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. 

spoon-management

Funny thing about Christmas cards.  If you live at a distance from me you are more likely to get one during advent than if you live over the road or next door to me.  This is because when the weather is inclement, which it mostly has been this year - if not raining then perishing cold - it is often a step too far to deliver the cards by hand through the letterbox.  If you live in another country it is also touch and go whether the card will arrive in time because that means going into a post office and queueing.  For the rest, I can do everything from here: write, put in envelope, affix stamp - and then Mr. Signs posts them for me.  It isn't as though I never get out.  But when I do I have a kind of tunnel vision.  First I have to actually get to the car, which may be parked a short distance away because how things are in this road - it's everyone for themselves and you park wherever there is a space, which might not be near your house.  If the windows are iced up there is that to see to - back to the house for a bucket of hot water to chuck over the car or time spent scraping the ice off.  Then there is the car to heat up so as to make it bearable to sit in - if the car actually starts up, which is not always the case when it is cold.  If I go into the nearest town I have to find somewhere to park that won't leave me too far from shops or having to negotiate a steep incline.  The village is easy as long as you just aim to get to one place rather than attempt both chemist and health shop in one trip.  Bearing in mind that adventures of this kind have to be thought about when you are a few spoons* short of a cutlery set, you can imagine why I have finally succumbed and begun to do a bit of serious online grocery shopping.  It actually works quite well, though they didn't have the particular kind of celery and organic broccoli I ordered so substituted those for bog-standard kind which is fine but I was still charged for the more expensive items I asked for.  A quibble, perhaps, but something else to sort out.  Pleased to have got a fridge and vegetable rack stocked up without setting foot outside the house.  Not pleased that I forgot to cancel my Abel and Cole order so was completely vegetabled out yesterday until I managed to offload some potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, onions, turnips and green stuff onto my neighbour.

*spoonie = someone with a chronic, debilitating illness

snow on snow

Essentials

There is nothing like a call from one's mater to say that she had run out of smoked salmon and double cream to focus the mind on what is really important. Mr. Signs and I trudged to the end of our road where his car was parked to make the perilous journey into the village for provisions. If no smoked salmon, she said, then Parma ham would do. There was basically nothing fresh to be had - no veg apart from spinach and certainly nothing like bread or milk. But lo! There was one solitary tub of double cream and there was, inexplicably, Parma ham. There is a Sign here somewhere - a clue to the kind of things one should look for in perilous times: luxuries, clearly. If I need to go to the chemist while this weather lasts it will be for Chanel No. 5. For ourselves we stocked up on biscuits, Supernoodles, peanuts, Monster Munch - plus a few sensible things, and I mean to say, who ever starved while there were lentils and rice in the cupboard.

The snow carries on falling and when I look out at the front I can only see a tiny bit of the middle of the Signsmobile as most of it is buried in white. Tomorrow, by hook or by crook, we have to get ourselves to London to meet up with Daughter and others to see Son performing the romantic lead in West Side Story at the Greenwood Theatre in London Bridge. Today all the trains are cancelled, so it has simply got to stop snowing in time to allow us clear passage. We will leave the cat alone, the central heating on. All will be well.

Narnia again

I seem to have walked through the wardrobe and found myself here again. The trees are becoming heavy with snow which is predicted to continue. The BBC weather forecast says the temperature here in deepest east sussex will plummet to minus ten by Friday, which is when we are due to go to London to see son play the romantic lead in West Side Story. The launch of a poetry anthology I was to have attended today has been cancelled because of weather. Leaving aside other considerations I would not, in any case, have been able to get my car out of the road.

I am uneasy in my soul - for other reasons than those listed above, and also for no clear reason, but the wintry landscape does serve as metaphor. It is Narnia in the grip of the White Witch, and Aslan is not in evidence. Of course, this is the real advent experience, everything getting darker and more difficult. It is just at this time (at these times) that you have to light the candle, that substance inside you, the wax and wick of it. I have lost my box of household matches, and here - conveniently - is another metaphor. I do not have the werewithal to light the candle. Well, ok, I lit it from the gas stove, but you get my drift.

There is food in the house, enough for today at any rate, and it is warm here. If I could just get myself out of the cold forest. But on the other hand, I have been there before and know the terrain.

Go deep and you are on hard ground.
You know the way the air grows cold,
it’s always winter and the light burns low
in a single lantern on a post, and you are
lost again. Flame won’t flicker, heart won’t beat.

The wardrobe is dreaming you out, pushing you
from the nest of your familiars to wander in the
dark wood. You have no compass. It is good.
Your breath is white, the ghost of owl calls
from the forest. Who walks in the night?

