We are getting ready for a visit to the green isle. It's long overdue and there are several very elderly sweethearts waiting for us to bring them on a nice long drive with a pub lunch in Roundwood and a nice cup of tea in Avoca, thank you very much.

Which we will do.

Then we shall attempt to meet some of the 500 cousins but we are making no promises. And of course there are the mountains and yes, I notice the look R gets in his eyes whenever Wicklow is mentioned. So we will pack one pair of walking boots. His pair that is, because packing mine would be so futile and only add extra weight to the baggage allowance. And it still hits me somewhere in the lower stomach, this reality that all that is gone, my energy, my stamina, my health, for crying out loud. But we decided that R simply needs to go on a good long hike with a bit of rain and a packed lunch and slippery mud and all the fantastic scenery. And that I will spend the day visiting pottery shops and then sit and sip tea in one of the grand old houses converted to attract loads of tourists, complete with parks, waterfalls and garden centers.

For the last three years I have tried, really tried to accept that this illness has presented me with limitations that cannot be changed, and I think I have done a fairly good job with this challenge and all the yuk limitations and I swear that I constantly revalue what is left of my health. Concentrating not on my illhealth and symptoms, my vulnerability, but instead on my personal strengths and bla bla bla.

But on some days... Never mind.

Hard to believe, he would have been 70 yesterday.

It's officially the greyest winter here since WWII. Seriously. This morning I got up and took a look outside to watch R's red anorak vanish in the mist and then I said my three words to the cat and crawled back into bed.  For just a little bit longer.

Some day soon, maybe, we will open the windows again, any time we want, and listen to the birds and kids and cats outside. At least that's the idea. Spring etc.

Whereas winter has me inside this dark cave. I fuss about with blankets and shawls and steaming tea and obsess about the cleanliness of the floor tiles in the kitchen. If this continues I will become a recluse. Of sorts. The daily struggle to get out of this house is just that, a struggle. Not only because of all the wrapping up. 

I know near to nothing about social evolution but I think humans are meant to live in small groups not herds of a million or more. Come to think of it we are probably also meant to communicate on a one-to-one basis. Or something like that. I remember reading somewhere that young babies are able to communicate simultaneously with a maximum of three people. At the moment I am down to a maximum of two, provided there are few background noises and I am not tired.

There is this man I know. Not very well, really. He is the second husband of my friend U. He is a good bit older. He's into cars. I have been told by more than one reliable source that he can take a car, any make, apart, down to the tiny bits and reassemble it - no bother. He was a ralley driver, crossed the Sahara desert, a man of adventures, always with cars. He drives a tow truck now in his spare time. All over the country. Making friends and fixing cars.

He has been strange lately, U told me. Listless, moody, boring in fact. And U loves to have fun, the two of them were always out and about. They have been arguing, it turns out. Many times. And things got worse, but in a weird way. Instead of storming out and getting into a car or maybe at least some angry shouting he has withdrawn to the sofa and the docusoaps on daytime TV. 

In the end, U somehow got him to see a doctor, and another one and another one. And today she called me to say that they have been told that he has Alzheimer's. And that he is back on that sofa now and refuses to eat or drink. We were quiet for some time listening to the static noises of our cell phones. She said she has never been so angry in her life. Angry and frightened.

I know the statistics, in the 65 - 70 yrs group one in 20, from age 80 onwards every third person. 

When I cycled home tonight just after sunset I decided to ignore the sound of the thin layer of ice crackling under my tyres. I just needed to get home real fast, needed to open the door and walk into the kitchen where R was singing along with the radio, chopping carrots, his glass of red wine on the counter.

We were debating last night whether it was not a bit too early for the lilies and the fig tree to go outside. Well, to be honest, we didn't debate, I just politely expressed my opinion without unduly raising my voice (too much) that they should stay in the laundry for a bit longer, that I smug as I am know more about winter in this part of the world than R will ever do. Even after all these years. Spring in Ireland may start on Feb 1st but we are not in Co. Dublin, aren't we.

