It exists therefore it stays

Things we cannot bear to throw away always have a story attached. And the story may reveal what sort of person we are.

Here’s a can of Red Bull energy drink which was bought in France. Its slogans have more charm than if they were in English: Formule Taurine (The Bullish Recipe or, more digestibly, The Bullish “Way”) and Vivifie le corps et l’esprit (hardly needs translating). The sell-by date is July 7 2011.

Why, you will ask it, did I buy it? Well, the journey from our part of England (confusingly called The Welsh Marches) to our regular French holiday area (Languedoc) is a long one and I share the driving with younger daughter, Occasional Speeder. The French autoroutes warn about driving when tired and we decided to test a collection of energy drinks prophylactically. Excellent idea. That is, until we started tasting and quickly decided a vacuum flask of black coffee would be preferable. I don’t think we got as far as the Red Bull.

Why don’t I throw it away? Well, it’s full and still unopened. Also it was brewed in Austria and foreign stuff often costs an arm and a leg in France; I can’t bear the waste.

But nor can I handily store it. Non-alcoholic drinks (for guests, of course) are kept in the garage on racking surmounted by free-standing pyramids of cans. Red Bull’s can is narrow and would slip through the racking slots. It is also too long to form a stable element in one of the pyramids.

One may add liquor to an energy drink which seems like a double whammy: diluting the booze and undermining the energy drink’s health claims.

I can’t give it away because of the sell-by date. So it presently acts as a paperweight. Time passes.

Jobs and jabots

Aged eleven I told my father what job I had in mind. Confirmed it four years later and thus joined the local newspaper, aged fifteen and fifty-one weeks. Most agree journalism was all I was fit for but occasionally a maggot nibbles. Suppose my father had lacked influence, that I’d had to paddle my own canoe.

Anything requiring advanced education (doctor, lawyer, academic, scientist, engineer, etc) must be ruled out since I lack the ability to study. Forget too the flamboyant jobs (politician, musician, stand-up comedian, baseball short-stop) given I have neither manual skills nor a viable personality. Nor the nerve for crime, organised or disorganised.

Un-talented men like me often sell things, notably advertising space on magazines I’ve written for. The requisites are mendacity, which I might manage, and constant self-delusion, which would worry me.

The armed services don’t take kindly to those who argue.

Being a priest is fine provided the intercourse never rises above theoretical debate. But I suspect my sermons would be coarse-grained, I could hardly advocate the adoption of an unproven faith, and the super-natural does not appeal.  I have, however, tended to favour all-black ensembles in recent months.

Catering? For two years I cooked for VR who still liveth. But my repertoire is limited to fifteen dishes; enough for me but probably not for paying customers.

I interview well which is not to say I always get the job. To me this skill has always represented a cul de sac.

My late pal Joe and I once met a mendicant poet. A tenuous existence and eventually one starves. A noble end?

Certain court functionaries wear jabots which I’ve always fancied. But are their wearers paid?

Further suggestions welcomed.

As James did to Louis

When did you last betray a friend? Five years ago? Ten? Never? Chances are it was within the last twenty-four hours.

Here's how. You've happily experienced a painting. It could have been a novel, a sonata, a sunset, a conversation or a sausage-roll; in which case the language may differ but not the nature of the betrayal.

You feel you must communicate this happy experience to a friend. You say: The painting looked like its subject (But a photo would have been even more realistic.). Its colours were well-chosen (But didn't nature choose the colours anyway?). It was inspired (By what? To what end?). It matches the painter's style (So what's the painter's style?). You get the idea. In broad terms you lied, not intentionally but because what you said didn't get close to "the truth". Whatever that is.

Your verbal inadequacy has left your friend uninformed about your happy experience. Since you felt it important to pass on details of this event, you've let your friend down. Betrayed your friend. But don't worry, your friend probably betrayed you twenty-four hours previously. It is in the nature of being human. Words are all we have. Words - so easy to understand as singletons, so slippery in groups.

V, my singing teacher, used to apologise before correcting me. But we've moved on. Things are more difficult (Intervals: oof!); V now shouts "No!" and I rectify. The level of difficulty, I’m told, betokens my progress. A happy event verifiable on the piano keyboard. I am unbetrayed because what V conveyed did not depend on the meaning of words.

