Random Thoughts

Connectedness

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

I may have mentioned it before, but once I had a vivid dream in which every single person I’d ever known was taking part in a football match while riding bicycles.

My overriding (pardon the pun) subconscious thought was not ‘How can you play football while riding a bicycle?’ but ‘Oh no! How can I have all those people together? They have nothing in common! Some of them wouldn’t agree on anything!’ Then I realised: ‘Oh. They have me in common. How dull.’

Since team sports fill me with overwhelming dread, I assume dreaming about a field of crazed cyclists was probably stress related and the people were incidentals, but maybe there was something else about my connectedness with others which was relevant at the time.

It’s highly unlikely that those people will ever all be in the same room, though I’d like to think that they’d find something other than me in common if they did.

Maybe I would be in the centre of one group (not my favourite place to be) but equally, each of those people would be in the centre of their own, with a  set of connections. Some would include me and others wouldn’t. Ultimately, there’d be a massive network of people all of whose connections would probably cross and interlink and double-back.

Family trees are even more of a tangle. I’m in the process of working out mine. As I’m half Scottish, I’ve got two databases to research in (and I haven’t even attempted the Irish side), so this is quite slow, but things are becoming clearer.

I’ve got clerks, shoemakers, farmers, servants, launderers, laundry owners, hoteliers (small), accountants and even a writer or two in the mix. But no one gets excited about being descended  from ordinary people so it’s fun to relate that my mother’s great-aunt stated with absolute certainty they were directly descended from the Scottish royal family (albeit ‘on the wrong side of the blanket’).

On my father’s side, one of my great-grandfathers was a genealogist whose book is still used as source material, and I can’t remember if there’s allegedly royal blood in my smaller pool of English genes in my branch (though I recall someone allegedly knighted for fishing a whale off London Bridge).

Possibly I need to look again since around 25% of British people can trace ancestry back to the Plantagenets and maybe that includes me. As an even higher proportion of Scots can allegedly trace their ancestry back to the Stuarts, if Great-great Aunt Annie was right, could I be sort of royal?

Lineage (unlikely or otherwise) aside, working out what connects you to someone else or to a group is part of being human. However knowing how to do it is something that some – including me – find difficult. I’ve learned some skills over the years, but I still fear that when meeting new people I exude either an air of desperation or of disinterest. It’s actually panic. Will I be able to think of anything interesting to say? Will they ask me something impossible to answer? Will I come across as weird and/or boring and/or needy? I can’t remember a time when that wasn’t my starting point.

Networks can be a blessing or a curse or downright manipulated. In the latter camp, there’s ‘it’s not what you know, but who you know’ and the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ for getting on in life. I’ve even heard people who’ve sent children to private schools admit that the child might get a better education in a good state school, but they wouldn’t make the connections which will help them get on in life. The tragedy is that they’re sometimes right.

Then there’s finding out you have something in common with someone and joining a group where you feel safe, comfortable, certain, protected. So far so good.

But what if the group can’t be challenged? What if by disagreeing  with other members, or behaving in a way which breaks ‘the rules’ you risk breaking your connection and ultimately finding yourself suddenly on the outside.

It happened to me. Knowing tethering lines had snapped and wondering if I’d ever find anywhere to retie them was necessary to my growth as a human being and becoming my authentic self, but it was terrifying, upsetting and difficult at the time.

We don’t need connections which stop us from being honest about what we really feel or believe for fear of rejection, which ultimately create cliques and divisions in society.

We do need connections which challenge as well as comfort, which enlighten, which let us be ourselves, and which ultimately create bridges and healing in society.

There is a word Ubuntu in, I believe, the Nguni language which is extremely difficult to translate into English but relates to a positive concept of what human connectedness should mean. Broadly, if you behave in a way in which the whole community benefits, then you are exhibiting what human behaviour should be and thereby become whole. If you want to know more, here’s an article.

Inasmuch as I understand it, the concept seems a much better connectedness than the Old Boys’ Network or the smothering safety of a clique.

If we spent more time recognising the needs we hold in common for safety, love, shelter, justice, freedom, rather than fearing the things we don’t have in common, the stronger the human network would be and the easier it would be to improve things for all humanity. I know it’s not that simple, but it’s surely a starting point.

It’s certainly a good deal more useful than working out whether you’re royal or not.

Apart from the fact that the ‘real’ heir to the throne may actually be an Australian, I’m not sure any supposed royal DNA in my blood counts for much.

After all, humans are supposed to share 50% of DNA with bananas and daffodils, and some may say I, personally, share even more.

 No one is going to crown me anytime soon.

Thank heavens for that.

[UPDATE: did some more family research with my mother and discovered some bigwigs back in the 17th C. Haven’t got back as far as royalty though, and it clearly all went horribly wrong somewhere around then! Or right of course – I expect the clerks, shoemakers and servants were more interesting really.)

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Technical Network Abstract Background Stock Vector – Illustration of design, overlapping: 63068618

Notebooks – The Conundrum

~ Paula Harmon ~ 4 Comments

I recently read an article by Jason McBride about the importance, and indeed joy, of keeping ‘ugly notebooks’. If you want to read it, here’s the link.

I have to say that I find Jason’s notebooks anything but ugly, which is more than can be said for mine, but that’s because I use mine in a different sort of way.

It’s hard to remember the first writing notebook I specifically bought, but I have a sneaky suspicion it’s still in a drawer or box somewhere, still untouched, because it was too pretty to write in.

