SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS OF WISDOM

SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A LIFE BEYOND POLIO is Gary Presley's account of his life after contracting polio in 1959, when he was a boy of but 17 years. Gary had gone along for the series of injections to prevent polio (many of us had those, or the vaccine on the sugar lump), and a week or so following the final jab, Gary collapsed. He has not been able to walk, and has had to rely on assistance with his breathing, since that time. Over the past 49 years, Gary has rolled along on seven wheelchairs, and presently enjoys the company of Little Red.

Gary Presley worked in insurance sales, and also in commercial radio. He is pretty much self-educated, and did a superb job with it. He is a son, a brother and a husband and father.

Gary has become a writer, and that is how I came to know him. Gary is an administrator of the Internet Writing Workshop. He is a published essayist. With this book release, he is becoming something of a media personality and I had the distinct pleasure of listening to him, over the Internet, speaking on the radio in Iowa. They've got him signing books as well: events, they call them.

In this quite easy to read, if difficult to live, history, Gary Presley uses words that make some of us a little uncomfortable: disabled, handicapped, invalid (and what a word that is, suggesting someone is not "valid"), paralysed, isolated, frightened. Another troubling word that pops up: normalcy. One might think: "Well, that's all about life in seven wheelchairs." Listen: Who among us cannot apply these words, even the terrifying "normalcy", to his or her life?

This is why I particularly enjoyed and benefitted from Gary Presley's account: There are Riding Lessons in Seven Wheelchairs for the likes of me.

It was interesting, and pleasing, to find that Presley's style is, at first, simple, untroubled (and untroubling), and has almost the naivete of a youth about it. The descriptions of falling to the earth, of being slotted into an iron lung, of being fitted for breathing apparatuses, at the age of 17, are fresh. There is no roughness of the man of 65 in it. As the autobiography, for that is what this must be in many ways, progresses, the style and content matures. When Gary finds love the writing really is a serious read, you linger over every line, liking it all so much. You feel he has grown, the book itself, the medium, has been a transport.

The book: Mine has 226 pages, I read it in two days at a leisurely pace. It is printed on pleasant paper, and the University of Iowa Press that published it is committed to preserving natural resources, and that's all worth noting. The book weighs about 420g, so you can figure out how much postage you'll need to send a copy to a friend or family member this coming holiday gifting season, and it shouldn't be onerous. Of course, Amazon.com can do that for you.

Finally, it seems to me that more than a few young people in their mid- to late-teens, say aged 17, could find this book a bit of a primer for life. Parents: Leave a copy on your son's bed.

When I was in my early twenties, I read, for the first time, The Rack by A.E. Ellis, and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Both novels, of course, and dealing with something that even 40 years ago we didn't trouble ourselves over much (tuberculosis). In my case, it was the musings of the characters, the troubled love lives, the frustrations, the breathing lessons, the psychologies, the philosophies, that kept me reading (and eventually re-reading) The Rack and The Magic Mountain.

I don't know whether people can be arsed to read those particular books now, but SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A Life Beyond Polio by Gary Presley deals with things that "other people get, not me" in our lifetime. It's an important book, makes you take stock, look at your feet and the door, and it might give you the push to get a move on.

Revolution Revisited

Protestors. Grosvenor Square, London. 17 March, 1968

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a

foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures,

shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions,

revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of

memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and

delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the

gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am

thankful for it.

William Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV, Scene II)

I HAVE SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. Do people who work the night shift ever suffer from sleepless days? Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on my mood, these hours awake when others sleep are not so regular, so frequent, as to render me useless most of the time. Four or five times a week I can get safely to the minimart for milk, to the greengrocer for broccoli, and to Roland's Butchers for a bit of fresh lamb's liver for Cailean, and not be standing out on the street wondering whether it is Thursday or Norway. When I am truly knackered in the daytime, I try not to stray past the pages of the book I'm reading. Cups of tea and a blanket over my legs on the sofa, and the dog kipping on his back alongside me.

When I become the vampire, the creature of the night, I usually have fallen asleep in the early evening, as early as tea-time, and wakened by nine o'clock. From that hour my mind races, I often pace the floor, and have to fight the temptation to leave the flat and go walking in the mists that this seaside village hides in every night. Fortunately for me, Cailean is not much of a werewolf, and he doesn't often care to go outside after dark, except for pee breaks in the courtyard, and snappy ones at that.

I did actually take him for one late night walk recently in the moonlight, near the River Coquet, and very nearly had to carry him home: hooting owls, barking dogs, splashes in the water, rather a lot of bunnies, and the clanking of cables on the aluminium masts of the sailboats. Oh, I think Cailean would have stayed by the river, but I was scared shitless and couldn't get home through the heaped autumn leaves fast enough. We were like two protons in the Large Hadron Collider!

Back at home. I find I can watch the television comfortably until midnight, and can push on for another hour if there's a good film showing. I rather like weird foreign films with subtitles; T-rated films: transvestites, transsexuals, tortured priests, twinks, trolls, tits, theatrics, twists in the plot, therapy, trench-coats. Well, anything by Pedro Almodóvar.

When I've had enough of the telly, I read for a while. Cailean, for many hours by this time, has been asleep under several blankets with all his toys. Approaching two-thirty in the morning, bladders must be relieved, mine first. Then out into the cold with the pup. The security light blazes and any inclination to sleep is blasted right out of me. We run back inside, switching off any lights, stand-by switches and the heater if it has been on. Cailean vanishes under the covers with "Snakey", a favourite stuffed toy that is a good deal bigger than he is. I pull the blankets up, face the ceiling, and start thinking.

