Madame Galina's Doings Diary

Saw'd Off!!

Go on...you!!

Next door’s builders are still at it. A year on.

Coming back from the library today I met Casta, daughter of the house, the kind of teen who insists there are subtle differences between the Crew, Jack Wills and Musto’s clothing lines. I asked her when we could expect the building work finally to be finished.

“I really can’t say. There’s still, like, a lot to do.”

“You know what would have been good”, I said, “would have been to get all the power-sawing, for one example, out of the way in one fell swoop. What they’ve done on your house is power-saw all day every day for a week maybe, then it goes quietish and we’re all lulled into a false sense of having a lifestyle again where we’re paying to live, and then we get another week of “bbbbbrrrrrrrrooooooonnnngggg!!! Bbbbbrrrrroooonnnngggg!”

“Oh, but that’s because, like, we’re trying to make it that our, like, builders have some, like, variety.”

“?!!”

“They’re, like, from the Eastern Block, and back home they were, like, doctors and accountants and stuff, but have to, like, take labouring jobs over here as that’s all they can get because, right, their English isn’t good enough for them to do, like, what they’re actually trained to do. So, daddy has gone through it with them and, like, timetabled it so they don’t have to do anything for longer, like, than a week or…like…so they don’t get too, like, bored.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Well, you wouldn’t like it, surely, if you, like, had to do the same thing, like, time after time, like, would you? And you’re, like, a performer anyway.”

“Sorry, I’m school of what John Le Mesurier said to Wendy Richard when she was starting out: “If possible, try and do the same material for seventy-five years wearing the same blue wool suit.”"

After not even seventy-five shows, I was desperate to change the solo I was doing nightly at Club Kabaret from Giselle to Kitri, Swan Queen or at the very least Sugar Plum; but when I said so to my Country and Western singer father, I got a lecture.

“Are they loving it? Then don’t fix what isn’t broken, no matter if you’re bored doing the same thing night after night. If I had a penny for every time I tried to leave The Old Rugged Cross out of my set and the audience heckled till they got it, same with China Doll, Casting My Lasso and Devil Woman (which he always intro’d with the same line about it being a comment on his marriage) then…”

He wouldn’t be living in a fixed caravan in a slummy bit of Norfolk.

“So, how about you ask your father” I said to Casta, “to make the Poles saw till the sawing’s all done?”

Which would sound a little bit country set to a nice bit of Paderewski, I feel.

The Parable of The Ugly Cheese.

Approaches To Creativity.

I had a nightmare last week. Not caused by eating cheese, though there was cheese in the offing as it turned out thanks to Radio 4’s Food Programme broadcast the following afternoon.

“Twenty-four years of my life spent on it”, I woke myself up shouting.

Twenty-four years of trial and error touring alone, having an average of forty-two pounds a week to live on during one very lean period so the Suffolk Coastal District Council Housing Benefit Investigation Department was able to inform me, performing in spite of everything from pulled calf muscles and pleurisy to thrush caught when I was having an affair with a married man whose wife had it and which chaffed like hell when I grands fouetté relevé’d, getting to the stage when I was such a sunk soufflé of tiredness I accidentally auditioned for Miss aka Nicky Ness Ruler of the CSE to be sent to Iraq, honing Galina to ten minutes of Pas De Chatting, innuendoing, and swooning into the arms of a Royal Marine Commando on a stage made-shift from six orange crates covered in flattened scoff boxes in the deserts of Um Qasar.

It was three am; and I worry that I often wake then, because the accepted wisdom is that a person with depression wakes at two, one with anxiety at four. I was sitting up gesturing to what would be the heavens beyond but that was actually the box with my Poundstretcher Christmas Tree in on top of the wardrobe.

“Twenty-four years”, I repeated, snuggling down to count Shades to get me back off to sleep.

Sleepless In Sweden Heaven And Hell

The cheese segment (see what I did there?) of the Food Programme came from a food and drink festival on the banks of the Dordogne. It began with a French cheesy saying of one English cheese, “Now it does not have a story. But given time in the future and it will. The English must not be afraid to make modern, ugly cheeses. There is too much pretty imitation French cheese to be seen.”

