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INSPIRED/ARNCLIFFE OCTOBER 2020

26/10/2020

[The following was completed as leisurely speculations about last days suddenly acquired a chilling new significance. A day or two later, a link to a Ted talk titled ‘What really matters at the end of life’ dropped into my inbox. I believe there is room – in fact a more or less urgent need - for conversation and speculation on such topics – but the events of a couple of weeks ago are a disturbing reminder that some things are beyond our control.]

Once my treatment is over, she said, I shall live each day as my last.

Not ‘as if’ but ‘as’: there’s a difference in emphasis I can’t quite put my finger on – something about actually doing it rather than pretending, perhaps?

It’s not an original thought, I know, but it’s set me thinking – about what our last days might look like, at best but also at the worst; how terrible it might be to be caught up in vengeful wrangling or bitter recriminations or in replaying old slights or newer sufferings and suddenly to find that this was how life would end for you. Or even if death took you unaware of how your final moments had been spent – I feel sure that dying with your focus on spite or sorrow will colour the process. It’s a bit like the old warning ‘Be careful the wind doesn’t change’ when your face is set in a grim expression for fear it might stick like that: to die with bad feelings uppermost will surely, somehow, make for a bad death. Not much better would be an indifferent ending – merely a fizzling out or Eliot’s famous ‘whimper’ – after a day frittered away. Not that I’m advocating anything so easy as looking on the bright side. Nor am I suggesting we follow the advice of another friend who recommends not allowing yourself to get up in a morning before you have managed at least one smile. Rather, I am interested in the choices I might make if I knew that this day would be my last, but without forewarning; that is, without the chance to tick off the item at the top of my bucket list, with no possibility of arranging to visit a favourite place or a longed-for destination, or to meet that special person one last time.

Something I heard somewhere recently – the source escapes me now but it has cropped up in conversations since – was the idea that we might take care to notice – one thing, anything, but really notice it, rather than going about our day with our heads down, just getting on with whatever we’re doing, with only the most superficial attention on what's around us. I’m reminded of a project initiated by Francesca in Buenos Aires: that each day we would walk just one block observing – in particular looking up at the upper floors of the buildings, often more elaborate or curious or enchanting than their ground level would lead you to assume. So yesterday, walking along the river, I saw how the clouds were stacked pale behind the spire of the church at the far side of the Common (after 12 years living in Cambridge, I had to check the name of the church (All Saints) when I arrived home). And I saw how sunlight alters everything. And listened to the birdsong behind the magpies’ chatter, ubiquitous now.

The pleasures and benefits of being outside have become highlighted during lockdown and this would be something I would add to my ‘last day’ list: whatever the weather, to spend at least a few moments outside. And, separately or not, exercise – not to let a day go by without some physical activity. Also I’m adding dancing to my list: not tango, probably, but for at least one song to get in touch with how my body might respond to music – something I’ve neglected for years, to the point where I’m actually unable to get to my feet and dance in any social gathering. That’s a loss I can recoup.

What else? Writing, of course; too often recently I’ve avoided the moment where I sit down with a blank page in front of me, blaming the fact that I have nothing to write. There is always something; even one sentence

To contact another human being should also be there: too many opportunities wasted, too often ready to crawl into my shell and leave it to others to contact me.

And finally – is it? – to do one small selfless thing each day that will benefit someone else – either small scale or for the ‘greater good’. That last sounds horribly self-righteous! And I’m wondering if there could be two separate impulses here: one personal, the other on the macro level..?

Saturday: not sure that I’ve hit either target in the last paragraph today but saw the blaze of virginia creeper on the Ferry Path bridge this morning and squeezed in an eleventh hour (literally) stumble around to Nina ‘Feeling Good’. And this I guess is/are my sentence or two: in sum, I’m inspired to be fully in the present; to inhabit the moment; to squeeze every ounce of nourishment from the day…

Bed. Yorkshire tomorrow.

SUNDAY

The way stone walls follow the curve of the land, the tree line, the valley bottom, divide field from field - the way beads of sheep’s wool are strung along a low fence wire - the way the cottage is hidden from the Darnbrook road behind trees - the way the trees are edging into autumn with an occasional one ahead of the crowd already a fire - the way after a certain time the noisy crows fall silent - the way the road drops dizzyingly down - after we left the motorway, the way one field after another was lit up emerald - the way the usually quiet roads were crowded with cars and walkers, even in the village - the way after sundown quiet was restored! - the way my feet stuck to the surface of the road, the way my breath stuck in my lungs, too long unused - the way turning and heading downhill was something of a relief! - the way I’ve mourned the loss of my ability to write as if it was for ever - the way the words spill across the page...

Fall No. 1: backwards into a ditch at the roadside - no damage.

MONDAY

...the way fields sweep down into the valley - the way in Wharfedale the valley bottom opens flat and wide, clumps of trees clustered along the slopes on the opposite side of the river - the way the trees are beginning to revel in colour, one or two massive chestnuts and sycamores ablaze with shades of orange and burnt umber, gold and magenta - the way the trees! - the way the larches by the river at Hawkswick lift up their skirts insolently, provocative, beginning the turn to ochre - the way the skeleton of a tree cavorts crazily, all limbs and angles - the way woodsmoke winds into the evening with the memory of a Burgundy November - the way the dipper appears suddenly and splashes and dips and swims before as suddenly flying off, skimming the surface of the water - the way the morning is constant drizzle, cloud hanging low between the hills - the way the garden birds vie for priority; so far the nuthatch is in charge...

TUESDAY

… the way the cloud sits on the hills as we drive into Wensleydale, rolling in around us, shrinking visibility to almost nothing - the way the cashier in the Spar launches into their Covid history, blaming Polish workers at the cheese factory for the earlier outbreak there - the way the rain sets in steadily as we take the track towards Nethergill Farm, passing the house where once we saw a man standing at the window - the way I can’t wait for the stove to be lit...

WEDNESDAY

...the way grass is combed thin across the rocks beneath - the way the cliffs across the valley are grooved like sabre-teeth or stalactites - the way the landscape is never still - the way two jackdaws sit in parallel on adjacent fence posts, and four ducks fly diagonally past, followed by another four, both in pairs - the way the call of crows is a rasp and the chorus of gulls as they rise and wheel above a far field is plaintive and shrill - the way pewter rain cloud drifts over the hill from Kettlewell and just hangs there, waiting - the way a swatch of pale blue behind a higher bank of sunlit clouds remains above the hills to the south - the way the steep slopes this side of the valley are ghosted with the pale outlines of what I think are dead or dying ash, their bare branches silver-grey against the green - the way there seem to be several stands of newly-planted saplings amongst the skeletal forms - the way the mossy walls glow emerald darkening to green-black with odd patches of faded crimson and occasional spots of deep vivid pink - the way there are sudden patches of paler green where tiny ferns grow out of the lichen - the way hips dot the roadside scarlet - the way the first larches of Hawkswick come into view - the way heading back towards Arncliffe the church tower is visible amongst the trees - the way the sky ahead clears into a hard blue - the way the sun, warm on my face, glistens through still-wet leaves - the way, whilst I have been out, our log basket has been replenished…

THURSDAY

.. the way the grey stone walls are every shade of grey, lightening to white patches of lichen and also sand and russet - the way the white horse in the blue coat twitches his ears for the camera - the way the lives of the lead miners of Grassington remind me of the gold prospectors in The Luminaries: hard lives - the way Grass Wood spreads, a rich mix, either side of the Conistone road, dropping steeply down to the river - the way the evening light! - the way a lone magpie flies like an arrow across the full length of a field - the way a small owl stands transfixed in the headlights, crouching over roadkill, before turning and flying off...

FRIDAY

...the way the world can turn on a sixpence - the way in the blink of an eye everything has changed.

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DIGGING

26/10/2020

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Leaving the motorway we stop twice, searching with scant success for evidence of C’s ancestors and move on, skirting the southern edge of the city, inching crabwise towards our destination. Memory flaps between recognition and strangeness like a sheet on a line - that curve in the road displaced by new build, the expected turning further than I remember. C talks, picking over the bones of an old love. I am half listening, half present, the rest of me taut with apprehension, anticipation. Red brick, weathered to crumbling, glows in the afternoon sun. Take care, I want to say, this is a dangerous bend but there's no need. And then there is the village sign, the dip in the road, the farm on the left.

We park round the corner at the lane end and walk up to the house. I feel the need to defend it from C’s unspoken criticism although it had no part in my growing up and I had no love for its bricks and mortar, not even for the garden, when I came to it as an adult. A moment is all it needs. We turn back and head between high hedges up the lane to the church. I wonder how many hundreds of times I‘ve walked this stretch of road, escaping the confines of what had become the family home, lighting the first cigarette once out of sight At a gap in the hedge we stop and look back at the house. What was a small acer has become a crimson fire. I point out the lone oak in the field. I used to look out at the tree from my bedroom window, I say, remembering as I speak that my room had no view over the back garden.

It’s a stiff pull up the path to the small church which squats square and defiant on its hilltop, the entrance opposite the vast split trunk of a yew. I wonder which has been here longer, church or tree? All Saints dates back at least to the eleventh century and what survives is now a listed building. I think of other feet making the same short climb over the centuries and of our own traffic through the years: weddings and funerals, Christmas and New Year celebrations and the day-to-day routines of a church-going family. My head fills with photographs of our own special occasions, many of those pictured long gone. Today, though, the church is not my business; I walk past and follow the trodden earth along the side of the graveyard almost to the end where the land falls away into the valley: the best view in the county, I’ve always said, if only they could see it.

The stone looks good, no sign of weathering. I’m surprised by the jolt of emotion when I read the last line of the inscription, long forgotten, ‘Together as in Life’. I’m unsure who was responsible for the sentiment, a tender evocation of a unity that wasn’t always evident. I’m reminded of the couple in Larkin’s ‘Arundel Tomb’, their effigies hand in hand, a perhaps misleading emblem of enduring love. Our father lived much of his life outside the home, absorbed in his railway career and, when that came to an end, in affairs of the church. Late in life my mother often told the story of Dad’s marriage proposal, sending her away to ‘think it over very carefully’ since he required a wife prepared to support him in his chosen profession, ready to move house at short notice when the opportunity for promotion arose. I imagine that Mum saw the marriage as a passport to advancement, an opportunity to exchange the poverty of her northern childhood for a better standard of living. In fact, there followed long years of privation, Mum stuck at home, often in a house she hated, nursing her invalid mother and with two small children to look after, the eldest growing into an increasingly difficult daughter.

