Dreamland Pilgrim

“The colour of truth is gray.”
André Gide (1869 – 1951)

SEVERAL MORNINGS AGO I stepped into my shower a Heathen. I washed myself, shampooed my hair, rinsed off the soap, and turned off the water. When I pulled the shower curtain back, I was still a Heathen (a clean one at least). Stepping down, I immediately appreciated that my bathroom floor was wet, very wet. Not just puddled, but under two inches of water, and this seemed to be rising. The Heathen paddled across to the bathroom door, up a slight step, and across the hallway. Every towel in the top of the wardrobe went onto the bathroom floor, along with the spare bathmats. Somehow, the Heathen won the battle; the dripping towels went into the laundry basket and then off to the washing machine in the kitchen.

The Heathen, which is to say the Writer, had dabbed at his wet body while flinging towels about, and was able to get dressed. On with the central heating to get the floor quite dry.

An experiment: A jug of water poured into the bathtub bubbled up through the space between the bathtub’s housing and the floor. Here was trouble.

I had cursed a blue streak, but calmed down enough to phone my landlord for advice. Unfortunately, he was out of town due to a family emergency. I figured I would wait a few days and make do with my bathroom sink and the hose from the shower, which could be used there.

When I was a boy, at my Nan’s home in Kent, and at my Mother’s family home in Lancashire, we did not have indoor plumbing. In the morning, Nan or my Auntie Maud would pour heated water from a ewer into a bowl on a washstand in my bedroom, and I would bathe in some fashion that way. The small child does not usually smell as much as someone does at my present age. Using my bathroom sink, I have washed myself incredibly thoroughly for the past few mornings. I had no complaints.

I shall tell the reader now, the first time I have told anyone, that my Mother, who lived most of her adult life in Bermuda in a house with good modern plumbing, never, ever, had a bath or a shower. She washed at the sink. Might she have been afraid of water? I never knew. In her last few years, she could not bear to be in a room with a closed door, and that included the bathroom. It was rather discomfiting. Her bathroom door faced across a hallway to the living room. One had to make excuses ... I think the dog needs a walk ... privacy should go both ways.

Was the Heathen, the non-believer, to be flung into the world of his grandparents and peculiar Mother, when it came to bathing in October 2011? For a few days it was interesting, gave me something to think about.

Yesterday, I had had enough. Was I getting all the shampoo out of my hair (the few strands remaining)? Could I be sure I was not malodorous? I was also missing the physical pleasure of a hellishly hot shower.

Then, last night, I dreamed that my Mother was telling me about a bolt in my bathtub drain. I doubt that my Mother had any knowledge of drains, taps or pipes or the nuts and bolts that hold them together. How did she get into my dream with the explanation that a bolt had fallen down my drain? I know so little of plumbing myself; I could not invent her words (could I?) I should point out that Mother passed away over 19 years ago, and has never appeared in my dreams with helpful hints.

I told a friend here in town about the bathtub drain, and he brought over two small washers. Told me he thought there would be a bolt somewhere below the drain and a screw passed through the washers would restore the drain. Well, the Heathen was not too much of a believer.

This evening, on my own, I shone a torch down the drain after lifting off the sieve plate, and way down I could see a metal ring with a ... wait for it ... bolt through the middle pointing up. It was awkwardly distant to be reached by fingers or pliers, but I had the sudden thought that a fishhook on a line might be lowered into the drain and the device below snared and pulled upwards. As if I had a fishhook and a line! However, after hunting through the many drawers and boxes in my flat, I found a long twist-tie with a thin metal centre coated in plastic. I bent the end to make a hook and lowered it into the darkness of the drain (impossible to manoeuvre a torch at the same time) and, praying “Please!” to no god in particular, pulled upwards. The hook had latched onto the bolt and its ring; it came up to the bottom of the bathtub. I quickly unscrewed the bolt, took off the corroded and worn washer on the end of it, dropped on the new washers, and screwed the bolt down again. This pulled everything tightly together.

The Heathen, with his dream, his Mother, his friend and (his luck?) had fixed the drain. He dared to run the tap for a good long time, and no water bubbled out from below the tub.

When I was younger (but older than I was at my Auntie Maud’s) I used to find religion, hints of God, in both major and minor events. The night sky might make me tremble and so might a few minutes of listening to sitar music. Words, especially, could turn me on. Words still turn me on, but they no longer seem to turn a god on. Not the way they did in the 1960s. I took drugs to try and find the way to God.

That said, I recently watched again, after a few decades, the television series “Cosmos” written and presented by Dr Carl Sagan. I recalled reading that Sagan, as he was dying of cancer, had pretty much decided that there was no God. When I read that, years ago, I was surprised. As a Heathen, watching the series from start to finish over a few nights, I had to ask myself how Sagan could have dismissed God while speaking of so many wonders in the Cosmos.

Haydn’s “The Creation” oratorio has the line: ‘The wonder of his works displays the firmament,’ which is pleasant to sing (which I did in school) and thrilling to hear. Happens that the original German does not make sense in English as commonly translated. It has to be ‘The firmament displays the wonder of his works’.

The works displayed so wonderfully by the firmament that Sagan wrote and spoke of had me thinking that maybe I had it wrong. Maybe there is a god, even a God.

“That the Mormons assume a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them, and the same will it be against Christians.”
Thanks to William Blake (1757 – 1827)

For me, I think the main difficulty with a belief in a deity is that people tend to create Him (or Her) in their own image. This exclusivity extends beyond the worship service, beyond the sacred image, beyond the promises attached to this or that god. The True God and his True Church (for there must be one, if just to collect tithes and offerings) can only succeed when all opposition is crushed. There was never a god that whispered to the prophets: “Tell the people to pray as they will, do as they would, be what they wish.”

At the present time, there is a run-up to the Presidential Elections in the USA. A year from now, Americans will elect a leader. One of the Republican candidates is a Christian, we are told, of the Evangelical bent. Another Republican front-runner is a Mormon. The Christians, the Bible Believers (dare I say Bashers?), are getting the word out that Mormonism is a cult, not Christian, and that a Mormon President would surely lead the country into the jaws of Hell. The Mormons, by the way, believe that when the American Constitution is “hanging by a thread” the Mormons will take over America (and eventually the world) and rule for the Mormon god(s). There will be a political kingdom of God.

A True Christian, and a True Mormon, cannot believe outside their particular Catechism.

JFK was elected President despite (we must assume) adhering to Roman Catholic doctrine, which differs from that of our Evangelical Christians almost as much as Mormonism. Except, so far as I know, the Pope was not pulling strings.

Mormons in their meetinghouses vote to sustain their church leaders by the sign of the raised hand. I have never, ever, seen a hand withheld, much less a hand raised in opposition, no matter how difficult a decision. Simply, the members vote for the candidates that the Church leaders tell them to.

Do not expect the voters in Utah to sing the praises of Barack Obama, the Democrat, or Rick Perry the Republican Christian. Utah Mormons (and those elsewhere) pushed The Osmonds to the top of the pops 30 years ago, and Brandon Flowers of The Killers is repaying his fan-base by backing the Mormon Republican Mitt Romney for President in 2012.

I would not back a Mormon candidate for high office because I know a little about Mormonism, and a good deal about what True Mormons are expected to believe and do. Mormons are expected to withhold information that might put their church and its leaders in a bad light, indeed, they can lie and it is quite all right. They do lie. I have lied for them and with them.

As I stood in my flooded bathroom the other morning, sending up the sort of prayer King Canute might have, that Noah might have, I did not really expect an answer. Dreaming of my Mother and the bolt in the bathtub drain was rather odd, and finding my answer in the dream was even odder. I am not going to found The Church of the Flood (that would be a very catchy name, of course) and get religion. I might put the clues together, admire the firmament, and feel comfortable with the casual thought that someone or something, billions of years ago, released everything into time and space, and that matter and energy flooded outwards in every direction. Did someone or something create the laws of nature, of physics? Perhaps they were inherited from an earlier incarnation. Let it roll.

The Heathen is enjoying his shower again. This is a rainy day outdoors too. Bless the drain that works!

Vanished. She was that Small.

“I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams.”
D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)


MOST NIGHTS I TAKE CAILEAN FOR A WALK some time after ten o’clock. In the summer months, this would be in daylight, even as late as half-eleven. However, for most of the year, it is well dark and we rely on the city lights illuminating our main street to mark the way out and the way back. The glitter of the sign above the door at Euro-Pizza, the creamy glow through the fogged window at Taste of China, the twinkle of the cigarettes youngsters are smoking on the bench outside the Post Office may not be visible at the International Space Station (indeed, I don’t suppose the folks up there can even spot Amble by the Sea in the daylight), but for the dog-walker they are signs of light and thus life.

