A wild slim alien

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Written in the dark

I’m not sure what woke me; it’s too deep in the night for it to be early morning dreams.  Perhaps the territorial screeches of battling wildlife.  Oh, but then as I shift position, a twinge inside my rib cage – the acid of reflux.  It’s snapped me awake.  I can tell I’m going to struggle to get back under.  An avalanche of images, thoughts and concerns is triggered by the noise of my mind coming to life.  Gradually I whittle these away until there remains the essence of an idea; a netsuke that I will set aside time to carve in miniaturist detail, if only I can remember its essence tomorrow.  I don’t want to disturb my partner sleeping next to me, so I have only two options; to repeat a concatenation of reminder words mantra-like before I fall asleep in the hope that I’ll remember them tomorrow, or to better ensure I do so by writing blind in pencil on a clean page at the back of the notebook I keep on my bedside table.  As you can imagine, this is a hit and miss affair.  I restrict myself to those key words that I hope will convey to me the idea as a whole when I look at them the following day.  But sometimes I struggle to read notes to myself written in full daylight; written in the dark my letters will loop crazily, while ‘t’s will be missing their cross bars, and ‘i’s their dots.  Words and lines will overlap.

The following morning I am improvising or even riffing in the car as my subconscious drives me to work.  My mind is trying to find something on which to latch and around which to gather.  I am thinking of the infinite variation of repetitive journeys, because early on in this one, someone ran across the dual carriageway between the two petrol stations on either side of the road, hurdling the barrier in the middle.  This has never happened before.  The man is wearing the kind of fluorescent protective clothing a fire-fighter might; perhaps he’s a petrol tanker driver.  Automatically I hit the brakes, because naturally I don’t want this real life game of Frogger to come to a sticky end.  The proximity of death shakes me, though admittedly in not quite the same way as when I put my own self in the way of vehicular harm.  I could continue on in this vein, noting all the variations from the norm of the drive there and back – the different birds I sight, the endlessly changing landscape and skies, the faces and bodies and clothing of the pedestrians I let cross at the roundabout.  In so doing I could show that there is some kind of variety in the rote of routine, if you choose to look for it.  But these thoughts are elbowed to one side, by not one but two new netsuke.  The first is the resumption of last night’s musing on writing in the dark.  The second is an entirely novel idea; as I glimpse it come into being I see also how it may move my writing forward, in a new direction.  The essence of the idea is contained in about six to eight words.  Now I know I need to get to the car park double quick and write those words down before I lose them forever.  Because if that happens, I won’t be as sanguine about it as Yuri is in Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago:

‘So many new thoughts come into your head when your hands are busy with hard physical work, when your mind has set you a task which can be achieved by physical effort and which brings its reward in joy and success, when for six hours on end you dig or hammer, scorched by the life-giving breath of the sky.  And it isn’t a loss but a gain that these transient thoughts, intuitions, analogies, are not put down on paper but forgotten.  The town hermit, whipping up his nerves and his imagination with strong black coffee and tobacco, doesn’t know the strongest drug of all – good health and real need.’

Inevitably my attention is diverted by the flashing lights of a slow moving vehicle, and by other slightly less slow moving vehicles moving into my lane to overtake them.  When I settle back into driving on autopilot and resume my conscious attempts to turn ideas and feelings into words, I find that while I can remember the writing in the dark idea, the novel netsuke is gone.  I try to smoke it out as methodically as a private detective might uncover the address or no fixed abode of a missing person.  I rewind, scroll back, follow the links that form the chain of my thoughts, handling each one in turn.  I jump to the start of the journey, and even beyond that to my shower before setting off (it’s another place where ideas come to me).  But the chain is broken and the missing link refuses to be brought back into sight.  I turn off the music – Dead in the boot, appropriately enough – in order to let my mind run free, because I know now that I’m straining too hard to remember.  If I just let myself drift into the drifting mood I was in before the slow moving vehicle blocked the way, before the anxious seeking took hold, I’ll surely remember.

