Kodak moments

I first heard the phrase "a Kodak moment" just a few years ago, possibly something to do with me being out of touch with what is happening in the big world beyond the South Downs. But with the news this week that Kodak, or Eastman Kodak or whatever the company is really called, is close to going bust, perhaps that little phrase has but a limited life ahead of it. I suppose what has really put the skids under Kodak is the digital age. Time was when almost every household owned a Kodak Brownie camera and bought rolls of Kodak or Ilford film from the chemist, taking the exposed film back to the chemist to be processed. As a young teenager, ie when I was about thirteen, I owned just such a camera. I seem to recall it taking a size 127 film which allowed me to take ... was it 8 or 12 pictures? Oh, the anticipation while waiting to collect the prints two or three days after taking the exposed film to the chemist - and the excitement with which the cardboard folder was opened! Few, very few, of the resulting photographs were worth preserving but every one would be lovingly kept in a photograph album.

Remember those? They consisted of a number of sheets of thick, black paper which was considered best for displaying the black and white photographs (colour film might have been available but if it was it would have been prohibitively expensive). The photos were held in place by mounts, little triangular paper things which slipped over the corners of the photos and were either self-adhesive or needed licking to make them stick to the page - I don't remember which. Then the photos had to be captioned using special white ink and either a dip pen or, if you couldn't find one of those, a cocktail stick or similar.

The photos themselves were mostly just contact prints, hence the small number on a roll of film. I have a couple on my desk in front of me now and they measure 1 7/8" by 2¾", which is just about OK for a head and shoulders portrait (those on my desk are of my mother and father) but absolutely hopeless for landscape pictures. All the same, I used to take great care in arranging all my pictures - portraits and landscapes - on the pages in artistic fashions.

Now that almost all photography is digital, the majority of pictures are stored on computers or, increasingly it seems, on mobile phones. Albums are almost things of the dim and distant past, remembered only by dinosaurs like me. I know two people who still use them but they use the modern version, the sort which consists of pockets fronted by cellophane into which one slips the pictures. There are always two to a page and the pictures are always displayed in landscape format (one has to turn the album to look at a portrait-format picture). I think that the sheer mass of pictures presented at a view with no space between them distracts from them and I find it difficult to look through such an album. But I wonder if it is still possible to buy the old sort?

Perhaps the ultimate in photograph albums is the printed picture book available over the web from so many places. It might even be possible nowadays to get them from the local supermarket. I did have one made and I found it great fun selecting the pictures to include and arranging them on the pages in various sizes. This is a great reminder of the before, during and after of our holiday home in France.

But on the subject of Kodak moments, I burst out laughing when I saw this:


That is the lock on the shower-room door as it was when we bought our French house. Yes, the lock was on the outside, not the inside. I had visions of the Old Bat locked in. You know the song?

"Oh dear, what can the matter be?
One old lady locked in the lavatory."

I've changed it now.

To kill a duck

At our Lions business meeting last night we received a report from David about the children's outing to the pantomime. This actually took place in December but he was absent from last month's meeting. Apparently it all went swimmingly.

We have been organising two outing a year for children. The one in the summer is to a reasonably near zoo and then it's a pantomime at Christmas. The original idea was that these should be for disadvantaged children, children who might otherwise not have an outing. At first, we relied on the social services people to provide a list of names and addresses. Unfortunately, it became apparent that many of these were the people who yelled the loudest and were not necessarily particularly needy or disadvantaged. We gave the matter some thought and decided that school teachers were probably the best people to provide names of needy children. But, of course, they wouldn't. The answer was to provide an outing for a whole class (or year group) thereby covering the disadvantaged even though it meant that some of the beneficiaries were not. But if we chose a school in the poorer part of town, there was a good chance that a large proportion of the children would be the ones we wanted to help.

Unfortunately, I think David has lost sight of the original idea. Certainly few of the children who were taken to the pantomime could be said to come from needy families. (I do have the advantage of inside knowledge as my granddaughter attends this school.) This was demonstrated when the school took up a collection at the Christmas concert and sent the Lions a cheque for over £300! Somehow we really must try to get David back on track.

