The Man with the Pint In His Hand

As good as the Diving Bell and the Butterfly undoubtedly was, afterwards I needed something lighter. A palate cleanser of a read, if you will, to prepare my mind for the next, truly ginormous reading task ahead of me...

"Up the street there's a restaurant with an illuminated sign proclaiming 'Celtic Food'. I wander up and go in. I'm intrigued at the prospect of authentic recipes, resurrected from the twilight of our Celtic past. A waitress brings me a menu. There's liver pate and toast, garlic mushrooms, pasta of the day, fish and chips, mozzarella sticks, and cottage pie. Interesting. Perhaps these dishes once had some ritual of ceremonial significance that's been lost with the passage of time. We know Celtic tribes originally came from Europe. I suppose it's possible they brought cottage pie with them. Those lines drawn in the mashed potato with a fork could be based on a pre-Christian pagan design."

Pete McCarthy: McCarthy's Bar

Nothing like a bit of traditional Celtic fare...

The Man with the Butterfly Mind

Just recently I have been lucky enough to spend hours, curled up in my favourite blue armchair, reading. Snatching moments away from reality to spend it in someone else's without having to move further than the kitchen for another cup of tea.

Like to see what I've been losing myself in?

"My cocoon becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas's court.
You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions."

Jean-Dominique Bauby: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly
 

 

Thoroughly recommended: just make sure you're in an empty room with a stash of hankerchiefs (or hanskerchiefs as my sister used to say) - the poignancy of this book will make you cry at least once. If it doesn't, you're possibly dead inside. Not to mention barred from this blog.

Basking

 ...like a lizard* in the sunny back garden of my nooky workplace (nooky as in 'full of nooks and crannies', NOT nooky in any other sense of the word whatsoever, oh no) and feeling spirits rise for the first time in a good few weeks. *albeit one that sits under a shady tree because this lizard has pale scales and burns faster than toast in the second slam-down of the toaster lever

...in the knowledge that my new back door is being fitted tomorrow. As far as earth-shattering news goes, this hardly takes the biscuit but it will mean that I am no longer woken at 4am by a plaintive yowling from the very biggest cat who's suddenly realised there is a rodent he hasn't dismembered or a female feline he hasn't attempted to ravish within a 5 mile radius and the situation Must Be Remedied Now.

...in words; have been very fortunate that the last 4 books I picked up have all been excellent, devoured in a matter of days, and then given a permanent home on my shelves as a reward. They are not sure that getting to join the dust and occasional cobweb is sufficient reward for providing me with so many hours of paper-based pleasure but I've told them it's all they're getting for the time being. If a shelf falls down in the night, I shall know they are sulking.

Revelling...

...in the sudden resolution to an impasse that had been reached at work. The project is once again back on and I can stop feeling like I do nothing of importance but push pens around a sheet of paper. Now I shall push pens with renewed vigour and enthusiasm.

...in new food adventures. The Teen and I have been experimenting with such previously unknown exoticism's as moussaka, and mussels. We do not like moussaka on the grounds that no food should feel gritty to the teeth. We do like mussels on the grounds that they are delicious and any dish that positively makes it a law that you have french fries and bread in the same meal is a Very Good Thing Indeed. Especially when you simply must mop up the garlic and white wine sauce with the bread.

...in the smell of hawthorn and may and lilacs that assail my nose every time I step out of the door: it's like the whole Shire has perfumed itself just for me. Add to that a spotting of deer this morning with a hearing of choral-like birdsong and if I find myself getting any more enamoured of the bucolic life I shall stick some bloody pointy ears on and run around saying "don't leeeave me, Maaaster Frodo" in a west country accent. A soonish trip to London should nip all this rural-tinting of my glasses in the bud, thank goodness.

 

Planning...

...a weekend with a very old and dear friend this weekend after having lost touch for almost a year. I am so excited! Mainly because I can put off the dreaded day I have to screw my courage to the sticking place and walk into a pub On My Own.

...trips to London (36 years on this planet and still never been to the British Museum? A great shame would weigh down on my shoulders if I could be bothered to go and dig out my great shame. Think I put it away in the loft. Which is now inhabited by bats. See what I mean about the bucolic taking over?); to the beach; to the nearest big shop so we can find myself and the Teen summer trousers. The latter may take some time.

...to carry on developing my newly discovered skill in needle felting. I say 'skill' with a certain amount of artistic license but at an excellent workshop run by Gretel (a personage of far greater talent than I will ever muster and who should be held accountable in No Way for my efforts), I made this sheep. And have now decided all my family can have one for Christmas. When they have to be nice to me about it or risk ruining Christmas for Tiny Tim...

