Concessionary Tale

The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest.

You are always asked to do things,

and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

A FORTNIGHT AGO, some old friends of mine (so many of my friends are old now, and this is what keeps me so young) on their first trip to Great Britain arrived in my part of this other Eden.

Sue and Dave had driven up from London, taking a few days, with a stop in York to visit the Minster. I can tell you that some of these single attractions are alone worth the flight from the New World back into time and place. They had spent a good part of a day at Westminster Abbey in London padding about between poets and headless queens.

I have been visiting many of these historic sites for over 50 years, first in the care of my Nan Eldridge who knew what is what and how to get to what is what. Those were early mornings in the forecourt of a coach station, with a bag of sandwiches for our lunch. A muddle of people, most of whom seemed as old as my Nan, which is to say truly ancient, would gradually make their way to the appropriate gate and form a queue. Of course, these fossils, these relics of another age, survivors of the war and peace, were not, in fact, as old as I am now.

Once on board the coach, we would fiddle with the air vents, and I would look out of the window to watch familiar places fall behind us. Then, at about nine o’clock, everybody on the bus would open his or her boxed lunch and eat every crumb. At ten, the driver would pause at an inn somewhere for a toilet and tea break. Nowadays, the word to politely cover this is a “comfort stop”. We all watch full-frontal nudity and listen to shocking language on Channel 4 in the evening, but prefer not to be troubled by anything that hints at bodily functions.

I have a toilet story. A year ago, Sue’s brother, Richard, was in town on his first visit. We took the train down to Durham for the day and after a while I needed to use the toilets (Richard, in Utah, would likely call them restrooms) and we found some at the bottom of several flights of stairs in a small shopping mall. I left Richard at street level and followed the signs downwards.

It was a very nice, clean toilet. A few others were using it when I arrived. I went to the row of urinals and unzipped my flies, as one does. There was one other bloke at the urinals as Richard appeared. He had decided he had best get some comfort. I did not appreciate that it was Richard, last to enter. I finished, headed quickly to the sink, and then climbed the stairs back up to the shopping mall concourse. No Richard. I decided to stay in place and wait for him to reappear, thinking he might have gone into one of the shops.

Richard trots into view, from the door down to the public toilets. He indicated we might move along, seeming a tad flustered. Turned out that Richard had, while peeing, thought the fellow a few bowls along from him was I, and with the stream of urine being plentiful and powerful, Richard had remarked on it. “Nice and steady there! You won’t be having any prostate problems for a while.” Then Richard realised it was not me, but a complete stranger.

When Sue and Dave rolled into Alnwick, where we had decided to meet for a walkabout and to visit the Castle (I had taken the bus up from Amble), they were coming from Otterburn, inland, and were directed by their Sat-Nav to the Pottergate entrance of the Castle. I had disembarked on the far side, where the Alnwick Garden entrance is. One has to walk across some fields to enter the Castle.

We each expected to find the other in the same gate area of the Castle, but were on opposite sides of the massive building. Thank heavens for mobile telephones! I think that when I phoned Dave’s mobile (he would call it a cellular device) the call might have looped across the Atlantic Ocean to Maryland and back. No matter how well travelled our telephone signal was, we talked ourselves into a common area outside the gift shop.

There was a younger woman, perhaps 25, behind the counter in the ticket office. I approached, smiled, and asked for a single ticket for the Castle. The young lady smiled back and whispered something to me.

I am hard of hearing, and am presently using a temporary hearing aid before being fitted for something more powerful in July. I said to the counter person: “I’m sorry, I cannot hear too well. Might you repeat that?” Another whisper. Another: “Sorry. Louder.”

One might be forgiven for misunderstanding what I was being asked in this whisper. The woman had said, a few times before I understood clearly: “Are you a grownup?”

“What do you mean?”
“Grownup. Are you over 60?”
“In fact, I am. Would you like some identification?”

I had ID, and I was wearing a grey beard, bifocals and a hearing aid.

“No. That is okay. As a grownup, you get a concessionary entrance ticket.”

Therefore, I was charged a pound or two less than the many visitors a few years and more younger than I am.

