Sunday morning life on mars

It's sunny outside, I can see how dirty the kitchen windows are. I know it looks worse in winter with the sun coming in at a different angle (lower? higher?) and anyway, what do I care. I have neither the energy nor the willpower to clean windows. 

Instead, there is R to watch. He is making jam. Since he retired from teaching science, the kitchen has slowly turned into one of his places of action. There now are a variety of fancy gadgets such as complicated mandolin slicers, variously shaped thermometers, frighteningly accurate scales, hot-water tongs, steaming baskets, grill attachments that look like spare car parts and research facility-grade timers. with alarm sounds you really need to get used to.

It's all very meticulous, weighing and stirring and putting a plate into the freezer. Wait. What's that for? Obviously, that's standard, how else could one determine whether the jam has set if not by putting a measured spoonful on a plate that has come straight out of the freezer. Anyway, with precision and detail, he ends up with a neat row of filled jars, now lidded and upside down on the window sill. 

All I have to do is watch and praise. And while this is happening, we are listening to Sunday Miscellany, our Sunday morning radio program, the one we have been listening on and off wherever possible for the past 40+ years. R starts to grin while Conall Hamill reads his memory of finding out about David Bowie as a teenage boy sent to the summer camp to learn Irish. And we both cheer when he describes how his life was changed listening to the sacred mysteries of Hunky Dory every night for three weeks. 

We have different memories of this song and where we were when we heard it first but we totally understand.  And I'll never need make jam again, I know that much.

(You can listen to it here: https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22192988/)

And Peace Shall Return

Our capacity for denial is stronger than our capacity for belief. We find it easier to not face the truth. We go on living our ordinary lives while refusing to believe the overwhelming evidence that our way of life is self-destructive. A prisoner of the past, we go on doing things which we know are killing us. Worse, we believe that the inevitable conclusion of all our deeds will not come to pass. We think that somehow, at the last minute, there will be a miracle, a magical solution. We possibly even hope that factors in nature we hadn’t considered will somehow wipe clean the slate of our cultural and environmental crimes.

 

Ben Okri

I could've done worse than read this story by Ben Okri (link here, go on it's excellent). 

But only barely so. The title is inviting but seriously misleading for all of us who believe we are on top of things and superior to, say, the common fruit fly. Reading it did all sorts of things to me, I cried, I admit that much.

To counteract any feelings of hopelessness, I am listening to/watching a live performance by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra directed by Daniel Barenboim. They are playing Beethoven to celebrate the composer's 250th birthday. Beethoven was born a few miles down the road from where I sit right now and this concert comes live from our city's opera house. 

The musicians sit spaced safely apart, they all wear masks, apart from the woodwind and brass players. Daniel Barenboim plays the piano and does not wear a mask, he shed a few tears during the Largo (second movement of Beethoven's piano concerto no. 3).

I am not particularly attached to classical music (I wrote about why this is so here) but I like the idea of it being a freebie (thank you covid) and that I can do some editing, i.e. paid work, while listening. 

And I also think highly of Daniel Barenboim.

We just had a break in performance and now Mr Barenboim is back with a mask on and we're off with the do do do doo at the start of the fifth symphony.  In another lifetime, when I was just about to become a rebel, I had to write a school essay on the second movement of this symphony and the ongoing motif  with its apparent sunny nature and its source (a Franconian folk song, I kid you not) in contrast to the fateful tone of the first movement. It all comes back to me now. Honestly, school! Now, today, I can finally use this knowledge. After all the trials and tribulations of the past almost 50 years. Here we are, thank you Beethoven, thank you secondary education.

Actually, the second movement is quite lovely to listen to.

In the silence the ever-present past

 

This is footage from Inis Mór, the largest of the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay, on the west coast of Ireland. It's a wild place, rough and windy. The land is crisscrossed by stone walls, protecting the fields from the wind. About 4  mins into this video, you see Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric hill fort, one of several Bronze Age sites on the island. But this is not a history blog, so for anyone interested, go here. 

