Tuesday 3rd April

I was travelling back from Wales catching the 5.20 from Bridgend.  Don’t ask me what I was doing in Wales, too long  a story to retell here, suffice it to say that in the early evening I was on a train heading due East.  Contrary to my normal behaviour I hadn’t reserved a seat, and was slightly worried that I might have to stand.  A three hour train journey was daunting enough without having a guarantee of a seat.  Luckily I found one amongst the almost entirely reserved section, but it was facing the rear which I hate.  I do love to see where I am going; I also feel slightly travel sick travelling backwards, but a seat is a seat I reasoned and took it rather than scouring the whole train for a better one.  I had a music magazine and my trusty kindle, but neither really appealed to me.  I read for a while but was quite bored, besides the young man who took the seat next to me (I was fortunately by the window) had plugged in a laptop and was watching a BBC thriller on i-player ‘Inside Men’, which I had caught a bit of a few weeks ago.  He did have earphones so I wasn’t too distracted, but actually just seeing the flickering images without the sound was more annoying than if I could hear the words; how the deaf must be frustrated by trying to watch just moving pictures.  I was forced to half turn and stare out of the window and thank goodness I did.  The sun was hanging low in the sky, and just preparing to set. And facing West as the train hurtled East I was in the perfect position to watch as it made landfall and seemed to get larger and larger and a beautiful bright orange.  It started to dip below the tree-line, and then I had this wonderful optical illusion.  The sun being so far away stayed in exactly the same place, the furthest and now almost silhouetted trees, houses and occasional church steeple, slowly moved across its’ face, while in the middle distance trees and houses moved quite quickly and the bushes and small trees next to the train sped past in a blur.  So, all at once I was seeing four different images, the blur of foliage, the fast moving of middle distance, the slow stately sweep of the horizon, and fixed yet slowly sinking my old friend the sun.  I watched for a full hour until the sun had completely gone and the last vestiges of pink had faded to indigo too, and the night came on black and cold.  The best bit was when there was only a faint haze of pinky-orange in the sky and everything was in silhouette, with the orange globes of street lights skittering past.  Quite spectacular.

Monday 2nd April

And now for a fabulous three weeks, but three weeks only folks, we have the blooming of the blooming marvelous magnolia.  This quiet boring little tree that inhabits many a suburban garden quietly minding its own business for forty-nine weeks a year, growing slowly and steadily, but honestly – not that much to look at – suddenly about now, bursts into bloom.  And it always takes me by surprise and absolutely takes my breath away.  Because actually you aren’t looking for it, the tree is no innocuous that you forget about its’ once a year spectacular display.  Too busy admiring all the ground level plants, the crocuses and daffodils, the hyacinths and early primroses.  Then suddenly it is the turn of the trees, the apple and the cherry, in all shades of pink and white tiny flowers that seem to light up the neighbourhood.  But they are all put to shame by the magnificent magnolia.  And the flowers are huge, and on every branch and all pointing upwards to the sky, the buds burst open all on the same day to reveal large spikes of creamy white and pink and dainty yellow, then they swell out from the base, and all at once the petals open to exclaim hallelujah to the very heavens.  The tree is suddenly a riot of colour and each flower a perfect copy of its neighbour.  The symmetry is gorgeous; the whole tree is balanced like a great big birthday cake aflame with hundreds of candles.  It makes you stop and wonder at the perfection of nature.  The petals shine for a few days then they open up wider and wider until they droop under their own weight and in a day or two they are gone, momentarily carpeting the lawn with a blanket of pink and white and palest yellow.  Then it is over for another year; one of natures’ finest displays and the humble magnolia settles down for another year of obscurity, just another boring tree.   The colours are always startling, often the deepest of rose pink at the base and a clear white at the tips or an even gentle pink or warm yellowy white.  Which makes it such a surprise when you open a tin of magnolia paint to find the dullest of colours, a completely nondescript nothing of a colour, almost an apology for or an absence of any real colour.  Magnolia paint must be the most badly named paint in the world.

Sunday 1st April

Am I tempting fate with that statement, I hope not.  But if this is the last ever post on this web-site you will know it was a foolish statement to make.  But compared to everyone else I am actually never ill.  I worked for about fifteen years before Edward insisted I stop, and then I did charity work for many years after that.  In all that time I never had a single day off sick.  At school I always won the book-token prize for attendance, though this was probably down to Grandma and her “Now come on girl, buck yourself up.  Staying at home won’t make you better, let’s be having you.  Come on, you’ll be late for school if you don’t hurry up.”

