To be perfectly honest with you, I do not normally speak to people on the phone when I am wearing only my birthday suit; in fact, I was just dashing by Chris in the passage, on my way to the bathroom, when Chris stopped me and handed me the telephone. Incidentally, I really was ‘dashing by’, rather than sauntering or sashaying by, sexily or otherwise, because all my efforts at dieting recently have been to no avail and I’m feeling a little coy about showing my ample figure naked, except as a flash of womanly voluptuousness as I dash past to the shower. Hence, when Chris stopped me in my tracks and handed me the static telephone, mouthing the words, “It’s Mary”, I felt quite unprepared, both to speak in the nude to my sister, and to stand in the one spot for long enough for Chris to take in the sight.

Happily for me, Chris found the cordless phone and passed it to me. Now able to move and converse at the same time, I went hurriedly into the bathroom and grabbed a towel, which I held up to my chest with my free hand and kept in place either side by clamping it under my armpits. In this fashion I walked back into the kitchen and stood at the far end, in the doorway to the corridor, and opposite Chris, who was leaning against the kitchen worktops. In this manner I talked to Mary for about ten minutes while Chris stayed put drinking his coffee. When the call had finished I returned to the bathroom.

I was getting into the shower when Chris, laughing and smiling, appeared by the open door.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Well, you know when you stood in the doorway/”

“Yes?”

“And you thought the towel was covering your modesty?”

“Yes?” I was starting to get the picture.

“Well, I could see you naked from behind in the mirror at the end of the passage, and because you weren’t aware of what I could observe, you stood there so naturally. That’s why I stayed listening to your conversation. You looked like the seventies poster of the girl tennis player with no panties on.”

I had to laugh. Maybe my pose was similar… There endeth the similarity. Surely? I’m feeling so chubby at the moment. Rubens would have loved me (that is Rubens the Flemish painter, not to be confused with Reuben, our handsome bookworm leader!) Luckily that particular mirror is highly flattering – it’s the one I’ve mentioned  to you before on my blog (the type everyone should have to make them feel good!). Now I’m not complaining if my husband chooses to see me in such a wonderful light. But of course, I have to take into account that this compliment comes from the man who remarked suddenly the other morning, while we were sat in bed talking over our cups of tea –

“I love your little tummy!”

“Really?” I asked, looking down at my tummy, “You must like Buddha!”

Thank you for sending me this joke, Robert.

 
Handy Woman

A young blonde girl in her late teens, wanting to earn some extra money for the summer, decided to hire herself out as a “handy woman” and started canvassing a nearby well-to-do neighbourhood.

She went to the front door of the first house and asked the owner if he had any odd jobs for her to do.

“Well, I guess I could use somebody to paint the porch” he said. “How much will you charge me?”

Delighted, the girl quickly responded, “How about £50?”

The man agreed and told her that the paint, brushes and everything she would need were in the garage.

The man’s wife, hearing the conversation, said to her husband, “Does she realize that our porch goes ALL the way around the house?”

“That’s a bit cynical, isn’t it?” he responded.

The wife replied, “You’re right. I guess I’m starting to believe all those dumb blonde jokes.”

A few hours later the blonde came to the door to collect her money..

“You’re finished already??” the startled husband asked.

“Yes,” the blonde replied, “and I even had paint left over so I gave it two coats.”

Impressed, the man reached into his pocket for the £50 and handed it to her along with a £10 tip.

“Thank you,” the blonde said, “And, by the way, it’s not a Porch, it’s an Audi.”

A strange little dog appeared on the rocks at Babbacombe, near Torquay, at the weekend….

We had book club yesterday afternoon. Luckily, I had managed to read 65 pages of the 1,200 page tome so I could enter the conversation to some small degree. Surprisingly, two bookworms had actually finished the book and the rest of us  bestowed them with the admiration they deserved for such a feat of determination. Unfortunately, none of my desired Hollywood celebrity guests were able to make it to swell the numbers of our little book club.

“Why didn’t you ask Goldie Hawn along?” all the chaps asked a bit shirtily.