I remember Marianne Faithfull being interviewed back in the 1960s, might it have been on the Simon Dee Show. The singer was not talking about her song - she may not have managed one that month - but about light and thus life. In her somewhat growly voice, Marianne told us that a spaceship from some distant world on a reconnaissance mission in our galaxy would have been disappointed until they slipped into the skies above the side of the Earth celebrating night. There, in the dark, would be sudden pockets of extraordinary brilliance. Where millions gathered in cities, the street and vehicle lights and the lights from windows in blocks and homes, would tell our visitors in no uncertain terms that we are at home here, their journey was worth it. I dare say the aliens overhead might wonder if we were glowing creatures, rather than the dark lumps we actually are. Might we gravitate to the dark with our inborn light, rather than light the way artificially as we fumble about without it?

It is curious how one recalls a brief interview conducted 45 years ago on the same day one pops across to the corner shop to buy milk and bread, but comes away without the bread because one forgets what it was one needed (and no list was made).

Last night, at about eleven o’clock, I walked Cailean as far as the Post Office on Queen Street, and turned back when I reached the three under-dressed young schoolgirls who seem to be there every night, smoking and yelling obscenities at passing cars and into mobile telephones. I crossed the street and walked up the pavement on the other side and at the top I was slowed down by scaffolding around the building next to The Waterloo public house. Outside the pub were a half-dozen or more youngish people, males and females, smoking, some drinking, and all in loud conversation.

Over the past few years, my dodgy hearing has worsened and I have a hearing aid in one ear (I am waiting for a device for the other ear). I struggle to make out ordinary talking, radios and background sounds. I can hear loud birds (the feathered variety and the lasses) quite well, something about the pitch, perhaps. People yelling on a dimly lit street do register with me.

And so, outside The Waterloo, I heard:

“She was really small. Not a dwarf, like ... But really, really small.”
“I recall her too. Lost track of her.”
“Remember what people used to call her at school?”
“Oh, yes. Bridgette the Midget.”
“Even though she wasn’t a midget.”
“And her name wasn’t Bridgette.”
“She was that small. Well under five feet. Maybe four.”
“Don’t know where she went after school.”
"Vanished."

That I remembered this afternoon, though I forgot the bread.

A Rustle at the door: Autumn had Arrived.

It is very much autumn. Cold, windy. The multi-coloured leaves were promising after some unusually sunny and warm weather a fortnight ago. The wind seems to be sufficient to wrest the leaves from the trees, and to blow a good many of them into the North Sea.

We may well have snow a month from now, if the past few years have marked a pattern. In any case, we are wearing nearly the full complement of winter clothes, though I have not worn my hat and gloves yet. God knows, walking Cailean late last night I wondered why I’d not reached for a hat when I left home.

Last winter our pavements and all but the main street were blocked by snow for weeks at a time. My courtyard was under ice. This year I have a snow shovel, and hope to make pathways.

Last winter, and the months through to early summer, my mood was buoyant. My Manic-Depressive Illness has, more or less, highs (mania and hypomania) and lows (depression) lasting around nine months each. When I am up, I feel brilliant, I am something of a superman, a rising star. I cannot sleep more than an hour or two a night. I read several books at once, an hour of this one, an hour of that one. I also walk a good deal, which is healthy. My medications tend to get me to a level point between high and low, but it is not easily done and requires monitoring. Nine months of flying near the sun and feeling untouchable ends, and I come to earth. I slow and cannot keep awake. My appetite goes. My enthusiasm dims.

Winston Churchill famously suffered from Manic-Depressive Illness, and he referred to his depressed periods as “the black dog”. I have a black dog, but Cailean tends to guide me through the light and the dark, aware of my wobbling, and he loves me as much when I stretch towards the sun claiming it for myself as when I go to bed at noon and pull the covers up because the light hurts.

I have been south of the centre for about four months. I am heavily medicated, more than I have ever been when low. I am sleeping too much. I am reading one book, and slowly. I am watching less television. I stopped writing entries for my Barking Mad Blog a few months ago.

Today, despite the wintry feel without and within, the cold and the dark, and struggling to eat regularly (I sometimes forget to eat for a day), I had a short group of words come to my mind. Not “buy bread” which might have been helpful this morning. Rather:

Look to the left,
And look to the right,
And walk into the starry skies.
Walk into the night.

I have been watching Carl Sagan’s wonderful television series from about 30 years ago—Cosmos—and know that Sagan, before his death, seemed to stop believing in higher powers, gods, divine creation. As I have watched his lectures on the telly, I have found myself returning to a belief in something. Christians and other religionists might not think much of the belief that flickers within me somewhere (nothing as bright as the light on the sign at Euro-Pizza). I find myself somehow content to think that something may have set our universe in motion (and that is that, no further interference, the laws of physics were set at the beginning). There are some scientists that think we may dwell in one bubble in a vast bowl of bubbles, each bubble a universe. Who is disturbing the soapy liquid, blowing the bubbles?

This flicker of belief, sadly, has given me little in the way of hope. Hope is a religious principle, and it seems to be the promise in a rather unpleasant life. I am not feeling any hope that I will see my dead loved ones some day. I feel the light, I feel the dark, the highs and lows, and they are real, but there are no visions. One day, it seems to me, I shall look this way and that, then walk into the unknown. Perhaps I shall see well-lit cities as I go forward, and shall know there is life, light in the darkest night. Will I dare to land?

“Life is a travelling to the edge of knowledge, then a leap taken.”
D.H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

AN EARLY EVENING with The Nirvana Tabernacle Choir Playing on the Hi-Fi while Gertrude Stein hangs a Picasso

CHAOS
(1) A condition or place of great disorder or confusion.
(2) A disorderly mass; a jumble: The desk is a chaos of books, papers and unopened letters. Much like my mind.

AS I NEARED THE PASSAGEWAY that leads to the courtyard behind my flat, I raised my right arm and twisted it so that my inner elbow knocked on the part of my jacket that holds the inside right pocket. And my wallet was there. Then I reached into my right side trouser pocket to remove my key ring. It was there. The ring holds my front and back door keys and what I think is a key to a post office box in Bermuda. It looks important, even if it is useless. A person cannot have too many keys.

I selected the key to the kitchen, which is marked with a green plastic tag, and adjusted the key in my hand, ready to fit easily in the lock. By then, I was entering the passage. It is always this way. In the winter, I do this by streetlight after three-thirty.

This is a routine. And there are routines within the routine. I take some sort of comfort in it. These are routines that I prefer to feeling compelled to pick up litter from the pavement and gutter. I did that for six months. It is very nearly the opposite of washing your hands repeatedly.

I inserted the already-aligned key into the door's lock, turned it, leaned on the door with my left shoulder and arm and walked inside. As I always do, I headed to the telephone. I pushed the 1571 message retrieval button on the machine. I rarely have messages. Sometimes a slight click and silence and then a hum. A caller not wishing to say much when he rang, perhaps.

I have to choose between continuing through to the front hallway to look for post and going into the WC. I have a weak bladder. Today the WC won out. There is always post scattered below the letterbox. Rarely mine, but my landlord uses my address for his copious correspondence. I do get clothes catalogues, and flyers from LIDL and the people at Cash for Gold. I gathered the envelopes up this evening and returned to the kitchen with them. My landlord's letters go on a pile by the electric kettle. I got some coffee going. As always.

Yes, there is comfort in it.

It is a luxury to be able to sit and write, live, just about whenever I want to. My hours are not just 9 to 5, but 24/7. The stories are right there, wherever there is at the time. Moreover, if I cannot actually type, I can write notes. Scrawl them. And stack them up.

Here I am, and this will be a conversation based on a few notes and whatever else might come along while I sit at the computer. Actually, it is not too different from therapy. Can one get online therapy now? Perhaps when one can pray online as well. One can play Poker over the Internet, and Bingo too, and both are religious sects involving a great deal of prayer and promises.

It is early evening on a Wednesday and I have just been deposited near my flat with a mind full of routines and habits to work through. I have had a day spent being supervised at Day Services by people who will wake me up in time to be returned home. I sit on a sofa in the Centre's main room next to a fellow I call "The Man in a Coma" for reasons you might easily guess. On the other side of me is a man who thinks I am a spy from Eastern Europe. At least the whispers in his head tell him I am a spy. The Bermudian accent, of course. So close to Ukrainian. Every schoolboy knows that.

