HOUDINI'S ELEPHANT

There live not three good men unhanged in England;
And one of them is fat and grows old:
God help the while!
A bad world, I say.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1

"I have never liked this part of Northamptonshire," broadcast—loudly—the unattractive woman in clothes that one might wear to muck out a stable.

Her accent was unusual for these parts: As Lancashire as "Coronation Street", as Lancashire as the red rose. More unusual, people usually refer to Northamptonshire as Northants. Most unusual, we were in Northumberland, not in Northamptonshire at all.

The bus was nearly a half-hour late leaving Alnwick and the light was already going by two o'clock in the afternoon. A few passengers whispered, as if whispering might not encourage it, the forecast was for snow. Would we reach our homes in time? Even with the bus's heaters on full we had our collars pulled up, scarves wrapped around and hats pulled down. Sitting, its engine switched off, in the Alnwick Bus Station for a half-hour, the bus was very nearly icy as we rolled onto Bondgate Without.

Ice and snow were not on the mind of the stranger from Lancashire, lost forty or so miles north of Newcastle. She wanted to give a running tour of what she did not like as she looked out of the 518 bus windows. She also made a few comments concerning those things that she approved of:

"Now, that is sensible housing. Easy care housing. Old people should be put in houses like that. All of them."

Did she mean all the old people, or all the houses? Should the nasty little boxes that I saw be available only to the old? Where I saw a row of brick shithouses, she saw a way to file away our seniors.

"No lawns to fuss over. Near the road."

But I saw flat, dirty, red brick fronts with squinting windows and broken concrete paths, certainly guiding the residents into the traffic, the only greenery being the few weeds pushing up through the cracks.

I do not know who lives in those unfortunate dwellings. On our side quite a busy road with a bus service, and behind and below them the railway line linking Edinburgh with London. I do approve of building houses near public transport. I believe in restricted private vehicle ownership. But nicer houses than these near Alnmouth Station. Houses should not be like, or look like, railway platform conveniences.

I may have told you this before: I love trains. I would very nearly live on a train if I could. When I win the Lotto, I shall have a suite in the Radisson Hotel in Glasgow where I shall store the clothes that I am not wearing that season, and the books I am not reading or needing for reference purposes. Many of my days and nights will be spent on trains.

Why the Glasgow Radisson? It is a nice hotel, extremely modern, with huge prints of the Beatles in "Sergeant Pepper" days on the lobby walls that remind me of my bedroom in 1967, when I had photos cut out of magazines taped to the walls; and the members of the Radisson staff have such wonderful accents. Eastern European, not at all Scottish. The rooms: They are all straight lines and right angles, mirrors and metal. Mattresses and cushions are firm, carpets and curtains are subtle. Electricity and electronics work from cards and switch-pads. Speakerphones. The bathrooms are huge.

My few possessions stand out in a sensible, tidy and organised atmosphere: I am the keeper of blobs and lumps, bags and heaps, unfolded clothes and opened books. Easy to find them in the Radisson rooms.

I actually like that for a time, being the standout stranger in the room. Nice as it is, I would not find it difficult to take to the rails. Of course, that will be my ideal world.

Now for something that might be useful to know. I am a giving person this morning; and giving is receiving:

"Retired people should be able to get mortgages for homes like that," continued the woman from Lancashire.

Just who was she talking to, besides all of us?

I remembered a class of insurance called "Mortgage Protector" that I used to deal with at American International Group. (You will have noticed their AIG logo on the front of Manchester United football jerseys.) You would be insured against the day you might have some misfortune and not be able to meet your mortgage payment. This works if you are twenty-five and have an income. As most elderly people have limited incomes, and more than a small chance of aching joints or worse, it is hardly good business to believe that most could support a mortgage, insured or not. Well, who would insure them?

I have told you this because one of you might think a Mortgage Protector policy is a good idea. I had never heard of such a thing until 1968. Personally, I have never had a mortgage and immediately sold a house that came my way so that I would not be tempted to borrow on the strength of the real estate market. I have lived in the rooms of others all my life.

One of those overused expressions that annoy me is "getting on the property ladder". Of course, it is a positive thing to want your own home, but—looking at the financial pages in November of 2007—houses are not as safe as houses. You might want to do what I do from time to time: Go camping.

The bus chugged a bit as we passed through the village of Warkworth, up the hill past the Castle. Yes, the Warkworth Castle that is the setting for Henry IV Part 1, Act 2 – Scene 3. Shakespeare's play, of course, though I would guess the great man never saw that particular castle.

By the way, the Shakespeare buildings in Stratford are remarkably cramped, the ceilings are low, the window and door lintels are low, and the doors are narrow. A very fat friend would hardly fit in. In order to enter one room, you usually have to walk through another.

One charming symptom of my mental state is that my mind wanders in time and space, and considerably so. I see ghosts. I commune with ghosts. I am a ghost. On the guided tour, as I walk through what appears to be a small, cluttered bedroom for a large family, I am interrupting something:

"Begging your pardon, Sir John Falstaff. Oh! And Mistress Quickly! And I thought you were only fictional characters. Just passing through."
"Go to, I know you well enough."
"You mean you do the lines as well?"
"You recognise the minor dialogue, Stranger?"
"Let's say I'm fairly well read. We have lots of rainy days in Northumbria."
"Go, you thing, go!" Falstaff is surprizingly firm for such a fat man.
"Say what thing? What thing?" asks Quickly, quickly.
"This is too cool." I head for the chink of a door on the far side.

Warkworth is a colony of Amble-by-the-Sea, where I live. Of course, you do not ever voice that opinion in Warkworth. I mentioned Warkworth to a friend from overseas and he said he thought he had stayed there once. A bed and breakfast on the main street—and it actually has only one main street that is, sadly, the route for all the traffic wanting to go up and down the coast on the scenic route—and at the top of the street, on the hill, a castle. Quite right.

In the summer time—several glorious months in 2006 and two days in 2007—every house, shop, pub and hotel in Warkworth has hanging baskets of flowers on the street side. There are planters, pots, and public gardens. A stone bridge crosses the river, herons and swans watch the traffic, and I am sure dragonflies dart above the surface of the rippling water. The village effloresces as only an English relic can. Milton Keynes does not. Nether Wallop does. You may have seen Midsomer on the television: people are dying to go there. Well, going to die there. Amidst the flowers.

I have discovered that one sure way of upsetting Americans is to mention them. They prefer to talk about themselves. Therefore, I will not. The other tourists who also visit and enjoy Warkworth are the Japanese. On fair days, the lanes are full of people with cameras.

"Take a picture with the castle behind me."
"Oh, mummy, do take a photo of that three-legged Border collie!"