The fiction is that our parents are buried side by side. In reality our mum, being the last to die, is on top. It’s more than four years since her committal - I believe that's the correct term - and the neglect shows. But I have come prepared. I take the trowel and shears, the plant, a pot and compost from the bag and crouch down at the graveside. It’s hard work and slow: the new shears are spring-loaded and I’m finding my upper arms too weak to snip away at the overgrowth for long. The area nearest the headstone is choked with couch grass and groundsel. I settle into a rhythm, alternating between yanking at the weeds and trimming the surface of the plot. Soon I give up my attempt to stay reasonably clean and kneel on the damp earth. I have no memory of Mum on her hands and knees scrubbing floors but I’m pretty sure it would have gone with the territory of the housewife, especially in the early days. Well into widowhood, ‘and I do all my own housework’ was still her proud boast. What would she make of me now, always scornful of her tidy habits and a grudging helper in house or garden, taking up such a lowly position with a good grace? We fought almost constantly as I turned from a surly and ‘contrary' child into a secretive, arrogant adolescent, tearful and truculent by turns, beset by passions, nursing the burden of my misunderstood state like a precious child of my own. My mother was out of her depth, prone to fits of temper punctuated by attempts to pacify. We prowled our territories in mutual mistrust although I recall the occasional truce: the post-Watchnight service party where we giggled at the host’s evident tipsiness or the day we struggled up the lane, clinging to each other in hedge-high snow. In her last months as dementia took hold we found an easier way of being together. Now, kneeling at her side, I feel as if I’m performing a service. In an unbidden echo of the childhood religiosity that I’ve been unable to shake off entirely, I’m reminded of the sister (Mary? or Martha?) who, rather than helping with the chores, sat at the feet of Jesus listening to his words and worshipfully anointed his feet with the entire contents of an expensive vial of perfume, Growing up, I might have wished for such an extravagant and affirmative show of love but Mum, ever practical, would have been on the side of the doers. I suspect she might have enjoyed this odd role reversal.

She would have appreciated this afternoon, too: the warmth of the sun, the murmur of farm machinery, the gently rolling landscape softened by trees, the first hint of the autumn colours she prized. No fan of big open spaces or the wild, she was frightened of water. Hers was a quiet life. She had no real interest in music, was apt to dismiss my dad’s loud-volume listening as a ‘din’ although she liked Gilbert & Sullvan - as long as it was delivered by the D’Oyly Carte Company. Her ultimate punishment, one stage further than the quick slap on the upper arm or the back of a thigh, was the silent treatment. She could keep it up for days. And yet, and yet… as I push the trowel deeper, worrying at the impacted roots, I see I have barely broken the surface of who she was. I remember her determination, returning to school in her fifties for ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, her jam-making and silver-smithing, the sense of humour she shared with a few close friends, the understated elegance she worked so hard to achieve. I don’t think she ever made her peace with her northern origins but I promise myself, on my next visit, to plant the low-growing rose ‘Lancashire’ and imagine the roots finding their way into her bones.

They will have further to travel - I’m not sure how much further - to reach my father’s remains but I like to believe they will make it eventually and will be welcome. Unlike our mother, Dad remained proud of his working class Wigan heritage, his self-published autobiography laboriously charting his climb from an engineering apprenticeship in Horwich to the heights of Chief Mechanical and Electrical engineer for the London Midland Region of British Rail. Using the headstone for support to pull myself to standing, I remember his catchphrase ‘finished with engines’ - we thought of incorporating it in the inscription but agreed in the end to reserve it for the order of service. I stretch out my stiff back and legs, staggering as I struggle to stay upright on the uneven ground. I look down into the valley, the last of the sun bathing fields and buildings in liquid gold. Glorious, Dad would say. I search for a way of matching his energy and remember instead a reflective moment, when three or four of us gathered in the tiny ringing chamber of the bell tower on the day of his burial. There was music - Elgar, possibly, and Strauss’s Four Last Songs. For a March birthday and an April death the first song, ‘Spring’, was particularly apposite. I find a recording on my phone and, upping the volume, balance it on top of the stone. As I fold myself back to kneeling, the soprano’s voice soars over the straggle of graves. Dad’s musical tastes became more catholic with the years and the full-blooded emotion of the Strauss is so characteristic of his final enthusiasms that it’s as if he’s with me, above ground. I begin to tackle the plant I’ve brought, a small spreading hebe which had seemed an ideal shape as a temporary stopgap. In fact it’s pot-bound, firmly wedged in its plastic case and extricating it takes what feel like hours of tugging and twisting until it sits on the grass in front of me, its root system a solid carapace. I make a feeble attempt at teasing out one or two strands and then give up, settling instead for sticking it in the new pot as it is and dribbling in a little compost wherever it will go.

The second song, ‘September’, matches the month if not the weather - no ‘cool rain’ seeping into the ground here - but as a lament for the last days of summer and for the end of life, its melancholy tone is perfect. This morning I’d watched as a distant tree released flurries of pale leaves, light as petals, shimmering in the sun. Their downward drift is echoed now in falling phrases in the music and the piece closes with what I think is a horn picking up the tender note of longing for rest. I was fortunate to be with both parents in their final moments and I’m still moved by the memory of our father hanging on until the morning after my birthday, when he came as close as he ever came to a declaration of love for me, his ‘darling daughter’. Ours was never a family - or perhaps a generation? - that spoke its love easily and even now the kids are the ones who trade hugs and ‘love yous’ naturally whilst my brother and I still dodge awkwardly round physical closeness. Now, remembering the room in the Infirmary where Andy and I watched and waited, there’s much to regret. In my teens I found my dad insufferable, in my twenties an embarrassment, his intensity overwhelming. He was an enthusiast - music, of course, and his beloved railways. He was also by nature a cataloguer, keeping meticulous records of his audio tapes and his slides, mainly railway-related. These would have been quite an archive, if only we’d thought to keep them rather than following Mum’s instinct to get rid of the lot. He came to travel late but embraced it, working for brief periods in India and New Zealand after he officially retired, and was a lifelong churchman. He was also keen on projects, master-minding a campaign for a new church roof and the refurbishment of the bells. I see myself in so many of his characteristics: his intensity, his passions, his strong will; less so his optimism. ‘Everything points to happiness’ he was given to saying when things were not going terribly well or, worse, ‘Couldn’t be better, really.’

I’m struggling now, wearied by the emotion of the afternoon and by the effort of my modest bit of gardening. Fortunately C comes to finish off the snipping and then leaves me on my own to wrestle for a few more minutes with the roots that go way down in the hole where the vase sits beneath the headstone. It’s no good, I can’t shift them, can’t get to the bottom of them, not even with the combined determination of both parents. Instead I clamber up the bumpy ground to the tap for a last drink for the hebe, trampling who knows who underfoot, a precarious few yards but amazingly I make it without falling and then I just listen to the last song, ‘Im Abendrot’. Sunset, I think, a perfect coincidence. In fact when I check at home later, it translates as ‘the evening glow’, surprising for what I always think of as a very matter-of-fact language. It’s beautiful, sonorous and slow, a fitting ending to the cycle and to my digging and there’s a section which reminds me of ‘The Lark Ascending’ (checking later I discover that there are two larks in the words). There’s just time for a final memory, a last regret: a conversation with my dad about the production of Top Girls I was part of in Hallbankgate Village Hall, for one night only. You should have told me about it, Dad said. I would love to have seen it. You wouldn’t, I said. It’s full of swearing. That wouldn’t have mattered, he said. I would have loved it. He was probably right.

Time to go. I replace the plastic vase at the head of the plot, pushing it down on top of the recalcitrant roots and arrange the flowers we bought from the bucket at the lane end in the village, a mixed bunch of cultivated blooms and wild flowers. I take a photograph and have a last look at the view. As I turn away, a surge of sobbing stops me on the path and I have to pause to catch my breath. I realise later that this is the first time I’ve cried - really cried - for either death.

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SPECTACULAR

4/9/2019

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THE KNOT SPECTACULAR: SNETTISHAM NORTH NORFOLK 1st SEPTEMBER 2019

Imagine a vast handful of fragments flung from a giant’s hand: a smudge, a stain, a dark shadow against the sky. The shape stretches, shifts into a thumbprint then swirls and dances into the smoke emerging from a genie’s lamp before it tips amd spills into a wide arc, now shards of glass, diamond splinters glistening silver in the early sun. At the susurration of thousands of small wings passing overhead the breath is punched out of me and I’m crying – sobbing, in fact, sideswiped by wonder.

It’s early on the first Sunday in September and after getting up in the dark we’re at Snettisham on the North Norfolk coast, joining a small crowd for the phenomenon that has become known as the Knot Spectacular. Knot (perhaps from their call which my bird guide gives as knut although its Latin name Calidris Canutus recalls the 10th century king who famously tried to hold back the tide) are waders, long-distance migrants that arrive in the UK in huge flocks in autumn from their breeding grounds in the high Arctic to feed on mudflats and estuaries. The spectacle occurs most dramatically at times of exceptionally big tides – this weekend’s was somewhere over eight metres – when the birds are pushed off the mudflats by the fast incoming water and take to the air in their thousands. In winter plumage the birds are silvery-grey on top but white underneath which creates the jewelled glint and gleam when the sun catches them.

Our route takes us along the sea wall, between the ramshackle assortment of shacks, caravans, chalets and huts to our left – I spot a hand-written notice ‘CHARITY YARD SALE 11 am. SUNDAY’ – and the sea on our right. There’s a thin covering of cloud and a biting wind. I feel the weight of expectation, anticipation, We stop often to look through the scope at the foreshore, dark with what Andy calls The March of the Oystercatchers. There are pockets of ring plover, hard to make out against the pebbles, and bar-tailed godwit; a skittering of wagtails and, as the strip of mud is shrinking fast, increasing numbers of knot, jam-packed and scurrying as if trying to outpace the tide. A few early flurries and here comes the sun and already one scattering of silvery slivers follows another, spinning, wheeling and swerving, white breast and underwing flashing and shimmering in the early sun.

It’s over before you’re ready: suddenly the watchers are hefting their tech and heading for the hides and you are left unsteady, almost alone, surrounded by sea heath and the startling blue of viper’s bugloss, trying to make sense of the migrant crisis you have just witnessed. Unlike its human equivalent, there is something both extraordinary and beautiful in their displacement – at least to us.