The poem is spoken by Mike Scott of the Waterboys. He wrote it in the early 1980s when the band was living in An Spidéal, a small village on the Atlantic coast, overlooking the Aran Islands and the coast of county Clare. The village is famous for traditional music sessions.

I like to believe that the storm he is referring to at the beginning of his poem is the one we ran away from in October 1981 when we were staying on Inis Mór for a short while. I have very little memory of our time there other than that we walked a lot, were accompanied by all the island dogs, met very few people and smoked our very last joint sitting next to the fort looking out on the ocean. That day, we decided it was time to have a child, one of several, so we imagined. 

Back at the harbour village of Cill Rónáin, the fishermen had started to pull in their boats and gear, windows and sheds were secured and by dinner time, the storm warnings were all around us. Early the next morning we got the last boat back to the mainland. 

This was the time when I started to think of myself as becoming an adult.

happy 73rd birthday Van Morrison

There are many rumours about Van the man, especially in Ireland. He's said to be reticent, bordering on rude, a loner, mysterious. Today is his birthday.

This one's a true story, I swear. A cousin of a friend of a friend told me this many years ago. And he must know, he's from Belfast:

Before he became famous Van Morrison once met said cousin in a local pub and the two started talking about a tricky boiler repair job when they were interrupted. Van Morrison left the pub and subsequently his career took off, fame etc. Many years later, said cousin met him by chance at a function and Van Morrison's first words were "About that boiler . . . ".

Anyway, in my family, we have favourite songs.

This used to be my daughter's favourite when she was a young teenager, becasue she always likes a good story and as usual, there's a story behind this song (beautifully explained in Thom Hickey's blog):




This is R's favourite because it brings back memories, he says, of listening to the radio while waiting at the hairdresser's as a secondary school boy:



This is my favourite because it reminds me of a special day in Connemara:



And this is an extra just for the fun of it:

This music. There should be a better word for it. Something about force, heart, soul, depths.

Hugh Masekela died last week.

In the late 1980s when I was living in paradise, we would listen to this song in silence. My co-wokers, who normally were happily skipping and shuffling to reggae and zouk and moutia and sega, sat motionless whenever this song was played on the radio or from the boomboxes they brought to work.

I may have been their boss, in theory, but when it came to music at work, visiting family, girlfriends/boyfriends, buying and selling of home produce incl. illegally collected seabird eggs or the trading of foreign currency, I was powerless. And reader, I didn't mind one bit. I only tried eating an omelet made from seabird eggs once, too fishy for my taste.

For the men and women in my office, the ultimate shithole country was apartheid South Africa and they told me by the way they listened to this song. 

In my time there and since, I have met a good few people who call this beautiful stunning natural beauty of a country a shithole mostly because the shopping experience is severely limited, there are too many mosquitoes, it is always hot and humid, it rains almost every day, the birds make a racket every evening before sunset, the bats make a racket all night, the dogs bark all day and night, there are children everywhere, and so on.

And I should add nepotism, that terrible African trait whereby members of the ruling clan are given cushy government posts. Plus, backhanding, blatantly corrupt officials, off shore tax schemes, all these strictly African shithole characteristics. No?
The tinier the country, the more obvious they are.
And the rumours of political intrigues, secret prisoners, coup attempts, exiles. Yes, many of them were true. Every week someone would walk up to my desk with secret information, sometimes testing me and if I fell for it, and I usually did, there was much slapping up thighs and laughter.
Paradise was (is) a bad place. Human greed etc.

(But also, free school for all, free health care for all, clean buses running to almost everywhere, more women in government positions than anywhere else in the world, active trade unions, a ban on all plastic packaging, strict observation of environmental protection laws etc.)

I was lucky to see/hear/experience Hugh Masekela live, here in our city. It was a cold night for an open air concert. He had us all sweating and shouting in no time.

midwinter is in the past

2015, all innocent

The river  burst its banks three days ago and this lunchtime, the water level reached orange alert  with red alert forecast for tonight. Like all good citizens, we duly made our way to see it with our very own eyes. Let no disaster happen without crowds to witness.
It was as expected, ducks and swans showing off their best plumage, a couple of canoeists paddling along where some eight meters below, we would normally cycle. Only the NE wind was icy cold.

