Thoughts and What Have Yous

Still reading old diaries off and on; more off than on now because my trials and tribulations of long ago follow me into unquiet dreams as well as causing me embarrassment at reminding myself what an unhappy idiot I was, endlessly regurgitating, in great detail, all the reasons why I should have brought that period in my life to an end but never quite having the courage to do so. There were times, there still are, when concentrating very hard I can find myself not altogether unintelligent. Maybe I just wasn't concentrating hard enough.

However, it was all a long time ago. The entry which made me exclaim that nothing ever changes is from the days between Christmas and New Year 1980/81 and runs as follows:

"I'm reading JB Priestley's 'Festival at Farbridge' and some of Louisa Casey's (a character in the novel) reading of the state of people's minds really resonates with me. She says "what's wrong... is just that we don't feel enough. There isn't enough richness and joy and glory in our lives. We're all living this flat sort of existence... if you were glad, you'd light up. Hardly anybody does. How much gladness is there about? Life ought to be wonderful...  instead mountains of misery ... Even all their betting and boozing and sex are dreary, just another kind of routine."

Well, it resonated with me then and it resonates with me now. Priestley's character speaks about the 1950s. Has much changed? I don't think so. Sure, we can blame a lot on the pandemic, even so, it's been a long time since I saw anybody light up. Me included. Is it age which turns the world grey?  What causes us to light up? Falling in love? Winning the lottery? How do we get 'enough richness and joy and glory' into our lives? How do we enjoy ourselves during a period of mingled unhappiness, anxiety and boredom?

I seem to have devoted much of my life to wishful thinking. It was Ellery Queen of all people (yes, yes, I know it's not a real name) who said "No-one outside the realm of fairy tales ever scaled a mountain by standing at its foot and wishing himself over its crest. This is a hard world, and in it achievement requires effort."

Not bad for a whodunnit and how true - wish I could get that bit into my head and live up to it.

This post incorporates a question I have asked in some form or other many times before; I suppose I have reached the age when one doesn’t realise how often one says the same thing and doesn’t really care. One of the many compensations of growing older.

So, anyone, how do we get the joy back into our lives? What works for you?

Doing Well

Sitting in the comfortable chair in my study, feet up on the footstool, book open on my lap. I am calm and quiet, reflecting on life as is and life as was. With the single exception of missing Beloved, then as now, I am content. There is no help for it, as Carson McCullers put it so movingly:

“the way I need you is a loneliness I can’t bear and there is nobody who can fill that loneliness except for the one who is no longer here”,

but bear it I must. Being alive brings the obligation to embrace unpleasant things as well as the pleasant ones. Even the most determined 'look on the bright side’, and all the insistence on 'positive thinking’ doesn't provide us with a constant diet of flowers, sunsets and cute kittens. Accepting that ‘life is hard and then you die’ is a clarion call to living life, warts and all.

So, I am content. The patter of soft rain on the window tells me that doing outdoor work is not advisable for now, whereas a spot of meditation is. Yesterday, I spent many hours outside gardening, doing hard and dirty work, like mulching, potting up, cutting ivy, carrying heavy loads until I could barely drag myself to the bench in my ‘woodland garden’ (a small patch of beeches and hollies and yews. I sat there, not moving, doing nothing much at all except taking in the sounds of nature, birdsong, the murmur of unseen small creatures, the soft rustling of beech leaves in the gentle breeze.

Autumn cyclamen are appearing in all parts of the garden, a welcome sight particularly in areas which are otherwise just green, like the view from the compost heap towards the leaf mould enclosure. Everybody who comes to help in the garden admires my compost. “Did you make this all yourself ?” , asked WW (Wiry and Willing - who is fast becoming a worthy successor to "Old Gardener”);  he sunk his hands deep into the heap, rubbed the compost between them and smelled it. “It doesn’t stink at all”, he said. “Lovely”. If I am remembered for nothing else but my compost when my end comes I am satisfied. Others leave great deeds behind, works of art, pearls of wisdom, empires and the destruction of empires. Leaf mould and compost are like me: practical and useful and given to long periods of rest and just being.

For me gardening is therapy, it fulfils my need for outdoor creativity, the result is pleasant to the eye and beneficial for health and wellbeing. I am currently reading a book by Sue Stuart-Smith “The Well Gardened Mind” sub-titled 'Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World’;  she says:

“Like a suspension in time, the protected space of a garden allows our inner world and the outer world to co exist free from the pressures of everyday life........
there can be no garden without a gardener. a garden is always the expression of someone’s mind and the outcome of someone’s care.”

For now the world within my hedges and walls is my castaway haven and this morning, looking out of the kitchen window while putting on the kettle for my morning brew I saw movement round the foot of the bird table. My blackbird fledglings are back, dad had brought two of them and they were all three picking busily at the ground. I call them ‘my’ fledglings although they may be another family entirely, but it feels good to believe that I have done my modest little best to help them survive during their most vulnerable time. I sincerely hope mum and dad call an end to breeding now, this must have been their second clutch for this year’s summer; in a good long summer garden birds with a ready supply of food and clement weather can have three sets of young.

The rain has stopped, should I cook my dinner or go outside ? Yesterday evening I was so tired I couldn’t bear the thought of cooking,  so all I had was a bowl of rice crispies. Perhaps I had better prepare a meal before I go out.

Good Intentions

Under the huge weight of the pink rambling rose stretched along the middle halfway up the picture are a brick wall, a wooden trellis and a garden door. The trellis is broken, the wall is cracked and the gate is held shut with string. HH (handsome hunk, how could you forget) will come and mend, as soon as the rose has finished flowering. The rose will be chopped and chopped and chopped, until there is little more than it’s thick trunk. That beauty is more than twenty five years old  and still going strong.