This will be made even more difficult for me as he has provided a report to be published in Jungle Jottings, the club's newsletter which is edited by me. His report is crying out not just for editing but for rewriting completely. I could try to make a few minor changes - but if I start I will end up doing a full rewrite. It would make JJ look better but might not sit so well with David.

What the heck, publish as written: it will all be forgotten in a month's time anyway - and I should be looking to build up, not destroy.

To finish on a lighter note. Some years ago the summer outing was to a playground-cum-activity centre. One of the boys, only about 4' 6" tall but 10 years old, claimed he had been pushed into the pond by a duck. After consoling him, one of the Lions suggested he should sit in the sun for a while to dry off. No fear, he said. He was "going back to kill that b..... duck!"

Allez les bleus!

If there is one thing the French do better than anyone else, it is bureaucracy. You might think you've come across some pretty good examples of the science of bureacracy but, believe me, if not come across it in France, you've yet to meet the world champions. They are masters of the art. I expect to have the pleasure of banging my head against the proverbial when we allerons en france next month. Of course, this will not be my first experience. I wouldn't say I'm an old hand at the game, but there have been a couple of bouts. (I first typed "skirmishes" but thought that would be mixing my metaphores so you've been let off.) The first time was when we exchanged contracts to buy our house (here) and then when we completed (here). The next occasion was not too long after we had bought our dream cottage.

In view of what I had heard about the bureaucratic French, I thought we should check we didn't need a permit of some sort to let the house as a holiday home. I duly presented myself at the village mairie on one of the mornings it was open. This is a building that seems far too large for a commune of just about three hundred souls; it is almost as big as the church and has a tower just as imposing as the church tower. I opened the nail-studded, oak door and crept into the enormous hallway. The last time I had seen an entrance hall this large was in one of the Loire châteaux. There was no sign of anybody, and there was no indication as to which, if any, of the many doors leading off the black and white tiled floor might provide access to a receptionist, or whether I would have to mount the magnificent flight of stairs. There was no ringing of telephones, noise of computer printers or even subdued murmuring to give me a clue. I decided to try the first door on my right and, if necessary, work my way round anti-clockwise. The first door was locked. The next door opened into a committee room where the plastic tables and chairs looked distinctly incongruous against the wood panelling of the walls. All the other doors were locked, until I came to the last. It would have been just the same if I had decided to go in a clockwise direction: the reception would still have been in the last room I tried.

An enquiry counter ran diagonally across the room. Well, it went from corner to corner, though not in a straight line, turning through ninety degrees every three feet or so to perform a zig-zag. On the desk behind the enquiry counter was a large ledger in which a lady was making entries with a ballpoint pen. From the look of the ledger and the lady's clothing, I assumed that she had only recently given up using a quill. Her grey hair was parted in the middle, pulled back hard from her forehead, and wound into two coils which were pinned one above each ear. She wore a grey blouse with a piecrust collar that buttoned tightly at the neck. Even her lips looked grey and, for the first time in my life, I saw somebody actually wearing pince-nez. I had to choke back a laugh as she reminded me of a Beatrix Potter illustration of a mouse. She looked at me timidly as I introduced myself as the new owner of old Madame Erlanger's house.

Suddenly, she became a model of business efficiency as she asked for my passport, which I just happened to have with me, and proceeded to photocopy every page that had anything on it. I decided not to ask why she needed a copy of the Maltese entry and exit stamps from a holiday three years before and just let her get on with it.

"Are you married?" she asked.

Blimey, I thought, she doesn't waste any time, but I replied in the affirmative.

"Is your wife with you?"

I looked around but could see nobody in the room apart from the mouse and me. Perhaps she thought Mrs S was very short and was hidden from her by the counter. "Err, not right at the moment," I replied.

A withering glance from the mouse, as if to say it was just typical of a man to leave his wife behind when it was obvious her presence would be needed and that I shouldn't be allowed out on my own. "She will need to come in with her passport."