Some years ago, I wrote a newspaper column that tended to be about days gone by, which were sometimes the good old days of my youth, sometimes about the travel I'd managed when my health and finances permitted, about people that I'd met, books I'd read, things that influenced me, the shitty experiences of childhood, conversions and diversions. My therapist thought I was getting all the past out of my system. I kept a journal for over twenty-five years, scrapbooks as well, and photo albums. Everything was on paper, somehow. As we carry the past along with us, perceiving time as we do in these dimensions, I hardly expected to get everything out of my system!

Three years ago I took all my journals to an industrial incinerator plant, along with my scrapbooks. So much for what I did in 1980; so much for the newspaper clipping of my mother's funeral notice; so much for important telephone numbers; so much for jokes that were so funny when I heard them that they had to be written down; so much for my thoughts on 11 September, 2001; so much for theatre tickets, and an address blotchy on a beer-mat, and a coin I picked up that I did not recognise. Into the fire.

I left my photo albums (and I'd been the keeper of the family photographs among my siblings), my personal papers, my newspaper columns, my reference books and notes, everything that I'd written, in an old cargo container in a damp field in Bermuda. When I turned my back on it, I knew that I'd not pay the storage fees after the first six months, and I didn't, and that was three years ago. Those things have gone. Apparently, as of three years ago, I'd pretty much dumped the baggage of my past, mentally, and the physical followed.

Back in England, I found I was unable, couldn't be arsed, to write about schooldays and fishing off the rocks and climbing Mount Pisgah on Beaver Island, though I was vaguely conscious of those times. Instead of panoramic views of driving through the Grand Tetons that just go on and on, I have a little, the smallest, Post-it Note reading "Saw the Tetons". Enough seen, enough said.

I'm tending to write about the moment, or at least last night or a day or two ago. I've taken up photography, I see something interesting, camera always at the ready, I get my snapshot, and I write about it. Or delete it. I don't save it.

And, in the night, in the last few hours before sunrise, my mind races. Something I saw the day before. I have a tiny torch, the sort that one might attach to a key ring, and I reach for it, my biro pen, and a jotter pad (they are scattered all around the flat), and I write down my great thoughts. Light out. Another thought. Light on. And through the night. Light off. Light on.

Sometimes I sit up completely and my thoughts become visual. In the room, awkwardly manoeuvring around the clutter, walk people and animals, sometimes flags flutter, things blow across the carpet which has become a street. There is no sound, unless I make it, and I don't want to disturb Cailean by talking to short-term memories.

Last night, I watched water cascading downwards through what should have been the carpeted floor, only it had become a rough path down a mountain, and pine trees hovered behind the furniture. It was quite remarkable; I made a note of it on my jotter pad. Had there been full sound, I imagine I might have been frightened.

Cailean only needs to pee once in the night, but I must go two or three times, so I got up from the sofa-bed and walked out of the woods, down the hall to the bathroom. When I came back, the room was a room again. I decided to make a large mug of coffee, which I do using skimmed milk rather than water. Four minutes and ten seconds in the microwave does it exactly. And I sit in the dark and drink the coffee and listen to music playing in my head. Coffee does that to me. Indie and Brit Pop.

Coffee also makes me sleepy at five in the morning. This morning, I wrote a few more notes and then rolled over in the bed, felt Cailean curl up behind my knees, closed my eyes, and then it was eight-thirty. Cailean was playing with Snakey on top of the blankets; the room was so bright that I knew it was a sunny day outside.

I do my house-cleaning chores on Friday, and I made beef stew from scratch, which takes two hours, not including the suet dumplings. So, I've done all that, it's Friday evening.

Just now, I had a look at my jotter pad. It reads, in part: "Revolution revisited before 2008 has passed!"

I must tell you my mind is not so far gone that I cannot figure the line out. You see, 1968, exactly 40 years ago, was quite the year for social unrest and upheaval, assassinations, invasions, riots and beatings and strikes.

The Rolling Stones sang their take on it, their anthem, Street Fighting Man, which is a shit song as far as music goes, but it included the lyric: "Summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy..." which is memorable to an old Stones fan such as myself.

John Lennon wrote one of my very favourite Beatles' songs, Revolution, which includes the lines:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

On 17 March, 1968, which was a Sunday, I was in London with a dear friend of mine, who reads this blog from time to time, he's still dear, and we saw crowds in the streets heading for the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest against the Vietnam War. The riot that followed kicked off the revolution season that year.

I was into all that Peace and Love business back in 1968. However, I am looking for some evolution, some revolution, in 2008. In international finance, in coming to grips with hunger and pollution and terrorism, in international political relations. I am hoping that a revolution of common sense over prejudice will see Barack Obama become President of the United States of America. The election of John F. Kennedy back in 1960 broke the evil spell over Roman Catholicism, and I imagine only those hillbillies and crackers in the USA give a hoot about the Catholic influence now. Can Barack Obama, even if he is only half a man of black African blood, if elected, contribute hugely to a decline in institutionalised racism and prejudice? I think so. I hope so.

I'm afraid, for me, Obama's opponent, John McCain, is the hero from the Vietnam War. Can a war that should never have been (and that was ultimately lost) truly have great heroes? I'm not sure that suffering, which McCain certainly had his share of, can be equated with heroism. Many would disagree with me across the Atlantic.

Struggles against suffering, however, can be heroic at times.

I say I want a revolution. I do!

Something You Mustn't Do

When clouds appear, wise men put on their cloaks;
When great leaves fall, the winter is at hand;
When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?
Untimely storms make men expect a dearth.
William Shakespeare (Richard III. Act II, Scene III)

OH! FOR FUCK'S SAKE! My first thought—in fact, I said the words out loud—yesterday morning when I opened the kitchen door in the now-dark morning after the alarm went off to allow Cailean to relieve his bladder in the courtyard.

