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NASTY AND NICE

4/24/2017

Despite plenty of weekend sunshine in this loveliest of cities in the loveliest of seasons, I have been missing the hills: both the Cumbrian fells (who’d have thought it?) and the Yorkshire Dales, a later discovery. So it’s good to be reminded of the pleasures of being in Cambridge in the spring. Nasty Women is (are?) I think newly arrived here. A few weeks ago a friend winked as she passed me a flyer calling for placards “in the spirit of resistance”. An exhibition of responses, variously humorous, angry, thought-provoking, passionate and engaging opened on Friday with a great buzz at Cambridge Artworks. All pieces are for sale – many sold already – with proceeds going to local women’s charities. The exhibition closes with a spoken word and music event next Sunday.

The season also sees Cambridge’s annual spring Literary Festival. I’ve been a volunteer steward for several years now. It’s a great chance for a writer to rub shoulders with others, both well-established and those just starting out on what promises to be a successful career. This year for the first time I was on duty in the Palmerston Room in St John's College, a first chance to wander through the grounds and across the Bridge of Sighs and soak up some of that atmosphere. Of course I’ve always picked out my must-see events beforehand but stewarding often provides an introduction to previously unknowns. This year Turkish writer Elif Shafak was new to me despite her international reputation, highlighted by my encounter with Manal, a young Lebanese student writing a PhD on Shafak's English-language novels. Manal had travelled from Dubai in the hope of a conversation with the writer. Sitting in on the session, I began to understand why. So impressively articulate on her country and its history and on a range of topics - nationalism, patriotism, politics, feminism, religion, as well as writing. PEN and threats to freedom of expression – Shafak is now on my list of essential reading.

My last shift finished on Saturday so yesterday was pure pleasure. I enjoyed hearing about First Light, an anthology edited by Erica Wagner celebrating the life and work of Alan Garner, with contributions from Paul Kingsnorth and Ali Smith. I came to Alan Garner’s books late, as an adult in fact, but I loved them and managed to pass on that love to one friend in particular – Red Shift was our favourite – and to my son. I remember sitting terrified with Jack in front of a vivid television adaptation of Elidor. I was interested also to listen to Dan Kieran talk about the success of the crowd-funding publishing venture Unbound and delighted along with the rest of the audience by Ali Smith’s debut writers. A regular event, it’s a must for me every time but this year’s had the added bonus of providing lots of laughs and one really inspiring anecdote: short story writer Eley Williams was approached by her publisher whilst reading one of her stories in a ‘particularly dank pub’ and invited to submit. The rest, as they say – and absolutely the stuff of dreams for those of us who haven’t made it yet. The event was so successful, in fact, that it led to the longest queues of the weekend at the Heffer's bookstall in the Old Divinity School and a complete sell-out of all three books.

The high point of the festival for me, though, was an hour in the company of Sebastian Barry. I’ve only just come to Barry – rather ashamed to admit that I had muddled him with Sebastian Faulkes and so thought I knew who he was. I devoured ‘Days Without End’ – read the first eight chapters so quickly that I had to go back to the beginning and start again because I was loving it so much I was afraid I might have missed something – and felt a keen sense of loss on finishing. I knew that the story at the centre of the novel – the friendship between two young Irish soldiers in mid-nineteenth century America which grows into love, literally, the love of a lifetime – had been inspired by his son – the book is dedicated to him, in fact – but it was even more moving in the telling. Barry read two passages, full of passion, drama, humour, even song – Thomas McNulty’s voice different from how I had imagined it – but an amazing experience. In fact, I teetered on the edge of tears throughout the hour although it was in no way a sad event, and narrowly avoided sobbing all over him when I went to get my book signed. ‘It’s the wrong book, but –’ I said as I offered him The Secret Scripture. ‘Don’t worry – it’s the same author,’ he said. I mumbled some other incoherent stuff about how wonderful the book was and how I wasn’t Irish or gay but I was a mum – what in god’s name makes us capable of such inanities at such precious moments? I would prefer to have said – as one reader wrote on her blog apparently – that Barry had ‘ruined her life’ because now nothing less than this great love would do. But I didn’t. I did come home inspired, though – he spoke about the ‘intoxication’ of writing, and the importance of making stuff up, even if we get it wrong. So I have more things to write, and Days Without End to reread – although I may tackle the Secret Scripture first, along with other purchases that I couldn’t resist.

Other reverberations from the weekend: I was mistaken for Madeleine Bunting. Two women stopped me for a photograph of my ‘amazing’ hair. I was reminded, courtesy of Rose Tremain, of the horror that the idea of exile can mean, and that the past is not simply past but lives on with us – to ‘entwine’ us was Paul Kingsnorth’s phrase I think. I was reminded, too, that we must write without fear – or was it to feel the fear and do it anyway? Meanwhile the sun is not far away and the avenue of bird cherry is prettily and fragrantly in flower across Jesus Green. So thank you Cambridge – on balance, it’s good to be here.

First Light, edited by Erica Wagner, was published by Unbound in 2016.
Ali's 3 debut writers this year were Luke Kennard for The Transition, Sally Rooney for Conversations with Friends and Eley Williams for Attrib. and other stories
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry was published by Faber and Faber in 2016

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To Have and to Hold

4/11/2017

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Today is World Parkinson’s Day. A friend sends a link for a news story on brain cell therapy. Trials in mice suggest that replacement cells can be coaxed to take over the dopamine-producing work of the damaged neurons. There are many such promising stories – another is the topic of this evening’s Gretchen Amphlet Memorial Lecture at Fitzwilliam College, where Doctor Alistair Noyce from University College London will speak about his study Predicting Parkinson’s. I have a ticket but the venue is a bit of a stretch for me at that end of the day, particularly since it eats into tango time and will then entail getting across to the other side of town so I’m unlikely to make it. My personal money is on Deep Brain Stimulation: since it was first mooted almost 18 months ago I’ve been lost and then found in the system and the next stage of my assessment – to check if I am suitable – is due at the end of the month. It can’t come too soon. I am more tired more of the time and suddenly a prey to severe dyskinesias, those all-consuming writhings and twitchings which are a side-effect of the medication. How sweet it would feel to be still!

I’ve been thinking about the term ‘grounded’, the way it’s migrated from the negative connotation of being prevented from flying or run aground, high and dry to the now more familiar sense of being mentally or emotionally stable: to have your feet on the ground; to be in the here-and-now. There are apparently techniques to help manage intense anxiety, and responses to feeling knocked for six by life’s vicissitudes which involve building, or rebuilding, a relationship with the earth. Whilst emotionally I find myself on fairly secure ground just now, the literal sense of trusting the earth beneath my feet is lost to me. I don’t want to make too much of this. Remembering my mum’s propensity for falls in her last year or two, her face more often than not a spectacular array of livid colours, or watching the elderly and infirm clutching the rails of the Jesus Green footbridge as they inch their way across, I recognise that by comparison I’m a model of equilibrium. It’s provisional, though. ‘Postural instability’, one of those cumbersome terms that have attached themselves to Parkinson’s – as if the clumsiness of the condition weren’t annoyance enough! – is a fact of life now. I’m careful not to look up or turn quickly in the shower. I watch out for anything which might trip me up when I’m out and about. Increasingly, I’m prone to falling over my own feet. Cycling must be timed to coincide with periods when the medication is likely to make me relatively safe; it doesn’t always work.

My hold on life feels especially precarious at the moment since I’ve set myself in motion, pulling up my Cumbrian roots and then, as if that weren’t enough of a destabilizer, my Cambridge roots too. Yes I know I’m only moving round the corner but the time factor has confounded me rather. I’m not sure how long it is since I packed my first box of books but I’ve become so used to living surrounded by the things that somehow this state of impermanence has become the new permanent. It feels as if I’m on hold, caught up in one of those interminable telephone conversations interrupted at intervals with the hollow assurance that ‘your call is important to us’, unable to settle to anything productive, forever marking time. When I do eventually receive the keys to the flat, most of a year will have gone by.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, I’ve been drawn to reflect on what endures. I’ve recently discovered Sebastian Barry. How have I missed him for so long?! This from the sequence in his latest novel which gives it its title, Days Without End:

Time was not something then that we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever… The heart rising, and the soul singing. Fully alive in life and content as the house-martins under the eaves of the house.

