Keir Royale

Tragedy by the Bee Gees

“When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on, it’s tragedy.”

Our two children have the mixed blessing of being born to older than average parents, especially, it must be said, their father. But what they lack in up-to-date, sing-a-long knowledge of the latest poptastic hits on YouTube, or MySpace or whatever it is this week, they make up for with an in depth knowledge of some of the greats, especially their Dad’s favourites, the Bee Gees.

To read the rest of this article see Guardian Family

So they’re going to move the bus station and concrete over yet more of my childhood.

The Weighbridge! What a name to conjure with. The after school destination of our teenage years, where high heels and make-up were de rigeur, and where skirts were surreptitiously hoisted up to reveal the delicious combination of tan-coloured tights and knee-length white socks.

The Weighbridge was where we learned how to flirt, where we took “hilarious” pictures in the passport photo machine, where we set off tremulously for our first driving lessons to the din of cheers and whistles from our mates, and where we made a cup of tea last the length of a game of Bridge in the Terminus Café.

It was the beginning and end of our weekend forays to the beach, it was where we decided which party we were going to head for on a Saturday night, and it was where the older boys would stand on the bottom step to ask for a “half to Gorey please”.

I started catching the school bus to the Weighbridge when I was about fourteen, not because I needed to catch a bus home, but because it was where you had to go to meet up with the gang. I actually had to walk back almost as far as school once I’d been at the Weighbridge for half an hour, as I had dance classes most nights at David Place. But I couldn’t miss out on the bus trip ritual.

We’d swap our regulation school shoes for the chunky platform ones we’d brought with us from home – heels as high as our mothers would allow. We’d take our hair out of the sensible ponytails we had to wear at school. And then we’d try to coat our eyelids with bright turquoise eye shadow and electric blue mascara – which, I notice, made a brief return to the fashion pages last year.

We’d be dabbing at our eyes on a moving bus, and as we weren’t yet experts at decorating even a stationary target, this wasn’t easy. So we’d arrive, taller, and sporting Midwich Cuckoo eyes, confident that this would attract the boys of our dreams.

What we did attract was inter-school rivalry, and once, an invitation to a pre-arranged fight at Snow Hill. We – secretly terrified at the idea – of course said “alright” with an air of bravado we didn’t feel.

We spent two days wondering what on earth we would do on the day, quizzing the boys about fighting techniques (as if they knew) and hoping someone would put a stop to it. We breathed a communal sigh of relief when we heard on the grapevine that the head teacher at the other school had learned about the plans and had banned all her pupils from the Weighbridge for a week.

We were especially relieved, as we’d heard rumours of bottles and chains, and we didn’t even know what you could do with chains.If it was raining after school we’d all troop into the Terminus cafe. The manager, Simon, knew us and would sigh dejectedly as we all ordered “one cup of tea please”, knowing we’d make the most of our investment.

After an hour of chatting, completing the Sun crossword in competition with each other and playing Bridge (without the difficult bidding bit at the beginning) Simon would kick us out. He was good-natured about it, but insistent. He had his profit margins to consider, after all.

If there were no parties to go to on a Saturday night, if we’d been to the Cellar youth club the night before and there was nothing on at the cinema to tempt us, we’d often just get onto a bus for the evening.

We’d take a cassette player, some beers and maybe some snacks, and sit there listening to David Bowie while chewing the cud and wisecracking our way through the evening.

The Weighbridge was a rite of passage. Some cultures pierce the lips of adolescent youths, others send them out into the wilderness to hunt with bows and arrows. In St Helier it was the survival of the fittest at the Weighbridge.

You didn’t have to walk over hot coals, but sometimes it felt like you had. And it’s hard to accept that such a significant site may be getting a Mafia-style concrete overcoat.

It was where I first crashed my car, while driving past on the lookout for my recently ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend. I looked for too long, my eyes blinded by tears, and drove straight into the railings outside the then British Airways office. It was my mother who paid for those solid, ugly, grey railings that are still there now.

My car was OK though, a very solid and ancient Wolseley 1500 Mum had picked up for £50.

