Dream and Memory Flood

I'm in one of those funny phases at the moment, when all of the channels are open, and all of the pipes are connected, and memories and vivid dream images are able to flood through into my consciousness and my subconscious.

Last night, for example, I had two extremely vivid dreams. The first one involved me standing on a football terrace with my little brother, in a time that was a mixture of the 1980s and a future time, and a stadium that was a mixture of various London grounds and more northerly constructions but, at the same time, was absolutely Griffin Park, the home of the mighty Brentford. We seemed to spend most of our time moving around in the early evening light (my favourite time for standing in a football stadium, preferably at a pre-season game in August, with the smell of roll ups and beer in the air), trying to find a place to stand where we could get a clear view of the pitch. Secondly, I was dancing with Nigella at a school end-of-term disco, the last, slow dance. She was beautiful and warm. It was very exciting. The main component of this dream was the warmth that was passing between her and me, and that warmth carried over into my waking state, when I was semi-conscious, and seeing that imagery in my mind, with that warm feeling echoing powerfully through me, and feeling that poignant feeling you get when you want that imagined/dreamed thing to persist, to be real.

Thinking about the poignant beauty of that dream later in the day, I found myself smiling at the warmth and desirability of that dream state.

I also found some other bits and pieces of memory creeping in unbidden: the subtle, splendid mouldings of a plastic model kit that I bought in - what? - 1977? - the Airfix B-26 Marauder (a WW2 US light bomber): I remembered how I'd been excited by the excellent moulding of the wheel bay interiors, and the subtlety of the control surface mouldings - I just knew that these would all look superb once they had been painted, complementing the aesthetically pleasing curves of the aircraft structure itself. I could unwind a whole other set of associations from this, so tactile and real are the memories that are living in my fingertips and in my nostrils - but I won't bore you with them (not yet...). I guess what I'm getting at here is that the things that really hit you, and the things that make an impression and spring easily to consciousness are not necessarily the things that you would choose if you had any conscious choice about it; the grand narratives that you create for yourself are undercut by the minutiae and randomness of your actual experience, creating a gap (and tension) between the imagined self and the reality of the living physical organism with a definite timeline and set of contingencies.

What you are, and what you want to be. The essence of being alive, and human, and fallible.

Transformations

[Calendar note - this refers to Saturday 23rd December]
Travelling in to London on the train yesterday, I noticed that there were patches of foggy countryside where the trackside trees were all liberally sprinkled with a Christmassy frosting of - well, of frost. These trees looked clean and crusty white - like the thick white icing on a home-made Christmas cake against the duller grey and off-white of the surrounding fog and mist, and where the sun broke through (only very occasionally) they were lit up bright and dazzling.

Our village has - like most of the rest of the country - been covered by near-freezing fog for days: a heavy, dull blanket that's been damp and unremitting, making moisture that's dripped off the trees and reducing the daylight to dusk-like levels throughout the day. Today, when I went out on my bike for the first time in ages, the fog ceiling had lifted a little, and you could see the roofs of houses and trees in their entirety. It was still chilly and damp.

Cycling up the long slope to Eydon, mist still clung to the top-most branches of the tall trees and, as I climbed, I saw that the trees up here were showing the same whitened effect as the ones I'd seen from the train. All of the lane-side hedges and bushes Strangely, though, the whiteness seemed to fade away as I got level with each tree. I slowed down a bit and tried to look a bit more closely, but the residual ground-level mist was collecting in tiny drops on my glasses, so I stopped to wipe them dry, pulling up at the side of the lane and putting my foot up on the verge while I fished my hankie out of my jogging trousers' pocket. Thus unencumbered of obfuscating moisture, I could see that the 'white' frosting was actually clear ice: each branch, twig, berry and dead leaf had, courtesy of the fog's condensed moisture, collected an extra layer on its windward side/underside - a partial sheath of ice that refracted the flat winter light so that the ice looked like a white covering; the closer you got, the more easily you could see that this uniform whiteness was composed of frozen rivulets of ice and, increasingly, of individual droplets as the daytime temperature rose and the ice began to melt.

As I cycled further around the route, the drip, drip, drip of falling water increased in intensity as the ice melted, sometimes quickening to a rain shower-like sound under the bigger trees. This drip and fall of water was interspersed with sudden scratchy flurries of melted ice tinkling onto the road surface as - seemingly - some kind of critical mass is reached and large quantities of ice crystals melt and fall in slithering sequence. My bike's tyres scrunch over the ice.

Denis again: starting putting words in a line again at last

Further along, the shopping streets give way for a while to some more open areas, flanked by grass- and tree-planted green spaces with benches and flower beds, and sometimes a small bandstand or an over scale chess set.

Then you came to the part of town where all the [Jews] lived: the poorer [Jews], that is – the men with their beards and their funny hats, and the women with their proud faces and their bold way of looking at everybody, as if they didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, living here in this poverty and squalor.

There were Jews in his story books. Richer Jews, not like the ones who lived close by in his city. They weren’t always called Jews, as far as he can remember, even though there were sometimes references to the ‘the rich Jew’, or ‘the Jewish shopkeeper’, or the ‘miserly old Jew’, but the parental readings of the books, and the accompanying commentary and the answers to his ‘What’s that? Why? Why? Why?’ questions made it clear that these characters were Jews.

These characters usually lived alone, in the last cottage in the village, or in a large, dark, looming house in the city, with bare tree branches in front of the windows and the moon rising above the chimney pots. The front doors of the town houses were always black, with a door knocker in the shape of a monster’s head – all scales and teeth and blank eyes beneath venomous lids.

Open/Shut

I took a lovely drive this morning: cross country from Woodford Halse (Northants) to Long Stratton (Norfolk) via the A14/A11/A140, to pick up my 70-year-old mother, newly-returned from her latest late-flowered holiday trip - Prague, this time.

I had intended to drive over on Friday night straight after work, but a sleepy head and the prospect of crawling round the M25 and along the A12 made me change my mind. As it happens (guys and gals, uhuh huh huh huh huh uhuh) this turned out to be a good call.

I left the house at 0405, closing the door as quietly as I could, with chilly air at my back and the night's rain reflecting the cold white light of the sparse streetlamps. It was marvellous to be on the roads at this early hour - the first time I'd been out this early for 18 months or so. I'd forgotten how much I like the feeling of 'owning' the road, that sense of solitude and independence that creeps over you when you put your headlights on full beam and head off into the darkness, knowing that you've got a 3 hour drive in front of you: there's something of a sense of mission that seizes you (me), the feeling that your mundane journey assumes a deeper meaning because it's being undertaken under a rain-scattered night sky, with the vague, soft orange glow of distant towns staining the horizon. It's true that the mood is momentarily shattered by a stupid grouse (?) sitting in the road for too long and eventually taking lazy wing and bouncing off your windscreen, leaving behind a wet, feathery stain on the glass. But a swift flick of the wipers sweeps away the bird residue, and you carry on.

On the radio, England take an early wicket against Australia. In the voices of the commentators - even the earthy, bitter tones of Geoffrey Boycott - you can hear the Australian heat, sun and dust and, despite the early wicket of Hayden, you can hear England starting to fall into the darkness of defeat, somehow more poignant for being on echoey, scratchy long wave. At the lunch break (some time between 0430 and 0500, when I've negotiated all of the twisty country roads and have reached the A14) I switch over to FM and search for something else to listen to. I fall into a hypnotic regime of channel-hopping, trying to find music that's either (a) familiar, (b) nocturnal or (c) somehow appropriate for night driving. In this state, I find that I'm really keen to buy records (CDs, that is) by The Feeling ("I love it when you call"), Snow Patrol ("Chasing Cars") and Keane ("These songs all sound the same, but they've got something about them"). Weirdly, in the rain and the dark, alone and unspeaking, passing a lorry in a haze of spray, I start to feel as if I'm back in touch in life.

Something by Joss Stone comes on - "Super duper love", I think. It feels horribly bogus and manufactured - a strong, interesting voice that can't quite carry off the material: it just feels too mature for a woman of her age, and it rankles. I switch channels. James Morrison (I think that's his name...) - he's another one with a voice that sounds older than his years, but somehow it feels more believable than Joss's, as if it's easier to think that he will grow into his voice through his experience.

I have to pull over to blow my nose (the ridiculously long-lived remnants of a cold). The parking spot is on a bit of heathland I know well from daylight stops: scrubby grass and yellow-flowered broom (?) bushes, Scots pines in the distance, and a lichen- and grass-covered pillbox from World War II (this area was heavily airfielded until recently, when the US Air Force withhdrew their fighters and bombers). I get out of the car and feel the cold wind and the swirling mist of the passing lorries. I feel very vulnerable all of a sudden, and move around to the front of the car to stand in the headlights' light so that (a) the lorry drivers can see me, and (b) any potential killers are confused by my silhouette, and might think twice about attacking because their maniacal features would be revealed to my (non-existent) passenger. I quickly get back in and carry on.

This all makes me think about being an editor...(of which more tomorrow).

