...in a most delightful way

It's not fear, rather a heightened awareness just below the surface. Dormant for much of the day but easily triggered. Typically the sight of two people, awkwardly and distantly disposed, voices slightly raised, trying to chat normally yet ending up self-conscious. Ah yes, you say, I know why.

Skyping with our daughters the meteor shower is mentioned. We go out into the back garden (US: yard) and imagine occasional flashes in the darkening sky. Decide to come out fifteen minutes later when it will be truly nighttime. The flashes - if they are occurring - remain inconclusive. But we're out there in our PJs, dressing gowns and slippers. Would we have done this if it hadn't been for... well, you know, the surrounding perturbations?

People are dying, the Ten O'Clock News says so, and I'm reminded of funerals. How they became a subject of detestation when we lived in the US. Cost, of course, but also an apparent conspiracy to ensure the cost remained high. Coffins (US: caskets) at unbelievable sums. A regulation to surround the interred box in a sort of concrete coffer dam. Arch solemnity.

A life insurance company offered us free will-creation and we mutually agreed to "the cheapest possible" funeral. But how about dropping off the unneeded rubbish at some medical school? Might we be too old for the anatomy students?

Death can be expressed mathematically and that’s amusing. Advanced age? Check. Underlying condition? Does bronchiectasis count? Will I make 2021? Hey! We’ve cancelled the villa rental in July, transferred the deposit to next year. I don’t fancy snuffing it without speaking French again.

Suddenly it’s personal. But a Wild Bill's IPA (sold out at Aldi, alas) will suppress unwanted awareness.

A day out in the park

Hereford's Borderline Film Festival is in full swing. You retain your ticket and, after the movie, you drop it into one of five boxes ranging from Excellent to Poor. The guy next to me says laughingly, "I'm toying with voting Poor."

I said, "You wouldn't get out of  here alive."

We both dropped our tickets into Excellent. Next time I visited the movie had scored 98%. Phenomenal!

The movie is called Free Solo and it's a documentary about rock climbing. That's under-selling it. Better to say the ultimate rock-climbing movie.

In it a guy called Alex Honnold, arguably the best rock-climber in the world, ascends a desperately hard 3000 ft route on El Capitan, a magnificent cliff in Yosemite National Park. Along the way are four sections (especially Boulder Problem) that are very very hard even by El Cap's demanding standards. But they've all been climbed before so what's new?

Honnold does the route on his own, without another climber or the aid of a rope. Were he to fall it would be to his death.

The camera crew, all expert climbers, discuss what he's about to do in sombre tones. Honnold practices the four hard bits on a top rope and falls off Boulder Problem twice, saved by the rope. Then he goes ahead.

He does it. You know he's going to succeed because the camera crew say they would junk the film if he were to be killed. Yet the tension as you watch is unbearable. The cinema is dead quiet.

Excellent.

Loss 2

Rock-climbing is prone to cliché so let's be original.

Rock-climbing explores texture as does kissing another's lips. Both stimulate, are life-affirming, pleasurable and voluntary human expressions. One looks for reassurance, the other might. Dispute this and I'd say you lack imagination.

OK, I'm done with the analogy and into facts. Rock-climbers continuously search for the reassurance provided by good holds. Holds vary in goodness. The best (and rarest) are securely attached flakes of rock which allow 300 deg. of grip, almost like rock rails. The next best are small horizontal steps which incorporate a right-angle, thus 90 deg. of grip. There are other shapes which offer less and less grip, best suited to simian experts.

For me the essence of rock-climbing resides in shallow scoops on rock devoid of cracks, ridges and other grabbable features. Their use demands faith. A scoop, as handhold, offers no mechanical engagement for the fingers only friction; when such a handhold becomes a foothold the uncertainty increases since boots reduce the climber's sensitivity. Friction works but only up to a point; a severely inclined scoop offers little friction. Yet others will have successfully climbed this route and made this judgment. Certainty melts into faith.

"Exposure" describes a growing unwillingness, due to increasing height, to perform manoeuvres which are unexceptional a few feet above the ground.  "Perceptions of height" is more exact. In a rock chimney one may be unaware of the drop; out on a bare face it may be only too evident. Climbers flirt with exposure as in an off-and-on affair. A rocky romance you might say.

I gave up rock-climbing when I moved and lost immediate access to rocks. Also I’d got older. I was simultaneously relieved and miserable. Being a human being is neither easy nor logical.

Variations on an old theme

The News Reader
or
Does this make things clearer?