I feel like time is standing still. Time was when things just happened, then they were over. Time just passed. We always come to the end of things, it’s a kind of relief to know that. Is that true still?

Urspo, in a slightly pensive post, reminded me of Beckett's ‘Waiting For Godot’, a play exclusively about waiting, waiting for an event that never happens. Is that what happens to us? Will there ever be a vaccine and a solution for Covid19?  Or will we sit, like Vladimir and Estragon, in this desert of humanity’s own making for evermore? Will it help if I turn a blind eye and do what Voltaire suggests in Candide :”Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” I want to take this line literally, without looking for Voltaire’s social criticism. Candide exposes the failings of his society but at the end of the novel, Candide and his companions find happiness in raising vegetables in their garden.  The garden represents the cultivation and propagation of life, which, despite all their misery, the characters choose to embrace.

A lesson to be learned, all the way from the 18th Century. Tending one’s garden (whichever way you read that) is the only way to live.

I have said before that in these uncertain times I turn to either non fiction or novelists who amuse me. Nora Ephron is one such, she can cheer me up during the darkest days. In Heartburn she has a paragraph which seems to be written for 2020:

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

Tired of Covid, tired of this Vale of Tears we find ourselves in, I will turn my attention to happier thoughts. Will you?

Change

One minute I am sitting staring into the void, the next I get up and the perspective on life changes.
The winds of change blow indiscriminately, sending you hither and thither without conscious volition. It might be a good thing for those like me who find it difficult to move into one direction or another deliberately. Times change and we change with them.

Or, as Dr Samuel Johnson had it (in his Drury-lane Prologue Spoken by Mr. Garrick at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury-Lane, 1747)

When Learning’s triumph o’er her barb’rous foes 

First rear’d the stage, immortal Shakespear rose; 

Each change of many-colour’d life he drew, 

Exhausted worlds, and then imagin’d new: 

I love the phrase “each change of many-coloured life he drew”. I should hold on to that thought, accept that change is inevitable and maybe even welcome it. Taking baby-steps. Life is for living and 'for the living’ and living it means being part of it in all its many-coloured facets. Death and grief are part of life.

The Syrian satirist and philosopher Lucian, whose works (written in ancient Greek) were wildly popular in antiquity has several very suitable quotations:

The world is fleeting; all things pass away;

Or is it we that pass and they that stay?

***

Realise that true happiness lies within you.

***

Not every story has a happy ending, 

but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth telling.

Beloved’s son and daughter in law came for a flying visit all the way from the US; as you know I live way off the beaten track, far from motorways and airports, and I would have understood if they had chosen to save themselves the extra two days’ travel to spend time with a relative-by-marriage only. But they came and I am both grateful and very appreciative; I had a great time with them, we talked about everything under the sun: politics, literature, music, travel, family news and, of course, Beloved. I handed over old photographs, family documents, music Beloved had written during the course of his life, even his school reports and records of prizes he’d won during his studies. I still have a large box of poems and diaries and other writings; in due course, after reading everything myself first, I will pass them over too. Beloved’s son is very like his father, in looks, bearing and intelligence; having him was almost like having Beloved again. It was a good visit.

My step-daughter-in-law was most encouraging, she told me that I must get a decent hair cut, find a colouring product that doesn’t provoke an allergic reaction, look after myself and get out from under the cloud of sadness. She also told me the story of an old aunt of her’s, who lost her husband in her early seventies and lived for another 20 years, apparently enjoying every minute of it, going travelling, making new friends and indulging her every whim. 

Very well, I will try.

Our History In Photographs

“The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” – said Ansel Adams.
That’s were Beloved took up position.

He was an excellent photographer. He had kept photograph albums of his own work from the time before we were together, a round dozen of them, which I inherited. He took many more photographs in our thirty years together, those I am keeping for now. But the early ones I filleted, sorted the pictures according to subject and, where I recognised the person, passed them on. I have only two small piles of pictures left, mostly of former colleagues, musicians all, which I am going to send to the Royal Opera House for distribution. A rather larger pile is of landscapes, cityscapes, mountains, rivers, the ancient bricks and mortar of European towns, churches, cathedrals, castles, market squares, secret passages in backwater villages, balconies overflowing with geraniums in French and Italian cobbled streets. What to do with these? I have many more in the albums I am going to keep; while I am alive they shall help to remind me of holidays we took in our time together. But what about the others? What to do with them?

I am not as good a photographer as Beloved was, I shan’t feel obliged to keep my own photos when his are so much better. But I have ancient photographs from a time before I was born, pictures of figures in formal dress, people I can no longer place, if I ever could. From my parents I inherited a boxful of loose pictures as well as three albums, the last one of which is a chaos of unrelated images which, as a child, I glued in without order, with the subjects unnamed and long forgotten. There is no one left who could help me identify them. I’d love to know who the smartly dressed lady is, elegantly  and elaborately coiffeured, in a long, flowing skirt, a white frilled high necked blouse with sleeves puffed to the elbow and from there to the wrists tightly buttoned. She is standing upright next to a chair on which, standing stiffly to attention, is a small child in a dark dress with a white pinafore, white stockings and black, shiny shoes. A boy? A girl? I vaguely remember Mum saying : this is aunt somebody, but whose aunt, hers or her mother’s?

We take hundreds of photographs which we post on social media (or not) where they will be preserved for eternity. Or at least for as long as our current form of social media exists. Since I have uploaded my pictures on to a screen I no longer stick them into albums. I had a look the other day, it says there are 6.000 of them; I sincerely hope that most of them are doubles and trebles; I surely have not taken 6.000 images? What on earth for?