Birds begin and end beyond us, out of reach and outside our thought, and we see
them doing things apparently without feeling or thinking but – and because of this –
they make us think and feel.
[Tim Dee: The Running Sky]

Bird migration, according to writer Ruth Padel, is ‘the heartbeat of the planet’. The knot regularly travel 15,000 kilometres to be here and, whilst crowded off their patch of shore for now, there are always the islands in the lagoon as a temporary respite. Nature takes away but also provides in a way we seem unable to match. As Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas, it’s the poorest communities – Haitian migrants living in Marsh Harbour, for example – that come off worst. Meanwhile the Greek government has announced emergency measures to deal with renewed ‘huge waves’ of asylum seekers arriving from Turkey and there are again rising numbers of small boats of migrants crossing the Channel.

Later, Andy reminds me of a big family row which happened almost 20 years ago. I remember the occasion clearly but not the resentment I expressed about our dad’s admiration for his – Andy’s – desire to protect and promote the natural world, whereas I – what? was all for people, I suppose. Andy pointed out that it was good that the breach was healed – and that I’d joined the nature lobby?! Prompted perhaps by the memories or by the knot experience – or is it the sighting of a couple of late swift, those Africa-and-back travellers who eat, sleep and mate on the wing lingering long after most of their species have left in July? – we discuss our own travel plans. Andy moots the idea of a year-long voyage, taking in Papua New Guinea I think for the sake of a species only found there, and Australia and New Zealand – ‘but it’s selfish,’ he says. Maybe it is. But as one whose freedom to travel with ease has been summarily scuppered by ill health it seems to me that, with the usual attempts to do so ethically and responsibly, limiting air miles, choosing the train where possible and offsetting carbon footprints with tree-planting and so on, we have a duty to see and experience as much of the world as we can. As I struggled to decide whether to accept the invitation to spend a year teaching in Mexico CIty 30 years ago, The Clash’s 1982 recording ‘Should I Stay or Should I go?’ might have been made for me. But how glad I am I went!

This is brought home to me in an email which is waiting for me when I get back from Norfolk. It begins:

Hello Kate
I don’t want to make you too envious but S and I are here in Everett, a small town in
Washington State, just north of Seattle…

The email continues with the difficulties my friend has experienced trying to contact Jonathan Raban, a writer much admired by us both, and who I learnt from his brother has been hampered by the after-effects of a stroke. After I discovered Raban’s ‘Soft CIty’ in 1974, I have read pretty much everything he has written and always think of him as a traveller. I’m guessing, much like my good friend Di in Brittany, also recovering from a stroke just over a year ago, he is much less able to travel now. I don’t like to think of him having to put up with clipped wings; it’s not a state I enjoy and I very much regret not grabbing opportunities to take flight when I still could. I am of course grateful to friends and family (especially Andy this weekend) for all they do to keep me out and about, and to those writers who manage to bring the outside world in for us in such a heartening fashion:

We have broken from nature, fallen from the earth, put ourselves beyond it, but nature, ever forgiving, comes towards us, makes repairs to the damage we have done…
[Tim Dee again...]

You go because hope, need and escape
are names for the same god. You go
because life is sweet, life is cheap, life is flux
and you can’t take it with you. You go because you’re alive,
because you’re dying, maybe dead already. You go because you must.’
[...and Ruth Padel: The Mara Crossing]

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GOING DOWN: ARNCLIFFE AUGUST 2019

13/8/2019

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It had been, on balance, a good journey: an early start and clear roads apart from the inevitable congestion around Doncaster and Leeds. The few spots of rain had given way to clear skies and a lovely soft afternoon light. The opportunity seemed too good to miss so we pulled off the road between Pately Bridge and Grassington and parked above Skyreholme for the Parcevall Gardens walk. There was a scattering of cows with calves on the path. We watched as a trio of young walkers strolled boldly through them, making themselves larger with their sticks outstretched. Through the gate we set off to do likewise, talking soothingly (I thought).

I'm unclear about exactly what happened next; only that the face of the largest orange cow loomed in front of me and then I was on the ground with the cow on top of me – I don't know which part or parts of the beast. I can't think I was actually trodden on – surely if I'd been under the feet, I would have been more seriously hurt? And no my life didn't flash before my eyes. But I was conscious of pain and terror and the weight on top of me and I had time to recall stories of people trampled to death by cows and I was sure I was going to die – and then it was over. I yelled for Carole and scrambled to my feet and clung to her hand as we cut down away from the herd, Carole checking over her shoulder every few yards that they weren't following until she had to tell me I was gripping her hand so tightly that her ring was pinching her fingers. I remember repeating 'I thought I was going to die' over and over. Now, I'm left with bruised legs and very sore ribs, as well as the sense that we got away lightly. Oh and the after-the-event wisdom which I guess we won't forget: if your path takes you through cows with young, go round. It seems so obvious now: that desperate maternal desire to protect your offspring. So I suppose, once I was on the ground and obviously no longer a threat, the irate mum backed off. Anyway, we completed the circuit, laughing a lot, a mixture of hysteria and relief. It is a beautiful walk, skirting the base of Simon's Seat and punctuated this time by the china blue of harebells and purple thistles and the marrram grass that glows rose pink when the light is right. Back at the car we took photos of the group of cows – infuriatingly, they had moved further away, diminishing their size somewhat. It looked to be an idyllic rural scene, the epitome of peace and calm. I wonder just how much that orange cow weighs.

Since then our conversation has been peppered with tales of risky escapades and near misses and I remembered the following episode from The House at Pooh Corner, where Winnie the Pooh falls unawares into the trap they had dug for heffalumps. In the process of dusting himself down and checking for broken bones, he hears a muffled squeaking which he eventually identifies as the voice of his friend.
'It's Piglet!' cried Pooh eagerly. 'Where are you?'
'Underneath,' said Piglet in an underneath sort of way.
'Underneath what?'
'You,' squeaked Piglet.

The following day I was content to laze around in the cottage garden with a book and attempt (unsuccessfully) to field the phone calls supposed to get the internet working. Almost any movement very painful. Late in the afternoon, though, I crossed the river and walked up the road to the top of the hill behind the cottage until the ground levelled and I could make out the farm buildings of Darnbrook in the valley below. It felt good to be moving and didn’t hurt too much if I was careful. I had the road more or less to myself: just me and a curlew, the heads of sheep emerging like moons rising from the bracken, the sound of munching. I’d forgotten the intensity of greens in those hills, lush carpets of grassland overlaid with darker patches, a clump of trees, a spread of heather about to come into flower, all punctuated by outcrops of rock, individual boulders dropped haphazardly or running in terraces along the hillsides facing me. As on previous visits, my memory is jogged in the direction of Auden’s poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’. Apparently written in Italy, Auden was in fact a native of Yorkshire and said that the local rock ‘creates the only human landscape’. I’m not sure how or why – because, despite its hard appearance, it is vulnerable, its weaker areas dissolving in water? Or because, as in human civilisation, it builds a history layer by layer? At any rate, although ‘this land is not the sweet home that it looks’, the poet ends with images of ‘the murmur/Of underground streams’ and ‘a limestone landscape’ which seem to represent for him ‘a faultless love/Or the life to come’. I did a few yoga stretches at the top and a passing motorist stopped to see if I needed help.

On Sunday to Grassington for coffee and a bit of shopping then a walk up the road to Yarnbury and left along a wide track past old mine workings towards Byfield. The track opened out onto level hilltop pasture criss-crossed with paths: my favourite walking territory, high enough for the wind in your hair and spectacular views constantly unfolding in every direction whilst also relatively easy underfoot and never too remote from rest or safety (the importance of these factors for me became apparent the following day). We stopped for half an hour whilst Carole drew and I wrote: an odd arrangement, perhaps, which seems to work well for us, although it means carrying a laptop and the half an hour or so it takes for a drawing is not really long enough to get stuck into a piece of writing. We sat surrounded by grasses yellow and pink, straw-coloured and every shade of green, with the rattling of the wind and the rumbles of distant thunder, clouds constantly changing. We headed down – a scatter of crows against a pewter sky – then back along the road; a heavy shower and the delicious smell of the verges after rain. A total of 7 or 8 miles in all and I was definitely feeling it in the last mile or so and struggling to keep up. In fact I fell over as we reached Grassington, a wobbly pirouette that almost had me knocking myself out on a metal bollard, and had to be hauled upright by a motorist who stopped to help, assisted by Carole. It was to be the first of many such heroics on her part, not good for a troublesome back. And I guess it was a warning, if only I had been listening.

The next day became known as the ‘Awful Walk’ – shades of A.A. Milne here? – although in many respects it was anything but and it began well enough despite ignoring Warning No. 2, my confession that ‘I’m not feeling in great shape today.’ (Note to self: in future, when your body is trying to tell you something, LISTEN!) Reluctant to turn back – partly pride, partly the steep and rocky slope I’ve just conquered (with Carole’s help) – we give a herd of cows a wide berth which involves a final clamber up a near-vertical grassy slope to the stile where two men with their dogs are rebuilding the wall. We stop whilst C draws the view. I dig out the laptop but am preoccupied by the fact that I am totally unable to stand up, not just from sitting now I’ve rashly allowed myself to sink to the ground, but even from kneeling, not even with the help of a stick, my legs just too weak for the job. I swallow the latest round of meds and hope for a small miracle.

Between us tussocky hummocks
                                 delicate yellow flowers - tormentil?
                                 short many-eared grasses
                                 small limestone outcrops, some moss-covered

Between us several feet of upland moor
                                 Carole sits, draws
                                 I cower, back to the wall

Between us empty air
                                 the wallers have gone for ‘us dinners’
                                 taking their dogs, leaving us silence

Between us almost 140 years accumulated
                                 like minds, disparate lives
our various tastes of guilt and loss, despair, delight
laughter and fury, exasperation, non-comprehension, respect
                                 and something momentary, fragile, elusive
                                 something not unlike love

Between us a shared anxiety
                                 gusting and then stilled
                                 that we will miss the Darnbrook turning
                                 that I won’t make it

Flanked by thistles, buffeted by the wind

So, not all awful by any measure although my pace on the flat was painfully slow and, despite an extra input of meds, my legs never recovered their strength. Still, we found the signpost for Darnbrook and began the descent under blue skies. What started as a gentle slope, though, quickly became more precipitous and we lost the path. Lurching between repeated falls (and unable to right myself) and ‘freezing’ so that I was rooted to the spot, I also felt myself becoming petulant and tearful – rather like my mum at her most difficult! But she was almost 95…

Well we made it somehow, between ignominiously slithering down gullies on my bottom and demanding that Carole hold my hand. Several times we thought we would have to get help. The indignity of the whole episode wasn’t lost on me nor the realisation that I had become something of a liability, almost overnight, it seemed. Carole apologised several times for treating me like a child – but why not when I had become exactly that?