Of course I get ill, I get a cold every year, but there is a difference between feeling a bit off colour, under the weather, and deciding that you are ill, because it is a decision that you take; to be ill.  At a certain point, either through physical pain or discomfort, or embarrassment, or concern that it may be something worse one decides to be ill, or at least to consult a doctor.  And some people actually love to be ill, they love the cosseting, the sympathy of others, the wallowing in self-pity that ensues from declaring that they are ill.    And why is it such a female trait to love discussing their ailments, in quite revolting detail too I am afraid.  I don’t think that men generally indulge in intimate discussions of the state of their penises as us women seem to love with relation to our genitalia.  I am so fed up of hearing about cystitis and thrush from my girlfriends that I always try to change the subject.  I really do not want to discuss with anyone my own bodily functions, thank you very much.  And maybe it is this natural reserve I have that stops me from deciding that I am ill; maybe it is inherited, my mother though often depressed was never physically ill, and though in her eighties now is still going strong; maybe it is that I walk everywhere, I gave up driving years ago, but maybe it is just luck.  Whatever the cause I simply am never really ill.

Saturday 31st March

It seems that there is a real dissatisfaction with politics at the moment.  People were seduced by the smoothness of Blair, and the reasonableness of Blair-Lite Cameron, and for a moment by the apparent breath of fresh air of Clegg, but like a lot of Chinese take-away food, none of it satisfies somehow.  In fact after you have eaten it, it leaves a cloying and irritating taste in your mouth, because try as you might you cannot get rid of it.  But it is even more than the characters, unsavoury and nondescript as they are, it is the whole political system.  Maybe we just need a politician to hold his or her hand up and say “You know, actually, we can do very little, all I can promise you is that we will try to manage events as best we can, we will not take bribes or try to be influenced too much by big business or the unions, and we will consult you if anything crops up that we haven’t talked about already.  I know that doesn’t sound much like a programme for Government, but honestly that is the best we can offer, anything else would be lies.”   And you know they would be crucified by the press and the commentators if they did.

But in all reality that is about all that under the current system anyone can do.  And even if we had a much better (perfect is too much to hope for) system of responsibility and real consultation and engagement with people the world is so interconnected that there ‘ain’t any real hope of substantial change anyway.  Companies would simple up and move their car production or their Insurance headquarters elsewhere if the public’s views were really acted upon. The reason that there is so much unhappiness with politics is not the lack of honesty, we quite expect our politicians to lie to us, it isn’t the lack of consultation, most people would soon tire of having to express an opinion about education or changes to the NHS; it is the knowledge that unless the whole world changes our politicians are at best simply tinkering around with a broken system.

Friday 30th March

They are at it everywhere you look; in fact you don’t even have to look.  It used to be just that annoying ring whenever you were on a bus or a train, and that irritating reply, “I’m on the bus.” – yes we know that, we can see you, and by the way do you actually realise that you are shouting and making an absolute exhibition of yourself.  Somehow the natural English fear of embarrassment seems to desert people whenever their mobile rings.  Then it was the absurd sight of people with earpieces apparently talking to themselves while on a hands free set.  The fixed stare into the middle distance and the animated face as if they are actually having a conversation with some invisible interlocutor, do they realise just how ridiculous they look, and yet totally oblivious of all around them, they are locked into the conversation of which we can only here one side, (thank goodness).  And then the lunch companions who insist on answering every Pavlovian summons; have they not heard of the silent button, but no, the phone must be obeyed, even mid-sentence, and with barely an apology either.  But now with the advent of all those Apps on these smartphones, which I refuse to be dragged down the conformist road towards, we have the sight of huddled pathetic phone fiddlers, stroking repeatedly the images across their tiny screens, or watching music videos or playing games or answering e-mails or texting or checking the news or the football scores or the traffic jams or the state of the tube or whatever other useless information the Apps industry can try to sell to people.  And they are everywhere, on every tube train, in cafes, when there is a slight lull in the conversation and even walking along the street.  And they are all locked in their own little isolated world, oblivious to any other human being on the planet.  So, wake up people please, and realise that there is a life away from your handsets, and please, please stop playing with your phones.

