Robert the Westie. My life. By me.

6. A country life and a Chinese dimension.

"But I really did love Lucy," Danny protested in response to Steve's dismissal of the iconic Hollywood star as a "hysterical, over-rated one trick pony." 

Even to me it seemed a harsh judgment. I had witnessed Steve equally as amused as Danny at some of her wilder antics with Desi Arnaz, her long-suffering husband. But he was too fond of criticizing Danny's less street-credible tastes to admit to his own affection for the deceased actress.  

"And your critique could just as easily apply to your own heroine, Blanche Deveraux, as to Lucy. Well, maybe role model would be more accurate terminology," Danny added with heavy emphasis. 

"It takes an old tart to know an old tart," Steve replied, completely losing me in the process as the flimsy logic of the conversation moved from television performers to bakery items in one incomprehensible leap. 

Nowadays, of course, it is all too clear to me. Blanche, the Southern Belle of the Golden Girls series, was best known for aging disgracefully whilst continuing to lust after any cute young man who crossed her field of vision. Steve, too, I had noticed at the office, was only ever interested in interviewing job applicants who were male, cute and under twenty-five. The frequency with which this category of applicant had achieved a second interview, inevitably followed by a "quick drink around the corner," confirmed Danny's prognosis all too clearly. I was not to know that it would have dramatic consequences for all of us in the not too distant future. 

For now, the drama for Spring 1989 lay in the addition of a new dimension to our lives, namely the English weekend country house. Now, for those of you happily living everyday in your single home, the concept of multiple homes may well inspire mystification if not downright derision. I can understand that, but I have to say that for those of us privileged to enjoy living in more than one place, the delights were many and memorable. 

I will not have mentioned that Steve was himself a country boy, born in village on the Devon coast, a part of the world to which he had returned for his university education and a region with roots buried deep in his soul. This surely explained his wish, already fulfilled in France, to have a sea view. It also explained his desire to add a countryside element to his life. Had Devon been accessible from London in two hours rather than four, I'm sure that would have been his destination. As it was, and based on his familiarity with the area through a network of friends in the vicinity, the New Forest emerged as the target territory 

Steve's old university friend, Keith, shared a cottage with his older lover, Alan, in a pretty village called Burley, a few miles off the A30 main road. Sweetly, they offered us the chance to stay over with them, eliminating the stress of a return trip within the day. As the drive took anything between two and three hours in just one direction, their hospitality made a huge difference to our anticipation of the weekend, as well as adding to the time available for scouting the region. The weekends of April, then, followed a regular pattern, a hasty Saturday morning departure from London, a rendezvous with an estate agent in a New Forest village, be it Lyndhurst, Fordingbridge, Brockenhurst or Ringwood, and a speedy tour of a number of prospective purchases. 

Steve adopted a methodical approach, basing each weekend on a specific centre and reviewing the offerings of a number of agencies before shortlisting desirable properties and opting for the agent with the largest number. The day would pass in a blur of cute cottages, some thatched, some tiled, some ancient, some recent, right up to the moment when the skies darkened. We would then bid farewell to the agent, still hopeful and always young, jump in the car and drive through the green vales and wooded lanes of the forest to join Keith and Alan for welcoming gin and tonics for the humans and a cheering bowl of tripe and mixer for me. 

Steve and Danny would then share their opinions, rarely harmonious, on the properties visited that day, receiving inputs from Keith and Alan in the hope of finding some kind of consensus. This seemed a reasonable construct if only because both the latter were born under the star sign of Libra, the home of the eternally balanced viewpoint. Unfortunately, hand in hand with the finely balanced opinion went an ingrained inability to opt for any single idea, or, more simply, to make any finite decision. So the inputs were both wordy and inconclusive. For Steve, an epitome of Arian impulsiveness and possessed of an ability to make an instant decision where none was even needed, this was a kind of living death. So, after an hour or so of debate that he alone found frustrating and interminable, he would clap his hands together, collect up all the property sheets scattered across the carpet and announce that he was starving and ready to do whatever was necessary to help create a dinner. The fact that this happened for three weekends consecutively made the decisive debate of the fourth weekend all the more surprising.