Cycles

8.40 am. Off to work. Time for a quick photo.

Given escalating petrol costs and my disinclination to return to full time work, it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'm going to be able to afford to run a car. It would mean cutting back so drastically in other areas that it's not worth it. And I've never enjoyed driving. And I'm pretty dark green, environmentally speaking.

Two colleagues, K and V, are in the same position. We're lucky in that we all live in town, on bus routes, that we've all got bicycles - and that the topography around here is river-plain flat. Not good for floods but excellent for unfit cyclists.

So V brings up the subject of electric bicycles as a way of going further afield and even negotiating the occasional steep hill. In the face of her enthusiasm I've done a little research on the net. This could be a possibility.

Ageing

His coat is the sandy brown of a lion's pelt and the sculpted profile resembles those of the cats in Ancient Egyptian paintings. He's beautiful, but of course I'm prejudiced.

He's getting old. Over the past eighteen months he's turned into a lap cat, rarely venturing outside even in good weather. He sleeps more and more, though he's perky enough when awake. The vet guesstimates he's around fourteen, but since he's a rescue cat we don't really know. Could be more, could be less, but it's clear that the days of playing the wild rover are gone for good.

I could never get him to stay on my lap when he was younger. Twenty seconds maybe if I held him down with both hands, then a struggle, a wriggle, and he was gone. If he was feeling particularly benevolent he would place himself next to me on the sofa, his flank against my thigh. Thus far but no further. I felt honoured, in the way we humans can by the occasional attention of a normally aloof cat.

Since we left London it's all changed. Whether I'm sitting on the sofa or lying in bed he jumps up. It's become difficult to read, impossible to knit - his furry bulk imposes itself between me and the object of my attention. He stakes his claim to my lap, kneads, turns round in a circle and settles. I feel the movement and warmth of his small body and the soft beating of his heart. As I scratch beneath his chin the purring redoubles. Quite quickly he falls asleep. What is seeking, I wonder. Body warmth? Comfort? Life force? Certainly his health is failing. There are chronic kidney problems and in addition he's losing weight and nobody knows why. He's also lost most of his teeth. Between the special diet and the vet's bills his care is expensive for someone on a limited budget, but I pay up more than willingly.

You see, he's a companion in the literal sense of the word. Since he arrived at my door over ten years ago I've had more meals in his company than in the presence of any one human. He's been there through the arrival and subsequent departure of two lovers, the death of both parents, through excitement, contentment, grief, anxiety, boredom. Through a mugging. Through a house move. Through the flu. He sleeps on the bed through my morning quiet time. He makes me laugh.

Ach. There'll be time enough for knitting later on, and in the meantime I go to a coffee shop or the library whenever I want to read in peace. He can have my lap, my body's warmth, whenever he needs them.

Intimacy

I catch The Band's Visit and find that I am in agreement with most reviewers: the film is a delight without being cloying. Members of an Egyptian police band find themselves stranded overnight in a dead-or-alive Israeli desert town. The band members and the locals, who offer them awkward and somewhat reluctant hospitality, form bonds of intimacy in inauspicious circumstances.

Politics aren't mentioned. Instead, we have halting conversations between guests and hosts about love, about the importance of music, about the pain of loss. Because they know they will never see each other again, confidences are shared. And the unspoken contrast is always there, between lively, open, cosmopolitan Alexandria, where the band hail from and which we never see, and the sterile Israeli settlement. There's much humour alongside the poignancy, including a positively Chaplinesque scene at the local roller skating rink. .

I spot a friend in the cinema audience. We meet up afterwards and compare notes. This happens in a small town (or even a not-so-small town), you meet people you know. Those of us who have alternative tendencies, who are interested in the environment and world cinema, and walking and yoga, tend to hang out in the same places.

We run into each other unexpectedly. Then we talk. I'm really not used to this.

Talisman

I have a photograph of my mother in her early eighties taken when she was still quite mobile. On a sunny spring day she faces the camera with the shoreline of the local harbour as a backdrop. She wears an old favourite, a rumpled, light mauve raincoat. A couple of swans can be seen immediately behind her - probably scouting for titbits. I'm glad they are in the shot, she was always happy to see them. Part of her face is in shadow, but her grey eyes are sharp and alert and she smiles tentatively, almost shyly, at me, the photographer.

My real name, the one I don't use on the blog, is all hard consonants. You bite into it, there's no syllabic softness, no flow. It labels me unmistakeably as a child of my time - I've yet to come across a girl born in the last twenty years, say, bearing the same first name.

The business of deciding what to call her daughters was my mother's domain, my father having no particular opinion on the matter. Or maybe it was easier just to let her have her way. When I had learned to read, at around six or seven, she showed me my entry in her book of Babies' Names and Their Meanings.

... From the Greek: Child of light, a pearl.

