Record

2008. The ones that got away.

Many photographs never made it to the blog at the time they were taken. I am drawn to those taken in the colder half of this year. The clean lines. The light.



December. Christmas decorations. Taken in a local cafe.



December. London dawn. Awake early in a strange bed.



December. A commuter on the Tube leaning against a glass partition immediately to my right. If I were a palmist, he would have been offering up his life up for my inspection.



October. The neighbour's cat and the aloe plant.



November. Winter beans. Now sprouting.



October. Reflections, Durham.



February. Local park. Fog. Emptiness. Silence.



February. Detail. Water of Life Fountain by Stephen Broadbent, Chester Cathedral.


****

When we met, Relatively Retiring and I spoke about our respective travels. Did you keep a journal, she asked. No. And that is sad. In those days I relied on an excellent memory and an unreliable camera. Twenty five years on I understand that the former is neither trustworthy nor time-proof and that uncared for physical photographs eventually fade, are mislaid or you spill coffee on them.

And now I have a blog. It is a record, of a kind. Blogging has shown me the extraordinariness of the ordinary and the value of naming what is there. And that the quest for perfection is pointless if it leads to paralysis. There are times when you just have to shrug and press Publish and move on. It's still worth doing.

It is.

Happy New Year!

Red kite

Mobbed by crows,
rising high,
high,
out of danger
effortless,
wings invincible,
wide as the world,
and silent,
riding an invisible wind
floating in blue.

On the other side
of the valley,
watching,
I drink tea
from the flask.
I eat my sandwich
then the banana,
carefully packing up
the rubbish
to take home.

Deo gratias.

Solstice

Too many people on the bus from the airport
Too many holes in the crust of the earth
The planet groans
Every time it registers another birth

But among the reeds and rushes
A baby girl was found
Her eyes as clear as centuries
Her silky hair was brown

Paul Simon
Born at the Right Time

The birth of a child. I'm from a branch of family which is disappearing. No babies. No children. No nephews or neices.

The Winter Solstice, the pagan festival, comes closer. The red of the holly berry on the winter wreath. Pale green hyacinth bud. The joking and banter at the checkout at the local mini-market. Even the office jollifications on Friday. Celebration. Light.

Feeling my way this holiday season with, by choice, far fewer plans than usual. People are coming by but I am not sure who or when. Volunteered for the soup kitchen but they have all the helpers they need. Today I cycle to a solstice celebration in a village hall in the middle of nowhere. The places I go, the people I meet. All new. Everything at the moment is untried. Everything ahead unknown and not without risk and danger. But there are always possibilities.

Solstice. The Sun stands still. Have a blessed and joyful time.

****

I have Something Understood, on the radio as I awoke, to thank for the reminder of this gem by Paul Simon. Eminently danceable. The complete lyrics are here.

Passing

Tube

Impressions

The scale and grandeur of the buildings, public and private. The pillars and porticos, the flights of high stone steps. The relentless hardness and shine of the marble. Left overs from the days of empire or steel and concrete temples to Mammon, so plentiful I barely noticed them when I lived here. After two years away, a surprise, a shock even. Acres of concrete. Scurrying people. Flocks of men in suits. Christmas muzak. Icy, grey dampness as we walk across Albert Bridge and P, always upbeat, says that Monet would have painted the view with its diffused, nebulous light. The dawn chorus of mobile phones and switched on laptops on the train that had carried me back to the capital that morning. The cough that I couldn't stifle. Buses. Trains. High prices. Noise.

Being greeted with such unexpected, tentative warmth by H it brought tears to my eyes. Realising that I am an uneasy houseguest as I hate to be beholden, but I make a huge effort not to let it show. Understanding that it is wise not to accompany P on her shopping trips - much better to arrange to meet at the coffee shop afterwards. Saying goodbye to P, hugging, then breaking free, then thinking of something else to say, three times before I make it through the ticket barrier to catch the train home.

London and me. So long together, reunited again for a few, short days.

Survival

Running down. Tired. Days till I leave work. Days till Christmas. The cat's special diet for failing kidneys is out of stock till the New Year. The vet and I are working out what to feed him till then. It's OK. We'll manage.