Parked on high ground above Hawes, a pause in our drive back to Arncliffe after our annual trip to the Wensleydale factory – its official title of ‘creamery’ does sound infinitely more appealing! Earlier flurries of rain and hail apparently chased away by the unrelenting wind that rattles and clatters in sharp gusts around us. To my left, patches of sunlight and shadow spill over the slopes. Next time I look, the patch of light has changed shape and much of the distant land is a uniform lilac-grey. Constantly shifting, now a narrow horizontal strip of creamy pink contrasts with the dark line above. Before I can finish the sentence, it has gone. Clouds mass shades of grey and white overhead – gunmetal, pewter, tin. To my right it looks to be raining still, the hills indistinct. Directly in front, bracken or forest is almost black and there is a sharply-defined outline of the hilltops against a creamy sky. Looking left, a shelf of cloud glowers above a visionary patch of sky, sunlight almost breaking through.

And us? We sit inside the car, Carole in the front seat painting, I in the back, wriggling in search of any position where the sore ribs will hurt less and finding no comfort; like a couple who have fallen out with each other and can’t bear to inhabit the same space. The sense of an uneasy peace, the residue of yesterday’s challenges, hangs in the air. Our aim of mutual silence and concentration is repeatedly broken by one or the other. Eventually we retrace our steps via Yockenthwaite and then a rush to eat and change in time to meet Robin at the Falcon.

The following morning the germ of an idea for a story: ‘Another Robin’. Although I’m not sure of the ethics of ’borrowing’ a real person for a character – especially when the events of the narrative are unlikely to pan out well! Carole heads out for a longer walk and I spend the morning recuperating, the after-effects of the ‘AW’ still lingering. So it’s mid-afternoon before I leave the cottage intending to walk to Litton. I turn back at the first field gate, deterred by cows. They look peaceful enough but I don’t feel inclined to risk it on my own. I stand by a gate in the sunshine opposite a barn, watching a swallow to-and-froing, presumably to a nest inside. A clutch of martins rides the wind. High speed acrobats, they dart here and there, experts in sudden changes of direction, wings closed then swooping and scissoring, their pale bellies flashing silver in the sun. I imagine they’re feeding although it’s hard not to believe they are at play, their aerial dance simply for the pleasure of it – because they can.

Then following the river footpath to Hawkswick and back along the road in warm sun.

And suddenly it’s our last day. A lift to Litton and a walk up to ‘Katie’s Honesty Box Tea Rooms’ in Halton Gill, where I chat with a biker from Keighley.
‘How long does it take to get here?’ I nod at the bike.
‘Oh I dun’t go fast, just cruise. That‘s what they call it, this model – It’s a cruiser.’
I miss my cue here, the opening to a discussion of the merits of the bike, engine size and mpg and the open road. Instead I thank him for guarding the loo for me then continue to Foxup. A rookery, querulous and shrill, a field full of lapwing. A handful of lovely slender birds – pippits, perhaps? – land on the fence and flit across the road in front of me. Two ducks squeak and take off in series; one rabbit in a field – blink and it’s gone. The wide flat valley bottom snoozes in hot sun: I’m definitely over-dressed for the weather and all too aware of the depredations of the disease, exacerbated no doubt by the heat as well as the fall-out from the cow episode and the demoralising AW. As I hobble the last half a mile or so to the Queen’s Arms, I can barely walk a straight line. Plus I’ve broken my second stick, pulling it out beyond its limit so that it’s well and truly jammed, awakening another echo of A.A. Milne, this time in the voice of Roo, from the chapter ‘In which Pooh invents a new game…’ (‘Poohsticks’):
‘I expect my stick’s stuck,’ said Roo. ‘Rabbit, my stick’s stuck. Is your stick stuck, Piglet?’

As I approach the pub, I happen to be looking in what I hope is a friendly fashion at a man cutting the grass verge on the opposite side of the road with a motor mower, at just the moment when he attempts to turn and the machine all but runs away with him, leaving him scrabbling desperately in its wake. I’m still grinning sympathetically in his direction as he irritably swats and swears at a fly which is bugging him – before I realise I am the target of his fury:
‘Fuck off! Fucking old cow. Fuck off, you old cow. Fucking cow…’
Obviously my social skills are not what they were. Can’t really blame the Parkinson’s for that, though…

['ANOTHER ROBIN' possible opening – with apologies to C & C!

As you enter from the Green, the narrow bar is straight ahead, flanked as always on high stools by a couple with a dog. The barman scowls.

C breezes up to the bar. ‘Hello. Are you the new landlord?’
His frown deepens. ‘No.’
‘But you are new?’
'No, I’ve been here 4 years.’
‘Ah yes, I remember - you used to be part-time?’
'No, I’ve always been full-time. And I remember you.’
C collects the drinks, turns to me. ‘Can’t get a smile out of him.’]

So I’m sitting outside the Queen’s with a pint of beer, soaking up the sun and reflecting on the events of the week. As always such a pleasure to be in Arncliffe and I’ve enjoyed the walking and the open air. Carole and I rub along together in relative harmony and find lots to talk about. This year in particular I’m grateful for her immense patience with the whole P thing. Despite many lovely moments, the week has marked a series of new lows: walking – any walking – is no longer easy. It’s hard to hold to a straight course and balance is tricky even on level ground. The freezing and the likelihood of falling as I turn are becoming more frequent and more difficult to avoid. One shocker is my total repeated inability to rise to standing. Granted this was most marked on Tuesday (the AW day!) – but it signalled a reliance on help from others which I have never needed before, or only occasionally. Walking downhill has long been a problem. For the last mile or two of Tuesday’s walk, though, I found that I needed Carole to hold my hand – literally – to get me to move at all and I fell, and struggled to stand, over and over. Soon I was too heavy for her to pull me up, to the point where we thought we would have to get help. Carole is still blaming herself for not anticipating the difficulties when really it’s much more about me learning to live with my limitations. Also, I have become such a messy eater! Several times I have felt either like a child, or as if I am turning into my mum in her last months, and sometimes both at once: dependent, tearful and demanding; simultaneously ashamed and without shame. There were moments on Tuesday’s walk when I was almost overwhelmed by the indignity of it all - and beset by worries for the future. With that all-too-frequently heard ‘Don’t leave it too late’ warning ringing in my ears, I’m wondering if it is time to set in motion some wheels for change.

On the day we left, woke to thick cloud and heavy rain...

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HAVE NAPPY WILL TRAVEL (OR WON’T) … TMI? LOOK AWAY NOW… OR MAYBE NEVER LOOK AWAY/'WORK WITHOUT AUTHOR'… OR ON BEING ‘WHOLLY KNOWN’...

21/7/2019

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It’s been an odd week, dominated largely by my increasingly troublesome irritable bowel (although 'furious' would be a more accurate description). Too much information? Yes I know this is the sort of thing we simply don’t speak about, or at least not outside the walls of the doctor’s surgery or one of those ghastly internet forums; or perhaps the hearing of our nearest and dearest. But here I am broaching the unbroachable, my only defence the rather flippant tone I seem to have adopted; my excuse the fact that I have at present (and for the foreseeable) no ‘significant other’. Occasionally I remember Derek Jarman’s account of his first meeting with Keith Collins (‘HB’) in a cinema when he (Jarman) was already quite old - certainly much older than the man who became his companion and looked after him during the last years of his illness - and quite ill and from this derive some hope for the future. So I am greatly saddened to discover that Keith died of a brain tumour at the age of 54 last September. Jack and I saw him at a screening of Jarman's film The Garden at the BFI two or three years ago. I remember he introduced the film (I can’t recall any of his words, only his wonderful mane of black hair which I learn now he donated to a charity which makes wigs for children after chemotherapy) and then leaving with his skateboard under his arm, looking as though he might live for ever. Anyway, for the most part now I am resigned to the permanent single state and grateful for friends and the patience of you, dear reader.

So, the unmentionable: a delicate matter though the reality is anything but. The problem comes and goes. Weeks go by when my odd diet and happenstance combine to fool me into thinking that I have this cracked. Then, in weeks such as the last, the output (I’m struggling for a kinder word) has been for the most part slight but more or less continuous, so that I’m fairly tied to home and my own bathroom. Of late while running or for longer excursions I have had recourse to the adult version of Pampers. So in addition to the private indignities, I now have the added burden of guilt: that my lack of control in this most personal of areas is part of a growing environmental hazard, filling up landfill at an alarming rate. And as for the prospect of travelling: forget it. However, in the last day or two I have been somewhat heartened by reading about Antegrade Colonic Irrigation (ACI) via Percutaneous Endoscopic Colostomy (PEC): despite the heavyweight definition and the daily rigmarole involved, this does seem to offer a solution of sorts. What’s more, the article I read came from a team of four, all at the time of writing based at Addenbrookes; so the answer may lie on my own doorstep

'September': Gerhard Richter 2005 MoMA. New York

If you’ve managed to stay with me so far without looking away - well done and thank you (and hoping you will forgive the clunky connection). Never Look Away is the English title of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, inspired by the early life of artist Gerhard Richter. Werk Ohne Autor ('work without author') – a phrase apparently once used by critics to describe Richter’s work – is the original German title. This is Henckel von Donnersmarck’s third feature (he made his name with the compelling Oscar-winning 2006 film The Lives of Others) and apparently earned him a 13-minute standing ovation at last year’s Venice Film Festival. With a running time of three hours nine minutes it’s a sprawling work but I found it totally absorbing when I saw it at the start of the week. The film begins in Dresden in 1937 with a Nazi exhibition on ‘decadent’ art, immediately raising questions about artistic freedom and politics, the function and purpose of art and what we mean by ‘truth’. According to Mark Kermode writing in The Guardian, the film’s central concern is ways of seeing, a story ‘about seeing and not seeing; about looking and looking away – often at the same time’. It’s a surprisingly straightforward telling for such an ambitious and wide-ranging topic – Kermode describes it as ‘an overcooked melodrama’ which nevertheless ‘succeeds more often than it fails’ reminding me somehow of the 2009 Argentinian film The Secrets in Their Eyes. A wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack, too. Towards the end the central character Kurt has burnt all his previous art and turns up day after day to sit in front of a blank canvas. I know how that feels!