I promised her, "Cross my heart and hope to die", that I would ensure Mrs S called at the mairie on the very first occasion she happened to be in the village with her passport at a time when the mairie was open. Then I dropped a bombshell. I explained to the mouse that we intended letting Les Lavandes as a holiday home and asked if we needed a permit for this. A look of utter terror came over her face as she told me that she didn't know and I would have to enquire at Angers, the large city that is the capital of the département. It was the way she said it that convinced me she didn't want me to make any enquiries that might stir up trouble from the big city and that it would be better just to leave them in ignorance while the village slumbered on in peace.

That time we opted for the quiet life.

All history is bunk

I'm probably misquoting Henry Ford and I am certainly taking him out of context but there is no way I can agree with his point of view. Although perhaps he is right and I just like some of the bunk! I find life, or the little details of other people's lives, endlessly fascinating. It is, to me, good to read of the life of an English lady in rural France (strictly speaking not yet history, I suppose) or about growing up in San Francisco after the war and comparing that with my own experience of growing up in England after the war. That was a time of shortages, not that we children realised there were shortages: we thought that was just how things always were. Those were the days when we would find a few odd scraps of wood and some rusty nails and build ourselves a cart. If we found we needed another nail we would go to the hardware shop and buy a single nail - and be given a paper bag in which to carry it home!

I read recently that the past informs the present, although that, perhaps, is not really relevant to my next comment. As you might know, one of my distractions is studying my family history. Although it is only during the last 200 years that it has been possible to learn much about the occupations etc of one's ancestors, even in that time one can see the truth of that old saying, like father, like son. There are some things that travel through the generations (and I don't mean like red hair). I'm talking about character traits. My wife's 2 x great grandfather was a pharmacist. His son was a keen photographer, this being in the days when being a photographer meant dealing with chemicals. I don't know about my wife's grandfather, but her father also dabbled in photography, developing and printing his own films. Am I being perhaps a little fanciful in seeing a family trait here? Well, how about an ancestor of mine back in the 17th century. He was a guardian of the poor and a magistrate. In the 20th century, two of his descendants became local councillors (one ending as mayor) and another was a trades union shop steward.

A copy of the birth certificate of my late father-in-law's step-sister has just arrived. I see that her father, my f-i-l's step-father, was a pen manufacturer and further research shows that for a while he owned a company making steel pens. This reminded me of my early schooldays when we learned to write using wooden pens into which steel nibs were inserted. Our desks had small, china inkwells in holes at the top right corner and every morning the class ink monitor would have to go round the room topping up the ink. There would also be two milk monitors to a class. In those days every school child was given a bottle of milk at school, one third of a pint. These had cardboard tops with a small tab at the side to pull them off. The monitors would fetch a crate of bottles for the class. On really cold mornings the bottles would be put on hot water pipes running along the side of the classroom to warm the milk. It was bad enough drinking cold milk but the warm milk was horrible! There would also be a straw monitor whose job was to hand out the drinking straws, although the tough guys would drink straight from the bottle if they could get away with it.

Ah, memories. History. . .

A little knowledge is a worry.

I know, I know, you don't have to tell me. The commonly quoted proverb is that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - and it is, or can be. It can also be a worry.

Years and years ago, a neighbour and I went to evening classes to learn motor mechanics. This was back in the days when one went to night school not only to study for professional exams and qualifications (I did it for years before I managed to pass my banking exams and become an Associate Member of the Institute of Bankers or AIB) but also for cultural study such as conversational French, cookery or chess for beginners. Alan, for that was my neighbour's name, and I had become disenchanted with the prices charged by garages for servicing our cars and reckoned we could save money by doing the work ourselves. We became adept at changing brake pads, bleeding and adjusting brakes, adjusting tappets, dismantling carburretors and distributors - indeed, everything in the standard service and a bit more besides.

Nowadays it's a different story. For a start, I'm a lot less keen on standing in a cold wind on the drive fiddling around under the bonnet. In any case, it seemed a lot easier when there were two of us doing the job and Alan moved away years back. Anyway, with modern cars it's about all I can do to open the bonnet to check the oil and water. With my present car even changing a light bulb is a garage job. But despite this, I still read the question and answer column in the motoring supplement that comes with the Saturday edition of my daily paper. The questions asked cover a very wide range of motoring subjects and it is through reading these and, especially, the answers that I have learned what happens if a timing belt snaps and that there are such things as a dual mass flywheel, this latter being something that, apparently, can disintegrate without warning and do a great deal of expensive damage.