Why am I at a day-care up to five days a week? My excuse is—I tell people who do not always ask or want to know—I am British and I am growing old. There is more to me than that, but we would be getting into very small fractions and I seem to have lost any aptitude for dealing with numbers.

This evening I am drinking coffee from the "World's Biggest Mug". Actually, it is not the world's biggest. I have another larger one that has "Coffee" on it in several varieties. One is cappuccino. A wonder I could spell cappuccino correctly the first time. It is spelled incorrectly on the sign of a bistro here in Amble. I spotted the error immediately, having been a proof reader in another life, and told the proprietor. She was rattled, but no correction has been made. Well, let us leave it at that.

My desk is such a mess. I have a simple filing system. Upwards. I make stacks of whatever needs to be shifted to make room for my big coffee mug, and build on them until they start to slide or tip over. Then they go on shelves near my desk. Stacked.

I have, now, near the top of one heap on my desk, back issues of Day Services’ “Newsletter". This is a monthly four-page effort. I contribute a story on something related to our activities for each issue. I made the front page this month. My article on a night we spent out at the greyhound races was edited. I had said that I placed a bet on the first race—winning £4.10—and then on the last race, the fifteenth on the card, which lost me a quid. The published version of my submission says that my second bet was on a dog that came in fifteenth. That would be rare bad luck. Of course, only six dogs race at one time. Our newsletter editor needs to get out more, see the track for himself. Smell the dog shit, beer, fags and BO.

There are bills and statements and DVDs piled on my computer's scanner-printer. In addition, two small stacks of telephone message pages and Post-it notes. These are covered in marks that even the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith would tremble at. No Reformed Egyptian, my hand. Just so you know: The squiggles that Smith supposedly copied from his gold plates were not Reformed Egyptian either, never mind what he said.

By the way, I have been missing the Rocky Mountains lately, and many friends living out there, happens a few are still Mormons. At Day Services recently, a member of the group came across something about the Mormons in the newspaper out of Newcastle. And he mentioned aloud that he had no idea who or what Joseph Smith was. A Prophet, I announced in the style of an angel. In saying it, I appreciated that Smith was a Prophet to those who believed in 1830. Still is to the members who heed their leaders’ orders to stay clear of anything that might show the Church in a bad light. If the truth makes the Saints look bad, then ignore it. We all have prophets, leaders and visions when you think about it. You can find them in the London Underground and online. Why not?

For three weeks now, I have been taking a break from writing. (Except for the article on my gambling income. £4.10 is about $8.00, so I am not stacking banknotes on my desk.)

No creative writing at all, just the scribbles I fit on Post-it Notes and on the backs of old envelopes. Things to write about one day. Or one evening with music playing. I must have music when I write, played loudly. This evening I fiddled about in my computer's music library—I have some ten thousand tracks—and decided to go with the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré.

Looking through some papers here, trying not to spill the coffee, I see that I had thought to write about the Creation, the Big Bang, the Pop of the Cork and the Earliest Ejaculation. It seemed like a good idea when I wrote that Post-it. I actually write on the backs of Post-its as well, which seems sensible because I think the people at Post-it really want you to just use the front side, then move on to another page. Use up their product in half the time; buy a pad twice as often. Bad for Global Warming. I go round to the back. The Green Man.

On the two sides of the small yellow square I have noted untidily that I should look up a definition of chaos, to see if that came before, during or after the Creation. Well, you take your religion, you make your choice. Therefore, I scribbled around that note "The Rock Room" which does mean something to me, even with my decrepit brain. Let us tease it out.

In St. George, Utah, in the grounds of a Mormon Temple, a visitors' centre has been built which gives those without the all-important pass, a ticket to "The House of The Lord", some indication of what might be going on inside the sacred/secret Temple. One room in the visitors' centre has paintings, models and films of all sorts of cosmic places and things on every surface, including top and bottom, and very loud and booming noises. God might be playing pinball and ringing up the points. God has crazy flipper fingers. The first time I was struck suddenly deaf for a doubter. The room is nicknamed "The Rock Room" and aptly so. I would like to have heard Jimi Hendrix's "Third Rock from the Sun" playing on their hi-fi. Alternatively, darker, for the Prophet: “Hey, Joe. Where you going with that gun in your hand?” God?

If you are in St. George, Utah, go looking for the Rock Room. It really is worth a visit. Five minutes into the Creation should be plenty at the speed of light. You may find one of the more remarkable facts of life is that things repeat, follow shapes, sizes, and laws of physics and nature, and yet are always new somehow. Very big. Very small. All alike. A scientist always anticipates another particle, yet unseen, yet unfelt. Somehow, all those rocks flying about make sense; you believe it without thinking much on it. Fling a fistful of Utah's red dust in the air. The Rock Room. A fistful of star stuff. It is so real that it is very nearly knowing all without knowing. That is a good place to reach until you learn to exceed the speed of light.

Then walk outside, perhaps a little deaf from the Big Bang, and look at the trees in the Temple grounds. Look at the trees and that extraordinary and peculiar Temple building. What curious things we create. Who was Joseph Smith? Indeed!

Yes, things repeat. In Bermuda, I lived about ten miles from an old town called St. George's. In southern Utah, I lived about twenty miles from a fast-growing town called St. George. These few summer days in Amble-by-the-Sea, Northumberland, I wear a baseball cap with "St. George's" on it. I bought it in Bermuda, actually. However, here it sometimes gets a raised eyebrow. There is a large psychiatric institution about fifteen miles away. St. George's Hospital. I am smiling.

Broadcasting live from Amble-by-the-Sea. As I sit here, my neighbours upstairs are having one hell of a row. Usually she says little while he thumps and screams from room to room. This evening she is howling back, using language that would embarrass a sailor.

It interests me that my neighbour's screams are quite deep for a woman. I must do the research. Must women scream in a high-pitched voice? Find an illustration.

Out of the blue, I am picturing Gertrude Stein arguing with Alice B. Toklas while hanging some pictures. You just know, without being there, that Alice is shrill and Gertrude booms like a God in a Rock Room. Gertrude is holding a portrait of herself by Picasso.

"I'm tired of that one, Gertrude. You look so severe. Let's have the Matisse in here for a spell."
"But Pablo might stop by, Alice. There is no sin worse than ungratefulness. The damn thing might be worth something one day."
"If Picasso does come round, let's ask him to paint some cows."
"And Henri goes out on the porch."

All is quiet overhead. Through my kitchen window, I see the woman from upstairs has just walked outside into the courtyard holding a bottle of wine and a single glass. That says a good deal. Perhaps she clocked her partner with it before coming down.

A few more notes on the subject of Creation under my spectacles case. I recently read something about the latest ideas on the subject: Where did we come from? And there is a little we can study first hand. Red dust from St. George or a universe full of Voyagers’ Ways.

Did you know that many, most actually, dinosaurs in museums have been reconstructed from very small fossil fragments? A chipped tooth and a slipped disc and you have a "Nuoerosaurus Chaganensis" as large as life, even its diet, disposition and complexion described. Would you prefer to just look at the bits, in a tattered shoebox, or to wonder about and over the greater skeleton that holds them up, knowing there may be major flaws in that framework as reinvented by 2000 Man? Tough choice. What sells tickets and stuffed toys in the museum gift shop? The resurrected beast booming at its prey, the neighbours, family and friends. They think. Did you see the movies too? The puddles rippled. How do we know that? Laws of physics.

My flat is next to a small Roman Catholic chapel with a large freestanding Christ on the Cross in its garden. Very nearly life-size. You can walk behind it, have a look at the curve in Jesus' back, twisted in pain, and get a feel for His shoulder blades and the stress in His neck, bent forward as it is. Most people do not get to see past the front. In fact, they do not seem interested in going around the body.

The Mormons again—they should be giving me indulgences for the publicity—must be mentioned again. In a very large visitors' centre in Temple Square in Salt Lake City there is a copy of Thorvaldsen Bertel's statue of the Christus. The Maker stands, arms outstretched, below the vault of Heaven. You can walk up and down behind Him. In this room, the only sounds are whispers, hundreds of them. “See, the signs of the nails in his hands.”