So we wake up to -4°C and now what? I suppose this is what gives the edge to a gardener's year. And I am not the gardener in this set up. Who is getting obviously restless. 

Yesterday morning I woke up with the dreadful image of R collapsing on the road and so I got dressed and cycled at slow speed behind and in front of him while he did his training for the half marathon. I could see the steam coming off him while I tried to huff and blow some warmth into my frozen fingers. But I am not convinced. Or rather: I have no idea what makes completing a half marathon in a sweaty crowd attractive. But I probably have to cycle along now with him until this is over and done with.

three days in Frankonia

doom and hope

I am having one these once (!) in a while days where it seems to be the right thing to just let it happen and not do anything at all. That is, I eventually made it out of bed but only because it got too uncomfortable what with all the bedding tangled up and the cat crawling all over. No, today the message is: rest. How this used to scare the shit out of me when I first got ill. The heavy shoulders and aching chest thing and this dire need to lay down my head. Now I am just glad I don't have to do a thing today. 

And for most of next week which is a holiday week. 

Just that on Tuesday we will spend 4+ hrs driving on the motorway to get to my father's dinner thingy on Wednesday and driving another 4+ hrs on the motorway back home on Thursday. Considering the weather forecast, this could turn out to be a bit of an adventure. Snow and stuff.

The stomach is cranky. I am still at the porridge-without-milk stage with an occasional piece of toast here and there but walking into the kitchen is an otherwise pointless exercise. Coffee is a distant memory and just typing the words peppermint/chamomile tea makes me want to weep with loss.

Right now R is down there clashing with pots and pans, frying up something Spanish - so he claims - for himself.

I hope they serve porridge and toast at the fancy restaurant my father has booked.

In the papers I have been reading the most awful stories, we are doomed. As for the books, I have given the my-grandfather-the-nazi search a break and what do I find? Doom and hope. Yes, doom and hope.

First, the doom (which is all self indulgent and pompous, but then what do you expect from a thriller):

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative. We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen first hand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the internet.

Whereas, the hope, well, what else is there?

Wade Davis and his team are travelling back by Jeep from an outpost in the Sahara desert, having experienced a freak thunderstorm pounding their camp some nights before. They meet a caravan of six men and 12 camels transporting salt. If salt gets wet, it crumbles and loses all value. So the men had been forced to stop in the desert to dry out the slabs of salt before continuing their journey. They had lost three critical days and were down to their last quart of water, 150 km from the nearest well with a cargo and animals that represented the entire wealth of their families. They knew of a depression some 25 km away that if excavated might yield water and they sent one of their young mates with one camel. And Davis continues:

While we waited for their friend to return, the leader of the party kindled a twig fire and with their last reserve of water offered us tea. It is said in the Sahara that if a stranger turns up at your tent, you will slaughter the last goat that provides the only milk for your children to feast your guests. One never knows when you will be that stranger turning up in the night, cold and hungry, thirsty and in need of shelter. As I watched him pour me a cup of tea, I thought to myself, these are the moments that allow us all to hope.

We woke up this morning to more snow. But it's just a dusting, a feeble attempt. This is not winter any longer, I try and convince myself. Looking out onto this monochrome world searching for a spark of colour I close my eyes and I see S as a toddler, her mop of blond hair blowing in the breeze. She waves to me with both hands raised up high, her cheeks red with giggles. Her red wellie boots shine as she splashes around the water's edge. Later on we cycle back home, she is sitting in the fancy bike seat behind R and her arms are gripping his chunky blue sweater. I am a bit behind them watching and I remember my heart jumping: Oh, here is the rest of my life. These are my people.

a bunch of bullies and devils dressed up in nun's habits

water water everywhere

 

Who'd have thought that there is such a thing as an inflamed duodenum. But apparently this is what has been waking me up in the early hours with a couple of nifty pokes between my right ribs for the last week or two.
So there. More meds. Well, I'll try everything once, I used to say, stressing the little word once.

