Last day of September … Can’t say I’m sorry. October is the month of my birth and Autumn has forever been my favourite season. The colours, the crisp air; a time to light the fire, close the curtains and cosy down, protected from the big bad world. The big, bad world. I didn’t use to think of it that way. How things change. How the world has changed. No! Positive thoughts … Conkers. Autumn is synonymous with conkers and, to this day, still one of my favourite things is to discover a seam of perfect, spikey green shells, anticipating the size of the shiny big chestnut within. How I loved that, as a little girl, and I knew exactly where to find them. The beautiful old chestnut trees are still there at the top of Drum Road in Cupar, the open countryside beyond; and, too, in Duffus Park. I hope they always will be. Timeless – and a humbling reminder of our transience in a world which continues, regardless.
Stubble fields. They, too, are Autumn to me. So many happy memories of riding at Foodie, that wonderful farm above Cupar which belonged to our friends. Our playground for so many years. What fun we had – and created, pretending to be cowgirls, flinging ourselves off the ponies onto the newly made bales of hay. The unbridled freedom. The innocence. Totally in the moment, we never gave a thought to what lay in the future … Sadly, that childhood no longer exists in today’s digital world. We were the lucky ones – somehow, I knew it, even then.
Seems my most enduring memories of Autumn recall being out riding on my own – just me and Teasy – as one in the countryside: late afternoon, that familiar chill in the air heralding the approach of winter and the end of another year; the light fading, enhancing silhouettes in the darkening sky of the wild geese, in full voice, wending their way homeward overhead. Ears pricked, he heard them, too – Teasy. We would stop to watch them, revelling in nature and the solitude. ‘Good for the soul’, as Pop used to say; or, ‘God’s in his heaven, Trish’. The voice in my head. Like me, he loved nothing more than to escape people, gathering his thoughts on the beach with Rumpole – our Old English Mastiff – at Hill of Tarvit or Kemback. For nature is healing, affording precious time to reflect and, moreover, for much-needed perspective.
‘Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet.’
Roger Miller
People. People in a world which no longer cares – about anything. That race to the bottom … Manners? That’s eight letters beginning with ‘m’ and ending with obsolete. For the purpose of example, let us take Keir ‘Jong Un’. Wow! Even I was surprised. Utterly devoid of. I happened to see his interview with Susanna Reid on Good Morning, Britain last Wednesday. Already ensconced in his chair, Susanna walked into the room, hand outstretched in greeting. No attempt to move, on his part, whatsoever! In fact, she was forced to bend over to engage. At once, unbelievable and unacceptable. An apology for a gentleman and, yet, what more would one expect from a man who refuses to be drawn on the definition of a woman? Not prone to tics, I find my teeth clenching and my facial muscles tightening in an involuntary grimace whenever he appears on screen. He makes my skin positively crawl, smarmily sinister being the description which comes to mind. Hang on! Methinks, I hear a knock at the door. Jest not, thou rebellious fool, for all is not as it seems. Insidious forces are at play … Exit, stage right.
Manners. Respect – or, a lack of. Intrinsically linked to slovenly attire. The dreaded trackie bottoms. Men devoid of class or style who choose comfort first? Perhaps but, in truth, they are just sheep following a trend; one which also demands an English vernacular favouring words beginning with ‘f‘. Seemingly a club offering free membership … I see their female equivalent, regularly, at Marks & Spencer. ‘Oh, Hi! Yes, just come from my Boxercise class’. NOT! Just finished watching Lorraine, let the cleaner in then had the white Range Rover Sport valeted. Chlamydia only went and upended her Irn Bru/Chia Seed smoothie! I know, two-years-old and already health-obsessed, what can one do?
On the subject of slovenly attire, what happened to a jacket and tie? I grew up with a father who was never without a shirt and tie, let alone a jacket. What happened? What happened to pride in one’s appearance? It’s commonplace, now, for men to appear on television, no jacket, no tie and shirts unbuttoned to the navel. Emphasis on the missing prefix, ‘gentle’. Then, there’s David Lammy, our Foreign Secretary. Another level! He turned up to meet Joe Biden at the White House, last Friday, wearing a pair of scruffy black trainers to ‘complement’ his ‘Next‘ suit (courtesy of Lord Alli, no doubt). An exclamation mark does not suffice. That’s it. Straight to the bottom. Race won. I suppose in a country which now sees fit to condone the home delivery of sex toys along with one’s pizza, anything goes …
Tuesday evening, now, I await the second part of Channel 5’s new Cast Away series starring the vilified Phillip Schofield. Re-awakening the anonymous, cowardly trolls on Instagram – not forgetting the rancorous Eammon Holmes on GB News of a morning – unusually, I took it upon myself to air my views in a comment. Enough! No, I do not condone him having an affair with a man young enough to be his son, and, no, I abhor lies but we have just witnessed the evil that is Huw Edwards, for goodness sake. A little perspective. Phillip Schofield is not a criminal. Rather, he was a beloved presenter whose popularity not only rendered him untouchable but a target for the jealous. As such, his fall from grace was savage. ‘Et tu, Brute?’. One wonders whether Caesar, himself, might have fallen for the guile of the blow-up doll that is Holly Willoughby?
I have always liked Phillip Schofield, part of my life since the Gopher days. We met him, back in the early Nineties, when he was starring in Dr Dolittle. Becca and Manny disturbed him having dinner in a restaurant across the road from the theatre and he couldn’t have been nicer. I refuse to throw him under the bus or be part of the baying lynch mob – miserable aggressors full of hate and little else in their sad lives. Infinitely more interesting was the footage of him with his wife and daughters on last night’s episode. A bond clearly unbroken. Says it all, for family are the greatest and, potentially, the most wounding critics of all. They have his back. Me, too.
Just watched the second episode … Damaged but not out. One hundred percent, me, too!
‘Things didn’t turn out the way you thought they might, so you’ve got to look elsewhere. Where does that path go, ’cause I can’t go down that one anymore?’
Phillip Schofield
This is Trish, signing off.
