A Very Sensible Man

I went to visit one of my elderly ladies this afternoon. These visits are meant to cheer them up and provide a little relief in an otherwise rather lonely day.
I usually take the dog along with me, he is well-behaved and provides a small focus to get them away from talking about their failing health.

Conversation is limited, I try to introduce some local gossip, ask for news of friends and family, and find out who, if anybody, has visited them.

Marjorie is in her mid to late eighties, not very well and mobile only with assistance, but otherwise bright and as cheerful as somebody in her situation can be.

Asking after their health is a must, and I always prepare myself for a long tale of woe.

But today Marjorie had a very unexpected tale to tell. She recently had a spell in hospital, one of several in the last eighteen months. She has been complaining throughout that time that nobody will tell her what’s wrong with her and she’s been getting quite cross with the medical and nursing professions.

A few days ago a doctor, a locum filling in while her regular Practitioner was away, made a house call.

“I see that you have been asking for information on what’s wrong with you”, he said to Marjorie.

“Yes”, said Marjorie, “I don’t know why nobody will tell me anything. It’s as if nobody has been able to make a diagnosis”.

The doctor looked at Marjorie, considered for a moment, and then pulled several sheets of paper from his bag.

“My dear, I have here a list of things we think are wrong with you, let me read it out to you”.

Which is what he did, starting with minor ailments and progressing to more important ones. He finished with the first sheet and was about to turn over and continue, when he looked up and asked,

“Do you want me to go on? Or shall I just tell you what is wrong with you?
The fact of the matter is, that old age has caught up with you, your body is wearing out. AND THERE IS NOT A DAMN THING I CAN DO ABOUT IT !
So you might as well accept it and make the most of what you have left.”

When Marjorie told me this story she was beaming with pride, and oddly gratified. “You see”, she said to me, “He sized me up, he decided that I could take it, he just went ahead. Now I will stop worrying, I will do as much as I can and stop fretting about what’s beyond me. I’ll rest when I need rest and sleep when I want to. I’ll eat what I can, when I can and enjoy it while I can.”

“And I’ll tell you something else”, she added, “I am really quite relieved”.

It actually showed, she looked a lot better than she has done for weeks.

Show Offs

The three greatest show-offs in my garden

at the end of May are

this small Polemonium

or Jabob's Ladder

Friko's very own Papaver

or Scarlet Poppy

and the Trollius

or Globe Flower

(grown in a tub, because it wants boggy ground

to be really happy.

Two examples of the popular teabreak

These you will find growing in the garden at any time

o-o-o-o-o

For those bakers amongst you who like to show off, here is the recipe for the Whitsun cheese-cake, traditionally baked today, on the 28th May:-

Take twelve pints of milk warm from the cow and turn it with a good spoonful of rennet. Break it well and put it into a large strainer, in which roll it up and down, that all the whey may run out. Then break the curds and wring it again, and more whey will come. And so break and wring till no more will come. Work the curds exceedingly with your hand in a tray, till they become a short uniform paste. Then put to it the yolks of eight new laid eggs, two whites and a pound of butter. Work all this long together, for in the long working consisteth for working them good. Then season them to your taste with sugar finely beaten, and put in some cloves and mace in subtle powder. Lay them thick in coffins of fine paste, and so bake them.

How To Pass The Time On A Boring Drive

As most of you know, I live in rural England, far from modern amenities, including shops. Every major refill of larder and store cupboard requires a round trip of two hours' duration, if we want to use the large supermarkets for the purpose. Sometimes we talk, at other times we just sit and wish we lived somewhere else, nearer to a big town. We do this about every three to four weeks, which means that  these trips provide us with the opportunity to study the effects of the changing seasons.

Yesterday we talked, we were in a slow-moving stream of traffic and there was plenty of time to admire the pretty countryside. The hawthorn hedges were in full bloom.

"Spring this year has been a bit like a performance at the Music Halls".

"Oh yes? How come?"

"Well, Spring has been late and it seems that each act has been on for just five minutes, trying to hog the stage;  while the next act's already waiting in the wings,  pushing and shoving to get centre stage".

