"Mi dispiace ma non e possibile così"

So Mr. Signs and I are off to Italy day after tomorrow and this, basically, is the Italian that I have managed to learn so far.  For those not proficient in the lingo it means, I am sorry but it is not possible this way, and it will have to serve me in all kinds of situations because we are going to southern Italy (Puglia) where English is not generally much spoken.  The daughter, who in a few weeks learned Spanish well enough to get by on a recent trip to Cuba, was a brilliant role model but somehow we haven't been able to follow through.  It will be ok as long as I am not in urgent need of a lavatory, although come to think of it, with a few appropriate gestures it might do nicely.

A couple of people have asked me if I have begun to pack and Prepare.  This would be a very good idea, but I never do this until close to midnight of the day before, thus ensuring that I don't get much sleep before the inevitable early start next day.  What I am doing is reading Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi which is set about a hundred kilometres from where we will be staying, and we plan to visit the caves at Mantera which is not far from there.



I have only been to Italy once, to a beach resort near Rimini with my sister and grandmother when I was eleven.  This will be nothing like that.  We are staying on an organic farm where the owner invites people to hear the sound of people's steps along the lanes, see the hands that placed the stones, feel the toil and sweat of those who shaped the land so as to be able to draw from it what they needed to live, but without depriving it of its life force.  A life force which still exists in some places and those who know how can hear its very breath.

I wonder if I will be one of those who know how to become all ear so that I can hear the very breath.  Spirit of place is a powerful thing, as I have sometimes experienced, and not for the faint-hearted.  Of course, one can do this just as well at home as abroad - feel the breath and being of a place.  But sometimes the shock of a new encounter can awaken the sleeping faculty.  The forest was never so present to me as when I first came to live here, and then it was on a particular day in a particular spot, unannounced and unexpected.  Something was revealed and laid bare, and the vision (if that is the word) I had is something I have never been able to properly put into words, and it only came once.  But once is enough because it isn't something you lose.

In my late twenties, sitting alone somewhere in the Austrian Alps because even then I was not strong enough to keep walking up with the others, spirit of place came with such force that I was not fully able to meet it and literally hid my face.  At the time, I thought it (the presence) might have been God.  But I think it was the land and the mountains that asked, as all places do, for me to say who I was.  And then the only position I could take was: mi dispiace ma non e possibile così - though obviously I did not say this in Italian or, in fact, any spoken language.

I think I need to prepare another phrase - just in case.

Ciao amici.

Celebrity Bear

Three songs from a musical the daughter wrote.  













If you would like to vote and help her get through to the finals of a competition for new musical theatre composers you can vote here.  Her name is Rose Lewenstein.  You'll find her in the third column.

You will also see a link there to the other submissions.  I'm obviously a bit partial.

The Rampant Heart (or Cooking the Books)

I’m still tripping over old notebooks even though I thought I put most of them in the attic.  It would be ok if I just let them be instead of dipping in and reading them – if I kept the lid shut.  Instead, I open the box (the hardback covers) and out they fly, all these unfinished stories, bits of almost-poems, chronicles of life with my constant companion, M.E.  I feel as though I am rifling through someone else’s writing, taking in the good, the bad and the ugly with a kind of dispassion.  Reading old notebooks is like spying on oneself, not altogether comfortable.  That person then is not this person now, but one is implicated.  She was not necessarily expecting all the words to be read by another, which I now am.  Grudgingly, because I want to be better than her, I admire her – particularly how she negotiates the business putting down words with being, at times, so ill that she can hardly hold the pen.  She keeps trying to push on, though she shouldn’t.  Some of what she writes is so overblown I want to rip out the pages.  But there are lines that take my breath away and I am half tempted to nick them.  I have in fact done this and cobbled together a poem from notes taken when she was in the far north of Scotland.  It was the image of a brown bird on a rock, perched on a leg as thin as wheat grass.  This is the image that stands at the heart of something-or-other, and my workshop group also liked this particular line.  But I have now looked up wheat grass and found that it is not what I had in mind (the dry kind with some kind of kernel and whispy stuff on top) – it is green and people use it for juicing and promoting health.  Bugger. 

 

But anyway.  I have other poems standing like greyhounds in the slips ready to go, but I’m not letting them.  I have submission block.  It takes a kind of courage to send work off, particularly if one has to put it in an envelope with a covering letter.  It takes a stronger heart than the one I feel precariously beating in my breast.  Ok, that last sentence is awful but now you can tune in to what I experience when looking over old notebooks.  Precariously beating is not good, by anyone’s standards, particularly if it is a heart.  Long ago my sister and I decided to compose the worst poem ever and present it at a family gathering.  We called it The Rampant Heart (even without the qualifier, this is a dodgy word to have in the title).  The last line went: it is too late, oh funfair of my fate!

 

Though actually, this does kind of speak to me now.  I’m going to send those damn poems off.  In the funfair of my fate, it’s not yet closing time.