I imagine I’d planned to simply write stories, novels and poems in some sort of logical fluid way. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t know where to start exactly meant that I left it pristine, and carried on writing on scraps of paper or cheaper notebooks instead, and even pressed school exercise books into play.

Below, you can see my Latin revision book, and a selection of other notebooks I used for probably fifteen years from mid teens on when I was trying to get something actually finished.

I bought the blue and green ring-binder aged seventeen, aiming to be organised, putting different things in different sections and moving stuff around as necessary. I took it to university, planning to finish a novel which had a potential publisher, although I never did and it’s still mostly in my head.

Anyone who knew me then thought my writing was bad, but people who know me now will surely attest that it was a lot better than it is now. The notebooks and the ring binder are full of stories, novel concepts and first chapters, all handwritten. But as you can see they’re also full of planning. I have absolutely zero idea who these characters are, or what any of the code in red means after all this time, but note to my long-suffering editor who sometimes thinks I have a loose idea of plotting, at least you can see I have always tried. I also, as you can see, sketched out my thoughts about what characters looked like.

There was then a sort of creative pause of nearly twenty years in which I drew and painted some, but wrote very very little, until a series of events got me going again.

After that, I started to use notebooks again. Some of those the second image were bought by me (just because) and some were gifts. If you’re someone who’s gifted me one and it’s not there, don’t worry, it’ll be somewhere in the house or writing shed, shielding its contents.

The thing is, I now use notebooks differently.

I find writing stories by hand very hard now. I can genuinely type faster. I find reading what I’ve written even harder. But I do sometimes take one to a writing course and do the exercises in it, and occasionally, I write poems or pen pictures by hand as it uses a different part of my creative mind.

As before, I use the notebooks for:

  • Plotting
  • Working out characters’ ages and interrelationships.

But now, I also use them for:

  • To do lists for the business of writing
  • Blue-sky thinking/brainstorming with myself when I’m stuck to work out what the problem is and how to overcome it.
  • Jotting down notes about things I mustn’t forget to include at some point, but not now.
  • Asking myself questions that I realise I need to answer when I’m editing ‘Where has X gone?’, ‘What did Y do exactly?’ or, as you can see, ‘When was Crippen exactly?’

Another person might use notebooks in some sort of order – one for each book, or for each time of mental activity, not starting a new one till an old one is full. But despite being quite sensible and usually organised, for some reason, I don’t. I pick up whichever notebook is closest when I’m thinking about something, or perhaps the one with a cover that ‘calls to me’ that particular day and use it.

There are minuses and pluses to this. It can take a while to find what I remember noting, but, it can also be a joy when I come across something I’d forgotten.

So yes, my notebooks (on the inside) are pretty ugly and would make very little sense to anyone else.

I rarely draw characters now (although you can see a red story-board for a possible promo video below). My sketches (of other things entirely) are chiefly in sketchbooks which I don’t think are ugly at all (even if the sketch didn’t work out).

Perhaps I should start something hybrid like others do, sticking in physical prompts – leaves, postcards, pictures – and responding in sketches or writing. It’s worth thinking about.

Of course, journals and diaries are something else. Below is a drawing I did for last year’s Inktober to the prompt ‘Journal’. I have a couple of old journals from my late teen/early twenties too which are something else altogether and probably need to be ‘lost’ before someone reads about my young adult angst. I’d much rather they were like my drawing.

But at the moment, I quite like my different books: my sketchbooks for an outlet of creativity with no particular purpose and my notebooks for effectively talking with myself as I work out the plots to my books.

What about you?

Words and images copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Forever Autumn

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

September

Gone are the aromas of hot earth and barbecues, lollipop-coloured clothes, other people’s lives audible through open doors and windows, sunshine warming bare legs, iced drinks sweet and herby.

As Summer tips into Autumn, there’s the scent of apples; hedgerows bejewelled with garnet and obsidian and ruby berries; the skip-whine-trudge of children going to school; bare legs encased; steaming drinks warming and spiced.

Conkers peek through spiky eyelashes from tree and pavement. What were you supposed to do to harden them? Oven? Vinegar? I can’t recall. Did I ever beat anyone? I can’t recall that either.

But I remember the first day of the school year when I was fifteen, far too sophisticated for conkers, walking down the hill to collect my friend, ignoring my mother’s plea to wear a coat. It’s still too warm, Mum, and it’s not going to rain.

I was ready for Autumn. I always was. Tired of the heat – or more often – the disappointment because there was none, tired of a lack of pattern, I was happy when primary colours became muted and freedom became something earned at the end of the day. Albeit briefly, I even looked forward to school.

We walk the mile to school wearing our freshly ironed shirts, knotted ties, dark skirts and jumpers. The uniform is supposed to make us look the same but never can. Short, tall, curvy, uncurvy, maturing at different ages into different shapes, we are ourselves, pushing the rules about skirt lengths and shoe styles and make-up to make uniform individual.

We pass the path to the waterfall, cross over the bridge over the river which will run slow into the bigger one for a few weeks yet and under the narrow gauge railway.

On every deciduous tree around us, the leaves are still green but they whisper in the breeze to each other ‘When shall we change? What will be the tipping point?’

I barely notice, too busy wondering if this year’s set texts in English will be good and what stories I’ll be asked to write and thinking as I’ve thought before:

Surely this year at last, school will be fun, the teachers will be inspiring, the bullies will have lost interest, and the boy will finally see me properly and fall in love…

October

By October, leaves are red and gold and orange.