I trawl my memories for such moments of joy. Grief lasts too, I suppose, the awareness of loss persisting like a drip of water on stone, always eroding, never done. Hurts can linger too although may be susceptible to the desire to forgive, or be forgiven. What we try to have and hold for the safety and security of ourselves and our children, though, these are the things which most elude or defeat us. A house can soak up all our resources, literal and emotional, and be destroyed in an instant. Health? A given, until it’s taken away. Careers we build our lives around are lost overnight. Trees planted, lawns laid, investments made, plans drawn up, money saved, partners and friends claimed – all ephemeral, the more we invest emotionally in these things the more vulnerable we make ourselves to despair. Hope can sustain us until it disappears without warning: ‘I have of late,’ Hamlet says, ‘– but wherefore I know not, – lost all my mirth...’ Life itself can be ripped from us just when we feel it will last for ever. So where should we lodge our hearts? What game is worth the candle?

The process of packing has rendered the past very present for me. My dad was an inveterate record-keeper, taking photographs of every family occasion and, strangely it seemed at the time, every new house or car, as if these material acquisitions were markers of our purchase on or progress through the world. He filled album after album of such snaps and produced laboriously typed lists – antique furniture bought, classical music tapes recorded. In his last years, the digital revolution only took him as far as transferring the lists to his computer – he still printed out the results. Our piano, the biggest challenge in my many moves, was his piano, bought, so the story goes, by his dad for half a crown from a man they saw pushing it on a bogie up the road in Aspull. It bears the scars of its many journeys and is irrevocably out of tune but I have to find a way for it to accompany me to my fifth-floor flat. I have been pretty ruthless with other leavings: a clock presented to him on his retirement has gone to my friend’s brother, one of his watches to my son, another to an old boyfriend. But other relics still surface, in particular the trappings of a railway life. When he died, we rashly got rid of the thousands of slides, though the memory of stifling Sunday evening slide shows still lingers, one locomotive after another appearing on the screen as we yawned and fidgeted our way through the sequence, lulled almost to unconsciousness by the hum of the projector and the sound of his voice. On the shelf above my desk there is a tray with a teapot and hot water jug, silver-plated and much tarnished, from the old railway restaurant cars which my dad brought home one day from a sale. I’ll never use them, but I can’t bear to throw them away.

The first anniversary of our mother’s death will be just after Easter. My dad died almost 15 years ago, the day after my birthday, which this year falls on Maundy Thursday. And then Good Friday and what has become a family tradition of queuing for the annual Ante-Communion and Veneration of the Cross in King’s College Chapel. On Saturday, also at King’s, tenor Mark Padmore leads the Britten Sinfonia in Bach’s St John Passion. Writing in Saturday’s Guardian, Padmore contrasts what he describes as our ‘age of anxiety for preserving things’ with Bach’s world, where 11 of his 20 children died before he did and all his four performances of the St John Passion had to accommodate changes according to availability of instruments or players, or changes in theological fashion.

Last week I saw ‘The Olive Tree’, an absorbing exploration of family and friendship, what we need to keep and what we can afford to let go. The thousand-year-old tree of the title has been sold. The film traces the effects of the loss on the grandfather and its repercussions on the rest of the family. Granddaughter Alma’s hare-brained scheme to recover the tree is never going to succeed – or perhaps the way the story unfolds encourages us to reconsider notions of success and failure. It’s told with a lightness of touch and lots of humour, and a reminder that uprooting is not necessarily the end of growth.

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STORMY WEATHER

2/10/2017

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Don’t know why
There’s no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather…

Recently back in the swim after a week in the Doldrums, I’m reminded of an artist friend’s tale of a telephone conversation with his elderly aunt, when builders replacing the roof slipped and broke through the ceiling into his studio, filling the house with soot and plaster dust. ‘I’m phoning you from chaos!’ he complained. Her reply: ‘Oh I didn’t know you were in Greece, dear.’ Curious, the way we make a geography of states of mind; as if despair or delight were foreign countries we could visit and as easily leave behind. ‘In heaven, I’m in heaven’ the song goes – but only when ‘we’re dancing, cheek to cheek’.

So there I was, stuck*, on the same spit of land I’d foundered on many times before. The view was achingly familiar: a few scrubby bushes, a grey expanse of sea merging into a grey sky. The occasional frigate bird loomed overhead; otherwise, only the rippling, the sough and hiss of the sea. I was alone, with no prospect of, or desire for, company. I couldn’t write, the words there, somewhere, but out of reach. My sleep was broken or invaded by strange dreams of loss and failure. High and dry: not just stranded, but out of the water for some time and likely to remain so: hence, without hope of recovery or rescue. Apparently beaching can be deliberate, either for maintenance and repair, or prior to breaking up. I was unsure which applied to me.

It turns out the ‘Doldrums’ really is – are? – a place: a low-pressure area in the Atlantic around the equator, where sailing boats might be stuck for weeks for lack of wind, where ‘becalmed’ equals frustration, an inability to move, back or forward, rather than flooded with sweet peace. It’s the perfect metaphor for the low ebb – ‘a state of weakness or depression, lacking vigour’ – in which I found myself during the last ten days or so. I’m guessing ‘low ebb’ is also originally nautical: if the tide is at a low ebb, is there simply not enough water to stay afloat? At its extreme, I suppose, a craft is ‘beached’, grounded in shallow water.

The Doldrums are also prone to sudden squalls, thunderstorms and hurricanes. The few who ventured near me last week will recognise the signs: unpredictable dips in atmospheric pressure and outlook, banks of glowering cloud, explosions of sound and fury, the odd downpour giving way to persistent drizzle. I’m not proud of these outbursts, wish I could head them off before they materialise. I came upon an unlikely co-traveller at the weekend when I heard Bruce Springsteen talking on the radio about depression and the coping skills he’s developed. With what I discover is characteristic humility, he spoke about recognising the beast for what it is: ‘This is something that comes, it’s also something that goes, you know and maybe something I have to live with for a period of time… But if you can acknowledge it, and relax a little bit with it, very often it shortens its duration… sometimes it’s just time… or the right drugs… these are all things that can pull you back into your life.’

I'm wondering what pulled my fragile little bark off the sand this time. Being outside certainly helps, and the Botanics is beautiful, even on days as wintry as today. Mainly I think there were three stages. First, a series of frantic attempts to shift myself off the shingle interspersed with hopeless MAYDAY – ‘m’aidez!’ – signals. The only result: digging myself in deeper. Next, accepting the situation, battening down the hatches and sitting it out: cold and lonely it may be, but it’s not dangerous, certainly not likely to be fatal. Last, looking up, looking around and out beyond my little patch of shore, trying a different direction. We inch ahead through the shallows until, with a scraping sound, we slide into deeper water.

Perhaps the gloom is seasonal. In Old English the month of February was Solmonath – ‘mud month’. In the real world, it’s certainly rained enough recently to turn the firmest ground to mud. Thanks to the persistence of my birding brother, I’m warming to the stuff. Mudflats are great for watching waders. I’m even learning to distinguish one kind of godwit from another although my bird-watching more usually takes the form of gazing across glistening saltmarshes in search of the metaphorical – until reality draws me back. Last Sunday was the 10th anniversary of the deaths of 23 Cockle Pickers whose boat was cut off by the rapidly rising tide in Morecambe Bay, not far from where I did part of my growing up. The tragedy drew attention to the plight of migrant workers: their gangmaster sent them out across treacherous quicksands with no warning. They couldn’t speak English. Some couldn’t even swim.

We’re more familiar with other migrant stories these days. Suddenly 23 comes to seem a drop in the ocean in comparison with the thousands who have drowned in their search for a safe haven. With these in mind, I return to the word ‘foundered’ which I used so lightly of my own small upset. Checking, I find that despite its casual sense of stumbling or coming to grief, originally it meant to fill with water and sink – to the bottom, presumably, since it derives from the Old French fondrer to submerge from Latin fundus bottom. Run aground I may have been but not quite sunk and, although depression is not helped by feeling guilty, of course there are always many worse off. I catch the end of Eddie Mair’s Monday interview with Steve Hewlett whose ‘cancer journey’ has been shared with listeners over the last few months. Faced with the stopping of treatment and the news that he may have only weeks to live, he was married in his hospital room at the weekend. As always his honesty, humour and courage are sobering. What’s strangest is that he doesn’t seem to have lost sight of gratitude – for his family, friends, doctors, and his radio audience. For Bruce Springsteen, coming out of depression puts him in touch with ‘how blessed my life has been’. A literary hero of mine, John Burnside, puts it differently: writing, he says, is what he ‘steals’ from ‘the usual flow of things, from all the noise and interruptions…’ along with happiness, and ‘grace’. The notion of grace stays with me as the wind fills my sails. The rain has stopped. The sun may be out tomorrow.