" Just look at the hedgerows. The cow parsley could be the chorus line".

" Yes, I can see that. All frothy and frou-frou".

"The dandelions have had their spectacular five minutes in the sun, now they've gone faded and blowsy and their glory days are over.

Look at them, their hair's already turned white, there are far too many of them, gone to seed and turned out to grass. Nobody wants an old dame, everybody runs for cover when they see them coming, Sad, really".

"Look at that hedge over there; broom, lilac and hawthorn all jostling for space at the same time. Perhaps they are the can can dancers, petticoats flashing, legs kicking".

"We must be coming up to the main attraction, here come the chorines, a whole field of them, dancing and swaying in the breeze, each pretty little thing beaming and turning to the sun,  each trying to attract our attention".

"Ah, here she is, the one we've all been waiting for, teasing and twirling, tantalizing and tempting".

"The Stripper!"

o-o-o-o-o-o

We seem to have got our metaphors slightly mangled during the drive and blithely swept from music hall, to vaudeville, to strip joint. Never having experienced any of them, I think we may be forgiven.

On the way home we left the delights of nature to get on with it and had a splendid lunch instead.

Getting Older

Salvador Dali 1940

Three Ages

Having posted on the physical effects of getting older in the previous post, I now have a more positive tale to tell.

At the last poetry group meeting the subject just happened to be ‘old age’, a subject which has exercised poets through the ages; some have bewailed old age, others found it  frightening, yet there are those for whom old age has many positive sides.

At these meetings we not only read poems that deal with the subject, which is set in advance, we also discuss the poems and the  poets who wrote them and to finish off there is usually a general discussion of our own perception of the subject matter, both anecdotal and as a result of research. The members of the poetry group are mostly of retirement age; several are well into their seventies. Old age is a matter of personal experience for most, not something which will happen in the distant future; it has either happened already or is not that far off.

I was delighted to hear one elderly lady say :” You know, I am glad of my age. I  feel I have gained a perspective on history simply by living through it. I am enjoying these years of reflection very much.”

I know that this lady is a widow, whose children live some distance away and have busy lives of their own; this happens to be the case for so many older women. She suffers from ME and has to have several periods of rest during the day, which she uses to study and read. I know that she is about to enrol in a correspondence course on science having recently finished a course on prehistoric man.

As so many of you, who commented on the previous post, said : "One door closes and another door opens".

One of the poems I read at the meeting was by Elaine Feinstein, one of my favourite poets.:


Getting Older


The first surprise, I like it.
Whatever happens now, some things
that used to terrify have not:


I didn't die young, for instance. Or lose
my only love. My three children
never had to run away from anyone.


Don't tell me this gratitude is complacent.
We all approach the edge of the same blackness
which for me is silent.


Knowing as much sharpens
my delight in January freesia,
hot coffee, winter sunlight. So we say


as we lie close on some gentle occasion:
every day won from such
darkness is a celebration.




So, Goodbye Tension, Hallo Pension!

Sad Times

It's been on the cards for a while

but now it's official:

music will have to be locked in a box, never to see the light

of day, of concert hall, of salon again.

The enemy

made his presence felt long ago, 

his advance has been steady,

now the invasion is complete.

The war is lost, 

arthritis rules the day!

The Consultant said so: there is no chance of the shoulder joint being repaired to make any meaningful playing possible. What has brought pleasure, now brings pain: an occupational hazard.

Strangely, I am by far the sadder of the two us.

Miscellany

I can't think of anything very meaningful to say today, so I'll probably waffle even more than I usually do. How about letting this chap show me the way? Or could he possibly be a beggar?

Can you see him?

Air Accidents

At this time of year there are always baby birds, which fell out of the nest a few hours or days too soon, hopping about the garden, chirping and calling pitifully for Mum and Dad to bring a juicy worm, and 'please show me again, how I can make these soft, useless, fluffy feathers lift me up into the air, out of harm's and the cats' way'. For me that means a few days of vigilance, setting the dog on any cat which examines the garden too curiously and periodically checking progress, always ready to pick the bird up and set in the branch of a tree. At the moment it's a baby blackbird.

Click on the photo

and you can see how immature the

feathers still are.