Thursday 29th March

What makes something like a stone, a mineral deposit, a rather large natural crystal either worth millions, or a few pounds or worthless?  Nothing; except our accepted ideas of what is beautiful or rare or desirable.  Years ago I read a story by Solzhenitsyn about prisoners being forced to walk about a thousand kilometers through the frozen tundra to one of the outposts of the Gulag.  The thing that struck me most was that the guards traded with the native Siberian peoples, half Eskimo I suppose they would be.  The guards swapped, or traded empty gallon tin cans for furs.  To the Western world empty cans are thrown away, disposable – as of course to these nomadic peoples the excess skins of animals they had captured and killed for food were.  In the West one of the most desirable items being a fur coat; just waste material for these people, and yet a tin can was invaluable for carrying water or other possessions in.  So the value we put on anything is completely arbitrary and not based on any intrinsic value the object may have.  So a lump of coal, unless we want to burn it is pretty useless, yet whole armies are funded by diamonds, as well as being one of the most desirable objects in our society.  But why is that, is it because diamonds are so hard, so indestructible (unless we burn them) or because they are so rare, or because they are beautiful.  They certainly are beautiful, although quite over-rated I think.  Personally I have always preferred those semi-precious stones like Turquoise or Amethyst or Jet or Amber (I know, not a stone at all).  They are usually much larger and less brilliant, but the colours are so lovely and look better against human flesh, which is the real test.  I also have a habit of beach-combing whenever I am near the sea, picking up some unusual but nicely coloured and smoothly ground stone from the beach.  And each one of these common pebbles is really as beautiful as any diamond that was obtained by sweat and toil in some African mine.

Adrian wrote me a poem – you can find it in Catherines Story :

Jet, Your obsidian net, Captured me right from the start.

Jade, Don’t ever fade, Or it would break my heart.

So precious or semi-precious or just a stone from the beach, they are all beautiful and equally valuable.

Wednesday 28th March

Now that the clocks have been forced forward in their relentless search for sunshine and the evenings are lighter earlier, the corollary is that the mornings are darker again.  Suddenly we are slung back into a touch of winter in the shape of darker mornings.  And you have to get up even earlier to really appreciate it.  Instead of my usual six-thirty to seven I have been rising at five forty-five.  This was a conscious decision, not a result of sleeplessness or some temporary insanity I can assure you – I wanted to see the sun rising again.  So I was up at that ungodly hour, which in old money was way before five even, and quickly dressing and foregoing my favourite and first tea of the day I was out of the door.  The temperature was not as cold as I had feared; the skies have been quite clear for days now, not a cloud to hide the blushes of the night, and I had expected it to be really cold, but although chilly it was remarkably mild.  And still – the very air seemed frozen, as if the wind had forgotten its duty to blow.  Hardly anyone was about at all, a couple of taxi’s still trawling the deserted streets and early morning delivery vans but no pedestrians at all.  In a moment I was in the park and here the light was just opening out, the sky a deep indigo brightening gently towards the land.  No birds were singing and no squirrels scampering as if a hush had come upon the land, I walked over to the lake, usually bustling with ducks, moorhen and a solitary swan, but here all was quiet too, the surface of the water an oily greeny-black, lurking and waiting for the sun.  The darkness was lifting quite quickly and soon the sky was a bright blue and the crescent moon just visible but the myriad stars were fast fading in the light of day.  There were too many trees to get a good view of the sun, but the light was perceptibly filling the sky and then there in-between the trees was the sun itself, large and bold and golden flickering through the branches.  Then I started to hear the birds start singing, a couple of dogs barking on their early morning walk, and the incessant hum of traffic resumed its background mumble.  Gone was the beautiful still of the morning; but for a few moments it had been so quiet that one could almost imagine the world itself had paused for a moment in its tracks, just a small hesitant pause, hardly a moment at all, before resuming its eons old journey through the day.

Tuesday 27th March

When we were at school assembly all those years ago our Head-Mistress Miss Taylor, or Hilda as we used to call her, (though whether the H initial of her first name was actual Hilda or a more innocuous Helen or Harriet we knew not; Hilda she was known as and Hilda she became) loved to present us with a little epercu, a thought for the day if you like, some little homily used on the generations of girls who passed through her hands which she would say in a voice full of wisdom and a baleful stare above our heads as if to some God hovering in the ether.  Well God never replied to Hilda, but sometimes in my head I did. One of her favourites which would be rolled out every few weeks was, “Here hath been dawning another blue day, Think, will thou let it slip useless away?” to which my considered and silently mouthed answer would be, “Mmmm probably.”

