Now What?

I've been well enough to restart/continue this blog for at least two months. The last chemo was in November 24, it took me six weeks or so to get over side effects, soreness from operations, and generally picking myself up off the floor. I had the temporary all clear in January 25 and will have the next instalment check up in a week's time. If all is well I will be left in peace for the following six months.

At the moment I am feeling well physically, if it weren't for the dratted leg and missing muscle in my right hip. A crutch will have to be my permanent companion from now on; nothing can be done to reattach the muscle, there is an operation but my consultant surgeon says it has never yet been successful.

As for the minor cancer on the back of my head, well that's of no great importance. Acc. to the dermatologist surgeon the bladder cancer chemo may even have shrunk it; in any case, it is extremely slow-growing and can easily wait to be dealt with until after there is clarity on the more important cancer. In order to avoid long waiting lists for free consultations I have been paying for them but, of course, this being the UK, all further treatments are free on the NHS. If this were the US I'd be bankrupt.

So, that's that.

Now to my blog. I do not fool myself into thinking that my former readers are all waiting breathlessly for me to tap those keys again. A few of you have been kind enough to ask for updates. Thank you. Well, here's the update. 

What is truly bothering me is the state of the world, in particular the dire situation in the US, its effect on geopolitics and the upending of the world order. It looks like democracy is on the retreat. Anger, anxiety and hatred are on the increase; the mildest, most peaceful, calm people openly profess hatred and send useless imaginary death wishes. Attitudes towards war and bloodshed divide nations and people suffer, children are maimed and killed in their hundreds and thousands. It breaks my heart and the heart of every compassionate, thinking person. In fact, on two occasions impotent rage at news reports have sent me into Atrial Fibrillations. Literally a breaking heart.

Is a blog wittering on about mundane daily doings really the answer for me? Even if there is a handful of people who might like to read me - are there still any at all ? - is writing and reading general blogs relevant at this time? Is looking at something like Monty Python's Bright Side of Life the antidote to the general despair?

I mentioned my unhappiness with the state of the world and politics in particular to a Social Prescriber (a whole new type of professional counsellor for practical matters like what to do about mobility, how to access help for all sorts of things ); she thought writing it all out would be beneficial to me as well as recharge my lost creativity. And she also thought that the ME I lost roughly the same time as I had the first diagnosis would stand a better chance of reappearing once I allowed myself to both stand back from and look deeper into my state of mind.

Will blogging help? We'll see.

PS

If nobody reads this it doesn't matter. It took quite some effort to sit down at my computer. As well as courage. I don't want to become a political blog but I also can't stick my head in the sand. I don't mean to give offence but if you feel offended, tough titty.

I was looking at the Formatting pages and how to exclude some readers (mainly very close to home non-followers) but it looks like I'd have to restrict readership completely and go from Public to entirely Private. Any ideas?

Happiness Factor? It’s a joke, right?

So there I was, aiming for human interaction resulting in happiness, or at least a semblance of contentment.

Fat chance.

Not that it was all bad. A friend and I went off to see a modern re-imagining of John Gay’s 1728 work "The Beggar's Opera" by Mid Wales Opera Company, a production for small spaces and therefore very intimate. Renamed “Mrs. Peachum’s Guide to Love And Marriage” it is a splendidly bawdy, ballsy take on relationships and the relative virtues of virginity. We enjoyed it and, what’s more, my friend and I didn’t fall out in spite of getting into politics.

Another event was a Spanish Evening set up by a local group. There was tapas, Spanish wine, some haphazard music and three short, separate, talks about the painter Joaquin Sorolla, Spanish food and how the speaker liked to cook it and wine talk. The wine talk was the only professional talk, which means that the whole hall could hear that speaker. The other two never remembered to speak into the microphone, in spite of an audience member begging them to do so. What made it worse for me was that I had chosen to sit at a table towards the back of the hall (ready to scarper?) just in front of the wine table where the volunteer wine server chose to use the time of the talks to rearrange his crates of bottles, picking up each bottle, checking it for dregs and plonking it back into its hole in the crate. He took absolutely no notice of my anguished looks in his direction and clinked on busily. Not the most enjoyable evening all told.

You can simply not rely on people to do as they say. I took a very wheezy chest to my doctor; yes, he examined me, asked a few questions and came up with the idea that my childhood asthma might have returned. And yes, he was going to investigate and consult another doctor. "So, should I make another appointment,” I asked. “O no, I’ll ring you later this afternoon.” That was two weeks ago. Not a peep out of the surgery since then.

Gadgets aren’t a whole lot more reliable, either. The whole area had a power cut. When the power came back on after several hours I mentally congratulated the electricity firm and settled down for a cosy evening. By and by the room cooled down, quite considerably by the time I bestirred myself to check on the boiler. One very dead boiler. This was Friday evening of the coldest weekend this year with frost and freezing fog forecast. I fiddled around and tried to relight it but it just grumbled and coughed at me. I spent some time online trying to find the nearest engineer but gave up and rang the manufacturer's company itself - Worcester-Bosch - who are many miles away but have always seen me right in the past. Many miles away also means an expensive call-out, of course. “Yes, we’ll come, On Monday.” Between Friday evening and Monday morning I wore thermal layers, several pairs of thick socks, my pyjamas under trousers and jumpers - who is going to undress completely in a freezing cold bathroom? - , carried around two small fires, and forgot about personal cleanliness entirely. What on Earth do people do who do not have immediate access to the wherewithal necessary to pay for an emergency like this? I had ice flowers on the windows, for heaven’s sake. The female engineer discovered that the power cut had blown the circuit board. She replaced it, serviced the boiler and made sure that all was back in order before she left.

