Question – what is home to you?

What is home?  My little boy says it is ‘the place where we live’, which I was pretty impressed by.  But for me, in my unsettled mind, this place, where we have lived for only six months is not yet home.  When I step beyond my house, are these streets home?  How many times do I have to walk down them before they become part of me?  Is home the repetition of experiencing the same place for a length of time until it is embedded somewhere in my memory?   If so, how long will it take?  What is the tipping point when the place where we physically reside becomes the place that we emotionally consider home?

I long for the feeling of home.  Home is my Mother’s kitchen, covered with sepia-toned newsprint wallpaper and orange tiles.  Home is the sweet, toasty smell of her apple pie baking in the oven.  But Mother is not in her kitchen now and I am not a time traveller.

And so, I seek home in the here and now.  And in this endeavour I reach out to ask – what is home to you?

 

 

 

 

Punk Eleven

I got my period when I was eleven years old.  My hair was straight and long.  Soon after, I began to change and feel angry at the endless rules I was required to obey.  I found a photo of a girl in a hair magazine. The girl was softly punk. She had loosely spiked short, black hair and wore a fashionably baggy jumper. She had dark smoky eyes and a sultry neutral-toned glossy pout. I wanted to be her. I took the photo to Keith and Pat’s house next door and asked their lovely hairdressing daughter, Karen, if she’d cut my hair short. ‘Yes,’ she said ‘but did you ask your Mum?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I lied, she’s fine with it.’

After Karen had finished and sent me off with a lesson in how to spike my new do with hair gel, I went home. I walked into the kitchen. Mum stood at the sink in a cloud of washing liquid bubbles and steaming hot tap water, wearing her yellow rubber gloves up to her elbows. ‘Oh what have you done to your lovely hair?!’ I don’t recall how much trouble I was in but it didn’t matter. I was changing and I wanted to rebel against authority and changing my hair without permission was my first step on the path to independence.

The following Monday at school, after assembly, the Headmaster, Mr Boddins, who had never before appeared to see me from beneath his impressive eyebrows, concluded his assembly by asking me to stay behind, in front of the whole school. My stomach wobbled. He looked me in the eye for the first time in two years. He was a large man, tall and big, towering over my tiny self, with the physical and institutional weight of authority. He wore a green-hued suit and had thick hairs in his ears.  There was talk of my slovenly clothes and attitude and something about bucking up ideas and pulling up socks but I cannot remember his exact message to me.

Looking back I think the old Headmaster was affronted by my appearance, but he was confused. I hadn’t actually done anything of note at school, ever. The only thing that had changed in me since our last assembly on Friday morning, was my hair. Thus, my hair was the single spark that caused him to speak to me individually for the first time in two years. Yet it was the only thing he did not comment upon. Perhaps he could not say, ‘A girl is not allowed to have hair like that.’ So, instead, he resorted to vague, well-used phrases which bore little relevance to me, an ordinary girl with a distinctly average educational record, who had her hair cut at the weekend.

As I turned to leave the assembly hall, a sea of kids faces greeted me with questions about my rare interaction with Mr Boddins. ‘What did Bodders say?’ and ‘Did he give you detention?’ My fame lasted three minutes, tops, but my fellow pupils made me feel less alone, in that brief interlude from the mundanity of school life.

Given my short, softly spiked hair was intended as a visible act of rebellion against authority, in the decade of punk after all, the Headmasters reaction was confirmation that my haircut had been effective. It had conveyed my inner objection to a felt subjugation. For me it said, I am an individual and I am free to choose. I come to this place five days a week from nine till three and I have sought for six years to conform, to hide behind mediocrity. But now, a new dawn has come and I do not agree that you can make me wear my clothes this way or that and dictate to me that my hair be long and flat.

Today my hair is long and flat.  But I quietly continue my hair rebellion.  I refuse to hide my silver strands beneath hair dye. I am proud of my years and my hard-won greys. I do not accept those who would have women conceal their age.  I smile inwardly when I find new, gleaming white strands. The greying of my reflection and my siblings and my friends, reminds me of our layered and colourful histories, of the vulnerabilities of humanity and the fleetingness of time.  The beauty of Age.

 

 

Look Now

It is the fifth instance of the third month of the year two thousand and nineteen, or so they say.  Measures of time bemuse me.  Sometimes it feels like I am living in many times simultaneously as my roguish mind is wont to wander.  It ruminates upon tannin-rich memories, swilling them around my head, clouding my days with powdery sediment.  The past is too real, it intrudes upon my present too frequently, too vividly.  My body lives through it, over and over again.

Plain sight eludes me.  I search feverishly through a tangle of words spoken and deeds done long ago, for safe passage through the unknown.  Although, on occasion, I hear the faint voice of a found woman.  She calls to me everyday but the noise, the before and the to come, pound on the side of my skull till I cannot hear her any longer.  But, today, she emerges from a dusty blackness.  A solid, whole being of curved flesh, peppered hair and weathered face sits before me.  Her back is straight.   She opens her hands and holds my cold fingers in her warm, rough skin and her firmness, her truth cradles my entire being.  She fixes me with her level gaze that sees the essence of me and she says: ‘Don’t look back.  Don’t look forward. Look now.  I dare you.’

And she is gone.

 

 

Open window

Saturday 2nd March

On a dark and still night I went to the bathroom, upstairs.  I left the window open.  I weed which was accompanied by the usual sound of water hitting porcelain and I heard a voice outside and it said: ‘Classy.’  I was ashamed.

My neighbour is a man of perhaps 18 years old, who lives with his parents and spends an inordinate amount of time in the driveway tinkering with his car.  But as all was deadly quiet and very, very dark, I had thrown caution to the wind-ow.  My decision was, in part, influenced by my frustration at having to close the window every time I wanted to use my own toilet in my own bathroom for fear that the young man would be outside in the driveway as he is most days, as he has every right to be.

When these new build estates were planned, little space was spared between houses.  So little, that even the daintiest, most elegant wee, can be heard by someone one floor down in the neighbouring property.  The windows on my house open and close, yet I do not feel free to open them whenever I like.  I find my right to invite fresh air into my home is inhibited by my fear of being heard; a liberty, a freedom is infringed.  ‘What will the neighbours think?’  I say to my husband and he replies ‘Fuck the neighbours.’  If only I had his disposition to not care what people think; it’s a work in slow progress.

What would I think if I overheard the sound of urine hitting porcelain from the neighbour’s bathroom window?  I would like to think I would conclude that the neighbour is a human being, like me.  I would like to think that these are the sounds of life.  But then, perhaps he thought he was alone in his driveway enjoying the solitude of a black and quiet night and my toilet music sullied his automotive tranquillity.

Windows release the sounds of private lives into the communal sphere.  They give us glimpses beneath the veneer that we may see what others are really made of.  When I lived in my London flat, I could hear the old Asian man playing his violin.  I could hear the little blond girl screaming at her Mummy across the way.  I could hear the man exclaiming ‘I love you’ in the throes of ecstasy.  I could hear the woman in the neighbouring block shouting from her bathroom throne: ‘Who finished the loo roll and didn’t replace it?!’  I could hear the muffled voices, the click of a light switch, the snore from next door, the rumble of cars, the turbulent sounds of humanity.

In the suburbs, neighbourly relations are more restrained.  The politeness is a barrier to the truth of who we are.  And here in the suburbs, my moment of freedom, to urinate in the night with the window open is a display of my low class.

Am I: a) Wrong to leave the window open when I perform my ablutions in the middle of  the night? or b) Is my neighbour wrong to deem me a woman absent of class due to my performing an audible bodily function or c) Was the building company wrong to situate one house’s bathroom so close to the neighbouring property’s driveway? or d) All of the above or e) None of the above?

I am undecided.  But I do know that all these closed windows will magnify my urge to scream until every pane of glass in every window in this treeless, orange-brick cul-de sac, shatters into a trillion tiny pieces so infinitesimally small that the gentlest, Spring breeze will blow that which conceals our humanness far, far away.

 

 

 

 

Missing

 

Friday 1st March 2019

‘I miss you Mummy.’  I told her how I felt and I wept.

She told me: ‘Don’t think of anything except me loving you.’

 

 

Less of a woman

Sometimes I feel less than a woman.  My relative smallness in size means I am less of a person and less of a female person, therefore, less of a woman.  The smallness of my breasts makes me less of a woman.  My inability to sate my baby’s appetite made me less of a woman.  I envied women their larger breasts that overflowed with milky abundance.  The narrowness of my hips makes me more of a man.  I envied women their wide, child-bearing hips.  My elusive fertility makes makes me less of a woman.

My pubescent upper lip hair. That made me less of a woman, more of a wolf or so the boys said as they howled in the playground.  And now, that sneaky black hair that sprouts from the underside of my chin.  It makes me less of a woman, more of a crone.

Yet the fineness of my fingers makes me more of a woman.  And some find smallness to be a greatly feminine thing.  And perhaps, I am a misogynist to define my own womanhood and worth as a woman, in purely physical and reproductive terms.  I feel less of a woman, according to what I think society wants a woman to be because my inner world is, in large part, constructed by my outer world.  I am the beast and the beast is me.  Perhaps, then, a wolverine, man-hipped crone is just as valuable to this life as any other being could ever possibly be.

 

The Nothingness Beyond

Lily was scaling the metal cage while her siblings slept soundly.  A man with an East Asian accent smiled and said ‘Ah, she like spider man.’  I laughed and agreed.  She was eight weeks old.  Lily was petite and kitten like, even as a senior lady. She would have been fifteen years old in May.  Three weeks ago the vet said she had a large tumour under her tongue and that she may only have a few days to live.

At nine o’clock on her last living morning, she was lying over my shoulder and purring loudly as I lightly rested my ear on her side to listen to her heartbeat. I sighed as I felt the warmth of her strawberry fur on my cheek. At ten o’clock she was devouring blended prawns. At eleven o’clock she was sitting on the roof of the garden shed, watching a black and white cat skulk across a driveway. At twelve o’clock she was sleeping in her bed by the sofa. At one o’clock she was chattering gaily in the passenger seat next to me as I drove her to the vets.  At two o’clock, she was lying on her fluffy blanket, upon a steel table in a windowless room. She purred as the vet injected her front leg. Her body became limp in my hands within ten seconds. Her eyes were large black discs. She cooled quickly and I took my hand away, what I wanted to remember was her warmth. All that remained was her absence.

‘I’m just happy she is at peace.’ said the vet. ‘At peace’ I thought, she does not have the awareness to be at peace. She is dead. When living things die, they simply die and their consciousness goes with them. To be at peace, one must be sentient. There is nothing. And it is this nothingness that fills my mind with a gnawing black hole where Lily once was. When I think of her, there is a hollow, pulling sensation inside me and I long for her trilling mews. In private, I weep at the loss of her. I apologise for my tears, because I am embarrassed to be bereft at the loss of a cat.

