Friday, 29 April 2011
Bunting For Sale
It seems that I have misread the mood of the public. I haven’t received a single RSVP to the 257 invites I sent out for my ‘Will and Kate’s Royal Wedding street party’. It wasn’t like this in 1981 or for the jubilee in ’77. Where’s the patriotism and sense of community spirit? I’ve hired two hundred trestle tables, Morris Dancers, a Boy George lookalike (was too slow off the mark to get a Prince William-a-like, although could have had the real Viscount Linley for less than Boy George), a Town Crier, face painters, paper plates and cups, 1800 metres of bunting and a massive tv screen to watch the ceremony on. The council said I needed 100 confirmed guests to close the road so I’ve fallen a few short there. 99 to be precise. I’m sitting on the pavement at my trestle table with a portable tv looking more desperate than a fat girl at the end of a disco and watching the coverage on the BBC which began about 8 weeks ago. I’m not alone though. Boy George is here. And Sami Khiyami who was a last minute booking. Come and join me. I have jelly.
Monday, 25 April 2011
My Kind of Town
We made a trip into The Fens on Sunday for a Bodger gathering. Here are the briefest of reflections on my hometown of Wisbech as I found it on 24th April 2011.
1.You know you’re entering Wisbech these days when you pass the Kiss Kiss Adult Superstore. They say first impressions are important.
2.We ate at Mendi’s. I haven’t been there since 1988. Neither has a decorator or chef to create a new menu.
3.We saw a rat in Tesco’s car park.
4.You know you’re leaving Wisbech when you see a young woman pushing a pram on the A47......not on the pavement but the actual carriage way.......in the dark.
1.You know you’re entering Wisbech these days when you pass the Kiss Kiss Adult Superstore. They say first impressions are important.
2.We ate at Mendi’s. I haven’t been there since 1988. Neither has a decorator or chef to create a new menu.
3.We saw a rat in Tesco’s car park.
4.You know you’re leaving Wisbech when you see a young woman pushing a pram on the A47......not on the pavement but the actual carriage way.......in the dark.
Saturday, 16 April 2011
David Niven's Handkerchief
I made a commitment to shoot my mother several years ago. She was completely serious when she asked me to but I was far from serious when I reassured her that I would. I was only in my late teens at the time.
Here is our definition of LEGACY
1. Money or property bequeathed to another by will.
2. Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past:
My legacy from my mother’s side of my family may be a little unconventional. It is, I fear, Alzheimer’s Disease. My maternal Grandparents both died very, very slowly from it.
Someone recently told me how their father died aged seventy nine whilst on a long distance bike ride. He had a massive heart attack and collapsed in front of the home of a GP who, fortunately, wasn’t at work that day and was able to pronounce him dead. His daughter thought he would have been overjoyed to have died doing something he loved and to be so well organised to arrange for his own physician in attendance. Deaths like that are unlikely to occur in my family.
My mother is one of six children. Her eldest sister died with dementia in 2005 and, like his father and mother, her eldest brother died a slow death from Alzheimer’s in 2007 with all that had been of his personality disappearing, a new one emerging and then nothing that could be described as personality replacing it. ‘He’ had died long before his body chose to. When I was young I spent a huge amount of time with my Grandparents following Jim around his garden or watching Ada cook in the kitchen. I know I should have spent more time with them as they declined. Their behaviour became odd, then bizarre and then worrying and then diagnosable probably before I entered my teens. Their death was long and slow and their lives ended as I was about to leave my teens. They died in different nursing homes within six months of each other. They were apart in their final days after over sixty years of marriage but neither knew that the person they’d shared their life with was missing. And then at my Grandfather’s funeral my mother asked me if I’d be good enough to shoot her if she should end up like her parents. Afterwards the six children sat and discussed their parents and wondered what the first sign of decline was; when my Grandparents convinced themselves my brothers were going to live in America even though they were only thirteen? When my Grandfather tried to withdraw his life's savings in cash and walked home with much of it in carrier bags? Or when he chose to paint the outside of their bungalow red?
I want to write this as a marker in time just in case.