This winter is desperate. No snow but a insistent , threatening cold that we rarely experienced in the city. Heavy frost. Ice that doesn't melt. A sense that darkness and death are not too far away. If the gas and electricity as well as the cat food supplies failed, for example. I live in a modern-ish house with no fireplace. Build a fire in the garden with newspaper and branches foraged from nearby fields and woods. Dismantle the washing machine. No use for it without electricity. We walk a narrow line in the developed world.

The inner drums make excellent braziers. I know someone who has several.

Create

For his cut-outs he used paper that had been hand-painted with gouache, laid down in abstract or figurative patterns: 'the paper cut-out allows me to draw in the colour... Instead of drawing the outline and putting the colour inside it... I draw straight into the colour'. The colours he used were so strong that he was advised by his doctor to wear dark glasses.

Drawing with Scissors


Decision made. The week goes on. A sense that things will work out, better perhaps than can be imagined.

The Matisse touring exhibition Drawing with Scissors is in town. Lucky us.

In the local museum the lithographs on the wall glow, vibrant and joyous. Red. Blue. Yellow. Flowers. Leaves. Women. The art of an elderly man (Matisse started working with gouaches découpés or cut-outs late in life) in a wheelchair, eventually bed-ridden, using a pair of scissors and coloured paper to create. Assistants would prepare the paper and pin the cut-outs on the wall for him. The imperative was so powerful.

Outside, the winter sky a deep, intense blue. Like one of his nudes. Evening now and the mental image remains of the old artist sitting up in bed, cutting shapes from sheets of paper.

Strong colours, bright and clear and true.

December 2

Beans

A cluster of flowerpots on the window sill next to the Christmas cactus, seemingly full of nothing but bare earth.

Blogger’s block. When all else fails, I’ve been told, write about what’s in front of you.

Fair enough.

R gave me some winter beans. Dry, hard and brown. Plant them in pots, she said, and keep them in a coolish room. Once they have sprouted - probably in December or January - replant them outside. The beans will be ready to eat by spring and the plants are chockfull of nitrogen to feed the soil.

The soil needs it. The prospective vegetable patch used to be lawn until a few weeks ago and is littered with pebbles and broken bricks. As neolithic remains have been found just a few hundred yards away I peer at each spadeful of earth as I dig in the hope of discovering some human artefact, more out of a desire for a link across the millenia with my predecessors on this plot than acquisitiveness. No luck.

As with gardening so in life. Planting seeds in a cold, seemingly barren time with no guarantee of a successful outcome. (After last year’s abortive attempt at growing carrots the fantasy that I am naturally green-fingered has perished). Earlier this week, following six months of dithering, I declined an invitation to join the permanent staff at the day job. It seems the right thing to do.

In mid-January I step back and become a floater, covering for sickness and holiday absence and in the market for massage work. I haven’t done any massage since October due to lack of time and energy and I miss it, badly. And I will turn my hand to anything else that comes along. Much better in all sorts of ways but not the most obvious choice in an economic downturn.

The business cards are printed. A massage client is booked in for this coming weekend. The beans will act as a serviceable reminder. They need care, water, light. I hope they grow.

****

On the subject of faith, Zhoen and Dale recently put up truly excellent posts on their personal stances vis a vis signing up to an organised religion. Worth a read, both of them.

Real Life

I’d been looking forward to Saturday.

Relatively Retiring invited me to lunch. She had introduced herself a few weeks ago in the comments and it turns out we live just three train stops from each other. We had to meet of course and it was like resuming a conversation with an old friend. Maybe meeting at first in the blogosphere oils the wheels, but there was a real connection.

The day flowed. Good food and talk, a drive into the hills before the daylight faded and a delightful dog. Balm for body and mind. And if you haven’t yet visited RR’s engaging, thoughtful blog, you’re missing something. It must run in the family as she is aunt to the esteemed Pohangina Pete.

A gift to discover a congenial fellow blogger in the real-life neighbourhood. Much as I love having a cyber life and far-flung blogfriends, you can on occasion feel isolated with just the computer screen for company.