P l a c e h o l d e r

Well, here we are...my cold starting to fade, and my new job starting to lose its grip on me, freeing me up gradually so that I can give my attention to other things apart from work. It's always all-encompassing and knackering at first, innit?

Anyway. Having access to a broadband connection, I had a bit of a play at 'Second Life'. After registering and setting up my avatar, I logged in. It was weird: as soon as I emerged into the light of the 'arrival island' and saw the other avatars around me, just starting to find their way along the paths amongst the grass, I did exactly what I do in real life when I pitch up in a strange place with lots of people in it: I headed off, away from the crowd, and tried to find somewhere where I could stand on my own, unobserved, and get my bearings while I built up some confidence to engage more fully with the environment. I thought it was telling that my personality was projected unconsciously and instantaneously through the keyboard and into that virtual environment. I guess one of the interesting things about such an environment is that you can train yourself to behave differently from your usual modes, more safely. Hm.

S t i l l o n p a u s e, s o m e w h a t

A bit quiet around here, I know: I'm a bit preoccupied with my new job and living arrangements, plus I have a reet manky cold (bah humbug). I've pledged to myself that I'll start to get back on track on...Wednesday this week.

Thank you for your patience.

H i a t u s

Just started a new job in a new location - hope to return to prolificness next week...

Gabriella half-pissed rant fragment – for somewhere...

The central paradox, it seems to me, comes down to this: one, you look at the world around you every day, at all scales, and it’s boring and hard and ugly and plain fucking brutal for most – especially for the people who don’t live in our cosy, economically dominant little Western/Northern bubble, with our historically supreme capitalist system of accumulation; two, all the books you read, and all the songs you listened to – no, heard up to age twelve, and all the films and comic books and television programmes you looked at, and all the things adults said to you – if you were lucky, and if they were kind, – they all told you that the world was fair, and that things worked out all right in the end, and that good people got their just rewards, and bad people got paid off and punished. And you have to resolve that paradox for yourself, using a set of values and taught/absorbed rules that just don’t equip you for the random, meaningless, empty truths of the world – all the stuff about emptiness, and injustice, and realpolitik, and power and cynicism and brutality and death, and the irreducible differences between belief systems.

And it’s because you can’t escape that taught set of rules and assumptions that resolving the paradox is so difficult – you’ve got this emotional commitment to fairness and rationality programmed deeply into you, and your rational mind is yelling at you to reject it and let it go, but your emotional self is screaming back saying ‘no no no – without that trust and faith in the world, you’ve got nothing, nothing.’ And you’ve spent the first twenty or so years of your life either thinking all that sentimental stuff was true (or at least clinging on to it as a romantic ideal), and it’s so, so hard to let it go, because you have no idea how you’ll orient yourself towards the world, how you’ll reconstruct your life with an alternative, realistic worldview without becoming cynical, bitter, acidic, hopeless and misanthropic. Fucking cheated.

Christ.

Denis - from the 'dark' novel...

That Sunday, when mama had stood at the sink peeling potatoes in the cold water and told him to go away and leave her alone, he had stood outside their apartment door in the still gloom of the afternoon, hearing the muffled sounds of families behind their closed doors, smelling the smell of their green vegetables boiling, and sniffing up his own tears and run snot, trying to clear his head of emotion and upset before he has to expose himself to the world. His tears and self-pity only live in these certain small spaces: the hallway, the gloom of their doorway, his bedroom in the dark, the lavatories in the playground at school after a bigger boy has hit him or humiliated him.

He thinks he’ll walk in his usual direction: up the street towards the main road, the park, the city beyond. He can take a shortcut through the hole in the chain link fence on [Bahnhofstrasse] and go play in the wasteland where the lead factory used to be, where the stone pavements are cracked and rain stained, and where nobody ever goes, except the kids like Denis who want to play on their own, and bigger boys who want to be somewhere where there are no adults. The weeds are already high there, grown up like hedges, and you can find spots where you can lie down and be invisible while the sky blows across the space between the weeds’ waving seed heads. Somewhere to be alone, where no-one else can reach you or touch you.

The hallway is empty, the well of it opening out into the darkened space around which the doorways all cluster on the balconies rising up to the roof.

The apartment building’s sounds are familiar to him: the sound of his boot soles descending the bare wooden staircase echoing up into the stairwell to dissipate there in the shadows. But as he reaches the last turn of the staircase, he recognises the sound of the main street door handle rattling and the door opening inward. He hangs back on the stairs, in the shadow of the [banister post??], not wanting to be seen, and hears the door close, followed by the sound of shoes shuffling across the linoleum. Once he gauges that the person has passed, he leans around and looks past the [banister post??]. There’s an old man standing right in front of him at the foot of the stairs, getting his breath back and mopping sweat from his tall forehead. He’s holding his hat in his other hand. He sees Denis’ face and says, “Good afternoon, young man. And how are you?”

Denis looks back at the old man, wide-eyed, but says nothing. The old man has a smart three-piece suit on under his overcoat. He also has thick, heavy-rimmed glasses, and the stereotypically large nose with big flaring nostrils.

He’s a Jew, thinks Denis. I shouldn’t talk to him. But what’s he doing here?

“Are you all right, young man? You look a little…strange – upset?”

Denis speaks at last: “No, I’m not upset, not at all.”

“I’m very pleased to hear it,” {He’s talking like Rabbi Lionel Blue, I think, in my head…}, “I don’t like to see young people upset. Life is long enough for sorrows enough, and I recommend that you put them off for as long as possible.”

“Oh.” Denis has never heard anyone talk like this: he thinks that it’s kind of sugary and false, but…he quite likes the sound of it, the way the words flow together and the rise and fall of the old man’s voice. He smiles involuntarily, hoping that the old man will say something else. He still feels like he shouldn’t be talking to this Jew, but there’s something holding him here.

“Ah, sorrows,” the old man goes on, “they are both our misery and our salvation.”

Denis feels like there should be more to follow this statement, but nothing else is forthcoming. The old Jew looks down at him, smiles, and then raises his hat again (?) before turning away and walking across the [vestibule]. Denis watches him go, wanting to say something – ask a question, perhaps – that will make him stay a little longer: while the old man is there, talking, Denis doesn’t have to think or reflect on anything – he can be led, and advised, and informed. [obviously he’s still at the stage where he thinks that any adult must know infinitely more than he does, and thus that these adults have inherent authority…]

Outside, it’s a typical gloomy Sunday. The street is quiet, with the usual Sunday afternoon torpor, the suspended space between (a) the working population’s belief in the infinity of rest that seems to stretch ahead of them on Sunday morning, and (b) the eight PM realisation that their shirts aren’t ironed, the chores aren’t all finished, and they’ll have to be getting out of bed for work again in nine hours’ time.

There are a few people on the streets, but all of the shops and cafes are closed, and the blank glass shop fronts and empty pavements make Denis feel more comfortable in these public spaces – as if he owns them in some way. It gives him an unusual confidence as he pushes his face against the shop windows, cupping his hands around his eyes so that he can see as much of the interiors as possible: washed butcher slab tiles; pale yellow fly papers suspended from the ceilings, carrying their loads of dead and decaying insects; shadowy back rooms seen through doorways and lit by small, barred windows; and sweet shops with their sterile rows of fat glass jars, the colours of all the sweets dimmed in the shadows.

Further along, the shopping streets give way for a while to some more open areas, flanked by grass- and tree-planted green spaces with benches and flower beds, and sometimes a small bandstand or an overscale chess set.

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Reading and Remembering

At the moment I'm reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation which, as the title doesn't really suggest in an obvious way, is his collected/reworked journalism/memoir from his foreign correspondent postings in the Middle East (as it used to be called when I was a nipper). This is an excellent read so far, for three main reasons: (1) The prose is very tight, powerful, vivid and descriptive; (2) The material deals with Big Events but encompasses the small and the personal, and covers issues that are still resonating powerfully all around us; (3) It reminds me about the big things that I have lived through (vicariously), and which I had half-forgotten - for example, the first section of the book is about Afghanistan, and deals in detail with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and its aftermath, touching peripherally on other contemporary stories - the hanging of President Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Iranian revolution, for example. These stories, and the pictures that Fisk paints of them, remind me of the news coverage of the time, of how I felt about those things, and of my political standpoint (I was switching out of a emotionally Marxist phase and coming to see the Soviet Union as just another self-perpetuating state - I also swallowed [hook, line and sinker] the idea peddled by the media I watched that the mujahideen were 'freedom fighters', and assumed that they must share the democratic values of the liberal west. Ah, happy innocence and simplicity...). These kind of reminders are very powerful for me, and make me realise how...'insulated' i seem to have become as I've grown older - that classic thing about how the middle aged become more conservative (with a small 'c'). It reminds me that I feel more alive when I am intellectually engaged with the wider world.