She didn’t know she was going to die that day.  If Lily could talk, when asked the question, ‘Would you like to be killed today?’, what would she have said? Would she have said ‘Yes please; I am in too much pain and I do not want to live another day.’ Or would she have said: ‘Living hurts. My mouth won’t close. My tongue is agony. I drool because it hurts to swallow. I cannot eat without pain but I am so hungry. I cannot clean myself. I am tired and I do not think I will be here long. But I like to feel the air in my whiskers and the sun on my back. I like the smells of spring and the grass blades on my scent glands. I like the taste of mashed prawns. I like the sounds of the garden and I am excited by the sight of the Dunnocks alighting on the bird table. I like your fingers stroking my head and I still want to sit across the back of your neck, like I did when I was young and I am not ready to let go of life just yet. Let me live a little longer.’

No one knows.  No one knows what animals really want at this time.  Perhaps, the survival instinct is stronger than the agony.  The vets think they know but they can only know the human response to pain and apply that to other species. No one really knows if Lily wanted to live or die on that day.  I can only hope that I am wrong about the nothingness beyond.

Cyanistes Caeruleus or Daniel & Erithacus Rubecula or Robert

 

Daniel is eyeing the bird feeder.  It is suctioned to the kitchen window and contains a single, half-decimated suet ball with hulled sunflower seeds poking out of the top.  He leans forward readying for take-off.  There is a shadow on the other side of the feeder.  It moves.

Gavin spots it first and whistles: ‘Dan, Dan, Dan, Danny, Daniel!’

Daniel stops and looks at Gavin: ‘What is it mate?  I’m on my way to lunch.’

‘Shadows, moving shadows, pink hands; it’s big, really big.’

The giant shadow is standing at the sink.  It has bright pink hands that it plunges into something white and foamy.  It walks away.

Daniel grows impatient.

‘Sod this for a game of soldiers.  I’m Hank Marvin.’

Daniel stretches indigo wings, leans forward and pushes himself away from the protection of the thicket.  A flash of red shoots out from the cotoneaster and charges into Daniel knocking him off course.  The red pecks viciously at his sweet-lined eyes.  He is spun around and over and upside down before he falls to the patio floor.  He lies on his back and blinks only once.

Image source: http://www.deviantart.com/art/robinredbreast-39849967

Industrial Infant

Industrial infant

 

 

The ticket booth is sepia-coloured.   The seller wears a beaked cap.  His mouth hides behind a thick moustache.  He tells me I can go on the steamboat or the train or even one after the other.  As my sleeve brushes the counter, my fingers turn shades of pale grey.  The gold pound coin falls from my hand and twenty silver shillings land in the centre of his square palm.

I step onto the platform.  I look down and there is a newborn baby in my arms.  There are black surgical pen marks tattooed all around his tiny cranium.  The bosomy, wide-hipped woman who takes my tea-stained ticket looks at him admiringly.  She does not see the oddity of his scars.

I board an open-top train and cling to the infant.  Together we ride around the roof of a red-brick wool factory amidst an industrial landscape, over and over again.

 

 

Source: http://www.steamsounds.org.uk/recordings.html

Cyanistes caeruleus or Gavin

Blue Tit in Trilby by Claire Tarling

Gavin is sitting on a bowed branch of firethorn outside the kitchen window.  His hat is gleaming as the sun runs fingers over his plumy skull.  He tilts his white cheek up to the right and blinks away the light to see a fresh, pale green shoot on the branch.  He stabs his short beak tearing the newness to shreds and inside he finds a sweet, juicy aphid just the colour of lime pulp.

‘Mm…I haven’t had one of these in yonks,’ he mutters through part-masticated flesh with two, fine legs dangling from his beak, before gulping down the succulent bug greedily.

Image source: http://www.jijikiki.com/collections/wall-art/products/blue-tit-in-trilby-art-print

http://www.rspb.org.uk/discoverandenjoynature/discoverandlearn/birdguide/name/b/bluetit/

https://soundcloud.com/lucystevensaudio/the-swithland-wood-recordings

 

To Polaris

Polaris dust nebula

 

 

February afternoon

Azure eastern horizon

Four hundred and eighty two

Aluminium-encased

Celestially-bound bodies

Reflect solar rays on ascent

Into the stratosphere

Compress and combust

Rotate and thrust

Breach auditory peace

Of wood pigeon coo

Teeter precariously

On twig tips

Winter ornament

To Polaris

 

Image source: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080111.html

In Search of Lost Time – Review

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: The Way by Swann’s is a densely descriptive, prose-heavy analysis of social mores, veiled human frailty, familial and romantic love, anxiety, jealousy and the relationship between memory, place and time. It is told through the eyes of a tortuously sensitive boy and, later, through the amorous encounters of a socially mobile man within the fickle, pretentious and stifling world of the Parisian bourgeoisie during La Belle Epoque, a period in French society that lasted from 1871 to 1914.

I must be honest and reveal myself a heathen. It took me two months to plough through this novel with pen poised in hand and an intense furrowing of the brow. After the first fifty pages, I shelved Proust for a month, in favour of Hilary Mantel. À la recherche du temps perdu was not a natural pleasure for me by any stretch. I have little interest in the tribulations of well-to-do people deeply aware of and concerned with social class. The turgidity of Proust’s lengthy descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of characters at a dinner party, are somewhat exhausting after ten pages of facial tics and acted laughter, the hidden meanings of which, in the end, do not seem of any particular consequence.

Yet, I persisted. The exquisite, descriptive vocabulary retains a nowness; a timeless quality.  And Proust’s meticulous, academic social observations reveal profound insights into the relationship between outward human behaviour and inner thought.  He reveals a tender cynicism about the contrivances of his characters and a witty self-awareness about the inherent sense of superiority and associated cruelties that are a by-product of his social standing.

The central theme of lost time encapsulated in the spongy joys of a tea-soaked madeleine is touched so lightly that it lingers delicately in the back of the mind soothing numerous angst-ridden tussles between social constraint and individual complexity. And Proust maintains a deeply personal and confiding tone that leaves you feeling you know a part of him, you have seen a glimmer of his inner world and most intimate worries. It is odd but true that I even think the author’s vulnerability triggered my well-buried maternal instincts.

Within the novel, Proust considers his relationship to the inner sanctum of books and exterior reality that presents a concreteness which ‘dissipates’ when he tries to make contact with it. He writes: ‘…as an incandescent body brought near a damp object never touches its wetness because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.’ The pages are bubbling over with this type of sumptuously visceral analogy that enables you to see and feel the intended sentiment.

Proust describes an assimilation of a book into a reader’s consciousness as he or she constructs characters from pieces of the writer’s creation; a meeting of minds, an exchange across time and space. His rigorous examination of the nature of literature reminds me that the written word is a living thing to be altered and interpreted differently by each and every reader within their own location and from their own construction of reality so that you might see through thine eyes what I have seen through mine.

I read In Search of Lost Time, despite my initial hurdles with the density of the text and disinterest in the staging of the novel, because I thought I could learn something from one of the most revered authors of the 20th century and I hoped it might make me a better writer. I leave the book on the shelf in the study/laundry/guest room, feeling enlightened, inspired and grateful that I didn’t give in.

So after all, as you read Proust and absorb a character, such as Swann’s lover, Odette de Crecy, and your mind shifts between the nuances of her elusive personality, remember you are sitting beneath a virtual blossoming chestnut tree with a French novelist, one of the greatest literary figures of our time, creating lives and building worlds.

View all my reviews

Avenue with Flowering Chestnut Trees at Arles, Vincent van Gogh, 1889

Image 1 source – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9713855/All-of-Proust-on-audiobook-Time-to-go-to-bed-early.html

Image 2 source – http://www.wikiart.org/en/vincent-van-gogh/avenue-with-flowering-chestnut-trees-at-arles-1889

The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba

Claude Lorrain, The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648

 

A distant sea bird calls in the gallery.  Yet, I cannot see one.  The visitors mull around in corduroy, folded-arm consternation, with audio guides and little plaques to lead them through a maze of Turner and the Masters.

Something shifts in the corner of my eye.  I turn back to the painting.  The men carrying the trunk are wobbling and sweating feverishly as they lower precious cargo onto the boat.

The idle bystanders are laughing.  The rowers are rowing.  The Queen’s blue cloak ripples in a Red Sea breeze.

I step into the painting.  I swallow hard and blink and stamp my feet in the dirt.  Nobody sees.

–

I do not believe I was in the painting.  I have an unsettling imagination that leaves me thirsting for reality.  Yet I can taste Arabian salt on my lips.

I go home.  I kick off my shoes.  I roll damp socks into a ball and throw them down the hall.  I watch the cat flick the sock toy in the air and pounce.  Liberated feet breathe in airy relief and siliceous grains glisten between my toes.

 

 

Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Embarkation_of_the_Queen_of_Sheba

Boy with Balloons

Boy with Balloons, Mrs Mook’s Mantlepiece

When I was a girl, about four or five years old, my parents would leave me with a lady called Mrs Mook. She was a big lady; strong as an ox. She had great, wide hips and salt and pepper hair that had been set in pink, heated rollers. She wore slippers for wide feet and paisley, patterned polyester dresses. I liked it when Mum and Dad couldn’t pick me up before tea time. I liked sitting at her Formica table and eating beef in little squares with sweet, tinned peas and grey-vy.

Mrs Mook had the most extensive collection of porcelain I have ever seen. As we had a cuppa in the living room, Mother would raise her cup to her lips, believing it to be a greater shield than it truly was, and utter in harsh, hushed tones ‘Don’t touch,’ before measuredly sipping her tea and eliciting a demure smile as she lowered her cup.

The boy with balloons was my favourite ornament. He stood nearest to me on the left of the dark wood mantelpiece. The balloons were so appealingly edible and fruit-like with their shiny, glazed spheres. I just wanted to pick one and eat it and feel it crunch in my molars like a pear drop. But I did not. I was keenly observed.

I was excruciatingly restrained, sitting on my hands lest they lose control and propel my child’s body up from my chair. They might fling me into the glass cabinet sending plates and coveted tea sets crashing to the floor, before dragging me across to the fireplace. My wayward left hand might lift my arm and force it in one neat line all the way down the mantelpiece decapitating the blue and white bonneted shepherdess with the upturned fingers, massacring the promenading Victorian couple, slaughtering the proud Dalmatian dog and finally murdering the boy with the balloons in one foul swoop with a crash and a smash into smithereens.

