Waiting room

This morning I had a dental appointment – an emergency appointment as I’d chipped a tooth when I slipped on ice. This meant sitting in the waiting room until the dentist could see me.  The place was full: Hogmanay means that the place will shut early, and so all emergencies were crammed into the first half of the day.  I read some magazine and found an article about Michael Palin in which he mentioned that he began keeping a diary the day he stopped smoking and indicated that he starts each morning with a diary entry.  Good practice for a writer; good practice for a new non-smoker; and good  practice for someone practising to increase the speed and accuracy of their typing.  All of which means it would be good practice for me!  So here I am, although not exactly first thing as dentist and dog walk took precedence, and then domestic displacement activity took over.  But now the washing machine is churning away, floors are swept and mopped, carpets are vacuumed and cleaned, and I’ve washed up all available dishes. 

The problem with writing what are tantamount to morning pages is that either they are destined for no more than the draft box, or they will distract me for a long time. 

I ought to make additional plans for the year, this being 31 December.  I may. I’ll need a little longer to think about this though – more time in the waiting room!

At home

It’s the stillness, the silence, I cherish here.  The doorways and stairway between the desk and the front door mute even the flap of the letterbox.  One phone is switched off; the other unplugged, confining interruptions to a virtual world of voicemail.  I can hear only the rattle of my keyboard, a clock ticking, the quiet swish of the central heating, and an occasional sigh as the puppy adjusts her sprawl under the desk.  Sometimes I add the click of the kettle and  quiet grumbling as water comes to the boil. 

This morning, even the light is quiet.  Low creamy winter sun is creeping over the roof of the house behind, and falling across my shoulders to fall exactly on the top shelf of a bookcase. The gilt titles on one or two hardbacks gleam, but softly.

Soon it will be very different.  I’ll leave this home for another and plunge into the hurly burly of Christmas. 

Christmases to remember: a luau in Waimea under the shade of canopy with Father Christmas, hot and sticky  in beard, fur trimmed red jacket, long black boots and a green hula skirt delivering gifts to small-pigtailed children in spangled pink party frocks; walking alone through Sefton Park, deserted and snowy under a clear blue late afternoon sky; lost in thick mist on Dartmoor  after eleven courses at a small hotel;  a night walk across Plymouth Hoe, with my father and the dog, looking at the stars and watching the lights at Jennycliff; the first time I had champagne for breakfast.

You need time for Christmas – lots of time.  Time to meander through buying  and wrapping presents; to sit at the kitchen table with a plate of biscuits still warm from the oven, writing letters to slip into cards; time to tie up and boil a Christmas pudding, choose crackers, fill stockings, sing carols.  People don’t have this time any more.   Even buying vegetables and crackers for cheese has to be crammed into a half day taken as holiday from work.  Late night shopping, extended opening hours, miles of shelf space devoted to Christmas puddings and mince pies, gift wrapping services all bear testament to this.  Carol singers now gather in shopping malls not on front door steps, and the Salvation Army brass band sits in the doorway to a large supermarket; places where, if you can pause to listen, others cannot, and will grumble that you are blocking their way, holding them up.  Listening to Christmas carols has become another item on a long list, to be ticked off you speed along aisles, filling a shopping trolley.

I have time.  At this moment, I have time.  And I shall have time again afterwards, when I hope it won’t feel too late.  I’ll look at photographs and remember that I was there then, and hope I know what it was that was there.

 

 

A gift

And now that the semester has ended, and teaching and marking is over for the next few weeks, I am relishing the gift of time. Time which many I know will consider I squander but which for me is not so much squandering but rejuvenation – time for myself in the sense of time I can use unconstrained by timetables, schedules and deadlines.  Squandered, possibly in a scheme in which time is measured in terms of output,but not in terms of input – of which there seems to have been rather little lately.

 

So I walk with the puppy for an hour relishing the rhythm of my feet against the ground, and watching my dog as she hurtles across the snow, long legs flailing inelegantly, large feet dropping from the ends, celebrating being let off the lead to run harum scarum across an empty open field; or burrowing through a snowdrift giving herself hoary beard and eyebrows.  I half register the chimes of the town clock telling me it’s a quarter to, and am delighted when I realise that I have no idea what it is a quarter to to.

 

 

Immobile

Days of cold stillness then, in the space of the last 24 hours, thaw, rain, snow, sleet and a return to The Big Freeze.  I no longer choose where to walk with the dog; I walk where I can, following wavering foot-wide paths carved out by trails of grit, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, but dark and hardened, and finding myself at such prosaic destinations  as the local supermarket, a bus stop, and, once, a  primary school.   I have forgotten how to look around me when I walk. 