* Beached but not stranded, unlike the hundreds of pilot whales who beached themselves on Farewell Spit in New Zealand's Golden Bay, their deaths made more poignant by the irony of the names.

Thanks to Raymond for his Auntie Margaret story
Bruce Springsteen's Desert Island Discs and Eddie Mair's Monday inteviews can be heard on BBC iPlayer
John Burnside's My writing day was published in The Guardian last Saturday 4th February
You can listen to Etta James sing Stormy Weather here
All photos (except the whales) were taken in Cambridge University Botanic Garden on 10 February

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Under a Mexican Sky

1/24/2017

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The first term of my year in Mexico is a blur. But when I went back after Christmas, kitted out in a heavy-duty sweater patterned with outsize red snowflakes, I recall the nip in the air as I walked up the hill to school. Already the sun shone from a cerulean sky. By lunchtime it would be in the seventies. For now, as we gathered with the kids in the yard to salute the flag, the distant volcanoes shimmered in the frosty air and we stamped our feet in time with the national anthem to keep them from freezing.

On one of the days when school closed for some significant date in the country’s calendar, Peter whisked me off in his smart car to Tepotzlan. The details are hazy: I think we lunched in style at the house of an elderly friend of his. We may have visited the witches and bought chaparro amargo to ward off amoebas. We may even have climbed the mountain. One memory remains, as clear as that sky: in a corner of the market, Peter parted with a handful of coins and presented me with a carved wooden whisk. ‘Bienvenido a Mexico’ he said in his Scottish accent and translated, as was his habit: ‘Welcome to Mexico’.

Most days the sky was a murky soup, the volcanoes lost in smog. When school finished, we would take off into one of the nearby pueblos in our battered turquoise Beetle and feast off quesadillas and cold beer before rattling home to light a fire. We had no furniture to speak of but our house did have the luxury of a chimney and we would lie on the carpet with our books and a glass of wine.

Peter inhabited a different world. When he wasn’t teaching – a grand name for the haphazard way we spent our weekdays – he was an orthodontist, which must have brought in the dollars. We never really understood why he entered our orbit at all. He didn’t seem to enjoy it much, struggled to manage the students, and the meagre pay the school provided can hardly have contributed much to his lavish lifestyle. He had a flat – a proper apartment with an entryphone and a balcony and artwork – and ate in upmarket restaurants. Once we met him at the seaside. I remember an evening walk on the beach from the Hilton where he was staying with one of the Alejandros. I was wearing white ballet pumps, quite unsuitable. He said I was like Marilyn Monroe. Afterwards we went for cocktails before Alan and I returned to our hotel. The dormitory room had seemed fine in daylight. Now, cockroaches the size of mice were everywhere, stretching on the light switches, hanging off the toilet cistern, scuttling across the beds. Nothing for it but to pull the blankets over your head and wait for morning. The next day we took a boat trip to an island. Somewhere there is a photo of Alan and Peter under a beach umbrella, beneath a suitably azure sky, ocean in the background. There is another guy with them, name long forgotten, dark hair shaggy to his shoulders. All I remember of him is being impressed by the fact that he drank beer for breakfast.

Sometimes I would take a pesero to the corner of Peter’s street. We made omelettes in his tiny kitchen. On Sundays we walked in the botanic garden before a lazy lunch in one of the swish neighbourhood restaurants. For all his peso-pinching tendency he could be very generous, letting us stay in his flat for weeks when we turned up worn out and spent up from our travels. He was a keen host who cultivated a reputation for disgraceful behaviour at odds with his respectable profession. I don’t think I made it to any of his parties, riotous affairs apparently, Peter dancing naked with his pedigree cats. We were able to return his hospitality in a small way when he visited England years later with a new partner, not an Alejandro this time, and stayed overnight with us in our north-east Cumbrian home. Predictably, they missed their connection from Carlisle but managed to persuade the train driver of the through train to make an unscheduled stop at our station. The change of context made for an awkward reunion. Peter wasn’t taken with our corner of the county, describing the grand houses on Capon Tree as so ugly that they shouldn’t have been allowed to be built.

The news of his death, in his late forties perhaps, came as a shock but no surprise. He revelled in promiscuity in a time and place when AIDS was rife, and he loved living close to the edge. In a city already notorious for opportunistic crime, you were a likely target if you were small, fair or appeared foreign or wealthy. Peter ticked all those boxes. In one of his favourite anecdotes he was wandering the streets of San Angel in the early hours of the morning, very drunk, when he was bundled into the back of a car, beaten and tipped out into the street wearing nothing but his underpants – his shoes, wallet, watch and cash all gone. Maybe Peter’s recklessness was extreme, but we took heart from his courage. We had escaped our safe suburban lives. Here, on the other side of the world, we braved dark streets and shady bars and dodgy food stalls, passed joints from car to car as we lane-changed on the highway. We forged visas, trekked through wilderness in search of waterfalls. Once we slept in a hotel with a gaping hole in the roof and travelled home in a car held together by selotape and string. Everywhere we went, we were offered food and shelter and friendship, most from those who had least. I remember one morning, standing with friends on a remote hillside outside a wooden shack, nibbling at a tamale. There was one for each of us, probably set aside for a feast day for the entire family but brought out instead to welcome travellers. We flirted with danger but avoided confrontation. If anyone had challenged our right to be there, to explore the world as if it were a playground for our privileged selves, we would have been outraged.

This morning Cambridge skies are Mexican blue. I take Peter’s gift from its earthenware mug. It is a trifling thing, but precious. Elaborately hand-carved from a single piece of wood, the molinillo is a complex arrangement of perforated circles and loose rings around a central shaft, its pattern highlighted with darker markings burnt on. It lived for years in our Cumbrian kitchen and doubled as a microphone for singing along whenever Feeder’s 2001 hit ‘Buck Rogers’ was played on the radio:

He’s got a brand new car
Looks like a Jag-u-ar
It’s got leather seats
It’s got a CD-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player-player

We’ll start over again
Grow ourselves new skin…

Buck Rogers, I read, was a fictional American character originally conceived as a World War One veteran who fell into suspended animation and returned in the 25th century to various space adventures. Vehicles associated with him were more likely to be rockets than cars. Peter’s escapades, though often extraordinary, were essentially terrestrial and although his car was immensely luxurious in comparison with our beat-up Bocho I don’t think it was a Jag. Peter wouldn’t have cared for the song – opera was more his to his taste. But whenever I hear it now, I remember all the fresh starts we’ve attempted over the years and feel sorry that Peter was cheated of such chances.

I dig out of the cupboard some Guatemalan chocolate with cinnamon, well past its use-by date and wipe the dust off the molinillo. I hold the stem between my palms and swizzle it back and forth but I make a poor fist of it: whilst the chocolate does dissolve into a grainy mix in the warm milk, I can’t get it to froth. I drink it out of the earthenware mug. It’s very sweet and, like café de olla, deep-fried quesadillas, the burning sun, even the polluted air of El DeFe, it tastes delicious in a bad-for-you way.

Thirty years on, I’d like to think the world would be a less dangerous place for Peter but I’m not sure. The weekend’s inauguration is a nightmare with no prospect of waking. Hospitality seems in short supply, a fairly even split between what Pope Francis described as ‘the globalisation of indifference’ and a dedicated desire to strengthen borders and keep the outsider out. Last week’s newspapers carry reports of the fatal shooting of Isidro Baldenegro López, campaigner against illegal logging, in the northern state of Chihuahua. Such deaths are apparently increasingly common. I chat to a half-Mexican friend about his roots. ‘I wouldn’t go back there now,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t feel safe.’

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GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

12/31/2016

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Nothing new under the sun, of course. Still, I hover over the title, thoughts of rights and royalties putting me on pause for a moment. In a way perhaps that’s the point: it’s all been done/said/written before. It isn’t a good time of year for goodbyes – or rather, suddenly they are everywhere, chattering on the edge of reason. ‘Absent Nanas’ Andy adds to our Christmas dinner toast and sets me teetering on the brink of tears.