This actually started in earnest on 6 September, 2008, a Saturday, four weekends ago.

There had even been a hint the weekend before that: Rain that refused to ease up, some flooding in the courtyard, six inches of water outside the kitchen door. The hint was a gift: I went and bought caustic soda, signing the poison register at the hardware store. I then scraped old leaves, clumps of moss, bits of gravel and other detritus from the drains, and poured the lye into them, and replaced the grates. A half-hour later, I poured a good deal of hellishly-hot water down as a chaser. The obnoxious effluvium indicated that something serious was going on. The serial killers one reads about, flushing the dissolving bits of their victims' bodies down their pipes, cannot have a pleasant time of it. But this was just a gift, unexpected, but not unusual, this heavier rain and rising water.

We had a bit of a spring in 2008. There came a day when I noticed a dead rat that had been frozen solid on the pavement just down the hill from me, which had not moved or been moved all winter, had thawed. It was worth celebrating after a cold and most miserable season. The rat's corpse vanished a day later, a meal fresh from the freezer we call Amble for a cat, or perhaps a fox. Soon after, the householder of a delightful bungalow nearby totted his half-dozen plastic sheep out of storage and set them up on his lawn. I wondered if plastic sheep should graze on Astroturf.

That was spring. It turned out to be summer too. The balmy months following the Solstice never really panned out. I did not use my central heating in July and August, but I slept under two blankets every night. We had, perhaps, five sunny days, and I wore my shorts and stretched out for long, long afternoons on my lounge chair and read. I potted plants and had some success with them. However, I only went to the beach twice. In 2006 I had spent an entire month on the beach, baking! I never broke a sweat in the summer of 2008.

And we had record rain in August this year. About twice the monthly average in most places, more in some. More in my garden, I'm thinking. The earth soaked it up where there was earth to do that. I live on a hilltop, my courtyard is concrete, I'm surrounded by paved roads up here, you cannot dig at all, much less expect to plant something in England's fresh soil. Down the hill there are farms between Amble and the next village of Warkworth. The fields dedicated to crops sucked up the moisture, day after day, and the pastures did the same as the sheep and cows squished about.

On 6 September, the Saturday, I was to go to an indoor rock concert in the evening, in Alnwick, with some friends. Trevor and his wife were driving up from Tyneside, which must be forty miles south of Amble, and were to collect me at six-thirty. I was very much looking forward to all of this. The musical group were doing a tribute to The Beatles and were said to be quite excellent at it.

That Saturday began with the usual morning drizzle. The television indicated that bad weather was headed for the northeast of England. We might need our brollies, no mention of wellies, or water-wings, or life-boats and rescue helicopters. I settled down with a book after watching my favourite cookery shows, and, from time to time, ran outside with Cailean, using the umbrella to protect us. I noticed that the drains I had scoured a few days before were working perfectly.

By lunch time, the rain was getting so heavy that Cailean's long walk was out of the question and, umbrella or not, the brief trips past the kitchen door had the poor boy doing the dog-paddle as the water gushed toward the outflows. He was not happy. I was not happy. The concert was to be held at the Alnwick Playhouse, but one must park some distance away in one of the Duke of Northumberland's lots and walk, with no shelter or overhang, to the theatre. That's a bother, especially if about ten people are trying to meet and then keep together as a group.

At four o'clock, the rain was getting serious. I'm on that hilltop, but from inside the flat, thanks to a garden wall, I cannot see down the hill to lower ground. I look across the rooftops to Warkworth Castle. On those occasions when the rain is not so intense that the visibility dwindles to a matter of yards, that is. I could only see the wall at the end of the garden, and that was hardly clear. Torrents of rain were running down the street on the other side of the flat, headed for pastures and chicken coops.

There's a stream, with the unpleasant name The Gut, below the flat that flows into Amble Harbour. It is normally a trickle of water, perhaps a foot deep and six feet wide. This trickle originates somewhere to the west of town, it would be run-off from fields I expect. It is affected by the water in the harbour and rises a foot or so during unusually high tides. I could not see The Gut that day, but I saw it the next. It had become a burn. The bunnies and moles and voles that live in burrows along the waterway must have had quite the experience. And I could not tell what was going on with the River Coquet a few hundred yards north of that, even a day later. I couldn't get near it a day later.

Trevor telephoned at five o'clock. He'd called the highway police to ask the best way to get to Amble bearing in mind that the rain was pretty heavy and wasn't letting up. A two word reply: By boat!

Between the River Tyne and our area the rivers were raging and overflowing, the town of Morpeth had 1,000 homes flooded, bridges were being washed away, trees uprooted, fields flooded, roads eroded and there were landslips. A new lake some six miles long by three miles wide had formed somewhere. All that wet earth from the summer of record rain had been unable to take a drop more.

The concert wasn't going to happen. In fact, the band was trapped somewhere south of us as well, and Alnwick was cut off from the north and west. I watched television reports on the flooding at Morpeth, 15 miles south of Amble: Helicopters, boats, firemen and rescue crews, little old ladies being carried feet first from their flooded homes, rising water, rising water, rain, rain, rain.

The next day, we were back to mere drizzle. And that's when I found out that the River Coquet had flooded. Rothbury had been badly damaged, Warkworth as well. The water roaring down the Coquet into Amble Harbour had undermined the town's docks by twenty feet, causing parts of the docks to fall into the harbour. Boats had been washed off the riverbanks, and from their moorings, sinking or being carried into the North Sea. The fields between Amble and Warkworth were under water. I believe the sheep that graze below my flat survived, but 800 in the district drowned. And mud. So much mud. Mud had washed up over the river's banks. Sand dunes had been shifted in the Estuary. The Coquet was choked with trees, logs and rubbish. That was the end of a not-so-glorious summer.

