Shipston

BBC Radio 4, and it's 'Woman's Hour,' this morning featuring the teenage popstar-goddaughter of singer Amy Winehouse, whose name rings the dimmest of bells, who is much under water due to substance abuse, it seems, and the goddaughter taking up the slack with hit 60s singles in 2009 and speaking the dim pre-language of post-valley-girlese, using 'like' as a verb and a conjunction. The young girl singer doesn't read newspapers because they are full of lies. They are also full of words, and these seem to give her considerable trouble. And I'm tuning into the contemporary world, for once, learning what's going on and am a better man for it. Surely.

Having arrived with Marlou's coat presents problems, with a chill Gloucestershire wind blowing across the fields. The solution is to go out into the mercantile world and take advantage of the sales. The problem is that everyone around Home Farm has turned down their personal speed setting, lying low and bracing for the last festive event of the season, Alexandra's 21st drink up. I am grateful for this. I no longer have perspective, but it seems that things move along quite briskly in my own suburban world in California, so a little slowing down cannot hurt. Furthermore, no one is excited at the prospect of skidding around black ice on the way to Moreton in Marsh or Stratford upon Avon, the nearest shopping towns.

Which leads us over the border. Caroline, Alexandra and I. East toward Darkest Warwickshire and the town of Shipston, four miles distant.

One of the interesting things about Britain is the way in which villages imitate cities and vice versa. Shipston, for example, manages to have very few streets, yet many of the latter are one-way. The village has a parking problem. Caroline pulls into an empty space in front of a dog charity, something along the lines of the Royal SPCA, closed this first Tuesday after Christmas. Our destination is more or less across the street. Alexandra hauls me to my feet, and I survey the situation. I am crutching it, and reconnoitering is essential.

The brick sidewalk, the fan pattern of the flagstones, the stone curbs, all these things are characteristically British pavements. This is one of the realities of crutching, which is how I got about the UK in my 20s, is that one is always looking down. That's where the perils are. I could easily write a book on London Beneath My Feet 1972. The wooden steps of the escalators on the Bakerloo Line rattling like a bag of children's blocks. Walkways of black substance, either extremely hard asphalt or dark concrete, no one can say. And here, in Shipston, all the stone surfaces in excellent upkeep with, as Caroline notes, a wheelchair ramp cut into the curb across the street, but not the curb on our side of the street, providing a way not to cross the road but only to enter it...a moot point, for I am on crutch, not on wheels. I grab Alexandra's arm and head for Spencer's, our shopping destination.

The pavements are wet, the cloudy skies and winter sun make the day surprisingly dark, and with my poor proprioception, the journey of 50 meters seems epic. Furthermore, my bones ache, with diffuse pains accompanying most strenuous activity. I step inside the store that is Spencer's, and I step inside the 1950s. The place is doing a brisk 2009 business, but it has the look and feel of a much older establishment. This is a wealthy part of the countryside, and a shop like Spencer's can pull this off. There is a counter with goods behind it, probably the sort of arrangement that once required a shop assistant to get items for you. But now people can wander behind the counter and get their own stuff, while the staff wonder about the store and get their own customers. It's a funny old world.

And the world remains pretty old inside Spencer's. Assuming you get inside, which I barely did. Caroline spotted some coats just beyond the door, so I tried one on. And then another. Caroline kept telling me I was looking like a country squire. But being oblivious to such things, I don't really know what country squires look like, aside from Squire Western who, like Tom Jones, is 260 years old. And being told that I look that old is not exactly a turn on. So I turned to Alexandra. What did she think? Would she mind having a look around?

I was now rooted to one spot, a location just inside the front door, which required no more walking and included a chair, where I briefly sat down. It has come to this. Don't get around much anymore. Alexandra returned with a different coat, one that included vertically zipping pockets, ideal for a mobile phone, she told me. And this one looked more stylish. Leaving me torn, and torn is difficult for someone whose emotional makeup formed in the company of embattled parents. My first instinct is to please everyone. My second is to take disparate points of view and decide which is more pertinent. I could tell that vertically zipping my mobile phone into a handy pouch in front of the coat would accomplish nothing. But Alexandra's warning that the first coat looked little too big, as well as unfashionable...that gave me pause. On the other hand, I was really buying a coat to stay warm. My arms easily went into the sleeves of the Caroline selection. Which I tried on a second time.

'Ugly,' said Alexandra. 'The stylish one is over there.'

'Wrong,' said her mother. 'This one makes you look like a country gent.'

Harmless Jewish family banter. By contrast, there was no banter and lots of harm in the exchanges between my own parents. So at age 63, it takes a bit of conscious effort to know what I want. At least I know what I don't know. That very morning I had been listening to the Decade in Review on Radio 4. It was only a couple of years ago that someone named Donald Rumsfeld was standing up before the American people, and we always forget, the American people's allies, and saying in all seriousness and with a tone of great authority something along the lines of 'there are things we know that are known knowns and things that we don't know that are unknowns, and some of those known unknowns we really know....' And with such words, leading people into war.

However wavering, I have learned to please myself. And I was quite pleased once I got in the wheelchair on the following day and headed through the damp and freezing fog toward the Farrier's Arms for lunch with a friend. At first, I thought, screw the mittens. That didn't last long. I got the mittens on just before an internal ice jam brought my capillary circulation to a halt. As for the coat, it kept me warm as a roaring fire. Only the icy stings to the face reminded me of where I was: Gloucestershire in winter. I had made the right choice.