But the netsuke is gone.  It may never now be carved.  As in the night-time, I wish I had an inky pipe going out of my brain onto a page which I could look at the next day, or perhaps a chip with something akin to a telepathic recording facility wirelessly connected to a laptop.  Maybe there will be such things in twenty or fifty or a hundred years’ time.   (You may be thinking, but the technical solution already exists – the note-taking app on your phone!  Unfortunately in the dark my eyes can’t cope with the glare from its screen.)  I can still feel that it was a novel thought.  But perhaps that’s why it didn’t stick, because it was brand new, and not a familiar theme or notion circling overhead, frequently visible in the past but never yet butterfly-netted.

These written in the dark thoughts are of that kind – so much easier to pull into the shape of words than that fleetingly glimpsed hint of new connections which ultimately proved not quite strong enough to live.  Still, I am full of frustration, mourning its loss; is this what dementia will be like, only with the connections that connect each item in the ordinary store of memory severed?

At the turning for Rowlands Castle, under my breath and as so many times before, I sing ‘Through the last light on the plain / Roland to the dark tower came’.


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Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of existing things

marvels

Dear reader, my Christmas gift to you is this – Hidden treasure: the National Library of Medicine – a fabulous, beautifully illustrated and freely available ebook detailing some of the riches in the collection of the National Library of Medicine in the US, and emanating from the point at which personal interests and my working life collide.

To give you a flavour, among my favourite of the revealed treasures are the Langenburg Manuscript (a 16th century compilation of texts about the health and maintenance of horses), nurse postcards and uniform photograph collections, White’s physiological manikin, Marvels of things created and miraculous aspects of existing things (a 13th century Islamic cosmography), examples of hirsutism from the 1876 edition of the Atlas of skin diseases, Theodosius Purland’s mesmerism scrapbooks, the Numskulls-like wonder of The wonder in us (popular science from 1920s Germany), Chinese public health slides, St. Elizabeths magic lantern slide collection, a 17th and 18th century book of receipts for remedies, and covers and pages from Scope magazine.  Plus lots of other weird, wonderful and grotesque medical stuff, and accompanying each item, short essays by scholars, artists, collectors, journalists, or physicians.  It’s not an entirely scientific trawl through the history of medicine, but it illuminates a creative energy from across the centuries in which medical science is married to art.

It’s an irony of course that this is an ebook celebrating hard copy words and pictures in all their varied and magnificent forms; books you’d really like to get your (white gloved) hands on.  But it is also itself available in hard copy, if a preference for the heft of a book in your hand and the feel of pages as you turn them beats the cost involved.  Or you are stuck for a last minute idea for a Christmas present.  It’s the kind of book I’d like to receive myself, and I feel somewhat frustrated that among those to whom I routinely give presents, I can’t quite imagine who I’d aim it at.  The same goes for the equally enticing Book of barely imagined beings: a 21st century bestiary.  But at least I can draw both books to your attention.

Merry Christmas to all my regulars, and to anyone stumbling into this alien domain for the first time.


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Star of wonder

Sagittarius

A while back my daughter asked me, ‘Is there a video of me being born?’  I laughed, and said that even if we’d had the camcorder then, I would have struggled to get sign-off from the principal actor.  Aside from a few photographs, the day went unrecorded except in memory, where the magnitude of the event runs up hard against pain, anxiety and lack of sleep, to speak just of what her father experienced.  But it was a nice piece of inference on my daughter’s part; she has been using the hand-held camera a lot lately, and knows there is footage I shot when she was much younger.  So I told her that I had in fact written something about her birth not long before, and that maybe when she was older she would be interested to read it, in the absence of video evidence.  I thought I would try it out here first.

*

I was out shopping for Christmas presents when your mother went into labour.  When I got home she was sitting on the floor with her back against the side of the bed.  She almost never shouts at me, but she did then, exasperated by my overlong absence, though I knew that it was born of anxiety and nervous excitement, rather than true anger.  And in any case, when we rang the hospital, they were reluctant for her to come in yet.

Once she was admitted later that evening, the long hours – a whole day’s worth of them – passed like no other long hours have passed before or since.  A heightened state of waiting, marked by minor developments, moments of concern, waves of pain.  Gas and air and an epidural.  The birth plan went out the window, an impractical ideal.  The simple truth is that obstetricians know what to do in any given situation, and their arguments carry both urgency and the weight of countless practical repetitions.  So labour ended and your life began in theatre, with activity just short of taking you out via the tummy.  I was invited to wear scrubs and sit where I could hold your mother’s hand.  It must have been a quiet time on the labour ward because with us there were about a dozen health professionals, led by a friendly and charismatic obstetrician with wiry grey hair and sideburns, an auspicious sign from my point of view, and one which I suspect influenced me to grow my own early in your life (though the effort shaving became may also have had something to do with that).