“Too many women already,” I answered.

They could see my point and I think they felt slightly chuffed that I was quite so territorial.

But that’s not what I wish to tell you about this evening; I really want to tell you about my funny day. I can sum it up for you with an extract from an email I sent a little earlier to our handsome book club leader. This is part of my response to his question, “What have you been up to today?”

There was a crash as two supermarket trolleys collided head on in the bakery aisle at Tesco Superstore (Newton Abbot branch) recently; the two middle-aged male drivers of the trolleys felt embarrassed at their temporary lapse of concentration as each normally prided himself on his ability to manoeuvre anything on four wheels.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said the slightly older of the two, “but I was looking for my wife.”

“That’s a coincidence,” replied the other, “I was looking for my wife too. So sorry I bumped into you like that…”

“How funny! Perhaps we can help each other. What does your wife look like?”

“Oh thanks. Well, my wife is thirty, five feet six tall, blonde and blue-eyed, slim but curvy, and she is wearing a tight low-cut pink top and very skimpy denim shorts. And she has great legs – you couldn’t miss her if you saw her. What does your wife look like?”

“Oh, no need to bother about my wife, let’s just look for your’s!”

Some people profess that they hate shopping and boast of zooming around a supermarket and doing all their weekly shopping in ten minutes flat – those people miss out on such a lot in life, as any sexy store security guard would be happy to tell you. A vocational store security guard has every reason to be passionate about his work; from his vantage point he can observe every customer entering the store, and follow them around the shop without even leaving his station. He may look as though he is doing nothing – daydreaming even – but he is very busy; he is a natural busybody. From his screen he watches, he assesses, he judges, and sometimes, he acts. And when there are no suspicious customers to pit his wits against, his eyes will still be roaming,from one camera view to another, watching you, and watching me (as I found out earlier today).

Now I rather like shopping, especially food shopping, not just because it’s nearly always lunchtime when we shop for our groceries (so I’m  famished) but also because I find supermarkets very sexy places. These days I rarely get asked out any more in supermarkets, not with Chris beside me – like me, he seems to enjoy shopping too. So why do we like shopping? Well, our favourite store, perhaps owing to cutbacks a few years ago, turned down the heating noticeably. Do we wear more clothing? Certainly not. Isn’t it cold? Yes and no; my mum puts on an extra scarf and jumper to go shopping whilst I remove  anything cumbersome. It may sound peculiar, but sometimes cold is hot (except by the frozen food cabinets where it really is frigid). I always insist on pushing the shopping trolley, hence both my hands are fully occupied as we walk along the aisles; normally we hold hands on walks, therefore, if Chris wants to connect with me in a physical way he has to put an arm around my waist. Sometimes he may have to squeeze by me to allow another customer passing room, in which instance he usually places both hands around my waist and presses closer. I feign surprise at his boldness and we laugh. We feel like we are in a secret bubble and nobody else can see us behaving like kids.

Today’s shopping expedition was no exception. We hugged, pressed against each other, pretended to be shocked, looked lovingly and smiled our way throughout the store. When we had paid at the checkout, Chris went off to locate and assist my mum with her shopping, and I walked on towards the exit. Craig, the sexy store security guard came up to me.

“Look over there, Sally,” he said, looking in the direction of a girl wearing a black leather jacket, a black mini-skirt, black tights and five-inch heels. Her legs were wonderfully long and shapely.

“My legs could look like that too,” I lied in mock indignation, “if I wore six-inch heels and lost a stone… or three.”

“I know,” he laughed, “I look at you, too, as you walk around the store.”

Craig smiled in a very knowing way and I thought of all the closeness in the aisles a little earlier when Chris and I thought no-one was looking…

This evening my brother, Robert, was awarded his twenty year Fire Service medal at a special ceremony held in the County Hall in Taunton, Somerset. We took two cars up, Rob and his family in one, and Chris, Mary (my sister), Mum and me in the other; we arrived before Rob so we had no idea who anyone was. We were ushered into a grand hall and offered drinks. There were several men wandering around in their smart uniforms with rows of medals. A particularly handsome youngish chap came up to me, held out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m Lee.”

