It's a small world.

It’s a small world.



The dental practice was situated on a busy road that housed not only Tranmere Rovers football club and the Ducklings nursery but also numerous medical practices of uncertain status.
A huge plastic banner resembling one of those ‘all you can eat’ banners that buffet-style restaurants like to display was draped across the front of one of them.‘NEW PATIENTS WELCOME,’ it announced.
The Buckingham Dental Practice was in fact a large,Victorian house which had been converted, so that patients would frequently wander into rooms not meant for them. In vain might one try to imagine the original character of the house and of those who once lived there, so heavily impregnated was the whole place with its present purpose and its pink mouthwash smell. It was impossible not to run one’s hand along the smooth curved banisters without a frisson of dread at the horrors to come, nor use the Niagara bathroom toilet without the sense of a relief so temporary that it was no comfort at all, and with only the certainty that this was merly an ante-room. Neither could the waiting room, with its gaudy women’s magazines spread on the low coffee table reassure.

The morning of my appointment to analyse a flaring tooth pain was a bright, brisk, December morning. Sunlight faded in and out of the waiting-room (coinciding with the flares of pain, or so it seemed)and illuminating the low table in the centre of the waiting room. The lady sitting opposite me was about fifty-eight. She was seated on a black, studded, leather chair. Out of a sense of duty, she leaned forward on the creaking shell of leather, picked up one of the fluorescent chat magazines, held it at arm’s length for an instant before dropping it cautiously on the pile of similarly pink and yellow chat magazines that boasted ‘Britain’s first pregnant man’, and whose features, including ‘My doughnut shame’ and ‘In a Klass of her own’ were so garish that they seemed to be shouldering each other off the page.

The woman was dressed down slightly, in order to resemble someone much younger; her own daughter perhaps? Her feet were crammed into black, chisel-pointed boots and the chain-belt she was wearing cinched a waist that was barely distinguishable from her hips. At her throat, she wore a pashmina, tie-style scarf. Reactolite, square- framed glasses topped her head( she felt that glasses like these took years off her). She had lately been considering laser eye surgery after she’d had her veneers done.

A few minutes elapsed in the disturbed, private sphere of the waiting room, during which time she took a packet of Dove tissues from her handbag, blew her nose in a self-satisfied way and lifted the main body of the Daily Telegraph which someone else had cast aside. She appeared to read the main headline in a desultory fashion, her face retreating from the newspaper pages in affectation of distaste, then she let it flop back onto the low coffee table as though it was too heavy for her to hold.

As is so often the case in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room, it was hard to discern the exact reason for her visit. Nonetheless, she was to be seen swiftly.

The dental assistant, whose badge read ‘Kirsty’ was wearing a pastel green smock. She waved me down the landing to an empty practitioner’s room and swiftly backtracked along the corridor to usher another patient towards a door marked Dr.Lindsay. I stood for a minute in the empty room before realising that it was the wrong one.

I soon found the correct room with Kirsty now installed by the dental instruments cabinet. The tall Dr O’Brien hovered near the yawning black dental chair while I contemplated the statistic that dentists, followed by farmers were members of those professions most liable to commit suicide. I wondered what it was that induced such despair. I could understand farmers, lonely, communing with their Fresian herds at 4 a.m., then deriving less than a penny a litre for their milk from the ruthless supermarket chains in the face of soaring grain prices. I could feel their despair at having this year’s wheat crop flooded at the crucial harvesting time, but dentists?!
Dr. O’Brien took an x-ray then sent me back to the waiting room, where a conversation was now flowing between the fifty-eight year old woman and a new, middle-aged woman with thinning, magenta-coloured hair, a tailored denim jacket and Ugg boots. They seemed to have some sort of connection between them.

‘We were in Cuba too last year’ said the first woman. ‘Isn’t that strange. I think we stayed in …I can’t remember the name of the place... I think it began with an H?’

