It's all about the ♥

I have got a Waitrose special Valentine's meal deal for two for twenty quid.  If you want to know what's on the menu (and why wouldn't you?) it is: a starter of smoked salmon and lemon pate, main course of Gressingham duck (red cabbage + mangetouts), dessert of chocolate and passionfruit assiette.  Plus a box of Belgian chocolates and a bottle of Rioja.  Candles, incense and music I got, plus partner. We have been together for over thirty years, and twenty eight years ago, having stated very clearly at the outset that he would never want to marry, he proposed to me.  Never mind that it took more than eight years for us to get round to doing it, and by then our two children were born and old enough to come to the wedding dressed in elephant suits.  The gesture counts. 

Romantic love - the heightened kind that has the power to transform your world.  It isn't just about me and him.  It isn't just about you and whoever you are with, wish you were with, desire, yearn for, think about in secret, blast with curses and tears, celebrate in sweetness and flowers.  In every good friend I have had since childhood there has been an element of romantic love.  The freckled red-head who built dens in the bracken made something happen to my heart (I could feel it filling up) when she called me her best friend, and again when she later chose someone else instead of me.  The friend who moved schools to be with me, and whose trust I betrayed.  The ones who matter, and not just the friends and lovers.  The niece who stares at you as though seeing you for the first time and says she loves your face. The small sister with a fever who waits up late for you to come home from boarding school. The children.  On bonfire night, a few days after my daughter's birth, I felt every firework in the sky (seen from a hospital window) was incandescent with the fact of her existence.  When my newborn son first looked at me I understood afresh what it meant to know someone - the shock of recognition.  And what about the brief encounters, the connections that are good for nothing but the particular moment, which might be in a train, a conference hall or a post office queue?  Times when you catch a person whole, or they catch you, though nothing comes of it that you can name, but something is changed - the heart is stretched, made bigger.  Perhaps not romantic love, but almost. 
And the animals, can I mention them?  Not just my own cat who loves, in her fashion, and though it is to some extent about the food, it is more than this (I meet her at the point of need and she restores my soul); once you really love an animal, you learn how to love the others more, even if you are a lapsed vegetarian.  It's a hard world, and ultimately (as someone said to me the other day), we all forgive each other.  I don't yet believe this, but I want to.  Perhaps this is a step away from romantic love.  And so is Raymond Carver's 'Late Fragment', but I will put it here all the same.

                           And did you get what
                           you wanted from this life, even so?
                           I did.
                           And what did you want?
                           To call myself beloved, to feel myself
                           beloved on the earth.

Spirit of NaNo

I have just eaten a packet of Monster Munch and am suddenly thinking about the woman with selective eating disorder who eats nothing else, and the six-year-old girl whose mother left her alone in the house for five days with nothing to eat but packets of those.  Both survived and survive, though obviously it isn't food.  The young girl's case was clearly one of child-neglect, but the other is a grown woman who seems to suffer no major ill-effects.  We do not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of god, so it is written.  Perhaps the woman's faith is very strong or she has another source from which to draw the vital forces one needs in order to live.  I have a healthy diet with organic vegetables, fruit, meat, whole grains and pulses.  But the woman who only eats Monster Munch is stronger and possibly healthier than I am.  All she suffers is brittle nails.  Some things are just mysterious and one accepts this.

Last night was the first Halloween for many years that we did not put a carved pumpkin on the hedge to show itinerant vampires, ghouls and witches that they could come and knock for sweets.  I know this is one of the winter shine-your-light-in-the-darkness festivals, but actually, I should have medals for doing this for, well - much of my life, really.  Last night the wick had burned down to almost nothing.  It revived a bit after the good words of a friend (we do not live by bread alone), chocolate and prescription drugs - good things all three, and I do not despise them.

And now it is that time of year again and I am back in the frolick and fun that is NaNoWriMo.  In my fashion.  One year I nearly killed myself with word-count frenzy, another I came down with swine flu and really, a diet of a thousand words a day is respectable enough in my yet-to-be-written book.  So I will be embracing the spirit of NaNo without the caffeine overload or sleepless nights which, actually, I already have.

It is also the Daughter's birthday.  This, and the fact of her existence, makes me very happy.

Bump in the Night

It's Hallowe'en and I'm unashamedly promoting this lovely vid made by the Zig Zag Birds. It's a band that Son is in, see if you can guess which one is him (clue: torn white T , hollow eyes and you don't see him very much but he looks distinctively intense). If you like it, pass it on.

There is a small but hopeful-looking pumpkin sitting outside in the rain waiting to be given a face. But Mr. Signs is clobbered with a cold, and pumpkin-carving isn't one of the things on my C.V. On the other hand, I have stocked up with a few goodies to give the Hallowe'en knockers - but the kids are polite here and if they don't see a lit pumpkin they won't knock. And if they don't knock, I will have to eat all the goodies myself, which I would love to do but it is bad for me.

Tomorrow is the beginning of NaNoWriMo, which I am signing up for, if only to be along in spirit. There is no way I can bash out fifty thousand words in a month, if I manage between five and ten thousand I will be pleased. But I like the idea of a novel-writing month. It's good to tell stories. It's good to feel one is in the flow and swim of things, and I intend to be. In my fashion.

