A SUIVRE

Night garden

2012-01-15T23:00:00.001Z

10pm. Plaintive and persistent miaowing. Projected onto the neighbour's fence by the dull orange glare of the streetlamp, the silhouette of a cat, spookily distorted. Too dark to see the actual animal.

Newspapers

2011-11-25T14:49:00.013Z

I've been following the televised proceedings of the Leveson Enquiry on media ethics with interest. Let's be honest, it is truly compelling. Gripping, horrifying details, lies and persecution by tabloid journalists and paparazzi, and I for one will be hoping that at least a part of this particular Augean Stables might be slightly less mucky at the end of it all. In my own defence I haven't bought a tabloid for years though in the past I confess I have been occasionally seduced into purchasing one by the offer of a free DVD. Not any more.

More than that, it's got me thinking about my father, his newspaper habits, and the man he was. He died thirteen years ago, and I have a sense that I'm getting to know him better in death than I ever did in life. Maybe distance lends perspective to the distorted view that we both had of the other.

News and newspapers mattered to him. He would have been dumbstruck by this past week's happenings. His aim at all times was to do the right thing and he was honest and upright to a fault. Born in 1911, he missed being an Edwardian by a whisker and in truth was born in another world, the pre-World War I world, and he carried it with him into old age. He was conservative - with a small c - and a polite, reserved man who was surprisingly individualistic given his deep respect for authority figures. He loathed tribalism above all else and couldn't bear Mrs Thatcher for that reason. At election time he always voted. He would never give away who he had voted for; it was private, nobody else's business, like sex and religion. All he would say was that he had voted for all three major parties at different times. He loved walking, particularly walking in the countryside on his own. He didn't join clubs, and although he had been part of the D-Day invasion in 1945 he never participated in reunions or commemorative visits to the Normandy beaches. Couldn't stand that sort of thing.

Every morning except Sunday the paper boy delivered a copy of the Daily Telegraph. On Sundays he relaxed an iota and the Sunday Express arrived on the doormat (in its broadsheet days - he wouldn't have had it in the house today). He read them in detail over breakfast, and then at points during the day he adjourned with the paper to the lounge and tackled the crossword. Occasionally he finished it. The Telegraph crossword was no pushover. To quote Wikipedia:

During the Second World War, The Daily Telegraph covertly helped in the recruitment of code-breakers for Bletchley Park. The ability to solve The Telegraph's crossword in under 12 minutes was considered a recruitment test. The newspaper was asked to organise a crossword competition, after which each of the successful participants was contacted and asked if they would be prepared to undertake "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort".

Towards the end of his life, from 1990 or so, he cancelled both papers. Lost interest. Then his memory started to fail badly and he slid into a gentle form of dementia. He transferred his allegiance to televised cricket and snooker and that's what he stayed with till his death.

Like him, nobody knows how I vote but I always do. I love walking on my own. I don't join things. I hate tribal thinking. These days I get my news from TV news channels or online and the only newspaper I buy is the local paper. I'm part of the problem, I suppose. Lower revenues for national newspapers means dumbing down in a frantic chase for circulation. In whatever form newspapers survive I hope Leveson can come up with something better than what we have now, something that preserves freedom of speech but allows easy access to redress for inaccurate and needlessly intrusive reporting.

And in some respects I quite like being like my dad.

Taking stock

2011-11-15T17:00:00.003Z

As is so often the case, the biggest hurdle is fear. I am going to have to live with a degree of pain. Not all the time, thank God, and not always excruciating, but flare-ups happen regularly. The usual contributory factors, stress, tiredness and so on and sometimes the sacroiliac joints just inflame and stiffen for no reason. But pain per se I can manage.

What scares me is the prospect of the recurrence of the sacroiliac instability that dogged me for months, in spite of treatment, at the outset of all this. The fear of the instability that the pain conjures up is the stuff of nightmares. According to the doctors, because of the strengthening effects of the course of prolotherapy that I underwent, a reasonably active life within limits should be possible. I'm trying to believe them but I'm dubious; in my experience doctors definitely don't have all the answers when it comes to backs, particularly my back. Nonetheless I am reclaiming - slowly - my beloved walking and I might learn to at least tolerate swimming because it's such good therapy. But the body will need kindness and attention. It has to be the priority. No exceptions.

Now to learn this, digest it, face it. Live it. Learn when to take the painkillers and apply icepacks and rest. Learn how to take care. When and how to exercise. How to try and desensitise myself to the uncertainty, because it's a given. Learn not to panic and sink into despair with every ache and twinge. And the incentive is there because I want my damn life back. There's so much I want to do.

Today I'm in a no-man's-land in the recovery process. Can't remember what it felt like to be fully fit. Body and mind are taking their own time to heal. Energy levels can and do plummet frighteningly at the drop of a hat and muscles are still too weak, but I'm not as prostrate nor as debilitated as I was. I do some basic pilates exercises daily. A, the cranial osteopath, has helped more than I can say. I'm thinner, so I'm told, and also my hair is greyer. Things will be very different going forward, I know that, and not just because of physical stuff. In the isolation of the past two years I've changed, become tougher, but in a good way. The boundaries are firmer. Integrity now matters more than anything. So life and my relationships will change.

Right now the craving is for human company, human warmth - not all day every day, that would be too tiring, but for short spells. There's a way to go but I'll get there. I will.

****

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions. Hafiz - trans. Daniel Ladinsky

Buds

2011-11-10T12:30:00.011Z

Calm after recent upheavals. Rest and relaxation. Reading U is for Undertow and catching up on Kinsey Milhone as she ferrets out more murderous goings-on in California. It's a relief to be reducing the painkillers. A visit from the mobile hairdresser helps as well. All this serenity is unusual on the day of a full moon (of course it doesn't apply to the global economy, but I'm not even going there).

And on a dank November morning the first buds of a Christmas cactus, flourishing in the moist warmth of the bathroom.

Movement

2011-11-05T20:55:00.005Z

Midnight. Through the bedroom window the moon is hidden but the long strips of cloud moving across the sky are back-lit with cool silver. In the distance a car speeds by and across the black fields the river flows on alone and silent. The world turns and when I awake it is still dark. The first train of the day rumbles its way north while I watch Jupiter descend towards the horizon, ice-bright and as fiery and pure as a diamond. The rising sun and a rhythmic swish of wings of a flight of geese and high above a speck of a plane leaves a solitary vapour trail.

Notes

2011-11-04T07:37:00.007Z

The grassy square opposite the house is strewn with fallen leaves, innumerable shades of yellow and ochre. In the late afternoon sun a little boy - fair hair, bright red jumper - pushes an equally bright red bicycle through the leaves. The bike is a bit too heavy for him to control and he swerves from side to side as he makes his way home, his small body consumed with effort and concentration.

****

Guarded forays into the outside world - no more than one a day followed by rest - but so much time is spent on my own. Reading. Watching TV. Surfing the internet. (TV has tended to take over when pain levels are up; at such times escapism and distraction rule). These days the recovery consists of small spurts of progress followed by consolidation. Energy levels are still horribly low so graded but regular exercise (important not to miss a day), a good diet and fresh air, along with fortnightly cranial osteopathy sessions, are what is needed. I can't speak too highly of cranial osteopathy and of my practitioner. It has saved me.

So hard to focus, to formulate ideas, to string thoughts together. If my ego were writing the script I would have used the past two years to produce a first novel or learn another language or read the complete Russian classics. What a joke. Such achievements as there have been seem pretty paltry from the outside but that's not what this period has been about, not at all. It's been about survival, being stripped back to the core.

****

The cat's blood test results are in. The problem doesn't seem to be kidneys as I had feared. Instead one of his liver readings is higher than normal, plus he has lost a small but noticeable amount of weight over the last three months. These symptoms could point to something ominous or they could simply be a consequence of his age. Vet's advice: bring him in for regular weigh-ins every three weeks or so. If he continues to lose weight then another blood test to clarify exactly what is going on.

Meanwhile he's happy. Eating, sleeping, purring. To be honest my instinct is to leave him in peace.

October

2011-10-27T11:51:00.006+01:00

A heavy, warm rain. The horse chestnuts have turned a gold-brown though the silver birch, apart from the odd yellow leaf, remains stalwartly green, resisting the steady march towards winter. In the next few days I'll phone the gardener to arrange for the final tidying up session of the season. Lavender to cut back, ditto lemon balm. Lawn to mow. The dying laurel bush to be despatched.

****

A nervous week. The cat - already on a special renal diet - started drinking more water than usual. A while ago I was warned by the vet that this could be a sign that the feline Grim Reaper is sharpening his scythe. In the last 24 hours the drinking has diminished but to be on the safe side we are taking him in for blood tests. A friend has been roped in for assistance - at 5+ kilos he is far too heavy for me to carry at the moment.

We've had these scares before but I'm aware of the fleetingness of life, even for one seemingly so resilient. When the time does come - be it next week, next month or next year - it will be very hard without him.

On the fence

2011-10-21T10:29:00.000+01:00

Seventeen years old and for me each day counts. This was taken two or three years ago and the back legs are creakier now, so he stays earth-bound for the most part. But he still purrs loud and long and the sweetness of nature is unchanged.

Infrastructure

2011-10-18T17:40:00.009+01:00

It's about very slowly claiming back bite-sized chunks of former independence. On the forays into the outside world, asking the taxi driver to stop at the ATM machine, getting out and withdrawing the cash myself rather than begging someone else to do it. Ditto letters at the letter box.

And also:

Changing the sheets
Hanging out the washing
Dusting
Rearranging pictures
Upping the distance of the daily walks

Progress. Exhilarating and frightening at the same time. Hope feels dangerous.

But there are helpers, of course there are. A cleaning lady every two weeks, and a gardener/handyman for whenever the lawn runs rampant. In both cases compatability has been key. Can't be doing with someone I'm uncomfortable with; isolation and pain have upped the sensitivity. These two are friendly and non-pushy. The cleaning lady's husband is also my plumber. He charges reasonable rates and (oh so important) is willing to turn out at short notice.