I’m reading Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (Edinburgh: Canongate 2008)– and, since freedom of movement and choice of destination has become restricted to indoor life, am reacting in unexpected ways.  Comments on climbing, such as:

… to the sober looker-on a man may seem to walk securely over dangerous places with the fey abandon that is said to be the mark of those who are doomed to death. (p. 5)

acquire relevance to what would usually be entirely inappropriate circumstances: posting a letter, buying a newspaper, visiting a neighbour.  But even without these weird connections between mountains and main roads, Shepherd’s observations strike the heart; probably  even of those who have  only ever seen mountains on postcards.  For example, describing the extraordinarily pellucid streams in the Cairngorm plateau, Shepherd writes:

Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to recreate its brightness.   This is one if the reasons why the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the corries, the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it.  The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away. (p. 3) 

And in that, there is a description of what it is about a work art that makes you want to keep returning to look at – its perpetual newness – that startles in being not just unexpected but as sheer as the flight of an arrow in its accuracy.  The mountain is living, not merely as an organism, but as a part of all life.

Stasis

It’s not fully stasis.   This morning the pipes were frozen and now they aren’t, as testified just now, when suddenly, loud groans and much gurgling signalled the bath emptying.  But that aside, all is much as it was yesterday, and the day before.   It’s still extremely cold (which is wearing) but very quiet (which is not). 

I crave warming food; not just food that’s hot, but food that’s spicy.  (I drew the line at spiced parsnip soup for breakfast – but only just.)  A large pot of spiced tea has taken up permanent residence on the desk and the study is scented with cloves and cinnamon. 

Bitter

It is bitter, outside, today.  At first light,

it was minus degrees. Now, the bright, white sunshine makes slender icicles hanging in trees flash against a cloudless blue sky.

Still snowbound

It’s been snowing heavily in great fat flakes ever since I woke up.  Yesterday, the view from my window looked like this:

This morning it looks like this:

So I’m at home, reading.

Well, mostly reading.  I’ve also been playing with the camera.

 

 

The snow hadn’t been quite so  demanding in the last day or two as I haven’t had to be anywhere else at a given time.  I’ve also been able dress for the weather with impunity, and this is veritably liberating: outside, I’m rendered incognito by layers of wool and waterproofs topped with most unbecoming but extremely efficient hat. Despite anonymity, it’s rare to pass someone without exchanging a comment on the weather, or the treacherous conditions of the roads or pavements (or both).  People with sticks wave them in the air in greeting from the other side of the road (which is sometimes a little unnerving), and small children regally wave a mitten as they pass on sledges hauled by a parent.   It’s peaceful outside: no cars dare to negotiate my road and the snow muffles any noise form the little traffic on the main road.  There are no buses or trains.  The town has become an island – one of many in this ocean frozen weather.

Eat, Pray, Love

I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love this morning and am left with with two burning questions:

1)  Why did Elizabeth Gilbert write the book?

2)  Why did I plough on with it to the bitter end?

Hibernation

Snow is tiring.  I’ve started work later than normal, each day this week, and left work at least two hours earlier than usual, and so, arithmetically considered, have several hours in hand.  However, the week seems to have lasted for ever, and, now, although it’s only 7 pm, I’m sleepy enough to consider giving up on the rest of the day and going to bed.  Is this just because snow makes everything just that little bit more demanding? I wear more clothes and significantly heavier boots; then, when dressing to go outside don an extra layer of almost everything and as a result am hefting around a great weight of woollies.  Since the snow is deep, and crisp but uneven, I dance about to avoid slipping: dancing on snow in heavy (but oh so warm) boots is as good as a workout with ankle weights.  There’s more walking each day too  - driving isn’t pleasant - and, since being impunctual is perfectly acceptable, given the weather, I walk distances which aren’t really feasible even in the best of conditions. Then too, Millie needs longer walks because it’s dark early, so she doesn't get to run off the lead in the park in the evening.  So I walk as far as she does (i.e. twice as far as usual).  In short, life with snow is akin to a stint on a health farm. 

(Does anyone else refer to health farms, or does that put me in the same category as those who still listen to the Home Service on the wireless? (On which, sort of: I mentioned owing a portable typewriter recently and only later realised that  that was probably seen by my (young) colleagues in the same light as once owning an black and white television (which I haven’t), or a car with a hand crank (which I have had, and consequently never ever had to call out the AA for a flat battery during the cold weather, leaving me now wishing that hand cranks still came as part of the basic car package).)  

So tonight , after yet another tango across the snow on the end of the doglead, I shall turn into a tortoise; my flat will become a box of hay; and with luck, when I next wake up it’ll be the end of March.

Digging in

I’m reading Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love tonight, bought some time ago after I read some interesting reviews, and which has, lain, unopened on the kitchen table ever since, buried under the general detritus that gathers with all speed on that table (in fact, on all flat surfaces in close proximity to me), sometimes surfacing briefly of its own accord, occasionally surfacing during a ‘tidy-up’.  Yesterday, it surfaced again, so I grabbed hold of a corner, to stop it diving back into the abyss, hauled it out and tucked it into  my bag.  The bag is only marginally safer than the table, but the book was still visible when I opened the bag this evening, having failed to burrow its way to the bottom during the night, and consequently is now open on my desk.   