Some day when Kim Jong-Un acts childishly,
And purple clouds obscure the Golden Gate,
As heat and death flow down Ol’ Sixty-Six,
And Napa grapes show strange maturity.
When mutants shag high flies at Candlestick,
And bats out-number folk at San Berdoo,
As I routinely turn on News at Ten
And note apocalypse proclaimed by you.

Oh you, all textiles to your neckless chin,
Poached-egg eyes to lend a false solemnity,
Left arm outstretched to prop your gravitas,
Decay delayed with thickened maquillage.
A stuffy herald for our piping times,
World’s end described in awe-free, wearied words,
“We’ll analyse,” you say, but dust is dust,
And Bridgend lilt can only bring more dust.

As Californians curl up and fry,
We’ll need a Milton or a Stratford Will,
Instead there’s you and “What’s your sense of this?”
Dulling the edge of death with Gelusil.
This end, our end, should be both dark and grand,
An austere welcome to oblivion,
More than a kiosk and a rubber stamp,
More than the forming of an ordered queue.

And when your chalk-stripe suit is touched with flame
Will light obliterate more of the same?

Too tired to read it yourself? Click HERE and I'll do it for you.

Idyll schmiddle

A horrid earworm which attaches banal words to the fifth movement of LvB's Pastoral can easily put you off the whole symphony:

The countree, the countree,
It's better than the town...

What's more, it isn't true. I've got proof.

We lunched at The Three Horsehoes yesterday and it was immediately assumed we were there for the Pensioners' Special. Yes, we look old but not necessarily indigent. VR was satisfied with her fishcakes but the onion gravy that came with my bangers and mash betokened the industrial laboratory rather than the kitchen. Round about, old codgers made a point of not looking at their wives.

We emerged from the pub to an absolutely hideous smell. "Pig-shit," said VR who profanes rarely. The road was covered with unspeakable gobbets that had fathered the smell. Nearby the police spoke to a tractor driver whose trailer had leaked the gobbets.

Inside our car the smell was even worse; the tyres had picked up essence of crushed gobbet turning the interior into a rural sewer. Worse was to come. At home I garaged the car and since the garage is integral with the house the smell eased its way into the utility room and thence to the kitchen. Understand we're not talking horse manure, here; that's quite pleasant. Pigs are nominally vegetarians but this lot had surely feasted on the putrefying bodies of their dead comrades.

Today it rained; never had I so welcomed a downpour.

Tell you what: our previous home was in the intensely urban Kingston-upon-Thames area and nothing our town-life threw at us ever matched that smell. And I don't go for waiters who decide in a flash I'm at the bottom end of the food-chain - in either sense.

RR: ex cathedra

Ever considered your moral development?

That uncertain journey which takes in the helplessness of babydom, childhood superstition, adolescent agony, adolescent cynicism, problems of sharing (love affairs, partnership), unwonted influences of earning a living, parenthood, a growing realisation of responsibility, fear of illness and death - all those slow-moving but inevitable rivulets.

Until - perhaps - an imperfect form of adulthood may encourage us finally to reflect, to conclude and to come up with some rules, some of which we follow, some we guiltily ignore, some we modify.

Along this route we may have decided to depend on ourselves or, ultimately, on other intangible forces. Or simply to hold our thoughts at bay; refusing to think, preferring instead simply to experience. There is no right or wrong in any of this. Even interaction with others is not an obligation; the hermit harms no one.

Recently, in the car, I heard the last few minutes of Haydn's Missa Cellensis. Paid full whack for it at our embattled CD shop (thus practicing the adult option of charity) and heard it last night. Masses set such phrases as Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) and Credo (I Believe) to music and often reflect the emotions of those who have chosen to depend on the supernatural. Which I, a non-proselytising atheist, vicariously share. I suppose. Look, I never said the rules we formulate and the dependencies we espouse aren't inconsistent.

The Missa Cellensis is a wonderful affirmative piece of music which, ahem!, improves on Bach. But it cannot be regarded as pure (ie, abstract) music – it is born out of Christianity and requires that knowledge to get the best out of it. OK, so my atheism is fuzzy but then I’m not preaching.

Totentanz

I am dancing with Elsie the Discontented, a woman given to accusation and  condemnation, who feeds on argument and whose bitter voice rises in all conversation. Elsie is a virago. She manages the photographic department and is ever at odds with me and other junior employees on the editorial side.

As we move round this otherwise empty dance floor I imagine her more normally, tensing as I enter the company's vast store of photo negatives, preparing to disagree.