Postscript: While I was putting up this post Mr. Signs did something to the pumpkin. Punk art, people - and expressive!

Voodoo Lily

They are back again. Sweet neighbour came and alerted us yesterday. Well, she has an interest because one of them grows near her garden. They smell of rotting corpses, you see - not that I have ever smelled one of those, but it is apparently an established fact that this is what they smell of and I can vouch that it is probably one of the worst smells ever. Flies love them, as you would expect. They are also known as Dracuncula Vulgaris - good name, lots of appropriate resonances.

It does make you wonder, I think, what kind of a god could have conceived of such a thing. It is both ugly and ridiculous with its ostentatious black penis surrounded by faux Hawaii shirt. It is something that was cobbled together as a bad joke, like sending a really vulgar stripogrammer, unnanounced, to someone's house :

Let us fashion something flamboyant and horrible that stinketh to high heaven, saith god. And this year, let us put it right back in Signs's garden in the place from which it was painstakingly dug up last year, by the roots.

Why have you done this, god?

Because I can, s/he saith, can't you take a joke?

So anyway, someone (not me) is going to have to dig them up again before they manifest their peculiar properties. Sorry god.

It being Shrove Tuesday, one of Mr. Signs's favourite religious festivals, I have prepared batter, fabulously caramelised stewed plums, got the creme fraiche, maple syrup, lemons and caster sugar. It is all we are having for supper tonight before Mr. S watches the Arsenal match tonight and I go back to choir. I have added an extra egg - turns out better that way.

Midwinter - the Festival

I don't know how one can do the Christmas thing in the southern hemisphere. I hear about opening presents and pulling crackers on the beach, Santas and reindeer flashing through hot and steamy nights. Or it is somewhat adapted to suit a midsummer festival, which Christmas is simply not. It is a midwinter festival and, as such, necessary to us. I realise this is making a pronouncement on behalf of absolutely everyone but I'm not talking about the Christian festival, which Christmas really isn't, not for most peeps at any rate. Or the Christian element does its thing somewhere on the margins, or vibrating inconspicuously as metaphor: extraordinary light and possibility in the darkest and most inauspicious of times and circumstances. We need the darkness, you could say, for this to be doing its work, for us to carry it into the realm of the human condition. You could say that all the tat surrounding the season is part of the darkness, but we're only human and what, in any case are we meant to do, those of us who are not ascetic contemplatives living in some remote or hidden place? We have to live as we find, and I find a certain gleeful hallelujah moment in the truly dreadful blue flashing lights that beam annually into the bedroom from the house opposite, come advent. God with us, prepare and make straight his paths. Actually, this last really belongs to the feast of St. John (remember that one?) which is a midsummer thing. Some might argue (and actually some do) that southern hemisphere should have their Christmas in June and do something else in December, but it would make life complicated and the card and flashing light industries probably wouldn't stand for it.

Meanwhile, on we go with our difficult lives and circumstances, and this time I feel confident about pronouncing for everyone because I can't think of anyone who is treading an easy path or going fishing "with the sail set fair and an understanding crew," and if they say they are then they are either on drugs or have gone completely wrong and we should be praying for their souls. Ever since we were thrown out of the garden (and thank you, Blake, for taking issue with this), we earn our bread with difficulty, are hurt, violated, misunderstood and at war with each other. (Digression: I am sitting at the window of Brighton flat looking at a parking official who is nosing around trying to find someone to nick, very easy here if you don't have resident's permits, and we are still waiting for ours. I have a temporary voucher perched on the inside of my windscreen but am running out of those. So anyway, he has nicked some other poor sod and is writing out a ticket.) Yes, at war with each other, e'en within our own families, communities and friendship groups - e'en in our relationships with goddam Shrinks! The betrayal of trust and innocence (I am not talking about the parking official, he just doing his job) goes on everywhere and is hardest to bear when closest to home, to the heart. It is enough to extinguish even the most persistent flame, if one did not take care to strike the match and keep it lit, or to notice that - actually - it does not really go out and is there, even by virtue of our need and wish for it. I need this midwinter festival.

On a more mundane note: I am nowhere near making a dent in my Christmas "preparations." I have ordered a goose. I am leafing through vegetarian alternatives for me and the daughter's boyf who is veggie but prefers not to have nut roast. I will probably have a bit of the goose anyway. In terms of available energy, there are very few hours in the day available to me and weather news has it that the intense cold cometh back again. Mr. Signs is in Romania and returns late tomorrow night. Son is planning to look in on Friday and play cello in his old childhood orchestra for their annual carol concert. Daughter is thinking of writing a blog next year, and her friend is doing (for the love of it) a Christmas blog. It's all good.

Mach's Gut

The final wedding party was in a place that was once a farm collective in the old GDR and is now occupied by artists, writers, musicians and biodynamic gardeners. We had a couple of nights in the East Side Hotel, hard by the old wall that separated east Berlin from west, you could see it from a porthole beneath the window in our room.

