familiar to me: I'd either read them, seen them cited in books I'd read, read something else by the same author, or heard of them as classics of their kind. Perhaps it was just beginners' luck. Then there are entire shelves on "How To..." just about everything from tracing your ancestors, through winning at Bridge, to origami, knitting and boatbuilding. I seem to be the most agile person who comes in on either Monday or Tuesday so a lot of the shelf-stocking falls to me.

The following week they let me loose on the till.

The best bit is, nobody ever has to come in and browse secondhand books: it's not like, for example, shopping for food or clothes, which can be a bit of a treadmill: eat, work, get latest fashion, repeat... Here, by contrast, is a shop full of people who have only come in because they are genuinely interested in what we have to offer. Which, you could say, is the chance of stepping off the ordinary path, even if just for a short while, and into the wide, Imaginary dimension beyond.

The wet stuff

You're a Brit (well, perhaps not, but if you were...). You take it for granted. It's a trade-off: your garden's always green, but sometimes you lose the entire Outdoors, and the planned activities therein, because water is coming out of the sky and making everything wet. You learn, by the age of about eleven, that if your clothes stay that way for any length of time life gets distinctly unpleasant, because you don't get the warm version here. You carry your own fallout shelter everywhere, just in case it turns up unexpectedly.

You curse it. You insure yourself against it (I'd love to see the Pluvius Policy quotes for Wills and Kate!). You use it as a metaphor for bad times, because it beat down and rotted your ancestors' food in the fields. Your children wish it would go away.

And then one day it does precisely that.

It hasn't rained here, at all, since the beginning of last month. "April Showers", that have been with us as long as the English language itself, have been cancelled.

I'd been wondering whether three barrels for collecting rain was a bit OTT for our small garden, but now I realise it is no such thing: they are rapidly emptying as we run around trying to keep everything alive. I'd put off planting seeds, waiting for wet ground to give them a good start: now they're in, but have to be watered nightly. A stiff East wind spends all day pulling what's left of the moisture out of the soil, and then, if I so much as touch it, pulling away the soil for good measure. Last month's RHS-donated trees at the Orchard and the Battlefield have had to be watered several times (in fact that was what some of us were doing during the Royal Wedding).

Manicured grass is going yellow. The NFU is advising farmers not to promise their buyers too much grain. Moors are quietly burning underground.

For once in my life, I really, really want it to rain. The irony is, I'm pretty sure that once it starts, it'll be with us all summer and I shall end up being sick of it.

The face that launched 500 trees

I am looking back at a life's work. Thankfully the life in question isn't mine, though. It is the life of the Sustainability Subcommittee, now sadly demised.

It all started two years ago, when our local Green Party's chief Organiser of All Things, in the time-honoured fashion, organised it from her place on the Parish Council. I was an enthusiastic recruit, and became secretary (and ideas lab). Collectively we organised a Parish-wide cloth bag campaign, the installation of several cycle-racks, the introduction of Green Burials in the Cemetery (I've often wondered, but never dared ask, what was in the rest of their "Business Development Plan"!), a re-think of the Parish "Design Statement" so that it included proper environmental issues as well as just appearences, and the signing-up of the Parish Council to that pledge to drop energy use by 10%.

But best of all, we brought out the inner tree-hugger in our local City Councillor. The Parish signed up to "In Bloom". It sounds all prissy and ornamental, but actually the RHS have kind of eco-pimped it on the quiet over the past few years. Battle lines are no longer drawn simply on whose patch looks the prettiest, but also on how many (different types of) people are joining in, and how "sustainable" (including things like collecting rainwater, composting and growing food) the area is becoming.

The upshot of all this machiavellian shenanigans was that between them the Orchard and the Parish were given, by the RHS, no fewer than 525 native fruit and nut trees to plant. Finding places in which to do this, though, isn't as easy as you might think. Private landowners are never there to ask, and even if they were, they'd probably have other plans. Some of the common land is being deliberately kept tree-free, for the sake of beetles who prefer meadows. Built-up roadsides have infrastructure underneath. One of the flood plains is set aside for housing. And so on.

We rapidly came to realise that edges were good, and that the best of these lay between the old battlefield (now a playing-field) and the main road. A date was set: perhaps a little late in the season, but then the season this year has been particularly cold. The RHS brief asked us to make an event of it, so we did: the mayor came along in her pink dress and hat to plant the first tree for newspaper coverage, and someone had thoughtfully provided Cava, fruit-juice and cake for all of us. It was, in short, a perfect day.

But don't trees take up space, rather than creating it? Well, that depends on who you are. Obviously if you're playing football on the playing-field, and someone's carelessly gone and planted trees in the middle of it, then they take up your space. But if you're some item of wildlife, or someone who likes climbing trees, then they provide special spaces just for you.

How space can save your life

It's kind of horribly compulsive, looking at those arial pictures of Japanese tsunami damage. And of no help whatever to anyone who lived in all those houses that were there, and are now gone. Except to notice one thing, that might be useful in future: the few roofs still visible in the aftermath pictures all lie directly inshore from city spaces set aside for trees.

Japan Tsunami Appeal

Space, for kids

It's the kind of space you don't know you need, until someone grabs it from you.

The 'phone was ringing. I'd woken up in the middle of the night and the phone was ringing. I turned the face of my alarm-clock towards the window to see the time: someone was calling our house at five to one in the morning. And presumably Dad was still at Valerie's, because he hadn't picked up the extension in the main bedroom. Funny, he always made it back by midnight.