Our personal losses have been keenly felt: two grandmothers gone this year, and one missing from the Christmas feast due to injury; one good family friend suddenly last month, the one person we thought certain to last for ever. The news that ‘Pops’ – not quite family but almost – had also died in November reached us in a Christmas card. We mourned others known to us who tussled with death and lost, or celebrated those who won, but only just. And then those we knew only by virtue of their music or art or profession but held close to our hearts: you will have your own lists. Phrases or snatches of song we associate with them inhabit our head space in a reverberation of grief. Jack remembers Moby, the sickly goldfish which died a couple of weeks after his dad left. He – Moby – had hardly been with us long enough to warrant a change of water before we found him floating on the surface one morning but, like moss on a flood plain, his passing soaked up all his keeper’s grief.

‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’ The last word stretches out as if in an effort to hang on just a little longer to what, or who, we had; except that of course, as we grow older, the only wisdom which sticks is that we can’t actually keep hold of anything: try as we might, success or love or friendship, health or wealth, all slip through our fingers, leaving us bereft and alone; and sometimes, if this doesn’t trivialise too much, miffed by our lack of readiness. Most last times have already happened by the time we notice; we can bid farewell only in retrospect.

The days after Christmas are always faintly dissatisfying. The push to make the holiday happen as we wish leaves us exhausted and out of sorts, with an irritable desire to do things better, if only we knew how. What did the Magi say? – ‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation’. There’s time to catch up on reading, though. Revisiting Margaret Drabble after what is probably a twenty-year gap, I am absorbed and troubled in equal measure by ‘The Dark Flood Rises’ and its reflections on ageing. After the ‘roller coaster’ of her middle years and the ‘plateau’ of her sixties, Fran has ‘suddenly taken a step down. That’s what happens. She knows all about it… not a cliff of fall, but… a descent to a new kind of plateau…’ I watched this happen to our mum: without drama but apparently overnight, some faculty, her characteristic elegance, gone without trace and no time to prepare or regret its passing. These last weeks, after another minor fall, I remain wobbly, and wonder if I’ve made one of those inevitable descents.

Moving house epitomises this unsettledness. In fact my goodbyes to Hallbankgate and the small house which sheltered us for almost 20 years from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are well-orchestrated: I even have time for a last fellside walk, and arrive back in Cambridge with roots of roses which I hope will keep the memories alive. It’s a double whammy, though, since I’ve already set in motion the wheels for moving house here also. And things are changing with regard to my bolthole, my brother’s lovely cottage in Norfolk: after the decorators have done, he will replace the huge old bed in the upstairs bedroom and reclaim the space. All those nights of cold sheets, the air smoky from the fire downstairs, and no chance of a last time. As always, the insecurity goes straight to my stomach and I lurch between excitement and anxiety – until I remember the thousands whose moving day in 2016 became weeks, months, even years of upheaval, danger and worse.

How do we make sense of it all? How can we say our goodbyes and reach for a new start without turning our backs on the many whose struggles dwarf ours by comparison? I guess one way forward is to recognise our good fortune rather than dwelling on our sorrow; in his alternative Christmas message, Brendan Cox says his family will try to remember ‘how lucky we were to have Jo in our lives for so long, and not how unlucky we were to have her taken from us’. But he also suggests that the losses of 2016, personal and global, can be ‘a wake-up call,’ reminding us that we all have our part to play. My friend Dan Ellis who does more than most to make the world a better place, put it neatly: ‘There is no one who can tell us truthfully that it will be alright. We have to fight for that within ourselves and keep on doing what we know to be the right thing.’

Maybe I was wrong about the inevitability of love slipping through our fingers with the rest of what the world offers; or at least, unlike those unavoidable drops which Margaret Drabble describes, we can do something to prevent this. Robert Peston, writing about the death of his wife three years ago, speaks of the indestructible ‘intangible connection’ which he experiences as a ‘continuing internal dialogue with Sian in my heart and head’. Reaching out to others in a spirit of defiance of what divides us is itself an act of love and a rejection of hate. We can choose that action and hope that Philip Larkin, who saw in the effigy of a couple hand in hand on their ‘Arundel Tomb’ a tentative cause for hope, is correct in his ‘almost’ truth:
‘What will survive of us is love.’

Leonard Cohen recorded 'Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye' in 1967, the year before I went off to uni.
40 years earlier, in 1927, T.S Eliot wrote 'Journey of the Magi'.
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble was published by Canongate in October 2016.
'An Arundel Tomb' by Philip Larkin, probably witten in 1956, was pusblished in his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings by Faber and Faber.

All photographs were taken in Hallbankgate in December 2016

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A BAGATELLE FOR THE ELEVENTH MONTH

11/2/2016

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Late on All Hallows Eve, an email from a friend arrives with three ‘bagatelles’. This morning I look up the word, forgotten since his last similar gift. Definitions include the game, and then ‘a short literary or musical piece, in a light style’. One source adds, ‘too unimportant or easy to be worth much consideration’. I don’t like the self-deprecating tone here, I think I will tell my friend: there are enough keen critics out there without adding your voice to theirs. But it’s an intriguing word, deriving apparently from the 16th century French word for a trinket or knick-knack, via the Italian bagatelle, a trifle, from the diminutive of the Latin baca, berry. I’m thinking again of the game – a childhood memory has a wooden board with a fearsome spring – where ‘small balls are hit and then allowed to roll down…’ according to Oxford Dictionaries online. So a perfect metaphor, I think, for a speculative piece which launches an idea and then allows it to go where it will.

This morning, then, a new month which reverberates with old echoes. Ted Hughes’s November is all rain, ‘sodden as the bed of an ancient lake’ and indeed the golden rain of falling leaves has become a persistent drizzle as I pedal home along the river. Simon Armitage’s ‘November’ epitomises bleak: the poet and his friend are delivering John’s grandma to the ward to die with ‘her towel, soap and family trinkets’. They feel ‘the terror of the dusk begin’ as they recognise, in the ‘pasty bloodless smiles’ and the ‘stunned brains’ of those around them, the fate that is waiting for them not far down the line. The poem puts me in mind of my mum’s last months. When the Parkinson’s bites, as it does increasingly between doses these days, I recognise in myself so many of her late mannerisms, the wincing and the whining and the losses of grace – or do I mean gracefulness? Hers, though, like my dad’s 14 years earlier, was a spring death and, as deaths go, a good one, I think. She certainly felt loved, both by family and by her carers in St Georges. In the minutes after she stopped breathing, a kind of Greek chorus of all the staff materialised in the room and just stood in a sort of respectful silence. Later, one of the care assistants, an ebulliently eccentric woman from Portugal who helped dress her for the last time said, ‘Clarice was my first death.’

Unlike Philip Larkin, whose poem ‘The Old Fools’ presents an unremittingly grim account of ageing, Armitage’s version does allow some light: ‘Sometimes the sun spangles’ he says, ‘and we feel alive’. ‘Spangles’ – another lovely relic of a word. It reminds me of a photo I took of Mum perhaps two or three weeks before she died. I’d bundled her up in as many layers as we could manage. She was pretty grumpy about the outing and I had to take her out in her slippers. Once we made it to the Botanics, though, she was happy enough to be pushed around. In the photograph she is practically inside the large flowering cherry on the lawn in front of the glasshouses, which is covered in blossom sparkling in the sunshine under a Mediterranean sky. Her woollen hat is pulled down over her forehead, and she is smiling that vague smile…

I have a very soft spot for Simon Armitage, not least for the nostalgic reminder of some of my favourite if often most tricky students who laboured through the selection of his poems in the dreaded GCSE Anthology. ‘Oh another teacher,’ he said when Debbie & I formed part of the audience in the pub in Greenhead, one of the stops on his ‘Walking Home’ tour and I mentioned how much I loved ‘Homecoming’. Like ‘November’, this poem considers our take on time, when a ringing phone remains unanswered since ‘it's sixteen years or so until we’ll meet’. Unlike ‘November’, time in ‘Homecoming’ endures and reassures: if you trust enough to ‘step backwards’ into it you will find that, even after all these years, the canary-yellow jacket ‘still fits’. And then there’s that wonderfully wry recording of ‘You’re beautiful’ on the Poetry Archive, the gravelly voice crunching through those delicious northern vowels. This is one performance always guaranteed to make me chuckle.

