Rainbow over Bengal

The Book Version of my sponsored writeathon

2011-02-27T09:42:00.000-08:00

Just follow the link below, preview the book and, if you like, make it yours. It's entirely non profit.

Anna xxx

Rainbow Over Bengal by A collection of short stories written in aid of The Elizabeth-Ann Charity by Anna Vaught | Make Your Own Book

Would that it were so

2010-08-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

"It is more remarkable for the quality of its doubt than of its faith" (T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, writing on Tennyson's poem 'In Memoriam')

Oh dear, oh dear. This was not going to be an easy road.Maybe it just wasn't for some.

Mother was an atheist, father was an ardent member of the Church of England with designs, in retirement, of being a non stipendiary minister. An interesting dichotomy at home, then.

"Because your mother is a good person, she will surely go to Heaven", he said to the concerned young teenager, his daughter. She, however, couldn't find any scriptural authority for this one, although she did think that she might have got it wrong somehow. Typical.

When daddy was dying, he took communion at home; her mother encouraged it, but could not bear to be in the room. Instead, she sat in the sun room sipping a sherry. Rose couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry, so just sat still and mute.

There were memories of a darkened church at Christmas; thoughts of something moving that was good and Holy and which loved her and wanted her for its own. But the feeling faded as the lights went on. Later, experiments with a Fellowship group so that, as a young teenager, she was encouraged to stand alone and be baptised. Consternation again, though. It seemed that everyone in the cavernous room had the gifts of prophecy or of tongues. Occasionally, one would fall on the floor in rapture. Here we go again, was her only thought - although that was not what she said out loud. Desperate to feel what they felt, she let the pastor take her head in his hands.

"The Holy Spirit is with you. Can you feel it?"

"Yes" she said, almost convinced by the fervent believer, but afterwards realising that it was a relief to leave. Again, not something to be said aloud.

Ah but back to the organised church some time later. All went well for a while. Baptisms of the babies, good wishes - but no. After a while, doubt prevailed. This time, though, it seemed to be more those around her who did not, in some ways, approve of Rose; what seemed to be a move in the right direction -of acceptance and being held within the body of a church-- began to fail. So sad. Was she too radical? Did she appear too full of nervous energy? Someone wanting to make changes and my goodness the children did not always know to be silent during communion? No harm meant, only concern for the future of the single church. The net effect, as before: no spiritual home other than a poetry book.

And that is where we leave Rose. Hand off the plough; hoping, in her childish way, for an epiphany. And in this, I know she is not alone.

At the Shalimar Gardens

2010-08-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

At the Shalimar gardens, the sun blazed down and her parents glowered at each other. She was familiar with these unkind silences; above all, her mother's eyes looking with resentment at her father. A look that says that "Though I am here, in this fine garden of cool white marble and lush vegetation, my adventure is tarnished because I chose you". 

Maya wondered, yet again, why her mother could not appreciate the man: hard working, diligent and loving. As a teenager, she could surely sense that her mother was altogether sharper than her father.In many ways, he could not keep up his wife's drive and intelligence. What could Maya do but observe and try and provide some solace for him as he laboured away.

This time, though, she saw her father's gaze drift. She followed it and it took her to a willowy lady, in a simple blue sari, who seemed to be charged with some repairs to the red and green floral designs on some of the little doorways on the garden's periphery. Maya felt, with a peculiar shiver, that the lady was truly lovely. That there was something lithe and at ease in the body and in the limpid dark eyes that turned to meet hers with a smile. May could not help but make the comparison with the stiffness of her mother - so beautiful, herself, but so affected by minor slights and what she saw as the disappointments of life.

There was joy in the brushstroke and in the movement of wrist and hand; in the way that the girl was absorbed in the task - and in the way she adjusted her sari to allow better movement when she needed to reach up. Maya knew that her father saw all this, too.

Well, her father was a man of principle. With reponsibilities and family, he would not leave for a girl with kind eyes who thought him charming. Instead, he might be ground down a little further by the woman he married and so, just now, Maya was glad that her father's mind could drift, while he watched a girl with coltish limbs and deft fingers and as he saw her disappear behind the fretwork at the Shalimar gardens as she made her way home.

The Shalimar Gardens are in Lahore, Pakistan. They are ornate formal gardens, built by Jehangir, Mughal successor to Shah Jehan, who built the Taj Mahal.

Walton West

2010-08-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

Back from a trip. Hiatus in stories. Here you are. Just something simple and personal.

Walton West church is hidden away down a tiny lane on the Pembrokeshire coast; one field across is its churchyard, a broad sweep of sea beyond it and gnarled crab apples trees shaped by the sea wind.

Here: Laura Margaret Llewellyn- my great grandmother- and her daughter, Florence Beckett, my grandmother. She was born in a house just by the beach you see here. But beyond in the churchyard, my best beloved John Llewellin Beckett, uncle, adopter of his own middle name (I don't know if his mother ever gave him one), but with the spelling he preferred. There are Llewellyns thick and fast in this place. And if you come here with the indomitable auntie Betty, she can take you round to graves old and new -- even explain the use of an epitaph or tell you a potted life story. That's if she has time. She does not care, she will say, to be morbid.

Roland Beckett, my grandfather and Florence, my grandmother, gave life to twelve children in all, with ten surviving childhood. With them all, the tough, kind figure that was Nanny, great grandmother. Always she lived with them. And I grew up with a vague idea that grandmother and grandfather had a bit of a difficult relationship now and then. I know that, when all the children were grown and most had left home, Roland and Florence divorced. Let's hope he found happiness in some other arms: a woman in Tenby about whom I know nothing. But she was subsequent, don't you know.

In farms from the Swansea valley (for my mother was really a Valley girl by birth, you might say), to Kidwelly and dotted about Pembrokeshire; from Wiston to Creswell Key - my grandmother's last house before she came to live with her large brood - my mother and her brothers and sisters lived a demanding but loving life. I long to hear the stories of all this; I grew up always wanting ten children, after all.

Last night, I heard about how they swam and splashed in a bathing pool in fields in Wiston; how my uncle John could not buy an engagement ring for my auntie Betty because, as he told her, he had bought a cow instead; how my great grandmother was so ravshing that she stopped traffic in Tenby main street and how -- well, you don't need to know all this. It's just that when you come from a big family, stories come thick and fast and I am grateful for their telling. And yet, much as I love this church on this peaceful little lane, I'd like them all back -- all those grandparents and cousins and uncles and aunts and great uncles - in one place, again - if I could. And just once - in case they all argued.

On finding true love

2010-07-30T05:34:00.000-07:00

For Katherine Thomas.

Walter looked a little like a duck. His nose was beaky, he had an unattractive gait which was, you've guessed it, more of a waddle really. For a man, he was short, but compensated for it with good cheer.

In Walter, there was not a whiff of arrogance or the slight bitterness one sometimes sees in those who have a chip on their shoulder due to perceived misfortune. And there was one more thing: Walter was very, very funny. He had the sort of timing which would cause his friends - and he had many- to double up; to have painful sides. He was also articulate, without being showy. Walter loved words. Felt them in in his mouth like something smooth and minty (a humbug) or rough and to be handled carefully (managed carefully with your tongue).

Walter's mother loved him dearly; to his father, he had always been a bit of disappointment, though dad tried not to show it. Walter was clumsy and, in those who did not know him, he might cause giggling or the foolish scorn of those who really should know better but don't. Walter, also, had never had a girlfriend - but he lived in hope. Waddling on through and making people laugh.

That day, on his way to work -Walter restored fine musical instruments - he had an odd sensation that today was different; an inchoate feeling - not of dread, but of a sort of warmth spreading up through him. One might say a new kind of happiness. There was a woman waiting for him at the shop; she had a cello and was -did you see this coming?- tall and willowy. She had the gentle flush of the English rose and strawberry blonde hair; she wore a white coat. Almost, he dared say, a little like a swan. Walter didn't mean to look a little too intently, but then she was, to his eyes, heart-meltingly lovely.

Yes, I can restore your cello to health. It will take this long; these are the procedures I am likely to follow and yes - it is a truly fine instrument which you're so right to treat with reverence and want to bring back to its former glory. He was avoiding her eyes for fear of blushing, but, when he looked up, she was staring intently at him. There was an awkward silence. Now or never. He wouldn't die if she laughed in his face.

"I have a break at about 11. I wonder if you would like to come and have coffee with me. At the new shop over the road?"

Well now. They were both blushing. Later they drank their coffee and talked and talked and the next day, too. Like him, she loved to play with words; to handle them and feel their heft. And Walter worked on the cello until he had brought it back to clear, resonant notes and a burnished beauty. She struck some notes right there in the shop and he almost cried. But she stopped him, right there, with a kiss and the world around went silent.

Yes, they do make a funny-looking couple, the swan and the duck. But they laugh constantly and make the kind of music that reverberates long. With them, you hear -no feel- the grace notes: those notes between notes which you take in on a visceral level. There are three little ducks or swans. They have their mother's grace and their father's waddle - a curious combination, but a good one.

So, ladies, if he looks like a duck, but he makes you double up laughing. If he can nurse something tired and jaded back to life. If he talks and his words do not enervate but buoy you up. If he smiles at everyone and there is no tiring bitterness about the man, then kiss him and be transported. You know I'm right.

Berenson looked back

2010-07-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

DEAR READER: I MUST WARN YOU. A CREEPY LITTLE TALE. YOU MUST DECIDE FOR YOURSELF EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS IN THIS STORY - AND WHO IS WHO (OR WHAT). DO NOT READ BEFORE BEDTIME.

A light drizzle settled in and, as Berenson walked home from an unremarkable job in the city, the darkness began to fall over London in November.

From office to tube and from tube to the beginning of his walk home, he was content enough. Even with the grey evening, the drizzle was refreshing on the skin after a day in the office. He observed familiar faces on his way, nods of acknowledgement and, to a certain extent, he fancied, of understanding. The day had gone tolerably well.

Walking up the final small spiral staircase from the tube station, though, Berenson was struck with an odd feeling: of the familiar being just a little off beam. He couldn't put a finger on it, but it made him shudder. Thinking carefully, the white tiles looked perhaps a little yellowing; the steps altogether dustier. Now and then, he felt someone brush against his shoulder, but yet he had no sense of someone quite so close to him as he made the final ascent to the street. Again, he shuddered.

Walking in the direction of home, he stepped first into the everyday sight of a London street, with its selection of shops. He bought an evening newspaper, rolled it up and put it under his arm. Again, the shops looked a little different. There was an unseemly and garish quality to the lighting and the bright displays of goods, even in the small newsagents where he stopped every evening. He had never noticed that before, always enjoying the convivial warmth of the shops and shopkeepers as he walked home.

He reached the end of the road, where shops began to give way to the residential streets. Berenson had an odd feeling - almost like the warmth of someone's breath on his back. He shook it off. "Maybe" he thought "I have one of my heads coming on. I've been working pretty hard " But the feeling did not abate: it grew stronger and more disconcerting.

Rounding the corner into his own street, it occurred to Berenson that he had yet to turn round. To have done so would have been to give credence to what he thought a foolish sensation. So he walked on. But, as he did so, he was conscious of the increasing closeness of another individual and, also, of footsteps behind him. Yet, when he stopped, so did the sensation and the hoof taps. It was true: they did sound very like a shod horse striking a road. Moving on again, walking more quickly, the steps and the individual kept pace with him. Looking around, he had the bizarre sensation that he was seeing everything as it always was - but through a glass darkly.

Walk on, walk on. Did he hear a laugh behind him? Was the breathing full and throaty? And did the man behind him identify himself as Berenson when, unable to bear it any more, Berenson looked back?

Daylight saw Berenson travelling, as usual, down a pleasant city street and past shops doing brisk trade and on the London underground. All was well. But tonight a story would appear in his newspaper about the diligent, well respected man, found cold and dead in his street last night. And the man who cut him down would, while there was time, sit in Berenson's favourite chair and tweak at what we know of our everyday familiar world. He would shuffle off his steel-tapped shoes, brush a little lint from his fine dark suit. And he would laugh.

On Chesil Beach

2010-07-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

The beach recedes five metres over a century; it's diminishing slowly, slowly under your feet.

There are people about on this summer's day, but you are all alone, sun on your back, sharp sea smell and digging your feet into the shingle: aligning your body once your feet are dug in right. You notice immediately the stiffness in the lower spine; a bit of a twist there. You must correct it -easily and satisfyingly done with the help of the smooth warm stones. This is the kind of thing you forget to do in quotidian existence.

Walking is hard-going along the beach, but it pays off with the tingle of calf muscles. Although you didn't feel much breeze, you see that you hair is all tangled as you get back to the car some time later. Salt on the lips.

There must be lots of people here on holiday but, on the routes you take, you seem to meet no-one. Climb up to the Hardy point. No one else. Much later, travelling nearer to home, not a soul is there at East Coker to follow the trail T.S Eliot left for us in 'The Four Quartets'. It seems right to visit his grave. There are some white roses laid on it. Would that there were lilac, too.

Take your time and travel slowly. You have been in knots and unravelling. This has happened before.

Pause.

Chesil Beach recedes five metres in a century. It is best that you move forward.

Thank you to Alexbrn and Marilyn at Flickr for the shots. x

Double rainbow over Bengal

2010-07-21T10:37:00.000-07:00

Apu loved to see the rainbow come; he would always try to find its end, wondering if he would see the patch of grass where its shards of colour first shot up into the sky. He would run, but the rainbow would always fade before he finished this task. This he took in good spirit, promising to run faster next time; to observe more closely where the colours began.

One day, he saw the most special of rainbows - the double. So lovely, arched over the steaming fields in the monsoon months. "I wonder if...." Apu began to run. He ran and ran and, this time, the colour seemed to hover for longer. In some way, it carried him onwards. He ran into landscapes he had not entered before, but he was not afraid. Eventually, realising he was lost, he sat and looked about. Recovering his breath, he found that still the colour stayed, compelling him to travel on until at last he saw what he often wondered about: the root of the rainbow in the long wet grass.

There it was, but it was the root of each of the rainbows of the double, beautifully and lovingly entwined. When he touched them, he found that the roots were soft, like the downy space between the ears of the family's buffalo. And then, without warning, they became arms and lifted him up, high over the plains of Bengal. He saw sights familiar and unfamiliar. Villages and ponds and ditches and emerald green and a train snaking through with a cluster of children running alongside. He began to recognise places closer to home: a roadside shrine, the river, silver and swollen. And still he was not afraid.

Finally, the rainbows set him down, not so far from home, by a Peepul tree he knew and in whose trunk he had carved his name. Apu walked on, into his village, not sure if he dreamed his journey. Whether he had or not, he was, from that moment, a little less sure of where the tangible world ended and where the intangible magic began.

Papu, the boy who wanted to chase tigers

2010-07-19T06:22:00.000-07:00

For Sol. Here is an intriguing little story for you.

Papu had always craved adventure; even as a child, fantasies and fantastic journeys came thick and fast in his head. His imaginary friend was a singer in a rock band with crazy tattoos, crazy hair and a wild look in his eye. He was also a world traveller and a man of no fear. An explorer.Papu wanted to be like him.

In his dreams, Papu chartered planes and followed stories of interesting people. On a whim, he might have heard a story of a boy, living in a remote Bengali village, who had befriended a tiger in the jungle, lived in the most hidden, most curious part of the delta and kept a boat for escape. And he was off, to follow the boy and write his story.

As he slept, Papu heard a story about a lady with twelve children and green eyes who could heal; a shallow pond that never dried even in the hottest part of the year; a magician who lived in a box in Kolkata. In his dreams, he followed these people, met them and became their friends and they introduced him to a world beyond his ken. Of a djinn, a fairy, of magic in the water and healing in a tree. Of things you could see at the corner of your eye at dusk and of a world of adventure, mystery and strangeness.

And thus was his world, thinking, thinking - when he was playing cricket in the street with the boys from the neighbourhood or when his mother made his favourite foods.

When Papu was grown, he became more sensible. He became accustomed to responsibility, as it is right to be. But at night, when Papu slept, the dreams came. There was a man with a great moustache throwing balls of fire, a beautiful lady with long hair singing songs full of sadness and places nearby that you could not see other than through her eyes. When Papu woke, he found that his face was wet with tears. This went on, until Papu couldn't bear it any more.

Ignoring the requests of his parents, who told him that he had to work hard and find himself a wife soon enough, Papu went wandering. He went in no particular direction, through the village and the temple. Through the fields and by Mother Ganges. He stayed with kind people who took him in when he explained that he was on a journey and that he was lonely and unhappy and was looking fore something. Perhaps they thought he was a mad man; perhaps some thought he was a holy fool yet to articulate his cause, but they cared for him. And then, one day, Papu was in the Sundurbans, that wide, low watery expanse on the edge of the Bay of Bengal. Here, there are endless streams, waterside settlements claimed and released by the mud at monsoon time, dark forests and creatures. He found an empty hut and sat down. He chewed on some betel leaf he had with him; a gift from the Panchyiat at the last village he had visited. He thought. Eventually, an old man came in and sat down, smiling at Papu, but saying nothing, They shared a little betel. A storm came up. It came stronger and stronger and soon, Papu realised that the hut was in harm's way: that the water was whipping up around it.