Anglo-Argentine poet, writer and journalist Andrew Graham-Yooll had several things to say about art and politics and how we choose what we see. News of his death reached me a few days ago, courtesy of Francesca. She and I visited him twice in his house on Iriarte in Barracas, Buenos Aires, a street of down-at-heel car repair shops amd kiosks. I remember the jasmine which spilled over the outside staircase. We sat at a huge desk in a kind of lobby next to a tiny kitchen, drank wine, ate salty biscuits, talked and listened. Whilst there we were lucky enough to meet his nine-year-old son Mattias, adopted by Andrew and his second wife after he was abandoned, and to listen to his stories of the ‘dirty war’ of the 1970s, when the Buenos Aires Herald was the only newspaper to publish the names of the ‘disappeared’. Andrew stuck it out until his life was so obviously in danger that he went into voluntary exile in the UK. Two things he said have stayed with me: that ‘fear had a place at the table with us’, so that people evolved a way of seeing and not seeing, simultaneously, maintaining the illusion that nothing untoward was happening whilst saying ‘algo habran hecho’ - they (those who were suddenly no longer there) ‘must have done something’. Also, that the terrible events of the 1970s would never be believed until they were written as fiction; from a writer of ‘facts’, a lasting belief in the power of art.

The other passing which has preoccupied me this week has been that of our own larger-than-life-transgender-tanguera-with-Parkinson’s, Cassie. At first there were fears she might have taken her own life and there was some doubt whether there would even be a funeral since she was estranged from her family. But then the news filtered through that she had died of natural causes following an aneurysm, a sad departure of a different order and her funeral, arranged I think by Ely Labour Party members and ‘the girls’, Cassie’s friends, took place on 16th July, which would have been my mum’s birthday. It seemed an extraordinary occasion, hosted (is that the right word?) sensitively by a female member of the family firm of funeral directors Fuller’s of Ely. The crematorium was satisfactorily packed, including a substantial handful of the tango community and lots of Cassie’s friends, several of whom spoke. I read a shortened version of the piece I’d posted shortly after her death. Then a woman who turned out to be Cassie’s daughter stepped out of the crowd (congregation?) and stood with her hand on the coffin, speaking directly to Cassie. Except that she addressed her (him?) as ‘my dad’. It was hard to hear (she had her back to me) but I caught some of what she said: that he had been a ‘bloody awful dad’ but then she had also been an awful daughter; that she loved him; that she wanted him to know he would be buried under the tree with the dogs and the children, part of the family. And then she wavered into song, something unlikely from the Upanishads. It felt like a remarkable moment of reconciliation (albeit too late for Cassie to hear?) Afterwards, at the milonga, John spoke about Cassie and we have chatted a good deal since then, trying to make sense of it all, not least the thought that we could be kinder to each other. I have been remembering, from Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge, the lawyer Alfieri’s words about Eddie: that he allowed himself to be ‘wholly known’ and for that he would love him ‘more than all [his] more sensible clients’. And I’m sure Cassie would be surprised, intrigued and rather touched that she has been so much in our thoughts and on our tongues since her death.

Issa Perillo Founder & Executive Director of Go! Tango P.D.

Cassie stood out in our tango world in so many ways: never a comfortable fit, she tended to ride roughshod over tango’s codes of behaviour and was often hurt by her lack of acceptance. But she will be remembered for her determination and courage, her idiosyncrasies, her sense of humour and her generous spirit. I know that she found tango helpful for her experience of Parkinson’s and I’m sorry that she won’t be around when The Tango Effect is published next year. The book has attracted a bit of attention online recently, not just in the UK – an invitation to speak at the Lichfield Literature Festival in March, for example – but also in the US. One approach came from Ninah Beliavsky, Professor of Linguistics at St John’s University, New York who took my story with her to Buenos Aires where she addressed a conference on unspoken communication in Argentine tango. The second, most recently, was from Issa Perillo, a dancer diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s in 2011. With movement specialist Gloria Araya, Issa now teaches regular adapted tango classes for people with Parkinson’s tango in Chicago (check out her website here). We spoke on Skype a couple of days ago, comparing our experiences and I’m very much hoping we will stay in touch. Issa wanted to know if I was likely to be in Chicago any time soon. While I tied myself in knots with my very English evasions, she was refreshingly open about my gastric problems and not afraid to call a bowel a bowel, leaving me feeling optimistic: that what has begun to seem like a life sentence, an early end to travel opportunities, might actually be resolvable.

Yesterday marked the end (for now at least) of the Dance with Parkinson’s Poplar project. After seven weeks of workshops and preparations with a wonderful team of musicians and dance and visual artists, the afternoon saw the exhibition and our final performances.The whole thing was highly emotional and came with a great sense of achievement, heightened by the fact that two of my London friends were in the audience. The performance aspect has been a key element of the project for me, its promise of visibility a counter to the shame that often goes with Parkinson’s, the felt need to hide away the self or at least the symptoms. I’m reminded of the inspiring Capturing Grace, the Mark Morris film account of their Brooklyn Dance for PD group’s preparations for performance (in fact I snivel my way through most of it once more this morning). In particular, the words of two dancers have stayed in my mind:. First, words from Reggie which we have all echoed in some way over the last few weeks: ‘It’s liberated a part of me. When the dance class is going on, there are no patients. They’re dancers.’ And Cindy on the verge of the performance: ‘It’s a moment to shine… when you think your life is not going to hold any more surprises, here comes this wonderful gift.’ I spoke at our last workshop about the sense of liberation which I have gained. It’s measured for me in the removal - or lessening at least - of the inhibitions which have prevented me from enjoying any kind of dancing outside of the formal frameworks of tango or classes: I’m hoping that at Thursday’s after-party I will be able to spread my wings!

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SPRING

2/4/2019

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So despite the frosty start to the morning's run, with the Equinox behind us and the clocks having gone forward at the weekend, it seems that Spring is here. (Who would have thought that, after all those long-distance runs were firmly consigned to my pre-Parkinson's past, I'd be casually mentioning 'the morning's run'?!) Days of heavenly blue skies and, after the early chill, warm sun. One morning a fabulous walk through Grantchester Meadows for lunch in The Red Lion. In a pot outside my window there's a clump of delicately buttery primroses although a visit to a friend round the corner puts my small spread into perspective. In her beautiful garden primroses have sprung up everywhere, along with a blaze of yellow jasmine and a sea of clear blue periwinkle by the gate. Even so, almost everything on my balcony seems to be coming into leaf or sprouting new growth, with last year’s birthday clematis armandii a riot of almond-scented flowers and lots of grape hyacinth below the birches. Only the Christmas tree (Mark 2) is struggling so it’s looking likely that we’ll need a Mark 3 for next Christmas.

My dad is always lurking on the edge of my mind at this time of year, due in part to his St Patrick’s Day birthday and partly to poet Philip Larkin, whose seasonal marker ‘The Trees’ I read at my dad's funeral, almost 17 years ago. Which makes it almost 3 years since we lost Mum. Larkin’s poem is characteristically double-edged: the poet finds in the new green ‘a kind of grief’. Still, the trees' ultimate message, if they have one, is hope in the possibility of new life, as they ‘begin afresh, afresh, afresh’. My dad, Fred, died in April, the day after my birthday, Mum (Clarice) later in the month. In the light of yesterday's Mother's Day Di and I agreed, as part of our Mapping Memory project, that we would each write a letter to our mothers. Yesterday afternoon a further reminder landed in my inbox: a Youtube link to poet Alice Willitts reading in her garden a poem for her mother from her new pamphlet 'Dear'. The pamphlet, on the theme of mothers and daughters, is based on the last years of her mother's life with Parkinson's.

Parkinson’s is something of a preoccupation at present, not least as a result of the generosity of Cambridge poet Diana Brodie who recently donated her remarkable and extensive collection of poetry to our Amnesty Bookshop. I wasn't familiar with Diana's work although I knew of the award recognising her work on behalf of Parkinson's UK and the fact that she drew inspiration from her experience of the condition. Our poetry stock has been somewhat depleted since Christmas so the arrival of lots of new titles, from vintage Auden to the best of contemporary writers, all evidently well-cared for, has brought a breath of spring to our shelves. Watch this space for a 'Gone but not Forgotten' window display celebrating twentieth century poets.

Photo: Mat Hayward

Parkinson's is rarely a cause for celebration. So the launch of the Mark Morris Dance Company's UK Pepperland tour at Sadler's Wells on 20th March was an occasion of especial joy and reaffirmed their commitment to Dance for PD. From their first class for people with Parkinson's in Brooklyn in 2001, Dance for Parkinson's has grown into a worldwide movement. It's years since my discovery of English National Ballet's involvement in the programme and my initial negative response. Taking part in their two-day training for dance professionals was enough to convert me and subsequently participating in the Ipswich classes taught me some of the bonuses of being part of a 'special' group. In 2018 I was one of seven people living with Parkinson's to become an adviser to the Dance for Parkinson's Partnership UK Practice Group and on 21st March this year I attended as a delegate a one-day international symposium on the theme of 'Looking Ahead'. I'm still processing the experience, a challenging and thought-provoking one. The evening saw an extra event hosted by dancer Danielle Teale in partnership with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, which offered a window on ongoing research in the context of a regular dance class at the hospital. I was inspired by the collaborative nature of this enterprise – Danielle is 'still asking the dancers what they want the research question to be' – and also by the news that she is working on other projects incorporating performance work with dancers with Parkinson's. I'm very much hoping to become involved myself at some point.

