It's who you know

London. Tuesday 14th. Not a good day. I struggled to open the door of my flat in London. There was a huge pile of post inside the door - unmissable offers, bank statements, dross. And a letter from LRI. I still can't quite believe it. blah blah blah "regret to inform you, you have been suspended on full pay pending investigation of serious allegations of misconduct on your part ...". I sat down on the sofa and read the letter again and again. No hint as to who making the allegations or the nature. No invitation to respond, no suggestion that I had a right to know what the allegations are.

I made a cup of coffee and reviewed potential courses of action. Then I picked up the phone and called LRI's HR department. The letter was signed by the deputy head of HR, but I don't deal with second liners. I asked to speak to the head, a woman I can't stand. She is the kind of person who gives business women a bad name. Vain, aggressive, duplicitous. She congratulates herself that she is playing in the deep pool with the big fish and is too thick to realise that they regard her as their disposable instrument, not their equal. That day she was 'not available' according to her sidekick who volunteered her assistance.

"Tell Sheila that she needs to speak to me now. I'll hold."

"That's not possible, she's in a meeting."

"She'll want to take this call, because if she doesn't, she'll be answering calls from my solicitor and the national newspapers ... not necessarily in that order."

"oh," there was a flustered pause,

"I'll see if I can interrupt her."

When Sheila came on the phone she attempted to take aggressive control of the phone call. I waited until she had run out of words and then, ignoring all that she had already said, asked "What are these allegations, and who made them?"

She tried to evade answering so I just kept repeating the same question until she offered "I think you'd better come into the office and we can discuss this." I smiled.

"I don't think so. This is a matter that requires legal support and witnesses. So we'll meet at my solicitors and you can bring with you all the background to this nonsense, if there is any. You'd better be prepared to name names. I'll ring back with an appointment time." I put the phone down and had a long hard think.

I didn't know any employment law specialists but I do know a man who knows everyone. Mac's a director of a City PR agency and an inexhaustible source of scurrilous (but true) gossip, essential names and very, very hardnosed advice. On an off-the-record basis I traded my knowledge of an unnamed insurance company lurking in the living dead zone, for the name of the top man in unlawful dismissal cases and ten minutes later was talking to my new solicitor, James. And so it was that James and I found ourselves facing Sheila and LRI's in-house solicitor that afternoon. I was glad to see it was the head of the legal department, not an insultingly junior colleague.

James began proceedings by reminding them that I was on sick leave, suffering from stress and suggested their letter amounted to harassment as there was no foundation to it. He's a bit of a stirrer. I really like that in a lawyer. I sat still looking thin and fragile (head swathed in a scarf to hide new hair and blue makeup shadows artfully brushed around my eyes) and said little, as directed by James.

By the end of an unnerving hour, it transpired that the allegations of misconduct had been made against me by a person who was himself the subject of a very high level external investigation, the substance of which could not be revealed to us. I can only hope that person is Vijay but it was clear that both Sheila and the LRI lawyer were completely out of their depth and were not party to that investigation.

It is also clear that no-one wants me back on LRI's premises until the big investigation is concluded and one or more people have been fired/thrown to the wolves/given a huge pay off/promoted or all of the above (cf Fred the Shred). And they want me gagged. I could see that James was having a "Gotcha, you bastards!" moment and thoroughly enjoying this as he launched into the attack. In fact, I was quite worried he would succeed in forcing them to take me back, just when I was looking forward to my leisurely summer under the flysheet. Then I realised that he'd expertly backed them into a corner from which the only way out was a graceful compromise that he proposed. They seized it with both snouts! The letter of suspension is to be formally withdrawn, with an apology; and I am to be granted a six month sabbatical (on full pay including bonus) whilst the other investigation proceeds. Result!

Champagne all round! After long hot baths, intensive clothes washing and general household chores, I shall be returning to my gorse field to try and second guess what is happening at LRI now. At least I don't have to skulk about in hiding from the media since if there are any leaks from the investigation, my name is unlikely to be in the forefront. Of course, if I wish to continue enjoying camping in the woods, I will still have to evade Farmer Giles, Larry the Lumberjack and Simon the Shepherd...  