In the morning, I can hear a timid dawn chorus, the days are getting longer, so R reassures me.

At nights when exhaustion has me in its tight wrap, I lie in the deep silence and although I cannot see the moon directly, I watch the blue light, the way it shimmers and shivers along the walls and across the ceiling and this longing for life comes over me, like an urge from deep inside of me that I had almost forgotten existed. 

Three years ago, I crossed the 5-year survival threshold reserved for 75% of people with my diagnosis. It meant nothing. Life ahead of me seemed endless.
(Still does.)
This summer, I have reached the half-way mark of the latest, statistically confirmed life expectancy. Do I care?
(Yes.)


It has been raining most of the week or maybe only for the last two days, I lose track. Most evenings, we manage to fit in a short cycle along the river in between downpours, watching the fog rise from the small valleys on the other side. The fact that I have enough energy for cycling makes me so giddy, I forget to take pictures. Next time, I tell myself, there will be a next time. And one after that and many more and so on.

(just for fun, soundtrack of a wild year)

 
I went into a bit of a huff last week. Sliding into a dark pond covered in duckweed, knowingly and yet, the way it makes you feel. Guilty and couldn't care less at the same time.
Oh poor me and so on. But shhhh, nobody was looking.

And then I cycled. Twice. Short cold windy distances. Terrified I should do harm to my back. But, oh the freedom.

This is me with my first proper bicycle, in 1964 the summer before I started school, I am six years old.

This is my grandmother (never granny) with her bicycle in her hometown. She is maybe 12 years old, so this picture was taken 60 years earlier, 1904 or thereabouts. She never learned to drive, never had to. Every Monday and Thursday, she cycled into town, on the cobblestone pavement, for market, butcher, baker and gossip, until she was well into her nineties.

My application for the medical rehabilitation program has been approved, starting next week Wednesday, six hours/day, five days/week for three weeks. I expect nothing short of miracles. Seriously. Or else. (I am scared shitless it will come to nothing and I shall remain a stranded beetle forever).

with the appropriate soundtrack

 After lunch, in a brief moment of mental derangement I decided that I was fit enough to walk down to the river and back. So while R ran after me, cursing under his breath, I marched on until exhaustion caught up with me and forced me to sit on a low wall by the cemetery until I had recovered for the slow crawl back home. There, in the cold damp February drizzle, nostalgia joined us with memories of our tropical past.

This is the view to the west across the Indian Ocean after slowly driving upwards on seemingly endless and very narrow hairpin bends through the rain forest. Further on and up, through ever deeper forest, there is a small tea plantation, a deserted Capuchin mission and then the road starts to dip down towards the east, the harbour and the airport.

It is late afternoon, definitely a Saturday or Sunday, on weekdays we would not have had the time to go for such a long drive after work and before sunset at 6pm. I think this picture was taken in November 1988, because sometime before xmas that year, this car caught fire and quickly burnt down to a pile of stinking rubble. The school holidays had started and R was driving three little girls, S and her two Swedish friends, to one of the beaches on the west coast for the day. They got out in time, laughing and singing, all unharmed.

I was working that day and soon after this happened - miles away - one of the government drivers, who considered the air conditioned office as their lounge, quietly walked up to my desk and waited for me to look up and

ask him what's the matter before he explained, very politely, that everybody except the nice white expat car was fine. And when I looked up and around the office in disbelief, I realised that everybody had known for a while, that in fact, this was the reason for all the annoying whispering earlier that had made me so nervous (I was new at the job and under constant observation). And while I sat there, at a loss and quite shocked, every one of 'my staff', one after the other, walked up to me, shook my hand, and Jude and Pascal, the magical twins, told me that they would take care of it. And they did. They always did.
These two watched over me, they spoiled me, they drove me nuts, they danced and sang during work, we hated each other and we loved each other. Some mornings, I would find my desk decorated with fresh bougainvillea and heaped with pink mangoes, while they both carefully explained why today, a small amount of money may be missing - temporarily of course - from the petty cash. Things always worked out in the end.