Thirty-five years in therapy and I wonder if existential psychotherapy just creates a man who is only interested in being—finding—himself, and gaining the acceptance and management of his most immediate personal experiences. Dinosaurs' complete lives from Post-it notes in shoeboxes. Can people see my back? Will they bother when I am whole?

If it is a luxury to sit and write about life as it all comes to mind, observed through a quarent, a door in time, or seen through a kitchen window—my neighbour has returned to her flat, taking her bottle and glass—it is a luxury to stop writing when you want to. If you have that much control. The Midas touch. Can therapy fix that?

I still have a few lines to work through, jotted down days ago on the back of my Centre Newsletter. These are for me, I suppose.

Listen: When I was eleven years old, I won a school prize, at Warwick Academy, for mathematics. The only prize I ever won there. Of course, it was for simple arithmetic. I had not yet cracked open the blue algebra and red geometry textbooks. The next year we had those. Our arithmetic included working in pounds, shillings and pence. In addition, and deduction, parts of those pence. The price of one small bag of gobstoppers could take an hour to calculate.

Came an orange biology book. I can still recall the name of that particular text. Brocklehurst & Ward. The reproductive organs, just line drawings, shown three-quarters of the way through it, were those of rabbits. Why rabbits? I wonder. We did not have human health science. Ever. We eventually killed and dissected a rabbit in my last year at Warwick Academy. I was in therapy five years later.

Mrs Lorna Harriott read us wonderful books that always required that we reach up to grasp their meanings. I was that underdeveloped that I did not then wonder if she had been named for Lorna Doone. She read that to us when we were about thirteen. Her readings were spirited, fascinating, and most desirable. She did drink spirits, though I did not recognise it then.

Senior School French came from a green book and the fleshy lips of Monsieur Ron. Monsieur Ron was le mâitre, and we were les élèves, and he had to leave the staff of l'école he had just joined before the year was out. Le nervous breakdown.

We did in one of our mathematics teachers a year or so later. One day she told us all to rest our heads down on our arms folded on our desktops. Close your eyes. Calm down. This would have been better advice for herself at that moment. It was an afternoon and we were wearing our summer uniforms. Khaki shorts and brown knee socks. She slipped out of the classroom, it was Lower 4. Nobody saw her leave. It was the only time we ever did what she asked of us. Living is easy with eyes closed. We never saw her again.

As I walked along the High Street and through the passageway to my flat's door this evening, I recreated an image from one of Virginia Woolf's novels. Live people turning into so many small piles of grey ashes—right there on the pavements: men, women and children—with bits of gold residue from wedding rings, earrings and the dental fillings of the older of us sparkling in the dust.

Thumping my jacket—my wallet was there—and fishing out my house keys, I wondered if it is the ashes that we come with, or the gold we adorn ourselves with, that really matters at the end of the day.

Reprise: Why do I do this? Check and check again. My excuse is—I tell people who do not always ask or want to know—I am British and I am getting on. There is more to me than that, but we would be getting into very small fractions and I seem to have lost any aptitude for dealing with numbers.

10 September 2007 / 3 May 2010

The Prints of the Nails

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
Aldous Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963)

I HAVE BEEN LIVING IN MY FLAT for five years now and I could not count the number of times I have approached my door onto the High Street, key in hand, to let myself in. Moreover, how many times might I have left home, turned to face the door from the outside so that I might lock it, and then walked away?

Five years, yet only a few months ago did a new friend, coming to visit for the first time, point out that next to my door, on the right-hand side, are six holes in the wall: Imprints of the nails, or screws, which must have once fastened a sign or plaque of some kind to the building. I had never noticed. Now I always see the marks in the stone.

This block of flats, created from a coach house that I have seen in photographs taken well over a hundred years ago, has three units on the ground level and three on the first floor, though the layout in any flat at street level does not match that above it. My flat has some odd angles with parts of two flats above mine. There is a passage through the building from the street to some garages and a courtyard. It is a narrow entrance and one can see damage inflicted by vehicles. (Aldous Huxley: “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”)

Once upon a time, so I have been told, there was a slaughterhouse, an abattoir, behind my flat. I dare say the piggies and lambs were herded through the passage, penned out back, and then killed and butchered in what is now a double-garage. Blood might have run across the floor and towards my courtyard because there seem to be a fair number of drains and I have heard the sounds of water trickling below the surface.

More recently, my flat may have been a dental office. That is somebody’s recollection, if not mine. I have wondered how the dentist’s surgery would have been laid out. I have an enormous kitchen (which I have subdivided into an office, and here I am writing this piece) and part of it may have been the heart of the surgery, seeing as the plumbing is located in this room. One would want to flush the spit and blood out of the building, and the drains that once serviced the abattoir outside my kitchen would have been an obvious choice.

My flat was renovated not long before I moved in. It is showing signs of wear and tear five years on. The roof on the back porch had a spell of leaking the winter before last and water got behind the wallpaper inside the porch, which now is becoming unglued. There are patches of dampness inside the corridor leading to the front door. The ceiling in the kitchen leaked for a day when my upstairs neighbours were having their kitchen or bathroom plumbing replaced. The damage to my ceiling was minor, but I always notice it because I saw it actually happening on the day. I ran upstairs to tell the workers what was going on; they were unconcerned, switching off something at their end, but not coming down to see what they had created below. I am grateful that I was in when the water started running through my ceiling, onto the counter top and then onto my floor: I was able to clean it up with a bucket, mop and a few towels. Left unchecked, I could have had a paddling pool when I got in.

The narrow road that emerges through the passage onto the High Street is higher behind the flats, and on two occasions during extremely heavy rainfall, the passage and the various drains in my courtyard and in the narrow road itself have not been able to cope with the run-off. Fortunately, I was at home when this happened and waded outside in over a foot of water and searched with my hands in the muck to pull up the drain covers. The water level had risen over my back step’s stoop, and was making its way across the inside of my porch and nearing the kitchen.

My flat came “furnished” and it had more than the basic furniture one might expect. There was a big bottle of talcum powder under the bathroom sink, cigarette butts in an ashtray, and every sort of Indian spice in bottles and packets on a top shelf in the kitchen cupboard. There were also tools, mops, houseplants, dishes, pots and pans, and a breadbox. Oh, and a George Foreman Grill. Yes, I had no need to buy curtains, pillows, sheets or a laundry hamper, or airing racks to dry the laundry on when I have washed it in the machine provided by my landlord.

This is a rather roomy flat, and I like a bit of clutter, so I have purchased a second, larger, television, several bookcases (and hundreds of books and DVDs to put in the bookcases), mats, tables, lamps and extra bedding, blankets and cushions. I installed a miniature dachshund puppy three years ago, and he has his own bed and heaps of toys, which are supposed to be under my desk. Cailean and his friend, Sasha, manage to distribute meerkats, turtles, snakes, footballs, and blankets throughout the flat in minutes. (Huxley: “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”)

I have a CD-player that also transmits sound in stereo from my TV and DVD-player, as well as my iPod. I do not have very many CDs now, but I have well over 600 albums on my iPod. I play music a good deal of the time, and sometimes the volume is higher than I intend because I have neglected to wear my hearing aid. If I notice the device on my bedside table I am a bit horrified when I put it in my ear and appreciate the fact that The Who are performing “Won’t Get Fooled Again” at live concert volume in my front room. I do have those upstairs neighbours only plywood away.

Now and then, I get post though my letterbox addressed to “Archway Cottage”. As the passage through the block of six flats is arched, I am guessing that the entire block or at least my flat is Archway Cottage.

Could the missing sign outside my front door have read Archway Cottage? It would have been a large sign, judging by the outline left on the sandstone block to which it was attached. It might have also read “Dental Office” and the name of the dentist and even his opening hours might have been noted on it.

I do not dream all that much about this flat, perhaps because I am busy living in it. I do not hear or see any ghosts: No dentists or their patients, or hogs, cows and sheep keep me up at night. Perhaps five years is not time enough.

Last night I dreamed of my mother. I have been visiting with her, as it were, regularly over the past winter. My mother has been dead for almost 20 years. And in last night’s dream I was at the house where I spent much of my childhood, stopping by to see how my mother was getting on (I am reminded of something else Aldous Huxley wrote: “Maybe this world is another planet's hell.”) and found that she had installed a fairly large fishpond outside her front door.