When I went to the parish hall to be interviewed by the centenier about the accident, I explained that I’d been crying as I’d just seen my ex with a new girl. He was very sympathetic, and told me to go out for a drink next time.
Presumably he wasn’t suggesting I should drive home afterwards.

And it was at the Weighbridge that I got onto a bus one day and found, scrawled on the back of one of the seats “Cathy Keir is a slag”. It was a shock, but an odd experience. I was far too young to justify such an insult but I was strangely pleased. It was as if I’d been elected part of street culture – such as it was.St Helier was hardly in the same league as the mean streets of A Clockwork Orange.

I notice that many of Jersey’s buses now say they’re heading for the “bus station” rather than the “Weighbridge”. This may be a small change, but it erodes another of the little things that makes Jersey different. Every town has a bus station, but only Jersey has its bus station at the Weighbridge.

It may confuse the holidaymakers, but hey, when I think back to the grockel pits we used to dig on the beach, surely a little eccentric labelling on the front of buses is a minor detail?

Jersey ex-pats like me are always moaning about how the place has changed, and I’m sure it annoys the people who still live there and want to enjoy the progress that happens everywhere else.

Why shouldn’t Jersey have a decent leisure pool and a modern bus station? I have no quibbles with the pool (except its exorbitant prices) and a bus station is generally best kept out of sight.

But why must the powers that be continue to make concrete the number one priority?
My grandmother would have said they must have shares in Ronez.

Now Jersey residents are being invited to have their say on what the Weighbridge area should look like in future. Should it be given up to hotel bedrooms and balconies, available only to visitors with a wad of cash to spare? Or should it become a public space without the buses?

My vote is for a public space with a few pieces of sculpture to commemorate the generations of Jersey youth taking their first tentative steps into adulthood…. perhaps featuring a half bottle of vodka discarded in one corner and a pile of vomit in another.

And there has to be a memorial to Simon of the Terminus Café, who dreamed up ever more ingenious ways to get us out of his establishment. I suggest a plinth (in granite of course) engraved with the words – “one cup of tea = 10 minutes”.Jersey’s future teenagers will doubtless form an unhealthy attachment to wherever the new bus station is. Perhaps, in their dotage, they’ll reminisce about “The Abbatoir”, inspiring confusion among eavesdroppers from “the other side”.

Or maybe the new bus station will be given a more feel-good, visitor-friendly moniker, like “The Waterfront”. This would at least allow future generations of yoof to feel an affinity with the first Wild One of them all.

But if the States really are going to tarmac over such an essential seat of learning, obliterating the island’s top training centre in the University of Life, then surely the Weighbridge is the only fitting site for the proposed University of Jersey – or at least for that part of the campus which prepares students for the world beyond formal education.

This article appeared in Jersey Now magazine in 2004

Every time there’s new research suggesting Alzheimer’s Disease can run in families, I find myself keeping a close eye on my mother; listening to her voice to detect any changes, worrying if she tells the same story twice, and rifling through her kitchen when I go to stay. I know if she starts keeping tea bags in the freezer it’s only a matter of time before I follow suit.

My grandmother always said she’d leave her home feet first, but that was before she started phoning my mother to accuse her of stealing the family silver. I was living nearby at the time and did what I could to keep her going.

I had an extra bell attached to the phone so she could hear it, and so I didn’t have wait while it rang and rang, wondering whether she was lying at the bottom of the stairs, or just watching telly.

She stopped washing her clothes, so I took them away when she wasn’t looking. If she caught me I’d get a furious,
“What are you doing with those? I CAN do my own washing you know.”

I cut her grass and pulled out her weeds, to a chorus of,
“Don’t take that, there’ll be nothing left in the garden at this rate.”

A friend and I redecorated her kitchen while she was away visiting friends. We’d just got the wallpaper scrapers out and the kettle on, when we started scratching. The house was infested with fleas. It was a hot summer and her last surviving cat had died only a few weeks before. The fleas were starving and we were their last chance of life.

I tried to get her some home support, but the attempts of the district nurse to get her to take her blood pressure tablets regularly were spectacularly unsuccessful. The nurse brought a container labelled with the days of the week, into which she put the correct number of pills for each day. My grandmother slid the lid on a different way each time she took out a pill. So Monday would first become Sunday, then Monday again, and she’d take two lots of pills on one day and none the next.
Then she started putting the cat’s worming pills into the container, and that’s when the district nurse gave up.