 

 

 

Sun Day

This morning I was looking out on a Brighton sun-day, after a properly muscular mug of coffee and a roll-up, thinking that this may after all be the best of all possible worlds and if freedom time cometh not soon then perhaps it is already here.  Catch me later in the day and there might be a different picture.  The weather could have changed, the coffee will have worn off and I would be thinking sensible, depressing thoughts about the roll-ups.  Seize the day and fritter it, is what I was thinking.  The day never allows much of itself to be seized in any case so  I need as much fun as can reasonably be packed into a couple of hours.  This means breakfast in one of those cafes where the croissants and bacon are crisp and they are generous with the coffee refills followed by a walk along the sea-front with an ice cream cone.  Fun usually always involves food of some kind.  Well I can report that a fabulous breakfast has been had, plus freshly squeezed OJ, and look - the view from the window post noon is still sunlit and I am, dear reader, on account of breakfast top-up, still caffeinated - just.  A walk along the sea-front was a step too far because, although these windows allow you to believe you're in the south of somewhere other than England in April, it is still cold out there, and windy.  I am still having a good time.  The great upside of chronic illness is that those windows of time when one doesn't feel wrecked are almost always good.  The world is charged with the grandeur of God (Gerard Manley Hopkins).  The world is charged with life - and also sometimes caffeine (Signs).

Good times used also to mean booze and hanging out with friends - my thirtieth birthday party was a champagne breakfast in my Bethnal Green flat.  BG is trendy these days, but it wasn't then, you could buy a flat cheaply and - oh halcyon days - pay the mortgage on it even if you didn't have a proper job.  This year I will be twice that age.  I no longer do booze apart from the occasional small glass of wine.  I do friends, but given certain restrictions one doesn't hang out in quite the same way, and a window of blue sky and sun, watching Brightonians cross the road to buy newspapers or milk at the corner shop, can feel as though one has been at a very pleasant social gathering.  One doesn't have the voices, true, but the voices in one's head are (mostly) very good company and often illuminating.  Joan of Arc might have said the same, before they burned her.  Time for a herb tea, I think.

still winter

I can't say anything more about Thatcher's demise than hasn't already been said better, and eloquently by La Baroque.  But I have been surprised by how miserable I felt after hearing about her death - because of a sudden, renewed apprehension of how much we lost as a consequence of her reign.  Her corpse is being treated like royalty here, so the word 'reign' seems apt.  I am also miserable about the singing and dancing and the raucous street parties.  The household is divided because Mr. Signs thinks it is an important symbolic act to stamp on her memory and sing.  I see what he means, but we are still living the aftermath, nothing that was broken can be put together again and there is no evidence that the meek will inherit the earth. 

And also: I feel there is something about death itself, an actual physical death, that asks for some kind of respect - for the death itself.  If nothing else is sacred, then surely this, where the Hail Mary (I am not RC) asks for special intervention for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death...  

And also, it is still winter.  Still. 

I Wish I Was Dreaming Of You

I am unashamedly promoting this vid that my son wrote for the Zig Zag Birds.  He is singing it too.  I love it.  Ok, it's my son, I would say that.  But if he had nothing to do with it I would still love this and other Zig Zag songs (which you can find on the side, on Youtube).  They are retro with a twist and remind me of the kind of songs from the 70s that I would want to play over and over.  Anyone remember Andrew Gold's Lonely Boy  and Never Let Her Slip Away?  He comes to mind, but there are others too so feel free to remind me of them.

back to basics

It seems a while since I have talked about shopping.  I am pleased to report that I do even less of it now.  I did buy a jumper in December, but that was because I realised I only had one jumper that I properly liked and I had the clairvoyant sense that we were in for another unforgivingly cold winter.  I think I have the clothes thing sorted: two jumpers and two trousers plus silk thermal undergarments in the winter and the same two jumpers and trousers in spring and autumn, minus the silk thermals, which can then serve as indoor 'leisurewear'; thinner trousers and a selection of tops for summer.  Pushing the boat out a bit with summer as it is unpredictable.  Footwear, as you know, is basically either Uggs or Birkenstocks.

Occasionally one needs Accessories.  So it was that I recently found myself in a shop with a voucher left over from Christmas.  it was a voucher I had planned to give Stepson.  I lost it, bought him another and then found it again in the new year.  I decided to spend it on a handbag because mine is on the small side - it can accommodate a Kindle but not a a book.  So I bought a bag, got home and found it was useless and suddenly very ugly when one put anything into it.  This is the kind of thing that happens when I shop, it took three attempts to get the right Uggs.  It's ok because I returned the bag and now have the voucher again.  No harm done, apart from the expenditure of energy.  But on my second trip I decided to see if I could get a couple of bars of soap.  Not easy, as I have banged on about here.  I was in East Street in Brighton and had the choice of any number of shops, including Crabtree and Evelyn, Lush, L'Occitane and Space NK.  Call me mean, but though I am delighted to get posh soaps as gifts I am not prepared to go into double figures for a couple of bars of what is supposed to be an everyday commodity.  In supermarkets, Dove is still cornering the market, as far as I can see.  But Imperial Leather seems to be making a come-back.  After my handbag-return trip I went into the ragged corner shop opposite Brighton flat and bought a couple of bars for a pound each.  Success.  Apart from other considerations, it smells of decades past, which were not necessarily better than the decade I now find myself in but gives a sense of continuity rather than a sense (increasingly) of feeling oneself to be an extra-terrestrial with no direction home.  Of course in the old days Imperial Leather was marketed as something that could give us all the experience of a little daily luxury (see below).  Not that we were fooled.  I mean, who was washing with lard and ashes, even in the seventies?  And it would have been perfect if she had said Bognor instead of Tahiti.

I am going to the launch of a friend's poetry book tonight.  There are many I miss, but this one is possible because it's in Brighton and I have allowed a night either side in the flat.  A group of us have met above a pub in Lewes each month for several years, to workshop poems, and she is taking us for a meal beforehand to celebrate.  And tomorrow is the neighbour's annual Good Friday bun party.

If I don't see you before Easter, have a good one.