Making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future.

smells from the kitchen

Half moon hiding in the clouds, my darling
And the sky is flecked with signs of hope
Raise your weary wings against the rain, my baby
Wash your tangled curls with gambler's soap

The cat is jealous because I am looking after the two bunny rabbits from next door for a week. Every time I climb through the hedge with my carrots and a handful of hay she hisses at me and whenever I sit down she climbs onto my shoulders and digs her claws in before she gets on with the purring - very loud and very uncomfortable.

Made lots of tomatoe sauce from the massive harvest. And there are more, lots more. Tomorrow.

S made it through her surgery and as a reward she went to see Dylan Moran live. That's the spirit, good choice. She also fell in love with her doctor and the nurses.

And now it looks like we have little bitchy battle with the fancy health insurance outfit on our hands because - aah what the hell. I am postponing all thinking and arguing and basically all mental stress until we get the final results.

Yesterday when I went to work the thermometer said 34°C, this morning it was 13°C. Weird, weird and cold.

My teeth are hurting - again, and it's really only a small bit of sore gum, I think, I hope. 

All in all, I am hanging in there like a limp sack of beans.

weekend

We harvested the last of the sweet peas and when R spread out the compost, he found a mango growing in it. It is now potted and on the patio.

Last night we drove up into the hills to watch the stars but a cloud blanket was moving in just then. So we looked at the lights of the city reflected in the river and when we drove down again the moon was a huge orange slice in the sky to the east.

After breakfast this morning R and S exchanged gardening news over skype and then he said, we will phone you again on the big day, love and we all held our breath for a second.

When R was making coffee he was whistling along to Neil Young.

I discovered that the online rain radar is quite accurate and useful to check before hanging up the laundry to dry in the sunny garden.

In the afternoon I sat in my deck chair and watched the figs ripen. And then my guts started to react to the kilo of apricots I have been eating in the last 24 hours.

So when R set out his pizza plans - zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, sweet corn, anchovies, two cheese... I suggested a more minimalistic approach.

my lucky girl

It rained heavily last night after a very hot day. I am curled up in my bed listening to the sounds of dripping water feeling the wet air coming through the window. Inside of me, deep in my belly and sometimes in my chest and even in my throat is this smooth cold dark heavy stone. I am trying to accommodate it as best I can while I am thinking of how lucky and happy her life has been so far, my daughter with the golden hair and the laughing eyes.

Remember, I say to her over skype, how you were twice within minutes, hours of death and how calmly we all knew you would pull through and how you had looked at me with your wide baby eyes full of concentration and trust? But of course, she cannot remember her birth or the time when she almost died of meningitis.

And remember the dangerous escapes we have had, from dodgy planes with bombs discovered onboard after a safe landing, or coming down the hairpin bends in paradise one heavy monsoon rain day when first the wipers gave in and next the breaks? And you in the back in a car with no seatbelts or doors? 

I know her life has been so happy, I know it because it shows: in her eyes, her smiles, her chuckles and her sharp remarks, the way she observes the world around her, makes friends and adapts to every new situation. Whatever unhappiness and even personal hell she has had, she knows that is all part of the deal. And I know that.

Remember the time right after we moved to the house?, I ask her. All that winter you were hiding inside your dad's big red winter anorak. I would watch you walking home from the bus stop, all skinny legs and lanky hair huddled up in this oversized bag of a coat with your hands hidden inside the sleeves, trodding along, eyes to the ground and your shoulders pushed down by your schoolbag. And all I could do was watch you and hug you and wait for you to leave this cocoon, which of course you did, eventually.

When I was around that same age I would sit in my father's car on my way to school in the mornings, dozing in the back and listening to the car radio. That was long before iPods or even tape decks and there was no debating the station my father had picked. So I would listen to big bands and what we called movie music, soppy stuff warbling on with violins and simpering choruses, but once in a while there'd be Roy Orbison or the Carpenters or even Leonard Cohen and every morning I waited with expectation and increasing certainty for those gems.

So this is a bit how I feel at the moment, waiting through the dreary bits, for the next gem to pop up.