Next stop a major building job. I had my windows on the South side of the house replaced, all eight of them. I was pleasantly surprised by the result. Beloved would have been livid, several years before we debated if we should swap wooden windows for plastic. “Absolutely not,” was his conclusion. "Wooden widows are so much more attractive.” No they’re not, says I. They require constant repainting, repairing and splicing, none of it cheap. So now I have perfectly fitting, draught excluding, plastic windows on the weather side. I was also pleasantly surprised by the workmen doing the job. They were relatively quiet, cleaned up after themselves and caused minor disruption, allowing me to escape to a different room with each window. Even so, there was a moment when the boss man and I almost fell out. Over Brexit, what else. He was a fervent Leaver who trotted out all the long-discredited lies we were told three years ago. There is no getting through to some. I wished him Good Luck and left the room quickly.  I had learned my lesson from a previous experience, much more painful and embarrassing, which I’ll come to next.

You see, there was this dinner party at a very good friend’s house, the guests being a couple from London, a couple from Valley’s End and me. We have met at this house in previous years, always get on well and usually have a splendid evening, with lots of wine, food, good conversation and a general feeling of goodwill to all assembled. Except this time I related my experiences and feelings about the need to apply for Settled Status after 50 years of living the UK, once Brexit has become reality. O dear. It appeared that the couple from London and the host, with whom they were staying for the weekend, had already had a falling-out the previous evening. So my remark simply stirred the flames all over again. It was most unpleasant for a while, a lot of wine had been consumed and tempers flared, in a quietly genteel way, neither bad language nor insults were employed, but tempers flared. I know that families have fallen out, co-workers have fallen out, friends have fallen out over this wretched business but I never imagined that a genial host and his guests would suddenly, in the middle of a most enjoyable dinner party, stage a mini-war. At the moment the UK is not a friendly place.

So, human interaction is all very well, but it does not necessarily lead to happiness.

Sheer Escapism

Fully autumn soon, the nights are drawing in, there’s a chill in the air and the leaves of the Japanese ornamental cherry show just the faintest tinge of burgundy. Millie is still with me, she seems to be having a reprieve in her general health - not the arthritis, alas - and I have decided to shut the back door at night. It keeps the warmth in and she has a more comfortable time of it in the scullery. If I have to clean up after her, so be it. It won’t be forever. And it doesn’t happen every night either.

The hedge cutters are here, another sign of autumn. Raindrops are dripping on them but they are hardy young men; “it’s only water”  said the one I took round the perimeter of the garden to give instructions on what needed trimming. True, but I myself still sheltered under a big umbrella. And I needed his arm to help me over a very steep slippery grassy bit without falling over. He promptly fell over himself, should have asked me for my arm in return.

There is so little that is pleasant in this world at the moment that I am seriously keen not to add to the misery for myself. Yes, I am still obsessed with current affairs, yes, I still shout curses at politicians whenever they appear on TV spouting barefaced lies, yes, I still dread what is happening to our climate and the environment. What to do? Withdraw from the whole unholy mess of it? Could be. Escape at least occasionally. Evenings start earlier, earlier evenings require indoor activities rather than balmy nights spent outdoors. Reading, TV and maybe closer attention to this blog of mine again, after several years of neglect.

Which brings me to another question: are you old enough to indulge in bad taste books, films, TV shows without embarrassment? To my surprise quite a few of the ‘ladies who lunch’ admit to doing so. Well, in that case, so do I. Not exclusively, of course. I couldn’t possibly live on a diet of sweets and chocolates, burgers and ready meals, neither can I feed my brain exclusively on pap. However, a Georgette Heyer Regency romance, a cosy mystery from the 'Golden Era', a Mary Stewart adventure, a Robin Hobb fantasy, even a Scandi noir thriller insinuate themselves on to my Kindle now and then. (I am too embarrassed to put hard copies on bookshelves). All of the foregoing have one thing in common, they all end happily-ever-after. As for TV, well, the ladies admit to switching on certain channels which run endless repeats of British and American sitcoms, British country village thrillers and long running soaps. I have to be very tired before I give ‘Midsomer Murders' another go - it’s too much like painting-by-numbers - but it’s been known to fill the odd otherwise sadly depressing space. Morse, Endeavour and Shetland are more to my taste. I can take Agatha Christie's Miss Marple or Poirot as well, if needed. I am not so good on films, but a romcom would hit the spot nicely too.

So, there you have it, Friko’s image as culturally high-brow is shattered. I always knew it and now that escapism has become ever more urgent I am old enough to blow a raspberry at anyone who feels judgement coming on. Not you, obviously.

For those who like natural history and the science of it here’s a recommendation which is neither pap nor instant escapism: Peter Wohlleben’s ’The Hidden Life of Trees’, an informative study and fascinating look into the enchantment of trees that can talk and sometimes walk - no it’s not a fairy tale. You’ll gain a whole new perspective on the amazing processes of life, death and regeneration of woodlands. The better sort of escapism.

Can’t stay away

in spite of feeling that I have nothing to say. I am feeling a little sheepish about having been away for so long.