I’m slightly irritated by the style – the tendency to implied superlative (I’m frankly exasperated by the Divorce (and as for ‘Divorce Internment Camp’! …  (p. 27))) and the rather chirpy dialogue are a little too Sunday supplement columnist for my palate; and the likening of the Indonesian medicine man to Yoda made me wince; but on the whole I’m surprised as I expected it to significantly less readable than it promises to be. I quite like some of the ideas, such as considering a prayer for God’s help as a petition that others might sign too, and am very taken with improving foreign language skills by reading a newspaper article in the language each day; but I’m annoyed by the misquotation from Louise Gluck’s ‘The Wild Iris’: it isn’t ‘From the center of my life, there came a great fountain …’ , but ‘from the center of my life / came a great fountain …’, and by Gilbert’s tendency to make (one of her superlative) points using overly long lists of names, questions … . But then, Gilbert is still eating, and maybe the style will change when she starts praying. 

Still, Eat, Pray, Love is the right kind of book for this night’s reading. It’s bitterly cold outside, with much snow underfoot and according to the forecast, the temperature will drop significantly and there’ll be much more snow.  I can think of no good reason to leave the hearth, dogwalks aside, and so here (dogwalks aside) is where I’ll stay.

Equilibrium

An odd entry for a day like today, when everything is at sixes and sevens because of snow, but there does seem to be more of a balance – for me, that is. Something to do with being able to live to my own timetable for the first time since June.  No teaching;   few real-world commitments (the odd lecture; a meeting; an appointment to have my hair cut – correction, my fringe cut).   I finished teaching yesterday, and went to the last course lecture this morning.  No classes to prep last night meant I drifted for most of the evening – walked the dog a couple of times through a swirl of fat snowflakes, rang my mother, rang Himself (twice), walking through a swirl of proper, fat snowflakes; read a paragraph here and a paragraph there; wrote a couple of short emails; waited for my ‘real’ work, the one that merits the label ‘full time’, to wake up.  It woke up this morning. (And yes, it does strike me as odd, maybe even perverse, that I work best when the rest of the world is going into hibernation.)

 

I experienced a kind of epiphany at the weekend.  I had always assumed that  the epiphanic would be exhilarating, exciting, perhaps even blissful, and, at the very least, pleasant. It wasn’t: I was infuriated and grouchy and returned again and again and again to the source of the fury. I felt I’d suffered an imposition – yet another imposition; yet another unwarranted imposition.    I hadn’t. Actually.  At least I hadn’t been imposed upon by someone else.  I’d imposed upon myself. Again.  And decided there and then I’d give up being nice, accommodating, friendly and become selfish and difficult and so forth. (The fact that the vocabulary for this isn’t at my fingertips is indubitably a tribute to a convent upbringing!) 

 

But. 

 

Stamping about being self-absorbed and unaccommodating and so forth turned out to be too much like hard work. (Some would put this down to my not having had enough practice.).  My enthusiasm for this quickly waned. It is, I  decided, probably better just to be - without art.

 

So here we are. Me, myself, I.  Unplugged.   

 

And what does this entail?  Disengagement, mostly, on reflection.

Not disengagement.  Mindfulness. 

 

And I am, once again, back in the domain of the Zen.

 

Things I do in a way akin to mindfully include training a dog, teaching, reading and writing; weeding the garden; singing.  They do not seem to include – or at least, they don’t as yet seem to include anything that involves other people – even proximity to other people.  Is isn’t the same as being focused, as often the problem is that of remaining unfocused enough to drift. To stop what I think is termed ‘scanning’ .

Harry Potter

and the Deathly Hallows

(which I’m reading for completeness)

is deathly writing.

I confess I haven’t not enjoyed any of the books more than I’m not enjoying this one – shoddy writing; poor plot (not unusual); lack of pace (partly due to poor writing); with the biggest failing being that the children just aren’t interesting enough to be main characters.  The story needs the adults to make it work, and consequently, the book is one-paced, slow and sludgy.  The idea of the book as TWO films is, frankly, appalling.

I’ll finish the book, if only to enable me to argue from a position of strength that the Harry Potter books needed to be reigned in from the second volume on.  The knowledge that these  books with have been celebrated as Great Literature by the Great British Reading Public is truly embarrassing.

Sweet 16 …

16 weeks that is – not years; and not that sweet at the moment , to be frank.  I’m talking about Millie, who is indeed 16 weeks today, and – right on cue - teething.  She must feel very uncomfortable, poor little thing.  But she’s gnawing everything, and I have to admit that once she starts gnawing me, it’s hard to respond with all sympathy.  Ice cubes help, and carrots from the fridge.  However,  it appears there are times when she is soothed only by ripping newspapers, decimating the cat’s toys and gnawing my fingers. 

She’s making great progress otherwise; and thanks be to everything good, she’s finally got the hang of housetraining.  For several weeks she’s been letting me know after the event, but for the last few days, she’s been letting me know when an accident is about to happen. 

Today, another  milestone: having grown out of her crate, she’s graduated  to boot-and-dog-guard.  She isn’t terribly keen on the idea yet, but after a couple of adventures she’ll probably be fine. It must be more comfortable for her.

The dog guard took some time to fit – far, far longer than the billed 15 minutes.  I hope it proves similarly recalcitrant with regard to deconstruction, particularly deconstruction by puppies.

Today she has also shed her puppy collar for something altogether more adult, and is now sporting a fine, red, reflective collar.