Not much levity here, though: I find myself fairly dreading the winter with all the gloom of a seasoned Cumbrian. All those long months of long nights and short days, getting up in the dark and going to bed in the dark, reaching its nadir in the winter solstice just before Christmas, ‘the year’s midnight’ John Donne called it. For Mike McCarthy, though, the 21st December is a cause for celebration and a source of joy. Unlike human time, which is linear – there is no escaping the fact that, like John’s grandma in Armitage’s poem, the monstering of age, disease and death awaits us – the earth moves in a cycle, and this lowest point is the moment when the days begin to lengthen, the moment when the miracle of rebirth begins. One of the bagatelles which has shot – or rolled? – into my inbox plays with the notion of counting time by making as many hour glasses as it takes to contain all the sands of the desert. Each glass will have its hour. I’m stopped in my tracks by the subtleties of this sentence.

We trade words, my friend and I, like kids swapping – well, what did we swap when we were children? Beads? Cigarette cards (were there really such things?)? Anyway, this is our currency. And here is a book (Alison Brackenbury’s Skies, with its beautiful cover) that I will give in October. By chance it contains a poem for October, a two-liner as I remember. And another entitled January 7th, which I read on the train. I see that it tells a story not unlike ours, save for the last bleak verse: the yellow jacket in this poem ‘flies like a flag’ alone on the line; the future is only a ‘long night’ of rain. I wonder if my friend will spot the likeness. Turns out he discovered the poem months ago! I don’t go much on praying these days but I am reminded that others might. And I’m thanking whatever it is in the universe that ordains that, come January, snowdrops will be in flower and all that new life will be well on the way. As for the bagatelle: whilst the beads or balls or tiny berries are subject to the whim of fortune or the pull of the earth, we are not powerless. A soft or a sudden start, even a slight tilting of the board, can change things entirely.

'November' by Ted Hughes was first published in Lupercal (Faber & Faber 1960)

Works by Simon Armitage: 'November' first published in Zoom (Bloodaxe Books 1995)
'Homecoming' first published in CloudCuckooLand (Faber & Faber 1997)
Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way (Faber & Faber 2012)

'The Old Fools' by Philip Larkin first appeared in High Windows (Faber & Faber 1974)
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy was published by John Murray in 2015
Skies by Alison Brackenbury was published by Carcanet Press in March 2016

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October Stories

10/5/2016

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Yes, I’m still here, and still writing, though the blog has been in hibernation for a while. Now, just when the rest of the natural world is thinking about bedding down for the winter, it’s ready to put its nose out of the nest…

It’s that time of year again. All those years of teaching with barely a break after school and university has meant that the shifting season signals the start of a new chapter for me. As the summer stutters to a close, the weather lurching from seaside sunshine to tropical storm, that restless feeling grows. My dreams are peopled with difficult students and critical colleagues, my competence questioned, my confidence challenged at every turn. I am late, unprepared, clueless. In the real world, I try desperately to recover a working routine but the fallout from the summer lingers in piles of washing and domestic chaos. Jack moves back in, and out, again. I wave him off with a heavy heart. The Cumbrian house is on the market, again and suddenly, after years of lingering, seems to have been snapped up. Unsettled to the point of neurosis, I become obsessed, again, with the idea of moving. I want to clear the ground, dig out what remains of the old plantings, put down new, permanent roots.

On mornings like these, though, I’m caught between nostalgia and longing. Somehow it’s the time for renewing old acquaintances, rediscovering lost loves. I return in my mind to Mexico, those magical early mornings, frost sparkling under sun from clear blue skies, when the usual smog cleared and the volcanoes shimmered in the distance as I walked up the hill to work. Out of sync with the rest of the world as always (my mother’s name for me was Contrary Mary) I took my gap year twenty years late. Looking back, though, at my astonishing naivety then, I might as well have been eighteen. I’m further unsettled by the late holidays of friends who send thoughts from abroad. Despite this city’s loveliness in early autumn, long shadows and rustling willows and sparkling water, I wish I was anywhere but here, with anyone but myself. School dreams give way to turbulent erotic scenes which leave me bemused on waking. And then there’s the botanic garden, a second home for almost two years. I rarely get there now.

As for the writing: there is a lot to be said for sticking at it. I am in the very fortunate situation where I can do that, without paid work wearing me out or children clamouring for my attention. Even more privileged to have a brother happy to share his lovely cottage in Norfolk, so that I was able to take myself off for the month of August and write there. It’s my ideal situation: just me and the laptop, a book or two, a pair of walking boots, the unassuming Norfolk countryside. I came back with a first draft of a novel almost complete. I am happiest when I can reproduce something like that routine here: up early, read a bit of hard stuff with a pot of tea, write for the rest of the morning, perhaps a couple of hours of editing in the afternoon, a chapter or two of fiction at bedtime… Often I don’t manage all of it and it does make it difficult to fit in other essentials – tango, exercise, shopping, friends – but I keep coming back to this: it’s what I do. Or, like Simon in Lord of the Flies, ‘What else is there to do?’

To keep going, I have to believe that some of what I write is important in some loosely political way, an exploration of pressing concerns – or that, even if it’s mainly for fun, it’s as perfect as I can make it. I have to silence that critical voice which says ‘This is rubbish’ or ‘You don’t know enough.’ I remember a workshop with A.L. Kennedy in which she offered this advice: get rid of your nerves, don’t allow your negative energy to crush or sabotage you, think of your reader as intelligent and interested in the same things as you and, what has stayed in my mind above all, make sure you give your reader your best shot – as if you are writing for someone you love.

There is something deadening about writing in a vacuum, though. So, although self-publicising goes against the grain, the other thing I’ve tried to address in the last six months or so is to get my work out there. And it has paid off. Two of the stories from Writing the Garden, completed during my residency at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, are due to be published in Crisp, ARU’s new anthology of creative writing, next month, and a third will be the featured story on Litro magazine’s #Story Sunday slot this coming weekend. Finally, as a result of a competition which I’d forgotten I’d entered, a publisher is looking at the latest novel. And there’s the blog, of course: I’d forgotten the pleasures of this kind of sharing…

To read ‘Inside’, go to www.litro.co.uk this Sunday and click on #Story Sunday. It should be top of the list. I think stories remain on the page for a while, but it would be great to have a few readers, and perhaps a comment or two, on the day.

'Heartsease’ and ‘Classical Studies’ will appear in Crisp, to be launched on 2nd November and available from ARU thereafter for £6.99. Or, if you’d really like to own one, I might be persuaded to pick up one for you at the bargain price of £5.00 on the night!

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Time Travel

6/21/2016

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Not the Doctor Who kind, although he does crop up eventually. It begins with welcome relief from a troubled week, a delightful 3-day stay in Meldreth with my friend Clare the Poet. Since we first met getting on for 300 miles north and more than 25 years ago, inevitably we spend time in the past: Do you remember our production of Top Girls - "Rocky Mountain Jim..."? And the first meeting of the Book Group? And the wedding: when was that exactly? We walk the dog, stroll across fields and along the river, lunch in the lovely Teacake in Shepreth, linger over a glass of wine. I’m also captivated by Clare (and Iain’s) beautiful garden, in particular a lovely old rose, deep crimson, which fills the air with its fragrance.

I’m there to take part in neighbouring Melbourn’s celebration of Bloomsday. On the first day, eight short stories are read outside different houses in the village – Dorothy Parker's 'Arrangement in Black and White', Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’, Joyce’s ‘Eveline’. My turn coincides with a deluge. I read a P.G. Wodehouse story under a chestnut tree, shouting out the wonderful lines (“The kemerer’s ’idden in the keb”) against the din of the rain. The following day I take part in a panel of four working writers discussing who we are, what we do, how we do it and why. It’s a compulsion, we agree.

And then Bloomsday itself, 16 June, a reprise of Leopold Bloom’s 1904 day out in Dublin. We follow him, in the tireless person of local Bloomsday organiser and enthusiast Hugh Pollock, wandering from martello tower to butchers to post office to pharmacy. Many have dressed in period costume. Like Bloom we eat sausages for breakfast and a gorgonzola lunch in the pub as we listen to music of the time from the very talented Brind family. I have the last reading of the day, in the cemetery for Paddy Dignam’s funeral. The sun is almost out, the band plays Abide with Me. It’s both funny and moving. The entire event raises money for the charity Water Aid.