It’s been up and down, mostly up, the past two months. In fact, most of the time it feels like I’ve turned the corner; you may not understand when I say that I am coming back into myself, that I am not on the outside looking at the strange ‘me’ I was for more than a year, but that that ‘me’  and the ‘I--myself’ I have always been are closing in on each other. Of course I am often sad but being solitary is not in itself a dreadful thing. Having decided to stay not only in Valley’s End but in my house until such time as I either must, or wish to move, has taken one major decision out of the equation. Sure, there are several other decisions to be made but they are not as life changing as a move. Which means that I can take my time over anything else. And if I don’t want to do anything, well, I won’t. In any case, perhaps the decision will be made for me when the idiots who call themselves ‘our government’ back themselves into such a corner that they take revenge on EU citizens living here without British passports and expel the lot of us.

I still follow the news obsessively and what sad reading it makes. Is humankind really turning into a nasty, mean, hateful, selfish, greedy, unkind mass? Sometimes I’m glad my years are numbered except that I feel guilty for leaving a huge mess behind for the next generation to clean up. Does every generation feel like that? Statistically things are getting better, poverty, disease and wars are decreasing, it just doesn’t feel like that. Perhaps the current older generation is the first without first hand experience of war, wide spread hunger and lack of basic necessities. We have food, clean water, shelter; we brought up our children to expect the same for themselves and their children, we live in peace and security. And still the world feels like a hostile place and far too many are viciously opposed to grant these blessings to those human beings who lack them.

What do I do? Stop reading and watching the media or get involved? My quiet little backwater allows me little personal involvement other than perhaps make donations to organisations that try to make a difference.

Organisations that deal with the continued existence of our planet are close to my heart and hand. When I look at my garden I could weep. This being  the first year that gardening has featured on my pleasure list for several years, when old gardener and I have worked hard on at least two days a week, it’s been all for nothing. Or nearly nothing. Clumps of herbaceous perennials have dried up, shrubs are drooping and even trees are shedding leaves from the stress of coping with temperatures way beyond our experience. From Algeria in the west, to the Arctic Circle in the north and the Baltic States in the east a huge swathe of land is sweltering in unnatural temperatures. Similar conditions are devastating Japan, Africa, Canada, North America, Australia. Sweden, country of snow and ice for months on end has asked for help with huge forest fires. The global forecast is for more rainstorms in winter and heatwaves in summer. Here in the UK the effects are relatively mild, although we have hardly any rain this summer and scorching temperatures, the heath fires have been put out and we have so far only reached the lower 30sC. Too hot for me, at any rate. I hardly move between midday and 5 o’clock. I have read an awful lot and also watched quite a bit of afternoon TV. Of course, I am lucky, there’s no need for me to move if I don’t want to. I go to the air conditioned gym to cool off.

For the first time in a thirty year marriage I am marrying our books. We always had his and her shelves before, now I am sorting through both, discarding some and reorganising the rest. Boxes and boxes go to charity shops, some antiquarian books I hope to sell, novels are shelved in alphabetical order, others arranged according to subject matter. Any of the novels I will never want to read again go into the give-away piles. I seem to have chosen to read  many more non-fiction books than fiction recently, have also started to buy new ones which is possibly rather stupid of me. Out with the old - in with the new.

For everything there is a season and not just a season but a whole new chapter of life. This is my fifth chapter: childhood and youth, a first very miserable marriage, a period of hard work and child rearing, and a second very happy marriage. I am settling into this latest, and probably last chapter of my life with renewed hope and the realisation that even now, and on my own, there are joys to be had.

Ruminations

15th November to 15th January - a long break from blogging. Only five followers have decided that this blog isn’t worth following now, so thanks to all of you who have stayed. This whole following stuff is a bit silly, I suppose, but there you go, silly is as silly does. Or is that silly too?

The year wasn’t even 12 hours old before I had the first accident: I broke a glass and caused a long, thin cut in my hand which bled a bit but has healed nicely. At least it wasn’t a mirror; anticipating seven years bad luck on top of the disastrous 2017 might have caused me to swoon and thus made burying the shards underground, by moonlight, hard to do.

I don’t do resolutions, but I did, sort of, this year. I was planning to stop being obsessed with the news, to leave Brexit and Trump to get on with things and concentrate on more pleasant aspects. There aren’t any. Brexit is a catastrophe, getting more so by the week, because our government hasn’t the faintest idea how to go about saving our cake, never mind eating it too. And Trump? I thought if I can stop myself reading about him and he presses the nuclear button, at least I won’t know in advance that I am going to be annihilated. So far I haven’t had much luck, the stupidity and hatefulness of those lording it over us remains fascinating.

What a world we live in. Interesting times indeed.

How was your Christmas and New Year? Good? Glad to hear it. Contrary to expectations mine wasn’t too bad either. Friends rallied round and gave me meals, drinks and a cosy place by their fire. There were a few modest parties, some good conversations, good food, plenty of books, schlock TV
and candlelight. Christmas day was a delight. Dinner, decent wine, poetry and Paddington Bear, the same kind of Christmas Beloved and I used to have.

