On My Mind

On my mind

I am going to tell you what I have been about.

No need to brace yourself, it is mundane stuff, but,

Deserving, I think, of record:

I wonder, I thought, ( and here, this being a low-budget poem, I advise insertion of your own quotation marks)

I wonder if I might garden in my pyjamas?

It's Warm, and Humid, and I considered it

OK, weather-wise, at least.

Besides, I reasoned, why bother to change? The hedges are high and the neighbours about their business. 

From pyjamas I came, and to pyjamas I will return, so,

It's just a matter of cutting out the trousery-bit

In between.

So I gardened in my pyjamas.

I hoed the herbs with careful attention to detail. 

With new hoe.

(£15.95 from Spear and Jackson, good for another nine years, eleven months, and twenty-four days ..) 

Coming close to a blooming foxglove, I turned up it's trumpets

And marvelled at the multitude of ants also

About their business. 

The cranesbill leaves I noticed, not sure that I approved, are laced with bug work.

And so on. 

There's something a little sixty-sixish about gardening in pyjamas. 

I think, when I was younger, I would have looked upon it as a worrying sign. 

Now I know, and I am laughing, it's no such thing.

When the hedges are high, and the neighbours about their business, you can do

What you bloody well like and really, REALLY not 

Give a damn. 

:)

Holiday Snaps

Ray and I returned on Sunday from a lovely relaxing holiday in Estapona, Spain, with our daughter Kate her husband Darren and baby Frank. I took lots of photos, mostly of flowers, I paddles in the Med, swam in the pool, drank beer in shady squares and  visited an orchid house and ate. Lots. See for yourself:

One Wednesday Morning

I hit myself on the ankle with the Paschal Candle, an extraordinary event that arises from Fr Aidan being on sick leave and myself, ever helpful, lending Fr Barnabas a hand (last Sunday) with a Baptism. (Welcome, young Charles David, to the fold.)

 

"Ouch, that hurts!"I protest, silently, as I process up the aisle with the Paschal Candle, which is considerably taller than me, and features a heavy brass base. Note the absence of profanity. A cause for pride.

 

The upshot of this minor injury is, yesterday, I stayed in the Mission Hall instead of doing my usual, which is roaming the streets of Gloucester with a trolley full of drinks and sandwiches for the 'Not Actually Managing At All' segment of the population. The drinkers, addicts, mentally ill and others with complex problems, that beg and borrow to keep their heads above water, and don't get much to eat or drink without the charitable efforts of the rest of us.

 

An eventful morning ensued. I have been away since early April, swanning across the USA, then catching up at home, doing this and that. Dave, Our Leader, greets me warmly. He used to be a Catholic, so he would understand my happening with the brass base of a very large candlestick. He now belongs to one of those independent churches that do so much good around the place. I like him. He hugs. Pope Benedict didn't approve of hugging, so we tend to shake hands now. Rather a pity, I think.

 

There are a few changes. Michael the community artist is absent. Cancer, I hear, not doing so well. Not coming back. He used to take a group for pottery, he will be missed. Some discussion about what to do with his materials. I am sad. I liked Michael's quiet unassuming presence, I admired his gentle refusal to get saved.

 

Cafe Guru are still providing a nourishing stew. Lots of organisations express interest in what we do. This small business actually does something. Week after week, year in, year out, the cafe sends in a hot meal for our sixty or so takers. They don't advertise the fact, they just do it. I tell everyone I know to go there.

 

It's a fraught morning. One young man thinks another young man is trying to take his stuff. Shouting and a punch-up, quickly resolved. Sam, with his underpants on the outside of his trousers, gives an impromptu sermon on the fact that all Christians are hypocrites and are going to hell: some good-hearted applause, including from the Christians. Then I chat to Maggie.

 

She speaks softly, I have to move closer to listen. We are friends. As her story draws to a close I'm in tears. It has taken her four years to open up and it's no wonder.

 

"I kept my daughter away from men, no father, no grandfather. No uncles, for fifteen years." Oh my God! Fifteen years??? "She's married now, and has children." Maggie beams with pride. Can you guess why I'm weeping?

 

"Don't cry, don't cry for me!" Maggie has not asked for sympathy, she has just asked for the right to tell her story.

 

No name, Maggie is not her name, no location, this did not happen here. Just her story:

 

"I wasn't put in the laundry, because of my chest. You know what that was like, you've seen the film. All that steam! I was in the orphanage until I was sixteen. We worked all day every day, from the time I was thirteen, and were given £13 a month." ...

 

"When our abusers became grandparents to girls - we went to the police. We couldn't let what happened to us happen to another child ... "

 

A ghastly story, Maggie didn't go into a lot of detail. She, her and her sister, won their case and received compensation. A lot of it. But:

 

"I couldn't let go of it, the compensation didn't help, not for years and years, not until I got cancer. Funny. I thought I was going to die, and I let go. Now, I'm free."

 

"For years and years."

 

The next time I hear another abuser gather his family around him and swear his innocence, I'll remember Maggie, and how HER innocence was stolen, her body used for the gratification of perverts employed to take care of her, her peace of mind destroyed, her mental health never fully recovered.

 

"I'm not crying for you, Maggie, but for the children still suffering from bastards like those." I said, which was partly true.

 

So a piece that started with a light-hearted run-in with a large candle, ends sombrely. I think that's the point. In the middle of the ordinariness of my lovely quiet life, a brutal reality intrudes, and I weep.