I looked up the website of the hospital she will go to for the surgery and I find comfort in every thing I see. At least they did a great job with the web design.

And, as it is the case so often, I suddenly meet women who have had that exact diagnosis and surgery years ago, not a bother, fine since  and a couple of the medical staff have come forward with reassuring expert talk and latest statistics from renowned oncology studies.

Of course there is a voice inside my head hissing away: not fair, she is so young!
Yes, the drama of it, hence the stone in my belly.

Here we are, this is life, we take the next step. You are in my heart, my wonderful wonderful girl.

legless

bursitis in my right ankle joint
something like bursitis, dunno, heavy stiff and painful, in my left knee
I am floored like a beached whale

It's a bit like a punch in the stomach, this news from so far away and fuck you skype, you are no help. I want to hug and hold my child across the widest ocean and all that I can try to do is stay calm. And grateful that she is not in some jungle without doctors and that the great and wonderful B is with her.

Oh how I wish I could be harder, let stuff bounce off me and not let it come so close, so overwhelming and all consuming.
Some people can just stay calm no matter what.

off with the ghosts

Too gloomy, too many memories. The garden smells like a gigantic compost heap. Summer today is heavy grey skies, silent birds and the humidity makes the little hairs on my arms curl up.
Time to cheer up.

I was only trying to take the easy way out, to cross off another item from my list of unpleasant things that have to be done. And of course I thought I was  really smart, calling the intensive care ward on the day after surgery, talking to a nurse in a hurry or maybe a doctor. I am the other daughter, I am calling long distance, etc. and they would reply with some of the medical talk  reserved for next of kin and a bit of concern and regret that I live too far away to be with my mother who had to get a triple bypass, her poor heart.

But instead the nurse said, hold on, I'll  just put her on to you  and then there was her voice in my ear, her real voice, not the usual drug/booze slur - ten days in hospital and major surgery, what a way to get clean! - and before I could catch my breath there was my mother from long long long ago saying, hello my little one, what a lovely surprise.  And we talked and I realised that this was the first time in my adult life that she was totally sober.

About six hours later her lungs, paper thin from a life of chain smoking, collapsed and when my sister arrived the next morning, she was hooked up to all sorts of gadgets and gagged with tubes.

She never spoke again and my sister was mad at me for a very long time, maybe still is, that I was the one who spoke to her last, that it wasn't fair, I was the one who had run away, never visited, hardly called and basically had never shown any Responsibility for Family the way she did.

On my first visit she was stretched out, small like a child with beautifully smooth skin and large open eyes. When the nurse told me that they often put on a country music station "to keep her entertained" I thought I saw a flicker of despair in these eyes. Back home I recorded tapes with some of the music she liked but when she was moved to another hospital they got lost.

By the time I managed my second visit, she had shrunk further and there was nothing resembling my mother and yet everything was so recognisibly her more than ever, urgently and furiously. When the young doctor with the shiny earrings told me that they have to sedate her more and more and even strap her in at night because like a naughty child she tried to pull out the tubes, I just lost it: Who are you, I shouted in her face, how dare you let this woman suffer on and on. Have you no shame? Look at her, look what you are doing, this woman was a research scientist, you have a copy of her living will in her files. You know perfectly well that she never wanted medical technology to prolong her dying.  How can you act so disrespectful?  

I remember being very loud and that tears were streaming down my face. Later on R told me that they could hear me shouting out in the hall and that the nurses came along tut-tutting ready to sedate me, too.

A week later my mother developed pneumonia and some merciful doctor decided against antibiotic treatment. She was allowed to die that night.

Sunday afternoon in Paris - if only

hate is not the answer

Bano Rashid was 18 years old and had many plans and dreams. She wanted to become a lawyer and a member of the Norwegian parliament. For the upcoming local elections in September 2011 she was standing as a candidate of the social democratic party. On 22 July 2011 she met her role model Gro Harlem Brundtland on the island of Utoya and they had a lively discussion. A few hours later Bano was shot dead by an extreme right-wing killer. 

With her Kurdish parents, Bano had come to Norway as a refugee. 