Here’s a photo: taken, not today, but three weeks ago.  We were strolling along West Sands at St Andrews:

Pin up

This is Millie …

 

… and, of yesterday, she seems to know this is who she is.  She’s developing a personality the size of a house, and a will to match.  You can almost hear her growing.

This morning I need to think about Foucault – specifically Foucault on Las Meninas:

but then there’s also Picasso:

and Witkin:

I shall enjoy this.

Enter Mill o’ Mains

I have a dog at my feet, but not my dear little Berry.  I can’t yet explain why it’s not Berry - too painful. 

The dog at my feet is called Mill o’ Mains, hereafter Millie.  Millie is 6 weeks old today.   She has the colouring of her Border collie father, but  threatens to become the size of her Irish wolfhound mother.  (And yes, the prospect of a Border collie mind in an Irish wolfhound body is a little alarming.)  She’s still young enough to have spells of intense activity, abruptly curtailed by sleep.  She’s now sleeping.  She arrived last Thursday, since when, she’s met her first garden, and explored three more; met Mossman, the cat, and learnt that she’s not universally regarded as adorable; and met family, friends, and neighbours and been cuddled in Chinese by students. 

Sales for puppy toys and, especially,  floor-cleaning agents have increased a thousand-fold, since last Thursday (note well, those who buy shares).  I, meanwhile, have done little other than play with puppy toys and  deploy vast quantities of cleaning agents – the latter despite the weather being benign enough to enjoy hours in the garden, watching Millie stalk beech leaves and dandelions, and waiting for her to squat.

Today, I need to be firm, and introduce a little work into the daily round of play.  To which …

Saturday morning in too

and more Epstein.  Well, less Epstein, than Epstein’s prompting, as today I’ve been thinking about Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird’.  Epstein refers to stanza V, but I’ve been  caught up in stanza XIII:

Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

 

Last night, I listened to Joan Armatrading, which is both the flat overlooking a graveyard and the flat near a large park: two lives I loved but no longer live. Both were music and laughter; both were brimful of running, and ramshackle dinners for dozens of people.  One is also summer afternoons stretched out on worn tombstones; the other, all-night conversations in a mustard coloured kitchen, sitting on green wooden seats stolen from the park, fuelled by pots of coconut tea.   One distils to a night in the front garden. There were daffodils.  We’d opened the bay window in the living room and put speakers on the windowsill, and were sprawled on blankets on the grass, listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  There were three of us to start with, then someone we knew climbed the steps from the street to join us. More and more people came. By ‘Winter’ there were twelve.  The essence of the other: Jen is describing Ian White’s affront at being made to wear olive trousers as part of his urban ranger uniform, and I am laughing too hard to drain spaghetti.

Both lives are irretrievable.  Since, now, no one lives without a phone, the randomness of gatherings in the first won’t occur - people no longer set out ‘to see if someone’s in’.  The second died with Jenny – and this makes Joan Armatrading dangerous.  The mustard kitchen too easily dissolves and I’m running along the Tay shore, my dogs before, beside and behind me, when suddenly I jacknife with grief. 

The pain of a death differs each time it occurs.  It is as if the one who has died takes some part of you with them; it, like them, becomes only a memory.  This translation is universally recognised if not truly understood for some kinds of parts.  For example, that I can now be my father’s  daughter only in memory is recognised, and I have no need to explain further, even to those who did not know my father.  The translation of the part that was Jenny’s friend was not, and is not recognised.  Now I as the niece of someone who tap-danced on the beach have also been translated. I’m struggling because this, too, is both unrecognised and inarticulable. 

And here, I think, is why I braved Joan Armatrading last night. 

And here, too, at last,  is the real reason why I re-read the story of the mustard seeds,

Friday night in

… and I’ve been re-reading Epstein’s Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, now read so often my copy is falling apart.  I opened it to re-read the story of the mustard seeds, having heard a radio adaptation of this on the radio, recently; but then, as usual,  became absorbed by Epstein’s discussion of emptiness and the idea of mindfulness. Again and again I come back to these ideas, and I am enchanted by them, but equally frequently, I become distracted then diverted, and when I return, feel as though I have to start processing his ideas from the beginning, again. 

It’s the idea of being able to ‘do nothing’ mindfully which defeats me, although even performing a single physical action mindfully is hard.  Walking to post a letter, earlier, for example,  I found I was planning a schedule for tomorrow.  (A schedule for a day of nothing!! Oh!  The monkey mind.)  And now, although this is probably far too simplistic, it seems to me that what one finds easiest to do mindfully is what one is best suited to doing.  But since that makes me a walker in the rain, maybe this is just sheer self-indulgence.

And emptiness?  It seems to the experience of silence (again) – at once both alluring and terrifying - together with stillness. 

Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

(London: Virago, 2009)

This is a curious book.  Although a ghost story, menace and suspense are generated from another quarter altogether, namely the GP’s sexuality.  It’s a thoroughly good read: well written, and although the author wears her scholarship lightly, well informed. 

I was particularly taken by Waters’ evocation of manners of the landed grand immediately after the second world war.  Waters captured the firm but polite ‘management of discourse’ characteristic of the current oldest generation of landed old money – their ability to intimate without ambiguity, and deflect topics which are inappropriate or distasteful.  I was pleased that Waters was sympathetic enough towards this echelon of society to portray with conviction, their stoicism. Too often landed old money attracts only castigation and derision.  