Going back to that painting you enjoyed, perhaps you should try la-la-ing your happiness to your friend. You don't sing? Well V's tuition is worth a guinea a box.

What's a body for?

Fearing it would be cold in Stuttgart (see pre-Christmas posts) I opted to wear my super-dooper anorak. Going through the pockets I found the above rectangle of plastic and was cast down. Had I been closer to laughter than tears I might have echoed Cole Porter in Kiss Me Kate:

Where is the life that late I led?
Where is it now? Totally dead!
Where is the fun I used to find?
Where has it gone? Gone with the wind!

Twas my last ski-pass, bought in 2007 for the high slopes of Zermatt in Switzerland. It cost a fortune and delivered a cruel message. "You are," it said, "too old to ski." Thus the transition from "elderly" to "old - definitely old". A life of ratiocination remained.

People who haven't skied think skiers are twerps. It's dangerous, isn't it? Memories of concussion, a dislocated shoulder, a cracked scapula and a torn intercostal muscle rise to remind me. But heck, those were stretched out in time between 1978 and 2007. A small price. Applying myself differently I might have gone mad reading the novels of Margaret Drabble.

Why ski? To be transformed. To escape the lumbering body I was born with, to embrace gravity like a lover, to perform tiny physical adjustments and to emerge as a proposition in aesthetics. To glide, laughing at weight and friction among scenery that shouts out - I live! What's pain? I've caused other dinner guests to go green with nausea at my account of how Swiss doctors reduced my dislocation without anaesthetic. The power of vivid discourse.

Nothing comes for nothing. Passive pleasure is, in the end, circumscribed. There's nothing quite like letting go and depending on your instincts and what you've learned.

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.

Silly season in the Marches

HURRAY FOR HFD Professional Bleeder and partner, Peter, are staying. They live in Luton and cannot agree with a local judgment that nearby Harpenden is "the most beautiful village in England". For one thing it's more of a townlet, for another a main road runs through it. I suggest that Eardisland, 20 miles outside Hereford, might be a stronger contender. We drive there, PB takes pix with her camera and we all come away smugly satisfied that Harpenden hasn't a hope.
Sir Hugh's advice is worth the effort.

BELATED DISCOVERY Peter is a great Kindle user. Can walk to work reading, without tripping over kerbstones or being squashed flat by a white van. I say I wished older Kindles offered page numbers rather than percentages especially with long books. He says there is a way - hold down Menu and the page number plus the total number of pages appears. But no doubt you all knew this.

BROTHERHOOD? I leave the cathedral close and enter Church Street, a narrow atmospheric ginnel left over from Old Hereford. A lad sits with a begging tray, reading a thick old hardback, his finger moving painfully along the line. He's still there when I return and I drop a pound coin in his tray. I hate doing this because I always need change but occasionally there are larger obligations.

WIP Second Hand (30,134 words)
(Lorne said) "Perhaps you’d be better off working in customer services... More interesting than till-work... How do you feel?”

(Francine said) "Sounds like an intellectual step up...  What’s this about training?”

“Knowing where we keep gherkins. Explaining why and what World Foods are. Working the Lottery machine. Arguing the toss about out-of-date vouchers. Handling returns. Knowing kids’ ages when they order cigarettes. Fun stuff.”

Why I am who I am

Pittsburgh, Christmas 1971

I waited, knowing the festivities

Would choke the flow of  transatlantic calls,
Delays which brought their own blank auguries,
A prelude to the saddest of farewells.

“Ah… yes…,” my brother said, quite languidly,

Languor that looked for comfort in delay.
But what he added lacked necessity,
The link was cut and youth had gone astray.

She died within a distant older place

I’d left behind with callow eagerness,
Yet unrestrained by any false embrace,
Encouraged, taught, with chances of success.

She wrote, I write, but here’s the difference

No letters, now, to foil my ignorance.

AUGUST 11 My mother’s birthday. She would have been 107, a cumbersome uninteresting fact. I write because, among other things, she encouraged me. Her poems were published in small magazines.

I did this sonnet a year or two ago, posted it then. The clumsy and obscure eleventh/twelfth lines irritate the hell out of me but I’ll let them be. Defects can be eloquent: revision is more than half the battle.