At the specific request of her Moslem family the memorial service was held in a Christian church attended by an imam and a priest. Her mother said at the service: The answer is not more hatred but more love.

it's hard, I know

the world tickles my heart

Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. 
It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. 

You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world.  

You are willing to share your heart with others.

Chogyam Trungpa

After the hottest May on record and the stormiest June on record we are now seeing the end of the coldest and wettest July on record with the forecast of a heatwave starting Monday.

I cycled home through lashing rain, which seemed to hit me from all sides and a steady trickle was running down my back through a hairline crack in my raincoat, soaking its way through my shirt and down into my jeans. 

Now the sky is a glorious pink, the rain has stopped (obviously, now that I'm home) and I have burned my gums with the hot tea R has made me.

I have been thinking of my mother for days now, a jumble of memories and ghosts and shivers down my spine. It is 13 years now since I saw her last. Only that time she was so zonked out of it she did not recognise me at first. My sister stopped me from running out the door and eventually persuaded her to remember that she had two daughters. She tried to hold it together the next morning and brought us for lunch to the restaurant on the corner. She was very slim, wearing a purple woolen dress and silk stockings, did not touch any of her food, instead she smoked one fag after another and bit her nails. We hardly spoke. 

I know there are good memories somewhere. But not these ones. But I think I must make the effort. Maybe. Tomorrow.

oh you sweet girl, what a waste

I made a really elaborate cake for my birthday man this year, all chocolate, pity about the weather, all rain and cold winds. Last night I watched a stupid talk show where a Zen master did a short meditation demo with the round of guests including a nasty comedian, two Sikh taxi drivers, a food critic and an Italian actor famous for a series of silly ads for instant coffee. Weird. Just be here, no striving, no rushing, he said and then someone coughed.

after the first hour

The dusty path endlessly ahead of me, deep forest to one side, the lake sparkling down a deep slope to the other. The sun is hot and there is a high wind but I don't mind. From time to time I break through a dense cloud of minute flies, sneezing and keeping my mouth shut, blinking to clear the eyes. 

On and on I follow the rhythm of my legs pushing the pedals, the wheels crunching along the dry track. I am humming my breath tune, my cycling mantra.

Around another bend, the track goes on and on and look, here I come and I am moving along, I am flying. I am laughing. My tears run backwards into my ears. I punch my fist in the air and shout to R, this is the life, look at me!

away we go

Tomorrow morning after a lazy Sunday breakfast we shall pack the red bag and load the bicycles in the back of the car and we will pretend all is normal because the cat smells a rat as soon as I lift the shampoo bottle from the bathroom shelf and we will let down most of the blinds to make sure the house stays cool and the cat will start biting my heels at this stage while I tell her reassuringly that H will take good care of her as well as the tomatoes and aubergines in the greenhouse and then we will probably remember some last minute stuff and run back and forth for a bit and then we'll be off for a week because longer could spell disaster for R and his garden. Oh, yes, we will also pack the telescope because we are going to the hills and the lakes, the nature reserve, away from roads and city lights and we will cycle a bit and swim and at night we will look at the stars.

and now what?

Resting on my comfortable sofa looking through the window into this clear evening sky after a brief shower, birdsong, the this-is-summer aroma of the flowering buddleia mixes with the smell of rain evaporating from the hot patio stones, and while I am licking my spoon after I finished a bowl of organic yoghurt with - would you believe it-  rose blossoms, the voice on the TV tells me that 12 million people are threatened with imminent starvation in north east Africa.

tail wind

Well, first of all he paid up. Surprise. Surprise. And with most of the money I bought myself wings, my wonderful new set of wings. A pedelec is not a little scooter or whatever, it is a bicycle with a little electric motor that is activated while pedaling. It feels like cycling with tail wind. When I switch off the motor it is simply a snazzy trekking bicycle.  

And it's so, so liberating. I am back on two wheels and my mind races and I am thinking of all the trips we had planned: crossing the Alps, continuing on along the Danube from Vienna to the Black Sea or the one we were about to start when I got sick, from the Rhone glacier in Switzerland to the delta in France - or maybe only as far as Geneva.

But that's dreaming.