Since Beloved died I have hardly taken any, fewer than I can count on the fingers of one hand: one of the German Bundesadler (Federal Eagle) in the Consulate where I applied for my new passport, one of the instructions on the inside of the Aga door how to operate the cooker, (which didn’t come out readable), a couple of spring flower beds. No more.

Some time in 2016 I treated myself to a new camera, idiot-proof the salesman said; I must have given the impression of an accomplished photographer. I still haven’t learned how to use it to its full capacity, little effort on my part leading to little progress. There must be someone who will teach me. The University of the Third Age does a photography class but I think you need to know how to handle the mechanics at the very least.

Old photographs have something so sad about them, the subjects no longer exist, they have become mere ghosts of the past, our own past, or our families' past. Gathering dust at worst, stuck in forgotten old-fashioned albums at best, they slowly fade and with them fade our memories. Here are a few lines taken from Philip Larkin’s “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”.

But o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! that records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
. . . .

How overwhelmingly persuades
That this is a real girl in a real place,
In every sense empirically true!
. . . .

Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Nine Lives

So here we are, almost back to normal. A bit thinner, a bit greyer, a bit chastened, a bit the worse for wear, but alive and thinking of making elderberry wine. Beloved and Millie, carefully and slowly, went down to the big elder tree in the field to check on this year’s berries and yes, there’s an abundant crop waiting to be picked. With lots left for the birds. Best get on with it then.

One lifetime is not enough. We spend the first years learning to pick ourselves up after a tumble, doing our sums and letters, making best friends today and pulling each other’s hair out the next. When we stop crying and running to mum because the world does not turn at our command new problems arise. We fall in love. First love is always painful. Exhilarating, exciting, deeply disturbing, and always painful. Once we get the hang of this strange emotion, and love follows love, we settle down. Sometimes just for a stretch, or sometimes for life. Now problems come in tiny packages which, by and by, grow larger, bringing bigger problems. This is the long and arduous period when we are wholly preoccupied with earning a crust, raising the next generation and looking after the previous one.

There’s little time to sit back and think who we are and what we might have been put on this earth for.

Then we reach sixty. It has taken us all this time to grow up, to see sense, to stop being foolish, to choose peace over the endless treadmill of duties, obligations, commitments; actually, sixty might be a little optimistic, many of us are still running on the hamster’s wheel well beyond sixty.

The first health niggles appear, joints are not as flexible as they once were and we become familiar with the doctor’s surgery; we are on first name terms with the receptionist, and the aches and pains we used to take to mum we now take to the practice nurse.

Soon enough we’re old, in second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.*

And before this happens is where I’d ask for another lifetime. Not to start again from the beginning. Certainly not. Have all that hassle over again? No thank you. But building on the experiences of a lifetime, having learned from mistakes and gained peace of mind and serenity in daily dealings, that’s what I want. No ailments, either; let them stay away. At a stroke short-termism would be done away with. We (and that includes politicians who only ever plan for the short period they find themselves in office) could finally get down to  fulfilling our dreams; there’s time to achieve everything we once strove for, everything that got buried in busyness. We could lie in the grass on a summer’s night, look up to the stars, remember the early promises and make them come true. After all, there’s world enough and time, finally. ** And because we have done our duty and are done with it, we can do what we always wanted to do: Make A Difference. 


*'The seven ages of man’  Shakespeare
** “To his coy mistress’  Andrew Marvell

A Man's A Man For A' That

taken from the bailey looking up the valley

K. has been a neighbour for several years. We meet walking our dogs, K. has a lovely collie called Sam; Millie can take or leave Sam, but she adores K. She and I were halfway up the hill when she spotted K. below us in the meadow by the river and down she raced to make a fuss of him and have him make a fuss of her.

K. is a strange chap, lives on his own, is extremely hard up and spends most of his time - up to 8 hours a day - making wood carvings with a religious theme. He is self taught and tells me he has never sold a piece. Beloved and I knew that he suffers from depression, we have had long talks with him (I have given him wood for his fire from the garden and once or twice I’ve paid him to look after Millie; he terminated the arrangement, not me. I’d have been happy to employ him as an occasional dog sitter), these talks have been on the doorstep, his or ours, and in the field, never in the house before.

When he saw me on the hillside he climbed up, Sam and Millie following.

After a desultory exchange about the weather and “haven't seen you around for a while and how are you?” K. laughed his strangely strangled laugh and said he would love to find himself a partner. “Oh yes?”, I said. “Yes, but all the single women in Valley’s End are lesbians; “. He continued, "I was thinking what a nice woman J. is but then Hen told me that J. is a lesbian. Hen is a lesbian, Trish is a lesbian, Jane is a lesbian . . . . ."

It’s true, considering the size of Valley’s End, we have perhaps a disproportionately high number  of lesbian and gay neighbours. Safety in numbers? Although that is surely hardly necessary nowadays. Maybe I’m a bit slow on the uptake but I didn’t consider being a lesbian (or gay man, for that matter) any kind of bar to making friends.

“Yes, but I don’t want a friend, I want a partner.” K. continued, “but then I’m probably asking too much anyway.” He began to count off on his fingers the qualities he required in a woman. “She’s got to be a good cook, she’s got to like opera, she needs to be into art, she needs to be able to put up with me. . . . “

“Aha,” I said, not being particularly tactful, “and what can you offer in return?”

K. choked. “Sweet eff. all”, he said. I’m no good at anything, haven’t a penny to my name, and I certainly wouldn’t want to put up with me.”

I suggested he might like to try and make friends first and to that end I invited him to “come on, come with me and have a cup of tea; we’ll wake Beloved from his afternoon nap and chat.” K. was very keen instantly, and I’d had enough of standing on a windy hillside by that time.