One of my sisters materialised (travel is easy in my dreams) and pointed out first tiny, grey fish no bigger than tadpoles, then one rather sizeable silver fish that was too big for the pool, its dorsal fin breaking the surface as it wriggled around trying to lift itself off of the bottom. That was a moment of sudden intense anxiety in my dream. To be honest, I had been having an anxious evening in what I suppose I could describe as my “real life”. A friend had been trying to get about, to enjoy freedom, and had been trapped on the mud, perhaps even the rocks, underlying his emotions. (Huxley again: “Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”)

Should one be giving memories the time of day or night? Private literature sounds rather exciting, rather enticing. Alternatively, should one think on this last line from Aldous Huxley, a man born on the very same day as my own grandfather Harry Charles Christopher Eldridge: “Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.”

Perhaps we should just live fully in the Here and Now, Boys!

Water Worlds

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

I MUST HAVE BEEN NO OLDER than five when I noticed the rain rushing down the driveway in my mother’s garden at such a volume that it could not be absorbed or carried away quickly enough to keep it from flowing into our garage. In Bermuda we had sudden rainstorms, often with extraordinarily violent thunder and lightning, and if the Island had been having one of its frequent droughts, the ground would be packed down as hard as concrete. All moisture would puddle and flow, absorption might happen gradually, and saturation would take a great deal of time.

And I crouched in my bare feet, in my Bermuda shorts, in our garage as several inches of water collected on the rough cement floor. The water, I recall rather well, was warm, and there were bits of sand in it. It had a slight texture besides that of pure flowing water. I found some pieces of wood, remnants from the roof beams of the garage (it had been only recently constructed to replace an open trellis with stephanotis vines on it that did nothing to protect the car), and tried to get them floating. Some were too heavy, some too thick, to sail about easily on my own private inland sea. Some, however, became ships and boats.

As the rainwater continued to drain into the garage, the currents within it would move my wooden ships about. No need for me to guide them with my hands. Like some sort of lazy god I could watch my creation work itself out. Some of the ships sailed safely to ports within the garage, others snagged on the uneven parts of the floor, and a few were carried right out of the garage door and down the driveway to the lower road behind our house.

Many of my Eldridge relatives have served in the Royal Navy. A cousin is an officer in what remains of Britain’s navy at this moment. It is worth noting he was on HMS Manchester last summer when she was sailing off the shores of Bermuda during Hurricane Igor, in case the Island needed help when the storm had passed. As it happened, no help was requested, and one assumes none was required.

The closest I have come to boating was a spell of rowing a relative’s punt (called Swampy) in Hamilton Harbour on a weekend. My plan was to build up my scrawny body. It did not help.

On my travels I have seen a good deal of water, salt and fresh. I have sailed across Lake Michigan on a car ferry to Beaver Island. I have driven up a fairly shallow stream in the mountains above Salt Lake City in a Ford Bronco SUV, which was hardly kind to Nature. One of the most incredible rainstorms I have witnessed was in Hurricane, Utah, in about 1994. That is a desert area, usually dry as a bone, where tumbleweeds rolled down the gravel-coated Main Street and orange dust blew about and coated everything the colour of the landscapes in John Wayne’s western movies. One afternoon I was in a car with a friend at the junction of Main and State Street and a microburst opened above us. We pulled over to the side of the road and slowly moved into the parking area outside a Taco Time fast food outlet. The world vanished as the rain poured onto the Hurricane Valley, and in a minute there was a foot of water on the roads and low-lying areas in the centre of town where we were attempting to shelter. If the water had been much deeper it might have been a flash flood, but it was able to move quickly enough to even lower ground at the south side of town. Still, it was rather exciting, rather frightening.

Having lived through several major hurricanes in Bermuda, complete with tornados and water-spouts and deluging rain, I can answer the frequent questions I get regarding the Bermuda Triangle with my general theory that it just happens to be a part of the western Atlantic that has frequent and often sudden storms, and it is a busy area for shipping and air travel. I’m almost certain that there are no more UFOs near Bermuda than there are anywhere else. Wind and rain happen, waves happen, things go down.

Last Wednesday we had a spectacular day. It was so bright and sunny, and fairly warm, that we took the dogs for a walk by the River Coquet. We even sat in the sun and talked about the sparkling light on the water in the River and out towards the Harbour entrance. The dogs ran about at the end of their longest retractable leads and returned with clean feet. The bank of the River has been under ice, snow or mud since last autumn. This was the first walk there since then.

Since Wednesday, we have had steady rain. It is snowing on higher ground, but we’ve only had some sleet on the coast. Howling winds. Dark skies. Wet footprints (dog and man size) in the hallway.

To summarise: Summer of 2011 was on 16 February this year, and it was lovely.

This afternoon we went to lunch at The Fleece Inn up in Alnwick. The landlord opened the doors at noon and had a coal fire going. On a cold, rainy day this was appreciated. It is an old pub, full of character. It happens to have a men’s toilet (the Americans might call it a restroom) for customers only (reads the sign) that is the most hideous public bog I have ever come across. The walls seem to be running with moisture, the urinal is along two walls with a stinking trough at one’s feet, and the red-tile floor is puddled. The single cubicle does not lock. I am rather surprised that a business would present itself so badly, even if it may be that most of the lads who use the toilet are off their faces and cannot focus on anything at all. I can only guess that the toilet is so ancient that it is “listed” and cannot be renovated or replaced; it is caught up, trapped, in history. I like history well enough, but I don’t care to paddle across a toilet’s floor to reach a smelly urinal. To use the cubicle, to actually sit on the commode, one would have to push on the door with one’s feet to keep it shut while one did one’s business.

I recommend The Fleece Inn, but do relieve yourself before you leave home.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts,

or my thoughts the result of my dreams.
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

It is a little after five o’clock in the evening. I woke twelve hours ago having a peculiar dream about North and South Korea. In my dream the North had finally lobbed some sort of nuclear bomb at the South. It has not been mentioned during the day, I’ve not watched the telly though. I imagine the booming wind and the rattling sleet on my windows at daybreak may have turned my dreams to thoughts of war, or my thoughts of war to dreams.

There's high, and there's high, and to get really high -

I mean so high that you can walk on the water,

that high-that's where I'm going.
George Harrison (1943-2001)

It’s full moon just now and the water in the Estuary is as high as I have ever seen it, perhaps a foot more and the road to Warkworth will be awash. The pastures on the other side of the road were puddled this morning, and are pond-like tonight.

The sky is dark as I write this, the rain is merciless. I know there’s a spring and summer out there. The snowdrops are up and blossoming, the daffodils are several inches high. We don’t really do crocuses up here, not the way they do in, say, Hyde Park. We will have wild bluebells and then the cultured plants. I usually invest in daisy-like seedlings and petunias. Most years I am inundated with flowers on my side of the courtyard.

One has to remember all that when it is this grim. In this Water World.

Purple Lights & Prophets' Promises

God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
André Gide (1869-1951)


A YEAR AGO I MADE FUN of the public Christmas decorations in the village, in particular the lights on our main street which were outshone by the sign at Euro-Pizza; the parade to mark the holiday season also seemed unusual to me with its escort of heavy motorcycles and Alice in Wonderland theme.

It was too cold and chucking rain on the night of this year’s parade and I stayed inside. Our community newspaper reports that a good crowd turned out to watch a Cinderella-themed trek down Queen Street, again with the motorcycles, and drummers. Santa Claus (as we now must refer to Father Christmas) was in Amble’s new ice-cream parlour at the far end of Queen Street, an encouragement to the children to ignore the ghastly weather, struggle down to Spurreli’s, and place their gift orders with the Bearded One. Ho! Ho! Ho!

We are having a brutal winter up here in God’s Country again this year, and it has been looking a lot like Christmas for over a month. Not exactly like Christmas in the mountains above Salt Lake City (I’ve been there, done that, several times) where vast quantities of snow, dense fog and mind-numbing temperatures are handled fairly easily. Here in our frozen north, everything tends to grind to a halt as the first flurries begin. I think that Northumberland could do with some free enterprise when it comes to ploughing the snow from the side roads (it’s all narrow country lanes up here) and car parks. In Salt Lake City, people with trucks and tractors would attach ploughing devices and head off to make a few dollars. I went with a friend to clear some parking areas at Mormon chapels in SLC, and experienced the worst motion sickness I’ve had before or since; but there are people who enjoy that sensation (the same people who enjoy Disneyland’s rides, I think).

