The shit I see, it don't cease to amaze me

“Ooh I just had a bit of a turn,” Country Mouse said, with an accompanying damp crackle of disintegrating paper bags, as she joined Hoxton Mum and me in the Patisserie. Mouse likes to shop while she’s in Lewes, as the only chance to buy anything in her hamlet is when the chip van visits on Wednesdays. But she agrees with me that when it rains, as it was now, one thinks fondly of the days before we realised that plastic carriers were an evil scourge. I carry a couple of emergency placcy bags in my coat pocket, and I passed them discreetly under the table now. Mouse began decanting her purchases into them. 

“Yes,” she continued chattily, “I was looking in the shop windows at those cute photo boxes of ye olden days, when I passed the funeral parlour and saw a painting of a chap I know. Good gracious, I thought, has that poor bugger popped his clogs? Only saw him last week, Time’s Winged Chariot, etc. Texted his wife to say how awful, and she had no idea what I was on about.”

“Ah, the good old-fashioned sympathy text,” I said.

“It was just an exhibition, wasn’t it,” said Hoxton Mum. She was clearly not in the mood for Country Mouse’s wide-eyed astonishment at our Big City ways.

“Heavens to Betsy,” Mouse said, removing a blade of wheat from her hair. “I find that a baffling choice of venue, don’t you? There are plenty of nicer places to display pictures. Your café, for instance, Hoxie.”

A frisson of cold air shimmied round the table, and Hoxton Mum put down her pastry with a surprising clatter. “Um, Mouse,” I said, “the reason we’re force-feeding Hoxie French fruit tarts is that she has just been fired from the café/art gallery/twine shop at which she has slogged for the last three years.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Country Mouse, “you lived, ate and breathed twine, Hoxie.”

“ I did,” Hoxie said, returning to her pastry. “I gave it my all, frankly.”

“The new owner,” I confided to Mouse, “has brought in his mother to replace Hoxie.”

“And she knows nothing about twine,” cried Hoxie, spraying us with confectioner’s custard. “Rien! Zip! Diddly-squat!”

“Lewes is such a strange place,” Country Mouse sighed. “Alive people in funeral parlours, workhorses replaced by people’s relatives, and also why are there two identical shops next to each other up at the Nevill? I’d give my eye-teeth for just half a shop in my godforsaken parish.”

“So true,” Hoxton Mum said, feeling warmer towards Mouse now that the correct amount of compassion had been expressed. “And another thing….” she was interrupted by a loud boom of fireworks, which made her spill her flat white. “Setting off fireworks in the daylight! What’s the point of that?”

“Ah well,” Country Mouse and I said in unison, “Bonfire surpasses all understanding.”

“That’s all you’ve got?” said Hoxton Mum.

“Yep,” we said, using scraps of paper bags to mop the coffee.

Beth Miller

Want some seafood, mama

We were having one of those discussions you have at work, about where to buy fish in Lewes; obviously a matter of considerable importance. Terry’s Riverside fish stall was first on the list, but then the conversation flagged slightly, because Tescos and Waitrose are all right, but they’re not exactly Billingsgate, are they? Then I said, “Well of course there’s the fish van,” and everyone cried, “What fish van?”
“Why, the Wednesday fish van, of course,” I said, “the one that goes round all the streets.”
“Not mine, it doesn’t,” said everyone, Greek-chorus style, and as their geographical spread runs from Cliffe to Nevill, I was forced to wonder why my street seems the only one blessed by the fish fairy.
The van comes every Wednesday morning – it’s done so for years. It signals its arrival by subtle use of a klaxon that used to wake my babies from their morning naps, when I had babies who had morning naps. On hearing this noise I leap into my shoes from the third stair and run outside to buy three fillets of salmon. I’m not very experimental in the matter of fish. “Three fillets of salmon, please,” I always say, queuing with Betty from up the road, the only other person I’ve ever seen at the fish van. The friendly fishmonger opens the back of the van where the fish lie fishily on ice, and chooses a fillet. “Like this?” he says, and I always say “yes.” I don’t know what either of us would do if one day I said, “No, not like that.” I’m not going to risk it. He wraps them, charges me a small amount of money, and remarks on the weather. “Hot enough for you?” he asks, or “Getting cold, isn’t it?”
I reply appropriately, take my fish parcel, and go back indoors. Man of the House doesn’t like salmon. So I really ought to buy a different fish that he does like. But then the children probably wouldn’t like it. You see the dilemma. Wednesday evenings me and the kids have roast salmon. I’m not sure what Man has. Bran flakes, probably.
I hesitated under my colleagues’ sceptical gaze. “I’ve lived in Lewes all my life,” one said, “and I’ve never heard of a fish van.” Eventually l I started to doubt myself.
Last Wednesday, the van didn’t come. Or if it did come, I missed it. Maybe I was back too late from dropping the kids, or I’d got Neil Pringle on BBC Sussex turned up too loudly to hear the klaxon. Now I’m worried that it was the Old Curiosity Shop of fish vans, and by discussing it with outsiders I’ve made it disappear for ever. I’m missing the salmon, and the weather discussion, and Betty, and everything. I hope he was just on holiday, and it’ll all be back to normal next week. I’d like to ask if he’s considered trying any other streets in Lewes.