There was something else which was good. My son came some ten days before Christmas, just for an over-nighter with a sufficiency of hours on each of the two days either side for us to have a comfortable and unrushed visit. He comes to ‘do jobs’. This time I didn’t have much in the way of ‘jobs’, he fixed a sticking music cabinet drawer and maybe something else minor which I have forgotten. There was, however, a pile of Christmas cards ready for distribution and we walked around Valley’s End, my son holding Millie’s lead and me popping up lanes and into courtyards to push them into letterboxes, introducing him to villagers out on similar errands every few yards. The great thing about the visit was that we reconnected; I had ordered a Nordmann fir, the first Christmas tree for several years, which was still sitting outside, undressed and unloved. Together we brought it in and dressed it with all the old family baubles, some of them dating back to my childhood, with coloured lights and all the usual kind of kitsch decorations. We had a wonderful time, listening to ancient carols and plainchant, eating Stollen and spiced biscuits and having a turkey dinner by candlelight and incense sticks perfuming the air. We talked comfortably. I haven’t felt as close to him for many years.

Both of us felt good, both of us hoped that this might become our own, private, tradition. We might even use the same tree. I am going to ask gardener to pot it on into a bigger container in the spring and then it can come back in next year, a foot or so taller.

My darling Millie is getting old, thirteen next month, according to her inoculation record card. I had thought she was ‘only’ twelve. She is doddery on her hind legs and she had a cancer operation just before Christmas. The wound has healed well and the current cancer has been removed completely. Unfortunately it is one of those that recur. Dogs are wonderful, she never turned a hair. Surely it must’ve hurt? Just a bit? She went in in the morning and the vet said to come back for her before nightfall. At three they rang: could I come and collect her, she had woken from the anaesthetic and wanted to get out of her cage. “She would be better off recovering at home and not to worry if she didn’t want to eat.” The first thing she did when she came into the house was to stagger to her empty dish and beseech me with big brown eyes: “where’s my dinner, I haven’t had a single crumb since yesterday evening!” She is still happy and keen on her food, so maybe she has a while yet. It will be hard when I lose her too.

More ruminations to follow, so don’t bother commenting just yet. That is if there’s still somebody reading.

Nemesis Day

How utterly exhausting it is to get tangled up in politics for weeks on end; it’s draining, physically and mentally. True, we need to get angry when we, our lives and our Earth are threatened; we should act on that anger if there is the smallest chance that our action matters, but for far too many of us there is little we can do to change things in the short term; we might as well continue with our day to day life and make what we can of it. Dreary, dark November is a joyless month anyway, looking for added misery only exacerbates the gloom.

I would love to believe in the truth of this quote by Lord (George Gordon) Byron 1788-1824, that most notorious and flamboyant Anglo-Scottish poet. :

“Time and Nemesis will do that which I would not, were it in my power remote or immediate. You will smile at this piece of prophecy - do so, but recollect it: it is justified by all human experience. No one was ever even the involuntary cause of great evils to others, without a requital: I have paid and am paying for mine - so will you.”

Were he living now he might vulgarly call it Payback Time.

In ancient Greek religion, Nemesis was the goddess who enacted retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods). Another name was Adrasteia, meaning "the inescapable”. The Romans knew her as Invidia.

Alfred Rethel “Nemesis"

The ancient Greeks knew a thing or two about retribution, in the shape of the Goddess Nemesis it was a recurrent theme of many Greek tragedies. Nemesis was to be feared and a sure and inevitable reward for arrogance and conceit, self-importance and egotism.

I came across Nemesis in a very much more modern setting, in one of the short stories by Saki (HH Munro). Clovis complains that there are remembrance days throughout the year which persistently harp on one aspect of human nature and entirely ignore the other: we have Christmas and New Year, Easter, Birthdays and Anniversaries, when we are encouraged by convention to send gushing messages to all and sundry; to pretend optimistic goodwill and servile affection to people whom we can scarcely abide in reality.

Clovis continues:” There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings towards people whom you simply loathe.”

Does he perhaps have a point?

Would a recognised Nemesis Day be such a terrible idea? Would we all wait for it impatiently and look forward to taking much pleasure in the settling of old scores and grudges being “gracefully vindictive to a carefully treasured list of people who must not be let off” ?

Or do we turn the other cheek by responding to injury without taking revenge?

Questions questions, problems, problems. I am not one for turning the other cheek, but neither am I a great one for openly seeking revenge, openly being the operative word. Besides, nurturing grudges is such a waste of precious time. I only learned that lesson in the second half of my life and have thereby saved myself a lot of heartache.

There may be a third way of coping with a world we find hard to understand and that is to take to heart the words of Wendell Berry, a poet whom I love and admire more and more:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Liar Liar Pants On Fire

In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year 2016.

US election and EU referendum drive popularity of adjective.....

.......defined by the dictionary as  “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”.  

Well, there we are then, it’s official. Telling lies is the new normal,  accepted if not acceptable. Morally defensible? Maybe even that. The end justifies the means. And so on.

What will we tell children?  Tell the truth or each lie will make your nose grow longer? If you tell lies nobody will believe you when you tell the truth?  Even if you shout ‘fire’ and there really is one and you are in danger of burning to death? (It’s called ‘putting the fear of God into children - I hope we don’t really do that to them anymore.)

When I was in junior school our teacher encouraged us to put on a play about Saint Nicholas, the one who brings good children presents while bad children are threatened with the cane wielded by Ruprecht, Nicholas’ servant. I was a bit of an uppity know-all, not only did I make up the play, I also appropriated to myself the role of Nicholas, dishing out praise and admonishments as I saw fit in my misplaced enthusiasm and infantile eagerness. Most of my fellow class mates received mild praise, a few I told off for minor (imaginary) misdeeds but for just one girl, chosen at utter random, St Nicholas, i.e. me, had a serious face, a slow and ponderous voice and the ultimate accusation: “you tell lies”.