My gran had seemed a bit forgetful for a few years, and I remember being very irritated that she was incapable of taking an accurate telephone message. I even lost a job and gained 20 parking fines because of her blundering on the phone. But it wasn’t until my grandfather died, when she was seventy-nine, that the cracks started to widen.

She dealt with her grief in typical fashion.
“I’ve bought a new cooker. Tom was too tight to spend the money. You can’t take it with you, and it’ll burn where some of ‘em are going.”

But my grandfather had always dealt with their finances, so she started paying her pension into one account and her bills out of another. I had her pension paid directly into her current account and set up direct debits for all her bills, but she foiled this simple arrangement by walking into town to pay the “balance paid” on her account.
I had words with one of the utility companies, which had allowed her to go hundreds of pounds into credit.

But I think it was the cats which finally made me realise she wasn’t coping.

I went round to see her and Kizzy was wrapped up in a blanket on the settee.

“He’s not very well,” she told me. I went to have a closer look. His staring eyes were bulging, his legs were stuck out in front of it like a furry occasional table, and he was obviously long dead.

Later a relative went on holday, and she told me she’d lost one of his two cats she was looking after. I knocked on neighbours’ doors and reported it missing. When the relative returned home and I went round to explain, he said,
“We only left her with one.”

I eventually managed to get the local Alzheimer’s nurse to visit once a week, and one day she called me at work to say my gran had been upset that morning because her cat had died. So the nurse had buried it in the garden for her.
Unfortunately my grandmother’s last cat had died two years earlier.

I laugh now, and I laughed at the time; a lot. But it was all part of her steady decline. Eventually she went into St Saviour’s hospital for a six-week assessment. She didn’t return to her own home, but even two years later I couldn’t drive her past her old house without her chiding me,
“Where are you going? You’ve driven straight past.”

Once she was in residential care, she was clean and sweet smelling. She had her hair shampooed and set every week and ate healthy meals. Whenever I went to see her she complained about the other residents,
“Look at ‘em all just sitting there like a lot of lemons. Never been to Guernsey, half of ‘em.”

She didn’t lose the ability to eat or talk, and we had endless circular conversations about what I was doing, who my boyfriend was and where her husband was. She eventually forgot he’d died and it seemed kinder to let her believe he was “down the pub” or “up the boxing”.

In many ways she was happier as the disease progressed. At the beginning she’d been anxious and aggressive, as she was aware her memory was failing. She’d check the oven was off three or four times before she left the house and spend hours every day searching for her handbag.
But once she lost a grip on reality, she could live from moment to moment.

I was always greeted with,
“What you doing here? Your hair wants a brush through it.”

I never felt her quality of life was unacceptable, and I always enjoyed her company and her lust for life - even when I was driven mad by the constant repetition.

Now though, as I keep an eye on my mother, I worry for my children if I succumb to the disease. After a short time of anxiety, I’ll eventually slip far enough into an eternal present to live a contended Groundhog Day half-life.

They’ll be the ones who’ll have to cope with losing their mother, slowly.

I only hope they’ll be able to laugh with me, as I did with my Gran.

This article appeared in Jersey Now in 2005.

It may not be a sport of kings, but roller hockey has a long and noble history.

Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel played it in the early 1900s, and now three Plymouth sisters are taking it to the max.

Ruth, Emma and Anna Russell have been playing roller hockey for just over three years.

Their father Paul is a coach, so the family’s weekends revolve around travelling to and from games.

The game is loud, fast, it’s played in an echoing sports hall and the goalies spend the entire game on their knees. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

To read the rest of this article, see BBC Devon

Students from one of Plymouth’s secondary schools have been racing Formula 1 cars - but they’re unlikely to be heading for Silverstone just yet.The students from Devonport High School for Boys have been racing carbon dioxide powered model F1 cars.

The vehicles - which are designed and built using computer aided design - reach speeds of up to 60mph.

To read the rest of this article, see BBC Devon