The gardener and his brother-in-law, the roofer, were here this past weekend. Guttering and loose tiles fixed. Apparently there were two holes in the roof - a result probably of the harsh conditions of last winter. Truly glad I didn't know this. In addition my neighbour has replaced the dilapidated fence that separated our two properties. Strong south-west winds are common and I would guess the fence only remained upright thanks to some wonderfully tenacious ivy.

I'm praying, crossing my fingers, that feng shui practitioners have got it right, that mending and adjusting the space where we live does affect the person who lives there. That as the roof is fixed and the gutters are cleared, as the floor is mopped and the garden weeded, as boundaries are strengthened, so healing on some level or another is happening. And I do - kind of - believe it.

Back

2011-10-13T14:54:00.013+01:00

After such a period of silence, after so much pain, a glimmering of light. The understanding that not yet but sometime I will inch my way back into the world. The extraordinary world of people and independence and buying your own groceries and posting your own letters. The world of walking. The world that isn't limited by four walls.

Still feeling unformed, semi-transparent, I've almost forgotten how to write. So I piece together word after word. Impossible to explain what has happened and no real need. Just now and again, when I can, I want to leave a mark here.

Therapy

2010-07-13T13:14:00.000+01:00

Just about a year ago, as Saturn approached the ascendant, the ligaments of my lower back and sacro-iliac joints gave up the ghost. The centre, literally, could no longer hold. Displacement, severe muscle spasm and weakness and flare ups of acute inflamation and pain. Since then a repeat prescription for cocodamol, a round of alternative and conventional medical treatments and far too much TV.

It's dawning on me that the job is to rebuild the centre - and what is more central than the pelvis and lower back, and what they represent? Or rather to give it space to do the rebuilding. I imagined my centre could look after itself while I led a busy life but apparently this was not the case. Maybe this was the only way to get my attention. After much inner resistance I am revisiting relaxation and meditation techniques.

Six weeks ago I ventured outside again. Ten yards and back home, fifteen the following day, then twenty. Today I reached the next street up from mine. The first goal is to reach the river. At a guess, I'm just just under halfway there. The strangest feeling, learning to walk again. Each time I go out, a mixture of pleasure mixed with terror lest there is a setback. Learning to trust this body that, seemingly, has turned against me for a season.

For the first time for a long while I hanker after the scent of essential oils. Lavender scented body lotion, orange and ginger shower gel. The physical as a source of peace and pleasure.

A desire as well to get creative. Photographs. Blogging.

About the same time as the back went, the computer hard drive died, and with it my stock of photographs. Right now I'm using a friend's PC, loaned on approval. No photography programmes so no new photos.

But thank god for Flickr. I'll be reviewing my on line stockpile and posting some of them here from time to time - at least for as long as the back stability lasts.

Therapy, you might call it.

Seven

2009-07-15T16:32:00.011+01:00

The brain has shrivelled. I'm finding it difficult to string together a coherent sentence, never mind a post, so am resorting to the old standby, a list. The equivalent of a musical scale, an arpeggio. It may have limited interest but it is the doing of it rather than the end result that counts.

1. Less blogging, more reading. I am re- reading Molly Fox's Birthday. It was, yes, a birthday present and turned out to be such a page-turner that I galloped through and only realised at the end that I had skipped much that was good, that deserved time and care. You could be tricked into thinking of this book as superior Irish chick-lit. It isn't. A subtle, compassionate writer, Deirdre Madden. (The Indie liked it too.)

2. Prompted by the news headlines I took down Reading Lolita in Tehran from the bookshelf where it had been gathering dust since I brought it. You probably need to have read more Nabokov and Henry James than I have to appreciate it properly, but the book shines a chilling light on the realities of living in a theocracy. At around the same time I caught Iran and Britain on BBC 4. Very, very good. Unfortunately it is no longer on Iplayer on the Beeb's website, but if it ever comes your way, watch it.

3. I dreamed the other night that I was temping in a grey steel and concrete office that I shared with a man and woman that I didn't know. I had been careless and made a mistake. I knew it, tried my hardest to concentrate but to was unable to. Nightmare.

4. My boss has gone down with swine flu. Am checking whether or not I have a sore throat.

5. The cat's fur is a totally different colour in sunlight. Bright ginger. On grey days he is sandy, mottled. A lion's pelt.

6. An afternoon of summer sun, warm strong wind, pink rhodendendrons, the first fuschia. Ten bumble bees on the lavender bush at last count. The silver birch outside the window sways in the breeze, slender and loose-limbed branches in perpetual motion.

7. Feeling the way forward step by step after a trying time. Tentatively. The landscape has changed. Certainties are no longer as certain. (Astrological note: Saturn transiting 12th house. Still).

Heatwave

2009-07-03T19:45:00.013+01:00

The humidity and heat - 28 degrees and rising - bring with them a fretful quiet, a slowing of activity. Of necessity. Impossible to think clearly and quickly, to move at a pace beyond minimal. My office is up four flights of stairs, on the top floor of a converted 18th century townhouse. No airconditioning. The south facing sash window is jammed wide open in the vain hope of capturing a breeze, the sunblinds drawn. As an emergency measure we set up an electric fan on a folding chair between our two desks, taking care as we come and go not to trip over the cable. In spite of natural inclinations the work rate slows and I put off anything beyond the basics, the simple. My margins are very thin in high temperatures. The fan's turbulent air blows papers off the desk and dries the eyes.

My office colleague is American, born in the desert lands of the South-West. She loves this weather, flourishes in the heat, goes to the sauna regularly in winter for physical and emotional health. We manage our thermostatic differences and make allowances for each other - I dress in layers for flexible temperature control, she brings extra woollens. I sweat occasionally for her, she shivers from time to time to keep me happy.

****

A first appointment with a local shiatsu practitioner this afternoon in the ongoing quest for spasm-free muscles. Shiatsu worked miracles for my lower back in 1993. The first session was a Wednesday evening and I had to take the rest of the week off work, nose and eyes were running so much afterwards. A continuous stream. Not a cold, or flu. Detox.

Later in the year, in the October, a major life change occurred for which I am thankful to this day. I still believe an apparently unrelated series of events including the fact that I am alive now - a tad melodramatic but possibly true - were in some way triggered in a treatment room in a basement flat in North London that evening in May sixteen years ago.

In my book, everything is connected and in ways we can't begin to imagine.

Survivors

2009-06-03T10:44:00.002+01:00

The back is less stiff and there is a greater range of movement in the neck and right arm but there is still work to be done, and I still need to limit computer time. Working on muscle trigger points - as many as I can locate. Still having physio. Going forward I've been advised build up some supportive muscle, so I wander over to the local authority gym. At 5.30pm it is packed. People pounding the running machines. Serious. No smiles. Hmm.

****

I work in the old part of the city. Walking distance from the cathedral and its green. Walking distance from pretty much everything: the bookshop, the library, M&S, the bank, Boots, the chiropractor and the gym.

A local architectural salvage firm had a temporary display in the tourist office just beyond the cathedral green. A favourite lunchtime haunt of mine for the duration, situated as it was en route to the Best Sandwich Shop in Town. A mishmash of rescued objects: statuery; horse brasses; coloured pharmacy bottles, dark green and brown, thick, uneven glass; small carved cows; steam engine plates; even a green man or two. I yearned after some of them. The cherub, or is it a satyr? - check out that unnervingly louche expression - with his shield and whatever it is he is holding in his left hand. The LNER plate. The antique tiles.

Part of the pleasure lay in the incongruity. A motley bunch. All survivors of small cataclysms of refurb and rebuild.

***

The rust-speckled white angel and his close companion were particular favourites. Better if you enlarge the photo and I couldn't get rid of the reflection from the street. But still, there's something about that face, blank and watchful, the protective curve of the arms. Those wings. Kitsch perhaps, sentimental possibly, but that's too harsh. I find it lovely.

Maybe an angel should only be seen half hidden among the reflections of the physical world. So you are never quite sure if he is actually present or simply a trick of the light.

Three score

2009-05-24T06:00:00.004+01:00

My birthday today. A big one. This last week I've been like a child awaiting Christmas.

Sixty. Three score years. Ten more to go before my time's up if tradition is anything to go by. The family genes hint that I may be around a bit longer than that but the reality that individual existence is finite and that it will vanish, dissolve into something with a different shape and form or without shape and form, ideally lends a heightened awareness and a freedom to each day. A lightening up. Which is as it should be. Throw what's left of one's allotted span into the air and see what shape it takes when it hits the ground.

Inventory:

The blessed liberation from the hormonal merry go round, and a consequent level of calm and equilibrium (some of the time) .
I can finally stop trying to get it right. If I haven't by now I never will and it doesn't matter. It being life.
There are still yearnings: to belong, love in the widest sense and an end to loneliness. But you start where you are with what you have.
Good health and fitness - the right rotator cuff excepted - are real, unexpected gifts. My body and I are finally on amicable terms. Weight has normalised. Clothes fit. I had huge food issues once so this is a big deal.
Family: my sister, my cousin. Meeting up with the former in a few hours time.
Friendships continue and a couple of new ones are forged. Others fall apart or fade away.
Nearly bankrupt we may be but as of today the state throws a small monthly pension in my direction. Not enough to live on by itself, I'll need to work for a good while yet, but I'm thankful to have it. Plus free prescriptions for any medicine I might require and - best of all - free bus travel all over England. The downside: the identity photo on the bus pass is truly depressing.
And there's more. As an OAP I can sign up for U3A, show up for the £3 afternoon Silver Screenings at the local cinema, get ten per cent off paintbrushes and spanners on Wednesdays at B&Q ...
Engaged and humorous colleagues who do a great job in the community. And who threw a surprise lunchtime birthday bash on Friday.
The cat. Of course. He's the feline equivalent of 86.

There are skills to develop. Plants to discover. A blog to write. Books to read. Seasons to greet. Footpaths to walk.

****

The sky pale blue, translucent after weeks of rain. The warmest day of the year so far according to the BBC. When I let the cat out just now the air was clear and heady, like a fine cool wine. Earth and grass damp. Breathe deeply.

Prana. Life force. The one constant

None of it matters.
All of it matters, every second and atom.

I wouldn't be twenty again for the world.