So pleased we did this.

Wall

Two people in the office, one of whom is me. There should be eight. Staff shortages. Illness. Holidays. The phones don’t stop. Clients arrive at the wrong times for their appointments. Apart from one five minute meltdown in private, automatic pilot takes over. Long hours. Uber-stressed. Dreaming of handing in my notice and living in penury on porridge and baked beans. I feel diminished, powerless, when life shrivels down to just one thing. Work.

And yet. I like to be working for the common good, and this organisation definitely is. To be part of a close team. To have structure. They are a democratic and friendly bunch, no heirarchies. My request for a three day week is, allegedly, on the cards for next spring. It would be sensible to wait and see.


****


Impossible to even think of anything except work, never mind write it down. Zhoen comes to the rescue with a satisfyingly minimalistic meme.

The sixth photograph from the sixth folder.

A wall. Hmmm.

But what a wall, made of downland flint, inseparable from chalk and created over vast stretches of time on the ocean bed. Flint placed to show the patterning to its best advantage, small pieces of red tile as contrast, set in mortar like so many jewels in velvet.

Taken near Chichester Harbour. Early 2006. A lifetime ago. I’d recently acquired the digital camera .....

If the meme appeals, just run with it.

Sunday

Houseplants watered.

****

Something Understood is a modest radio gem from the BBC.
Gentle, contemplative, conducive to reflection.

The frustration is in the timing, as the 30 minute programme goes out on Sundays at 6.00am or 11.30pm. I’m either half awake or asleep, so I miss the presenter - Mark Tully, always worth hearing - as he introduces words and music, from all faiths and none, on life, hope, despair, prayer. And so on. The big stuff.

The good news is that the Beeb now has an iPlayer facility, so I can sleep in and catch the programme over the first coffee of the day. Just click on the link above.

This week’s subject: Happiness. Contributions from Sophocles, a Tibetan singer, an Islamic scholar, Tracy Chapman. Several modern compositions, including an achingly beautiful setting of the Beatitudes from the Taize Community. An interview with the Abbot of Worth Abbey on the monastic tradition, boredom and the difference between the robustness of the intention to do good and the fragility of feeling good. Readings.

And a musical setting of this:

Xaipe 65

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of allnothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e e cummings

Not sure if the iPlayer works outside the UK or not. I hope it does.

Respite

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise.

Thomas Jefferson


Sunrise. Day off, the last one ahead of a work scramble to meet a deadline. For the first time for aeons the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. I need to get out of the house. Throw on clothes, a parka and wellington boots and head for the fields with the camera. Nothing like photography, with the focus and attention on the present that it demands, to curb - if not stop - obsessive thinking.

The air is cool and fresh, the sky a pale blue. Puffballs of cloud blown along by a gusty south-west wind periodically hide the sun and the drop in temperature at these times is noticeable. The morning light extraordinary, as it so often is. Crows pass overhead, cawing, then drop from the sky onto a newly ploughed field. A faint deep throb of machinery from the small industrial estate hidden behind a barrier of trees can be felt, rather than heard.

No-one else to be seen. It is midweek, after all, and most people are at work.

Just past the railway bridge, a touch of the surreal.


The river flooded recently. My guess: an angler’s chair, temporarily moved to higher ground. A group of mallards are swept downstream by the force of the current and I watch them until they disappear from view. They speed past, imperturbable, bobbing on the surface of the water. I stop and turn around, looking for my visual touchstone, the ridge of the Black Mountains on the western horizon. The wind strengthens, buffets a mass of gold-brown leaves on the oak tree, but they cling on tightly, reluctant to leave their branches.

At the hawthorn bush I turn for home. Under the arches of the bridge, a hint of the macabre. A doll’s leg half buried in the mud, left behind by the floodwater. No sign of the torso.

****

A lunch meeting in town. Good talk. Then back to prune the ivy that grows up the side of the house. It is starting to grow over the electricity and gas meter boxes and must be cleared. Cut back the lavender and trim the dead fuchsia stalks, raw material galore for the compost heap.

