Hilary Boyd
Annoying stuff on a screen near you

Annoying stuff on a screen near you

by | Jul 20, 2020 | Hilary’s weekly ramblings

I think I’m watching too much TV/online streaming platforms at the moment. But I’m starting to notice things that are beginning to annoy me big time. For instance:

Orphan Annie

Female characters who wear the sleeves of their oversized sweater pulled over their hands as if they’re orphan children left out in the cold. I assume it’s supposed to be sexy, the Vulnerable-Little-Woman syndrome, and falls into the same category as pearl-pink lipstick in 19th Century Russia. (Although Julie Christie got away with it.) Of course, this may just be envy, seeing as I was six foot at fifteen!

In the same vein, women who wear their jumper slipped casually over one naked shoulder. Have you ever worn your jumper like that? Even by mistake? Because if you have, you’ll know that it’s phenomenally irritating and all you want to do is haul it back into place.

And again, the women detectives on British TV who wear heels to work. They dash up rusty metal ladders in deserted warehouses and wade through mud to the riverbank to examine dead bodies in shoes better suited to their sister’s wedding.

If you watch Scandi-noire, or even Euro-noire – which we do quite a lot – the female detectives wear the equivalent of Doc Martens and look fantastic – proper professional women, not the glossy mag types that are the Brit equivalent.

The infamous wall-slide

Characters, men or women this time, who slide down walls when in distress. Am I missing something? Is this a thing? If I’m distressed I sit on the nearest chair or sofa or hurl myself onto a bed. But regularly on screen there are these actors doing the infamous wall-slide, ending up in a heap on the cold floor to weep. Maybe it’s again just jealousy on my part, because my knees aren’t what they used to be, but I do feel they’d be more comforted if they used the furniture instead.

Guild for Maligned Teenagers

Then there’s the main protagonist who has the dysfunctional teenage daughter. It’s always a girl, never an annoying boy. They’re astonishingly rude to their parent and completely moronic/incompetent – even by teenage standards – getting themselves into all kinds of hot water, from which said protagonist, (whose parenting skills, admittedly, probably leave much to be desired), then have to extricate them. If I were still a teenager, I’d form the Guild of Maligned Teenagers to protest.

And why do characters always chop carrots when they’re cooking? Does the carrot community demand Above The Title billing? The amount of carrots eaten – or at least chucked into saucepans – on screen should certainly warm the cockles of the Five-A-Day mob. But couldn’t we have a bit more imagination? Maybe a courgette or two, a nice bulb of fennel, a spud? There’s no evidence of what dish emerges from all these carrots… I’d love to know.

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Castles made of sand – pace Jimi

Castles made of sand – pace Jimi

by | Jul 6, 2020 | Hilary’s weekly ramblings

We went swimming at the beach last week, twice! Both times were exhilarating. Whatever the conditions, being in the sea is somehow life-enhancing. 

Logistic Nightmare

But beach swimming is a logistics palaver worthy of the most talented expert in the field. To start with, I must check that my cozzy still fits – it’s a year since I last dug it out. And check there isn’t inappropriate hair sprouting from places now made visible by the costume. I always put my cozzy on at home – I’ve seen these cute little sundresses that slip over a bathing costume perfectly, but, needless to say, I don’t have one, so settle for shorts. Must remember my knickers, I tell myself. And my neoprene beach shoes, which look ghastly, but my feet are rubbish on stones. Then there’s all the other essential paraphernalia: the towel, the sunscreen, the hat, the sunglasses, the bottle of water.

 

I arrive at the beach, but should I leave my phone/watch in the car? Is the car park safer than the beach bag I’ll dump on the sand, then turn my back on for hours to swim? I hang onto the car keys, certainly, stuffing them into some obscure back pocket of my shorts I hope a robber won’t find – and I probably won’t find either, of course.

At last, I’m ready. Cozzy on, shoes on, sunscreen and sunglasses on, towel and clothes piled neatly. ‘Left of the yellow blow-up boat’ I remind myself as I skip off to the waves – hoping the family who owns it doesn’t go home before I get out of the water, because the tow on our beach is really strong. Even a good swimmer is swept along without realising it and gets out miles from where they went in.

 

Beach-towel juggle

The swim is gorgeous. I splash and frolic in the waves as if I were twelve again and when I get out I’m glowing and invigorated. But what to do next? If it’s boiling hot, I could sit on the beach and dry off. But we’re talking British summer here. I don’t know about you, but in all the many decades I’ve been swimming in this country, I’ve never mastered the beach-towel juggle that involves dragging a wet cozzy down over wet limbs and replacing it with dry knickers without revealing acres of naked bum to various innocent bystanders – probably traumatising the family with the yellow blow-up boat into the bargain. It’s just not possible. I could do it in the car park, of course, crouching by the open boot in vain illusion of shelter. But the same applies. Just at the moment the towel slips off, is the moment a whole gaggle of gawping teenagers saunters past.