The rest of September surprised us. Chilly weather, but some sunny days. I'd discovered a spot near the river where, behind a windbreak of pine trees, I could lie out on the grass with Cailean and enjoy the sun on my face, at least. Not warm enough to bare the arms and legs. But the light from the sun, scooting lower across the sky every day, was very nice. And my patch of grass, with red berries and rosehips on the trees and in the hedgerows, bunnies nosing about (Cailean too content to fuss over them), and interesting birds—an influx of swans, cormorants and gulls after the storm—made for hours of recharging my mental batteries after all the gloom. It was just seven dwarves short of a Disney movie set.

I also made apple crumble with windfalls. I enjoy peeling and cutting things up, and apples are a nice change from carrots and tatties. Then I moved on to banana bread. The leaves started to fall on their long journey to oblivion, just like D.H. Lawrence's apples. No gorgeous colours yet, this year. Last year was stunning, once in a lifetime. I took a train trip to the Lake District, over the Pennines, in 2007, and I can (and must, apparently) revisit that memory through my own latter days. The folks at the house near me with the plastic sheep folded up the flock and put them in the garage for the winter.

The real rams have been covering the ewes. Cailean's grandmother, Holly, had puppies. I have flowering azaleas and cyclamen on my window ledges indoors, and I'm finding large spiders in the house. Cailean is sleeping under three blankets with me, behind my knees, like my Aleks used to. A dachshund thing. Life goes on.

Then, yesterday morning, I opened the back door at about seven-fifteen, and looked out into the darkness. Cailean stood behind me, and refused to step over the stoop. The rain was tipping down, the wind was truly howling, it was bitterly cold, not much above freezing it turned out. I was standing in my shorts and t-shirt and wearing slippers. Because one has to, I picked the dog up and walked a few paces into the storm and set him down. He assumed the position immediately, peed, and ran for the door, and I followed and switched on the central heating.

Hours later, in winter clothes and hat and coat, I took Cailean for a brief walkabout. He pushed through piles of leaves while we dodged around other piles of dog excrement that hurried dog-walkers had not paused to pick up, and we returned with Cailean muddied and soaked. Into the bathtub with him, which he loves. For fuck's sake, as the little children say, winter was upon us.

Until this morning. Today: Not a cloud in the sky. Warkworth Castle was brilliant in the sunrise. The light twinkling in Amble Harbour and on the Coquet. Birds everywhere, pecking about and preening their feathers. And it is not too chilly, jacket weather, but no need for a hat, scarf and coat. Cailean lay on the concrete briefly, rolled on his back and warmed his bits. I did laundry and put it out on the lines and it is drying nicely. People have been walking past the flat on the street side, headed for the outdoor market, some wearing dark glasses. There are young men having beers in the garden of The Wellwood Arms across from me, all in shirt sleeves.

There's a saying here that I hear a good deal, but do not use myself. It is something one offers when all hell is breaking loose: "Still, one mustn't complain!"

Given today, after yesterday, one mustn't complain.

The Banana King's Progress

Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry,
their passions a quotation.
Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)

UNTIL THEY ARRIVED in Bermuda in the first week of August of 1925, my mother's parents, from Harle Syke, Lancashire, near Burnley, had only seen one person of colour. For the first quarter-century of their lives, the only black man they had ever set eyes on was The Banana King who, I gather, marketed bananas that had crossed some ocean to the west or south, somewhere in Burnley. They don't grow bananas in Lancashire, not even under glass. Not then, not now.

My grandparents had followed my grandmother's cousin towards the Americas, but must have got side-tracked. The cousin had gone to Canada with her husband, and then crossed into the USA, illegally, in upper New York State. They ended up on Staten Island, where their descendants still live, so far as I know.

Life in the failing cotton mills in Lancashire must have been quite grim in the early 1920s; I've read a few books on the subject, and heard the tales first hand, of course, from my grandparents and back in Harle Syke when visiting family there who'd not moved away. However, bearing in mind that my grandparents didn't go to The Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave in search of a better life, but to a backwater island some 600 miles from anywhere that grew Easter lilies and Bermuda onions, I think it was more a case of getting away than of going somewhere. My grandfather had hoped that his Uncle Mick, who had no sons, would leave him the farm that Mick owned. When Mick said no to that, my grandfather was mightily miffed, he had a temper, and was probably embarrassed at having asked, so they went and booked a passage on a boat to Halifax, and then another down to Bermuda, wherever it might be.

My grandmother was expecting their first child, they were newlyweds, when they left England, but they didn't tell anyone as they knew the family would not be happy to see them go in that delicate condition. My mother was born, in Bermuda, six months after they arrived.

On 3 August, 1925, coming down the gangplank onto Front Street in the City of Hamilton in Bermuda, the first thing William and Elsie noticed was that the Banana King was not unique in his blackness. In Burnley, the Banana King had been a curiosity, he had a certain charm, and he was wonderfully rare. In Bermuda, upwards of 80% of the people were Negroes. Racial segregation was the law. My grandparents never quite warmed to the population mix, they never liked the coloured folks. My grandmother died, in Bermuda, aged 104, in her right (if prejudiced) mind, and complained as long as she was able about the lazy, shiftless coloured girls who cared for her in the home she'd gone to live in when she was 98. She sometimes complained to their faces in her thick Lancashire accent. My grandfather had died some 25 years earlier, and he'd actively disliked the locals till his time ran out.

I never, ever, heard my mother say something disparaging about any person of colour. She had many black and Asian friends, and not just in name or as a convenience. My mother did things with all her friends, went out with them, visited, telephoned and waved to them. My mother was mentally ill most of her life, and one might ask if that is to blame for her simple acceptance of people as people, not considering racial types, or religion either.