...actually there may well be a Tiny Tim (gender willing but minus the irritating "Gawd bless us" at everyone within earshot) this year as my sister is due to drop another (her second) in October. This is very exciting and may call for another sheep as a birth-gift for the young dude. Which again, everyone will have to be nice about.

Bring On the Weekend

Oh happy happy Friday! There has been an air of more than a little excitement around the Shire today: planning a whole two days of sleeping late, taking leisurely walks, eating food that I don't normally have time to prepare during the week, starting up the sourdough project that was untimely abandoned a couple of months ago and taking in this show on Saturday. So much of nothing much, everything that I like to do, to look forward to.

Spending Sunday morning in bed with a pot of tea and the Guardian review section.

Maybe, possibly, starting a little bit of decorating. If I feel up to it.

But mostly, above all else, losing huge chunks of time reading Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. I have been so looking forward to this book: "His children are falling from the sky. he watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze."

I'll be back when I've retraced my steps to the 21st Century. They just don't make politicians the way they used to. Just think how much more exciting (and its been fairly jaw-dropping as it is) the Leveson enquiry would have been with Thomas Cromwell involved.

I wish you all a happy, slothful, busy, lost in time weekend. Whatever century you may find yourself in.

The Accident-Waiting-To-Happen Tourist

I have itchy feet. No, I don't mean the kind of 'itchy feet' that has doctors scratching their heads, calling you a medical mystery and having you banned from swimming pools the length and breadth of the land. Although I am not really a swimming pool sort of person. Not really a swimming sort of person. I like to be in the water (preferably the sea), rather than do in the water. This makes me a splasher of shallows and an explorer of rock pools which is fine and dandy - not everyone has the BMI for surfing.

I digress.

This kind of itchy feet has me digging out my ginormous atlas and pouring over the wavy lines and pretty colours. I look up Norway on Google Earth and spend some time admiring just how very frilly round the edges it is. When someone tells me they're going on holiday, I have to duck my head so they can't see my eyes flash green - hopefully they're too busy being excited to notice the bile that threatens to choke me every time I have to say 'Oooh how lovely' because really, I'm torn between begging them to take me with them if I promise to be ever-so-good-and-quiet, or beating them to death with afore-mentioned atlas.

I do not do this because that sort of behaviour would create repercussions. But believe you me, behind my glasses I am committing murder and then stealing their passports, tickets and making good my escape to for'n parts.

Really, I am the world's worst suited person for any kind of travelling: I speak only basic French (yes, yes, I know this is shoddy and unacceptable and utterly indicative of the arrogance of the English - I apologise now and will amend my 'to-do' list to include learn a new language, as soon as I get to the 'to-do' that says 'start new to-do list'). I am not the sort of open, warm, attractive person that walks into a room and instantly makes friends - skulking in the corners watching people is my way: been glared at by a compulsively drinking, mad-eyed gollem recently? Probably me.

All modes of travel make me feel sick. There is not so much an inner-ear balance problem as an inner-ear rollercoaster that operates permanently, even when I'm driving. I've been on ferry trips where throwing myself overboard has seemed like a better option than staying the last 20 minutes on board. Flights to Edinburgh where the hope that the plane might bank into the Firth of Forth got me through the last drawn-out moments of a flight full of flatulent business men.

I will at least attempt to eat anything unless it has eyes (excepting whitebait because they're coated, fried, crunchy and delicious), feelers, more than 4 legs, answers to a name back home or contains peppers (the result the next day is not to be discussed). Working in a hotel once, I was asked to go and collect some king prawns from the freezer: 20 minutes later found me shaking, frozen in fear, staring into the black dead eyes of the nearest prawn and gibbering about how they had 'spider legs'.

We will not discuss the oyster. In a word: phlegm.

Some people glow in an attractive way when they reach temperatures above 20 Celsius: my Mum is one of them. Bronzed and smiling, I remember her making her way round Egypt, serene in the heat while I straggled behind. Gasping, sweating, red of face, an apparent magnet for bastard flies, covered from head to foot in an attempt to stop my pale limbs from burning: I was aiming for Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, instead managing to channel Miss Marple Has A Breakdown in Luxor.

I am too busy staring around wearing my invisible 'I am a Tourist' sign to notice the pick-pockets, the sudden dip in the road, the car hurtling in my direction or the sign that says 'Private: Keep Out On Pain of Being Chased by Very Angry Bulls'.

Too busy being in awe of wherever it is I happen to find myself: the languages and dialects that flit past my ears; the smell of spices and foods that assault my brain and remind me it was a long 2 hours since breakfast; the sight of markets, people and landscapes. And above all, that unspecified sense that you only get when away that causes the stomach to flutter and brings a clarity you've lost back home.

It's that unspecified sense that'll get me moving again after so many years of being stuck.

But probably not in one of these.