Against his advice, I stood up to see you born.  It had seemed traumatic as labour went along but then you were out, bloody and pink; the elation we both felt made the trauma seems so much less traumatic.  The obstetrician announced the time – 16:58.  Tuesday’s child.  Despite being ventoused and clamped with forceps, you were pink and perfect and – I can’t resist using such an old-fashioned word – bonny.  I have a dreamlike memory of being given you swaddled to take over to the paediatrician to check you for APGAR (Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration); pink as you were, you scored high.  Certainly I looked into your seemingly astonished and certainly astonishing face moments after you were born, and my recollection is that it was as I carried you across to the paediatrician that I spoke your name for the first time, even though your mother and I had not yet agreed it.  But the moment I saw you, it was obvious to me that you were who you were.  Obvious too that you were beautiful.  In the weeks ahead, everyone would say so, from midwives to passing shoppers in the supermarket; and once a health visitor added, ‘of course we say that to every parent, but she really is a beautiful baby’.

On the maternity wing, a student midwife took the first photo of the three of us together, and I took one of you being weighed in: 3.548 kg.  I can even tell you that you were 50 cm long.  We heard you cough for the first time, and saw your tiny tongue appear.  You looked bewildered, as you had every right to be.  You tried out your first grouchy frowns beneath your bloodied mass of hair, for yes, like me you were born with a full head of it.  Your fat little lips almost arranged themselves into some distant relative of a smile.  Your eyes were immediately questing, your thighs pudgy and your knees strong.  You had a dimple where I do.  Every time we looked at you in those early weeks we saw another face emerging out of your blooming cheeks.  You were a barrister clutching the imaginary lapels of your baby-grow and addressing the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  A little Buddha or the last Emperor.  In nappy alone, a sumo wrestler, or a miniature heavyweight boxer.  A Mafia don.  Winston Churchill.  Friar Tuck.  Benny Hill, leading us a merry dance.  But beautiful versions of all of those large personalities.  At times you seemed to be playing an imaginary theremin, or perhaps a double bass, with swoops of your tiny hands.  Or you were a conductor whose emotions were rioting carefully across your face in time with the swishing of your imaginary baton.  Oh, the faces you pulled.  Maire Antoinette, dismissing the hoi polloi.  Frank Sinatra singing ‘My way’.  Vic Reeves’ impersonation of a club singer, crooning out of the side of his mouth.  But when you had been well fed, and hadn’t a care in the world, then what you most resembled was a cat.

The period a few hours after your birth is dreamlike in my memory.  Remember, I hadn’t slept for more than thirty-six hours.  Perhaps that’s why instead of driving home, I have what seems a puzzling memory of catching a bus, a London bus wanly lit in the way London buses are, rumbling and bouncing and lulling me as it moved through a magical neon-lit world which in reality was for the most part suburban housing – twenties mock Tudor and thirties terraces and semi-detacheds – lining the ceaseless rumble of the main road.

At home I must have had something to eat.  I strongly suspect I drank a bottle of beer, perhaps two.  I certainly turned on the radio to listen to John Peel, wanting music and to share the moment with someone, even though I would never have gone so far as to email the DJ to let him know about this momentous event in the life of one of his longtime listeners.  That night Peelie played a whole host of songs which gave me the uncanny sense that somehow he nevertheless knew what was going on in my life: ‘I love your mum’ by the 7-10 Splits, Cosy Cosy’s ‘About a boy, about a girl’, ‘How the angels fly in’ by the group in session that night, extreme metal outfit Anaal Nathrakh, ‘Darlin’’ by Frankie Miller, sweet Gene Vincent’s ‘Baby blue’, and even ‘Clappin’’ by a group called Bus.

On your 18th birthday – to which you are now halfway – I’m going to give you these words, and together with them, a recording of that show, if I can find one, and if not, then as many of the songs as I can trace compiled together in the order they were played.  Against my better judgment, I might even throw in that week’s number one: ‘Changes’ by Kelly and Ozzy Osbourne.

Photo of the Milky Way and the Sagittarius constellation by Terrence Dickinson via Hubble.