“Absolutely”, I said, not looking up from a one-man PC Solitaire Olympics.

Next two festivals exhibiters were interviewed about their approach to making cheese. First up the man who had not flinched from foisting on the world the ugly bugger of a cheese discussed above.

“It was all I ever dreamed of, making cheese”, he said in a Lancashire accent, “and I know that sounds daft, but it was. It wasn’t in my family or anything – my father was an accountant – but I hankered to make cheese. Then I saw come on the market the only dairy that I thought we – my wife and I – would ever be able to afford – so I talked her into giving up everything we had in the North and moving down to Somerset where this dairy small-holding happened to be. And for a while, I have to say, it didn’t all turn out well. I had a recipe that I followed, but it wasn’t producing a cheese we could sell, let alone that was going to excite anyone. Everything we’d put into that business, too. I could see it going down the pan. Then one very late night I was so tired, I made a mistake with the amounts I put in the mix, and against all the odds, the result was outstanding. I remember the look on the wife’s face when she tried it, and friends told me they loved it, we sold out at the local markets, so that decided me to give it a try over here.”

Next up a woman from Bayswater.

“I was already involved in a number of catering outlets anyway, and we had a good look round Neale’s Yard, for one example, to see what was missing from the market, and we decided there was room for a strong Brie-like soft white with a strong cabbage after-taste, so we went into production and here we are with it.”

Don’t you hope it chokes her?

The Grannification Of Galina

If I fluff a step during a Galina gig, I point at the imaginary grease spot on the floor of the stage and take a random punter to task for having spilled something. It’s an irrational tick I lifted from my Nan Atkinson, aka Nancy Ak, muse for the poem:

Where's Nancy Ak?
She've gone for a wee out the back.

Now I fear I may have brought a curse upon me and be turning into her.

Last night I knocked a cup a cup into the sink and broke it. In the dark, I managed without cutting myself to scoop out all the glass, wrap it in newspaper, and put it in the bin. Just now in the glare of mid-morning, I was sorting cardboard for recycling and cut my lip on the lid of a Cuppa Soup box.

Similarly, sometime in the late sixties my Aunt Kay gave Nancy Ak a lift to Bingo. On the way down the very steep street that is bisected by the wall of the church, Kay’s brakes failed. She made a quick decision to turn left at the bottom of the hill and coast till the car stopped. She explained this calmly to Nancy.

“So, nothing to worry about, now mum. Just going to turn the car, the road’s easily wide enough there and…let go of the steering wheel, now mum. Open your eyes. No, we’re not going to die so there’s no need for you to go screaming that we are. And it doesn’t matter that you haven’t got clean knickers on for when the ambulance men come and scrape us- what a thing to say! - off the graveyard wall. Let go...!!!"

They hit the church wall. But neither of them was so much as scratched, let alone scrapeable. Mrs. Jones came out of her house at the noise and offered to take Nancy indoors for a cup of tea.

“Be good for you, mum, for the shock”, said Kay, knowing that Nancy wouldn’t want to go in Mrs. Jones’s.

“I’ll have it out here, thank you very much,” Nancy said, “I can feel that the fresh air is doing me good.”

Mrs Jones went to make the tea.

“Still about the bunting, is it?” Kay asked Nancy.

“Yes.”

My grandfather had been in charge of decorations for the coronation street party, and Mrs. Jones had taken against the shade of red he used for the bunting. “More pimp than pomp”, legend has it Mrs. Jones said. She hung her own bunting out of her front bedroom window. “Eyes averted from that treasonous tat”, Nancy had admonished Kay and my father whenever they passed.

Mrs. Jones came out with Nancy’s tea.

“Here you are, now. Made it good and strong I have with lots of sugar for the shock. Miracle you weren’t killed.”

Nancy took the tea and sipped it while staring disapprovingly at Mrs. Jones. Thus, she seriously misaimed one saucer to mouth manoeuvre and chipped some enamel off her right front tooth.

“Ever the bloody trouble maker, Carys Jones”, she said.