I do not know how to write that in Japanese. I made up the collie.

Amble is picturesque in a different way. To be downright honest, the town looks as if it could do with a good scrubbing with abundant soap and boiling water. Nevertheless, we all love a grubby urchin, don't we? I never see people taking photographs of anything actually within Amble. Things that are not being photographed include the butcher's, the baker's, the greengrocer's, the fishmonger's, three chippies, many hairdresser’s, tanning salons, a couple of funeral parlours and an enormous sundial. The sundial must be fifteen feet high. Even at that height, sunlight is hard to come by. Nobody poses in front of our tiny post office that houses a bookstore with local titles on sale.

Time for a smile. In the window of the Co-Op Funeral Care at the bottom end of Queen Street, near that huge sundial, is a printed sign:

CCTV CAMERAS ARE IN USE
for personal safety
and security purposes.
Images may be shared with
crime prevention bodies.

I find the mention of "crime prevention bodies" connected to a funeral home rather a hoot. Dead coppers, maybe? Think of the movie plot!

Seriously, Amble is the perfect spot from which to take photographs. Look out to the North Sea for waves like mountains, look across the River Coquet Estuary (and bird sanctuary) for protected waters, and turn your lens on the boats, on Warkworth Castle a level mile along the River, on the Pier as the enormous waves smash around it. Face away from Amble.

I was a little concerned that the woman addressing the bus passengers might get off at my stop in Amble. She was not with anyone. When I talk to nobody in particular, I am hustled inside and someone pops a pill in my mouth. My flat, which is fifty feet from the bus stop, is across the road from the local, "The Wellwood Arms". People do get off the bus to take refreshment there. And within a few yards are a lawn bowling green, a Catholic church with a life-size Christ on the cross in the garden which seems like a good idea for security purposes (with or without a CCTV in His loincloth), an Italian restaurant, a dentist’s practice, apartments, terraced houses and the block of flats I live in. Yes, people get off at my bus stop.

The lady with the headscarf, scruffy coat and net shopping bag, and that thick Lancashire accent—my mother's family, the Lancasters, Cloughs and Proctors, come from Lancashire, I grew up hearing that dialect and can mimic it after a few drinks—stayed on the bus. A couple of other passengers stepped down and toddled off.

"Goodbye, stranger! This is Northumberland you do not like. Silly cow!"

I walked through the passage to the courtyard behind our six flats, the daylight was going, but at least the snow had not arrived. There were no birds coughing: We are all afraid of this H5N1 Virus, "Mad Crow Disease". I suddenly remembered seeing a black, man's glove on the path when I had left home in the morning. A nice glove, leather I think, though wet. I did not pick it up. Of course, I did think of O.J. Simpson. You would too. It had gone.

Earlier in the week, there had been a pair of blue denim men's shorts on the ground, not far from our street entrance. They looked new, they looked about my size, and they looked tempting. Blue is my colour. I wear shorts indoors. What do you do? I left them. I might have answered my front door to find a bloke there saying:

"I wonder if you've seen a pair of blue den … wait a minute! You have my shorts on. You perv."

In my "might have” world he would have been holding his hands in front of his crotch, bare to his shoes. Writers can think that sort of thing and get away with it. Talk about pervs!

Recently there was an entire, unblemished courgette on the pavement outside the flats. Unless a rabbit was carrying it under its arm and let it gently slip, I would have expected it to have fallen some distance from a shopping bag. But not a mark on it. How do these things happen? I was on my way to the ATM and decided that I would collect the courgette on the way back home. Fifteen minutes later, it had vanished. The rabbit, no doubt, had returned. We all do.

The tale I am telling is about homes, rooms, creature comforts and discomforts, and—going by the title—at least one creature. I have spent time in four small rooms in my life that I instantly recall, and, in each case, some sort of mental mechanism prevents me from remembering too much about the bad times in them, if I truly was suffering somehow. A safety device, I think. For your sanity, you may not remember those curtains you put up in the lounge when you were newlywed. Same fabric and pattern as your mini-skirt. And your husband's extra-wide tie and matching handkerchief. Ugh!

In 1981, the spring I think, though it was cold weather, I was committed to a psychiatric hospital named for an Irish saint. My room, like about two dozen others, opened onto a porch around an open-air grassed quadrangle. On the lawn, which was rather scruffy, were wooden picnic tables. A small booth at the entrance to this "en plein air" Somer's Ward housed the duty nurse. To get "outside" you needed to pass that point. Ken Kesey's "McMurphy" would have wanted to get through that locked door. Such was my drugged state, I could not be arsed.

So, I stayed in my room. It was about ten feet by four feet; a bed and a table were provided; the table was to put your folded clothing on. As if. There was a toilet with no lid to cover the pan, and the contraption was in the room itself, next to the door to the porch outside. The door to the room was so hinged as to make it impossible to close completely, and you had no privacy to sleep or—as the little children say—take a dump. The staff checked regularly to see if their charges were trying to top themselves. Showers were a communal facility, but you could go and take one any time during the day or night. Those with OCD would appreciate this.

I must have spent six weeks, perhaps more, in St. Brendan's Psychiatric Hospital. I know a little of my time was spent assembling calendars with a group, many members of which did not know that April was followed by May and not Norway. One morning I was sent to a large room where the profoundly handicapped permanent residents of St. Brendan's spent their time. I found myself in an ill-lit workshop with at least twenty small people. They were all adults, I think, but twisted, shrunken, and bent, and as they were unable to make intelligible speech, I could not communicate too well with them. They were all black. I was quite white, and feeling suddenly tall. I now know that their families had abandoned them all and their visitors were few. They were busy playing with red roses made from tissue and bits of wire, except for one woman who thought anything red must be blood.

"We thought we'd show you how to make roses, Ross," said the recreational therapist.

And so, at the age of thirty-one, I learned how to create roses. I was not permitted to take any back to my room. As I was the only person actually able to make roses in that workshop, my output was left for my fellows there to enjoy. Damaged as I was, there was still something I could do for others. There is a lesson in all that.

I spent most of the 1980s in a small bedroom in my mother's house, drugged to the gills. I was so crippled with Panic Disorder that for weeks and months at a time I actually would not step outside of the house. I did read a great deal, being blessed with friends who would drop off bags of books regularly.

My other form of entertainment came from a Sony Walkman. I listened to a "Lite-FM" satellite radio station out of Chicago, when not reading or sleeping, for very nearly that entire decade. As the station did not play current music, I missed everything from Madonna to Duran Duran to Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Almost everything. I was over-medicated and transported to the home of a friend on 13 July 1985 to watch the "Live Aid Concert" on television. Seeing the hairstyles and clothing I had been missing made the next five years alone in my room a lot easier.