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XTC [e]

I’m having to pick my way artfully through this topic, as I pair notions with songs to match. Sgt. Rock is going to aid my stab at this most difficult of lipogrammatical tasks, but I’m still touching a rabbit’s foot for luck prior to starting in on it.

So it’s touch, sight, olfactory bulb and tract, all that acts synaptically on that muscular mass for tasting in your mouth, all that’s audibly born through air too, working in common to impact amazingly on your brain, as MDMA might do, in a club, with 4/4 rhythms insisting that you consign your mind and gift your body to music’s structural flow. On occasion grass or laughing gas might work similarly, allowing you a stony high or making you stupidly happy.

It’s also a singular kind of thrill, which works maximally with coupling parts locking in sinuous gratification. It’s both an armchair holding your body and zaps of almost painful joy acupuncturing your mind. It has you burning with flaming optimism, blowing rooks away, and can unfrost any snowman in an instant. It’s yachts dancing, ladybirds loving, dog day cauldrons of knock-out punch and a wish you had which abruptly blooms. It’s fluvial orchids and dictionary minds. Pink things and fruit nuts. Brown guitars and radios in motion. Stars twinkling as fairy lights do at Christmas and a full moon’s glow. Rain and sun skylarking to form a rainbow. It is, to sum up, your own palatial Nonsuch in which any wondrous thing might occur.

This kind of thrill scorns cash; it can run on nothing much at all – a farmboy’s salary, say. Follow such a boy and his girl walking arm in arm through high swaying corn, making plans and passing hours carving wood and daubing paint. As dark falls, should Thor blast lightning from his tool and so crack monstrous sound simply out of sky, watch on still as our pair hold fast in sugary bliss; mark how two minds can lay upon a solitary pillow. Caution though; as participant or fly on a wall you might incur its risk and cost – its morbid Midas touch.

It scorns status too – Argonaut or navvy or blacksmith or mayor of a small town, it’s of no account, all can act as king and consort for a day. It’s no ball and chain, and usually though not always it balks at chains of command. Nor is it for somnambulists – waking up is what it’s all about. But with luck a runaway and a vanishing girl might find lasting comfort in its clutch.

My final thoughts: always avoid a void. Day in day out. Last thing you want is that sound of a scissor man snipping, coming for you. Raging against dying light and any fat lady’s song, that’s what I’m advising. And without a doubt Sgt. Rock thinks so too.


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Jumping through hoops

The bombardment of Algiers

I am holding hands with two work colleagues, as part of a circle of ten. This is not something I am accustomed to doing. Over my wrist hangs a hula hoop (the children’s toy, that is, rather than the potato snack); on the opposite side of the circle another is similarly positioned. The object of the exercise is to pass the two hoops around the circle without any of us letting go of our colleagues’ hands. We are in competition with two other groups of ten and it’s as we stand there hand in hand waiting for the whistle that I wish I had played up my sore shoulder when the facilitator asked if anyone had a back complaint. But there’s no escaping the circle now, so I do my best for the team on each of three attempts. After we have finished second overall, the facilitator elicits from us the team-building attributes of this exercise. I expect you can imagine how facile the dialogue is. While it is unfolding, everyone is sitting around in a circle on the floor, some cross-legged, as if they were back in primary school. Everyone, that is, except me. I’m the one breaking with my team to sit on a nearby chair. The facilitator clocks me, has me marked. I am evidently not a team player. But if she’s thinking that, then she’s wrong. The nature of my work is that it is done for other people, rather than myself. I am in fact the perfect team player, experienced and can do; as in, I do shit for people that others wouldn’t. I am sitting on the chair because all the team-building psychology being spouted is either bleeding obvious or bleeding obviously bullshit. I’ve heard it all before and I’ve had it up to here with it.

It’s the departmental away day. A direction-setting and team-building exercise. Except that the direction’s already been set and the team builds itself, outside of these excruciating, naval-gazing days. The facilitator is a genial people person, a concentrated dose of consultant on the make. She loses me early on when she flashes up a slide on which she has spelled cliché incorrectly (‘clishe’), and I’m afraid I don’t revise my opinion when she later confesses that she is somewhat dyslexic.