So........My mum and dad visited to help us finally move our furniture out of the storage and into the house on the thirteenth. Although we speak on the phone often I haven't seen my parents since last October. I’m not sure if I recognised an increasing absence of presence or an increasing presence of absence but there are some things I want to note down about my mum. They may be nothing but I know that they were significant enough that within two hours of meeting them Marianna told me to stop staring at my mother and looking so worried. I had been at Birmingham Crown Court all day, mostly reading a book and didn’t return to Leamington until 6.30. I went to meet them and Marianna at their Bed and Breakfast (Our house isn’t fit for guests). I met Marianna at the door and we waited for my parents in the guest’s lounge. After a few minutes my mum stepped into the room, looked at us and said to my dad, who was still in the corridor, “It’s not them in there Dave”. I called to her and she came back in and seemed to recognise my voice before she recognised my face. Perhaps it was the suit that rendered me unrecognisable. We took them out for a meal and she was rather quiet and just ‘not my mum’. Perhaps like a crucial scene from Invasion of The Body Snatchers something was giving her away as not being the genuine article. She has the same hearing issue as me only worse and worsening and does struggle when there’s background noise but if you went back 5, 10, 20 years you’d never describe my mum as quiet. That’s my dad’s role; to be a man of few words and yet he’s downright chatty these days. I think it’s that he’s compensating for and covering up for my mum in the hope that you won’t notice that she isn’t really taking part in or driving the conversation anymore; she’s a passenger. She was the same the next day when we were moving the furniture; she was a passenger. I don’t expect someone approaching seventy to be lifting and carrying furniture but she looked lost. Imagine you’re at someone else’s house and they’re clearing things away after a meal or party. You don’t feel able to help out much because you don’t know where anything goes and you feel like a spare part. She looked like that but it wasn’t complex because everything needed to come out of the storage unit, go into the van and then go into the house. When I caught her eye, and I often did, she beamed at me but it was an awkward smile, like she’d been caught out. She also didn’t say anything. She’s becoming a mime. You should know that before she retired she was a manager. When Marianna, dad and I discussed how we might arrange things in the van my mum didn’t take part in the discussion but, more worryingly, having heard us conclude that we’d put the sideboard in a certain space we carried it to the van to find that mum had put a chair there. Later, as the three of us carried a sofa out of the van and into the house, me at one end and Marianna and dad in reverse at the other end I noticed that mum had piled the cushions just inside the door. It was just illogical. She was very apologetic. I told her not to worry. I said it so many times in less than two days. She only became a manager after a career change after my brothers and I left school. During our school years she was a cook in three different schools around the town (She may have poured some custard for you) . Even if that wasn’t the case she cooked every day for the five of us. When we took a break from loading and unloading we had some fish and salad for lunch. The fish was prepared on our camping stove. When the water began to boil and possibly boil over she became panicked and didn’t know what to do. It seemed simple enough to lift the pan off the heat or turn the heat down or off but she was lost. Also, since we now have carpet upstairs and downstairs is still a building site we keep our shoes on downstairs and take them off for upstairs but mum couldn’t grasp this and might remove them as she entered the kitchen. She also told me three times about the poor state that the house I grew up in and they moved from twenty years ago is now in.
We took them out again on Thursday evening. For Marianna’s benefit they reminisced about how they met in June 1962. My mum held my dad’s hand but I thought she was holding on more than holding.
I never thought you’d leave until you went.
Here is our definition of LEGACY
1. Money or property bequeathed to another by will.
2. Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past:
My legacy from my mother’s side of my family may be a little unconventional. It is, I fear, Alzheimer’s Disease. My maternal Grandparents both died very, very slowly from it.
Someone recently told me how their father died aged seventy nine whilst on a long distance bike ride. He had a massive heart attack and collapsed in front of the home of a GP who, fortunately, wasn’t at work that day and was able to pronounce him dead. His daughter thought he would have been overjoyed to have died doing something he loved and to be so well organised to arrange for his own physician in attendance. Deaths like that are unlikely to occur in my family.
