Of Kettle Chips and Caffeine

The lovely Rilly Super suggested that blogging may have been my displacement activity after I stopped smoking; alas, this was not the case. Blogging, I believe, has no calories. Kettle Chips, on the other hand, have loads. Especially when the Co-op is selling the large packets at two-for-one. Kettle Chips, along with Cornish pasties, lemon sherbets and chocolate limes were my oral substitutes for smoking and saw the speedy displacement of an extra stone – mostly on to my hips.

Like my previous half-hearted attempts to stop smoking, I’ve had a few vague stabs at shedding the excess weight. I’ve managed to get rid of a measly 4lbs, but no more. I am too vain and too mean to buy the next size up in clothes and I am getting rather bored with items straining at the seams.

So, I have bought a diet book. As well as cutting out nice things to eat, it commands that I banish all caffeine for at least a month. For someone who drinks strong black coffee and slurps tea throughout the day, this is a cruel commandment. The book suggests alternatives such as Rooiboos tea, which is not awfully pleasant, and dandelion coffee. I mean, dandelion coffee? I have instead substituted decaff Gold Blend and Tetley.

However, no one told me about the agony of caffeine withdrawal. Apparently my headache is caused by blood rushing to my head as the vessels contract due to the lack of caffeine. I fail to see how this is a good thing. It seems the pains in my back could be due to the same reason … either that, or it’s my age …

When the smoking stops

It can be so hard saying goodbye to something you care about, even though you know your continued reliance upon it is doing you no good at all. But sometimes you just have to bite the bullet; accordingly, a year ago today, I ended my love affair with smoking.

It was a passionate affair. I was not a hobby smoker; rather I was, as a former colleague described it, “hardcore”. Lighting up was usually the first thing I did on waking, the last thing before I went to sleep.

“It’s easy to stop smoking,” I’d tell people, “I’ve done it dozens of times.” My previous best was three months and even that was interspersed with cheating: I wasn’t really smoking if someone gave me the cigarette, I wasn’t really smoking if I had a drink in my hand, I wasn’t really smoking if it was after 6pm on a Friday …

Most attempts ended in ill humour after a couple of days. There was always something to be stressed about that necessitated a fag or there was always something important that needed to be done. Oh, I fully intended to stop: just not yet.

I tried willpower, patches, lozenges, chewing gum (it upset my stomach), I read books by anti-smoking gurus and winced at public health adverts with yuck oozing out of a lit cigarette. Nothing worked. Not until a friend at the stables – an even more hardcore smoker than me – managed to kick the habit. Her secret? An inhalator.

Puffing away on a little plastic pretend cigarette loaded with a nicotine and menthol cartridge might not look cool, but it worked for me. I could do it at my desk, in the car, in the bath, in bed. And I did. Until three weeks in, I lost my little plastic lifesaver. I was distraught, convinced that I couldn’t manage without it.

I did though… and now I’m free.

Homemaker

In the week leading up to my 30th birthday I had some strange dreams. One stood out above all the rest. It was twilight and I was leaning over the gate to my granddad’s old garden. In the dream, the garden was just as it used to be – an acre of so planted with vegetables, with waist-length nettles in one corner, a little hillock in another, and a sparse line of trees on the long side adjacent to a paddock where a dun pony lived. Even while I was dreaming, I knew that the garden – and indeed the paddock – were no longer like this. I knew I was looking at something that, like just about every ‘vacant’ green space around here, now has houses built on top of it.

During my lifetime, there have been houses upon houses built at each extremity of the village. The last couple of years have been particularly busy: it has been like a perpetual building site. The horses no longer spook at the skips and cement bags: they are a fact of life.

I have mixed feelings about all of this building work. I detest the disappearance of places I knew, places I played; yet I know that villages must grow. But the thing that annoys me about all of this building is that most of those new homes are not affordable housing for local people; they’re too expensive for that. Rather they’re retirement and holiday homes for the better off.

I read recently that locally, a house costs ten times most people’s annual salary. Am I the only one that thinks there is something fundamentally wrong about that?

A murder of crows

The shrieking was high-pitched and heart-rending. It was the noise of something not long for this world. Two crows – looking for all the world like Antonio Banderas’ black cloaked gang in Interview with the Vampire – had flipped a baby rabbit on its back to expose its soft belly. I went to investigate; the crows let go, their victim scuttled into the undergrowth. Deprived of their dinner, they eyed me angrily from the telegraph wires.

I had seen crows mob a cat before but had never seen them catch a live mammal. From an anthropomorphic point of view, crows appear cruel. I don’t think they are: I consider them to be very clever. Indeed, the appliance of science has proven them to be far from bird-brained.

Three types haunt the horses’ fields: the carrion crows I saw attacking the rabbit, rooks and jackdaws that scatter the horse muck as they look for worms. They have chosen their homes wisely close to the shops. Their cousins who build cities in trees near busy routes also display admirable foresight by choosing locations with a ready supply of roadkill.

