A muffled voice over a low wave. A violin whispers in the ear. Synapses spark and flash till spinal chills overwhelm. A great organ horripilates. A cello’s bass reverberates through connective tissues that feel. An oboe soars in the lungs till emotions dizzily follow a physiological repertoire and retort with florid eyes. A piano’s cyclical melody soothes a throat-aching yearn, a chest-tightening pine, a homeless elation.
On a winter’s night, under an indigo-black sky a tree stands alone next to a yellow light on the corner of a city pavement. It is bold, youthful and strong yet quite ordinary. An intricate spiral pattern emerges from light-reflecting, icy moisture on smooth, bare branches. Nature shows a face, an invisible web connecting each twig and sleeping bud with light and molecules and atoms, energy, cold and magnetism. Cars rush by. A man walks his dog. A couple argue on their way home from the pub. Yet no one sees the trees incandescent display. The secret remains within the humble roadside, ice-lit winter tree which, on occasion, reveals the hidden code of everything.
The red-haired woman is very angry with her husband. She asked him to write a note, a sort of memo to the staff but he had done a very bad job of saying the right thing. The angry wife tells me to review the note and re-write it. Then she says lots of things that she does not like about her husband till my head hurts and I forget where I am.
I find the husband hiding at the back of the book shop between self-help and foreign languages. He is tall, lanky, nervous and has poor control of his limbs, as though he just grew into a man only moments ago and hasn’t quite got used to his new proportions. He is wearing a navy jumper over a sage green shirt, mustard yellow corduroy trousers and tan moccasins. His short, brown, utilitarian hair is reminiscent of schoolboy crops. I ask to see his note and he hands me a jar of puffed rice and it tumbles but I catch it before it smashes on the floor. He pulls a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket and mops his brow.
I clutch the jar carefully to my chest and walk to the wooden bench in the window and take a pew on a wobbly stool. I dip a stainless steel dessert spoon in and eat a spoonful of puffed rice. It is coloured brown and seasoned with soya sauce and star anise. As I chew a mouthful, a sentence emerges from mist in my mind. Each grain of rice is a word and each spoonful I eat, a sentence. The saltiness of the rice is so tastily moreish that I gobble more and more. Words drop down my jumper and land on the floor and passers-by tread on them and as grains of rice crunch under boot heels and get stuck in shoe grooves and carried to the pavement, their meaning is shattered into tiny alphabet crumbs.
I eat over half the jar, almost the whole memo, till my belly swells and I undo my belt and top button before remembering with a final gulp of Asia’s grain, that I cannot edit a note if I eat it all. But how strange it is, I ponder, that crumbs are the alphabet and rice is words and mouthfuls are sentences and a full jar of rice is one complete, imperfect note.
I walk to a place of three hills. My hill is lower than the other two. Sun battles cloud. All the land fills with water. As the ocean rises I look with envy upon a family standing on the very top of the highest hill in the valley. They are close and safe and dry. The High Hills stand with arms folded. I hear them chunter with ambivalent curiosity, mulling over what the Low Hills will do. My sisters and I embrace the coming of the seas. ‘Shall we swim?’ says the middle one. I wade out into water. I am wearing an old towelling dressing gown and carrying a cup of tea. The gown becomes sodden and heavy. I panic. Then I tread water and sip tea. My sisters distant banter drifts into my ears on a maritime breeze. The ends of my hair are wet. Calming waves lap fondly at my shoulders. Sunlight reaches across the water. I feel its warmth upon my face. Everything will be fine.
A long, long time ago it was – Fadó, fadó, fadó a bhí ann (Irish)
It’s an old story – बहुत पुरानी बात है – Bahuta purānī bāta hai (Hindi)
There was once – Der var engang (Danish)
My mother would read fairy tales from a large, grey book.