I took this photo yesterday morning and everything is still fine this evening. The parents are feeding regularly and young Pecksniff with his wobbly wing is safely hidden under a dense shrub for most of the time.

Urgent Shopping

I've been to the nursery to look what's on offer.  

Plant nurseries are like books stores; I can never pass one without buying something. This plant nursery was totally on my way, just an hour's detour; unfortunately I couldn't continue with the errand I was doing because I couldn't very well leave the dog there, and once he was back in the car there was only room for the plants and not other shopping.

Apart from the dog, this is what I came away with.

Not more Bloody Poetry !

Fear not, not here for the moment, but I have started a wholly self-indulgent poetry blog, Friko's Poetry and Pictures, where I shall publish all my favourite poems without let or hindrance, thus saving poetry haters from accidentally stumbling over poetry bores. I would be happy to publish other poetry bores' favourite poems, we could have a positive poetry orgy!

Perish the thought !

May Landscape

I remember the land of my childhood on the Dutch-German border as gentle and mostly silent. A peaceful land, neither dramatic nor exciting, with wide skies and clouds always in a hurry to move on. A low hill here and there hardly dares show itself, the earth is spread wide and flat and green and fertile. The observer’s wandering eye is allowed an endless supply of nourishing horizon-fare. Blossoming orchards are dotted between the lush meadows; streams, brooks and the mighty river Rhine keep all supplied with life-giving moisture. Once out of the industrial cities, small villages embedded in this landscape show off neat and tidy houses with scrubbed faces and pretty, tidy little vegetable and flower gardens. The sun’s rays are always clothed in a thin veil of silver radiance, soft mists envelop and dampen the view on all but the hottest summer days.

This is a landscape for walkers, cyclists at most. This is a landscape where rest is inbuilt, the wanderer will not tire himself or herself; a welcoming inn beckons from morning to night and there is no need for making great plans beforehand, take your time and let your steps, or bicycle,  take you where they will.





Soft greens and browns of  hedgerow, copse and field, pink and white blossoms, muddy ponds colonized by emerging water lilies, a tinkling stream still holding late meltwater, all these  bring peace of mind; pliant earth makes walking easy and if you are cycling, there are many paths set aside especially for you. Willow trees assume their shimmering, glimmering spring coats. In the meadows black and white cows gently chivvy their calves after a long winter in the stable. And above you, if you are very lucky, invisible larks will hurl their joyful song into the canopy of  the endless sky.

This Landscape is good, tender, friendly and full of little miracles. It is the landscape of May.

Diaries

Last night I finally caught up with my current diary; I hadn’t made any entries for several weeks and it was becoming a question of looking at the household engagement diary and copying dates. I hate the kind of diary which says “and then I did - - - - -,  and then I went - - - - -, ” as much as I dislike blogs of that nature.

I have written diaries of one sort or another, my own and invented ones, for many years, starting as a child. I still write them now, by hand, in ordinary school exercise books, lined and with margins, the sort of exercise books used  by morons, who write with tongue sticking out from between moist, slightly open lips, while mouthing each word as they press on their pencils to keep within the lines.

As a teenager I got into serious trouble because of it. I read a lot of unsuitable books from an early age and being a solitary child with a feverish imagination, I thought I could do as well, or better. Transferring some of the more insalubrious passages, in my own, still rather childish words, and altered to fit  my ideas of the femme fatale I was training to become, to my own diaries, was good writing practice, I thought. And fun too, of course.

My mother thought differently. She must have been sneaking peeks at my various diaries for some time and when she came upon a passage describing adventures I really should not have known about, ( and actually didn’t, in reality) she made a very unfortunate comment in the diary, in large letters, across a whole page. Poor Mum. Finding this comment the next time I opened the diary was devastating for me.

The whole sorry episode ended with my mother feeling a complete and very angry fool and me tearing up the diaries.

I still read unsuitable books, but now I know what they are talking about and a purple passage stimulates my funny bone rather than erotic imagination. I also have first hand knowledge on the subject of my own to fall back on, when necessary.