Perhaps the oddest small space I lived in for a spell was a caravan in a snowy field in Salt Lake City in the winter of 1979-1980. In a way, its stripped-down appearance and design was not unlike a miniature version of the Radisson Hotel suite in Glasgow that appealed to me over twenty-five years later. Everything was functional. I used to pee in the snow.

Of course, one must look all the way back—according to Freud—to figure out the whys of life.

In the 1950s, when I was a very young boy, my mother's father worked in the purchasing department at a hospital. When things were replaced at that hospital, my grandfather would have a crack at getting them for himself for little or no money. You take it away by Friday and it is yours!

Therefore, I slept on an old-fashioned metal hospital bed with white linen sheets—that my mother did starch for a few years until it was well out of fashion to do so—and white coverlets and my curtains were hospital issue. I had a metal, white bedside table. There was no carpet on the floor.

These were the 1950s and the white paint on the hospital furnishings smelled of the lead base used in it. The odour filled the room. You could taste it on your teeth just by lying back and breathing.

I slept this way, in my ten-foot square bedroom, until the mid-1960s when someone gave me a sofa, second hand. That was when I put pop music posters on my walls.

2004 found me sharing a room in a filthy men's shelter only eight by eight with two recently released convicts. You may ask if I wondered about Christ and the two criminals crucified so near to him at Golgotha as I scrunched my eyes closed and tried to pretend I was somehow in a better place. I did not. If you scrunch hard enough, a louder and louder noise comes and sometimes you just pass out with exhaustion. That was all I wanted.

My flat in Amble-by-the-Sea is fairly large. I do not use all of it, the lounge is the perfect size for heating easily and living in, and has a comfortable sofa bed. This unit is a furnished accommodation and came with everything from the big bed I do not always use to a TV to three sets of crockery. There were also candles—though not spare light bulbs, which I could have used—and an ashtray with ashes, and lint in the lint trap. In addition, a full selection of kitchen spices. Isn't that odd? Spices!

I cannot pretend that my home is as neat as a pin—and pins and needles were provided, along with spools of coloured thread—and with my clothes, many books, papers and knick-knacks scattered about, as well as the Radisson dreams, there is some disorder here.

Just this week I decided I might have the last of my personal things taken out of storage in Bermuda and freighted to me here in Northumbria. It is a gathering of those parts of my life that have had to be put away elsewhere because I had no room to cope with them. I am nearly sixty and the Eldridges and Lancasters die young. Gather I must.

I have seen some of the files my analysts, therapists, psychologists, hypnotists, and pharmacists have kept on me over some thirty-five years. Heavy stuff! In the fantasy movie version, I will somehow get those files and take them to my suite at the Radisson. I shall open them, pull out the pages, and fling them about. Later I shall go to catch the train and leave instructions for the excellent staff at the hotel to dispose of those scraps of paper before I return from my latest trip:

"Just make it all vanish!"

The title, of course, starts to make sense. Magician and illusionist Harry Houdini is particularly well remembered for making a full-grown elephant disappear at the Hippodrome Theatre in New York City. Perhaps he invented "the elephant in the room" by doing this.

4 December 2007 / 30 April 2011

UNEASY LIES or THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN

I DO NOT CLAIM, or even pretend, that I am in touch with your God. I am not in touch with my parents' or grandparents' God, or the one whose Holy Writ we studied in Religious Knowledge classes at Warwick Academy. The political God who watched over racially segregated Sunday school classes at St. Mary the Virgin does not attend me. The Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox and Mormon Gods have also abandoned me, at my request. No sign of the God of the Muslims. Does he have a long beard? Are we allowed to guess? I do not have the God of the Jews calling out from a doorway I had not noticed until then, as I pop a butterscotch sweetie in my mouth:

"Come on in. I will put words in your head. Words in your heart. Words in your mouth. Words on your page. I am a God, after all."

Still, I have something. Echoes move me. What a clever God to give us that second and third chance to hear exactly what we are saying, the opportunity to call again across some canyon or down a valley:

"Sorry. That came out all wrong! I will try again."

Echoes and pictures. While treating myself to some fine art and culture over the Internet, I discovered the face of Christ in Michelangelo's 'Pieta' (sculpted in 1498and 1499, presently in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome) this week. This is the most famous Pieta; Michelangelo created several. You will recognize this one. You might not know the face, and that is what moved me to write about it, the other faces of God, and the smug faces of men.

To be honest, my memory of this Pieta is a sense of a picture that is not so clearly detailed, but that has what we might call a sensory language, a psychological effect on the viewer. A man's body very nearly broken over a woman's lap. That is what I have been seeing for fifty-seven years. That might have been Michelangelo's intent. Yet it is not broken, if you look a little closer. There is, after all, no pain in it. I cannot feel anger towards anyone, even myself, for this expression of Christianity.

Christ's face is looking very nearly to the ceiling. A friend went to see this monument to faith and, just as importantly in my opinion, the genius who carved it. It is now behind a bulletproof glass wall, you cannot get much closer than thirty feet from it. You can, I suppose, see the body language, if not the face of the Lord.

However, someone has climbed onto a high ladder and photographed the face of Christ. Content in his mother's arms. His face looks like that of some noble-born man of the Renaissance. He hardly looks like some rough-hewn saviour, some Jewish carpenter with blistered hands, any man of the Holy Land. The expression on the face, the lips slightly open. Lips that you would kiss without fear should it come alive. I think there is God in it.

God also appears in the fog that visits Amble-by-the-Sea, where I live, quite often. All the straight edges become soft. The world is changed. Colours change. The presence of God makes things look very different. Things sound different too. Like echoes in the subway.

"TOUCHED"
I heard it from his lips one day.
It touched my heart
and moved me.
I believed there was no other way,
no other way but to stay and pray.
Everything I'd lost was found
Thanks to the busker in the Underground.
The busker in the Underground.
Performed by The Hoover Damsels

I was raised in the Church. My first book was a child's hymnal that my two grandmothers bought in a bookstall in Canterbury Cathedral in 1952. A gift for my third birthday. I still have it.

Even as a very young boy I wondered why each and every one of the black children had to file out of St. Mary's church hall and head up the hill to their neighbourhood before we might step inside. During Holy Communion, their parents could stay in the church itself, in a designated area at the back. Not quite so near our God. My father might nod his head to his house cleaner and her grown daughter. A smile would not have been appropriate.

It is the law, my father would have said. He approved of it. I suppose it was a law. If the lawgivers did not pray about it, I can only think the clergy did. Who shall we invite in? What else did they pray about? What answers did they get? What promises?

