Monday 5 July

~  I wake, as I often do lately, from dreams of my sister.  They are not exactly happy dreams, often sad or troubling, or both, but they are sometimes beautiful, I think, and I welcome them all anyway.

~  A wonderful river walk at the chaos, with Rosie and Porridge.  The dogs are each intrepid in their own ways, and make us laugh, and the scenery is beautiful.  We lose each other, and find each other again, we take pictures and talk of important and less important things, we come back tired and relaxed and go our separate ways.  Molly is incredibly thirsty and drinks off two bowls of water striaght when we are back at our car; she forgot she could drink the river.  I look forward to going through the photos soon, meanwhile,

~ four lots of gear and tackle, ancient and modern, from my brother's place.

Reflections on boats

I first fell for boats, sailing boats, when I was about 10.  Before that it was horses.  My yearnings were for big things, animate or otherwise, which could carry me places and give me an exhilarating ride on the way; dolphins and magic carpets also swam and floated around the borders of my imagination.

I had riding lessons, for a year or two, which were OK; I'd cheerfully get up early on Sunday, and my dad and I drove through the bright or misty or frosty edges of Ashridge forest - I still dream of those roads and woods, I think.  He'd read, come and watch me ride for a bit, wander round the stables, chat with the rather posh stable owners.  Thinking back, they were rather pleasant times we had together, though neither of us made much of it.  He kept a bit of the countryman in his heart, and like his father, who had left the land on account of his family's poverty and his own fecklessness, since he prefered to head on down to Priddy horse fair, appraise the stock and chew the fat with the gypsies, so the story goes, than mind the sheep on Mendip, my dad liked to be around horses. 

However, though the hacks through the forest on fine mornings were great,  plodding round the indoor school on fed-up and stubborn ponies, their mouths hardened by the clumsy hands of  learner riders, grew uninspiring.  When the instructor, who was, I think, as fed up with her job as the ponies, hauled me off a bigger horse who I couldn't get to do anything, and got on him saying 'This horse is deaf to the leg, this is what you have to do...', thrashing him with her crop until he shook and stumbled, I decided that it was time for me and horsiness to go our separate ways.  Yet horses still have a place in my heart, horsy people rather less so.

Then I read 'Swallows and Amazons' and most of the Arthur Ransome canon, and my inner narrative switched and coalesced into that vision of independence and escape, to an island or a further shore, propelled by the wind and one's own gumption, of sheltering and feeding oneself, of cutting loose from the adult-ordered world, while still, of course, maintaining safe links to it.  I know Arthur Ransome is a terrible cliche of the English middle class childhood, that whole scathing critiques could be written about this from every psychological, sociological and historical persective, and that probably no child would even look at them now, but they were meat and drink to me then.  I wanted to live them out, and I wanted to sail. 

Practically this was difficult; even if such adventures had been possible in the Lake District of the 1920s they weren't in the Home Counties conurbations of the 1970s.  There weren't the 'Outward Bound' opportunities for kids then that there are now, so I had little chance to get on the water.  But they nourished further games and fantasies, and we did get a small inflatable dinghy (without a sail), which in summer Ruthie and I used to paddle about on a quiet stretch of the Grand Union canal, our parents steeling themselves presuambly against fears of our drowning, being poisoned by canal water (more likely than drowning) or being abducted, and in the winter we sometimes inflated it in our dining room and played 'Swallows and Amazons' around the gateleg table.  My parents were quite accommodating when I come to think.

About this time, my second brother came back from a stint working in Bermuda, where he had taken up sailing.  He climbed the box elder tree and slung up the rope ladder I had had for Christmas, and though, as I've remarked before, box elders are not well-designed for climbing, tree houses or other three-dimensional adjuncts to childhood fantasy, in a pair of red rope-soled shoes I'd found in a chandlers in Falmouth, I made believe I was climbing the rigging.  I can still make a reasonable fist of climbing a rope ladder, though I don't often get the opportunity.  He also gave me a couple of sailboat recognition books, which I loved; with the youngster's (particularly perhaps the boy's or tomboy's) fascination with typology which I was only just beginning to apply to birdbooks, I studied them until I could recognise and give chapter and verse on any dinghy or small yacht by its sail insignia, and identify any rig or mast configuration going.  Most of this has left me now.