My wedding day was in October. All the days leading up to it had been grey and drizzly. Early in the morning of that day, I heard a pattering on the roof. No one had planned for rain.

My father, the tee-total, brings me a Bucks-Fizz, saying ‘Rain before seven, fine by eleven’ to help me stop worrying about what will happen if it doesn’t stop.

Then we’re caught up in a flurry. I’m too busy with hair and make-up and unfamiliar hooped petticoats to notice what is happening outside. When my mother and sister have gone ahead, Dad and I wait with nothing to say, because what can be said? I am doing something irrevocable – going from single to married, from daughter to wife. I’m aware of myself teetering on the edge of change, while my father is muttering the words he will shortly need to say.

Who giveth this woman?

Her mother and I do.

I hadn’t lived with my parents for ten years by then and I was never my father’s chattel anyway, and he never thought I was. But I was his beloved, stepping into a new stage of life.

Once he’d held my hand as I learned to walk, and later held the bicycle steady as I learned to ride and then… both times, he’d let go to see how I managed alone. Now, as I teetered, he was trusting once more that once he let go, I’d keep my balance.

And then the car arrives to take us to the church and Dad and I walk towards the entrance, late guests scurrying past.

Arm in arm for the last yards we pause and look up.

Above us in the churchyard, trees bow heads crowned with golden leaves, and above those leaves is a canopy of the deepest, clearest, most beautiful azure sky.

I am ready.

November

November is sometimes a drowning month when wind drives the last leaves from every tree to skitter angrily across grey skies before rain drums them into the mud.

Even if it doesn’t rain, the skies are dull, the night encroaching on day at either side, crushing it slowly hour by hour towards Solstice. Frosts start, snow may fall.

For a day or so, fireworks stud the grey night, rockets going up, up, up and balancing in the darkness before… Hoom! They fall in showers of impossible brightness. Bonfires scent our hair and clothes with woodsmoke. Our hands are warmed by hot dogs and steaming chocolate, before waving sparklers in defiance against the black night.

I remember a firework display when my children were very small. My baby daughter puts hands over her ears and buries her nose in my shoulder, sobbing. It’s too overwhelming for her. Not for my toddler son who tries to out-jump and out-shriek the fireworks then… losing both wellies in the mud, steps forward in his socks and…then falls flat. Just as well the noise blots out what my husband is saying as he picks that muddy figure up.

When the fireworks are over, November becomes dull again until Christmas fills the town with lights and gifts and sparkle.

In the countryside, a few brown leaves cling moistureless for a few more days, then fall to crunch under feet before turning into earth at the foot of their tree.

In three months, they’ve gone from green to … dead?

Maybe not exactly. Because they’ve fallen, mushrooms can grow. Under them animals seek food or store it. A hidden world is revealed by bare branches: the last of the berries, bark, fungus, hedgehogs, deer, rabbits, squirrels, and the curious, mischievous fox – russet, red, fawn, silver, orange.

Those Autumn leaves have transformed, every one holding a memory of eons of leaves that once emerged green then turned gold then faded so something else could grow and live. Another tree, a fungus, a creature.

Everything fades but nothing ever truly disappears. It changes. It feeds. It makes something new possible.

Everything is a matter of timing and balance.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Revisiting

~ Paula Harmon ~ 6 Comments

Last week I met a friend in the town where we first met as students. Apart from attending an open day with my children once, I hadn’t returned in decades.

Walking up from the station, I expected to be filled with hiraeth, an untranslatable Welsh word which, like the Portuguese Saudade, broadly means a kind of melancholy nostalgia.

As a student I made the mile and a half walk from station to college many times. It was often very late at night and, not having money for a taxi, I would walk very fast through town and across the college fields hoping to avoid any ne’er do wells. (My parents never knew and I’m not sure I’ve ever told them.)

Despite my anticipation however, I walked up that once familiar street and felt no hiraeth whatsoever.

I passed the place where I think I went to for my twenty-first birthday meal with my college friends. It was an Italian restaurant then. It’s a music venue now. There’s something incongruous about this half-timbered, wattle-and-daub building which was then draped with artificial grapes and is now advertising open mic opportunities.

Temptation in the form of bookshops, antique shops and independent shops full of pretty things slowed me down. Then… was that where my dentist was? Was that building once my hairdresser’s? Surely that was once Woolworths? And wasn’t that once the Athena shop where I used to buy posters for my bedroom wall?

Quite possibly I was wrong about them all. It didn’t really matter.

Apart from my former bank, the only things I recognised were things that have been there for centuries without materially changing: the Cathedral and the Cross.

I walked a little further and met my friend rushing the other way. We hadn’t met in the flesh since before Covid so there was a risk we wouldn’t recognise each other, but we did, and we went to have lunch and catch up on what had happened in the last few years that we didn’t already know.

 ‘Do you remember…?’ said my friend about a series of places in town which I’d entirely forgotten.

‘Didn’t you spend much time in town?’ she asked when I shook my head.

The thing was that I did. But I also went for cycle rides, on my own or with another friend who’d wanted to join us but couldn’t, or with my then boyfriend. I climbed the local hillfort, I visited the Harbour. Once, at least, I cycled to Southampton. I went on train trips to see my gran or my parents or school friends who were in different universities.

Mostly I wandered around in town too, only the finer details evade me completely now.

My friend and I visited the cathedral which we both remembered well, not least because we both sang in the choir and took part in Christmas concerts there.