The old man left the hut. Papu did not know what to do other than follow him. The wind and rain were dreadful. He would not have been able to hear his own voice or the voice of the old man had they ever tried to speak to one another. The old man climbed a tree as the water lashed at the ground, with increasing viciousness, below him. He beckoned Papu to follow. And there they stayed, lashed tightly to the tree, until the wind died down. The old man was limber; he was also calm. Papu, however, was terrified and struggling to hold on.

Morning saw an exhausted but alive Papu climb down from the tree. The old man helped him. The mud was thick and he followed the man through the forest to a clearing where he saw a small settlement. Invited into a small dwelling, Papu sat and stared. A tiger was there, asleep on the floor, a lady with long hair resting on him. In the corner, there were large smouldering coals; three of them and Papu was pierced through by his memory of the man who juggled fire. As he looked from the very corner of his eyes in the dusty light of the dwelling, he wondered if he could see more people or creatures - but of this he was not sure. And then, he slept, lulled by the pressure of the old man rubbing his feet with mustard oil to soothe the pain from gripping the trunk of the tree through the night.

When Papu woke up, he found himself alone on the warm soil of a forest clearing. There was nothing he could say, nothing he could do other than move on. Move on home, certainly to a world of responsibility, but Papu would bear this lightly - even gratefully, if he could. He thought that he must have dreamed it all but he saw the blisters on his feet and he could smell the warm scent of the mustard oil. Even today, the rest is a mystery and you, dear reader, must make of it what you will. Papu, though, - today a family man with a decent kind of job - always remembers, once in a while, to look out from the corner of his eye, to meet a glance from someone and to let in happily and gracefully what dreams may come.

Photographs 2003 from Jessika Fortin at www.flickr.com These are of the Sundurbans in Bangladesh.

Crummy mummy disappoints her children

2010-07-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

Parents' evenings. One attended, initially, on the wrong day by mistake. But all seems well and it's great that there has been an end to dry retching on the way to school. Crummy mummy feels a little gasp of relief come suddenly. We appear to be going in the right direction. We are going UP sub levels! Hoorah! But today, crummy mummy is in trouble with the kids. So, periodically:

"You gave us the wrong sandwiches again. You know I hate cheese and pickle."
"Why did you give me chocolate spread? And there were vegetables in my packed lunch and you know I hate vegetables."
"You didn't sign the form for the road safety man and so he wouldn't give me a certificate even though I crossed the road and didn't get run down."
"I looked in my P.E. kit and you put the wrong trainers in there and I had to wear them and I fell over."
It is a litany of small errors.
"P's mum lets him walk to school on his own."
"S's mum lets him stay up until 8.30 on a weeknight AND he's got a telly in his room."
"N's mum gives her £1 pocket money a week."
"K's mum gives him loads of pocket money. But he has to earn it. He almost has enough for a house."
"Why do we have to get chickens when Toby says we can have his guinea pigs?"
"Why can't I watch a 12? F. watches 18s and he's not even 8 yet!"

Oh lordy. Crummy mummy hits upon a brilliant scheme. She lifts the strands of hair from in front of her ears, applies earplugs and settles the hair down again. They need not know. Now she can smile beatifically because she can't hear them complain. If it's an emergency, they will pull on her arm. Crummy mummy only pretends to be patient with children, you know.

A slow walk through a sad rain

2010-07-16T05:25:00.000-07:00

HHe walked on, the sleet and rain falling into his soul. She had gone. Beautiful, kind, clever - everything that might have held him utterly. When he told her, she cried silently and his heart broke. So he walked. Wished he loved her. But he just didn't.

Another 50 word story.

The title comes from a line in Johnny Cash's 'Drive On'
The story is based on something that once happened to me, elided with someone else's experience. I won't say whether I walked.

50 words for yesterday and 50 words for today!

2010-07-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Oh dear oh dear: been a bit poorly. This is to make up for the dearth of story yesterday.I bring you 100 words!

The thread that ran through a life

"That's Joe Biles: a good one. Fast. I'll have to remember that one. Watched the team first in 1950, down the front of the ground. Got there early with my dad. Oh Harry Cairns: he was good, too, but he was lazy."

Fine memories were triggered by those grainy images and, just for a while, the remarkable power of memory made John hold his head up and his daughter smile with relief. John leafed through the album and was back when the faces were young, enjoying a joke with the man on tickets and sitting on his old man's shoulder.

This story was occasioned by an article I read in The Guardian back in June. Its title was The Memorable Game and its subtitle Football can stimulate the recollections of some people who have dementia, a project has found. I found the article thought provoking, affecting and encouraging. Yes, there's a glum beyond words (I'm quoting W.H. Auden here), but if you look at http://www.alzscot.org/ and read through the tartan army sections you'll see what this charity is doing and how it's using football and years of being a fan to do it. I thought it was just brilliant. There is some hope that this project will be unrolled further.I hope that Bath City F.C. will get involved! (Note to husband.)

The waiting room (another 50 word story)

2010-07-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

Osteoporosis; type II diabetes; malaria; melanoma; under 24 chlamydia test. One might be relevant. Catalogue on orthopaedic aids. So much to look forward to, but today I cannot even manage a fully perforated eardrum. Glancing again at the posters, I go home with nothing to show for my moderate pain.

Occasioned by a visit to the triage nurse today. The images are by 'Centralasian' at www.flickr.com THANK YOU! They are part of a catalogue of his images of original 1940s American health posters. These posters are on display as part of a retrospective at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C.

The rock she dreamed of

2010-07-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

Another 50 word story for you, as promised.

It was a ruby, looking like her; it would always be glamorous; a contrast against alabaster skin.

"Marry me", he said, proffering a sumptuous velvet box.

"You know what it is. It looks like you."

Inside was a rock: opal on old gold.Oh dear. He had to go.

The tale of H., unlucky in love, who found solace by the Avon

2010-07-10T04:22:00.000-07:00

Now, I notice that our town festival is running a competition. You have to write a story of 50 words and it must be in some way connected with the River Avon, which flows through this town. I thought I'd write a series of 50 word stories for you - the first of which is about the Avon. I wrote this in bed last night and timed myself. With revisions, it took me 12 minutes.

"Take me down by the river?", she'd suggested.

"Not on our first date!"

Never good with women, a social misfit who couldn't resist inappropriate double entendre, our hero gave up courtship, went fishing, saw kingfishers; a fine swan's nest. Thought for a while.

"This'll do instead" he said, half smiling.

The idea for the first bit comes from something I was thinking about myself the other day: when nervous or slightly ill at ease in company, I slip into banter - some of which may drift towards double entendre. I don't know why I do this! Deep abiding insecurity, maybe. And could it be also just a little impulse to be a tiny bit subversive? Other details: you can indeed see kingfishers on the river even near the centre of town and I'd seen that swans were nesting near the town bridge. Fishing is, I think, meditative. Those thoughts were all in the 12 minutes, by the way.

Help from an unlikely source

2010-07-09T04:47:00.000-07:00

Self help books Yeuch. Never gone a bundle on them. Always thought they were a bit new agey. (Now, when I say new age, I don't mean the proper cognitive behavioural therapy-based practical stuff; I don't refer to the NHS-advocated mood gym programme. No, I mean the airy fairy love yourself, meet your personal angel and channel your energies thing. Yep, it's prejudice, I suppose. Like nails down a blackboard.) I've noticed, also, that a number of the global proponents have preternaturally white teeth, too. In a mahogany tan. It's superficial and I'm not proud of it, but this also bothers me. Back to the books.

Here's the thing. I picked up a little book. I was reading all about today being good enough and burning the scented candles and wearing the best lingerie and not saving things for a day which might never come because tomorrow you may be struck down by a number 9 bus (it didn't actually say that; I'm embroidering) and thinking that this whole thing was sappy, but it was sort of growing on me. Giving me pause. The book in question suggested making a list of 20 times when you felt really happy and then 20 things you would like to do. Not, it counselled you, a list of things you thought you ought to put down (like your wedding day, say), but times you simply loved and would write down now as if no-one were looking or judging. So I had a go. It wasn't the list I thought it would be, quite. And it wasn't in order. At first that made me feel guilty but I went with the flow. Ha! Were my chakras open? See how bigoted I am!

1. Warm rock pools on Pembrokeshire beaches

2. Hens

3. Cats

4. At night, alone, in hospital the night my youngest son was born

5. Other son as a baby lying on my lap and doing huge grins at me

6.Having a bead and craft box (not an armoire - like Martha Stewart advocates: see it's all coming out now...) and choosing beads to go in my haul

7. Husband rocking me in hammock on roof just after we first met

8. Collecting bilberries on heathland

9. Walking on coast paths

10. Collecting shells and finding treasures

11. Painting in oils and acrylics

12. Travels with husband

13.My auntie Betty stroking my hair

14. Riding a horse

15. The intimacy of a good friendship

16. Christmas: but not 1988, 1989, 1990-1998 and not 2008 (don't laugh: I had to think about this one). I'll also say the season of Advent and a darkened church here

17. Our boys saying and doing funny things

18. Walks in the rain: British and tropical

19. British country churchyards

20. Cooking - but at leisure, not necessarily the shape of everyday things

These were the first twenty things that came to mind. I realise, looking at it, that there are some seminal people and places which SHOULD be on there, but aren't. Where is the Taj Mahal at dawn? Where is an azure sea round a remote tropical island? There are obvious more glaring omissions, you might say. I'll leave that for you to attempt some pyschoanalysis on, maybe. I noticed that the hammock rocking thing was there, but not the wedding day. Hmmmm.

Then I did the next bit. 20 things I would like to do.

1. Have another baby. I admit to it. Preferably a big fat chubba wubba.

2. Get some chickens

3. Go for more long walks

4. Paint more

5. Watch films in bed

6. Spend more time with my wider family

7,. Do yoga and pilates regularly

8. Get more and better sleep

9. Maybe have a small rose tattooed on my ankle

10. Own a camper van

11. Stop worrying so much

12. Go out more with husband.

13 Learn to make clothes

14. Learn to make soap (well, I'm thinking presents and I LOVE making presents)

15. Have massages

16. Go to the sea more

17. Take a sabbatical with my family

18. Fix all the problems for my friends and everyone else

19. Leave the past where it is: in another country

20. Read more

Now, reader: I am ashamed. I scoffed at all this stuff, but damn me, it works. It made me feel good just writing it all down and, also, forced me to notice that many of the things, in both lists, that is, were to be found under my nose and not in a corner of the globe miles away or to be achieved with all my usual heart searching and hand wringing and exponential levels of frankly unnecessary effort. Clever book. Silly me.

Well now. At the end of August three chickens are coming to live with us. Notice that hens feature as number two on both lists. I have always loved them and they are associated with happy childhood stuff. They are ex battery hens who will need careful nurturing. I am making an ark and a run for them and I think they will be called Claudia (mother in law), Monica (mother) and Patricia (aunt) although, if their characters remind us of anyone, their names are subject to change.My youngest son favours Stacey, for some reason. The idea of a hen called Stacey is really rather good. The rest of the list, well I'm working on that. Some of the things will conflict; the odd one is not happening. Probably. I may want to change some of the items on the lists. I do, however, stand corrected.

N.B. when you read these stories, do bear in mind that they are not necessarily about me - although a good number of them will be within my sphere of experience!

Photo by Casey Serin and Wrestlingentropy at www.flickr.com Thank you.And to Teena and Louise and a heap of good sense. Thank you thank you.xxxx

The provenance of the dove

2010-07-08T03:58:00.000-07:00

Out in the fields, the sweetcorn was growing tall. Now, you could run through tunnels and, even as an adult, be hidden from view if you wanted to be. It felt magical. On this particular day, Laura was alone, but still she ran sometimes. The sky was almost violent in its blue, a shock against the bright green of the stems and growing leaves around the miniature husks. But it was not the blue that Laura was looking at; it was the dark ploughed soil. Because, when the farmers had turned over the soil, there was always treasure to be found.

Laura had always liked to collect the old clay pipe stems that you find in pretty much every field in Britain, if you care to look. From centuries of people working the land, stopping for a smoke or skilfully keeping the pipe in the mouth as they worked. So, today, a haul of old pipe stems of various lengths and thickness and a lovely pipe bowl with a scalloped design around it. She would give all these to her boys. But, eyes down, she found what she thought was a strange-shaped piece of bone. Wiping off the dirt, it revealed itself as a dove, with one wing broken but otherwise perfect and raising up its one remaining wing as if about to fly. The bird's head was raised and its wingtip was sharp. It was carved quite intricately, too and might have been made of bone or ivory - or just pottery with the patina of age.

Now how, do you suppose, it came to be there? What could have been its provenance? It didn't seem like something a child would have lost, carelessly, in the field. Laura constructed a scenario. Was it something a man working in the field had given to his sweetie? Had she received it but later dropped it? Or had she rejected him and the dove been lost - worse, thrown into the field, either by him or by her? Maybe, prosaically, it just been what to someone else, some years ago, had been worthless rubbish, put in a fire at the edge of the furrows and eventually integrated into the soil of the field through repeated ploughing and sowing. Laura decided that she liked this story best: that a man who loved a woman gave her a present: a perfect little white dove, with two outstretched wings. By accident she dropped it and could not find it. She never told him but he loved her anyway and always. Eventually, the little dove got buried. But one day, many years later, someone else found it, thought it lovely and carried it home where it was enjoyed and wondered at by a family and anyone else who cared to look.

And that, thought Laura, was a much better story. She walked on through the tunnels of sweetcorn, but still keeping her eyes down just in case.

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The dove I describe is, indeed, something I found yesterday while out in the sweetcorn field.
"That's wonderful" said Susie
"A little bird" said Polly (6)
"It is a dove" said Ethan (8) "and its wing is broken."
"What a funny little thing" said Isaac (6).
"Put it on the window sill where everyone can see it" said Elijah (8).

So Blinkie don't surf?

2010-07-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

Now, you remember the curious tale of Blinkie the rabbit a little while back? Her owner, Rosie, has requested that Blinkie go on another adventure so....

Having had the boost in confidence that, for a rabbit, is engendered by stealing a car, doing your own shopping for green vegetables and, frankly, having grown men in a public house find you attractive, Blinkie was hungry for another bite of freedom.

Night fell. She had stealthily put together all her kit over the previous few days.

1. Shades. Check. (Aviators. Very on trend, she had seen in Squeak magazine. Angora Hilton wore them.)
2. Miniature wetsuit. (Don't ask.)
3. A log. Tied to a string.
4. The car. Again.
5. A cool friend -or rather, Stinkie, the white boy rabbit from up the road. It was platonic, because, frankly, Stinkie was a bit square and was no stranger to the carrot trolley. He had, though, consented to go on this adventure.

This time, they took a different car. The family saloon. Blinkie was ready to slip the booster seats in place and had already stolen the spare keys. They were off and headed for the coast. Dorset. It was dusk and Blinkie hoped that, in the smudgy light, she and Stinkie would not be seen and arrested. Having said that, would you believe you had seen a rabbit in charge of a car?

The conversation was a little stilted on the journey. Yeuchhh. Stinkie was dull.

Carrots. Blah blah blah. My nice new run. Blah blah blah. The time I got the bronze in the county pet show. Blah blah blah. Music. Something cool and surfy to get Blinkie in the mood. Accelerate a little. As the light dropped, they were there and Blinkie, dragging her log on a rope, wearing her little suit, was free.

(That's Stinkie above, by the way; he is a little rotund, you must admit.)

Stinkie loped behind her, splashing in the water while Blinkie dragged her log out, caught the wave and WHOAH! Don't ever say that Blinkie don't surf. Blinkie was a goddess. Neptune would gladly have taken her as a wife. Fine, black and sleek she was, with her long ears trailing in the wind behind her and her nimble paws gripping the surf board log. Maybe at first the surf dudes on the beach might have laughed. She was, after all, a small black rabbit on a log. Within the hour, they were putty in her hands. They smoothed her sleek coat, admired her unusual board with which, she told them, she could also shoot rapids (this was a bit of a fib, but Blinkie had plans). Stinkie sat on the beach and glowered. The gooseberry again. Slow coach. Always chortled at by the lady rabbits, a bit clumsy and, yet, so very very in love with Blinkie and unable to tell her. At that moment, though, he even thought he hated her; thought that, if her family ever babysat him when his own were away, that he might go and piddle in her eglu, pull the rose off the roof of her run or spit in her straw. Yes -- he was ashamed of these feelings.

And so it went, as the darkness came. He could see the silhouette of Blinkie riding the waves, the spray around her catching the rays of moonlight. And suddenly it happened. Where was Blinkie? The beach had begun to empty, but where was she? Had she gone off with these handsome, silly men and boys? Then he heard her: "Stinkie! Stinkie! Help me!" He ran like the clappers and dived into the sea, following her frightened and yet gorgeously rabbitty tones. She was underneath the log, below a wave with her paws caught on the rope. In a second he had saved her, swum with her -really quite athletically- back to shore and laid her on the sand.