Several years later, I re-started writing diaries until I now have a whole wooden chest full of be-scribbled paper and exercise books. I used to hide them, although I know that there were others who found them and occasionally read them, until I found a new hiding place. I got my revenge on mum by writing in a language she couldn’t read and on an ex-husband by writing in shorthand and in a foreign language, adapting the one to the other, just in case.

It must have been infuriating for them.

Only once did I forgive an uninvited reader and that was when an entry was used to trace me in an emergency. But that really is a very private story.

I am very happy that I no longer need to hide any writing, imagined or factual.

The Scraper Arrives Back Home.

This is the 27th and final episode of the Scraper's Diary, continued from the previous post.


Sunday,  April 13th, 1947

We are in one of those long, twelve-tabled carriages.
Ginger and I sit at one table, Jack is opposite, across the corridor. Ray and Taff are reading at another, and a solo school is going strong next to them, Stan, Bob, Jock and Ken. A few more of our blokes are situated at strategic points, while two tables are occupied by some arty civvies who travelled over on the boat, a perfumed black man, a precious man in blue, and two sycophantic women.


"What's trumps?"

" . . . a perfectly divine little man who cooked like an angel . . . "

"entrance to a mine, in five letters - - -"

"Cor, - - -  me,  I've saved the wrong bloody suit"

"Ever read this? It's a smashing book".

"No darling, no trouble at all; he just said, 'anything to declare, sweetheart', and I said, 'no, nothing at all', and I walked right through".

"Got a pen, old man?"

"No bombs fallen round here, makes a change, don't it?"

"Remember that tart in Husum?"

"Keep your mind on the bloody game, will you".

"Home at last. Good old England again".

"I darned nearly scuttled myself, when we went in".

"Couldn't speak a word of English".

"You might give me a gasper, darling, I'm positively dying for a smoke".

"One more revoke from you, Say, and you'll get . . . ."

" only two cigarettes too . . . ."


And the dead trees stretching themselves before the real awakening, and the few, high, expansive clouds in a dreamless sky.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o

I have compiled a separate list of all the articles bought on the black or grey markets in Germany during the six weeks we spent there; others in the band bought - and stole - far more. In my pack and music case I have 2 watches, camera equipment, a lighter, some lace, toys, jewellery, a pen, an electric iron, German stamps, sheet music, wooden plates, books and scent. I spent a grand total of 1185 cigarettes, one ounce of tobacco, thirteen bars of soap, two bars of chocolate and three and a quarter pounds of coffee. These cost me the princely sum of £3.1.10.

Not bad, but, as I said, this is modest compared to some blokes' loot.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o

I can't read anymore for a bit. The bright sunlight on my face draws my eyes outward to the swelling hills and the rich brown fields. Old hedgerows reflecting the sun, two brilliant lovers laughing in a field, a quiet stream shuffling over stones; the sudden, cool blazing of a bridge, fields still flooded here and there, and trees whose bareness in the new warmth seems a freedom rather than a martyrdom. English telegraph wires and England racing into my Spring life at fifty miles an hour, and laughing away there, chuffed to busting.

I feel fine and clean and unusually young. The country is lovely and it is England. All I want now is a drop of leave. And a drop of tea, how could I forget that, a cup of tea.

Cuxhavn, Harburg, Celle, Minden, Bad Oeynhausen, Bielefeld, Hamm, Duesseldorf, Wuppertal, Moenchen-Gladbach, Cologne, Dortmund, Osnabrueck, Oldenburg, Wilhelmshavn, Bremen, Verden, Muensterlager, Soltau, Hamburg, Husum, Itzehoe, Rendsburg, Kiel, then Hamburg and Cuxhavn again.

And now it is all history.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o

We are now at Basingstoke, for half an hour. A line of us in the buffet discovered a mirror on the opposite wall, which reflected all of us at once. all waiting to be served mugs of tea.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Larkhill, Royal Artillery Camp, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire,  Monday, April 14th, 1947

The sun is shining brightly. The lady in the cigarette shop asks how we enjoyed the trip. The lady in the newsagent's asks how the weather was, 'it's been so terrible here'. The lady in the chemist's says that I can't get quinine without a prescription.