Beth, 20th Sept . Published in VivaLewes.com and Viva Lewes magazine, November 2012

So then I dropped it in the mailbox and sent it special D

On my way into town I bumped into Grange Girl. I began telling her about an excellent article in Tunnel and Bridge Monthly, which settled the much-disputed pronunciation of ‘Cuilfail’ once and for all. Nonetheless, Grange Girl picked holes, plunging us into a heated debate which culminated in me saying I’d already put the article aside for her, her replying she would use it for cat litter, and me pointing out that she hadn’t got a cat.

Both slightly ashamed after this outburst, we moved to discussing our Waitrose lists. I said, ‘Must remember to post a letter on the way.’

Grangey seemed strangely interested. ‘Which post box will you use?’

‘Probably the one opposite Boots. Why?’

‘Ah ha! It’s not there any more.’‘Where’s it gone?’

‘Post box heaven. You’ll have to choose another. May I recommend the fine example outside the Nutty Wizard?’

‘Grangey, have you been making a study of Lewes post boxes?’

‘My new year’s resolution is to memorise them all!’ she cried. ‘Then, wherever I am, if someone rushes up in urgent need of a post box, I can calmly direct them to the nearest.’

‘You really have lost it this time.’

‘Let’s take a tour’, she said, steering me up the hill. ‘There’s one outside Ask, and obviously the Post Office. You can’t use that, it’s too easy. Though there is that decommissioned box inside… very interesting.’

Round Lewes we trundled, my protests futile: Grangey had the light of obsessive completism in her eyes. ‘Ah yes, one by LOGS, one outside the loos, the Gallops, ooh, here’s the funny one in the wall of St Anne’s Crescent.’

‘A pigeon-pock fairy box’, I said without thinking.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Ahem. It’s what we called those flat ones when I was a kid. We, uh, thought they looked pretend, the sort of things fairies would use.’

‘Fair point, I’ve never actually seen a postman emptying one of these. They’re probably a front for something.’

We counted the impressive series of red boxes across the Nevill and Wallands: ‘Nine!’ Then down to the pigeon-pock fairy box at the bottom of Keere Street, where we found DJ Mama swearing because she was unable to post a letter into the tiny slot. We sent her to a real post box, and headed off, round Grange Road, Priory Street, the station: by the time we were back at the Cliffe I was agog at both the extent of the network and Grangey’s imaginative methods for passing the idle hour.

‘We haven’t even done Landport, Pells, or Malling’, she said happily.

‘Yes, there’s that one at Cuilfail’, I said, risking the correct pronunciation, and receiving a hard stare.

Outside WH Smith’s I finally posted my letter.

‘Who’s it to, out of interest?’ asked Grangey.

‘It’s to you, Grangey. It’s that article from Tunnel.’

‘I’m just going to mark it ‘return to sender’ when it arrives’, she said, as we walked back along the Cliffe.

‘I know’, I said.


Published in VivaLewes.com. Photo by Alex Leith