The Storyteller, Franz von Defregger, 1871
I was fond of Tommalise by Hans Christian Andersen
Tommalise by Vilhelm Pedersen
There was once a woman who wished very much to have a little child, but she could not obtain her wish. At last she went to a fairy, and said, “I should so very much like to have a little child; can you tell me where I can find one?” “Oh, that can be easily managed,” said the fairy. “Here is a barleycorn of a different kind to those which grow in the farmer’s fields…”
I live in the 19th century in Victorian London. The drawing room is crowded with men in top hats and coat tails. There is a thick, smoky fug. I am stifled. I want to escape. I sneak out of the back door and walk to the end of a long, thin, untidy garden. I lift my layers of skirts and scale a metal fence; the like of which I have never seen before. I jump from a height into a busy road. Every which way I turn there are motorised vehicles so I run. I run and run down the road till air fills my mourning dress and lifts my feet and I am flying. My flight is jerky and uncertain. I’m worried my petticoats will get caught beneath angry wheels. I try flying with one arm outstretched but two arms thrust forward gives me more power. Yet I cannot gain enough height to stay above the bustle.
It was summer 1999. I ventured out from the grotty pensione for my first evening ‘solo‘. A surly, paunchy waiter with impressive sweat patches under his arms slammed a clay pot down on the wobbly table and barked ‘caldo’ at me with paternal gruffness. The fish looked aghast at their predicament. I stirred my spoon through abundant heads that bobbed around helplessly in sea-laced pomodoro. I took another generous sip of red wine while summoning the courage to swallow something that would ordinarily beat me in a staring competition, when poised with glassy-eyed head on fork, I noticed a faint glow in the night sky. On this hot Sicilian September night Mount Etna erupted and emblazoned on my memory its magnificent, molten sight.
The heroine, Alma Whittaker is the daughter of Henry; an entrepreneur who rebelled against the subservient abeyance of his respectable gardening father and clawed his way to the highest echelons of new wealth in a new world.
Alma exists for the better part of her life in a stifling cocoon of wealth, botany and academia. She is fiercely intelligent, frustratingly naïve and endearingly self-effacing. Her story unfolds within the confines of a vast residence and within a small circle of family, friends and acquaintances where there is scant close relationship or understanding.
The icy reserve of her mother Beatrix, her nanny Hanneke and her adopted sister Prudence exacerbate Alma’s social isolation and encourage her lifelong intimacy with moss and a binding closet. The introduction of Retta does bring a warmer relationship but she is portrayed as such a flibbertigibbet that she is quite hard to grasp.
Alma’s love interest, George Hawkes, is never really described. There is no clear sense of what Alma loves about George. It may be that he is the object of her inexperienced affections because her exposure to the world is so limited that he became the target for her burgeoning sensuality out of mere happenstance. This means there is no emotional oomph and meaty substance to get your teeth into.
Alma is prevented by a powerhouse of a male role model, in Henry, from venturing out and making her own life. Yet, it seems incongruous that a character of keen inquisitiveness, exposed from childhood to the great minds of her time, with such capacity to observe and theorise so adeptly upon her world would not delve deeper into human relationships and push the boundaries of her father’s permission earlier in the story.
Consequently, Alma does not come of age and begin her adventure as an independent woman until very late in life and in the book. Her late blooming and emotional starvation may be an accurate reflection of the constraints upon freedom of expression and female liberty in 19th century Philadelphian society. Yet, this means the reader must persevere to stay with Alma to the end, which could easily have come at least one hundred pages earlier and it is tricky to invest in aloof characters hidden behind a wall of stoicism.
Gilbert beautifully weaves botanical, historical and scientific discovery into a fictional tale. I thoroughly enjoyed the melding of fact with fiction, such as, Henry’s discovery of Jesuit’s bark in Peru and other such curiosities. I smiled at Gilbert’s literary skill and entertaining use of language, colloquial or other, such as the description of Henry as an ‘impudent picaroon, this mackerel-backed shaver, this jack-weighted hob.’
On the whole, The Signature of All Things is a gentle, character-light read carried along smoothly at an evolutionary pace on a bed of botanical wonders.
‘I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo’ as the song goes or I was once but now I’m retired. I’ve experimented in life. At twenty two I moved to the Big Smoke. I threw myself into London’s dazzling lights. I hurled shackles of constraint across Euston Road and they were crushed into a million pieces beneath the wheels of a cement mixer. I got carbon fumes and piss-stained streets and voddy and tonic and bullshit in my peroxided, orbital red and black hair (an entry requirement for living in Camden that garnered the attention of snap-happy Japanese tourists ont tube).
