Grey and Green

Moonface and I walked from Kirkby Stephen over the Pennines down Swaledale to Richmond, last week. It's one of England's most underpopulated areas, with vast swathes of bare moorland and upland bog. Even in the valley, there are few people and the villages are widely separated.

It wasn't always like this. From Roman times (and probably before) until early last century, the hills were one of the world's richest sources of lead. Metallurgists have found that Swaledale lead has been found as far afield as Jerusalem. ( like the lead and silver from the Mendips, closer to our home) There are strange hummocks and folds in the hillside throughout the valley where mines one were, and the remains of smelting mills on the moors. There must have been hundreds of people involved, from the miners themselves to the peat diggers who provided the fuel for smelting, to the wainwrights and pack-men who provided transport, and the cooks, builders and ancilliaries who kept the mines going. All of them needed food, so the farmers would have been richer and more numerous than now.

Now, on the tops, there is silence. The hills were stripped of peat to fuel the smelting works, so the bare rock is exposed. The mine working and mills are in ruins. It's like another planet, when the valleys are hidden by perspective.


:-]

Diamond Wedding

Today would have been Midge and Frank's sixtieth wedding anniversary, had they lived.
It's funny how time erodes the differences between ages and generations: that's now less than twice the time that Moonface and I have been married. And saying that only emphasises our own mortality and how time is passing by.


:-]

This Be The Verse

Philip Larkin

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.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Well, it's too late for me to obey the last injunction, but we'll cope.
Most people seem to crawl out from under, sooner or later.


:)

Empty Nest

Monday morning:

It starts here. Moonface and I are a couple again, no longer the parents of a nuclear family. Tom's in Wells, Rio's in the North. The house feels subtly different from when the kids were just out for the day: there's an emptiness that one can feel: it's underused.

We're going to have to change our lives to accommodate the gap which the children have left, perhaps make more effort to socialise outside our current main circles of friends. I must admit, I'm a little apprehensive about this change of life and how it will affect us.


:-)

Autumn

It's cool in the evenings, and cold by morning. Dawn is late, so waking is hard and the sun rises far to the south so that when it does shine into our bedroom, it illuminates our bed set against the far wall. Walking in the garden on the wet grass in bare feet is painful, especially after the light frosts which we had last week. And the leaves on the creeper covering the wall, have turned red within the last few weeks.

:-)

More goodbyes

Just after our daughter left home for university, our son found work away from home, so he moved to Wells last weekend. It's a lovely small city (the smallest city in England) which is only 25 miles from Bristol, but that's just too far to commute daily on the slow traffic-filled routes between there and here. Saying goodbye was a strain, as he had to find digs quickly in order to start work as soon as possible, so he is lodging with an oldish single man. It's not what we wanted, but Wells is a small town, and needs must. It's not a long term decision, as we hope he finds somewhere more convivial soon. But until then, at least he has a decent room and access to an acceptable kitchen and living rooms.

Moonface and I have had a short break in the North, but next week we will be a couple, living by ourselves for the first time in more than twenty-five years. It's quite a frightening prospect: there will be just two of us rattling around in this huge house. The dynamics of living here will be changed, and I foresee that we will change the way we live to match the way we did so before children. I can't imagine that we will take lodgers again, although it worked fine when we were in our twenties.

Acquiring lodgers was accidental, and easy. When we moved house from Ash Road to here, one of our next-door-neighbour's friends asked if she could stay a while, as she had just been thrown out of home by her father. So, one day after we moved, she did. Then her boyfriend more-or-less moved in, too. She later told us that she was pregnant, which was why her Catholic father played the Victorian paterfamilias so sternly. And since we had one person living with us [or one, one half, and a foetus] and three more rooms to spare, we advertised for and found two more. With changes of people and circumstances, living with lodgers lasted for five full years, until just before Moonface gave birth to Tom.

Now, living here with just the two of us is going to feel strange. It's hard enough when I am working in my garret with the others scattered throughout the house, but their psychic presence helps. On our own, it will be harder.


:-/

Avalon

Tom and I drove down to Wells yesterday morning, in perfect Autumn weather.

Descending from Mendip, the view of the Levels was chillingly beautiful. The fields and woods of the hills below us were still green, but slowly showing shades of brown. All over the Levels there was a thin layer of translucent mist obscuring all but the tallest trees, and making the fields below the vapour look drowned as if the waters had returned. The Levels themselves were ghostly grey, but rising out of them and isolated from its surroundings was the smooth round cone of Glastonbury Tor, its dark monument the only building visible for miles.

