Diana Parikian

Christmas Eve 1972. I am seven.

The milkman has just been.

Quickly.

The haste of his departure may or may not have something to do with the fact that, instead of delivering the specified sixteen pints of gold top, twelve giant cartons of double cream and enough butter to sink the navy of a small seafaring nation, he has contented himself with a couple of pints of the markedly inferior silver top (one of them conveniently pre-pecked by a highly-trained squadron of blue tits) and a tub of strawberry Ski.

As I sit at the kitchen table I am vaguely aware of some sort of whirlwind streaking through the room and out of the back door. It is an image that comes back to me many years later when John Simpson reports seeing a cruise missile “fly down the street and turn left at the traffic lights” on BBC news.

But this isn’t a cruise missile. It’s far more dangerous than that.

My mum, on the warpath.

A few seconds later I hear, for the first time in my life (but by no means the last), some very very bad words.

You know the ones. They rhyme with ‘bucking stunt’.

Poor milkman. We never saw him again.

Quite why it is this scene in particular that has popped into my mind on repeated occasions in the twelve days since my mother’s death, I’m not sure. Her ability to swear at public servants wasn’t her defining quality. It probably only came about third.

The trouble is, she had so many qualities, it’s impossible for any of them to be a defining one.

So here, in no particular order, are some things she loved: books (old and new); music; food; art; architecture; gardening; Italy; being irreverent; Mozart; starting conversations in the middle; the Hockney exhibition; laughing; Milan; her grandchildren; Jane Austen; red wine; garlic; being unconventional; Piero della Francesca; Eastenders; osso buco; really good musicians; having a laugh with colleagues; parmesan; Jane Gardam; knocking bottles of wine over within five minutes of sitting down in a restaurant; Gerard Depardieu; that story about Nathan Milstein; cooking scrambled eggs just right; intelligent and witty conversation; Dad; being in beautiful places (but not the travelling to them bit); swearing; Bach; cheap and colourful plastic jewellery (in recent times); Buena Vista Social Club; looking things up; smoking (for more than thirty years); Dime bars (after she gave up smoking); Flanders and Swann; gin and tonic; the Marx Brothers; extremely rare roast beef; the house I grew up in; Lucca; a really good frying pan; Peter Ustinov; Beethoven; asparagus; playing patience on her computer; Alan Bennett; strong coffee; stopping in the middle of the pavement so that you ran into her; bread and honey; gardens (good ones); the company of the right people; Donna Leon; that chord in Soave sia il vento; Venice; Strictly Come Dancing; the company of close friends; dark chocolate; throwing crumpled ten pound notes onto the table while looking for her credit card; telling people what she really thought; the view across that valley when the light was right; Florence; lily of the valley; Rembrandt; shouting at the radio when someone said “rather unique” or “quite literally”…

You get the idea.

Or, rather, you don’t. You needed to know her.

She came back from a trip to Italy a few weeks ago with a chest infection. It didn’t shift, not helped by an underlying kidney condition.

She told the doctors what she thought of resuscitation, dialysis, and other dastardly methods they might have up their sleeves to prolong her life. The truth is, the life they envisaged for her wasn’t her idea of a proper one.

So she died as she lived: on her own terms. A magnificent woman, and one without whom I find it hard to envisage the world managing.

Here is an interview with her from a couple of years ago: http://www.aba.org.uk/interviews/89-diana-parikians-swansong

And here is a charity, founded by our cousin, that she liked: www.ace-africa.org

And here are some photos.

RIP Diana Margaret Parikian, 1926 – 2012.

A fiendish plot

We stood on a hill in South London, as cold and wet as an eskimo’s lavatory. The lettings officer drew an imaginary line with her arm across a patch of sodden wasteland.

“This is half a plot,” she informed us, “more or less.”

She carried about her an air of disappointment, as if showing prospective plot-leasers around a soggy allotment on a miserable Sunday afternoon was somehow not what she’d expected from life. Clearly hating us all for our doggedness and enthusiasm, she did her best to dampen expectations.

“We get a lot of slugs. Foxes will eat your brassicas.” She paused, as if to lend extra weight to the killer blow. “There are cats.”

The subtext was clear. “You think this is bad?” she seemed to imply. “Just wait till you’re chasing feral animals away from your sprouts with a pump-action water gun in sub-zero temperatures come November. Abandon hope and leave now, then I might catch the second half of the rugby.”