"Oh Stinkie! You saved me!"

Now, call our girl fickle, but in that second, Stinkie was transformed into a rabbit Adonis. She saw him in a new light. He might dawdle and loaf around; he might not be socially articulate, but he had saved her life and showed some serious, sinewy athleticism into the bargain. They rubbed noses.

On the way home, Stinkie drove and Blinkie fell asleep on the passenger seat, exhausted by her ordeal. It was going to be lurrrrrrrrrvvvvvve. And in the morning, he placed some clover tenderly on her straw pillow. The next adventure they must have together. Never again, would she go for pretty boys, but for a slightly overweight herbivore who was a surprisingly good swimmer.

There's a lesson in there for you all, ladies.

Bethany Bluebottle starts young

2010-07-05T06:11:00.000-07:00

For Mrs S and in memory of my dad, an eminently sensible man and teacher -- and to all people in charge of children who see the funny side!

"You will start piano lessons this month."

"Later this year, you will be going to ballet."

"Next month you will start Brownies."

Oh dear, the ever hopeful mother.

The piano lessons started amidst much howling. Mrs Bluebottle was determined that Bethany should go, however. The piano teacher, it turned out, did not appear particularly to like children. Plus, she had a large wart to one side of her chin with a big hair sticking out of it. On the worst days, when she thought Miss Hamm, the piano teacher, would shut her fingers in the piano lid, she fantasised about pulling that hair out. Snap! Yank! It's gone with only one deft movement! And Mrs Hamm had very big teeth. There was nothing to be done about that, though.

Bethany had no patience with the piano; it just wouldn't seem to accommodate her. After months of poor reports and an embarrassing turn in a little concert in Mrs Hamm's house, her mother recapitulated and told her she could stop. Oh, the relief. Bethany kept quiet, though, about the fact that, when she closed her eyes at night, great patterns of notes would swarm and swoon behind her eyelids and, gradually, compose themselves into melodies. "Hmmm", thought Bethany.

Ballet. In the village hall. There were lots of sweet little girls in their pink ballet pumps and angora ballet wraps. Bethany tried to walk in gracefully. There was a witchy woman called Miss Close in charge of the class. It appeared to Bethany that this lady also did not particularly care for children, regarding them as objects to be trained and formed and improved upon. Alice could do every little move expected; Emma could bend her leg up behind her back while smiling and keeping excellent poise. Oh. Miss Close was smiling. Perhaps, then, she didn't particularly like Bethany. But the Bluebottle gave her all, as she thundered around the hall in vain mockery of the movements the girls had been asked to perform. She was aware of the shame settling upon the room when she, elephant that she was,danced past the old room heater with its big wire guard. She could hear it rattle as she passed. This time, Mrs Bluebottle removed her from the class after only a brief conversation with Miss Close. "Great. Now I can get back to climbing trees and building dens", thought Bethany.

Brownies. Really, it was an accident just waiting to happen. Bethany felt the urge to rebel on the swearing in day. She chanted the Brownie Guide pledge, stepping from one chair -for Brown Owl had put two chairs back to back: little girls stepped over the apex from one chair to the other and thus entered a new realm. But Brown Owl did not seem to be smiling very much. Could it be that she, too, did not particularly like children? Red rag to a bull. Certainly, over the coming weeks Bethany hoovered up snippets of conversation: "I do have a full time job, you know." "I am doing this as a volunteer, you know." And she realised that Brown Owl had cast herself in the role of community martyr. Bethany was always eavesdropping on adult conversations.

Well now. Bethany liked the walks they went on, but disliked everything else. And then she did her first badge with Brown Owl and another ill humoured person. After this, it was suggested that the Bluebottle was not perhaps suited to structured and responsible work of this kind. There had been matches. A roll of kitchen paper. The mixing up of food and non food substances and, worst of all, the inappropriate use of water in a tiled area. Mrs Bluebottle paled. And yet, in the car on the way home, Bethany could have sworn her mother was trying not to giggle. At home, Bethany continued with making up her spy codes. She was sitting high up in her rickety tree house in the damson tree as she did this. "Alright there, old son?" asked her father.

After these three episodes, it was decided that Bethany Bluebottle was perhaps better with spontaneous activity. The funny thing was, though, that given a few years she went on to sing and play various instruments, scruffy little thing that she was. And the musical notes continued to swarm and cohere behind her eyes at night. They were joined, increasingly, by words. All in good time, she thought. And that, dear reader, is one reason why she observes a stern policy of benign neglect -- offering and responding to be sure-- with her own children now she is all grown up. And, do you know, she still sometimes has the urge to be very, very naughty....

The red dress

2010-07-04T02:44:00.000-07:00

In Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette is recast as Bertha by Mr Rochester. It is a name with which he feels more comfortable. From a tic in her sleep, all shifts and Bertha, with her name -a name which is not her colour and is, most likely, an insult to her pride - shifts to a private world where shapes are lurid and vivid and where she has no sense of being loved. Instead, she is sold like a chattel, exchanged as currency for land. Maybe, like a piece of cargo, she goes on her journey to the attic in the old great house where she is, to generations of school students, the prime example of the mad woman in the attic. Mr Rochester's first wife.

But sometimes at night, Antoinette -for that, of course, is who she really is - runs through the corridors of the great house. Sometimes, Jane Eyre hears her. But no-one visits Antoinette. She is insane, lost to that private world in which nothing makes sense. One day, she takes a candle and she runs. There is fire, maybe by intent, maybe through her own special brand of lunacy. If you've read Jane Eyre, this part of the story is known to you. But if you've read the former (and I should say second, though first in narrative) book, then the mad woman in the attic is something else to you. She is a woman treated cruelly; beautiful, turned savage and formed in the heat beyond the wide Sargasso sea. But, for the last few moments, she is free and I imagine that she stands, face to the cool, foreign English air, high up on the walls somewhere. Round and about - there in the countryside or beyond in the towns -- there might be English ladies, in subdued colours of slate grey and cream or charcoal, with maybe an ornament of pearl or a pretty cameo. But high up in the house, Antoinette stands, in her long red dress - the dress which she had hauled from the Caribbean, all secretly smouldering in its trunk. And she is aflame. And she is beautiful.

World on my back

2010-07-01T04:01:00.000-07:00

So, I take the well travelled bag. It's a green rucksack; lots of secret pockets, not too big because to travel light is liberating, as you may know. Yes - it could go on as hand luggage; travelling in South Asia in the late summer I won't need more.

Clothes: wear; wash; dry in a heartbeat. Sari, salwar kameez, something sort of half way to stop me looking like I'm trying and failing to be assimilated. Take off engagement ring and put it somewhere safe. The diamond and the aquamarine don't need to explore the reaches of Andhra Pradesh. The wedding ring has to stay. Mend the little cross around my neck that goes everywhere and put it on, but I do think twice about it. I've had good and bad conversations about that necklace - but it's who I am and subtle enough for me to leave. I think. The Balinese sarong that's circled the world comes, as it always does. Sheet, towel, comforter. I hope it will last forever. Shawls for discretion and warmth. Socks, but only because of the mosquitoes.

I delve into the first aid kit material. Not much I need, but I collect, with the pleasure it always gives me, the little syringes in their packets with the nurse's note to say they are for emergency use, I scoop up my mosquito repellent, antiseptic, my malarials, paracetamol, iodine, re hydration mixture - all the usuals. I feel light as all these things go into the little red nylon first aid bag: between us, that bag has been to 85 countries, so I have a peculiar feeling about it: like it carries with it a barely perceptible tinge of all those countries, somehow. It's at this point that the room takes on just the tiniest supernatural edge. That comes with leave taking and arrivals if you travel a long way; for a moment, you are not quite yourself.

There's the photocopied pages of passport, the bits of my bag and my clothes in which I hide cash and I.D. I go through a routine. Still the bag is only half full. The money belt: the card, the stamped passport, a few rupees, phone, a little cash, a card and to be sure, a brief note from the G.P. saying I don't have swine flu. I know they are scanning travellers at arrival point still; this may expedite things for me; it may not.

Elsewhere in the bag: some things I love. Solar charger, plug, the Swiss army knife, a little comb, a miniature mirror. With it, just a stick of kajal. I'll look like me, but different, different. And then I luxuriate in my choice of pens and pencils for the journey. And which notebook? Some paperbacks. Hindi and Telegu vocabulary. Still I am not up to speed, but I am a quick learner and I talk, talk, talk. When in motion, I don't fret. I am more confident; liberated.

On the floor of the room, there is one green bag, easily carried on my back. Sure, the paperbacks will go in out, in out for a few days yet. Always, I struggle to decide. But I reflect that before I was someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's teacher or employee or had a house full of stuff, I was just me. I don't want to go back; don't want things to change. But I have hands for things beyond this home and today, I am not ashamed to admit, either, that it's just me and a bag too light to be waited for at the carousel. And I'm off.

AN UPDATE

2010-06-30T08:05:00.000-07:00

Painting in oils. To cheer you because it's so very jolly: Mother and child ladybird, by Isaac Vaught, aged 6.

AND AN UPDATE

With the blog and my Indian tea party fund raiser, we've raised over £500. I am aiming for £1,000 - and remember that I will be selling an edited version of the short stories on the blog as a paperback from November. It would help me if you could tell anyone you know (who might vaguely be interested) about this blog. If you would like to sponsor this project, start at £1! I do appreciate it. I have not to date had any support or interest from local press despite the fact that it is a BOA charity (apart from the town's venerable magazine: thank you Jackie) so word of mouth or a link would be cracking!

AND DON'T FORGET THE NEXT EVENT: A PAY WHAT YOU WILL YARD SALE

MY PLACE

8TH JULY

FROM 7.30

Anna. x

Johnny Cash, in a lift, in Dallas, Texas

2010-06-30T04:39:00.000-07:00

For Paul.

"I was told that when Bob Dylan met John -- I think it was at the Newport Folk Festival-- he circled John, bent slightly forward and smiling up at him with pure admiration."1

When he was ten, my husband happened to be in an elevator in a hotel in Dallas, Texas. In walked a tall man; the boy looked at the man's shoes. From there, it was a long way up, but look he did. The boy saw that it was Johnny Cash. No, he must be wrong. But hang on, Johnny Cash must have had to ride in an elevator sometime, so he looked again. He nudged his little brother: "Curtis, I think it's Johnny Cash." Maybe the man heard him; maybe not, but he smiled and grinned a broad grin and nodded: "Hellllllllo boys." A low, slow, warm voice.

The youth was starstruck and cannot remember if he said hello back; little brother was possibly unmoved, being too young to understand that, maybe, Johnny Cash was not to be seen riding in an elevator with you any day of the week. Upstairs, or maybe it was on another occasion, he learned that his mother had gone into labour with him (in Georgia) while watching Johnny Cash on a t.v. show. Now, these little links; they kind of went in deep. Plus Cash was, like him, a Southern man.

As an adult, he would listen and feel at home.Cash was flawed, both powerful and weak. He had struggled with addiction and insecurity, gone on a journey from the cotton fields of Arkansas to, well, a meeting with a luminary or, say, The President. He had Faith that was both angry and beautiful and music that haunted. So why not share? Well, that's what our grown up boy from the elevator in Dallas did. Best of all, he shared American Recordings, which was played again and again in the house and, for a quiet moment when no-one knew what to do -he suspected that Johnny Cash would have shrugged off the fact of their doing this- 'Down there by the train.' Now, there was a song that could still a room or a nervy individual with its invocation to meet him if you had "taken the low road"; if you had "done the same." "There's a place I know", sang Cash - a place where he saw "Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth." So, if you dear reader, especially you dear British reader, have not taken a look or a listen, may I suggest you go back and listen again and get to know him a bit. Not that I'm putting him on a pedestal, or nuthin.'

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Notes: American Recordings. Easy to download - you might try MP3 Panda. So cheap you wonder if it's legal (it is).

1. The Man Called Cash by Steve Turner (London, Bloomsbury, 2006). This was the first authorised biography. Quotation from the foreword by Kris Kristofferson, p. ix.

And, if you're unsure, Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus for pieces of silver; John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

The photo is by Mollipop at www.flickr.com. I LOVE it. She has written underneath "Cash. Still there." Absolutely. And thank you.
This is a true story. Elevator, labour and all.

The cucumber sandwich

2010-06-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

Cucumber sandwiches. High tea somewhere in the past, which is another country. Cucumber sandwiches are those that you neglect to prepare. Predictable. Maybe so predictable that you forgot all about them and how extravagantly delicious they were.

But on this particular afternoon, the sandwiches had not been forgotten. A screened porch in Virginia and an English-style tea today. Hot tea, iced tea, the cucumber sandwiches -with no crusts, to be sure- ham sandwiches, strawberry shortcake and an English fruit cake. In Britain, those same sandwiches, but also ham, scones with some home made jam, the absence of iced tea and rock cakes made by a child in the family.

In Virginia, it was stiflingly hot and the guests came, grateful for the swooping fans and the tea and the cool of those lovely cucumber sandwiches. It all looked lovely. But the hostess was simmering, although nothing was said. There was a sighing just about audible, but no-one said anything or asked what was the matter. Someone might have wondered whether a fainting couch was around, for this was suffering pure and simple: I invited you but I do not particularly want you in my house. I wish I had never thought of it.

Back in Britain, the gloves were off. It didn't take long for a comment to be made. Did you not like the scones? You clearly didn't want to come, did you? Why does no-one else make an effort? It's always me. At least it was quiet, there in the Blue Ridge - but the atmosphere would do well to be cut with a knife. As an experiment. In Britain the knives had been slammed down on the worktop, a visual index of how little she was appreciated. No more cutting today, then.

Outside, summer blazed on. Inside, we resorted to near fisticuffs or a glint of resentment in a smiling face. Depending on where we took our tea that day.

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Disclaimer: this is NOT about anyone I know. It may, however, make some suggestion about how women are martyred in the Southern United States and in, well, Wales.

Amtrak with Ned

2010-06-28T06:04:00.000-07:00

Washington. Baby in arms. The Capitol, Smithsonian; half smoke hot dogs in the park. We caught the New Orleans train and I remember the baby, lying on his back with his arms held up high, as the view liner train went through the night and on into Virgina. I woke early and saw that we were in Georgia and that the earth, just by the track, was red. The baby was still asleep, the train rocking him; my husband beginning to stir on the bunk above mine. He raised his head: "We in Georgia yet?"

In the dining car a shower of ma'ams and y'alls and a shower of hands for the baby. We had grits and eggs and crisp bacon, with hot sauce. Scalding coffee to further wake us. The creepers and the red earth gave way to the suburbs of Atlanta and we were almost there. I'd always enjoyed the hoardings of the city as we approached it from Hartsfield airport: Free at Last Bail Bonds! Chicken Breast Strips Meal only $2.. Here, just flashes of garden, then creek, refuse by the side of the track, more red earth. Still the kitchen staff dandled the baby while others poured us endless coffee and we were content. I remember that my husband told me to get ready. I hadn't combed my hair but I put on some lipstick because I wanted my mother in law to think well of me when we arrived. Silly, really, what with the baby being the show, not me. I remember that he was dressed in a bright red all in one we called the 'firework suit.' We were there.

Just a memory. Of being in motion and being at ease. Also, a testament to the South and why central government should not have slashed the Amtrak budget, if you're asking.

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Photo (I cheated slightly , this train is actually a North bound one coming up from Florida to Virginia....) courtesy of John H Gray; he has a fine selection of Amtrak photos at www.flickr.com Thank you.

City of light, city of joy

2010-06-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

Benares, Varanasi, one of the world's oldest inhabited cities. It was not his city, but he felt at home there. He sat by the river at dawn and people were there - countless people- praying and bathing and offering up what they could. The sun hit the water and he watched them, not able to offer a libation - just to watch. Efflorescence on the water. It was strange, then, that this moment was the one on which his life turned. He felt an impetus to move.

At the tiny stall of a man he had come to know, he brought tea. Took it back to the room and set it by her bed. Then, later, mangoes and tomatoes and onions and limes and some olive oil from the Ayurvedic shop to make a sort of dressing. He begged a hillock of salt. He thought she would be proud of what he had done.

On the balcony of the room, the light was dazzling. There, with what kit he had, he assembled breakfast for her, called her out from the room. She had drunk her tea but had drifted back to sleep. Lost. But now, she sat. He smoothed her hair, put on her hat for her and gave her what he had made. They said little as they ate and watched the sun on its ascent. The colour of the Ganges changed from white and yellow to the more familiar muddy brown.

Then he stood up and told her that, now, he would stop running, stop travelling and that, whenever he put one foot in front of the other, he would be with her. She understood and that was that.

In the lanes below, the monkeys chattered. They could scent the food he had prepared and were ready to steal. The heat of the day was becoming pressing already and the yoghurt sellers were doing a good trade from their trestles full of clay cups. Later she and he would pack up and move on, no longer alone.
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If you look at www.flickr.com there is an exquisite series of photos from Ahron de Leeuw, of which this is one. Thank you!