The venue is grand. Chandeliers with a myriad of old-fashioned water droplet bulbs hang from the high ceiling. A portrait of Queen Victoria presides over us. On one side of the door, our eyes can feast on the Battle of the Nile, while on the other there is a scene from the bombardment of Algiers. In groups the facilitator asks us to represent ourselves with a picture. At my suggestion our group draws a Christmas tree, on which I hang myself inside the bubble of a bauble. One group draws an aeroplane, another a man holding a number of balloons. A final group with individualist leanings draws seven or eight different pictures including fog and darkness and sunshine and sea gulls.  And a frog.

The self-styled communication consultant asks us to enter a mood of ‘relaxed fascination’, akin to how we might feel on Sunday morning reading the papers, or when we are losing ourselves in our favourite hobby; but this is work, not a Sunday morning in bed, and I’m not sure about you, but I don’t usually share mine with thirty-nine other folk. Lady, all your constructs are artifice, built out of hot air and diluted versions of theories which were already suspect to start with.

For example. She asks us to work on prioritising our circle of influence, thereby minimising our circle of concern. Coincidentally I often find at these events that I am trapped inside a circle of bullshit, and that the circle of sense seems very far away. And yet as the day drags on, and we endure its many and varied humiliations, there is plenty of laughter in the room – to the point of hysteria, it seems to me – despite a number of the people to whom I talk saying that like me, they enjoy these days about as much as a trip to the dentist. It seems that most of us are grinning and bearing it.

Another exercise involving coloured ribbons shows us how interconnected we all are. As if we none of us had worked that out for ourselves. The exercise is hosted by two colleagues I have a lot of time for, people who are at least somewhat inclined to send the whole thing up; I know they have been co-opted and are making the best of it. The resulting maypole tangle of ribbons is diverting, but the message could have been conveyed in a minute by drawing lines and circles on a piece of paper. I can’t be the only one in the room thinking that life is precious and hours of mine are being wasted today.

Some of my colleagues may not have a job come April and during the day, they have voiced that concern to the facilitator. She airs this grievance, scarcely bothering to feign sympathy or understand its full import. Essentially what she says boils down to this: deal with it, because lots of people in other industries than yours are having to. Embrace change as an opportunity, make your own luck. A political interpretation might be, embrace getting fucked over by the long-term effects of bankers’ greed and government complicity; choose to be a survivor or a victim. I’m no economist, but if there needn’t have been quite this seismic shift in the economy, it’s galling to hear a hard-hearted banking industry apologist from the private sector preaching their creed to the less than well-paid foot soldiers of the public, particularly ones whose director had earlier been talking about life chances, opportunities and inequalities.

The final kick to our dignity is an alleged poem she reads us about geese – some of which I have just seen fly past the window, which was poetry enough for me. The analogy being our similarity to geese flying in a V formation, able to extend their range so much further because they do so; and when one of them is shot or otherwise injured, another two will drop out of the formation to tend to it until it dies or is ready to fly again.

Days like this make me feel that it’s high time I shot myself, or at least broke formation for good in some less self-harming way. The pair of colleagues threatening to stand by me if I do; well, you needn’t.

Painting of The bombardment of Algiers 27 August 1816 by George Chambers, Senior via History of the sailing warship in the marine art.


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Of candles and camels

‘It’ll be like this candle.’  My daughter picks up the orange and cinnamon-scented candle from the table.  The candle is contained in a glass a little bigger than one you might drink a shot from.  ‘You’re the wick, and mummy and I are at the bottom.’  She touches the charred wick and then the underside of the glass, to which the barcode remains attached.  We bought this candle together at the pottery for her mother’s last birthday.  More of a Christmas than a birthday candle, it was the one with the smell which most appealed to her.  ‘All we have to do is light the candle, and the wax will melt, and you’ll be with us again.’  See, I told you, next she would master metaphor.  I truly am the wick.  I feel charred, old, every inch my age.  To mix my metaphors, I wish I could be the wet new butterfly I watched emerge from a chrysalis all those years ago at school.  When I was small and innocent and (I like to think) necessarily good.  I watched it open and fill and flood with life.  I wish like it I could be new again, freshly minted, at once green and all the colours of the rainbow.  Like my daughter is, with everything still ahead of her.  But of course if I were, then she would not (yet) exist.