I am dreadfully nervous, afraid of overdoing it. And I am knackered at the end of a day with only 20 km done.

Patti Smith all sweet

so small so big

when you lie down on the hot patio stones at night and watch the stars you realise how small you really are, how obsessed with the minutae of your little existence and how easily you lose sight of the enormity of life and the incredible potential presented to you

At night waiting for sleep to come I have now started to allow myself to think back over the last 18 months and very carefully, almost gently I am beginning to take stock, compare, look at myself then and now. What comes to mind at times is definitely startling, almost feels like an achievement - last year at this time I was more or less flat out with mega doses of drugs suppressing my out of control immune system, so obviously there are dramatic changes I can observe now - and then this list of all the things that have now become a most unwelcome part of my life starts rolling in my mind and what a struggle it is to accommodate it all and I quickly switch off, or try to switch off before I get too upset. The amount of anger is still overwhelming at times. But at least I am starting to step back and take a look at that anger and I find myself saying, well as interesting as this may be dwelling on it gets me nowhere. And so I try to take another step out of this sluggish sticky mess of ill health and another and another and another and another...

Even going round in circles you can change, surely. Please?

breathing in again

Being able to breathe out
one's unhappiness

breathe out deeply
so that one can
breathe in again

And perhaps also being able to speak
one's unhappiness
in words
in real words
which are coherent
and make sense
and which one can
understand oneself
and which perhaps
someone else can understand
or could understand

And being able to try

That again would
almost be
happiness

 Erich Fried

barefoot

Mahatma Gandhi’s central belief was that the knowledge, skills and wisdom found in villages should be used for development before getting skills from outside. 

This is very inspiring.

the garden in June

lily ladies

Bergamot punks

blue beauty

calm valerian

drink

food

remember

When we think that something is going to bring us pleasure, we don’t know what’s really going to happen. When we think something is going to give us misery, we don’t know. Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. We try to do what we think is going to help. But we don’t know. We never know if we’re going to fall flat or sit up tall. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know. 

Pema Chödrön

Now finally nothing, only a blackbird's song coming in through the open door as if from far away.

The garden is cool now after the thunder storm. The sticky mist of the humid day has lifted. The clouds are turning pink and grey with the sun setting.

I wonder what time it is.

I can dance in my kitchen, too

never ending story

Attempted to get the house into shape. Three (!) weeks ago I got some storage boxes to clear away some of the trinkets, too many, on the various shelves and window sills. Sturdy boxes, they look good, still empty. I think the bookshelves will remain stacked and stuffed all higgeldy piggeldy until S comes back to this continent and I can bribe her to sort them out. 

My guts are in a mess, welcome back colitis, after a night out with pizza funghi and three coffees and I pretended I was in labour until 4 am reading William Boyd's Any Human Heart  (good good good) and so the night was not all wasted. Probably also too many apricots but this is one sacrifice too many.

Still, as I walk into my office every day I tell myself, stay positive, welcome all offers, be here.

When I get home R is usually somewhere deep between the vegetables picking sugar peas and raspberries. At night, the lilies smell heavenly.

This morning I happened to see a snippet of a clip of this most awful concert with a totally doped/drunk - whatever - Amy Winehouse. And suddenly this big heavy wave of fear, panic, loss washed over me and I got up and rushed outside and walked up and down in the rainy garden for a bit until it got better. But the thought remained: Is there nobody who loves and cares for this woman to not let shit like this happen?

Amy Winehouse means nothing to me. So what was going on? I have been chewing on this all day. Weird.

and the lesson is

Sit in the sun, head down, within a prickly vine, in flickery light or open light, and the world will come to you. The sky will come in its time, bringing rain, and the earth will rise through you, from beneath, and make you rich and make you full.

Ray  Bradbury

the past will never leave us

I don't know how many times I have checked what age my parents were at the end of the war in 1945, how many times I needed to reassure myself that they were both still kids (not teenagers, because being a teenager for me implies listening to the Stones, messing around with hair and make-up and not getting out of bed before lunch. And that's definitely not what they were doing).