It is good to be a grownup!

I am suddenly reminded of something that happened over 40 years ago. A friend (a young friend then) and I had gone to the cinema to see the recently released (and much hyped) film “Bonnie and Clyde”. We thoroughly enjoyed the picture (I have never seen it again, and do not know if it has held up at all well) and came out into the chilly night air, lighting our cigarettes and pushing through the crowds to get to the parking area.

And we walked straight into my mother’s parents and some family friends, a couple not much younger than my grandparents. They would all have been around the age I am as I sit here typing this account.

My mate and I were positively bubbling with enthusiasm about the bloody gangster film we had all just seen. My grandparents and their friends looked quite deflated, shocked even.

“We thought it was just awful.”
“We had expected it to be a Scottish musical.”

I am wondering if my grandparents, who would have been “grownups” by the current definition at the ticket desk at Alnwick Castle, would (40+ years ago) have got a discount on their theatre tickets.

Are there any attractions, such as historical sites, places of worship, films, plays, and books, that one can gain entrance to at a mutually agreed rate? If the Tower of London knocks one’s socks off, might one happily pay the full admission price (or more)? And if Owl World disappoints, can one ask for a few quid back (to spend in the pub)?

Alternatively, shall we just have the young, and grownups?

IMAGININGS

So sure as this beard’s grey,
What will you adventure...?
William Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene III)

IN 1978, I had a passport photograph taken in a shop in the Bermudiana Arcade in Hamilton, Bermuda. The proprietor sat me in front of a screen, took a photograph with a large camera on a tripod, and then took another picture after telling me not to move. My photographs would be ready in a week’s time.

I recall collecting four prints (and he gave me the two negatives), which would have to be trimmed down by somebody in the passport section of the British Embassy in Washington DC. The head, neck, and uppermost shoulders were the correct size, but the photographer had set his sights on my waist and everything above.

Happens I had a beard at the time. Not the first I had grown. I have had a moustache since I was in my late teens, and once I reached my twenties, I would grow a beard from time to time, depending on the weather. A cooler time of year would be more encouraging.

In 1978, when I was renewing my British passport whilst in Bermuda, I was anticipating a trip, my first, to the Rocky Mountains. I would have been 28 years old. My hair and beard were reddish brown, quite a bit darker than my hair was in a 1968 passport (taken in Gillingham, Kent). A passport in the late 1980s showed me with thinning, greying hair.

My current passport, issued here in Northumberland about two years ago, is that of a white-haired individual, with a white moustache. The same picture appears on my bus pass. When I was in the booth, having my photograph taken by a digital camera, my glasses seemed to reflect the light. I took them off, and so I am not exactly myself, as I always wear my glasses when I am out and about. I look squinty.

I spent a few years on the other side of a camera in the same shop in which I had posed for my passport picture back in 1978. It would have been the late 1990s. “Kit ‘n’ Caboodle” sold newspapers, cigarettes, junk food and soft drinks, and ghastly small toys at Christmas. One could have photocopies made. I never figured out how to work the enormous Xerox machine, and tried to be busy whenever a customer appeared wanting copies. As I recall, most of these customers were expatriate workers copying documents to submit to the Bermuda Government to enable them to retain their jobs another year or so. There were also a few poets who wanted no end of copies of their latest oeuvres. Expectant mothers would turn up wanting copies of their ultrasound scans, and would point out the important bits. The ultrasound foetus, one’s first passport picture.

At Kit ‘n’ Caboodle, I was mainly employed as their passport photographer. One would hold a Polaroid camera, and aim a beam of light at the client seated in front of a light-absorbing screen, and a tiny red dot of light could be seen on the client’s forehead. One learned where to aim the beam of light for the particular type of passport photograph. Different countries had different requirements. The United States passport needed one ear showing, so taken from slightly to one side (I forget which). The United States also requires passport photographs of even the smallest infants, with eyes wide open. This could take an hour and could reduce me to near-insanity. One had to stand leaning over the wee bairn, holding the camera out, but being extra-careful not to drop it (which could kill the kid!)

