Urchins on the Stairs

"The child lying dead in the little sleeping room, which is behind the open screen. It is winter-time, so there are no flowers; but upon her breast and pillow, and about her bed, there may be strips of holly and berries, and such free green things. Window overgrown with ivy. The little boy who had that talk with her about angels may be by the bedside, if you like it so; but I think it will be quieter and more peaceful if she is alone. I want it to express the most beautiful repose and tranquillity, and to have something of a happy look, if death can...I am breaking my heart over this story, and cannot bear to finish it."
Charles Dickens (Instructions to illustrator George Cattermole for the Death-Bed of Little Nell)

I'VE HAD THE ANNUAL FLU SHOT every autumn for at least ten years now; late in 2008 I had a jab for pneumonia, supposed to protect me for ten years (I figure the year it wears off I'll most likely die of a severe lung infection, unless someone invents a new vaccine that will carry me into extreme old age).

Because I've had those flu jabs (not for the so-called Swine Flu though, which is by invitation only so far), and because I have a runny red nose, streaming eyes, a headache and tinnitus, a cough, a good deal of wheezing, and I've been unable to breathe easily for days (and, worse, nights) I'm guessing it's not the flu, but a truly stinking cold. My appetite is fine. My mother used to chirp: "Feed a cold! Starve a fever!" I'm not consciously stuffing myself full of healthy food, but I am dining very well and enjoying it. Sure things taste a bit odd, but not so awful as to be inedible. I think that if I were going against the rules and feeding a fever, I'd know about it.

Hot baths, of course, with various fragrant oils which I cannot appreciate being unable to breathe deeply. I'm kind of panting, which has Cailean puzzled. The sneezes really have the poor dog anxious for my wellbeing. Aleks was the same way: He knew when I wasn't up to scratch. Cailean has been sitting quietly at my feet, or lying next to me on the sofa. No leaping about. I tried bunging some sort of ointment that is the Boots equivalent of Vicks VapoRub in my nostrils last night, and smeared some on my chest. I noticed no relief. (I couldn't get to sleep till four this morning when I must have passed out from exhaustion after several nights without rest.)

I did go up to Alnwick on the morning of New Year's Eve, got caught in a snowstorm. It has snowed regularly ever since. We had a white Christmas and Boxing Day (my last was in 1994 in the Rocky Mountains) and I gather the temperature in rural Northumberland hasn't been in positive territory for a few weeks. I don't think snow and cold weather gives one a cold (my mother would have chirped that it did), but I've been freezing and thawing so often lately that I imagine it cannot be the best way to live.

I've hunkered down at home with the television. I've pretty much ignored my computer. I'm finally making headway with stacks of DVDs that I've bought over the past four years and haven't seen. I'm into box-sets: "Absolutely Fabulous"; "Jonathan Creek Mysteries"; "The Mighty Boosh"; "Two Fat Ladies"; etc. And I've bought a fair number of modern classic films: "2001: A Space Odyssey"; "Women in Love"; "The Full Monty"; "Close Encounters"; "Strictly Ballroom"; etc.

I've also watched a number of films on the telly. I finally saw "Citizen Kane", and I rather enjoyed it. The British television stations have taken to airing tired old American films that, I suppose, are no longer under copyright. Those and Disney-shit. So, I've passed on "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (Pat Boone's version, and the one starring Treat Williams). I have not watched "The Guns of Navarone" either, or "The Italian Job", which have British actors in them. Not one "Carry on …" film, I had enough of Barbara Windsor's tired old tits decades ago.

I did decide to watch a recent version of Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop" for no other reason than I'd never seen it, or read it, but that I knew Oscar Wilde had said of it: "One would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell." "Shop" aired on or near Christmas Day, and I couldn't see anything Christmassy in it. Derek Jacobi plays Nell's simply awful grandfather who gambles away every last penny the family has, and even gambles away Nell's virtue. Almost. Fortunately, Nell, by then a waif begging on the street, collapses in the mud and muck. Is Dickens suggesting it is better to collapse and die (yes, Nell pops her clogs) than to struggle towards the sun? Dickens somehow makes death attractive, something the Victorians would really appreciate.

Was Dickens religious? Did he believe that what we do here, and deal with in this lifetime, is rewarded in the afterlife? He certainly created some monsters. Nell's grandfather has no redeeming features; one senses he'll be playing cards before the girl's corpse is cold. Seems to me the grandfather should be bumped off. My mother would chirp: "The good die young." So Little Nell has the silliest deathbed scene (adding insult to injury, surely).

Earlier in the film there's a scene that is classic Dickens. In the entrance hall of a lodging house one sees a small, scruffy boy - he might be twelve at the most - on the stairs, looking through the balusters at the filthy goings-on below. There's always an urchin on the stairs in Dickens. And on the landing, at the top, there's a young servant girl looking through a keyhole with hopes of improving her station in life. Always in Dickens, the lower orders at the keyholes.

Well, Little Nell, a little holly on your bed and the angels there to collect you, you are a laughingstock.

Be a fine thing if this cold does me in. I should get some holly from the hedgerows. Cailean can play the urchin.

Happy New Year!