The girl instantly dissolved into floods of tears, sobbing that she never lied, that lying was bad and a sin and that she would never do that. Teacher cradled her in his arms, trying to calm her down, saying how the whole thing was made up and not true and nobody believed that she lied. He threw me a very filthy look, told me to say sorry, to go away and be ashamed of myself for being so unkind. I was crushed, indeed feeling ashamed and guilty and very disappointed that my grand play had come to such an ignominious end. I got carried away, as they say, didn’t know when to stop.

I had accused a class mate of lying; not in a playground rough and tumble way, but seriously, on an important occasion, with teacher and the whole class being present. The poor child’s pitiful sobs took a long time to subside. The fact that I remember it so well all these many years later shows how deeply memorable the incident was, probably not just for me.

Today we know that the Brexiteers led by Johnson and Farage in the UK and election campaign Trumpism in the US have made lying into an art form; the more they lied the more people applauded them. One day after Brexit Farage was asked about that repeatedly promised extra 350 m  for the NHS. His answer? Oh well . . . . .

And  "post-truth" nobody holds them and their cronies accountable. The sensation is not the demise of truth but the fact that we already have a word for it. Oh Brave New World.

Keep Breathing

on this grey and dismal day. That’s about all we can do.

“Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. *

We had Brexit not so long ago, Although, in the scheme of things, Brexit isn’t on a par with what happened yesterday, the immediate impact on this side of the Atlantic was tremendous. Even for the winners. Impossible things seem to happen more and more and leave more and more people shell-shocked.

‘What I tell you three times is true.’ **

The morons are on the march everywhere.

Which reminds me of a story my foot health practitioner told me. She also works as a telephone operator for the WM Police - privatised, of course - and takes calls from sometimes desperate, sometimes urgent but mostly daft callers; some get passed on, for others there’s advice, yet others make no sense and are beyond help. This story is actually quite sad, as well as hard to believe, but true.

“Hallo, my car seems to have disappeared from where I left it.”
“Oh dear, I am sorry, may I take some particulars?”

Particulars, like name, address, car registration etc, duly taken, the operator continues.

“You are certain the car was parked in front of your house?” The caller is a lady in her 80s, the assumption that she might have been mistaken is not completely unlikely.

“Yes, I always leave it there. I had come in from shopping. A friend called and we chatted and when she left I saw the car was gone.” It was in the evening - grocery  shops are open late in the UK.

The operator remains calm and friendly. “I take it you heard nothing. Presumably the car was locked? The thief had to break in?”

“Oh no,” the old lady said, “I always leave it open. That’s what I do. It sits just in front of my house, you see.”

“Ah, you might have a problem with your Insurance then. Where was the key, did you take it in?”

“Oh no, I always leave it in the ignition, that’s what I do, you see.”

There is no way the operator could say 'you silly old bat’; she has to remain calm and concerned and keep breathing. And probing.

“What else was in the car, anything else that could identify it as your property? I will be putting a general call out right away and the more details we have the better.”

“Well, there was my shopping, I hadn’t had a chance to bring it in. And, of course, my handbag, on the seat in front. Where I left it when I came into the house with my friend. I’ve done that before and nothing happened."

The operator remained totally professional. “And what was in the handbag, your purse maybe . . . . “

“Oh yes, my purse with some cash, my cards and bits and pieces like that.” The old lady paused and repeated what she had said several times before. “It’s what I do, you see. It’s what I do.”




*Alice in Wonderland
** The Hunting of the Snark

by Lewis Carroll

Seriously, Dear World,

what is wrong with you? Have you gone stark staring mad?

After last year’s horrors, I was counting on the silly season being exactly that: the lazy, hazy days of summer, when the living is easy and the news is frivolous, with maybe a 'crime passionnel’ amongst the more hot-blooded classes to exercise the mind.

Instead we have more of the same, possibly even worse. Dear World, why are you turning at an ever faster pace, the news being outdated even before it’s been digested and events overtaking each other at breakneck speed? How did we allow this to happen? Sitting, as I do, in front of screens and pouring over newspapers doesn’t help. Neither does it help to mouth pious speeches: “Our thoughts and prayers are with you” being one of them, favoured by politicians and the general run of commentators at the scene and in memorial gatherings alike.

Battles in Syria, Iraq, the Ukraine, the refugee crisis, Islamist terror in France, The ascension of populist right wingers everywhere, with Donald Trump the most visible, Brexit in the UK, which one commentator explained as  a “howl of outrage" by those left behind in the global scramble for a place in the sun, whose votes were tricked out of them  by shameless lies and, most recently, the attempted military coup in Turkey with far from transparent origins. We hear of endless shootings in the US, which we hardly recoil from any longer, telling ourselves that  an obsession with readily available weapons will logically have only one outcome.

So much is happening, Dear World, how can we stop the carnage?

It may sound macabre, but we are so swamped with daily dollops of unbearably horrendous information that we are in danger of forgetting that 1000s have drowned in the Mediterranean  on their way to a “better life"and that the Italian coastguard has recently found a boat on the bottom of the Med with 675 corpses.They’re just the ones which have been discovered. How many more are there? How many more atrocities can France bear?
How many more men, women and children will have to leave everything they hold dear behind and run for their lives? Nearer home, what will Brexit mean for the poor in our own society?

hashtag “jesuissickofthishit"

Dear World, could we please stop now and start again?

