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.