temps perdus

Wet and chilly. K and I splashed our way down to the Arnolfini yesterday afternoon to listen to Annie McGann read her poetry. She advised K to cover her ears for her reading of "All men are bastards, and so are the women", which got some spontaneous "been there" applause from the crowd. The Bristol Poetry Festival is in full swing; my contribution, at the Central Library on Thursday, was seventeen syllables long, and was appreciated at least for its brevity. It was the haiku I wrote for K's first day at school, written that morning.


There seems to be an air of nostalgia for the lost and now-drowned summer, here in the blogosphere. Unless, of course, I'm just projecting. Only ten days ago I was swimming in a warm(ish) sea in Devon. It seems very long ago now.

Here's a photo that really was taken a long time ago. In human years anyway.



This picture is by Mervyn Joseph Pius O'Gorman, and is a portrait of his daughter Christina. It was taken at Durdle Door, in 1913

term

It's me. I've been trying to get a decent self-portrait to send to the Bristol Evening Post along with a bunch of illustrations from the Bristol Downs book. Guess it'll do; I tried smiling, and looked scary.

In her really rather good review of Becoming Drusilla in the Daily Telegraph, Diane Purkiss comments on this blog that I am "less juicily confessional than we might wish". I don't think that she's being entirely serious. But it did get me wondering, "what is the point of this blog?" And at least part of the point of it is to describe how things are for me, and how I see my little corner of the world.

So. Right now, the biggest thing in my life is my daughter's coming to live with me and starting secondary school in Bristol. I find it a bit difficult to talk about the last few years in this respect; while I was at least a weekend parent, I also missed out on a lot of the day-to-day shared experiences that go with family life. Never mind; K and I are now treading cautiously into a more shared future, and that is good.

Today was her first day at school. We were up early, getting ready and faffing around and worrying. And then we walked round there together. Other children were walking in groups, but K hasn't re-connected with any local friends yet so she walked with me, and was a bit self-conscious about being with a parent, and feeling very nervous. I told her about how I used to feel before I joined my ship; I was usually physically sick for the day beforehand. She'd had no appetite at breakfast. She thought it would be better when she'd actually got there. And she was right. We found her teacher and parted company, and I went home and felt rather overwhelmed for some reason or other, and tried to write things down and didn't succeed entirely.

But here's a haiku about it.

Rainy day, new school
-under two separate brollies
but still holding hands.

back to the Valleys

I went over to Risca in South Wales, to see my old friend Gareth. We'd lost contact, and then he heard me on Radio 4 and got in touch again. The power of radio...

We went hunting for an iron foundry in Abercarn; there was a blast furnace operating there in 1576, apparently. The Gwyddon stream is dammed in the side valley, and once powered a water wheel which operated the furnace bellows. We scrambled down the steep bank of the stream, over rubble and domestic waste. There was a culvert on the side, but nothing much else. New flats had been built on the side, out of sight on this picture.




..and we looked at St Luke's church, which I'd not even realised was there until recently. It's just down the hill from the younger St Luke's Church, which was Anglican -I'd been there once on an Air Cadet church parade, and found it cavernous and rather arid in spirit. It was abandoned because of structural problems. The older and smaller St Luke's has been preserved thanks in large part to the efforts of Gareth's mother, Bronwen, who had once taught us English at the Grammar School. The church is shared by two groups of chapel types, one of them welsh-speaking.

So the whole thing could be a metaphor for something. Or just a nice story.

I like Welsh chapels. I got to sit in on some services, again thanks to the Air Cadets. I like the way everyone sings their own harmony, so there seem to be as many tunes as there are congregation, and it all hangs together beautifully. On the other hand, there was the time that a womens' choir at a service in Blackwood sang their own arrangement of "When I Survey The Wond'rous Cross" which reduced me to helpless laughter...


That's Gareth there on the left, discussing recent vandalism with the chap who lives next door to the church. There were empty vodka bottles in the porch, and some of the roof had been smashed.

We noted down the inscription on Abercarn's war memorial, for subsequent translation; Gareth is studying Welsh, but is not yet fluent. Gwell angau na chywilydd. "Death before dishonour", apparently. While I sort of approve of the principle in my own life, it feels rather bombastic for a memorial erected by the people who ordain such civic monuments and therefore ipso facto didn't die. Perhaps the sentiment is differently nuanced in Welsh.