We used to pray for the Royal Family on our white knees. I recall we sounded most enthusiastic. We prayed for our leaders and were told prayer works—if not, why bother—and I guess white boys of an age in single digits unwittingly subscribed to some political kingdom of God. What did black boys in white shirts and little bowties, with their hair slicked down with pomade, and their sisters in pastel coloured smocks with hair pulled tight, braided and tied up in ribbons to match, pray for?

In 2007, should we pray for our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan? Should the British Royal Family, our Prime Minister and his Cabinet, our military leaders, and our young men and women bleeding out there in dusty places feature in the prayers offered at mosques here? If not, isn't something very wrong?

"PRESIDENTS AND KINGS"
Every Sabbath on his knees
with some burden on his back,
blinking in the lights,
dry mouth.
A broken smile
is what you see,
a common sort of courtesy.
No President can pray alone.
Our Kings were once in touch with God,
believed themselves divine.
Basking in glory,
from youth.
If only a King,
the President's always begging.
Then I might lead and pray alone.
Performed by The Hoover Damsels

In America, it seems to me, a considerable part of the population subscribes to a form of Christianity that centres itself on men. Sometimes women, though they must be subject to the men, of course, as the Bible tells us so.

To remake an old tale, a group of women sit at the foot of the cross weeping:

"He would not let us walk upon the water. We were not permitted to raise the dead. We could not break bread and feed the thousands. And now we cannot be crucified."

On television in America, religious frustration and friction becomes a fire. We are called to follow our host, the leader, the man selling the book, the man who shook the President's hand and promised him a passel of votes come November. Are you registered? If Ross Eldridge is not exactly godly, by belief or works, a man in a Hawaiian shirt and glasses on a chain, holding that book we should call in for, is positively glowing. Godliness boils down to a look, a ceremony, a backdrop, a blue screen, something that, actually, defies one's belief. Yes?

"TELEVISION EVANGELIST"
Why hide your light?
Why hide your light?
Why hide your light under a bushel, baby,
when a thimble will do?
Send us your money, baby,
and we will send one to you.
Performed by The Hoover Damsels

Fifty years ago, a friend of mine had his aged granny make him liturgical vestments to wear on weekends. He stayed home crossing himself and genuflecting at a mirror. My sisters and I went to the movies and followed the adventures of Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon, of course, wore odd costumes too. You should see Mormon temple clothing!

My friend drank himself to death before he was forty-five.

"PASSION'S FASHIONS"
As a boy, he had a cotta,
a chasuble and a cope.
He'd wear a mitre and an alb,
with a cincture of gold rope.
Solomon's glory!
Still singing boy soprano,
he got into his parents' wine
and blessed it to his use.
Blessed a Ritz Cracker biscuit,
you know.
A communion he could not refuse.
Performed by The Hoover Damsels

It seems to me that there is no greater divide than that between Science and Religion, yet they are constantly entwined. Like the wheat and the tares. Both are constructed by men from very little, and far-from-reliable evidence. When Michelangelo was chipping away at his Pieta, the world was flat, the sun, moon and stars spun around the Earth. Heaven was not immediately available; Hell was, but so was the last minute confession. A ledger full of indulgences added up very nicely. One quick postcard from Purgatory and on your way over the rainbows! Here they have a thorn. A church in Greece had a holy relic, a feather from one of the wings of the Angel Gabriel.

Can we be sure that it is all quite correct now? In balance? Can a Pope be absolutely sure that God frowns on cloning and euthanasia? Can even one person preach forgiveness, as many of us are told to, and be quite happy about criminals being despatched by lethal injections? Perhaps death is suitable for abortionists. Eyes for eyes. Injections prepared and administered by scientists. In addition, presidents hang dictators for the good of us all. Here is something to make you wonder, a mad creationist at work.

"FIRST A CLONE"
Where, oh where, does life
first come in?
Is it by the prick of a pin?
Does it go out by the very same way?
Death, where is your sting?
Grave … Is this your win?
Can a cloned man die
a thousand deaths?
Performed by the Hoover Damsels

There are peculiar notions, of both Christians and Muslims, as to our Fate. Where are we going, then? Should we pack a suitcase? Build a pyramid?

The notions are all about exclusion. A good Christian will not have to sit next to some dusky Arab chap on the cross-town bus in Paradise. Or Asians, or Africans. If they had converted to Christianity, as they should have, praise God, they would have been washed clean by the blood of Christ. Mormons believe that dark-skinned converts will have their skin magically lightened. The Jews will have converted too. Or else. Some believe that. St. Mary the Virgin's church might have been the template for the new Heaven and Earth when I was a boy on my white knees.

You only see coloured angels on ethnic Christmas cards. Be honest, white Christian folks, most of you would not buy and send out those cards yourselves. Or the black Jesus greetings.

Yet, we always—always—recognize Jesus when we see him, in any colour, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. That is remarkable. Even recreated in our own images. That is the God in it.

Does a Muslim easily recognize Jesus in a picture, a piece of art? We are not to see Mohammed or Allah portrayed in a picture. That difference in beliefs, religious customs, is a big one.

I shared a room with two other homeless men a few years back and one was a Muslim. Well, he did not have the certificate, but he had changed his name. When I first went into a Mormon temple, I was given a new sacred and secret name. If I revealed that name to anyone, it would be the death of me. The name was Dan. That day, every man being processed in a Mormon temple was given the magical name of Dan. At confirmation, some take on an extra name. These things happen.

On the wall of our tiny shared cell, there was a large poster on a board. (Actually, the board was the back of a mirror; it would sometimes be taken down, turned over, and used for drug-taking involving fire. Scared the daylights out of me.) On the poster was a row of pictures, from paintings, of all the major Islamic prophets. Jesus was there. An artist's likeness. Actually, he looked much like the other bearded gentlemen, but fortunately had a name attached. I found that all rather odd. Prophets, the godly, are of a type.

As far as I know, Mormonism is the only religion that preaches that God had been a man once, and that men—so long as we buckle down to some hard work—can become gods. Why not?

"GODLINESS EXPLAINED"
You must be married for eternity,
sealed across an altar of the one True God,
and raise up children to that former man,
to become a god yourself.
They told me.
You must exercise paternity,
and if you hold tight to the iron rod
your every word will be a holy Word.
No stopping yourself
from becoming a god.
Performed by The Hoover Damsels

I think there is no man alive, no matter how godly, who knows a whole lot about a whole lot. We guess at things and robe ourselves in piety. Some of us. Others take up the sword, which is a form of piety if we believe the history books are honest accounts.

As I am not in touch with your God, and I am scarcely in touch with my own, I will tell you I think we have to enjoy the scenery, wherever it arises. A tree is godly, beautiful, yet you could lynch a black man from it with impunity in my lifetime. Still could, actually.