A Warning

Since Friday morning six a.m. I have done little but follow the unfolding Brexit horror story; on the TV news, in political debates, newspapers, both digital and paper; I have opened every chime on my phone and checked news of developments on my tablet for hours every day. And when there were no new developments I read the old ones over again. And comments. And political blogs.

In a word, I’ve been obsessed. Still am. But I want out now. Enough, for heaven’s sake. You will understand if I tell you that I have done this in two languages other than English, namely from the EU viewpoint via German and French sources as well. As my French is pretty poor I earned myself several severe headaches into the bargain.

After months of relentless bombardment with ‘project fear’ on the one hand and a merciless diet of lies, some of them whoppers, rebutted and shown for the lies they were, but taken as gospel by people desperate to believe them, on the other, the populace has voted. Lots of them have since woken up saying "WTF have I done”, particularly now that the liars are back-pedalling like mad on their promises and the ‘project fear’ lot are suddenly not quite so certain that Armageddon, a nuclear holocaust, world war III, and economic collapse loom. It’s too late, in spite of a three-million-signatures-strong (so far) petition to reverse the process. We have ‘project farce’.

The funniest result is that the winning side now has absolutely no plan on how to implement vox pop’s wish. “There’s no hurry to execute withdrawal” they say. now that the repercussions are becoming apparent. I am allowing myself a smidgeon of Schadenfreude seeing that I am on the losing side.

The winners have been handed a poisoned chalice.  'Le Monde' said that it’s like a death sentence without an executioner. Nobody wants to carry out the sentence.

Now for the warning: many of my readers are US citizens. You are being offered a poisoned chalice yourself. Before you accept it make absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. And that you have a shrewd idea what the wrong decision will mean for you.

Good Luck to all of us.

Just when it felt safe to cheer up

and come out from behind that black cloud, they decided to have a divorce.

(image it’s nice that)

.... alle Menschen werden Brüder ....

?

not bloody likely!

Blogallimaufrey

Following news sources online is a mug’s game. There are too many sites which concentrate disproportionately on hyped and blown up bad news. Headlines scream at you, deliberately phrased in such a way that you are drawn in against your better judgement. Result: depression and feeling down-hearted. Yes, bad stuff happens all the time, but concentrating on it to the exclusion of good stuff doesn’t make it better.

Living in a phoney bubble of privilege and positivity is plain stupid, we must face reality. After all, we are part of the human race, living at this time,  constantly confronted with the awfulness of traumatic events. 

Desperate refugees pressed up against barbed wire, children with huge hungry eyes, mass shootings, politicians in the UK all but shredding each other over the EU referendum; and then there’s the surreal and well nigh unbelievable spectacle of Donald Trump. 

But there was better news too more recently:

What, really?

Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall? I can’t have been the only one whose face cracked into a huge sneery grin when the news came through. Finally, something to make me giggle. I loved the pictures of the happy couple, (particularly the close-ups), arm in arm, Jerry in flat shoes, so as not to tower over her shortish groom who's 84, and looks every day of it. 

And so Rupert plays his part. Shifting

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound.

However, it doesn’t do to make fun of Murdoch. At 84 his money bags can still cause our craven government to kowtow and let him have all the best programmes on the BBC for a song. Even for the man who can, and has, bought himself everything his mean and desiccated heart desires, the other man’s grass is always greener.

Not that you could mistake him for a sheep; a wolf in sheep’s clothing, more like.

Paul knocked on the back door today. The celandines are out in the hedges.Yes, it’s that time of year, March, the most exciting and provocative month in the garden, full of promise, with blizzards one minute and sun as warm as in May the next, with thunder and lightning, frivolous snow flurries, fierce storms pelting you with sleet and hail and soft breezes to make you throw off your hat and gloves. Yellow-gold March, with daffodil, coltsfoot, aconite, buttercup, dandelion and marsh marigold all vying for the attention of the earliest insects.  

Oh Misery !

 First it looked like everything would change,

we’d tax the rich and allow the poor to eat without feeling guilty.

Children climbed trees and parents sat underneath

awaiting the miracle of rebirth.

 Horses grazed peacefully

and riders took a breather.

Then, Oh horror!

It all went down the pan again;

another five years of fat cats getting fatter

and belt tightening for the rest of us. 

They’re lining up to chuck themselves off the cliff!

Oh Misery, Oh Horror.

The images are borrowed and misused - Valley’s End had its Green Man Festival.

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum . . . .

. . . . . Don’t speak ill of the (recently) dead.

Two men, both larger than life, both on the very left of the political spectrum, have recently died in the UK. I briefly met one of them during a one day conference; being there as the hired help (I was one of the interpreters), this ardent socialist and defender of the common (wo)man, ignored both me and my colleague comprehensively. We had both been looking forward to meeting him and telling him how much we admired him. Ah well, ‘handsome is as handsome does’.

Both these men made many enemies during their careers; it is amusing to watch those, who thoroughly disliked them and all they stood for, now scraping and dredging for the most fulsome praise. And all with a straight face.

But I was going to talk about funerals, one of which I attended and the other I was told about.

Kelly’s dad recently died. He and Kelly’s mum had been divorced for many years. Apparently they couldn't live together and couldn’t live apart. He visited his ex frequently and the eight children of the marriage continued to get on well with him in spite of the fact that he had been busy fathering another four with a new partner, whom he never married. None of this is my business, you will quite justifiably say, but Kelly was perfectly frank about her father's busy life, which he pursued happily despite his many ‘aliments’. 