Like many lonely and solitary people K. turned out to be a great talker. After he’d admitted that he wished they’d lessen with the years, we dropped the subject of his amorous needs, and he suddenly quoted the beginning of T S Eliot’s Ash Wednesday

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

and from there it was but a short step to a discussion of singing and music, (K. has had training as an opera singer), poetry in general and T S Eliot in particular, drama, the arts, etc.

“There,” I said, “you have a lot to offer, even if you have no money. In a place like Valley’s End you find many people with tastes similar to yours. What about joining a choir, for a start? Or a drama group?” I wasn’t quite ready to invite him to join our poetry group.

“No, I couldn’t”, he said. “I have been told that I have an excellent voice - (true, he is a powerful baritone) - I wouldn’t really fit in with any local choirs or drama groups. Besides, they wouldn’t want me.”

And then the flood gates opened. “I don’t fit in anywhere.” He quoted Philip Larkin’s ’This Be The Verse’ which starts

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.  

K. is 61 years old and still chewing over the hurts and grievances of childhood and youth, still craving the love he believes he didn’t get as a child.  It is the common story, self-destructive and a barrier to living a full, independent life.

His background is totally uncultured, his parents and siblings are working class people with no pretensions to being anything else, content with their lot. They haven’t read a poem or a book in all their lives. He left as soon as he could for London and education. He did college courses in various subjects, trained as a singer, earning a precarious living in his spare time. “But I couldn’t finish any of the courses,” he said, “ I even did half a Masters in arboriculture. But I ended up in an office, which I hated. I absolutely hated it.” K. began to drink. And carried on drinking for years. He finally hit absolute rock bottom, which is when he ‘was saved’, found religion of a sort and joined AA . He seemed still amazed at what he found there. He said “There were all these people, drunks like me, but they were sober now and jolly, clean and smartly dressed, with jobs and a purpose in life; they didn’t need drink to get them through the day anymore.”

He talked for over an hour, occasionally close to tears. The main impression I had, and still have, is that he needs to find a reason for his years of self destruction and he finds this reason not within himself but in others, his family and circumstances.  In other words, he blames others. He appears to be totally lacking in self confidence at the same time as having unrealistic schemes of making his carvings count for something in the art world by approaching religious bodies, incl. the Vatican.

If only K. could learn the truth of Robert Burns' famous lines which say that wealth, or lack of it, and social class should not be the measure of a man’s true worth.

A Man’s A Man For A’ That

If he gave himself half a chance K. could be that Man.

Meditations On A Rainy Day III

The difference between these two pictures is 20 hours

and an awful lot of rain.

It’s the same stretch of river and the same willow tree.

For tonight the forecast says dry and very cold.

2014 has been good to me, or perhaps I have been good to myself? They say “Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied”, or ‘Life is what you make it’. Even the ancient Romans knew that. Appius Claudius Caecus told us that  ‘Every Man is the Architect of his Own Fortune’. I expect everybody has their favourite proverb but do we all follow the sentiment?

Well, I think I’ve cracked it. For the whole of the year I was determined that apart from the odd stumble here and there my path would be smooth, that I would not let indifference, unkindness or bare-faced lying on the part of others, no matter how close the connection, push me into unhappiness or illness. And I’ve done it. Two separate relationships have made me very unhappy in previous years; one is severed completely and the other is cooling. So, that’s that. I am amazed at how easy it was in the end. I feel regret, but accept what is and cannot be changed. Both situations have been fraught with unease and pain in the past, in both cases a catalyst caused me to stop and examine my motives for continuing with them, when there was no profit and all loss. It feels good.

Half the young ladies in London spend their evenings 
making their fathers take them to plays that are not 
fit for elderly people to see.               G.B.Shaw

All the pleasures and happinesses of 2014 have been modest, play-going chief amongst them. Thanks to a good friend we have had many trips to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford; many more are planned for 2015. That wonderful new institution, Live Streaming from the foremost theatres in London, as well as the Royal Opera House, have meant that we hardly had to miss anything we crave. As well as going to poetry meetings in Knighton, over the border in Wales, we have resurrected poetry readings at our house once a month; wine and poetry in a circle of like-minded friends make for wonderful evenings which require little effort but give an inordinate amount of pleasure.

A Book Is Like A Garden Carried In The Pocket.

Chinese Proverb

Aren’t I lucky. I have both. An endless supply of gardens on my shelves and an outdoor garden for work and play. The balance has been shifting, I’ve allowed myself far more reading than gardening time during the year, partly due to the ease with which I can, thanks to a Kindle app, read for hours without stopping. Gardening has been important too but I’ve relaxed my harsh policy of eradicating every weed that dared show its face; or if a plant wants to lean over, muscling in on its neighbours' space, so be it. I will not chastise and imprison it in a rigid corset of stakes. Besides, I’ve dug up and given away many clumps of herbaceous plants this year to replace them with easily cultivated shrubs. But best of all is to be out in the garden in summer, drag a chair into the shade of a tree, fetch a drink and open a new book. Bliss. 

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Pat Conroy: My Reading Life

To my great surprise, I’ve continued with blogging throughout the year. Had you asked me five years ago I would have said that this is an activity destined to last but a short time. I am posting less, reading fewer blogs, leaving comments only once or twice a week. I have made absolutely no effort to gain new followers and have cut down on the numbers of those I follow. But I am still blogging. It’s my only other addiction apart from a craving for chocolate. Will I give up either next year?

I often think that the night is more alive 

and more richly coloured than the day.

Vincent van Gogh

Leaning out of my window last night, breathing deeply to get rid of stale central heating air in my lungs before bed I looked up into a clear, cold, starry night. The swollen river hummed monotonously, deeply soothing to the spirit. The night was calm and so was I. Counting my blessings is not for me, but appreciating the joys of the simple life is. 

