So April was a month of anniversaries. The 14th, the day following my birthday (a milestone I’m more than ready to forget) marked the day my dad died 16 years ago, and five days later, the second anniversary of Mum’s death. When I look in the mirror, often these days I see one or other of them looking back at me. I wonder what they would make of all this, unsure whether I’m meaning the personal or the mess that characterises so much of the wider world. ‘All this’ has me looking up at the poster above my desk advertising a 2006 exhibition of Samuel Beckett manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, which I went to with my friend Maxine at just about this time of year. The exhibition took its title, ALL THIS THIS HERE, from the last poem Beckett wrote. In July 1988, 18 months before his death, a fall in his kitchen left him with what were thought to be the effects of a stroke or, strangely for me, Parkinson’s. Whatever the cause, he experienced temporary aphasia, a disturbance of the brain’s speech centres. In hospital, as he gradually recovered the ability to speak and write, he began work on ‘Comment dire’, described by one critic as ‘a representation and exploration of… the fruitless compulsion to search for words’:
what is the word –
seeing all this –
all this this –
all this this here –
folly for to see what –
glimpse –
seem to glimpse –
need to seem to glimpse –
afaint afar away over there what –
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –
what –
what is the word –
what is the word
In an even stranger postscript, some hours after writing this I wake screaming from a nightmare to my own experience of aphasia, five minutes of slurred speech and nonsense alternating with a complete inability to form words at all which sees me spending half the night in Addenbrookes, the cause as yet unclear. Beckett - like me he was born on the 13th April - died on 22 December 1989, eight days before Jack was born. And so now I’m also remembering a fabulous production of Endgame with Michael Gambon and Liz Smith, which Jack & I saw at the Albery in the spring of 2004 and waited at the stage door afterwards for a glimpse of its stars.
what is the word –
seeing all this –
all this this –
all this this here –
folly for to see what –
glimpse –
seem to glimpse –
need to seem to glimpse –
afaint afar away over there what –
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what –
what –
what is the word –
what is the word
In an even stranger postscript, some hours after writing this I wake screaming from a nightmare to my own experience of aphasia, five minutes of slurred speech and nonsense alternating with a complete inability to form words at all which sees me spending half the night in Addenbrookes, the cause as yet unclear. Beckett - like me he was born on the 13th April - died on 22 December 1989, eight days before Jack was born. And so now I’m also remembering a fabulous production of Endgame with Michael Gambon and Liz Smith, which Jack & I saw at the Albery in the spring of 2004 and waited at the stage door afterwards for a glimpse of its stars.
Anglia Ruskin can lay claim to its own success stories over the years although I’m not sure that any of the glittering back catalogue still living made it along with me to the 25rh anniversary celebrations of university status the last weekend of the month. I scroll through the list of alumni, wondering as usual too late why I didn’t ask if i was in the company of famous names. Here are David Gilmour and Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, of course, rubbing shoulders with Labour Party politicians Sue Hayman and Kim Howells, writers Chris Beckett and Grahame Davies, and artists and illustrators Edward Bawden and Ronald Searle, the last best known to me for the delightful Molesworth series. I learn there is a lot more to him. Born in Cambridge, son of a post office worker and a student of what became Parkside School and then Cambridge College of Arts & Technology (later ARU), he spent much of World War II as a prisoner of the Japanese, documenting the brutal conditions of his incarceration in a series of drawings that he hid under the mattresses of fellow prisoners dying of cholera. He said afterwards that his experiences gave him a ‘measuring stick’ for the rest of his life. Other heroes emerge: I’m excited to find myself in the company of the very fine poet and author John Burnside and the wonderful Alberto Manguel, now Director of the National Library of Argentina. I first discovered Manguel through a gift of ‘The Library at Night’ from my Norwich friend Richard who also alerted me to Manguel’s new book. Packing my Library, on the power of reading and the importance of libraries. Our books, Manguel says, are ‘accounts of our histories, of our epiphanies and of our atrocities… They are also reminders of better things, of hope and consolation and compassion and hold the implication that of these too we are all of us capable…’