Our black customers nearly always hated their passport photographs, usually saying: “This is too dark. I look like a Jamaican.”

One woman with rather droopy breasts pushed them up from underneath and asked me to ensure they were in the finished picture. I explained that an acceptable passport photograph showed the top of the shoulders, neck and head. No breasts (neither pert, nor pendulous).

We also had an ID photograph service, creating personal identification cards that were, clearly, not legal. $18 would buy you a laminated card the size of a bus pass with your name, address and age alongside a photograph. The client would write the details onto the card. Nothing was witnessed. The client could create his own identity.

One day a young, light-skinned lad came into Kit ‘n’ Caboodle and asked for one of our ID cards. The boy looked, perhaps, 15 years of age. I dare say he wanted an ID to buy cigarettes and liquor, requiring him to be 21. This kid’s picture added nothing to his smooth face. Before I could glue the photograph onto the card on which the boy had written his inaccurate details, and then laminate it, he grabbed the photo, whipped out a black felt-tip pen, and scribbled a beard and moustache on the immature face. “You can laminate it now.”

The boy had it in his mind that if he presented a photograph of himself with a beard, even if he did not actually have one on his face, he would still be able to buy his smokes and Black Seal rum. He did not seem to have a notion that his hastily drawn beard was clearly just that, scribbled onto a picture. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Naïveté is like the bloom of a delicate, exotic flower. You touch it but once and it is destroyed forever.” One did not have the heart to spoil the boy’s day. I gave him two dollars change from his twenty-dollar note.

I have two personal activities that are, I dare say, hobbies. I research genealogy, which involves many, many hours following up leads back many centuries. I have around two thousand individuals in my “family tree”, all considerably detailed. Each relative has documented evidence attached to his or her file: addresses, dates, connections, photographs.

I also have a Nikon digital camera, and I spend time taking dozens of pictures that I tinker with on my computer, and that usually are deleted as the one or two satisfying snapshots stand out. If a picture is too dark, I can change the lighting with a few clicks. Nothing Jamaican about my photography.

Factory Flowers

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers
is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852)

I SOMETIMES JOKE that when I look in the bathroom mirror in the morning I find my grandfather looking out at me. Of course, I have two grandfathers somewhere behind the looking glass, two parents, my grandmothers and great-grandparents, all around in my lifetime. It might be more accurate to say that I look like one of my grandmothers, perhaps my mother’s mother. Bleary-eyed, as I get ready to brush my teeth and shave, I do not get into too detailed an examination of the fine (or not so fine) structure of my face; indeed, I cannot, for I do not have my glasses on.

Like both of my parents, and all of my grandparents, I discovered I required glasses to read (and, in my case, also to see distances) clearly when I was a young adult. Over the thirty years since my first eye-test and prescribed spectacles, my eyesight has worsened steadily. The vision correction has been complicated because I take some rather strong medications, and take different medications appropriate to the cycle my illness is in. Six months after an eye test resulting in new lenses, with different substances in my system, I might be straining to make out figures in a fog.

My mother, Mavis Lancaster Eldridge, wore glasses from earliest childhood. Born arse-first, in a clumsy delivery back in 1926, my mother suffered what we would call brain damage. In those days, it was just not mentioned. In fact, I did not know the circumstances of my mother’s birth until her mother told me shortly before dying at the age of 104. My mother, who had suffered with mental and emotional illnesses, and eyesight so damaged that reading was well nigh impossible for her (I never in my lifetime saw my mother read a book, or anything smaller than a newspaper headline), died young, my grandmother outliving her by over a dozen years.

My mother only took her glasses off as she got into bed. She suffered grand mal epileptic attacks and even then, one did not remove her glasses. One day, during the last week of her life spent in a cancer hospice, I arrived to spend the afternoon with my mother (she was quite lucid until the day before she passed away) and found that the hospice staff had propped her up (and belted her into) a recliner chair. My mother looked comfortable, but she was not wearing her glasses. Only when I spoke her name did she realise who it was taking a seat next to her. She did not know where her glasses had gone and was quite bothered. I went looking for the hospice manager. They had left Mother’s glasses off because she was not using them. They meant to read or watch the television, I assumed. I was rather angry and pointed out that there were other things to see, shadows to comprehend, the light coming through the shutters, the visitors. I found Mother’s glasses, put them on her, and that was not a problem again. My mother’s glasses had become part of her. I took them off on 28 September 1992, at 3.03pm, when she died. To close her eyes. The glasses went in a case, Mother went out in another. She was wearing them when she was buried.