Primrose wine

A recipe for Primrose Wine has pinged into the mailbox from an anonymous supporter. Thanks!

Primroses are a protected plant so I've been looking for a source of domesticated ones that I can pick with a clear conscience. More about that later. However, dandelions have suddenly burst out yellow all over and they certainly do not deserve or need protection from anyone. We used to make dandelion wine and it is certainly an effective way to get drunk. We were inspired by a strange pre-war children's book that Sky found in a box of junk. Some adventures involving children running feral and reliving the Persian legend of Sohrab and Rustum. They made dandelion wine but in retrospect I think it was more like beer.

Sunday was a long lovely day of sunshine here but we have been plagued by rain since. On the one hand, no water carrying - the flysheet captures enough. On the other hand, the ground is getting muddy again and everything in the tent is subtly damp. Damp hair, damp dog, damp bedding. I don't want to be disloyal about Stalky when he's not here to defend himself (sleeping off another rabbit I caught in a snare since apparently he doesn't 'do hunting' in the rain but lies in bed with a metaphorical crossword and cup of tea), but he does have a certain aroma in high humidity. He pokes his long nose cautiously out of the tent, collects a spot or two of rain on his nose, sighs philosophically and turns his back on the day.

I've been to the local library and used the computer there as the batteries aren't charging in the rain. A PC. How do people manage to run businesses on Microdaft? The demned thing kept crashing and faltering. Or maybe my fingers were shaking with shock - I've been spotted, electronically speaking, by a cousin. Well what the hell was she doing on that website? I thought she was married and in Australia, but clearly not!

Easter approaches. There are real easter eggs here or at least fragments of shells from all the noisily nesting birds - blackbird's egg like an improbably turquoise piece of sky. And there were rare Clouded Yellow butterflies before it started raining. 

A good deed is never lost. He who sows courtesy, reaps friendship

One of the benefits and drawbacks of home education is the acquisition of huge amounts of knowledge quite outside the Government's definition of education. Apposite quotes? Don't get me started! Lesser works of unfashionable Victorian writers? Reddit!

Anyway, last night's good deed did reap a reward. After I had cooked, consumed and cleaned up supper, and offered the dog some water in the billy can, I retreated to the comfort of the sleeping bag and Thermarest (plenty of product placement in this blog! Perhaps I should get sponsored by a camping equipment shop?), leaving my dinner guest outside. I suppose I hoped he'd push off in the night. The remains of the rabbit were suspended in a nearby silver birch, above the level of interest of the local foxes. I read for a bit, trying to ignore the odd scratch and reproachful whine outside the tent and presently fell into the usual dreamless sleep of the clear conscience and the psychopath.

In the morning I rather hoped for a steaming cup of tea, freshly brewed by Stalky, if he was still hanging around. No such luck. Another beautiful morning and an empty clearing. Entirely dog free.

However, by the time I had brewed some tea, eaten a bagel inadequately warmed by balancing on top of the kettle thingy, washed in the remaining water supplemented by baby wipes, collected up the rubbish and decided to go for a walk, it was 7.15 am and Stalky had shimmied back into the clearing, too late to bear a cup of tea. Soundless, he took up position beside me, looking up expectantly.

I didn't have a clear idea where to go - thinking that it would be sensible to get an idea of the topography, but Stalky seemed to be subtly leading me his way, deeper into a deciduous forest, interspersed with holly thickets. He trotted soundless by my side, his ears relaxed, head down, seemingly uninterested by his surroundings.

Then, with a rustle, he had vanished between the bushes. For a moment or two, I waited on the path but there were no sounds of dog pursuing prey and eventually I walked on, to be startled when he suddenly rejoined me from a bramble thicket, dragging a limp pheasant with him. The corpse he dropped at my feet and then stepped back. I picked the dead bird up; there wasn't a mark on it's warm body. Payback for last night's meal? He shrugged and trotted off back the way we'd come.

