Thoughts of gnomes on St Patrick's Day

The Little People are the Irish Fairies and Leprechauns are their shoe makers. The Banshee is an Irish house fairy and the Fairy Maid of Ireland, also known as the Will-o-the-Wisp or Jack-O-Lantern is a spirit of the bogs and marshes who leads astray travellers.

It is, ofcourse, the goblins, also known as hob-goblins or boggarts in Scotland, you have to watch out for who live in private houses and the chinks of trees. Elves, fairies of diminutive size and not to be confused with pigwidgeons who are very tiny fairies, like all faeries, are fond of practical jokes and should not be confused with gnomes who are guardians of mines and quarries.

A puck, not to be mistaken for a Devonshire pixie, is a merry little fairy spirit, full of fun and harmless mischief, also known as Robin Goodfellow and should never be confused with an imp, who is a little demon and spirit of mischief, or a hamadryad, who is a wood nymph. Each wood nymph lives in their own tree and dies when the tree dies.

Where on earth would we be on St Patrick's without the marvellous Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by E. Cobham Brewer? A wise man who can be relied upon to illuminate our ignorance about the inhabitant of Fairy Land.

Personally, I feel you can always rely on gnomes. They believe in love and laughter, abhor violence and believe that Man can live in harmony with nature and that wars should be lost deep in the pages of history.

Many people, when asked about gnomes, think of them as garden mascots guarding rockeries and ponds. But there is a higher explanation for Man's fascination with gnomes throughout the ages.

The word gnome is derived from the Greek verb meaning to know and this is why gnomes have always been thought of as small people with great knowledge and magical powers.

I was introduced to a community of them by my dear friend Colin Stone and, as far as I know, they still lives beneath Dragonlair Hill in the Middle Lands of England.

Gombolo, their king, Nostragnomas, Paradoc, Curlygrow, Nippergnome, Gastrognomus and Ludwig Von Metrognome. It was always Colin's wish before he died that the stories he and I wrote about them would be told to children all over the world.

But I keep the stories safe knowing that they will one day be found and shared.

As we gather at dusk with friends to celebrate St Patrick's, I shall raise a glass of Black Velvet to the waxing moon and think fondly of Colin, of the fairy blacksmiths, Nostragnomas's library where the squirrels scurry among the shelves fetching and replacing his books and of the range fire blazing merrily in Gastognomas's grotto.

But I shall keep an eye out for the goblins. You just never know what they might get up to.

A Heratic's Help

Seeing the recent publicity about the brilliant polemicist and former Cambridge biochemistry don Rupert Sheldrake, took me back to 1982 when I was a trainee reporter with the Nottingham Evening Post.

It was a year after Sheldrake had found himself exiled by the scientific academic world and branded a heretic following the publication of his first book A New Science of Life and a journalist friend of mine had mentioned a murder case to him which I had been covering.

On 23 September in 1982, Pamela Savory, a teacher and mum of three children, aged eight, ten and 12, disappeared from her cottage in Halam, Nottinghamshire.

A week later, after her husband Ralph, an oil refinery engineer who worked in Libya, had been interviewed by the police and released on bail without being charged, I went to the cottage in the hope he would agree to be interviewed.

At first, he claimed to be busy and when his youngest daughter Rebecca took me by the hand and walked me into their cottage orchard to show me a bucket of apples she had been collecting, he smiled and asked me how many sugars I took in my tea.

Back in the cottage, Ralph spoke of his love for his wife and told me to take no notice of village gossip about the relationship Pamela was supposed to have had with a local man.

“She’ll be back,” he assured me. “She might leave me but she would never leave the children.”

When I told him that some of the villagers had told me he might have believed the rumours and been jealous – a motive for murder that Nottinghamshire police already had in mind – Ralph smiled and said “I wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Did you kill Pam?” I asked him.

Ralph smiled at me again. “Do I look like a murderer?” he asked. “And would you honestly be sitting here alone with me if you thought I was capable of killing someone.”

I took Ralph’s photograph, the only photograph that he allowed, and one that appeared in my paper and was syndicated, along with his only interview.

But as I left, I instinctively knew that Ralph Savory knew more about his beautiful wife’s disappearance than he was prepared to say. For obvious reasons.

In the weeks after meeting Ralph when he had travelled back to Tripoli, I dreamt about him. It was a recurring dream in which I would pad down the stairs of my own Nottinghamshire cottage to answer a phone call from him.