The shepherdess’s head would roll casually along the floor till it reached Mrs Mook’s slippered toe where it would rock gently and come to rest with a delicate nose, pressed between a rubber sole and worn carpet. The pink balloon would break free from the others and rather than float away to the boundless sky, it would land with a sure thud and nestle by my chair leg. My unruly hand might take the charlatan strawberry sherbet and conspire with my guileless mouth which, overcome by temptation and fateful opportunity, will weaken and allow wicked, tiny fingers to prise its lips apart just enough to gleefully pop the pink balloon onto my insatiable tongue.

I must sit on my hands.

I wonder where the porcelain boy is now and whether his knuckles are still white because he has been clutching china balloons for his entire life.

Tom the Dog

A dog called Tom

 

 

One day there was dog and his name was Tom.

Tom was walking.  He was a street dog.

He wanted an owner.  He got an owner and he was so happy.

The End.

Zara, age 7

 

I love the way that even in this short and sweet tale, my lovely niece has structured it in traditional storytelling form, with the introduction of our hero; Tom the dog, his plight and a happy ending.  I wonder whether we learn the structure of storytelling or if it is innate.  Zara has read plenty of books so she is influenced by her environment naturally, but perhaps there is a universal formula of narrative that reflects the way the mind processes information.

Zara delivers the tale brilliantly and she was delighted when I asked if I could share her story with you. I hope you like it. 🙂

 

The Psychopath Test – review

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jon Ronson’s the Psychopath Test is a compelling and entertaining documentary novel about clinical categorisation of mental illness. This is a fascinating foray into the prevalence of psychopathy within the criminal justice system, most obviously, but more intriguingly into identifying psychopaths within the power-wielding echelons of society, where it is asserted that psychopathic traits enable an individual to thrive.

Ronson introduces us to some charismatic, confident and mercenary characters from convicted murderers to billionaire businessmen in a variety of environments from high-security prisons to opulent estates as he investigates the nature of psychopathy, if they really do meet Bob Hare’s criteria and what that means. Throughout his encounters which he approaches with a remarkably cavalier attitude, the author endearingly reveals his naivety, arrogance, insensitivity, fear and doubts as we get to know the surface of his, simultaneously, charming and menacing interviewees.

There is discontinuity throughout the book which can, at times, seem like a number of disparate journalistic articles shoved together between the covers and the structure is so loosely circular it’s hardly worth referring back to Being or Nothingness at the end. However, the reporter’s journey is the glue that holds it together as Ronson’s personal foibles and anxieties add an appealing quality of self-awareness to the novel that finds him ultimately examining his own mental health in relation to the moral impetus and nature of his enquiry into psychopathy.

The Psychopath Test raises important questions and warnings about the necessity, the fallibility and the dangers of clinical labelling but as he turns the spotlight inward to his own profession, Ronson critically observes media treatment of those who are just the right kind of mad for the public to swallow with their eggs on toast in the morning.

Jon Ronson’s fast-paced, journalistic style and neurotic wit make the Psychopath Test a hugely entertaining and greatly informative read easily digestible within 3 or 4 evenings. I highly recommend this book and yes, I did take the psychopath test and I’m quite confident that I could do a much better job than Robert Hare and my list will attain global renown, once I have lied and connived my way into the Royal College of Psychiatrists, about which I will feel absolutely no remorse. 😉

 

View all my reviews

 

Homeless elation

 

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.

 

Image source: http://teleautomaton.com/post/1179230296/technology-review-turning-thoughts-into-words

A humble winter tree

Winter Tree

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.

 

Eat my words

I will eat my words

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.

Flood

Swimming in my dressing gown

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.

Storytelling

Once upon a time (English)

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…”

And I sank into wonderment.

Image 1 source: http://robvanderwildttellerstalespictured.wordpress.com/

Image 2 source: https://topillustrations.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/vilhelm-pedersen/thumbelina-3/

Dream of flying away

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.

 

Fleeing the past

 

 

Mount Etna erupts during fish head stew

In a bit of a stew

 

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 Signature of All Things – Review

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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.

View all my reviews

Weirdo to Wo-man

‘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 🙂

 

 

Image 1 source: http://london-sightseeing.net/camden-market-london/

Image 2 source: http://insidersasia.com/tour/sapa-hill-tribe-markets

Image 3 source: http://www.itv.com/news/granada/2014-09-09/harvest-moon-2014/

 

She’s an Easy Peeler?

 

09.03, Friday 5th September 2014

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.’

love

Fruitloops

Cue tenuous musical exit

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Book review

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mr Singer lives with his friend, Antonapolous.  They are mute.  Singer and his friend are separated leaving Mr Singer alone and yearning for company.  Four very different and seeking townspeople are drawn to Singer by his silence.  Never knowing what he truly thinks, they perceive him as being the only person that understands their individual plights.  They imbibe Singer with their own meaning, as he imbibes Antonapoulous with his.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is close to perfection.  Carson McCullers wrote this book when she was just twenty three years old.  The timing of which the story and characters unfurl is expertly measured. The characters, Mick Kelly, Dr Copeland, Jake Blount and Biff Brannon, are beautifully developed.  The author consistently introduces you to each new character with physical appearance, behaviours and idiosyncrasies to guide you comfortably into their lives so that the many people in this book are easy to get to know.

The dialogue has a concise, coarseness to it that gives it a very genuine quality.  The complex inner workings of each person are revealed steadily without it feeling like anything other than organic observation.

The vocabulary throughout is replete with colloquialism.  This enhances rich descriptions of place, tastes, smells and sounds with a transporting outcome.  It seems like McCullers had a particularly keen sense of smell.  She even describes classical compositions as smelling like spring rain and she deftly tricked my brain into fooling my senses.  This August I’m fairly sure I lived in the Deep South.  I lay on dewy grass under a pine-scented night sky while Beethoven drifted from a neighbours wireless and I washed down Dr Copeland’s true purpose and torment with turnip-green liquor and a pone of cornbread.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a nourishing tale that is full of empathy for humanity in all its flaws and foibles.  Carson McCullers must have been one of the highly sensitive persons of this world, possessing great depth and insight into the human condition at a remarkably young age.  To have the ability to communicate that understanding is a rare, innate and instinctive gift. I cannot find fault with this novel. I correct my earlier statement.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is literary perfection and Carson McCullers was born to write and she is a writer to aspire to.

I highly recommend this restful, wise, warm marvel of a novel.

View all my reviews

Edmond was a Donkey

 

Edmond was a donkey from Franck Dion on Vimeo.

A good brain shared this film and wrote a very insightful and interesting post on his excellent creative blog here: http://summerlad.com/edmund-was-a-donkey/

To said good brain I say this – Thank you for bringing me out of my slump.  I’m currently wearing a paper capital L on my head but I’m embracing it and off to find my pasture. (Oh and by pasture I mean Loser Lounge where I’m allowed to sit on an L-shaped sofa wearing PJs all day while I watch endless movies and eat cheesy Doritos and Quality Street washed down with case after case of perfectly chilled dry white wine for the rest of  my days without getting fat, getting a headache, getting cirrhosis of the liver or developing suppurating sofa sores.  BTW, it is always raining outside the window of Loser Lounge to remove any feelings of guilt at staying in and prevent the compulsion to go out for a walk or something equally absurd.) 🙂

This charming animation tells a tender and poignant tale that bears many great truths for many. In fifteen minutes your eyes will open and you will see yourself clearly and all your fellow donkeys.

‘Edmond is not like everybody else. A small, quiet man, Edmond has a wife who loves him and a job that he does extraordinarily well. He is, however, very aware that he is different. When his co-workers tease him by crowning him with a pair of donkey ears, he suddenly discovers his true nature. And though he comes to enjoy his new identity, an ever-widening chasm opens up between himself and others.’

Source of film and excerpt: http://vimeo.com/97122568

Skinny Bitch – Book Review

Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Skinny Bitch is a sassy, sharp-talking, humorous, and at times, disturbing assassination of the crap that we put into our bodies. I have been an omnivore all my life but lately, for health reasons, I started thinking about and modifying what I eat. In researching how to be healthier, I came across Skinny Bitch. This book was a #1 New York Times Bestseller…in 2005ish and 2007 in the UK. It does seem like I was the last to know but I say ‘better late than never.’

If like me, you’re starting to think about what you eat and why and how it impacts upon you and the world around you, this is an extraordinarily light and accessible way into a veritable minefield of information. It breaks into bite-sized chunks a huge amount of topics ranging from nutritional content to health outcomes, environmental pollution and animal cruelty and government facilitated industry corruption that I am afraid are still only too relevant today.

The book is, for me, the right balance of enlightenment and humour until Chapter 6 where the authors quote too heavily from another book called Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz. In my humble opinion, supporting materials should be just that and not the body of a chapter. The authors are very honest about their use of this material being to discourage the reader from eating meat. In this vein, it is indeed effective because I haven’t even been able to look at a sausage roll since. On the other hand, using graphically distressing descriptions of extreme animal abuse and horrifying torture has prevented me from sharing an otherwise up tempo book with friends and family whom I am fairly certain will find the content too disturbing.

The writing style is punchy and interesting most of the way through. Chapter 9 delves into government and industry corruption a little too intensely and does become somewhat dry and turgid in comparison to the rest of the book. On the whole, this is a nice, quick read and the lively pace made me gobble it all up in around four evenings.

It is no small feat that Freedman and Barnouin have managed to communicate something as potentially dry as conscientious food consumerism in the voice of girlfriends having fun in a bar over vegan, non-alcoholic cocktails. In a sense they reversed the trickery of big industry marketing teams who present crap as good for us. The authors have presented something good for us in a format that makes us think we’re consuming a celebrity magazine, when in fact we’re learning how we can prevent suffering, reduce damage to our planet and feel altogether better by eating right, well and true. To me, it’s a pretty good message.

Skinny Bitch is an easy, enjoyable and worthwhile read. In the voice of the authors: ‘Just stop being a pussy and read it already!’

 

View all my reviews

 

Image source: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/genetically-modified-cows-could-fart-less/story-fn5fsgyc-1226311605016

 

Theodor Kittelsen 1857-1914, a Great Norwegian Artist

Kvitebjørn Kong Valemon (White Bear King Valemon), 1912

 

 

Soria Moria Castle, “Far, far away he saw something bright and shine.” 1900

 

 

Die Pest Kommte (The Plague is Coming) 1896

 

 

Gutt på hvit hest (Boy on white horse), 1890-1909

 

 

Sorgen (The Woe), 1894-95

 

 

Kittelsen and his wife Inga, 1910

Morgenstimmung (Morning Mood) Edvard Grieg, 1875

Scott’s Last Expedition – Review

 

Scott’s Last Expedition, V1 by Robert Falcon Scott

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Last year my partner and I took a trip to Northumberland. On our return to London we whiled away several hours in a magical antique book store in Alnwick called Barter Books. (http://www.barterbooks.co.uk)  I got lost in almanacs, girl’s coming of age tales, African adventures, poetry, biographies and many literary jewels.  Once I’d swamped myself behind a book tower, The Man chucked me a disapproving look of ‘we’ll never get all those in the boot’ and I began the job of narrowing down what I was allowed to take home with me.