We are not dancing to music but to fragments of verse with Welsh associations:

Waking slowly into the hangover that is Wales.
Ap blue jawed,
Ap regretful.

How can Elsie have agreed to this? She says nothing and her face is neither happy nor unhappy. Austere, perhaps? Yes that will do.

This must be set in 1959 when I was twenty-four and she fortyish. The ages and the gap are significant. Then, age tended to carry authority and that put me at a further disadvantage. Made up, her face is nevertheless worn and irregularly discoloured. As was the style then, her lips are always lipsticked: a deliberately artificial crimson. Her black hair, possibly dyed, is tightly permed, a smooth dome in the centre, surrounded by a lifebelt of curls.

I am in awe of my situation. For a short period Elsie's anger is at rest and her presence lacks menace.

But I am a time traveller. This inexplicable event is being re-created in 2014 and Elsie is almost certainly dead. I suppose I have finally won the undefined argument, if briefly. I'm not inclined to celebrate.

Joe: Goodbye exhilaration 2

My friend, Joe Hyam (previously Plutarch) died a couple of days ago. Inevitably my valedictory post was as much about me as it was about him; I needed to explain how he affected me for good. I fear I also figure in most of these vignettes but not, I hope, to his detriment.

● Our first encounter. He'd written a piece about a complex materials handling system; I was supposed to edit it but one sentence was beyond me. I asked him to explain. He read it aloud and the word "plenum" cropped up. He re-read it, relishing "plenum" each time. A wordsmith, you see.

● At a formal dinner-jacket affair I noticed he wore a made-up bow tie. I pointed out the snobby potential of the self-tied bow adding "but never tie it too well; people might think it's made-up". He took my advice and bought a self-tied bow. I was there to see its first outing. He struggled in front of the mirror, ending up with a sort of grannie knot. "Nobody," he said sighing, "will think this is made-up."

● We were accosted in central London by an urban hobbledehoy who asked if we were interested in poetry. Joe said yes, whereupon the hobbledehoy sold him a poem, perhaps for 50 p. Joe immediately read the poem and - in a not unkindly tone - pointed out some metrical solecism. This angered the hobbledehoy who handed back the 50 p and snatched the poem. Joe approved of this.

● Until I eventually grew up (ie, say age 45) I was prone to incapacitating attacks of embarrassment, especially in social encounters with women. Joe with his magnificently hoity-toity accent, public school education and Oxbridge was not only impervious but liked to prolong embarrassing situations in the spirit of curiosity.

The launch of the Lamb's Navy Rum calendar took place in a Soho cellar where I found myself terrified by an elegant, if louche, woman who wore brilliant green contact lenses which made her look like a werewolf. Joe immediately interrogated her about this startling effect and she revealed, quite unnecessarily, she was a lesbian. Noticing we seemed to be together she recommended homosexual experience as a way of "feeling freer". Joe roared with laughter while I looked around for a refill.

● During a shared villa holiday at Concarneau in Brittany the main toilet became blocked. Joe, whose confidence in his spoken French greatly outstripped his competence, announced he would ring the agence and complain. Joe's technique with French natives was to keep on talking to avoid having to understand any of their responses. Unfortunately the woman at the agence was called Lavalou and this undermined any of Joe's pretentions to seriousness.

● During that same holiday Joe read Le Grand Meaulnes in French (his grasp of written French was excellent). I repeatedly asked for progress reports but his responses were atypically vague. Such was his dominance over my bookish tastes that I have never dared tackle this masterpiece - in English or French. I have the feeling that I profited and that his vagueness was deliberate.

● Joe's language (other than about Jonathan Meades) was never extreme. I remember asking him about a restaurant meal and he described it as "indifferent". It was an object lesson about the usefulness and power of temperate words; that adjective is among my most treasured.

NOTE I see most of these memories are trivial. But I can't bring myself to celebrate Joe as a solemnity. He was kind and generous, true, but most of all he was fun. That must survive.

Yes, we had good weather

The hottest day of my life. Well, not quite. That occurred in the former Yugoslavia on a day which did not support life, when even the locals, habituated to the Adriatic furnace, moved so slowly you'd have sworn they were en route to Hell. Where the eighteen-year-old waiter (in a restaurant chosen because it was embedded in a cliff and thus hidden from the sun) took our order for beer without speaking, all energy drained away.

