Goodbye and thank you

I am surprised at my reaction to the news of the death of John Peel. I was a bit choked. Maybe it was because when I was at boarding school I usually went to sleep with my radio on, earphone in, tuned into the man himself. He was the last person to speak to me every night for quite a while.

There was the one occasion when everyone in my dormitory had received the severest bollocking due to a bit of a rumpus after lights out. There were a couple of nervous sniggers after the house master left and then it was finally quiet. There must have been over twenty of us in that dormitory. I decided that the fun must be over and so reached out from under the covers, plugged myself in and turned on my "radio cassette player", which was parked on the chair by my bed. How we all laughed (particularly as I was awarded detention); I’d plugged the earphone into the microphone socket.

Anyway, thank you very much Mr Peel, (you must be inundated with thank you messages wherever you are), sorry you had to leave so suddenly.

Art

I was at the local printers the other day when in came a rather doddery but very nicely presented old lady and her daughter. There was nowhere obvious to sit but she declined my offer of the edge of the desk I was perched on and was eventually persuaded to sit on a stack of boxes of A4.

She started to tell me about how she never had any idea what day it was any more. I sympathised and mentioned that I had managed to lose half kilo of cheese the other day (nice cheese from Italy; I had taken it from the fridge just to try a sliver and it has never been seen since, I think I must have wrapped it up neatly and popped it in the bin).

Her mother spoke to the girl behind the counter who disappeared and returned with a proof of the Christmas Card that the smiley old lady will be sending this year. They liked it, and so did I; a pretty representation of a vase of lilies. The daughter read out the inscription; ‘vase of lilies etc…….1937’. “Oh no, said the painter, I did this one in 2002”. The correction was made and the proof okayed together with an instruction to print 150 of them.

With the help of her daughter, the old lady manoeuvered herself from the stack of boxes and said bye to me. I mentioned that even if her memory was not as good as it had been she could still paint. “Did you like it?” I was saying that I did when her daughter interrupted to explain that once her mother was in front of her easel you couldn’t pry her away, “even when I bring her a mug of tea which she usually puts her brush in, she doesn’t stop till she is happy with the result”.