My mother is one of six children. Her eldest sister died with dementia in 2005 and, like his father and mother, her eldest brother died a slow death from Alzheimer’s in 2007 with all that had been of his personality disappearing, a new one emerging and then nothing that could be described as personality replacing it. ‘He’ had died long before his body chose to. When I was young I spent a huge amount of time with my Grandparents following Jim around his garden or watching Ada cook in the kitchen. I know I should have spent more time with them as they declined. Their behaviour became odd, then bizarre and then worrying and then diagnosable probably before I entered my teens. Their death was long and slow and their lives ended as I was about to leave my teens. They died in different nursing homes within six months of each other. They were apart in their final days after over sixty years of marriage but neither knew that the person they’d shared their life with was missing. And then at my Grandfather’s funeral my mother asked me if I’d be good enough to shoot her if she should end up like her parents. Afterwards the six children sat and discussed their parents and wondered what the first sign of decline was; when my Grandparents convinced themselves my brothers were going to live in America even though they were only thirteen? When my Grandfather tried to withdraw his life's savings in cash and walked home with much of it in carrier bags? Or when he chose to paint the outside of their bungalow red?
I want to write this as a marker in time just in case.
So........My mum and dad visited to help us finally move our furniture out of the storage and into the house on the thirteenth. Although we speak on the phone often I haven't seen my parents since last October. I’m not sure if I recognised an increasing absence of presence or an increasing presence of absence but there are some things I want to note down about my mum. They may be nothing but I know that they were significant enough that within two hours of meeting them Marianna told me to stop staring at my mother and looking so worried. I had been at Birmingham Crown Court all day, mostly reading a book and didn’t return to Leamington until 6.30. I went to meet them and Marianna at their Bed and Breakfast (Our house isn’t fit for guests). I met Marianna at the door and we waited for my parents in the guest’s lounge. After a few minutes my mum stepped into the room, looked at us and said to my dad, who was still in the corridor, “It’s not them in there Dave”. I called to her and she came back in and seemed to recognise my voice before she recognised my face. Perhaps it was the suit that rendered me unrecognisable. We took them out for a meal and she was rather quiet and just ‘not my mum’. Perhaps like a crucial scene from Invasion of The Body Snatchers something was giving her away as not being the genuine article. She has the same hearing issue as me only worse and worsening and does struggle when there’s background noise but if you went back 5, 10, 20 years you’d never describe my mum as quiet. That’s my dad’s role; to be a man of few words and yet he’s downright chatty these days. I think it’s that he’s compensating for and covering up for my mum in the hope that you won’t notice that she isn’t really taking part in or driving the conversation anymore; she’s a passenger. She was the same the next day when we were moving the furniture; she was a passenger. I don’t expect someone approaching seventy to be lifting and carrying furniture but she looked lost. Imagine you’re at someone else’s house and they’re clearing things away after a meal or party. You don’t feel able to help out much because you don’t know where anything goes and you feel like a spare part. She looked like that but it wasn’t complex because everything needed to come out of the storage unit, go into the van and then go into the house. When I caught her eye, and I often did, she beamed at me but it was an awkward smile, like she’d been caught out. She also didn’t say anything. She’s becoming a mime. You should know that before she retired she was a manager. When Marianna, dad and I discussed how we might arrange things in the van my mum didn’t take part in the discussion but, more worryingly, having heard us conclude that we’d put the sideboard in a certain space we carried it to the van to find that mum had put a chair there. Later, as the three of us carried a sofa out of the van and into the house, me at one end and Marianna and dad in reverse at the other end I noticed that mum had piled the cushions just inside the door. It was just illogical. She was very apologetic. I told her not to worry. I said it so many times in less than two days. She only became a manager after a career change after my brothers and I left school. During our school years she was a cook in three different schools around the town (She may have poured some custard for you) . Even if that wasn’t the case she cooked every day for the five of us. When we took a break from loading and unloading we had some fish and salad for lunch. The fish was prepared on our camping stove. When the water began to boil and possibly boil over she became panicked and didn’t know what to do. It seemed simple enough to lift the pan off the heat or turn the heat down or off but she was lost. Also, since we now have carpet upstairs and downstairs is still a building site we keep our shoes on downstairs and take them off for upstairs but mum couldn’t grasp this and might remove them as she entered the kitchen. She also told me three times about the poor state that the house I grew up in and they moved from twenty years ago is now in.
We took them out again on Thursday evening. For Marianna’s benefit they reminisced about how they met in June 1962. My mum held my dad’s hand but I thought she was holding on more than holding.
I never thought you’d leave until you went.