The last week in April sees me out and about a bit. I travel to Norwich twice in the space of three days, the second time to dance. This is the first time I have been to a milonga in Norwich and I’m disarmed by the warmth of the welcome. I have persuaded Richard & Felicity to call in, envisaging a quiet drink while we watch the floor but unaccountably there are lots of opportunities for me to dance and somehow I feel more relaxed and calmer, more confident than I sometimes feel in Cambridge. Which i’m afraid turns me into rather a distracted host, shooting onto the floor at a moment’s notice and then returning to excitable explanations of the virtues of tango – shades of my dad’s overweening enthusiasms there. I also have an afternoon in London for my first meeting as adviser to People Dancing’s Dance for Parkinson’s Partnership. I’m pleased that I will be able to contribute to the planning and development of this programme. I’ve lost my early antipathy to specialist provision and know from my own experience as well as observation that the classes can be a powerful and joyous experience. Crucially, participants are able to leave their Parkinson’s at the door: Interviewed in the fabulous film ‘Capturing Grace’, Reggie Butts sums this up nicely: ‘There are no patients,’ he says. ‘They’re dancers.’ I discover at the meeting that the last day of the month is World Dance for Parkinson’s Day. I explore the web pages created by the Mark Morris Dance Group/Dance for PD and the video made by English National Ballet to mark the occasion and find myself feeling rather proud to be a person with Parkinson’s. Although my first love and my passion remains tango, of course, made possible by the inclusive approach and support of my local tango communities.
On the 30th I switch on the radio to find that the afternoon’s ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ comes from the Sainsbury Laboratory in the Botanic Garden here in Cambridge. I calculate: an incredible five years since I began my residency there one Monday in May. It has been much on my mind recently and the reminder blows through the day like a serendipitous ghost. Somehow I feel I have lost touch with that side of myself and my writing recently. The final question for the panel comes from Steve Coghill, Senior Horticulturalist at King’s and concerns the ‘amazing’ Ellen Ann Willmott who famously sprinkled seeds of Eryngium giganteum sea holly amongst the borders of gardens she visited. The experts were asked what ‘calling card’ they would choose to leave. Miss Willmott’s name is familiar but I can’t find any reference to her among my notes so I resort to Google and discover she was indeed quite a character. A traveller and a plant collector, wood carver and photographer, she was a fellow of the Linnean Society and contributed more than 15,000 specimens to the Cambridge Herbarium. She also funded Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson’s expeditions which definitely ring a bell and I recall tracking down his find Sycopsis sinensis Chinese fighazel before other distractions intervened and I abandoned the trail. Reputedly a demanding employer, Ellen Willmott became increasingly cranky as she grew older, carrying a revolver in her handbag. I wonder what, if any, echoes of my residency remain, among the roots or along the paths of the Garden, perhaps fleetingly in the memories of staff or visitors. I did make one physical deposit, a sliver of slate engraved with a spiral and with the word ‘envoi’ and a web address on the reverse, this from my Cumbrian friend and artist Liz Clay, now sadly no longer with us. Liz gave all her friends a similar piece of stone whenever they were travelling, with instructions to leave it in a significant spot and bring something from that place back to her. I placed my envoi in the rock garden and for years I visited it every time I was passing. Sometimes it was hard to find but it hung on for years - until one day it simply wasn’t there any more. Fortunately, thanks to Kaddy the poet, there is a photographic record. Is it too fanciful to imagine the ghost of Liz joining ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ to call my own shadowy presence back to finish what I started? Perhaps. Still, I find myself revisiting one of the stories from the Writing the Garden collection, the story for May. A quick edit and ‘Paradise’ is on its way to the US as a competition entry. Later that day, I receive news of the Garden Museum’s first Garden Writing Competition and I’m keen to get started, the compulsion to write returned after months of absence. Whether the search is fruitless - well, we will find out.
'What Is the Word': Beckett's Aphasic Modernism was published by Laura Salisbury in 2008
The omnibus edition of Alberto Manguel's Packing my Library, read by Oliver Cotton, is available on BBC Radio iPlayer for one more day.
For an exciting taste of inclusion in tango, check out el abrazo verdadero
The omnibus edition of Alberto Manguel's Packing my Library, read by Oliver Cotton, is available on BBC Radio iPlayer for one more day.
For an exciting taste of inclusion in tango, check out el abrazo verdadero
Sycopsis sinensis
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