Saturday takes me to London for the annual Open Garden Squares Weekend. I begin with a diversion, striking out up the Holloway Road in search of the school in which I cut my teaching teeth. I feel I am close but, it turns out, not close enough. So I retrace my steps and track down my first garden, the tiny Melissa Bee Sanctuary, tucked away at the side of the Union Chapel on Highbury Corner, where I spend half an hour sitting on a tree stump bee-watching and learning about these amazing insects. A mix of Italian and Serbian bees, they are busy collecting pollen. Although they are not kept for honey, some has had to be removed from the hives, so I get to taste a spoonful on my way out, an energy boost for my next venture. Heading east, I turn off along Petherton Road to Clissold Park, trying to spot the house I used to visit in the early 70s. Everything looks both the same and different. I have heard stories of total gentrification, but Green Lanes and Newington Green Road seem as defiantly run down and as determinedly Turkish as I remember. I toy with the idea of loitering for a coffee but decide to press on.

It’s late morning by the time I arrive at King Henry’s Walk, just off the Balls Pond Road. This is probably my favourite garden of the weekend. Once derelict, the garden has been transformed by local volunteers, with a large raised bed along the south-facing wall, planted with espalier and fan-trained fruit trees and divided into plots for local people, with peonies, sweet peas, vegetables and herbs. There are also large metal planters accessible to wheelchair users and a small wood. They have provided a feast of home-made cakes and there is a sizeable pizza oven on the go – I make the mistake of deferring lunch until the next garden, a decision I definitely regret later. We are entertained by a chamber group. It’s such a lovely, friendly environment, I sit in the brief spell of sunshine with a cup of tea, imagining that I might one come and live in the neighbourhood. The estate agents windows I pass en route to Hackney bring me back to earth with a financial bump.

The rest of my gardens for the day are a mixed bunch: Dalston Eastern Curve doesn’t quite cut it for me, whereas the modest Cordwainers Garden with its raised bed community allotments, plants for dyeing and its curious backdrop of tailors’ dummies in the London Fashion School windows I find charming. At the Geffrye Museum I meet up with Joy, another friend from my early days in Cumbria, so tea and cake and memories, including a strange series of Doctor Who-related coincidences, eat into garden time. We manage only a quick march through 400 years of English town gardens and are chased out by the man with the keys when we attempt a second look at the lovely herb and rose garden. I stay overnight with Joy in Hackney and hop on an early Number 30 which takes me back along the streets I walked yesterday to Euston Square, then a walk down Gower Street – here’s UCL, the Catholic Chaplaincy, 89, Waterstones that was Dillons when I was 18 and a student here – to The Academy Hotel, its two courtyard gardens my my volunteer slot for the morning.

By lunchtime I’m just about gardened out, but I’m still feeling the need to stitch together the pieces of my past which are bobbing about like prayer flags in my mind. I head west along Goodge Street to Manchester Square – a brisk circuit of the gardens – then a dip into the Wallace Collection for a glass of wine, a bite of lunch and a spot of art: Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda holds my attention for a while – I’m struck by the legs of the swooping upside-down Perseus, which remind me of the tiny legs of Icarus disappearing in the water in Brueghel’s painting (which is now thought to be not by Brueghel at all). Both paintings date from around the same period, but how different. On the way out I pause by Rembrandt’s painting of his son Titus, painted about 100 years later. I think I can feel the artist’s love of his subject – something about the light along the nose? I learn later that 1657, the date of the work, was a troubled year for the artist. Titus was the only one of Rembrandt’s four children by his first wife to survive infancy, and died eleven years after the painting was completed.

Ladies enjoying the Geffrye Museum Gardens

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Walking like a Bulgarian

5/28/2016

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3 NIGHTS IN SOFIA

We arrive in wet dark, a recent downpour just petering out, car parks and streets awash. We are met by a smiling young driver who patiently answers all my questions on the way to Hotel L’Opera, a quirky nineteenth century building on Parizh (Paris) which takes its name from the opera house (modelled on its Parisian counterpart) around the corner. From my attic room I can just see the top of the golden dome of the Sv Aleksandur Nevski Memorial Church and, on a clear day, the Vitosha mountain. A floor below, Carole’s tall windows look over a garden full of cats. For most of our time in this lovely city, the sun shines.

We spend our days wandering: church interiors, markets and parks, cobbles and back streets, much more interesting than the pedestrianised shopping street bul. Vitosha. We plod the length of 6 Septemvri several times a day, frequently finding ourselves lost. We discover a fine vegetarian café with excellent humus and soups and a cocktail bar in a square on Angel Kanchev where we sit under an umbrella in an evening storm. On the same street, a family-run Italian restaurant provides two of the best meals ever. Carole plays a jewellery seller at backgammon for a ring and loses. We visit the tiny but charming botanic garden. We dodge trams, ride one stop on the metro. It takes us several attempts to find the Central Station.

3 NIGHTS IN PLOVDIV

Much to the surprise of many we meet, we take the train. It’s a pleasant 3 hours or so, in a compartment for 8, very basic, with metal luggage racks and blue velour seats. We are joined by a (Roma?) couple with what look like bags of laundry and a loud mobile phone, an elderly couple – the man shakes our hands as they leave, with a prepared farewell in careful English – and a woman who, full of smiles, corrects our pronunciation of her stop. In Plovdiv, women waiting to board the train lift our suitcases off for us.

Initially wrong-footed by Capital City Centre Apartments, whose ‘great location’ turns out to be directly over the motorway, we manage to lock ourselves out on the fire escape, having to be rescued by a disapproving security guard. We get used to our flat, although the plush black and white interior, giant TV screens in every room and the disquieting click of lights which switch on automatically whenever we move makes me feel we are in a scene from The Pedestrian. Indeed, when we ask for directions to walk into the city we are greeted with incredulity: get a cab! In fact we discover a back street route into the centre which takes us 15 minutes and is full of surprises.

Still, it takes us a while to warm to the city, the old town so thoroughly refurbished that it seems at first a concoction for tourists. We are rescued by our discovery of Pavaj, ‘Pavement’, a small restaurant in The Trap, where the baked aubergine with feta is so good we have it two nights running. We sample some art – a fabulous exhibition of Encho Pironkov’s paintings, and the work of Plovdiv artist Dimitar Kirov (‘Diriko’) in Veren Stambolyan’s beautiful 19th century house, which we have completely to ourselves and are free to wander – and rest – as we please. While we are in Plovdiv, we hire a car and make a small first excursion to Bachkovo Monastery, which makes such an impression we agree to spend our last night in the country there.

HARMANLI

‘If you find the bridge with the large soviet woman statue, the camp is on the side of the road…’

I’d been up half the night before trying to plot a route from our apartment to the Refugee Camp in Harmanli, where I was due to visit the Play School that morning. Our return from Bachkovo had been tricky to say the least. My attempt at navigating with half a map and a profusion of road signs in the Cyrillic alphabet had sent us across lanes of traffic onto the forecourt of a petrol station, where an endlessly patient young man with no English drew us an elaborate way home. It almost worked perfectly until, at the last minute, there was our apartment block rapidly disappearing as we sped past in the opposite direction, involving my poor driver in a risky about turn in rush hour traffic. We weren’t keen to repeat this. Add to this the fact that the address I had for the school didn’t show up on any search, plus there were last-minute problems with my permission for the visit. We set off with me pretending a confidence I didn’t feel, wildly guessing at distances and road names. Somehow, in the nick of time, I figured out how the GPS on my phone worked, and we left the city secure in the knowledge that the soothing English voice would get us there.

Which worked fine until we approached the small town of Harmanli, back in unknown territory. What did a Soviet woman statue even look like? But here was the bridge, and the statue, unmissable and unmistakable. A bit of help from a couple working in a garden centre and we were there.

There are no photos of the visit itself, only a few of the area nearby, taken after I left. I’d been warned that it could be difficult to get permission to enter the camp and I thought it might be easier if it looked as though I wouldn’t be taking any secrets away with me. Despite my long wait outside this ex-army barracks, looking across broken concrete and blocks of flats – empty now? – security didn’t seem particularly tight and my escort, when he arrived – another of those young, mild-mannered, slightly sleepy young men with a slow smile – seemed relaxed and very open to answer my questions as we strolled across empty spaces past abandoned buildings and individual units, windows broken – by the refugees, the man said – they get drunk, sometimes there are fights – and awaiting refurbishment. Once there were thousands in the camp; now just a hundred or so. He painted quite a caring picture – here is the canteen, three cooked meals a day for the residents – and said he enjoyed his job. He was 26, the same age as my Jack. Once inside the classroom or rather its temporary home, things looked less straightforward: you’re being listened to, Sadie warned her mum as she talked about the children and the difficulties they face.