Avalon indeed.


:-/

Lacrimae Rerum

Another leak
in the lavatory roof
drip drip down the lightbulb.
I pissed in the dark, raindrops
smacking my shoulder-blades.

This morning I woke
to fresh wet birdsong
under a cloud of quilt
last night's hot sweetness
still fizzing between my legs.

I was fooled into swallowing spring
jumping up to make tea
and rinse dishes, whistle
a liquid kitchen oratorio.

It's your birthday next week.
This time next year
I think you'll be gone
quietly as this water
slipping over my hands.

After your funeral
we'll return
to your parched house.
We'll try to hold our mother up
like this exhausted roof.

I carry your dying
inside me
as real as milk

as I'll carry on
getting the roof fixed
making love
weeping into the washing-up.

Another Michele Roberts poem: short, brutal, romantic and without hope.
Funny, I had no idea that she wrote prose as well, until I tried searching for this one on the internet. Mournful stuff, but that suits my mood at the moment.

:*

M

Consumer

I complained about not my writing poetry, a week or so ago. Thinking about this, I don't produce anything artistic at all. I don't play an instrument since I stopped playing the saxophone and ceased to keep a mouth-organ in the car. I don't paint, I don't sculpt, I don't sing except in the shower.

But, I guess that I help keep the arts alive, as a consumer. We go to concerts, listen to records, buy books and even paintings occasionally. It evens out. And someone has to pay the piper.

I've been creative in the past, in a mechanical fashion. I used to be good at DIY, and enjoyed tinkering and making things. I still (sometimes) assemble bits of bicycle into something rideable and fun, and fix fiddly objects around the house. For some reason, though, I've done much less of this recently, than I would like to, and can't quite work out why.


:-)

Midge , 1921- 2007

Midge's funeral service was held today.
She was the last of her siblings to die, so a generation passed away with her, the last family memories of another time: before cars were commonplace, before household telephones, television, refrigeration.

I don't know what to say about her, beyond that she was a typical English farmer's wife, having travelled enough of the world to like her own corner best, with familiarity and home as her great comforts. We will miss her.

Moonface and I are now part of the elder generation, so from now it will be our memories and opinions that will be variously picked over to be respected or discarded as the listeners choose.


:-(

Feeling my Age

My arms and shoulders ache: I've been out on the singlespeed in the woods again, but feeling less fit than I should be. For some reason I was slow, which has a bad effect when cycling on worn tyres over wet roots, mud, and polished smooth limestone rocks. Like skiing, it's necessary to have a certain momentum and pace to carry oneself over the tricky bits of trail, as the wheels get thrown sideways and the rider thrown off by small obstacles if one goes too slowly.

With my wheels were slipping and skidding I just didn't feel confident, which in turn meant that I was cycling more circumspectly and slowly instead of faster, and the whole circuit of Leigh Woods and Ashton Court was a mess. It's the sketchiness that scares me, when my front wheel starts moving in a different direction from the intended one. Yes, scared. I've hurt myself a few times when falling off, so I don't want to do it again. I'm a wuss. But at least I'm a 54-year-old wuss still cycling in the woods.


:-)

Poetry

As I am a sensitive and aesthetically-oriented flower of a man, I have a liking for poetry.

There is usually a slim - or fat- volume of verse by my bedside, as I find it easier to digest a poem of two as night-time reading, than a few pages of a novel. I'm not fussy about what I read, so long as it's good, but don't ask me to define what I mean by "good". Homer, Hiawatha, Ars Amoris and Simon Armitage; it's all worth reading. I suppose that in total we have half a shelf of poetry, mainly anthologies, dotted around the house.

However, I've not really written any poetry since I was a tormented late adolescent. I've composed poetry alright, but only when in that state of semi-consciousness when drifting into sleep. And as expected, I can never remember any of it in the morning, so nothing gets committed to paper. Or screen. Perhaps it's because I'm not tormented enough these days, although the last few months have been emotionally draining, so I may be getting into the right state of mind. Or perhaps, just a right state.

I can invent doggerel easily enough, spout rhyming couplets to amuse Moonface, but that's white rap, not poetry. And in terms of prose, this blog is the most I've written for thirty years, except for business purposes.