We walked along a recently-restored section of the Crumlin Branch of the Mon and Brec Canal. We watched a young buzzard petulantly calling for its parents; a heron standing motionless; and a kingfisher, which darted ahead of us all the way along the towpath. I'd never seen a kingfisher in the Ebbw valley before. Times are changing.

Sitting outside the Darren pub and drinking Brains Dark for old times' sake, we talked about school days. A man at the next table overheard us and joined in; it turned out that he was at Newbridge Grammar School too, though a few years ahead of us. He's a florist in Risca now, and still knows some of the teachers. We compared our early ambitions. I gave an edited version of mine; I said that I wanted to see the world, and left out the desire to be a fighter pilot. Some people can get slightly angry and confused if I come up with some of the more conventionally 'male' aspects of my past, and this was an exercise in trying to make things easy for everyone. A little frustrating. Like last week in Devon, when we'd been discussing birds we'd seen on the cliffs. A man stated that a bird of prey under discussion (brown plumage, seen hovering) was a peregrine falcon. He backed it up by adding that his mate was the peregrine man. And he was so confident that everyone believed him. Peregrines are not brown and they don't hover, but my opinion didn't count, because.

Anyway, there at the Darren we sat until late, and had an unexpectedly sociable time.

I do miss that sort of thing; the friendliness of South Wales, and the way that everyone seems to know everyone else. Still, I felt like an outsider then, and I suppose I still do, in life as in South Wales.

tent

A few days holidaying. I went down to South Devon and met up with some Bristol friends. Somewhere west of Start Point, where I've not been before. So before I left I looked at Google Earth and peered down on the area from high up, to get an idea of where I was heading.

And I saw a field with bell tents in it and thought, "That must be the place".

I was right.



There were several of them, which had survived the storms surprisingly well. In the corner of the field was a pile of mangled aluminium and heaps of nylon, where wrecked tents had been dumped. Other tents had simply disappeared in the direction of Dorset, never to be seen again.


Here's M with her van. I encamped with her and A. They are seasoned outdoors types and I felt extremely minimal by comparison.

I noted happily that they are not averse to using make-up in the field, as it were, as a few people had expressed amusement that I was described as doing so in "Becoming...". So there. Real campers (or is that "glampers", as A described herself?) use make-up.

Walked, swam, ate, socialised. Holidayed.

wonders and monsters

I was sitting in Brendagh's garden yesterday afternoon, drinking tea and munching hummous on crackers and chatting and watching the birds. A high flight of swallows, swirling slowly westward. A sparrow landing on the gutter.

It gives a little sparrowy chirp.

A sparrowhawk clunks against the gutter, its wings beat against the roof slates, and it's off, away along the front of the house with a little sparrow-sized bundle in its claws.

Gosh. I am really rather shocked. Never seen that happen before. Although I saw a hawk snatch a fish from the harbour in Colombo once. But this was sudden death in a Somerset garden, where that sort of thing seems slightly outrageous.

But the sparrowhawk isn't a monster, it's just a sparrowhawk doing what sparrowhawks do.

I was talking with Geraldine about the funny stuff you see at sea.

...no, not that sort of funny, silly

Or as the Bible sort of put it,

They that go down to the sea in ships,
that do business in great waters;
these see the works of the Lord,
and His wonders in the deep.

My first trip to sea, rounding Land's End in December 1981; there was a hurricane going on, and I was wedged by the compass on the bridge to stop me from going flying. The wind was howling in the superstructure, and the sea was mixing itself with the sky as though we were in a very large food mixer. The captain was faintly illuminated by the lights of the instruments. He was listening to the radio. "Some ship in trouble to the west," he said. That was the Union Star, about to be lost along with the Penlee lifeboat.

A winter's evening in the Bay of Biscay, a long low swell running and a washed feel to the twilight. Gannets were sitting stilly on the water, as far as you could see the sea was punctuated with gannets, uncountable numbers of them.

Thundering across the Arabian Sea on Condor 10 at night, watching silent fireworks flashing under the water around the keels, as the plankton fired off its flashbulbs. Photoluminescence, it's called apparently. Looks very impressive anyway.

Loitering on deck in hopes of catching the Green Flash, when the sun just disappears behind the horizon. Not seen it yet. But there was one sunset when a column of light stood in the sky over the place where the sun had set, for quite some time.



Which was not a patch on what I saw in the Indian Ocean, sometime towards midnight, a thousand miles from the nearest land, out on the back deck and seeing a very bright vertical column of white light way off on the port beam. I went up to the bridge and asked if anyone had seen it. They thought I was being silly There was nothing on the radars, nothing at all. Then there was a terrific flash of white light, from horizon to horizon. We exchanged "Well I never saw anything like that" looks, and continued with our business.