One criticism – the house. Although this was, in effect, a major character in the plot, I failed to develop a real sense of the place.  In fact, overall, the author is much better at conjuring people than place.   One felt that she needed to have her characters revisit the relevant areas of the house time and time again, each visit adding more description to the rooms and stairs and so forth in order to build up the reader’s acquaintance with the house. As it is, we were given only the GP’s initial impressions of each area, with unease derived somewhat heavy-handedly from winter gloom, long, cold dark nights, and unexpected noises – the latter very well done.

Not great literature than, but I recommend the book highly as a thoroughly entertaining, light read.

Invisible art

Clackmannanshire is beginning to invest in a big way in public art.  I love this, but others consider it an outrageous use of public money.  My two favourite until this week were 'This journey's end' , which is on the first roundabout after the bridge over the most south easterly of the county’s bridges over the Forth as you approach from Glasgow or Edinburgh.  It's almost lyrical but it's also such an incongruous image for the area that it preoccupies for many minutes after you've passed it; and Foxboy, another sculpture which provokes because incongruous - it's in a hillfoots village, which seems so dour that nothing at all suggests the whimsy of the sculpture.  However, both have had to concede first place to new sculptures in Alloa town centre.

The centre is being radically made over, and promises to be stunningly elegant as a result, with pride of place given to three 'invisible' statues by Ron Mulholland - Mulholland's specialty.  This is a photo of some of his work (taken from the BBC News Scotland  website (16 February 2010), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/8518153.stm)  There are four statues in this one. They're made of highly polished stainless steel, reflect their surroundings, and so disappear:

The Alloa statues were unveiled yesterday, but they're once again covered with bubble wrap to protect them from dust raised by workmen completing their installation (photo by Brian Smith, Alloa Online, http://www.alloa.org.uk/ [Accessed 6 May 2010]).

On trees

Suddenly - or so it seems - the trees are in leaf.  Last week, the Cambridge spring seemed so much further ahead of ours, because the trees there were in leaf.  Yesterday I walked the dog early in the morning and noticed, first, the copper beech in the middle of park was a wonderful light aubergine of first leafiness, and then that the  horse chestnuts were heavy with limp hands.  Limes are dotted with startling colour; and even the larches – the Miss Haversham of trees, and my absolute favourite – have a haze of colour flowing down each elegant branch. 

At home, Rangoon’s camellia has been in flower for a week or so (now beginning to look a little blowsy),  while a tiny azalea I found after cutting back a rosemary bush, seared by the snow, has miniscule buds in the centre of each of its bowls of leaves, and the magnolia tree in the garden next door is an extravagance of rich creaminess.  Our rhus has numerous large swellings along each furry branch – a relief because, for a long time after I’d pruned it, it threatened to be no more than a very big stick in a very big navy blue pot.

A gean on the main road from town is heavy with blossom.  It's mostly pink but has a skewed chevron in a different colour running from the centre and down one side. The heavy asymmetric shock of white cutting through the pink is like the fringe of some of the more exotic gamin hairstyles seen on campus at the moment.

Every year, vicious cold and relentless darkness in January and February lead me to plan to move south; but as soon as the trees leaf, I  become very happy to live in Scotland for ever. 

On fishing and other essays

I am – here – now  – warming up for a morning of admin, or at least admin-type activity (proofreading for students; marking essays; email …).  Every fibre is railing against this.  I want to spend the morning with good book; not a ‘work’ book, but the new book by Andrew Greig, At the Loch of the Green Corrie. (Could I claim this as sort-of-kind-of-work  because it’s Scots lit?  Probably not ~~~). I splurged in a fairly small way in the campus bookshop earlier this week, and bought the Greig in hardback (which was sitting above the recent paperback edition of  Wolfe Hall, reminding me that patience would pay, or at least reduce the outlay).  I also bought Homer and Langley, E.L Doctorow’s most recent book, and, just because the idea intrigued me, Brian Clarke, On Fishing (London: Collins, 2007), not unexpectedly, a book of essays about fishing.

I doubt very much that Clarke’s essays will inspire me to take up a rod, or even find out how to put one together, but fishing seems to be an occupation which would both engender odd thoughts, and give the thinker time to pursue and develop them, so fishing essays sound promising.  I have such sharp memories of the utterly unexpected  pleasure of an essay by Ian Hamilton, on Paul Gascoigne,  in Granta 45 (1993).  I barely knew who Gascoigne was, and certainly had (or have) no interest in football, but was so intrigued, that I read the essay non-stop – twice!  Ever since, I’ve sought out and read essays on subjects about which I know nothing.  I suppose I approach them in much the same way as I do BBCR4, happily imbibing material on subjects about which I’d never claim knowledge or have any inkling of why I might find them interesting; and with no expectations about what I shall or should remember afterwards.

Anyway, I’ve earmarked both the fishing essays and the Doctorow for June’s week lounging in the Med, but want to start the Greig immediately. 