In my family, immediate and extended, the stories were few and far between. There were decades of deafening silence. At the time - in school, at home, at family gatherings - there were only sighs and code and the feeling that something big and momentous was kept well hidden. Instead, we had this fixation on careers and prosperity.  After all, the economic miracle had to be performed, the country had to be put back on the map by all these well dressed people driving in shiny cars from their semi-detached homes with the good china on Sundays to the holiday beaches across the Alps, while any mention of the endless pain and suffering caused by Nazi Germany was neatly supressed. 

I wonder how many children my age knew subconsciously that their parents' souls were kept under wraps. I know now that I did.

Of course, I have found out much. The ‘never again/ let’s face history` wave was hitting schools and media at the time I became the bookworm daughter and so, starting with the big picture  - the stuff of documentaries, books and political/historical debate and discourse - I carefully scratched away layer after layer with seemingly innocent questions and comparisons trying to place public figures, politicians, actors, artists, elderly teachers and neighbours, distant relatives, closer relatives, my grandparents... until I had to look at my parents and I found two people with their individual share of trauma and loss and confusion, disorientation and displacement. I know it sounds preposterous and I would gladly just unload my disgust and my anger and my condemnation - and I have done so when I was younger, only to be met with more sighs and more code and withdrawal. There is still so much that I will never know and so much I will always doubt. I picture my mother as she plays with us before bedtime with the songs and nursery rhymes and stories from her childhood and I remember how this memory disgusted me so much later on when I was a teenager thinking how all this was soiled and ghastly.

Last Sunday morning I sat in a beautiful café with my father, part of a gorgeous park full of modern sculptures we had just walked through taking pictures and comparing impressions. According to his guide book, the park once belonged to an equally gorgeous villa - now an artists' retreat  - built in 1946 by a local industrial magnate as a summer residence outside the city. Which immediately makes me suspicious, obviously.

And so there we sat under the trees eating strawberries and cream and I said, come on: 1946 and such a mansion, what did he make his fortune with and how did he manage to hold onto what certainly must have been a large chunk of it through the war and denazification.

And my father gave me this look, this long look and he said: You know, this will always stay with us here in this country, this past will never leave us and believe me, I have carried this shame with me all my life, this shame and this enormous feeling of guilt that I trusted and looked up to people - my teachers in school, my parents, my brothers and cousins - who really must have known what was going on and who did nothing. I trusted them and accepted their judgement. I was healthy and young, I could read and ask. How could I have been so ignorant, so stupid and so inactive!

let's get a move on

moaning is over, this song made me roll down all the windows of my car
he could be Billy Bragg's little brother, sort of, I mean, listen:

And I still believe (I still believe) in the sound,
That has the power to raise a temple and tear it down.

And I still believe (I still believe) in the need,
For guitars and drums and desperate poetry.

And I still believe (I still believe) that everyone,
Can find a song for every time they've lost and everytime they've won.

So just remember folks we not just saving lives, we're saving souls,
And we're having fun.

rain in paradise

Got wet from all sides that day with Jack and M and played scrabble in the lodge.

bruised

Since the big clean up after the storm mood and energy are down. Muscles ache and soul is sore. Rain outside. The storm washed away all of the rambling roses.

Pema Chodron says

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. I once asked the Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi how he related with fear, and he said, “I agree. I agree.” But the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away.

summer night

paradise lunch hour

three spicy samosa and orange fizz

the storm

40+ l/sqm rain in ten minutes with the wind coming sideways from the north east after a day of 33 degrees C, all afternoon distant thunder and humidity in the 90s. I get ready to watch the spectacle with a cup of tea while the garden is flooding and the Douglas fir sways dramatically.

After a heavy thud R comes running downstairs shouting and the rowan tree is down bringing the cypress with it partially blocking the road and barely missing the car. But before we can sort that out we are down in the basement where the laundry is flooded with water pushing its way up through the drain and the boiler room filling up with rain washing in through the air vent. Just as we get the buckets ready my fathers calls from upstairs. But it's only the cable and no more French open finals on TV. Well tough, he can switch his hearing aid off and watch the empty screen for all I care.