Scott’s Last Expedition in two volumes gifted with love from Dorothy to Herbert in 1954, according to the beautifully penned inscription, was my prize.

I began reading Scott’s diary of the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition last July. It became my bible. I journeyed on an overladen ship that left New Zealand on 29th November 1910 and I stayed with Captain Scott until his last journal entry on 29th March 1912.

Even when I wasn’t reading it, the old, blue book sat on the bedside table and the sights and sounds of the expedition lived with me. In the bright white, ice crystals bit my fingers and my eyes were dazzled and then snow blindness would cure and I could see the Soldier cajoling a wilful pony called Chris into a harness. The dogs barked excitedly before Meares mushed them across a glacier. Skuas shrieked and emperor penguins gabbled. I tasted Clissold’s seal soup. I marvelled at moonlit Mount Erebus. I watched the aurora dance in front of the Owner and I walked hundreds of miles through freezing blizzards of bleak, long white.

Funnily enough, I have never taken the slightest bit of interest in adventurers and expeditions and man’s races to be the first or the pioneers of the world. But I was drawn in by RF Scott’s appealing, personable and beautifully prose-filled descriptions of Antarctica. I fell head over heels in love with the place and the people and the excitement and optimism.

Scott’s portrayal of the expedition is remarkably revealing in what it tries to conceal. He presents an impression of a team of courageous, intrepid, altogether good sorts doing sterling work and following his own flawless planning and command without even the slightest disagreement, in the name of King and Country. But this is a hard task to maintain and he cannot hide his anxieties entirely so when they are revealed there is a poignant intimacy that the author of this wonderful journal is lowering his guard and speaking to you.

Scott’s unerring outward denial of responsibility and lack of expressed doubt regarding the efficacy of his planning, serves to intensify the tragic quality of the final throes.

This is a beautiful book. It is not a novel. It contains wind directions, gale force strengths, temperatures, coordinates and geographical features. It is a physical description as much, if not more, than anything else. It cannot be read in one go.

It is a man’s life and should be digested slowly so that day by day, Antarctica seeps into your bones and you live the adventure. If you read this fascinating man’s journal, you will spot blue whales from the Terra Nova with Edward Wilson. You will pass a wall of blue ice in a small row boat, as it crashes into the Ross Sea. You will get to know the vital and brilliant men of one of the most controversial, daring and infamous adventures in history and in the last moments you will see the South Pole with Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

Scott’s Last Expedition is one of my greatest treasures. I cannot praise it enough. I love it dearly. I urge you to read it.  Be patient with it.  Savour it and share the adventure.

 

 

 

View all my reviews

 

Image: Captain Scott writing his journal in the winterquarters hut. October 7, 1911,  Photo: MASONS NEWS SERVICE, sourced here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8979966/Captain-Scotts-team-ate-curried-horsemeat-for-Christmas.html

Just now

Ash tree outside window

 

It is one o’clock in the afternoon. I am hungry.  My mind is drifting towards the beans and sourdough bread in the kitchen.  I have been sat still for too long at the £10 IKEA desk. One of the cheap metal wire drawers is collapsed. I should fix it but each time I do, it surrenders to the greater forces of gravity and the weight of paper.  The seat is an unwanted office chair.  A memory comes of my partner smiling as he wheeled the purple and yellow ergonomasaurus across four lanes of traffic at Waterloo.  I sat in the car under rumbling railway arches laughing at him.

A dull pain nags me in the back of my shoulder.  The voices of two bin men drift through the open window as they wheel away used cotton buds, squeezed teabags and stale bread crusts.  The sun is shining. Children are screaming and shouting from a nearby school playground.  The jets of a Boeing 747 are roaring less than one mile above my head.  A wood pigeon is cooing from the top of a sycamore tree in the garden.  Four crows are cawing and doing acrobatics between the branches of an ash tree.  A marble white butterfly flutters up the window.  The school bell rings.

No analysis.  No judgement.  Just now.

The Dentist and the Crossing Lady

Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia, Guido Reni 1575-1642

 

This morning I went to the dentist. He looked barely a day over twenty one and he was just about the height of my chest and I am not tall.  He eventually averted his gaze from my unimpressive cleavage to speak to me about, you know, teeth.  I assured myself that my pelican jumpsuit and grubby, canvas pump ensemble was in no way feminine or revealing enough to be described as ‘asking for it’ or ‘flaunting my wares’ or ‘not leaving much to the imagination’ etc.

So I was caught off guard and somewhat unnerved by his overt lechery.  In all my years of dental visits, I have never experienced this type of thing before.  I would expect it in a bar, if I ever went to a bar.  But when I am putting my health in the hands of another person I am vulnerable and I like a level of professionalism and respect for the patient-doctor relationship.  Nay, I deserve it.  It is my right.  I opted to handle the situation with an aggressive formality that created an even greater discomfort between me and the twerp who had free reign of my oral cavity.

 

‘So Me Dear…what can I do for you?’ he said.

 

It was unusual to be referred to as ‘Me Dear’ by someone so young.  After the examination, he filled out my record.

 

‘Do you pay for your treatment?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Are you employed?’
‘Uh well no, I gave up a long career to write a book so I guess I’m unemployed. But I support myself so I’m not on benefits or anything.’

 

Oh the shame I feel when I try to explain what I do.  I have worked since I was fourteen years old.  And after years of doing the wrong jobs in politically-paralysing environments, which required me to be someone I am not five days a week and subsequently wore away my mental strength, I am doing something I absolutely love.  I am taking a risk.  But the only real risk would be not to have ever tried. That I would regret.

 

So, like most of you, I write and I love it.  And when I successfully ignore statistical probabilities of getting published, then everything is almost peachy-rosy.  Occasionally, the worries spill into my dreams, and I am back in a dusty, old office in a meeting room full of people who cannot say what they mean.  They are afraid.  The first to speak, will be the first to go.  And I try to speak but there is an invisible gag over my mouth and it is the fear of truth that pervades bureaucracy and I can’t breathe.  I can’t go back.

 

Aside from the odd nightmare, this change, this writing thing is blooming wonderful. It’s the happiest I have ever been.  But I don’t like to describe myself as unemployed. Yet, in this society, on the reams of paper and in the dinner party conversations and over the Christmas turkey and Brussel sprouts at the in-laws, I am not a writer until my writing has monetary value.  Therefore, unless someone pays me for that damn book, in the eyes of others I am unemployed.  Employ also means to keep occupied and I am occupied.  I’m occupied in the work of writing and I do it for a lot of hours. And each page I write, to me, has more value in love and emotion and passion and humour and tenacity and integrity, than a year of turning the cogs of a bureaucratic oil tanker so that it can sail in the wrong direction.  I just don’t fit into the boxes any more.

 

‘Well if you’re not on benefits then you have to pay.’ he concluded.

 

The dentist handed my record to the receptionist and whispered indiscreetly:

 

‘Tell her to give me a call for a date when she gets a job.’ I looked at him sharply.
‘Sorry?’ The receptionist looked confused and embarrassed.
‘Uh, nothing,’ he muttered into his notes and took a keen interest in the grey-flecked carpet.

 

I was humiliated and insulted on so many levels. I am about to swear. Please look away now if it may offend you.

 

What a fucking dick! That smarmy little shit-bag, fuck-faced prick.

 

~ The crude and offensive language has reached its denouement.

 

I, a forty year old woman, was being leered at and made a mockery of by that little fucker (apologies for the lapse).  And I know he must have been at least twenty five to qualify so he is old enough to know how to conduct himself in the workplace.  I should have said something.  I should have, but as usual, I did not.  I won’t go back.

 

As a child I had an old, grey-bearded Jewish dentist.  I would sit next to my Dad in the waiting room and try not to look at the mildly grotesque photos of raw, receding gums on the surgery walls.  The dentist’s chair was pale grey and quite comfortable.  Mr Bacher was a kind man. You can tell these things.  His doughy, square fingers smelled metallic like the long-armed tuppence-shaped mirror and probe he expertly wielded with a tap here and a scrape there.  At the end of every appointment he would say: ‘Ah, you’re teeth are veeeerrrry good,’ in his long, drawn out creaking way.  I liked him veeerrry much. He never told me not to drink fizzy drinks or eat too much sugar. On the contrary, he religiously offered me a choice of orange, strawberry or lime-flavoured, boiled-sweet lollypop after each visit.  Orange was my favourite; still is.  He gave me my first filling, naturally.

 

This morning as I walked away from the dentist, I waited at the lights to cross the road and engaged in habitual, internal self-flagellation.

 

‘You’re an idiot. Some little twat made you uncomfortable and you let him get away with it. You’re a grown woman now. You’re pathetic.’

 

I became aware of a pair of wide, blue eyes peering at me in my peripheral vision. Damn, am I saying this out loud, I thought. There was a woman in her sixties with short grey hair. She stood next to me, smiling while we waited for the green man.

 

‘Everyone’s in such a hurry.’ She rolled her eyes and laughed.
‘I know…where are they all going?’

 

I laughed back while weighing up whether she was a. a nice friendly woman, b. certifiably insane, c. about to ask me for the train fare to Bromley or, the most fearful of all d. a God-Botherer.

 

‘I lived in New Zealand for twenty four years. I only came back to look after my Mum. She’s ninety and there’s no one else.’
‘That’s very kind to leave New Zealand for your Mum.’ I replied.

The fuzzy green man walked onto the black felt and we trundled across the road with one, cautious eye on the white van that was growling and edging forward menacingly.

‘Ah well, back to it. Better see she’s alright.’ She waved as she wandered off down the hill.
‘Bye. Have a good day.’ I called.

 

Crossing lady did not ask for money or offer me a badly printed flyer to a church event with a picture of an open-armed bearded bloke in a white robe and a biblical psalm on it. That’s options c and d eliminated. Perhaps all those years in New Zealand, with a population that we would cram into south London alone, has removed her big city fear-field.  And she was a nice woman, and maybe a good sort of bonkers.  I enjoyed a perfectly pleasant, brief encounter with a complete stranger in an over-populated city for the sake of nothing more than congeniality. It was a connection.

 

Too often I spend my days disconnected.  Exchanging niceties with crossing lady over roaring traffic and beeping, flashing men, after tolerating a disrespectful, juvenile dentist, injected humanity back into the sea of empty, grey masks passing by on pavements, in buggies, cars and buses. Crossing lady reached right in and pulled me out of myself. People are more than obstacles to be avoided along the journey from A to B.  There are some days, when no matter how reclusive one feels, the universe insists on pushing through your barriers until you let it in. And so, for better or worse, let it in.