In the dream, he told me he had killed Pam and wanted me to tell the police where to find her body. But I would never be able to find a pen to write down the instructions and the phone would be dead by the time I had raced to find one.

This dream haunted me to the degree when I would leave a pen and notebook by my phone but each time, I awoke in the dream to take Ralph’s call, the pen and pad would be missing. The line would go dead.

Two months later, while Ralph was still in Tripoli, 34-year-old Pamela’s body was found in a shallow grave in Nottingham Forest. She had been strangled with her own tights.

My photograph appeared for a second time alongside another article about the police preparing to travel to Libya to bring Ralph back to the UK on suspicion of his wife’s murder.

But Ralph had other plans. He was found hanged in his room near the oil refinery where he worked. A final declaration of guilt without having to face the certain consequences of a life sentence.

The police closed the case and I never had the dream again but the notion that I could have told the police about Pam haunted me to such distraction that my journalist friend decided I had to meet Rupert Sheldrake.

He was interested enough to travel to Nottinghamshire and listen to my story. And yes, he agreed, it was possible that my involvement with the case was enough to incite my dream scenario. Not because I was mad but because I knew I had interviewed a killer.

Because I had befriended Pam’s youngest daughter and desperately wanted her to be reunited with her mum.

 Sheldrake is a master who seeks out and studies phenomena that "conventional, materialist science" cannot explain.

He helped me by listening to my irrational story and helped me to lay the ghosts of Ralph and Pamela Savory to rest.

In an interview with the Guardian, Sheldrake said “I've always thought death would be like dreaming but without the possibility of waking up. And in those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will."

Pretty perceptive.

Funny Valentine

Another fabulous St Valentine’s evening at Stepple thanks to Bunny and Colonel Mustard’s famous couples supper.

Gaylord looked splendid in his Barney Rubble costume although lost one of his latex bare feet in the ha ha as we were leaving.

I'd had second thoughts about the leopard-print balcony bra but it was my back-combed spray-dyed black hair that caused most mirth.

"What a ghastly wig," Minnie Mouse announced when she saw me. This, I felt, was rich coming from an inebriated 15 stone woman in an over-stuffed red and white spotted skirt who looked like a pregnant hamster.

"I'm not wearing a wig," I told her, briskly.

"Good grief!" she continued. "I never realised you had so much hair."

I was on a roll then. "Yes, you and I are lucky in the luxuriant hair growth department, aren't we?" I said.

 "Oh, no," she said, poking pudgy white-gloved fingers into her fringe. "My hair's really thin."

"Actually, I was looking at your whiskers, " I said and shot off to recharge my glass before she could answer.

Bunny and Col M are far too young and exciting to imitate Charles and Camilla but this evening, side by side in the vestibule wearing county attire, pearls and a pinky ring, they were perfect royal doppelgangers.

It was harder to find anything remotely recognisable about Bonny’s Clyde (one really shouldn’t attempt to do Warren Beatty with a treble chin) and dear old Ginger, whose wig took on a life of its own after her fourth glass of wine, was badly let down by her Fred Astaire.

But sitting round the kitchen table reminiscing; the weddings, the births of our beautiful children, the tears, laughter, ups and downs, the love shared between all of us as couples was plain to see. The fire of a million cherished memories burns brightly within us all.

We moan, bicker, berate and bluster, nit-pick and nag and, all too often, forget how blessed we are to have found each other.  We side-step emotions, refuse to compromise and, sometimes, dwell on the past and who we were instead of celebrating the alchemy of love and who we are.

Love is selfish. It touches us all in so many unfathomable, scary and surprising ways. It breaks us, completes and confuses, delights and deserts us.

It’s part of the journey which many of us find is far more exciting and satisfying than the destination.

And even if it is easier to wait for and welcome in than it is to let go, none of us should ever forget it.

Some years ago, a dear friend and one of the sweetest women on God’s green earth, was watching her new husband chatting to guests at their wedding.

Eccentric in two-toned stack heels and an ill-fitting tail coat, he could easily have been mistaken for one of those card -shuffling magicians who have, nowadays, become so mystifyingly fashionable at mile-stone celebrations.

The elephant in the candy-striped marquee that bright August afternoon that all of us recognised but refused to speak of was, of course, how this funny little man could have wooed and won such a stunning, warm and witty woman

But I remember he looked across at her, just for a moment, held her gaze and smiled.

“He’s a sanctuary for my battered heart,” my friend told me.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

  

Bless This House

Two visitors this week. My cousin The Priest and Merriment, one of The Actress’s Labs, who took up residence in Sister P's basket while her mistress was back on set at Claridges in the corset.

