Isabella

Did you ever have the feeling that there was nothing you wanted to say? Silence and solitude are greatly under-rated phenomena. In this world there is so much chattering, so much endless babbling. It's where ever you go. Telephones and mobile phones invisibly fill the air with tangled webs linking A with B and X with Y. It's as if the planet is like one of those enormous rubber band balls that bored office workers make. In pub gardens the chattering goes on, in schools, in hospitals, old people's homes, factories, shops - an endless chain of words.

But in Isabella Purves's top floor flat on Rodney Street in Edinburgh, Scotland there was complete silence for five long years. Nobody came to chatter the day away. No one telephoned. Occasionally, the whistling postman pushed mail through her letter box. It piled up on the mat. Five years worth of mail - reminders from the optician, pizza menus, voting registration cards, bank statements. And this pile would have grown bigger if it hadn't been for a plumbing fault which caused water to drip into the flat below. That's when the neighbours, the authorities, the health service, long lost acquaintances, the postman and the rest of us learnt that Isabella probably died in 2004.

On the ground floor of her tenement there is a flower shop - "Fioritalia". Its owner remembered Isabella: "She would sometimes weed the communal garden at the front of the tenements and I used to see her with a huge rucksack and big walking boots... but I never knew where she was going." ...Well do any of us know where we are going? Yet we know where Isabella finished: alone and stone dead for five long summers and five cold winters. In my estimation, we are all partly responsible and this unnoticed death is just as blameworthy as the heart-rending "Baby P" case in Haringey.

...Later, I notice that the only picture we have seen of Isabella is a passport photograph. You can tell by the squiggles to the right. Where was she going I wonder? And what sort of a life did she lead in her younger days? There must have been work, family, friends, happy occasions. How sad that it should all end in a lonesome flat where nobody, not one single soul in the entire world, thought to check on her welfare. Nonetheless, there is a steeliness in those eyes - a firmness of purpose and a certain self-belief that suggests that Isabella was perfectly self-sufficient. I hope she died peacefully in her sleep.

Help

On Sunday evening strolling to the Sunday quiz at our local pub. I wave to Neil and Sue but I don't wait for them. They're too far away. I cross the pelican crossing on Ecclesall Road and just as I reach the opposite pavement, I become aware of some shouting further down the road. I walk on.

Causing a passing car to screech to a halt, I see a young man running towards me, hotly pursued by another young man who is holding a weapon - a bat or club of some description. The aggressor is shouting that he is going to kill his prey - "You're f---ing dead mate!" As the young man gets closer to me he yells -"Help me! Help me!" I sense the panic in his voice.

I have never seen the young man before and I have never seen the hunter. I don't know what it is all about. The hunter gives up his chase and I turn to the quarry, shouting "It's all right! You've got away. Just keep running!" The young man turns the corner but he's slowing down - he thinks he's got away.

Club-man retreats to a parked car - a battered old green vehicle with an ancient "B" registration plate. He jumps in. There's someone in the passenger seat. Putting his foot down, the ancient wreck of a car screeches upto the corner. Momentarily, I picture the victim, sauntering along feeling a huge sense of relief that he has escaped the nutcase with the club. Then the green car brakes to a halt and the nasty bloke jumps out with his bat.

I replay the words"Help me!" again and again. What could I have done? What should I have done? The parable of The Good Samaritan is a story that contains a moral message which I have always identified with. And yet there I was being asked for help by a young man with fear in his eyes and really I did nothing. Lord knows what happened round that corner.

Michael

The California coastal road - Big Sur

It was Easter 2005. One of the best trips I ever organised. After Santa Monica and Los Angeles, we drove up to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon, then back to Bakersfield via Boron and along the rich Central Valley, detouring to the breathtaking Sequoia National Park and then on to beautiful San Francisco. Three days there living on Lombard Street then down to Salinas and the Steinbeck Center, and onwards along the famous coastal road past Big Sur with its marine vistas. We stopped at San Simeon Beach to see elephant seals lounging in the sand and then it was back in our black Jeep heading for Santa Barbara County.

Seals at San Simeon

At the humble, down-at-heel agricultural settlement of Guadaloupe, I went into the gas station and asked if there were any hotels in town. "There ain't no hotels here", chewed the bored young woman behind the counter, "try Santa Maria". Another three or four miles and we were in Santa Maria. I had imagined that all hotel rooms would be taken because of what was taking place in the Superior Courthouse. However, I was wrong. We had no trouble booking into the cheap-as-chips Rose Garden Inn on East Main Street.

After showering, preening and then eating at Denny's we headed up to the courthouse. It was pitch dark by now. I guess I was expecting crowds of fans there but there was no one. We had seen the scenes on television - crowds of fans with placards, cavalcades of motor cars, police officers, sirens. But that night East Cook Street was as dead as a ghost town in a cowboy movie. Only the tumbleweed was missing.