Bedtime

2009-05-12T17:47:00.021+01:00

Prompted by Dale's recent post:

I think of my father particularly at this time of the year. He died in April over a decade ago, during the bluebell season.

****

I was eleven years old and heading towards a difficult adolescence, my sister, L, around one year. At her bedtime and because she insisted, my father - in his late forties by now - would carry her around the living room, moving from picture to picture, object to object, stopping briefly at each.

Goodnight ships (in front of a picture) ... goodnight other ships ... goodnight table ... goodnight trees ... goodnight window.

During the ritual my sister clutched her favourite stuffed toy, a koala bear. The pronounciation defeated her. The rest of the family followed her lead and called it Kayola.

****

He was at his best with babies and very small children: something tense and taut unwound and his defences lowered a fraction to display a quiet tenderness. He would have doted on grandchildren almost certainly, but neither L nor I were cut from a conventional nor a maternal cloth.

****

Our relationship feels easier at this distance. I struggled. So did he. The difficulties - there were a lot - matter less, his integrity and humour matter more.

Green corn

2009-05-04T17:53:00.015+01:00

On this misty, rainy morning we climbed a hill ...

and walked through the bluebell woods ...

... and along a leyline and passed a church and two dogs and their owners and marvelled at the bluebells and the cornflowers and the pink campions and the rape (ugh, hate that word but the fields are shockingly, wonderfully yellow) and the red soil. And against the red soil the green, young green wheat, green woodlands. In the field, larks rose around us, singing.

A verse from the John Masefield hymn came to mind

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn
and thou wilt bring the young green corn
the young green corn divinely springing
the young green corn for ever singing.

Echoes of long ago school assemblies. Horrible, I hated my schooldays but on this particular morning the angst has faded and I'm not going to quibble about the religious theme. Masefield, the avid reader, seafarer and eventual Poet Laureate, was a local lad: he knew about red soil. And it is a beautiful poem ....

... the laughter of holy white birds flying after

On this hill, the parliamentarian armies laid siege to our royalist city in the valley below over four centuries ago. The men were so hungry they ate the cider apples in the orchards and the potatoes and robbed the farmhouses of bread and towards the end in extremis resorted to eating acorns. Difficult to imagine today in all this greenery and lushness. Indeed, the land is almost too perfectly cared for, too well manicured: wild flowers flourish along the lanes, no pesticides on these verges, no litter that I could see. A mystery solved when the landowner's name is spotted on a notice. Enough to convert one into a present-day royalist.

The hardest part of the walk was the last part, climbing the hill for the second time. A steep, hard pull. Near the summit we rested on a log on the edge of the wood in silence for five minutes or so. The field in front of us rose steeply, the line of the horizon curved like a giant's back recumbent against the sky. Raindrops on leaves. The moist smell of earth. The harsh call of a pheasant. The distant murmur of traffic, faint but just discernible. I hadn't wanted to come out this morning, had something on my mind, hadn't wanted to see anyone. Yet growing older, I have learned from experience that I don't always know what's good for me and consequently can be persuaded. By people I trust, by an uncertain yet stubborn faith in the apparently random flow of life.

"Shall we go?" my companion asks. We head for the car. Next stop, the house and a late lunch.

...

The shoulder still stiffens when I spend too long here at the computer. I overdid it on Friday and it took thirty six hours for the pain to subside. Thank god that nothing is obligatory in the blogosphere. Short posts, long posts. Whatever works. Right now, photographic posts seem to fit the bill. I love taking photographs and it's easier on the body than writing.

Grow

2009-04-30T19:50:00.005+01:00

There were moments during the seminar when the heart began to pound and the eyes welled. Just being present, sensing the rusty cogs in the brain creak and groan with effort, was moving and exciting. Blame the euphoria on our lecturer - a grey haired, affable man, dauntingly intelligent. He wove ideas and concepts into a magical whole and yet at the same time, as they say, he spoke my language. I came away without catchphrases or coherent soundbites, just three pages of scribbled notes - can't afford to forget this, must record it - some photocopies and a changed perspective.

I had wondered whether or not to go, whether I would be out of my depth. Now and again I was but it didn't matter. There's all the time in the world to reflect and ponder. Mostly I was carried along. My colleague, C, had the same reaction. A bonus to have her with me on the long journey home.

I hadn't realised how thirsty I have been for study and to be stretched by a subject that fascinates, in the company of like minded others. There's this sudden craving for learning, an urge to explore and to grow and take a few risks.

Even at nearly sixty. Especially at nearly sixty.

Time to check out some prospectuses, perhaps?

****

Oh, and Relatively Retiring may recognise the photograph .....

Stretching

2009-04-22T16:52:00.003+01:00

The shoulder and neck are better, though not cured. Too much time on the computer, using the mouse and the dull throbbing starts. Moderation, that most elusive of qualities, is my holy grail.

The immediate goal to work on the cow face pose, which with my hypermobile joints I used to find so easy in yoga class. One arm reaching backwards over the shoulder, the other behind the back reaching up. The hands clasp. Once I was proud of my prowess, glowed when the teacher praised my flexibility. Yes, I know, self-congratulation is at variance with the non-competitive spirit of yoga, but that didn't stop me. The karmic comeuppance is that these days I can just about manage the pose on one side only. Impossible to move the right arm upwards behind my back.

The difference between a year ago and now is still dispiriting. A lesson is humility. Also in self-forgiveness: nobody made me sit at the laptop for hours at a time without taking a break

I'm supposed to do exercises three times a day. Some days it's only twice but Sheila the physio is pleased with progress and the gap between our appointments has lengthened from weekly to fortnightly to monthly. At my request - she knows I do massage and is supportive - we name the muscles, bones and joints beneath her fingers as she works, massaging and stretching contracted muscles, neck then arm then shoulder, me on the couch, her standing alongside. A litany, a recitative: Pecs minor, scalenes, subscapularis, levator scapulae, coracoid process, C4 and C5 ....

When we tire of A&P we talk about cats, hers and mine. Or gardening.

I turn onto my back. She places both hands, one over the other, on the injured shoulder, leans her weight forward onto her arms. Clavicle and sternum are pushed towards the spine and my lung capacity is reduced by what feels like 90%. She's a large woman in her early forties, as tall as I am and a former shot putter, solid and muscular. The effect is not dissimilar (I imagine) to being run over. I close my eyes, wonder if my skeleton can take it, imagine the pistol-shot crack of fracturing bone.

At the end of the session the muscles in the right shoulder and arm feel blessedly looser. Silent prayers of thanks for the NHS. And for Sheila. We've almost, in a way, become friends. Not quite, the professional relationship takes precedence, as it should.

But I like her, and I'm grateful.

****

A visit to a National Trust garden last week. I couldn't tear myself away from the spiralling, unfurling ferns. Uncurling. Releasing. Stretching out of themselves.

Abeyance

2009-02-19T18:50:00.001Z

Writing The End seems far too final. Impossible not to leave the door slightly open.

Nonetheless, after two plus years and three blogs the time has come to stop, at least for a while. A combination of the RSI (which is serious and painful and which I need to take seriously and blogging really doesn't help) and the awareness that, physical injury apart, I have been spending more time than is beneficial in front of the computer screen.

So, in abeyance until further notice. At least until the summer.

Three months of minimal computer work, the physio says.

After that, we'll see.

More Snow

2009-02-07T22:35:00.016Z

No better place to be than on the bus this morning.

The road winds up and out of our low-lying city and as the altitude increased the view broadened till we few passengers could see across the fields to Wales. Skirrid - the Holy Mountain - and the Sugar Loaf and the Black Mountains, all, including the last, a pristine white. A panoramic view in any season. Today, heart-stoppingly beautiful.

In town you have to be up early to see the snow at its best. This past week it has fallen overnight then as the day progresses the temperature rises. Snow drips off the trees, turns into slush, flows away down the drains.

Here, just a little higher, the land is colder, the air crisper. The driver changed gear to accommodate the upward climb. In the reserve and silence of the lower deck we stared out of the windows at a changed world. Random travellers. The familiar reborn, recreated.

Update: More snowy pictures here.

Snow

2009-02-03T09:10:00.018Z

You'll have to indulge me with this post, readers in North America and, indeed, other parts of England. And Wales, and Scotland. Our snowfall has been minimal in comparison to yours, probably, but nonetheless in these parts it's a rare event. I'm not working till Thursday so can enjoy it all as I prowl around the garden with a camera.

A touch of cabin fever mid-evening yesterday. Home alone after an exceptionally social and stimulating and surprising weekend. Restless. The urge to pull on boots and go out into the fields, into the snowy darkness, to explore. Sloth overcame courage and I surfed the net instead.

*****

The male blackbird is getting braver in approaching the patio, the one spot in the garden that is free from snow and where I can scatter crumbs. He flies off with staccato cries of alarm when the the cat approaches the French window - just a few feet separate them through the double glazing. Suddenly my elderly cat is transformed from the peaceable beast that I know. He crouches, every muscle on alert. Teeth chattering. Pupils dilated.

My companion. Still a hunter after all these years. His instincts remain as sharp as ever. Does the same apply to his owner who is also, in her own way, ageing?

Candlemas

2009-02-01T20:27:00.012Z

Cotton wool balls of snow rush towards the windscreen. The wind whips up the flakes on the road surface into swirling, dancing patterns. White snakes, says B. He drives fast, even in this weather. Oncoming headlights dazzle, dip and disappear behind us.

To the west a hill curves on the horizon. A line of trees on its summit, stripped of leaves, fine drawn shapes against the last vestiges of daylight. The silhouettes are so distinct that even at this distance I fancy I can see individual twigs and the discreet, tumescent buds of spring.

Dilemma

2009-01-27T09:25:00.016Z

La falaise a Penarth, le soir, marée basse - Alfred Sisley.

I linked to this painting in a previous post. The coastal scene is not that different today, over a century later. The promontory in the distance is Lavernock Point, a few miles out of Cardiff, one end of the proposed Severn Barrage, linking South Wales to Somerset. According to a front-page article in today's Independent, this will harness the powerful tide of the Severn Estuary to provide 5 per cent of the UK's energy needs.