We’ve been talking about my being away from home for a few days.  It’s for work, and I don’t really want to go, because what I’m doing will be dry and tiring and very possibly not worth the considerable effort and expense.  But I’m signed up for it and I’ve got to do it, so we talk about how much I’d prefer to stay and not go.

‘Would you rather take me to E-Z-P-Z?’  E-Z-P-Z is an indoor play area with aircraft hangar acoustics that magnify the hullaballoo from the kids and the easy-peasiest of ways of making a father feel his age should he be foolish enough to be swayed by supplication into entering the play structure, there to test the inflexibility of both his back and all the joints in his legs.

‘Much, much more,’ I say.

‘If we went to the zoo and we saw a camel and it bit you, would you even prefer that to going on your course?’

‘How hard would the camel bite me?’

‘Just a nip.  Maybe there would be a bit of blood.’

‘Hmmm.  I’ve never been bitten by a camel before.  It might be quite interesting to be bitten by one, if it won’t take any of my fingers off; and if that were the only bad thing to happen in the day, well, I’d definitely go for that over my course too.’  She seems satisfied with my answers and we turn back to the bracelet she is making.

*

Now I am back from the course and it was… endurable.  This weekend it’ll be a toss-up between the toe-blistering and feet-murdering experience of ice-skating, or a close encounter with a camel, in which case this might be the last eight-fingered entry in these annals.  But that’s a sacrifice I will make willingly, and happily.


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The Cupola House [q]

It was a building more suited to the south of Italy than to its actual location, set into a terrace along one of the cobbled streets of an old English market town.  Like the rest of the house, the zenith – the octagonal cupola itself – was now a mess of peeling stucco.  But its bell still tolled the hours, albeit at some degree of variation from the metronomic chiming of St. Edmund’s.  For three hundred years the two bells had carried on their conversation, and for that same number of years, the townsfolk had been happy to eavesdrop upon it.

Built by a prosperous apothecary who had been three times mayor of the town, the Cupola House was the kind of informal institution from which every place of its size benefits.  For a building with an Italianate exterior, inside it was rather a spit and sawdust kind of place; no-one seemed to know how it had resisted the tide of gentrification that had swept the rest of the town, save for the landlords’ stubborn refusal to listen to offers.  The couple could see their customers liked it as it was, no frills save for a bar lined with the best beers that they could source; and so they kept the cracked flags and the stained tables and the wall above the roaring fire somewhat blackened by years of wood smoke.  It was lived in, and snug, like a cardigan worn for comfort rather than style.  Which is not to say that the Cupola’s customers lacked style, but that comfort was interpreted individually by each and every one of them without much regard for the fashions of the day.

Though a bastion of the non-conventional, the welcome was as warm as you’d get anywhere.  The landlord and lady strove not to preside over their domain like monarchs at court; they saw themselves more as servants of the mood, and the mood came from the customers and the longevity of their custom.  The drinkers relaxed into the Cupola’s unforgiving wooden chairs as if they were the plush leather sofas in the lounge bar of the grandest hotel in town.  In a nook of the Cupola’s rather more democratically open living room was a woman whose broad, immediate smile and mass of curling russet hair ensured she stood out even when she would prefer to observe rather than be observed.  A regular from down the years and across the week, she might be said to be House royalty.  Hers was a regal name, too – Charlotte.  Not that she affected airs, or found herself deferred to; in fact the reverse was true.  From the first sip of her opening drink, she exuded the warmth you saw in her face; a striking face whose attraction was in part that it was open to life, to the scenes that she witnessed as she went about her working day, and to the people milling about the pub, so many of whom seemed to take a chance at some point or other in the evening to engage her in conversation, like bees buzzing about an apian monarch.

As was the case with that earlier red-headed regnant, Elizabeth I, it was hard for a newcomer to gauge who her consort might be; but the outsider would swiftly divine that such a woman would not be walking through life alone; and on closer inspection, he or she would spot the man sat across the table from her, arguing the toss with a logic so unbending and rigorous that in its glint the observer would deduce the beginnings and sustention of their attraction.

The evening we see her embarked upon, this was the evening of her mock-coronation, for it was between the third and fourth pints that she let slip the news that the (cross-dressing) younger of her two sons had recently become the singer in a Parisian electro swing band called Princesse.  A wag nearby suggested that if her son was une princesse, then she was la reine – la reine Charlotte of the Cupola House!