‘Havana, so were we, but we had the second week in Puerto de los Sablos. That’s on the coast.’
‘Did you? Oh yes, we found the hotel in Havana was alright but they’re like, very laid back there.’
‘Mmm, that’s right, we found that too, but the month before we were in Thailand. They couldn’t do enough for you there, and right away. Everyone is so friendly.’
‘Well, they do say that don’t they? A bit too much sometimes with the men!'
‘And I think it was in 2005 that we went to Jamaica.’

‘ Now that’s somewhere we’d love to try, but Brian’s not as keen as me.’

Both women laughed and there was a kind of gurgling satisfaction in their laughter.

‘So how are you fixed for Christmas?’ the first woman asked the second.

‘Oh we thought we’d go away again but I’m not so sure with all this, you know, the credit crunch. My daughter’s asked us over to Sligo, that’s where she met her husband.’
‘Oh that’ll make a change. We’re off to Florida. We DID do the shopping trip to New York a few years ago, it was amazing but…’

At this point a small, tinny shout seemed to leap out of her handbag. She stared at the bag, wilfully pulled it towards her, whipped out the offending mobile whose ringtone was a pre-recorded male voice which shouted angrily ‘message!Message! MESSAGE! M-E-S-S-A-G-E! She swiped at the thing, pointed it away from her, shot me a withering look in reply to my obvious scowl. Staring incredulously at the screen, then cupping the mobile against her cheek so she could fondle the bag, she told the mobile, the waiting room and its occupants that she had done the rest of the shopping but would be late, repeated the word ‘Prenton’ twice, then squirelled the mobile away into her bag. She picked up the dropped thread of the conversation almost immediately.

Yes, we DID the shopping trip to New York too’

'Did you stop off like WE did on the way back in London?’ the other woman interjected.

‘No, no. God, no. Anyway this year we just want to be somewhere warm, so we thought Florida.’

During the course of their conversation, I had been holding the pages of the Daily Telegraph open on page twenty-seven, retreading an article that bristled not with its content but with my annoyance reflected back at me from the page. I fulminated at the thought of the air-miles they had blithely clocked up over the past few years between the two of them. The tall Dr.O'Brien appeared in the doorway. ‘Mrs Jean Robbins.’ he called, appearing to examine the sheet of paper he was holding out in front of him.
The first woman stuffed her Dove handkerchieves into her handbag and waddled to the door. After she was installed in Dr O’Brien’s room, the woman with the thinning, magenta-coloured hair turned to me approvingly.

‘Isn’t it a small world?’ she remarked. ‘Would you believe that that lady and myself were both in Cuba over a year  ago and then we both turn up at the same dental practice? Unbelievable!’

'World Cup' 5th July, 2010.

05 07 2010.

Source: Metro.

Airport officials in the Colombian capital of Bogota opted to inspect a scale replica of the World Cup that was bound for Spain. When analysts tested the gold model this weekend, they discovered that it was moulded from 11kg (24lb) of cocaine!

Airport Narcotics
team score, fulfil goal, seize World
Cup made of white gold!

The cactus and the money plant.

The cactus and the money plant.