I may be able to  open it this afternoon

– but only if I’ve completed those admin tasks. 

To which …

Louise Welsh, Naming the Bones

(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010)

Drowsiness is mandatory when reading this book, preferably that resulting from life on a sunbed by a pool in the Canaries, but the kind induced by a long overnight bus ride would do. The  storyline is light, rather tired, and peopled by stereotypes, while the writing is simply mediocre.  Since the sole source of suspense is the back-cover blurb, it’s not exactly a page turner, and I’m afraid I failed to spot any of Welsh’s alleged trademarks: wit, insight and gothic charisma. 

The plot centres on Murray Watson, a lecturer in English literature at Glasgow University.  Watson is  researching the life of Archie Lunan, a young Scots poet who published only one slim collection of poems, Moontide, in the 1970s, before he died, aged 25, in a boating accident off the Lismore coast.  Watson takes a sabbatical with the intention of writing a  literary biography of Lunan, and the novel follows Watson as he tracks down Lunan’s associates, and unwittingly uncovers sordid truths about Lunan and his contemporaries.  

Watson is astonishingly bland and uninteresting.  He appears to have little or no intellectual curiosity –  for example, he is said to have in the past, spent more time than he was happy about exploring ancient monuments with his then girlfriend, but nonetheless archly displays ignorance of the meaning of broch (p. 209).  His preoccupation with sex is initially irritating and then boring.  He displays a remarkably weak imagination – his description of sheep running down a hill as looking like fat women running in high heels is grating.  I can only assume the chapter spent in the pub with his colleagues, chapter 6, is an attempt to round out the man.  If it isn’t, then it’s a very longwinded way of introducing a sliver of plot development (Rab Purvis’ one-night stand with Rachel Houghton).  The brother, Jack, lurches in and out of the story for  no obvious reason bar that a saviour is needed at the end.  Jack’s glamorous fellow artist, Cressida Reeves is part of this clunky sub plot as is Jack’s girlfriend Lyn,  whom, for reasons I fail to see, we accompany while she helps a paraplegic ex-drug addict do his shopping. 

There is much that is derivative: the opening chapter set in Edinburgh is weak Rankin; the art exhibition in chapter 2 appears to be a bad replica of Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved; once the action moves to the island of Lismore, it becomes The Wickerman, while AS Byatt has covered the general storyline so much better in Possession.  Taken with together with the countless threads, burgeoning with potential, which Walsh introduces only to allow to fade away, you are left with a lazy attempt at a thriller, and an author who appears to assume a readership undiscerning enough to be satisfied by reputation alone.

Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition

(London: Harper, 2008)

I’m not quite sure that I agree with Stephen Fry’s description of the book as ‘complete perfection’, but it’s a delicious read.  It’s located around Falmouth - a beautiful part of the country and one which I know well, and although I’m not sure how well the descriptions will evoke the place for whose who are unfamiliar with the area, there were enough details to prompt memories of the coast, and the light that painters so delight in.  It’s the story of the Middletons: Rachel, a brilliant but mentally unstable painter from Canada, who exhibits under the name Rachel Kelly; Anthony, a Cornish birth-right Quaker schoolmaster, and their four children, Garfield, Morwenna, Hedley and Petroc; and more specifically, of how the children individually respond to their upbringing by a bipolar  mother for whom the mania of the illness is necessary for artistic fulfilment, and a father whose equilibrium is sustained by his Quaker beliefs. 

I love the structure chosen for the book.  As becomes evident as the book progresses, each chapter is an explication of the notes from a retrospective exhibition of Kelly’s work.  The narrative follows the order of the exhibits rather than the chronology of events, allowing the author to introduce questions over the identity of Rachel and over the cause of tragedies in the family’s life, and to create momentum for the story by remaining silent on key questions until the final page. 

The novel takes on many enormous issues – mental illness, gender, artistic drive versus social expectations of motherhood, and although not tackled, they are treated with delicacy, resulting in a respectful and sympathetic portrayal of mental illness, and a portrayal of Quaker beliefs and attitudes that left me envious.  It’s a novel for which mood is as important as action.  Trying to think about events independently of their perception by the characters, the story becomes melodramatic, even though centring on the extraordinary character of the mother, simply because the mother is so extraordinary – showing both how much care was required to create both balance in events and the children’s response.   

The book excels in the treatment of Kelly’s abstract art – both in the descriptions of her work and the source of their abstract content. 

Gale foundered on the story behind Rachel’s arrival in Britain, and one or two elements jarred slightly, and with hindsight seem to trade too heavily on the stereotype of an artistic community as essentially eccentric. 

Al;though this isn’t great literature, it’s a thoroughly absorbing read, and, I imagine,  will be enormously successful as a book-group book.

More on the silence of running

… social silence, that is; prompted this time by Patrick Gale, Notes from an Exhibition which I picked up at Stansted airport on Friday, having had to wait so long for my flight from Glasgow, that I finished the book I thought would last for the whole trip just as we were landing in London, and needed something for the next leg of the journey to Cambridge. A serendipitous choice: the selection was so poor that I fully anticipated coming away with something unnoteworthy, but it’s so well written and storyline is so good that I’ll look for more of Gale’s books.  However, what prompted me to think more about running and silence are the Gale’s descriptions Friends meetings – Quaker worship. 