There was a pre-nuptial party, a coach ride to the registry office in Köpenick followed by a two-hour river journey with champagne and canapes. It was the wedding of my ex-stepbrother, there were people I had not met for many years. The elephant in the proceedings was ex-stepfather who has for many years, King Lear-like, cut himself off from everyone he ever knew. His absence was a palpable presence. He had many children, many liaisons, some also connected to my mother's early life in the Free German Youth. It is complicated, but when you are in the middle of proceedings it somehow isn't. My e-s-b wanted a celebration that brought the disparate pieces of his life together. We were, for the duration, a patchwork community, brought together by this event to be (for a space) all of a piece. This is what celebrations can be very good for.

I also had an appointment with anthroposophical doctor who knows about PBC. He has basically endorsed what the specialist over here said, so off I go on the new regime with medications - sans alcohol or anything with paracetamol, so obvious that it's barely worth mentioning; except that doctors over here tended to equivocate and shrug when I asked about these. Will need to find other, possibly more fun things to give me a break from muscle pains.

The appointment was in Kladow, where I lived for nearly three years as a child. I experienced a kind of symmetry to this. The language and sense of place live strongly in me, though the actual and imaginary sometimes merge, and who is to say that the imaginary is less true. I always pictured a pine forest at the back of my house where the small window of my bedroom was and where, for a time, I used to fear that witches might fly through. In reality there are just a few trees, similar to the kind found here on English Edge. In fact the whole area is not dissimilar and it is as though in coming here I found an English version of the German village, though I was not consciously looking for that. I learned to read in both languages, I read early and intensely so the stories became a part of the environment. The years were not happy or easy ones. My father was an actor with a distinguished theatre company in east Berlin but things were not turning out the way he had hoped and though the wall was not yet in place, the east/west division loomed. Each day he would go from the west, where we lived, to work in the east. My sister was born in the British military hospital. My mother went to parties in town but was, I think, depressed. She had not (nor would she ever) come to terms with her father's death in Buchenwald.

By the shores of the lake, where the steamer takes tourists on excursions, Mr. Signs and I stopped by a kiosk for coffee and streuselkuchen. In Germany, wherever you go there is sure to be food of some kind. A customer who was clearly a regular said goodbye to the melancholy kiosk man: Tchus, Jurgen - mach's gut! Go well; literally, make it good. In the Berliner accent it sounded like mach's yut. I remember this, the softening of the letter g. I can still speak like a Berliner if I need to, my accent almost perfect. But anyone who knows can hear that there is something not quite right, I don't have the words, the language is broken, I am not from there. But in a sense I also am. We are such stuff as memories are made of.

Missing

A low-key easter sunday, hence no capitals. We did eat chocolate, watch a particularly crappy Jonathan Creek show, had daffodils, candles and a painted egg, the only one that survived from days when I used to do that with the kids. Daughter has gone north to meet the boyf's family and son is now somewhere between Jodhpur and Bombay (we call it Mumbai, but they don't, is what he tells me) and I was glad to hear his voice yesterday because the last time I'd spoken to him he said he was in the desert, and what happened in the match between Arsenal and Barcelona? It was a draw, I said, where will you be sleeping? On the sand, he said, on a rug, I've got low battery, bye. I like to hear the voices of my children, thank god for mobile phones and Skype.

A friend came over to have walk on the forest with me. We'd gone but a short distance when we spotted an orange and white cat sitting on the branch of an oak tree, looking at us. It's the Cheshire Cat, said my friend, look it's grinning at us. Miaow, said the cat, miaaaaooow. It got up, ran the length of the branch and back again. It's got itself stuck up the tree, I said. Friend climbed up a little way trying to reach it but the cat was too high up. We walked to the rushing stream, turning back when it began to rain and saw that the cat was still there, stuck and singing out for help. Back at Signs Cottage we pulled Mr. S from newspaper heaven to bring a ladder in the car, he was not best pleased, (cat's are intelligent, it will find its way down) but did the job, got cat by the scruff of the neck and down it came, singing. Off it went, and I hope it found its way home, but in the right kind of story it would have turned into a handsome prince or princess and given us three wishes.

Perhaps it is because I have been spending too much time at IKEA (all day friday - Good Friday - looking for sofa, 'struth!) , that I woke today remembering Dennis O'Driscoll's poem Missing God and how I tore it out of the newspaper when I first read it during Advent in 2002 and kept it in my bedside locker for years. Can you miss something you never had in the first place? Probably, and maybe particularly.

Kyrie Elaison

I will be singing Haydn's Nelson Mass tomorrow (alto line) - kicking off with Kyrie at approximately 7.30. So if you'd like to sing along:



Also singing Karl Jenkins' Stabat Mater, which youtube doesn't seem to have. So here is Adiemus - one we did earlier. No excuse at all for you not to sing along to this. Yes, I know, but sing it all the same. Is niiiice - even if it does go on a bit. (Try and ignore the adverts, unless you're actually looking for 'cheap chat' and debt management plans etc.)