Pieters

Maybe I am too soft. Like that time I found that blackbird in our back yard, mauled by a cat. This is – what? – fifteen years ago now? And I tried to kill it, to put it out of its misery, but it just wouldn’t die. I can’t really think about it still, it’s such a horrible memory. I think I got a bit tougher for a while after that – closed off a bit, and didn’t let things hurt me or get close to me. I didn’t like to feel that helplessness and panic like I’d felt when that blackbird’s head had spun back round after I’d tried to throttle it, and the way it just sat there looking at me with its eye fixed on me and its head all lopsided and the flesh and blood showing through the feathers where the cat’s claws and teeth had hurt it. I was still pretty young then, of course.

There was a swan with a broken wing in the field last week, and that reminded me of the blackbird again – brought back those horrible vivid memories. It made me feel very upset, actually – kind of shaken up and sad. You know, like when…well, I don’t really know like what – not like anything I can think of that you might have experienced. But sad and empty, but sort of clear about everything at the same time, as if the thing you’re doing is not really happening to you – it’s more like you’re looking at yourself from outside. And that clarity stays with you as you walk away, breathing in deeply. It’s as if everything else in your everyday life suddenly seems simpler and more manageable. As if you’re ready to take something new on. Funny.

I sat down on a fallen tree trunk, quite close to where the swan was, but not so close that I would frighten it. I just sat and looked at it, feeling sad, knowing that there was nothing I could do. The swan was sort of folded up into itself with its neck swept around and its head facing backwards, but its eye was looking at me. The broken wing was stretched out on the stubbled edge of the field, the feathers very white against the brown earth. The swan looked as if it was trying to shrink away from the world, to hide itself inside itself, as if it were embarrassed or ashamed, and didn’t want to be seen.

It still felt strange to be sitting there, doing nothing, just looking. I thought about going over to the swan, maybe trying to pick it up and move it closer in under the hedge, or between the tree trunk and the bushes, where it would be more sheltered, but I knew that it was just going to die anyway, wherever it was, and I thought that if it was left a bit more exposed it might die more quickly – which would be the kindest thing. It didn’t seem right to kill it myself, even though I had the shotgun with me, so it would have been easy to do. So I just left it to die on its own.

Pieters

It’s almost frightening to think about how long ago I started in this job…how long I’ve been here. It’s nearly eight years. Christ, just thinking about that number takes me aback every time – how could so much time have passed, almost without me noticing? Frightening, frightening.

Anyway. Back then the department didn’t even supply the free boots, so you had to wear your own. That year, when I went home on leave in the autumn – that was the time when the gabbling bloke with the funny laugh was here covering for me while I was on leave…the one who left the toilet in a disgusting state – when I got home my mum had bought me some winter boots (second hand, of course). They were nice boots. Well kept. But they were a bit stiff, and the seamed pieces at the back of the heels dug into the backs of my ankles, just there between the bone and the tendon, where your skin is stretched and sensitive. And it really hurt, the way that that stiff leather and the stitching chafed on the day before’s scabs and sore skin. But I kept wearing them, for mum’s sake, even though she wouldn’t have known if I’d have left them off. It just doesn’t feel right not to appreciate and make use of the things that people have bought you out of generosity or love, does it? Not to me, anyway. That’s always been something big in our family – the whole extended family, not just our houseful – even though we don’t talk about it out loud with each other. We look after each other. We want everyone to be OK. We care about each other, and we look out for one another. Like I say, we don’t talk about it, not really, but it’s there in the handshakes, in the pats on the back, in the arms around the shoulders. That’s the sort of thing that makes our family – the whole community, really – hang together: those kind of instinctive values and unspoken understandings. Hard to put your finger on where they come from, or how you learned them, but they’re there all the same, and you wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t learned them.

Although sometimes I wonder if I’m too soft – if I think about these things more than some of the others. Sometimes they can blank you, or treat you like you don’t deserve the same attention or time as some of the other relatives. That’s especially the case with some of the younger men, I think, like at Christmas parties or at family weddings, when the younger men cluster around the bar in an aggressive little group, smelling of cheap aftershave and beer, with their smooth skin and their sleek black hair, and all they’re interested in is shouting and laughing and the young single women. It’s almost like you don’t exist for them. They just sort of look past you if you talk to them, tapping their fingertips on the side of their glass, nodding, but desperate for you to get out of their line of sight. I know it’s them, and not me, but sometimes you can’t help but feel hurt – ignored. But that’s me being too soft, as I say.

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The Customs Officer – Pieters?

There’s history here – that’s one of the things about the job that he loves.

There’s been a customs post here for more than five hundred years. Think about that: a building on this very spot for five centuries, serving the same purpose for decade after decade after decade. All of the people who have served here and lived in the accommodation, all serving their country, protecting their country from all kinds of different threats, and all making their little contribution to the well-being and prosperity of the nation. Every time I think about that, I feel humbled and privileged. Privileged to be doing a job that I like, in a building full of history…living in a cottage that’s housed customs officials for two hundred years – the same stones, the same woodwork, the same windows and chimneys. What a privilege! To be in an historic building all the time, the kind of place that ordinary members of the public never get to see.

I particularly like my job at this time of year, when there’s snow on the ground all the time. There’s not much work at this time of year, if I’m honest. Not many people try to come in, and those that do are easy to spot and track against the snow. Easy targets. There’s a bit more to do in the lodge when the weather’s like this, I suppose – keeping the boilers fired up all the time, and then there’s the need to keep things tidy around the lock and the water gate, which is always more difficult with all of the snow and ice on the towpaths and up over the tunnel portals’ brickwork, but I do have these special-issue boots with the metal cleats on the soles, which are really marvellous. I get a new pair issued every year – for free, of course, part of my salary – so they never wear out. And they’re so comfortable. I think annual reissue is a bit too frequent, actually – a bit of a waste of money. Still, I take the old pairs back with me when I go home on leave, so the family get good use out of them – though I ask them to keep quiet about where they got them from. So I suppose it’s not that much of a waste – not like a lot of the undeserving things (and people) that the Councils seem to spend money on these days – you might have well have pissed that money up the wall and have had done with it. But that’s another story.

Odd richness

I don't know why, but my dreams over the last couple of nights have been very vivid, rich and varied. I've been married to Madonna (who was surprisingly down to earth, loving and considerate); run away from Starsky and Hutch (who were, surprisingly, both vampires); sat next to a bloke called 'Terminator' who was a 6 foot 5 inch cross between the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction and Jonathan Franzen; watched a vast, white delta-winged airliner crash into the sea; sat in a big wicker basket under a hang glider wing with my parents as we descended towards the shallow sea alongside a summer pier thronged with bathing suited holiday makers; chatted with some students as they stacked books in bookcases in the garden of a 16th century country house; hurried through the streets of nighttime Oxford with a madman following me - he's alternately shouting expletives and the names of 1970s bands...Osibisa, for example; and stepped into the flooded part of my nan's garden, which then transformed itself into a large pool, in which I was soon up to my nadgers, and then the pool was a river with a current, and I gave up to it and let myself be swept towards the rapids ahead...as I anticipated telling my new-found student friends about my rapids-shooting experience over coffee at a pavement cafe, I realised that the rapids actually had a drop off of about 100 feet...on the opposite side of the ravine the rapids fell into there was a glass and concrete office block, and a woman in a green dress fell from a high window to her death on the pavement below...which is when I woke up - mid-plunge.

Is it any wonder I'm not refreshed in the morning?

Hendricks

He doesn’t actually enjoy seeing people struggle and flounder, but he does prefer them to damn themselves rather than go through the collected evidence and series of failures – which he finds much more sordid and depressing. So he gives them plenty of rope, and time, and lets them get on with it. Ultimately there’s not going to be any argument about his decision, so any semblance of a debate or examination of evidence is rather tedious and patronising, he thinks: it’s better to help these benighted souls come to the only possible correct conclusion – as quickly as possible. In truth, he prefers it if these things are dealt with by one of his deputies or sub-managers, but if it’s a particularly senior official, or someone he feels a particular responsibility towards – say, somebody that he hired personally – he’ll agree to take the ‘bad news’ meeting himself.

Back in his chair, stirring dissolving brown sugar and nutmeg into his hot wine, and looking down at his finger tapping on the briefing papers on the desk top, Hendricks is the centre of attention, the vortex of power [?] in the high-ceilinged, ornately plastered room. Without looking up, he says, “Who wrote this report?”

The three officials are silent for a few seconds, and Hendricks’ spoon clinks and scrapes around the inside of his glass. The youngest of the three officials, who scarcely looks old enough to have left school, and who is in fact the author of the piece, imagines that all the blood is draining out of his head and coagulating in a dense ball in his bowels, and his head becomes slightly woozy with panic and the fear of impending doom.

Eventually the senior official – Brightman – says, “It’s a departmental team effort, Councillor. Fleming here – ” – he gestures at the young man, who grimaces – “ – did most of the core research.” Fleming’s stomach seems to void itself into his legs, which feel suddenly chilly and light.