I first learnt about Quakers from a post grad supervisor from the Faeroes who was a Birthright Quaker; then learnt more from a close friend after she began attending Quaker meetings for their peacefulness.  I’m both curious and  unnerved at the thought of sitting in silence for an hour with people I don’t know. Would I  find the atmosphere too stifling, too claustrophobic?  alternatively, would I become so comfortable in that setting that I’d begin to talking aloud to myself  (and would that be seen as self-absorbed or ‘sharing’)? 

Yet silence as the ‘default’ is preferable – think of the preference for running with a visitor, or taking them on a dog walk, for example.  It makes the visit so much easier, because it is then perfectly acceptable to not-talk (and, probably, not-listen), which it most certainly when meeting, or visiting, or being visited by, someone ‘for coffee’ (in scare quotes because coffee is usually a euphemism for ‘gossip’, ‘complaint’, etc. (and, if being pedantic, is inaccurate in my case, not drinking coffee)).    

What is the difference between walking or running in silence with a  companion, and sitting in silence with other people?  Would the silence of a Quaker meeting be like of a London tube – with concomitant disapproval for staring?  Or gentler, like a yoga meditation group? 

I crave silence - or rather the absence of speech.  The bus to the airport, yesterday, was blissful, after two days of demanding listening and difficult talking (because at a conference).  I knew no one, needed to say nothing, didn’t even need to smile, 40 glorious minutes of wordlessness on my part – of mindlessness.  Thoughts come and go without any need to keep track, pursue, or judge them – less like thinking than watching clouds.  Today I haven’t the stamina even to write letters… 

Experiments

At a party last week someone asked me what it was like to run long distances – really they were asking why anyone would do this.  I wasn’t able to reply very coherently and muttered something about The Wall without explaining why it’s important. This morning, I realised that what I ought to have answered last week was that you gain a tremendous feeling of confidence and control from extending your boundaries.  You go through a curious argument with yourself , with one side driven to to go further or longer; while the other side finds good reason not to – it’s too tiring or too dangerous dangerous or you haven’t the time.  Then you just do go further or longer, and for  short while you’re conscious of this, and perhaps feel a little pleased, until another milestone pops up on the horizon, and the whole argument starts all over again. 

There’s no need to proclaim achievement in this; there’s no winning as there’s no race and so no one to beat;  it isn’t connected with generating praise or public esteem as there’s no one to tell.  It’s a little like yoga in that respect, even though it’s not usually something you can do completely out of the public eye, so people might recognise you while you’re en route.  However, they’ll have no idea how far you’ve run or swum or how much further you will continue to run (and you won’t tell them).  It’s a deliciously private realm of non-competitive rival-less achievement. 

And between the milestone wrangles there’s the hypnotic quality to the exercise itself.  Miles and miles of which you have little recollection, rather like driving on a motorway; hours in which you can think uninterrupted – or during which you don’t think, but instead, amble through and around  random ideas.  This kind of disconnection must be good for one. 

The Secret of Sherlock Holmes

Last night we went to see The Secret of  Sherlock Holmes at the King’s, Edinburgh.  Distressingly, the theatre was half empty - distressing because the play deserved better for the cast alone: Peter Egan as Holmes and Philip Franks as Watson.  The play was excellent: an excellent script (Jeremy Paul), excellent set (Simon Higlett) and a superlative performance by Egan and Franks, whose pairing had the same comfortable familiarity as Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in Waiting for Godot.  Solid familiarity proves important for Holmes and Watson for the same reason as it is important for Vladimir and Estragon: fallings out needed to be convincingly intense but temporary.   

The play concerns the friendship between Holmes and Watson – how they met initially, why they continued to associate and in particular, the nature of Holmes’ dependence on Watson.  Franks’ Watson is interesting – guilelessness, sincerity and gratitude are woven into the more usual representation of him as guardian of Holmes’ arrogant and  wilful brilliance.  Holmes’s character has more melodrama, naturally, and more predictability.  However, this is not to detract from the play or the performance.  Both the extension of the narrative tale to embrace how the pair met initially, and the portrayal of Watson’s response to Holmes’s seeming resurrection after Reichenbach Falls are pleasingly credible.  I have no idea how fans of Holmes’s casebook would react to the play; as someone  who is familiar enough with the stories to be able to nod with approval at the plausibility of the reconstruction, and chuckle with delight at  Paul’s discrete display of his erudition (Watsons's catalogue of Holmes’ failings is particularly pleasing), the play was rivetting.

I loved the set, and Robin Herford’s use of the space.  The incorporation both the London skyline and the Reichenbach Falls into a set predominantly comprising 221 Baker Street is masterful; Holmes’ disappearance at Reichenbach Falls is striking, and the use of the residual smoke during Watson’s elegy for his dead friend is clever.   Sound was cleverly used too, but, Reichenbach aside, I found the lighting poor, as, all too often, it cast the characters’ features too sharply into into shadow.   The presence of a signer for benefit of the deaf was, at times, frankly irritating.  Indeed it is difficult to see how the deaf can have benefited, as they seemed to have been forced to choose between watching either the play or the signer, and, given how much meaning was added to the script by the actors’ body language, being confined to an either-or will have detracted enormously  from the experience.