But now, I've been set a challenge.
Another person I know well has started to write poetry in their blog. One of our closer friends is already a published poet(ess) and I think quite highly of what she writes. It's not great, but it's good. And the new blogger's not bad, either. Short poems, almost songs without music; with short lines and verses but conceptually complete. There's an element of the haiku in their spare nature.

Something strikes me: both women (of not dissimilar ages) are childless, married to separated men several years older than themselves who already have near-adult children, both are highly intelligent, both have (had) self-image problems, and both were brought up by their grandmothers rather than their mothers.

Go figure.


:-] ???

1924

I spent a few hours today sorting and scanning photographs of Midge and her family, for the funeral on Thursday. The oldest one we found is from 1924, showing Midge (the youngest) and her siblings with their parents in a formal group. There's a strange wave to the photo, distorting their legs.

Seven children!
It's another world.

:-(

Damsons

The southern edge of the Cotswolds flows towards Bath like a river delta, becoming diffuse and interrupted instead of a solid body. There are deep, steep, hidden chalk valleys; remote in spite of being so close to two major cities.

During a walk through St Catherine's valley, we spotted what we thought was a short line of sloe-laden blackthorns, unusually productive, but which proved to be wild damson trees.
Their plums were as small as grapes or sloes, with a sky-blue bloom where they were not wrinkled through age. One bush had younger bitter fruit, but the others were plump and sweet. We ate as many as we could on the spot, standing on tip-toe to reach higher up the trees to where the fruits were more profuse, then picked a pound or so to take home.

We ate damson & apple crumble for our pudding, on Sunday evening.


:-)

A bit of history

At the back of the attic, unused and covered in dust, Moonface found some boxed software that must have been there for nearly twenty years. I even remember using them for work, aeons ago.

Supplied in huge boxes with thick manuals and floppy disks, we had Wordstar, Harvard Graphics III, and Ashton-Tate Framework. All were for DOS- based PC's, all need a massive 640kB memory to run. Yes, 640kB, not MB. I hated Wordstar, with peculiar key combinations for spacing and functions; Harvard Graphics was functional but primitive; but Framework was a minor piece of genius. It was effectively a Windows-type integrated office solution before Windows existed, as it could display multiple documents on a DOS screen, each bound by a frame (or window) and allowing cutting and pasting between them.

It was a very neat solution for its time, and is available now at the dump to which Moonface took the boxes yesterday. Twenty years!

:-)

Crook Peak

Crook Peak is an outcrop of the Mendip Hills, towards their western end, rising high above the Somerset Levels south of Bristol.

Yesterday, Moonface took a day off from sorting out her mother's affairs to walk with me over there, a six-mile circular walk from the village of Cross: up, along, over and down again. It was a wonderful day for a walk, with clear blue skies, few clouds and a slight breeze. The paths, which can often be sticky with chalky mud, were dry and resilient. As it was mid-week, there were few other people around and those were mainly retired people and dog-walkers. We saw perhaps half-a-dozen couples all afternoon.

It cheered us, to get into the open air and to feel sunlight upon our faces. The views from the ridges leading to Crook Peak are spectacular (I'm only sorry that I didn't take the camera) and panoramic, with vistas of the Severn estuary both north & south. We could see the coast and hills of Wales clearly laid out, individual large buildings clearly visible, then to the south we could see Devon and Glastonbury Tor beyond the flat Levels. The scars on the landscape are the encroaching boxes of Worle, that bland extension of commuter Weston, and the M5 roaring beneath us.

But ignoring the hum of that distant traffic, we had the wind in our hair (her hair, anyway. There's not much of mine) and the sun upon us. As we sat to eat our sandwiches, a kestrel hovered around to hunt. It quartered the ground before us for a good ten minutes: swooping and gliding, hovering quite close to us, so that we could pick out the patterns on its pale buff breast. There were swallows still around, twittering as they flew hunting for insects. It must have been a good September for them, as usually they have headed south by this time of year.

Crook Peak is a good place from which to contemplate the world; its past and future.
The Somerset levels were once marshes, from which some of England's most ancient traces of man have been excavated. Now they are drained fields. The vile ribbon of the M5 did not exist forty years ago, so the whole area would have been relatively peaceful and green. The blot of Worle would similarly have been fields. And what of the future? The plans to build a Severn Barrage for power generation will mean that the Mendips will be extended into a wall across the sea, with more roads and traffic. Or will rising sea levels mean that the Levels are flooded again?
Who knows?