Bibles and the tongues—the words—of men, even prophets, are used to convict innocents if it is convenient. And to execute them. They are also used to excuse friendly fire and collateral deaths and damage. Greater love hath no one.

A president goes to church each Sunday, God bless him, and he may pray for us. That he might better lead us where he feels inclined to go. Even to Armageddon. With a Bible in his hands, shown on the evening news, some can pretty much accept that. Should we?

Can you take a Koran into a Christian church and not have it burst into flame? Of course, but it might be regarded as bad taste. I wonder if you might shed your shoes at the door of a mosque, and carry in a Bible. Maybe not.

A comedian's line about public transport:

"If the subway carriage is crowded in the morning rush hour, I just start praying aloud to Allah. Fifteen seconds later I'm by myself."

They are just books. Just words. However, the world might be changed if a president carried a Koran from his limousine into the chapel, and meant it.

The word of God, for me, is imprinted on my senses, usually suddenly, from time to time. Impressions. The Pieta. However inaccurate the face of Christ might be two thousand years after the fact, it moved me. I wrote some odd song lyrics during a discussion about a Christmas party, invented The Hoover Damsels to sing them, sat down here tonight and typed this out, and it seems to me that Jesus might not object if one greeted him with a kiss on the lips. Unless one is Judas. Even then, maybe not. Forgiveness. You learn things.

14 September 2007 / 28 April 2011

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.

Tea and Therapy

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene (1904-1991)

IT IS MY HABIT, for better or worse, to hurry home from certain occasions and experiences that are interesting to me and to scribble hand-written notes on the subject and to write up conversations word-for-word. When it is convenient, I type the notes up and keep them as work-papers in my computer. Eventually, the particular event may be revisited. For me, this is a kind of therapy.

And so it happens that I have fifteen pages of typewritten notes created from impressions gathered at a November birthday party spent with about a half-dozen friends of mine, and a subsequent afternoon tea party in December to celebrate a book that one of the same group had just had published. This happened in 2002, and the notes have been waiting to see the light of day (and reason) for over a year. The birthday party will have to wait a while to be recreated, but the gathering of about twenty friends and acquaintances for a literary tea is about to go down on the printed page. I'll call it "Tea and Therapy" and hope to amuse.

[This article first appeared in Defenestration, an online literary magazine, in June 2004.]

You are going to meet some of my friends and a very odd therapist. If my lay friends are peculiar, and they really are, it is my experience that one of the strangest people I have ever encountered is a psychiatric therapist. More than a psychiatrist, this gentleman is a psychoanalyst, with, I imagine, a wall covered in diplomas and, I trust, a file full of "Thank You!" letters. My own therapist knows him, and recommends him as a colleague and an amusing personality.

I first met this curious fellow at a combined Christmas high tea and book launching, so let us go there now.

Several of my friends attended the party, and I've known the host - a Bermudian writer who specializes in local history books - since he wrote about the ghost that haunts a home my father lived in for a time. I had not appreciated that my friend, the writer, was in therapy. His guest of honour was his therapist.

When I walked into the rather grand old Bermuda home, I was met by the anxious author of the book being launched (or dedicated, autographed and handed out at least ... no books flew through the air) who warned me that I could not under any circumstances review his book in the newspaper. It was not because of my poor reviewing skills on other occasions; it was simply that the book was a personal effort, not for commercial sale or profit. Rather, a gift to the author's friends and, I think, selected family members.

The book featured family photographs with captions, the writer was identified and his picture shown on the cover. It seemed obvious to me that it was hardly a secretive document.

"It's about my sexual awakening," whispered the host.
"I see. I can imagine you don't want that reviewed!" I tried to create a bit of humour to lighten the atmosphere. Actually, I'm a bit of a smart-arse and I couldn't resist making the remark.
“A very limited number of copies and all will be handed out personally,” and he pointed to a cardboard box much bigger than a breadbin.

In a large room with an open-beamed ceiling and a blazing log fire in the hearth, the author started signing books from the box and passing them along to each of his guests, who were sipping tea, and nibbling finger sandwiches, slices of cake and dainty pastries.

Every adult at the party, and quite likely the two youngsters present, eventually received a copy of the book, autographed and personalized. Each recipient seemed to examine the cover, open the book to the dedication, flip to a page or two at random, and then would slip the book onto a side-table or onto the floor. There were no public or private readings aloud from the text itself, and the book was not openly discussed, if at all.

The dedication in my copy indicated that the writer appreciated my "wonderful messages", which the author had detected in my weekly newspaper column.

It is not my intention to review anyone's sexual awakening here, except to say this one detailed by my friend was loud to the point of having his neighbours at a noted boys’ boarding school banging on the walls and, apparently, was more than satisfactory for all concerned. As I am a bit hard of hearing, anything at increased volume gets my thumbs up!

Playing at being a therapist, I now sense that the book that I will not review was discussed with, and encouraged by, the author's own therapist. It reads like the revelations you might offer to your professional confidant and close friends, if not all your immediate family. The therapist had been invited to the tea for the wisdom and encouragement given the writer, and I don't think he had the meter running for the hour he spent with us all.

My friend with the tell-nearly-all book must have spent a fair bit of money for his therapeutic publication. It is a beautifully designed and printed hardcover effort. I rather liked the story too. The writer entertained his readers, added to the body of artistic literature in Bermuda, and had some therapy in the bargain, all under the watchful gaze of a psychoanalyst. And what a curious fellow this analyst turned out to be.

I was eventually introduced to the honoured party guest. A firm handshake, as you'd expect from a medical professional. He had his wife and two teenage daughters with him. I met them quickly, more handshakes and first names exchanged (and forgotten, I’m afraid).

"So you are Ross Eldridge?" asked the doctor. "I read your column in The Mid-Ocean News each weekend."
"Don't be put off by that," I replied. "I'm not such a mad or bad person in real life." (I forgot that one should never use the words "mad" and "bad" and "real life" around those in the psychiatric field.)
"But, Ross, you don't look at all like the photograph in the newspaper by-line." It's true, the photograph was many months old and I'd grown my hair longer and had quit wearing my reading glasses.
"It's me, it really is!"
"Is there a copy of this week's Mid-Ocean News here?" asked the doctor. There was. He looked at the newspaper and looked at me, and again at the newspaper. "It really doesn't seem to be you. Are you sure you don't write for another newspaper?"
And I thought to myself: "Here's a conversation to write down tonight!"