Cacti, like tortoises live to a ripe old age. Like tortoises, they lead unhurrried, peaceful (one might almost say still) lives. In general, they trouble no-one and no-one troubles them; they've seen to that! They maintain unruffled, deadpan lives although they must bear silent witness to all manner of upheavals; when their owners move, for example or when someone they share their home with falls down the stairs at their feet, becoming as still as the cacti themselves.
The strange affair between a cactus and a succulent growing in the same terracotta pot began on my window-ledge about a decade ago. It was I who bore testimony to the affair, to the twists and turns of this menage a deux. As I was an unattached woman, the affair had to stand in place of a human one.
The relationship between the cactus and the succulent took place in several majestic acts which unfolded first in my kitchen then, when the two plants had gained height and I had seen fit to move them, in the bathroom on the window-ledge overlooking my white, enamel bath.
At first, the cactus was a modest four inches tall. Its spines were arranged along its eight double-seamed ridges in pairs, sprouting from nodes spaced at regular intervals down those stitched seams like the legs of a caterpillar. Its near neighbour was a money plant with pinky- green, fleshy leaves. Over the course of time, the money plant began to gain height, reaching that of the cactus. There was nothing remarkable, you would have thought, in the coexistence of plants in the same pot. However, you would have been underestimating the ingenuity of these two creatures, of their shared lives, as I did.
Once, in the bath, I had glanced up at the terracotta pot, noticed the proximity of the two plants and found myself wondering how they planned to share the environment, for it seemed that they had started to lean towards each other. I dismissed the question to begin with, invoking one of my Mum's sayings that 'water always finds its own level.' The fluidity of this assertion ensures that one can apply it to almost any situation with pleasing conclusions.
After a few months the spines of the cactus had grown perilously close to the fleshy leaves of the money plant. Was this a case of 'opposites attract' or just waywardness, happenstance?
I waited for the two plants to pool their ideas about how they would maintain their distance or else become conjoined, or perish.
There can be no room for strife whether you are sharing an island, a street, a house or a pot, yet the bristling animosity that can arise over territorial claims, is never far away.
In fact I was to witness both accord and animosity, diplomacy and deception over the ensuing months, the years. The poor succulent, who had the misfortune to be a kind of cellmate to the cactus, and in order to protect herself from the assaults of his spines had to pretend that everything was alright, that she was not hurt by his piques, his slow stabbings, his putting the knife in and twisting it. She could not, would not allow him the satisfaction of his torments, the final satisfaction of murder, or whatever it was to be.
Thus, whenever a spine from the seam of the cactus managed to penetrate the fleshy cuticle of the money plant's leaves, whenever a fencing move was made, she would faint so slowly that the injury would go unnoticed by the marauding cactus. Punctured by his apparent failure to make an impression , the cactus would then make a temporary withdrawal. After a few weeks, a new approach would begin to unfold.
Thus began an almost imperceptible dance; a dance of retreats and rapprochements that was to continue for many years.
I went away one September for a week and was shocked when, upon my return, I discovered that there had been a particularly spiteful, spineful attack on the money plant, whose plate-like leaves were now dull, wrinkling, dessicated. The whole of its being was atrophied. The plant was slowly dying. There was nothing for it but to remove it from the shared pot and hope that it would make a recovery.
I rehomed the money plant in one of the larger pots I had been collecting in my back yard (with the idea of introducing other succulents or cacti to my flat to join the five-foot tall Weeping Fig, Dracaena and the Mother-in law's Tongue all housed in the bedroom). I had been considering buying a group of Living Stones from the local nursery.
I placed the money plant on a window-sill in the kitchen where it would benefit from the morning sun that often poured through the sash window. The remaindered cactus was left standing on the bathroom window-sill, behind frosted glass. It looked stark, odd, growing as it was rather at the margin of the pot the two plants had shared for so long, without a fall guy. I was obliged to stand the cactus in its pot close to the wall, fearing it might topple over.
Almost as soon as I had moved the shrivelled succulent to sunnier climes, it began to flesh out, to regain its full stature and its pinky-green hue.
One evening, shortly after the transplant, I was preparing a meal for my two sisters and I. The radio was meting out its 5p.m. news coverage. The news items on the kitchen radio were being delivered in well-modulated, suave tones with breathing-space intermissions to separate them. A Parliamentary recess had ended and a trial at the Crown Court had dismissed the case of a mother accused of smothering her baby to death on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
A tiny crashing noise, barely audible, was attached to this news item. It hadn't come from the radio or even from the kitchen but from somewhere else in the flat, The hall perhaps, or the downstairs landing. I descended the half-flight of stairs to the bathroom and was startled by the contrast between the smooth whiteness of the bath and the matt, shock of ink-black soil, broken terracotta and,worst of all, the prone cactus, a dark green exclamation mark, finally unable to stand alone, a fish out of water.