:)

Nanny, again.

Moonface's mother died late last night.

She'd been hospitalized for over two months, since she broke her hip; but had cancer spreading throughout her body as well, weakening her badly. It wasn't a good death, but we suppose that she had a decent life, with the opportunity to enjoy the world. Life on a west country farm wasn't the most cosmopolitan location, but it was pretty good for her.

I have three overriding memories of Midge.

Most recently, last weekend, was of her lying inert in her nursing home bed, hardly aware of the world. She was emaciated, yellowed, weak, saddened. Her arthritic hands were bent so that she had difficulty holding the beakers containing her drinks. These, almost identical to toddlers' mugs, had plastic spouts to help guide the semi-competent users to their own mouths. Poor Midge could hardly lift the beaker to her mouth; I had to help her drink, and in her semi-conscious state, she mistook the beaker spout for an errant spoon and complained about it. Poor woman.

Six years ago, after Moonface's father's funeral, we scattered his ashes under and around a sapling freshly planted at the farm. Midge was alert, cheerful, and scampered around more than I had seen her for years - perhaps freed of the responsibilities of looking after her man. There was a strong breeze that day, so as we poured Frank's ashes into the holes prepared for the young trees, the wind caught his remains and blew them into our faces and irritated our eyes. Midge laughed as she rubbed her face and turned away from the dusty powder.

And longer ago, more than thirty years, I remember her reaction when we told her that Moonface and I wanted to marry. She looked shocked, stood straight up, uttered a single sound "Oh!" , and sat down, poker-backed, in silence.

****************

I feel guilty about not being with Moonface. She's gone to the farm, to help sort things out.
It's difficult, as I want to be with her, but I think (and hope) she'll bear up better without me. And, she's got her brother with her. If I went to the farm as well, we'd have left Tom on his own which I think would leave him vulnerable and potentially miserable, too. This is a big house to be lonely in.


:-(

Naming America

Returning home from an open home art exhibition in Windmill Hill, I called briefly in upon St Mary Redcliffe church, my first visit for several years. Looking around, I noticed William Penn's memorial. His son (I think) was granted land in America in return for loans to the king. Hence, Pennsylvania.

And further down towards the church altar, a rood-screen commemorating Richard Amerycke's daughter. Now, as every good Bristolian knows, Richard Amerycke funded John Cabot's early voyages to the New World and in return had the continent named after him. Why the rest of the world believes that it was named after Vespucci, we cannot understand. After all, he called himself Alberigo until he returned from his voyages, when he renamed himself Amerigo. Self-aggrandisement, and successful.

The linguistics and tradition lie with Bristol.

With the exception of places named after royalty and saints ( Louisiana, San Francisco, Georgia) all locations in the new worlds and colonies take the surnames of their founders or those they commemorate. We remember Bougainville, Tasmania, Bolivia, Rhodesia, as well as Pennsylvania I(as above), Leopoldville, Washington and Pittsburgh.

We speak of Columbia, not Christophia.

So remember our city, when speaking of America.


:-)

Burma

This pestle and mortar have sat somewhere around our dining room fireplace for a quarter of a century. It's probably our most distinctive souvenir from our late-'70's hippy year, the result of an exchange in Burma. It still brings back memories of our first exposure to south-east Asia, a reclusive country with (then) so few tourists and a recursive way of life.

We obtained the pestle and mortar in Rangoon, in a back-street deal from a street trader who was very keen to take our single bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label whisky brought in duty-free. And we loved the country. It was too difficult to visit Mandalay and Pagan in the north, but we took a bus to Pegu outside the city, to the giant reclining Buddha of which my father had such memories.

And now, the nightly news is reviving my memories. The TV shows the street leading to the Schwe Dagon pagoda, the street I remember walking along, between the verandah'd colonial shops and houses all painted white and green. The heady scents and heat sway back in my mind. I can visualise the brightly coloured cars and crimson monks' robes, the gold of the pagodas and statues. It's the one country to which I now want to return, if the politics and purse permit.

Thinking along the timelines, there is now almost the same interval between my father's sojourn out there during and just after the war and our short tour, as between our tour and the present. Thirty years, near as dammit. We should send an offspring out there.


:¬/