This is England, and the sun is shining.

In the cookhouse, the tables are dirty, the meat is tough, the greens are uneatable. The washing up water is dirty and insufficient. The A.T.S. servers are rude.

This is Larkhill, my Larkhill, and I'm back, and I know I'm back.

The Scraper Is Going Home!

Aboard S.S. 'Empire Rapier'    -   Saturday, April 12th, 1947.

I am snatching a few moments to write this after dinner, which looked like it was meant to be a half-way mark between the food of the last six weeks and that to which we are returning.

Everything about this voyage is smoother and slicker than the last. The boat is faster and the weather is as different from the snow and gales of six weeks ago as possible. There is a pretty stiff wind blowing, but the sun is shining gaily and the sea is quite warm, and, above all, the table stays still.

We have a wide, curving wake of pure, milky foam and nothing seems to impede the almost visible purposefulness of the ship. The sky is unclouded and the visibility excellent. There is no ice floating about.  Instead, we got stuck on a sandbank for two hours during the night.

Psychologically speaking, one of the most interesting symptoms of our homeward sickness - and a sign more finite than the voyage that we have left Germany - is the sudden generosity of the band. We were issued with forty cigarettes each this morning, and since then I have accepted five from other lads - more than I have been offered in the last three weeks! I suppose that it's natural enough, but I have smoked far too may cigarettes already.

Most of the blokes aboard are grouphappy, or else going on leave, but there is no air of gaiety, that air that seems to be so obvious to lady journalists. We are just going to England, that's all, because the ship happens to be going there.

A bloke two bunks away is torturing a mouthorgan, and, incidentally, me.  Smoking is prohibited down here; every soldier in sight has a lighted fag in his mouth. The ship is trembling with unspeakable and unnecessary emotion.

Memo to self: must decide what articles to declare, and what story to tell if found out.

o-o-o-o-o-o

ENGLAND!  -  Sunday, April 13th, 1947

"Oh to be in England, etc ".
I have said that several times lately and even after only six weeks of exile, England holds something that is more than just a welcome.

I am sitting in the shabby carriage of a slow train, looking through the dirty windows at the furtive smoke insinuating its pollution into the fresh fields' laughter.

And yet it is not as slow, and the seats are softer, and the fields yet smile, and even the smoke breathes purpose more than there.

The squat, smoky houses by the way are squalid and sullen in the sun.
And yet they do not cringe in the air, and there are not acres of devastation and despair as there have been there.

Doncaster. The sun is bright, and Spring seems to have kissed our return, and laid her benediction upon us. The ground, cindery, is strewn with litter between the rails. Scraps of paper, dog ends, orange peel, the rails have rusty sides and careworn hypnotic faces. A pile of deserted mailbags lies disconsolately on platform five, oozing melancholy.

This is England, we are home, and it is in no sense bitterly, but a conscious knowing of the land, and yet loving.

We docked at eleven thirty last night and at eight this morning we joined the tail of the queue before the customs shed, growing steadily more and more apprehensive.

We arrived at the head of the queue.

"Any spirits. cameras, binoculars, or watches?" said the man.
"No", we said.

He looked at us.

"Oh", he said, "Band, eh? Go straight through" and doubtless added "too dumb to smuggle", under his breath.

The train was waiting by the quayside. We got aboard and waited; the train moved a few hundred yards and stopped. We waited.

Now going through the yards at Doncaster, I have made up my winnings at solo to one pound in English money. The sun is shining courageously on the page, but I cannot find a really comfortable writing position.

Roll On. Bloody Roll On.

o-o-o-o-o-o

There is just one short instalment to come before the Scraper reaches his destination and therefore the end of this diary. I will post this tomorrow.

Happiness is also . . . . .

A misty, drizzly, morning

I feel never happier than when I’ve done a day’s hard labour in the garden. Gardener insists that I work with him when he comes; we work for seven hours, with only a short break for lunch and two breaks for a cup of tea.

I love it.

It was cold and damp and windy in the morning; I was more than half hoping gardener would decide to stay away, so when I looked out of the window and saw him walking round the back garden while I was lingering over my second cup of breakfast tea, I was almost disappointed at not getting a lazy Saturday to myself; especially as we had been out to dinner with friends the night before and not got home until midnight.