I've often wondered if my mother ever clashed with her parents over her unwillingness or inability to see non-whites as different, hostile, fearsome, untouchable or unattractive beings. I certainly had some rip-roaring arguments with my grandparents, for the most part about racial prejudice, segregation, and disharmony in Bermuda. I didn't know a whole lot about the world as a boy. I don't know all that much now, but I recognise illogical hate. It's easy, all hate is illogical!

As a member of a minority group myself, I have to deal with people who have a problem with it. You see, I am a fan of Joni Mitchell, have been for over forty years. For the majority of people, perhaps as much as 90%, I'm a freak. You thought I was going to out myself as a Mormon?

My grandmother operated a little shop in the hospital in Bermuda, the profits went to charity. She sold sweets, ice-cream, soft drinks, potato chips, air-mail writing pads and envelopes, postage stamps and tampons. I'd usually get her to buy me a Nu-Grape drink, sometimes an orange sherbet in a paper tub with a wooden spoon. Through the window, or hatch, at the shop, you could not really see a great deal, you had to know what you wanted, and people did. No point in asking for a sandwich or an apple, everything was pre-packaged.

When someone offered the money, usually coins as I recall, to pay for their crisps or Tampax, or was accepting change, something happened that I always noticed, and that bugged the hell out of me. If you were white, your cash was taken by my grandmother in her hand, and she would place any change into your palm. But, if you happened to be other than white, she would point at a rubber mat on the counter, and you must put your money down on it. Change was placed on the mat for you to pick up. My grandmother could not bear to physically touch a black person. She didn't like cats either, but that's not important in this story.

In the last months of her life, incontinent and crippled, unable to move about, but still thinking clearly, my grandmother had to be handled in every way, touched in every place, by others, usually black nurses and nurses' aides. And she'd yell at them! They could wipe her arse, but they didn't do it right. What a hell it must have been, and it seems, to me, a divine sort of punishment!

My father disliked blacks too. He once had a black man turn up to be interviewed for a position at the bank where my father worked, and the black man pointed out that his middle name was Eldridge, like my father's surname. And then cheerfully offered: "I think we must be related." It took my father weeks to calm down from that affront to his good name.

On one occasion, my father happened to board an aeroplane for London that I was travelling on. We bumped into each other in the Departure Hall in Bermuda. When we arrived at Heathrow Airport, my father asked me how I was getting into the City. I told him a friend was meeting me, and said that if there was room in his car and time, perhaps he'd take my father to his hotel. And my friend, who is dark-skinned, was waiting at the exit. I made the most simple of introductions, no explanations, the ride was agreed, and we headed for my friend's car, which happened to be an enormous Bentley, black, gleaming, spotless, leather interior, buttons to push. I sat in front with my friend, my father reclined in the back. He thought my friend was a chauffeur, as you've guessed. We off-loaded my father and then headed to the apartment I'd rented for a month. My friend was the son of the Ambassador to the Court of St James (the UK) of an African country, and he'd borrowed an Embassy car to come out to meet me at Heathrow. I told my father a few days later, and invited him to join us for lunch, but he declined. A drink then? No, thanks. It was never discussed again.

A few weeks ago I upbraided a sister of mine for complaining about her "Paki doctor" to his superior, pointing out that she was fortunate someone from Pakistan was here in England to tend to her neuroses, and that "Paki" was not an appropriate word to use. My sister snarled: "What's wrong with 'Paki'? And I call the Irish 'pikeys'!" She's like that. She doesn't like coloured people, as she calls them, even though her husband is a person of colour, and their son is mixed-race. Go figure! Finally, she said the most damning thing she could think about me: "You never did care what colour people are …"

The Americans are a fair people; they
never speak well of one another.
With apologies to Samuel Johnson

My grandparents, and my parents, have all passed away now. My grandparents and my father (who detested each other, my parents' marriage was short and unhappy) would be truly horrified to have lived to see a person of colour in the 2008 US Presidential Election. My sister, who is alive, is not happy with it, and says so. I feel sure she knows nothing of American politics, except a few names, and those confused. Republicans? Democrats? Huh? But Barack Obama must not win. She will not know that Senator Obama is accused of being a Muslim, or that it should not matter even if he was. She doesn't know his politics. She only knows he's not quite white for the job.

A reporter from the BBC was in the USA recently, interviewing prospective voters, mainly in Eastern Seaboard states. The blacks, male and female, tended to support Barack Obama. A few whites did as well, but over and over again, concerned white voters said there were problems with both candidates. What might they be?

"Senator McCain, there's the age factor. That is a problem."
"And Senator Obama?"
"Well, the race thing. That could be a problem."

The race thing. Could be a problem, and indeed it is. As one comedian here said: "There are many Americans who won't put a cross by a black candidate. Unless it's on fire."

The Americans pride themselves on the belief that the Puritans, back in the early 1600's, left Europe in search of freedom from the cruel laws that they felt persecuted under. Of course, they took their own brand of those laws with them; they were very nearly Christian Taliban. One's own freedom can only be achieved through the servitude of others. Later immigrants to America, likewise, sought a better life. Many got it by riding roughshod over the rights of others. Ask the original inhabitants of America! Ask the Jews! Ask the Catholics! Ask the Mormons! Ask the Latinos! Ask the Chinese! The Hawaiians! Oh, and ask the women! The blacks didn't immigrate to the Americas in search of a better life, which is just as well, because they certainly didn't find it waiting for them. They haven't ridden roughshod over much of anything, only moving to the front of the bus in 1955!

In 2008, I believe the Americans should think hard and ask themselves if they are The Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. Then demonstrate it to the world. Elect the Irishman! O'Bama for President!