My mother’s mother, Elsie Proctor Lancaster, who lived beyond her centennial, wore glasses all the years I knew her. As did my grandfather, William Lancaster, who died in his 70s, though he only wore his when reading. They were both avid readers, and spectacles’ cases were usually lying around their home. As very young children, we would ask to try one of their pairs on, and realise just what happens to one’s eyesight as the years pass. My grandmother, like her daughter, had a run-in with nursing staff in her last days. I was spending afternoons at my grandmother’s bedside in a care facility and found her without her glasses on, and without her hearing aid in. I had been taking some responsibility for the hearing aid, changing the batteries and fiddling with the volume. I had difficulty getting my grandmother to understand who I was, as she was literally in a fog of sound and vision. I raised hell with the nursing staff.

My mother’s parents were both sent off to work in a cotton mill in Harle Syke, Lancashire, just outside Burnley, at the age of eleven. That was a hundred years ago. The Queen Street Mill is now a museum, and it houses the last steam-powered looms in the world. If you saw the film “The King’s Speech”, you saw that mill. The King addressed his northern, working-class subjects there, at least in the Hollywood version.

The mills in Harle Syke (eventually eleven weaving firms with seven mills) were built in the years following 1850, when some men from Haggate built the first one. Haggate and Harle Syke blend into one another, the larger area is Briercliffe. The last mill, Queen Street, closed in 1982. Water came from nearby streams and coal to power the looms was mined in the Burnley area even after the middle of the 20th Century. There were no public houses in Harle Syke (my great-grandfather, Harry Lancaster, would catch a ride on a wagon, or walk, to a nearby town to do his weekend drinking). There was, and still is, a Church of England chapel in Harle Syke; my grandfather’s brother, James Arthur Lancaster, killed in the last days of the Great War, aged 24, is noted on the war memorial in the churchyard. His body, which we located recently, is in the Pas de Calais in a very nicely maintained cemetery.

I visited the Queen Street Mill some fifty years ago, as a boy, while staying with my grandfather and his sister, Maud Lancaster Roberts, in the house in Harle Syke that my great-grandparents had lived in. I slept in my great-grandfather’s bed. He had been alive when I was born, and for a few years after that, and would have had photographs of his first great-grandson. I eventually inherited a number of old pictures of my great-grandparents taken from 1900 until about the time my great-grandfather died in January of 1952.

In 1900, my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Geldard Lancaster, was expecting her third child, the one that would turn out to be my grandfather. Apparently, the childbirth experience had not been a particularly good one for Elizabeth and she had decided that this time she would not survive it. To mark her impending doom, Elizabeth had Harry, and the children, James Arthur and Maud, dress in their very darkest, gloomiest clothing and they went off to a photographer’s studio for a family portrait. Elizabeth was swathed in black cloth, the pregnant figure not being suitable to display, and the occasion being such a sad one. Harry was wearing a dark suit and looked very handsome in a working-class way. The children had only wide, white collars to indicate there was any hope for them.

Elizabeth survived the photograph, and my grandfather’s birth, but did not manage the winter of 1942, dying that December. Like many, indeed most, members of my family, Elizabeth did not reach the age of 70.

Harry Lancaster, my great-grandfather, actually reached 77. Both of his parents, my great-grandparents, John Lancaster and Ann Driver Lancaster, died in their early thirties, their young children subsequently being fostered by the Driver family. The Drivers’ own children worked on the family farm, the Lancaster lads were sent to work in the mill.