I travelled. I tried things. In Verona, I watched Aida at La Scala after a near miss with a suicidal chihuahua that flung itself from a fourth floor balcony, allegedly, and landed behind my head on the pavement; a tragedy that, to me, usurped Verdi’s opera. In Tuscany, I fell in love with a waiter, naturally. I defy anyone not to. In Sicily, I watched Mount Etna erupt as fish heads in my stew expressed alarm with terror-stricken, wide eyes and gaping mouths. In Rome I was pickpocketted by an eight year old. In Bologna, I dined beneath the porticoes on crostini and velvet ragu before dancing the night away.
In Thailand, I fell off a motorbike, got chased by a goose and bitten by a dog. In Ao Nang, I washed myself with a blue bucket in a barmaid’s flat before a moped ride to Tiger Temple in the middle of the jungle where I was blessed by a Buddhist Monk. I bathed in natural forest springs in Bali. I walked through stepped paddy fields to meet the Hmong hill tribe in North Vietnam and I sailed through limestone outcrops at Halong Bay.
At Uluru, I marvelled at redbacks beneath a caravan before clambering upon its roof to gaze at the southern constellations. I fell in love with a Kiwi in Sydney and we watched the sunrise at Gordon’s Bay. I chewed the fat with coal miners at Tennant’s Creek and played Monopoly with a seventy year old ex-convict in Alice Springs. In Queensland I met an Eastern Brown snake while clearing bush and one evening at dusk I stood in a cave and felt eight hundred and seventy two little bent-wing bats flutter through my hair.
So you see I’m glad I did everything I wanted to do. There was a price but how can I possibly regret a thousand glorious memories. It is what it is Gerry.
Right now all is calmer as I shuffle around in sheepskin booties and curl up under the arm of comfort and kindness and love. I am older. My hair is still long, straight and brown with an auburn glow in sunlight but now there are anarchic, wiry greys springing forth from my scalp to dismantle youth. My eyesight is blurry. My fingers are long. My nails are chipped and unkempt. My left hand is bigger than my right and my right ear is higher than my left. I am to wed this autumn.
I have a round belly. I eat well. I have consumed meat just twice in two months. I eat half a grapefruit most mornings. I haven’t had a glass of wine in ten days. A lingering virus helped along by two weeks of holidaying constitution abuse has quelled the thirst of late. I love Asahi beer, a nice grassy Sauvignon with a hint of apricot and a stiff gin and tonic but I’m really not missing the demon drink at all, honest. I told a lie. I drank half a Guinness on Sunday but purely for its iron content; booze with a halo.
I have good personal hygiene, some say excessive. I don’t recommend extinguishing a candle with your head or licking Raspberry and Vanilla scented shower gel off your arm no matter how much it smells like milkshake. I can recommend sitting on the cool, white enamel of a bath tub while the shower pours hot water onto your back to unknot writer’s neck…bliss.
I find the social behaviour of crows amusing but people who balance plates, cups or glass precariously on the edge of things send my anxiety levels through the roof. Gone, or at least fewer, are my days of ill-considered risk taking. I am easily overwhelmed by any one thing en masse; people, cars, pigeons, cat hairs, voices, anything. That said I live in the third busiest and fifth most congested city in the world. I like that I can walk down a street and hear Somali, Cockney, Vietnamese, French, Dutch, Arabic and Gujerati. I like the open-mindedness and tolerance required to live amidst a cultural smorgasbord. I like that I can see alternative theatrics of an evening. This city will never cease to surprise. But now I am ready to live elsewhere. I long for the colour green.
I do not follow any faith. In religious texts I have discovered beauty, bigotry, love, hate, wisdom, truth, lies, naivety, prose, dogma, common sense, ignorance, morality, fear, creativity, humour, discrimination, serenity, history and humanity in all of them. My conscience is inseparable from my physiology. When my body dies, I am gone. I will exist in images and the words I write and the memories I make, so now is quite important to me.
Occasionally when I get too much for myself, I shake my spitefully masochistic brain around by the stem and slap its frontal lobe hard till it stops screaming and takes a hold of itself. I sit on the floor, cross my legs and breathe, deeply. I focus on dancing light between pear tree leaves till I see shimmering electrons resting on the spheres of a million tiny atoms. I tell my mind to stop and sometimes it listens. Time freezes. My heart rate slows. My body vanishes. And then I hear. I see.