But all was not what it seemed.  Charlotte’s life was two intertwined spirals.  As one helix spiralled up among the pints of ale and glasses of wine and shouted conversations and gusts of laughter, the other spiralled down on into the stillest part of herself, from which detachment sprang words, swimming upwards for their life, breaking the meniscus of the lake at the centre of the forest of noise around her with the sudden grace and surprise of a landlocked dolphin.  The words that rose mused on her fellow drinkers, on herself and her lot; and on the nature of existence.  They were beguiling words as they broke the surface of that pool in her mind and Charlotte knew she really ought to catch them before they lost their buoyancy and disappeared, very possibly forever.  But more often than not the stories and the images held in them sank from view as the whirl of the evening and the first of those two intertwined spirals scooped her up in its arms and bought her another drink.  Sometimes, however, when she got home in the early hours, or waking sore-headed in the morning after a broken night’s sleep, the words would still be there, bobbing like apples or corks or waterfowl, and she would net them or feed them bread and then once more she had language in the palm of her hand.  She didn’t care much if anyone read what she wrote; what was important was to name the nameless and numberless feelings and thoughts and images teeming up and down the two spirals, leaping from one across to the other and back again.  To do this was to achieve a moment of measurement, of graceful balance, in the see-saw of life, a life whose chief certainty was that the helter-skelter whirl of another night at the Cupola would be upon her again before she knew it.

*

Both spirals were silent – the one rendered speechless, the other wordless – the day she turned the corner and saw that the Cupola House, that beautiful building with its long history and its warm welcome, had been gutted by a fire.  Its bell tumbled, its cupola gone.

When the words came back, she would ensure that its memory was kept very much alive.


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I feel mango

Over the course of the last year, my daughter has been discovering the power of the figurative.  Hills that had seen snow were ‘covered in icing sugar’, and of a classmate’s efforts at passable front crawl, she somewhat surreally said, ‘he looked like he was trying to catch a fish that was dangling from the sky.’  The development of and shifts in a child’s linguistic and expressive abilities are endlessly interesting.  In my daughter’s case, perhaps especially entertaining in her early years were the logical but incorrect inferences from what she had already learnt – versions of words that made sense to her but weren’t strictly speaking English.  Irregular past participles regularised, and nouns turned into verbs, like ‘blooded’ for ‘bleeding’.  Looking at the extinction page of her dinosaur book: ‘Ah, this is the deading time of the dinosaurs.’  She also used to say ‘is it reald?’ meaning ‘real’, and that always made my heart melt.

And now all these similes.  Perhaps it is the effect of being encouraged to vary her language when writing stories at school, and to use ‘wow’ words.  Perhaps she hears her parents and others doing it and is trying it on for size herself.  Perhaps she is simply and unselfconsciously extending the range of her expression.

‘I look like Shakespeare in this shirt.’  She has on a collarless white cotton shirt with thin blue stripes.  What she means is that she looks like Shakespeare as portrayed by Dean Lennox Kelly in an episode of Doctor Who back when David Tennant was at the controls of the TARDIS.  And even then, it’s a stretch.  But this is the shirt she dons for special occasions – a meal out at a restaurant, or when one of her friends is having a party.  She dresses up as Shakespeare on red letter days; the kind of day when Doctor Who travels back in time to find Will penning the sequel to Love’s labour’s lost, in which it is of course won.  Or rather, would have been, but for the intervention of three alien witches straight out of Macbeth via the Fourteen Stars of the Rexel Planetary Configuration.

‘One of my toenails looks like a ship.’  I put my head next to hers and look at the toenail from her perspective.  She’s not wrong.

She sniffs my upper arm though my shirt.  ‘You smell of grease.’

‘I do?  Thanks for that.’

‘No, I mean Greece the country.’

I’m not quite sure how I achieve such an effect.  Possibly through a diet high in Mediterranean foodstuffs, or through having read the Iliad, if not the Odyssey.  But it’s not as if I ooze ouzo.  From subsequent conversation I take it to be a smell that she likes, and she knows whereof she speaks, because we have been to Greece, and smelt the smells of sun-baked pines and meltelmi-rustled vegetation.  I know I don’t always smell as sweet to her.