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Bodger For Sale
I met someone recently who, when told what I did for a living, said “Well, you’re not Cracker are you so it’s probably not that fascinating”. Indeed! This is the response I have always wanted because it means that we can move the conversation on to something much more interesting and I don’t have to pretend that my work actually is fascinating. In reality, my work largely involves being in grotty northern towns interviewing far from fascinating people. However, over the weekend beginning 8th April my ‘career’ took me to north and south Devon to work on a case which was brought to me by the job description ‘school teacher’ and the phrases ‘she looked a lot older with make-up’ and ‘I didn’t know she was a pupil in my school when I met her in the nightclub’. I had another case in another part of the county and it was a nice coincidence to have two cases fairly close to each other and at a similar time. The plan was to see one client on the Friday, work in the Bed and Breakfast over the weekend and travel across the county and see another client on the Monday. In the end I was convinced by my hosts to actual take a walk and enjoy the good weather. The drive to the second venue and later on my way home revealed scenery unrivalled on other continents I’ve visited.
So, on Saturday morning I was in a very lovely coastal town having a very generous breakfast. My hosts were busy dealing with the concerns of a group of German professors who had mislaid a fellow professor and found that his bed hadn’t been slept in so I engaged my fellow diner in conversation. She was a very lovely lady in her early fifties who was in town to collect her son from college and take him home for the Easter holidays. When I asked what she did for a living she told me that she was due to retire in three weeks time. She and her husband had, all of their working lives, owned and run a village shop. They lived in a house next to the shop and this was the house her husband was born in since the shop had previously belonged to his parents. They were in an area so wonderfully remote they hadn’t been affected by a nearby supermarket wiping out their business. She mentioned that they were open early until late seven days a week and how, over the years, it had been very difficult to take holidays. In January a man came into the shop and declared himself to be an employee of the Co-Operative. He then made an offer to buy the business for a sum of money which she described as “more generous than our wildest dreams might have conjured”. And so they’ll both be retiring in three weeks. It had all been a bit of whirlwind she said but was excited about their new future. She was unsure of what they were going to do but thought that holidaying regularly would feature heavily. A door will open in three weeks and on the other side will be the rest of their lives.
It’s unlikely that the Co-Op would want to buy me out but I want to make it clear that I’m open to offers. If anyone would like to offer me a sum of money which forces me to holiday almost permanently for the rest of my days the chances of refusal are slimmer than a cheap hotel towel.
So, on Saturday morning I was in a very lovely coastal town having a very generous breakfast. My hosts were busy dealing with the concerns of a group of German professors who had mislaid a fellow professor and found that his bed hadn’t been slept in so I engaged my fellow diner in conversation. She was a very lovely lady in her early fifties who was in town to collect her son from college and take him home for the Easter holidays. When I asked what she did for a living she told me that she was due to retire in three weeks time. She and her husband had, all of their working lives, owned and run a village shop. They lived in a house next to the shop and this was the house her husband was born in since the shop had previously belonged to his parents. They were in an area so wonderfully remote they hadn’t been affected by a nearby supermarket wiping out their business. She mentioned that they were open early until late seven days a week and how, over the years, it had been very difficult to take holidays. In January a man came into the shop and declared himself to be an employee of the Co-Operative. He then made an offer to buy the business for a sum of money which she described as “more generous than our wildest dreams might have conjured”. And so they’ll both be retiring in three weeks. It had all been a bit of whirlwind she said but was excited about their new future. She was unsure of what they were going to do but thought that holidaying regularly would feature heavily. A door will open in three weeks and on the other side will be the rest of their lives.
It’s unlikely that the Co-Op would want to buy me out but I want to make it clear that I’m open to offers. If anyone would like to offer me a sum of money which forces me to holiday almost permanently for the rest of my days the chances of refusal are slimmer than a cheap hotel towel.
Friday, 1 April 2011
All Things Must Pass
There is, I feel, little to say about yesterday’s funeral. Or perhaps it’s that I don’t know what to say or how to say it. Perhaps I don’t know the right words. Perhaps those words don’t exist. If I felt able to speak about it at length I would need to find a way to explain why Margaret’s passing has impacted on me so deeply and I don’t know how to explain that. I have never previously known grief to be so tangible, to be such a physical experience.