Yet proportionately very few crows end up squashed on the roads themselves. It amazes me how they judge when to move away from the traffic; they are rarely wrong. One made a mistake last summer, a young rook playing chicken with a gang of his mates. Leaving it a fraction too late, he crashed into my car as he rose into the air and became trapped in the bumper. I stopped to free him. His heart was pounding but there was not a mark on him. I let him go in the long grass. He lay quiet, his wings outstretched, his still body looking like a blue-black cross.

Of cars and cleaning

My car is a rather clapped out Corsa called Charlie. I have had him for nearly six years; that’s longer than some marriages last. But I am not kind to him. He is forced to do a 100-mile round trip five days a week; I tell people in his hearing that I want a diesel and I openly lust after a 4x4 with horsebox pulling capabilities. But I think, deep down, it is the lack of TLC that hurts him the most.

My brother, who is an avid Top Gear viewer, adores his car. It is regularly cleaned inside and out. It is on intimate terms with Turtle Wax and air freshener-impregnated cards that dangle from the mirror. Charlie, in contrast, never even gets a bath. His boot is full of dirty winter horse rugs, his back seat further covered in horse paraphernalia – numnahs, bits, parts of bridles, boots, plus plastic bags containing feed dregs and the odd mummified carrot.

My granddad grimaces whenever I give him a lift. He is wary of putting his feet on crisp packets and sweet papers, bits of string, more carrier bags and finds from the fields: broken cut glass decanter tops and a rusted metal crescent that I believe is an ancient bracelet but others with no imagination think was used to attach pipes to a wall.

It was worse when I smoked. The footwell debris was joined by dozens of empty fag packets. Once, when Charlie went for his MOT, someone wrote ‘clean me out’ on one of those ciggie boxes and propped it on the dashboard. Another time, the mechanic told my dad he wouldn’t touch Charlie again unless he arrived in a presentable state.

Perhaps it's a man thing.

An unattractive emotion

I love the colour green but I detest the emotion of envy. Whoever decided to link the two must have been thinking of a bilious, pea soup sort of green; that is the unpleasant imagery that concurs with the evil feeling in my stomach when I am overcome with envy.

It grabbed me yesterday, a steely hand sharply twisting and knotting my intestines, as I looked at the BBC news website. The Baftas report included a picture of someone I used to know, someone I had trained with, someone I used to share a lift to shorthand classes with, someone who had just won a Bafta for their journalistic endeavours.

It doesn’t have to be an awards ceremony: switch on the local TV news, and there is another one I trained with. See the reporter on the celluloid version of Calendar Girls? Her too. That TV continuity announcer? I worked with her; the Radio 1 newsreader? Ditto.

Then there is the woman I went to university with, the one that was on the edge of my circle and is now a big noise in regional BBC programming. The one that was invited to our house Christmas dinner out of pity, then sat prodding her nut-cutlet while treating us to a graphic description of how turkeys were slaughtered. Once, she visited a newsroom where I worked; I kept my head down, but noticed the elfin crop and pale blue eye makeup hadn’t changed since 1988.

I no longer beat myself up with thoughts of “that could’ve been me”. Now, I know why it isn’t: I am not terribly good at pushing myself forward in a professional capacity and I like to have a life outside of work.

But, like the Murphy’s, I’m not bitter. The boil is lanced ... for now.

Responsibilities

My sister has gone gallivanting and has left me holding the baby, figuratively speaking. In addition to the grey mare, I am responsible for her four: three ex-racehorses – the cheeky orange one, who has the tenacity of The Terminator when there are sweeties around; the dark prince, black, beautiful, bright as a button, but oh-so-sensitive; the leggy, loving bay one who follows you around like a giant Great Dane; and the speckled, semi-retired Clydesdale-cross who is happy just to be. They must be checked, patted and Polo’d. She has given me £3 for the Polos.

The responsibility hangs heavy upon me. Some years ago, my sister went to the Badminton Horse Trials for the weekend and left me in charge of her previous black Thoroughbred. He had white socks on his forelegs and face like Black Beauty. I adored him.

On the second night of my patting and Polos stint, I found him looking very sorry for himself. Suddenly, I realised that I couldn’t see his white socks. They were dark with blood. He had caught and ripped both front legs on wire. It was a Bank Holiday and the vet on call was novice and nervous. It was a good job it was a woman; he wasn’t very fond of people he didn’t know at the best of times - but he simply loathed men. It didn’t help matters when an onlooker kindly informed her: “I’d watch him, he got hold of a jockey by the neck once.”

The horse sedated and stitched, I considered what to tell my sister. “Don’t say anything to her,” was the consensus, “she’ll only worry.” I sidestepped her text messages with questions about the weather. Of course, she went crazy when she came home.

I just hope she’s told this lot to be on their best behaviour while she’s away.