The funeral brought the two families together. It must have been quite a rumbustious affair. The second family overthrew all the funeral arrangements the two lots of children had initially agreed on, including changing the venue from a 'large catholic church to a paupers’ church’. “We’d given them money for half the costs but we took it all back again”, Kelly said, “we were really disgusted with what they did." She is a member of a large gypsy clan to whom appropriate funeral rituals are very important. “We did manage to give him his rosary beads and my sisters put a few ‘trinkels' in the coffin before it was closed”, she added.

The other funeral was here at Valley’s End. It was a short, matter-of-fact service, only two hymns were sung and even the eulogy was lifeless and dry. The deceased was “a man who didn’t suffer fools gladly, if at all”; and “did everything he undertook to perfection". The mourners heard it and made up their own minds about the kind of man who could be found behind these statements.  There was a moment at the  graveside which made up for the bland service: a bugler from the British Legion played the Last Post, while a comrade lowered the flag, in a brief, moving salute. The deceased had requested that this be done. Perhaps he had made all the funeral arrangements himself, which would account for the nature of the service. Valley’s End is usually so good at funerals.

All the funerals I’ve ever attended had one thing in common: a jolly bun fight afterwards. I am often surprised at the excellent appetite and thirst the mourners display and once you’ve paid your respects to the immediate family, you are free to mix and mingle and chat and gossip. Loud laughter is never frowned upon; perhaps the relief at 'it not being me this time' is something to do with it? Only on one occasion have I been present when the deceased actually was the centre of attention after the funeral, but that was a party nobody who was there will ever forget. On that occasion the eulogies went on and on and all the good things said were true.

o-o-o-o-o

In “The Open Grave”, by Louise Elisabeth Glück, the mortuary phrase is repeated as a framing cadence.

My mother made my need,
my father my conscience.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Therefore it will cost me
bitterly to lie,
to prostrate myself
at the edge of a grave.

I say to the earth
“be kind to my mother,
now and later.
Save, with your coldness,
the beauty we all envied.”

I became an old woman.
I welcomed the dark
I used so to fear.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

Heads Rolling, Then And Now.

"Any ideas for a blog post? I need something light and easy, nothing that will require research, nothing too serious, nothing too personal.”

Having just finished reading ‘Stoner’ by John Williams, the must-read novel of 2013 according to the literary establishment in the UK, I was still deep within the pages of this bleakly depressing and utterly gripping book; nothing suitable sprang to mind.

“Have you mentioned 'Bring Up The Bodies’ yet?” Beloved answered, metaphorically scratching his head. We went to see the second of the Mantel adaptations at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon last Saturday.

“I want something light and entertaining. Besides,  the people who read my blog are not culture vultures. A review of a serious play would interest few of them.”

“Yes, I see that; of course, you want to write for your readers. Mind you, the Tudors are absolutely at the top of the tree of current interest. You can’t get away from them on TV.”

Beloved had a point. There’s one more or less populist programme after the other about them; learned researchers and historians strutting their stuff in front of the cameras, not to mention fictionalisations with added cleavage, smouldering, meaningful looks and gruesome executions galore.

Henry VIII went in for gruesome executions on a grand scale. Depending on which source you follow, during his reign between 1509 and 1547, a­n estimated 57,000  to 7­2,000 English subjects lost their heads, and not in a nice, flirtatious way. As soon as he ascended the throne he chopped off the heads of his father’s most influential advisers; he was probably just following the old adage  'start as you mean to go on’.  New brooms and all that. By comparison, his daughter , who succeeded him on the throne,  killed fewer than 300 people during her six years as queen. But she came to be called ‘Bloody Mary’. Talk about double standards. Feminism still has a job to do on this one, even in these enlightened times.

“No, writing about Tudor politics doesn’t strike me as an apt subject for a lightweight blogpost.” I needed to turn the conversation back to the matter in hand.

“Put like that, I agree.”

“Just think though, nowadays, if governments want to do away with politicians who have served their purpose, or others, who have become a thorn in the flesh of whoever happens to be paying the piper, they get the media to do it for them. No blood visible. Public opinion will do the rest. Blood and circuses for the 21st century. In Tudor times, the populace gathered around the scaffold or the executioner’s block, today, we read the Daily Muckraker.

“At least we no longer kill them dead.”

“No such luck, instead they get to ‘spend more time with their families’ “.

“This is all very well, and I’m sure we could go on, but it still leaves me short of an idea for a blogpost. Something light and funny, maybe?”






PS: For US readers: 
“Spending time with one’s family is a metaphor for being sent into the desert politically.

I Wouldn’t Call It Research, Exactly . . . .

If anybody checked my Google searches they’d either have a fairly detailed picture of me quite quickly or they’d get a headache. With one half of Europe (the populations of the countries involved) disgusted and the other half (the governments of said countries) declaring themselves innocent of all knowledge of nefarious deeds by the NSA/CSS,  I fell to wondering how the secret services tell friend from foe.

I actually googled ‘security services’ and came up with reams of sites and pages and pages of newspaper articles on the recent scandals. Will this curiosity now put me on the list of suspect individuals? I’m probably there already because I carelessly said in a comment that, as far as I’m concerned, whistleblowers like Edward Snowden deserve a prize for bravery.  It beggars belief that vast resources are used to amass, sift, evaluate and store all the rubbish that floats about the world wide web. Every email, tweet, FB update, blogpost, etc. of millions of people is studied electronically.