When we arrived at the church Mike, his daughters, their husbands and Margaret’s sister were outside greeting mourners. Mike shook hands with or hugged each one. “It’s okay, it’s okay” was what I noticed him say to the two people he hugged before Marianna and he said it to her too. I thought it was a message for himself and not the people he said it to; “It’s okay, it’s okay”.
But of course it wasn’t.
I have never seen a church so full. It’s a sign of a life well lived.
Mike read a Robert Graves poem. He read. He cried whilst reading. He read whilst crying.
The priest and others, later, spoke of her premature passing and how young she was. But she wasn’t. She was sixty four. I don’t mean that if you’re in your fifth decade you should start putting your affairs in order but twenty five is a premature death. That people actually believed it was premature was because of her character, her personality, her radiance, an inner light. They used the word premature when unfair was more apt. The priest guided us through Margaret’s biography/obituary which they had compiled jointly when they met in the hospice. Her sixty four years and career involved nursing, social work and counselling as well as motherhood and many other activities and there were people from all different stages of her life. Childhood friends of her children attended because of how she may have impacted on their lives thirty years previously. She had touched many lives in major and minor ways and people came to acknowledge this. The priest spoke of her marriage to Mike in 1970 and anecdotes from their life together. He spoke of how she chatted to strangers on buses and made friends everywhere. He said he had visited her in the hospice and she complained of how complimentary people had been in the cards they had sent, how they portrayed her as a saintly figure and how misunderstood this made her feel. He told of how she passed away with Mike and her daughters at her side. We sang hymns, including Lord of The Dance; I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me.
Then there was a gathering in the church to drink tea and eat sandwiches and cake and “share your memories of Margaret”. But that wasn’t really what happened, she was largely unmentioned. People, as they always do, talked about their work, families, ailments, holidays. I didn’t engage anyone in conversation. Marianna didn’t. It was only Mike we had words for. But there were no words.
Counting The Beats
by
Robert Graves
You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day;
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.
Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?
Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
When we arrived at the church Mike, his daughters, their husbands and Margaret’s sister were outside greeting mourners. Mike shook hands with or hugged each one. “It’s okay, it’s okay” was what I noticed him say to the two people he hugged before Marianna and he said it to her too. I thought it was a message for himself and not the people he said it to; “It’s okay, it’s okay”.
But of course it wasn’t.
I have never seen a church so full. It’s a sign of a life well lived.
Mike read a Robert Graves poem. He read. He cried whilst reading. He read whilst crying.
The priest and others, later, spoke of her premature passing and how young she was. But she wasn’t. She was sixty four. I don’t mean that if you’re in your fifth decade you should start putting your affairs in order but twenty five is a premature death. That people actually believed it was premature was because of her character, her personality, her radiance, an inner light. They used the word premature when unfair was more apt. The priest guided us through Margaret’s biography/obituary which they had compiled jointly when they met in the hospice. Her sixty four years and career involved nursing, social work and counselling as well as motherhood and many other activities and there were people from all different stages of her life. Childhood friends of her children attended because of how she may have impacted on their lives thirty years previously. She had touched many lives in major and minor ways and people came to acknowledge this. The priest spoke of her marriage to Mike in 1970 and anecdotes from their life together. He spoke of how she chatted to strangers on buses and made friends everywhere. He said he had visited her in the hospice and she complained of how complimentary people had been in the cards they had sent, how they portrayed her as a saintly figure and how misunderstood this made her feel. He told of how she passed away with Mike and her daughters at her side. We sang hymns, including Lord of The Dance; I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me.
Then there was a gathering in the church to drink tea and eat sandwiches and cake and “share your memories of Margaret”. But that wasn’t really what happened, she was largely unmentioned. People, as they always do, talked about their work, families, ailments, holidays. I didn’t engage anyone in conversation. Marianna didn’t. It was only Mike we had words for. But there were no words.
Counting The Beats
by
Robert Graves
You, love, and I,
(He whispers) you and I,
And if no more than only you and I
What care you or I?
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
Cloudless day,
Night, and a cloudless day;
Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day
From a bitter sky.
Where shall we be,
(She whispers) where shall we be,
When death strikes home, O where then shall we be
Who were you and I?
Not there but here,
(He whispers) only here,
As we are, here, together, now and here,
Always you and I.
Counting the beats,
Counting the slow heart beats,
The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
Wakeful they lie.
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