The house in Flatrock

2010-06-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

.

The house was really a wooden cottage; in another setting it might have been made out of gingerbread. It had window boxes full of red impatiens, still a thick fall of leaves on the ground from last autumn and the sound of a creek below it. Inside, the finds and hauls of a family over almost thirty years. A family escaping the city or sheltering from the storm with books and jigsaws and a making things drawer and a small radio. That night they drifted off to the sound of a small North Carolina radio station playing Cousin James and they felt proud.

It was early summer and there was a storm. Earlier, he had told her the storms in the South come in with a faint whoosing sound, a whisper at first. A shift in the tenor of the air. She woke to it. And felt its warmth before the explosion of thunder and lightning. They were sleeping in the loft of the house and they felt themselves being shaken by the storm outside and she wondered if one of the tall trees all around would fall. The children crawled into bed with them, shaking and sobbing a little: "I'm frightened."

Morning found the house still, intact and the air clear. The children ran in pyjamas to the creek, burying their toes in the mud and slipping over the wet rocks. A small and sleepy snake reared its head from the shallows, gave a half-hearted hiss, showed its fangs briefly and nestled back into the mud. Strangely no-one said anything.

Inside, coffee was brewing and the radio station was on again. Mom was up and doing, immaculate as always, and making bagels with cream cheese to eat on the screened porch. The children's father was still asleep, a half smile playing at his lips. Their mother would sit on the swing seat to eat breakfast; she would not wake him yet.

Simple really, but there it is.
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Flatrock is a community in the mountains of North Carolina. Photo courtesy of Appalachian Encounters at www.flickr.com Thank you.

Crummy mummy has a comeback! Bonus story

2010-06-23T04:34:00.000-07:00

Thursday! Top day for Crummy Mummy! She was delighted, for a start, by the comment of a friend who had written, online, that really the earlier chapter of Crummy mummy was the story of "Yummy mummy and her magnificent breasts." But, aha! I can shoot that one down, for I am wearing St Tropez tan and have hoicked up the breasts", thought crummy mummy victoriously. This is a curious game that introverted and self conscious women - possibly all women - tend to play. Yes: she knows. It isn't big and it isn't clever, either.

Hmmm: open classroom day in crummy mummy's corner of the world. Senior has made a Japanese garden; Junior is doing France. "What do they do in France, then?" asked crummy mummy, keen to be supportive of the teachers' work. "They have markets with cheese and eggs and they speak France language."

Crummy mummy visits Senior's room: she notices he is wearing his t shirt inside out and has a black pencil-covered nose, like a teddy bear. He shows her a Japanese garden. "That's lovely darling." "It's probably not mine", says he, "because we tried to make a pond with the crab shell you gave me, but the shell leaked and the garden flooded and the cardboard collapsed and then it fell on the floor." There are some exquisite gardens on display, though. Also, Senior looks happy and he gives her the "easy" entry level Sudoku puzzle sheet because he reckons she won't be able to do the hard ones. Crummy mummy does, however, score full marks in the "put the events of the Buddha's life in the right order" task. "It's time for you to go now" says Senior "Or you'll do that thing where you start teaching people."

Senior's class teacher tells her that he's a bit confused by the movements in the Japanese dance which they will perform in front of parents and pupils a little later. In the event it doesn't matter because Senior has placed himself, as in previous years, behind a pillar. Crummy mummy gets her 2010 "shots of the pillar" to show daddy. In the same arena, Junior performs a French song with accompanying hand movements. He performs with gusto, having told her before that the song is called "John Petinkee dancer." "I think it might be called "Jean le petit dance -eu (little French grunt and inflexion), darling." "Don't be silly mummy: his name is John Petinkee." During the performance, crummy mummy notices a preponderance of Boden matelo stripes and attractive red and blue shorts, echoing the French flag. Junior is wearing turquoise beach shorts and a home made effort on top: a white t shirt with a French flag on it displaying the legend "Vive La France."

"Well", said yummy mummy, "we all tried our best." Back home, she awards herself a yellow merit certificate and fills the too small paddling pool so that the kids can have a punch up in it before tea.

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Well, never say I'm not versatile: you got graveside wonderings and comedy crummy mummy back to back today! xxxx

Elegy in a Country Churchyard in the 21st century (fragments)

2010-06-23T04:03:00.000-07:00

Out walking one mid-summer day, Flora took the path through a churchyard she had never explored before. Nobody else about, roses spilling over the walls and the stones warm in the sun. She had always visited churchyards, a habit inherited from her parents, she thought. But, quite suddenly, it seemed that the place spoke. Not with fresh revelation, because it wasn't as if, through experience and knowledge, she had failed to feel loss or a sense of the brevity of life. That it could ebb and flow, but leave brutally; confoundingly. The message was of a sadness beyond words and yet, when it spoke, it was both sharp reminder and reassuring call, despite the shock of the detail it contained and the sharp address to those who needed to be reminded.

On a grave of 1812, a passer by was addressed directly, thus.

Sacred to the memory of Margaretta Sally Shute who, with her daughters, Mary Susanna and ------, was unfortunately drowned at Chepstow on the evening of Sunday September the 20th, 1812, after hearing a sermon from Philippians, 1st chapter, 21st verse.

Sacred to the memory of Richard Chute Esq., Sydenham Kent, who died at that place the 17th of April, 1819.

Part of the text read

Farewell ye broken pillars of my Fate,

My life's companion and two first born:

Yet while this silent stone I consecrate

To conjugal paternal love forlorn,

Oh, may each passer by the lesson learn

Which can alone the bleeding heart sustain:

When friendship weeps at virtue's funeral urn:

That to the pure in heart to die is gain.

At home, Flora checked the Biblical text, rather as instructed to, she thought: "For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

Whether you believe this or not, she thought, Mr Shute had done two things. Perhaps, it was just a verse and description made by a sculptor who did not know the family, but it did not feel that way. It felt like a privileged intimacy: read the text and will yourself yourself to feel and see and believe what I am willing myself to feel and see and believe, it said. But it was also a reminder, a sort of call to action and Flora, often stymied by petty squabble and worry was brought up short. Bind those you love to you with hoops of steel, he might have said. You: passer by. And make me feel I am not alone.

Flora sat for a while. Found herself reflecting on a line from Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb', where the poet gently chides those who come to "look, not read." And she found she had missed another part of the text: Richard's Shute description of his children's mother (she) "who gave them life and taught them worth." Now that really is something to be proud of.

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The grave in question is real and in the churchyard of a village in Somerset. The response to it is shown in a truncated form in this story.

Father's Day yesterday

2010-06-22T04:33:00.000-07:00

Flora was all sour grapes. Father's Day. Well that sucked. It did every year. Mother's Day is even worse with its more entrenched traditions. It does help that now she was celebrating a husband on father's day, of course. Oh hell, I'll abandon the moniker and state my case here and say that I miss my dad and have done ever since the day I took a call by the river Cam, aged 19. So I thought, I'll let him give you a story tonight or on this lovely summer afternoon. Just this once. I'm cheating, so don't sponsor me, just read it. I've taken it from his notebooks. If you've loved and lost, too, I hope it helps.He was writing about the landmarks of a year - those he remembered growing up on the Mendips. He is 'John' and 'Miss Constance' a hugely influential primary teacher - it was she who set him down the road to primary school teaching.

There were landmarks all through the year. In January, the families had a late night and all the chauffeurs had a busy time, because Miss Constance arranged for staff families to be taken to pantomimes at the Prince's Theatre in Bristol. It was a great occasion; always looked forward to and always enjoyed. John remembered the year of Aladdin particularly. Bold and striking stage settings; magnificent costumes; story lines and comic digressions which were easy to follow. And the principal boy - later to become a famous film actress - was very glamorous indeed. Window Twankey was uproarious with her washing scenes and saucy asides, and the wicked villain forgot about the magic lamp long enough to lead the audience in a good rousing song. His baritone soared out across the packed auditorium - "Many hearts have been broken ...... just because a word was spoken..." sang the villain. Then, gathering in the audience, "So be sure it is true when you say I love you..." they warbled happily: "It's a sin to tell a lie."

John, sunk in the red plush seat, was dazzled by the stunning shifts of light, colour and sound. All too soon it was over and they were motoring home through the starlight. Wrapped in the honeyed warmth of the car they drifted in and out of sleep as they went.

Every Good Friday Miss Constance sent each child an Easter egg. Much bigger than those in Harry's shop, or at the post office stores, they were in presentation boxes and wrapped in foil of bright, metallic colours. Excitedly, the children opened up the two halves to get at the sweets and chocolates that always filled the hollow eggs. These eggs usually lasted the whole of Easter week. Easter meant planting potatoes, and the baker delivering the Hot Cross Buns. It meant going to church a lot; but also time for Miss Constance's Easter eggs.

When mid-summer came they looked forward to the trip to Bristol in the warm, sweet-smelling late evening, to see the illuminations. From Bedminster Down they had the first, full view of Brunel's great Suspension bridge. It was floating in the air in the darkness, its every line clearly pointed up by hundreds of winking lights. Fifteen minutes later they were crossing and re-crossing the bridge, craning necks and peering up at the great chains - chains like no others they had ever seen, that held the great structure half way to Heaven.

There continues a detailed description of seeing the illuminations of Bristol, an intimate portrait of a rural family on a summer outing - just to look at the city with the lights on. Best not to lose that sense of wonder.

And for me?

Christmas: Advent is magical, the buses are Christmas buses as the interiors glow in the winter darkness; open fires and waiting; waiting. And Epiphany? January. Sliding into February. We are still watching and waiting. Since childhood, this is, though, the most melancholy part of the year for me. So I am in hope of snow and that air you can taste and feel revived by.

Spring and Easter: primroses and watching the lambs being born. Wales. Barefoot at home, outside, apart from when it's raining. Eating under the trees and Palm crosses Lilac and cowslips. Heading Stateside.

Summer: feet in a stream, peonies, swallows, swifts and house martins. And, as in the Louis MacNeice poems. 'Thalassa', "Round the corner, always, the sea."

Autumn. Warm wind; cool nights, arranging wood, the thankfulness that I never have to go to school again, toes up and pumpkin carve. Candles. All greeted thankfully.

Now, I don't know that this - in some fundamental ways - is so very different from the childhood of my father in the 1930s and 1940s.

How about your landmarks?

Unrelated incidents

2010-06-21T02:17:00.000-07:00

Ah, texts. If you looked at a string of them, in an inbox, it is possible that the individual messages could cohere into a story. Or, at least. an interesting sketch of a life.

Take yesterday: what would you make of this selection? Lola's list of messages, I'll call them.

1. All stickiness off Cath Kidston now!
2. I am sorry. I am so stupid. Please forgive my stupidity. It is all my own: please forgive me. xxx
3. Hello:do you remember me?
4. Gothic paper was ***** Nd to tlk 2 U!!!!
5. Thanx for all yur help. U R gold.

What conclusions would you draw? If a reader looking at Lola's inbox wanted to make up something, starting from that first text there, he or she could say that..

Cath Kidston had been visiting the local store. Just to swoop down and check, sweetly, on progress, The shop was full of oilcloth, melamine beakers, a few choice floaty dresses, picnic hampers and thermos flasks with the ubiquitous chintzy print on them. Lovely, but, as Lola liked to say, just a shade away from old people's homes, the smell of talcum powder and of crumbs down, depressingly down, between floorboards and the grooves in your kitchen table. You suspect, as you contemplate your array of Cath Kidston and watch Countdown, that this is a kind of existential terror: that you are on your way out.

Now, if you took exception to all this, you might have kidnapped the designer and rolled her in pastel pink and white marshmallows, served from a 50s revival picnic tray. Later, feeling guilty because she was clearly such a nice woman, you hosed her down, prised the last of them off and then took her out for tea, pausing only to buy a few yards of 'boat' fabric and a tablecloth in the iconic 'spot' print. And to text your co-criminals who had fled from the scene: "All stickiness off Cath Kidston now!" And boy, did you feel bad.

As for the others, I will leave you, reader, to make up your own story, if you so choose.

"Stupid" A lover? A clash between souls? Did someone forget something vital and are they really sorry OR -I too am sorry if I cause dissent here- doing what one's husband sometimes does and admits to doing: saying sorry vociferously in order to close the subject.
"Hello?" A long lost friend; a remembered assignation in the back of a mini when you were 16? (It happens and the mini was black with boy racer stripes.) Actually, it might be your mother, berating you for insufficient contact, but doing it with sardonic humour and then saying it was just light hearted tomfoolery afterwards.
"Gothic paper"? Might it be a design for stationery. commissioned by the deepest, darkest corners of the Marilyn Manson fan base? Damn! That stationery order had gone wrong and you'd need to start all over again. Alternatively, it might be a student of the genre.Ooops: that's what it was! Note the confident use of textease, which should enable you to guess at the provenance of the text.
"Thanx". Hmmm. Where could that one take you? Well, now. My friend Sophie and I spent a merry ten minutes looking at some items on eBay that were so hideous, they were fabulous. Top of the list: a set of gift mugs to give as a set or, perhaps, parcel out to your best buddies. With shots of sunsets and forest at sunlight and the inscriptions: faith, hope, inspiration and tolerence (sic: I actually preferred it with the spelling mistake, somehow - but then I am a crashing snob sometimes). How would it be if you took this concept and made each mug in a metal - thus someone, say, gets gold for their charity as a friend. Which then begs the question: would the girlfriend who, say, got silver or, God forbid, tin, know what to say? You take it from there.

Now let's see what is in in today's haul of texts in Lola's inbox.

Thank you to Batgirlbob at www.flickr.com for the image

Elijah; Isaac.

2010-06-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

Inspired by T.S. Eliot's 'Marina' and Shakespeare's Pericles.

"I am wild in my beholding."

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, scene 22 line 208. (The text is reconstructed and is unique in Shakespeare's plays in being laid out only in scenes not in acts and scenes.)

What lost worlds, what grey days, what sea water lapping at my toes, wishing to be warm? What calling - through what I do not know, cannot see, will never see and will always ache to know? The call of my child: urgent, hungry and entirely self centred, though learning to look outward.

What voice I thought I always knew, what granite words to say you would not come. But here you are. Calling to me, insistent and growing.

My sons.

Oh yes: I write in very different styles. If you want to see the stimulation for this little piece, just google T.S. Eliot now and find 'Marina.' She is the daughter of Pericles .Eliot's poem is set at the point, near the end of the play for Shakespeare, where Pericles is reconciled to his child, thought lost. At sea. See the significance of the name?

Crummy Mummy OR diary extract of a very bad girl

2010-06-17T03:26:00.000-07:00

On the shelf in the boys' school, there was a book of this title. On the cover, there was a mortified-looking boy and a mother with rather large hair and wearing bright colours. "Oh - that'll be me, then."

Crummy mummy tried to be on top of things. This week she had helped with the collection of items for a Japanese garden and put together an outfit for her 6 year old's 'French' parade and song ( having daubed "Je suis un rock star" on the back of it, she recanted and made a more sober version, having surmised that one of her son's teachers might not approve). Then she had gone through the younger child's road safety booklet after the visit from the man with the amusing name (it wasn't quite Dr Goodhead -as in the Bond film- but it was close enough to make her snigger). Junior told her there were just a couple of things he didn't understand.

"What are those, darling?"

"The things about crossing the road."

Great. Between them, crummy mummy and Dr Goodhead had some work to do.

The children had a fist fight before leaving the house.

"I hate you!"

"You smell! and the cats like me more than you! I wish you was never my brother EVER and I saw you NAKED!"

"Raaaaaaaa!"

Lunge. Hair pull. "HE STARTED IT AND HE STEALED MY MATCH ATTAX FOR HIS OWN!"

The Japanese garden again. Crummy mummy hurriedly shoved her bamboo sprig in someone's green bin on the school run when she saw other children's magnificent glossy foliage.

Spellings. "I'm on it, miss!"

Japanese technological products in the home homework. Check. A moment of misunderstanding, though, had seen the inclusion of a book of Haiku on the list.

Pillowcases for 6 year old for an as yet unidentified future task. Check - including one of the two for another crummy mummy who did not keep surplus white pillowcases. "Whoa!" said crummy mummy: "I am getting ahead, here." But that was before she discovered that she had been supposed to provide a Japanese costume for the next day.

Another homework just discovered: back to the road safety booklet and the work of Dr Goodhead. This was an altogether weightier tome to be studied by older child. Plus, if he successfully completed the next week's road safety outing, he got a certificate. Crummy Mummy noted that she might not have worded it quite like that. Then, her eye fell upon a grammar error and two spelling mistakes on some correspondence and she felt the red pen urge, then was ashamed because she had nothing to be on a high horse about. Especially, as one of her friends pointed out, she had accidentally worn a cleavage-exposing dress the previous week and made a twit of herself. Accidentally, that is, because crummy mummy - unlike the sleeker yummier mummies in the playground - had not noticed the popping off of two buttons and subsequent, slightly slapstick exposure of breasts in the key stage one area.