By the time I get home, there’s sand in every nook and cranny of my body and my clothes – which I then deposit on the bedroom floor to crunch over when I go to bed. My hair is stiff and creaky with salt, my skin dry, my cozzy cold and nasty, and I’m shivering because I forgot my hoody. But I’ve loved every minute and as soon as the sun comes out, I’ll be off to the beach and start the whole seaside rigmarole again.

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Much more cheerful

Much more cheerful

by | Jun 18, 2020 | Hilary’s weekly ramblings

I’m in a much more cheerful mood this week. The reason? Food! Specifically, my sister, Judie’s, little cheese and chilli biscuits. Completely delicious to nibble with a glass of wine. I have no idea how she makes them, but I hope she doesn’t lose the will to do so. She’s been shielding, hasn’t been out of the house for months now. Which is good for the cheese biscuit production line, but extremely difficult for her. I really take my hat off to all the millions of people living alone who have endured such an extended period of solitude so stoically. There may be tensions being holed up with potentially irritating spouses and even more annoying kids, but the thought of being totally on my own day after day, month after month, is terrifying. I think this dotty government should hand out prizes when this is all over. (I might get Marcus – or Daniel, as Hancock likes to call him – onto it. He seems to be the only one around here that gets things done.)

Banoffee

I’m sure you’ve all got them, those food moments in your life when something tastes magical, just absolutely right? No good trying to replicate it – like that blissful Italian holiday back in 1976 when nobody argued – because it was probably as much to do with where you were in your life, your hunger levels, the air, the company, as the food itself. One of mine is what we dubbed ‘killer pie’ in a Lake District tea shop – banoffee with an acre of cream on top, by any other name. Another is lamb chops and chips in a deserted mountain café in Crete with the cook and the owner having a domestic in the background. Another is my school friend’s mum’s cauliflower cheese… which she said, many years later, for sure was out of a packet, because her mum couldn’t cook. And my own mum’s fish pie.

Bullets-and-sludge

I’ve been lucky in lockdown, foodwise. My neighbour got bored and baked these delicious cakes, kindly leaving 2 slices on the doorstep for us. We found a farm shop with asparagus – for which, I’m proud to say, I made hollandaise sauce (the first attempt did turn into scrambled egg, admittedly, but Jamie Oliver saved the day). And tonight I’m watching a Zoom demonstration with my cousin Mark, (www.cookingexperience.co.uk) who is going to attempt to teach me how to make risotto. Good luck to him, I say. I only tried to make it once and it was bullets-and-sludge, more suitable for sealing a wall – not that I know anything about sealing a wall, either, of course. So cheers to everyone out there improving my eating experience on so many levels. You are all much appreciated.

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Enough already!

Enough already!

by | Jun 11, 2020 | Hilary’s weekly ramblings

Maybe I’m becoming increasingly grumpy in my old age. But I’m worried we’re all turning into a nation of navel-gazers. Our lives have become so small and self-contained, we seem to be focusing on ourselves to an unhealthy extent. At first it was amusing, to hear in detail everyone’s lockdown life: favourite desert-lockdown track, poem, lunge, neurosis, cereal, Netflix box set, hand cream, sweatpants… on and on we all went. Every inch of the media is now thick with intimate details perhaps we’d rather not know.

I sympathise, obviously. I’ve done it myself. What else are we poor buggers going to talk about, seeing as we can’t go anywhere, and we’re all in need of a vent. But, as with all the blanket coverage of Covid wind-ups and speculation we have to wade through every day, it’s just not interesting anymore. It was, for a while, but could we move on now?

Radio days

Take Radio 4. Now, I’m an avid fan. I have the radio on a lot of the time, when I’m cooking or driving or in the mornings to catch up with the headlines. But I’ve almost stopped listening in the last two months. I don’t want to hear yet another theme on the virus played out in programmes that aren’t usually concerned with the news – when the news itself is scaring us, baffling us, and irritating us out of our wits. I almost long for the good old days of international death and destruction that didn’t involve a care home – tales from Syria, Afghanistan, The West Bank, Putin and Erdogan’s latest scams. Almost.

Nimbyism flourishes

What’s the solution? As my dear father always said, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’. So, read on… We had bacon for breakfast. We’re eating too much during lockdown, no idea why. (how am I doing?) Then my hero husband struggled manfully with my new desktop, transferring endless files while I sweated quietly in the wings, convinced all my work would disappear forever in a puff of the other sort of virus that no one’s interested in except the perhaps the Chinese these days. (Gripped yet?) After lunch of salad with unmentionables left over in the fridge, I went for a walk and flexed my unfortunately burgeoning nimbyism – hordes of incomers littering our quiet little harbour and weeing in the churchyard. And that’s pretty much my day. I hope you’ve been entertained? Answers on a postcard please, if such things exist anymore… you can see my mood has not improved.