- and when it rains I think of you

I can't be absolutely sure of this, but I think my very first valentine card probably came from my father. When I was at boarding school he sent me one with a thick, embossed heart on it, signed it "love, Daddy" and drew a heart made out of kisses. He and my mother had been separated for some years and he was about to marry someone else, a woman only thirteen years older than I was. So this gesture, these tokens, were particularly good things, and I did love him dearly. But even I could see that it might have been more to my credit, in the eyes of my peers, had the card been from some anonymous admirer, albeit I was only eleven years old. In the classroom, valentines were left under the lids of the wooden desks, or ostentatiously lying on the top. I had two: one from a boy in the class who was sweet on me (he put his initials in the corner so I would know) and one from the class teacher, a dotty, good-hearted woman who had an eye out for anyone who might possibly be left out, and I was clearly a possible candidate. She drew it herself and composed a verse where each line had a letter from my name. This was a Steiner school, remember. Friends wrote in each others' autograph books, things like:

An elephant never forgets, they say,
And neither do I on St. Valentine's Day.

Enemies (or sophisticated kids who knew how to spar and banter) left anonymous scraps saying:

Roses are red, violets are blue,
And when it rains I think of you:
Drip! Drip! Drip!

Thankfully, I did not receive anything like this, but the words etched themselves into my consciousness and I later used it in a story I wrote. The thought of anyone actually receiving a message like this was, at the time, too much for me to fully digest - someone coming to their desk hoping for words that suggested, however obliquely, at love, friendship, some good quality in oneself revealed, celebrated, and finding instead: Drip! Drip! Drip!

Here on the edge, every restaurant, inn, pub and, actually, anywhere that sells anything, is screaming at us to remember Valentine's Day, just as they will be screaming about Mother's Day, Father's Day, not to mention the ancient festivals that still figure, somehow, in our calendars. We will be reminded to buy cards, chocolates, flowers, wine, treats. Of course anyone with sense and sensibility knows it for what it is. But even so, it is possible to reclaim something - to have our special days and small festivals. I did, as it happens, get a card for Mr. Signs, an image of two birds on a telephone line (they looked like the blue tits that come and lodge in our bird house every spring), and I left this with a bowl of fruit salad for him to find in the morning before he went to Shrink-school. He drew a red heart on an orange background with chalk pastels and wrote a verse about difficult choices (bathroom taps, kitchen tiles) versus easy ones (being with me). It kind of works, you'll just have to take my word for it.

getting my oats

Still on the subject of porridge, it having been Burns night and all: we went to our neighbours-over-the-road for the annual haggis-stabbing and a bit of song and dance. Mr. Signs, who is tone deaf, sang his Burns party piece (The Belles of Mauchline) to my guitar accompaniment, Scottish host sang a reggae version of Scots Wha Hae and a lesser-known version of Auld Lang Syne, I sang May You Never (after John Martyn) neighbour-next-door got six of us (though I chickened out half way through) to do a circle dance, following a whisky-tasting session. We ate two different kinds of haggis with neeps and mash, followed by three different kinds of pudding. On the morning of that day I had porridge for breakfast, there was oatmeal in the haggis and in one of the puddings. You could say that I was oatmealed and porridged out, but I have never worried about getting too much of a good thing.
I was too ill to write much last week, but did some editing on a couple of short stories and sent them off, and today went back to the lovely notebook, my big story still warm and waiting for me.
Here's the actual John with the actual song. I can never get too much of this either.

Festival Again

Off to Edinburgh again tomorrow, looking forward to all of it. Daughter is staying in London this year, bashing on with her nearly-finished musical and working. A fun shopping trip with her today (me, who usually detests shopping for clothes!) - both of us bought lots of lovely things in the high street of my nearest little town, quickly, painlessly, and cheaply. High spirits.

Son will be playing geetar in a show called Miles Ahead with other jazz musicians - at C Venue, if you happen to be there and into Miles Davis.

Ms North has been shortlisted for the Kelpies Prize with her story, Magnus Finn and the Ocean Quest and the Signses will be there at the award ceremony on Wednesday when the winner will be announced.

I will be taking the notebook along, probably not writing much in it until my return but one must always show willing, even on holiday.

There is so much auspiciousness in the air, I can taste it.

Midsummer Invocation

Today was the Feast of St. John and midsummer’s day. In days of yore, and even more recently, if you happened to go to a Steiner school, there would be bonfires lit and people would jump over them for luck and courage, and to frighten off the evil spirits. I have no lit bonfire but want my measure of luck and courage, and to give the message that any spirits whose intentions are questionable have no place in the house and being of Signs. One can but try. So I have lit a candle. It is just a humble IKEA tea light as I am out of beeswax candles (on which I tend to stock up in the autumn), but a flame is a flame and the village Wise Woman once assured me that wherever a flame burns the forces of the will are strengthened. I suppose this could work for good or ill, depending on whose will forces are uniting with flame. The salamanders (fire elementals) are neutral in the sense that they will go to work, whatever. So I resist the urge to call on them and the angels to smite my enemies with a great smite and such a thing would not in any case be seemly.

There was a yoga teacher I once knew briefly. I forget what kind of yoga – I was very keen at the time but I didn’t keep it up. What I still remember, though, are the words with with he began each session:

may all beings who live on the earth be free from fear.