‘I remember this aisle being a lot longer,’ she said.

‘We were in long skirts, carrying candles and singing slowly,’ I said.

‘True.’

Perhaps my lack of nostalgia is partly because I’ve (so far) never put roots down anywhere longer than twenty years. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many places I’ve lived in and to feel nostalgic about them all would be overwhelming. Each of them has left something with me, I remember most with fondness, but take me back to any of them and I feel like a visitor.

On reflection, I don’t mind.

I may not recall the teashops and pubs, but I remember the friends I was with. I can’t remember what we talked about, or even really what we looked like. But when I looked in my friend’s eyes, her essential lovely soul was the same. Physical changes that years have made disappear when you look in someone’s eyes. And despite all the setbacks and heartbreaks the last few years have brought her, at heart I know the essential her is still there in the process of healing. I was glad to hug her and listen to her and talk not just of a distant past we can’t really remember, or of a recent one which holds pain for her, but of a future that will help her lovely soul to blossom as it should.

No I don’t remember the finer details of those days, but I remember who we were.

I remember choosing posters and books that portrayed who I wanted to be rather than who I was. I remember sitting in pubs with my then boyfriend (poor chap) tying his brain in knots with my assertions of black and white certainties I am no longer certain of. I remember cycling to the lazy south coast because I was lonely for the wilder Gower waves. I remember getting lost with my other friend walking through fields of yellow on the way back from the hill fort. I remember the Christmas procession down the candlelit cathedral aisle. I remember being young and doubtful and foolish and confused and impetuous and illogical and angry and sad and happy and in love and heartbroken.

If I felt any hiraeth at all, it was perhaps for the girls that we were, including the friend who couldn’t join us. All three of us were shy and out of synch with our own generation.

We were the first drafts of people we are still becoming.

And that’s what I remembered and recognised and saluted, not with nostalgia but simply with acknowledgement. That was then. This is now, but the goods and bads of then, have helped to form now and are worth a raised glass (or cup of tea as we were both driving – then or later).

Rather than feel nostalgia, I felt a warm, fuzzy, joy to be back somewhere where I was once very happy and to be meeting one of two people who made it happy.

We were first drafts of ourselves then. Who knows what draft we are now. But one day, we will be masterpieces.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Stirring

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

After breakfast, I sit with my tea next to an old fireplace in a renovated ancient cottage.

The small log burner under the chimney is redundant on a summer day. Once, I muse, there would have been an open fire for heating and cooking. A kettle and pot would have hung from trammel hooks over the flames, a small oven might have stood to the side.

It’s hard to imagine this tiny house with more than two people inside. Downstairs, there’s barely room for a table, two chairs, two armchairs, a dresser, a two burner hob, fridge (with microwave atop) and large sink. A large, low double bed fills the attic upstairs. A pleasant shower room has been built, adjoining the lower floor.

My husband and I, our laptops, tablets, phones, leads and books fill the place.

I sip tea, and scroll through reels on social media, musing. This cottage would have been home to a poor family once. Now it’s for holiday makers. Where I sat idle in an Ikea armchair, a woman would have bent, stirring the pot in the fireplace, sweating because even in August, food still needed to be prepared, a family still needed to be fed.

Surely she’d only have had a dresser, table and chairs. No armchairs, no labour-saving devices, no sink. Apart from the river, where was her water supply? A long early morning walk perhaps? Maybe she cared for an elderly relation who watched as she worked with children at her feet, a baby in her belly while a husband waited to be fed.

I scroll and come across a video.

Someone is reconstructing ‘mud cookies’ also called ‘bonbon tè’. I unmute my phone. It’s a Haitian famine recipe made of mineral-laden mud mixed with salt and a little fat then baked in the sun.

Appalled, I watch the maker taste them.

‘They’re so salty,’ she says. ‘They suck all the moisture out of your mouth.’

The fireplace rattles.

I look at it. Nothing is moving. But the noise is there.

Shaking myself, I scroll on and come across a thread about secrets. Some are appalling. Some need reporting. One says ‘My husband works all the hours but doesn’t make enough to feed us all. I pretend I’ve eaten when we have dinner. I don’t want to make him feel a failure. Sometimes I’ve had nothing to eat but toast and black coffee all day.’

How can it be that a woman in a developed country in 2025 is doing what women did a hundred years ago and more – try to survive on next to nothing so that her husband, children and dependent elders can eat?

The fireplace rattles again.

There is no wind to come down the chimney. There is no traffic on the narrow country road to vibrate the house.

There is just an old fireplace and the ghosts of women who stirred the pot in the fireplace beside me while their stomachs rumbled.

And they have not forgotten.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

It’s All on the Board

An image of board games and a card game:
~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

Do you like or loathe board games? We love them.

In our house, games come out for family get togethers, or when we have friends staying. It’s something we all (with the possible exception of my father-in-law) look forward to. Yes, my adult children play video games too, but when they’re home, they even bring their own friends round to play board games with us sometimes. There is nothing like a board game to foster, um, healthy interaction and um… Let’s have a think shall we?

Contraband

Contraband was my parents’ and dates back (as you can probably tell) to the 1950’s or 1960s. It’s a bluffing game in which you take it in turns to be a traveller passing through customs, or the customs officer.

Like most bluffing games, the fun is trying to keep a straight face when you’re smuggling stuff or pretending you have the diplomatic bag when you don’t or trying to look guilty when you’re innocent to tempt the customs officer to make a false accusation and have to pay compensation.