That's a lot. You can see why the Government are very interested indeed, and why at first glance it makes sense. A wonderfully green scheme. But. But. It will mean the destruction of natural habitats, marshes and mudflats, for thousands of migrating birds, fish and eels. Vague promises are being made that alternative wildlife sanctuaries will be found but the loss will be immense. There are other less damaging options under consideration for harnessing parts of the Estuary - such as the ones put forward by Friends of the Earth, who have come out strongly against the Barrage - but none that deliver this kind of mighty renewable punch. As the Indie says:

There is little doubt that a barrage would destroy more wildlife habitat than any other British construction project in modern times. The Severn Estuary, where the celebrated naturalist Sir Peter Scott founded Slimbridge, the wildfowl refuge which became one of the world's most famous nature reserves, provides an 86,000-acre feeding ground for wild swans, geese and many thousands of wading birds, such as dunlin, turnstone, oystercatcher and ringed plover, from all over Europe.
Under EU wildlife habitat laws, if the Government were to go ahead, it would have to find alternative compensatory habitat – mudflats and marshes – which might be as much as 40,000 acres, and which might cost anything up to £3bn.
But that is unlikely to hold the Government back, such will be the temptation to grab that massive 5 per cent renewable energy boost from a barrage – for in December ministers took on the enormous obligation, in an EU-wide deal, of sourcing 20 per cent of total UK energy demand from renewables by 2020. Twenty per cent of total energy (which includes heating and transport) means finding about 40 per cent of electricity from renewables – nearly 10 times the current figure of about 4.5 per cent.
The Herculean size of that task means the Government is very likely to go for the barrage, especially as the onshore wind industry is suffering strongly from the rise in the euro against the pound, meaning turbines made in Germany and Denmark are now about a third dearer than they were a year ago.

Dilemma. I know the area well and would grieve at its destruction. I am in favour of renewables and clean energy (who isn't?). I distrust the forthcoming Government consultation process and the hidden agendas behind it that quite probably mean that it will be a rubber-stamping of a decision already made. I am a supporter of Friends of the Earth. There is a long way to go and we are currently living through the mother of all recessions and the country may go bankrupt and there will be an election soon. But I suspect the Barrage will be built, eventually.

Family

2009-01-25T15:10:00.006Z

Last Sunday afternoon, late. The train is crowded. Luggage everywhere and no seat to be had when I get on at Bristol after a few days at my cousin's place. Not my favourite part of the journey, this, but fortunately it doesn't last long. Twenty minutes at most, then a change. I share the stretch of grimy corridor with a father and two sons. The father, late thirties, jeans, sweatshirt with a logo. The boys maybe ten and eight. The father asks if they are in the way, offers to help me with my suitcase. A Welsh accent. He seems kind.

The two boys chatter, looking out the window, pointing at trains, carriages, signs. Look over there, Dad. Is that the same train we saw at Swansea? It would have to be a very long train if it's the same one, says their father. Laughter. Oh Dad.

The older boy starts to talk to me, unprompted. Quick, darting speech. I notice the bulky dental braces.

"We're going to Maesteg". The Valleys. "We've been to see our cousins in Durham". That's a long way, I say, I did the journey myself a few months ago.

"I know. We've been travelling all day". He turns back towards his brother and the window.

Rail travel may be a novelty for both boys. There is something old fashioned about their excitment and keen interest in everything on the other side of the glass, with nary a computer game or ipod to be seen. I watch them with mixed emotions - happy, wistful, sad, who knows - their lack of cool is very endearing. As is their confidence in each other's company. Their security in being part of a unit.

Newport. The father offers to open the carriage door. People start to board, pushing. Almost dark. Goodbye, I call as I get out. A faint reply is just audible over the blaring cacophony of the station loudspeaker.

Mouse II

2009-01-25T12:25:00.006Z

An upsetting Friday at the now very part-time and occasional job. The backwash turned yesterday into something of a convalescence. Rest, light housework, repotting plants. Don't think. Follow a gentle routine. Eat properly. Don't think. Drink water. Let it go. Don't think.

Today, feeling stronger, I summoned up the courage to plug in the vertical mouse.

It works. A bit hypersensitive compared with my old mouse, but we'll get used to each other. Ugly and cumbersome, yes, but who cares. As we all know by now, looks aren't everything.

Mouse control is mainly via the hand and fingers. No twisting of the arm. My biceps brachii are cautiously optimistic. Not to mention the acromioclavicular joint and associated muscles and ligaments.

Better days.

Diffuse

2009-01-21T09:09:00.002Z

The Bristol Channel and Severn Bridge from north Somerset.

A blustery wind rushed in from the Atlantic. Diffuse light, muted colours, boundaries between sea and sky and land softened. Studies in blue and grey. The Impressionists would have loved it. (In fact Sisley did paint some later landscapes on the opposite side of the water).

If you can see Wales, according to the locals - tongue in cheek - there's rain on the way. If you can't, then it's already raining. Sure enough a few hours after these were taken the heavens opened.

****

A line is crossed.

Certainties dissolve. Or maybe are distorted by the mists within.

Gargoyles and a Vertical Mouse

2009-01-19T16:16:00.009Z

Last Monday the new physio diagnosed chronic RSI in the right shoulder. A consequence of a couple of decades of computer work and faulty posture and seating. The latest chapter in an ongoing saga. Remedial exercises three times a day and a course of ultrasound (thank god for the NHS) are prescribed. Most important of all, a limit - a drastic one - on computer time, certainly until the vertical mouse, now on order, arrives. Never heard of a vertical mouse? Neither had I.

Just as well you've stopped full time office work, she said. Lucky too that the injury doesn't much affect the range of movements needed for massage.

I'll be blogging and reading what I can, when I can. Ditto commenting. Want to do more and frustrated that it isn't possible. Face to face with my own limitations yet again - something I resist and resist - and a reminder that no-one (including, especially, me) can do everything and be everywhere.

Strange, I find, how driven behaviour patterns crop up everywhere, including in cyberspace. Laugh at them and they dissolve. But only for a while. They return and sit on your shoulder, whispering in your ear until you laugh and shrug them off. Again. Grotesque, comical gargoyles.

But I will catch up with the blogreading. In due course. Promise.

Snapshot

2009-01-13T00:28:00.005Z

Northern Israel, near the Lebanese border. October 1995. A pit stop. We were warned not to take photographs of the soldiers in the area, there had been incursions across the border and people were jumpy, but this one - so young - seemed open and friendly so I took the risk. I gestured with the camera. Would he mind? He smiled and I pressed the button.

It was what passed for a time of hope, the narrow window of one year between the signing of the Oslo accord between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin and the death of that hope by assassination a few weeks later in the November. Even then, in the best of times relatively speaking, there seemed to be little optimism. Just a sense, at least among the Israelis that we met, that it couldn't work out, that the enmity on the other side was too deep. That it would always be like this. We had sat next to a Palestinian doctor on the plane from London to Tel Aviv and he spoke with quiet bitterness about a life in exile. He was equally pessimistic.

****

This isn't a political post about Israel and Gaza, though heaven knows I have my own opinion.

I had a CofE education. These days forgotten snatches of Old Testament verses float back into the memory.

The Lord hardened Pharoah's heart.

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

A hard heart.

Not a refuge, not a defence. Not at all. A place of danger.

And Then

2009-01-11T08:16:00.022Z

A farewell speech, a homemade cake, a present. Embarrassed shuffling of feet. Strange, as I will in fact be back working there for a few days towards the end of January, and periodically again after that. And I meet a former colleague for lunch next week and another at yoga class on Tuesdays. Nonetheless it is the closing of a chapter. And a stepping into a void.

I'm lucky. Small pensions kick in over the coming months which will pay just a few of the bills. I have skills, including massage - ostensibly the latter is the reason for leaving a nearly full-time desk job. Pass out cards. Offer tasters. Get a massage or two myself. Do yoga. Speak to people. Prepare the paperwork. More than anything else, trust. Listen for the nudges that indicate a way forward, even if, especially if, it is in a direction I don't expect. Be content to breathe and walk and garden until then. I can temp while I wait.

What of the waiting times? And the uncertainty? That's where life is lived, not in the illusion of plans and goals. More of a challenge when you live alone and there is no-one to chivvy you, and when you tend towards worry.

I want to cultivate both the garden and my friendships.I started working almost immediately when I moved here and have put little effort into finding and nurturing friendships, a community, a tribe. Like work, this takes work.

I need, really need to read more. Much more.

Don't know where the blog and blogging fit into all this, if at all. On verra bien..

Create. Create. Create. Anything.

****

This morning, while I typed, the sky caught fire. The frost has vanished and a west wind is blowing. Beneath the horizon, invisible, a full moon.

Sunday

2009-01-05T06:12:00.006Z

Should I blog about the new computer and the relief to back and shoulders of not hunching over the laptop and the delight of a proper keyboard? Should I, after watching the news and trying to take in the futility and the suffering? It's the dilemma of personal blogging, the sense that trivia is sometimes just, well, trivia.

****

A solitary female blackbird pecked at the stiffened crusts of bread. Minus 6 degrees yesterday and the frost seems permanent. Low grey cloud. Rock-like soil. The rasp of the scraping of car windscreens. The cat dozing on the sofa. M did indeed install the new computer. A visitor engenders a flurry of tidying up. I made him two cups of tea - milk, one level teaspoon of sugar - and he polished off the plate of Jaffa cakes.

****

Saturn transiting 12th house. A stripping down, a melting away.

****

At one point a robin sang in the rowan tree. The song pierced the silence like an arrow. Clear. Utterly beautiful.