The defiant silence that followed knocked the stuffing out of her.

“We’ve waited five years for this,” it seemed to say. “You think we’re going to be put off by a bit of rain and some foxes? We’re gardeners. We sit up all night in the rain just for the pleasure of cutting a slug in half with a Stanley knife. Think again.”

In my case, of course, this veil of hardiness was a mere pretence. The Flame-Haired Temptress is the green-fingery one in our household. My contribution, thus far, has been in the under-rated departments of Moral Support, Appreciative Noises and Occasional Vegetable Eating.

She had made it clear, however, that from now on this wouldn’t be enough.

“If we get this allotment, I’m going to need some help.”

My tone was airier than a David Gower cover drive.

“Of course, of course. Just tell me what to do.”

There floated into my head at that moment a little saying I’m fond of flinging at orchestras whom I perceive to have the memory span of goldfish:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it – George Santayana.

And now I was transported back five years, to the time we thought we’d lay a patio at the old place.

“Let’s do it ourselves – dig out the area, level it, lay the flagstones. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

Sometimes it’s as if I haven’t learned anything from the nearly forty-seven years I’ve spent on this planet.

Never was this more starkly demonstrated than by what happened next on the blasted South London hill.

I realised that my estimation of our son’s enthusiasm for tramping round what amounted to a muddy field in the driving sleet (when he could have been doing something really fun like, say, beating himself repeatedly round the head and neck with a length of barbed wire) was somewhat optimistic.

“Shall we go back to the car?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

We slithered our way back, and once ensconced in the car, I turned on the heaters and radio. We whiled away the next hour playing two happy games of iPhone Scrabble (I won both – kid’s got no tactical nous).

Anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of car battery technology will be able to guess the result.

The man at Green Flag was, under the circumstances, quite nice. He only laughed for five minutes.

And if marital harmony was preserved, it was only thanks to the F-HT’s state of euphoria on signing the lease of a soggy rectangle of real estate on a windswept hill in South London.

Gardeners are strange that way.

First take your Shrove…

In the aftermath of my Advent blog-binge (blinge?), I’ve been absent from here for a few weeks.

I apologise. Whether for my absence or my return is for you to decide.

But sometimes I feel impelled to share.

February’s a funny month. Is it something to do with the identity crisis caused by not knowing how many days it’s supposed to have?

Whatever the reasons, it finds itself host to two of the weirdest days of the year.

First there’s Valentine’s Day. I’ve already ranted about that.

Then, hot on its heels, comes Pancake Day. (Shrove Tuesday for the purists).

Before you all write in, I get it. Shrove Tuesday, Lent, fasting, self-denial etc etc. It’s not my job to start a religious argument.

It is, however, my job (or at least my job as defined by me within the confines of this small cornerette of cyberspace) to take the piss out of silly people. And in that group I include you, if you happen to be one of the Pancake Sillies.

Because to judge by the fuss surrounding the day, you’d think everyone had been imprisoned by some satanic cult that prohibits the making of pancakes, or, as they know them, “the devil’s blotting paper”. And some people approach the process with such trepidation you’d think it was as difficult as attempting nuclear fusion using nothing more sophisticated than a frying pan and an egg whisk.

With this in mind, I feel it’s time to lay down a few ground rules:

1. You are allowed to make pancakes any time you like. I give you my permission.

2. They are really not that difficult.

That’s all.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to fuse eggs, milks, flour, butter and sugar. A complicated process, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Now where’s that egg whisk?

Happy Christmas

This series of posts ends, as it started, with a brief explanation.

Around mid-November I had already had more than enough of Christmas. It wasn’t so much that it had started early – effectively it always starts at the end of the summer holidays these days. It was more that the intensity seemed greater. People seemed keener in their anticipation, perhaps because they wanted to take their minds off all the bad news in these allegedly apocalyptic times.

Or perhaps people just really like Christmas.

Anyway, when the John Lewis Christmas advert appeared, to collective hysteria on all sides, I flipped.

“Stop it everyone! It’s not Christmas yet!” I ranted on Twitter, failing, in my apoplexy, to take advantage of the full 140 characters available for such diatribes.

A blogpost followed, from the melancholy point of view of an unloved and overlooked November day.

I even invented an acronym for my own personal use.

WISCONSIN (Why is sodding Christmas on now? Stop! It’s November!)

