Things to Make and Mend Read Online Free PDF

people, civilised. 
    *
    I have always forgotten appointments. Coffee dates. Dental check-ups. I mislay my glasses and my keys. But this was something new. These were disconcerting gaps in my memory. ‘My name is Rowena Cresswell,’ I said in Accident and Emergency, a couple of hours after the accident. I had, distressingly, forgotten my married name.
    Fortunately the important facts of my life returned quickly – I remembered that I have a job as a French lecturer and translator; that I have a new Canadian husband and a quite old English son. That I live in North London, walk every day beneath the pretty shadows cast by London plane trees; that I spend a lot of time at either Stansted or Heathrow airports. But there were still occasions  when I would completely overlook something. It was as if there was a tiny gap in my brain, caused by the accident, down which pieces of information got lost. It was, I said, describing my condition to Wilma McHale, the departmental secretary, like losing things down the back of a sofa. Little, valuable things that you might not even know were missing. And then, when you were in the middle of looking for something else, they would suddenly surface.
    *
    ‘I’ve gone blank. What’s the French for needle?’ I asked my husband the other evening, hunched, too late at night, over a translation. I had to be up at six to catch a plane, and I was trying to finish an essay on the nineteenth-century manufacture of Persian carpets. Camels were involved – in the context of their urine being used to bleach the wool. Le blanchissage du tapis à l’urine de chameau … and tapped my pen against my bottom lip. I thought of the quote from the Bible about camels and eyes of needles. I thought of needles in haystacks.
    ‘A needle …,’ Kenneth mused, not looking up from the fiercely spot-lit book he was reading. ‘L’aiguille,’ he said after a moment. ‘Masculine.’
    ‘Oh yes. I was thinking it was “clou” for some reason.’
    ‘That’s a nail.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘You couldn’t get much sewing done with a nail.’
    ‘I know.’
    I looked back at the page I was working on: … and the intricacy with which the brightly-threaded needle was used …
    I worry about my forgetfulness a little. But I know it’s probably just due to tiredness and that little knock I had. I remember most things eventually. Important things, like words, phrases, turns of phrase. I love words; have always had a fear of misinterpretation. Which, I suppose, being a translator, is just as well.

Long-legged Cross
    Sally Tuttle walks to East Grinstead station carrying her handbag, a plastic bag from Harrods and a floral umbrella. The sky is a brightish grey. She is a professional woman, her heart calm, her mind uncluttered.
    She gets on an ancient, door-slamming train to Victoria. It is early afternoon but the train is busy. She sits beside a woman who glances up, smiles, then returns her attention to her magazine. She is filling in a word puzzle, slowly circling around words that she has located in the jumble of letters. She works horizontally, vertically, diagonally. The words, Sally notices, are all to do with medicine. STETHOSCOPE. ASPIRIN. WAITING ROOM. The woman is gripped, as if there is nothing more important in the world than to locate the word SCAPULA. Sally sits beside her, her plastic bag on her knee.
    She has come up to London to visit haberdashery departments. She likes to empty her mind at times of stress by gazing at the ranks of colours.
    In John Lewis people are collapsing their umbrellas, folding their raincoats over their arms, walking purposefully towards their prospective acquisitions. It is three o’clock on a slow, pale afternoon, but there is nothing like a large department store to make you feel there is a purpose to life. You just have to glance at the Storage Solutions to know there is an answer to everything. Bras in a muddle? There are bra organisers! Cat hair on your coat? There are