Travels With Charley

When I was about 17, and prone to taking out my allotted 7 books from the library and sucking them all down over the course of a weekend, pausing for food and sleep; I borrowed (in quick succession) Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, East of Eden and his translation of the Arthurian legends.

It was a case of love at first page, his humanity and language gripping me, but sadly I let it slip away until a couple of weeks ago when I came across a copy of Travels with Charley and felt it was time to rekindle that love affair:

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy described was middle-age. In middle-age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job."

And wham! It's back again, as though it had never faded:

"For other states I have admiration, respect recognition, even sometimes affection, but with Montana it is love, and its difficult to analyse love when you're in it...It seems to me that Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is large but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and colour, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda."

He remains clear-sighted, open eyed and non-judgemental about the country he loves so much. Getting to know it again, rediscovering what he'd lost touch with, become insulated from but without sentimentality:

"This sounds as though I bemoan an older time , which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere was frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside grey walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."

His writing is timeless, parts feel as though they could have been written just the other day, as though he never left:

"It is not only the size of these redwoods but their strangeness that frightens them. And why not?...Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it?"

The few times he abandons his journey to just sit and reminisce are incredibly touching, and I find myself wishing I had known his father, his wild-cat shooting mother, his feistily political sisters. A rare moment of romance slips in:

"And on one of those oaks my father burned his name with a hot iron together with the name of the girl he loved. In the long years the bark grew over the burn and covered it. And just a little while ago, a man cut that oak for firewood and his splitting wedge uncovered my father's name and the man sent it to him."

And I become totally disorientated in time, societies tend to flow around world events, adapting to a change and carrying on as they always have done which lends a feeling of a journey recently undertaken. I forget that his travels took place in 1960:

"Now I had moved through a galaxy of states, each with its own character, and through clouds and myriads of people, and ahead of me lay an area, the South, that I dreaded to see and yet knew I must see and hear. I am not drawn to pain and violence."

So it was a shock to come smack bang up against one of the nastiest incidents of American history. Raw and ugly, I felt, like Steinbeck, nauseated and horrified:

"Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women with their little hats and their clippings hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insane beastliness much more heartbreaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actor playing to a crazy audience."

But it's over too soon, far too soon. Settled into his company, I felt as though I were travelling through America with him and hadn't had nearly enough. Even though he had:

"I know exactly where it was over. Near Abingdon, in the dog-leg of Virginia, at four o'clock of a windy afternoon, without warning or good-by or kiss my foot, my journey went away and left me stranded far from home."

How lucky I am to have rediscovered this man.

Legal-unease

There is something deeply depressing about going to see a solicitor.

You see, I'm not going there to have a will drawn up that details at astonishing length how I'd like my vast fortune to be spread around after my passing has been mourned by the entire nation. Not even about how I'd like it all to go to the local cat's home, thumbing my spectral nose in advance.

I'm not going because I've bought property or sold property or even moved property. I'm not going to get contracts drawn up for an exciting new business venture. I do not have copyright, trespassing or aggressive neighbour issues. I'm not going to...umm actually, I'm not sure what other reason I could possibly ever need a solicitor for, solicitors not being known for their professional dog training/house cleaning/replacing the carpet/framing an old map skills.

This is in fact my first ever visit to one and whilst I'm easily impressed by the coffee being real and not instant, as well as being served to me in a lovely blue Denby cup and saucer; not to mention the magazines being neatly ordered and inoffensive (well, Cotswold Life...I could find something offensive about the scent of money that wafts from its expensively printed pages - lets face it, articles on affordable housing are few and far between in that publication, where would they fit them in amongst the pictures of be-hatted ladies at social functions? Chip on my shoulder? Yes thank you.), I cannot shake the sad little lump that's currently inhabiting my chest.

How so very depressing it is to have 18 years of your life up for scrutiny. The assets, the debts, the negatives, the positives. My unreasonable behaviour versus someone else's. 'List 5 things.' Just 5? I have a list longer than King Kong's arm of things I find really unreasonable about myself, that chip on my shoulder being up there at Number 1.

How so very easy it could be to lose sight of the positives, to just focus on the lack of shared assets, to be forced to apply a coldly analytical brain to a period of time that saw you become a mother, grow up, find a career. To leave at the door memories of all the good times, kicking them off like too-tight shoes. I don't want to. There were good times and the end of one way of living should not mean that I have to put those memories to one side. Shan't. Can't make me.

And how unbearably sad it would be to become buried beneath the all the legalese, to lose sight of the one living positive that scatters a Gretel-trail of books, scarves, socks, i-pod cables, empty mugs and school papers behind her as she walks on towards her own tempestuous, conducted-on-her-own-terms, chin in the air future.

I'm not about to. Can't make me do that either.