I wonder what I got myself into now. And why. The stack of books on nazi crimes and history and memoirs of children and grandchildren of nazis is growing, almost daily I receive notifications from various university libraries to my numerous requests and then there are the websites I haven't even started to check out. I know somewhere there will be traces of my grandfather, maybe just specks, little nothings. Maybe more. Probably more. I just found out that he was on the run for months, hiding from the allied forces.

Last night I read for what I thought was maybe an hour in this book by the granddaughter of one of the henchmen. She is about my age and she did the dirty work of digging up the facts after watching her mother die the slow death of alcohol, valium and depression. Her intelligent mother, the daughter of one of the henchmen. And with a lot of effort I kept on reassuring myself that this was not my mother, nothing like my mother and that I must not confuse these two women in my mind. That the similarities (age, education, family circumstances) are far too simplistic, too "easy". And yet. By the time I put the book down, forced myself to put the book down and try to get some sleep it was 3 am.

I wonder if I should stop this right now. I wonder if I still can.

tropical heat, breadfruit trees, clear skies, birds, my girl exploring, fearless, curious as always

while guilt is not hereditary, guilt feelings are

Coming home on Friday evening on the little stretch just before I turn into our driveway the car took a heavy swing on the ice and I barely made it in one piece. I furiously hacked away the icy rim of the kerb. I hate winter. I hate winter. And so on.

Back inside the lonely house - R away at a conference - I opened the mail, the ususal promises, wine tasting vouchers, ever faster broadband, estate agents asking whether we want to sell, and this fat envelope from the national archives in Berlin. 

And so I fold open two photocopies, I still have my coat on and my gloves and the keys on my lap.

One copy tells me that my grandfather joined the nazi party on Jan 10, 1931. The other lists all his various addresses and party duties/ranks between that day and July 1939.

The accompanying letter explains that these are only preliminary findings and that according to my query and the information I supplied, further searches have been initiated and any results will be posted asap.

I mean, what's the big deal. I guessed all along that the story of him having to join under duress - as rarely as it was mentioned - was simply family folklore. But still. And I have nothing else, yet. And this may be it. Nothing too sinister, eh? Except for the fact that this intelligent, well educated man, a father and husband, at age 35, decided that he wanted to be part of the mob that was growing and festering around him, pushing for power at all cost, with promises too blatantly empty for a scientist to accept. In 1931, he was well into his university career, his research projects were promising, he had published his first important papers. And he decided out of his own free will to join this pack. 

I don't want to imagine his motivation. I don't want to even consider it. And yet, my thoughts are jumping and all sorts of explanations pop up, the far fetched ones, the obvious ones.

And that night, with impeccable timing, I end up watching a documentary after flicking my way through the talk shows and romcoms for distraction. A documentary about the children and grandchildren of one of the henchmen. As it happens, there are many connections, places, times, names, that I can link to my grandfather, to stories I have been told by my mother about her glamorous and happy childhood.

And as I sit in front of the flickering screen, with the little cat on my lap, a cup of cold tea in my hand, I can hear the clicking in my mind, the adjusting and rearranging, I hear distant voices and laughter, only it sounds like the cackling of mean birds and I run to the bathroom and throw up my dinner.

I love the internet

The sheer

dull

scintillating

infantile

anarchy

of

it

all.

Boisterous Brughel medieval market.

Futuristic Middle Ages

Directed
by

Friar Tuck.

And offset, whispers
of
Robin
lurking
in
wood.

I love the internet.
Cos it's ours.

 http://barringtonkevin.blogspot.com/

more snow

no sun for ages, feel like a withered leaf

You are only ever as happy as your least-happy child. You want your children to live a life with as little struggle as possible, and you never want bad things to happen. But, of course, that's just not realistic.

Kevin Bacon

it snowed

 

I was travelling by train in the amazing valley with all the castles yesterday morning. The appointment with my lovely immunologist was, well, lovely, but she will not let me lower the meds. I still like her, though.

I met the whole world out there, yesterday. Ten hours, four trains, three train stations, three taxi rides, one bus trip. Three lousy cups of coffee, one black hair in a cheese sandwich, one sticky cinnamon bun. 

And an amazing array of ringtones.