The cat sits in the November sun and makes a show of supervising my efforts, but his heart isn’t in it. After a few minutes, with a twitch of the tail, he wanders back indoors.



I didn’t have high expectations for the day. It surprised me with its perfection.

Anxiety

Stressed. Work. Uncertainty and indecision.

So, once again, it’s a walking, not a cycling, day. What convinced me was pedalling full tilt into the side of a slow moving car recently when the concentration was elsewhere. Fortunately no harm done to self or bicycle or car, and the driver was touchingly concerned about my physical welfare - and my mental state probably, though he didn’t say so.

I crave the rhythmic action of walking. Steady and regular. One foot in front of the other, right, left. The autumn morning, damp and so still, the trees enveloped in their auras of gold and ochre and russet, the earth solid beneath my feet, reassuring. People pass. I exchange greetings with one or two.

The brain still runs in dark circles and the stomach remains a black hole. The exercise doesn’t make the symptoms go away, not at all. Yet it becomes a wordless instruction on surviving a future that seems to crouch somewhere ahead, menacing and waiting to pounce.

Keep going. One step. Then the next. Walk right towards it.

Generations

I never knew my mother’s mother. She died of cancer during World War II. I’ve heard a lot about her though.

She was a primary school teacher in the Cardiff dockyard before she married. It was the tail end of the nineteenth century - the women in our family had their children late and the generations are long - and South Wales was a hotbed of industrial production. Vast quanitites of coal and iron were sent out from the docks and ships disgorged their incoming cargoes from all over the world. Riches and extreme poverty rubbed shoulders with each other and my grandmother taught at the poorest end of the Victorian spectrum. Children would arrive at school without shoes.

She was a true internationalist apparently, fascinated by what she read and heard of the United States, this promised land of brotherhood and equality. Her favourite hymn - she was deeply religious - was The Battle Hymn of the Republic. She idolised Abraham Lincoln. They were, after all, almost contemporaries. She was born in 1874, just seven years after his assassination.

Her idealism was passed to my mother. Another American, Eleanor Roosevelt, was one of her heroines and she often spoke about her. My mother abhored prejudice of any kind, racial or sexual or religious, and to the end was open-minded towards other people’s beliefs. In her bedroom she had a statue of the Buddha on the window ledge and a picture of Jesus on the wall.

Both of them would be so pleased at the outcome of the US election. They would have been as moved as I was by the TV pictures of the people of all ages and races waiting to vote. For hours. To see such a candidate elected.

I think of myself as more jaded, more self-absorbed probably, than either of them. I don’t underestimate what lies ahead and I know that the gloss may wear a little thin after a while. That’s just the way of things.

This morning though I’m happy too. It has been an astonishing night. I wish they were both here.

Halloween

The most recent attempt to finish a Harry Potter novel. Failure once again in spite of the cat’s unexpected attempt to up the fear factor (moral: always have a camera to hand). I realise I am in a minority.

****

One stormy night this week a friend and I cycled home in the dark along the river path. A section unlit, overgrown and so narrow that we pedalled silently in single file, headlights bobbing in the dark like a pair of foolhardy fireflies. Rain beat in our faces and the cold cut to the bone but exertion and waterproofs minimised the discomfort.

Elemental. The river to our left, a dim, eerie grey-green, its surface ruffled and harried by the force of the wind. Bare willow branches tossed this way and yon, in terror or ecstasy. Wet face and hair and a pulse of wild exhilaration.

****

Halloween

Imminence. Deep darkness
wraps itself around us:
hidden lanterns glow.

Voices

Vocal workshop. Thirty something of us locals, a dozen or so of the fabulous American touring choir who were running the event, all of us in the assembly hall of a local primary school, the women in bright colours, a good few in pink and fuschia and mauve, harmonizing by happy accident with the purple plastic chairs.

And we sang all day a cappella, learning as we went. African choruses. A Georgian song. Traditional American gospel. Appalachian folk. Shape note. Slap down on perfectionism and the urge to get it right. How is the body, how is the breath? Stay loose. Are you enjoying it?