Needless to say, that afternoon found me at the nearest Pets@Home, stocking up on flea treatment, wormer, tick tweezers (2 pairs - his n'hers) and some doggy treats; and that night found a heavily medicated and much cleaner dog on the inside of the flysheet and the outside of the remaining rabbit. The upside for me was warm feet.

The poacher's companion

On Friday I moved to exclusive new premises; desirable; detached and strictly single occupancy. Well that was the plan.

A cheerful bus driver dropped me off at a crossroads a couple of miles from my gorse field as the light was fading on Friday afternoon. It was that time of the evening when the deer emerge from their daytime cover to the edges of fields and rabbits flash their white scuts. The birds are closing down but two owls were hooting mournful, wavering notes to each other. The pack was heavy with water, a couple of bottles of wine and food and I wasn't paying much attention to the road when a shiny black four wheel drive rocketed past. In it's wake it left the the tumbled body of a careless rabbit.

It was a decent size - young enough to be tender, big enough for a couple of substantial meals and I didn't waver long over the concept of a roadkill meal. I picked up the warm body and blood dripped onto my boots and jeans. Not clever; it's not like I have an inexhaustible supply of clean clothes. After some consideration, I found the big penknife in a pocket of the pack and scrambled off the road to clean the beast on a handy tree stump. Skinned, paunched and jointed it was quite pile of meat and luckily I had a clean plastic bag to carry it in.

When I emerged from the gorse tunnel, dusk had settled on the clearing and the tent was in shadow. But something seemed wrong. The solar charger was still hanging on the tent side, but the tent doorway was unzipped, and I distinctly remembered zipping it up. I bent to look inside and my eyes met an unfriendly gaze in the shadowy space. Lounging on my sleeping bag, was a motionless dog. Shreds of coloured paper indicated it had found my teatime biscuits. The dog and I looked at each other. When I inched closer it raised a lip in a grimace revealing very long, very white teeth.

I backed off to consider things and realised I had a solution in my hand. Removing a piece of rabbit from the bag I tentatively waved it in the mouth of the tent and was rewarded by a scuffle. With lightening speed the meat was seized from my hand by the passing dog which retreated to the far side of the clearing to consume its prize. Out of the gloom of the tent interior, I could see more detail. It was a small greyhound or lurcher type, long-nosed, long-legged, painfully thin.

Its blue-grey coat, the exact colour of the cats we had had in the barns at one of our many homes, was dusty and scarred, but there was a shabby elegance about the animal. He had the air of a gentleman fallen on hard times. The rabbit piece was soon consumed, bones and all and the dog showed no signs of leaving. in fact he was gazing at me expectantly, his long, slightly crooked tail waving very slowly in an ingratiating manner. I prepared to throw him another piece of my supper but he came softly towards me and took it from my hand as gently as a feather falling on water. After the second piece he seemed satisfied and lay down in that peculiarly gazehound fashion, front paws extended neatly forwards, hind legs tucked beneath body, long nose resting on fore arms.

With his steady gaze on me, and a glass of wine ito hand, I lit the gas stove and cooked the rabbit with onions, wine, courgettes and baby potatoes. It was delicious and for the first time I began to believe that this strange experience could be enriching and fun rather than a bizarre ordeal.

Deep in the furze

Up betimes, and out of the door by six of the clock. Or, more accurately, out of the tent flap. Packed and left the conifers without breakfast. It was a long hard slog over to the gorse field with so much to carry. Definitely more weight in the packs since I arrived but probably less on my body.

It was a still and silent morning, a thin mist softening the landscape like a watercolour wash. A pheasant erupted from almost beneath my feet with loud carks of alarm and the drumming of woodpeckers accompanied me for the first mile through the woods. A long hard pull up to an escarpment edge and then two counties were laid out before me, as indistinct and imaginary as an ancient map. 

The gorse field is separated from the woods by a rusty barbed wire fence whose untensioned strands hang from rotting posts. Hardly a barrier for determined livestock but awkward to negotiate. Lowering the packs over the fence, I wriggled underneath it and then surveyed what appears to be an impenetrable barrier of spiny, prickly gorse. At my feet a very faint track led through last years dead bracken between some trees and vanishes from sight. When I followed the track delicately, a small fox-sized and fox-scented opening appeared in the vegetation. Like Beetle,  pursued by Stalky, I wormed my way into the gorse, through a fairish tunnel that after a few twists and turns, opened out into quite a large grassy clearing. Perfect.

