That time of year again.
First though, a note to readers. My late mother often said that my blog wasn’t interesting most of the time, at least not interesting to her, because most of it was technical stuff about boats and there was no way near enough about my partner – Jackie. This one won’t have anything to do with boats as I have almost completely retired from sailing and boatbuilding although I do have a future project in mind that would use the same kind of skills that I learnt in the long build of the big Pathfinder expedition dinghy.
And so……it’s gone midsummer (in blog time) and we’re on our summer holidays on the north Norfolk coast once again, Jackie is stomping along the coast path somewhere and i’m perched in the Blakeney cafe waiting for coffee and a bacon bap. In my head right now is an odd train of thought about clothing as a form of class uniform which has made me ponder, this hot and sunny morning, what I should be wearing rather than what I am actually wearing which would best be described as boatbuilder scruffy : epoxy dobs on my shorts and holes at each elbow on last season’s work jumper.
What I should be doing, what I had planned to do during this holiday, is working on the first draft of my proto novel but my Macbook has tossed it’s cookie once again so it’s at home and the best I can do is make some written notes and read some background material about the period I have chosen to set my story in : the late Victorian era, a period I know little about. The main book that i’m reading as general background is The Victorians by A.N. Wilson and more a series of vignettes about the period than an exhaustive history : as of this morning’s cafe stop i’m only about 50 pages in and haven’t started shouting out loud….yet !
Some of my odd chain of thought – about what people wear – came about when I was having a first try at creating characters to tell my story around : what do they look like and what clothes do they wear ?. I’m also up against my first real literary problem which isn’t so much describing the scene and giving the background narrative as it is how to do the he said/she said of people talking/arguing. Where all that ultimately got me was how my usual dress code (or not) is perceived by others. In my story i’m having to create an early class of English Hobo’s, wandering the country in search of work just as the real Gypsies of my childhood years did and running into all of the problems of middle class police, landowners and the judiciary as they did.
Uniform thinking.
My odd train of thought, this morning, started with the observation that both cars, clothing and houses are often a kind of uniform expression of social class. This morning it was my rather obvious observation that most of the other customers were middle aged and middle class people, like us on their summer holidays. Many of the women this morning seemed to have what I can best describe as serious seat anxiety – a bit like the car parking anxiety you will see at school kicking out time except that, in this case, it’s about not getting the right seat (or table) in the cafe : I can tell very quickly when any number of middle aged women are doing that hand fluttering at face anxiety thing when they clearly want the little perch in the corner where i’m waiting for my morning coffee and making notes in my travelling notebook. Most of the men seem to turning beige in their dress code as though the color is slowly leeching out of their lives.
The spooky thing about Norfolk, in my opinion, is how relentlessly middle class it all is : I was once inspired to ask ‘where do they keep the poor people and all the youngsters that take low end jobs in the service economy’ ?. There are probably sink estates around the edges of Norwich perhaps but nothing that even an average nurse or healthcare assistant could afford. The worst example is one village that we drove through, it’s outskirts all covered in exclusive new builds : all of them exclusive detached houses, all uniform and with a recent model high end German saloon or large Disco (Discovery) in the drive. Sad to say that even the women looked uniform in a kind of aggressively vegan yoga class going yummy mummy kind of way.
The strangest example of middle class leisure is the preponderance of uniformly clad twitchers (birdwatchers) all in green or some variety of realtree camo clothing. We had just one example staying at the same campsite and the huge zoom/telephoto lens on his high end DSLR would have needed a tripod at minimum and a vehicle mounted heavy weapons set up at best. The scary thing is that none of them seem to know that birds, as with most mammals only see in greyscale although often very acutely : you could be wearing camo or bright orange – it’s all a shade of grey to the marsh greebly.
Disco fever.
The uniformity of most car ownership in the Norfolk villages is depressing in that usually they seem to be high end saloons or large people carriers such as the huge Land Rover Discovery’s and almost always driven badly as though they own the place : sad thing is that they probably do. This week one of the worst examples of bad Disco driving was when one of them tried to bully it’s way through one of the tight villages here : not so much a twee village but a narrow slot canyon with flint walls. In several places there is only space for one vehicle to slip through and in my observed example a rather florid looking lady with severe RBS ( resting bitch face) came face to face with the school bus going in the opposite direction and with a whole tail of other cars following along. She did that angry female middle class thing of trying to shoo the bus driver into reversing and good for him he was having none of it. Last thing I saw was her trying to reverse in an obvious bad temper and using too much lock such that she had to keep rocking forward to straighten up each time.
What if…..
What I should have been doing during this holiday was working on my first real attempt at writing fiction : what i’m working on is a kind of what if story. The nub of the gist of my what if came about as a tiny scrap of detail that I came across when I was reading up about the Plague pandemic of late medieval times – recently iv’e been reading several books on the subject. The small scrap of detail is that in technical terms we call the Plague Yersina Pestis after the Swiss-French physician who worked out that it was the bacillus that now bears his name, as carried in the gut of the rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) that is thought to be the primary vector of each form of the plague : there being three forms of which the bubonic plague in just one.
The tiny scrap (factoid) that set me reading, researching and writing, is that there was almost a worldwide plague pandemic in the early 1900’s centered in Hong Kong – my what if is largely what if it had been carried to the grain ports of London and Ipswich by infected rats nesting aboard the grain ships. For the purposes of my attempt at fiction I make it the Pneumonic variant rather than the Bubonic form medicine was more familiar with and to which some humans will now have some small degree of immunity. If you want to imagine an absolute horror story then consider an outbreak of Pneumonic Plague in the crowded slums and generally poor health of poor Londoners.
Dr Google
We’re back home, btw, after a difficult journey on the out leg and an even worse one coming home. Both of us were pretty exhausted by the drive home : flat and frazzled as Jackie put it. I suspect that our regular Norfolk trips are now a thing of the past as it’s a very long way and however we manage the driving we have to fight our way through the insane motorway madness of the Englsi midlands on full flow : on the last afternoon of the last day I kind-of said goodbye to the place with a last walk at low tide Wells on a wet day.
We’ve both been seeing a lot of Dr Google : for Jackie it’s the end of her first year trying to manage her PMR (polymylaga rheumatica) and i’m glad to be able to report that her inflammatory factors seem to be coming down and that she has both an excellent, on the case, GP and is now under the eye of a Rheumatology consultant as well. As for me i’m just one of thousands of men my age that have developed a prostate problem but glad to say that my PSA (prostate specific antigen) is normal/low so it’s unlikely to be prostate cancer. What it definitely is though is another bout of prostatitis which had me running to Dr Google and then to my own GP whom i’m glad to say has been superb. If I ever get to speak to that Mr God bloke I intend to have some serious words about poor design – the design of the prostate gland that is.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 