Daybreak

Very early morning, pre-dawn, in my dressing gown I carry the filled charity shop bag to the front lawn for collection.   A warm wind from the west, soft as a caress, with the faintest scent of flowers and pine.  High above the waning crescent moon says her farewells to the current lunar cycle.

Most of the bag is filled with old books.  I have a schizophrenic relationship with books these days because as fast as the old ones are given away new ones are being ordered; second hand all, so bankruptcy isn't too much of a threat.  In my defence, reading still has to be the primary occupation.   I've just ordered a copy of Katherine Mansfield's Letters and Journal - my previous one fell apart a few years ago I re-read it so much.  Also I'm currently addicted to Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder detective novels.  Very dark but riveting, particularly if you know New York.  At some point I'm going to have to get a Kindle.

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A couple more butterfly photos. The underside of the Small Tortoiseshell's wings is less showy than the upper surface but equally beautiful.

 

Movement

Sunshine and brief showers today with a warm southerly wind  that carries along with it these cloud formations that change with the passing second. This is the sort of summer weather I like. 
 
The letting go continues and a lady called Lin is coming to pick up the cat basket tomorrow afternoon. I've tried to live a well-adjusted life.  I mean love and stability and companionship and job and belonging.   Money only as a means to an end. Nothing has worked - and the higgledy piggledy pile of books and possessions that I'm sorting through demonstrate this.   Massage books (can't do massage any more, nor do I want to). How To books. Crafts that were abandoned.  Co-dependency books. Journals.  Detritus all. Being ill has given me the space to understand to that indeed nothing could have worked. Not with me being the way I was and everything and everyone else around me being the way they were.  The fit was never there.

Stripped to the core. Feeling like a newborn at 64 years old. It's a relief to be this age and not to worry about so much that used to distress me. Each thing I surrender - and I do so willingly and with relief - stokes the fire that moves me forward. 

Decluttering

A good day.  More energy.  Major decluttering in the kitchen, the logic being while I'm sorting out my digestive system in the spirit of fengshui why not spring clean the surroundings as well and maybe help things along. Deeply embarrassing to discover so many food items in the cupboards that were way past their sell-by dates. I mean two or three years. Mainly stuff in tins and packets.  So they go on the compost or into the bin. I hate throwing food out but it's got to be done and the streamlined shelves and cupboards are now a joy to behold.

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I've recently discovered Ann Cleeves and her northern detective stories and I'm hooked.  Brain fog means that of late crime fiction is pretty much all I can focus on, and she is very good. 

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The silver birch sways languidly in the fresh north-west breeze and the evening sun warms the brickwork. The horse chestnut is clothed in a pale green mist, not yet leaves but no longer buds. Dandelions, daisies and forget-me-nots have sprung up on the lawn. I'm happy to see them all, even the dandelions.  No, especially the dandelions - there's something so cussed and undaunted and cheerful about them, as if they know they're not always welcome and they don't care.

Like I said, a good day. It finally feels like spring.

Emotion

I don't cry much nowadays.

Increasingly my way of navigating life's rockier passages has been governed by pragmatism.  What must I do to sort this out?  Will crying help?  No.  Right then, let's move on.  Let's plough through.  Action.  Distraction.  If I start crying or allowing myself to wallow I won't be able to cope with what must be done.

 Odd then that twice before 10.00am today I became watery-eyed over something on the radio:
 the wonderful Kathleen Ferrier, who was to die far too young herself, singing  Che faro senza Eurydice (What is Life) from Orfeo et Eurydice, and the final episode of the Radio 4 Book of the Week adapation of The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison, the story of Serge and Lina Prokofiev.  Both in their way heartrending but very beautiful.  Love and separation and loss. I remembered: those are the things I used to cry over.  For hours, days at a time.

Good to be reminded that my emotions haven't shrivelled and died.  And good that I am able to respond once again to beauty. 

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I must avoid this becoming a weather blog, but the forecasts say that from next week it will be getting warmer.   A pale, timorous sun appears for a few minutes then, seemingly overcome with shyness, disppears behind the clouds.  Perhaps she will become more courageous with time. 

Halloween

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

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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.

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Halloween

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

Once Upon a Time

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.

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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.

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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.