Just that. It feels to be as much of the essence now as it did then.

A Good Friday

Here are the particulars: a hot cross bun from the Good Friday breakfast gathering that our lovely neighbour gives every year. You will never find anything like these buns in a shop, or anywhere. Only she can make them like this and only her tiny and beautiful kitchen can expand to hold such a convivial gathering as we always have at this time. The candle in a pot of wheatgrass is an Easter gift from her, and the beeswax candel in front of it another gift from a neighbour across the road. The twigs in the strange and suggestive vase (made by my mother-in-law who was a fine potter) come from the cherry tree that was recently cut down. A small yellow chicklet is perching on the rim, it came with the beeswax candle, an early hatching.

Later on, I made Matapa. Well that is what my friend, the Cake Lady (who is not the same person as the Bun Woman) calls it, and I ate it at her house first. But it is a recipe that seems to change every time it is handed on, it is quite accommodating, always delicious and takes hardly any time to make. Spinach, tomatoes, onions, garlic, chilli, garam masala, coconut milk, peanut butter. You have it with rice. Afterwards Son went back to revision and his parents went over the road to an impromptu wine-tasting event set up by neighbours and their kids who are home from college. There were about ten bottles opened and the only one I liked was an Australian Merlot (Burra Brook, 2007). There was an expensive one that smelled of cat's piss. Not that I drank very much more than a sip of anything. Mr. Signs got a bit plastered.

More strange and suggestive mother-in-law vases (one has nobs on, the other indents, and they fit together when pushed close), both filled with daffodils from our garden. We had them in the kitchen for a while but the daffodils came with rather a lot of black creepy crawlies so we took them out. They have gone now, but the daffodils and vases look fine where they are on the patio, welcoming in the spring. And I think of the words that I saw pinned up on the walls of my daughter's school one spring when she was five years old:

For I, the Lent Lily, the Daffy-down-dilly,

Have heard through the country the call to arouse.

Happy Easter, Peeps.


(you can enlarge the first photo but not the other two, don't know why, and it seems to have baffled greater techie minds than mine)

pyjama reflections

There is someone with a pneumatic drill in the vicinity. I live in an exceptionally (relatively speaking) quiet spot and it feels as though some alien, and not the friendly kind, has landed and is letting me know of its intentions, which are all about – well, invasion. If I ignore it perhaps it will go away.

So, lets talk about Mother’s Day. Sweet Daughter came with a card that said lovely things, later we went for meal out, and Son sent me a musical e-card and a recording of him with his barbershop band crooning a love song. I don’t care how much the miserable gits bang on about all this being an invention of the card industry, we need our small and large festivals, our special days, and I’m for them – yes, even pancake day – the more the better, I say; both pancakes and festivals. Mother’s Day can be a bit of a loaded one, of course, if you have had a conflicted or downright bad relationship with the mater, but even I managed a card with a photo of a large-eyed rabbit on it and a bunch of daffodils from my garden. She is getting better at taking these tokens of daughterly affection but did immediately point me in the direction of the sumptuous basket of flowers and big expensive-looking card my sister had sent. How nice, I said. She doesn’t actually find it that easy to receive gifts from me, but neither does it sit well if I don’t give. The classic occasion was the time when I had been instructed several times, and in no uncertain terms, not to bring anything at all for a birthday bash she was having in London – no card, present – nothing, and especially not the cake I had planned to make because she didn’t, repeat didn’t, want that or anything else and was that understood? Well the upshot was that I was the only one who arrived empty-handed. My sister made a speech and then there were murmurings to the effect that it was a shame no-one had thought to bring a cake. The mater looked at me, suitably stricken, and got, basically, what she wanted. So you could say it all worked out a treat.

But what am I doing sitting here in my red, white and tinsel pyjamas that are becoming almost as much as an established part of my sartorial repertoire as my purple trousers? I should be getting dressed and ready to go to a certain shrink-artiste in Brighton, getting stuff in the post, shopping for salad and spring onions, writing the next bit of my woman-on-the-edge-with-a-shrink-and-cigarette-habit thing. I think I will carry on sitting here a while – not do anything, and see what happens. The drilling has stopped. Silence.

V Day

Mr. Signs is so romantic.

"It’s Valentine’s tomorrow – lets have a carb fest."

Now, this kind of remark may or may not do it for you, but you have to bear in mind that I have been making poignantly yearning references to the bread and butter pudding that we made at the end of last year. Man of the Moment that he is, next minute he forgot all about the carb fest and said we should go on a spree at the “aphrodisiac food section” (?) of Sainsbury’s.

Somewhere in a box in the loft are a couple of menus from a restaurant in Camden Lock on Valentine’s day in 1985. There were asparagus, of that I am certain, and I think the ice cream was garnished with passion fruit sauce and a spring onion, but I can’t remember what else we had. I do remember, though, that on this night, probably over the ice cream and spring onion course, he proposed to me. On this night also, Daughter of Signs was conceived.

It's not all about the food, obviously. I am not forgetting about the carb fest idea though. Tomorrow I am going to be making these for breakfast

We will be having them with jam and cream, and then we will be walking on the forest, me remembering lines from the e.e. cummings poetry we read to each other at the wedding, eight years after the Valentine proposal, (our children came dressed in elephant suits).

"Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need"

Happy V day.

(I know this is the second time in a week that I have banged on about scones - they seem to have become something of a motif.)

candleground

It is both Candlemas and Groundhog day, and you can take it from me that the signs are very auspicious – at any rate, if you live in the south-east of England they are, and if you don’t then I have it on good authority that all you need to do is change the name of the place where you are living and it will all come right. For there is thick snow on the ground and the slow, white stuff has been falling all day. Everything has ground to a halt, as it does in sweet Albion whenever there is anything that one might call weather happening. So people don’t go to work or school or anywhere, unless there is a dire emergency like running out of milk for one’s essential caffe latte or to get a copy of the Guardian newspaper (the latter is Mr. Signs’ emergency, for the sport and crossword pages wait for no man). According to a commentator on radio 4, people are out having fun in parks with sledges, throwing snowballs or just chilling warmly at home and we need more days like this (says the commentator) because we are completely losing the plot in terms of work/life balance and becoming a nation of dull and stressed-out Jacks and Jills. Be that as it may, my life dances to a different drum beat so a bit of weather doesn’t particularly affect me personally, other than worrying about children of Signs having enough winter thermals and son’s bicycle slipping on the ice.

I had planned, though, to get a few things done today and stuff printed off, put in an envelope and posted. But today was migrainey – not quite the same as full-blown migraine but a kind of weaker, younger sister of the real thing. So a nothing-very-much day, other than looking from my bed at the snow that kept falling on the rooftops and swirling around the trees; and thinking about how auspicious it all was because:

If candlemas day be fair and bright,
winter will take another flight;
if candlemas day be cloud and rain,
winter is gone and will not come again.

(If I had changed “rain” to “snow” it would not have rhymed).

I have been given a particularly dense and fragrant beeswax candle by the ancient woman who is the nearest I have to a godmother and looks like Mother Holle herself. I will be lighting it.

Epiphanic

I came the closest I’ve been in recent years to getting nicked by the police yesterday. Thinking to take my Visitor from the North to have a look at the school where my children went when we first came to the Edge, we drove into the grounds (once the estate of the Lord of the Manor in these parts) and up to the Kindergarten where we were graciously welcomed in by one of the current teachers there who also happens to live in my road. It looked very much as it did when my son of four and daughter of six first went there – aesthetically pleasing with all the things made from natural and beautiful materials, it being a Waldorf school. I wanted also to show her the upper school building where the older children went, and where I myself had once been for two years as a child. The grounds seemed empty of children, the term not yet begun. An angry-eyed woman with metallic hair and a steely expression had been watching me as I drove slowly to and from the Kindergarten. She jumped into action as she saw us drive (very slowly) along the tarmac road within the grounds that led to the main building. She sprinted towards us and began shouting. Driving rather than walking up the path was never encouraged (I used to give myself license when muscles were bad) but now it was clearly forbidden. I indicated that I was leaving, but she ran in front of the car and blocked our exit. I’m not entirely sure what took hold of me, but instead of stopping and engaging with her I decided to reverse the car and drive off (slowly) the way we had come. She banged on the window, shouting that I was a health and safety menace and I saw her following me with a baleful stare from the rear-view mirror.

Back in the village centre, I felt uncomfortably that I ought to go back and find a way of apologising, partly for the sake of expedience – it doesn’t do to make enemies in a village on the Edge where you never know where or in what circumstances you will bump into a person – and partly because of (I am telling myself now) my naturally good disposition. And, I supposed, I had behaved like a bit of a plonker. I didn’t know if I would find her there, but clearly it was karmically ordained and she came over and began her tirade. It took a fair amount of time for her to hear my apology, let alone accept it. She made stabbing movements with her finger and anger rolled from her like big waves looking for somewhere to crash, but they washed over me and I kept surfacing, still able to keep afloat. I am not a bad person, all said and done, had just been a bit thoughtless about current health and safety regulations and the anger that kept coming was hers and did not belong to me. When she had done ranting there was a flicker of something else that crossed her face; helplessness, perhaps. What does she do when she is not angry? She might be the perfect person to have on one’s side when fighting for some cause, but on this occasion all she had was me in my Nissan Micra, an insubstantial demon who was trying to apologise but would not be diminished by her, however long she kept stabbing the air. Less than an hour later the police were at my house investigating, thinking to find a couple of drug-fuelled teenagers out on a speed-crazy joy-ride.

But all’s well that ends well, and we had a merry Epiphany evening chez Signs with some Edge-dwelling friends who came to meet the Forriner and melt the pewter horseshoes she had brought with her. Extraordinary stuff, you hold it in a large, flat metal spoon over a gas flame and when it is molten pour it into a bowl of cold water where it forms into a new shape, which you hold in candlelight to see what the silhouette might reveal about the year to come. Mine was in the shape of a Madonna, with a mermaid’s tail: Stella Maris, Star of the Sea – one hundred percent auspicious, by anyone’s reckoning.

And today the Icemaiden flew north to stay with NMJ and become Scottish for a while. The snow, it seems, has flown with her.