And how true that was; every day is another blue day, and yes, we mostly do let them slip if not completely useless away, then more often unfulfilled than a box-ticked achievement.  As a young woman, conscientious to a fault I would often assess my day, and give myself a mark out of ten, writing it neatly after my usually sparse diary entry in a circle, more often than not my score was 5 or below, and only occasionally hit the heady heights of an 8 or a 9.  Being taught at school that perfection was actually unachievable, but simply something to strive for I would on principle refuse to ever award myself a 10.

I stopped all of that nonsense years ago, including the diary entries, although of course my little blog which you are now reading has become a sort of substitute for a diary.  Now I rarely think about whether I have let slip the day or have actually used it well.  And the reason is that I have discovered that no matter how poorly one has wasted the day, how carelessly let it slip away, there is always the promise of tomorrow.

Monday 26th March

This was another of those great Tamla-Motown songs of the mid-sixties, this one by Jimmy Ruffin.  It has been covered many times by many artists, one of my favourites being by Colin Blunstone in the early eighties.  But I don’t want to write about the song but about the phrase, the emotion, the shared experience; that awful desolation when you realise that the one you have loved doesn’t love you any more, or has let you down, or more likely, gone off with someone else.  The utter despair when you can hardly face getting up and going to work, maybe because you will have to explain why you are no longer together, or just try to fill your day with something, anything to stop you thinking about them and digging deeper into the roove of your misery until the blood runs free.  There you go, pick-pick-picking at the scab, and just as your mother (or in my case Grandma) told you to leave it alone to heal on its own; you just can’t stop yourself from tormenting the wound over and over and wallowing in the mud-bath of your own despond. That moment seems to want to last forever, as if letting go of the pain means you are letting go of the once-loved one; that you are somehow betraying your desperate and hopeless love by laughing or having a good time once more.  And so for days and days and sometimes weeks you do penance for the sin, the capital crime of letting them slip through your fingers, as if you cannot quite forgive yourself for losing them, when in most cases you are completely the innocent one.  Ah, but apportioning blame helps little, it matters not whose fault it was, the heart is broken and will not mend, and actually you don’t ever want it to mend, as then the memory of your perfect love will be be-smirched.  And so you mooch around and make those around you miserable too, until one day you wake up and realise that the sun is shining, you are mildly happy, and you haven’t thought of the wretch all day.  Instantly you feel better, straight away the heart lifts, and you can hardly believe what you saw in them anyway, and you make a solemn promise never to let anyone ever treat you like that again.

That’s what becomes of the broken hearted.

Sunday 25th March

Every single human being is wonderful, even those few flawed and broken, or what we might consider not quite whole humans, are wonderful.  The texture of their skin, even when broken and cracked and chapped – soon heals, the gentle fall and curl of eyelashes never fails to amaze, the eyes themselves, each a window to the soul within, the hands which express and show and hold and sometimes harm.  All of it – and each and every one is marvelous.  And when you occasionally are in a crowd, at a concert say, or a football match, or just shuffling along down a tube corridor, you cannot help but wonder that we are all so similar and yet each of us quite quite unique too in this mass of say a few thousand.  Then when you think about a city like London, which I always considered must be the largest in the world but which is rapidly being overtaken especially in the far East, with its teeming how-many-millions of people, all different but all basically the same, how large that number becomes, suddenly we are into the millions.  The human population is estimated at about seven billion, which is about one thousand cities of London full, and again each one much the same and yet vastly different.  At this point one begins to wonder at the enormity of numbers, to try to physically count them would be impossible and we would die before we achieved it.  And human beings are far and away from being the most populous of species, even among the animals; there are far more fish of some types in the sea and most insect species number far more individuals, which we can only assume are similar but each one different too.  Then we have the plants, where billions are incredibly small fry; has anyone ever tried to estimate how many individual grass plants there might be.  When we try to think about bacteria and all microbes numbers are simply no use to us, as there are millions on each individual human let alone in the air around us.  And I ask myself, why this enormity of numbers should exist; is it DNA run riot, or just that there is real safety for a species in numbers? But we look at numbers from the wrong perspective, we each have our single identity, and we therefore look at all numbers as multiples of ourselves, whereas we should maybe be looking at mankind as one, and grass and ant as one too.  Then perhaps we wouldn’t be so overwhelmed by the enormity of numbers.