I had never been in a factory until my grandfather walked me over to the Queen Street Mill to see his sister, my great-auntie, Maud at work. It happens that Maud and her father had raised my mother’s brother, Jack Lancaster, through the Second World War years. As Jack left the UK after the War, he had been a teenager, and apparently had the same wavy blond hair and grey-blue eyes that I had fifteen years later when I turned up. Several people working in the mill cooed: “It’s Jackie, come back!” (In a marked Lancashire accent, of course.) There was soon a group around us, and people, who seemed very old to young me, pressed coins into my hands. Not pennies and sixpences, but florins and half-crowns. As I was off to the seaside for a fortnight, this loot was much appreciated.

My mother’s family, for the most part, are buried under the surface of the old Haggate cemetery, now grown wild. The collapsing Haggate Chapel has been pulled down. As a child I tended my great-grandparents’ grave. My Auntie Maud died at the age of 62, almost my present age, as we do. She went into her parents’ grave, the one we had weeded together.

All that said, I should mention my father’s family. I do look like Dennis Eldridge’s son, if not so tall and thin. I have wavy, blond hair from my grandfather, Henry Charles Eldridge, on that side too. However, there are a good many on the Eldridge side with dark, almost black hair, olive complexions and dark eyes. I have a paler version of my father’s nose to identify me. I can see my father’s looks, which I recall seeing when I was younger in my grandfather Eldridge, and grandmother, Charlotte Crow Eldridge, in my Eldridge cousins, and in their children. My father’s family could be generally described as better looking than my mother’s.

My father’s parents were not sent off to work in a mill when still children. However, the boys, some of them, did join the military, especially the Royal Navy, when still in short trousers. Happens that my father dropped out (as we might say) and became a naval cadet in his early teens, though he never made much of that as a career and was washed ashore in Bermuda during the last War where he unhappily married my mother, there with her father who worked for the NAAFI.

In addition, the family scattered to Australia, the USA, and Canada. Some returned, in the next generation, to the UK. One of my parents’ grandchildren lives in Mainland China, and his wife is expecting a child who will be, as we say, of mixed race. We have red hair, now and then, in my mother’s mother’s family. My nephew has that ginger hair; no telling how that will blend with the Asian genes.

We have a fair number of artists, actors, musicians and writers on both sides of my family. My cousins’ children have inherited those gifts. Fortunately, the youngsters are able to have educational opportunities and can develop their natural talents. Some members of the family made a great deal of money, some lost a lot. We have punk rockers and members of the Peerage in the family tree.

As for me, I tend to scribble things down. I also study and compile my family history. I live in a world of Post-It Notes, remembering, noticing, seeing and hearing.

I have poor eyesight and wear bifocals. Moreover, not generally known (I have not mentioned it in any Christmas card inserts yet) I am quite deaf. My hearing aids are being replaced in a month’s time and I am hoping that I will be better able to hold my own in conversation. I am not deaf, as my grandparents were, because of the dreadful noise in the mills that they were exposed to as very young children. I played a great deal of loud music, and found I sought louder and louder music as my hearing declined, compounding the damage. (You have been warned!)

I think it was my grandfather, William Lancaster, looking out at me from my mirror earlier today. In addition, his father’s moustache seemed like a true reflection. The words roll forth from generation to generation, and I reach out for all that I can.

A JEST'S PROSPERITY

“If I revealed all that has been made known to me, scarcely a man on this stand would stay with me, and, Brethren, if I were to tell you all I know of the kingdom of God, I do know that you would rise up and kill me.”
“In your hands or that of any other person, so much power would, no doubt, be dangerous. I am the only man in the world whom it would be safe to trust with it. Remember, I am a prophet!”
Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805 – 1844)

I CAN REMEMBER THE BEGINNING almost to the hour of the day, easily the month and year. It is the ending that is unclear. It began exactly 38 years ago, and was over about 8 years ago, give or take a few years.

When people find out that I was a Mormon for over a quarter of a century, for most of my adult life, they often ask me how I managed to get involved in such a peculiar cult. How did a chain-smoking, drug-taking, manic-depressive and anxiety-ridden lad raised in the Church of England and on rock and roll end up singing “Come, Come, Ye Saints!” a couple of times a month, year after year?