Crummy mummy shuffled off home, to practise (note to educational establishment: practice with a c is a noun; with an s it is a verb) mummy skills with the help of a book . On the doorstep there was a dead frog; it was next to a spider crab shell. The shell had been intended for the Japanese garden material; the dead frog was unrelated but a present from the cat. Inside the house, she found a letter that she had meant to read the previous night: it said that school dinner money was in arrears and the now unable to feed your child bit was underlined twice in red biro. But it was a fine sunny day and crummy mummy heard a toddler wailing and a blustering mother trying and failing to keep her cool somewhere beyond the back of the house. She felt a bit better - even got to thinking that, if she did manage to tuck her dress into her knickers on school run today, it was hardly the end of the world. And they were very nice knickers, purchased recently when some well- meaning friends told her that her lingerie was threadbare. See, crummy mummies are crummy in other areas, too.

The bookshelf

2010-06-16T03:26:00.000-07:00

The online photo archive, Flickr, is awash with people who colour code their books. They had, she noted, given them cheerful, jubilant titles such as 'cornucopia of books' or 'rainbow books.' In a way, it appealed, so she had a go at doing the same. Thus orange began making towers of Penguin texts. And then - serendipitous!- she saw that the Wisden Cricketers' Almanacks were already done. With a frisson of excitement, she turned to other colours. Hmmm: a subtle change: how might one grade and sequence pink and purple books? Let's have a look. So, we ended up with William Faulkner next to a googly-eyed children's book on strange birds (actually: now I look at this shelf in the picture - I am charmed by the diversity of the stuff in our house - author) and texts by Sylvia Plath and William Empson. She felt niggled, though. The shelves and their arrangement did not have the neat appeal of the rainbow books on the Flickr gallery. But plough on.

Black books. Penguin Classics, naturally.A few others would fit in here. Malory's Morte D'Arthur next to the late Benazir Bhutto's first autobiography, Daughter of the East. But she was running out of time and put the rest off until tomorrow. Twenty shelves were done. Productive work.

Later that day, Susie happened to come into the study.

"That thing with the books. We'll have to get you out of that", she said. Not, then, "What lovely colours!" Susie sniggered quietly and left the room.

But our book shuffler felt on top of things; controlled; co-ordinated - despite nothing being quite as neat as the blueprints offered by the internet rainbow artists.

Her husband came home; he looked but said nothing. He looked again. And said nothing very loudly.

And the following day, there it was. A dark purple book in the midst of a sort of sea colour melange (because, as she went on, the urge to think in areas of the colour spectrum rather than pure tones became more compelling). She had not put it there, a book by the Southern author Robert Penn Warren, against a diary and a book on Methodism; cocking a snook, she thought, at the green of Lord of the Rings. It went on.

He said "I cannot ******* find anything."

She stood back. It was true. And a lesson was learned. If you have a lot of books, adopting this approach is not befitting. It's also not, as a general rule, clever, funny or remotely sexy. With apologies to the keepers of the rainbow books, it is not for her - however much she might like it to be so.

On happiness (subtitled The Ball Jar)

2010-06-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

Flora was a melancholy soul, always keeping busy to avoid feeling sad and thinking that, if she sat still, trouble would somehow come. This was a habit so ingrained it was difficult to shift now. But of course, it is a mistake and made many times. But, maybe, this way madness lies, so let her reflect on her summer garden and, most of all, upon one still life that seemed to have arranged itself in one corner of the kitchen: summer flowers, her grandmother's jug and the Ball preserving jars that refracted sea light across the cool white kitchen. And for that quiet moment, happiness came - stealing upwards from the toes and taking its course.

There is no more to say, but I am sure you will know what she means.

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(And a note - yes I was thinking of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, in the title of today's story.The pictures are all mine and taken yesterday in my kitchen and front garden.)

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Dear readers: we are having a few techie problems with both layout and feeds to Facebook and twitter. Hopefully soon to be resolved!

And the funds have gone up further!

2010-06-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

Right, just done some sums and, with the writeathon, Saturday's little Indian tea party fund raiser and donations within the last hour, we have now raised £446. So, with gift aid, that's hitting the £500 mark. Just shows what we can do with three weeks' work if we put our minds to it!

And only another 80 stories to go. Keep reading as and when you can.

THANK YOU.

The image above was taken in Calcutta (oops Kolkata) by Subhodev (check out his work at www.flickr.com). It's just a work bench or table and stools; a little observation. And I like it.

Atmospheric disturbance in a vacuum

2010-06-14T03:31:00.000-07:00

This is for Fabian, who suggested the title for a story in a spirit of devilment, I think. Ha! He thinks he has me beaten! O.k. I confess that I am going for an offbeat approach here and that Fabian may consider this cheating. So, if he would like, I will write more on a later date on vacuums proper as one studies them in Physics.

But for now....

Henry had put in many valuable years of service and had, on occasion, felt himself treated rather roughly. I say, "himself" because it is hard to refer to something with a face as "it", which is, of course, what the manufacturers had been aiming at. That the anthropomorphism would take place and Henry, with his rounded sides, squat body and cheerful grin, would become part of the family.

Henry could tolerate carpets and, occasionally, stone dust. One one occasion, he had had to suffer a stiff and very dead frog, whose legs protruded menacingly from the end of his hose. "Look! Henry ate a killed frog!" said one of the young children. The shame. It was, though, his owner's attempt to emulate the chimney sweep and do a little light removal of chimney debris that probably did for him. He had suffered disturbance in the makings of his vacuum mechanisms before, but this caused a cough. Three days later, further disturbance. One rug too many and -Bang! Henry was no more. Unfixable. His engine removed, his hose and all its accoutrements given to people who liked spare parts and who wanted to recondition their own Henrys. He just sat there, de-boned, stripped and disembowelled. It was tragic.

A new Henry came: lighter, sleeker, altogether more dashing. "I hate him" thought he.

Worse, the children were happy. "Another Henry, but don't throw the old one out!" But what point in existence was there?

What could he do, though? His finely calibrated inner atmosphere thrown and his workings given to the dogs. But then the children asked: "Henry is sad. Can we keep him? You can't take him to the tip - he's got a face!" and a thought occurred.

Henry has had a second incarnation, Fabian. You can see him, above. He has been stuffed (so no longer empty and thus not a vacuum -- ha ha), patched up with gaffer tape and is now a kind of wheelie toy for two young boys, who scoot downhill on him at speed. So, you see, he's happy. And if there is a moral to this tale, it is two fold.1: that one can rise, phoenix-like, from trauma, atmospheric disturbance or, actually, explosion and, 2: that you always get a second chance.One just has to be imaginative sometimes and think laterally. For you? No problems. And thus ends the tale of Henry and the atmospheric disturbance in a vacuum.
x

Erratum. Squid.

2010-06-14T01:51:00.001-07:00

I am advised by one S Langley and second eldest son that squid actually have three hearts and not two (see 'One beak and two hearts'). Also, that your average punter may not know that the mouth area of a squid is called a beak. x

The jar

2010-06-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

For Claudia - my mother in law. From Bristol, Virginia to Florence, South Carolina, to Atlanta, Georgia and full circle to Lexington and Virginia again - just like she wanted. Love you (but won't be actually saying that out loud because, well, I'm British and funny like that). xxx

A Ball preserving jar, in its original lucent aquamarine beauty, lay in a flea market in Virginia. It was tucked into a somewhat scruffy area of kitchenalia and vintage aprons, but it was pale beauty and the colour of the best sea glass and Flora wanted it at once. After that, she bought them everywhere she could in the South and took them home, where the sea light from them reflected a subtle light on the stone around her kitchen windows. Or she gave them to friends, who filled them with glass marbles and treasures - always remembering to set them in the light, she said, because of the watery sea colour and the delicacy of the embossed script: Ball. Perfect Mason, they said.

The jars she had bought, stallholders told her, were mostly 1950s and bought from house and farm clearances over the South. What might a Virginian farmer's wife of that time have thought of Flora's collecting these jars, supposed to be tough and practical and used for preserving? Exactly what her own mother would have thought, Flora decided: that if something is lovely and practical, it does not stop one from noticing its beauty. Her own grandmother used to pause before she shut the door of her huge Somerset larder just so that she could admire the big jars of pickled eggs and onions and cabbage and the preserved damsons, apples and plums from the trees in their garden. The satisfaction of good housekeeping. And what if the jars themselves were glowing, too?

To see the jars in a Wiltshire or a Welsh kitchen made her husband happy. Because they were the jars of his childhood, in which grandmothers in South Carolina would preserve their vegetables. Flora longed to see a Southern pantry of these jars, all filled up with, maybe, bread and butter pickles. But she wondered if they showed their fine colour, all used as their makers intended, but housed in a cool and shadowy room. So she compromised. Today, half the jars are in the kitchen window, with the shafts of light cutting through them; the others house pickles. Watermelon this time of year, in honour of the place that made them.

Ball still makes the jars. These days they are clear and a little more square and a little less sensuous and you can buy them for a few dollars in Walmart. Flora won't be buying any of those.

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Note from author: yes, I do collect these jars, as I do kitchen items and aprons from the Southern United States.

Ker ching! Look what we done

2010-06-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

Today's little 'Indian tea party' event raised £246.40, which, with the funds already raised by this writing project - plus gift aid reclaimed will make over £400. I am aiming for £500 by the end of August as a minimum. Do you think we'll get there?

THANK YOU!

One beak and two hearts.

2010-06-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Now, this is a curious title but it arose from a conversation earlier.About squid. I agreed to write a story with the title above because, I am told - I have yet to verify this - that squid have two hearts (interesting) and because the sentence had caught my attention.But squid are thought to be clever creatures, especially the giant sort, so here we go.

To Claire, then. And to all overlooked cephalopods. Now, I may be having a funny turn here, but I thought I would knock out a sad little tale that verges, linguistically, on Mills and Boon (which obviously doesn't have squid in it). xxx

ONE BEAK AND TWO HEARTS

I am a gentle sort of fellow. But when aroused to great passion, I fell. And I fell hard. She took my beak tenderly in hers and caressed it, told me that I was hers, that she could not tell where I ended and she began. Afterwards, we lay entwined in each others' arms amongst the beds of kelp and I could not believe it was true.

But oh: cruel cruel. In time, she seemed distracted, avoided my eye, would not hold the tentacle I offered up to her, telling her that I would understand - that even if she loved me less than before, my love for her would go on. That I could even tolerate having her love me less than I loved her. I shamed myself at her beautiful, sucky feet.

There was someone else, of course. Her head was turned. The things she had said? Just bubbles in the deep, but still I could not help but love her. And she? She had only ever given me back a single heart for my double and would forget me all too soon.

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(I've tinkered slightly with a quotation from Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing, here: it is when Beatrice refers to lending Benedick her heart for a while and receiving back only a single for the double she had given him...And I cannot believe I have tears in my eyes while reading this. About squid.)

A little more specific information

2010-06-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

If you have donated to my writing project or would like to, I'm just sending this to you now. The place where I am going in the autumn - and for which I will take funds - is a school. Take a look at these brief notes to see what a donation might buy.

http://www.thee-acharity.org.uk/EA_Project_4.htm

This was the fourth project in a line set up by the Elizabeth-Ann Charity. Note figures! You can also follow the full range of projects through the link from the top of the page.

Thank you all,

Anna xx

On being a teacher

2010-06-11T06:39:00.000-07:00

For Katie. Because I think you care a great deal about what you do.

The old woman sat on the train, dozing in the warmth of the day as they travelled through the Cambridgeshire countryside. Her book was at her side, for she was never without a book. Generally, she had three books open by the bed because it was so hard to decide to follow one; downstairs, it was the same story. By her side on the train a book she hadn't looked at for a while but felt compelled to bring with her today: The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. MacNeice had been a favourite of hers at university but, much to her dismay, was scoffed at by some of dons who considered him a lightweight - poor cousin to Auden. Shoddy classicist! Kind of Anglo-Irish literature pretender! But that didn't matter now. She dozed and let the ruminating thought settle.

A younger man was walking in her direction down the train; he must have been in his sixties to her eighties. She happened to open her eyes and wondered where she had seen him before; she could see that her recognised her immediately. Then,

"Miss Williams? Is that you? Hello. Do you remember me?"

This made her start. She hadn't been Miss Williams for a long time now. A memory formed. The man was once a boy - a boy from one of her classes. She couldn't quite remember his name amongst all the thousands of students she had taught and dragged through literature and grammar and parts of speech and all those seemingly unfashionable things that people don't bother with these days. The semi colon! The subordinate clause! Ha!

"It's John, Miss. I was the annoying one in year 11. You know: the one who always drew rude cartoons of you - always having to see the Head? "

Memory formed and reformed and she had placed him: "Of course. And it's Anna. Not Miss. How nice to see you."

They didn't speak for long as the train was about to halt and John explained he would have to get off at the next stop, but he told her some things. That he still doodled -"Good for my arthritis these days!", was still a rebel of sorts and that, above all, he read. Everything he could get his hands on - but most of all, poetry. It was hunkered down in there so deeply now, he could recite reams at will.

"Never knew I had it in me, Miss - um, Anna."

He would turn to it when sad, when celebrating, looking for an answer or just at odds with the world.

"This is my stop: it was really good to see you again. And, well, thank you. Thank you."

She sat and pondered on this. It had felt so often with syllabus and curriculum and telling off and - the word she detested - relevance - that this was a strange old world to be in. What good could you do? On the train she had an answer, of course: the good of what she might have done was not quantifiable immediately; might not show up until years later but, with patience and care, you just had to trust that it would.

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A note from me: I worry that this story sounds trite. But it is pretty much how I feel about teaching English - especially literature. That our response to poetry, in particular, may be both visceral and intellectual. If what we read is any good, of course. And one other point: the story is true. It happened to me and to a teacher older than me. In the former case, in meeting a student; in the latter, when the teacher whose work I have admired enormously met his former teacher (one was 60, the other in his mid 80s) and told him that he read, he remembered and he was grateful. Uh oh: down come the tears in quite a deluge. I will sign off.

The photo was taken in the library of St John's Colleg, Cambridge by Ben Gallagher (www.flickr.com). Thank you to him and thank you Alma mater.

Taj Mahal

2010-06-10T02:37:00.000-07:00

The Taj Mahal was built, as you may know, as an extravagant mausoleum for and monument to Mumtaz, beloved wife of Shah- Jahan, Mughal Emperor of India. Mumtaz died with their birth of their fourteenth child and Shah Jahan began his building a year after her death.

See it at dawn as it rises from mist and dust and gradually comes into sharp relief beside the sluggish Yamuna river over there to its side. See this place later in the day as the crowds amass, cluttering the symmetry of the pools and paths as you approach. It glows, but go closer and look also at the detail inlaid, at the flowers made from semi precious stones pressed in to the white marble by the twenty thousand workers who took twenty two years to build it. And the most pressing thing about it might not be its numinous beauty, but the reason why it was built. The tombs lie side by side inside the centre, in an area plain by contrast in keeping with belief - because this is what is appropriate in the heart of the mausoleum, however extraordinary the outside. An here, where the tombs lie, is the heart of it all, shadowy and cool and reverent.

If you cannot yourself, ask someone to read for you the inscriptions from the Qur'an that are inscribed throughout the complex. On the Great Gate it says

"Oh Soul, thou art at rest.
Return to the Lord at peace with Him and He at peace with you."

Think on. The Emperor himself wrote that

"Should guilty seek asylum here
Like one pardoned
He becomes free from sin."

He conceived it as a resting place, a place of cleansing and also, you might say, as a testament to a belief that what will survive of us is love. That he could, as the poet Rabindranath Tagore has it, "conquer time's heart/Through beauty."

And from Tagore's 'Shah-Jahan',

"Poet-Emperor,
This is your heart's picture,
Your new Megaduta,
Soaring with the marvellous, unprecedented melody and line
Towards the unseen plane
On which your loverless beloved
And the first glow of sunrise
And the last sigh of sunset
And the disembodied beauty of moonlit cameli-flower
And the gateway on the edge of language
That turns away man's wistful gaze again and again
Are all blended.
This beauty is your messenger:
Skirting time's sentries
To carry the wordless message:
'I have not forgotten you, my love, I have not forgotten you.' "

The flowers at the top and above show details in carving at the Taj Mahal. Both courtesy of Christian Haugen at Flickr under creative commons licence (thank you) and taken at 7 a.m. Can you detect the pink glow on the stone at this time? That's why you go and visit it day and night - to see how it changes with the light. Thank you Christian for the other picture, giving us an idea - though perhaps we should not idealise who the Emperor was or what he did in his rule - of the scale of his vision and purpose.

Not Waving but Drowning

2010-06-09T08:26:00.000-07:00

Here is the text of the Stevie Smith poem of this title. And, below that, your second Stevie Smith-inspired story of the day. It is a little sad, so should I preface it with a thought that we might always ask someone how they are and pause before and after their response? I expect Stevie Smith might tell me I was taking this too seriously.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning;
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving, but drowning.