Record

2008-12-30T23:21:00.010Z

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

2008-12-27T06:00:00.007Z

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

2008-12-21T09:18:00.002Z

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

2008-12-19T23:13:00.000Z

Tube

2008-12-19T23:12:00.000Z

Impressions

2008-12-19T06:20:00.005Z

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

2008-12-12T06:27:00.007Z

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

2008-12-06T19:25:00.002Z

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

2008-12-02T23:55:00.000Z

Beans

2008-12-02T18:34:00.007Z

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

2008-11-24T06:00:00.005Z

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

2008-11-20T06:34:00.009Z

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

2008-11-17T08:15:00.015Z

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

2008-11-13T06:15:00.007Z

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

2008-11-07T06:10:00.010Z

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

2008-11-05T06:00:00.017Z

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

2008-10-31T06:00:00.016Z

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

2008-10-26T17:28:00.011Z

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

2008-10-21T07:54:00.006+01:00

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

2008-10-17T17:18:00.006+01:00

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

2008-10-13T15:02:00.008+01:00

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

2008-10-10T07:21:00.001+01:00

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

2008-10-08T21:04:00.005+01:00

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

2008-10-06T12:07:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-02T07:47:00.011+01:00

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

2008-09-28T22:30:00.007+01:00

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

2008-09-25T22:30:00.004+01:00

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

2008-09-13T16:28:00.013+01:00

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

2008-09-06T18:32:00.016+01:00

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

2008-09-04T07:00:00.009+01:00

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.

Kill Claudio

2008-08-30T15:45:00.012+01:00

I must have been around 17 years old and was in the audience on a school trip when Maggie Smith's Beatrice spoke these words to Robert Stephens' Benedict.

A pause and a silence that you could have cut with a knife.

As a comedy, Much Ado about Nothing has a dark side. The male rage and vitriol (including that of her much-loved father) heaped upon Hero after her faithfulness is questioned, for one thing. It reminded me of present day newspaper stories about honour killings. Shakespeare did seem to have a fixation on cuckoldry and you wonder (well I do) whether he subscribed to the attitudes he bestows on some of his male characters.

Then I think that he has to have the benefit of the doubt. Any man who can create a such a human, stroppy Beatrice must be all right. She and Benedict are equals, each gradually dismantling their own defences against the possibility of love (with a little help from their friends of course).

Much Ado came to an open air performance in our town last week courtesy of a touring theatre company. Four men and two women, covering several roles each (Beatrice was also Dogberry!). It was played for laughs and the goal was entertainment, text interspersed with asides and banter with the audience. We were eating out of the actors' hands after the first two minutes for they were genuinely funny. A relaxed, enjoyable evening but somehow the light/dark qualities of the play stood out all the more because of it.

Beatrice and Benedict will be OK. Claudio and Hero are heading for the divorce courts.

....

The night was dark and close and warm. I was the only one walking home, but this isn't a problem here. Houses and gardens. Trees. High hedges. A stream. A pub with drinkers sitting in the gardens, talking and laughing. Several cars went by, then for the last ten minutes, silence. Just the sound of my own steps. Friends were unavailable or away and I was glad I had pushed through reserve and inertia to go to the play on my own - not something that comes easily however often I do it.

I opened the front door and went indoors, locking up behind me.

Family

2008-08-25T17:40:00.021+01:00

The weather is overcast and humid, with spells of sunshine. It has, thank the Lord, stopped raining. A powerful, steady wind rushes up from the south, tugging at the hair and separating the first dry leaves from their branches. I woke at 6 this morning and the sky was barely light. Autumn isn't far away.

***

My cousin, J, drove over yesterday. That's inaccurate, her father and my mother were cousins, so the link is more biologically tenuous. Now that I'm closer geographically - she lives about sixty miles away - we're seeing more of each other. Aside from my sister she is now my only relative.

When she walked up the path I did my usual inward half-gasp. Family genes are strange. J is eleven years older than me and she looks so like my mother in her later years that the effect is downright spooky. The resemblance was nowhere near as marked between me and my mother.

The face, the stance, the grey wavy hair. So similar.

I'm fond of her. For all our differences we share pieces of the past: she is the only one alive now who knew my grandfather and it means something that we can talk about him. And I'm one of the few who remember her father. Custodians of each other's memories, you could say.

After lunch we sit on the patio. She smokes her second and third cigarettes and tells me about her children, her husband. I unload my current employment woes. She gives me hints about cutting back the fuchsia and spreading the compost. We discuss water meters - apparently it will save money if I get one (she used to be a maths teacher and has done the sums).

The realisation dawns that I am being taken in hand, gently but with great competence, and there is an unexpected rush of gratitude. She issues a standing invitation to spend Christmas with them.

"No need to decide now. Just let me know in early December."

I will.

Connecting

2008-08-23T23:00:00.002+01:00

Well now. I'm gratified. This blog has received an award from Kate at Dating God, who was one of the instigators of my life in cyberspace. I found her blog way before I started mine and remember spending several rainy afternoons reading through the archives, hooked. She writes with courage and honesty about beginings and endings, about waking up and trying to live out her purpose, telling it like it is through the highs and lows. I've followed her progress from New York to North Carolina. I can't imagine not keeping up with her - and the cats of course.

The idea is that recipients in turn nominate seven blogs. Rules are made to be broken, I know, but I haven't linked much recently and it seems a good thing to do at this point, for all sorts of reasons.

I'm not going for any of the blogs on my blogroll. It would be impossible to choose some and leave out others. So here are seven excellent sites that I visit regularly mainly, but not exclusively, as a lurker rather than a commenter:

Life on Earth and other Accidents: LJ used to blog regularly but then life happened in a big, painful, way and she stopped. Happily, she's started again. She has a big heart, a keen eye and a nice line in irony. She lives in Nova Scotia. And, heaven knows, she writes so well.

The Sudanese Thinker: By Drima, an expatriate Sudanese whose blog is a mixture of African and international cultural and political comment, interspersed with videos of his favourite music. He tackles controversial subjects with civility and acceptance, and nearly all the commenters seem to follow his lead, more or less. Besides, any blogger with the phrase "Warning: I'm very sarcastic." in the About section has already won me over.

Patteran Pages: Dick Jones's blog. Dick is a terrific poet, with wide interests that are reflected in his writing, both poetry and prose. I love his work.

The Paris Project: Can't remember how I found Jenell. An American Christian anthropology professor in her thirties with a feminist outlook and three young sons, we seem to have little in common, but she's a fixture on my Bloglines subscription. She questions and celebrates life and her faith with a sharp, open mind and a light touch.

Astrotabletalk: One of the best astrology blogs around, taking the subject far deeper than many. Dharmaruci has strong Buddhist leanings and is an excellent and thoughtful writer.

Nothing Special: Never was a blog so inaccurately named! Janice's beautiful artwork makes this a calm and reflective place to visit. Companion blogs are her Zen Diary and the Reading Diary. She doesn't post often but it's worth the wait when she does.

Tasting Rhubarb: I've read Jean's blog on and off ever since the start of its first incarnation, when we were almost-neighbours in South London. Like Kate, her example was one of the reasons I started this blogging business. She combines words with beautiful, subtle photography to create an art form out of the raw material of her daily life.

No pressure on any of the recipients to take this forward if you're not in the mood or it's just not your thing. But if you are mentioned (or even if you're not) and you feel like doing a spot of awarding, then pick up the badge and go for it.

Once Upon a Time

2008-08-16T23:55:00.012+01:00

Rue Mouffetard, Paris
www.terragalleria.com

Steve, the library assistant, said jokingly that he should perhaps date stamp the book for a year rather than the habitual three weeks.

Spells of Enchantment – The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture is a collection of wonder and fairy tales from the 2nd century AD to 1988 by authors ranging from Andersen to Voltaire to W B Yeats. At thirteen hundred pages and sixty plus stories, Steve is right, it isn’t a quick read. A week later and I’m just three tales in.

In the editor’s words:

In the wonder tales those who are naïve and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can read the wondrous signs. They have retained their belief in the miraculous condition of nature, revere nature in all its aspects. They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism. In contrast to the humble characters, the villains are those who use words intentionally to exploit, control, transfix, incarcerate, and destroy for their benefit. They have no respect or consideration for nature and other human beings, and they actually seek to abuse magic by preventing change and causing everything to be transfixed according to their interests.

and then this

Enchantment means petrification. Breaking the spell equals emancipation.

If I discover nothing else, I’ve been introduced to the writing of Angela Carter, whose tale, The Tiger’s Bride, a feminist variation on Beauty and the Beast, makes me want to run out and read everything else she has written. Here's a wonderfully gothic description of the scene as the heroine’s father gambles, his daughter as forfeit:

But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father’s expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil’s picture books.

The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more and yet more drafts of the firewater they call grappa, rid himself of the last scraps of my inheritance.

Fabulous.

****

I’d better come clean. The subject matter was not the only attraction of the book. What made it leap off the shelf into my hand was the name of the editor. I’d never come across any of his books until this.

Thirty years ago this month I owed the first of my three homes in Paris to him. He was American, a visiting professor at Nanterre University who needed to rent out his studio for three semesters to take up a temporary post in East Berlin. I had arrived from England to work a few weeks previously in the wake of the breakup of a long and tortuous love affair. Totally alone, I was staying in a cheap hotel and looking for somewhere to live. I developed a tentative friendship with a Peruvian postgraduate student, a gentle, quiet man who was moonlighting at the hotel as a weekend receptionist and who put us in touch.

A faint memory lingers of my quasi-landlord. Blue eyes, blue jeans, nice smile.

In the August of 1978 he set off for East Germany and I moved into the flat in the Ve arrondissement, the heart of the Left Bank, on the rue Mouffetard, a cobbled street, narrow and picturesque, that snakes downhill from the Place de la Contrescarpe to the rue Censier.

More memories float back into focus. You left the bustle of the daily street market, passed through a dark, narrow passage to a small courtyard. The flat was on the ground floor of the far building. Eerily quiet it was, considering the crush of people on the street.

****

Nine months later. I found an apartment with a new friend and a white cat on the rue Andre del Sarte up against the massive stone bulk of the Butte Montmartre, convenient for the Gare du Nord and the train journey to the job I had been offered in Chantilly.

Invisible links.

Paths that cross.

Lives that intersect

I would stay in Paris for ten years. I don't know how I did it. Looking back I suspect I might indeed have had a fairy godmother. The years were marked as much by searching and hunger and lostness as excitement and adventure. Yet opportunities came when they were needed. Helpers stepped out of the shadows at critical moments.

It would be another fifteen years and I'd be back in England before the happy ending started to manifest. Slowly. It wouldn't be the one that I had envisaged. And the process still continues.