Whatever happens in the new year, I will be kind to myself. 

Self Pity And Other Vices

When delving into the philosophy of how best to live life in midlife and beyond, many bloggers stress the importance of remaining productive, being positive, keeping busy, working for others via charitable deeds, and practicing gratitude for everything life hands out, every breath we take, every additional day we are granted. Idleness, self-indulgence, a bout of self-pity, a moan about ’the unfairness of it all’, some healthy self-interest, are castigated as unworthy, foolish, sinful. There’s that little word ‘self’ again. Perish the thought it should get a foothold!

Well, I don’t agree. Not in the blanket, no-deviation-allowed-ever way.

What did the ancient Greeks call a person who takes the afternoon off instead of concentrating on filing her (overdue) tax return? A lotus-eater! A diet not to be sniffed at in my opinion. What’s the point of having reached that famous midlife and beyond point if I’m still flogging myself into a frenzy of activity?

I am looking up poems for tomorrow’s poetry group meeting. The subject is ‘Happiness’, which, according to the advocates of all those virtues mentioned in the first paragraph, is the sure-fire result, if only you practice what they preach.

Guess what, not a single poem on Happiness I found, praises relentless positivity, busyness, rattling through the days on a quest for achievement, aching muscles and a to do list with every item crossed off. A bunch of lotus-eaters if ever there was one, these poetry merchants. They are happiest lying on their back in the grass, watching drifting clouds,  their reverie interrupted by the cries of a flock of geese. That’s all they need to set off a train of thought ending in something as fleeting and immaterial as a poetic idyll. (Unless they are enclosed in an attic, starving and warming their hands on the pitiful flame of a candle stub.)

I’m all for it. (The lying in the grass, not starving in a garret)

As for the most vilified sin of all, self-pity, who can say that they are entirely free of the occasional bout? Why is it considered to be particularly disgraceful? I see it as neither a virtue nor a vice, but simply an inevitable emotion. Others may sympathise with our misfortune, but the moment affairs of their own divert their attention, we are alone again, unconsoled. We have to be sorry for ourselves: nobody else can sympathise with us as steadily, as loyally as we, and it is from such sympathy that we draw strength to put a decent public face upon our misfortunes.

I’ll allow gratitude. Aesop, another ancient Greek, said ‘Gratitude is the Sign of a Noble Soul’. But I doubt he meant it in the sense of being grateful for all the nasty surprises life has in store for us. When the people of Delphi sentenced him to death on a trumped-up charge of temple theft, he cursed them. After they’d thrown him to his death off a cliff, the Delphians suffered pestilence and famine.

Fear

I expect Florence had something there.

Fear can be quite debilitating. Shakespeare says in Romeo and Juliet: “ I have a faint cold fear . . . . . . . that freezes up the heat of life.” I know what he means.

Being afraid is not always cowardly. In fact, fear can make you think before you do something stupid or dangerous, which is surely good.  I have little sympathy for people who risk their lives unnecessarily and expect rescuers to endanger their own lives to extricate them from their folly.

But it doesn’t always have to be quite as serious as that. Beloved tells the following story against himself:-

While floating along on a narrowboat on the Oxford canal with friends, their seven year old daughter fell overboard. Beloved can’t swim, he is terrified of water and doesn’t even like to get his face wet in the shower. Nevertheless, he instantly jumped after her, only to find that the canal was no more than 5ft deep. His heroic effort ended with him STANDING on the bottom, feeling rather silly, while the girl swam back to the boat and scrambled aboard. The fact remains that, when he saw the girl fall, his instant, thoughtless, impulse to rescue her overcame his fear of drowning. He also tells me that, had this been a fast flowing river instead of a gently drifting canal, he might have needed rescuing himself.

What Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, Florence Nightingale mean, is something different. Something with which I am very familiar.

Both Paul and Gardener have been poorly, neither has come to work for three weeks. Some serious jobs were waiting, so I attempted them myself. Pulling apart large root balls, grubbing up stubborn weeds, cutting back overgrown clumps of herbaceous plants, shovelling and a bit of digging. I was enjoying myself, adrenaline flowing. Gradually I became aware of a niggling pain in the throat area; "hay fever", I said to myself, although I should have known better. True to form, during the following night I woke up with a racing pulse, thumping all over the place, an episode of Atrial Fibrillation. Since last November, the last time I was hospitalised, I had only had a couple of minor, short-lived episodes, not more than half a day long, and I had put my otherwise more or less permanent apprehension about a renewed attack to the back of my mind. Along the lines of “new medication - new improved me”. Apprehensive, but a bit foolhardy.

I am better again, it was a mild attack, lasting nine hours; for most of the time I slept thanks to sleeping pills and tranquillisers; and then it stopped again, as it always does. A couple of days of taking it easy (saving me from a play-reading party for which I had little stomach anyway) and I was back to normal.

Back to normal, but also back to the ‘faint cold fear, that freezes up the heat of life’. You have no idea how sad that makes me feel.

Tubs, Puns and Holy Men

Black tubs are sprouting all over the garden. Paul came yesterday, then today it was Gardener’s turn.  Gardener still hasn’t twigged about Paul. Neither of them gives me more than three hours, which means that between them they provide the day’s work I need. Paul is very different from Gardener, no doubt I shall have to train him up. But there’s promise; he may appear in these pages and we may all get to know him as summer progresses.

During tea break he was telling Beloved and me that he’d taken a long time getting to grips with his chainsaw. “I was really nervous handling it at first,” he said. Sensible man, chainsaws are not to be operated in jest.

Beloved, not a hard worker, but keen to be part of the labour force, told a story.

“When the Royal Opera took the orchestra to Los Angeles a friend and I went to the beach, Venice beach, I think it was called. We saw two men juggling with running chainsaws. They were throwing them at each other, catching them in mid-air.”

