Subtle Notes

In Brighton, where I have been intensely occupied listening to seagulls.  They have been in full voice here, even at midnight, when the ululation bears no resemblance to the cat's mew or querulous chatter one sometimes hears in the day.

Attending to these has not really left room for much else, but yesterday I found myself (don't ask) sitting in a white room with a psychic medium who claimed to have a message for me from a dead relative whose name began with B.  If there were any possibility of finding a connection I would have done so, even with going into second and last names, but of B there was no-one I could bring to mind, nor of the colour orange and pots of marmalade which were manifesting somewhere in the astrality.  I would very much like to have heard from my communist/atheist father-in-law who made a promise that when he passed over and if the possibility ever presented itself then he would communicate, with a very particular message that we agreed on.  But his name began with O and we never touched on the subject of marmalade, though he did eat it on toast every morning for breakfast.  There was another message for me - not from B but a different entity - which was a suggestion that I take my aged mater to tea.  Joke?  Mater did actually ring me a couple of days ago to say that her deranged spouse ("he's nuts") had gone out and so the coast was clear for a visit - but there wouldn't have been time for me to get there before his return.  The seagulls have been talking endlessly about all this, debating between themselves about the best way to proceed, but so far there has been no consensus.

Went to my first ever proper wine-tasting last week - arranged by the Signs children as a post-birthday treat for their dad.  I am not a wine sophisticate.  All I ask is that my whites are crisp and clean and my reds are smooth and mellow, and I seem to miss the subtler 'notes'.  Perhaps it is something like being colour-blind or tone-deaf, I just don't get the essence of berry, leather or earth that the others picked up. The exception is perhaps Rioja, which to my mind tastes of my dad because it was his favourite wine.  I couldn't drink much and didn't feel like availing myself of the spittoon, so took a couple of sips and shared the rest out - apart from the dessert wine, which I loved because it tasted of honey.  Even so it was enjoyable hearing our Guide talk us through the various wines.  I love an Enthusiast and it almost doesn't matter what the subject is, though tasting as one goes along does give substance to it.

The real question, when all is said and done, he said as we neared the end of our session, is: does this wine make my life better?

A first response might be that this is a big ask of a bottle of wine.  But what a fabulous question.  And how might it be if one applied this to almost everything?  Obviously the morning cup of coffee would get an unequivocal thumbs up, but the cigarette begins to get complicated.  Yes - but then again possibly no.  And when applied to human relationships - where to begin?  There are, as I am sure the psychic medium would agree, a whole tangle of karmic as well as emotional cords that bind us to each other and every grown-up fule kno that "life isn't all ha ha hee hee".

I am prepared to compromise.  If not actually life-enhancing, then at least it has to be quaffable or at any rate not downright unpleasant.  Anything sour and toxic?  Spit it out and don't have any more of it.  And finish up with something that brings a taste of honey.

Slings and Arrows

 

 

Good news.  My doctor has given the thumbs up to coffee, chocolate and smoking.  Ok she is not a GP, she is the alternative kind who dispenses small sugar pills with exotic-sounding names and occasionally some lines of verse by Rudolf Steiner – but she is also a proper, medically-trained doctor.  Just in case you want to argue.  But why would you?  Here is the low-down: if you have low blood pressure, coffee first thing is brilliant and much healthier than any medicine that might be prescribed; stress is much worse for you than cigarettes and if the latter helps with the former then smoking can be seen as a health measure; chocolate, and sweet things in general, can help to bring “organisation” into the body.  Obviously one does not want to bring any of this under the harsh light of sensible scrutiny.  She would probably throw wine into the mix but the sad fact is that I can’t tolerate more than a little of this.  If it were otherwise I might, like the mater’s husband, begin drinking before breakfast and carry on till bedtime.  He is nearly ninety, so clearly it hasn’t done him any harm, unless one factors in what feels suspiciously like paranoid personality disorder, but that may have nothing to do with wine.  At time of writing he is not allowing the mater (who has Alzheimers) to have contact with me – hence my smoking as health measure.  It has been a time of stress and upset.  One has weathered this before, but this time it feels more entrenched and there is no telling how the situation will resolve.

 

Last night I felt too sad to eat.  This morning I breakfasted on kiwi fruit, fried fish and latte, made with my lovely Bialetti espresso-maker.  I breathed in the scent of mint and roses, given from my friend’s garden, now in a jug on the kitchen table. I am thinking about how the exhortation (in school hymns, in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio) to Be Joyful sometimes struck me as peremptory but actually makes a lot of sense.  Joy may sometimes come as a kind of grace, but mostly we have to do it for ourselves.  For some this is an extraordinary achievement in the face of overwhelming dreadfulness.  For me there is enough else to be joyful about to make it a properly sustainable activity.  I spent a couple of nights with daughter in Hackney last week and met with son for lunch.  My children are loving and beautiful = Joy.  I left my phone charger at daughter’s flat but neighbour had a spare one so she didn’t have to send it in the post.  The washing machine broke down and we thought we would have to replace it but then Mr. Signs (though he didn’t know how) fixed it.  While these might not come under the heading of Joy, it is still worth celebrating small wins of the more mundane kind.  As Tesco so eloquently puts it: every little helps. 

 

I got drunk in the middle of the day on Saturday.  I can’t remember when that last happened, and when it did it was probably for a more cheerful reason than wanting an anaesthetic for the emotions.  The after-effects (discounting the physical) were such that on Sunday I felt moved to attempt a visit to the mater’s house, making myself believe that the substance of good will and sanity would triumph over the forces of darkness, and that all manner of things would be well.  It was not a success.  Perhaps insanity is contagious, or the after-effects of drunkenness more interesting than we know, but I climbed out of the car outside Signs Cottage and announced that I was Jesus Christ.  My neighbour (the one with the roses) exploded with laughter = Joy.  The next day we went for a walk and I found a piece of twig with a catapult-like fork at the end of it.  It either represents a sling of the kind that David used against Goliath or a two-fingered salute. Whichever, it seemed to be an auspicious Sign.  Back outside my neighbour’s house, a young sparrow in mid-flight hurled itself against her kitchen window and fell dead at our feet.  The milky-white film was over its eye and there was no reviving it. 

 

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?  And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will (Matthew 10.29)

 

We wrapped the lovely creature in kitchen roll and binned it. 

The sparrow was not sent as an omen to forewarn me.  And I am not Jesus Christ. 

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. 

"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.