It’s impossible to put the genie of the internet back in the bottle; whatever would we do without it. Personally, I find the internet a good thing, it is enriching my life quite miraculously. But, having made these remarks electronically, I have the uncomfortable feeling that somebody somewhere might now consider me a threat to national security.

However, be that as it may, my real googling activities are nothing to do with spooks and how they are out to get me, but a lot with cooking, literature, gardening, etymology, birds, plant names and what’s in the news locally.

Here’s a small selection from last week:

Imperial Rome in the 1st Century AD  
Reading a history of the emperors of the period, as well as going to see Shakespeare’s gory play ‘Titus Andronicus’ who is absolutely nothing to do with the historical emperor Titus.

Wasabi Chocolate
I bought a bar, to see ‘what it tastes  like’ . It’s disgusting stuff, I’m going to throw it away.

AM Homes - Who she?
Another book, a novel, “May We Be Forgiven”, for which Homes won the Women’s Fiction Prize.
It’s good but not that good. Too many detours, red herrings, unnecessary paddings.
But worth reading anyway, at times moving and funny and an absolute action packed tour de force.

What are Chinese Lanterns?
There’s been a horrific industrial fire in a recycling warehouse; fire investigators blame a single Chinese lantern seen floating above stacks of packed recycling material on CCTV images. We only knew the horticultural variety of Chinese lanterns which look very pretty but have never been known to cause more than a rash.

Nouns Of Assembly
A breakfast ramble. We were arguing about collective nouns, in particular jackdaws and rooks.  We have hundreds of these noisy, greedy, gregarious birds, at this time of year they bring along their entire families; all my clapping, shouting and beating a pillow with a stick to mimic a shot doesn’t frighten them into leaving.
Jackdaws collectively are known as a train or a clattering, whereas rooks collectively are a building or parliament. I like the phrase  'a murder of crows’ , another member of the genus Corvus.

Etymology of ‘barbecue’
The reason for wanting to know this is easy, we’ve just been to one. There are lots of explanations but the most likely one is that the word originally came from the West Indian “barbacoa” which denotes slow-cooking meat over hot coals.


There you are, all of it totally innocuous and inoffensive, not a search term amongst them which would give a spook cause for a sharp intake of breath. And all thanks to Mr. Google. It would have taken me days to assemble and dig through book information on these subjects.

Now there’s a thought - would that have been more fun?

Update: Keep Taking The Tablets

The receptionists at the private hospital barely looked up from their computers.  The one I chose stretched out her arm and grabbed the forms with my personal and payment details.  “Do you have your card? I need to swipe it.  No money will be taken but your card needs to go through the system.” She handed me a receipt for £0.00 and waved me away. “Take a seat”. She still hadn’t looked at me.

Mr. Mistry was a nice Indian doctor. The higher up the medical food chain you are the less fancy your title. A consultant, an expert in his very particular field, with years of experience, is plain Mister.  Mr. Mistry is a cardiologist; I liked him and was willing to trust him. He read the GP’s letter, my notes, flicked through the test results and turned his professional gaze on me.

Less than an hour of questions and answers later he was ready to give his conclusions. I’ll live. No operation necessary, no drastic treatments needed, an increase in beta blockers will probably do the trick. AFib is very common and although ablation has become fashionable, there are unpleasant side effects and the operation is not always successful, nor is it without its dangers. I am wholly relieved; the idea of having a bit of my heart burnt off was not something I relished. Now I know, and spending whatever it’s going to cost me was worth it. He answered all my questions patiently and exhaustively. For me, knowing is half the battle won.

I’ll go back to the trusty old NHS with its friendly GPs, nurses and receptionists for medication and, if the condition at some time again necessitates urgent treatment or hospitalisation, I’ll know that the NHS will be there for me. And I won’t have to pay a penny.

I’ve been gardening all day today; I am tired now but  have managed to keep elation and excitement within sustainable bounds. Mustn’t overdo the happiness. I’m still allergic to it.

You Can Pay? At Your Service, Ma’am. Riding the NHS Merry-Go-Round

For eight years you’ve been suffering the same health problem. Once a year, maybe twice a year. Not always to the same degree of seriousness but frequently serious enough to necessitate hospital admission for a night. Each attack frightened you but you always recovered. You have had many kinds of test, all of them thorough, highly involved and using advanced equipment. All of them expensive, although you were not asked to pay for them.

After eight years you have grown tired of the lack of progress. Nobody ever followed up on the tests, although each time you were put on a waiting list. Lately you were told that the time for ‘Plan B’ has come, but Plan B didn’t materialise. Instead you went on another waiting list.

Once again you found yourself in your GP’s surgery, complaining. “We can do nothing”, the GP said. “Once you’re on the waiting list you have to bide your time”. Ringing the hospital’s booking office didn’t help. “I can confirm that you are on the list, but I don’t know when you will have reached the top (or bottom) of the list. Try the consultant’s secretary.” The consultant’s secretary couldn’t help. “Yes, I can confirm that you are on the list. Ask your GP to write and state that your condition is worsening. That might expedite matters.” The GP said: “They always say that, but they take no notice. They get these letters all the time. I’ll write, but I can’t promise that it’ll help.”

“How much would a private consultation cost?” you asked on Tuesday.

Your appointment to see the consultant for as long as you need is on Thursday; letters have been written and are awaiting delivery; you have been given copies of all the relevant test results, neatly packaged, and waiting lists have shrunk to the point of non-existence.