“Huh,” grunts Hendricks. “It’s actually very good indeed.” He nods, twice. “Yes, very good. Excellent, in fact.” He looks up at Fleming, whose grimace is struggling not to morph into a smile, and says, “Where did you get your insights into the religious and cultural aspects of this issue? They seem very well thought through to me.”

Fleming looks at Brightman, who nods. “I studied Central European culture as part of my degree studies, sir - Councillor. And I’ve always been interested in that area anyway, in my own personal reading, so I…”

“The content is troubling, though,” interrupts Hendricks, flicking through the papers until he finds the particular page he has in mind, “we need to look at this whole issue of migration cycles and patterns much more carefully, Brightman, and develop the appropriate policy to set before the Council.”

Brightman, scribbling notes, nods vigorously, and all three officials sit forward, gripping their pre-prepared option/implementation papers, eager to get into the policy details.

“So,” says, Hendricks, “what else can we do to protect our borders?”

Hope, hope

Ian Fleming's first novel - Casino Royale - was published in 1953, when he was 45.

I'm 44. 44.

Hurrah!

03.00 The Right Honourable Councillor Peter Hendricks, in his office in the Palace of Councils building (Interior Ministry)

In the mist and dusk Hendricks can just about make out the shape of the cathedral tower on the other side of the Palace of Councils’ plaza [?]. The cathedral bells’ three o’clock chimes are shuffling their muffled way through the damp air. He presses his face against the window glass, filling his visual field with the mists and with the reflection of his own eye sockets.

In the brightly lit office behind him the three civil servants rest their plump, besuited buttocks on the plump, shiny leather armchairs, and plentiful firelight glints and winks on the chandelier and on the facets of the large brandy glasses that all three men are balancing on top of their laptop stacks of papers.

Councillor Hendricks’ office is renowned for its comfort and high quality comestibles as well as for its professionalism, rigour, and for the councillor’s penetrating questioning style. His intimidating, unblinking silences are also legendary, silences into which the nervous, the inexperienced and the under-prepared or soon-to-be-dismissed gabble unintended revelations, awkward truths, or confused, self-contradictory rationalisations of things done or left undone. It won’t happen again, Councillor. And it usually doesn’t, since Hendricks most often consciously employs his silences against the fast-learning tyro in need of a career-stiffening lesson, the over-promoted incompetent who’s on their final warning, or the politically naïve or expendable who’re about to be sacrificed to the press for the good of the department or the Council.

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Gabriella

[The soldier/he] remembers how strong and secure he felt then: his mother and father providing him with everything in the comfort of their sturdy village home, and he was young and healthy, with all the possibilities of his life still open before him: the village, the market town, the more distant city and, from the port there, the great river to the sea. And then across the whole world, carried by the imperial ships that commanded all of the known oceans and seas.

When he remembers that kitchen on that summer day, and the soft wash of sunshine through the ivy-shrouded window, he sees the cottage set in a green, sunlit garden, partly shaded by broad, leafy trees, as if at the centre of a net laid over the countryside, over the map of the map of the nation, over the blue seas and distant lands, deserts, hill stations, passes and rivers, jungles and snow-topped imperial mountains. And he knows that each strand of the net was a tightrope that he could have walked, each [node? Net-strand junctions…] a point of decision, a place to pause, feet balanced on the ridged knots of the junctions, and consider the options that are open to him, the results of all of the choices he’d made and all the accidents he’d adapted to in his life so far.

And yet, in spite of all the informed choices that he had made, all the fine calculations of odds and return, he finds himself here in the moonlight, in the service of the empire in a war it is struggling to win, with the net strained and torn behind him, and limited choices before him. Now it seems that retreat is the only choice, a return to the past across a changed landscape that he has already traversed once, when the net seemed whole and unbreakable.

Gabriella, half-awake in the gloom, thinks the soldier is sad and brave and vulnerable, and she wants to be his friend and to comfort him. She thinks about his bright, clear eyes and his thick, dark moustache until she falls asleep, assembling in her mind a fresh, clean, deep blue uniform for him, and placing him, smiling, in a succession of sunlit spring parks and gardens, and in plush but tasteful townhouse interiors, drinking tea with young ladies to whom he is politely attentive, but whom Gabriella knows he secretly finds deadly dull. He is waiting for someone else, she knows: his perfect love and sweetheart. She holds that warm thought tight as she falls asleep.

[Anna continues]
“The little girl was a little afraid of the woods”, my grandmother had gone on. “She knows that it’s bad luck to cross a moon shadow, but the moon above the hill is throwing black-striped tree shadows across the road in the sunken lane. But she’s a brave little girl, just like her mummy told her to be, so she keeps her eyes on the clear moonlit patch of grass at the end of the sunken lane [it’s a bit like a tunnel…], and she steps into the shadow of the trees, and is never seen by anyone on earth again. A darker shadow has swept into the dark after her. [NB - All of this has been in the dream of the young girl in Nanny Anna’s story {the little girl and her story are derived from Anna’s own childhood experience in that village…} …Imply this by making the language of the dream within the story more coloured/descriptive, less like the simple ‘story speech’ of the rest of Anna’s tales…making it sound less like my normal narrative voice…]

“The little girl awoke, confused, under the creaking oak tree. Just as in her dream, she was cold, her thin cotton dress chilled by the falling night. She could see a few stars through the tree branches, very glittery and hard looking in the darkness, and the silvery-blue light of the moon was creeping up into the sky from behind the hills. It was as if, while dreaming, she’d been watching the evening with her ears and eyes wide open, seeing the colours change from blue to orange to pink to grey to blue-black, watching the trees drain the colour out of their silhouettes, and hearing the birds settling down, their songs and calls thinning out gradually to a single cheep, to a furtive ruffle of wings, to silence.

“The little girl’s mummy, exhausted by her day’s toil, is startled awake as her daughter rattles the door latch and bursts into the firelit room. The little girl, breathless, snivelling, gulps for air between spasmodic sobs. The woman puts her arms around her daughter, squeezing, stroking, rocking her until the upset subsides, and then coaxes her, despite her own tiredness, into telling her what’s wrong. And so it all comes tumbling out, lubricated with fresh tears and paroxysms of [crying/sobs/breaths]; the fear-ridden journey from the river, the dark lanes beset by animal sounds from the fields and undergrowth, the shivers of cold and anxiety.

When the deluge of words and fear has abated the mother is stroking the girl’s forehead and shushing away the last ebb of the [upset], the fire is flickering down, almost to extinction, and there’s a cold, blue-white wash of moonlight on the windowsill and the bare wooden floor. Gathering the child in closer to her on her lap, the mother says, ‘Shh, shh. It’s all done now. You’re safe with me. We’re safe together here.’

“The little girl says, ‘Mm,’ still wide awake, and calm now.

“The mother says, ‘I’ll tell you a story before bed, shall I?’, and feels her daughter’s head nodding agreement against her shoulder, the little girl’s hair brushing against her mother’s throat.”

Gabriella

When I think of those woods, and that hill in the moonlight, I see the mess and chaos left behind in the evening after the battle that took place there, many years before the little girl was born. Nanny Anna’s stories often included references to this battle, and to soldiers, and to the wars that seem to have been the constant backdrop to the lives of the people in the village and in the towns and cities in the widening circle beyond the confines of the village stories.

Dead soldiers. Dead horses. Wounded men, smashed carts and cannon, and abandoned equipment litter the dark fields and the grassy slopes and the fringes of the woods.

I imagine the moonlight picking out the pale wood of severed branches, and glinting on pools of [thick/coagulated] blood that hasn’t yet drained into the soil. There are white breeches and dark uniform coats, shattered wheels, muskets and pikes half-hidden in the rough grass and the crop [?] fields, and – always – the young soldier, his head untidily bandaged, pouring water onto the lips and moustache of a dying comrade who’s leaning back against some empty cannon shot boxes. The young soldier’s face is grave but resolute as he looks down at his [comrade’s] face, as if he were trying to keep the older man alive through sheer seriousness and force of will alone.

I always thought that if the young soldier softened the intensity of his gaze the older soldier would slip away to the land of death, which I imagined to be a smoke-wreathed replica of this nighttime battlefield, haunted by abandoned, voiceless soldiers, by wolves and battlefield scavengers in human form, and by horrible things that crawled and chewed and burrowed into [exposed/bare] flesh [especially at the throat, at the collar??].

The soldier’s efforts are fruitless in the end. The veteran soldier dies, eyes wide open in the moonlight and chin still wet from the last choke-spilled mouthful of water, far from home and unknown to his family.

The young soldier straightens up, feeling the tension in his head and the back of his legs for the first time. The moon is high and nearly full, and he can look out over the gently sloping land and its clutter of battle detritus, seeing the clumped shapes and their skirts of shadow. Away to the east, glittering in the moonlight, a twist of metalled road makes a silvery S against the [matt] fields. As the wounded and the dying groan under the moon and animals snuffle around the bodies of the dead, he feels a cool breeze against his cheek, and he thinks of home.