I was still husky after the flu. Doesn’t matter. Just go outside and cough while the others create wave upon wave of sound, soprano, alto, tenor, bass, and then drink and come back in again, the chorus goes on, just join in when you can. Float on the ocean. Sing.

I can fit in as a soprano or alto. I am happiest in the higher range, soaring. The point of choral singing is not to listen to your own voice, you can’t hear it anyway. It is to sound the note with your throat and your belly and your heart, with your whole body, every cell, and to trust that it will reach the right place, the place where it needs to go.

Magpies

Flu. Off work. Aching back. Scrambled brain.

****

Candle and incense lit. Can’t focus on the breath. Or chant. Through the window a low, grey sky as the wind separates more leaves from the branches of the rowan tree.

A pair of magpies chuckle and squawk on a neighbour’s nearby roof. I don’t get the dislike these birds apparently evoke - they can be garrulous and, um, assertive, to be sure but they are also beautiful and there is a dash of entertaining villainy about them. Rather attractive, all that thieving.

Hard to sit still.

****

Finished: Restless, William Boyd. Well written spy story.
Surfed the net: Sporadically. Found this illuminating op-ed in the New York Times on the global implications of the current financial mayhem.
Watched: 2 episodes of the West Wing.
Watched: News bulletins. Lots of them: elections: climate change: Afghanistan: credit crunch. Retained some of it.
Purchased: The Millenium Collection - Tim Hardin (via Amazon). I had an LP of Tim Hardin in the 70s which I lost. Like many other things in that decade.

Drank rooibos tea.
Used one full box of tissues.
Coughed.
Fretted
Slept.
Cabin fever.

****

Two magpies.

One for sorrow
Two for joy ...

Viaduct

Circumstances seem to require you to make a fairly major decision. So you do. Then you are persuaded to unmake it. Loose ends abound. Bah. One of the hardest delusions to relinquish is the stubborn, nagging belief that life should at all times be tidy.

****

Back to last weekend.

Durham. We imagined we would be impressed by the cathedral and the castle as indeed we were, especially by the former which is extraordinary and moving and deserves a blog post of its own. Maybe another time.

But very, very early on Sunday morning, sneaking out alone, it was the railway viaduct - a Victorian engineering masterpiece that rarely makes the tourist brochures - that worked the unlooked for magic. I love the cathedral-like curve and sweep of the arches, the regularity and strength of the massive stone supports, the combination of stone and brick, its grace and scale.











It dwarfs the houses beneath ...



and the castle on the horizon.

On the prowl on the scruffier side of town, absorbed in colour and light and shade and camera angles. No traffic. Empty beer cans in the gutter. Two men, obviously friends, walk their dogs.

Proximity

You’ve been travelling since that morning and now the sun is going down behind the hill at the end of a limpid autumn day and along with a dozen others you’re waiting at the little Victorian station at Great Malvern for the final train to take you home. Last leg of the journey.

The body itches and aches with travel fatigue, a day of sitting too long, not moving enough. You walk along the platform, pulling the suitcase behind you, and take a few photographs. It has been a good few days away, a respite from the reports of financial meltdown and a reminder of reality, of the nuts and bolts of living in close proximity with another person for more than three hours at a time. It can be done.

Back to the bench. Two teenagers walk over and sit down. Extremely 21st century, boyfriend/girlfriend, pale, dressed in black with spiky hair and a clusters of metal studs in nose, mouth and ears, they exchange sentences in a desultory fashion. At first sight they seem edgy, hostile even, yet their conversation becomes surprisingly conventional. College. Examinations. Friends. How to navigate through the next seven days without upsetting the parents.

You’re not used to young people these days except as the collective subject of doom-ridden news items. In spite of wariness and mammoth preconceptions, you warm to these two.

Nothing to fear here. Nothing to envy either, not really.

Behind us the cool moon rises, almost full.

River Path

Click to enlarge.


Brown water murmurs
and churns,
its current
tugging fretfully
at the willow branches.
Come with me.

....

A boy on a red bicycle
hurrying to reach
his future
anxious to overtake me,
saying excuse me
pedals by.