After that introduction, I sat on a sofa with my tea (in a cup and saucer that had arrived in Bermuda in a barrel of sawdust or flour on a sailing ship more than two centuries ago, which made my hands shake to think on) and noticed that our host-author was engaged in loud conversation with the wife of the psychiatrist. I could hear the words quite clearly. She was talking to my friend while listening absent-mindedly to a mobile phone held to her ear, and looking around at the party guests. That might indicate a broad mind, the kind I lack, the ability to multi-task.

"I say," she said to the author, "did you celebrate Hanukkah this year?"
"Well, no. This is my only party this month. It's for Christmas and, besides, I'm not Jewish."
"I understand. Hanukkah was very early this year."
One of the daughters gasped and asked, quite audibly, "Mummy-Darling, doesn't that mean Christmas will be early this year too?"
"I'm afraid so."
"So early! So early!" The young girl looked to be close to tears.
Her sister, however, turned to the analyst, asking, "Daddy, what jewels are you getting us this Christmas?"
"They will have to be rubies or emeralds, of course. It is Christmas after all!"
"I do so adore rubies, Daddy."
"For myself, I'm thinking of getting some star sapphires. One can get so lost in star sapphires. I might even have a diadem made for me." The analyst reached up and posed his fingers like a crown on his head.

I'd met quite a few therapists over the years, but never one like this. Of course, he was not sitting behind a doctor’s desk or alongside a couch on this winter’s afternoon. It seemed that psychiatrists might be people too. Weird people! The daughters, who I probably should not lampoon bearing in mind their ages and delicate sensibilities, then seemed to forget about jewellery and precious stones.

"We sat next to two virgins on the flight to Bermuda," one daughter informed us all.
"Yes, one was seventeen and the other twenty-five," chirped her sister.

At this point, I very nearly had to be a nosy reporter. "How," I wondered, "did they know these fellow passengers were virgins?" I restrained myself and figured that they probably simply asked, and were given clear answers to their rather personal questions. This sort of thing might not be strange in the First Class Cabin on British Airways.

The best part of an hour having passed, the psychiatrist and his family grouped together and prepared to take leave of the party, clutching their four copies of the book we'd received in a kind of Holy (or Unholy) Communion. Kisses and thanks were exchanged with the host; they were that kind of guests.

I thought the party would surely grind to a halt. Could a group such as this continue to function without a resident therapist? Yet, there were a few more public offerings and notes for me to take.

One guest was trying to convert an elegant young woman to the Animal Rights Cause. Cleverly, he used the description of the person stroking a warm bunny's fur to inform her how such things lower our blood pressure, get us in touch with nature, and benefit us in so many ways.

"Yes," replied the well-dressed woman, "I quite understand that. I have a fifty-two-inch mink coat and I love to stroke it." [I have a sudden memory of my blue, lucky rabbit's foot that I lost while on holiday at the seaside in England as a little boy. My luck never really recovered from that.]

The PETA activist immediately looked nauseous and almost speechless, and stuffed some angel-food cake into his mouth hurriedly with his stubby fingers. I know that eating is often a symptom and result of anxiety and distress for some of us. The man was somewhat overweight. "This needs hot custard! Hot custard!" and then there was a horrified silence.

When it came time for me to leave, my host whispered again the words he had inscribed in my copy of his book.

"I got the inspiration to write my story partly from some things I read in your newspaper column. I feel you are sending me messages. Thank you for the messages!" The host did not kiss me goodbye.
"I am not that kind of guest, or it is not that kind of party," I thought to myself. "But what do I know? I only write a newspaper column, not a tell-nearly-all book."

I'll mention all this to my own therapist.

Abstracts & Brief Chronicles

This I wrote in 2005, about a year before my grandmother died at the age of 104. She spent her last few years at the Westmeath Residential Home, shown above. This article appeared in FRESH YARN, an online magazine.

THERE WAS A MAN, a composer of poetry, without a chin. He had lost it to a cancer. He kept some of his mind, however, and recognized an opportunity when one came along.

My grandmother, at 103 years of age, watches the other residents of Westmeath slip away, and most go down in the elevator to the ground floor, and then out the back entrance. I think you know what I mean here.

The man, the poet, stayed on longer than most; he seemed a prisoner of the past in the present. He had passed around a book of some of his poems that he had written during a love affair that had ended unhappily eighty years earlier. In his present deformity, he could hardly read them aloud easily, assuming poetry is to be spoken, heard and perfectly understood. I never heard him try. He feared facing the public so damaged as he was, this poet, and his only excuse for using what was left of his face was a certain hunger that remained. There was no starving to death by choice or through circumstance, only hunger.

His craving never eased as he allowed himself to be caped and covered by a large, moisture resistant cloth, because no matter how carefully he spooned his food towards his throat, it tended to slip down from where his chin once had been. He didn't want help with his difficulties.

He would walk up and down the corridor in the Intermediate Wing, such a tall man, he had been in the British military and it showed. An officer, I believe, but I didn't see the obituary.

For a time, a contemporary of the poet with his own cancer came to visit him and they were able to converse quite satisfactorily. There is much to be said silently between friends. And the friend from the outside died first. After that, the poet often got lost. Which door on a corridor might be his room there on the upper floor? How many paces to get you to the place where you belong? Right turn? Left turn?

The poet's room at Westmeath had a view through a south-facing double window directly opposite the door to the corridor. He found his room on his own at times, more by luck than calculation. Often he would step into another room and be ordered out with a "Go to your own room!" When he did end up in the right place, he could go and look from his windows to see orange trees, oleanders and a jacaranda across the lawns and below.

One morning, the poet raised his window, pushed out the screen, and slipped away to the concrete below. He did not die immediately, but days later in the main Hospital. His was a big body, he'd kept himself active: upright posture, no bending over a cane or walker. He'd have needed to push very hard to go through the window, and to go quietly as well.

My grandmother was not sure who might have gathered up the poet's clothes. His late friend had been his only visitor. Copies of a slim volume of his love poems had circulated among the residents who were well enough to see them -- if not to understand the revelations and sentiments -- but the poems slipped away too. I am wondering if, when my grandmother moves along, we might come across the poet's work, tucked away in a bag or parcel, or below some underwear she no longer requires. She wears diapers now. Perhaps hidden with something of hers that we had not known about.

The residents at Westmeath do not discuss those who have gone down in the elevator a final time. Rather, there is an empty seat in the dining area for a day or two, and then a new face arrives that few notice. My grandmother is the only resident on that floor with a functioning memory. She tells me all the gossip. She knew her neighbour, the poet, had slipped away, and how. We spoke of him for no more than a minute, and then she moved on. I found I could not leave it behind that easily -- I've tried to write poetry myself -- and wonder if these words on this page will mark the point of a departure.

I've assured my family members that I will not write about them -- as if they really had important or necessary secrets -- in their lifetimes. I'm afraid of losing my own memory, or my ability to convey my words. Sorry, folks.