There’s a tree, barren of leaves, but well-lit by silvery fairy lights just outside my front door and twenty-five yards over to the right. It’s rather attractive, and I do not know if it is a public display or provided by the householder next to the tree, but it greets everyone coming into Amble from the north, from Warkworth. There’s a bench below the tree and I suppose a hardy soul could sit there and enjoy the glitter overhead. Well, there’s a foot of snow on the bench, so a very hardy soul with thick trousers.

The overhead lights on Queen Street are new this year, and are purple. Small, purple and plentiful. I have been walking Cailean after dark (which is not that late in the afternoon just now, think three o’clock) to the Town Square at the bottom of the street, with the world somehow transformed by the bluish colours above. Other lights are attached to the first floor outside walls on Queen Street, in most cases above shop-fronts. Several of our shops have lovely displays in their windows which can still be seen at about 3.30pm as the businesses are open. Shutters tend to come down at five and the village world is less beautiful.

Our pavements are not always clear of ice, and the snow on the road gradually gets filthy and shifted up onto the pavement’s edges, narrowing any pathways. One must walk most carefully. I plod along hardly lifting my feet. Cailean, in his dark blue or tartan overcoat pads along quickly on short dachshund legs. By the time we get home he’s shivering and his underside is very grubby. I’m cold as well, no matter how many layers I’ve dressed in, and even my sturdy shoes are soggy and need to go by the fire. For all that, we are enjoying our walks in the purple world.

When I went to get my fibre-optic Christmas tree out of the cupboard in the back porch a week ago I found it below no end of boxes, bags and bits of furniture. That cupboard is a catch-all. So I decided to empty the cupboard, remove the tree in its box, and then restack things neatly. And I did all that, in a little over an hour. There’s no heating in the back porch and it was not exactly pleasant work. My cupboard is now as tidy as one could get, the tree in its box is still in there, on top of everything; I was so tired that I couldn’t be arsed to take it out and assemble it. I’ve settled with arranging my greeting cards around the fireplace in the front room. Perfectly happy with that, I am.

There is a tall brass standing lamp with a very large pink shade in my front room. It looks like something I imagine a Victorian whorehouse might feature. This is conjecture; I’ve not been in a Victorian whorehouse. But one sees films. With the lamp lit the room glows pink. The electric fire is disguised as a coal oven, and that gleams nicely. With the greeting cards along the hearth, on the mantelpiece and around a large mirror, the room is very seasonal. If my curtains are open, there’s usually snow flying around outside and icicles hanging about. Yes, it works rather well.

I have put up some lights. This meant that I had to stand on the one chair with a flat, fairly hard seat; not something I like doing as I do not enjoy heights, ladders, wobbling and reaching. Two days ago my overhead light fixture in the bathroom suddenly made a popping noise, and one of its three bulbs went dark. A few hours later a second bulb blew. Now my bathroom is in the centre of the flat, and there is no window to the outside. There are no electrical outlets; one could not even take in a small lamp in an emergency. It is always like midnight in there! In the past I’ve only been able to get the particular bulbs from a shop up in Alnwick, so I was wondering how I’d manage that in the ice and snow. However, I was plodding past a little shop in Amble that sells electrical goods (radios, hair-dryers, clocks and TVs) and thought to go in. The shopkeeper now has light bulbs and (Hallelujah!) had the very kind I needed. A secular prayer answered?

I headed home with my bulbs (I bought extras, the darn things seem to burn out every six months) and got out my chair. A few unsteady minutes later my lights were up and the bathroom was well-lit once more. No peeing or shaving in the dark!

Yesterday the electricity went off all over the village. The snow was falling heavily and the roads had not been ploughed or gritted, and few cars had even tried to navigate them. Coast Guard, fire and hospital ambulance vehicles crawled past the flat, a helicopter was overhead somewhere, sirens going off. Despite the falling snow and cold, suddenly the street outside was heaving with people on foot heading down the hill after the emergency crews. Hours later the lights came on again, but I have not been able to discover what the brouhaha was all about.

For some, this is a most holy season. I grew up singing carols and Christmas hymns at grammar school and in church. We usually had a tree in the living room, and we had dodgy lights on it; if one burned out, they all switched off. Which was the bad bulb? An hour to try every last one.

Christmas Eve was reserved for a family meal. The turkey tended to be dry and for some reason we had nasty tinned Danish hams. A sherry trifle (without the sherry) was usually served for dessert. When I was in my mid- to late-teens I used to attend a candle-lit service at St Paul’s (Church of England) with friends at midnight on Christmas Eve, usually fortified with eggnog. Gifts were opened early on Christmas Day. We always had a tin of Quality Street chocolates. Christmas Day meant The Queen's Speech on the telly. Boxing Day meant more visiting with family.

I hardly think of Christmas in a Christian context now. I’m not really alone in that. I’m fairly sure not one of my greeting cards has featured a Nativity scene this year. I have had several dogs wearing Santa hats, which Cailean appreciates.

I think there’s no Christian church or sect that holds strictly to the belief that 25 December is the actual day on which its Jesus was born. The Mormons, I think, say it’s on their magical 6 April. If one believes the Bible (and I cannot say I do now) the indications are that Jesus was born in the spring.

It would be nice to mark the season as a time of peace. The birth of the Prince of Peace if you wish; though the Bible has him saying (prophetically, accurately) that he was not bringing peace, but a sword. Looking at today’s headlines, we seem further from peace than ever. The bright lights might well be explosions in the East.

Here’s a lovely bit of Shakespeare (Richard II, Act II, Scene IV):

The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

Shakespeare seems to have sad tidings, little comfort and joy. Despite that, the words he uses are exquisite. Little purple lights above a cold, dark street.

What to do? Back to André Gide:

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.

Enter the Whirlwind

Change your opinions,
Keep to your principles;
Change your leaves,
Keep intact your roots.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

I WORE A SWEATER YESTERDAY, as well as my corduroy jacket, and did not feel over-warm. The ghastly metal seat in the Alnwick Bus Station was really rather cold on my backside; I shall soon have to get my winter trousers down from the suitcases atop my wardrobe where I store them for the two or three months that pass for summer up here.

Yesterday’s slight chill is today’s howling gale from the north, and genuine cold. The BBC weatherman used the “F” and “S” words. Ground Frost in Northern England by Friday night, and Snow in the Scottish Highlands by weekend. I live less than 50 miles from Scotland. The first visible sign of winter in Amble is usually an open flat-bed truck come down from Scotland with an unintentional load of snow. I should point out that one’s breath shows in the cold morning air well before the imported precipitation, and I’ve noticed mine as I wait for the car for over a week now.

We had wonderfully coloured autumn leaves in 2008, and then last year, in early September, we had a sudden violent windstorm which withered most of the leaves here on the coast in a day or two. The leaves fell to the ground and blew, I think, into the North Sea before the week was out. They vanished! Autumn’s lease, like that of summer, had all too short a date. One did see some colours in forested areas inland, but nothing compared to 2008. I am watching the plants in the courtyard being blown about; they are somewhat protected. The cables and power-lines above the street are snapping about in the wind, so it’s safe to assume that the bigger trees in town are shaking like a Hawaiian hula-dancer.

There were American and Japanese tourists on the bus yesterday, most of them dressed in summer clothes. Shorts, t-shirts and blouses along with their Foster Grants. The bus hauled a fair number of them from Alnwick (their shopping bags indicated visits to the Castle with its Harry Potter connection and the Alnwick Gardens) over to Alnmouth Village. The usual anxious questions from our visitors: “Are we there yet?” “Will the pubs be open?”

There was an English couple on the bus; I’d guess a husband and wife. Older, dressed for winter, and dressed in rather more formal clothes than the foreigners. I’ll add, to be honest, this couple looked rather shabby, unkempt. They were sat together across and a few rows in front of me in the seats indicated for elderly and infirm passengers. The woman pressed the bell and the couple stood up. The signs on the bus tell us to ring the bell, but to remain seated until the bus stops. I am the only person I know who does that; even the most wibbly of the wobblies insist on rising and making their ways to the door, even as the bus thrashes about. I noticed that the gentleman with his rumpled collar and poorly-knotted tie, old grey-green suit, and a yellow cardigan, had a white stick. He turned back my way, his eyes clamped shut, and it was obvious that he’d come to town without his dentures. His wife called out to the driver: “We can’t see. We want the stop across the roundabout, past the Royal Oak.” They moved along the bus. I knew she’d got it wrong, there is no Royal Oak in Alnwick, it is The Oaks Hotel. The driver brought the bus through the roundabout, which the old lady could sense, and she started calling loudly: “This is the one. This is the one. Stop!” though we hadn’t actually reached the bus stop. She was quite anxious. The bus jerked to a halt and the driver and everyone on the lower deck of the bus watched the blind couple feel their way out of the bus and onto the pavement. Once outside, the man held onto the woman’s arm and began tap-tapping his stick (it was an ordinary walking cane that had been painted white except at the curved handle). They shuffled away, as winter, while those of us on the bus, summer and autumn, rolled on towards Alnmouth.