When we’d finished laughing, Paul said : “Look, no hands.” I told you he shows promise. He’s not bad as a gardener either.

St Gregory was another punster. That awful Ambrose Bierce said of punning: a form of wit, to which wise men stoop and fools aspire. I like it; Bierce often pleases me.

Yesterday was St Gregory’s Day. In spite of my catholic schooling I am no expert on saints, I simply have access to an almanac. The Venerable Bede had this to say about Gregory the Great (papacy 590-604):

He was moved to send Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons by an encounter in the Roman slave market with some fair-haired English captives. On being told that they were Angles, he replied ‘not Angles but Angels' and on hearing that they came from Deira in Northumbria, he retorted that he would save them from the wrath (de ira in Latin) of God. And finally, when informed that their king’s name was ‘Aella’, the relentless ecclesiastical punster rejoined that Christian ‘Alleluias’ would soon be heard in their land.

Apparently, Gregory was also responsible for Gregorian Chant. Who says the early Church Fathers didn’t have a sense of humour.

I still like Paul’s ‘no hands’ though.

Poetry, Plagiarists and Literary Truisms.

What better occupation on a filthy day like today (Thanksgiving for my US friends, but a very ordinary, very wet, very blowy day here in the Marches) than to sit in my cosy study, surrounded by piles of women’s poetry anthologies, current and from long ago, looking for a couple of poems for tomorrow’s meeting of the poetry group. Although I have four weeks to do so from one meeting to the next, and although I read poetry most days, I always delay the search until the very last minute.

So, tomorrow’s subject is women’s poetry, and I have just come across the lines “Laugh and the world laughs with you, Weep and you weep alone.” Having always thought that there were no further lines, that that was it, and that these lines probably originated with some hoary old chap, much given to trite aphorisms (aphorism: a tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion), I decided to follow my nose and find out.

Far from it! Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919), was neither hoary nor a chap, but a farmer’s daughter from Wisconsin, a bonny lass, who wrote the poem after she had met a women on a train who was dressed in mourning and weeping pitifully. Ella herself was on her way to attend the governor’s inaugural ball in Madison, Wis.,  a highly celebratory affair.

She sent the poem to the Sun and received $5 for her effort. In May, 1883, "Solitude" appeared in Miss Wheeler's book Poems of Passion. While most of the book was second-rate verse, it received much attention from the press, because readers assumed that Miss Wheeler, a single woman, had herself experienced all that she had written about. Consequently, she and her book were called "indecent," "shocking," and "disgraceful.”

Naturally, this condemnation ensured that the book became a financial  success.

Ella Wheeler married Robert Marius Wilcox and prepared to live a blamelessly domestic life, without further notoriety. Had it not been for the audacious theft of her poem by the author John A. Joyce, that’s how it would have ended. Joyce stole her poem, word for word, and passed it off as his own. Ella challenged him to prove that she had not written it, but Joyce refused and even had the first two lines of ‘Solitude’ emblazoned on his tombstone.

Whichever one of them wrote it - and I vote for Ella, the story is just too delicious - here it is:


Solitude


Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow it's mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.




The two lines "There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall” would make an excellent summary of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, not the most riveting of the Bard’s plays, which took a lot longer to sit through than a quick read-through of Ella’s, ahem, masterpiece.

September Miscellany - Of Autumn Fruits and The House Of Libra

Ciclo dei Mesi - 1397

September

Chaenomeles

The fruits of the Japanese Quince are very hard and astringent,
inedible in their raw state.
But roughly chopped and cooked for a long time
they become soft and mushy, and
can be used for marmalades and jellies.
Japanese quinces contain more pectin than apples and true quinces and will set readily.

Tusan
Hypericum androsaemum
(St John's Wort)


'Tusan' is a corruption of the French toute-saine, roughly, 'all-heal'.
Modern herbal medicine uses hypericum poultices and salves for wounds and burns.
It is also well-known among herbalists as an anti-depressant.

St John's Wort, with its bright yellow flowers in summer, which turn to
showy black or red berries in autumn, is a popular plant for a dull spot in the garden.
Most of the leaves are retained in winter.

English Lavender

It's time to prune your lavender plants.
Lavender is another of the herbs that have a wide range of uses,
in food preparation, herbal medicines and cosmetics.

There's always a bowl of lavender flowers,
enhanced with a few drops of aromatic lavender oil
standing in a warm place in my house.



"I judge that the flowers of lavender, quilted into a cap and daily worn, 
are good for all diseases of the head that come of a cold cause,
and that they comfort the brain very well, 
namely if it have any distemperature that cometh of moistness."

William Turner
Herbal 1568

The Sun enters the House of Libra

'The man born under Libra shall be right mightily praised and honoured in the service of Captains. he shall go in unknown places. He shall keep well his own, if he make not revelation in drink. He will not keep his promise. he will be married, but go from his wife. He shall be enriched by women, but experience evil fortune, though many shall ask counsel of him. He shall have seventy years after nature.'

'The woman shall be amiable and of great courage, and shall go in places unknown. She shall be debonair and merry, rejoiced by her husband. If she shall not be wedded at thirteen, she shall not be chaste. After thirty years old she shall prosper the better and have great praise. She shall live sixty years after nature.'

Kalendar of Shepheardes 1604

Boiled Eggs

Loriot   

Nov 12, 1923-Aug 22, 2011

At some dinner parties the most wonderful conversations, clever and witty, erudite and eloquent arise spontaneously, out of nowhere. A host with a lavish hand and an ever ready bottle opener, good food and a company of people who share a positive attitude towards the pleasures in life are essentials; without these as givens no party will ever really take off.