The firethorn outside the window is laden with orange berries. This morning as I flung the curtains back a startled wood pigeon abandoned her breakfast and took a laboured and clumsy flight into a pale gold, shimmering autumn sun.
At 13.27 an engineer came to fix the glacially slow internet upon e-instruction of a woman called Anju in a call centre 4,470 miles away. He was a young man with a short Afro and bright eyes. He told me a funny story. The cat liked him. He had a nice way. He said: ‘The cat knows good peoples.’ I agreed. Another man delivered a package at 18.06. He told me he left the depot at 10am and he had delivered packages to 146 homes before mine. I was number 147. He said a lot of people get stressed but he still smiles because ‘all you have to do is allocate the right amount of time’; a good lesson. He is going home after number 160.
Tonight after I have fed and watered Whatsfortea Jones, I will watch the waning Harvest moon on the eastern horizon. Through the fork of the ash tree where the querulous squirrels sleep and beyond silhouetted leaves, I will visit the southern lunar highlands and land my craft in Tycho. I am grounded nowadays. My itchy feet are sated. But my mind travels further than it ever has before.
Creep by Radiohead, just because it is amazing. Embrace your inner weirdo! Xx 🙂
My hair is damp from the shower and my appetite is unsatisfied after a not very easy to peel, yet pleasingly sweet clementine. I’m moderately irritated that I was deceived into parting with fifty pence extra to taste the difference and improve my access to fruit. Surely this marketing implies that fruit for fifty pence less is not tasty. If this is the case, why is it being sold in the first place? If you cannot afford tasty, easy peel fruit, you must battle through thick-skin that will inevitably wedge itself uncomfortably under your thumb nail to reach a meagre reward of pithy, bland, stale-tasting citrus.
Supermarkets have cashed in on the fact that consumers prefer to get to their fruit effortlessly. Consumers want convenient fruit with a thin, supple skin that comes away from the inner flesh in one, aesthetically appealing spiral. We want easy, quick pickings. A commercial genius realised that varying prices can be applied not only to the edible part of the fruit but also to the skin, nature’s very own biodegradable packaging.
Bananas, although readily willing to give up their soft, sweet, yellow flesh to any remotely dexterous creature, have an easily bruised package. Consumer distaste for mushy, brown bits and our fondness for the finger-herb at a rate of consumption of 100 nanas per Briton per year, that’s over 5 billion bananas eaten every year in the UK alone, inspired the invention of products like the banana guard and the ridiculous use by it’s makers of the term ‘banana trauma’.
Mango, papaya, passion fruit, kiwi and melon, although delightful exotics, require preparation and are perhaps consumed more at weekends when people have time to peel, scrape and chop.
The dragon fruit’s hot pink skin belies its disappointing lack of flavour. So once one has ventured beneath the vibrant surface, you learn that dragon fruit simply does not provide bang for your buck. Nature is a liar, the dragon is a myth that haveth not fire.
The pomegranate that has reached the dizzying status of superfood is frustratingly messy and time-consuming to access with endless tapping to remove its reluctant jewelled seeds. Its juice is so tricky to extract that some health seekers will pay the exorbitant price charged by one popular brand of £5.01 per litre!
And don’t even talk to me about coconuts. I have battled with hammer and blunt knives against the woody shell of that sweet, white fruit. Anyone who buys a coconut more than once, is almost certainly an expert with a machete and is probably best avoided, if not reported to the local constabulary.
Supermarket misrepresentation of citrus fruit has highlighted the following things:
1. I am an unfocused, irritable, trivial and hungry human, just cellular gunk with a wavering conscience applied to matters of little consequence and I am in need of a leaden piece of yeast extract-smeared rye toast.
2. I abhor the cunning of a market that capitalises on fruit peel.
3. I am angered by my own suggestibility.
4. I shall not pay Lord Henry Super Money Bags Market more money to get into my fruit. To hell with it! I might even buy an orange next time.
In the words of the young Russian chap in the unmissable blockbuster film below entitled: ‘You’ve Been Peeling Clementines Wrong’,
‘Don’t get offended. Boom! Just pull it off and eat it, pull it off and eat it.’
Yasmin Ward 