Stephen lived a simple kind of life; pleasant place to live, nice wife - nothing spectacular, but homely and something to be thankful for: both the home and the wife. Went to work, did well: again, nothing spectacular, but reliable. Good old Stephen, they said - and always thanked him heartily at the staff Christmas party. He never quite got promoted, though. Kids came along; usual ups and downs; things went, he thought, tolerably well and he loved his girls, though sometimes he might have wished for boys. Holidays in a nice spot; savings and annuities; mortgage paid up well in advance of retirement because of his diligence.

And all the time, he smiled. At the neighbours; at the tetchy mother in law; waved his daughters off to new homes and college and husbands; he wanted to please and had been brought up so to do. And exhaustively so. But inside? Well, you've guessed, I expect, that there was more to it than this for nobody is so uncomplicated. Every now and then he would have an unsettling feeling; a catching in the throat; sort of strange cascading feeling inside. Then a tightness in the throat. He wanted to call to someone that it was an emergency - but of what kind? No-one was hurt, all was well and, as I said, he was grateful. If he were the man swimming way out at sea, you might look at him from your place on the beach and think he was larking about, waving at you, inviting you to come out, too. The water's lovely. But the truth was, he was drowning. And always had been. And nobody knew it.

Text of poem. Copyright Stevie Smith 1903-1971.

Inspired by Miss Smith. Today two stories fror the price of one.

2010-06-09T03:06:00.000-07:00

I take the title and inspiration for this first story from Stevie Smith's poem, 'Croft.' I will not claim it is a work of genius (or is it?) but I expect you might remember it for a while; the second story is inspired by another poem by Smith, 'Not Waving but Drowning.'

Dedicated to some poetic ladies: Sarah, Katie, Kate, Susie, Susan, Vicky, Janet and Izzy the small dog. I'm glad you all came to my poetry classes -- a marathon from November to June. Thank you.

Aloft

In the loft,

Sits Croft;

He is soft.

Poor old Croft. The fool on the hill - laughed at as a child by the other boys because, not only was he a bit slow at his work but, well, he had two left feet when it came to playing football. Still, though, his mother shed a tear for him and, well, Croft plugged on. This boy was gauche socially, never quite made it with the girls when he was a teenager, but he was brave enough to ask them out anyway. Even if the less sweet ones snickered while he blushed and wished he could run away. And again his mother shed a tear for him; his father, by the way, said nothing and carried on with his woodworking and Croft, all fingers and thumbs, tried to help him. Poor Old Croft. Sometimes he wanted to shed a tear, too. But he just plugged away, getting the measurements wrong and getting in the way. And then, eventually, he was all grown up and sitting up there in the loft of the barn.

Ah, but reader, that's not where it ends. Did you think that he had nothing but lazy feet and a fuzzy head? It's all in the plugging away and the kind tear of a devoted mother. My goodness, how it hurt her to see him fail in the eyes of others. But then, can you picture him sitting up there in the loft? Croft built that barn, you see; got there in the end. And it was beautiful and all the more so for its integral flaws, hard to avoid for soft Croft. And it lasted and lasted. The barn is still there. And Croft isn't really the silly boy-man to be laughed at. Remember that the fool on the hill might be the one who sees the world in its clearest, most luminous state and that, one day, he might get the girl, too. Tenderly, in the soft hay of the loft.

P.S: if you happened to find Stevie Smith's drawing to go with this poem, you'd see she had thought of something else! So, I'll leave that one to you.

poem copyright Stevie Smith: 1903-1971.

Blinkie the wandering rabbit

2010-06-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know: yesterday we had a scene of domestic tetchiness; today we have a story about a rabbit with a sweet name. But I did say that, if anyone requested a story on something, I would promise to respond. The rabbit is a real one, belongs to Rosie ( who is a year 10 GCSE student) and she is bigger than one of our cats. (The rabbit and obviously Rosie, too.) Also, I noticed that she has HUGE feet (the rabbit, not Rosie)..so...

The cautionary tale of Blinkie the wandering rabbit.

Blinkie was not like the other rabbits of one's acquaintance. Oh no. SHE was bigger and stronger and rather more cunning, although it took her owner a long while to realise this. Oh yes - and she had strong legs and great big feet. These she would use well in her adventures, along with the fact that she was coal-black and surprisingly stealthy for one so, well, rabbity large.

A day like any other. Blinkie's routine involved a good scratch first thing, a bit of a lollop round her 'eglu' - for she was a refined sort of rabbit and had a sort of chic lime green run, rather than a home made of wood slats and wire mesh, though she could have done without the chicken association: Blinkie knew all poultry to be stupid. Couldn't they at least make it look more like a rabbit dwelling? Today was going to be different, though. Because, when she was let out of her eglu and into the bright sunlight of the summer garden, she was going to spend some time hatching (chickens: again!) a plan. Today she was hell-bent on some particularly spectacular rebellion.

So, after the greens and the scratch and the morning cuddle with her owner and rub underneath the chin, she sat and thought. Or rather she sat and thought while chewing through the lower levels of the clematis montana and a couple of geranium plants. How could she have an adventure today? She thought all day as she scampered about. Then "That's it!"

Night fell. A visitor came for her owner in a car. Now or never. In a flash, Blinkie was out in the street, nipping under the side gate and in a flash she was in the car of the visitor. How opportune. Even managed to pinch a bit of money from the car's cash box before she settled down to hide in the back seat. Just before she eyeballed the child's booster seat in the front passenger seat of this conveniently compact car, that is. And so, later, when the visitor got back into the vehicle and settled herself down, turning the key in the ignition...Blinkie reared up on her giant feet and did her best the-evil-one-in-Watership-Down-impression. "Raaaaaaaaa!" Never had humankind shifted so quickly, she thought. "What a sight I must have been, hurtling towards her in the driving mirror!"

Of course, the keys were in the ignition, the car was running and it was the work of a moment to shift the child's booster seat to the driver's side. With a stretch of her absurdly long legs, Blinke could just get to the gas. So, without a moment to spare, she was off. While the owner of the car hyperventilated in the street with her back to her

So where first? Spend some cash. Lettuce! To the supermarket (she wasn't daft and knew that the grocer's would be closed.) Now, you would think that they might not take her cash but, dear reader, your food conglomerates will take cash from anyone. So, ignoring the stares and open mouths, Blinkie sallied forth and bought her lettuce, pausing also to buy a few more adventurous greens, such as a bit of pak choi. What? Does anyone want to eat the same leaves every day?

Now, for a giggle: "I need some stuff to go in the 'eglu' and some paint." So, some beach balls (Blinkie knew herself to be dandy with her moves), exterior gloss paint, a boules set (do rabbits not need stimulation?) and, oh, a pint of beer! All were duly purchased, apart from the beer. She did have a conscience of sorts and knew not to drive after having after a drink. So, parking as neatly as a big black rabbit can, she tottered into the local pub and pointed to a local brew. She stretched out on a bar stool. People were staring, of course, but Blinkie could take it. And the funny thing was that she noticed some of the gentlemen in the pub give her sideways and then somewhat lingering looks. For yes: Blinkie --with her debonair stance and her glossy black fur- was a hit with the gents. They moved towards her, tickled her chin and admired her lovely coat, bought her drinks and she listened attentively and sensitively to what they told her. You know: things their wives just didn't understand; how they were bored, under-valued. Without speaking - because everybody knows that rabbits cannot speak human language- she made them feel like gods rather than workaday men..

Time to go.Our Blinkie patted the behinds of the gentlemen, gave them a low wolf whistle and they giggled and told how they had really enjoyed having someone listen to and appreciate them. You might say she was stringing them along, but Blinkie had no intention of exchanging phone numbers or anything. After all, it is a commonly known fact that rabbits will listen to human males but fall in love only with boy rabbits. But onwards!

Feeling a little light headed, Blinkie made her way home, remembering to remove the keys from the car and dragging the haul of shopping behind her. Returning home eventually, tired but glorious. Now, the house was in darkness, but Blinkie got to work: lay out the assorted leaves as a culinary hint for her owners (do I want iceberg every day, then? I should cocoa!), put the toys in a prominent position in the run (look! I too need diverse play and entertainment) and, finally, doing a DIY job so that the embarrassing 'eglu' sign (how the rabbits in the neighbourhood laughed at this!) was painted out, to be replaced with 'Blinkie: wererabbit, adventurer and hit with the boyz."

And so to bed, having thoughtfully thrown the keys through the letterbox. Blinkie knew she was a fine wandering rabbit. And what would tomorrow bring? Come to think of it: she could hear a little soft weeping from one of the bedrooms. Was it for her? A presumed missing rabbit. She'd like to be sympathetic, but just maybe she could turn this to her advantage....?

To be continued.

Rosie: I hope you liked this. Written in 20 minutes.

Thanks to Giosa Chivas for 'black rabbit' at www.flickr.com

Coming tomorrow: Blinkie the wandering rabbit. For Rosie!

2010-06-07T12:49:00.001-07:00

She said, he said.

2010-06-07T04:15:00.000-07:00

A salutary tale: reader make of this what you will.

She said "It's not like it used to be."

He said "That's because you're always critical so I tense up around you."

She said "Nobody else says I'm critical; maybe you just give me things to be critical about."

He said "And you're surprised I go quiet around you?"

She said "Well I didn't introduce the 'critical' thing; you're the one who brought it up."

Then he said "And your tone of voice is critical; you're always angry and irritated with me."

So she said "That's because you withdraw from me."

To which he said "We are going round in circles here."

So to change the subject and lighten the mood she said "And I'm really worried about the children. Do you think they are o.k.?"

Which elicited "They'll be more o.k. if you stop worrying about them."

Which prompted "Are you saying that I've caused them to behave like this?"

To which he rallied "I didn't say that, really."

To which rejoinder she added "What do you mean by really?"

So he said "I don't know: it's just a word."

Which she parodied as "Just a word; just a word."

Which he threw right back at her as "Sarcastic! Sarcastic!"

And she countered with "Words are important, you know. Modifiers; tags. Why do you have to be sloppy?"

Which caused the parrying of "I am not a child or some kind of linguistics student!"

To which she said "If you were a linguistics student maybe you would choose words and phrases more carefully? Some kind of linguistics student, for example?"

Well, they had a parrot in the room, these two. And to their shame, the parrot learned to, well, parrot what they said right back at them. It made them flinch and squirm and people would come into the house and say

"Oh - what an unpleasant parrot."

To which he said....

Picture of a blue hydrangea in autumn. Still beautiful stripped of its former vibrancy, I think.

The man in the mirror

2010-06-06T11:38:00.000-07:00

This story is dedicated to Sophie. "If you were a president, you'd be Babebraham Lincoln."

Poor Rhea. She was a lovely girl who had fallen on hard times.She had lots of sisters and, of all of them, she was quite the jolliest. She told great stories. She was funny and vivacious and her laugh was contagious. Unfortunately, though, the mistress in whose service she lived was very cross with her. With her chatter, her jokes and her cheerful temperament, she had been deliberately employed to distract her mistress from the fact that her husband, shall we say, played away. Or sometimes just to distract her mistress from jealous musings and hot temper. When, one day, the mistress found out she had been duped, she mistress looked for revenge - although Rhea was, sadly, only the scapegoat.

I told you that Rhea loved to talk. Well, her punishment from her mistress -who had the devil and sorcery in her when she was in the worst of funks - was that she would be struck dumb. A song, a joke, a story might be for ever on her lips, but she could not share. Instead, the most tiresome thing ever: she would simply only be able to repeat the last words she had heard spoken. So, Rhea, while able to use her voice, could only imitate. She left her band of sisters and went, with a melancholy beyond words, to live all alone. She lived, I think, amongst the trees on the high slopes of the mountain.

One day, though, a fine looking man was hunting with his friends amongst these trees. he got separated from them and was disoriented and quite, quite lost. Rhea saw him and was spellbound: he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. She was spirited away; time stood still and nothing else mattered. And for a moment, she even forgot the wicked punishment meted out to her by her nasty former mistress.

Ah, but reader. The fine face can hide a cruel and self-interested interior. Where there is little kindess or admiration for the kindness, wit or imagination of others: only a delight in oneself.. Ascanius had grown up pleasing himself and, because he loved only himself, he had never felt what Rhea felt now. So Ascanius wandered and Rhea followed him at a distance. Eventually, he began to look a little unsettled:

"Where are you?" he shouted.

Of course, Rhea had no choice to but to copy him. He heard her, of course.

"Who are you?"

She echoes back

"Answer me!"

Oh, the painful irony of this. He could never answer her: never give what she would be able to give. Joy and life and..

"I told you: answer me!"

She could hear the anger in his voice. He accused her to her face of being a temptress and of mocking him. Rhea was in tears. His words came thick and fast, ever more cruel and Rhea - while she repeated these awful words back, bitter and repugnant to her - lay on the moss and cried.

I hadn't told you how beautiful Rhea was.She would have taken away your breath. I have heard of people like that. Even wished that, one day, I could be like that for someone. Haven't you? Think about this old Urdu poem "In love there is no difference between life and death:/ We live by gazing on the face that takes away our breath" Yes, think about that for a while? You would have fallen in love with Rhea, even though you might have found a bit of a chatterbox sometimes. Ascanius, though, did not see her beauty. While she was dumb in her way; in his, he was blind. Because what happened next was this.

Eventually, Ascanius stopped insulting her. Not because he had no more mean things to say, but because he was worn out. So he lay down and, yes, his breath was taken. Because he looked into a clear mountain pool as he rested and saw what was for him the most beautiful face he had ever seen. And he fell immediately and hopelessly in love - not with Rhea, of course, but with the reflection that he had been yet to see: his own. He stretched out his arms to the face in the pool, spoke sweetly and, of course, the handsome reflection whispered back in the voice of Rhea, ending in an "I love you." How those words hurt Rhea. Ascanius tried time and time again to hold the figure in the pool, clasp him and bring him closer. He looked and looked, and cried and the figure cried back, giving back to him what he gave himself. They were now, he thought, inseparable. And, in time, Ascanius became desparate and threw himself into the pool to catch his loved one. In the depths there were only stones and choking weed and darkness and his own death.

So he was gone and Rhea, bound to him still, could not save him. I heard that she simply wasted away as she longed for him. We can see how futile this was and how unworthy he was, but we don't always make wise choices, we know. We might think with longing for others who can never return our love. Maybe you could go to that mountain and try to talk to Rhea; tell her that you are there and that you understand, maybe? She would answer you back, though, because while her body is gone, she is still doomed to wander and echo back what we say. But you would be company and understanding for her and, maybe, when the light is dappled and the shadows lengthen, you might just catch the shadow of a beautiful girl...

Nobody ever found the body of our vain and unkind man, who had fallen in love only with himself, but people from this part of the world say that flowers sprang up around the pool where he drowned and where Rhea mourns him -although only in her fleeting and shadowy self - to this day. It is a shame that sometimes love chooses us and we seem powerless. Most important, though: do not think yourself the centre of the known world but also do not, however swept away, think this of another. I promise you that it will not end well.

A retelling of the story of Echo and Narcissus. I won't say that again.

HIRAETH

2010-05-31T02:28:00.000-07:00

In the Welsh language, the word hiraeth, is, he thought, most beautifully defined as longing. His whole family - at least those whom he knew or who wanted to know him - were from Wales, scattered from Kidwelly, to Neath, Cardiff and thereabouts, Aberdare, Newport and, beyond the Lanskaer line to the little England beyond Wales - which is what you say to annoy a Pembrokeshire native.

And it was longing. When you were there and most of all, when you were not. John had been brought up in Somerset, a little lonely, really - something missing; part of the puzzle. An introverted young man, he was thought a bit prudish by his contemporaries at teacher training college, but, in a a moment of uncharacteristic, boldness, he had proposed to the first woman he fell in love with. She, he thought, was the most beautiful girl he had ever clapped eyes on. They married just after leaving college, to the disgust of his family. Too hasty; she was pregnant, too. "If you want your furniture", said his mother, better come and get it sharpish because your father's having a clear out."

John didn't criticise. He did, however, feel a shift. That longing thing again. Time to go.

So, with Mary, his new wife, they shifted across the river Severn. John found a job in mid Wales and, eventually, in Pembrokeshire. Mary, in the bosom of her large and shambling family, had her baby and was able, with their help, to take her first teaching post at Wiston, in Pembrokeshire, when there was still a school there. It wasn't a complicated life, but he could see the Prescelli hills beyond the school, watch the mist come down all of a sudden and walk out to St David's Head and be alone and still.

***********************************
So, today, it is a very short story, because I am off to Wales today. To Cardiff, Penarth, Merthyr (I'm not just speaking of what is pretty, but also of what is there and of what is), then on to the Brecon Beacons, Ceredigion and into Pembrokeshire. In a church at Walton West, above Broad Haven and gazing out at the sea, are buried two uncles, a cousin, my grandmother, my great grandmother and various other more distant relatives - all Becketts and, allowing for variant spellings, LLewelyns. And I feel it -that sense of longing - too. I was not, unlike, my family, born to it. But there is something about Wales. It is brooding, mysterious and, somehow, it feels ancient in a way that England, to me, does not. It is affecting in a haunting and entirely visceral way. That, I think, is hiraeth for me. I may not have been born in it but I am and have always been, of it.