“Hello, I’m Sally,” I said shaking his hand.

“You’re rather nice and dishy,” I thought.

He chatted with us for several minutes during which he explained, rather modestly, that his medals were for long service and not bravery, “sadly”.

We girls went to the loo and conferred immediately on the subject of the handsome man in uniform.

“He was nice,” I said, looking at Mary.

“Wasn’t he handsome?” asked Mary.

“I do so like a man in uniform,” said my mum.

Back in the hall, Robert and family soon arrived and before long we were invited into another reception room for the award ceremony. Eleven brave men and women were given their medals and certificates; Rob looked especially gorgeous in his uniform and we swelled with pride that he was our beloved brother (and son, in my Mum’s case). There were some heartfelt speeches of praise and thanks; perhaps the nicest came from the Chief Fire Officer of Devon and Somerset – Lee Howell – a handsome chap….

Lee posed in photographs with us later on. He was just as nice as he looked. Rob was a bit embarrassed that his sisters were so familiar with his big boss – but we weren’t, after all, Lee had made the introductions. Oh we do like a man in uniform!

At midnight last night I was in bed, thinking about the forty-minutes talk on art that I was due to give the next afternoon (today), when I started to worry that I might run out of things to say about “Painting in the open air” (which had been my original thought because I had a funny story based on an unfinished painting of the Australian bush that had been painted “en plein air”).

“Chris?” I asked in the darkness, hoping that Chris was not asleep yet.

“Yes?” Chris was awake now… if he wasn’t before.

“Can you think of any funny stories surrounding any of my paintings that I could talk about tomorrow?”

There was a long silence and I thought Chris had gone back to sleep, but no, he was pondering on what I had asked.

“What about the painting of Adam Trumbet’s wife? That’s a funny tale. And you still have the painting to show,” suggested Chris.

“Ah, yes, my ‘Dorian Gray’ painting! Clever you.”

“Or Doreen,” he corrected.

We laughed as we do whenever on the subject of that particular painting, always with rather a lot of irony, although it has to be said that the memory of it has got funnier, and less worrying, with the passage of time – it is seventeen years since I painted it. I went to sleep thinking about how I would present my talk.

At a quarter past two this afternoon I turned up at the Hedley Way Centre in the Dawlish Manor grounds; Chris and my dear old Mum accompanied me – they were my Sherpas (and I thought Mum might enjoy the outing). Chris carried my heavy easel, while my mother and I carried the paintings. Everyone was rather intrigued by the largest painting, which I kept covered on the easel during most of the talk. I began by saying that I had decided to be a bit different to other artist guest speakers by telling them, not about my best painting experience, but my worst! I called my talk, “The Perils of Portrait Painting”.

To give you the “Doreen Gray” story in a nutshell, a recently bereaved husband commissioned me to paint his much missed wife of thirty years, but I had never met his wife and all the photos, showing his wife through the decades, were unclear and either too distant or too blurry to be sure of ascertaining a correct likeness. He did not favour one photograph above another and left the choice up to me; likewise, he had no preference for backgrounds. I was to telephone him when I had something to show him. I painted ‘Doreen” by the sea – she was a pretty twenty-something wearing a mini-skirt. Adam came to view the oil painting at my gallery.

“It’s just like her,” he began, “except for her mouth. Can you please change her mouth? And there’s something about her chin, her chin was a bit heavier.”

Adam didn’t realise that if you change a mouth, and a chin, you may as well change everything and start again, which is exactly what I did. Thus began the gradual transmogrification of Doreen’s image, in five different settings (beach, moors, gardens, Pre-Raphaelite fantasia, plain blue, plain dark green), in five different layers of oil on the same canvas.The painting became my block, preventing me from moving on to other work, and looming over me for the two years it took to arrive at the final stage.

Adam hadn’t called during that period. I saw him around the town, walking arm-in-arm with a new lady; at last I summoned the courage… and got Chris to call him.