With the maturing day, the clearing is a warm and sunny spot and there is enough room for the tent, a fireplace sunk in the turf and to loll around with a book, undisturbed by gamekeepers. However, rations were low and  so the afternoon was devoted to a trip into town and a search for internet access.

Up sticks....

Blimey! Riots in the City! The Queen patting Michelle Obama's bum! The Stock Market up! What am I missing?? Well, clearly not a recovery in world stockmarkets - that's not going to last.

Turned on my mobile phone this am. Still nothing from LRI. Very suspicious. Had a quick browse for news and salacious rumours on the usual websites and ... nothing. The quarter end has come and gone; whatever happened to 'mark to market'?

On to more important things. Oh yuck, I'm going to have to move camp or go to the vet. Found a tick this morning, on me. Worse than that, full of me, well my blood anyway. A big swollen chestnut body with little twitching black legs at the business end. I had to pull it off with my eyebrow tweezers and that jolly well hurt. Hope it's not left its nasty little mouth parts behind as it was in a pretty sensitive location. The woods are full of deer and the deer are full of ticks ... and the ticks carry Lyme Disease. Can I use Advantage (from the vet - to deter dog fleas and ticks) on myself?

Actually, Mrs Tick's drop in has just reinforced the feeling that it is time to move on. A distinct path is being created to my camp by my comings and goings and the clearing is awfully gloomy. My solar charger is not really doing the business in this claustrophobic spot and I never really did like conifers. Did I mention the solar charger? Fabulous thing, got it from the States. It's a flexible array of solar cells that folds up to the footprint of a sheet of A4. Pitch the tent east-west, spread the solar charger on the south side and plug in the laptop. 

I've found a new spot - a derelict field being reforested by massive gorse bushes and scrubby little silver birches. There are little paths and sunny grassy clearings kept mown by the rabbits. It smelt of coconut oil in the warmth of the sunshine. I have one fear - I think it's private land, rather than Forestry Commission or National Trust, so I've no right to roam and may be surprised by Farmer Giles, out with his gun for a bunny or two. At least on public land the workforce is only active in normal working hours and there are usually signs up warning where they are felling trees. The muscled young treefellers (should that be treefellas?) who whistled at me yesterday probably wouldn't report me if they found my camp, but they might turn up for late night drinks without an invitation.

Anyway, I'm going to risk it. It's rather a hike from here but I'd like to get moved before the weekend when this woodland becomes quite busy. The other lure is a water tap on the back of a farm building quite nearby.

Growing up with the Fey

Yesterday I finally turned into the girl my mothers wanted me to be. After the haircut and the swimming pool session, I was rather shaken and retreated to a Costa coffee shop to regroup and test my new appearance on strangers. She's rather striking this girl and maybe attracts a little too much attention.

Demonstrations in the City, more Building Society woes... why isn't anyone talking about the insurance companies? Or is the truth being suppressed because the insurers represent the last stones still apparently standing in the collapsing building of our global financial systems. Whilst I'm in town I take advantage of the mobile phone coverage to listen to my voice messages. Quite a few. Friends asking where I am. It hurts to listen to people I care about, who yet I do not trust with the truth of my situation. Or do not want to involve. If they have not heard from me they can truthful. Nothing from my family - well, no change there. I suspect that some of my siblings are enjoying the huge party that is the G20 demonstrations.  The rest? Well, they live in their own worlds, which only tangentially touch ours.

Did I mention that I have eight siblings? There's us seven sisters which is rather a special number, and then the identical twins - the boys. I use the words siblings and sisters loosely because it is not at all clear how we relate to each other. 

