Three Weddings and a Funeral

                                                                           

 

 

Is it time for a post?  Already Italy seems a distance away – in time, I mean.  Obviously it is a distance away from Forest Edge, Blighty, where I now sit looking out at autumn again, which is what we always seem to come back to these days, even in June.  The wind is even now tearing at the wild cherry tree, whose days are numbered because it is growing too close to the garden studio and is altogether too huge and obliterating (I will miss it though, and the wood pidgeons whose home it has become). 

 In Puglia there was wind too, but there was plentiful blue sky, gelati, cherry trees whose fruit we  picked and ate by the handful, focaccia baked in the wood-fired oven in the grounds of the organic farm where we were based.  Am I talking about food again?  It was not all about the food, though it almost could have been (extraordinary slow-cooked dinners each night, with bottles of Primitivo and home-made liqueurs).  It was about being in Elsewhere.  No-one spoke English.  I mean they really didn’t, not even a bit of it.  At the farm we managed with French and German and amazingly some of my ancient grade E Italian O level came back to me.  Not enough, however, to properly converse with the wild-eyed man who accosted us on a narrow stone path at the extraordinary Matera caves which had been dug out of rock and had housed people (including the desperate, malaria-stricken poor in the 1940s, as described by Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli) for centuries.  The man led us to a small cave-church, talking at high speed.  When I asked him if he spoke French he became incensed.  He pointed to the arcane etchings on the walls and black and white photographs of peasants from decades past.  I understood enough of what he said to make out that no, he damn well didn’t speak French, he was an Italian, and moreover he liked people who were intelligent and cultured, and what the hell were we doing there anyway with stupid questions like that.  He handed us a leaflet with details about a local B and B which we didn't need but allowed me to say grazie. 

 I was keen to see the insides of a few churches but whenever we went inside one there was something going on.  May, as Mr. Signs pointed out, is the time for weddings, and we inadvertently gatecrashed on three of them, standing at a respectful distance at the back.  A small church in Polignano looked as though nothing much was going on.  Inside, there were people in some of the pews praying and another couple dressed in black (but that was not unusual) near the front, with their heads bowed.  As we came close they turned their heads to look at us.  I smiled and then saw that between them was an open coffin and guessed that a funeral service would shortly commence.  Back outside, I realised that we had gone in holding cones of gelati which we had been licking.  I felt a sudden impulse to go back inside, apologise and explain; also to sit with them for a while, by the dead person, for what reason I didn’t know.  I was from Elsewhere, I might have (but not really) said – and also Elsewhere in my own country because of a chronic disease which was generally not understood, and which had prevented me from spending time with my father before his death, I had not reached the hospital in time to say goodbye and after he had died they whipped his body into the mortuary and that was the last anyone saw of him, but if there had been a church like this with a place to put his open coffin I might have sat and kept him company in the days between his leaving the world and going into the earth. 

 We finished our gelati, got into the hired car and went back to the farm to read and wait for dinner. 

 In Conversano there was the annual festival of Maria delle Fonte, with processions through the ancient streets, girls like white birds in their first communion dresses, serious-faced men with medals on their black jackets carrying the cross with Christ crucified and a banner of the Madonna with her right hand held over her breast, looking mildly affronted.

Why do you keep wanting to see these things? said Mr. Signs.  It’s all about misery.

A woman’s voice through a megaphone intoned Ave Maria and made a long address to the Sanctissima Madonna.  In the narrow cobbled streets people, most of them old, who did not go to the actual procession stood or sat on chairs outside their houses dressed in their best clothes and joined in the Ave Marias.  I became desperate for somewhere to sit and something to eat.  A café in the square sold cold beers and tuna fish salad.  The younger people ate, smoked and talked in loud voices ignoring the processions, and the older people stood and mouthed along with the loudspeaker voice. 

 We flew back to England from Bari and took the opportunity to visit the church of St. Nicholas, which is mentioned in all the guide books. It is an important church because the Saint (the original Santa Claus) passed by on his way to Rome and chose Bari as his burial place.  Mr.Signs pointed to a bigger than life statue encased in glass.  He sported a gem-studded golden halo and a flashy golden ring on one of his fingers. 

I said, who is that?

Who do you think? said Mr. Signs.  Would you buy a used car from this man?  He pointed to a box full of coins and another stuffed with notes.  And he wants your money. 

I put half a euro into the box and lit an electronic candle for my Dad. 

 Our last lunch was in a small, hidden away café of the kind that tourists don’t usually find where we had what was probably the freshest fish I have ever eaten.  In Italian, I asked the name of this kind of fish. 

Orata, said the owner, and then: is in English Sea Bream. 

small wonder

Today I will be going with my book group to see this event, which is part of the Small Wonder festival at Charleston.  I have just looked at the site and seen that one of the contributors, M. J. Hyland, will not after all be there.  I am disappointed.  This morning I read her very good piece in Granta magazine where she talks about her experience of M.S.  - of how she felt impelled to keep the illness a secret and how, until now, she has not written anything about M.S.  I was struck by the relationship she has with her very wretched and dysfunctional family, for whom she feels a profound sadness.  She says,

"I can't be near them, can't belong to them.  I worry for them, dream about them, but I can't talk to them.  They frighten me."

She says that "having MS felt tantamount to losing, and felt too close to being like them; a failure and a victim."

Hence her response, which was to keep it a secret.

What she says resonates; not because it echoes my particular way of coping with a chronic disease (though there have been periods I attempted to keep the fact of my M.E. a secret) but because I have known for a long time that people are frightened by illness and disease and feel much the same way about people with ME as M.J. Hyland feels about her family.  The fact that most of us are not (yet - the time may come, given enough research) able to Win The War against it, that it just goes on and is something to be negotiated and endured, does not help.