Since she turned ninety-eight, my grandmother has lived in Westmeath. Five years have gone by; we've observed one crisis of health after another, one departing face after another. This former grand home is a desirable residence for seniors, with monthly fees that suggest some luxury of food, excellent medical treatment, care-giving, and companionship. Of course, I would be correct in admitting that most of the residents haven't a clue where they are, many don't even respond to their own name being voiced. It might be wasteful to feed them anything but macaroni and baked beans. They do better than that.

My grandmother has lived on and kept her senses because, I believe, she has many visitors. She reads the newspapers, does jigsaw puzzles, and converses about politics and religion, and -- very reluctantly -- how it was to work as a child in a mill in Lancashire. The memories of the cobblestone streets of Harle Syke are not lost -- we can pick things up where we leave off, and go into details. Sometimes I have to draw her stories out. We are hearing of events that most of us, in her family, had not a clue about. I feel I must mark these, get them on the page.

It is the latest missing face in the dining room, noted succinctly, that gets left behind as my grandmother and I continue our own journeys back in time, and in the present whilst draped in a cloak, a patchwork of everything that has happened 'til that moment. We don't look far ahead; I have no idea if my grandmother has given my uncles her preferences for when her funeral comes. Around me, she wishes aloud that there were a crematorium in Bermuda. So do I. When she is tired or bored, I offer to open her bedroom window just as I'm leaving. I'm making a joke. She says: "Don't bother, it might rain." I leave smiling, and she waves me out. That's what you do at 103.

Another writer showed me some of his poetry this week. I had felt impressed to try and contact him after many years. He had been a long time friend of my parents, an employee of the same bank where my father worked, and a neighbour for forty years. His late wife brought flowers each week from their garden to my mother who had such bad luck with her own. I felt that if I did not see the man immediately, I would have to admit, head bowed, to the memory of the poet: "I didn't see you, old friend, while you lived among us, but now that you're dead I wish I had."

So, I telephoned the elderly man, now in his nineties, and quickly told him I was coming 'round to see him the next day, and gave him a time. I felt sure he'd have settled for a telephone call if I'd paused on the line, and I wanted to avoid that. I still wondered if he'd be at home when I turned up, or hiding away, not wanting to answer the door.

As children, we had visited the couple often, until the wife died, and I always went to the kitchen door -- in Bermuda it is unusual to use a front door, no matter how grand the occasion -- and rarely stepped inside. Rather, we might be offered a cold drink on the back patio and a look at the friends’ cats. This week, with one part of me in the past and another part a bit worried about the present, I went to the kitchen door. It was closed, but there was a doorbell, and I pressed on it. I heard the "pong" inside.

A voice called out my name, "Ross, you'll have to go 'round to the front door, the back one's jammed shut." I walked through the garden, noting how overgrown it was, and how the house was in poor condition. The shutters were closed, and had missing slats and hung crookedly, paint peeling off them.

The closed shutters were not all that surprising as our police force and security people now tell us that we should not only close and lock our homes when we leave them, but also when we are home. We should lock ourselves in. As a boy, I believe I could have walked in and out of two dozen houses in our neighbourhood without worrying anyone and not needing to force a lock. I could call out: "It's Ross!" without frightening anyone. I might be given a biscuit and a glass of milk, from a real bottle, milk with the cream on the top. If it looked like rain, I'd take the neighbours' laundry in from their clotheslines if they were not home, or were taking a nap from the humidity of a summer day in Bermuda.

I rang the bell realizing that I'd never been through the front door at the old friend's home. His wife grew African violets in the reception area so many years ago. Those did not interest me then, though it might have been an emotional moment to find them now. The main door opened, and I saw it had been pushed into the closed position by several large bricks wrapped in cloth on the floor. We got the door open, and the reception room had no plants at all in it. Things change, I thought. Shaking a very firm hand, I stepped into the darkened room.

I was offered several seats, as my host settled back into his own reclining chair. I sat near him, and directly faced him. I knew he was blind in one eye and had limited vision with the other eye. We both felt awkward, and I wondered what to say to get things going.

"How's your health these days?" was how I started. I'd noticed that besides his firm handshake, he was well-dressed in clean, casual clothes, and had nicely cut hair -- more than mine -- and a trimmed moustache. There was no odour in the room, and I know about those from visiting my grandmother in her upscale residence. There was no dust on the coffee table in front of me, but there were several boxes on it holding medallions and ribbons below glass lids. I knew enough to appreciate they had been awarded to my friend's wife by the Crown.

"I'll start at the top," he replied. And we got through headaches, dodgy hearing, a blinded eye, sore throat, tummy troubles and gall bladder surgery. That was as low as I wanted to go. I mentioned that he'd certainly trumped any aches and pains I might confess to. And then I asked how long it had been since his wife had died. He told me the exact date and time, 17 years earlier, and in the darkened room I noticed that the house was not furnished the way an elderly gentleman might do it.

Everything was set in its place, upholstery was worn and split, photographs and portraits on the wall remained from the days I'd seen them as a child -- old men with beards, now I noticed they'd been done when the subjects were much younger than I am now -- and the paint on the walls was peeling in sheets. Curtains slumped next to the shuttered windows.

Odder still, were several quite lovely cigarette boxes and lighters -- his wife had been a smoker, and died of cancer -- I wondered if the boxes might contain cigarettes still, 17 years later.

There was something different, unusual: The dining room table was heaped in bottled water containers. He offered me a drink: "Water or Sprite?" He explained he took a diuretic for his blood pressure and peed a lot and needed to replace the fluids. The water in the tank under his house was not potable, and he only used it for laundry and flushing. He used bottled water for everything else.

At that moment, he went off to pee and I opened my knapsack and took out a newspaper and slices of plain cake and fruitcake, and rested them near all the water bottles.

"What's this?" he asked at his return.
"Ah, I brought the newspaper, thought I'd read it to you if you wanted."
"Can you leave it for me?"
"Of course."
"Cake?"
"I figured you probably were told not to eat cake, and you could enjoy some."
"Oh, yes."

The spell was broken. We talked about old times, really old times, when their home was built a few months after my parents' place. Neighbours that we shared. We quickly realized nearly everybody of his -- my mother's -- generation on that street had now died. But we raised them up for an hour.

This old family friend revealed that he only went to the grocery store once every three weeks with a volunteer who took him in her car. I asked: "Fresh vegetables?" and he shook his head. "Many visitors?" and he shook his head again. I'd noticed a radio, but not a television. He listened, he said, to call-in radio shows. I told him that I found those too confrontational. I confessed to having a home computer, one nine years old now. "I mostly write these days," I offered. "It's a compulsion. I have to get things down on the page."