My dad made a brilliant customs officer. He’d stare menacingly into your eyes then do something like waggle his eyebrows to make you confess all. I developed quite a good poker face (even if I’ve rarely used it to play poker, and then never for money).

Scrabble

When I was about sixteen and went to visit my German penfriend, we played Scrabble. My penfriend tried making English words while I made German words. However, my vocabulary was tiny, and while her English was very good, the letter selection was designed for the German language, so the ratio wasn’t right. We gave up quite quickly.

My husband can’t spell, but loves Scrabble. Playing it with him is a very long-winded process as the options are (eventually) to tell him how to spell something, or let him use a dictionary.

One pre-internet summer we went on a three-week trailer-tent trip in northern Spain. It rained solidly for the last fortnight, a quagmire forming under the ground sheet. We were a long way from town, so we spent some of our evenings playing Scrabble. It took him so long to play his turns, that I managed to read most of Lord of the Rings during the games we played.

Monopoly

I couldn’t picture Monopoly because it’s in the attic somewhere with Rummikub, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit and Skirrid. (I like to think that the friendly household ghost (who makes odd noises around the house) and our timid household elf (who moves stuff about) spend their evenings playing them and will be upset when we’ve moved enough clutter to find them.)

I was rather a goody-two-shoes child, but I confess that when my friend and I played Monopoly with our little sisters, a determination to win at all costs possessed both of us.

‘If you give me Mayfair, I’ll give you Old Kent Road and Whitechapel,’ one of us would say, making the most of our younger sisters’ slim grasp on finance. ‘Of course it’s a fair swap!’ Then we’d bankrupt them.

They cottoned on in the end of course, and my sister still complains about it. I feel little shame. It was revenge for all the times she got out of chores by being cute.

Cluedo/Clue

She can’t accuse me of cheating at Cluedo since it’s barely possible, but even as an adult my sister finds it baffling. After playing one Christmas a few years ago, I found a clue sheets on which she’d written ‘Have you got any idea what’s going on?’ and my brother-in-law had written in reply: ‘Nope’.

When the children were little, we bought a French version while holidaying in France. Then we realised that the board had a different layout and extra rules. My French wasn’t up to working them out, so it’s actually never been used.

The layout change wasn’t so bad. That’s happened on and off since it was invented as you can read about here. But ever since that holiday, our family has called Colonel Mustard ‘Colonel Moutarde’ with a bad French accent.

Articulate

Articulate starts the most arguments. You have to describe something on a card to your team mate and if they get it right, you move to the next card, getting as many right as possible until the time is up. The key is being on the same wavelength as your partner. My husband and I usually are which means we’re sometimes not allowed to be in a team. But we’re not always.

There are photos of people crying with laughter while in another team, A shouts at B because B’s suggested something ridiculous as the answer to a perfectly ‘obvious’ clue and B shouts that A is incomprehensible and obtuse. Insults fly and divorce and/or murder is threatened. It makes no odds – we all (with the exception of my father-in-law) still love it.

Winning exchange:

‘You know Shakespeare’s play where they killed a king?’

‘Er…’

‘OK, so the burger place that sells burgers that’s not Burger King? The first half.’

‘Er… Mac?’

‘Yup. Um… the beer that Homer Simpson drinks?’

‘Duff? Oh! MacDuff.’

‘Yes!’

Losing exchange:

‘You know the man who fell out of the tree?’

‘Er…’

‘He was a scientist. What did he discover?’

‘Aspirin?’

What do boardgames teach?

Chess and Backgammon teach strategy (and so does ‘Ticket to Ride’ which I haven’t described as we’ve only played it twice), but the other board games above?

Reading through this list makes me wonder. Monopoly was originally invented to teach about the evils of capitalism, but during a game, almost everyone turns into an evil capitalist. Clearly I was no better than any of them once.

The others might be accused of encouraging lying, manipulating and arguing. Perhaps. Or maybe they just help you let off steam.

Despite a lifetime playing board games, I grew up to be the upstanding moral citizen.

And let’s be honest, they’re great fun.

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI).

Obstacle

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

‘Don’t touch it!’ says Norindis. ‘It’s manmade.’

We all look at the rock blocking the crossroads. Thrust into its centre is a large sword, its blade engraved in some unknown script.

‘How do you know it’s manmade?’ I say. ‘Maybe some other otherworld being did it.’

‘An elf like us would have put that sword in straight and enchanted it with proper runes that appear and disappear according to how annoying we want to be.’

Brendillion scratches his ear. ‘Tons of our stuff is manmade. That’s why we lure humans here, isn’t it? So they work and we don’t have to.’ He gives me an awkward smile. ‘Sorry Astrillia… you know what I mean.’

‘We don’t keep humans to do this sorta stuff!’ Norindis flicks the leather bound hilt and makes the sword twang. ‘And this is iron. How’m I gonna get my unicorns past? Flaming humans – coming here, polluting our… highways.’ He twangs the sword again.

Brendillion tenses, ready to dive in before Norindis gives it a third twang and releases something we can’t control.

‘Which human?’ he ponders. ‘We haven’t got many now apart from those hippies we nabbed at Woodstock in 1969 who think they’re still there.’

Pandotha frowns. ‘We’ve got a shedload of “misunderstood” teenagers.’

‘They’re useless,’ argues Brendillion. ‘We’d send them back if their parents didn’t prefer the changeling replacements.’

‘So it’s one of us,’ I insist.

