Fortieth

 My daughter's 40th birthday. Landmark for her, landmark for everyone connected to her. We just had a chat on the phone about how we all think  it must be fun being young but the 30s- in particular- can be a grim decade- because you're expected to be all grown up but actually you're still quite inexperienced and gauche- and it's hard work. 

It seems only yesterday we were in the middle of a heatwave and now the night time temperatures are in single figures and the day time ones in the mid teens. This morning is sunny but cold and cutting.  I like this kind of weather; it's invigorating. I went out into the fields and did more than I usually do- pulling up ragwort, dragging fallen branches to the bonfire site. 

Conkers are fairy gold- but while their sheen lasts they're beautiful- the colour of a mahogany table that's been polished and polished for two hundred years.  Would they keep their shine if you buffed them up with beeswax? But, then, again, would you want to? They're seeds- and change is of their essence. 

Last Of A Fabulous Generation

I drink my eleven o'clock coffee out of a "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" mug- purchased in the Tunbridge Wells Museum.  TW has a historic  reputation for being full of peppery retired colonels and Lady Bracknell types and- as the note on the back of my mug explains- "Ever since a morally outraged reader wrote to a London newspaper, signing himself 'Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells', the town has been associated with quintessential Englishness and correctness." 

Or, in other words, with having a stick up its arse. 

I read all the obituaries I could of the late Denis Norden- and one of them said  "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" was something he gave to the world.  It's not something I'd heard before, but why not? He gave us so much else.

Norden was one of a remarkable generation of funny men- writers and comedians- who learned their craft during the war- and then spread out to colonise radio, TV and the movies. His contemporaries included Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Jimmy Edwards, Eric Sykes and Norden's comedy-writing partner and game-show team-mate, Frank Muir. They were quite a bunch- and he- Norden- who made it to 96- was the last survivor.