Cold Comfort Forum

Unless we can think peace into existence we
- not this one body in this one bed
but millions of bodies yet to be born -
will lie in the same darkness and
hear the same death rattle overhead.
Virginia Woolf (Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid)

A FEW DAYS OR NIGHTS AGO I dared the snow to come. And it did, with considerable enthusiasm, particularly in the southern half of Great Britain. Northumberland seems to have had a good deal, but it has turned to ice and the temperature has not been above freezing in almost a week. It is minus ten Celsius this evening. Damn!

Yesterday I managed to take Cailean for a walk in town, and even though he was wearing his winter overcoat, when we paused while Gavin got a Lotto ticket at the newsagent's, within seconds Cailean was shivering in the doorway with me, and trying to climb up my leg to be held where he thought it might be warm. We were standing in the ice. Cailean rather likes soft snow. Not the ice. I imagine it hurts his foot-pads. My nose was burning in the cold, my eyes watering, and my knees seemed to be colder than most of me.

Will this weather last another five days? Will we have a white Christmas? Will the Eurostar trains return to service in the Channel Tunnel? Will airports run on time? Will little children get to Euro-Disney for their holidays? If this week remains snowy, icy, all the rest may suffer. Can you have your cake and eat it?

There's been an over-hyped con-fab in frozen Copenhagen recently to discuss Global Warming. As one wit put it, "A good thing we haven't got Global Cooling, or we'd really be fucked!" He was looking out the window, I'm guessing. Or trying to find a public transport vehicle that was able to run, or a highway that wasn't clogged with stalled Lorries waiting to cross the Channel.

A word about Copenhagen. What a waste of time and money. Well, that's seven words. The non-result will be subject to so much spin control that we'll think that Obama and Brown have saved the world. Obama doesn't get out of bed to do less. I'm not sure that pollution is the main factor behind this supposed warming of the atmosphere. I'm not even convinced that our atmosphere, in total, is warming. Over decades and centuries and millennia, we have all sorts of climate changes. An active volcano can make a huge difference. A volcano in the Philippines is just about to pop its top. There's something satisfying about an event that the Americans cannot possibly say they can fix.

We won the wars for you, and now we're going to put a great big bung in Mount Mayon.

Population control may well save the planet. The Catholics and the Mormons and every other faith that promotes breeding without feeding need to get real and encourage birth control. Bombing villagers in dusty foreign lands and adopting polar bears ain't gonna save the world! Get real! Get real!

I'm enjoying the run-up to Christmas this year, even if the cold makes my nose run and my snot freeze on my moustache. It's like a holiday with Roald Amundsen or Ernest Henry Shackleton … More fun than Disney!

The earliest Christmas memories I have are of faces of Father Christmas drawn on paper, cheeks coloured red, and bits of cotton pasted where we thought a beard should be. My sisters and I each had one of these paper Santas and they hung on our trees for several years, along with lights that were filled with some liquid that came to a boil after a time (which frightened me, probably with good reason), and a decreasing collection of brittle ornaments. One year my mother could not afford to buy a tree, and this was before fake firs, and she cut a branch off a casurina tree in the garden. It was a total disaster, but the annual treats from family friends (Quality Street choccies) slid under the casurina.

I hated those Christmases. I hated the Christmas Eve dinner with my mother's family, even when I moved up from the small table to the big one. The food was always tasteless, and bought on a shoestring budget. If I never see another tinned ham running in jelly in this lifetime I'll be happy!

I hated the whole business of gift-giving, and I learned why many years later. If our gifts were piddling and small, and perfunctory (underwear and a new school tie perhaps), we children did not have the funds to buy gifts for those we cared about. One of life's great pleasures for me is to hunt out a gift that I think somebody special would enjoy. I cannot afford anything too grand now, but I've learned that a few pounds can provide a treasure if the digging is done in the right place.

I have a small fibre-optic Christmas tree. It has not come out too clearly in the picture, but rest assured that it's a bit of an out-of-sight light show. In a darkened room with music playing, it's a trip.

Cailean has his Christmas gift already. I'd bought him a very lightweight, but super-warm blanket. Came the ice, out came his gift. He's asleep under it, below my desk, at this very moment. Better to be toasty on the 20th December than to shiver for days and nights just to be precise about a gift-date. Heck, Mount Mayon might rumble and it could be palm trees in the courtyard by the 25th December. Make hay …

I bought myself something rather brilliant: The complete, stereo, digitally-remastered, box-set of the Beatles CDs. Absolutely fantastic. On sale at a considerable savings at Amazon.UK. I've been tripping back to the Sixties. You see, I didn't wait till the 25th for my gift. Mount Mayon and all, I might be out sweating in the heat in the courtyard on Christmas Day. These past few days, however, I've been listening to all the Beatles CDs, hearing things I never heard before, while lying on the sofa, facing the window to the High Street, watching the snow sweep down. And saying aloud: This is magic! Absolutely magic!

If you got a gift from me, you probably could guess that it was a book or CD or DVD. Shapes of things. Things I hope will turn you on.

As we had a postal strike looming and happening in the UK, I decided not to get Christmas cards printed this year, but cards with Cailean and I snarling at the world, as we do, with gentle teeth and not with our eyes, with love really, and the word PEACE. Inside, a quotation from an essay by Virginia Woolf. The words head up this blog entry.

From Amble in the Ice, we wish you the best for the holidays, and let's all come to our senses in 2010, or at least enough of us to drive out the tyrants, warmongers and saviours.