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A writer’s dilemma

A writer’s dilemma

by | Jun 2, 2020 | Hilary’s weekly ramblings

The virus is messing with my head again – amongst everything else it’s messing with. I’m just settling down to write my next novel. It was to be set in 2020, but now I’m having a drastic rethink. I can’t comfortably start a story that will span the year, when I don’t know how it will all end. It’s not like Brexit, where you can just not mention the damn thing – leave  politics out of the picture altogether. Covid has affected every inch of all our lives these last months, so my fictional characters can’t escape, unless I decide they live in some far-flung corner of the world, like, for instance, Kiribati, which has so far had no cases. But then it’s in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and clearly it was too much effort to infect the islanders, even for this wily virus. Anyway, I can’t go and visit for research any time soon.

No sex?

The thing is, we’ve all slogged through months of lockdown and had to endure endless tiresome coronaspeak, such as the dreaded R-number and self-isolating and PPE – which used to be a university course, right? Then there’s poor old Durham, which is now eternally twinned with Specsavers. So will we really want to read a novel which features Matt Hancock on every page? And in which the only sex is virtual? I’m not saying it’s all about sex, obviously, nor that my characters will be doing it with Mr Hancock, but I’d like to point out that I write romantic novels and if my characters can’t even kiss unless they’re self-isolating together… it rather ruins the plot.

Land of milk and honey

So, I reckon I’m not going to say when this book is set. It’ll be a sort of no-man’s-land time where anything is possible and where the virus is only a glint in poor Boris’s eye – that’s a real case of ‘Be careful what you wish for’, eh? Nobody will have heard of our Dom, or know how to wash their hands properly or raid the supermarket for loo rolls or lose half of every meeting because they don’t know how to work Zoom. They won’t even have heard of Zoom. It’ll be a glorious land of milk and honey – both bought in a normal shop, of course, with crowds of people jostling at the till and spitting enthusiastically in each other’s faces. What a joy this book will be to write, I bet you can’t wait to read it!

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Lessons I’ve learnt about my lockdown self…

Lessons I’ve learnt about my lockdown self…

by | May 29, 2020 | Hilary’s weekly ramblings

I quite like having no social commitments.

Sounds really terrible, doesn’t it? But, however much I look forward to seeing my friends – and I do – it’s really peaceful not to look at the week ahead and start making calculations about which London train to catch, when should I wash my hair so it’s not fluffy – which is pretty much never, but there is a fleeting window when it’s marginally less so – what the hell to wear for multiple meet ups in town, taking into account the weather, comfort v smart, can I cram my current weighty tome into my bag and not drag my shoulder off… You can see how complicated it is. Way simpler to wear the same jeans for a week. And have more time to write.

Lunging for the crisps

I haven’t morphed into the female version of Joe Wicks. I thought perhaps I’d get lean and fit now I’m in total control of my diet, have more time to exercise and no chance of a rendezvous that would include too much wine and chips. But, disappointingly, it turns out change doesn’t happen without major effort. And also, what could be nicer, when you’ve just been rendered tearful by the daily bulletin of death and trips to Barnard Castle, than a restoratively chilled glass of something delicious and a large bowl of crisps?

Not a fan of Zoom. 

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s better than nothing right now, but you can’t interrupt people. If you do, you lose the end of what they’re saying. And most conversations – mine, at least – are a crisscross of everyone talking loudly over everyone else. It’s such hard work keeping quiet or having to repeat stuff. Although our yoga teacher has set up wonderful Zoom classes. And I only hit the furniture with my long arms and legs, rather than whacking the poor person lying next to me in the face.

I’m not going to make bread.

I had such good intentions. I grabbed the last kilo of flour from the empty supermarket shelves with a cry of triumph, was kindly donated yeast and a bread book by my sister – who makes brilliant bread btw – and… well it all just sat there eyeing me reproachfully. I did read some recipes, honest. But although bread makers tell me it’s so easy, it seems to take ages and need such careful monitoring. I had the feeling me and Don would end up munching through leaden bricks of toast with a brave smile and a wavering belief that anything homemade must be better than shop-bought. So I gave the flour to my sister, in the hope she might donate a loaf this time!

 

Me and Groucho

My hairdressing skills are legendary. Well, slight exaggeration, Don won’t let me near his Barnet, which seems perverse, especially as I’ve now got the proper scissors and watched loads of YouTube videos – like the bread-makers, they make it look so easy. And I suppose I have no intention of cutting my own. But I’m terribly proud that I’ve successfully trimmed and dyed my eyebrows. I looked a lot like Groucho Marx for a few days, but who’s going to see me anyway?

Having wondered how the hell I would adapt to lockdown, I’m now wondering how I’ll adapt to being allowed out again. Will I be able to wind myself up and embrace the pressures of Real Life? Or have I developed worrying hermit tendencies that will be hard to shake? I’ll let you know.

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