The first taxi driver had a picture of his large family on the dashboard and when I asked about it - as in having a conversation while we were inching forward through the traffic jam - he told me that this was his family in Syria and that there has been no contact for the last four weeks and then he cried. And I could not hold his hand or anything because of the traffic and so we sat in silence for a while and when he dropped me he said, thank you. And then I started to cry.

On the first train, two excited young women asked me where to sit for the best view of the amazing valley, like, with all the castles. So we got all fixed up by the window and they sorted out their backpacks and their cameras and ipods and water bottles and peeled off their ski coats and fleeze hoodies and scarves and piled it all nicely into a heap to lean into. And then they both fell asleep for the entire journey through the amazing valley with all the castles. 

The second taxi driver was from Kurdistan and he was very happy, because in Kurdistan there are blizzards and mountains of snow and no taxis to drive and make money. He was also very happy because I said my three words in Kurdish but he would not translate them for me - nobody does. And I have no idea what it means but whenever I say them, people laugh happily.

The third taxi driver was from Afghanistan and after a short moment we both remembered that we had met before at my previous appointment at the clinic. He filled me in on his son's career (2nd year at law school) and his parents back in Kabul (safe and sound) and he gave me his card and I had to promise to book him as my personal driver the next time I come to this city.

On the fourth train I counted seven different nuns, i.e. in different outfits and totally unrelated, or probably only related due to the fact that they are nuns. I am getting lost here. Obviously, I haven't a clue about nuns. They all read books and smiled inwardly from time to time. One book was called Journey to Freedom.

Opposite me, I young man was reading The Story of Mathematics, which must have been a bit boring because he switched to Courage for Power after a while. 

And I looked out at the amazing valley with all the castles, all pretty and romantic, vineyards and churches and ferries. The castles that were once fortresses, strongholds of warlords, the river that was stained red with blood, dead bodies floating in it. The vineyards and forests that were filled with armies and rebels and tanks and bombs. Battlefields, bombed bridges with people fleeing across. Not so long ago.

Sharp frost and clear sky. Woke up with quite a handful of my usual complaints and it was really hard work sitting through two hours of Jarvis Cocker's Sunday Service - at the same time cutting up some of R's check shirts for my neverending patchwork project. Now the world and its noises are fuzzy and roaring and my head feels delicate and sore. But what the heck. Tomorrow is my next appointment with Dr B, the loveliest immunologist I know. I will take the train up along the flooded river.

To put it still more plainly, the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.

Alan Watts

After I had woken up in a fuzz of loneliness in my tangled bed sheets, with the grey light of another damp day coming in through the windows, after I let out one my deep dramatic sighs, R shouted from downstairs: Don't be so hard on yourself, love.

Happy Birthday David Bowie!

Imagine a 14 year old slightly akward girl, she has been told that she has a brain but she wants to be wild, she looks out for the odd ones, the school anarchists. She times her walk from school to the tram station so that she can follow this guy wearing an old army anorak with autographs from rock stars. When she eventually finds the courage and asks him to have a closer look, he proudly tells her about hitch hiking to the Isle of White Festival and Jimi Hendrix and The Doors and together they gently stroke the inky signatures of Joni Mitchell and Ritchie Havens.

Later that summer she moves to a small town on the east coast of England. A depressing place, high unemployment, strikes, school uniforms, Danny Osborn and The Partridge Family, fried eggs and toast. But in between the grey and damp, there is glitter and blue nail varnish and platform shoes and suddenly the world explodes and her head bursts open and the days and nights are full of dancing.

memory

 

I was in paradise after we stepped off that ferry (the one with the three masts) and four long hours of sea sickness

To doubt whether life's worth pursuing
Is doubtless a doubt one should quell
If nothing is really worth doing
It's surely worth doing it well

Jens Arup

The thought that there will be spring and light in the evenings soon is just wonderful. Wonderful.

internal dialogue

Intestine to brain: Hello? Stay off that pumpkin seed bread! Remember last night, between 4 and 6, no? Come on, you were cursing every seed you ate.