I’m brimming with words, this morning, but I’m also inapanicbecauseshortoftime for the next fortnight or so. This, I find, makes it difficult to slow down enough to consider what I write; and frustrated because I need my ideas to appear fully formed and perfect because I haven’t got time to tinker, revamp, etc. Ah well, let’s just see how this goes.

‘The past’ because I’ve been thinking about the past in different kinds of ways, recently. I miss my study often, acutely. I miss the idea of my study, and I miss having a room of my own which I can arrange as I please, where I can keep and access my books, where I can pace the floor or listen to the radio without disturbing other people; and, probably most importantly, which has a door I can close on other people’s noise; I miss all a personal study stands for, and sometimes I miss living alone.

Then too, we’ve just booked a long weekend in Liverpool, and in March will be staying just around the corner from the flat I had in L8 for years, not far from Lark Lane. I feel oddly excited at seeing certain places again: Sefton Park, where I walked daily with my dog; the Inner Temple in L1, where I worked for a year. I’d like too, to visit the Everyman Theatre again, and if it’s still possible, the Bistro there, scene of many strange, funny, intellectual conversations, and the odd, awkward departmental gathering. I shall be sad to find the Cafe Berlin has disappeared – it’s where I and the best friend I shall ever have held our Last Liverpool Party, just before I moved north. I’m also looking forward to just walking along streets I know well. I’m worried though, that it’ll all be massively uninteresting for Himself, and worried also about meeting people I ought to contact while in the area, but actually don’t really want to, because I can’t bear the thought of lurching through conversations which have no heart. and I’m worried because I’ll have to leave my dog in kennels and she’s really too old for this.

I was up and out very early, today, taking Himself to the station to catch a train for Dundee, as he’s going to the funeral of a friend, this morning. The friend died last Tuesday. He had cancer. Although I didn’t know him very well, having met him only two or three times, I’ve been knocked off balance by his death. He was kind; and he somehow managed to make people feel important. We were ‘dancing partners’ at parties, and I shall – I do – miss him.

And more on the past, because I finished reading The Spaewife for the third time, on Friday, and I am grappling with Galt on history. Was he, I wonder, thinking about the way, when writing historical fiction (or theoretical history), certain events are fixed, and so events and states of affairs prior to these fixed points seem to be ordained? Is that where Providence comes in? I also found a review of The Spaewife by Scott, in which he refers to the difference between his historical fiction and that of others, which I think might prove useful although I need to read it again. I’m now reading The Omen. Short and compelling – and I need to finish it this morning.

Which thought brings me back to the present.

February

February already. I hope the rest of the  winter passes as quickly as January did as I’m very tired of the cold and the long dark nights. 

I’m having a day at home today. I did the same yesterday. One could quite justifiably regard it a postponed weekend, since last weekend was busy and Monday was frantic.  I lounged around all day yesterday, finishing a novel I’d been reading for several weeks: Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved; and picking up another I was part way through – A.N. Wilson, The Lampitt Papers, which I started so long ago that I can’t remember when that was, and which I plan to finish today.  I’ve been re-reading Galt’s The Spaewife for work, for the last couple of weeks. The book just gets richer and richer, which is both wonderful and alarming; the latter because I’d like to  be able to ‘get a line on it’ at some stage very soon, but it seems that, each time I pick it up, I notice something else worth mentioning about it, so instead of developing a line, I’m creating something resembling a stook of hay.

On Monday, I had my hair cut by someone new. It’s not a flattering cut as it’s both too short and rather severe, making me look like a bespectacled Joan of Arc. It was, I think, the only way the new girl could achieve what I’d asked for, namely the removal of as much evidence as possible of the previous hairdresser.   The previous hairdresser, who’d taken me over after the one I’d seen for some time left, and to whom I’d given two chances, had introduced into my hair what he referred to as ‘movement’.  This appeared to necessitate my vision being obscured by a thick shock of fringe  whenever I tilted my head forward (to read, to put the lead on the dog, to tie my shoelaces, to check toast under the grill), and the kind of layering I associate most closely with growing a style out.  I reached my wits’ end when putting together a flat pack set of shelves: hammering in tacks which vanish behind one’s fringe with every tap is so far from satisfactory that I’d phoned the salon to make an appointment before I’d completed constructing first shelf.  Since I am now a movement-free zone, I’ll probably be very pleased with the cut in about 6 weeks.  For now, I’m concentrating on the pleasure of being able to read without first needing to recreate the Forth Road Bridge in hairgrips; avoiding mirrors; and ignoring the temptation to wear a woolly hat 24/7.

I miss this

My hands in sunshine, mitten free.

I'm downsizing, but I have to keep my fountain pen

my fountain pen
It's written homework, university assignments, exam papers and a thesis; shopping lists, journals, stories and postcards; birthday cards and love letters; letters of sympathy; good news, bad news and reams of gossip;it's signed cheques and contracts and letters of resignation and - once - an autograph book.