Reader: we have to have a pause in our stories here because I am without internet connection for a few days. Perhaps you were under the impression that the whole of the U.K. had broadband connection or WiFi? Not in one little corner of our family! When I can, a batch of children's stories for you -- featuring Bethany Bluebottle -- plus some vampire stuff for 16 plus!!!

Observations upon one's grandparents. For Kate

2010-05-30T03:46:00.000-07:00

Flora's paternal grandmother lived in a wonderful late Georgian house on the edge of the Mendips. She was Elizabeth, a proud and private lady, who kept chickens and made copious preserves and pickles and Flora remembered the dark larder in which the eggs glowed in the malt vinegar in Grandma's huge preserving jars. There were jams and pickled red cabbage and the damsons and plums from the old trees around the house.

It was thought that Elizabeth didn't particularly care for folks outside the family; there was respect, then, though perhaps not liking between Flora's mother and grandma. Conversation was always confined to cooking and cottage garden plants and then silence. Flora had no memory of her mother ever visiting grandma beyond her early childhood. And certainly no memory of Grandma ever visiting Flora in her own house. This made her sad. A sort of lingering, quiet sadness which there was no point at all in sharing. It was just the way things were.

Flora's grandfather, Reg, was a tall, handsome man. Big working hands, broad shoulders like Flora's father. A man, again, of few words, but with lots of jobs for Flora. Pick the fruit, some dahlias - in his garden, all the plants stood to attention when he walked among them - check the chickens, go into the huge walled vegetable garden and pick peas and broad beans, climb the tree and get some prize plums. Don't want to waste them. 50p pressed into your hand wordlessly as you got into the car to go home.

She loved to visit this part of her family but, as an introspective child, knew there was little to say and that they liked to see her, but would never, ever dandle her on their knee. Just the way things were. There was silence around what Flora knew to be sad things in the family: of death and separation and cancer and blindness and things involving tempers and people not being able to get out of bed. This unsettled Flora as a child and teenager, but as an adult she respected its dignity. When, over an eight year period of losing both grandparents, her father, her godmothers (one, her father's beloved and gregarious sister - the unusual girl in the family) and her mother, her remaining aunts and uncles (there were six in all) gently told her that they would most likely not see her again, it didn't come as a shock. Just sad. Sad. She never saw any of them again.

And then, there was the other side of the family. The lively, bright clan from South Wales. As a child, Flora was never quite sure how many of them there were, but thought that her mother had more or less ten or eleven siblings, with some attrition and a grandmother's tale of a baby dying at the breast - the story of which always made Flora cry. Flora's grandmother was theatrical, really rather a good self-taught pianist, would have been at home in the music hall where - and she liked to remind her little granddaughter of this - she would have drawn crowds. Instead, she managed the tribe of children as they shifted through various farms across South Wales and into Pembrokeshire as tenant farmers and grandfather -whom Flora never met- came along, too. At least, that was the impression Flora had growing up. That grandfather was there, along with grandma and her mother, Nanny - who died in her own bed accompanied by a vision of the virgin Mary in the corner of the room.

Flora keeps even now a picture of her maternal grandfather on a dresser. He -Roland - looks like a movie star and has an intense and steady gaze.She always wishes she had met him; Flora's father once told her that grandpa was an intensely clever man, a fine mathemetician. She knew from her aunts that there had been flashes of dangerous temper - but never at the children. She wanted so much to understand and know more. When the last child grew up, grandfather left and went to live alone in Tenby, Pembrokeshire. If he found someone to love, we'll never know.

So, what have we left? Flora had thought it odd, when she married into a family from Georgia, in the Southern United States, that such interest was taken in family history, in genealogy and who was kin to whom. But of course, it makes sense. Kin is what you are. Not the whole of what you are, though. Experience, bitter and otherwise, teaches us that blood is not always thicker than water; that family is, frankly, a flexible construct. But, as Flora raises her own children, meets and is partially assimilated into other families -which is how it should be, she might say- she does think back two generations and has come to the conclusion that brooding of this nature is born of someone thrust into adulthood early by loss.

The painting is 'Grandmother's cheese dish'. 2010 in oils by Anna Vaught.

Down by the old Fogle house (Georgia....)

2010-05-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

In a small town in Georgia, the Spanish moss cascades from the live oaks, the red earth is soft and warm and the benches are white. At this time of year, though, the grass had begun to parch and, by midday, the frames of the branches were hot to the touch. So it was good to be in the park with your Kool-Aid, sheltering in what less scorching enclaves you could find and catching the occasional spray from the fountain when a breeze came in your direction. And you want to be there rather than at the strip, with its hot tarmac and its huge Piggly-Wiggly and CVS stores; but even more, you would maybe not want to be on the other side of the town, away from the pretty centre, where green gave way to swamp and the fetid smell caught your nostrils in the summer. At least that's what the ladies who lived on the best street said.

Down by the swamp lived old John Fogle; he had, children said, the gift of second sight and, along with his cold, hostile wife and his unfriendly brood of female offspring, did not like people to stray their way. The children were at school but chose to play together, shunning the company or Missy or Mary Lee or Claudia. Did well in school, though. Top of the class. Certainly, the other girls in the class tried hard to be friendly -- the ones, that is, whose mothers had not warned them away from the Fogle girls. The ones with the kinder, more broad minded mothers or those who wanted to rebel aganist their mothers -- for this was also a town in which mean mindedness and snobbishness tended to run rife.

Today, one young girl was determined. Betty was kind, but also intent on one day getting down to the house and looking more closely at the swamp. And she persisted.

"Can't I come home and play with y'all? Ma says it's o.k."

"No. Pa wouldn't allow it."

"Why not? I'd be real good."

"Don't matter."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. Sump'n. Nothing. Can't tell."

This enigmatic last answer was all she needed. So she told her mother that she has been invited home -and her mother allowed her because she, too, was kind and kind of curious to know about this family and, essentially, believed that they would treat right if treated right. So Betty followed.

"Go away. Pa don't like it.!

"Oh go on. You yella?"

"No. Well, if you'll go away after."

To the girls' surprise, John Fogle, who had stood up in what felt like a menacing way (Betty shuddered and regretted coming along), said that it would o.k. as long as she did not stay long. And in went Betty.

Sure, the area around the house was close to the swamp; you could smell the heavy air. But, it was also somehow exotic and beautiful and a breath of fresh air after the tight little corner of town where Betty lived. And the house was tatty, but oddly welcoming and, well, fun. Yes, fun. Like anything could happen. And Betty liked it. Gradually, the girls began to play with Betty, too. Chase and hide and go seek and, well, anything that took their fancy. And Betty met their mother who, in a startling and untidy way, was also unexpectedly beautiful.

She stayed for the evening meal, too. Basic and old fashioned, but substantial, too. And, while no-one said much, Betty realised that she had been accepted. Maybe she would be able to go back.

Next day in school, the Fogle girls continued to play together only, but they looked sideways at her even with a hint of a smile. She felt happy. It was, in its way, all rather mysterious. She wondered, too, why John Fogle looked so old: more like a grandfather or even a great grandfather than a father.

I expect you, reader, would like to know a few answers, wouldn't you? Well, the writer Carson McCullers, who came from Columbus, Georgia, wrote that she needed to return to the South from time to time to renew her sense of horror. It's not that I generalise here, you know, but do you think she had a point? Because John Fogle was not the girls' father and he did have the gift of second sight. He was the girls' great grandfather and he had, for reasons and by folks we cannot name, been preserved for his gifts. Father and grandfather? Gone. To the swamp one day. John Fogle saw what they would become. Told you that old brackish water was fetid. Not just that: it lived and breathed and did what it would do. And John Fogle was its custodian, being no murdering sort himself, exactly. Betty would be just fine because, as I told you, she was kind and looked without arrogance - only with spirit, love and curiosity at the world, in the way child and adult should. And those hoity toity mothers who lived on the best street on the other side of the park? Well, better not go the Fogle way. Swamp gonna get you.

NOTES: thanks to Ned Vaught (from Georgia and on my mind -sorry).
Piggly Wiggly is the name of a Southern chain of supermarkets.
cdsessum has piblished a number of portraits of the South at www.flickr.com Thank you to him for his generosity in making them available under creative commons at www.flickr.com

Feasting and fasting at the Great House

2010-05-28T04:27:00.000-07:00

Another creepy story -- as I've been teaching Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Gothic novels and re-reading The Turn of the Screw and The Castle of Otranto (the latter of which didn't really bear re-reading, but that's another matter). Let us begin.

The old house, in the sleepy French village, is tall and dusty looking. Once, it must have been vibrant, but now, bindweed curls around it and ivy reclaims the windows and the stone of the house. It must be hard for the quiet inhabitants to see out.

Sometimes, there is post for the house and the postboy makes a swift passage towards the door because the house alarms him. There is a housekeeper, an old crone who will not give you the time of day and, curiously, a gardener - though he never tends to the front gardens, so fallen into disrepair they must be. The villagers wonder whether there are beautiful and well tended gardens to the rear of the house.

It is said that a lady lives at the house, some say two sisters, and that they never need company. But that this is a house of shadowy presences; a place where melancholy hangs thick in the air. And at night, sometimes -in summer when the top windows of the house are opened - one hears music, from a curious assortment of instruments: flute, cello, but also mandolin and dulcimer. And an inhabitantof the village making his way home could be stopped in his tracks because the music is so extraordinarily beautiful. And even so it sends a shiver up the spine which is not so pleasant.

But today is different. People do not come and go readily in this village, but a new person has come, from the city, and he wants to enquire about the tall, great house. He thinks he might like to buy it: a retreat. It has great potential and he knows excellent architects and designers in Paris, where he lives now. He is bold, so he knocks at the door and it is answered. The rumour held true. Two women come to the door, so similar facially it is immediately clear that they are sisters. They are not beautiful, but they are arresting: striking and sensual women, with poise and grace and exquisite manners. They seem pleased to see him and -he is surprised to entertain this peculiar thought for a moment- as if they knew he were coming.

Over tea and dainty little cakes, he explains to them what it is he is looking for. They are clearly amused by something but do not elaborate. And to his delight, they indicate quite clearly that, indeed, they were thinking of it, of perhaps finding somewhere smaller because the great house is too much to manage and they realise parts of it are in a poor state of repair. They tell him that they will be in touch, that they have a solicitor in Paris who attends to matters of estate and finance for them - and so the visitor takes his leave.

So he waits and, sure enough, within weeks he hears from them again. A sum is agreed and the solicitors are instructed. Within two months, he is in the house, removing dust and grime and revealing the lovely house under the crumbling plaster and neglect. He has a lady in Paris and she becomes his wife. So taken with the house is he that he decides to move from Paris; it is a fair trip but he thinks he can make the journey once or twice a week to conduct his business. And during these times, his new wife is left lonely at home. The dream becomes more to his liking than to hers and, eventually, resentment begins to settle in the house.

And so they come to her. The two sisters who are still there for, of course, they did not move out - just retreated into the deeper recesses of darkness until they saw a purpose. The housekeeper and gardener are there, too. They will never leave because the house is alive: it is a living breathing organism and they, hungry for blood and for dim, mysterious life, are part of its darkness. The house may be trimmed and tidied and made pretty but, underneath, it will not change. And so the young wife is taken to be with them. And when her husband, upstart from Paris, comes back, he will not find her. Eventually the house and its inhabitants will claim him too. Except that his will not be a quiet taking - for the sin of presuming to buy what belonged for ever to somebody else. Something that was never for sale. And all those who live in the wings of the house and in the fine rear garden will play their music, jangle the gold of our upstart, do what cruel things they must to survive and laugh. You could hear them if you went to this village on a summer night when the music is played. But keep your pride in check.

The convergence of the twain (except we are in Bengal not mid Atlantic - as in the poem)

2010-05-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

Funny how things can happen. It's just a street and this street is full of activity and colour and frying smells and the splashes of water from the pumps and the hiss of milk from the tea stall. And there is a snack seller who sets up at dawn: there will be samose for breakfast. Today he has made gol guppas - little round wafers which he puffs up in hot oil and then fills with a mixture of potato or chick pea curry and a tart tamarind water. She cannot stop at one: the sourness, spice and salt being so at home in the searing heat.

An unfamiliar happiness while she does things such as this; holding the babies, being integrated into the life of the street. Not at home, but, for the first time in ages, feeling quite at home.

On one such day, while she dashes out to work, trying to make the metro to Chandni Chowk, she sees a man. Looks very fresh-faced; he is clocked. Surely she has seen him somewhere before? Today they are on different sides of the street, but he smiles. The next day, he asks for directions -- though she is never the right person to ask for this. They talk, walk, splash when the monsoon starts. He is supposed to be moving on; been an itinerant for ten years now, just come in from Bangladesh and from Meghalaya and Assam. But, as I said, funny things can happen.

Well reader, I promise, hand on heart, never to write with such sentimentality again, but our two restless souls were married within ten months. She has been foul to him today and that's why she wrote this story.

Subhodev: thank you for the old Calcutta photo.
www.flickr.com

Felix Cattus Brattus Culpa

2010-05-26T05:41:00.000-07:00

You remember Daisy and Max from a few stories back? Here is the I.D. picture again, should you, unfortunate, encounter them doing damage. Or should I say that this is the picture of the real culprit, the other being an unwitting and unfortunate accomplice.

Note the strange half a moustache; we are told it's more a Stalin than a Hitler and may be part of the reason for misbehaviour: this cat has a grudge born of not particularly conventional looks.

The children and some of the neighbouring children had, that day, gathered tadpoles in jam jars and they were released into the garden's newly created ponds. Most of the tadpoles lasted just long enough to grow the beginnings of legs before Daisy ate them, carefully prodding them to one side and slurping them up. Those that remained were clearly the most gifted, knowing to burrow in the mud to evade their captor. Then she started on the frogs: there were frogs behind the sofa, a frog in the shower and a partially hoovered-up frog. They were, as the more phlegmatic of the children put it, "killed frogs." And then the worms. Live earthworms, this time. Brought in by the mouthful -- a sort of moveable Salvador Dali moustache to go with the Stalin-- and shaken onto the carpets and rugs. "Presents. Don't be cross!" said the child.

At mealtimes, Daisy assumed her place on the chair, sitting up straight, like a well brought up child, yet refusing to move when a human came to its rightful place. When forced to get down, she would sulk and nip on the ankles. She swung from the tree as if it were monkey bars, stalked pigeons, peed in the bath (over the plughole, at least) and refused to capitulate in general -- even when next door instituted double thick mulch, a water pistol and an electronic cat deterrent to stop her digging.

This, then was a sort of slightly malevolent super cat. She was Asbo cat. Notice had been served and she stuck up a V for victory right back at them. Asbo cat learned to open the fridge, get into other people's wardrobes and go to sleep there and beg prettily and in a slightly pleading way which human folk like. It worked.Asbo intellectual cat, then. She was training them.

And Max: stool pigeon. Always caught on worktop and windowsill, while she sat sweetly below. Eating what he should not while she sat a few paces away as he got admonished. A bit like Lennie before George euthanised him.

The cat has a sort of style, but she is marked for trouble and she couldn't give a fig because Max (known domestically by the children as El Thicko, The Thickster or Captain Chubby) can be readily framed. So watch out. Felix Cattus Brattus Culpa is about.

The lady, the hallway and the stars

2010-05-25T05:16:00.000-07:00

With apologies to the late Angela Carter and The Bloody Chamber

Dedicated to this summer's A2 AQA Gothic option students!

It is a strange place; a cold street, in which the temperature seems to drop as you round the corner. You feel the breeze cut into you; sometimes you think you must have imagined it, but no: there it is again. A street that looks the same as the last but inescapably, dangerously and, unfortunately, irresistibly different.

The young man, lean and callow, has been called upon to work for the shadowy residents of this street. There, every day, post is delivered, collected from doormats, papers from drives and houses and gardens maintained in apparently prisitine condition. And yet, we see no one, telling ourselves only that the street's inhabitants must keep shifts or, more exotically, rather bohemian hours.

So, the young man is called to the fifth house on the street, a tall house, as all the others, with imposing gables and a tall, tall chimney stack. He rings the bell and a lady answers, ivory and willowy, with intense blue eyes. She sees him start just a little, as one does when confronted by such intense beauty. "Won't you come in? So much to do."

Inside, it is a world away from the modern suburban street, all billowing drapes, vast cabinets of dainty phials and bottles, Venetian mirrors and candelabra. And little cups; so many little cups on narrow shelves. With fluted saucers, Japanese and Chinese designs, lacquerwork. His eye is drawn everywhere all at once and she senses this.

"Yes: I am quite a collector, as you see."

"Well, I'm wondering, Miss -is it Miss? (it is) - which jobs you need doing."

"Ah, yes, But first, won't you have some tea? Come through."