Brain to no one in particular: What's that? Is this yet another tinitus? Never mind, how about a slice of this gorgeous pumpkin seed bread.

Intestine to brain: Hold it, hold it, be a good girl, will you. No need to have another sleepless night.

Brain to no one in particular: That was a weird dream last night, sort of colicky, was it? About that bread, butter maybe? Or a slice of Manchego, a couple of olives?

Intestine to brain: For goodness sake, no butter or cheese! There will be cramps runs and you know that. But I seem to be talking to a wall here.

Brain to intestine: Is that you? What's up? I am thinking avocado instead of butter. Good, eh?

Intestine to brain: It's the bread, the bread with all those massive seeds, you fool!!!

Brain to intestine: Look, I am sprinkling cumin on the avocado. Cumin is good, isn't it? And no cheese. And only this one slice, I promise, or maybe just one more...

Intestine to brain: I give up. But don't blame me.

happy new year

Here, it's all a smoky mess with people shooting up fireworks from their front steps across the sky. (R complains every time about the waste of money and the noise. The cat goes into hiding.)

In paradise, people pop hundreds of balloons, which can be very noisy, too.

In Ireland, the bells ring while people get seriously drunk.

 

three wishes for the new year

1. Be Calm. calmer.
2. Stay open to whatever happens.
3. No more Less gum inflammations.

 

It was a strange visit with a mean aggressive sparkle. At times I felt like I was 15 again fighting for my 20 seconds of attention and not getting anywhere. Listening to my father's lectures on corrupt politicians and people without decent education and poor understanding of science and all the other evils responsible for the state of affairs we are in and none of it is our fault because we have a university degree. 

I want to bury my head and cry or laugh and try not to treat my 84 year old father like a precocious child. 

And then I must pinch myself as if waking from a bad dream and stop being so condescending. 

Totally unrelated:

stardust

The house is clean, the cake is cooling, the cat is asleep. My father is somewhere on the motorway heading this way. I am terrified that he will fall down the stairs one of these mornings, on his early shuffle around the house before day break. My sister's angry voice told me on the phone that he is well able to lift his feet but simply too obstinate to do it. The bad boy.

This could be the year he will have to stop driving his shiny car. I hope not. None of us has a plan B for this.

We have been watching the river flooding the park and the promenades. Xmas day was the mildest on record ever, in between the heavy downpours it felt like Easter Sunday. Not right, not good, but what is?

The air is getting thinner and I don’t feel secure. The powerful and mighty have met and postponed once again anything remotely concerning climate change. The arrogance is simply overpowering. Throughout my adult life I have gone a fairly long way through various stages and methods of personal protest ranging from the emphatic and angry activities of my student years to slow, pragmatic and cowardly withdrawal having faced again and again such raw power and injustice way beyond my means and energy. We confuse money for wealth and are becoming poor (in many of the components of true wealth incl. environmental health). I believe we can no longer achieve anything in protesting, rallying, organising resistance to the big power elites, they have become too self satisfied, too entrenched. The horrible truth is that people at the top are not better off than you and me in the long run but it’s the planet and the ones down at bottom level that are sacrificed. I used to think only fairly recently that the only viable activity in this scary scenario was to work locally, think globally, i.e. lobbying for those who have become lost, who are forgotten - but I think this is just a distraction.

And yet.

Last night we looked up to the almost full Moon with Jupiter close beside it and when I gave it a little wave saying that I hope whoever is out there is making less of a mess than we humans, R hugged me and whispered, we are stardust.

For nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent.

W.B.Yeats

The swans and the waterfall at Glencar Lough, a place were Yeats spent a lot of his time, faded pictures from a visit in early 1982.

Remembering the birth of my child, the beginning of my life as a mother, of our life as parents, makes me weep with joy every time. Home birth was a given, I cannot remember us even discussing a hospital delivery. I was so extremely lucky, with supportive friends, understanding family, generous experts and the fact that we lived in the right place at the right time. 