‘No,’ Norindis snaps. ‘It’s manmade.’

At this point my human husband Derek appears. His only magic skill is making my heart flip when I see him, even after ten years. He wandered into our realm by accident and stayed by choice.

‘Wotcha Nobby,’ he says. ‘What’s with the new street furniture?’

Norindis clenches his fists. ‘Address me properly, stinking human!’

Derek makes a flourishy bow and declaims ‘Greetings Nobby. What wisdom too deep for my human brain has led to this impediment to traffic?

Norindis roars. ‘How’d you do it eh? Why’d you do it?’

‘Not me,’ says Derek. He inspects the stone. ‘Excali….Interesting,’ he says. ‘Hundreds of years ago, a boy pulled a sword out of something like this.’

‘An elf?’ says Pandotha.

‘Human,’ says Derek. ‘He’s supposed to come back if the world got into a pickle again, which…’

Norindis spots a teenage humans slumped in torpor against a tree staring into an object no amount of magic has yet prised from his hand. ‘You! Come here! Pull this out.’

The boy looks up and whines. ‘Why me? It’s not faaair! Don’t wanna.’

‘Tsk,’ says Derek. His eyes suddenly sparkle, his hand stretches out…

I can see what’s in Derek’s mind: us riding into the city on glimmering horses to… disappear into an angry world of iron. I reach to stay his hand but he’s withdrawn it.

‘No,’ he says, the sparkle fading. ‘This is bad magic. It’s not a sword that’ll put things right now. Besides,’ he glances at the truculent teenager, ‘You just can’t get the Once and Future Kings anymore, can you?’

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Sword in the Stone Excalibur Stock Image – Image of magic, rock: 78763523

Barnet Fair (1)

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

When I was a teenager agonising over my hair, my paternal grandmother told me about her brother cutting hers when she was around the same age

At the time of this conversation my own hair was long, straight and mousy-brown. In theory it had been in fashion for a while (although it would have been more fashionable if blonde), but somehow it – along with me – never was. Now, a new fashion was coming in: shoulder length with curled sides. I needed a good hairdresser, possibly a perm and definitely curling tongs. None of these were things my mother thought worth spending money on. She considered me too young for a perm, could trim my hair herself and from bitter experience suspected it would take more than curling tongs to curl my hair.

‘I rather regretted letting him do it,’ said my gran, touching the nape of her neck where there were some adorable grey curls sticking out.

This stopped my whinging in its tracks. While my sister and I are now best of friends (which we weren’t at the time), I still wouldn’t trust her with my tresses and a pair of scissors. And what I knew of friends’ brothers, I definitely wouldn’t have trusted them.

‘Whatever did he do?’ I said.

‘It wasn’t his fault,’ she said. ‘He did what I asked him to.’

Halted in my tirade against parental unreasonableness, I asked the obvious question: ‘Whatever did you ask him to do?’

‘Bob my hair,’ she said. ‘My parents wouldn’t allow it. The bit where he shaved at my nape has never quite grown right since. Before my parents found out, I sold a lovely necklace I’d been given so I could go to a barber and have it done properly. They were horrified all the same, even though my mother once did something similar.’

Her parents were horrified? So was I. My gran was the archetypal housewife. She had married young, had never had to work for a living and never had an urge to. She’d fallen happily into running a home efficiently and well. She gardened, styled her home, baked and sewed with high skill and also joy. She was calm, conforming and believed in obedience and the status quo. The last thing I could imagine her doing was anything that horrified anyone. But what did she mean about her own mother ‘doing the same’?

It turned out that it all went back to cultural perceptions of femininity, modesty, and being a good Christian woman which we’ve now largely put aside.

My great-grandmother was in her late teens in the 1890s, one of the youngest of eight (I think) children. Her father would have been well into his sixties. While not remotely poor, they certainly weren’t in the ‘going to balls’ class, so when she obtained a party dress which exposed lower arms and neck, her father was apparently horrified. (Although I have a photograph taken of her in this extremely modest – by today’s standards – dress, so she must have been forgiven.)

Her daughter, my grandmother was the youngest by far of four, a teenager in the 1920s. The brother who cut her hair must have been a good six years older, since the eldest one had been killed in WWI. Their father would have been in his fifties and her mother in her forties. Bare lower arms and neck were one thing. Short hair and short skirts were something else altogether.

But WWI had accelerated what had already started in the 1910s – more sensible, practical clothes and hairstyles for women – and by the 1920s there was no going back. My great-grandparents forgave her. It was a very loving and accepting family, and they must have realised that the world was never going to be what it had been before the Great War and that fighting over the length of someone’s hair was pointless. Plus Gran had a married sister who was eleven years older and probably took her side.

The whole conversation came back to me recently as I started writing a new project: a mystery set in the 1920s where the female main character is twenty-three. She hasn’t had her hair cut into a bob yet but a number of the other female characters have. (At the time, you went to a barber to have it done, holding a page from a newspaper with possible hairstyles in your shaking hand.) Will she get it cut or not? Haven’t decided yet.

I don’t think having her hair bobbed was Gran’s only rebellion. I believe that there was some concern about her marrying my grandfather. It wasn’t because he was unsuitable in any way as a person, or is family was less than acceptable. I think it was because there was a possibility of mental illness in his family since his father had tragically died by his own hand. Somehow my grandparents prevailed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

I never did get that fashionable curled sides hairstyle while it was still in fashion and stopped nagging my mother. Perhaps I realised maintaining it required more skill than I had (or would ever have).