Once out in the garden, woolly hat and fleecy jacket on, trowel and secateurs at the ready, wheelbarrow, spade, fork and rake in position, there was no stopping me.







I started with the pelargoniums (indoor geraniums to most people), which needed potting on. I counted about fifty. Normally, they’d go out into pots and borders now, but the weather being as capricious as April this May, I can’t risk it.  Gardener shoveled muck, and trimmed and redefined border and lawn edges. Neat and tidy edging makes a big difference to the look of a garden.

Some of the pelargoniums waiting to be potted on.

We then turned our attention to a particular bed which has suffered a lot of frost damage. We took out an ancient hebe, which had seen better days, trimmed back a choisya – at the wrong time of year, because we cut off a lot of the  summer flowering branches, but nasty, slimy, brown frost bitten leaves do not look good – and finally turned to the bay tree.  Last autumn it was still a magnificent specimen, mature and dense, actually a bit too large, beginning to outgrow its space.

I took a deep breath and started to hack away at it, cutting out branches, stripping the remaining ones of all leaves, leaving only a trimmed-back pompom at the very tips. I want to turn it into a ‘cloud’ tree. It looks pretty awful now, but If it works, it will be an interesting and unusual shaped shrub to have, if it doesn’t, there’s not much harm done, because it might shoot again from lower down. That is, if it is indeed still alive. Cloud trees and shrubs fascinate me; as so many of these interesting ideas about unusual treatment of plants, it comes from Japan.

  

The fernery/shrubbery was next. For once, the harsh winter has done some good; all my native ferns seem to have benefited; the tree fern ‘Dicksonia’ is dead, of course, but then that was to be expected. No Australian would be up to last winter’s temperatures, no matter how well wrapped, wusses that they are. I’ve waited until now to attack my private enemy Number One, the lesser celandine, which loves the fernery and hides among the fronds. Now that I can see the first croziers unfurling, I can deal with them.




My garden is bordered by English Heritage land along one side; some tree surgeons had operated on trees in the castle ground and chipped the wood there and then, leaving vast piles just spread over the bank. Very useful stuff for covering paths, wood chippings. So gardener and I clambered up and filled four large sacks. The path along the fernery looks splendid now, the chippings came in very handy!




Saturday morning I thought I might manage a couple of hours’ work, two hours turned into seven and I was still loath to come in. The experts who say that outdoor exercise is the best medicine for a gloomy outlook are right, happiness is a sore back, rough hands and muddy knees, provided a hot shower and a glass of sherry are available when the work is done.

All of the photos were taken this morning when the sun was out.

Museum Pieces

Want to feel old?

Talk to your grandchildren.

Granddad, how did you watch TV when you were small?
We didn’t have TV. TV didn’t exist.

But who told you stories?
My Grandad did.

But you had music, right?
Oh yes, we made music.

Made music? How?
We played musical instruments and we sang.

You did? That’s weird.
Not at all, we enjoyed it.

But when you just wanted to listen to music, what did you do then?
We had a radio.

What’s a radio?
A box with knobs on the front. When you turn them, music comes out.


Okay, maybe that was a little excessive, let's try mothers and daughters instead.


Mum, what colour was your mp3 player?
We didn’t have them when I was a child.

But how did you listen to music when you were out?
On a walkman.

What’s a walkman?
A gadget for listening to cassette tapes.

What are cassettes?
Little square boxes with long reels of tape inside.

Could you put CDs into your walkman?
They didn’t exist then. We had LPs.

Eh?
LPs, large, black, round discs, for playing music.

And how did they fit into your walkman?
They didn’t. We had record players. There were no CD players either.

Mum, what kind of mobile phone did you have?
I’m afraid, darling, they didn’t exist either.

Didn’t exist? How did you call home when you needed a lift?
There were public phone boxes.

Eh?
We had stationary telephones, on a string, with a kind of wheel with numbers from 0 – 9.

So how did you get in touch with friends. How did you send them photos and texts?
You spoke to them in person, when you met them.