Some of these conversations are so brilliant that I forget everything but a rough outline of the subjects discussed almost by the time we get home; I'd love to be clever and able to turn these conversations into equally brilliant blog posts, but short of taking a dictaphone and hiding it on the table during the meal I can think of no way to make that possible. Music, literature, the arts, the theatre, how do you keep track of bon-mots and amusing remarks, intelligent arguments and witticisms on these topics? By their very nature they ebb and flow without leaving a permanent imprint except to tell you about the speakers' preferences.

Unless the talk turns to eggs. I can remember eggs. Eggs is easy.

My favourite host invited us to meet a friend of his, one of his former students, whose first novel is to be published in the spring. She is busy writing her second novel about a barrister in chambers; she herself trained as a lawyer, the subject is therefore an obvious choice. She has given this barrister an egg to eat in one episode, and mention of this led us to a discussion of what you can judge about the character of a person from the way he or she eats a boiled egg.

Quite apart from the Swiftian war between the Lilliputians and Blefuscu, a lengthy conflict between the big-enders and the little-enders, who could not agree on which end to crack to eat a boiled egg, there must be other rules and regulations people hold dear.

Mr. Woodhouse, father of the eponymous heroine in Jane Austen's 'Emma', believed that 'an egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome'.

Personally, I prefer a softish yolk inside a firm white, but there are many ways to boil an egg. I once watched a fellow guest in a hotel in Cornwall send back his egg three mornings running, because it was not cooked to his exacting specification; he had stipulated the number of minutes and the chef was unable to bring the egg to the required consistency, no matter how closely he watched the boiling point. In the end, another guest came up with the most logical solution: the Cornish egg was simply too fresh compared to the egg the complainant usually used.

Once we have established how to boil an egg, how do we then open it?  Which end, big or little? Do we stick our knife into it and swivel it round the whole of the big or little end? Do we upend the egg and hit it on the plate? Do we hit the top of the egg with the knife? Or maybe the egg spoon instead of the knife? Do we peel the opened end or eat the top out of the separated end?

Again, speaking for myself only, I use the most merciless method of getting at my egg: I lay it sideways on my plate and behead it with one hard whack, then eat the little end first.

But stop, I forgot a very important point: Do we add salt to the opened egg before we eat it? Kipling says 'Being kissed by a man who didn't wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt', although I think he probably stole the phrase from an old Spanish proverb which says that 'a kiss without a moustache is like eating an egg without salt.'


I won't bring up the soldiers and egg question, I am assuming we are all adults on this blog. Or the hard-boiled egg salad, an abomination in my opinion. There may, of course, be those who do not like boiled eggs; you will, no doubt, tell me so. But a Sunday morning without a boiled egg to accompany a thickly buttered slice of hot toast, or, even better, a thickly buttered slice of sweet raisin and cinnamon bread, is not worth getting up for.

Melancholia

Nobody wants to know you when you're down; 

A dark cloud deadens the sparkle 

and muddies the waters.

I'm in hiding.

"Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

But has trouble enough of its own.

So says Ella Wheeler Wilcox,

and so say I.

The Decorettes

For the moment I lack the mental fleet-footedness that comes with a healthy mind in a healthy body; all I can come up with in response to  Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales No. 78 is a picture of The Decorettes. Lynn and Lorraine and their dog are having a break from painting the outside of my house last summer.

See you soon -   

The mere fact that I've stuck my head above the

parapet to post this apologia is a good sign.

Actually, why should you care. 

What's one more blogger more or less.

My World - The Spring Equinox - The Sun enters the House of Aries

Few people, even in the UK,  know about the beauties of the English Border County of Shropshire; I feel privileged to live here and  have decided to sing its praises in these pages. South Shropshire is a particularly quiet, very rural part of the world,  far from busy crowds and the hustle and bustle of modern cities. The Shropshire Hills have been granted the status of AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) as well as Area of Tranquility.

That's My World Tuesday

will help me.

The large pond in Colstey Wood between  Clun and Bishop's Castle

in the South Shropshire Hills

Beware

'Here Be Dragons'

The Dragon's Head

And the Dragon's Foot with Long and Vicious Claws

The Sun enters the House of Aries:

He that is born in Aries shall be of good wit, and neither rich nor poor. He shall be soon angry and soon pleased. He shall have damage by his neighbours, he shall have power over dead folks' goods. He shall be a liar and unsteadfast of courage, and will take vengeance on his enemies. Unto thirty-four years he shall be a fornicator, and wedded at thirty-five; and if he be not he shall not be chaste.  He shall have great sickness at twenty-two years, and if he escape he shall live seventy-five years after nature.

The woman that is born in this time shall be ireful, and suffer great wrongs from day to day. She shall lose her husband and recover a better. She shall be sick at five years, and in danger at twenty-five, and if she escape, she shall be in doubt until forty-three years, but afterwards prosper.

Kalendar of Shepheardes 1604

We've Made It Through Another Winter

"Come, sweetheart, listen, for I have a thing

Most wonderful to tell you, news of Spring".

Chaenomeles flowering on a sun-kissed, sheltered wall.

One more sleep and then it's official: it's Spring. Every year on this day Beloved and I congratulate ourselves and each other that we've made it through another winter. Winters are hard for me, I need daylight to keep the black dogs of depression at bay; although Beloved doesn't suffer from SAD he too is always very glad to see the lengthening days and feel the ever more warming rays of the sun.

"The loveliest flowers the closest cling to earth, And they first feel the sun".

Miniature Tulips

Miniature Daffodils

The leaves of this red Euphorbia glow in the sun.

And so do gardener and I, back in the kitchen, after a full day working outside.

Quotations:

The Miracle by John Drinkwater

Spring Flowers by John Keble

Of This And That

Of Rivers

What a difference a week makes.