Blame it on the Boogie

I have seen a medicine

That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion.
William Shakespeare (All's Well that Ends Well. Act II, Scene I)

THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX is today, at exactly 15:43 GMT, and I suppose, if the rain were to ease up, I should head for the nearest stone circle, barrow or oak tree and do a dance. As it is British Summer Time, I must remember it would be about quarter to five that I should get jigging. The folks in Salt Lake City, many wearing funny knickers, should step outside their car dealerships at quarter to ten this morning, their time. If you are in Honolulu, in a grass skirt, knackered from entertaining tourists from the Mainland all night, a quick run around a palm tree at sunrise will suffice. If you happen to be in the Bourbon Street Pub in Key West, which will have opened 45 minutes ago, take off your t-shirts and give your best rendition of I Will Survive just before noon.

As the rain is pissing down in Northumberland, unusually, I am going to be reading this afternoon: An Utterly Impartial History of Britain or 2000 Years of Upper Class Twits in Charge by John O'Farrell. He's the author of a number of amusing studies, including Global Village Idiot and I Blame the Scapegoats. Put him on your reading list.

For a week or so, I have been reading the Impartial History, which began with Julius Caesar having a hell of a time getting four good seats together on the cross-channel ferry back in 55 BC when he invaded the British Isles. It is a big book, factual for all the humour. A critic says of it: As entertaining as a witch burning, and a lot more laughs.

At two o'clock this morning, I reached 1401 AD; Henry IV has just decided that it would not be a particularly bad thing to incinerate the Lollards in town squares as heretics. The Lollards, originally followers of John Wycliffe, who had translated the Bible into what passed as everyday English in 1382, believed that the average bloke might learn to be pious from the scriptures, not just from the priests. In other words, that piety might be developed at home, around the hearth with your family, in your vernacular, rather than struggled with at a church where someone mumbled Latin. Clearly, a revolutionary idea. Henry IV, as we all know from our Shakespeare, meaning it must be so, fell ill with insomnia, became insane, and his face was covered in ghastly pustules, which could happen to any of us. The clincher, however, was the poor, old-at-forty-five, King waking to find his son, the future Henry V, trying on the crown that he'd left on his spare pillow. Seems that torching the Lollards resulted in some bad Karma for the King. We should take note! If you must take your symbol of office to bed, then wear it, or someone will nick it. Uneasy lies the head that doesn't wear a crown.

It's riveting stuff for me. I studied English history generally, in Bermuda, but my high school course was centred on the first Hanoverian monarchs (Georges I, II and III) and, particularly, the American War of Independence, as we call it. O'Farrell suggests that the American Revolution might well have arisen from disputes over standards of British dentistry. I'm enjoying catching up on Boudicca, the Black Death, Stephen and Matilda, Piers Gaveston fondling the crown jewels and Edward II taking a red-hot poker up the bum, and so on.

What a history we have here! I'm sure that my ancestors must have known just a little of what was going on. A friend's cousin's brother-in-law took part in that Peasants' Revolt of 1381 when my great-grandad Eldridge was shovelling pig-shit for his master. I have never, for a moment, considered myself the heir to any sort of baronial title, much less a descendant of some mighty prince of the realm. I know one old queen in Bermuda who has linked himself back to the Plantagenet kings somehow. I'm never impressed when he tells the story. He's a twat, and a shame the Black Death missed his family's no doubt fabulous palace back in 1348.

Amble by the Sea, also known as The Friendliest Port, is historic in its own way. Amble has been ambling along for around 2,000 years, and there are lumps and bumps in the landscape, columns, walls and castles, coins in the fields, and ghost ships sunk in the Coquet Estuary, and the memories of the older folks who've managed to live here despite the winters, all testifying to things past.

Sometimes a bit of history comes to town. Last Saturday afternoon a troupe of Morris Dancers from Yorkshire (that's a northern English county well to the south of us) turned up in the Town Square. I had seen a little note about this in the window of the Bread Bin Bakery, a few doors down from my flat, and decided that if the sun was shining at one o'clock, I'd go and have a look. I've seen Morris Dancing on the telly, and in movies, it's quaint these days. I'm sure the young people think it's just naff. It does appeal to the tourists, I have no doubt, and I fancied some tourist-watching.

So far as I know, I've never seen Morris Dancers live. They were certainly naff when I was a student! I was too busy applying Clearasil to my face, combing my hair forward and wearing flowered shirts and ties from Carnaby Street to watch silly people in top hats, dressed in funny clothes, with bells strapped to their legs, and waving hankies about as they did in Nether Wallop before Noe's Floude.

I hitched Cailean up in his new multi-coloured harness and leash at quarter-to-one as, miracle, the sun was out on Saturday. It was not only sunny, but quite warm. We made our way down to the Square, with the usual stops to meet & greet and pick up the newspapers. At the Square the dancing had commenced. There were eight dancers, two alternates, a fellow playing some sort of squeeze box, and a girl who might have been ten or eleven who was clearly dealing with some developmental handicap. The girl was keeping watch over an upturned top hat with some coins in it placed on the cobbles at the entrance to the Square. The little girl, chubby, her bare bottom hanging out of her white, baggy sweat-pants, stared into some other dimension, her mouth wide open with amazement. I spent the late 1960s like that.

The dancers, all male, were dressed in white tunics and trousers with criss-crossed blue and maroon bands over their chests and backs, and grey top hats with matching blue and maroon ribbons, brown belts—some with mobile phones attached—did not match black shoes, bells were strapped below the dancers' knees. Most of the men were bearded, grey bearded. There was only one young chap, tall, fair-skinned, red-haired, dark glasses, too young to produce even a rudimentary whisker. Most of the group wore sunglasses, as I'm sure they did back in the Middle Ages. Tucked into the belts were white hankies, and there were duffle bags containing what turned out to be long sticks and short sticks off to one side of the designated dance-floor.