And then there was my sea monster.

It was not a hugely monstrous sea monster, but it was the one I saw. We were chugging along southwards across the Bay of Biscay. It was a flat calm summer's day, nothing but the occasional distant splashings of tuna shoals 'hitting' mackerel shoals. Away ahead, I saw a dark object get closer and closer. It was a long eel-shaped creature swimming along in the opposite direction to us, with its head sticking out of the water. It passed down our port side, gave me a cursory glance and continued its indifferent way.

I looked around the bridge, where the watch were doing what the watch does best, chatting, drinking tea, gasconading. "Did I really see that?" I wondered.

I did, you know.

pretty vacances

Balmoral coming up the Avon yesterday

I'm always reading Blaise Pascal, me*. When I'm not reading Ulysses, of course. The special edition of Ulysses, that is, with the extra words**. So on a day like today, when I hear the rain pattering on the roof and think of Bank Holidays, those wise words of the slightly-dead French philosopher come to mind. In french, naturellement.

Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'un seul chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.

Sounds like a good reason to put t' kettle on.

....dips Hobnob into tea, continues.

The tidy-up continues. I hoovered up a few hundredweight of dust from under the bed, and took up a few floorboards to try to find some of the ear-rings that I've lost over the years. It's funny how it happens, that; something falls onto the floor and you reach down to pick it up, only to realise that it is nowhere in sight. And no amount of scrabbling around with a torch does any good at all.

Didn't find anything, apart from an ancient Bakelite light switch deposited there by a casual electrician sometime long ago.

This reminded me of a time down on Ashridge Farm in Devon, when I was doing some work on the place. I took up some floorboards in one of the upstairs rooms, and found.... well, a long-dead rat for one thing, and the skeletons of lots of little mice which had been electrocuted in the top of a light fitting which, presumably, their mother had thought would be a nice warm nursery. And, in one corner of the room, piles of ancient buttons and sewing things. It had evidently been the place where someone had sat and done the needlework over a long period of time.

In the same room, when I stripped off the wallpaper around the window, I found some lines written on the exposed plaster. Tantalisingly, the words were indecipherable, but I could read the signature, Jane Lakeman. I found her grave in Modbury churchyard; she'd died in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was odd, sitting in the window seat where she'd sat as a young woman thinking poetic thoughts, and looking out onto the same wooded and rainswept hillside. I do wish I could have read what she wrote; those words had been waiting for such a long time under the wallpaper.

Back to the present... so I made a pile of videos-that-are-probably-worth-something, and checked that they still played. I was amazed to discover how rare this one is:

...and transported back in my mind to the early 1980s, when it also seemed to be raining a lot. Driving up the motorway through the night on my way to Newcastle, past endless police convoys during the miners' strike, listening to Everything But The Girl and trying to stay awake. Here's a nice track from the compilation: Working Week, with Tracey Thorn and Robert Wyatt...





*fibs
**all fibs

holiday

wishful thinking

It's a Bank Holiday, apparently. I am always taken by surprise when they come along, as they have never featured particularly in my working life, which has either been at sea, where they don't count, or self-employed, where they don't count. I know they're going on because supermarkets get horribly crowded as people panic buy the essentials to keep them going during the one day that the shops will be closed, except that shops don't tend to close on Bank Holidays these days.... and there will be queues on the M5 heading into the West Country, followed by queues on the M5 heading out of the West Country.

All in all, a good time to stay at home. Going out and about on a Bank Holiday provokes in me the feeling, described by Evelyn Waugh, that Basil Seal experiences at the outbreak of the Second World War, in, I think, Put Out More Flags: "like being in the middle of a South American revolution, but being oneself a South American."

I may have paraphrased.

K is away with the Other Parent, on her Other Hols. I texted the OP yesterday: There is something odd going on the sun is shining in Bristol. She replied There is something even odder going on- it is pissing with rain and freezing cold in the south of france.

I continue to get the flat tidy, or at least less messy, in readiness for K's return in time to start school in September. She will be living with me after some years of living in the Other Place, and we're all treading cautiously into the new order of things.

I have a friend who has three children and an estranged partner, and they arrange things such that the children live in the same house and the parents alternate staying with them. K is very struck by the felicity of the solution. I can, of course, think of all sorts of reasons why it wouldn't or couldn't work in our case, but then I would, wouldn't I?