Despite living in landlocked Herefordshire, my brother bought a small blue fibreglass Moth dinghy, and sailed it on Llangorse lake in Mid-Wales.  I was fairly impressed, but the Moth was purely and simply a ride, a light flat craft with a single sail for one person to scoot around the surface of the water on at speed - no room for a pudgy little sister on board - little more than a sailing surfboard, the forerunners to the as yet unknown windsurfers.  It wasn't quite what I was looking for, I wanted something to travel in, not just sit on.

Well, painted wings and giants' rings ... the craze dwindled and passed, and I never really got to sail.  By the time I was old enough to take up the offer of a PGL holiday I shrank from the idea of spending a fortnight in a crowd of other teenagers being energetic, preferring to stay with the familiarity of holidaying with my parents in the caravan with Scrabble and bird books and solitary exploration. The nearest I came was a few years later with my 6th form sailing club, a couple of the younger male teachers and a handful of students, pottering round a Sussex gravel pit in some old Mirror dinghies during the evening after school.  Looking back though, those sessions, the laughter, the relaxed chat and friendliness, the trips in the minibus to and fro stopping at the bakers, being wet, windblown and scruffy and somewhat outside of my usual orbit - I was never sporty in any way and the other students and teachers were not people I saw much otherwise- the clunky little wooden boats and their bright red sails, and the occasional pleasure of achieving a satisfactory manoeuvre in a gust of breeze, are very good memories from a time, my later teens, which on the whole I don't look back on with much rosiness.

The stories and dreams of childhood, the books, films, games and activities that create and feed them, don't all have to be lived out and fulfilled.  They don't all have to be a source of sorrow and failure and disappointent either. If we are allowed to hold to them as dreams on our own terms for as long as necessary, and not have them stripped brutally away, so we can weave and smooth and inlay them into our growing realities, they can be there for us always, revisiting and enriching our lives with surprising joy and intimacy.  

Now I live in a place where I can quite easily go and meander and dream around ports and harbours, and the sturdy old-style boats, like the sturdy old-style horses, are preserved and cherished, and that's really rather fine.  Since I never came to know and understand larger sailing boats from the floating, moving, in fact rather frightening, inside, seeing them in boatyards, up out of water, is like being able to wander among and look closely at awe-inspiring great creatures, tethered and docile and able to be approached, stroked and studied. They fill me with wonder, but not with any great longing.

Though I may yet take a trip across the bay in La Pauline...

Early

Move in and out of the absurd
margins of sleep, reach out a hand
enough to be held.  It seems I might roll
the shadows up tightly,
keep them somewhere strange.

The faith is steady but the liver is weak...

I suppose I am a very slightly disenchanted Pollyanna at this point, but not seriously so; blessings and silver linings still illuminate my life, be assured.

I think we were really less than convinced by the magnetiseur, though I'm not sorry we went. He was a quiet, gentle little man, living in the countryside on the edge of the town. He had a simple waiting room, with a notice saying he was registered for tax and would only see people after they had been to their doctors. His consulting room was plain and old fashioned with a couple of wooden beds and a desk. He told us his father had done this and he did the same things his father did.

He didn't touch any of the afflicted areas, only Tom's head and hovered about over what I assumed was his liver area. He said the liver was important as it was responsible for the toxins in the blood. (The French preoccupation with the liver is well-known, the English are supposed to be similarly focused on their bowels. I was initially somewhat taken aback , whenever one complained of feeling a little the worse for eating and drinking too much, to have it pronounced that one was suffering a 'crise de foie', not least because it could be mistaken for 'crise de foi', to which I was always tempted to reply, no, not at all, I have been happily and constructively agnostic for many years, but thanks for your interest in my spiritual welfare...)

