Bear-fasced Cheek
‘When we first noticed him, he was going totally crazy, ripping off branches from the trees in that garden, tearing up the lawn and roaring something terrible. Then he just s*a* right out there in the open view of everyone.
Agnes: Sleeplessness
Dear Agnes,
I must write to ask how you go about getting a good night’s sleep.
I have tried everything from counting sheep to decorating the house. I even transformed the garden but despite these strenuous activities I cannot find sleep.
I am under the attention of my G.P. who diagnosed me as an insomniac. Flattered as I am that she thinks me so intelligent, it doesn’t help my rest.
Now as I lie awake when all around me are snoring their heads off, marvelling at how clever I am, I wonder will I ever again need to sleep at all? Or is this just a phase I’m going through?
Yours desperately
Drooping Eyelids.
__
Dear Sir or Madam (your nom-de-plume doesn’t determine which!)
I’m not confident that Drooping anything is the real problem here! Indeed I was slightly alarmed to read that ‘in the middle of the night, all around you were snoring their heads off!’. Just how many people are you sleeping with at the one time?? Is this a harem of yours that you refer to as ‘sheep’?
And in the night hours you still find time to decorate the house and transform the garden? You want to take yourself in hand!
No, on second thoughts, that’s not a good idea! Perhaps you can get someone else to do just that!
I was glad to learn you were under the doctor! I advise you to stay right there. She may provide the physical exercise required to induce sweet slumber.
That’s what works for oul’ Dayee and me! Not the doctor, of course, but the bedroom exercises. Despite his name – like the Tory leader Michael Howard – he has ‘something of the night’ in him. And thank heavens for it!
Agnes
Kilnasaggart Stone Plaque
A number of our most popular tourist attractions have recently been embellished with informative plaques outlining the significance of each. We believe the information contained is of interest not just to tourists in situ but might indeed help to attract visitors from abroad.
Meadow Rangers
We were runners-up in the Meadow League in 1963, just a few short years after its inauguration. I cannot recall who beat us but I suspect it was High Street’s Rockview Rangers. It usually was.
Woman’s Work
She was a formidable character, the farm woman of old.
‘Don’t work for a woman,’ the old labourers would advise. ‘They never know what’s in a day’s work.’
In truth, she was more energetic and capable and expected no less from the men. She came to the head-rig with ‘dinner for the field’ and after the meal – amid compliments satirical and genuine, the teasing and earthy, adult repartee in traditional phrases about love and marriage and children or the lack of them, she stayed to help.
In between the preparation and the hectic scamper of setting or sowing she found time to ‘cut the seed’. This time she found – ‘idle time’ – was to get to a barn where she squatted on a creepie stool, bent over a heap of potatoes which she was slitting expertly to make seed with just enough eyes or buds and no more (or she gouged those out) and so make ordinary white potatoes go further.
Sometimes she was giving a hand there, to an old woman who had come to do the task for wages. When we saw these waifs – most of them ‘going the roads’ in spring, their dark shawls about them – we knew they were off to ‘cut seed’ for someone and glad to get the money. Many of them subsisted on ‘poor relief’ doled out in the local dispensary each week.
‘They have the back for it’, the men sometimes said wryly, evasively, but it was a belief then. When a man had his drills ready for planting, he might say wishfully,
‘Man, if only two or three tight, strappin’ lumps o’ weemen would slip a braskin about them and drop me seed, I’d have that field in, in junk time!’