Weekend before last I went on a day-trip to Bowness on Windermere in the Lake District. Somehow the weather cooperated and we had brilliant sunshine until late afternoon. We’d taken a coach to Haverthwaite where we boarded a steam locomotive and took a really, really slow trip over to Lakeside. In Lakeside we visited an aquarium, and then everybody except me and our coach driver took a steamer down Windermere to Bowness. I opted to do the drive as I do not like boats and with my brother dying in a boating accent last March I’m now totally boat-phobic.




On the train, and during the coach ride around the lake to Bowness, I had some wonderful views of the English countryside. So lush, so green, I have decided that when I win the Lotto I shall buy one of the large estates near Windermere that we passed by. I am wondering, of course, whether all those leafy trees will be as bare as ours in Amble in a matter of weeks. Trees and men are subject to autumn and winter.

On the way back from the Lake District, crossing the tops of the Pennines, we moved slowly through a barren landscape, just low scrub and rocky outcrops. The ubiquitous loose-stone walls were not in evidence, the only barrier between the land and the highway was fencing. There were a very few stone cottages, none looking habitable. A most desolate place. And we passed a small herd of camels. It must be pretty boring up there, even for a camel, as the beasts were standing at the fence watching the traffic go by. The camels would not be surprised by the cars and coaches, for that is their lot by night and day. For me, on the coach, listening to Jefferson Airplane on my iPod, it really was a most unexpected sight to look out at dromedaries. Will they be up there come the snow?

There’s an apple tree in a garden just along the street from my flat. This is the first year in five that the tree is truly burdened down with apples. They are starting to fall, in the grass and some onto the pavement. None are gathered up and I wonder if they are sour. D.H. Lawrence wrote a poem about the falling of apples to the ground in the autumn, making the point that it is only in the fall to the earth and the bruising of the fruit as a result that the seeds inside are released and the cycle permitted a complete rotation. I believe Lawrence was thinking, also, of the advancing years of man, and that it is the ripe, fully mature fruit that gives rise to the new tree in the spring. Lawrence was only 44 when he died back in 1930.

One sure sign that autumn is arriving is The Last Night at The Proms. That was last week. The Promenade Concerts from the Royal Albert Hall in London run through the summer, and some are televised. I rather enjoyed a concert devoted to Doctor Who. I noticed that the audience was more than half young children, nice that many were with their fathers (rather than mothers). I’ve been following Doctor Who, off and on, since the 1960s. I’m more of a fan now than ever. Are my years running in reverse here?

Every year, when it is time for the grand finale of the Proms, I decide I won’t watch as it will be a bit silly with toffs wrapped in Union flags, bobbing up and down to a hornpipe, and then breaking out into “Rule, Britannia” and “Jerusalem”. However, each year I do tune in, just to see who the female soloist will be. The soloist and the conductor always have a chat with the audience on the Last Night, usually something quite amusing.

So, I switched on my telly, dialled up the BBC, and listened to some rather nice pieces by Richard Strauss. The soloist this year, American Renée Fleming, was splendid, dressed up like a ship of state and beaming.

There were Union flags aplenty, and a good many English, Welsh and Scottish national banners. I’m not too good on flags of the world, but did spot a Canadian flag and some from “down under”. Ms Fleming had a small “Stars and Stripes”.

And the audience sang along with “Jerusalem” and not just in the Albert Hall, but in vast crowds outside in Hyde Park, and in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, as well as at other venues in England. I used to sing Jerusalem at school; it was the only hymn we always sang loud enough for our tetchy Headmaster. Listening to Jerusalem the other night brought back the springtime of my life, when grass was green and tides were high. Now, summer is falling behind and autumn is upon me. My mother died in the autumn, 28 September 1992, when she was in the autumn of her life, aged 65. I tried to sing along with Jerusalem the other night, startling Cailean. It comes with too many memories now, which well up as tears. I wonder if William Blake ever wrote of England’s bleak and wintry land.

As I sit here, minutes from midday, the sky has clouded over completely. The wind seems wilder than ever, I can hear it booming in the rooftops, my chimney and fireplace played like an enormous musical instrument. There are the first bullets of rain on my windows.

The few flowers left by my kitchen door tend to be blue: lavender and hydrangeas and small blossoms that froth from my plant pots. Bees are fond of blue flowers, so there are still some of those around. Where do the honey bees go in the winter? Where will the people play?

Beastly Behavior

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
William Shakespeare (The Tempest. Act V, Scene I)

WHEN I GOT HOME THIS AFTERNOON and opened the kitchen door, I was shocked when Cailean did not run straight over to me. Usually he does this, all waggy-tail, and puts his front paws up on my shin. If I’ve been away some time, as I had today, my first duty is to put Cailean in his harness and get him outside to pee. He knows that.

Two o’clock this afternoon, after being away six hours, there was no sign of Cailean in the locked kitchen. There was, however, an extremely loud buzzing noise. I called out several times, and looked under the table and found a lump in Cailean’s bed. I lifted his thermal blanket and there he was looking up at me, rather concerned, I thought. Then he hopped out of his bed and ran into the front room. The buzzing in the kitchen continued uninterrupted.

I have smoke detectors in the flat; the buzzing noise was a completely different sound, much lower, but it seemed almost as loud. And it was coming from the window behind the kitchen sink. Cailean watched from the door on the far side of the room, and I fiddled with the net curtains. And found a gigantic bumble bee. One of those 747-type bees. How the hell do they get off the ground? How can they move about?

I’m not into killing things if I can possibly help it. Happens that in the car coming home we had to do some fancy driving on a country lane to avoid a cock pheasant. Our car was red and the male birds are attracted to anything red during the mating season. The pheasants are not suicides when they dash from the fields; they are just defending their territory. One sees more of them dead than alive just now. I hate to see the bunnies and hedgehogs that poorly time their crossings. Fewer dead badgers, but there are fewer of them in the first place. It's all distressing.

I don’t kill bugs either. My mother always said that it was bad luck to kill a spider in the house. My mother was a nutter; she didn’t practise what she preached. It proved the point though, our luck was shit. My early memories include my mother armed with an enormous Flit gun which she would pump all through the house, poisoning us as much as the ants and flies and cockroaches that were standard occupants of a house in Bermuda. My childhood memories stink of the oily Flit spray, especially in the summer. In the winter our kerosene stove, burning away in the middle of a room, gave off fumes enough to kill anything that wasn’t hiding under a floorboard somewhere. I’d be naïve to think that we came to no harm breathing all that poison.

In my flat in 2010 - 3,500 miles and years from Bermuda – I have the occasional spider. They come up through the bathtub drain, I think, as most of them turn up in the bathroom. The old joke goes: What have an old age pensioner and a spider got in common? They both need help getting out of the tub. My spiders, so far, have been fairly large and I have been able to pick them up with a bit of tissue, without crushing the beasties. They don’t seem to mind going outside in the courtyard at this time of year, but they do look rather stunned when there's ice and snow in the garden. I think they head straight for a warm drain and make their ways back to the bathroom.

I’ve never had a single ant inside the flat. After my Bermuda experience of ants – they'd materialise by the thousands in a minute – it seems odd not to see very many insects. They must be out there somewhere, but not around the house. We have a few wasps every mid-summer; one needs to brush them away as they can sting. And then, each year, I might see half a dozen great big bumblebees. Not in a little swarm, mind you. A single bee will struggle over the garden wall between my courtyard and the Catholic chapel next door. The Catholics have wonderful roses in their garden (along with an almost-life-size Jesus on a cross near their wheelie-bins) and I don’t know why a fat bee would expend the energy it takes to fly over a ten-foot wall when I have but a few Protestant (well, Atheist, I think) petunias and the odd daisy.