[Gabriella now? Or back then? Or is this Anna’s memory/story? Who knows…?]
He remembers a blue jug on a thick wooden table in front of a window, backlit with buttery yellow light. There’s a blackbird whistling its characteristic fluting tune in the vegetable garden beyond the window. This summer afternoon moment is the soldier’s recurrent memory of his childhood. He can step back into the cool, shadowed [pantry??] of the cottage kitchen, his shoulder blades [angular and protuberant – tender??] against his coarse [linen? Poor cloth…] shirt, leaning back against the rough plaster, his fingertips brushing over the familiar pocks and lumps on the wall.

He can step forwards into the kitchen proper, look left, and see his mother, grey-skirted and white-bodiced [?], her hair secured under a white cap, kneading dough, with a dusting of flour up to her elbows and little globules of dough on her cheeks and forehead where she’s wiped away the sweat with her forearms.

Tuesday

Another flawless winter's day. Managed a quick 12 mile circuit on my bike this morning, not wearing enough layers on my torso. Brrrrr... I say 'quick', but actually the wind was an icy bully with a longer reach than me, and it reached out its bony hands and put them flat against my chest, pushing me backwards for half of the circuit. Bastard.

Daily

I'm aiming to post something on here daily at the moment. I've got two weeks off between jobs, which should allow me - theoretically - to concentrate on being creative. However, I think I'm still just getting used to the removal of the daily discipline of working hours: yesterday I kept feeling as if I should be 'doing something' - that non-specific sense of being driven, and time-limited. Must try and relax. That's R-E-L-A-X, Andrew.

(Managed 10 miles on my bike yesterday, and stopped for a few minutes halfway through the - chilly - ride, looking out over a rural landscape that fell away in a mixture of pasture, copses, cows and sheep and ramshackle sheds and fences, down to a streambed and then back up to some hazier fields and woods in the distance. I could hear cows bellowing and rooks cawing, and the distant drone of an invisible light plane.)

Being Still

Everything's moving, too much
Flowing and spinning past,
But, once in a while,
You turn your head and look out
Through the window of the fast-moving train
And the blurred confusion of the night-darkened
City's brick walls and lighted back windows
Pivots past, controlled, like meshed gears,
And you see the trackside room whole,
Profoundly clear and impressed.

Casino Royale

The last Bond film I saw at the pictures was Live and Let Die. That would have been in 1973, at the Ealing ABC, I think. Between now and then, if you'd asked me to characterise Bond films, I would have thought of Roger Moore's stiltedly-arched eyebrow, and his knowing eye contact with the camera: that camp self-awareness and self-referentiality, coupled with schoolboy-level sexual titillation, misogyny, borderline racism and unconvincing big bang special effects whose aspiration outstripped their execution. So the pleasure of the Christmas Bond film paled after I hit 16 and started to develop some critical faculties and became aware of the cultural orthodoxies that were embedded in these 90 minute chunks of glamourous hokum.

So I came to Casino Royale with a rather fuzzy set of expectations. This was to be the last cinema-social with some old work colleagues (Friday was my last day at work with the company), and I'd agreed to go entirely as a social thing, rather than in any expectation that the film might be any good. I'd deliberately avoided reading the reviews.

Despite those loose expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised to find that: (a) it was very good; (b) I enjoyed it; and (c) most of the Bond cliches that I'd come to despise were gone. (And no Q and his ridiculous gadgetry.)

This Bond film sets a different tone right from the outset: a double killing that sets Bond on the road to his '00x' status. The violence here is not stylised or casual, but mechanical, earthy and effortful - blood, sweat, dirt and fear (to paraphrase Churchill). This monochrome segment establishes a hard-edged realism that the rest of the film (mostly) echoes: it's played pretty straight, with a few ironic self-references that are neither mugged nor telegraphed as of old. True, there are some elements that don't really stack up for me - the main romantic relationship felt to me as if it was never quite effectively established, and the functional poker game sequences are a little dreary - but as a straight thriller, this is pretty thrilling, with some excellent action sequences that really demand to be seen in a cinema with a big sound system.

And beyond all that, Daniel Craig and his impressive pecs manage to imbue James Bond with character, and with real humanity. That's quite an achievement, I think. I went into the theatre thinking that the film ran for 90 minutes, when in fact it's 140 minutes. I see it as a very good sign that it never occurred to me to think that the film was overrunning. Recommended!

Call me Bridget

Hm. Got on the scales yesterday, and my series of 'leaving work' dinners and evenings out have really taken their toll: I now weigh the same as I did about 5 years ago, when I decided that 'that's it!' and went on to lose 3 stone plus. I swore that I would never go back to that weight...but it accumulates, dunnit?

I now need to repeat that earlier weight loss, as I now see myself as prime heart attack material. Hence these pages will carry notes about the number of cigarettes smokes/drinks consumed/miles run or cycled, as I track my progress from vast porky bloater to healthily slender normality (I'll work on those pecs later).

Today: 0 cigarettes (v. good), 1 hour's walking, 1 hour's cycling, alcohol units = 10 (v. bad). (OK, I never smoke, but it's a real positive, innit?)

Dreams

I will look into dreams more, I think: I was thinking about them in the bog today while I watched the cloud-dodging light flicker on the pebbled glass. Dreams are everywhere you look in literature, in film, in TV shows. Clearly I haven't made a study or anything, yet, but what strikes me is that dreams are universal, and that they reveal things to us that we already know (but can't acknowledge openly to our waking selves), or they tell a story that contrasts or echoes the main narrative, or they make the protagonist feel weird. (I'm sure there are more functions served, but those are the only ones that spring to mind at the moment...)

Anyway. What's interesting to me is how all this must be rooted in the electrochemical activity of our brain matter, and how different we become when we are asleep (or very drunk), when the 'editor' of consciousness - and the filterer of the permissible, the acceptable and the sensible - takes a break, and all the stuff that's kept at bay during the day is allowed out to play... And, of course, if this 'conscious' self - this 'I' and 'me' - is (as I believe) merely a construct of the underlying systems, then the stuff you get in dreams is closer, possibly, to the 'true' 'I' that's embedded in all those synapses and neurons. (But ah, you might argue. the sleeping 'I' who sees all of this 'unacceptable' material is just another construct from the same source...so where does that leave you? Good question.

Books, must buy books on this. I feel another monomaniacal frenzy coming on.

Gabriella

When I woke up, the room was almost totally dark, the gauzy curtains breathing gently at the window. Something about the intense fixity of the quiet outside, and the absolute stillness of the building, told me that it was very late – the middle of the night. I still had my clothes on, and my body felt achey and bent from where I’d fallen asleep in an awkward position. My eyes were taking in the fragments of light and shade, and I could feel my ears straining to pick up sound, but I wasn’t yet fully present in the room. It felt as my brain was struggling to catch up with my body, as if they’d been separated from each other and, surprised by wakefulness, were seeking each other out in a confused haze.

After I’d undressed and pulled the thin cotton sheet up to my ears, the rest of nanny’s story started to echo in my mind, although I wasn’t really sure which parts I remembered from the actual telling, or from previous tellings, or from the additions and distortions of my own dreamwork. In the darkness, feeling overtired but not ready for sleep again, the pieces of the story danced around each other but never quite met.

“While she’d been walking by the river, the moon had been hidden behind the hill, and by the ring of trees on the hilltop. She now crossed the bridge, from the meadows over to the cultivated fields, and the moon rose above the hill. There’s soon enough moonlight to cast blue-black shadows on the silver-grey dust between the cornrows, and the hedges are inky with shadow too. The woods are black, smeared across the hillsides above the curve of the lane. Most of the village is still in the moon’s shadow, between the shoulder of the hill and the [Hanging?] Wood.

Good Grief

Like Gabriella, I get very annoyed when I listen to our political correspondents as they nobly unravel all of the 'complexities' for us. Christ! Beyond Norman 'Cliche machine' Smith on the Today programme - a man who spouts more uncompleted metaphors in two minutes than even I'd thought possible - we have John Pienaar, who seems to think that we're as interested as he is in the minutiae of the Blair/Brown relationship, and who can still use the phrase 'big beast' in apparent seriousness.

If you wonder why people are disillusioned with politics, listen to these two and to Nick Robinson: once upon a time, it seems that political life was focused on doing stuff. Now - if the mainstream coverage is anything to go by - it's about soap opera, and about a self-absorbed obsession with presentation and surface issues. Hardly news, but still irritating and pathetic. All that surface coverage leaves no room for substance.

Gabriella

“The little girl set off for home,” nanny Anna went on. “She walked beside the river, heading for the old stone bridge. She could hear plops and splashes as little creatures went about their business in the rushes by the banks, fur and feathers whispering against the reeds and the sun-dried grasses. The sounds of the little animals and birds comforted her, and made her feel less alone in the twilight.