Mormonism is, in 2011, a great deal easier to investigate in depth, thanks to the Internet, new revelations, confessions, books and personal testimonies. I dare say that a person aged 61 who has not developed dementia, and has had some experience of life, if just through conversation and correspondence and late-night television, is likely to question a great deal of what he is offered. Particularly when it sounds too good to be true. When I was 23 years old, in August 1973, I knew very little of the Church of the Latter-day Saints, except that Brigham Young had had a great many wives and over fifty children. I had not picked up that knowledge in Sunday school, but in conversation with my grandmother. It is worth noting that a recent publication of the LDS Church does not include the multiple wives and children of the Church Presidents. I dare say even the Third World nowadays, where the Mormons are seeking converts, might frown on Church history.

My grandmother had told me that when she was a little girl, which would be no later than the year 1910, if she and her siblings were naughty, my great-grandmother would tell them: “If you don’t behave, the Mormons will come and get you.”

My great-grandparents and their seven children lived near Burnley, Lancashire. Happens that in the years after 1830, when Joseph Smith Jr. founded the Mormon Church, missionaries were sent to Great Britain (and other countries in Europe) to convert white folks and get them to bring their families and funds to America, to gather to Smith’s Zion. Zion had to be reinvented several times as the Mormons, both homegrown and converted overseas, were hated and hounded, persecuted and driven out of street, town, state and finally the boundaries of the USA at that time.

Many of the English converts joined the Church in Lancashire, within but a few miles of the villages where my mother’s family lived. My great-grandmother’s threat of Mormons kidnapping boys and girls and taking them away to America was probably quite effective. I imagine missionaries in top hats, carrying strange scriptures and talking in unintelligible American tongues, would appear in and around Burnley. I have researched and studied my family history in considerable detail, especially the folks in the past 200 years, and, so far as I can tell, no member, naughty or nice, on my mother’s side in the North, or my father’s side in the Midlands and Southern Counties, ever converted to Mormonism in Britain, and none caught the ships in Liverpool and sailed away to the Promised Land to gather in Joseph Smith’s or Brigham Young’s latest City on a Hill.

We now know that Brigham Young (and other Church leaders) told the missionaries, lads in their teens, sent off to Britain and Europe, that they should convert attractive, young, unmarried women, who looked promising as child-bearers, in particular. Not as prospective wives for the young missionary converting them, for the girls must be set on the rough seas and dusty trails to Salt Lake City where they would discover they had joined a church that believed, above all things, godliness only comes with polygamy. Back in Britain, such practises would have been strenuously denied. The girls would be married to the elderly Brethren in positions of power in the Church who collected plural wives.

On trips to Utah, I have looked in telephone books and have noted that many surnames are typical of the people of the towns in the North of England. Men and boys over here also converted and followed the command to gather in America.

Among the converts in Scotland was an ancestor of a friend of mine whose family, in 1973, was still essentially LDS. James Campbell Livingston was born in Lanarkshire in December 1833. In 1849, young Livingston was baptized into the Mormon faith, and, in 1853, he left for America, by ship from Glasgow to Liverpool to New Orleans, over nine weeks at sea in all. He went up the Mississippi River to Nauvoo, the former Mormon city, where he met Joseph Smith’s widow, first wife, Emma. We now know that Joseph had at least 33 wives, most likely over 40. Joseph was fond of young girls who might be employed by Emma. Joseph would get a sudden revelation and the girl, one as young as 14, some already married, would be told that an angel with a flaming sword had threatened Joseph with death (!) if he did not marry the particular girl. James Livingston would not have known all this at that time, if ever in such detail, but when he arrived in Utah, he did take three wives and fathered 18 children. He was one of the quarrymen for the Salt Lake Temple where plural marriages took place. By the way, Emma Smith was not a fan of polygamy and always threw Joseph’s latest wives out, and Emma eventually claimed that Joseph had never practised spiritual wifery, despite her documented part in it. Lies beget lies.