Tom relaxed, and said afterwards that he was concentrating on being open and employing some familiar meditation techniques he thought might be helpful. After a bit, the chap left him there and took an ordinary bottle of still mineral water, over which he did a bit more hovering and stroking, while chatting to me about how his dad used to do this and how he wished he'd learned English but it was so badly taught at school in his day, 'trop literaire...'. I was a little concerned that surely if one is imparting one's magnetic gift to a bottle of water one ought to concentrate and not talk about other things, and did my best to avoid engaging in the conversation, but perhaps I underestimated his facility with the energies. He wrapped the bottle up in a page of Ouest France, and said to keep it out of the sunlight, as that was a different kind of energy which would counteract the magnetism. Tom was to drink a glass of it every morning before eating or drinking anything else, and then to drink it or apply it to the affected area as and when. He said the pain would continue but he had 'coupé le feu', cut off the fire.

We were there about half an hour, and he charged 18 euros. Though he'd said he was busy that morning, and he was open most days, there wasn't a great queue of people, plus he has to pay all his business charges and taxes, so he's not exactly laughing all the way to the bank. We both felt he was sincere.

On the way back, it rained cats and dogs all the way down the bit of the dual carriageway I was dreading, and we found out the Saxo's heater didn't work, so Tom had to keep wiping the inside of the windscreen by hand while I drove, and also that the 'défaut d'étanchéité' that had been specified on the controle technique (MOT) document as needing to be fixed sometime, but which none of us, including our French garagist had been able to identify the exact nature of, was in fact a fault of the seal around the windscreen, and my feet got rather wet. I was tempted to rail against the vendors for selling me a car with a defective heater and a built-in foot spa, but on balance I shall give them the benefit of the doubt that perhaps they didn't know, since it's been very warm and dry lately, and Saturday's conditions were exceptionally foul. They did actually e-mail me this morning saying they hoped everything was OK, so I shall assume their good faith. Anyway, it's better to know about the problems, which are not major ones, now, before it goes in for its overhaul, than on my first day back at work on a dank October morning. Pollyanna rides again.

After this quite stressful journey, and despite stopping off for a brioche sucrée at Tartapain, Tom said he felt worse than ever, and that really he didn't think the magnetism had worked at all and the man probably had no special powers. As I can't feel how he's feeling, I'm can't argue with this.

However, though he'd deny, probably rightly, that it had anything to do with it, and that his faith is better placed in antibiotics, antivirals and very strong paracetamol, though he's still getting pains, and coughing from the chest infection, though much less, and feeling exhausted quite a lot, nevertheless he has a brightness and warmth about him he didn't have before, and things are, in a two steps forward, one step back manner, improving. That night, he had a dream of such bittersweet, haunting power and vividness, about being lost and then restored, that it made me cry just to hear about it. We'll never know, of course, and perhaps he's have been making an even better recovery if he'd just stayed at home in the warm, but if we hadn't tried, I'd always have been wondering if it would have done any good to do so. And at least we found out the car heater didn't work.

The other thing that I thought was interesting was that the magnet man said he had seen an inordinate number of people with shingles over the last three weeks, as well as confirming the outbreak of chicken pox at the primary and infant schools I'd already heard about from a neighbour with a young child. Yet, as he said, it makes no sense, as shingles can't be passed on from person to person, but is a recurrent form of the chicken pox virus usually contracted from years before. It almost seems as though the virus has a collective life of its own, in spite of being contained within discrete human bodies, and it rises like a tide. Though this too is anecdotal and probably can't be proven.

~~~

Just in response to a few of your other comments on the last post; the dining room really doesn't always look that tidy and uncluttered, when I took that picture we'd recently had people to lunch, and beforehand I'd cleared all the surfaces around to put things on, then everything had been cleared off and the spare chairs taken away so it really was spick and span. But it's all very newly done, so I did want to show it at its best.

One day I'll scan in a few of the photos of the house as it used to be, and you can see what Tom has used up his health and strength achieving. ( I have helped. Helped with the house, that is, not with using up his health and strength, although...)

As to the garden, I must stress I can take no credit there either, other than perhaps making the odd suggestion of plants I like. It's Tom's baby, I am simply the lawn mower operative and occasional weeder, as you can see, not very assiduous in either capacity!

And just a word on computer chairs, though this one looks comfortable and ergonomic, it isn't terribly, and it wasn't the cheapest. But it's probably worth shopping around for a good one, and you probably get what you pay for. I am the world's worst sitter, and cannot maintain a nomal straight posture for any time, but kneel, curl, tuck feet under me, put them up on the knee rest, whatever, which I blame on short legs, and I broke the last ordinary office chair we had.