“She paused by the bridge, staring into the black shadows where the river ran underneath, not looking for anything in particular, but just looking at the darkness as if she half-expected something to emerge from it and break the spell. During the daytime, with the sun shining and with light at the other end of the tunnel, the space under the bridge was cool and nice, a good place to rest and listen to the water tinkling by. The boys and girls would paddle there, stepping in and out of the shadows, and picking their paths across the river by the broad stones planted in the shallow water. The stones and the gravel were all different colours – white, orange, brown, grey, bluey-black – and, in the daytime, the moving water made the light ripple and pulse over them.”

Nanny’s voice sounded as if it had changed, somehow. The flow of words was just as smooth as always, but it sounded as if she had abandoned a written text and was making up her own story as she went along. I sort of liked that, because it made me think that the story could be different this time, with a different ending, but at the same time I felt slightly worried that the familiar features of the story would be left out [and I would…???].

As nanny read on, I sometimes leaned against her, and my eyelids drooped and closed, but the words kept coming out of nanny’s mouth, and I heard them with my ears and felt the vibrations of nanny’s voice through her ribs and chest, and through my skull resting against her body. The warm smell of nanny and the oily perfume from downstairs lulled me towards sleep.

Gabriella

[It may be that she’s drinking here, and trying to think straight]
The thing about what that composition teacher told me – about the rules about what we should write – the thing about it is that it wasn’t the rules that really seemed important to me (although they were, in a way). No, it was what the fact of those rules implied, and what it meant for me to be told these things by that teacher.

Let me try again: what I realise now is that I was so accepting in those days. Whatever anybody in authority said must be true in some way, even if it didn’t fit in with what I’d learned through my own experience. I knew that there were sources of authority that were unquestionable – though I wouldn’t have put it like that back then, of course. I knew from my family upbringing that here was always a ‘man who would shout at me’ if I transgressed – for example, by drawing attention to the family in a public space, or entered a building through the wrong door, or jumped a queue – even accidentally.

I’ve forgotten all the specifics of those lessons and directions, and anyway, it was the generic lesson that was important. The lesson of the existence of externally-imposed, independent standards of excellence and behaviour – standards that wouldn’t live down to me, but which I had to live up to. And I had no choice about that.

Let me try again. I was never conscious of this. I just spent…a series of moments, reacting to what was put in front of me, trying to do what I thought was the right thing – the thing that would make people like me, or which would make them happy (or at least not unhappy). I have an image of acting, and then looking over my shoulder to check that what I had done was OK. And even when there was no adverse reaction, I was still not quite sure that I had done the right thing. The absence of censure/approbation (?) was no guarantee of increased confidence.

But what am I trying to say? It’s so difficult to think about the things that have become the basis of your behaviour over years and years, because the neural circuits that you’re using to do the thinking are dependent on – and partly composed of – those strata of circuits and protein and blood vessels…the tangled meat machine is trying to separate itself from itself so that it can look back at itself and report back to itself. Hah!

Fuck. What I mean is that I learned that there were higher things. Things that I knew second hand, but which were unquestionable. The unimpeachable authority of the things that weren’t me. They were everywhere you looked. So I did the right things, and behaved myself, and followed the conventions, and didn’t draw attention or make a fuss, even when people fucked me over, or served me crap food in a restaurant – I’d smile and say it was ‘fine’. And where has that got me? Fucking nowhere. Teachers, lecturers, journalists, managers, politicians, authors, film-makers, musicians – I thought that they all had the kind of special knowledge that I couldn’t ever get access to, mysterious stuff that lent them authority and credibility. Now I can see that that was all crap. I was just building myself an inferiority complex that kept me powerless and opinionless. All those wasted years when I was being a good girl and living to other people’s standards, thinking that they were my own. Fucking idiot.

You just have to listen to the radio in the morning, all those voices employed by our most august national broadcasting institution, privileging their narrow editorial focus – obsessions – through repetition. Ten years ago it was business, business, business – all the time: that was the thing that was most important to everybody – acquisitions, mergers, share issues and rumours boardroom changes. Today it’s the internal politics of the government and the intrigues and posturings of ministers, all trying to outsmart their interviewers and prove that whatever they’ve said or done, and whatever changes of direction they’ve made – they’ve always been right. Crap. And the posturing extends to those so-called rottweiler interviewers, whom we’re supposed to admire for taking these shifty bastards to task on our behalf, but who are really just going through the motions of their limited repertoire of studied incredulity and automatic gainsaying – the same generic questions with a thin veneer of topical detail (courtesy of a background researcher) which never really probe, because the interviewer and the interviewee know what the rules are, and that there’s only a three-minute slot, so you’re not going to crowd a proper exploration of any kind of complex issue into that time, are you? You make your points and I’ll pretend to press you. Shit. Shit. Shit. Pointless shit.

Gabriella

“Not long ago,” nanny Anna would begin, “there was a little village tucked into a hollow between a hill and a forest, and a little river winding between the houses and the fields. And in the fields there were horses and pigs and cows. The people who lived in the village were poor, but they were happy, because their houses were made of brick and stone and they were safe and warm, and the fields were green all summer long. At harvest time, all the villagers would help to gather in the harvest, and everyone would be well-fed through the winter. And so the village lived peacefully and happily for year after year.”

The first time nanny told me this story, I thought that the story had ended when she got to this point, and I said, “Goodnight, Nanny,” and turned to my pillow. The story as it stood seemed to me to have all the story components that I was used to, and a balanced, natural arc – some scene-painting, a sense of place, and everyone living happily ever after, with a peaceful sun setting over the generous fields. On subsequent tellings, however, I had a sense of the gloomy challenge that was coming to the village, and so I always felt a little sad for the people who lived there, knowing as I now did that their happiness would cloud over and that the sunlit village would be deluged with troubles.

The substance of the story that followed nanny’s prologue is lost to me now, although I still have some fragmentary images in my mind, all associated with the crisp, fresh smell of nanny’s sun-steeped cotton dress and with the play of reddening evening light on the pale wood and plasterwork of my bedroom: I can remember a cruel, rich man in his manor house on the other side of the forest, who took more than his share of the crop; a disastrous flood that ruined the harvest; hordes of starving soldiers returning from the war, marauding across the landscape in the autumn, carrying off what food there was and killing the animals for meat. And I recall the feeling I had, even then, of mingled dread and puzzlement. It seemed so unfair that these blameless people had so much trial and suffering visited upon them, when all that they wanted was to live in peace and wait for the next season to come around.

Sometimes, when I was feeling irritable or overtired, it seemed to me that nanny was somehow partly to blame for this/these unfairness/injustices, especially as there was so much hushed enjoyment in her voice as she detailed the pains and misfortunes, too much deference for the rich man and his damaging, whimsical demands, and too little sympathy for the little boy and girl who drowned, glibly and quickly, in the rain-swollen river, seemingly punished for their perceived naughtiness. And there was something particularly discomforting about the relish with which she told the final part of this often-repeated story, the part whose approach I both dreaded and anticipated with excitement, the part where the horror and fear made me tingle, wide-eyed, in the dusk.

“Late one afternoon, on the longest day of the whole summer,” she’d continue, “a little girl sat alone on the river bank. She had been cruel to her friends, and they had all left her and gone home for their supper and bed. This little girl’s mummy always had to work hard, because the little girl’s daddy had been killed in the wars, and so the little girl knew not to go home until mummy had finished all of her cleaning and sewing for the lord of the manor. All this work made the little girl’s mother sleepy and forgetful, and the little girl didn’t have to be good like the other children.”

I felt sorry for the little girl – especially that she didn’t have a father, like me. I felt close to her. I snuggled my head against nanny’s soft stomach and bosom, trying to burrow in tighter. Nanny paused and breathed deep in the sudden silence and stillness of my room. Outside, the city streets were evening-quiet, and the sun was setting: it was already well below the rooflines of the opposite apartment blocks. Nanny put her arm around me – I remember the feel of the soft, slightly clammy skin of her upper arm against my bare shoulder – while she shifted us both around so that the sun’s afterlight glowed on her forehead. She seemed to stare off into that fading light, looking at something I couldn’t see, while she continued.

“The little girl had been playing on her own on the riverbank for a while after her friends had left, and when she found herself yawning and yawning again, she thought that she would have a little nap under a tree for a while.

“And of course she fell asleep, and while she was asleep she dreamed a strange and frightening dream. In the dream, she woke up under the tree, and it was late. Very late – nearly dark. There were few stars out already, and some thin pink clouds still in the deep blue sky. She felt cold. There was a breeze blowing, rippling across her thin cotton dress and making the branches of the tree sway, the leaves all rustling and looking white in the dusk. The little girl felt chilly and afraid for a few moments, knowing that it would be full dark before she got back to her home on the far side of the village. But she knew the lanes and the fields very well, and she could see by the white glow above the hill that the moon was rising. The light of the moon would see her home safely.

Gabriella

One summer, at the time of year when the late afternoon sunlight shines on the closed, faded wooden door of my bedroom, I hear doors downstairs opening and closing, shouts of greeting and laughter, and I know that Grandma Anna (as mum calls her – I call her ‘nanny’) has arrived for one of her brief stays.