In the summer of 1973, my LDS friend visited me while I was house- and pet-sitting in Bermuda. One day the two Mormon missionaries stationed in Bermuda stopped by on some errand to see my friend, and I met them long enough, as I recall, to nod my head. Elders Belnap and Mortensen came by again after my friend had gone off to the USA, and we chatted a bit. I chain-smoked and they told me in brief what they were doing in Bermuda. Self-supporting missionaries, two years in the field, working out of New York City. This interested me, the concept of lads younger than I was committed to a cause, even if I had no idea what exactly they believed in.

Could they come by another time and tell me about their church? Certainly. You don’t mind if I smoke, do you? It is not good for you. I know that.

It turned out that the missionaries had a very slick presentation kit, coloured pictures and charts that could be flipped over in a binder, and it did fascinate me. Apparently their Joseph Smith had been directed to some golden plates on which was engraved a book (of Mormon) which he translated using curious spectacles. The missionaries showed me paintings of Joseph sitting with his golden plates while his scribe wrote down the translation as Joseph gave it. Smith was not wearing his magical goggles, however, which I would like to have seen. The Urim and Thummim, they were called. There were no representations of Smith in one room with his face in his hat, in which was a peep-stone, or seer-stone, calling out his translation to someone out of sight, at a distance, and no golden plates. One now knows that this was the manner Smith supposedly dictated his Book, nobody besides Smith ever saw the golden plates uncovered, something was under a blanket at one time, but it was not revealed to any witness.

Smith’s visitations by gods and angels were recorded, re-recorded, and changed until he was murdered in 1844. Family and friends claimed different versions that had been related to them by the Prophet or amongst themselves. The stories became more and more convoluted and forced to fit the latest situation. The Angel Moroni, the keeper of the buried box containing the golden plates, was sometimes a white toad or salamander. Smith, like many people in that part of the world at that time, believed in folk magic. His line of work had been seeking buried treasure using a peep-stone. Treasure never found. Well, until the Book of Mormon.

If Elders Belnap and Mortensen had told me their Prophet translated by looking into a hat jammed on his face to keep out the light, there being a stone he had found while digging years before in the hat, on which words would appear, I would have thought it so much nonsense. Those missionaries would not have known all this either. In fact, I doubt that it is taught to potential converts in the huts of the South American and African countries where the Mormons are canvassing today. What pretty pictures do the Mormon Elders flip in their binders in 2011, say in the Philippines?

I did not feel immediately inclined to go to a church service with the Mormons, but I accepted an invitation to a “Family Home Evening” with some members of the Bermuda Branch of the Church. There were a fair number of people, all clean-cut, eating tacos and jell-o and drinking Kool-Aid, with prayers to start the gathering, bless the food, and to send everyone home safely. Everybody was rather nice.

This is what converted me. The toothy, smiling, happy faces. The abundant food.

Then the doctrine: Families are forever! That was an idea I rather liked as I had a few relatives I would be quite happy visiting in the afterlife. At some of the get-togethers there was one peculiar woman who had been having no end of miscarriages, but who firmly believed that she would be reunited with those children of hers and would raise them in the afterlife.

Without any reservations, I went through the course prepared for investigators and the missionaries told me to pray about it. Ask if it was true, Brother Eldridge. And I did, and got no reply. That was in the autumn of 1973. Nice parties, nice people, even if I had to smoke outside, God was silent. I should have listened to that silence! Belnap and Mortensen had mentioned that God and Jesus had bodies of flesh, had passions and parts. There was little mentioned concerning the key LDS doctrine that God once was a man, and that we men might become gods.

I was challenged to stop smoking, and drinking alcohol and tea and coffee. The missionaries and the happy people probably had not known that Joseph Smith and his cronies drank wine in their temples in Ohio and Nauvoo. Joseph served it to his guests at his home. Tea and coffee were used and went with the Saints to Utah. All this after the Word of Wisdom.

In the autumn of 1973, Elder Mortensen finished the Bermuda portion of his mission and an Elder Love replaced him. In February of 1974, Elder Belnap left and Elder Burke arrived.