I never did like that house: it tried to be modern, but it was so dark. The sitting room had three windows but it never seemed to get any sun at all. The house, in fact the entire village, "nestled", which basically meant you didn't see anything or get any light. Which was probably a perfect end to the day if you'd been up on the fells since dawn looking after cows or sheep, but for an urban type like me it was a bit of a drag. It may have been something like the same feeling that had caused Mum to go and live with Douglas: obviously, because there was nothing bad about any of us. It had only been last month and it had come as a bit of a shock. I remembered wondering whether Chairman Mao's parents had separated when he was a teenager. That would account for a lot.

Come to think of it, the brightest "room" in the house was, in fact, the upstairs corridor, the length of which I was now walking to go and answer that 'phone. It seemed rather a lot longer than usual for some reason. I tiptoed past my brother's room _tiptoed, for heaven's sake why bother? and how could he sleep through that racket?_ pushed open the door, and picked up the handset

RRant RRant RRant RRant hoose RRant RRant!!!

eh?

RRant RRant RRant Yew RRant!

Someone was obviously very upset and, to add a surreal twist, she had a huge Scottish accent. I didn't know anybody Scottish, except Douglas, and my Grandfather who lived in Scotland, and they were both very polite and softly-spoken. And of course, they were both men.

I'm, er, very sorry but I couldn't hear what you said_

RRant disnae RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant wukkud RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant!

Well, let's apply some logic here. Though that seems rather difficult (why's that? Does logic need daylight in order to work? Why should it? And is that why school happens during daylight hours?..): this is obviously grown-up stuff, and therefore luckily none of my business, so whoever this is needs to talk to Dad, and she's already got his number, so all I need to do is_

I'm sorry, Dad's not here. He won't be back 'til_

midnight. Oops! And anyway if this happens again tonight I won't get my 8 hours sleep, then I shall be dozy at school and look like an idiot.

_er, 'til the morning.

RRant RRant wutch RRant wrang RRant RRant RRant RRant wurrus RRant RRant RRant Yew RRant RRant!

I decided the next best thing, asking if she'd like to leave a message, was probably a bit pointless, said goodbye as politely as it was possible to do when interrupting someone mid-sentence (which I then felt guilty about) and put the phone down.

Now that I was no longer being ranted at, I could think a bit. Supposing I'd made a terrible mistake, and it was distress I'd been hearing, not anger? What if someone somewhere really needed help? Well I could at least find out who it was: in the days long before 1471 was even thought of, but when there was still operators, you could dial 100 and ask for the last call to be traced, as long as the lines had been quiet in the meantime. I picked up the 'phone again_

RRant chuldrren RRant RRant RRant RRant RRant wrang RRant RRant RRant Yew RRant

but of course the connection only finished once both people had hung up. I remember wishing we had one of those machines that took calls automatically and taped the answers, like the detective in San Francisco:

This is Jim Roquefort*, at the tone leave your name and message, I'll get back to you

by the time I got back into bed I noticed that I'd misread the time: it had been five past eleven, Dad would be home by midnight, and I would get my eight hours. Just.

*****

"You wouldn't believe what happened last night", I began over breakfast. "This mad Scottish voice_"

"Oh, so she finally managed to wake you up without waking me, then" interrupted my brother.
"It's Douglas' wife" said Dad "Just ignore it". Like you can ignore a 'phone?? This was the 1970s, when phones were mighty chunks of engineering hardware that made a right royal racket, not the slim little items you get today that discretely slip out of your pocket and get lost in the park, or on the bus. And they were hard-wired in, too, you couldn't even unplug them. Or switch them off. And if you took them off the hook they turned into air-raid sirens. We thought of wrapping the 'phone in a quilt and stuffing it in the Evil Wardrobe, but somehow never got round to doing this every night.

*****

"Right, pay attention" said Mr Square "Who can tell me how to use one word to remember what Inductors and Capacitors do in an electric circuit?.. Lunchista?"

I always sat in the front row in Physics. My enthusiasm, terrible eyesight and the fact that, in the driech summer we were having this year, it was the warmest part of the lab, made it the perfect place as far as I was concerned.

"It's CIVIL, sir. C for Current leads...er..." Hang on, "I" is current. So what was the "C"?.."Sorry sir, I can't remember". This was so unusual that the rest of the class went quiet behind me. It sounded odd. Mr Square asked sympathetically if I was alright. "I...
(suddenly realised that saying in front of the entire class that I'd got woken up in the middle of the night by a mad Scotswoman on the 'phone, would probably not be a good idea) "...didn't get much sleep last night, Sir"

Some wag in the back row helpfully added "She was on the job, Sir", which sent a giggle round the whole class. Including me, because the idea was so utterly incongruous: I must have been the least likely prospect in the room for that kind of thing. Even if you included all the lads. "Get Lunchista on the job" added the class reprobate, in a flat tone that implied that he had tried, but found it completely impossible, to imagine.

*****

Douglas turned out to be an interesting and humourous friend ("A collective noun for people who run Universities? Oooh, how about "A Lack of Principles"?"), and Valerie turned out to be the sort of person you could really confide in. The dreadful dark summer of 1977 seagued into a delightful autumn, and the nightmare calls faded away. My old school reports, which turned up in a recent house-move, show a dip followed by a bounce. And I now have two extra parents.

But to this day I consider "I don't have to answer that bloody phone!!" as the statement of an inalienable human right. And of course, we have an answerphone.

*****

*we apologise for the unwarrented intrusion of cheese into this post. The gentleman's name was in fact Rockford.