 

Image: The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia (the patron saint of dentistry) by Guido Reni 1575-1642, source – http://en.wahooart.com/@@/8LJ2ZX-Guido-Reni-Martyrdom-of-Saint-Apollonia

Marley Man-Cat

 

 

 

The cat is sleeping on the windowsill of the spare room cum study cum laundry room.  I admire the golden-tawny colour of his undercarriage, the leopard spots on his saggy, old tum and his perfectly striped legs.  His chest and leg are bald where he was shaved, revealing velvety nude grey skin beneath.  Two weeks ago he was quite unwell; kidney problems.  When I left him at the vets he was a shadow of his former self.  I thought he would die.

 

‘We are going to have to keep him in,’ said the very efficient vet.

‘Oh, okay.’

 

I blubbed hideously.  My partner looked embarrassed.  A box of Kleenex were expertly presented to me by the vet.

 

When Marley was returned to me I could not take my eyes off him.  I watched his every move as though it were his last.  Sometimes, when he lay on the cushion with his head hanging off, I would rush over to his side and shake him awake fearing that he had gone to meet Bastet along the River Nile.  He’d shake his head and adjust his eyes and see me and sing a reassuring rhythmic song.  I recorded his purr on my Dictaphone. I took hundreds of photos.

It seems absurd to feel so much for a cat.  But then, he has been with me since he was six weeks old (the lady on Shootup Hill said he was older but she lied).  He survived my student years and all the late night parties and cannabis fug generated by Pink Floyd lovers.  He even took me back after I left him with a friend in East Grinstead so that I could bum around Australia for a year.  All it took was a quick sniff and it was as if I’d never been away.  Marley has lived in Finchley, Kilburn, Leytonstone, Clapham and Peckham.  He’s travelled extensively and he’s even endured kitty jail.  He’s done time.  In his 18 years, the old boy has lived.

Nowadays he likes to curl up with me on the sofa to watch old movies.  He is quite deaf.  It takes him a long time to get up from his cushion and he often wonders into the kitchen/hallway/living room and then stops and looks around with a bewildered air as though he clean forgot what he went there for.  Sometimes he watches us walk down the driveway and he stands at the very top yowling in his guttural voice.  It bounces off the walls of the flats.  The neighbours talk.  They say things like: ‘Oh my God, it’s just a cat!’  The vet says he might be a soupçon senile.  But whatever he is, he seems happy.

Marley’s whiskers are twitching.  His eyelids flicker and his black-padded paw flinches.  He is dreaming of the little one, Lulu.  She is ginger and white with freckles on her nose.  She is very smart.

 

In his dream, he is licking her face and the backs of her ears with his pungent, oily, dense, spittle-covered emery board tongue.  Suddenly he is overwhelmed by the desire to bite her.  It happens every time.  He sinks his teeth slowly into the whitest, softest part of her throat.  She extricates herself from his grip and punches him in the face before leaping back sideways like a crab-cat.  She runs out of the cat flap and he follows her into the night.  She scales the birch tree where he cannot go.  He watches her climb to the thinnest, highest branch and she taunts him from her elevated position.

‘Come down Lulu.’

‘No way Grandpa…You come up here.’

‘I can’t. It’s my arthritis.’

‘Tough shit fat boy.  Shouldn’t have bitten me.’

‘I couldn’t help it.  I don’t like it down here all on my own.’

‘Don’t worry.  The big French thing will be out soon with that Staffy she’s fostered from Canine Incarcerate.  I hear he was in for cat-killing.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah man.  It was like a quintuple felicide or something.  Didn’t you hear?  All the cats have been talking about it.  Anyhoo, I’m going hunting and you’re way too slow to catch mice.  You really are quite the most monstrous clummer I’ve ever known.’

‘Bitch.’

‘See ya. Say hi to Gnasher for me.’

‘No, Lulu, wait.  Let’s play catch leaves.’

‘No thanks!’

‘Why do you want mice anyway, there’s chicken in gravy in your bowl.  Mice are revolting; all that bone and eyeball, grasping claws and weird little teeth and a wiry tail to get stuck in your throat.  They make my skin itch.’

‘Fat chance of getting any food the big things leave.  You always push me off and eat my dinner Maximus Felis Catus. ’

‘No I don’t.  I just have a little lick.’

‘You lick off all the juicy bits and leave the dried up crispy remnants for me.  That’s why I am tiny and lithe  and you’re morbidly obese, too fat to be a real cat.’

‘Am not, I’m just as real as you.’

‘Are not, you’re like a man-cat.  I saw how she held you over the loo that day when you were chucking up.  Are you a cat or a man?  Man-cat!  Man-cat!  Man-cat!’

 

Lulu undermines his cat-ability, his very cattiness.  Marley jolts awake from his anxiety dream.  He looks at me and blinks.  He rotates on the spot and grumbles quietly as he flops down again into slumber.  And I love him.

 

 

 

 

The Little Prince – Review

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Little Prince is a magical tale about a pilot who crashes his plane in the Sahara and meets a boy; a little Prince. The pilot is enchanted by the sweet enigmatic boy and they soon become friends. The little Prince reveals his origins and shares his innocent wisdom. The pilot is slowly reconnected with a long-forgotten way of seeing; a child’s truth that he had learnt to suppress in order to become a socially acceptable adult concerned solely with ‘matters of consequence’.

The inter-stellar adventures of the cherubic boy show the pilot the absurdity of a material world concerned with placing numerical and monetary values upon beauty and life. The man is reminded of the futility of the human race.  The little Prince and the pilot together learn about friendship, love and loss.

In the unassuming demeanour of a child, there is a powerful voice that tricks you into thinking it is but a whisper when in reality, it hollers at your conscience and summons your spirit.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is one of the most treasured books I have ever read. There are some tales that are made of gold. Live with it. Live with the Little Prince on his asteroid.

View all my reviews

 

About the Author

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger comte de Saint Exupéry had a very long name.  He was a French aristocrat and aviator.  On December 30, 1935 at 02:45 a.m., after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his mechanic-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert. They were attempting to break the speed record in a Paris-to-Saigon air race (called a raid) and win a prize of 150,000 francs.Their plane was a Caudron C-630 Simoun, and the crash site is thought to have been near the Wadi Natrun valley, close to the Nile Delta.

Both miraculously survived the crash, only to face rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat. Their maps were primitive and ambiguous, leaving them with no idea of their location. Lost among the sand dunes, their sole supplies were grapes, two oranges, a thermos of sweet coffee, chocolate, a handful of crackers, and a small ration of wine. The pair had only one day’s worth of liquid.

They both began to see mirages and experience auditory hallucinations, which were quickly followed by more vivid hallucinations. By the second and third day, they were so dehydrated that they stopped sweating altogether. Finally, on the fourth day, a Bedouin on a camel discovered them and administered a native rehydration treatment that saved their lives. The near brush with death would figure prominently in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, winner of several awards. Saint-Exupéry’s classic novella The Little Prince, which begins with a pilot being marooned in the desert, is in part a reference to this experience.

 

Biography source: http://www.poemhunter.com/antoine-de-saint-exupery/biography/

 

Interesting 1979 clay animation film of the Little Prince with bonkers music.  Warning: If you haven’t read the book, don’t watch this film in case you cannot get the unremittingly screechy voice behind the little Prince out of your head. 🙂

 

 

Fruitless

Pregnant Woman and Death, Egon Schiele, 1911

 

The embryologist played Sade’s ‘Your Love is King’ to Ovum and Speirin.  I reclined on the bed in the operating theatre in shower cap and gown. We watched an old black and white movie. Mind you, the tickets were £5000 a pop and they didn’t even give us flat, warm diet coke and unevenly salted popcorn.  I didn’t like to complain though, best not when someone’s got their hand up my Veronica.

A steam train catheter chugged onto the big screen and with one jerky jolt, two tiny white dots; two potential people, disembarked at Womberloo Station. They were swallowed up by the big smoke. Dazzled by bright city lights and a fast-paced, rat-race. But they couldn’t afford the real estate so they got the 17.17 to Burton Pidsea.  The third one was mistaken for a bit of fag ash. She was deposited in a rubbish bin and last we heard, she was on her way to a big, fuming, waste-recycling plant in Bermondsey and we haven’t seen her since. It is unexplained.

Nonsense aside, there is a rawness with me. It sits in the pit of my stomach. I wake up in the morning and for a moment, it is not there. Then it seeps into my day. I lost them; quite careless really. P’raps it’s for the best. I’d only fuck them up.

Trouble is, even though I am convinced I am still sixteen, my body is coming to the end of its reproductive life. Perry Menopause it’s called. Then one day, in a few years I’ll look out of the bedroom window and Impendia Menopause will emerge through a gathering mist and glide eerily down Scabbard Street. It will not be long before I hear her frightening, thud-thud-thud at the front door.

‘I’m not ready!’ I’ll shout.
‘No one ever is,’ she’ll reply.

She will break the door down. Her menacing footsteps will clomp up the staircase and the floorboard outside the bedroom door will creak under her impressive weight made of her prized Menses Collection. I will cower under the duvet. She will creep up from the foot of the bed, like that terrifying scene in The Grudge where a ghost with a wayward neck climbs into bed with a Japanese schoolgirl and fails miserably to enunciate the word ‘toast’.

‘Can’t I keep them a bit longer?’ I’ll plead.
‘No love, you’ve had them for over thirty years. I’m taking them away.’

And I’ll miss them. Periods that is. Menarche is a celebrated time in a girl’s puberty marking the beginning of her fertility. It marked my transition from girl to woman. I feel earthy during monthly or moon-ly cycles. I am connected to a natural order of things and other women.

Menopause, on the other hand, does not seem to come with a Happy Ovary Retirement banner or a flag-waving commemoration. Don’t my ovaries deserve a long service award?  A Royal Doulton lead crystal trifle bowl for the credenza.  Perhaps they don’t. My ova never made a baby or breakfast.

What was all the blood for? Just to keep Tampax in business. My capitalist ovaries contributed to the economy then. And at least I didn’t have to fashion papyrus into a cylinder and shove it up me thanks to Earle Haas’s unusual preoccupation with the discomfort of his menstruating wife.

I just can’t seem to get used to the idea of never having a child. Sometimes I think that I’m ok, then I see a pregnant woman rubbing her swollen belly in proud contentment and I am overwhelmed with the impulse to yell: ‘What’s so great about you? Why do you get to have one? Stop rubbing it in my face, walking around showing it off…Ooh look at me and my special bump, I am the creator, I am Mother Earth, bare-footed and bleeding pregnant!’  Fortunately, I keep the crazy in my head and turn away filled with yearning and envious sorrow.