~~~

Oh, and as promised, the funny our friend sent us. I suppose the more religiously sensitive of you may prefer to look away, but perhaps that is to patronise you. Anyway, it made us laugh. It was allegedly a bonus exam question at the University of Washington.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Student Answer

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell,then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, 'It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,' and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct......leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting 'Oh my God.'

(THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+.)

~~~

And finally, a quick collage. Evening walks and the low sun have lately yielded a luminosity of linear green maize shoots and the rosy red heads of sorrel, mostly going over now, and those fuzzy etched looking umbellifers I still haven't got around to identifying. These all beguile me every year. Still not disenchanted.

(It should click up big. I used to take ages planning Picasa grid collages, now I just throw them together and take ages clicking on the new Picasa 3 'Shuffle pictures' button till I get one I like.)

I'll once more set about the business of trying to get round you all. I'd have made more headway yesterday, but we had about four hours of power cut, so it was back to Henry Adams and the 12th century, though he tended to favour the 13th. (Damn, finding that Wiki link, I've just discovered he was repellently antisemitic. Wish I hadn't seen that...)

If you've got this far, thanks for reading.

Three poems from a virus-struck time, and self-portraits in the new toaster. There doesn't have to be a point...

Feeling much better, thanks.

Three bits and pieces from the time.

Early

Thresheld, standing between the mist
and the brown, unleavened content
of the house, when a bird comes,
circles, its wings lapping slowly,
then resolves into the haze.

Morning myopic, blurred, its shape,
movement, nature, all slip
between my vision's fingers.

Grudgingly grateful, I accept
the gift of unknowing.

[Too many drafts, can't tell which is best. The curse of needing to know what birds are...]



Idling

Cutting nails by the bedroom window, dropping
the ragged crescents into the mauve plastic bin,
I enumerate my fingerprints: left,
three right loops, one to the left,
with an egregious whorl on the wedding ring finger;
right, four leftward loops and a double one right on the index.

My sight hops, skips and jumps out of the window,
to dug earth, tree and cloud shapes.


Honey and water

Honey and water, simple, a simple,
hotter and sweeter than blood.
Makes no claims, no demands
to heal, raise, restore, drive out the invader,
or furnish with riches, just offers
kindness.

~~~

The old toaster summarily threw the trip switch twice and was equally summarily dispatched to the waiting room for the déchetterie. The hot-cross buns for Friday's breakfast had to be grilled on the stovetop. It's replacement is twice the size, which means no more juggling keeping one batch hot while preparing the next.

However, when divested of its packaging, it proved to have a dent in its otherwise flawless stainless steel surface. Mild gnashing of teeth, but toast for the weekend was more important than driving all the way back to the supermarket to grumble about it.

And I became beguiled by the interesting distortions the dent produced, and tried to capture them.

I have dreamed a couple of times lately that I have forgotten the camera, left it behind somewhere. Absent minded and inclined to forget my head as I am, I never, touchwood, have been known to forget the camera, I take good care of it.

But I am forgetting to use it, or just not bothering with it as much. I am beset with the sense that either the pictures are pointless, or I've already taken them, there's nothing new. I toy with the idea of upgrading, getting something fancier, in the belief it will renew my motivation, which is probably a mistake.

I think the dreams may be saying I need to redress this, and take the pictures anyway, that I and the camera are missing one another. Hence daft pictures of dented toasters, and maybe other equally inconsequential things to come...

As it turned out...

As it turned out
the backyard was a forest.

Within its shuttered space
the trees towered tall,
neck-craningly, taller than tall.
They arched with saddened grace,
sacred and measured as cathedral ribs,
dark red against opaque blue night.
Then, through their vaulted canopy,
a fragment of a flake white moon.

We stood in brokenness
for me to understand
they grew from your earth,
not mine.

I seem to think
you took my hand.