 

 

 

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Family Reunion

Carol (Wood) Hensley is my oldest friend. We met in 1965 (mid-teens) in the Fourth Form at Ribston Hall High School For Girls, that bastion of middle-class privilege that let we working-class girls in to teach us our place. I have touched on this before, but even now I amazed that I STILL categorise myself as, 'a working-class child,' why the hell do I continue with it? Never again. So, getting beyond the basis for my socialism: we were friends right back when I swooned over Bob Dylan and she the Pretty Faces. She scratched 'Pretty Faces' on her desk and inked it in, I remember regarding such behaviour as curious, without wanting to do it myself.

 

Today was her mother's memorial service. Carol casually invited me, as I was one of the few people around who remembered the Wood family back in the sixties, and I was pleased to go.

 

The chapel and crematorium are in my old stomping ground, Coney Hill, Gloucester. My brother Adrian and both my parents are buried there, so I combined the memorial with a visit to their grave to tidy it up and put some fresh flowers on it. I also tidied up Baby Annabelle's grave next door, as my mother always used to - it is tiny, and overgrown: the little Cherub and the Father Christmas much in need of a wash. There must come a time when parents of a baby no longer feel the need to come where she isn't, but my mother was sentimental, and so, I guess, am I.

 

I was an observer. There for Carol, certainly, as in weeks to come when we talk about it, I'll know how Penny has aged, and how good the children were, and what a good job the humanist celebrant made of the service..

 

An observer soon knows the groups. The distant relatives not seen since Leslie Wood's service back in 2003, relieved that no-one mentions the promises to meet up that were never kept.

 

Kathleen's friends, ripe with reminiscences, some of them, judging by the shushing and giggles, not entirely respectable.

 

The immediate family, pulling together. Their politeness to me: "Well, Dominic, the last time I saw you, you were a gangly teenager with very blonde hair!" It's been a while.

 

The most interesting character, to me, was Steph, a women in her fifties, I'd say, a first cousin, who had never been allowed to mix with Carol and her sisters. Aunty Betty had married above herself, and all contact with her family was forbidden.

 

Steph's parents are dead, and she is delighting in her discovery of the only family she has now, she being an only child of a father who was an only child.

 

How strange it must be to have been forbidden a family! What kind of snobbishness, what degree of awful compliance, could possibly lead to such a nonsensical state of affairs? People are peculiar, families particularly so.

 

I was in conversation with a Canadian on Saturday who marvelled at how we Brits cling like Velcro to the ridiculous class system. I seconded her amazement. She would have been very entertained by this family and it's story of wealth, estrangement and inestimable loss.

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Defeat?

I fixed the shower curtain back up just now.  My nearest and dearest frequently remark, just this side of admiration, that I don't know when to give up; it is truer to say,I believe, that  I do not know HOW to, which is sometimes problematical, but I have learned, for my 

sanity, not to look upon defeat as failure.

So this is the third time I have put the shower curtain up.  The first time was, with regard to longevity, the most successful effort to date. The drill would not penetrate,to any great degree, the hardboard that covered the ceiling.  I don't know why this should be so, however, it wouldn't, but for a fraction of an inch, three times, which was enough to screw in three small hooks to hold up the cord that held up the shower curtain and this for five months until a near and dear one decided to take it down to wash.  

The hooks fell out, wouldn't go back in, so that was that.The second attempt was, and I am not ashamed to admit it, genius.  I could tell that what was needed was a rail, and such I could have contrived but for the sheer effort involved. 

We are talking about a week ago last Thursday, and I am recently returned from camping in a field in a small tent -the tent being held up by two extending plastic poles made both rigid and flexible at the same time by an elastic rope that goes through them like Brighton through a stick of rock. Ah-ah!  and Eureka!  I stretchecd a tentpole across the space, first before, then after, threading the shower curtain through it. Voila!  

The crack and bang that served as a fanfare to the collapse of my ingenious artefact was spectacularly loud, though fortunately neither the bath nor its occupant suffered any permanent damage as the tent pole and shower curtain descended into the foam.

Today's effort was rather more prosaic.  If I tell you it required 3/4 yard of 60cm wide white sticky-backed plastic, 54cms of double sided carpet tape and a pair of scissors, I shall leave you to work out how I did it.

:-)

Marianne North

I recently returned from a visit to California, where my focus was, you'll not be surprised to read, it's flora.

Decades of flower spotting have given me an connoisseur's eye, and anything unusual elicits a cry of, "Stop!" Which must sometimes, regretfully, in the interests of safety, be ignored.

I am good. A white bee-orchid picked out ( but not picked!) in a mass of foliage besides lake Bled in Slovenia elicited admiration from fellow walkers, but my golden moment was spotting a man orchid ( which is green) from a grassy bank in Cyprus AT DUSK! Even my husband, whose hobbies run more towards chess and trains, was impressed on that occasion.

All well and good, but who, you may be wondering, was Marianne North? A nineteenth century botanical Illustrator, who got to California before most people, and painted. Her work inspired me to get off the trails, recklessly ignoring the "Beware Mountain Liions" signs, and look. Her works are displayed in a purpose-built gallery at Kew Gardens. Do go and see. 

Here is my California Selection:

 

A Trapper's Home

 

Rainbow Falls Yosemite

 

Yosemite Falls

 

California Flowers

 

 

Lake Tahoe

Marianne North

Marianne North Gallery, Kew Gardens, London UK

 

 

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