There were group dances from various villages in Yorkshire, which were not terribly unalike, one song in someone else's language, and then the leader of the pack said that young somebody—turned out to be the nice-looking lad with ginger hair—would do a solo turn. The group moved back, a tune was squeezed out enthusiastically, and the boy took to the air with his handkerchiefs. Look out, Billy Elliot, there's a new kid on the block. I'm not sure whether the dance was accurately performed, but it was well-done and rather entertaining (yes, like a witch burning) and I was most impressed that somebody of the next generation was going to take this peculiar custom forward. At least, I trust he will. The afternoon's show ended with some stick banging and the red-head did an odd run out of the line-up, swung around the metal sundial in the centre of the Square a few times, bobbed about a bit there—in theatre, this is called chewing the scenery, I believe—then ran and leapt back into the group with a flourish. Of course, we all applauded, scaring Cailean.

The audience, no more than twenty people and my dog, was, indeed, mostly made up of tourists. There had been one teenaged boy wearing a Newcastle United FC jersey, but once the jump-up began, he hurried off into a ginnel at the south side of the Square, no lover of history, pageantry or the arts. That or he preferred a wank.

I discussed the goings-on with a lady from Essex who'd been sat near me. Cailean had taken an interest in her and had climbed onto her lap when it was offered. The lady had suggested she mind him while I took some photographs. My accent, of course, baffles people. Are you Canadian? When you have the town's cutest dog, and an odd way of speaking, you can go a long way.

So, we wondered how regional accents have managed to survive, and whether they will do so in the future, and how long history can last in Britain. And we turned our faces to the sunshine, Cailean too, just like they did back before the Renaissance, and enjoyed the warmth of it all.

The World Always Ends on TV

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
Right after these commercial messages
T. V. Eliot (The Wasteland)

I'VE HELD OFF writing up my brief notes on the Large Hadron Collider experiment just in case the other shoe dropped and there wasn't much point in doing it. No computer. No Barking Mad blog. No Internet. Nobody out there. No Amble. No out there.

But the experiment is incomplete, even though the news headlines announced that the universe had not ended. The news of our survival may be premature. The risky bit, when the particles going clockwise around the LHC accelerator in Switzerland meet the particles going anti-clockwise, will only happen, they now coyly say: Some time in the next month, perhaps. The other shoe is yet to drop.

Last Wednesday morning, 10 September 2008, just after eight o'clock, the LHC was to be fired up, and if the red standby light turned green, big things were going to happen. And it was going to be on the television. Some said it would be the end of the world, the end of the universe, live from Geneva.

There could be small Black Holes created when these miniscule protons bumped into each other at very nearly the speed of light. [99.999999% of the speed of light, apparently, which is almost as fast as the speed of a dachshund grabbing a bit of steak. I'd like to race wiener dogs round that 17 mile track.] Black Holes worry people, even if they really haven't got a clue as to what they might be. If only they'd been called Pale Blue Holes, everything would be hunky dory.

The things that could be discovered, that will be studied, and the measurements, the names, the contortions, and logic, are so peculiar (the Higgs boson, electromagnetic symmetry breaking, masses and decays of quarks, dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, the string theory) that my mind would be wound up tighter than Stephen Hawking's voice machine if I tried to think too much about them. [Please note that I have my own String Theory: No matter how long you cut a piece of ribbon to tie up a Christmas present, it is always too short.]

I was home on Wednesday morning. Optimistically, I even made my bed. I skipped my bowl of cereal and wondered about a beverage to consume while watching the big Switch-On on Channel 80. Tea? Coffee? Hemlock?

Cailean joined me on the sofa as I settled down with my coffee. I reached for my TV remote. The upper left button should switch the flat-screen on, but the battery is loose and I had to whack the remote a few times before it made contact. What do you expect for £250?

White men, a very few white women, and no people of colour that I noticed, were standing around or sitting around on what might have been the deck of the Starship Enterprise. Lights were a-flashing, screens were a-screening, and a voiceover from London told us that we were watching the control room at CERN in Switzerland. Then we got to see some animation. We even had a bird's eye view of that part of the Swiss-French countryside with a dotted line superimposed to indicate where the LHC was buried. I wondered if it ran under anyone's bedroom. Imagining Claude calling Marie to the window and saying, in French, of course: There's a big dotted line coming straight towards us from the east, and going out again to the west. WTF?

The voiceover said that it was about time to turn on the Large Hadron Collider. I was astonished to hear that it might just not work. That's what they said. The whole project was so far out: Who could be sure? And what do you expect for £5,000,000,000?

If it had refused to operate, I expect some boffin would have called out: Try switching it off, then on again.

A sip of the coffee, I stroked Cailean's ears. I waited to be dragged by a mighty wind across the North Sea, up into the Alps, and through a small black hole, surrounded by millions of spinning chocolate bars and Rolex watches to find Tom Cruise being crowned Grand Poobah by tiny, green aliens fresh from a tear in the Space-Time Continuum. Nothing. Not one Toblerone wrapper.

The television news team went over to another story. A banner on the screen promised an update regarding the Big Experiment later in the morning. No World's End, just Credit Crunch. This reminded me I'd not had breakfast. I got on with the rest of my day, but left the TV running, the sound muted.

It was mid-morning when the headline came up to announce that one beam had gone around the LHC successfully. Hopefully a second beam would take the opposite track in the afternoon. But the real experiment, to get the beams to collide: Some time in the next month, perhaps. In fact, the second single beam made its trip before day's end, before the world's end.