I feel cheated. I feel like my biology is wasted. To reach the end of my reproductive life and not have made life leaves a gaping whole. I just cannot fill it.  I can’t ignore it any longer so I am breaking down my self-constructed glass wall of isolation on subject Ferre.

Is there anyone out there who feels like I do? And if so, does it ever go away? Your thoughts, ideas, musings are very, very welcome here.

Thank you for listening. 🙂

I find the best way to process things I don’t like to process is to accompany them with totally irrelevant irreverence.  So…watch Streetbands ‘Toast’ for a very funny lightner!!  I promise it will make you smile.

 

Image source: http://www.egon-schiele.net/Pregnant-Woman-And-Death.html

Life after Life – Review

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Life after Life is a story about a baby, a child and a woman called Ursula who is gifted, or cursed, with the reliving of the same life and the ability to remember her previous lives. The story spans two world wars and its robust historical context provides a tumultuous and fascinating stage for the lives of Ursula and her family, lovers, friends and foe.

In each life, the protagonist effects a change in response to the last, and profound questions are raised both in her individual life stories and as a philosophical theme throughout the book about whether we have the capacity to change our fates and if we did, would it really matter?

It took me seventy pages to get into the story as it leaps across time and lives. This may just be my de-cluttering from the last book I read or a rather slow warming up period to adapt to a new type of narrative structure. But once I was in, I was definitely in and my struggle was rewarded handsomely.

I found the meditative circular rhythm of the many-ended story simply entrancing, soothing and strangely nourishing. Atkinson’s deliciously sophisticated structure serves to build up intrigue in Ursula’s life choices, events and relationships and a commitment to staying with her and finding out if she could and should make a difference.

I only finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago and while the concept, structure and context of the story has stayed with me, the characters are long gone and I’m struggling to remember their names. This is unusual for me. I normally remember people, even fictional ones.

Ursula has several lovers in various lives, but I did not get a sense that any of them were significant and they were quite forgettable. The only real tenderness seems to be for her brothers and her father Hugh, who was perhaps her only true love. I could attribute this to a learnt mistrust of men but her female relationships are all quite absent of emotion at the same time.

There is a distance in each character that keeps them on the historical stage, rather than bringing them to life. If it were only one or two characters, I’d assume it were intentional, but as it is most of them, for me, perhaps there is something about writing people into history and in emphasising the popular notion of a ‘stiff upper lip’ war-time mentality, contact with the frailty of human emotion is sacrificed or lost.

Having said all that, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Life after Life. It is a brilliantly engaging novel for its intelligent narrative structure, grounding historical context and the philosophical questions it tantalisingly toys with on the cyclical nature of life and its infinite possibilities.

View all my reviews

Islands of Genius – Review

Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant by Darold A. Treffert

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Islands of Genius is an enlightening journey into the breadth and depth of Savant Syndrome through scientific evidence and case studies from the authors wealth of experience as a psychiatrist specialising in the epidemiology of Savant syndrome in autism.

Treffert presents an intriguing argument that the evidenced existence of unlearnt knowledge in music, art, mathematical ability, literature and so on, in people with Savant Syndrome or a prodigious ability, is indicative of genetic memory that is present in us all.

The author goes on to ask if people with a learning disability, CNS injury,dementia or other condition that inhibits left-brain function and stimulates right-brain function (a common factor in Savant sydrome cases), can access a reservoir of information stored in their DNA, is it possible for neurotypical people to access the same through conscious right-brain stimulus?

Genetic memory and epigenetics are complicated fields of study and Treffert introduces us to the lived examples of this in an accessible way. Meeting people in the book, like Kim Peek, Alonzo Clemons and the larger than life Temple Grandin, is an enriching experience. There are plenty of references to direct you to films about the people you are introduced to in the case studies, making this book a very interactive tool and bringing the pages to life.

The content is greater than the written style. Many parts of the book are repetitive. It could be a lot more concise and would probably be more powerful if it were edited down.

The case histories are integral to introduce you to some very important people, but they are all approached with the same success story formula which becomes predictable and, unfortunately, less impactful. They tend to reduce the people they describe to their savant ability and the positive effect of that skill in their life, always with the support of a loving family. It gives the impression that the author is extracting the information they need to convey a strongly-held belief or argument, rather than letting the information speak for itself. Because of this, the book is a little too prescribed. After the first five cases, you hear the author’s message loud and clear but you do not get to know the individuals themselves in any other way, which keeps you at a distance from the person behind the condition.

However, the subject matter of this book is highly valuable and the concepts that it posits are not only brilliant in themselves theoretically, but they can, do and should be ever more applied to uncovering vast, untapped oceans of diverse intelligences and abilities and potential for human development.

Islands of Genius is a living thing and when you absorb the ideas within it, you feel inspired and compelled to share its capacity to make you think and its humbling attention to the people who grace its pages and for that I am incredibly grateful to its author. Read it.

View all my reviews

The Hare in the Moon

 

It is three o’clock in the morning on the fourteenth instant of the fifth month. While Terra sleeps, the Hare turns on the Moon and opens heavy lids and stretches great hind legs and bursts with zeal from dark lunar regolith with the verve of new life. Charged with spring’s brio the Hare goes running, hopping and jumping from Spica to Zubenelgenubi to Antares before he takes one final three thousand trillion mile-long leap.

Vega sleeps next to her husband on the left side by an open window. The Moon Hare creeps with ears flattened to his angular skull through slats of blinds and pads two by two over a white gloss sill. He hops onto the end of a quilted bed. Vega feels his weight. She opens her eyes and sees a shadowy silhouette of tall, alert ears and a gnarled face and she stretches her fingers out and touches the cool, smooth skin of her husband’s back.

Husband lump grunts.

 

‘Hare’ she whispers.

 

And the bed is lighter and the shadow is gone.

 

An hour of fitful slumber later, a coarse barking peals through warm, rain-fresh, moonlit night. Husband lump stirs and turns over.

 

‘Fox’ the woman whispers in half-sleep.

 

It is morning and walking husband phones his wife.

 

‘There is a fox in the drive. His entrails are out of his body and a crow is breakfasting on him. If you can avoid it, I would not go out there. I have called the council and they will come and take it away.’

‘The fox; I heard him in the night.’

 

At ten o’clock at night on the fifteenth instant of the fifth month Vega looks to the May sky.  On indigo air, nestled amidst luminescent cloud-mountains, beyond sable, jagged arbour networks and night-ash leaves, the Hare is chasing the Fox all around the Moon.

 

 

 

Images 1&2 – Stargazing Hare and Full Moon Fox by Anita Inverarity, http://www.redbubble.com/people/anitainverarity/works/8385756-star-gazing-hare

The Distance Between Us – Review

The Distance Between Us by Maggie O’Farrell

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story of two strangers, Stella living in London and Jake living in Hong Kong is woven together cleverly. The chapter-less structure of the story where you hop back and forth from one paragraph to the next between the parallel lives of the two love interests manages to gradually entwine Stella and Jake beautifully in the readers mind. The past is unravelled with evocative and viscerally described childhood and coming of age experiences that explain the relationship between the two sisters, Stella and Nina, in all its gloriously unhealthy insularity as well as inviting the reader to witness and relate to the complicated and competitive love between siblings.

I realise I may be biased here in relating to the female characters more, but I suppose Stella is the protagonist and as such I was given more reason to invest in hers and Nina’s story. I found a lack in Jake that left me a little cold and the emptiness in his character does not resolve itself at any point, but perhaps it is not meant to. His mother Caroline, on the other hand, is very interesting and I enjoyed the dialogues between Jake and his down to earth friend Hing Tai, who, to me, has a warm and immediate humour about him and a certainty to counter-balance Jake’s watery nature. But Jake himself seemed a little undeveloped. Consequently, I don’t think I cared too much about what happened to him.

There is something about the strength of the peripheral characters in this book, like Stella’s mother, Francesca, and her friendship with Evie, who we get to know just enough about to like and engage with, that add a quality whereby the field of vision is extended widely beyond the main plot. Because of this, because they are not too prescribed, the characters stay with you and grow organically and effortlessly.

I read The Distance Between Us in three nights which for me, as a SLOW reader, is pretty quick and testament to very well placed hooks and shows. I’m sure a normal person could gobble this lingering and resonance-rich novel up in no time at all. Overall, an enjoyable and sensory read.

View all my reviews

Edie’s poem

My 7 year old niece came to visit.  We took her to the Natural History Museum.  Edie met her forefather, Neanderthal Jones and she shook the three-fingered hand of Tyrannosaurus Rex and she danced the do-si-do with Allosaurus and she swam alongside a sei whale, who combed her hair with his fine baleen.

After the museum, Edie saw lots of people close together, waving blue, red and yellow flags in the air and holding banners of words and shouting.  They were saying something that they cared about a lot to do with a man called Maduro.  He is the boss of a country five thousand miles away where angels fall.

Edie went on the train under the ground and then she saw a house on the river where the bosses of this country talk and make things up and decide things.  Then at quarter past four, the little Bens rang and she curtsied to the tower and yawned into my gloved hand.

At home, while I cleaned the kitchen, she asked me for a piece of lined paper.  I gave her my notepad and she sat at my desk.

I opened my notepad today and this is what I found.

 

If I was with you

the things that we could do

Like go and see Big Ben

If I was just with you then

 

Edie, age 7

 

Edie’s poem is the musical beauty of simplicity.  It is worth a million of my words.

Yours truly

YW

 

Image – Stephen Wiltshire sourced here: http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/art_gallery.aspx?Id=3855

Grumpaldine and the Sensational Salamandridaes

 

I am taking a risk and bearing my Grumpaldine to you because it is the truth, because I would be a liar if I pretended that every morning my heart sings at the sight of squirrels chasing each other around the trunk of a white, blossoming pear tree.  Some mornings I cannot see.  Today I am in a stinking, rotten, self-hating, self-pitying, loathsome little mood and it is probably unwise to make it known. It isn’t interesting, it is not positive, it is not inspiring, it is not well-written or eloquent.  It is what it is. And what it is, is a pile of self-indulgent, maudlin, shoulder-drooping, face-sagging, furrowed-browed shit.  Ah! Just uh! Ur! My skin is crawling with it and it’s all tangled in with the staphylococcus and it wants to be scraped away with papaya body scrub.  Skin wants to start at the beginning, before the toxins and the years, the very beginning.

Most days I wake up in the morning and run downstairs followed by an arthritic yowling cat. I sling him over my shoulder while the kettle boils and he purrs and rubs his whiskers on the metal frame of my spectacles. I deliver tea to him upstairs and I push back the bedroom curtains shedding sunlight on sleep-squinted eyes and I fling open the window and fresh, crisp spring air rushes in. Mr Blackbird chases his wife and bright, green parakeets squabble in the silver birch while wood pigeons plunder the hawthorn. I marvel at magnificent, cream-white chimneys and a giant Ferris wheel and square Victoria Tower jutting out of Parliament on the hazy, city skyline before I notice honeysuckle’s tender night growth winding around the trellis and reaching up to my chilly fingers from the balcony below.

