Lucy never ages, my aunt says

But I haven't seen her neck, she adds

I typed ‘turkey neck’ into the picture search and here’s what came up. Photo by Deniz Demirci on Unsplash

Hello! Thank you for being here. I hope the first week of January has been passable for you - or good, even.

If you’re in the UK, you’ve probably had a bit of a deluge of rain so far - so roll on some colder, drier, sunnier weather in the coming week.

People have been asking what happened to my mum’s favourite Aldi boot after she got stuck in clay up to her knees over Christmas.

All will be revealed, but first: resolutions.

I’m doing dry January, after a damper December than I would have liked. I managed one drink at my first work-related Christmas party, four drinks at the second and three at the third, which for me is a lot, and then I got quite pissed on Christmas day and new year’s eve.

I haven’t attempted dry January before, but despite December’s form, I am not a big drinker because I get a hangover after one drink (I wrote about my usual ‘semi-sober’ strategy for Delish magazine here), so I’m not expecting it to be too difficult. We shall see.

He was sitting around like a piece of fried bread

My other sort-of resolution is to use the Pomodoro Technique of time management, where you do 25 minutes of uninterrupted work, then have a five-minute break, and repeat three times before a slightly longer break. Pomodoro is Italian for tomato, and if you’ve ever seen a timer shaped like a tomato in someone’s kitchen, now you know why.

I’m hoping the method will be useful for the days when I don’t have a deadline and have my own ‘free’ time to pitch or write. If you have other anti-procrastination tips, let me know.

Anyway, back to the boot. Sadly, it is gone to the Cotswolds countryside forever as we decided not to make a rescue attempt, which would probably have involved me sliding sideways into said clay with a shovel and getting stuck there myself.

After Ma got stuck in the mud, we hobbled to her friend Kevin’s, who gave us a lift back to the cottage we were staying in, Ma’s legs in tied-up bin bags to protect his car.

We thanked him, Ma took her sock and the remaining boot off, put on some shoes and we met my aunt at a nearby café, where she and my uncle were perusing the menu.

“Can you get me some sugar?” my aunt asked. “They have two each,” Ma said, so I went to the counter and got four sachets.

“Not that stupid stuff,” my aunt said when she saw the packets. Instead, she took a jar of sugar from the table and put it in her pocket. “This’ll do.”

Apparently, as I was away from the table, my aunt tells my mother that she thinks I never age, then adds: “But I haven’t seen her neck.”

This is rather Text Lucy, don’t you think? (Text Lucy is my sharp-tongued alter ego, and you can read about her here. Also, sorry if you thought this post might be about ageing. It’s not, but I’m going to write that one soon.)

I quite liked my aunt’s bluntness and it made me realise that this Text Lucy streak runs in the family. (I also returned the jar of sugar once my aunt had taken what she needed.)

My grandmother used to have a few choice words and phrases too and would often tell me: “Go around the orchard but don’t pick a crab apple,” or say: “He was sitting around like a piece of fried bread,” when criticising some kind of incompetence.

(I’ve dated both crab apples and pieces of fried bread, so I’m looking forward to a blossoming orchard this spring.)

Grandma would also tell us the tale of how my grandfather wooed her.

“It’s got a radio, you know,” were the words Grandpa used to persuade Grandma to accept a lift home in his car after they’d met for the first time at a charity dance in Oxford Town Hall on 6 December 1940.

A few months before the dance, my grandmother, Jean, had reported to her parents that she had been spending some of her free time standing on the roof of the Berkeley Hotel in Mayfair, London, where she worked as a housekeeper.

This wasn’t because she was on a cigarette break or that she liked the view over the city’s rooftops - it was to look at the bombs that were being dropped on London during World War II.

Naturally, her parents told her to come home to Oxford immediately, and her mother persuaded her to go to the dance to meet new people. My grandmother was nervous as she would be going alone, but she loved dancing and hoped to meet a man who did too.

Sitting at a table on the edge of the hall, my grandfather Roy, a farmer, approached and asked her to dance. “He had two left feet,” Grandma used to say, but she accepted the lift home, and he took her phone number.

Grandma told me she liked him partly because he wasn’t “part of the wandering hands brigade,” and they were married just over a year later.

Grandma died in 2016 when she was ninety-nine and three-quarters. Everyone but her wanted her to live to 100, but while she liked the Queen and would have enjoyed her correspondence, she wasn’t bothered about ticking the 100 box for other people.

I think she would be amused to know that my mother’s boot is buried in the field that backs on to the cemetery, and I like to imagine my grandparents having a chuckle somewhere about this.

Ma has decided that her regular wellies will do for future adventures, as the middle aisle at Aldi now only appears to sell footwear in the form of furry slippers.

She has thrown away the remaining boot and chucked both muddy socks into a lit fire at the cottage.

As you do.