First, there was Mrs Ritchie, a retired nurse/midwife who phoned one day and offered free-of charge ante natal classes to both of us. There was a vague connection, a friend of a friend who knew her as a midwife in Nigeria during the Biafra war. There we sat on the carpet in her sitting room and practised breathing and afterwards she poured the tea and offered home made cake.

Then the midwife, pragmatic Helen who had delivered babies out in the sticks of West Cork for 40+ years, she charged 50 pounds for her services, which included three ante-natal visits (the scheduled six were cut short because of the premature delivery) and four weeks of daily post-natal care incl. a pint of milk from her Jersey cows every day. 

And then the doctor, this calm man who had delivered babies all over the place, he charged us nothing, not a penny, for the entire ante-natal care and all the back and forth during labour, incl. staying with us for the final 15 hrs of labour throughout the night. In the end R planted a walnut tree in his garden.

Wild dogs run trackless courses

We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not knowing is part of the adventure, and it’s also what makes us afraid. 

Pema Chödrön

don't just do something - sit there

There was a time, way back in my distant past (we are talking about a mere three years eons), when I set about my daily tasks with admirable energy and most of all efficient briskness. Stuff like getting up before daylight, sorting out various household chores incl. breakfast and laundry before cycling off to work where I would of course solve an immense amount of complicated and urgent riddles in support of medical research - easy. With a smile, never losing my cool, gosh, I was wonderful. The bedrock of research teams, and at home Martha Stewart with a toothbrush cleaning between the bathroom tiles.

These days I simply Potter About and completing the whole getting up/shower/breakfast scenario in under one hour borders on the miraculous. I seem to spend an enormous amount of time just sitting there, doing nothing, eventually thinking out my next step, while already composing reasons for not doing it in my mind.

Generous souls may call this mindfulness, good grief - even meditation!

But I call it sloth.

He who wants the world to remain as it is, doesn't want it to remain at all.

Erich Fried

East Side Gallery, Berlin 

remember summer

 

We loved her as much as we could and it was really hard work. Especially when she got so sad because she could not take a shower in the mornings because there was some of our hair in it, or because we had forgotten to practise the piano, or hung up the laundry the wrong way, or got sick in the car, fell off the horse after she had arranged lessons with the best teachers, or spilled cocoa on the beautiful new  matching blue gabardine coats she had made for us, missed a layer of dust under the record player, forgot to wipe down the kitchen surfaces after doing the dishes, left our pjs on the bedroom floor. Loving her was like walking on a minefield, you never knew when the next explosion would erupt which would throw you way off and out of her radius of motherly love. There were so many tears, hers and ours. So many hours spent locked into our rooms with the broken plant pot or the torn pair of dungarees, the muddy new sandals, waiting. For the door to open, for the hugs and the promises to be good, to try harder, to never ever make her so sad again. Never again.

My big sister always carried a piece of cardboard in her pocket with the phone number of our GP. She only called there once, on the day we had watched our mother crying and banging her head against the wall for too long. There was heavy snow outside and the doctor said he could not make it but would call the police instead. And my six-year old sister said, no thank you we will wait for our dad.

On rainy Sundays we often played board games, family tournaments, with score sheets and medals and a hollow ache in the stomach, the same nauseating taste as when we had to sit at the table until we had eaten up all that was on the plate. My little brother always developed cunning schemes to ensure that she would win. He loved her so very much. She would put down her cigarette and hug him, my prince, my one and only.

 

Standing by the window after midnight, waiting. 

For my mind to calm down. 

Just listen: how still it all is, moonlit night, not a breeze, glittering layer of frost.

I no longer dwell much on the why me. 

So obviously futile. 

Asking why me is like asking why not me. 

So there.

But a lot of time and energy has been wasted on why and how. 

There are times when I'd love a culprit, something to blame, wrong diet, bad habits, drugs, drink, fags, that sort of stuff, having lived too fast and too wild etc. 

But, no. 

Even if I did, it makes no difference. 

Congenital, genetic, hereditary: empty phrases, even once you figure out what they mean and how to differentiate between them. 

Disposition? Nope.

A spell? Voodoo curse? Witchcraft? For goodness sake.

It just is. 

For no reason whatsoever.