What a catastrophe, then, it must have been to join the ranks of the 'failures' and 'victims'.  How I would like to have heard her speak about it.  But I am pleased to be going.  A.L. Kennedy will be one of the contributors.  A friend will be driving.  I like visiting Charleston, even though it is rarely a comfortable experience (today we will be in a barn, must wrap up warm).

Poetry Cafe

To have a poetry café you need a poet, a room with chairs and a tin. The poet is for bringing poetry, the room with chairs is for people who come and listen to the poetry and perhaps share some of their own and the tin is for collecting money from the people that come in order to pay for the poet and the room with the chairs. You do not need to have coffee. The word café is to suggest the idea of a congenial gathering of artistically inclined people. If you want to add flourishes you have a person with musical instrument making melodious sound, tables with flowers in jam jars and lit candles, incense, fruit cordial (hot apple and ginger in cold weather), biscuits and a couple of bottles of wine for you and your mates or anyone who looks as though they might fancy some. And if people want something more rock and roll there are plenty of inner city venues. You won’t be getting the smoke-filled atmosphere these days but there will still be black walls and bleakness. I’m not being snooty here, believe me I like all that and will go in search of it myself one way or another, but it’s no good being a black walls and bleakness merchant when you live on the Edge. We do things differently here and the punters like it. Well, I like it and I’m number one punter, having begun this so as to keep the poetry buzzing on my doorstep, or as good as.

What you hope is that people turn up – and they do, usually. Visiting poets, used to an audience of Sid and Doris Bonkers plus one or two more on a good night are surprised to see the room quite full. So Ros Barber wasn’t in the least put out by the relatively low numbers the other night, reminiscing about one gig where the only audience was the other poet and his spouse and how they’d basically spent the evening reading back and forth to each other. I was disappointed that more people hadn’t turned up. Something about this time of year, I think - peoples’ kids going back to school, choirs starting up, end of season cheaper holidays, and perhaps it might have been better to have it at the end of the month. And it was such a fine, powerful reading, on the edge of (but not quite) performance poetry. Only four people put their names down to read in the open mic session, so I padded it out with three of mine and kicked another poet who would have preferred to nurse his cold into doing something. The Signs family was there, daughter visiting from London and son not yet back at university, Mr. S. taking money at the door. Not much money, on account of low numbers and we didn’t cover costs, and it would have been good to give the poet a bit more for travel (she hired a car to get there). But no-one complained. My experience is that poets tend to be like that. They do their work, they come, are happy with little, are gracious. But perhaps I’ve just been lucky.

See Her Run

Yesterday I went to Brighton to catch a whiff of the Festival spirit. Everything is a-buzz with beautiful people. Brighton has, for some time now, been a very cool place to be, and not just as a playground for tired Londoners who want the life they had hoped for in London but easier, better, cheaper and with clean sea air. There is lots of good fringe activity all year round in the poetry, comedy and music scene, good cheap places to eat, and, if like me you live within reasonable driving distance, you can almost get everything you want (shops too, for those that like that sort of thing) without setting foot in London at all. Everyone was looking particularly exquisite last night in an out-to-party sort of way. There is a kind of Brighton chic that is hard to pin down – a way of standing in your black, sequinned vest with your slicked back hair as you drag on your cigarette outside heavenly café. A dusty glamour. Me? I wore my purple “crushed silk” (a.k.a. acetate shell-suit trousers found many years ago in charity shop) with cashmere jumper, red socks and black suede slip-ons. There is, must always be, a place for grunge. My hair, I think, did me proud. But more of this anon.

We went to the Dome to see a showing of the film Run Lola Run accompanied by a live soundtrack from The Bays. A couple of years ago it was The Battle of Algiers with music by the Asian Dub Foundation. Both brilliant. Anyone who has seen Run Lola Run will picture the running sequences which make up the bulk of the film – and Lola in her pale green jeans and sky-blue vest, her punk-red and orange hair flying back as her feet slap the ground and she tears through the city. The music, by anyone’s standards, was loud, with enough bass for it to feel as though it has come right into the body. I had come prepared with water bottle and drugs should my body wimp out on me, but it was ok. Sometimes, in spite of M.E. and all the attendant things, there are moments when it just is o.k. I had, I knew, not just to let the music and images come into me, I had to move out and go into them, lose myself.

There are moments when you meet a poem, an image, a piece of music, a film, when you stop in your tracks and say, yes, I am that. The girl running the fine line between destiny and her own will was me, was everyman and everywoman, but at that particular moment was me – my heart and soul out there, or where I wanted to put them both, with nothing but passion to bring down the rules, regulations and everything else that comes against her. There is a scene where she stops for a space to stake everything she has at a roulette table in a casino and begins to scream. She has twenty minutes to come up with 100,000 marks. As she clenched her fists and screamed the intensity of her desire and intention, half the audience in the dome began to clap and cheer and the music (which they do not rehearse) was with us. Of course she wins, must win, if the story is to be true, in the sense that fairy tales are always and forever true. The prince (for she was that) will capture the castle.

And my hair? A few days ago, contrary to my recent stated decision, I coloured it red by mistake. They didn’t have my usual colour and the packet said “Light Mahogany Chestnut.” Obviously a practical joke, as it is in fact a bold, rusty and robust red. At the moment only the top of my head really shows it (yes, it’s a beacon). I have decided to go with the flow and bring the rest up to scratch – at least it will match my socks. And if I’m not mistaken, there’s a sign to be read here. After all, the hair colour wasn’t planned. Lola, c’est moi!