The kitchen is through the long narrow hallway with its unusual intricate pattern of hexagonal tiles. The room has a surprisingly vast azure ceiling, upon which are painted many tiny gold stars. He would have thought it exquisite, had it not already begun to make him dizzy just looking at it for a short while.

She boils water in an old fashoined urn (strange, he thought: why no kettle?); rather too much for tea for two. She makes tea in a lovely, highly polished silver tea pot -again it seems disproportionately large of scale.

"I need more shelves, Long thin shelves for my display. I am such a magpie, as you saw. And shallow cabinets for the walls. Like you could see in an old fashioned apothecary. But not so deep and, you know, with drawers. Can you picture what I mean?"

Yes, for the first. That shouldn't be hard but her second request would be more difficult. But, as he drinks his tea, he feels he wants to please her, so he agrees to start the job the next day. Although really, his other commitments tell him he should wait. It is something about this lady - and she amuses him too, he thinks as he drinks the tea from more of her little cups.

Next day, he begins and, in a day, the narrow shelves are cut and fitted for the rather bare little ante room off the kitchen. "This will be my dining room",. she says, "You are decorating it for me."

He drinks more of her tea, even eats some dainty little sandwiches she makes him, and begins work on the cabinets. The work seems to flow from him; oddly, some of his best work to date. Invisible joints and beautifully conceived design. He has surprised himself. But then, standing back from the room, as it begins to come to life with its first fittings, he feels suddenly tired and this she sees.

"Come and sit down. In the kitchen."

"She looks more beautiful than ever today", he thinks."Yes, I had better."

He sits, closes his eyes for a moment to rest. He feels worse. Looking up at the ceiling - at the fine golden stars - he becomes dizzier and dizzier. And then he sees and remembers no more.

The shadowy inhabitants of the rest of the houses in the street come through interconnecting doors -they are corporeal, after all- and they feast and they drink him dry from the little fluted cups as they sit under the stars. And what they cannot digest, they grind for their medicines and make up and potions and this they place in the shallow apothecaries' drawers. And thus they retreat to their own homes and the lady with the lovely blue eyes is alone. Until, that is, she crosses her hall to the next visitor, floating across the fine encaustic tiles, which show not hexagons, but pentagons - no pentangles- and say, in the Latin inscription which our carpenter did not know how to read, "Caveat venus et stella." And if you, too, cannot read this, then you must find out -just in case.

cats again

2010-05-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: £100 RAISED AND WE ARE ONLY A WEEK IN! THANK YOU!

Although it is not my favourite story so far, the cats' tale, 'Cat Mischief', seems to have produced the happiest response. Other comments have been that readers wish the stories were longer and that we could revisit some of the characters to see what happens next. If there is something you would like a story about, why not challenge me or leave a request?. Leave a comment in the box below the blog post.

Well, we will return to the cats and to Flora, as she, essentially, is me, which you will have guessed if you know me other than in passing (Anna: "Here is my heart; I am wearing it on my sleeve"). Other folk who have been introduced, maybe, maybe not. As for longer stories, the answer is that I will write more where I can, but I need to set myself a limit of something I can do every day. And these stories are fresh each day; I have not planned them out in advance - so I need to write something manageable. And a short story is, well, a short story, not a chapter.....read on and bear with me!

Below is a picture by Subhodev at ww.flickr.com; part of his Old Calcutta series. It's the Maidan -- which means an open grassy area-- in Calcutta at sunset. Sundown here, too. New story tomorrow. x

Sakhina. A true story.

2010-05-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

Sakhina lived on the street in Chandni Chowk, Kolkata. She was tiny, with deep brown skin and huge eyes, ringed with kajal. She did not know how old she was, but my guess was six or seven. Her dress was all in one piece, but filthy - and her hair was matted. She scratched her skin and hair a lot because of the nits on her head. She said that they ran down her back. When I held her, they jumped on to me. And it was hard not to be close to her because she ran at me, a hard little torpedo of a child and I would pick her up and swing her in my arms. And when we slept on the floor of the school after the midday meal, she would shift sideways into my armpit, not so sweetly pinching any other child who tried to get near me.

Sakhina's home was at the edge of the pavement not far from a school, just the size of a crawl space and made of flat pieces of plastic, tin, cardboard and tarpaulin. They had a cooking stove and bedsheets of some sort, a few utensils and maybe a few extra pieces of clothing, but that was it.

Sakhina played in the street, with sticks and stones, throwing them at the stray 'pi' dogs, making cheeky faces or even obscene gestures at passers by until this elicited a resounding slap from her mother. Mother had a grin from ear to ear, but a steely glare reserved for her child - or possibly children, as I never discovered who else was in the family - and on the two occasions when I saw her father, he was blind drunk.

Sakhina told me her mother sold things and worked hard and that her father slept a lot. The child had managed to learn quite a lot of English in the little school and, probably, through her own fierce intelligence and the skilful acquisitiveness of someone whose daily goal is to survive. Sometimes, I saw her howling and crying, but these occasions were few and far between. She was beautiful and I have never forgotten her.

On not being lonely

2010-05-23T03:24:00.000-07:00

"Living alone and loneliness are not synonymous" (from The Department and Work and Pensions at Directgov)

Flora was a funny kind of kid; struggled with friendships in school, not the sort to be able to stand up and receive a prize for anything but, you know, pretty bright - just not the sort, as she was once told, to set the world on fire. Hmm. She struggled with that one because, of course, like more than would care to admit it, she wanted to set the world on fire; to be conspicuously brilliant, (modest, though) known to be kind, intuitive, creative. Well, and pretty, too. Shy throughout, she would smile at other people -older people- but it never really occurred to her that she might engage them in conversation.

Flora, I suppose, was damned by faint praise.

"All that matters is that you try hard."

"I know you're not really determined, but we're still proud of you."

Lovely, but somehow missing the spot, she felt.

Rhoda lived down the row. She was about eighty, with a soft, kind face but, Flora sensed, girders of steel. Rhoda had had a tough life, widowed two years ago and had lost a child in adulthood, too. There was something resilent about her; joyful, even. One day she asked Flora in. The girl had always smiled at her, but never chatted. That shyness thing again. One day, though, she was just kicking about in the garden, disconsolate, after a bad week at school which nothing seemed to cure, when Rhoda asked her to come and help. Flowers needed moving but Rhoda had stiffened up.

Flora felt that she wouldn't know what to say to Rhoda, but also understood that she must lend a hand. So flowers were moved to a better spot; clumps of irises and opium poppies were divided: Flora discovered that she knew a bit about this from having watched her father at work. Not instruction; just osmosis. The next week, clematis and honeysuckle cut back, under Rhoda's watchful eye. Flora saw to her own delight, though, that she knew about finding a strong shoot and where to cut. Getting ready for Spring.

Flora found that she relaxed and began to chat. Squabbles with her more articulate, popular, profoundly cooler schoolmates began to recede with snipping, tidying, mud and the abundant cakes and cups of tea that Rhoda produced. The girl began to chat to Rhoda - about her parents, school, not being particularly good at anything. Rhoda listened; gave her the occasional pat on the arm and said simply: "You will find your voice and, you know, when you get to my age, you'll see that none of the things you worried about ever came to much."

Flora is older now, more sure of herself; Rhoda is a little unsteady on her feet. But the visits are kept up and assuaging the loneliness cuts both ways. Sometimes the least likely person might be a peculiar girl's best friend - when it matters most.

Evelyn: this is for you.
Pictures by Katherine Thomas (year 11) and Anna Vaught.

A fund raising update

2010-05-23T02:36:00.000-07:00

YAY! One week in and we've raised £90!

Thank you xx

A scene you might recognise, people of BOA and its environs. Thank you to John Picken at www.flickr.com

Cat mischief

2010-05-22T01:15:00.000-07:00

Max, a peaceable and slightly overweight tabby of two years and Daisy, conniving kitten of six and a half months. This their photoshot, kept for reference in case identification were needed by people in the community.

Just like all the cats at the house -and there had been a parade of them over the years- the animals were rescue creatures and came with a back story. In Max's case, he was just glad to be at home and recline; in the case of Daisy, prospects seemed mixed. She was bent on merry making and mischief and the slow-witted Max was to be her accomplice. She was what a vet had referred to as "a naughty tortie".

At night, she contrived a plan: they would make some subtle adjustments to the house. Max sat and took instructions while Daisy advised on drill bits and the size of rawlplugs needed. The refined old sepia photos on the sitting room wall were replaced by their dining mats, with pictures of fishbones on them. They placed dead mice on the end of the children's beds and a live shrew, bought in so delicately by Daisy, in the airing cupboard. A frog or two: dropped behind the radiator in the children's room. Cat biscuits dropped in the muesli. Some doors were removed from kitchen units and dragged into the garden. push and pull together. In the morning they would be dotted with slugs and woodlice. A lick of poster paint and a stubby children's brush -even so, not easy to manipulate without opposable thumbs: behold a mural for the landing. A kind of abstract painting of fish, with waved brushed in by Max's tail, as Daisy directed him up and down, up and down.

And leave no trace of your part in the crime, so a quick wash and brush up in next door's water butt. After, that is, a raid on the fridge - so easy to flick open with a slim paw if one were to sit on top and aim for the seal around the door edge. Ham; a piece of cheddar; a chew at Sunday's leg of lamb; tip out the milk and lick the floor. Cats cannot open fridges, you know: So, frame the children, surely naughty enough to have a midnight feast. Chuck a few yoghurts around and loosen the lid of the biscuit tin to make it convincing.

Now off to bed; sit prettily and wait for the morning. We have finished being nocturnal and want to rest. "Tomorrow", thought Daisy the conniving kitten, "I will teach Max to be a proper cat burglar."

It's Pentecost, Tom, but not as we know it.

2010-05-21T05:05:00.000-07:00

The photo above is by Giles Turnbull. Through the gate of Holy Trinity Church, Bradford on Avon. I particularly like this picture.

The story below is inspired by Thomas Hardy's poem, 'Church Going'. Make of it what you will. Maybe read the poem, too.

Tom sat at the back of the church. It was Pentecost, celebration of the day God sent His Spirit amongst his people. Fire, wind, comfort and inspiration for all time.

"No. I just don't get it", he said silently to himself. And not for the first time, as he sang the hymns, smiled at people about the church and tried, where appropriate, to look solemn and meditative.

"I mean, I keep coming here - I like the building; it's peaceful. But I don't feel what they all seem to feel. What has been revealed to them and why has it never to me? Are they arrogant and pleased with themselves because they are so sure about their faith? I'm not sure I even like that."

Tom found that, despite his best intentions, he was riled. Irritated because no one was helping him. If they were so close to God, why couldn't they sense that he was struggling? His chest felt a bit tight. He was getting the old, frosty demons again. Emma Gifford. How could it have all gone so very wrong and now she was gone, too. And here, in a place which was supposed to help him, he could find neither solace nor guidance.

"Out. I cannot stand it. I cannot do this any more; skulking at the back. I need some air. I don't want to hear all this talk of the Holy Spirit coming among us. What about me? No one or nothing has come to me."

Outside, though, his breathing came deeper and he felt a little better. It was a warm Spring day; May the 23rd. He could smell the last of the cowslips, a warm honeyed breath. The lily of the valley mingled in their sweet, fresh scent and the earth, he thought, exhaled. The old gardener was at work; not in church, Tom noticed. Keeping the Garden of Remembrance tidy; mowing and clipping. When he saw Tom, he sat down.

"Morning, poet" (as was his wont).

"Well, as you know, I write novels, too", said Tom, unneccessarily.

"Church a bit stuffy for you, was it? Artistic type like you."

And Tom, without having intended to, poured out what he felt about church going. Even said some quite unpleasant things about it. And the old man listened without comment. Finally, Tom stopped, aware that attention was waning and that, perhaps, he was being boorish on this fine Spring morning when folk had gardens to tend and services to worship at.

The old man stood up and turned from him, lifting his spade, fork and trug. Still he said nothing. Tom worried that he had caused offence. Damn it all and damn himself, too. "Low born churl", Emma had once called him. Now he could add "blasphemer", "man with ideas above his station" and "berater of old men going about their peaceful business".

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean for that all to come out. I can see I have caused offence" he called after the man.

"No offence, no. But I must be going about my business."

The gardener walked on and stopped, still without turning around. But if Tom could have seen his face, as we do now, he would have seen a wry smile playing about the corners of the mouth.

"No poet. Never you mind. I always listen. I notice such things. And I'll tell you this. The garden is warm today and do you see the breeze around the flowers? Like a heat haze, isn't it now? This is my church right here. And you might want to take your jacket off and sit for a while. It's the Spirit, you see. Followed you out here. Dooesn't stand for none of your nonsense. Came to you because you couldn't come yourself."

The old man raised his fork above his head in goodbye and Tom was alone in the garden.

A bookworm's Pygmalion

2010-05-20T04:31:00.000-07:00

Jim, lord of all he possessed, which at the time wasn't all that much, felt disappointed by what he perceived as the slights and slanders of everyday life. So he thought he would withdraw from life and build himself some splendid bookshelves and begin to fill those shelves with beautiful books. He had always liked carpentry and had tended to take refuge in his home and in reading when he felt things were not going well.

The bookshelves provided him with an absorbing project; he was cheered by the making of excellent joints and with the odd flourish of carving at the edges of the shelves - just a subtle scroll; nothing too much. As he worked, he thought about how, when the shelves were done and filled with new books, he would stay in more. After all, in his entanglements with people, he felt susceptible to critical voice. If he retreated a bit more, he would surely be happier.

Eventually, the bookshelves were finished. One for most of the rooms of his house, all with slightly different design and, in some rooms, painted in subtle chalky colours. He gazed at his shelves and his woodworking tools and felt content, but when he looked outside the window, he felt a pang of anxiety. Oh. The outside world. Other people.

Now, he assembled what books he had on the shelves and saw how empty those shelves looked. Right: he would buy his books online, so as not to sully the perfection of what he had done. For what if someone looked askance at him when he was choosing his books? Then, perhaps, his project would feel spoiled. At the moment, his skin was thin and he was tired of the society of others.

Ah - but Jim found he couldn't get everything he wanted and he began to want to handle the books; to look at them as physical objects and admire their aesthetics and have them there to eat up the stories within. Greedily and rapturously. So out he went to add to his collection. He had no Greek Myths on his shelf, for instance: how he had enjoyed listening to his father read from The Golden Porch when he was young. So that was the first thing he looked for. But while in the shop, time stood still and he was reading, reading; lost in pleasure, just as another was, near to him. He looked at her sideways. Hmmmm. Helen?

The next day he went back to buy more books and she was there again. This time she looked sideways at him and caught his look.

Eventually, Jim's bookshelves were full, with texts that told him not only when to be alone, but also how you might live with a full heart. And then he and Helen - the face that launched six bookshelves, as it turned out - threw a book party.

Photo of some of my books -these in one part of the kitchen- by Giles Turnbull, who has never knowingly flown too near the sun.

Eric Newby, Kolkata and the book. A true story.

2010-05-19T01:53:00.000-07:00

That year, there was prodigious flooding in Calcutta. People stumbled in gutters, water up to their knees in parts of Chowringee. Boys on tea stalls raised their kit on boxes and hoped for the best. Everone who lived on the street had found enterprising ways to elevate their home, too. Resourcefulness, as ever. Families soaped themselves under the municuipal pumps and the suds floated into the road.

Flora had her dress tied around her knees, so it wouldn't get too wet or torn on potential underwater obstacles.She was on her way to the book shop. Just to look. There was, as usual, a plethora of Indian published Penguin books. But amongst them, she found an immaculate copy of Eric Newby's A Book of Traveller's Tales. Having always been a fan, she bought it and took it back to the hot little attic room with no cooling breeze. Lying on the bed, she found the book was inscribed with the words: To Ted and Vi, in memory of a happy walk on Dorset cliffs, Eric. The text was signed by the author.

In Dorset late that summer, it had been balmy; here, the rains still came and people, as they do during a bad monsoon, began to fall sick with waterborne disease - particularly when the sewers flooded. Flora wondered if Eric Newby was out walking on Beeny Cliff, how the book got to West Bengal -- and felt terribly homesick.

Thank you to Subhodev at www.flickr for this shot. I have enjoyed his picture series entitles 'Old Calcutta' and I like the humour and feeling of this one, in particular.

The first post

2010-05-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

A DAILY WRITING PROJECT FOR THE ELIZABETH ANN CHARITY

I saw it from the open door of a train. We were rushing through the last swathes of the countryside before slowing down for the slow approach into Calcutta. I could see pools in villages, women washing, buffaloes at work in the fields, everything deep green, wet and lucent. And above it all, a double rainbow over Bengal. It's just a memory I have of feeling perfectly still and happy. And I wanted to think of it now before I start this project. I hope you enjoy your daily read -- do read every day, if you can-- and now you know why I chose this title. It's also, actually, the title of a book of children's stories I've been working on for, oh, a while now.

But we are heading South, now. Michael's and Julie's projects are in Southern India, a long way down from the flat plains of West Bengal. A place where you might wear frangipani flowers in your hair.

Anna xxx