I had it at the back of my mind that later this year I should consider having the timing belt and associated pulleys etc changed in my car. I had the job done on my previous car - same make and model as this one - and it cost an arm and a leg. I also know that later this year I will have to spend quite a lot on a major service. With the worry of the dual mass flywheel at the back of my mind, I was thinking that maybe I should change the car for one that has a timing chain (doesn't need replacing) and does not have a dual mass flywheel (I don't actually know if mine does or not). That would also save the cost of the service and (maybe) a set of four tyres.

You see? Just enough knowledge to make life a worry.

I got Friday back

Yep, that's right. Last week I got Friday back. Not all of Friday - just Friday morning. I hadn't lost the rest of the day. To tell the truth, I hadn't really lost Friday morning either, but last week Friday morning was back to what it used to be.

Friday is the day when the Dearly Beloved takes herself off to the MS Treatment Centre for an hour of breathing pure oxygen under pressure in a sort of land-based diving bell. She doesn't have MS but she does have a condition which, in many ways, is similar. It just has more letters - CBD - but not the pain of MS. All the same, the old love finds that her weekly high dosage oxygen treatment ameliorates her condition.

It was sometime in November that she developed a peculiar, well, what can I call it? Disease, condition, infection? We don't know what it was (nor does her GP) but it left her feeling light-headed and, as a consequence, unwilling to risk getting behind the wheel of a car. So on Friday mornings I drove her to Southwick, went on to Tesco's to do the shopping, and then had about 45 minutes before I had to collect madam. I used that time to explore parts of Shoreham that I didn't know and to take photographs. Many of them have already appeared on Stanmer and Around and I have more to come. But last week the old duck felt OK to drive and my services as chauffeur and personal shopper were no longer required. I had my Friday morning back.

Maybe it wasn't such a good thing. I got stuck into chasing down a few loose ends in my family tree and, as a result, spent far too much time at the computer. This is something I find almost impossible to stop once I get started. I find one new person and have to take it further. When were they born? Did they marry? If so, who? What about children? And so on. And then there are the puzzles that seem to be quite impossible to solve. They are rather like cryptic crossword puzzles where solving one clue can help with the next - but don't expect everything to fall into place at once! Take this little conundrum.

The Old Bat's great grandfather emigrated to Australia. In Melbourne he married an Irish girl and they had three children, one of whom died as an infant. The wife also died and the two children (my wife's grandfather and great aunt) were sent back to England to live with their grandparents. The boy, William Carstairs, grew up and married Helena Jones, a girl born in Liverpool to Irish immigrant parents. A son was born and was also named William but when he was only four, his father died. But he didn't die in London (where the son had been born) or in Brighton (where Helena had lived before her marriage, attending the same church as William's grandparents). He died in a small village on the borders of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and was buried there as there was no money to bring his body back down south.

Many years later, William junior and his wife (my wife's parents) were still very friendly with a family living in that little village - but nobody was able to explain how the connection had come about. Why did a young couple from Brighton visit a remote Midlands village? And how did a Liverpool girl come to be in Brighton in the first place?

As I implied earlier, I had traced Helena to Liverpool where she was born in 1878. Her parents and an older sister where living there at the time of the census in 1871 but there was no trace of the family in 1881 when the next census was taken. I eventually traced Helena's father and older sister to an address in London and saw that the father was described as a widower. There was no record, however, of the mother's death. Nor could I find any trace of Helena. I found her in Brighton in 1901, living with Mr and Mrs Hall. It was in 1902 that she married William Carstairs, their son was born in 1904 and William died in 1908.

How I wished there was a diary to tell me what had happened to Helena before her marriage. Eventually, I learned. An Internet contact told me she had been adopted by Mr & Mrs Hall after her mother's death. The Hall's lived in that little village, hence Helena's (and subsequently her son's) connection. The Hall's had moved from there, ending up in Brighton.