The next couple of hours we are clearing water from the basement, cutting down a gorgeous rowan tree with the help of our neighbours and clear a container load of fir branches from the road. People come along to help, more tales of trees and street lights down blocking the roads, damaged cars and almost all of the basements are flooded it seems. A smart ass who has watched for a good while and comes over to give advice as he believes we are doing it all wrong gets the finger.

All night we can hear the chain saws and the fire brigades. More to come to day, it's hot and damp and the first dark clouds are moving in. 

Too exhausted to sleep all night. My father had enough and drove off in his smooth silver car listening to Mahler. I want to think he was frustrated he could not help.

Needless to say that this has never before happened here in our calm and sheltered suburb.

humming along with Radiohead

Humming along with Radiohead I am cleaning the bathroom. While I am pinching my faded Indian wraparound skirt between my legs and squat down to clean the toilet I am thinking how my mother would disapprove of all of this: the music, the cheap cotton clothes, the actual fact that I am cleaning a dirty bathroom. After all the money she invested in me, her bookworm daughter. It was an easy fit, this label, with my older sister being the sporty tomboy, mad about horses and cowboy games and my brother simply being the son. When people ask me where I am from, I am always tempted to say, arrogant academia. My mother’s country. It’s a place where you ask, what instruments do you play and what was your first foreign language at school. It’s a place where sport means tennis or horse riding and where you never ever wear two different patterns and blazers are always dark and jewellery and make-up must be discreet. It’s a place where your ignorant visitors are tolerated with a tight little smile always followed by the standard question, and what did you say your parents do?  It’s a place where the cheap paperbacks are hidden behind the complete works of Goethe and the science books and where music means classical symphonies. Here drink comes in the correct glasses, white wine in small oblong ones, brandy in solid tumblers and vodka straight out of the bottle behind the dining room door. 

I flush down the detergent and move on to close the shutters in the upstairs rooms to keep the heat out. I turn around and there she sits in the armchair, her legs elegantly folded over, cigarette in her hand, the tight little smile again with just that hint of condescension reserved for me and me alone.

Whoosh! I say and clap my hands and she disappears.

It apparently has been shown in brain research that when you keep a positive stance, i.e. straighten your spine and hold your head up etc., your brain over time translates this into a general positive attitude which is in fact reflected by an increase in certain hormone levels. I just heard this on the radio in the car, waiting for a green light, on a very hot day, eating strawberries, unwashed strawberries straight out of the punnet spilling on the passenger seat. Must be true.

I remember one miserable day last year in March after my month in the RW clinic when I sat in my GP's surgery and wanted to fold myself into a small crying bundle and it was so hard to speak up that he had difficulty hearing me. Where was Charlie Brown when I needed him?! 

(I have eaten so many fresh strawberries in the last 48 hours I think I am all gooey sticky sweet red inside.)

too early, much too early

C

A friend from long ago visited me last night while I was watching the box. I saw him in the faces of the men on the screen, heard him in their voices, recognised his shy smile in the way one of them turned his head  just a small bit to one side, looking down as if to avoid looking fully into the camera while he spoke of being sexually abused by his teacher. One of at least 18 teachers at this progressive secular co-ed boarding school. He was there, at the time when it happened, these were his schoolmates, I know that. I can imagine him, a shy, beautiful waif-like little boy. I don't want to imagine anything further. But he stayed with me all through the night.

We were close for a while, sharing music (JJ Cale) and poetry (Erich Fried) and films (Visconti's adaptation of Camus' The Stranger), spending more time in the Hohe Strasse cafes and pubs than at the university. Everything was so important, intense. Heidelberg, so beautiful and so many angry young students.

He lives somewhere south now, a sculptor, with a family, a quiet life - I hope.

there should be more songs starting with happiness

You wouldn't think I could forget that I am ill? I can. And when it happens it is so sweet, so gentle and soft.
And, no, it is not just getting used to being ill. But maybe it's to do with me not dwelling on it so much.

Wait a minute.
What was that??
Only joking. I know how to dwell, seriously dwell on it. Self pity is my middle name.

reading Joyce Carol Oates

When there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

I ran from both as soon as I could.