Sadie and Gil have been running Harmanli Refugee Camp Play School since November 2014, unpaid and unfunded. They are from Cambridge; from Newnham, in fact, just down the road. But if this puts you in mind of well-intentioned ladies with independent means, forget it. These are ordinary working women, a qualified primary school teacher and a qualified nursery nurse, doing extraordinary things: fund-raising, building support, campaigning, collecting resources and, above all, piling all their creative energies into making a difference to the lives of traumatised children through play. Have a look at the evidence on their facebook page: picture after picture of smiling faces. I spent the morning listening to their stories and sitting with the children as they worked and played. One small boy in an Arsenal shirt, one of four brothers, sat beside me copying the days of the week – in English – in careful capitals before donning a multi-coloured wig and heading for the mini-pool table. Another showed me a book which is helping him learn Welsh – he hopes to join his uncle in Wales. I came away excited, moved – and exhausted!

MADZHAROVO

Whilst I am in the camp, Carole explores the small town of Harmanli, right to its poorest peripheries. We eat our lunch in the square, exchanging stories. It’s an interesting place with a 500-year history. Situated between two mountain ranges where the Harmanliiski joins the Maritsa River, it lies on the trans-continental route from Western Europe to Istanbul, and on the old silk road. The marble plaque on its landmark hump-back bridge reads ‘The world is a bridge, across which the way of the king and the poor man passes’. And now we are on the move again, heading into the Eastern Rhodope Mountains in search of migration of a different kind. The road is spectacularly pot-holed: it takes us hours to travel the 30 miles to the Vulture Centre at Madzharovo, where we have booked a two-night stay. As usual our first impressions are not positive: the town looks like a ghost town, with dilapidated blocks of apartments. Later, we learn that the discovery of gold in the 1960s created a boom which lasted as long as the gold. Now, the 5,000+ population has dwindled to 500. The rooms in the Centre are basic, views of the river screened by densely-leaved trees. We move our furniture around and grumpily ask for tea. By this stage of our journey, we should know better. Within minutes we are walking across the river bridge, guided by the tireless Nusha, to a spot where we can see vultures flying.

We opt for an early start the following morning and set out with cloud still hanging over the valley. A longer walk takes us nearer to where the vultures nest. They’re slow to get going as rain threatens, but we’re treated to a clear view of several huge griffon vultures wheeling and soaring around the peaks. We also learn to pick out the birds perched on the rocks: an awesome sight. We’re encouraged by Nusha’s passion for the birds – ‘I love’ she says, hand on heart. We're also totally charmed by her warmth, by the way she runs everywhere in her desire to make us comfortable.

I chat to Yanna, a student on a six-month placement pending her dissertation on bird crimes, about the spectacle of the spring and autumn migrations of soaring birds and raptors in the area, which is the reason behind my wish to include the Centre in our itinerary. I’m already 20,000 words into a novel, set in south-eastern Bulgaria, exploring our responses to the current refugee crisis, and I’ve been struck by the parallels between human and bird migration. Yanna confirms what I already know: that the sight is most impressive on the Black Sea Coast. But you can see several of the large birds in flight together near Madzharovo during migration, she says: good enough, though sadly we're too late this year. She promises to send me some photos. When our two days are up we’re sad to leave. We’ve seen Egyptian vultures and Black Stork, and learnt to recognise nightingale song, background music to all our wanderings. We’re even seeing the town through different eyes, looking past the dilapidation at the well-tended gardens, vegetables and roses everywhere.

'THE PLACE IN THE SKY...'

...is Carole’s name for Gorno Pole, the next village to Madzharovo up the mountain. We try to extend our stay with the vultures but the Centre is fully booked. So we follow a recommendation and head for Betty and her Wild Farm. Unfortunately Betty, who speaks good English, is away from home so we have to resort to miming to make ourselves understood – with limited success. Still, there’s that warm welcome which we’re growing used to. The food is fabulous, especially the farm’s own yogurt and honey for breakfast. Our rooms are comfortable, the views spectacular, and we see our first stork's nest. All wonderful – but it’s not Madzharovo.

We eat dinner with the other guests, a Swiss German, René, who is learning Bulgarian so is able to translate, and a trio of Romanians, all here on a return visit for the weekend to do some birding and botanising. René has some things to say about the English which I wished afterwards I’d pursued: if there are national traits, what are the Bulgarian ones? Or the Romanian? Can the stereotypes, our prejudices even, have something useful to tell us? I’m also annoyed with myself, still, for passing up on the chance to probe their views on the refugee situation. The silence with which they greeted my resumé of the novel suggests they might have held some interesting opinions. As Carole points out, my desire to accommodate and to avoid confrontation can be counter-productive. What is it Auden says? ‘To ask the hard question is simple’ – I wish I found it so.

THE ROAD TO ELHOVO

The next day sees us on the road again, aiming to cover almost 300 kilometres to the small town of Ahtopol, on the Black Sea Coast near the Turkish border, with a stop in Elhovo on the way. Elhovo is situated in a river valley between two mountainous areas, 36 kilometres from the border crossing at Lesovo, at the end of the old branch line from Yambol 40 kilometres to the north. Passenger trains stopped running in 2005, and the line closed completely a few years later. I came across Veselin Malinov’s wonderfully atmospheric photos of the derelict station when I first began work on the novel and gradually it emerged as one of the key locations. So I’m familiar with the look of the place – or as familiar as you can be in a virtual world – but I’m excited to see the town and the remains of its railway station for real. It’s a long way from Madzharovo, the densely wooded crags and heights soon replaced by flatter country, grass and agricultural land, and fewer trees, but the roads are empty, and we arrive in the early afternoon.

It’s bigger than I expected, a sprawl of a place whose centre is difficult to locate. It’s also the first place where we’ve been aware of foreign (that is, British) incursions: the group at the next table are loudly English, their bare limbs reddened by the sun, and we pass a bar which advertises English food: oh dear! The railway proves more elusive: try asking for a disused station when you don’t know the language – No, no trains now. But the waiter in the café eventually points vaguely down the road opposite and he’s right. Six years since Veselin’s pictures were taken and the buildings have fallen further into disrepair. The weeds have grown, hiding the tracks almost completely in places, but it’s all still there. I feel that tremor of recognition which has been missing as we’ve walked through the town, although our return to the car through the back streets is more promising, and I realise that tourism or second home ownership is perhaps simply another form of migration to be considered. And then we’re off: another 100 miles to go before we’re finished travelling for the day.

AHTOPOL

This was to be our well-earned rest after what looked on paper like a rather punishing schedule, especially for the driver. Our plan to stay overnight in Burgas didn’t materialise – thankfully, we thought as my compulsive camera-work on the approach to Elhovo had drained my phone battery almost to zero and we found ourselves horribly lost on its outskirts. Eventually we arrive in Ahtopol with the prospect of a luxurious extra night here. Perhaps it’s not surprising that it all feels a bit of an anti-climax? We’ve grown used to the stimulus of new places and Ahtopol just before the season gets under way is very quiet – so quiet, in fact, that our search for a restaurant yields precisely 0 results, so we finish up back at the hotel, where we work our way through their fish menu during the rest of our stay. Our Hotel Agata Beach has a pretty perfect location – our balconies are perched right above the sea – and on paper it looked by far the best of the bunch. But some problems with the rooms and a general feeling that money is the prime motivator here leaves us feeling somewhat disappointed.

Of course there are many delights here too. We spend some time on the beach, most notably the beautiful Silistar beach, part of the Strandzha Natural Park, 1161 square kilometres of protected land which stretches from the Strandzha Mountains to the coast and which includes ancient forests (80% of the Park is covered in deciduous woodland) and a rich biodiversity of flora and fauna. We don’t get much walking done, deterred in part by warnings of ticks in the area and partly by laziness. But this early in the year we have the sand to ourselves and manage to swim – twice. We also visit the border village of Rezovo – no photographs allowed, but we experience the odd sensation of looking across the narrow channel of the river to the Turkish flag on the other bank, whilst on this side of the water two men and a boy struggle to raise its Bulgarian counterpart. It looks as if it would be the easiest thing in the world to swim across. Ahtopol itself, both holiday resort and authentic small town, is worth exploring. We meet Kamiz, cheese-stick-and-pizza-seller who has spent two months in London with his uncle, and his dad in the background, who names London boroughs – Tottenham, Stamford, Haringey – in a kind of contrapuntal litany. And on my last morning, I am treated to coffee and figs in emerald-green syrup in the harbour-side house of Pancho, retired sailor, and his wife Nadia.