In Bermuda there was a van that would stop at select locations near the beaches (this before ugly, permanent, concrete-block eateries sprouted in the pink sand) and at parking lots in the city of Hamilton. This van, more of a wagon, sold hotdogs and hamburgers and soft drinks. It was fondly, perhaps accurately, referred to as the Roach Coach. I never, ever sampled any food from the Roach Coach, and I never knew anyone who did. I saw an ice-cream wagon in Morpeth last weekend. It was bright red (did it have pheasants in its grill?) and had the oddest name painted on it. MISTER WHIPPY. That’s a turn-off for me, frankly. We have an ice-cream wagon in Amble by the Sea. It plays the tune “Yankee Doodle” very loudly as it crawls around our few streets. Do American ice-cream wagons play “Rule Britannia”?

Back to the bee in my flat. I have a very large kitchen, it must be 18 feet by 18 feet, and there’s a smaller porch attached as well. I probably should have closed the door to the front room, but Cailean was sitting there anxiously watching. I lifted the net curtains and the bumblebee slowly flew out, very nearly hovering. When it crossed the counter I lowered a clear drinking glass from the drainer over it, and then down onto the surface. I had an envelope within reach and slid that under the glass, the bee being helpful and jumping up a bit. The noise of the bee buzzing in the glass, the paper trapping him there, as I carried it out into the courtyard was extraordinary. I wonder if one could have a musical instrument using different size bees, different size glasses, varying thicknesses of papers.

In the film “Sunday Bloody Sunday” the doctor had tubes of different lengths in his garden that were filled with coloured liquids and they played “Soave sia il vento” from Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”. I’m thinking something along those lines, with bees.

My bee, released in the courtyard, despite hours of captivity (it must have come in before I left the flat at eight o’clock), buzzed up and over the garden wall, to sanctuary at the Catholic Church.

The flat is buzz-free, quiet. Not even a Twitter. And I’m going to read in silence for a few hours till bedtime. Unless I laugh, it’s a funny book that I’m reading.

Stormy Weather

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane
And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right. I'm Jumpin’ Jack Flash,
It's a Gas! Gas! Gas!
The Rolling Stones (Jumpin’ Jack Flash)

AS IT HAPPENED, I WAS NOT born in a hurricane. It must have been a pretty fair Sunday morning because the doctor who delivered me (feet first) was planning on going sailing that day in November, mumble years ago. I arrived at 7.06 a.m. and I’d like to think the doctor managed to head over to the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club. I don’t know how many hours he had spent dragging me into this world. He might have been tired.

Yesterday, in Northumberland at least, the rains came. The last bits of snow and ice on my courtyard finally washed away. I spent the morning down the coast in Blyth, or in a field outside Blythe to be accurate, standing in the steady rain and a freezing fog, looking at polytunnels. Only a couple of the tunnels were in use, and they were not very warm inside, despite having some heated air pumped in from time to time. Tomato seedlings in one, and sprigs of lavender and bits of geraniums in rows and rows of plastic pots in another. I noticed an almost-dead rubber tree, five feet tall, in a large pot. I imagine it had lost its will to live over the harsh winter we’ve had.

I am familiar with rubber trees. Full-grown, enormous rubber trees in Bermuda. I have climbed about in them, including one that was famously painted by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe in the mid-1930s when she was recovering from a nervous breakdown. There was a rubber tree near my mother’s home, and we’d swing on ropes in it. Outside the Bermuda Library in Par-la-Ville Gardens, another rubber tree giant loomed over the verandas where I’d sit and read in the warmer weather. Rubber trees like to be warm and moist.

Last night I stepped outside in the rain and took a picture of my flat. That’s the photograph above. To be honest, we don’t have a great deal of heavy rain up here. This winter has been unusual for abundant snow. In four years it has not seemed worth taking a look at the rain, much less getting the camera out in it. Four years ago the reservoirs were running dry and we were not to water our lawns or wash our cars. This year I’m taking long showers and deep, hot baths, and I’m not feeling any guilt.

In Bermuda, despite a wet climate, the rain was not dependable. We might have three months of more-than-average rainfall, then many months of severe drought. Our water was caught on our whitewashed rooftops, running into tanks below the ground floor. We were permitted brief showers and very shallow baths. I still have a moment of panic and guilt to work through if I’ve been showering more than 90 seconds.

Curiously, I don’t recall many rainy days in Bermuda, though we must have had a few. I walked to and from school, or had a bicycle, and I can only think some days must have been inclement. I don’t recall having a raincoat or umbrella, which would have been a bother at school. We had a few rainy lunchtimes at school. Normally we ate picnic-style comestibles out on the fields. When it rained we were crammed into the school’s lunchroom. This room was also used if we were to see a film (the only film I recall involved a dam across the Zambezi River). In the lunchroom we had benches without backs and fold-away tables. The lunchroom eventually became the biology lab, same benches and tables. I cannot think where we spent rainy lunch periods after that conversion. Rain must have been rare, or a feature of the night.

During school holidays, I do remember a very few days spent on our dock, sheltered beneath an overturned boat on the planks, with fishing lines lowered through the gaps. I think we took shelter because someone usually had a precious transistor radio. But holidays were not rained out.

In Bermuda, it always rained on either Christmas Day or Boxing Day. We did not suffer this in misery, and we usually went visiting by car (relatives or taxis).

In England, rain rarely interrupted my life. I do remember standing in Piccadilly Circus very late at night in a downpour and discovering that the reflections in the water running around our feet were as exciting as the lights blinking on the buildings around us. An out-of-sight light show. Holidaying with my mother’s people in Harle Syke, Lancashire involved cold summers; we’d have coal fires in August, but misty rain at the worst. And if off to Morecambe for a week or two, every day we’d been walking along the front, or on the sands. Hardly hiding away from downpours.

I remember three hurricanes in Bermuda. Arlene, in August 1963, flattened all our tall casuarinas. The root systems were so dramatic when ripped from the ground that the local newspaper sent a reporter and photographer round to our house. My sister and I made the front page.

Hurricane Emily came along in late September of 1987. We woke to find it on top of the Island. It moved on quickly, but did a good deal of damage. We had no electricity for ten days. Fortunately, a neighbour had a cooker that used gas in cylinders and I was able to cook all my food. Water had to be dipped out of our tank with a bucket on a rope, enough to wash one’s face and underarms and bits, and to flush the toilet once or twice a day. The trees we’d planted to replace the casuarinas lost in the 1963 storm all came down in 1987.

On 5 September 2003, Hurricane Fabian roared over Bermuda and paused there for the best part of 15 hours. I was not quite alone in my cottage, my dog Aleks rode out the storm with me. The electricity went off almost immediately, and the reason was clear. From the house I could see that every tree in every direction had come down, and any power lines (and other utilities carried on poles on the roadsides) were in a tangle of trees in streets, on lawns and slumped across rooftops. I’d heard a thump, and the ceiling in my living room started leaking, but it didn’t collapse at least. Remarkably, my telephone kept working and through the day and late into the night I was able to speak with friends. One described his roof tiles dropping around his home, miraculously missing his car.

Fabian left me without electricity for a few days, but because I lived across the road from Bermuda’s Deputy Governor, and a few doors down from the Premier, the streets outside my residence were cleared promptly, and cables were going up on new poles within a day or two.

If you want to experience driving rain, a hurricane on an island 600 miles out in the Atlantic is the way to go. The rain comes at you horizontally; the waves break on the edge of the volcanic archipelago and sweep over everything. Tornados and water spouts drop water from overhead.

In Hurricane, Utah, about 15 years ago, I experienced a flash flood. I was with a friend in her car, not a mile from her home, and suddenly we were inundated by water. First from above, onto the hard desert sand and rock. The rain could not soak into the ground and Hurricane’s streets were soon awash as water roared along the valley floor. Cars were being driven up onto anything higher than street level, we followed. And for a relatively short time, perhaps 15 minutes, we watched the new river running through town. And then it was gone, rain and river. The sun blazed through and in an hour dust and tumbleweeds blew down Main Street as usual.

It is raining heavily today in Amble by the Sea. Cailean has refused to go more than a squat outside the door. I have the day off, and I had things I needed to do in town. So, off for a haircut and postage stamps. The barber and the postmistress both wondered why Cailean was not with me. I explained that he was not overly fond of chilly rain. If there’s running water on the pavement, or puddles, Cailean ends up swimming with those very short legs.

I’m enjoying the rain beating on the windows. I'm writing and listening to Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, sung in English. Cailean is in his bed, under his blanket. It’s not all bad, this rainy day.

I can show you
that when it starts to rain
everything’s the same.
I can show you.
I can show you.
Rain, I don’t mind.
The Beatles (Rain)