He reached over to a table at the side of his recliner and drew several pages from a yellow pad. He studied them carefully, put a few back and finally handed two pages to me.

"These are some poems I wrote recently." He explained. "Would you like to read them?"
"Of course, let's have a look."

They were written in impeccable handwriting, in ink -- he had been a bookkeeper at the bank so many years ago -- and two lines into it I realized they were comedic. The first was about his poor, worn out body with everything broken or bent or missing, and all written in clever rhymes, and going south of the gall bladder that we'd discussed earlier. He'd written it very recently. I was reminded of a famous gravestone that reads: "I told you I was sick!" Might it be Mark Twain? No, don't think so, but worthy of Twain.

The second poem was a commentary on the loss of innocence in Bermuda: Crime, gangs, fear, high prices, shortages, rude children and their rude parents, and endless industrial disputes. In the poem he had not written in so many words that he missed his wife, though as I read his couplets, I appreciated that he missed her more than anything else, but was glad she had not lived long enough to see these days. The house they had lived in - closed and shuttered against time, the master of all thieves - is still as it was the day she died, only the dust has been removed.

I did not offer to open any windows. This poet had almost completed his love affair with his wife; it was still evolving. When I left, returning another firm handshake, I warned I'd like to come back soon.

"Yes. That's OK, Ross," he said.
"Don't forget the cake."
"Oh, I won't!"

Walking out of his garden that was so unchanged, I passed the house my mother lived in for 40 years until her death in 1992. I knew it had been rebuilt. The house itself had been rundown but the land was valuable. The hedge of bougainvillea and hibiscus that I'd planted for my mother was now so high and thick that I could not see the house behind it. I saw some children's toys in the driveway.

And I walked to the bus stop. Feeling good about love.

And on the Eighth Day ... They Wrote it Down

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

ULTIMATE TRUTHS are those that we reject first of all. It is the Great Lies that one draws to one’s bosom and allows to burn there, a cold confusion, a universal counterfeit currency. I have seen young mothers whispering poisoned verses to their tiny, scarcely-formed children, held up to the crowd: “Tell them you know this [or that] is true.” Sometimes the little boy or little girl struggles and weeps, and refuses to speak, and must be put down to toddle back to its seat. There is wisdom. One hopes that the day or night will come when the child runs outside, stands below the sky, beneath creation, and listens not to its mother, but to all that it observes by eye, ear, taste or touch.

This week it has been reported that the Hubble Space Telescope is studying an enormous green blob in distant outer space. The news reports use words like “mysterious”, “bizarre”, “gigantic” and “strangely alive”, the panic headlines of a 1950s science fiction B-Movie.

The great green blob has a name: Hanny’s Voorwerp. The blob is the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, 650 million light years (each light year is six trillion miles, if you care) away from us, and it is giving birth to new stars as parts of the blob collapse and result in pressure enough to create stars. It’s mostly hydrogen gas swirling about from a close encounter with two galaxies, and is illuminated by a quasar, a bright object full of energy supplied by a black hole.

Ms Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch elementary school teacher, first spotted the phenomenon in 2007 while studying archived photographs. She says that the blob originally appeared to be a blue smudge; now it seems more like a vast green (wait for it!) dancing frog. If that worries you, take a deep breath, Ms Arkel has discovered that the frog not only has limbs, but eyes.

And there it is, creation observed over the past three or four years: A gaseous frog god named Hanny’s Voorwerp spewing stars, lit by a quasar powered by a black hole. If it had not been on the morning and evening news, one might have missed it. Worlds without end (or beginning). Amen.

Let’s talk about sexual creation. Hanny’s Voorwerp is a tale waiting to be told: grand green sex, but it is the business of the religious amongst us to sort that out; I just scribble on Post-it Notes and write a thousand or so words from time to time on what I might have seen or heard in the light or dark. I struggle free from my parent, and run outside in tears having not said: “I know this [or that] is true.”

The Ancient Egyptians were creative and inventive, and wrote things down. Their histories on the walls of their tombs and temples, and on papyrus scrolls that have survived the souvenir-hunting tourists and the uncomfortable, yet looting Victorian explorers, give varying versions of the creation of the Universe.

According to Egyptian tradition, the god Amun [also spelled Amen, Amon and Ammon] existed alone, all alone, in an aqueous sort of world before there were time and times. This First Being was described as an attractively-built, human-like male wearing a crown depicting a goat’s head. Amun’s symbol was the always randy, sexually insatiable ram. The eminent Victorian explorers, scientists and Egyptologists destroyed, damaged and hid references to the Amun creation cult. Here’s why.

Lonesome Amun created the universe sexually. He masturbated and ejaculated into his hand, drank his own semen and so impregnated himself. Following this monotheistic sexual act, Amun spat out Geb, the (male) Earth-God and Nut, the (female) Sky-Goddess, who then copulated heterosexually and produced the rest of the gods and their mortal offspring. That’s the way they saw it.

The Egyptian Pharaohs with their royal wives would re-enact Amun’s creation, the Pharaoh of the day would get inside a hollowed-out statue of Amun, including a hollow penis, and go to it.

You might find, in your research, that the First God was called Atum rather than Amun, and after ejaculating directly into his own mouth he spewed out Shu (male) and Tefnut (female), the rest of the story is the same.

The Egyptian priestly class was not the only one to act out the Creation Story. I myself have attended a session in a Mormon temple [in St George, Utah, if you care] which featured snakes and altars; Adamic-language chants; really strange, mysterious, bizarre clothing; signs and symbols (Mormon temples have been called the International House of Handshakes); lights and mirrors, washings and anointings. There are suns, moons and stars and many gods. This is called “Temple Work” and is considered to be surrogacy. One of the Mormon Holy Scriptures, The Book of Abraham from The Pearl of Great Price, was [Joseph Smith said] a translation from an Egyptian papyrus retrieved from the wrapping around a mummy in a travelling road-show. The Mormon Temple Ceremony is not quite as interesting as the Amun offerings would have been, but you are just as knackered after two hours of it.

We have scientists that postulate a creation from a Big Bang. From nothing to everything in almost no time at all (there being no time). This is akin to Amun, is it not? There are many religious folks who consider any form of science to be sinful. In fact, they consider anything outside the Christian Bible to be the work of the Devil. Never mind the Bible is convoluted, confused, contradictory and badly constructed. The latest translations have even destroyed the glorious language of the King James Version. Christian sects are at war with one another. A preacher threatens: “Tell them you know this [or that] is true. Or it’s hell for you!”

Run outside, boys and girls, and take your parents and grandparents. There are tadpoles falling from the heavens, and the sap is rising.