At Christmas, some months after the conversation I’m relating, my paternal grandfather unexpectedly died. A little after a year after that my paternal grandmother did too. We’ve always felt that a broken heart was more of a cause than anything medical.

For reasons I still can’t explain, one of the first things I did in my grief was to demand to go to a hairdresser, where I had my long hair cut into a short bob. Ever since then, my hairstyle had been fundamentally one of three styles: long and straight, long and permed, or in a bob.

But for the record, so far I haven’t got my sister to do it, and no one has ever taken a razor to the back to create the adorable curls that stuck up at a funny angle which my grandmother had.

(NB for anyone not in the know, Barnet Fair is Cockney Rhyming Slang for Hair. And I will be writing more about the subject.)

Words copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit Vector Set of Different Flapper Girls Icons in Modern Flat Style Isolated on White Background. Stock Vector – Illustration of hair, face: 87491137

Apples, Pears and Triangles

~ Paula Harmon ~ Leave a comment

When my sister and I were teenagers, our parents went away for the weekend leaving us to our own devices.

Is this a tale of wild parties? Nope. We were far too boring.

Instead, we started a two day super low calorie diet.

Started.

The first meal was a raw egg beaten into orange juice.

One sip was enough for both of us. We’d been brought up not to waste food, but…down the sink it went and the diet went in the bin.

At the time, my sister and I were slim, healthy and fit, but we were both self-conscious about our busty figures. ‘You’re an inverted triangle shape,’ the magazines told us (apparently is a carrot shape now). We could have been apples or pears or hourglasses. We didn’t want to be any of them. We wanted to be like the girls on TV.

The negative body imagery I grew up with was not simply through media and peer-pressure (then nowhere near as bad as it is nowadays) but from years of little comments (made as if we weren’t there) by the extended family:

  • ‘He’s rather a trencherman isn’t he?’ (*)
  • ‘Her feet are large – I imagine she’ll grow up to be big.’  (She didn’t.)
  • ‘You’re not as thin as you used to be.’ (I’d just had a baby.)
  • ‘Isn’t that dress is a little tight/low cut/short?’ (No.)
  • ‘Their busts must be from their Polish great-great-great-grandmother.’ (She wasn’t Polish and no one knew what she looked like.)

(*In case you don’t know, a ‘trencherman’ is an old-fashioned term which suggests someone who’d not only eat their meal but what it was served in (a trencher originally being a piece of stale bread used as a plate).)

One of my earliest memories was hearing someone say Dad ought to lose weight and being upset because I thought he was lovely and cuddly. It wasn’t till much later that I realised the risks to his health.

He really did try.

He started every fad diet going, and what Dad ate, the whole family ate. Luckily for us the diets only lasted as long as Dad could bear them (generally about two days).

He kept a complicated graph on which noted his weight daily down to the quarter pound. When later quizzed as to why, he said it was because of a diet he’d been on which had worked. Was he still on the diet? No. He’d just kept the graph habit. My sister and I rolled our eyes. We didn’t understand the genetic element of the situation nor the psychological one.

I had a different battle at eighteen. A combination of negative body image, a broken heart and struggling with my A levels meant that my life felt out of control, so I controlled the one thing I could: eating.

I wasn’t trying to make myself ill. I’d had a friend who became anorexic and was taken out of school a few years earlier.  But caught up in my own misery, I couldn’t see I was risking the same.

There was little recognition of eating disorders then. They were seen as a lack of self-control rather than a psychological issue. The parents of the friend with anorexia initially insisted she was just losing puppy fat. But she’d told me she’d started cutting out food because bullying from boys at school and feeling second best to her brother had become too much. I hope she got the treatment she needed. The parents completely cut her off from her former friends and I never found out.

I myself didn’t become anorexic because Dad spotted how thin I’d become and said so. I realised it must be bad if he noticed and started to change what I was eating.

It was a struggle to get back to normal, not least because shortly afterwards I went to university (despite duffing up my A levels) and was too shy to go to the refectory to eat with strangers. I fundamentally lived on crackers and soup until I made lifelong friends and started reaching a sensible weight.

You might not believe that if you saw me now. A combination of menopause, medication, genes (perhaps) and a sedentary job mean I’m no longer a carrot but an apple and need to lose several pounds.

Proffered help is sometimes trying.

A (male) doctor said ‘It’s so easy for post-menopausal women to gain weight but so hard to lose it.’ Little chuckle. ‘My wife’s forever complaining when I tell her she can’t eat carbs!’

How humorous.

I drink wine and I don’t exercise near enough, but I prefer healthy food. I’ve never been a comfort eater, but I am a boredom eater.

I explained all this to the doctor, who said that my ideal diet was poached chicken, poached eggs, lentils and no carbs. Thinking I’d infinitely prefer to give up wine than pasta, I got off the call with a desperate urge to make a massive bowl of macaroni cheese.

Instead I cooked eggs. (Poached, with no orange juice in sight.)

My paternal grandmother despaired over her post-menopausal but quite average weight and her greying hair and her soft face. I loved all of it and couldn’t see the reason for her distress then. But I understand now.

I’d like to be thinner not just – or even – because it would be healthier, but because deep down I still want to look like women on TV, even though they’re the middle-aged ones not the teenage ones.

Is that a society thing or a me thing? Dad and his daily weight graph is no different to me and my weight-loss apps which are only relevant if I’m eating less and exercising more.