Fuchsia

2008-08-11T12:24:00.032+01:00

September 1993: a holiday with a companion in Co. Kerry. A peaceful, serene hiatus, amidst mountains and green fields, in a life that was at that point careering out of control with the speed of a express train. We walked lanes and paths bordered with mile upon mile of fuchsia hedges.

Previously I'd thought of the fuchsia as a well-behaved, cultivated suburban species. Rather boring in fact. I'd never seen anything like this riotous, unlimited abundance of colour and I marvelled.

****

It wasn't in the garden last year and I didn't plant it. Probably a passing bird.

For a start I wouldn't have placed it where it is growing now, right in the middle of a flourishing clump of other assorted blooms. But I can't deny that it lifts the heart to see it. The red and purple flowers glow and quiver like so many miniature, coloured lanterns. In the grey August dampness, uninvited, they shine.

Next Thing

2008-08-07T22:26:00.002+01:00

It takes being sick, if only for a few days, to remind me how healthy I generally am, and thus how fortunate. I can't remember the last time I was off work due to illness. It hasn't always been like this.

I've had to leave some time-critical job tasks undone, which I'm fretting over. I'll probably go in tomorrow for a couple of hours, just to clear them. In any event it always comes back to doing the next thing, slowly and gently.

Trying to let go. Being open to - praying for would be more accurate - a change in perception.

Dog Days

2008-08-04T20:32:00.003+01:00

The phrase Dog Days or "the dog days of summer", refers to the hottest, most sultry days of summer. They are a phenomenon of the northern hemisphere that usually falls between early July and early September but the actual dates vary greatly from region to region, depending on latitude and climate.

Dog Days can also define a time period or event that is very hot or stagnant, or marked by dull lack of progress.

Wikipedia

Hot, yes. Dull lack of progress, yes. Stagnation definitely. I remind myself that the word germination might be more helpful, but the sense of drumming the fingers in frustration, of marking time has felt almost palpable.

Sunday was different.

Twenty or so people. a leisurely lunch followed by a game of rounders on the lawn of an old farmhouse facing south towards the Monmouthshire hills. The weather: warm and overcast, promising both sun and rain at different times but never quite delivering either. Aside from a few partners, children and dogs (including the subject of the photo) everyone knew each other.

We ate hot dogs (oh yes) and salad and cheesecake and strawberries. We drank juice, ginger beer, coffee. We chatted and cheered and ran and hit and missed the rounders ball. I can't remember the last time I felt so at ease in a group this size.

It occured to me during the drive home: Don't put labels or expectations or judgements on a single moment of this fragile, unpredictable life.

Dog Days can be good.

More info on Dog Days and the Dog Star here and here.

And who is old enough to remember Al Pacino's extraordinary, febrile performance in this?

Midnight

2008-08-01T23:57:00.003+01:00

The words won't come. Much is happening and very little of it translates to a blog post. Thoughts come and go, drift and evaporate. Looking back I see that August has been the month in each of the past two years that I've taken a blog break. Hmmm.

****

In the middle of the night, last night, I woke up. Power cut. No habitual shadows on the wall from the street light. I reach for the bedside lamp. Click. Nothing. No World Service murmering by my left ear. I shuffle to the window and look out over a sea of total, unaccustomed dark.

****

Leading onto a middle-of-the-night poem by Ted Hughes. Out of season, but who cares. I've only recently discovered this and I absolutely love it, the symbolism, the physicality of the description of a very non-physical event.

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Practice

2008-07-25T19:14:00.002+01:00

She practises weekend mornings.
She clasps her wrist behind her back better to resist the temptation
to guide the ball with a passing hand.
She dances the ball from knee to toe to head to torso.
Repeated, with variations, ad infinitum.
She loses control of the ball.
She keeps her composure.
She retrieves it.
Starts again.
No temper.
No exasperation.
No whoops of delight.
Just focus and concentration.
I hear the bounce as the ball meets the tarmac.
She makes no other sound.

I stop what I am doing and watch.
Respect.

You may have seen this in which case you'll understand.

Bulletin

2008-07-20T13:34:00.001+01:00

Subject: 1 pale ginger cat. Neutered male.

Age: C. 14 years.

Health: The heart is strong. The remaining teeth aren't wonderful but in view of the risks of giving a cat with kidney problems a general anaesthetic, the vet's advice is to leave things as they are.

Behaviour in the surgery: Impeccable.

Location: In his favourite spot where he has appointed himself guardian of the newly acquired, ahem, Money Plant. As usual he ignores the neighbours.

Weather outlook: Sunny.

Hard Cash

2008-07-19T07:48:00.010+01:00

I worry about tomorrow's money. What's not to worry about?

Will my (very small) pension be enough? How will I manage on my own with the utility bills rising all the time? I lie in bed at night when I get these attacks, reproach myself for all the wrong financial and life choices I have ever made and imagine how I will live as a bag lady.

Self pity and insecurity don't make for a happy mix, and it's pretty obvious if I read the paper or watch the news that there are so many in a similar or worse situation. As the world population goes, believe me, I'm in the fortunate half. Even in the UK I'm not doing too badly. No debt. No dependents. None of this makes me feel any better.

So I’ll have to work as long as I can. OK. Fine. Find something that is worthwhile and makes my heart sing, or at least doesn't make it sink, and I'd definitely choose to be occupied and happy.

I have a good and exceedingly well-heeled friend who owns a couple of rental properties, who has a portfolio of stocks and shares, who is a Buddhist and who also worries about becoming a bag lady. In my more jaundiced moments I roll my eyes. This is unfair to her. I love and trust this woman and believe that when she tells me what she is feeling she is telling me her truth. Her fear is very tangible.

Her teacher tells her that she is powerless over outside events. That her best defence against financial, or any other, uncertainty is to live simply, kindly, in each moment, to make each second a mindful and one-pointed one, and to meditate. That’s it, aside from normal prudent budgeting.

Beyond logic. Yet at a deep level I know this is the answer. What is important is to accept that I see through a glass darkly and what I have to do is to finish this post then go downstairs and start the washing machine. Make a phone call. Take the cat to the vet at 9 o'clock. Mow the lawn. Laugh at jokes. Watch for opportunities today. Tomorrow. In six months time. Oh, and give some coins to the busker.

Leap into the chasm. No alternative when you really think about it. I’m still queasy and scared. I wish the ever-present fear would go away, but it doesn’t. In the here and now I'm not permitted (or required) to have all the answers. I hate that.

Face

2008-07-16T06:10:00.012+01:00

One of a pair of stone carved heads on either side of an iron gate in Ludlow, where I met up with a friend a few weeks back. No idea who or what they are, nor of their age, though obviously this one has sustained damage during its existence. But the broad face with its high cheekbones and fleshy lips and those large, hooded eyes, is so compelling. I've been wondering whether a real person served as a model or if this very human representation in fact originated in the mind of the sculptor .....

The image keeps drawing me back. I'm not even sure if it's male or female. Raw material for the imagination to chisel and shape.

Visible

2008-07-12T23:40:00.008+01:00

Small town living:

- I run into the massage therapist unexpectedly in the health food café and we exchange a bear hug.
- The owner of the Aladdin’s cave of a hardware shop greets me by name and when I request some heavy duty adhesive for a very small job, goes out the back and for a couple of pennies slips me half a tube of Supaglue that he had left over from some work he had done on his own account.
- The bus driver who tells me to take care, love, and mind how you go as I get off at my stop.

Initially I was thrown by the absence of anonymity. Not what I was used to at all after London or Paris. Being visible, recognised, felt threatening.

Now I welcome it.

****

Impossible to describe the shifting landscape, the promises that haven't thus far materialised but which feel so very imminent, the hopes that can't be dwelt on for long because they might vanish under scrutiny. Work. Love. Can I remember that both require strong boots, not glass slippers? Hold steady when the sirens start their song and the ropes with which I’ve tied myself to the mast as a protection from illusion prove to be as fragile as - secretly - I knew they were all along?

****

….. there is such complexity in us and so many layers to the human heart that we rarely ever encounter ourselves.

Anam Cara
John O’Donohue

Four

2008-07-10T00:16:00.002+01:00

Refocussing

2008-07-09T22:00:00.004+01:00

So much rain. Through the window of the bus the summer foliage moves in and out of focus, the tracks of the raindrops on glass creating a hall of mirrors effect. A routine pause at a crossroads is transformed.

I'm not around here much at the moment. The absence is necessary but I miss my online world - especially reading other blogs. I'll catch up when I can.

....

What would you like to do long term, somone asks. Pieces of the answer are easy. Grow the massage work. Grow food and flowers. Develop a thicker skin and a peaceful heart. For the rest, I sit with with the question and strive for zen-like calm and insight. The snag is that I need to earn money.

I update the CV. When the answers don't come, do the footwork. And footwork can be surprisingly therapeutic.

Train (Updated)

2008-06-28T08:15:00.012+01:00

Update: I also love synchronicity. Today's issue of the Guardian contains an absorbing article on Edward Thomas. Poetry. Therapy. Ecology. Makes me want to read more.

I love train travel.

Apparently a serious expansion of the rail network is planned for 2020 or thereabouts. Good. In addition to the high speed lines though, what about re-opening at least some of the branch lines that were closed (thank you Dr Beeching) in the 1960s? They will probably be needed sooner or later.

****

It is indeed late June, so an unashamedly famous ode to a now-defunct country station about an hour's drive from here, on one of those vanished local lines. The poet, Edward Thomas, was killed in battle in 1917 during the First World War. (He was born in the same year - 1878 - as my grandfather: the latter had a defect in one eye and so was excused the call-up).

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Some one cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and around him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The context of the war has turned the poem into an elegy for lost innocence and a world that never really existed. Yet its real theme is the wonder of the present moment. And the power of the unexpected.

A sudden halt. High summer. A hiss of steam, and the observation that (I think) makes the poem: the clearing of the throat. The song of the blackbird.

It takes shock or ecstasy or good company to jolt me into the present moment, application and some kind of faith to live in it on a daily basis, if only for seconds at a time. Even as a child - little worrier that I was, living in a stressful home - I found it difficult. No guarantees. No wonder so few manage it. No wonder I tried to escape.

One minute, one second at a time. Feel. Breathe. Sing.