The Priest is an easy house guest.

Armed with a copy of the Daily Mail, a plate of Stinking Bishop, celery, a packet of Bath Olivers and a bottle of Merlot, he sinks into the sofa with the dogs and channel surfs between Frost on ITV4 and replay matches of his beloved West Ham.

He and the Labs have so much in common. Dog collars, a tendency to snore in front of the fire and a voracious appetite.

The last time he came, he blessed a friend’s car and a neighbour’s rabbit before it underwent a routine teeth-filing procedure,  slightly disconcerting when our cousin in the Canadian outback reminded me how the within a year of him blessing her log cabin, it caught fire.

But then I reminded her of the time he gave the Last Rites to one his parishioners and a week later, she turned up at mass to thank him.

Candlemas Day

‘If Candlemas day be fair and bright,

Winter will have another fight,

If Candlemas Day brings cold and rain,

Winter won’t come again’.

I return to the blogosphere on Candlemas Day. The ancient festival marking the winter midpoint – halfway between the shortest day and the spring equinox.

Montmorency and Sister P continue to hog the rug in front of the log burner and can’t even be persuaded to go out and stand guard over the mole hills.

The rats have long gone but the moles have taken up residence. The muntjac, meanwhile, have eaten all the snowdrops.

It has been a jolly January though. Ski-ing in Zell with Mother Superior and the Von Trappes, a rousing Twelfth Night Supper at Stepple Hall, a flying visit from Mad Aunt Sue and, last night, a candlelit winefest with the slummy mummies.

The Actress has been away for the season, in rehearsals for a period drama in which she will appear as a dowager duchess. Despite being as thin as a besom, she has vowed never again to suffer the confines of a corset.

“It was hellish,”she muttered, dipping her eggy bread into her Guinness. “The war paint, the wig and the blasted whalebone. Never again.

“The director said I reminded him of Maggie Smith with tits,”

Star of Wonder

This evening, at the nativity at St Cassian’s, we were reminded of a modern day twist to the tale of travellers following yonder star.

Unlike the kings and shepherds who left gifts of gold, frankincence and myrrh, those who climbed up onto the nave over the St Nicolas chapel a few weeks ago took the lead and left under cover of darkness.

So as we watched our own dazzling village stars process solemnly around the pews with their flickering lanterns, it was good to know that the retiring collection will boost the lead replacement fund.

Even more uplifting than the voices of the assembled choir and angels, was the wondrous sight of Ken the donkey leading Mary and Joseph down the central aisle.

He may have relieved himself, I hesitate to use the word discreetly, at last night’s production but tonight, unlike those who stole the led, Ken simply stole the show.

A Very Special Legacy

Tonight, as the wind rattles round the chimney pots at Toad’s Mouth, my thoughts are with the family of a fallen soldier and the dog who became his best friend.

Conrad Lewis was on his first tour of duty with the 4^th Battalion The Parachute Regiment in February when he was killed by a sniper in Helmand province.

His extraordinary relationship with Peg, a three year old mongrel, began four months earlier when Conrad had been deployed to Afghanistan with the Fire Support Group attached to A Company, 3 PARA.

In one of his first letters home, he wrote “I’ve got a dog” and described how Peg, who he had named after Pegasus, the winged horse on his regiment’s emblem, went out on patrol with his unit.

Conrad was the lead scout for his section, based at a front line checkpoint from where his unit patrolled to reassure the local population and gather census intelligence.

For Conrad’s mum and dad Tony and Sandi, it was, they told me, a source of comfort to feel their son had a four-legged guardian angel. So when he came home on leave last Christmas and said he planned to bring Peg home at the end of his tour, they were just as determined as he was to make it happen.

When Conrad was killed, friends at his funeral said Peg was still living with the unit in Afghanistan and the international animal charity Nowzad might help to bring her to the UK.

Nowzad was founded by former Marine Pen Farthing to care for stray and abandoned dogs, cats and donkeys in Afghanistan and Iraq and did, indeed, smuggle Peg to safety.

Tonight, after a year in one of Nowzad’s quarantine kennels where the Lewis family have been visiting her, she is beginning a new life with them.

“Like everyone in our family, Conrad was a big dog lover,” Tony Lewis told me. “He thought the world of our bulldog Fergie and had a natural affinity with animals.

“Peg is our link with him and the job that he did. And knowing how much he loved her and had wanted to bring her home, we wanted to complete the task.”

I