The Icemaiden Cometh

I would like to say that I am looking forward to Christmas and not planning to top myself. Just thought that needed spelling out in case anyone got the wrong end of the stick after my last post. Desolation angel is only one of my personas. Personae. I don’t know who I am most of the time so no reason why you should.

I would also like to say that Mr. Signs and I have spent a ghastly day at the Croydon IKEA. Of course they never have the exact (or even approximate) thing that you really want: settee covers no longer available because settee in question is no longer made; lamps are still from the planet Zob, in fact I think that they are all extra terrestrials cleverly disguised as lamps and I fully expected The Doctor (Christmas Day, oh yesss!) to come charging through the IKEAn maze hotly pursued by an office chair. That was on the list too, but we couldn’t find one that felt comfortable and they were expensive. Mr. Signs lost his mobile phone while trying out various mattresses (this was the main purpose of the expedition, to replace the broken one on son’s bed). We found it handed in at customer services, but not before we had scurried around the place like headless chickens looking for it. We had our usual consolation prize meal of meatballs and chips with lingonberries and beige gravy and I stocked up on more of the same to put in the freezer so we can play IKEA back in Signs Cottage. The gravy comes in packets, one mixes it with water and cream and it is weirdly delicious if one doesn’t look at the small print and find out what is in it.

And I would also like to say that I am looking forward to a visit from The Icemaiden herself who is due to arrive chez Signs on the first day of next year – not long to wait now, yippee! We will of course have a very interesting time of it when trying to communicate because, as everyone should know by now she actually speaks by making strange, unintelligible (to the uninitiated) seal sounds, and she uses a special instant translation facility when coming to talk to us on Blogger, but we have an empathetic connection and can always wave our arms around so all will be well. I will be asking her to bring some proper Finnish snow and a real, live penguin – hoping this won’t cause problems at customs.

But first we have Christmas and a steady trickle of relatives, half-relatives, ex-step siblings and sundry others to cater for in the postage stamp of a kitchen with two tables pushed together and the collapsible garden chairs brought in so we can all sit and get stuffed. Stuffing I have not yet made, nor the bread pudding, nor anything else other than a few sorry-looking spelt (sugar-free) mince pies and some gingerbread mixture that went wrong (but I got some nice ready-made heart-shaped things at IKEA to hang on the tree). No, everything has to be got ready tomorrow – tree, marathon shop at supermarket, getting crib set, lights and other paraphernalia down from the loft. Not to mention taking son’s friend to the airport so he can get back to the States for Christmas Eve. And the bed linen must be changed so daughter can sleep on fresh sheets (also new from IKEA). And the place is a mess. But Son of Signs has asked if he can cook the dinner on Christmas day and I have said yes please. And the angels and elemental beings will (have to) come and sort everything else out.

Festival

Heavens, where have I been? I mean a week in Edinburgh, yes, and then a poetry week back on home ground in Sussex, but where have I been? Not in my usual place, that’s for sure – a little bit out of the body; and it was great, folks! And me usually so sparing with exclamation marks! Taxis in Edinburgh are cheap compared to down South (£4 a trip, I mean to say) but on the whole I managed with all the walking this year, mostly drug-free. Mr. Signs and I were situated in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh old town, right beneath the castle. Last year we struggled to get beyond the haggis, chips and pies but this year we found all kinds of places, including one that served heavenly oysters and a ‘surf and turf’ combination of perfect steak plus pot of mussels cooked in cream and wine. Sorry to bang on about food before culture, but the importance of such to the general wellbeing and disposition of Signs cannot be overstated, especially as I have been doing (my version of) a Stone Age-type diet that seems to be, if not strengthening, a little less enervating than other kinds, and you can do lots of calories without doing extra weight (they ate crème brulee in Stone Age times, right?). I couldn’t keep that up in poetry week as I ate at the college where it was based – healthy vegetarian, with all the grains and pulses that go with it, but my body registered the difference strengthwise; back on home ground, too, the clay soil does tend to exert a gravitational pull – I should live on granite really, it suits me best.

But anyway, culture: I have been doing it, people – I almost said so you don’t have to but of course everyone has to or we will all go to the dogs. Sometimes one suffers, and it wouldn’t be Edinburgh Festival without a turkey or two, or something really dire. Last year it came in the form of a folk concert and this year it was a one-man show, full of sound and fury that signified nothing that I ccould identify, with a guy who looked as though he had taken one too many acid trips in his mis-spent youth and was therefore, despite all the sound, not quite or even remotely in the body from whence it came. And to boot, the show was in an underground vault of a place that absolutely reeked of mould and made the insides of my nostrils prickle, so I had to make an exit before the end, leaving Mr. Signs and a friend to make the best of it while I sat in a bar wishing that I were still a smoker. Absolutely everyone, it seemed, was smoking, even those of a certain age who should know better. I know better and wish I did not. Still, there was coffee and taiblet (they also ate fudge in Stone Age times, I believe).