I never drove that car, it was too dodgy for my nerves, too many tricks to get it started, too neglected by too many previous owners who would pass it on like gold dust after their two-year expat stint. Then of course, the roads made me nervous for a long time, miles and miles of steep bends, sheer drops and no hard shoulders, thick forest and then the rain, almost daily, torrents, steaming floods. 

The car we got after that was even more dangerous but soon I had gone native and wild and could drive those hairpin bends with my eyes closed.

The twins are both grandfathers by now.

Classic mistake. I went back to work because I wanted to show my superhuman commitment and let everybody think what an obviously  tough and dedicated person I am but also because of cabin fever setting in and frankly, because I miss work and for a while I thought I could pretend it's all down to willpower and taking control and just doing it.
Of course it is not, what on earth was I thinking, and so here I am, the stranded beetle once again, trying to remain cool and calm and composed and carefree about the variety of new symptoms. Obviously, I could write about them endlessly but right now I just want to let them be.
So then, so there, so what - as we tend so remark in this family before we move on to our next mistake.


The summer is entering its seedy phase when you stop caring about the flower beds overgrowing with weeds and no longer brush away the spider nets between the garden chairs. The first apples are falling off the tree, there are masses of blueberries, R is shaking the hazel bushes every evening collecting handfuls, the blackbirds are eating the grapes and someone's cat has started to shit on our lawn. Or maybe a hedgehog. Never mind, go right ahead. We know this is going to be over soon enough. Hot sun on your skin, warm wind in the evening, open windows at night. In a few weeks, the spiders will be dust and we will wear long sleeved garments again. I even may be able to recover some semblance of health and fitness. Alternatively, I may find myself without a job and will start making quilts and read that silly meaningful book on how to reorganise your wardrobe with the sock rolled up in a peculiar colour coded way.

The butterfly larvae ate their way to fat green and black caterpillars before turning into shiny hard grey chrysalises speckled with a line a golden dots. There are now hanging almost motionless inside their habitat (a mesh cage) until some time maybe this week or next week they will mysteriously unfold their magic wings and teach us a thing or two about beauty.

It's amazing, isn't it, how all this goes on around me, just waiting for me to notice and be surprised and awed.

Outside there's children laughing
The radio plays my favourite song
The sun is shinning
Oh and peace broke out in the world
And no-one says a cruel word
And peace is the sweetest sound I've ever heard

 

these are the days of miracle and wonder

On the day when your boss calls you to assess whether you are still an asset or possibly already a massive burden and you really couldn't care because you spent most of the night coughing

on the day your GP confirms that this isn't strep throat but in fact scarlet fever and that it will take a good while longer before you will enjoy whatever you imagined this summer still has to offer

on the day your sister tells you - sort of by the way - that just before we all got together under my granny's apple trees, three and a half weeks ago, her granddaughter, the sweet but somewhat cranky toddler we all passed around from lap to lap that afternoon, had developed the tell tale rash plus fever and that the pediatrician had warned earlier that she was highly contagious and should be kept at home but my sister felt what the heck

on the day that you open a small parcel that your science teacher husband has placed on the lunch table

you realise that obviously this is the day you start breeding your very own butterfly family.

These are the first five larvae just after arrival. If it works out, I am going for hundreds. This year, we have counted numerous useless Cabbage Whites, one Brimstone and one lonely Red Admiral on our butterfly friendly flowering plants. Clearly, there is room for improvement.

The school boys from down the road. AnnenMayKantereit.

