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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.