I do not think I am subject to revelations or great knowledge, but I knew, somehow, that Elder Carl Burke was an unusual fellow. I bumped into a fair number of LDS missionaries in my time, but Carl was a special friend from the get-go. In addition, it was Elder Carl Burke who baptized me on 1 August 1974. I had given up smoking, tea, and coffee to make the grade, and was attending services in the chapel used by the Saints in Bermuda. Once I was baptized, Carl was transferred back to New York City to complete his mission. In 1975, he returned to Bermuda as a civilian, and worked in a motor garage on the US NAS for a few months, staying with me part of that time.

I had a close friendship with Carl Burke and his family, and was devastated when he died suddenly some five years ago.

Despite anxiety disorder, I was attending and taking part in some LDS church services. I learned how to conduct meetings, to give talks, teach classes. All using the very basic information available to us.

Until June of 1978, it had been doctrine of the Mormon Church that people of colour, if they converted to Mormonism, could eventually have their skin magically lightened. However, they could not, if they were Negroes, be anything more than a basic member of the Church, and could hold no offices or enter Temples. With Church officials unable to tell which of their prospective converts in countries like Brazil might have a trace (even the smallest) of black blood, which would make them ineligible to be full Mormons, a revelation arrived saying everyone could come on in. Fundamentalist Mormons, who tend to remain true to Joseph Smith’s teachings regarding polygamy, race, and the ways of heaven and earth, disregarded the latest change in the unchangeable word of the Lord.

I have travelled to Utah a few times and enjoyed my time in large and small towns. I have held church positions here and there, and went in the Temple in St George, Utah, to receive my endowments, and picked up my sacred/secret Temple name that I must never reveal (it is Dan), and appreciated how fragile many of the Saints are in Utah. So many on tranquilizers, so many depressed, so many trying to be on top in Ponzi Schemes. Moreover, so many choosing ignorance so as not to upset the scheme of things, believing and doing what the Old Men in Salt Lake City command.

“I have a hard time with historians because they idolize the truth. The truth is not uplifting; it destroys. I could tell most of the secretaries in the church office building that they are ugly and fat. That would be the truth, but it would hurt and destroy them. Historians should tell only that part of the truth that is inspiring and uplifting.”
LDS Apostle Boyd K. Packer, when interviewing a prospective member of the BYU faculty in 1976.

About 8 years ago, we started getting books by members of the Mormon Church and others that have uncovered some rather startling and unpleasant Church history. It has seemed to me that the Mormons I have known over the past almost-forty years simply could not, did not, know most of what we are learning at such a pace now.

I wrote to the LDS authorities and asked them to remove my name from their records, utterly and completely. It was easier than I expected. At least I hope so. I received a letter saying it had been done, but any time I wanted to return I should contact them.

Mormons are somewhat fanatical about keeping their numbers up. They canvas for converts in the here and now and in the hereafter. You may not know that they do baptisms for the dead, which is why they are out copying records all over the world. You may be horrified to know that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun have been baptised, by proxy, in the font in a Temple basement so that they can chose whether to be Mormons, and to enable them to carry on and become gods.

It is not that I now believe Mormonism to be so much guff, and I do, but that I find no attachment to any God, Lord or Maker, any Creator, any Great Magician or Spoon-Bender. When I look out over the landscape on sunny days, or days like today (grey, a bit cloudy), I see the world as it is. I do not see it rolling forth out of time. If I have a feeling about it, it is the immediate warmth on my face, not the hot breath of gods on my body, or the Holy Spirit flaming up in my chest.

Do I regret my quarter-century in Mormonism? Not at all. I have learned a great deal, made some lovely friends, travelled about, and in reading the exposés have been entertained and my knowledge broadened. Somehow, fortunately, I do not feel to have been made a fool of.

For someone today, with access to libraries, bookshops, lecturers and the media, I can only say that you should not believe that Joseph Smith Jr. did what they told me he did when I was new to this, about 40 years ago. He has been shown to be something quite different. He and his followers changed their histories repeatedly, they changed their perfect books, and they changed their unchangeable gods.

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not.”
André Gide (1869 – 1951)

The ministering of angels might just be indigestion.

Ross Eldridge
8 May 2011

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

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