My mother wrote under her unmarried name: Dorothy Hilda Stringer. A workaday sort of name. It’s all a long time ago. But her interest in what I do still reaches out: full of emotion yet useful.

The bright cloud darkens

Perhaps this means I'm softening. Becoming "lovely" as The Crow so hideously suggests
.
I get up at 6.25 am. Precisely, of course, because by now I'm obsessional. My mind's sharper; my writing's technically better, invention arrives less grudgingly. I know these things even though I know I'm Boastful Brit for saying so. Where's the stiff upper lip, the sense of restraint?

I use this sharpness to cut into whatever needs to be written: presently the final 500 words about two spies fencing with each other, or the final 8000 words of Blest Redeemer. That's the theory. But first and fatally I access LiveMail to find out if anyone's responded. If they have I'll often use up the two hours ostensibly allocated to novels, short stories and schlock verse to being clever-clever with my correspondents. My wider social circle. And commenting on their blogs too, of course.

Receiving an email is almost the equivalent of a letter in the old days,  a privilege, a gift despite the technology. Runes to read. I'm in danger of getting sentimental.

So can Amazon, INKcredible (printer inks), Dawson (sheet music), The Marquise at Alkham (swanky food), First Direct (a bank), Santander (another bank) realise how TRULY DISAPPOINTED I am to receive their huckstering blandishments instead of something from a live being in, say, Pennsylvania. How full of bile, how resistant to their products and/or services, how mulish, how trigger-happy, how bloody-minded? How utterly put out? Well now they know and the hell with them.

BOOK NOTE For most people these days Hemingway's down the terlet. Wanting to swim against the tide I'm re-reading A Farewell To Arms. Two extracts:

The town was very nice and our house was very fine.

and

"Wine is a grand thing," I said. "It makes you forget all the bad."

Hmm.

By (slightly more) popular demand

Brother Sir Hugh says the photographs used in By Unpopular Demand (below) aren’t as he remembers me. I could say he started wearing glasses before I did but I won’t, it would be cruel. At his behest I am posting a more cheerful pic together with what I now see is an unfortunate written example of navel-gazing. I pray for your forgiveness.

 Obviously when I say I don't smile that's not quite true; I have in my time responded to jokes and friendliness. What I mean is I rarely initiate smiles. I distrust the gesture, don't do it well. Here my two brothers Sir Hugh (left) and Nick (right) beam away at the Frenchman we persuaded to take the photo. At best I am smirking.

Which is a shame. This was a happy occasion and grows in retrospective importance given Nick's illness. My failure is even sadder since at the time I was being introduced to sailing which I enjoyed enormously. Despite that I was unable to contort my face appropriately.

For other reasons I've had to reflect on my social inadequacies recently. I conclude I'm not an inter-personal person. Being inarguably a smart-Aleck, I've found a way round this. Social intercourse depends initially on certain familiar approaches which qualify as conversational clichés. I've spent a professional lifetime avoiding clichés. But of course this is sophistry.

The answer is to avoid social encounters which - with a few exceptions, mainly mano a mano - I do. Instead I write, these days more than ever before. I'm lucky in that blogging includes written exchanges with interesting people round the globe so I'm not exactly an anchorite. Americans find my situation unbelievable so there's written mileage to be gained there. Perhaps I need my own French valediction: au revoir becomes au récrire.

By unpopular demand

EVENTUALLY,

say optimistic observers,
IT WILL TURN TO DUST

So this is what the world has seen for years,

While I, inside, have worked the steering wheel,
Unconscious of those sleek-fit otter ears
And oblate lips that snaggled teeth conceal.
Should I have been so damnèd confident,
Given those parboiled eyes with pendant sacks,
A mouth that falls apart, an accident,
A wattled neck with flaps of melting wax?
A nose for poking into others’ lives,
Untended hair that apes insanity,
While all the while a tomblike gauntness strives
To add an undeservèd dignity.
Without the face I’m told I irritate;
With it, the greater I aspires to grate.

NOTE
(1) This is one of my better shirts.
(2) I have learned never to smile for portraits
(3) The prints are first-rate
(4) Zoom and it's worse.