No 2 - My Alma Mater. Rickmansworth Young Ladies College

My Alma Mater, Rickmansworth young Ladies College

I was telling Tamsin about my earliest memories. I recalled playing on a big rocking horse and of our ginger cat Monty that used to lie on the end of my bed. I asked Tamsin what were her earliest childhood memories.

Tamsin cannot help herself she always has to go one better. She thought about this for a moment then said it was leaving involuntarily from her mother’s uterus and seeing Auntie Elsie coochie-cooing and tickling her under her chin as her father endeavored to take a photo of her on his mobile phone just as they were about to cut her umbilical cord.

She said it all got a bit hazy after that. I know Tamsin is inclined to exaggerate but using one of father’s sayings “stuff me this surely has to take the cake”.

She told me that when she was young she remembers asking her mother where babies come from. Her mother told her they were found under gooseberry bushes. She said she accepted her answer without question despite crazy speculation by her primary school friends. Later she found to her horror her mother had been lying to her.

My parents sent me to a very exclusive girl’s boarding school, Rickmansworth Young Ladies College, also known as Denham Hall, for genteel young ladies. One term school term fees would have armed a third world country for years or fed a child from Biafra for hundreds of years, probably more, and possibly got a space programme off the ground for them.

A chance remark by an internet acquaintance of mine reminded me of an incident at school.

I was approached by Miss Frenzi the school sports teacher and asked if I would like to join the senior netball team.

She asked “what position on the court would you like to be trialled?”

I replied “well, preferably in goal miss”.

She inquired “do you know much about netball Bridgette?”

I replied “Well frankly not a lot”.

She never got back to me.

I buried Charmaine one of our chickens the other day. She had been egg bound. Her spirit moved on and she was consigned to the cold, cold ground.

I advanced the hypothesis to mother that it is possible that the sudden demise of Charmaine must have caught the attention of the other chickens and would have been the focus of much discussion. We as humans think we are the centre of the universe. We are so puffed up with our own importance we fail to see the broader picture.

I reminded her, “mother dear, we are wretched victims of nihilism. Chickens too suffer anxieties from a sense of insecurity when something like this happens. Remember we are all fellow travellers on this inconsequential dying blue/green stellar piece of flotsam floating aimlessly without any apparent purpose against a star-studded ebon cyclorama”.

I reminded her, ‘Life Doesn't Stop When Dementia Starts!’

No, that’s not the ramblings of a twitter amateur philosopher. I saw it on the wall in the doctor Mackenzie’s waiting room in Inveraray high street along with ‘Parents be Ever Vigilant for Head Lice’. Funny that I thought only children got head lice.

It has happened again; another one of our chickens died. I found Pamela on her back under a tree. She was a homing chicken. She will be sorely missed. As you can imagine the other chickens are distraught and again are trying to come to terms with the tragic loss of a sister chicken.

Phaedra my fourth best friend suggested to Graham that seeing he had Irish heritage he should buy his mother for her 20th wedding anniversary a celebratory pack of 20 DVD'S totaling 1,000 hours of Irish dancing.

Roger, my friend, bought me a year subscription for my birthday for the Dolly magazine little realizing the profound, haunting morbid dread I used to experience whenever I was about to open the sealed section at the back of the magazine. It probably explains why even today I am terrified of badgers. Can you understand that?

By the way, I was hoping the new Pope would have been an African woman.

I suppose it all started when my mother suggested I should cultivate some "deep meaningful relationships". So I joined Facebook. Father then accused me of being a tart trying to pick up males of the opposite species? I overheard mother's bridge partner, Mrs Dalrymple ask if I was adopted. Mother shook her head and replied “I don't know where she came from” with a heavy emphasis on the ‘where’.

A new day and the news is that mother returned from shopping in Inveraray High Street and surprised father by informing him she has decided to part exchange her Hillman Minx motor car and upgrade to a second hand Morris Minor, a green one. She has this nostalgia for past times. Father refuses to be seen in it and prefers to drive the Rolls Royce. .