Photograph uploaded at Poems and Prose by Kendrive.The original station sign, preserved in a nearby bus shelter.

Tuesday

2008-06-25T08:00:00.013+01:00

Aimless doesn't work. I like having a fairly firm structure to my free days, though I often tell myself the opposite. Tuesday began early with a trip to the bicycle repair place (I fell off the bike, very publicly, two weeks ago - no bones broken but the machine wasn't so lucky) and ended with an evening yoga class.

Somewhere in between, to the local arts centre for a lunchtime viewing of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical animated film about a young girl with a taste for the music of Iron Maiden, growing up in Teheran from the 1970s to the 1990s. Witty, harrowing, tragic and at times downright comical, with a political edge. I learned a surprising amount that I didn't know previously about the history of Iran and the rise of fundamentalism. One quibble: ten minutes could perhaps have been cut somewhere towards the end; the last half hour was a little too long for me.

French with English subtitles but there's a dubbed English language version out there as well. Definitely recommended.

Household gods

2008-06-20T07:49:00.004+01:00

The ritual:

5.30am. Our neighbours are still asleep. We climb the stairs together, but as we near the landing he scampers ahead. He has eaten. I have my mug of hot black coffee. The study faces east and on June mornings like this it is flooded with sunlight.Still in my dressing gown I switch on the laptop and scan emails, blogs. He stretches out in his usual position on the window ledge, next to the brass figure of the Lord Shiva as Nataraja, the dancer.

Four-armed Shiva dances the world into enlightenment. The cat, felis catus, relaxes in the sun. He is, lest I forget, a creature of the goddess Bast, patron of the sun, women and secrets. He watches me intently. Now and again I return the favour, entranced as always by the way he folds his front paws inwards. Neat and tidy.

A few hundred yards away an early train clatters past. After a while I close the computer and head for the shower.

The cat stays where he is.

****

Summer solstice. In the abundance of such clear, generous light, everything seems possible, all barriers surmountable. Of course life isn't like that. Darkness has its own time. Dreams are shattered fairly regularly. Physical and emotional blockages imprison as deep as any dungeon.

Persistent delusion then? I don't think so. For good or ill, this is what light does.

Five

2008-06-14T21:28:00.008+01:00

1. Seriously large leaves. Magnolia macrophyllia, or Big Leaf Magnolia,a native of the south-eastern United States and one of the hundreds of trees from around the world at the local arboretum. Sunshine. Walking in the woods. Feeling heard. Listening in return. Good advice. More pictures on Flickr.

2. Friday 13th lived up to its reputation. A catalyst of a day that ended in tears. My colleagues are as hard working and caring as any I have come across but good management is vital. An organisation simply can't function without it. That's all I'm saying.

3. I meant to blog about this extraordinary photograph and article when it first appeared last month. The subject is a Premiership footballer who had just scored a decisive penalty goal and who had lost his mother earlier that same week. The author is The Times's art critic. On the quiet I'm a follower of soccer, but even if you aren't, do read it. The commenters debate whether the piece is celebrity-fawning or superb artistic analysis. My inclination is towards the latter.

4. The shoulder pain has lessened. Oddly enough, apart from the deep tissue work, what seems to have turned it around was tackling a full body massage myself and not listening to the internal voices that told me I shouldn't because of the injury. I went ahead. The friend was effusive. I loved it and am almost pain-free. We're doing it again.

5. I need to register as self-employed.

River

2008-06-11T07:45:00.004+01:00

I'm lucky. I knew I wanted to live near the river and now it is just a five minute walk away, bordered by fields where cattle graze.

Sometimes we regard it with apprehension. If enough rain falls in Wales, then sure enough a day or two later we are flooded. The reason these fields have survived being snapped up for housing is that they do double duty as a flood plain. No insurer would look at anything built on them.

I remember the first time I saw it in spate. It is terrifying. Angry. What shook me was the volume of the noise made by the rushing water. Stained reddish-brown by the topsoil gathered from flooded fields, the river boils and it roars. Whole tree trunks and branches are caught up, swept through the town and onwards downstream as swans, ducks and humans retreat to higher ground to wait out the torrent. Mostly though the Wye wears a tranquil face, a fisherman's and a canoeist's delight. At one time it was used for navigation - the path in the photos below was once a towpath - but no longer. Dog walkers and hikers now keep the grass short.

****

The internal combusion engine holds sway. The powers that be have recently decided that a major bypass should be built to cross the river just beyond where the cows are grazing in the bottom picture, near a rookery and the nesting site of a pair of buzzards. It will take years; the plans will be protested for many reasons, not all of them scenic and aesthetic. I'll do my part with local environmental groups, but I suspect the outcome may be inevitable.

Now I walk these fields with a sense of foreboding and try to to imprint on my memory the solitude, the sound of running water, the exact detail of a leaf, a bird. All of them ephemeral.

Love of place. Not dissimilar to love of a person.

The usual advice: it really is worth clicking to enlarge the photographs.

Links:

River Wye, Wikipedia
Wye Valley, Wikipedia
Wye Valley, AONB
CPRE transport page

Timing

2008-06-07T17:27:00.013+01:00

The massage therapist, F, has discovered the cause of the shoulder problem. Tight pectorals. Those of you who read Dale's blog will know that he addressed this condition recently and I'm here to tell you that he was spot on. The pain is in the right upper quadrant of the back, spreading over the shoulder to the right arm. The range of movement of this arm was becoming increasingly limited and I was getting far too accustomed to permanent discomfort.

Lo and behold the pectoral muscles on my right side are contracted and as tight as piano wire. At the end of an excruciating but wonderful session I sit on the couch, legs dangling, wrapped in thick white towels. F kneels behind me and pushes his knee into my thoracic area at the same time pulling the shoulders. This is how you need to sit, he says. Keep those shoulders back. Do yoga. Do the Camel. The Locust. When you are standing, don't fold your arms in front of you. Give yourself regular massages where the pectoral muscle joins the sternum. And I always thought I had good posture.

Deep tissue massage with a male therapist seemed the path to take because I sensed the problem needed some heavy-duty physical work. F is good. He looks to be in his thirties, a bit shorter than me, chunky. In addition to skill and strength he possesses the gift of making his female clients feel safe. Open and friendly but everything strictly appropriate. There's more work to be done, and possibly some ultrasound, but I am encouraged.

Of course there are twinges of guilt and even shame to go along with the physical ache: this shouldn't be happening to me as an (occasional) massage practitioner. I shouldn't have been this neglectful of my own body. Oh well. But it has to be admitted, an unbeatable way to understand in depth the working of the individual muscles is to develop a problem or two yourself. A gold standard Anatomy & Physiology refresher course, you could say.

The title of Dale's post also strikes me as significant. Opening the heartspace.

****

The sun is high in the sky: the golden days of summer are here.

Herb Garden

2008-06-01T07:05:00.013+01:00

Lemon balm. A recent gift. I made my first tisane from the leaves the other day. A light, lemony flavour. It won't replace coffee but very pleasant.

Valerian - flower detail. About five feet high as of this morning and growing. For medicinal purposes you'd need to use the root.

Nettle. A so-called weed that grew under the fence from the neighbour's garden. Next year - nettle soup. (This link is particularly good. It seems I've just missed Be Nice to Nettles Week but I think I'm obeying the spirit of it).

Chive. The flower can be used in salads. For me, a bit too much like eating a work of art ....

I'm starting to love my garden, to be excited about it, much more than I ever thought would be the case. To be surprised that the majority of these these plants will grow and flourish in spite of my ignorance and lack of skill. The ones that don't I learn from.

Consider the lilies indeed.

Risk

2008-05-31T08:21:00.014+01:00

I've been mulling over Tarakuanyin's recent post
which eloquently puts into words much of my own thoughts and feelings about blogs and blogging.

My favourite bloggers have a common thread: a degree of self-revelation. They are personal bloggers. They communicate in prose and poetry and pictures. They write about places they have visited. They write about their passions, their loves, their children and their childhood, their interests, their joys, and a connection is forged. They sometimes post pictures of the intricate and beautiful things they have made. Perhaps they write about their politics. It doesn't matter to me whether they are "good" writers. What is a good writer anyway? From heart and mind to heart and mind and my online world becomes a larger yet more intimate place. They may write about more general topics as well, and I'm glad to read these posts, but I'm not sure I'd be visiting the blogs regularly without the personal.

Having said that, although I would class myself as a personal blogger I'm finding it difficult currently to blog about myself in any great depth. At one time I was far more open in cyberspace but now there are draft posts galore where I've opened my heart and where I hold back from pressing the Publish button. Some of it is a desire to remain anonymous. I can't resist posting about the area I live in - so much is new (to me) and fills me with joy and pleasure to the point that I want to share it in words and pictures - but I shy away from self-revealing in case an acquaintance hereabouts homes in on a give-away detail. I think about boundaries and this gives me more reason to pause.

So. I don't tell you about the therapy that is helping unclog the metaphorical passages nor the man I am attracted to (but I'm not sure how much he's attracted to me. Watch this space.) I don't write about loneliness or fear. I don't write about about my concern over what we are doing to the planet to the point where I blank out a lot of the news that I read. I don't tell you about the bad habits and compulsions. I don't tell you how badly I missed my father, even when he was alive and present. I pride myself on seeking harmony and beauty so I won't write about my dark side nor about my laziness. I don't tell you about my spiritual life and the unreasonable conviction that in spite of everything the future holds love, the daily new beginnings that I make, how my life is a series of moment by moment new beginings. I don't write about the mystery of the early mornings, and today's early morning in particular, and how privileged I can feel at times to be alive in the here and now.

Except I just have. This is the best I can do.

Lost

2008-05-27T07:53:00.022+01:00

Bank Holiday rain. In torrents.

Undaunted on Sunday S drives over in her trusty white van and we head off towards the border with the general idea of visiting the Knights Templar Church at Garway, a first for us both. We never made it. It would have been helpful if I'd thought to bring the Ordnance Survey map. Even more helpful if the local signposting were less eccentric. The skies are heavy, the hills shrouded in rain and mist and the windscreen wipers work overtime.