These two photos were taken from the same spot

of the same part of the river.

I am not at all sure which view and temperature I prefer.

Muddy brown meltwater, dull skies and drizzle,

or last week's frozen river and clear, cold days.

Of Gardens

The water in the water butt is still frozen solid.

The butt measures three feet by two feet

and holds over 200 litres of water.

It was toppled by its own weight.

Wonder how long it will take to melt?

Of  The Twelfth And Last day Of Christmas

This was once the most festive day of the twelve, its celebrations ruled by the King of the Bean and the Queen of the Pea - respectively the man and the woman who found the concealed bean and pea in their slice of Twelfth Cake, If a woman chanced on the bean, however, she could choose the King; while a man, who got the 'pea slice' could select the Queen.

Of Molehills And Snowdrops

The early snowdrops are very late this year, 

The last few years they were out and in full bloom by Christmas.

But molehills have appeared everywhere.

To destroy moles, take some white or black hellebore, the white of an egg, some wheat flour,

milk and a little sweet wine, or mead, make it up into a paste and put pellets of the size of a nut into their holes, which being greedily eaten by them, will occasion their death.

The New Gardener's Calendar 1779

And, finally, of Labradors : first there were two,

then there were three.

The Twelve Days of Christmas - 22nd Window

"Twelfth Night" by David Teniers the Younger (1634-40)

The Twelve Days of Christmas begin on  December 25 and end on Epiphany, January 6. In the Middle Ages this period was one of continuous feasting and merrymaking, which climaxed on Twelfth Night, the traditional end of the Christmas season.

During the twelve days of Christmas, traditional roles were often relaxed, masters waited on their servants, men were allowed to dress as women, and women as men. Often a Lord of Misrule was chosen to lead the Christmas revels. Some of these traditions were adapted from older, pagan customs, including the Roman Saturnalia. Some also have an echo in modern day pantomime where traditionally authority is mocked and the principal male lead is played by a woman, while the leading older female character, or 'Dame' is played by a man.

Everybody knows the hardy perennial
"The Twelve Days Of Christmas'.

Here is a rather different version in the form of
A Correspondence

25th December

My dearest darling

That partridge, in that lovely little pear tree! What a

enchanting, romantic,poetic present! Bless you and thank you.

Your deeply loving Emily

26th December

Mr dearest darling Edward

The two turtle doves arrived this morning and are cooing

away in the pear tree as I write. I'm so touched and

grateful.

With undying love, as always, Emily

27th December

My darling Edward

You do thinks of the most original presents: whoever

thought of sending anybody three French hens? Do they really

come all the way from France? It's a pity that we have no

chicken coops, but I expect we'll find some. Thank you,

anyway, they're lovely.

Your loving Emily

28th December

Dearest Edward

What a surprise - four calling birds arrived this morning.

They are very sweet, even if they do call rather loudly -

they make telephoning impossible. But I expect they'll calm

down when they get used to their new home. Anyway, I'm very

grateful - of course I am.

Love from Emily

29th December

Dearest Edward

The postman has just delivered five most beautiful gold

rings, one for each finger, and all fitting perfectly. A

really lovely present -lovelier in a way than birds, which do

take rather a lot of looking after. The four that arrived

yesterday are still making a terrible row, and I'm afraid

none of us got much sleep last night. Mummy says she wants

us to use the rings to 'wring' their necks - she's only

joking, I think; though I know what she means. But I love

the rings. Bless you

Love, Emily

30th December

Dear Edward

Whatever I expected to find when I opened the front door

this morning, it certainly wasn't six socking great geese

laying eggs all over the doorstep. Frankly, I rather hoped

you had stopped sending me birds - we have no room for them

and they have already ruined the croquet lawn. I know you

meant well, but - let's call a halt, shall we?

Love, Emily

31st December

Edward

I thought I said no more birds; but this morning I woke up

to find no less than seven swans all trying to get into our

tiny goldfish pond. I'd rather not think what happened to

the goldfish. The whole house seems to be full of birds - to

say nothing of what they leave behind them. Please, please

STOP

Your Emily

1st January

Frankly, I think I prefer the birds. What am I to do with

eight milkmaids - AND their cows? Is this some kind of a

joke? If so, I'm afraid I don't find it very amusing.

Emily

2nd January

Look here Edward, this has gone far enough. You say you're

sending me nine ladies dancing; all I can say is that judging

from the way they dance, they're certainly not ladies. The

village just isn't accustomed to seeing a regiment of

shameless hussies with nothing on but their lipstick

cavorting round the green - and it's Mummy and I who get

blamed. If you value our friendship - which I do less and

less - kindly stop this ridiculous behaviour at once.

Emily

3rd January

As I write this letter, ten disgusting old men are

prancing abour all over what used to be the garden -before

the geese and the swans and the cows got at it; and several

of them, I notice, are taking inexcusable liberties with the

milkmaids. Meanwhile the neighbours are trying to have us

evicted. I shall never speak to you again.

Emily

4th January

This is the last straw. You know I detest bagpipes. The

place has now become something between a menagerie and a

madhouse and a man from the Council has just declared it

unfit for habitation. At least Mummy has been spared this

last outrage; they took her away yesterday afternoon in an

ambulance. I hope you're satisfied.

5th January

Sir

Our client, Miss Emily Wilbraham, instructs me to inform

you that with the arrival on her premises a half-past seven

this morning of the entire percussion section of the

Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and several of their friends

she has no course left open to her but to seek an injunction

to prevent your importuning her further. I am making

arrangements for the return of much assorted livestock.

I am, Sir, Yours faithfully,

G.CREEP

Solicitor-at-law

Messrs. Sue, Grabbit & Run

John Julius Norwich