I have no idea what mum and nanny do during the day when I’m at school, but in the evening they still seem to be full of talk, talk, talk, all through tea: about people they used to know, places they used to know, and relatives whose names sound familiar but whom I have never met. They try to engage me in their conversations too, but I don’t understand how this kind of conversation works, and I find it boring and effortful, and they quickly tire of my monosyllables and patent lack of interest, and I’m free to go back to my comic book.

As their talk flows across the table, though, and as they drink cup after cup of tea, I [soak up/osmote] an impression of intimacy and shared history, and I somehow resent – despite my boredom – the fact that I’m excluded.

In the evening, after a typical summer supper of cold potatoes, pickled beetroot and a slice of ham, I’ll go up the stairs to bed with the dusk light glimmering on the staircase, and nanny will follow me up later – wheezing by the time she gets to the top – to tell me a story, either reading from one of my books, or something from memory.

Her favourite story, it seems to me, and the one that I’ll always associate with the smell of her soap and sweat, and with her cotton-clad bulk beside me on the bed, is the one that was set – or so she insisted – in the village where she had grown up. This insistence (which I didn’t come to doubt until much later) lent the tale an intriguing degree of immediacy and contemporaneity, and I imagined my nanny as an active, concrete presence in the landscape that unfolded in the story, and I sensed her in the background of the story, going about her everyday life, as she told it.

Sometimes I would tune out of the story and just gaze up at the side of her face as she read, her jaw moving, as the evening faded down and she had to shift the book around to catch the light from my bedside lamp.

Dream

I dreamed I was going on holiday with some old friends and a couple of current work colleagues - somewhere in the West: Wales or Cornwall, I think, with cliffs and big surf and unforgiving rocks. We were staying in a big wooden hut complex, with high ceilings, big windows, and lots of shelves and storage racks of scientific equipment and tools.

Anyway, the most important thing was that I kept waking up with wasps in the hollow behind my (right) knee, and I kept thinking I had them in my hair (ha ha) and on the back of my neck. Oh, and the wasps transformed themselves into vampires at night. eventually, after pulling back the itchy woollen blanket on the metal sprung bed and rooting around underneath, I discovered that there was a wasps' nest under the bed, and that this was the source of the blood-sucking contagion. Sadly, I was already infected, but I was able to help the others create a vampire detector device using some bits of bamboo and some stripped copper wire that I pilfered from the shelves of supplies. Everyone else would be OK, but I was doomed to pass over into the darkness.

(Not sure if this is a dream about changing jobs or about my Messiah complex...)

Something Else...

Gabriella

Sometimes I think that the only things I really know are the things I’ve created in my own head; the ideas that have grown out of my own… ‘felt experience’ – things that are rooted in what I’ve sensed for myself. Richard [the lost, lamented partner] used to get annoyed with me and say that I lived too much inside my head. And he was right, in a way, but I came to see that way of being as a strength, not a weakness. The things that I believe in all come from inside me…they’ve grown from inside to out. Everything else – what people tell me, or what I read in books – feels somehow incomplete and unconvincing…as if it’s all surface and no substance. I can’t absorb it properly, and there’s no nutrition in it. It doesn’t do me any good, and it never truly becomes a part of me.

The disadvantage of this is that I’m somehow experiencing the world at one remove: everything that comes in gets over-processed, interrogated to see how it fits with the core truths that I have assembled internally. And anything that doesn’t fit that internal template gets twisted out of shape (out of existence), or is sceptically/suspiciously dismissed. This applies to other people’s emotions and attempts at close communication, too. So when people try and tell me something about myself, or ask me a question about my feelings (or which touches on them, however obliquely), I’m immediately defensive and prickly, intent on deflecting their focus and on moving the conversation on into a more comfortable area. And, of course, I have no way of checking whether my intuitions about what people are feeling is accurate, or checking if what I feel about them is reciprocated: there’s no way of internalising their messages properly, and no chance of me externalising what I feel. It’s like there’s a shell around me, impermeable and glossy with reflected light.

Richard hated that about me: I could see him trying to chip away at the shell, or try and sidle up to me and take me by surprise and fool me (when I’d been drinking or smoking dope, for example, when he thought he could bypass the normal channels) – but he could never get in. Those channels were the only ones that hadn’t silted up. I have to give him credit for persistence, though. God knows why he stayed with me as long as he did…it can’t have been very rewarding for him.

And so here I am.

Six Feet Under

Courtesy of LoveFilm, I'm working my way through season 5 (or series 5, as we'd probably say in my country) of Six Feet Under. This has to be the most consistently excellent TV series ever offered - unless you know different? Over five years, the characters have all changed in different ways, while retaining something of the essentials that they started with - this is a messy programme, without neat resolutions. Sure, people say things that sound profound and over-thought periodically, but people do that in real life, don't they? (I know I do - I think about things and concoct little sentences to bring out at appropriate moments, usually under the influence of alcohol, and when I want to impress people with the depth and gravity of my thought.).

Anyway. There's a section in episode 8 (?) where all the concurrent stories (drawing upon everything you know about these peoples' history and character from the previous series) kind of focus together, and everybody's feeling confused/upset/uncertain, and the editor cuts between shots of people sitting/lying awake looking unhappy or distressed, over a soundtrack of k d lang and Jane Silberry singing the latter's Calling All Angels - with its lyric about needing help, and not being able to understand how the world can be like it is, and how to be. And it's just beautifully judged and executed. Lovely.

You'd tell me if I overused italics, wouldn't you?

Something else

My big, fat, miserable novel has been making me fat and miserable again, so I've shelved it (again) for a bit. It's 120k words now, so I don't think I can ever abandon it - there's just too much emotional/physical energy invested in it.

Anyway, I'm working on something else for a bit, and I'm going to post that draft material here. Enjoy.

00.00 Prelude

Two weeks into the winter freeze, the city is shrouded by a pall of fog and icy air that’s suffused with a faint gleam of cold grey light. By the time the muffled church bells strike three o’clock the semi-opaque sky is already dimming, deepening into premature night as the gloom of low cloud, mist, smoke, steam and the condensed exhalations of those toiling in the slush and fog damps the light out of the sky. It’s as if the half-light suspended over the city all day is slowly subsiding, with an exhausted sigh, down into the chilled earth and stone.

The lanterns have been lit down on the waterfront, their light flaring across the ice-clamped river, throwing wavering shadows off the low [contours? plateaux?] formed where the plates of ice have fused. The shadows and dusk seem to scuttle across the deep, dull ice, and little [flurries] of light snow skitter over the roughcast surface, twisting and jack-knifing, almost alive, [like the spasmodic track of a pursued animal].

On the other side of the river, between the ice-locked ancient oak piles supporting the jetties [and wharves], the vagrants are stoking up their braziers, filling the dark spaces beneath the frozen planking with heat, smoke, soot and an [oily? Bituminous?] light that seems to etch the vagrants’ bristly beards in dry point [?], and which fixes their rheumy eyes with cleaner, sharper, harder edges. Hyena-like dogs skirt the fires, all rib racks and scarred muzzles, watching for falling food scraps against the flames’ glow, listening for the rats that scurry over the frozen detritus embedded in the river bank, and remembering vivid blood-and-sinew dog memories of dead vagrants: fresh meat for the pack to sustain them through the long winter night.

In the riverside stores and bars higher up the bank, smeared around the dark flanks of the city, the lights are shining out yellow, smoky and warm, beckoning in the chilled workers as they make their journeys home. Time passes, the crowds gradually thin out, and the horses and carts that have plying the business streets disappear. Chimney smoke gradually pales against the sky as the darkness comes down, and frost starts to glitter on slate roofs. Windows are shuttered against the cold. Distant dogs bark.

In the dark and the haze of cold, the more distant lights of the city falter and twinkle.

01.00 Gabriella

Why do I keep letting myself get dragged down like this? Why does that happen all the time? It’s the little things. All the details. Christ, my nails… bitten ragged and sore again. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

This is all true. All of it. But I have some stories I tell myself – the ones that help me make sense of everything. So do you, though. It’s not as if you’re any different from me. So don’t judge me.

In the year they let me stay at the grammar school, our composition teacher taught – no, told us – some rules, one of which was don’t start your story by describing the weather. But I remember the weather, so fuck him. Fuck all of the teachers at that school, in fact.
I’ve forgotten places, names, people’s faces, whole years – but I remember the feel of hard rain on my head and the smell of the city under fog in the middle of winter.

The way into my childhood – into the winters when I was a girl – is the glow in the sky after sunset, seen through the kitchen’s high window, with the metal frame silhouetted against the chill sky – all faded blue, purple, turquoise. I’d have my supper in the kitchen after school – usually it was toast or bread and something: sardines, cheese, sausages. Monday night was boiled eggs…two of them. With white bread, buttered cut into strips to dip. That was my favourite meal.