Perhaps most inventive of all, on waking one morning recently and feeling a bit peaky, she groaned, ‘I feel mango’.  That fruit being the one food which is sure to make her throw up, every time.  Almost certainly she’ll use it when she wants to bunk off school as a teenager.  Having read up on mango allergy, the allergen is apparently in its skin, and tends to manifest itself though touch rather than the eating of the fruit, juiced or otherwise.  So it may be that an association has been formed from one instance of being sick after eating it, and that that is the problem rather than the allergen.  Or possibly it is a reaction to the protective chemical which I’m told is routinely sprayed on mango trees.  Or it could just be that she hates the taste, I suppose.  I like the fruit myself, but I think whenever I’m nauseous in future, what I’ll say is that I feel mango.

Where the simile leads, metaphor will one day surely follow.  Her uninhibited use of language is a constant source of surprise and delight.  She’s already proficiently turning out neologisms when they suit her needs.  In a story she wrote outside of school – she is exhibiting worrying signs of having inherited the same affliction as her father – she created the word ‘countrysea’ for someone who lives in the countryside but near the sea.  Now there’s a ‘wow’ word if ever her teacher marked one.

(No. 2 in an occasional series in which I allow myself to be sentimental – or rather, more sentimental than usual – despite the inherent danger in these posts of attracting an audience who are I fear looking for something quite different; the first in the series has meant that A wild slim alien is more often visited for its scant information on alien eggs than anything else, and now I’ve gone and mentioned Doctor Who…)


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Sleeping [z]

It was the ants who told her to leave.

Sunday morning he lay wasted in bed and she rose early to find a foraging column making its way to and fro between the back door and the pile of sugar he had spilt in the early hours but neglected to clear up. Each departing ant had in its clutches as many of the fine, translucent-white grains as it could carry. While the outgoing line descended from the worktop down the face of the fridge, the incoming ants ascended. The two broadly parallel lines stretched away across the floor, disappearing into and appearing from the gap under the door, a gap visible to both the human and the formic eye. Beyond were a couple of concrete steps, in the crevices of which the nest had been created and the colony lodged.

Feeling like his mother, if she had told him once about the sugar, she had told him a thousand times, but he. Never. Bloody. Listened. Away from the columns of ants – it wasn’t their fault – she smashed his Dunfermline Athletic mug on the floor tiles. The dregs splashed on her bare feet.

She wanted to go home. He didn’t want to; ‘Not just yet, hen.’ She wanted air that carried on it the scent of the sea or the heather over which it had blown rather than a single day and night more of kebabs and grimy heat and petrol fumes. Recently too she had been dreaming of feet kicking at her tummy from the inside, kicking her so hard that she would wake from sleep. She had told him the dream, but she could tell he didn’t want to; ‘Not just yet, hen.’ So she slept while he lived life as an urban ghoul. She needed to wake up, to snap out of it, to do what she wanted to do, be where she wanted to be. For too long she had clung to the belief that he had to get all this out of his system, and then he would be ready. But she knew now he would never be ready. He would always spill the sugar.

As a girl she had been fascinated by ants. The singular way they formed their collective, she supposed. They seemed so driven and determined. She crouched on the floor tiles as she might once have done to get a better view of them. Even here crawling across the theoretically hygienic space of the kitchen, they didn’t make her skin crawl. She watched them scurry, able to move off in any direction as curiosity or the surface over which they were passing required, always returning to the strength of the line.

She opened the back door, and there were the first flyers of the year, spreading their wings; or rather, rising as cavalierly and as uncertainly into the air as the pioneers of human aviation must have. She had refused to let him kill the ants, either with powder or boiling water. In that sense she was to blame for the problem as much as him. In all probability they were doomed from the beginning; perhaps she should have asked him back then what his position on ants was, or insects in general. Filtered out his mass murdering tendencies.

She stood up, stepped back over the ant lines, and added what sugar remained in the bowl to the spillage on the worktop. To her eye this did not create a sufficiently impressive mountain, so she opened the store cupboard, found the rest of the pack of sugar and emptied that out too, followed by healthy measures of demerara, caster and icing sugar. The ants deserved the lot, and he could walk for his afternoon cup of tea, or drink it unsugared for once.

She packed her suitcase to the rhythm of his snoring. He remained oblivious as she moved quickly and quietly around the bedroom. There seemed no point leaving a note; the sugar mountain was eloquent enough, and if he didn’t understand its message, then there really had never been any hope.