The good things were many. We saw Jerry Sadowitz again – not as thrilling an experience as last year, but still worth doing, even if only for the quality insults; the comedian Stuart Lee – fabulous and I’ll see him again if I get the chance; a Mighty Boosh-style comedy group from Melbourne called Simply Fancy – so delightful that one forgets to complain about the airless room they performed in (despite relentless rain outside, many of the smaller venues were stiflingly hot); a Russian folk group called Koleso that we only went to see because one of the women caught the eye of Mr. Signs as she waved a flyer and her cleavage at him, and at first I thought it was going to be another turkey because of all the red lipstick and promise of “Russian heartbeat”, but it was thrilling, and we bought the CD afterwards; extraordinary flamenco dancing and singing – the real, unadorned thing; a foot-stomping Blues Brothers cover show suggested by my friend’s daughter. Just some of the things that come to mind.

But the highlight for me was seeing the performances of the Signs children. True, I’m their mother. Had I not been, I don’t think I’d have gone to see a show like Strippers & Gentlemen, and though the words “physical theatre” and “multi-media” had prepared me for the idea that this was something out of my usual experience, I had no real idea what I would find. We went twice, each time in the company of different friends. It was an astonishing production. The review from Three Weeks called the show “something great” and said “through dance, mime and spot-on dialogue the faultless cast explore ideas of contemporary sexuality, self-respect and morality. Set to a thumping high-octane soundtrack, this perfectly intense promenade performance will have you questioning your own ideals from the word go. Impeccably directed, involving and revealing, this must be one of the secret gems of this year's Fringe.” It had some other sparkling reviews, and a couple that were not quite so enthusiastic, including one by Lyn Gardner in the Guardian who didn’t, to my mind, really get it – but still, three stars in the Guardian for a show devised by people fresh out of drama school is not to be sniffed at. For me, hand on heart, it would have been a highlight whether my daughter had been involved or not. The co-director did wonderful things with sound, lighting and film and at moments I felt as though the experience was like walking into a poem where everything becomes, as it were, illuminated from within. Of course everyone’s experience of a work of art is different. Mine was that it was (in the words of my friend) poignant and beautiful.

We had to leave Edinburgh the day before son’s jazz a cappella group were due to perform because of my poetry week; but we were treated to a special preview performance in the living room of the flat they all shared and it was glorious; not just the music, the arrangements, the fact of all this fabulous sound coming from twelve voices, but the sheer work and discipline, the energy and enthusiasm that went into everything. They performed to full houses most days.

The arts: what would life be like without? I don’t ever want to find out. And so, as my lovely departed Dad might have said at the end of a long letter, here’s hoping that this finds you as it leaves me – in the pink.

More on poetry and stuff anon.

Signs En Route

Yesterday I went for a walk on the forest with my ancient friend. At the age of eighty seven and three quarters, she is not as near ninety as I thought. She has a face that is more carved on than WH Auden’s and is a tiny hobbit of a woman, with a dicky heart and a ridiculous amount of energy. Mr. Signs picked her up from Gatwick airport where she had just arrived from a holiday in Siberia, with a German friend in tow. They were holed up for a couple of nights in Irkutsk en route to St. Petersburg and hadn’t had baths for weeks because there was no hot water in any of the taps. They were high in spirits and in strong body odours, and lovely company as we padded over the beautiful forest terrain with the heather all coming in the meadows and the sun looking down through the trees. She makes eighty seven and three quarters look like a breeze, being almost weightless and of a sunny and tranquil disposition. She is the closest thing I’ve got to a fairy godmother and I reckon she could get me to the ball without a wand, a pumpkin or a coach-and-four. An old refugee, she was with my mother in internment camp in the Isle of Man, those days when the Brits were locking up all the Jewish forriners in case they were spies or in cahoots with Madalf Heatlump. She never married but spent her life looking after special needs children in Camphill communities.

After a lunch of red lentil and vegetable soup, the black Russian bread she brought with her, cream cheese and radishes, I was flat out, literally, on the bed; but agitated by the thought of all I needed and wanted to get done before going away, and immediately on my return. My lilac jacket came back from the dry cleaners clearly untouched (they just hadn’t bothered or forgot to do it) and this threw me into a spin – it just seemed horribly inauspicious that simple thing like that couldn’t be sorted, and I so wanted something for being bright and gay (original meaning) in Edinburgh, where my daughter’s play, Strippers and Gentlemen, has been awarded five stars by the Festival newspaper, Three Weeks and been called “One of the secret gems of this year’s Fringe.” Imminently expecting something to appear in the Guardian, who have been to review it – but one never knows. On account of having to be back for the poetry week, I'll be missing son's gig with his band of jazz singers, as they don't start until the 17th. Will try and catch them in rehearsal.

Well I may be gone some time, folks, but hopefully the blog’s loss will be the notebook’s gain. I gotta write more pomes and, well – I just gotta write more. Sick of competition judges who do not seem to recognise my towering genius, I’ve started to send things out to poetry magazines, beginning with The Rialto. Apparently they take forever to get back, but hey – I got all the time in the world.

This time tomorrow I’ll be on the train reading Nasim Marie Jafry’s novel, The State of Me, which is not just good – it’s M.E. brain-friendly.

Keep rockin, people.