Sometimes, in the winter rain or slush, my stockings would still be wet from the journey home. My mother laid out a clean pair for me every night after I’d gone to bed; I didn’t have access to the clothes cupboards, and had nothing else to change into in the evenings before my bath. So I’d sit with damp feet until the grey school stockings dried out. I’d twist my toes against the wet wool, and they’d get sore and itchy. I remember a funny feeling when I curled and arched my toes in a certain way, and the bones seemed to lock, seize up. It gave me a funny mix of feelings – hurting and laughter-inducing together. That kind of feeling – like when you’ve got an insect bite that you have to keep scratching, even though you know that it’s going to hurt like hell when you stop – always makes me think of that little kitchen with the yellowish lamps lit and my mother stirring something on the electric stove, and me at the table reading the labels on the sauce bottles or jam jars, or looking up at the window and seeing the kitchen lights reflected there, high up, and the roofs of the houses opposite, dark at the bottom of the window, and the lighter sky above.

Trying to remember those evenings, to search out the details and bring them back – capture them for a moment and look at them properly in the right light – is like scratching that itch: trying to bring the thing to completion and hold off the moment when you stop, and it disappears back into the fog. I remember trying to see the world outside and the kitchen reflections at the same time, trying to make my eyes register both things at once – but I never could: it was always the reflected yellow light, ceiling and cupboards, or the roofs and the paler sky.

My room was right at the top of the building, up several flights of bare wooden stairs, separate from the kitchen and the bathroom on the ground floor. The staircases were gloomy even on summer evenings, and almost lightless in winter; in winter, I felt my way slowly up to bed, my feet probing the tread distances and my palms skimming the banisters, walls, and doors that acted as my landmarks on what sometimes – only sometimes, though – felt like a long and frightening journey through the dark.

The staircases and landings were shared with the other roomers in the building, so I heard different voices as I climbed the stairs, the sounds seeping through the gaps at the bottom of the heavy wooden doors whose sunken panels were so familiar to sight and touch. (When I think of those doors, I can still feel the little mental lurch I got when the panels dropped away from my fingertips, leaving me adrift for a moment.

Different smells dominated different landings, and different stages on the climb: floor polish, pipe tobacco smoke, boiled ham always on the second floor (where you had to take care not to knock over the precarious stack/tepee/pyramid of umbrellas and sticks), stale fat and fried onions. On the last half-landing below my little room there was a funny sweet scent like incense and rich ladies’ perfume and creamy vanilla candles. In the winter, when the landlord’s men sealed all the windows shut, that rich smell stayed in my nostrils even after I’d climbed into bed under the cold, stiff sheets. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and it would still be there, up my nose, even under the covers, lingering in my snot and little hairs.

One winter night I was waiting for the bed to warm up, trying to keep my arms and legs motionless so that they wouldn’t touch any of the still-chilly cotton beyond the outline of my body. I remember that there was a little bluish moonlight showing at the top of the heavy curtains, and I knew that there was already ice inside the window – a thin patina/layer on the glass and a smooth beading where the glass met the frame. I’d looked before I got into bed, and felt the beaded ice melt flat against my fingertip. The moon had been higher up then, full, and very white and strong in the cloudless sky. That whole side of the sky was so brightly lit that I couldn’t see any stars, just a big sky of graduated grey blue, with the dazzling moon at the top of it. The frosty rooftops stretched away, slates and ridgelines crisp like cast metal edges in the clean light, and here and there I could see yellowish lights in tall towers, [mesmerically attention-drawing] against the silhouette backgrounds of dead stone and brick. From my bed, when I looked at that silvery [gauze] of light above the curtain, I pictured all those roofs, and the great blank light glaring [dumbly] down on them, and I thought that all those roofs would have rooms like mine stacked beneath them, with children in them trying to keep warm in cold beds, and adults in the rooms below, eating their dinners and talking in and out of the sound of metal knives and forks on thick china plates, their voices rising and falling, the words always unclear to the children upstairs; just the rhythms and tones of familiarly indistinct, distant voices lulling the children to sleep.

I was jealous of all those other children, who had a mum and a dad to listen to through the floor – when I just had my mum . Remembering this, and picturing my little girl self, I’m tempted to see chill, reluctant little tears glinting at the corners of my eyes in the faint light. That would be a lie, though – a self-pitying adult invention projected back onto little me. As far as I remember, I was just jealous. Not sad.

Lying in the cold and dark I felt – just for a moment, but very clearly – the memory of warm sunlight on the skin on the inside of my forearm, and smelt the smell of sun-warmed skin, that dry, [intoxicating?] odour of spring. The sense of being back there in the [warmth] of May was so real that I thought I could almost see the sunlight on the wall at the foot of my bed, an even spread of light on the custard-coloured paint. Then the [sense-] memory was gone. Trying to recreate the sensations by focusing on the light, the wall, the separate feel and smell of skin, I found that I could bring back each element in isolation, but never conjure them up simultaneously in a single assembly that suddenly locked [in focus] and vibrated, alive and whole, in my mind. I circled round these fragments as they snapped in and out of [apprehension/comprehension], each fragment of lost attention careening away from my fragile grasp, immune to my appeals for it to stay.

Blogjam

The blogjam is over.

Urged on by audience feedback, I have decided to apply the cattle prod of discipline to the vast immobile backside of my bovine lack of creativity. (Thank you for the prompt, S.) Once again, tenuous extended metaphors will send their weedy tendrils out towards the edge of the page, gradually attenuating until they cannot grip any longer, when they will inevitably curl up and die of vegetable matter-based embarrassment. Just like that.

More later. Really.

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Early doors
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A Rubbish Joke What I Made Up While My Soup Was Undergoing Its Second-stage Microwaving. You'll Despise Me For Taking The Time To Type It In And Wasting YOUR Time Too. Especially Galling Will Be All Of These Capital Letters For No Reason

What do you call a listless Frenchman who plays for Arsenal?



















Thierry Ennui.


See?

Marie Antoinette

Do yourself a favour: don't bother going to see Marie Antoinette. If you must go, take your iPod and listen to some music. That way you can ignore the slacker accents, the unconvincing acting, the knowing ironic lines - oh, and the sound of clunky metaphors thudding to the floor and the music soundtrack telling you what the characters are feeling. It looks pretty sumptuous, though: beautifully sunlit forests, fine buildings, lovely frocks, grand ceilings, and wonderful staircases. Sumptuous but vacuous. And so dull and unconvincing: the film seems to spend so much time being ironic that it forces you not to care about any of it, or any of the characters. I struggle to see the point of telling a story about dim people living empty, protocol-constrained and vacuously hedonistic lives unless you're going to make us sympathise with them in some way - but this film is so lacking in any psychological realism or depth that you really can't care at all. I was already looking at my watch after 45 minutes.

Low points: "Fools rush in" on the soundtrack to indicate that she's smitten with a Swedish soldier; a fountain spurting to suggest Louis' new-found sexual potency; a feather clinging to a grass stem in the breeze while the queen's child gambols bucolically - presumably drawing our attention to the transient nature of this idyll. You start wondering whether all of this is ironic, or whether Coppola really means it. It's not often that a film actively irritates me, but this one did. It's so pleased with itself that it seems to forget about the importance of engaging the audience. Grrr.

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Where I stayed on my holiday...sigh...
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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Another pixellated moonshot...
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A heavily pixellated moon rising over the forest
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...beep ...beep ...beeeeep...

you know that bit at the end of the (relatively) recent animated version of Ted Hughes' story The Iron Giant, when the scattered pieces of the giant are emitting beeps and flashes of light, and gradually dragging themselves towards the North Pole, where they'll rendezvous and recombine? well, that's how my life feels at the moment. i've secured a new job, and that knowledge fills me with a sense of liberation, a sense that i can start to get back to being myself. the last three years, i realise, have been a waste of energy. but my scattered wits have ceased flying apart, and feel like they're pausing, poised at their terminal points, and are now ready to collapse back into the centre. that feels nice.

...beep... ...beep... ...beep...

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Two things I noticed about colour today

Yes. Out in the lanes and bridleways, with black mud spattered in my face and all down the outside of my leg where I overbalanced in a splodgy rut where the wheels couldn't get any purchase. Demanding but fun - and healthful.

Two things about colour, then.

1. In the sunlit, bright green and dark-shadowed late summer foliage, where purple-black elderberries are hanging overheavy, and the blackberries are ripening through red into black, the wood pigeons' plumage looks blue rather than grey - the blue grey of a nighttime cigarette-smoky jazz bar lit by Ridley Scott.


2. Where the road bends and then passes over a culvert, there's a bridge set into the flat field. The railings of the bridge are painted - where the paint hasn't peeled or been superseded by rust - a flat, pale blue: that washed-out, aquatic blue, the colour of every outdoor paddling/swimming pool we put our feet in when we were kids. The blue that has in it the memory of high, strong sunlight, of flies in the water, and thirst that can only be slaked by Ribena.

I ate some blackberries from roadside bushes, and rode along a byway I'd never used before, finding myself on a raised bank in the middle of two stripped fields with the wind blowing stalk fragments about, and tiny weeds in the spaces vacated by the crops.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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