Not this week though, not today. My inner bitch is having a field day today. I couldn’t get out of bed. He brought me tea. I scowled at azure skies and lurid, green leaves and I would not let life in. I need to get my kung fu pants on and fight her off with a jab to the eyes, back fist in the nose, right-side kick and a left-hook, fisted groin punch. She’s holding me down with an elbow in my windpipe and I cannot move and I gasp.

 

‘Grumpaldine, I…can’t…breathe.’

‘Oh how interesting, you crazy, deluded loser. No one, do you hear me, no-one gives a flying fig what you have to say, a big fat failure like you.  Who do you think are?  No one will read your pathetic, insignificant, tedious and turgid drivel.  No-one, not one.  You losing failure, failing loser face!!!’ she spits and a globule escapes her mouth and trembles on her lip that quivers with hatred.

‘Please Grumps…can’t…breathe.’

 

Eventually she gets bored and I pull myself up and plod to the shower.  Grum-pals follows me everywhere I go.  She nags at me all day long and she’s so terribly mean.  She says I’m a drain on the planets resources, a useless individual who never grew up, who never had the mettle to succeed or the physical ability to breed.  I am angry. She’s right.  The bitch is right.  I have not done enough. I have spent so long worrying and procrastinating that I simply haven’t done anything.  I am ashamed, shame on me.

I had a German teacher in school. Everyone called her Frau Cow. Hans und Lieselotte mit Lumpi are projected onto the classroom wall above shadowy, children’s heads of all manner, shape and size. The class chants like mesmerised zombies ‘Lumpi ist mein Hund.’ Frau Cow shouts across a dusty beam of light that ends on drawn, black-out curtains: ‘Liesl!’; it was my German name, ‘Du bist die faulste Mädchen in der klasse.’ I learned this sentence well. Lazy; I was the laziest girl in the class, a bone idle, good for nothing, space-wasting, slovenly little trollop and I never pulled my socks up, nor did I go outside and turn over the new leaves. No, I did not.

 

 

If I die tomorrow, what would they carve into the light grey granite headstone, not that I’ve thought about it, but would it say: Born 1973, Died Aged 40, Here lay the remains of a woman who paid the bills, for which she will probably not be remembered. This part is not self-pity.  It is a reality. It doesn’t matter I suppose because when I’m dead, I’m gone. But given that I’m likely, in purely statistical terms, to go on for at least another forty years which is basically living my life over again but with an older body and a more decrepit brain, I really don’t want the next forty to be pretty much the same as the last. I want to create meaning where my body refuses to create life.

Writing can’t tell me what all the blood was for but it is a soothing tonic and I can vent my spleen and drape it around my shoulders like faux ermine and I can make things. I can make stories. And that is all I want to do, to communicate. But I may be a tad unhinged, I may be living in cloud flipping cuckoo land and I am often certifiably…lost.

I might as well go on Britain’s Got Talent with my invisible, ribbon twirling blind newt family the Sensational Salamandridaes.  They really are very good you know. If only you could see them.

 

 

 

Image 1 – The cat

Image 2 – Lumpi und Hans, http://ru.pinterest.com/pin/95983035782295953/

Image 3 – Texas Blind Salamander, Tony Northrup, http://www.northrup.org/photos/texas-blind-salamander/

Nearly

 

 

 

Switch on, filament sparks lighting a lonely bulb that hangs down from the garage ceiling over the sunroof of a carbon-fibred East Asian tiger cub.  It lights up the web of tegeneria domestica.  The house spider darts from illuminated exposure at the centre of its sprawling web into the dark-cornered sanctuary of rare-used wooden handled garden rake, shovel, fork and hoe.

Silver-birch seed-covered sun loungers and dusty parasols collapse in a forest of green plastic chairs.  Milly Molly Mandy and Saucepan Man and Dick and Ann and an obligatorily blond-haired, perpetually fainting Princess dine on damp-aged paper and eat the rotten pea.  As Five Get Into a Fix, Timmy barks and leaps from the margins to wrestle crisp and crunchy Crane fly carcasses from the fluff of a faded, luminous yellow tennis ball. Heavy-handled tennis rackets lean against brown brick and beneath their navy cases, muffled shouts and laughter of four squabbling sisters echo from nylon strings.

Dimpled balls cluster in plastic plant pots and gather around a homicidal Slazenger 9.  In 1983, it left the iron of a clown-trousered, pastel lemon-wearing, Faldo wannabe across the grassy course, over the bunker, between mating magpies in Scotch pines, above blackened sandstone and through pink, blooming, honey bee-filled, buzzing rhododendrons.  As Mother pegged towelling smocks in purple, pink, tangerine and lime green onto her prided rotary washing line, spinning three thousand times a minute and flying at one hundred and sixty miles an hour, the tight, white sphere, brushed by fluttering her fine auburn hair in its determined breeze and whispering ‘nearly’ in her ear.

 

Image:  A good switch born 1979, Parental Garage

 

 

21 Things I Irrationally Hate

 

 

 

21 Things I Irrationally Hate are: 

1. Clicking jaw during mastication

2. Blue bottles hammering their heads against a window pane and threatening to fly into my forehead while hurling around the room at speed in a misjudged figure of eight

3. Uncontrolled screaming, shouting, running, hitting, breaking, pigeon-chasing wayward children en masse in cafes, parks, museums, aquariums, where, by the way, you will inevitably find a deranged five year old boy    hammering on the glass shouting ‘Nemo!’ while the parents stand idly by enjoying their momentary respite at the expense of the longevity of an institutionalised Clown Fish, and other places of interest…keep them on reins until they are at least thirteen or take the little blighters to an open field where you can unleash them, for the love of Mike!

4. Squeaking sound of cotton wool and the repulsive feel of it in my fingers as it catches on my nails and causes skin tingling shivers

5. One wintry, dark and drizzly evening, I was waiting in traffic at a roundabout and noticed a small boy, perhaps eight years old, in a burgundy school blazer, trying to cross the road. He kept stepping into the street one foot and then back on the curb and he just could not get across because the cars were coming thick and fast from all directions. It was my turn to go and I stopped my car on the roundabout so that he could make it. A couple of people gave those long, angry hoots on their horns that sound like shouting because I blocked them from rushing to wherever they were going but I didn’t care. I just hated that no one let that boy cross the road. I hated the humans we can be when we’re consumed with our own squinty-eyed, selfish, single-mindedness. I hated the city. I hated the rushing. I hated it so much I cried when I got home because no one let the boy cross the road.

6. A gang of wasps trying to share my lunch

7. Nine inch heeled torturous, posture damaging, toe squishing, foot crippling death trap shoes…I watched a girl on a night out with her date teetering around on stiletto heels before flapping her arms like a demented seagull and taking a mean tumble down long escalators in Euston underground. I hate that we women feel like we have to be taller and our legs have to be longer to be attractive. I have been there and now I truly hate those killer heels. There are better ways to feel taller…try a penny-farthing or stilts if you need a rush.

8. Canine faecal matter on the pavement down the hill on the way to the train station

9. 4am rumblings of a Boeing 747 over the roof of our home that is just the beginning of the relentless air traffic that congests the skies 9 km above our fitfully, slumbering heads

10. Man-made fibres drive me potty. If I wear viscose then I am so wired, so electrically charged and I can get a shock from anything…even the ruddy cat and neither of us are happy about that.

11. Someone’s tendency to place his dinner plate at the very edge of the table so that the plate’s rim overhangs the floor and is far easier to knock off in spectacular fashion when there is an entire empty welcoming middle to the table. No need to exist on the borders I say. I hate unnecessary risk-taking with a perfectly good piece of crockery and a nice meal.

12. That single, wiry black hair, that before forty had never shown itself and now sneaks up on me under my jaw and that other one that grows out of my moustache, it’s darker than the rest and does not respond so easily to my friend Jolen. What do you want? Why are you here? Is it because I, having been the maiden and the harlot, must now become the hag? I hate it but then again perhaps I could nurture it and come Halloween it will be a new accoutrement to my witch’s costume. ‘Are you a real witch?’ children will say and I’ll show them that loathsome chin hair as proof of my new found identity as the neighbourhood Crone!

13. Seams in the toes of socks are an abomination. Why do sock designers ensure that your little toes will be rubbed raw to blistering by poorly placed seams? Perhaps, they assume that women won’t have little toes anymore after all those years of wearing pointy toed foot breakers which in fairness, in my case, is almost true but I still have enough toe to rub.

14. Bad queuers

15. Mean bus drivers who accelerate really fast, take corners at 100mph and slam on the brakes throwing old ladies and their shopping bags down the centre of the aisle till they fall on top of a poor Mum who’s trying to remain upright while holding onto baby in buggy. Mean, mean, mean bus driver. Not all of them, just too many is all.

16. People looking

17. Sitting next to fidgety, twitchy legged people on flights, train journeys, buses.

18. Nose pickers in traffic jams…I can see you!

19. The low, top shelf in the newsagents. Even a child could see 21 year old Kent-born, Denise’s mammary glands galumphing out from the cover of a lads’ mag. Really, I don’t know who should be more insulted; perhaps the men who these over-paid media twits have reduced to fodder chewing, video game-playing brainless idiots that only pause from Streetrace 5 to have a mid-afternoon w***.

20. Pouting

21. Dust

 

A very funny and brilliant blogger posted her list of irritations here: http://rarasaur.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/21-things-i-irrationally-hate/  She invited people to do the same.  And so I have, thanks to positively radiating Rara!!  Reading hers and writing my own provided some well-needed amusement for which I am very grateful. :>)

 

Image: The Angry One by Francis Hodler 1881, Source: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/ferdinand-hodler/the-angry-one

 

 

Bealdric & the Dungsworths

Bealdric’s summer dreams fade with a last bite of Greenup’s Pippins xanthic-white flesh and a swallow of sweet, apple acid.  Ice crystals gather like unwanted visitors upon his flanks.  The Black Shire horse investigates the creatures.  Avice recoils as he leans down, inhaling folk scent and ruffling her matted, ashen curls with his muzzle.

‘He’s getting to know you is all.’ assures her big sister.

‘Oh right.  Good day Sir.  We are the Dungsworths.’

Idonea grasps coarse, wet Yorkstone whose ore-less field magma and hexagonal sheets of glitter crumbs sparkle between webbed fingers.  The girl finds footing on Dry Stone wall and stands next to the equine giant, tall.

‘Where have you come from?’  She whispers into the Shire’s ear.