“I can’t face it,” he said, “it’s giving me a nervous breakdown. I’ll get get my former sister-in-law to come and look at it.”

Adam never came to see the painting of his first wife – his second wife probably didn’t want a large oil portrait of the first Mrs Trumbet above the fireplace – and “Doreen” has lived with Chris and me ever since. I pass her on the stairs every day but I rarely look at her.

Towards the end of my talk at the Hedley Way Centre this afternoon, after tantalising the audience on several occasions by making to pull back the cloth, and failing to do so; at last, following much urging, I revealed the painting. The lovely Dawlish folk cheered and were unanimous in their appreciation of Doreen’s soft face and the hint of a smile on those lips that had been painted and re-painted to perfection.

“Her eyes follow you everywhere,” said one nice man.

“She’s good-looking – isn’t she?” said a lady.

“A nice face,” agreed another.

The same nice man, who had liked Doreen’s eyes, stood up with his hands together when I had reached the end of my forty minutes or so, and thanked me. The meeting had started with the Lord’s Prayer and ended with a song of grace for the tea and biscuits we were about to partake of. I thought how sweet and charming they were – the old-fashioned quaintness was somehow refreshing.

It is only now, as I write this, that I am beginning to look at the original Mrs Trumbet (in her many layers) in a good light. Perhaps from now on I shall look up at her as I pass by on the stairs and think, “You have a nice face…”

The view outside at eight o’clock this morning was pretty well the same as it has been for some days now – grey, wet and windy. I can gauge the force of the wind by noting how much my neighbour’s honeysuckle bush gets blown about against a background of watery grey sky; every day recently, the leafless stalks have been shaking and waving wildly like the extra-long, super-thin arms of a Giacometti statue come to life and behaving dementedly; and each time I see them I think, “I must cut those horrible arms!”  These are the kind of days that make me think of how nice it would be to be back in Brisbane in the Spring.

And yet, there is something very exciting about living in our big house by the sea at this time of year because the October gales and high tides have arrived; the big waves crash against our sea defences, trying to force their way through granite and concrete, and sometimes succeed; and when the seawall has been breeched we can feel the impact through the foundations of our Victorian terrace, but while the fringes on our lamp shades shake with trepidation, we are not so timid…

Chris and I looked like ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ (except that my coat is pink) as we set out for a nice walk in the rain and gales this morning; even with my hood enveloping most of my head, and with the cord tied secured so that only a three inch diameter of my bare face was open to the elements, the rain, whipped up in the wind, still managed to sting  and my face smarted. We lowered our heads and made our way down to the railway bridge by Coastguard Cottages, where we met another couple of intrepid explorers, similarly dressed like Scott, and with the same tell-tale, wet red faces. We all laughed, as you do, and, without speaking, we were in accord that the seawall was impassable from that point – even the trains tiptoed past, hoping not to be spotted, and deluged, by the waves.

We took another route down to the beach. I was taking a few shots of the rough sea with my mobile phone camera when a man came along; he wore black jogging pants, an old brown ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ hooded coat (the genuine article, by the looks of it) and sandals. The man stood for a minute or so, looking very intently at the pounding waves, and then he took off his sandals and his coat.

“You’re not going in – are you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, taking off his tee-shirt. (He was a man of few words.)

“But aren’t you afraid?” I pointed at the sea crashing into the wall.

“I do it every day,” he said.

I supposed that meant he went swimming in the sea no matter what the weather.

“May I take a photo?” I asked.

He nodded his consent but he paid me no special attention and walked straight into the raging water. Several people came along and marvelled at the man “from Atlantis”; we  agreed, behind our hoods, that he was an excellent swimmer so we moved on.  As we were leaving, a couple of self-assured young mothers decided to take their little tots for an invigorating walk along the same seawall where the waves were of a mind to frighten the pussyfooting trains.

Everything seems to involve trains this week – ever since I started reading “Atlas Shrugged”, which has a lot (1,200 pages!) to do with railways, as you know, if you’ve been reading my blog recently.