Part of me wants to say ‘Come back next week and see if I’ve rejoined the gym and lost some weight.’

The bigger part knows ‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t, but I need to love myself as I am either way.’


UK Help Links

Beat Eating Disorders

Menopause Matters

Obesity Support Groups

Diabetes UK

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI). Image credit ID 21036277 | Apples And Pears © Elena Schweitzer | Dreamstime.com

Shelf Life

~ Paula Harmon ~ 1 Comment

The other day when I needed rice wine vinegar for a recipe, I discovered the use by date of ours had expired seven years ago. For the record, we probably hadn’t used it 2018, but it did prove that we need a cupboard audit.

No one has ever accused me of being a tidy person, but I try to be organised in the kitchen. Unfortunately I’m constantly undermined by my husband who thinks it’s a waste of time and thinks the fact that I have the spices in the spice cupboard in alphabetical order hysterical. There’s a sort of running battle because he puts things where he sees a space and then of course the chief chef (e.g. me) can’t find them and remonstrates and he rolls his eyes etc etc etc.

Use by/Best Before dates of course are somewhat new. Our parents and grandparents used their noses and brains. Admittedly, until forty years ago, the variety of things we take for granted weren’t as easily available (or a desire to cook several different cuisines), and my grandmothers having endured ten years of the Depression followed by thirteen or so years of rationing, were both very frugal. and unlikely to buy things they weren’t going to use.

They both cooked good plain British cooking (yes it’s a thing) with fresh ingredients. One grandmother also made macaroni dishes and the other also made curry. One baked her own bread. The other made the thinnest ever crêpes suzettes.

In contrast, I store ingredients for recipes from Jamaica to Malaysia, from France to South Africa, often bought on a whim. Periodically I realise a ‘best before’ is rapidly approaching and adjust what I was planning to cook accordingly.

There are things in the cupboard whose dates we’d never check: treacle, golden syrup and marmite. It’s hard to see how any of them could go off, and I suspect the treacle may outlast me.

On the other hand, there’s a tin of Confit de Canard which my husband bought in France in 1993 which was put in a cupboard when we got home and subsequently forgotten. The use by date was 2001 and we’ve moved twice since then, bringing the tin with us because we feel guilty about throwing it away. My husband swears it’ll still be fine. He’s probably right, but I’m not taking the risk and said he can eat it on his own and if necessary clear up afterwards. So far, he hasn’t tried to prove his own theory.

So it’s obvious that things on kitchen and fridges shelves have a life span. Is the same true of things on other shelves?

Books for example.

For irrelevant reasons, I recently tidied the bookshelves in my daughter’s room. It includes the books she left behind when she moved away, plus a few she adds when she comes to visit. It covers her reading life from age ten to nowadays plus art books, Spanish dictionaries and the Modern History textbooks she never returned to school.

I extracted the latter to sneak back somehow, noting with depression that (a) her Modern History course ended with the 1980s Cold War when I was a teenager doing a Modern History course which ended with the 1950s Korean War and (b) it’s all repeating itself. Again.

Then I put her novels in alphabetical order by author. This resulted in a bit of a bonkers mix. Monica Ali’s adult novel ‘Brick Lane’ nestles against Frank Cottrell Boyce’s middle grade novel ‘Cosmic’ which nestles against Malorie Blackman’s young adult novel ‘Checkmate’ etc.

A collage of bits of my own bookcases are below. I know that I’m fortunate to have all these books and the space to have them by the way, but that aside, if you can’t abide things out of order, you may need to brace yourself before looking closely.

Different shelves are supposed to have different functions: research, general novels, the ‘I have a literature degree honest’ shelf, general non-fiction books, and of course cookbooks. But not everything is where it should be. I like to think that part of the reason for that is because books like to wander about when I’m not looking, but I have to admit, most of it is just me being lazy.

Some of the books are new, some second-hand, some from my childhood, some gifted at various times in adult life. Some were once my father’s, some once belonged to his aunt. I think the oldest book is from the 1850s (a volume of recipes) and possibly after that an 1890s children’s book which was my great aunt’s. Some books are other people’s – borrowed, lent or left behind by one of my children or their partners until they have space for them.

Hard as it is to believe (and please don’t tell the ghost of my father if you meet him in a second-hand bookstore), I do periodically reduce my collection, but it’s never an easy task. With the exception of ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘The Noodle Maker’ both of which I was more than happy to get rid of, I feel like I’m giving away a kitten for adoption when I donate books to charity shops etc, hoping desperately that each will be cared for properly in its new home.

In ‘The Unpleasantness at the Belloma Club’ by Dorothy L Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey describes books as lobster shells. His theory is that as you grow and change, you’ll discard them and replace them with something else.

For me, I think that’s true of the art I’d display, but it’s not for books I own.

There are perhaps some I’ll never read again, but I keep them because they hold memories. These were read to me by my father. That was once on my grandmother’s (very tidy) bookshelf with the blue glass jar of humbugs on top. And these, like songs on the radio, recall a point in time and just looking at them will bring memories and emotions back.

Like my daughter, I’ve kept books from childhood which I periodically read and enjoy every bit as much as I ever did.

So no, I don’t agree with Lord Peter Wimsey on this occasion.

Maybe rice wine vinegar and Confit de Canard have a shelf life.

But for me at least, books don’t.

What do you think?

Words and image copyright (c) Paula Harmon 2025. These are not to be used without the author’s express permission including for the purposes of training artificial intelligence (generative AI).