....

I move aside
and watch them pass.

Jolt

So what do you do, as was the case yesterday, when the bank that has been looking after your modest rainy day savings suddenly freezes the account - this is the money you have put by in case the roof blows off or the boiler dies one cold day in December or even both at once - and reports indicate that your cash, your security, your thin financial cushion, has disappeared down a large black hole somewhere in Reykjavik and may not be seen again?

The first reaction was victim guilt. I had obviously done something wrong, had lusted after the relatively high interest rates dangled in front of me and had committed an unforgiveable error of judgement.

Then anger. Then clodding fear.

Evening. I phoned my sister, who reminded me that I have a roof over my head and food in the cupboard. She also made me laugh.

Today I picked up the camera and deliberately decided for the sake of sanity to pay attention to the moment as I walked to work. Any serenity I could hope to find during the coming twenty-four hours would be as a result of living second by second.

On a morning like this, surprisingly easy.







At work I made coffee for my colleagues and sat down at the desk. The phone rang. The boss calling from home. She had just heard on the radio that The Chancellor of the Exchequer is going to look after me and my 300,000 or so compatriots in the same boat. All this on the same day that my fellow taxpayers and I apparently took ownership of every bank in the country. Crazy.

Yes. I am relieved. Very. Aware of my personal good fortune and embarrassed to be in this situation. Goodness knows what is happening to our world, economically and politically, right now but hopefully it might be at least a partial cleaning out of some pretty filthy Augean stables and not simply total madness.

Me, I am a bit more awake than I was last Monday.

Of Cats and Men

From the Hebrides, c. 1930, Iain the herd boy with his cat, Eachunn.

A friend in Scotland sent me this postcard last week. For framing, definitely. If he is still alive, Iain would be very old now.

It reminded me of a June evening in Italy ten years ago ...



... when the man behind the counter of a small hardware shop - I was trying to buy batteries - allowed me to take a snap of him and his cat. He nodded when I asked if I could photograph the animal, scooped up the sleeping feline from his place on the counter and led us outside.

Not a good shot, technically speaking (what is that thing that seems to be coming out of the young man’s ears?). The day was fading fast and the cat was struggling to get down. I think the obliging shopkeeper was happy though and I certainly was.

Something about this combination of men (or boys) and cats undoes me. The two cats appear to be startled and pissed-off respectively, but look at the expressions on the faces of the humans .....

Journeys

Northamptonshire two weeks ago, South Wales for a massage training this coming weekend. At the end of next week the train to the North of England for a few days break with an old friend and former work colleague.

This is the first time since the move that I have travelled further afield than Bristol or Cardiff. The globetrotting days are largely over but in the future it should still be possible to walk in the Welsh mountains or take the National Express coach to London to stay with N for a few days, or even visit Birmingham (never been!).Or do some conservation volunteering. Or rent out the house and go to India for a year.

Or, most daring of all, catch the local bus and spend ten days with these people ...

***

Each day the mind climbs into its hamster wheel and runs and runs. Uncertain, draining times. I need to bite the bullet and ask difficult questions when I return to work briefly next week. One way or another, hard decisions need to be taken.

***

Repeating patterns. The older I get the more they are apparent. When I switch on the news. In my own life. The work. The addictions, greater and lesser. Loves chosen and rejected. The supposed free choices made.

Maybe real freedom is simply to know this, to understand, and with this knowledge to move into the unknown.

Time to go to work.

Le Plat Pays

Weide in de lente - Veldweg: Albijn Van den Abeele

Waiting in for a carpet to be delivered a few Saturdays ago I caught a fascinating radio programme, Brel et Moi, featuring the Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel and presented and written by Alastair Campbell (yes, that Alastair Campbell). Such a short life. A serial womaniser in Paris, a demanding paterfamilias in Brussels. Self centred and driven but loved by those he worked with and, heavens, what a talent.

Years ago the Brel song that seduced me was Le Plat Pays (the Flat Land), a love song to his native Flanders. A poem in its own right, lyrical and elegaic. I was born and spent my childhood in a similarly flat land of earth, water and wide skies on the other side of the North Sea and the song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it. It still does.