THE ROAD HOME

An early start and good intentions see us on a minor road cutting across country; all good until we hit a road block. In hours of driving we’ve covered barely an inch on the map so we sacrifice the planned flying visit to Dimitrovgrad, my second location, and settle for the motorway and we’re in Bachkovo by mid-afternoon, where nothing is as we have imagined. A distinctly chilly welcome, rooms more like a youth hostel than a monastic cell though warm and comfortable enough, terrible toilets and worse food. The peace within the monastery walls and the view beyond to the mountains remain something quite special, and we’re happy to share the space with chattering swallows and martins, but the coaches and the rain are arriving by the time we’ve eaten our yogurt (a jar bought from a nearby stall: infinitely preferable to another monastery meal!) and we head for the airport.

WALKING LIKE A BULGARIAN?

Remember The Bangles? If you’re old enough to remember the 80s, you might recall their hit single Walking Like an Egyptian. The song made a bit of name for itself by being deemed ‘inappropriate’ after the 9/11 attacks and also appeared on a BBC list of ‘records to be avoided’ during the Gulf War. The video, filmed on the streets of New York, was nominated for an MTV award in 1987*. It – the song – has been on my mind since my return from Bulgaria. I’d done lots of research from books and the internet beforehand so the trip, as well as being a much-needed holiday, was a first attempt to get the feel of the place and to begin to think myself into Bulgarian shoes. Yes I know, two weeks following the tourist trail is very different from real life but it felt like a start. There are questions about research – how much is enough? how much is too much? – and also questions about whose story a writer has the right to tell. For now, I’m working with my central character, a station master from Dimitrovgrad, as a kind of everyman, and reminding myself of the long catalogue of writers who inhabit foreign soil in their fictions. William Trevor once said in an interview: "I write out of curiosity more than anything else. That's why I write about women, because I'm not a woman and I don't know what it's like. The excitement of it is to know more about something that I'm not and can't be."

So walking – or thinking – like a Bulgarian is a leap of the imagination but one I’m interested to make. We liked the country very much, enough to think about a second visit in the autumn, enough even to daydream about buying a small house there. The other concern I have is that I might be too late with this book. Just today I came across reviews of two books about the ‘migrant crisis’ and listened to a radio programme broadcast ‘as the refugee crisis in Greece subsides’. But I think of that huddle of half a dozen men squatting on a Bulgarian roadside somewhere, startled faces looking up as we drove past, and of those who drowned off the coast of Libya today and of the steady stream of people on the move always, in search of safety or a better life. And I think maybe it’s never too late to explore: new territory, what it means to be Bulgarian, what it means to be human.

*The light-hearted tone of song & video still sits very uncomfortably with the realities of human rights abuses in Egypt now, highlighted in the murder of Cambridge PhD student Guglio Regeni: see Amnesty International's campaign for Justice for Egypt's Disappeared.

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BIRTHDAY PLUS ONE & COUNTING

4/24/2016

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The numbers game: 14 years since my dad – ‘Poppa’ – died on the 14th of April, the day following my birthday. We always imagined he hung on through the 13th, determined not to spoil the day for me. Now, we find ourselves counting and failing to remember exactly – was it 4 months Mum was in The Hope, or a year and 4 months, or 2..? I find I’ve been telling people an untruth: she will be 95 this year, not 96 at all! It seems both to matter and not matter at all. When I phone my landlady about the broken boiler, I mention my birthday. Oh I can never remember how old I am, she says. It’s either 72 or 73.

As usual my lovely landlady is not at all well, and she’s also feeling the cruelties of time passing. Quickly we settle into an antiphonal lament for what is lost: how did that happen..? where did it all go..? you know, I remember when I was a child even… it just flies… and I’m thinking, is this it? is this all there is, this life? and the children, they don’t want to know, as soon as they think I’m rubber-necking, they start yawning and turning away… oh I know, you can’t tell them anything… somehow I thought I would do more, travel to more places… now, though…

It all seems to have happened so fast, without warning. One minute we’re anticipating another 5 or 6 years of the slow attrition that is dementia, preoccupied by the quality of Mum’s life or the state of her dress. We’ve grown accustomed to marvelling at her loss of interest in how she looks, she who was famous for her elegance. How many coffee stains she has down her front, her tendency to wipe her nose on her skirt or a tablecloth – only her squeamish relatives notice. Her needs have shrunk: warmth, lack of pain, hot drinks, sugar, sleep. Her manners, though remain intact, or almost: ‘would you mind awfully if I nodded off?’ she asks from her hospital bed. A moment later, another, older self emerges: ‘what’s she on about?’

Even though we’ve had years to grow used to the steady deterioration in her mobility, her posture, her capacity and her interest in anything outside herself, we are not ready. The sudden onset of pneumonia, her admittance to hospital and what appears to be a big stroke take us by surprise. Steep steps downhill follow rapidly, the days of high agitation, laboured breathing and confusion – ‘where will you stay tonight?’ ‘where are my Sunday things?’ – giving way to a day when she is simply asleep and can barely be roused. Her breathing is shallow but suddenly seems effortless. She twitches and murmurs, sometimes cries out, like a puppy lost in a dream world, but she seems peaceful. All the lines have vanished from her face; only the creases round her mouth return occasionally as she makes a chewing motion with her lips. As I watch her sleeping, I think she looks to have done with all this life business – enough, finished. Not a pretty picture, but there is a kind of dignity, even a beauty, in the way she is at ease in her own skin, for the first time I can remember.

As if a tap is turned on, my head fills with imperatives: not just the inevitable to-do list which simply being the ones left alive seems to generate – Contact Muriel! Find Tony’s number! Make a list!! – but with well-worn exhortations to my son, my friends, family, myself – ‘Get out there! Go places! Use every minute! Seize the day!’ – and then, from somewhere deep inside myself, the routine cautions which dogged my early years – ‘Concentrate! Do your best! Sit up straight! Shape yourself! Try harder! Be nice!’ Always a worrier, Mum was preoccupied – too preoccupied, we thought – with status, with how we appeared to the rest of the world. Embarrassment, shame even, were ever-present possibilities to be guarded against, respectability the ultimate goal. Its pursuit absorbed all her energies and required an iron will.

No wonder she’s exhausted. Suddenly I see what’s she’s been up to these past few months: one by one the straps that hold it all in place have been discarded. Her slight frame gives; flesh spreads. She abandons her bra, then tights, wears any old thing. She indulges her craving for sweet things, licking marmalade out of the pot. She obsesses about the time of the next meal. Today, she seems to have stopped eating altogether. When sleepy, she sleeps. So, it’s done. She no longer has to keep that face prepared to show the world. She’s ready to let go. And in myself I feel the stirrings of something, some dark impulse buried beneath the carapace I've built over the years. That shell has been the surface I present to protect myself and to disguise my inadequacies; staying in control in order to succeed the lesson I learnt from both my parents. It’s enabled me to achieve a good deal but I’m finding, in writing at least, that the ties that bind can be a stranglehold as well as a support. All my life I've flouted Mum's advice and example. Sitting by her bed now, I wonder if I can mirror her new readiness to let it all go while there's still time, and see where it takes me.

In fact it didn’t quite end there. Rallying for a day or two, she kept us guessing to the end; long enough to make it back home to St Georges for a final 24 hours. We spent countless hours with her in those last few weeks. I read to her from whatever I had at hand, chattered on about any old thing, even sung to her a bit. I also found, after a lifetime of keeping our distance from each other, that suddenly touch was what we needed. The end, when it came, came suddenly and very quietly, in the evening of 19th April. Since when, I have been surprised by the weight of the loss, side-swiped by grief at inopportune moments, impatient in any company that isn't family.

The poem On Falling by Joanna Klink dropped into my inbox at the end of last week. I read it as metaphor before discovering at the end that it is really about a tree! There's the beauty of poetry, I guess!

All photos taken in the Botanics on the morning of 13th April

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NASTY AND NICE

To Have and to Hold

STORMY WEATHER

Under a Mexican Sky

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

A BAGATELLE FOR THE ELEVENTH MONTH

October Stories

Time Travel

Walking like a Bulgarian

3 NIGHTS IN SOFIA

3 NIGHTS IN PLOVDIV

HARMANLI

MADZHAROVO

'THE PLACE IN THE SKY...'

THE ROAD TO ELHOVO

AHTOPOL

THE ROAD HOME

WALKING LIKE A BULGARIAN?

BIRTHDAY PLUS ONE & COUNTING

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