I'm rather at a loss, though, how to share what seem to me significant experiences although I'm feeling I want to share them, and not just in writing. Or perhaps it's how to integrate them into the rest of my life? Much of what I do and am is separate and also solitary: I live alone, read and write alone (usually), run alone. I'm excited that my book Parkinson’s & the Tango Effect is happening at last – an online conversation with Unbound's editors about the cover this week – although this is something else I struggle to talk about openly. What's more, increasingly I'm finding it difficult to take part fully in social events. This weekend found me perched on the edge of a gathering of friends, unable to contribute even when the conversation turned to something I'm well-practised in: 'me time' or the art of being alone. It begins to feel as if I am the embodiment of the proverbial elephant! I've mentioned before that sinking sensation as my confidence ebbs, an echo I fear of my mother's difficulties in engaging socially as her dementia took hold. Coupled with my troublesome gut, a source of endless low-level misery which threatens to capsize potential travel opportunities and even my tango habit, I can only scuttle away with barely a polite goodbye.

Well. As my own birthday and its small gathering approaches, at least I will be on home turf. I'm looking forward to the Tulip Run on the Sunday morning and to more early miles along the river as spring becomes summer. Weirdly, as my symptoms generally become more taxing, my stability more precarious, I’m finding that running, rather like dancing, seems to take me to a Parkinson’s-free zone. I’m also counting down now to the end of Lent – I'm already thinking of a glass of very good Italian red! – and to reading some of what promise to be wonderful books which have accumulated around me over the last few weeks, Ali Smith’s latest Spring about to be added to the top of the pile. For the rest? I hope for the continued patience of friends. And whilst I can't claim any residual faith in whatever might be 'out there', I will be in the queue as usual outside King's on the morning of Good Friday for the annual 'Ante-Communion & Veneration of the Cross' music & readings and hope that Easter might bring just a taste of what Hopkins described as a 'crimson-cresseted east’.

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THOUGHTS FOR ASH WEDNESDAY AND AFTER

11/3/2019

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DAY ONE:

As usual my first recourse is to other writers. My battered school edition of Eliot’s poems is not much help –

what is actual is actual only for one time
And for one place
or

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

The Daily Stoic Journal has a different angle: today’s prompt is ‘Where am I a loud mouth?’ Well..! At risk of sounding smug (although self-satisfaction is absolutely not in play here: rather the opposite) last night I was so troubled, or disappointed, or dissatisfied – with myself, my lack of courage, my loss of confidence, my social laziness or ineptitude, evoking vivid and disspiriting memories of our mum in her later years, making absolutely no effort to take part in the conversation, that I googled ‘symptoms of dementia’, inconclusively. Some days I fear I am becoming my mother, or at least taking on some of her least appealing characteristics. I’m not sure which were more off-putting: those occasions when her lack of engagement took a surly turn – I recall in particular an episode with a Norfolk neighbour – or others when she smiled vaguely, as at the supper table in the Hythe hotel on our last Music at Leisure weekend together, making no attempt to join in. The mother of another friend, now also sadly no longer with us, often disappeared into her own world. Sometimes she could be brought back with a word, or a touch of the hand; often it felt like an intrusion. Really, I think I have to take responsibility for my own actions at the time, rather than succumbing to inertia and its resulting dismay and then beating myself up afterwards… something about inhabiting the present moment fully, keeping a lid on petty resentments and minor discomforts but also perhaps being a little more forgiving towards myself? I could certainly take a leaf out of the book of one friend and practise smiling more!

So: this is the day when we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we will return: good to remember that our time here is temporary and, however big a noise we feel we make in our own worlds, our impact in the greater scheme is negligible. Still, there is the ‘Look Away Now’ factor which has been preoccupying me recently – of which, more later. Meanwhile, Allegri’s Miserere plays in the background, another reminder: how many almost-Easters have we stood in the queue outside King’s with our cups of coffee ahead of the Good Friday liturgy? Useful also I think to take a day to consider how and where we have gone wrong. When I followed such things, Ash Wednesday always felt like a rock-bottom day, a time for confronting – confessing, I suppose – ‘sins’ or shortcomings, and preparing for a period of sober reflection. What was it the school’s bandleader used to say? – ‘You’re only as good as your last concert.’ I seem to remember one year actually following the liturgical framework for the period of Lent – or maybe it was just for Easter week! At any rate, almost entirely selfishly and to benefit my overindulged waistline, this year I am resolved to give up alcohol for the entire 46? – yes, I make it 46 – days (gulp!) – excepting only 14th April when I hope to celebrate my birthday a day late by completing the Tulip Run for Parkinson’s UK in the morning and allowing myself a ‘Refreshment Sunday’ afterwards. I am aware of some slightly out-of-reach awareness that this might be a salutary period of giving myself permission to feel what I often shy away from: there is a cold core of loneliness and isolation – no, it’s loneliness – that is exacerbated when I allow myself to give in to feelings of isolation and return eagerly, and too soon, to this high-level bolt-hole. I think of one friend who has vowed to practise being on her own, without panicking. Virginia Woolf reminds we must ‘face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone’.

Maybe Eliot was some help, after all: perhaps this is a time to ‘commune with your own heart and in your chamber’ and be still.

(Only 45 days to go….!)

DAY TWO: LOOK AWAY NOW

In town this morning, I almost fell over a very substantial all-weather pile of sleeping-out kit, on the corner of Emmanuel Street where a regular Big Issue seller with her cloying greeting has also to be negotiated. On a bench outside Boots, a man who decades ago you might have described as a ‘gentleman of the road’ sat, head in hands, roaring – literally. I could make out the odd word – ‘fuckers’ was in there, for sure. Drunk? Or simply enraged? I didn’t get close enough to tell but, like the rest of the Thursday morning crowd, gave him a wide berth. I wasn’t around for long though long enough to register the untidy straggle of discarded blankets and bits of cardboard or, in other doorways, couples and singles apparently sleeping peacefully. I saw one teenager look curiously at one such nest; others, like myself, hurried by, tamping down any sense of shame or sympathy or outrage that threatened to make itself felt.

This is, after all, the new normal. 50 years ago, when i was a student in London, late nights on Thursdays saw me with a dozen others hunting down the city’s rough sleepers as part of our soup run. Then, you had to hunt: the handful of men – it was mostly men, middle-aged or older – hidden away under the arches by Waterloo Station or round the back of the Strand Palace Hotel, out of the public gaze, resigned to being moved on by police. Twenty years later, Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time begins in a dystopian future where licensed beggars patrol the Westminster streets with their ‘bright badges’ and their ‘regulation black bowls’. Now – I’m disturbed by the way in which homelessness has become so visible and so all-embracing – women, young, old, alternative and apparently ordinary, ‘substance abusers’ and the squeaky clean: on any corner, in almost every other doorway, you come upon someone who might well be your son, your sister, your mum, yourself. Not that the homeless should feel the need to hide themselves away; but that we have inured ourselves to their pain and their presence to such an extent that we can walk on by with barely a blip in our blood pressure…

(44 days remaining…)

DAY THREE: WALKING ON BY

I’m remembering Francesca, talking about the last weeks and days of her grandmother: ‘I do what I need to sleep at night.’ And another memory, unbidden: on a street somewhere in Buenos Aires, as we walked back in the early hours from a milonga, Francesca gently tucking a sizable note under the pillow of a doorway sleeper. Last time I was there, real poverty was all too visible: the massive sprawl of Villa 31, the shanty town of 120,000 you pass en route to Tigre, the cartoneros picking through the trash for cardboard to sell, the encampments which have grown up beneath bridges and flyovers, kids who tout for business at traffic lights. I'm remembering too how those who scratch a living from selling or performing on the Subte are treated with courtesy. Some in Argentina, though, recognise that in these respects theirs remains a third world country. Whereas we –

(43 days left)

DAY SIX: ENCOUNTERS

Over the past few days, a series of chance encounters. As I rounded the corner of Westbrook Drive late one morning a tall man, well-dressed, beer bottle in hand, stood on the opposite pavement, swaying slightly. As I approached, he turned to face me and observed me as I walked past. Turning onto Milton Road, I was greeted in friendly fashion by a youngish man I’ve seen before but have never spoken to. Scrawny, with long yellow hair and a grubby white cap, he appeared wired. On my way back from the shop, I saw him again waiting at the bus stop, shifting and pacing, unable to be still until suddenly he took off and marched across the road, oblivious to traffic. By this time the first man had progressed the few yards to the end of the street. The following morning, as I waited for a bus, I watched a woman on the opposite side of the road pacing up and down outside the Co-op, looking along the street in both directions, as if expecting a lift. Smartly dressed, with dark hair, perhaps in her forties, she held a single red rose. Was she waiting for a blind date or just a meeting with someone she hadn’t met before, who wouldn’t recognise her – perhaps a potential employer? Given the romantic connotations of the flower the former seemed the more likely. Infuriatingly, my attention was distracted by a young woman who came out of the Old Spring after a birthday lunch for her mother, keen to tell me all about it and the next time I looked, the woman and her rose had vanished. Late that night, as I waited for yet another bus, a young man – late teens, early twenties? – picked bits of litter off the pavement and put them in one of the roadside bins. I watched as he disappeared into the distance, still collecting. Then, yesterday morning, another bus stop, another chance meeting, which began when Chloe, who I later learnt was approaching her 16th birthday, slapped me lightly on the shoulder twice and was reprimanded by the couple I assumed were her parents. They alternately murmured endearments and told her off. The girl was silent. Eventually after a long and affectionate goodbye, the girl left with the man. The woman explained that he was in fact her brother and had looked after Chloe, who had severe learning difficulties and was unable to speak, since birth as she, the mother, also had learning difficulties.

Yesterday a Skype chat with Di in Brittany, revolving mainly around our Mapping Memory project, leaving me thinking about connections across place and time. Soon after we first met, in Carlisle, Di and I discovered so much in common in terms of our past lives, not just in coincidences of place but also in place-time conjunctions, so that it seemed possible that we might have actually brushed shoulders as we passed each other on some pavement years earlier – which is where our project began. One of the first non-teachers I met in Cumbria was poet Clare Crossman, who set up a reading group with me and a fellow teacher. Ten years later, I started my own reading group in Hallbankgate, by which time I had also been part of a production of ‘Top Girls’ which Clare directed. Soon afterwards, Clare married and moved to Meldreth just outside Cambridge. Eventually I followed her in her path south.

My first visits to Cambridge as an undergraduate, in the company of Ron, RIchard – and once, I believe, the other Richard – around 1969 and 1970. I remember walking across grass – Jesus Green probably – punting down to Grantchester and The Orchard, and swimming off the side of the boat in the Cam. Almost 30 years later, in 1997, I was again in Cambridge, this time for a week with Gordon and Jack. We stayed in the Ferry Path house whilst Andy and Susannah were away on honeymoon. Whilst here, we visited Kettle’s Yard where I discovered Winifred Nicholson for the first time, standing in front of her painting of Bank’s Head, a stone’s throw from our house in Hallbankgate. Back in Cumbria, I came to love her work and rubbed shoulders with various bits of her family.