Maybe only a Belgian could pull it off. Using each of the four winds Brel celebrates the different moods and seasons of this modest and - nowadays at least - peaceful stretch of land. He opens himself to embrace the rain and cold and the tedium and monotony, as well as warmth and sunlight. Winter. Summer. Everything in between.

The lyrics are below. I'm not attempting a translation. There are a few versions floating around on the web but they don't really reach the level of the original. According to one contributor to the programme there is a view that Brel's work is pretty much untranslatable and it's true that those songs that have made it into English haven't necessarily benefitted. One of the other contributors, Mel Smith, is a Brel devotee who neither reads nor understands French: the ferocious intensity, the sweat and saliva (literally) of Brel's performances were enough to captivate him.

Cue for a video of a mesmerising live performance of Le Plat Pays. Enough of my words. Listen.



Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague
Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues
Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassent
Et qui ont à jamais le cœur à marée basse
Avec infiniment de brumes à venir
Avec le vent de l'ouest écoutez-le tenir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
Où des diables en pierre décrochent les nuages
Avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
Et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
Avec le vent de l'est écoutez-le vouloir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec un ciel si bas qu'un canal s'est perdu
Avec un ciel si bas qu'il fait l'humilité
Avec un ciel si gris qu'un canal s'est pendu
Avec un ciel si gris qu'il faut lui pardonner
Avec le vent du nord qui vient s'écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec de l'Italie qui descendrait l'Escaut
Avec Frida la Blonde quand elle devient Margot
Quand les fils de novembre nous reviennent en mai
Quand la plaine est fumante et tremble sous juillet
Quand le vent est au rire quand le vent est au blé
Quand le vent est au sud écoutez-le chanter
Le plat pays qui est le mien.

Jacques Brel

More insight into the inspiration for the song? There's a set of masterly, evocative photographs of Le Plat Pays here, just a click away.

I keep returning to them.

Change of season

I know. It isnt October. I just needed to blog.

This early autumn, with its golden afternoons and cold, clear nights is proving to be a gorgeous one. I stare at the flowers - autumn daisies, fuchsias, dahlias - and the changing leaves, trying to commit those vibrant reds and yellows and oranges to memory, to soak them up. Grey days lie ahead, and these have their own beauty, but I will miss the colours.

I ignore dire warnings about corrupted files, cross my fingers and, once again, switch on the ailing laptop ....

Expiry

The last post for the laptop.

It is expiring. No longer can I type apostrophes and there are other even more worrying symptoms. A computer techie friend tut-tuts and shakes his head as I describe them. Time to give it a decent burial, he says. He advised against using it at all any more but I wanted to write this post.

The laptop has proved an able and willing servant in its five years of life, fitting discreetly into the compact and bijou London flat (anyone remember that Fry and Laurie ad?) and introducing me to blogging and the fascinating and sublimely addictive world of cyberspace. It played havoc though with my trapezius and rhomboids, and I will be replacing it with a "proper" computer. Adjustable screen. Separate keyboard. Two different computer-oriented friends have recommended Dell which surprises me as I seem to remember reading less than wonderful reviews a few years ago.

If anyone has any recommendations, believe me, they will be gratefully received. Just leave a note in the comments.

****

An involuntary hiatus, then, since blogging at work isnt a possibility. Probably till mid-October, given my diary and the schedule of my techie adviser. No bad thing. Life sometimes knows better than I do what I need and it will be salutary perhaps to live for a spell without rating the events of the day, consciously or unconsciously, on their blog potential.

*****

At last a golden September morning:

- Warm sun but the hint of a chill in the air. Hanging out the washing early. The bus into town to get my contribution for the party tonight, listening to two elderly ladies on the seat in front discuss mutual friends. A browse around PC World then a cappucino on the verandah of the arts centre.