The courthouse in Santa Maria

Squeezing through temporary barriers, we edged into the court complex when from behind a bush there appeared a small bearded man with a flashlight. He was a gruff security guard. I soon engaged him in conversation. He said he was happy that the court case was rumbling on as it had given him a couple of months of reliable income. He wasn't complaining. We shook hands with him and before I squeezed back through the barriers, I asked "Are you a Michael Jackson fan then?" He paused and grunted, "No I ain't mister! I'm a me fan!"

That was the closest I ever got to the legendary Michael Jackson. To be honest, his sort of music and razzmatazz never appealed to me but I cannot deny that he contributed to the soundtrack of all of our lives these past forty years - you could hardly avoid him - and he genuinely touched the hearts of millions.

Frances, Ian, Shirley and our trusty Jeep - Rose Garden Inn Santa Maria

Glorious

A bee at work in our garden.

Perhaps surprisingly, I love the British climate. I love its unpredictability - whereby we may experience lovely warm days in mid-February, freezing winds in July, rainstorms in just about any month, mild green winters or arctic tundra. You never know what you're going to get - rather like Forrest Gump with his box of chocolates. And so unsurprisingly, weather is a popular conversation theme with British people. I can't imagine that in Alice Springs, Death Valley or Saudi Arabia where weather patterns are much more predictable.

Today it is quite lovely. As I sit here typing, the outside temperature is already a pleasant twenty degrees and rising with the afternoon scheduled to reach twenty four. The sky is clear blue and bright sunshine is beaming down on our garden - a little green oasis in a big northern city. The other day I found an abandoned blackbird's nest complete with four little eggs in an overgrown bush I was hacking back. It seems that only one in ten blackbird nests in urban areas successfully produce fledglings.

A big slimy frog was living under that monstrous bush. He looked at me as if to say "What the?" before hopping further into the undergrowth. Shirley had been asking me to tackle the offending border for months. I created a new space for plants and enriched it with our own household compost - from the bin where the spaghetti worms writhe their lives away in black plastic darkness. We went up to Wentworth's magnificent garden centre and to B&Q to pick half a dozen new plants which I have promised will not be smothered by the re-advancing bush that had over the years turned into the shape of that massive stone ball in the "Indiana Jones" movie.

Walking out in the sunshine. How lovely it is to live in Yorkshire, England. You can keep your apartments on the Costa del Sol, your rural retreats in Tuscany, your condominiums with pools in Orlando, your Sydney Harbour views. Why can't people make the most of what they have got, appreciating the world around them?

Looking up the garden from our upper decking.

The border I have been working on.

Stocktaking

It's been a while now since my nasty little operation. I have been off work ever since. There has been pain and there has been blood but fingers-crossed, things are feeling rather better now. Last week was a first for me - my first doctor's note - giving me licence to be off work for a further seven days. I may as well take it. I owe the school where I work no favours and I will be leaving there in less than a month anyway.

I saw a job in the Times Educational Supplement. It's about promoting global understanding through school-based activities - developing resources, trialling and evaluating them. It would be so different from what I have been doing for the last thirty years. I have completed the online application form but then hesitated. I am not sure it's what I want to do but it would bring in decent money. Maybe I should just click and send it. The likelihood is that there's somebody lined up for it anyway. Who knows.

There aren't many pictures of me connected with the job of teaching. I have always been a keen photographer but a very reluctant subject. I came across two photos that other teachers snapped of me - both of them around twenty years ago. In one I am holding a homemade sign linked with the school's annual cross country run. Perhaps it is an instruction to drivers to slow down because of runners crossing or perhaps - and this seems more likely to me - a declaration that the children who are about to cross the road are intellectually challenged.

The second picture shows me behaving like the Pied Piper of Hamelin on the school's annual sponsored walk. I am leading the slow children into the cave. The entrance will magically close behind them and I will be left with a crippled youth called Hans or maybe Herman. I think of that workplace - the hours I have put in , the weekends, the sleepless nights, the times I have gone the extra mile and I wonder - will this be all that's left to show - two photographs from twenty years back? Work. It's a much over-rated activity in my view.

Another

In this "illusion" we can all see the tiger but can you also see the hidden tiger? Look carefully.

Illusion

This optical illusion has been doing the rounds for a few years. You have probably seen it before. Stare at the four black dots in the middle for about ten seconds and then stare at a blank sheet of paper or a light coloured wall. At first you just see a rough circle of light. Then the miracle happens. Christ is born again!

I believe! I believe! ...Mind you, it could be Charles Manson!