People, it seemed, agreed with me. Likes appeared on Facebook, retweets on Twitter. In rehearsals I would deftly veer the subject away from the tricky passage in the slow movement and on to how nothing was sacrosanct any more, and how as far as I was concerned it was not permissible to mention the ‘C’ word until December 1st.

Everyone smiled and nodded.

At the time I thought it was in agreement. Maybe they were just relieved not to have to play the tricky passage.

And then a couple of dissenting voices appeared.

“Where’s your Christmas spirit?” “Bah humbug!” and all the rest of it.

It became clear to me that I would soon be cast in the role of curmudgeonly Christmas-spoiler if I wasn’t careful.

So, to show my hohoho mojo, I vowed to establish my jollity credentials in a daily blogpost throughout Advent.

It’s been sticky going at times (possibly more for you, loyal reader, than for me) but I did it.

And now, as we reach Christmas Eve, I’m looking forward to Christmas Day more than ever.

Before I disappear, though, and without wishing to end on a downer, I’d like to commemorate Christmas Eve as the 24th anniversary of the death of my father.

This may help explain why I don’t want to start celebrating Christmas too early.

I haven’t got a recording of him being a great dad, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

But he was also a great violinist, and there’s some evidence of that knocking around the place, like here for example:

In all the festivity tomorrow, do take a few seconds to remember those for whom Christmas is a difficult time, for whatever reason.

But don’t let it stop you from enjoying your own.

Happy Christmas, and thanks for reading.

RIP Manoug Parikian 15/9/1920 – 24/12/1987

The Night After Christmas

One for the kids, although you may have to explain what ‘stertorous’ means.

**********

‘Twas the night after Christmas and Santa was weary -

Arms and legs aching, and eyes feeling bleary.

He sat in his armchair, mince pie on his belly,

And watched an old Marx Brothers film on the telly.

 

Just when he’d slipped into untroubled sleep,

His phone woke him up with a deafening beep.

He peered at the text on the flickering screen:

“Come quickly pls Santa. Elves.” What could it mean?

 

He hastened to find his coat, jacket and hat,

And tried to avoid tripping over the cat.

He ploughed through the snow that was crisp, even, deepish -

The elves in the grotto looked terribly sheepish.

 

“Wossmatter?” he slurred through his thick hairy beard.

“Oh boss, I’m afraid that it’s just as we feared -

There’s one bag of presents left up on the shelf.

I don’t know what happened,” replied his Head Elf.

 

“We must have forgotten it. What a disaster!

That’s what you get when you try to go faster.

Never before have we made a mistake -

Can you forgive us? Please give us a break!”

 

Santa looked down at his Helper-In-Chief

And thought that he’d better not give him much grief.

His helpers worked hard every day of the year

So that when Christmas came he could dole out the gear.

 

Their record was fab, without blunder or bloomer -

They’d never so much as mislaid a satsuma.

How could he scold them for one tiny bish,

Even though it would ruin a boy’s Christmas wish?

 

“Don’t worry”, he said, “I’ll just have to go back

To the place we forgot. Now give me that sack.”

But when they went out to the reindeers’ stable

They found the poor beasts neither willing nor able.

 

“Vixen! Blitzen! Dasher and Dancer!”

The old man called out, but came there no answer.

“Comet and Cupid! Prancer and Donner!

We’ve got to get going, or else I’m a goner!”

 

Santa fell silent – ’twas no use ignoring

The stertorous sound of his reindeer snoring.

“They must be exhausted, poor things. I can’t ask

Them to set off so soon on another hard task.

 

There’s only one answer, and not one I like.

There’s nothing else for it – I’m going by bike.”

Santa would rather have gone back to bed,

But, stout and determined, set off for the shed.

 

Five minutes later our hero was ready,

Sack on his back, a trifle unsteady -

Perched on a bike that was rather too small,

He felt on the verge of a socking great fall.

 

He tightened his helmet, adjusted the saddle,

Said under his breath “I hope the young lad’ll

Appreciate what I am doing for him,

‘Cos just at the moment I’m feeling quite grim.”

 

He started to pedal with all of his might,

But to his distress found he couldn’t take flight.

Then, just at the moment of deepest despair,

The bike flew like magic up into the air.

 

Santa was flying! Up up and away!

The SatNav, not reindeer, could show him the way.

His heart filled with joy as he floated up high -

He wanted to reach out and cuddle the sky.

 

Several hours later he finally saw

The house that he’d missed out just two days before.

