Wait

A still, shimmering afternoon. Sunlight, so bright, so strong, dazzles and drives one into the shade.  Early mornings and evenings are best in this heat, though - intermittently - there is the softest breath of a breeze. The houses around the green and their occupants seem to doze peacefully.

The naturopath says that my system is getting more robust with each visit but energy levels are down from when I last saw him two months ago. Unsurprised by the latter.  Since May there have been mice in the bedroom wall, a posterior vitreous detachment and a nasty fall-out with a close friend (which please God will be resolved - though I don't know how).   Stress and fatigue buttons have been well and truly pushed.  But I persevere with the anti-yeast diet and he will be starting me on a new treatment at the next appoinment - or at least soon.  Not ready yet. We wait. Not easy for someone who is naturally on the hyper side. 

So. High summer. A time apparently to hold still.  To let things be as they are. 

And today this story makes me happy for all sorts of reasons. My father had mild dementia in the last year or so of his life.

More Snow

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.

Impressions

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

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

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

Real Life

I’d been looking forward to Saturday.

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

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

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

So pleased we did this.

Halloween

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

****

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

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

****

Halloween

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

Viaduct

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

****

Back to last weekend.

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

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











It dwarfs the houses beneath ...



and the castle on the horizon.

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

Dog Days

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?

Lost

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.

Intimacy

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

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

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

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

Blossom and Bicycles

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

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

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

***

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

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

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