The Night-Side

I like winter. I like cold. I like night. But this year the winter feels too hard and I am not sure why - it isn't the snow. Sometimes the winter feels like a long night, and the nights are already so long when one doesn't sleep properly. The longest night I ever had was when I was five and went to have my tonsils out. After the operation I was sick. The nurse was angry. My throat ached and we had to eat ice cream. There was a bitter medicine to take, it made one of the other children cry, but afterwards we were given glucose. When my father came for me I thought I had stayed for one night but he said I'd been there a week. No-one visited, you didn't visit children in hospital then, it was thought less upsetting for everyone. Anyway, I was used to being left with strange people. If I was there a week, it was always night. When you are ill a long time, it feels as though you are living in the night. Floyd Skloot wrote a book called The Night-Side - he got the title from Susan Sontag, who wrote "Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship." There are weeks, months, years, waiting for the day which never comes. Times when you behave as though it does come, you talk about the weather, what is coming into leaf and bud in the garden and forest, lemonade on the patio drinking in the blue sky and light. But soon you are tipped back into night and it is as though the day was a brief space in some parallel existence that occasionally opens for short, intense moments. In the night, you keep telling yourself that the day will come, and you wait for that because if you told yourself that this is how it will be for ever you would lose hope. And you can't do that.

I am reading The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson. I will echo Ursula le Guin's review: it is the most beautiful and satisfying novel I have read for a very long time. The words come into me and find no resistance. I have need of this language.

Snow on the Edge

Inspired by Cuspie, some photos of where I be, in deepest Sussex. Cheating, because they are taken by my neighbour-over-the-road who has a talent for this sort of thing.

The last photo is of Signs Cottage, the lit up window our living room.

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.

Ice Witchery

The electricity hums in my limbs. Today it has even reached my fingertips, and everything looks askew, as it must have done to Kay in the story of the Snow Queen, after a fragment of glass from the devil’s mirror had lodged itself in his eye.

It was cold this morning, but not cold enough for my liking. I don’t want things to get warm and soft, it’s even worse then. Cold, white and bright, and very hard, is what suits me in winter, or even just cold and hard. Here everything turns to mud in the warm wet, and the wet comes into your body and weighs you down. It is a seasonal thing: a warm late spring day in January is an abomination; and last year we had midwinter at Easter and everyone was saying Merry Christmas, that was bad too, but not as bad as summer in January. I become like the White Witch who sees her perfect Narnian winter melting. They are ruining your winter, Madam, says the dwarf. I want the winter to come into my muscles and limbs, my organs too – my heart: freeze everything up and make it hard and impenetrable, allow nothing to swim around. I want to be glacier, hard as rock.

Last night I threw off the covers, hot. Not right in January, and everyone saying how lovely it is, now that the terrible cold has stopped, even though some also said that a cold snap was good for the earth, killed the bad things off and the potatoes would grow better this year. But mostly there was bitter complaint, oh isn’t it awful, this ghastly cold, can’t wait for it to stop, just horrible, can’t get warm. And outside the hoarfrost so radiant, the arms of the trees thick-feathered and brilliant. Let it be like this always, I said, and let the summer not come, or if it does let it be a short blip that we endure and let the rivers and lakes freeze so we can walk on them without falling into water.

The days become longer and ask for so much life. In my body, the bad weeds grow and multiply, all the small blooms choked before they have a chance. This year I am in the service of the White Witch and the Snow Queen. Will you harden your heart, they say, in return for what we bring? Ladies, I will, with great pleasure. Give me a pair of strong walking boots and a sledge, a coat made of bearskin, a bow and arrows. Put ice in my limbs. Turn my enemies to stone.

Out of Joint

This is how it looked earlier. Sky is chucking it down and everything is white. Old Mother Holle is shaking out the bedding - now, when “Aprille with his shoures soote the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote.” Yeah, right. Don’t get me wrong, one appreciates the elements in all their manifestations and I am by no means wishing to hurtle into a long and remorselessly hot summer, nor has it passed me by that here in Blighty we don’t really have much of what you might call Spring these days. They don’t call me RTS for nothing, after all, no siree. I notice things. And one doesn’t like to grumble, but:

Son is still not well, and this after a clutch of doctors gung-hoeing that all would be well in this the best of all possible worlds, in time for his trip to the States on Tuesday; and a second course of (different) antibiotics because it was found on Friday (by an ENT specialist, at the eleventh hour) that he had tonsillitis and nasty things on the tonsils that were somehow missed by the health centre doctors; and he has been on mega-strength painkillers, and at time of posting is still needing them. He also has a quantity of naturopathic, homoeopathic and otherpathic remedies to help things along, but sometimes the body just needs time to recover and restore itself; which isn’t necessarily welcome news to someone wishing with all his heart to go off on a wonderful trip that has been planned and worked for (are you listening, Angels?) – ach!

