Madame Galina's Doings Diary

The Queen's Spiel

At Christmas I used to watch out of the window for Santa Claus. Just now I was watching for rats having chucked the cheese I got in a gift pack out on the front garden as bait. In the past couple of weeks there have been droppings on the crazy paving and gnaw-marks on the kiddie tricycle left outside by the Bulgarian brat from the basement flat. Hang on: just going for another look...

Oh my sainted aunt - I'll have to make a New Year's call to Rentokil. There are piebald ones. They don't have those in Nutcracker. But then, talking specifically of the present Royal Ballet run, Laura McCulloch's Rose Fairy is horror enough.

Also at Christmas we think of doing good. Well, you might; I’m too busy with the Cava, jumbo single Quality Streets and having arguments with myself while watching black and white films. ‘No, that isn’t Deanna Durbin: she’s not dressed as a nun or swinging round pillars singing Mozart’s Alleluia: and you can see her hands at all times because she isn’t wearing a muff. What? No, of course it isn’t Margaret Lockwood – are you trying to goad them into coming and taking away your gay card, or what?’

Anyway, talking of doing good, I heard yesterday from Marine Hobbit, one of the greatest of Afghanistan Solors. Oh, which reminds me: Nicky Ness, boss of Combined Services Entertainment, is coming with me to watch La Bayadère in February to see the Scarf Pas de Deux in context. I feel I ought to warn her that Nikya doesn’t throw herself into the arms of her Solor and make him carry her off to her dressing room as I do with Royal Marines Commandos...

What? The first time I did it for revenge, thank you; and all the subsequent times I've been trying to smudge their chest tattoos for purposes of research, honest guv.

Anyway, Hobbit thought I might like to hear about window cleaners in Salford, earless labradors in Kajaki, streaking in Kentucky Fried Chicken and about a letter sent to him through an Adopt a Penpal in the armed services scheme. More people should involve themselves in such schemes. Here, with Hobbit’s permission, is a copy of the letter.

Dear Serving Serviceman,

I hope this finds you as well as can be expected with the predicament that you find yourself in, having made your specific career choice. I hope you’re managing to keep yourself safely this side of the monstrous anger of the guns, as the late great Wilfred Owen so aptly put it.

Just to tell you a little bit about myself, in case you decide to write back to me and we become pen-pals or something. I’m called Eileen May Potter, named after my two grandmothers, Eileen and May. I’m twenty-seven, petite with mousy hair, live in Farnham in Surrey, and work for the local council in its administration department. A bit dull, perhaps, but there’s a lovely camaraderie in the office. We have a rota ensuring that every two months someone has to change something about the office environment: a plant, maybe, or a cuddly toy perched on a PC. This is done in secret and it’s always a little lift on what we call All Change Day (not strictly accurate as it’s only as I said a small change) as we go round the desks and cabinets trying to spot what is different.

At the moment I’m very well though overstretched with my various commitments – such as collecting for various charities (so many, I have to be careful not to confuse my tins before I go and stand on the slope outside the Budgens in town), doing the flowers in the Catholic Church and being a Talking Newspaper for the blind locally. Last Sunday it was my turn on the rota (it comes round so quickly I might be suspicious if I didn’t know that Brenda Simpson, who draws it up, wouldn’t pull a fast one) to cook for the homeless. I have to, between you and me, resist the temptation to give second helpings to those diners that I can see are wearing a Big Issue seller fob on a chain. My grandmother used to tell me about the moral debate pertaining to the amputee ex-serviceman selling pencils outside the library in Acton just after the war. Some library users just gave him money and wouldn’t take a pencil, saying then he would have more to sell. My grandmother always took one, saying that taking one made him a business man, not taking one made him a beggar. I think of Big Issue sellers as business men, you see. That’s the point I was trying to make.

Sorry, this is such a letter on mundane subjects, isn’t it? So, I would like to share this meditative thought with you. When any human being dies, especially if it is a violent death, there are ripples of consequence for every human soul on this physical plane. I think of it as being like a candle. A candle has its own light, and by carefully tilting it to avoid spilling the wax it can pass its light on to other candles and cause them also to shine forth. If the candle is snuffed out we lose not only its light but its potential to pass its light on.

I do hope I’ve given you something to take with you as you go about your life out there.

God Bless You,

Yours faithfully,

Eileen M. Potter

And now here’s Hobbit’s reply:

Dear Eileen,

Thank you for that most morale-boosting and uplifting letter. And thank God for this scheme. But if it’s not too much trouble next time can I have something about you touching yourself?’

Next not wanting to knock Woolworths when it’s down, but…

In 1999 one or more of their branches held a Christmas Party at Murray’s Club Kabaret. I entertained along with Marissa Carr: a Burlesque striptease artist and Anke: a Marlene Dietrich impersonator. Piers, the club owner, fretted that the ‘knick-knacking f**ks’ would still be enjoying their one free drink, over-salted canapés and We Three Variety Turns when Madonna, Jude Law and Kate Moss showed up for the late hour stint. And he had a point – we'd had the Woolworthians dunking one another in the Chocolate Fountain, showing in the manner of score cards for each Variety turn photocopies of their bums or worse - and as I walked through them to take the stage for the Sugar Plum Fairy one girl wearing antlers, no bra and her knickers over her skirt tottered over and handed me a napkin with a half eaten mushroom vol au vent on it. ‘Don’t want any more of this' she said.

After my faster twirling spot for them I put my purple baby-grow and student-bought trench coat on over my costume and hared off thinking I knew the way easy-peasy to Sugar Reef. I didn’t. I got lost. And the Japanese woman I stopped to ask for directions took one look at the make-up and the tiara and the three inches of pink tight and four of purple saggy and screamed, stepping backwards into the road in front of a black cab. The driver, a Fagin clone, bopped out of the cab and berated first her and then me after she explained that I accosted her. I had to talk him out of citizen’s arresting me for endangering life.

When I got back to Club Kabaret, the celebs time was about to chime and the Woolworthians were still there; Piers was adamant that they must be elsewhere by the time Jude, Kate and Mad’ arrived. ‘Can’t still have them here then showing the proper people their thirty-pence garlic peelers, Little Nippers mouse traps ten for a pound or Pic ‘n’ Mix – what the –‘

His gimlet eye was piercing Anke’s fishnets. Anke, I kid you not, had come to work with Chicken Pox and tried to pass it off as an allergy. It looked like she’d coated her legs with red muesli. ‘What a God send' said Piers. 'I’ll say the place is being quarantined as off immediate effect. Marlene: I love you!’

‘But I’m about to go on for Where Have all the Flowers Gone’ said Anke with a moue.

‘Not like like, darlin’. Chicken pox, that has to be’ Piers said. ‘Marc, go behind the bar, ring the Last Orders bell and start chanting: “Bring out Your Dead…Bring out Your Dead…’”

One last thing to share…

I don’t know if Jamie Oliver is consciously imitating (as I consciously imitate Olga Spessivtseva’s arms in Giselle) but from the point of view of content and presentation, he is Fanny Craddock for the Men’s Health generation.

Posted by iestyn at December 24, 2008 10:56 PM