Helena had a tragic life. Not only had her mother died while she was very young, but her husband died after only six years of marriage. She did later remarry but her second husband mistreated her, attacking her with a knife on at least one occasion, and he committed suicide.

At least I did eventually learn about Helena. I'm still struggling with her step-daughter, Moira, who was last heard of in Paris just before the second World War and who is believed to have joined a nunnery but who I have been unable to find in any official records. I have found a record of Helena's step-daughter Johanna - of whom my wife had never heard. Was she Moira? I wonder if I shall ever find out.

Frustrating books and television

Just recently two different writers for two different media have had me writhing, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists. The first is a well-known television presenter who has also written several novels. I borrowed his latest from the library on my last visit. It's not exactly a who-dun-it, although there is a mystery surrounding the death of a girl back in 1816, nor is it a romance, although the main male character does fall for the woman next door. This latter is in 2010, by the way. The book switches between 1816 and 2010 all the way through. The final outcome is irrelevant to my griping so I won't bother you with the details. Suffice it to say that the denouement depends on a scullery maid from 1816, a 15-year-old girl, being able to read well enough to read novels and a 16-year-old boy from the same year, a miller's son, being able to write and being sufficiently literate to write a daily diary. Sorry, Mr Author - that just doesn't gel with me as I know that well into the 19th century very, very few people of that class could read and write.

On Wednesday evening the Old Bat and I settled down to watch the latest episode of Midsomer Murders. I should explain that Midsomer is a fictional English county centred around the county town of Causton and that the villages of Midsomer Worthy, Midsomer Parva, Midsomer Magna et al are the murder capital of the country. They have, over the years, experienced more murders per 100 population than London, New York, Detroit or any where else you care to mention. Each and every one of those murders has, of course, been solved in the course of a two-hour television programme. For years, the successful detective was Tom Barnaby, played by John Nettles.

(Just going off on a bit of a tangent for a while. The Old Bat is, I think, quite keen on Mr Nettles. I think he frequently looks like my brother. When I mentioned this to him - my brother, that is, not Mr Nettles who I have never met - he told me that his daughter thinks the same. Now it happens that many people think my brother and I look alike. I don't, nor does the Old Bat, but could it be that she subconsciously sees me as the hero in those television programmes? No, don't answer that!)

One of the reasons why those programmes gave so much pleasure is/was the location shots. These were in beautiful Buckinghamshire villages full of cricket on the green, thatched cottages and low-beamed pubs. If the Old Bat liked John Nettles, I rather took to his screen wife, Jane Wymark. Mind you, she seemed to be involved in every organisation in every village, from bell ringing to civil war re-enactment, but that brought her into the plot in most episodes so I wasn't complaining as it gave her bigger parts. Tom Barnaby retired and his place was taken by his cousin, another Barnaby. The new Barnaby is not so much to the Old Bat's taste but his wife is quite a looker as well. She doesn't get such big parts as she teaches full-time so is not involved so much in village life. All that, though, is by the bye. It was this week's episode that got my goat.

I haven't quite decided if the scriptwriter was extracting the Michael or if he was really quite serious, but the story-line concerned the Midsomer in the March Ornithological Society and the sighting of a supposed rare bird, the blue crested hoopoe. Now I'm not an expert, but I suspect there is no such bird. If there is, I don't suppose it looks anything like the stuffed bird which was displayed as an example. This was an ordinary hoopoe with the tips of the feathers of its crest coloured blue. Quite ridiculous. Then two or three of the members of the society were in a hide watching birds which they identified as non-existent breeds. But the thing that really got me going was that one of the members was going out at the dead of night to record bird song. Bird song? At midnight? Of a meadow lark? Do me a favour!

Frankly, if scriptwriters can't be bothered to make their plots at least reasonably accurate in the detail, I don't think I can be bothered to watch the programmes.

But I do wish I could find a 19th century diary written by one of my ancestors. It might help me solve one or two riddles. I won't go into that any further just now - I've dribbled on long enough. I'll save that for tomorrow.