Bealdric does not answer.  He moves closer.  Idonea runs her hand along dewy hair from crest to croup.   She surveys the mist-hidden horizon.  With a deep breath and eyes closed, she grabs his withers and hoists herself with a spring.  Her sister simmers and shakes her head before following the elder with trepidation into mounted heights.

‘Ground looks a long way off.’ worries the small girl.

‘Aye Avi, twenty two hands or more I reckon.’

‘Won’t we get into trouble? Someone’ll miss a beast this size.  He’d be able to turn father’s field in a moment or pull a quarry of millstone.’

‘He don’t belong to no one.  Didn’t you see?’

‘See what.’

‘I know you saw Avi.’

The Black Shire feels the little one’s fear pulsing through each nerve-ending in his twitching hide.  He treads thoughtfully around peat bogs, walks between heathery hills and climbs bracken banks through fuliginous fog.  Avice is calmed by his steady gait.  As she studies her sisters back and follows the jerky, uncertain journey of a water droplet that arrives at the end of a dank, auburn tendril of Idonea’s hair, she is moved by her child’s trust in the safety of her sibling.  She tightens her forearms around Idonea’s waist and rests her cheek against her sodden woollen cloak.  

Lagopus lagopus scotica startles and a flurry of terracotta feathers takes flight at Bealdric’s side, gliding and whirring from wing to wing.  Bright orange lids lace glassy, chestnut eyes and the moorfowl’s lucid gobble echoes loudly against elemental walls that reach six thousand feet high.

‘Go-back, go-back, go-back.’ calls Red Grouse.

 

Image 1, Moors above Holmfirth, Allan Kirk, source: http://tarnincolour.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/moors-above-holmfirth-from-a635.html

Image 2, Grouse, Archibald Thorburn, source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/grouse-82084

About me, sharp teeth and other things

I was born at three o’clock in the morning in 1973, under the glare of the bedroom ceiling light, on a bed covered in plastic sheets in a square 1960’s semi-detached house in Yorkshire.

When I was five years old, my first teacher was Mrs Cruickshank.  She had steel-blue eyes enlarged to a terrifying googliness by her magnifying spectacles that were framed in pearlescent, pink plastic to match her pink rinse.  She wore maroon crocodile shoes and fawn-coloured tights that flattened Daddy Long Legs on her strong, old lady calves.  When she gave her special smile that was reserved only for little boys, a deadly venom dripped from her canines.  In her presence, I could not speak or think or move.  I was paralysed in fear.  I was utterly mute.  Mrs Cruickshank was a whiz with a wooden ruler.  She told my mother I was stupid.  I agreed.

Later on, I found privacy from the intrusiveness of my rowdy family in writing and I escaped in words.  Inner sanctum did not last long.  The three sisters took English exercise books from my school bag and read my stories out loud to one another for their evening entertainment.

‘And then I woke up with no arms and legs!’ squealed Marjorie in delight.

The evil trinity howled hysterically and revelled and rolled around in the morbid gore of a shark attack.  They mocked my imagination which they considered to be uncharacteristically dark for an eight year old girl.  I don’t know why they were surprised; we had all watched Jaws 1 and 2 together after all.

            At high school I met a friend.  Her name was Ronda.  She didn’t like P.E. either.  I enjoyed my first truant with Ronda.  Instead of walking into the changing rooms, we conspicuously walked across the chalk-white lines of the school field and ran into the woods.  Legging it, as it was called, with the prison-like deportment of the hulking school mass disappearing steadily from view, was exhilarating.  It was freedom.  We enjoyed hanging around the disused playground while tufts of grass crept up the rusted, blue metal poles of the swing frame and grew around our woollen tights.

I should have been in the sports hall being picked last for the netball team and shouted at by Miss Yates for not running fast enough or not defending or not attacking or not catching the ball.  That ball.  It came alive in my butter-fingers and bounced off sweaty palms into the hands of my opponent.  I did not want an opponent and I did not want the ball.

And so, I truanted and then I truanted more and then Ronda, Nicky and I drank Ronda’s Dad’s home-made plum wine and looked at his pornographic magazines one afternoon instead of attending Biology.  It was biology of a sort.  Only Nicky evacuated plum wine all over her school desk in the next lesson.  And then I got caught over and over again until I earned the grand title of ‘truant’.  I became adept, or so I thought, at forging my mother’s signature on my truant notes but unfortunately I wasn’t very good at that either.  By the time I had earned the grand titles of ‘inept truant’ and ‘ham-fisted forger’, school was almost over.

I didn’t try because I didn’t think I was any good you see.  I said I didn’t care but I did.  I cared.

At eighteen I started working in my Dad’s surgery.  I remember a lady there talking loudly.  Her name was Doris.  Her hair was translucent, blond-grey and it gleamed in harsh strip lighting.  She was talking to another woman.

‘I mean I feel sorry for all those coffee-coloured kids…they don’t know where they come from, they don’t even know who they are, I mean who’s going to want to marry them?’ she said indignantly.

I looked at my forearm.  It was the colour of coffee.  Not the greyed, dirty dishwater colour of Mellow Birds.  More the colour of a nice, warm, nutty Arabica bean monsooned in Malabar, with a splash of cream, I prefer to think.  But I do know where I come from.  I was born where I was conceived; on that saggy old mattress.  And my Dad was born on an island six thousand miles away and he fell in love with a Yorkshire lass.  And as for marriage, ‘well I’m too young to think about that’, I thought.

But people like Doris made me want to know more.  And so, I woke up one morning and decided I would.  I moved to London and I studied Anthropology at UCL.  They let me in because I knew a bit about bonobos.  Then I buggered off to Thailand and Vietnam and Australia and I came back with no money.  So I worked in a job I hated for five years.  They gave me a car and a phone and a computer and I got by until my soul was hanging from the jaws of Satan’s hellhound and then I left.  I found a job I hated less for the next five years and then I got angry so I took an MA in Human Rights Law.  They gave me a First Class Honours.  It was the first time in thirty one years that I began to think that Mrs Cruickshank could have been wrong.

Life happened and I decided that it’s too short to waste it on being too afraid to do what I love.  So I wrote a book and now it is sitting on an editor’s desk and it is waiting to be read.  And I am waiting.

 

 

Image, Steven Spielberg in Jaws mouth, source: http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2013/06/07/must-watch-young-steven-spielberg-friends-react-to-jaws-oscar-nominations

 

 

Bealdric the Shire

Stratus stomps and snorts and treads slowly towards them, breathing getting louder and closer.  A silhouette emerges through grey cloud canvas.  Bealdric Black Shire strides over the moor.  He wears a faint star on his angular face.  He draws Avice down into bottomless wells of blackest eyes where secrets of the other world hide.

Idonea and Avice look long and hard at their last food.  In silent agreement sisters hold numb, flattened, tentative fingers in front of their narrow chests and out into icy fog, an offering.  Yellow dominoes pierce and sink into hard fruit, making easy pieces of it.  Chewing and chomping with ravenous enjoyment of sweet crunchy pleasures, Bealdric recalls green and russet memories of long gone summer treasures.

 

 

Image by Annette Hegel, ‘Horse in Fog in Winter’ sourced here: http://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-Horse-in-Fog-in-Winter/225958/106168/view

Grandfather and the Giant

Grandfather worked down the mines.  He was an electrical engineer.   During the war he tried to sign up.  He wanted to join the Royal Air Force more than owt.  But they said no because they needed engineers at home to keep things running.  Granddad was very upset.  He felt bad about it.  Mum says he never got over it, not really.

He rallied his BSA motorcycle.  He liked going fast and getting muddy.  He met Grandma in Sheffield.  She was working as a nurse at a hospital for the war-wounded, doing her bit, you know.

In the 1970s, a power station was built in a village called Drax in Yorkshire.  Today, it has a really tall concrete chimney 850 feet high and she is mother.  Sunshine stored in black rocks from Africa and Siberia trundles into the power house.  Twelve brothers, 374 feet tall and 300 feet wide, wear concrete-grey suits and their white cotton-wool hair hangs in the wind on sunny days.  Granddad got a job at Drax power station.  He was pleased to leave the mines and turn coal into light.

They say it can make 4000 megawatts of leccy; that’s more than any power station in the whole of Western Europe.  They say it chucks out more carbon emissions than the whole of Sweden.  They say that wood pellets are de rigueur but they have to come from somewhere too.  Burning new American trees instead of old Siberian ones was not exactly what Mrs Green had in mind.  They store them in giant upside down eggs to keep them dry, adding more peculiar constructions to the horizon.

But it is a marvel of man’s engineering that makes me stop the car in a patch of muddy gravel when I see a gathering of cooling towers around a monolithic enigma through a clearing in blossoming hawthorns.   It is people like my Granddad that built and maintained this opus, this enemy of the planet.  In a way, even knowing what I know, I find it beautiful.  I am drawn to the magnificent scale of this engineered construction.  In its utilitarian grandeur I see a collaboration of men who had lived through a war and dared to dream.  They dared to dream of bringing light to every home in the country after a period of forced darkness.

And now, as a Londoner, I long for dark skies that I may admire celestial artistry and glimpse stellar worlds.  But if I were forced to sit in the dark, perhaps I would want to light up the planet too.

Granddad died a long time ago now.  He smoked like a power station chimney and he liked to sup a pint or twenty to wash down Grandma’s tripe and onions.

Perhaps, I’ll pay it a visit, take a photo.  Like granddad, I love the power station and I hate it too.

For the National Grid go here: http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Image 1 source: http://www.mikecurryphotography.com/portfolio/print/drax-power-station-vi

Image 2 source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/utilities/article3829929.ece

Image 3 source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonobass/3635530311/in/set-72157619904132174

Edie’s poem

My 7 year old niece came to visit.  We took her to the Natural History Museum.  Edie met her forefather, Neanderthal Jones and she shook the three-fingered hand of Tyrannosaurus Rex and she danced the do-si-do with Allosaurus and she swam alongside a sei whale, who combed her hair with his fine baleen.

After the museum, Edie saw lots of people close together, waving blue, red and yellow flags in the air and holding banners of words and shouting.  They were saying something that they cared about a lot to do with a man called Maduro.  He is the boss of a country five thousand miles away where angels fall.

Edie went on the train under the ground and then she saw a house on the river where the bosses of this country talk and make things up and decide things.  Then at quarter past four, the little Bens rang and she curtsied to the tower and yawned into my gloved hand.

At home, while I cleaned the kitchen, she asked me for a piece of lined paper.  I gave her my notepad and she sat at my desk.

I opened my notepad today and this is what I found.

 

If I was with you

the things that we could do

Like go and see Big Ben

If I was just with you then

 

Edie, age 7

 

Edie’s poem is the musical beauty of simplicity.  It is worth a million of my words.

 

Yours truly

 

YW

 

Image – Stephen Wiltshire sourced here: http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/art_gallery.aspx?Id=3855