I didn’t know – until very recently, via Cambridge poet and friend Kaddy Benyon – of her friendship with poet Kathleen Raine nor that, for a time Kathleen Raine rented a cottage in Hallbankgate, this last uncovered by Clare Crossman when researching Winter Flowers, her biography of Cumbrian artist Lorna Graves. (I’m wondering if I heard somewhere it was one of the houses along the road at Coldfell, or whether I’ve invented that?) I have two Kathleen Raine books on my shelf: a first edition somewhat marred (or enriched?) by its sojourn on the shelves of Hackney Library, of the first volume of her autobiography Farewell Happy Fields, published in 1973. My copy is an Amnesty Bookshop find from some years ago but I first came upon the book on the bedside table in the small bedroom upstairs in Kettle’s Yard. Unaware then of the don’t touch instruction, I opened it at this passage from the Introduction:

I once read somewhere that it is a mark of
the perfection of the wise to arrive at the
place they should be, at the time they should
come; but such correspondence does not belong to lives less perfect. If we ever sometimes, momentarily, arrive at the time and the place, it is already much. The marvel is that we ever do arrive at what is our own; and then with such a sense of homecoming, as though the long waste of time stretching before and after had never existed at all.

Which seemed to me then, and seems now, a perfect evocation of that sense of ‘homecoming’ (echoed beautifully in Simon Armitage’s poem of that name).

The second book, The Lost Country, also a first edition, is a volume of poetry published in 1971. It includes poems entitled ‘By the River Eden’ and ‘The Roman Wall Revisited’ and one, ‘A Painting by Winifred Nicholson’, signed ‘Bank’s Head, October 1968’. It’s not entirely clear, but perhaps the ‘friend’ who appears in the second stanza is the painter? A year before the book’s publication, I met the poet herself in Ron’s room in 13 Woburn Square. The event: a postgraduate discussion group, my presence explained by my friendship with the host (the book has no inscription, unusually; even so, I imagine it came from Ron). I recall nothing of the evening, only that I sat on the floor at Kathleen Raine’s feet. Another detail belonging to that evening comes in a pencilled note from Richard, written probably 6 or 7 years ago. He remembers bumping into the poet (and the house cat Theo) on the steps of Woburn Square as he went off to a rehearsal. Apparently Kathleen Raine said something along the lines of ‘Met by a cat and a young man with a cello. What a moment.’ Richard’s memory was pricked by a hand-written copy of her poem ‘Rock’ which fell out of Jacquetta Hawkes’s The Land. The book had belonged to Richard’s Aunt Marjorie and was sent to me as part of the ‘flotsam and jetsam’ which surfaced during Richard and Felicity’s house move. ‘Rock’ had been interleaved in Jacquetta Hawkes’s book for the past 60 years, so they must stay together, Richard says, adding ‘can it even be in the hand of K. R. herself?’

Miranda Boulton 'Inside Out' 2018

This weekend saw me returning to Kettle’s Yard for a presentation ‘A Painter and A Poet: Art and Poetry in Response to Winifred Nicholson and Kathleen Raine’. The collaboration between artist Miranda Boulton and poet Kaddy Benyon is evidently a fruitful one and I’m vicariously excited by the prospect of their research visit to my old stamping ground of north-east Cumbria. Their partnership, doubled by the relationship between Winifred Nicholson and Kathleen Raine is further augmented by writer Victoria Best and I feel myself drawn into the web of connectivity they have created. I‘m very much looking forward to the publication of their book later in the year.

(…and I make that 40 days of abstinence remaining!)

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REFLECTIONS ON WATER, REFLECTIONS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

29/1/2019

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Cambridge, January, the dead of winter. Sometimes, when the weather is fine, I’m tempted after swimming to walk along the river rather than head straight home. These days I rarely swim anywhere other than in a chlorinated indoor pool and it’s 50 years since I had a dip in the Cam but early mornings along its banks can be magical and I like to think that its water still holds a part of me. Although geography has never been my strong point, I let my mind wander upstream to Grantchester and south, following the Rhee to the point where it receives the River Mel at Malton and then tracing the course of the Mel towards its source in Melbourn. Along the way I might meet my friend and poet Clare Crossman walking the dog or perhaps film-maker James Murray-White with his camera and I imagine the Cam reaching out to welcome the waters of the modest stream.

Tindale Washpool Photo: Richard Knights

I’ve only walked Meldreth’s river a couple of times but the Waterlight Project's website provides a compelling multifaceted picture of this small waterway, its flora and fauna, its geology and history. Poems and photographs, anecdotes and reminiscences and conversations come together to create a living map of memory and connotation which takes the reader beyond this particular chalk stream. Like Clare, I spent much of my adult life in Cumbria: not the Lake District, though that was within visiting distance, but close to the Eden Valley, a more remote north-eastern corner of the county where I learnt to dread the winter, its short days of horizontal rain and near darkness, cloud sitting stubbornly over the fells. The streams there spill over sandstone rather than chalk, carving a pathway through the soft red rock and there is Roman graffiti on the cliffs above the Gelt and the Irthing. I remember skinny-dipping in the Washpool near Tindale and the briefest splash in the River Gelt at Jockey Shield. Even though it was midsummer, the water was cold enough to turn my limbs blue.

Carlisle Floods 2015 Photo: J Jeff Mitchell/Getty

A hundred years ago a stroll along the Mel would have been a very different experience, passing osier beds and mills, the steam laundry and brewery. Like its larger cousin in the north, it has also been subject to flooding, with hindsight attributable in large part to human activity or rather the lack of it. As the mills and brewery closed and arable farming replaced water meadows and osier beds, there was no longer a vested interest in maintaining the waterway. Back in Cumbria, rivers burst their banks three times while I was living there, with devastating consequences for thousands of residents across the county. Although each instance was prompted by record rainfall, there were clearly problems arising from large-scale development on the flood plain and an overloaded Victorian sewage system, compounded by inadequate flood defences. Families hit more than once struggled to afford the rising cost of insurance, so suffered a double impact. I vividly recall driving the long Warwick Road into Carlisle years after the 2009 floods, past skip after skip still standing outside ruined houses. Before I left Cumbria for good, I rented out my house to a family who had just finished refurbishing their property when they again fell victim to flooding in 2015.

Globally, flooding is one of a number of indicators of our changing climate, with particular communities under repeated threat of losing their homes if not their lives and with wildlife especially vulnerable. I recently attended an evening of poems on the theme of Climate Change, hosted jointly by Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Magma Poetry. The event celebrated collaborations between eight poets and eight scientists and conservationists. As well as highlighting the damage we have inflicted on the planet, the outcome celebrated ‘the way arts practice can challenge and reshape approaches to contemporary conservation’, according to author and environmentalist John Fanshawe. Much of the work expressed a strong sense of loss: Jos Smith asked ‘Would you hear/The silence of lapwings, of thrushes?’ Claudine Toutoungi said, ‘the last kittiwake has/no comment’. Nancy Campbell’s photograph ‘Greenland Dogs No Ice’ pictures the two animals looking rather lost in a snow-free environment. And whilst Kathleen Jamie stresses the importance of advocacy in our response to nature, giving voice to aspects of the natural world, she has found her ability to write poetry silenced in the face of climate change.

'Splash' the dolphin Photo: DBCA

John Kinsella is anything but silent, regarding poetry as an opportunity for protest and an integral part of his activism, which affects every area of life. He stands fast and roaring in the face of the bulldozers which raze the forest to the ground in the development of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt. Here he describes ‘the chainsaw effect’:

It is not subtle. It is not ambient…
…gung-ho,
blazon, overconfident. Hubristic
to the final cut, last drop of fuel.

Kinsella comes from the Swan River area of Perth in Western Australia, familiar to me at one remove in the person of Georgiana Molloy who, in 1830, arrived there from her native Cumbria with her new husband to establish a colony. I came upon her first in the herbarium in the Sainsbury Centre at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and her extraordinary story, emerging from a stifling religious Victorian background into an independent pioneer with a passion for plant-collecting, became the subject of one of the short stories inspired by my residency. Kinsella enabled me to see her from a different angle: rather than a first-rate if undervalued botanist, here was a representative of a colonial past responsible for the wholesale theft of land from its indigenous peoples. For Kinsella, Swan River is also the site of damaging pollution, its population of dolphins dying tangled in fishing line or poisoned by toxic chemicals.

A quieter response to climate change came from Polly Atkin who also, coincidentally, lives in Cumbria. Her sequence ‘Notes on a Transect’ echoes her conversation with British Trust for Ornithology’s Blaise Martay in form as well as content and reflects the joy in our relationship with the living world that both ‘kept returning to’ in their exchange. Polly also records Blaise’s excitement – at the return of ospreys and beavers, for example – and the importance of excitement in building connections and instigating change. I found both excitement and joy in Anna Selby’s ‘Flowers in the Volcano':

At my feet, the impossibility
of three purple violets
shaking in the dark.

As I make for home along the Cam I’m thinking that these two qualities, excitement and joy, are also reflected in the Waterlight project. I love the way it marries the essential nourishment we gain from both words and water. Underpinned by dialogue between the arts (poetry, prose, image), considered and heartfelt responses to the natural world and a practical commitment to the messy business of effecting change, this local project is inspiring in its reach and its achievements.

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FALLING

5/11/2018

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Falling in love again            Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss
What am I to do?                  Auf LIebe eingestellt
Never wanted to -                Denn das ist meine Welt
I can’t help it                          Und sonst gar nichts

‘eingestellt’ – ‘focused’? ‘set’? ‘tuned in’? The German is better: a sense of being entirely given over to the business of loving, hard-wired for love: because ‘that is my world and absolutely nothing else’. Even so, the English version captures the deliciously involuntary nature of the experience, that precipitous toppling into the altered state which makes surrender so irresistible – or madness to resist. For who would turn away from the opportunity to lose oneself in another, to be enfolded in the arms of the beloved, especially in the later years?