My mothers were 1960s hippy chicks who have never moved on. Willow and Sky. They look extraordinarily alike - they could be sisters, but I don't think they are. Between them they have raised 9 children but none of us kids are sure which, if indeed either, of them is our biological mother. The space on my birth certificate for Mother reads Catherine, which I share with all my siblings but neither Willow nor Sky will answer to Catherine. There's no father implicated on our birth certificates though there have been men trailing through our complicated caravan of life who have been pointed out to one or other of us as 'father'. 

Willow and Sky dragged us through a childhood of fantastical invention. We lived on isolated farms by the goodwill of the farmer or on rented fields and waste ground, at constant battle with planners, social workers and the suspicious. Oft times we were described as gipsies or tinkers yet Willow and Sky both speak with educated and upper class accents and instilled in us formal manners and behaviours worthy of a finishing school. Indeed, that's probably where they met. We seem to have no genetic grandparents, uncles or aunts and yet our early years were filled with eccentric individuals casually introduced as relatives with a vagueness that forestalled further enquiry.

The Willow and Sky menage must have been frustrating for the social workers to deal with. The girls may have cultivated an aura of otherworldliness but they were formidable opponents to those whose tidy-mindedness would had had us placed under permanent roofs - whether home or school.

Willow has a comprehensive grasp of the benefits and legal system and we have never been obviously short of money, not that she and Sky find much to spend it on apart from mysterious packages of seeds that arrive by mail order and are planted with the waxing moon, or occasionally and more sinisterly, on moonless nights. Sky was and is an inveterate attender of auctions and farm clearance sales. Sometimes we were pressed into going with her to carry home the results of her meticulous bidding. Bantams in a box, a frame for making hazel hurdles, old horse harness, pretty old crockery and small household items which Willow often sold on at a profit to local antiques shops.

Willow is the commercial one; she has a website now selling the herbal cures she makes and a range of benignly occult products - the kind of things that are artlessly attractive rather than threatening, such as the Witch Ball that Sky found at the clearing sale of a remote Northumberland farm. It's a beautiful object, a mirrored sphere of the soft, blotched silver of ancient looking glass. It's hard to imagine what technology made it - it's clearly very old. It looks as fragile as a blown bubble but my brother Adam dropped it once and instead of shattering into minute shards of glass, it rolled slowly back to Sky's feet and she hung it up out of reach above the doorway. Those were the horse-drawn caravan days before my younger siblings arrived.

As children we were evidently well-fed and cared for. Our clothes were no more scruffy than the average active country-living child; we had footwear appropriate to our environment; our mothers were punctual attenders at the local GP surgery for our vaccinations. We did not suffer lice or rickets and our injuries were largely of the 'fell out of a tree' variety.

The authorities would dearly have loved to get us all into school. Periodically Willow would come back from town, where she had a PO Box for our mail, brandishing another letter requiring an inspection by the local education authority. This usually resulted in a trip into the local town's library where we would be lined up with our exercise books to demonstrate our grasp of maths or natural sciences. For us maths came in the guise of astro-navigation taught by Willow who'd sailed round the world on a Tall Ship; and natural sciences was a rather loose term for what Sky taught us about horticulture, botany and wild animals. Now my siblings are scattered to the winds, armed with these curious skills. Oenone makes award winning wild life documentaries, her skill at observing the intimate lives of shy animals honed by our mosquito-ridden badger watchings. Mithuna is the most obviously whacky. She's a fashionable astrologer and sooth sayer though she admits to me that most of what she 'predicts' to her rich and restless clientele is reassuring nonsense. Her sight does not penetrate the brittle shells of self-regard and self-obsession enrobing her most famous celebrity clients. Phoebe is the Head Gardener at a glorious National Trust property whose gardens are rightly famous.

After years of scepticism, I now accept that Willow and Sky are a pair of modestly successful white witches, who have enthusiastically embraced those aspects of modern life which make their lives more fun and (by their own standards only), effective. For example, Willow has a mobile phone for conducting her business. But regardless of her telephonic availability, just as many people turn up as expected or unforeseen to buy or trade with her as did in her telephone-free past when she relied solely on a sense of an imminent visit. 

I'd like to know who I am. Does my upbringing direct my destiny?