- A busker with his guitar, nobly taking up the most insalubrious pitch in town, a dirty, littered underpass smelling of urine, which nonetheless probably has the best accoustics, and belting out a cracking version of After the Gold Rush that would have made Mr Young proud. His voice soared through the filth and tiles and concrete and part of me floated upwards with it. I tossed him a coin, slightly embarrassed, as I tend to be on such occasions.


Well I dreamed I saw the silver
space ships flying
in the yellow haze of the sun.
There were children crying
and colours flying
all around the chosen ones.
All in a dream, all in a dream
the loading had begun.
They were flying Mother Natures
silver seed to a new home
in the sun.


See you here again sometime in October.

Deluge

Compared to the flood-induced misery in other parts of the world, or even just down the road or across the border, this is nothing. Mere inconvenience. But the rain certainly has been tipping down these past two days. Wave after wave of it, sweeping in off the Atlantic.

This morning, a quick bicycle ride to the supermarket.



The usual route was impassable.



His owner and I compared notes on floods and rumours of floods.

After lunch, between downpours, a dash to the fields at the back to check on the river where I meet up with two neighbours doing the same thing. We riparian dwellers (a new adjective to me, h/t the Environment Agency website) keep a close eye on the water levels in our locality. Our little development hasn't flooded yet but ....



... cattle grazed here a few days ago, now it belongs to the ducks. (Apologies for the smudge on the camera lens. A raindrop.) A sudden roll of thunder provided an apocalyptic soundtrack.

****

You can always rely on the BBC to be prepared. An outside broadcast unit was in town yesterday. They had obviously taken note of their own weather forecast.

Reprise

I'm navigating the treacherous waters of French bureaucracy. Next year I become eligible for two small pensions as a result of the years that I worked there. No doubt this partly accounts for the current bout of nostalgia.

Lots of forms to be completed. In French. Amazing that I had the wit to keep all the documents that are being photocopied and sent to Yannick at the Centre Nationale d'Assurance Vieillesse over there in Tours. Twenty years ago the idea that I might ever need a pension simply didn't enter my head. Growing old? Moi?

I went to France looking for a fix. I came back without one. No denouements, just a melancholy petering out. Much of the story isn't for the blog. Yet it was a rich time.

• All that travel. It came - unexpectedly - with the second job and continued into the third and final one. I wrote about one trip here.
  
• The piercing, damp cold. Mornings of freezing fog, the cobbles slippery and treacherous with black ice.
  
• Small children speaking French. Totally delightful. Normally I'm not a huge fan of small children.
• The river on hot summer nights. No wind. The lights from the Ile de la Cite and the Ile St Louis reflected, shimmering. Shouts and laughter echoing faintly across the water.
  
• The local boulangerie, and the seemingly ever-smiling femme du boulanger who served behind the counter.
  
• The question: C'est pour offrir, madame? (Is this a present?) If the answer was yes, the just-purchased flowers, or the chocolates, would be wrapped beautifully, with pride and care, the whole thing finished off with a ribbon. Part of the service.
• The sound of the dustmen in the street below c. 6am. daily. My alarm clock. Jacques Dutronc's Il est cinq heures Paris s'eveille describes these early mornings well. Good song. The lyrics are here.
  
• Jurgen, the Austrian painter. Big and brawny and shy, he drank like a fish and produced light-filled paintings of pale yellow and gold. For a long time I was smitten.
  
• Waterlilies. The vast Monet canvasses at the Musee Marmottan.
  
• The whole beautiful, ugly, achingly lonely, dirty, frightening, marvellous city. Home to an international ragbag of seekers, looking for something we couldn't find where we came from.
  
• Mme R, in her 80s, my voisine d'etage, who took both my hands in hers when I knocked on her door to say goodbye the night before my final departure. The van was loaded and we were leaving for England early the following day. We embraced and her eyes were filled with tears.

I'm just visible in the photo at the window on the second floor of the building on the right hand side of the road above the car parked on the pavement.

A part of this story fades with each day, the memories thin and friable, curling at the edges.

****

This morning, after rain, the scent of lavender hangs in the air. The pale orange berries of the rowan tree are wet and shiny, the leaves a burnished red-brown.

A sense of optimism. In spite of it all. Because of it all. Glad to be here.