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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. 
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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. 
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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. 

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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.

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PicturePhoto: 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.​

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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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UP NORTH

5/8/2018

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                        If you're travelin' in the north country fair

                        Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline...

For all that I’m a northern girl by birth and habit, sometimes the north, like the past, feels like a foreign country. Our first morning in Grassington, we are charmed by vivid blue skies and sunshine but also by an old-fashioned gent who holds open the car door for us as we squeeze out of the narrow space. Only when we’ve thanked him several times and are marching off down the cobbles does he confess self-interest: the gleaming white Mercedes parked next to us is his.


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The past is never far behind us, though. Echoes of earlier visits chatter at our booted heels as we head along the grassy track towards Parceval Hall and on to the Skyreholmes. Like last time, we follow the flight of steps down behind the cottages, marvel at the gardens which drop steeply to the stream and afterwards peer longingly in through the front windows. At the far end of the terrace there are nests – swallows? house martins? – in
the top corners of the highest window, the glass crusted with accumulated droppings. As we walk, earlier pasts crowd in on us, the ghosts of friends and lovers and children shadowing our progress.


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On our second morning we drive to Litton and stop for coffee at the Queen’s Arms: a chance to pore over maps and change our minds about our planned route. We attempt to book for dinner the following evening and C suggests the table by the window. The landlord explains that he can only reserve a table for ‘medical reasons’, citing the ‘lady with the stroke’ as an example. So, ‘unless you have the side of your face paralysed,’ he clarifies, we will have to take pot luck. Really.
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We take the road past Halton Gill and the quaint honesty-box arrangement that is ‘Katie’s Cuppas’ and leave the car in Fox-Up. From here we climb across the fields and head right along the wide track which skirts the base of Plover Hill towards Horton-in-Ribblesdale. We fall into the familiar pattern, C striding ahead and then pausing for me to catch up, perhaps sketching whilst she waits, I plodding in her wake, spinning tales in my head. I have just finished reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore and the novel is still very much in my mind: memories, the choices we make, the weight of our pasts and the presents we shape for ourselves. How much is metaphor? Like Kafka Tamura, I follow the path ahead because I must, because it’s there, because I need to know. And the future? There’s no prospect of an end to my solitary state and, whilst I’m happy enough in my own company and still relatively able-bodied, I can’t claim to be approaching the years ahead with optimism. For now, though, this will have to do – and, looking around me, there are definitely worse places to be.
  

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On the one occasion when I get ahead, I miss the point where the path climbs to the left and we have to scramble up through boggy ground and over a gap in the wall to find it again. As the landscape opens out, a curlew calling to my right becomes visible for a moment, pale body gliding away from me. The table-top of Ingleborough appears in the distance as the blunt shoulder of Pen-y-Ghent takes shape on our left. We stop to eat our sandwiches at a junction of paths, sunlight on the far quarry. We don’t quite make it to Hole Pot, our intended destination, turning back to allow time for a cup of tea before we meet R, ex-landlord and old friend of C, in The Falcon.


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We are the only customers and settle in the back room, looking out over the garden and the hills beyond. The pleasantries out of the way, the conversation meanders through reminiscence and anecdote, peppered with laughter and a touch of gallantry. I’ve only met R on a couple of occasions but I’m intrigued and – yes, charmed, again – by his warmth and by that heady mix of dogged old school resistance to change – no email, the sense of generations rooted in the place – and a contrasting openness – to ideas, art – which somehow seems more contemporary. Or is this my southern stereotyping?! There’s a love of words, too – and a kind of caress in the sliding cadence and rhythms of his speech which cuts through the distance between us, creating a suggestion of intimacy. (Of course this could have something to do with the quantity of wine he insists on buying for us.)

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The following morning the bush outside the kitchen window is littered with raindrops which sparkle in the early sunlight – as if someone has sprinkled the leaves with glitter. After yoga in the garden and a leisurely breakfast, we set off along the Hawkswick road, past the larches which dance along  the river bank, skirts scooped high,  before branching left on the track to Kettlewell. I’ve spotted the track from the road, from where it looks like a gradual ascent on a wide grassy track. Which it is, at least at first. But I’ve forgotten my stick and an emergency replacement we find is too thin and whippy to be much use. Soon the path narrows to an uneven rocky thread with a bit of a drop to our right, sending me into a wobbling mode which I struggle to shake off. The descent is a scramble, steep in places and I’m reduced to sliding down on my bottom or accepting the offer of C’s hand. I’m touched, and a tad surprised though I don’t know why, by her patience. Even so, the two-mile stretch feels more like 22 and the prospect of walking back is daunting, not least as we have to pack up ready for an early start tomorrow before our date with the Queen’s Arms. Nowhere to buy a new walking pole – apparently the outdoor clothing shop closed last year. No buses, no decent coffee shops and the village store is shut, although they open up for us to buy cheese and oatcakes and we manage a surreptitious picnic round the back of an ice cream parlour. On an impulse we decide to hitch a ride. Whether it’s another example of that northern charm, the kindness of strangers or the effect of C’s shorts, we’ve no sooner stuck out our thumbs when a chap pulling out of the car park raises his thumb in reply and we pile in. Turns out he’s driven over from Halifax in nostalgic mood, revisiting the area where he camped as a cub scout. He explains away his generosity as an example of northern hospitality – which of course it is. And which is replicated later in Litton, when we find the table in the window reserved for us, after all.

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'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there' is the opening of L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, published by Hamish Hamilton  in 1953

 'Girl from the north country'was written by Bob Dylan, recorded in 1963 and released the same year as the second track on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
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