After a weekend with tooth ache I went to the dentist and the sky did not fall down. He was very reassuring and even made me a little drawing of the gap between the two molars that got infected because the world is not fair.
I think I will survive. But. Of course, I don't believe he is right and that my last remaining upper molars are quietly rotting away in all their shiny whiteness.
Still hurts but I am ever so cool and brave and grown up. Last night I read about Napoleon and the battle of Austerlitz until the dawn chorus set in. Not in my wildest dreams etc.

Waiting. I am tired. So tired that I fall asleep sitting up, for a half minute, enough to jerk my head upright when a clanging noise, a cold breeze, whatever, wakes me up again. I want to look smart and presentable when the doctors knock and walk in with their white coats swishing.
Ever since breakfast I have been imagining what I'll do once they discharge me - which they have done by now or this post would not be up. The taxi ride through the cold and sunny Friday morning, searching for the house keys and stepping into the warmth of my messy kitchen. Putting on the kettle and sitting on the old leather sofa, wrapped in two blankets, looking out into the garden with a steaming cup in my hands and the newspaper on my lap. On the window sill, the first little pots are basking in the sun. We'll start with the peppers, R told me last night.

Not looking at the lab report from hell. Not yet.

To think that somewhere on these pages with their secret codes, the bold red type indicating where my blood sample failed to remain within the reference ranges, a hidden message may be waiting.
I am kidding myself. It jumped at me as soon as I got the print out and hastily I folded it and stuffed it in my overnight bag. I can see it with my eyes closed and I wish I would be ignorant, that nobody ever told me about transaminases and inflammation markers and all that shit.

Anyway. Spring is on its way somewhere. Get a move on, hear me.

Ottorino Respighi: Ancient Airs and Dances

do not adjust your speakers, the first 60 seconds are almost silent

This is the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. It touches the soul.

happy 70th birthday Neil Young

It seems I have been humming and singing this song under my breath all my life. Long before I could understand the lyrics.

Right now, I remember singing it at the top of my voice while painting the walls of the former industrial school in Letterfrack in bright purples and reds. At the time, I didn't know a thing about the horrible history of that building. I was a clueless student of theories and ideals.

But I was happy, really happy. I had just fallen in love, I had met wonderful people and together we set out to make this place habitable again. We had grand ideas involving woodworkers, weavers, potters, children, gardens. You know, the whole shebang.

Today, my paintwork is long gone. Instead, it has become "a place of excellence".
I am still in love. 

Sometimes we’re going to find ourselves completely caught up in a drama. We’re going to be just as angry as if someone had just walked into the room and slapped us in the face. Then it might occur to us: “Wait a minute—what’s going on here?” We look into it and are able to see that, out of nowhere, we feel that we have lost something or been insulted. Where this thought came from we don’t know, but here we are, hooked again by the eight worldly dharmas. Right then, we can feel that energy, do our best to let the thoughts dissolve, and give ourselves a break. Beyond all that fuss and bother is a big sky. Right there in the middle of the tempest, we can drop it and relax. 

Pema Chödrön


Clear days, clear nights, frost maybe. We moved the plumeria inside into the front room where it promptly dropped all its leaves. R is losing patience with it and threatens to give it away if there are still no blossoms by next summer. I prefer to call it frangipani, sounds so much more tropical. Once upon a time, when we lived in paradise, I carelessly stepped on frangipani petals on my way to work every morning. And a visit from the local tortoise was just a nuisance - because he would regularly get stuck trying to push into the back door.

For a long time I would play this make believe game, where you have one wish (one really selfish wish, not a world peace or end to hunger wish), and I imagined that I wanted us to be back there, by our kitchen door, sweeping the mango leaves and listening to the fruit bats screeching and the dogs barking and the kids everywhere. But not any more.

Now my one selfish wish is a different one. I have become more careful - but equally unrealistic. Now, I avoid wasting my wish on being healthy again (but oh believe me, I want it so badly). Instead, my one selfish unrealistic careful wish is for a life without doctor's appoinments. I would settle for that. Maybe.

Lonesome Leash

Music for a massive gum inflamation, I wonder what keeps my teeth in place. There is nothing nice about the taste of your own blood. I have tried. Believe me.