Over the years she would talk to me about it.

"That's what you are", she would say, pronouncing the definition with relish. "A child of light." She had a clear, resonant speaking voice and had dabbled in amateur dramatics.

The name's meaning clearly mattered a lot to her: it represented perhaps her hopes for herself as a mother and for me, and it symbolised something indefinable in our relationship that would remain immune from the conflict to come. She had such high aspirations, living as she did in a world of sometimes unfocussed ideals, and often found unpalatable aspects of reality too painful to tolerate or accept and this would make her very, very angry. She could be charming but she definitely wasn't easy.

Yet by the end of her life she had found a way through. She came up with resilience, courage and a somewhat lavatorial sense of humour. With the onset of a slow, terminal cancer, this last probably saved her as her body gave out, but she had always possessed an appreciation of the ridiculous and a sanity-saving (hers and mine both) ability to laugh at herself. In her sixties she had finally found an outlet for that intense idealism and this had stabilised her. She became a talkative, stubborn, cheerful old lady.

Maybe the choice of that name - with its meaning - was about other things as well. Her parents' marriage was difficult, though this was never mentioned, and her own was stressful. The month I was born purple lilac and flowering cherry were in blossom but there would also have been the moaning of the weekly air-raid siren tests (something I can remember being terrified of as a toddler), the Cold War and rationing.

Perhaps it was an attempt to protect her first child. A talisman.

Lepidoptery (Updated)

Update: Jan has come to the rescue in the comments. It is a Small White, or Small Cabbage White. They're quite common so it shows how much I know about butterflies. Fortunately the only vegetables I've planted this year are carrots.

I love the internet.

It's that compound eye that draws me in. And the fragility.

It landed on the bathroom windowsill a few mornings ago and stayed there long enough for me to grab a camera and take some shots. Then it was gone, fluttering erratically towards the trees on the other side of the road. The photographs are worth clicking to enlarge - the digital camera was on form and I had a cooperative subject.

April's quite early in the year for butterflies. Or is it a moth? After searching reference books and online I've drawn a blank. Medium size, perhaps 50-60mm. Pale yellow wings with a mottling of brown. The closest possibility I've come across is a brimstone.

Maybe there's a lepidopterist out there?

Labels aren't everything, but I want to know.

Follow up

Goodness, what wonderful comments on the posts below. I need to respond and to catch up on the blogs of old friends and new but that may not now be in the next few days. In the contrary nature of things, just as I start blogging again my work life has unexpectedly become very busy and I'm putting in a lot of extra hours all this week and probably into next.

But I'll be back a s a p. Thank you all.

Blossom and Bicycles

Early blossom. Yellow celandine and the bruised blue of grape hyacinth. Greenfinches dart and flutter in the branches of the rowan tree in the garden. Exhausted relationships morph into shapes I'd never imagined because truth will always, always out. Yet it doesn't do to give up on love and joy. On warmth and tenderness and touch. How could I? Something close to elation is tracking the footsteps of loss.

It still feels strange to be alone in my mid-fifties, without partner or children. I am an anomaly, in spite of all those futile efforts when I was young to blend in. (There's nothing wrong with blending in per se providing you don't do as I once did and make it your life's purpose). I ponder the seeming inevitabilities and conditioning that have led to this point, what - if any - gifts of mine are needed by the planet and whether it's time to stop dying my hair to cover (or blend in as the blurb on the packet says) the grey. I enjoy the town and the job - its ethos and people - and fret over balancing my budget in this low-wage county.

The days slip by smoothly one by one. Impossible to decipher the bigger picture, how the pieces of a life fit together. Uncertainty is what makes living such a whacky business, and it's all ridiculously transitory. Fossils have been found in the fields where we walked a few weeks ago - those hills once formed part of an ocean floor. And there's a place locally where you can book an environmentally friendly burial plot with a tree as a gravemarker. I'm a little surprised at my own pleasure at this discovery. Silver birch perhaps, with sweeping branches that are never totally still? Or a lime tree, for the heady scent of the blossom on a summer's evening?

***

A friend tells me on the telephone that the real high point of her life to date was not meeting her lover. Nor giving birth to her daughter.

It was, she says, learning to ride a bicycle as a little girl one morning on a dirt track in East Africa, the day her father finally took his steadying hand off the saddle. Short chubby legs pushing down on the pedals, picking up speed in the hot, dry air, the shock of the realisation - one that she could never have articulated that day - that it was possible to break through limitations, to fly out free into the wide world.

I've rarely heard her voice so certain and joyful. As she talks she's back on the bicycle again.

Welcome

Welcome to the new blog. It's a work in the progess as far as the decor goes but watch this space. I've chosen A Suivre for the name, partly as a nod to my love of most things French but mainly because the phrase neatly sums up life and blogging.

A suivre. To be continued.