Tired from the thrilling emergency dash,

He landed the bike with a thundering crash.

 

“What are you doing and why are you here?”

Said a voice rather lacking in seasonal cheer.

A family stood there, not brimming with joy.

A father, a mother, a ten-year-old boy.

 

“I’ve brought your son’s presents. I know it’s quite late,

I’m terribly sorry you’ve had such a wait.”

“Sorry, you say? D’you really not know

How upset our young lad was when you didn’t show?

 

We waited and waited – we got in a lather,

Then had to give up,” said the furious father.

“We couldn’t face eating our turkey for lunch -

You’ve ruined our lives,” said the mum. “Thanks a bunch!!”

 

Santa just stood there, he said not a word;

Then into the silence the boy’s voice was heard.

He’d waited and listened while Mum and Dad whined.

Now he could give them a piece of his mind.

 

“Hold on a minute, let’s not be so hasty;

We don’t want to make Santa’s journey a waste. He

Has come all this distance to give me my stuff -

Don’t you agree that he’s done quite enough?

 

He’s done what he reckoned would be for the best -

When what he’d prefer is a jolly good rest -

But when have you ever gone out of your way

To help someone else have a more pleasant day?

 

For instance, on Tuesday, when poor Mrs Hawley

Was very upset that her budgie was poorly -

What did you do, Mum? You made her some tea,

Then kicked her out so you could watch some TV!

 

How about you, Dad? You’re not so clever -

Do you remember Mum’s birthday? No – never!!

Both of you live your lives just for yourselves,

And then have the cheek to insult Santa’s elves!

 

I think you should both say you’re sorry to Santa,

And don’t give him any more unfriendly banter.

Invite him inside for some food and a sherry,

And then we can all have a Christmas that’s merry.”

 

The silence that followed was heavy and long,

And then the boy’s parents confessed they were wrong.

“We’re sorry, dear Santa, please don’t think us bad -

We just want the best for our wonderful lad.

 

He’s taught us a lesson we’ll never forget,

We’ll change our behaviour, on that you can bet!

Now will you please stay for some bubble and squeak -

Our leftovers look like they’ll last us all week!”

 

So in they all went, and later that night,

Santa set off on his homeward bike flight.

Tinkling his bell he called ‘ciao!’ to his friends,

And set the SatNav for the North Pole.

THE END

Keeping It Brief

Of all the comedic televisual transmissions that entertained, diverted and amused your correspondent through the otherwise vexatious and irksome decade that bore witness to the unseemly progress of his adolescence, there was one which would consistently prove a most satisfying source of amusement and intellectual stimulation while, at the same time, offering itself up as the ne plus ultra of that most unjustly maligned art form, the situation comedy; and furthermore, while its rivals would on occasion furnish the viewer with an ephemerally fulfilling experience, it was the diffusion of the afore-mentioned presentation that would most regularly and undeviatingly render the author of this sentence into a state of quasi-incoherent anticipation at the riches that would be contained therein, said riches including, but not being restricted to: the combative byplay between the principal protagonists; the dazzling effulgence of the badinage, scripted by two of the finest exponents of the form and performed by an ensemble of leading players that would be the envy of any contemporary or historic production, be it theatrical, cinematic or indeed restricted to the selfsame medium through which the programme to which I am referring was originally broadcast, that is to say television; and of course a dazzlingly incisive and satirical exposé of the machinations and manoeuvrings of the political behemoth that has become familiar to the populace through the activities of those who have been elected to represent their respective constituencies in the democratic process that prevails in this country as part of the constitutional monarchy which, as you know, is headed by Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.

I refer, of course, to the programme whose sobriquet might best be described as comprising the monosyllabic affirmative particle followed by a form of address usually apportioned to the responsible head of a department of state affairs, although some confusion is caused by the secondary meaning of the word which of course denotes a member of the clergy in certain denominations of the Christian church.

I hope that clears everything up.

H-h-h-happy Christmas

Classic radio comedy for your delectation today. One for the nostalgists.

Poor old Hancock. He fancied himself above it all. Instead he had to endure the banality of East Cheam.

Still, at least he had Sid James and his laugh for company.

This is forty-two years old tomorrow. I still find it very funny.

This is also a rare opportunity for me to point out that the open salvo of the theme tune bears a striking resemblance to a single bar from the first movement of Mahler’s 6th Symphony.

I am cheap that way sometimes.