Really? In the evening, did you mail them?
We had no email. There were no computers.

Eh? No computers?  So how did you do your homework without the internet?
Yes, how did we?

NORMAL - I'm normal. Are You?

What is it that we call 'normal' in our society ?


The other day an acquaintance found it necessary to remind me that some of my tastes, preferences, priorities, ideas and opinions, are slightly outside the usual, what she called ‘everyday, normal’ range; when she noticed my face, she quickly added ‘but in a nice way’, so I forgave her instantly. Apparently, she found my enthusiasm for opera and poetry, my willingness to discuss rural life and the accompanying, lower case ’c,’ conservative attitudes robustly, and my equal unwillingness to dedicate a large part of my life to village concerns rather alarming. The fact that that doesn’t worry me seemed to disturb her even more.

She was right, of course, I can quite see that.

We think of ourselves as liberal and open-minded, we understand and feel sympathetic towards everybody and everything.  We practice tolerance.

But what happens when this tolerance comes up against people who look, behave and act outside the parameters of what is generally seen as the norm, who provoke our sense of decency and custom, who are simply different from others?

Being concerned about how society sees us, how we want to be seen, is this question still relevant in today’s world, where anything goes? I remember the time when parents and teachers reminded me of what is and isn't 'done', how I should look and behave to please convention. How many of us experienced and remember the phrase "what will people think"?

Who determines what normal is, who defines normal and not normal?

Basically, the majority of people want to be seen as normal, be part of a set, avoid sticking out like a sore thumb, avoid being instantly, recognizably different. It’s comfy and safe being one of us, belonging.

There are as many ways of belonging as there are of being different.

Every parent has had  cause to say “what do you think you are wearing?” Every child has, at some time, replied, “Mum, Dad, this is normal, this is what everybody wears. You wouldn’t understand”. This difference in personal taste goes on throughout life; while we stay broadly within the appropriate grouping, personal preferences matter little. We are still recognizably normal. Whatever way of life we choose, we will still fit some pigeonhole or other. We may get stared at for the way we look, be ridiculed for our opinions, what we eat, even, but either we pay little or no attention, or we conform.

But what happens when we are disabled, mentally or physically? When we bear the visible scars of impairment, when we ‘show up’ as different. When we are not 'normal' ?

We all try very hard to stay fit; consider the fitness mania. The moment we are ill, many hide away. If at all possible, we pretend that nothing is wrong; if we can’t, we feel ashamed. Why should the disabled person feel ashamed for being different, why avoid eye contact on an equal level, lower their gaze?

Considering that a huge percentage of the population will, at some time, suffer from mental illness, why is mental illness still such a taboo? Something to be ashamed of?

Being depressed, sad, disturbed, happens to most people, are we not normal when we suffer? An acquaintance admitted to a family member’s brush with the law quite cheerfully the other day, but the same person hid, for as long as she could, somebody else’s depression. This mental illness was hidden so well, that the sufferer received no help and attempted suicide.

There are still many places today where a person’s sexual orientation is cause for scandal,  censure and condemnation. How appallingly hard it must be to keep such a huge part of your personality a secret. Worse, to feel trapped in the wrong body, unable to do anything about it; having to come to terms with being an outsider, a misfit, abnormal. How does this person cope in the face of Society’s disapproval?

This is where Society itself becomes abnormal. In the mass, it is normal to bay for the blood of a perceived wrong-doer, found guilty or not, there is mass hatred of countries which live to a different code from our own; in the mass, mankind is a very frightening animal indeed. But nobody says, ‘this is not normal’.

Lying politicians, companies who cheat and exploit,  clerics who abuse their calling, nobody calls them abnormal. We say they should be ashamed of themselves, which they obviously are not, as we watch them, or another of their ilk, carry on. Most of the time, there is no punishment to fit the crime.

We tolerate their actions; they are wrong perhaps, even immoral, but still within the bounds of normality.

Or so we say.

Sunday Quotation (5)

HERE

My steps in this street

Echo

In another street

Where I hear my steps

Walking down this street

Where

Nothing is real but the mist.

Octavio Paz

translated from the Spanish