But the day I have in mind - hot enough at 40 deg. plus - touched on Hell in another way. Oradour-sur-Glane, a little township in the Limousin in France, was the scene of a WW2 atrocity and has been left as it was when the last resident died: in a wrecked garage the remains of a pre-war car, a sewing machine visible through a house window.

A banner across the street announced that what remains is a special type of war memorial and exhorted visitors to move about the streets without speaking. The French are famous for disobeying official orders but in this instance they took heed. The oppressive heat seemed to connive with the banner's sentiments.

Away from Oradour we ordered beer but it had no more placating effect than our own saliva. The frozen food department of a supermarket in Limoges provided temporary relief but hardly encouraged us to linger; the store lacked other customers and the girl at the check-out overhung her till like a wilting flower.

Back at the villa we put on our bathing costumes, jumped in the nearby river and I sat on the top of the weir, causing the diverted water to flow over my shoulders. I'd like to pretend to deep thoughts but all I can remember is the physical gratification at having escaped the sun's influence. I have no wish to be facile but the day remains a salutary, unforgettable memory.

Ignore him; he's showing off

Theoretically I can post about anything. But I know that's not strictly true. In my heart of hearts, where shame rules and someone from Luddenfoot acts as chairperson, there is a need to reach out. To cause a response. The only proof that the act of writing has demonstrated its worth.

I could of course go the Germaine Greer route. Switching  from tough-mindedness to being a contrarian: seeking deliberately to get up another's nostrils. I did this in the early days. I wrote dismissively about gardening and Joe (then Plutarch) responded, too philosophically for my taste. I called into question nostalgia about aged motor-cars and Avus rose up.

After a while I saw this was crass. A variant on the French irony contained in: Ce chien est méchant; quand on l'attaque, il se défend. What I really wanted was for others to enhance and embellish my missiles in their own way.

Lists could do this and I did a lot of My Ten Worst... or whatever. But after a while a List-Truth became evident; the items needed not only to be honest but to be unexpected. They also had to have universal appeal. Then another smaller, more personal List-Truth emerged: lists aren't really writing.

Let's suppose I was desperate for a response. How would I go about trying to ensure it? One possibility would be to do what Peter Finch did, playing a TV news anchor-man in the movie Network. Announce I was going to commit suicide in front of a video camera on a specified date. I could go further, and promise an encore. Saying that my follow-up post would be from beyond the grave (proving there was an after-life) or not (proving there wasn't).

But would such a gesture, at best, result in anything other than Goodbye in different forms?

Short trip to nowhere

In House, the TV hospital series, scanners are used quite casually - to measure an Adam's apple or check whether a pyjama cord is tied. Typically doctors argue about their sex lives while unfortunates passing through the big white tunnel have nervous breakdowns, burst their aortas or turn into industrial accidents when forgottten metalware within their chest cavity becomes incandescent.

VR worries about claustrophobia but I am now able to reassure her. Someone dropped off the Hereford scanner schedule (having become incandescent through waiting) and I took take their place at 7.20 pm last night. Why so late? Cherchez l'argent. Scanners cost big bucks and a constant flow of soft tissue makes economic sense.

As usual there's humiliation. Having removed all clothing above the waist I had to put on something both my grannies would have called a "pinny", a ludicrous scrap of cotton, worn back to front, too small to enshroud a hamster. I lay on an upholstered bench that looked unnervingly like those final resting places employed in lethal injection executions. When the institutionalised voice of an American woman told me to hold my breath the illusion was complete.

I became disoriented (lethal injection has that effect) as I was moved upwards and inwards although I remembered being grateful I'd removed my Longines wristwatch. In one House episode a small electrical device (perhaps a pacemaker) exploded inside the tube and I doubt it was covered by insurance.

Space wasn't a problem. Depending on your plans there was room for two. A print would be an interesting addition to an album of wedding photographs.

Let's try pansies instead

Mrs RR said, “We must get some wallflowers next week.”

And I sang,

Wallflowers, wallflowers growing up so high,

We are (pretty maidens?) and we are going to die.

Except for XXX XXX, she’s the youngest here,

Turn for shame, turn for shame,

Turn your face to wall again

Wallflowers…

Directly out of the vaults of memory but what made this different was the length of time since it was last referenced: almost seventy years. And I can be sure of that because of that second line. I was so young that almost any mention of death terrified me; in this case future death is admitted by the singers in the song. They appear prepared to consider their own deaths. For me at eight or nine death was an image: lying in an open grave, able to see anonymous crowds walking by, no one caring that I had died. No one caring.

There are some advantages to getting older.