Once off the main road we navigate narrow lanes bordered by high hedges and crane our necks at T-junctions. Occasionally we pass an isolated farm. No churches. Now and again we get out of the van briefly to look around. Nothing but fields, dripping trees, pure air and ecstatic birdsong.

I think of the documentary of the life of Annie Liebovitz, the photographer, I'd caught a few days previously. She describes her childhood as an airforce brat, the driving from one air base to to a new one by car. How for her the landscape became an endless series of pictures, all framed by the car window. It's a bit like that.

Some of the things S and I talk about during our search:

Friendship; a mutual friend; living alone; gardening; maps; directions; vitamin supplements; pyramid selling; cults; loneliness; a weekend away we've planned in September; men; money; peak oil; electric bicycles; hybrid cars; my latent codependency in relationships; her irritability; my mother; therapy; Mars conjunct Mercury in Scorpio; the place I work; her boss; a former boss; the place we used to work; vegetarianism; where we might get a meal.

We end up in an old pub for Sunday lunch with no vegetarian options and hunting prints and stuffed animals on the walls. Still raining but neither of us are bothered, we're just enjoying each other's company. She's buying, I leave the tip.

I value my friends, now more than ever.

A sign on the wall of a house, passed en route.

Thoughts

2008-05-23T22:30:00.004+01:00

Click to enlarge.

A photograph taken this week on the regular morning walk/commute. It's amazing I make it to work at all these days.

****

Two male blackbirds perched a hundred yards apart, sing out piercingly beautiful warnings to each other. Stay away. Stay away.

****

The electrician in the office takes his time, working steadily and methodically. He pauses for a moment to chat and asks about plans for the weekend. I stop what I am doing to reply. There's no hurry.

****

V, wearing a green jacket to go with her Irish lilt, brings me an armful of flowers from the farmers' market as a birthday surprise. I'd mentioned to her in passing a few days ago how much I liked that particular flower stall. Unkempt and wonderfully imperfect blossoms, redolent of another era, so different from the tidy bouquets in the florists. The tansies and cornflowers - and many others whose names I don't know - in my bunch are plucked in local gardens and tied together with thick, rough string. As best I can, I thank her.

****

J's eyes are exactly the same shade of dark brown as mine. It's unsettlingly like looking at a male twin. Previously I've been attracted by opposites: men with blue, or grey, or green eyes, the colours of the sea.

I doubt anything will come of it.

Energy

2008-05-21T18:41:00.022+01:00

Half way through the yoga class Susanna talks us through the Padma Mudra. We kneel, palms facing the floor, wrist against wrist, fingers hanging downwards.

“The roots of the lotus flower”, says Susanna, “reaching deep into the mud.” We press our wrists together.

We reverse the position, drawing the hands through. The fingers point heavenwards, thumbs and little fingers of both hands touching, the remaining fingers forming a flower shape. Susanna guides us into a short meditation on the lotus in full bloom.

The silence and the simple grace of the mudra are powerful.

The class continues. Cobra. Camel. Resting Locust. Spinal twist. Corpse posture. The breathwork the string holding the beads together. Time to go home. My right shoulder still twinges but for the first time in many days I am calm and my body is temporarily at peace. This calls for celebration: long-stemmed yellow lilies and a taxi instead of the bus.

The young woman driver is dark and wiry and has an accent.

“Are you Polish?”, I ask.

“No” she replies, “Brazilian.”

She tells her story. A failed marriage to a Brit whom she had met in Brazil. Three years ago they parted but by now she has a young son.She decides to stay in England: this is the only country that her boy has ever known. She works in a supermarket then decides she needs more flexibility, so goes into the taxi business.The last time she saw her family in South America was seven years ago.

At a red traffic light she spots an English friend. Leaning forward over the steering wheel she waves animatedly.

"When I was a child in Brazil I never imagined my life would be like this", she says without self pity. A simple statement of fact. She didn't sound unhappy. Not at all.

Photography, photography

2008-05-17T18:14:00.008+01:00

A thought-provoking visit to the local photography festival, examining rural change and disruption in a globalising world and featuring the work of both South African and local photographers. I was particularly moved by the photographs of young people on the fringes of South African society, Between Dogs and Wolves by Jodi Bieber, and - closer to home - by the exhibition by college photography students .

It's inspired me to post some of my own recent shots taken around town. Nothing to do with globalisation. Just for the pleasure of it

Behind the counter ...

Overhead ...

Message ..

Crossing the river.

Cathedral: Stonemasons' yard

2008-05-14T05:56:00.000+01:00

Tools for restoration: wooden workbench, the block of red sandstone, a hammer and chisel. A large mug for tea.

Later I notice the man, half hidden in the shadows.

Change of Pace

2008-05-11T18:14:00.015+01:00

My right shoulder and upper back are in a bad way. Muscle spasm and it's getting worse. Pain has started to spread down the right arm as well.

"Not more than 20 minutes at the computer without a correspondingly long break", said the nice young man who is my new remedial massage therapist yesterday.

Which means that habits will have to change. It's not work that's doing the damage. I have frequent breaks from the computer and am more than happy to take them. It's blogging, blog reading and generally surfing the net at home.

When I'm writing a blogpost I go at the first and second draft for an hour, maybe more, without moving. Then maybe a few hours, maybe a day later I might revise for another hour. If I posted the first draft you wouldn't understand a word. Neither would I. I'm not a naturally fast or ordered thinker or writer and the drafting and editing become part of the thinking process. I lose myself, my sense of awareness. in the whole deeply enjoyable, compulsive exercise. Only on closing the lid of the laptop after a marathon session do I realise that my body has been suffering. And I haven't even mentioned the lengthy delights of a wet afternoon's blog reading.

Not good. The rules of health aren't any different for me than for the rest of humanity.

At least for a while until things improve physically I'm going to experiment with shorter posts, so that I'm not fretting to get back to the computer and finish the project. I've started to investigate blogs that make a feature of brevity and it will be an interesting change of pace. More stand-alone photographs. Maybe some link posts. Blog reading for limited times only.

I'm alarmed that I've allowed things to get to this stage, in spite of regular yoga classes. I know this stuff, for heaven's sake. There's nothing new in what the massage therapist said. And yet I enjoy my online life and don't want to give it up. I need a special back chair. I need to set gentle limits. I need to get well and to treat my body kindly.

Misrule (Updated)

2008-05-08T22:50:00.010+01:00

"It's a three day visit by the Lord of Misrule", someone who should know tells me. "All bets are off.".

He's talking about the May Fair, which has just ended. Apparently a fair has been held here in one form or another since 1100-and-something, and it almost certainly originated as a pagan celebration that the church was canny enough to take under its wing.

These days though it's nothing more than a gigantic funfair. Now I'm used to such things in allocated, contained areas - parks, fields, open spaces, whatever - generally out of town and well away from the real world of offices and public buildings. But the fair rolls into the centre of our town and just takes it over.

The main streets are closed to traffic: big wheels and dodgems, roundabouts and burger bars, candy floss and helter-skelters - often strung out the length of a road in a long narrow line - replace the usual cars. Locals grumble about the consequent traffic jams and dearth of parking spaces and even on the outskirts you hear the distant thump-thump of the music. Squeezing past the hordes of parents and excited children, the groups of teenagers, you go about your business on the way to work or shop, step over unnervingly large electricity cables and enjoy the crackling energy and excitement of it all. But there's also a jittery nervousness in the air and the noise can be deafening.

The rides start around lunchtime so the early morning is relatively peaceful. The sacred provides a backdrop to the secular.

By mid afternoon the crowds arrive and the action will continue well into the night, when things really warm up. People travel here for miles, from way across country.

"Look at the faces", says my local friend.

Rides soar above the throng of pedestrians, dwarfing the cathedral skyline ...

... just yards away from banks, solicitors offices and GPs' surgeries. Heaven knows how all this is squared with current Health & Safety legislation.

In my own life during these three days there were two unexpected events - one tantalisingly agreeable, the second less so. Upheaval and catharsis.

Maybe it's easier if you work with Misrule, or Chaos, when he comes to visit. He's not necessarily an enemy.

****

Although I didn't like it for writing purposes, I've a smidgin of nostalgia for the template of my previous blog which allowed larger photographs. It's really, really worth clicking the photos to enlarge.

****

Update: More photos of the fair on Flickr.

R & R

2008-05-05T10:48:00.019+01:00

Bank holiday weekend. I've changed plans and stayed close to home, mainly out of fatigue. Intermittently I've gardened, cleaned house and pottered. The last weeks at work have been difficult. Much distress and upheaval, not involving me directly but the cumulative effect has been draining. Until recently I've enjoyed this job: the organisation's work ethos is an excellent one and the people are more than compatible. In fact they've been a gift, which makes it worse. One day the acceptance will come that this is how life is sometimes.

Early morning. In my dressing gown I take a cup of tea outside and sit on the patio. It rained during the night and the paving stones are still damp, the sky heavy and overcast. The temperature is comfortably warm: for the last few days - the first time this year - there's been no temptation to switch on the heating. Daisies and dandelions have sprung up overnight on the lawn, scatterings of white and gold, and the scent of the blossom from the next door neighbour's fruit trees permeates the morning to the point of sensory overload. I sit back and try to disentangle the threads of birdsong: blackbird and thrush are simple, the rest need work.

That evening I go to take out the scraps for the compost. The blue crocs - kept outside for garden wear - have been comandeered.

People (Updated)

2008-05-01T18:05:00.034+01:00

Update: Gut feelings are generally a good guide. I've taken down the additional photos that were posted here and to which the first two comments refer . After overnight reflection I wasn't comfortable having them them up on the blog - just too intrusive. Maybe I'll leave people shots to others. A shame because I find humans fascinating, but I don't have the stomach for it.

I'm still very fond of the juggler though.

A solitary juggler puts in a bit of practice on a rainy day in the park. I request a photograph.

Cycles

2008-04-26T07:35:00.012+01:00

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

2008-04-24T18:50:00.016+01:00

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

2008-04-18T08:09:00.004+01:00

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

2008-04-15T16:01:00.009+01:00

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)

2008-04-12T07:39:00.017+01:00

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

2008-04-08T09:17:00.003+01:00

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

2008-04-06T18:12:00.008+01:00

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.