Mr. Signs has been buying energy-saving lightbulbs. We have one at the top of the house casting a murky gloom on the postage stamp landing at the top of the stairs, and another in the kitchen, a bit brighter but still cold and desolate, like Narnia before the coming of Aslan. I love electric light and have always bragged about the fact that all my other Conditions notwithstanding I have never suffered the awfulness of S.A.D. But these new bulbs may change all. I am as keen to save the planet as the next chap, but I’m going to stock up on the old bulbs while they are still for sale. The world still needs a functioning Sign-reader, is what I will tell myself and anyone else who might want to talk about the weight of my carbon footprint.

But The Doctor is back, and not before time. For I love him. Well, not him exactly, but the idea of him – in all of his incarnations, and I have been there since the very beginning with William Hartnell and his child-assistant, Susan. Knee-high to a grasshopper though I was, I wished that it were me going off with him to travel in time and space in the blue telephone kiosk spaceship; and ever after, I have found the idea of staying put on planet earth a bit of a trial.

On the other hand, there are compensations. Speaking on the phone to Daughter today, she told me about the Sunday roast beef she and her flat-mate were planning to cook later on for themselves and others who were coming to eat with them, and her general cheerfulness about it seemed to suggest that this might be the very thing I needed to do in order to redeem the day a little. So I have been to the village Tesco Express and bought a joint of pork because that’s all there was. But it will do. Sufficient to the day the joint* thereof – and I don’t suppose you get much of that on the Tardis.

* it's at this point that the title of the post suggested itself to me, but I have always wanted to play Hamlet, as it happens.

How Things are in January

The Christmas tree is lying on its side by the bins. It has a gold ribbon still tied to one of the branches and it waits for me. Do something good with me, it says, don’t let me go this way. I say it must wait. Everything must, I am sorry, but there it is again. And January, of course, which brings renewal or things breaking down, depending on how you look at it. The car lights need fixing, the computer is malfunctioning, the boiler needs replacing, someone has tried to access my online bank account, I have been overcharged on my mobile phone. And all around the little house is stuff – piles of it, or so it seems when one is able only to lie on the sofa or bed and look at it.

Oh wash me, say the sheets that appeared as though by magic from an overlooked laundry bag – son’s laundry bag – yesterday, just prior to his going back to Oxford. Oh recycle me says the army of empty bottles, ditto and gather me, say the newspapers that are everywhere in grumbling piles. Attend to me, says the rusted gate fallen from its hinges, and the room that needs a damp course is quite beside itself, neglected as it has been.

Be quiet, I say, I am doing my best which, at this particular moment, may be nothing at all, but it is my best.

Oh write me, says the novel, compose me, cry the poems, give voice to us, the words all shout, falling over one another in the attempt to be heard. And Live me, says the life that is pressing against the window; an astonishment of blue, a clear , cold winter’s day. Let me bite you, it says.

Yes yes, my darlings. Soon. I promise.

Epiphany

This year the weather people are again talking about the cold that’s coming, the hard, icy winter - last year was supposed to be colder than any since 1962, the year that Sylvia Plath died, that terrible early February of the full moon and the howling wolves. I lived around the corner from her and remember it well. Or to be more precise the details I learned later became the imagined past and filled the place of memory. I read Ariel when I was fifteen, heard what happened just a short walk away from the flat where I lived with my mother and sister near Primrose Hill and I thought that if only I had known her I could have done something to change the situation, that we could have been friends and I could have saved her. That she may not at that point have welcomed the friendship of a nine-year-old child didn’t occur to me until years later, but by then the idea had lived in me so long it had taken a kind of root. And I wrote a story called “Saving Sylvia”. So it goes.

My neighbour says he is ready now for whatever comes. It can hail and sleet and huff and puff and his house can withstand it all. He is a builder. He has filled in all the cracks, lagged and plastered, rendered and made good. In our house there are cracks and imperfections but I think it will do and can’t help wanting the clean, sharp bite of real cold, something strong enough to harden the earth. Clear bright nights with stars. I fear it when I think of my children, grown as they are, out in it without enough warm clothes, but want it too, more than the long, grey, warm and wet days with cars slushing through congested streets and flooding in the low-lying parts of the county, the sky with its endless incontinent weeping and mutterings about the effects of global warming. I am ready for the cold.

And now it is almost epiphany. Here is the beginning of T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi”:

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’

Keep warm.