I seem to have developed a falling habit; only the love aspect is missing. A couple of spills from my lovely New Hudson (almost as old as I am now), one unbalanced by a massive bag of shopping, always from standing, although there have been several near misses while moving. I am especially vulnerable when attempting to get going on even the slightest incline and my wobbles haven’t escaped the attention of frustrated motorists. One morning I fell at home when transitioning into ‘Warrior Two’, simply tipped sideways and en route to the floor crashed onto the stool which held my glasses and a mug of cooling tea; yoga not always the healthy option, it seems. Floor, mug and spectacles all survived more or less intact – and bones, thank goodness. Then, late last week, after an overlong wait at a cold and windy bus stop, crossing the street on the way to the Picturehouse. I landed in true old lady fashion at the feet of a handsome young man who hauled me to my feet and dusted me down with considerable charm. I had a little cry in the dark while waiting for the film to start!

My friend Aileen tells me that we used to use ‘fall’ for autumn in this country, before we came to regard it merely as an americanism. It makes sense, I suppose. Lovely as the season is, though, its mellow fruitfulness is somehow always tinged with melancholy, as if the downward direction of the falling leaves has a similar pull on the spirits, unlike the upward thrust of spring, all that new life emerging into the light as the days lengthen. Or is it just my inability to stay upright which disheartens? I don’t know: the glass falling is a sure sign of worsening weather; a fall from grace has negative connotations across a range of contexts, religious and otherwise. If falling into disrepair is what buildings do, I’m beginning to feel architecturally challenged.

Perhaps it’s unwise to dwell on such things although there is much to be said for being prepared, I think. A recent conversation with Cumbrian friends, all of us in our sixties now, drifted inevitably perhaps to how we make ourselves ready for whatever challenges might lie in wait for us. ‘Don’t leave it too late,’ seemed to be the consensus which I’ve heard repeated several times since. With this in mind I succumbed to impulse at the start of the weekend and bought a large red three-wheeler, a potential solution to the cycling problem. The transaction, in the dark outside the sociology department on Mill Lane, was a sobering affair which rendered me infuriatingly shaky, too shaky in fact to try out the bike – trike, I suppose – properly and subsequently side-swiped by a brief burst of sobbing on the way to the cash machine. Fortunately Jack was there to soak up the worst of it. I’m still rather cowed by its size and its shiny redness, although it’s not unlike the tricycle which was my passport to five -year-old freedom. It reminds me of a long ago bid for liberation when I bought a motor bike from a colleague. Not huge by motor cycle standards – it was a Honda 175 – I never conquered my fear of it and, after a few secretive sorties up and down outside the garage, I sold it back to its previous owner. Now, I’m hoping I’ve found my big yellow taxi (‘you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone’) in time.

So yesterday Hudson and I embarked on what might be a last outing together for a while. Not really a sentimental journey although pedalling along the river into town and then across Midsummer Common and along Riverside was pleasant enough in the autumn light despite my wobbles. The outer limit of the expedition was the Cambridge Retail Park, my destination B&Q for a tub of tile grout. Not the way I would normally choose to spend a Sunday afternoon – years of Sunday tango practicas have saved me from such a fate – but it wasn’t pleasant being reminded that this is what a large proportion of the population do with their precious free time or being part of that throng. Not much of a journey in real terms but by the time I headed home I was exhausted. ‘Don’t get old,’ I overheard a woman trying on sports shoes advising the young assistant. I know what she means.

And then there’s my beloved tango. Whilst I’m not exactly falling out of love with her, she’s never been a forgiving mistress and she doesn’t get any kinder. These days I have to dig deep to muster the energy to get myself to St Paul’s on a Tuesday evening. I don’t always make it. When I do, my balance has become so wonky that reluctantly I’ve had to settle for flat shoes much of the time and even that doesn’t guarantee safe passage round the floor although I haven’t actually fallen mid-dance yet. In my head I still dance beautifully, of course, but the reality is frustrating in the extreme and naturally the number of partners I can rely on to take the risk is shrinking. I have absolutely no patience with those followers who rock up and sit on the edge of the floor looking miserable and then go home complaining that they don’t get any dances but I’m aware I’ve found myself in that position a time or two recently. Hanging on to confidence and dignity in the face of attrition is a challenge but the possibility of losing what has been a lifeline looms large and feels more than anything like an impending bereavement. So, like a lover slow to accept the inevitable, I’m clinging on.

Something I’ve read recently hovers on the edge of my mind: something along the lines of how life sometimes seems to last for ever, whilst at other times, like a shirt hanging on a washing line, it’s whisked away by the wind and gone in an instant. I love that image and I’ve tried and failed to track down the source. Meanwhile I’ll take my cue from a Nick Pemberton favourite, Prince Buster’s recording of ‘Enjoy Yourself’ which he chose to play him out, as it were, at his funeral. Whilst the words carry a sober enough warning, it sounds like a party. Thanks to all the incredible support from friends, family and strangers, the book is happening: definitely something to look forward to and a dedicated celebration and thank you is coming soon. This morning I was up with the birds and out for a jog round to the pool before breakfast without disasters. And later today I might just go and get the red monster out of the bike store and give it an airing. ‘Big yellow taxi’ is a bit of a mouthful for a nickname. Perhaps I’ll call it Grace (as in ‘Saving…')?

'Falling in Love Again' was composed (in German) by Friedrich Hollaender in 1930 (English lyrics by Sammy Lerner) and performed by Marlene Dietrich in the film The Blue Angel, after which it became her anthem.

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INSPIRATIONAL? TANGO TALES AND THE COMFORT OF MARMALADE

30/8/2018

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Having seen myself as predominantly a fiction writer for the last ten years or so, I’m finding myself increasingly drawn to reality. Not that I no longer believe in the necessity of fiction for telling truths, just that I seem to have to lost the taste for making it. Is this just laziness on my part? Or an inevitable preoccupation with health and ageing? At any rate, I’m reminded of my mum (again) this morning as I spoon marmalade onto an oatcake. In her last weeks, she took to ‘ordering’ toast and marmalade at random hours through the day (and probably night) from the harassed care home staff as if she were in an exclusive hotel although by this time she had given up a life-time’s dedication to the impeccable manners which would have served her well in the Ritz or the Savoy and had taken to scooping the orange goo out of the plastic container with her finger. Not an inspiring end to a life or an enviable one although much is made these days of the importance of being ‘authentic’, of the ability to be yourself and know yourself. And much to be said, perhaps, for contentment, for the ability to let go of what no longer serves us well.

I have my eye on that ticking clock this morning. Partly this stems from conversations last week on the edge of the dance floor. One friend recounts his mother’s comment as she potters round outside the home she has lived in for more than twenty years – ‘I’ve no idea whose garden this is’ – and we discuss the challenges of dealing with the ageing process and not just in relation to our parents.

An odd consequence of the tango culture is that the perceived need to ‘get dances’ above all else means that there is rarely space to chat with fellow followers. Last week was an exception although tales of a summer spent travelling or staying happily at home in the heat both left me feeling rather out of sorts, having been strapped for cash and lacking the energy to do either. I’m inspired by one suggestion of the Canaries in autumn before I remember my growing credit card bill.

Not everyone has had the best time, of course. I approach someone with whom I have never before exchanged more than the briefest hello, to find that she lost her husband a month ago. I knew that he had been ill for some years and that she cared for him at home. As she spoke about his last months, the inroads of the illness, and the happiness of almost 50 years of marriage – ‘I’d been with him since I was 14’ – what shone through was her extraordinary strength and the remarkable gift of love which she’d been able to give him. I snivelled my way through the conversation, moved by a detail here, an anecdote there, recognising that she evidently felt loved in return. As she spoke about the final days, I remembered singing to my mother as she lay unconscious, an odd departure for two people who never in life shared an interest in music. Our conversation ended with an update on another older friend with his own health issues. ‘He’s determined to die on the dance floor,’ she said.

Photo: Sarah Lee for The Guardian

This morning an email introduces me to Paul Mayhew-Archer, diagnosed with Parkinson’s seven years ago. Deciding he could either laugh or cry, he chose to laugh and took his stand-up show ‘Incurable Optimist’ to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. An English graduate and an ex-English teacher like me, Parkinson’s has given him a ‘greater sense of purpose’ than ever before and he is now working on a romcom set in the Oxford Dance for Parkinson’s class which featured in the documentary he made for the BBC in 2016.

I have recently been suffering another crisis of confidence about my capabilities as a dancer. Part of the self-doubt no doubt familiar to most tangueros, the ‘P’ thing adds an extra edge. Today I’m hovering somewhere between feeling motivated by the lives of others and heading for the marmalade. But how hard can it be, really, to get over myself and just make the best of what I have and can do? Time to follow Fred and Ginger and pick myself up, dust myself off, start all over again:

Before the fiddlers have fled,
Before they ask us to pay the bill,
And while we still have that chance
Let’s face the music and dance.

Stephen Moss's interview with Paul Mayhew-Archer 'I wanted to show people with Parkinson's can do comedy' was published in The Guardian on 20 July. The documentary 'Parkinson's: The Funny Side' is available at BBC One Inside Out South.

'Pick Yourself Up' was written in 1936 by Jerome Kern (lyrics by Dorothy Fields) for the film 'Swing Time', which features a Fred Astaire whose 'two feet haven't met yet' apparently struggling to learn to dance with teacher Ginger Rogers

'Let's Face the Music and Dance' from the film 'Follow the Fleet' with Fred and Ginger was written by Irving Berlin, also in 1936.

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INSPIRED/ARNCLIFFE OCTOBER 2020

DIGGING

SPECTACULAR

THE KNOT SPECTACULAR: SNETTISHAM NORTH NORFOLK 1st SEPTEMBER 2019

GOING DOWN: ARNCLIFFE AUGUST 2019

HAVE NAPPY WILL TRAVEL (OR WON’T) … TMI? LOOK AWAY NOW… OR MAYBE NEVER LOOK AWAY/'WORK WITHOUT AUTHOR'… OR ON BEING ‘WHOLLY KNOWN’...

SPRING

THOUGHTS FOR ASH WEDNESDAY AND AFTER

REFLECTIONS ON WATER, REFLECTIONS ON CLIMATE CHANGE

FALLING

INSPIRATIONAL? TANGO TALES AND THE COMFORT OF MARMALADE

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THE KNOT SPECTACULAR: SNETTISHAM NORTH NORFOLK 1st SEPTEMBER 2019​

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THE KNOT SPECTACULAR: SNETTISHAM NORTH NORFOLK 1st SEPTEMBER 2019