As we survivors of this non-event know, some time next month might be around 21 October. Put it in your Doomsday Book. And pray the Universe has a Reset Button.

That might be the end of this post, but I saw a programme on the TV last night that included an interview with a man in America, outside his home on the Texas Coast as Hurricane Ike approached. All the residents in his town had been told to evacuate their homes immediately, there was almost certainly going to be some heavy weather, perhaps a huge storm surge that would wash anything in its way from the face of the Earth. The man insisted: I'm not going. I believe in God, and he'll look after me. I'm a Christian.

And a damn fool, I thought.

Aspects of God

OUR DAILY NEWSPAPER in this part of the world is The Journal, and I suppose the best-known part of this part of the world would be Newcastle. Like sending coal to, and all that. And, in this part of this part, the best-known part might be St James's Park where the Newcastle United Football Club lads kick a football about.

I have walked by, and driven past, St James's Park a number of times, but I have not been inside. However, over the past few years, the names of some of the characters associated with Newcastle United FC have stuck in my head, and I've even experienced the occasional frisson when something good (not often), or something terribly wrong (frequently), happens to the Magpies or Toon, as we commonly refer to the Club.

Yes, I seethed over Joey Barton, and I'm pissed off today with his mere twelve match suspension (it may be as few as six if he behaves, which is doubtful) for his act of violence against another player. Toon manager, Kevin Keegan, stood up for Barton. Thousands did not. I'm not sure that I believe in a God that follows footie closely. At least I didn't until this week. Suddenly, it seems, things became so uncomfortable for Kevin Keegan, that after several days of wrangling, hours and pages of media time and space in the Northeast, then the UK, then across the globe, and large crowds shaking fists outside St James's Park—even without the benefit of a few in Shearer's Bar—in the deluging rain, Keegan quit last night.

Some of the headlines in the Journal:

"Fans rally to Keegan's side"
"Day of rumour triggers uproar"
"Reports and analysis, Pages 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 70, 71 & 72"
"Rumour and counter-rumour are rife"
"Keegan's future in doubt after day of high drama"
"Keegan Crisis"

Those from pages one and three only! It gets worse:

"Supporters endure day of torment at the gates"
"Don't you mess with a Messiah"
"Closest thing to God has gone, says fan" (That headline in a Millennium-sized, very bold font.)
"Why tell us nothing?"
"Fans salute one man who feels their pain"
"Shambolic day really tested my patience"

And, of course, photographs of Kevin in happier times. The man should have been shot for the hairstyle when a player back in the 1980s. He must have spent more time at the beauty parlour than practising with a soccer ball, and as he wasn't such a great player, all told, but had charisma, he did very well. It was said that when his hair was flapping about, the massive perm of black curls, the other players simply couldn't tell what was going on beyond him. In the right situations, this would have been useful.

He's gone now, he's resigned, it's official. It is Friday night. The fans will be crying in their beer. Hopefully, the continuing soap opera that is the Toon will resume tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I have to face up to something Chris Gibbons, a footie fan in Bermuda, told me eight months ago when Kevin Keegan returned to manage Newcastle United (which was then in a dreadful slump and in danger of being relegated). Chris said something like this: "Keegan! Hah! The minute things start to get a bit tough, Keegan will get going!" And I protested. The Toon turn of mind was affecting me already!

*

ON PAGE TWELVE of the Journal there is a headline on quite a different subject.

"Explicit statue row rages on"

This story is making national headlines—we are a nation, even if we have no credible government at the present time—as it involves an outrage against public decency. I'm sure even the tacky newspaper The Sun—which always features a topless blonde on page three—is noting that the Baltic Gallery on the Gateshead Quays across the Tyne from Newcastle proper is in court, charged with displaying something so offensive that a Christian lady in Essex decided to make a private case against the Baltic.

The prosecuting lady's name is Emily Mapfuwa; the shocking artwork, which was exhibited for a few months at the end of 2007, is owned by Newcastle-born billionaire Anita Zabludowicz and her husband Poju; the artist that created Gone, Yet Still is a Chinese-American chap called Terence Koh. All good English names, eh?

And the piece of art? A white, plaster figure of Jesus Christ, only a foot high, portraying Him considerably over-dressed and—here's the rub—sporting an erection. The newspaper uses the words "in an aroused state" which could, it seems to me, mean, if you wanted, no more than he was pricking up his ears. So, I'll say "erection", just so you don't picture his ears.

I guess the loss of our Messiah, Kevin Keegan, got me started. I was in no mood to read about art censorship. Not that there is any obvious connection between the stories. Just the business of annoying news.

During the reign of Queen Victoria, explorers from Great Britain went to Egypt and snapped the phalluses off the statues of the pharaohs and their chums, and scraped off and over-painted the offensive things on the walls and columns. Never mind the art, it was history! And never mind Victoria had nine children and had, one assumes, some experience with erections. The Christian thing was to pretend they didn't exist.

The Puritans smashed statues centuries before, and whitewashed walls, and applied loincloths and leaves to the most exquisite private parts in art. We regret that now.

I'm one of those blokes who believe that if Jesus Christ existed, it is most likely that there was a Mrs Jesus Christ, and children. And if He got the wife with children, I'm guessing he got aroused, and not just around the ears. The Mormons were taught (though they tend to avoid the subject now) that Jesus was fathered by a God with Mary in a normal act of sexual intercourse. No Harry Potter magic.

I also believe that Christ's apostles were married men, most likely with children. So, we don't read about the wives, kids, in-laws, kitchen curtains, colour of the fishing boat. It's not because they didn't exist, it is because the Gospels concern other things and, in those days, writing anything down was quite an effort. Keep it brief! I'm sure that was uppermost in the minds of those who wrote the New Testament. So, I think Christ and his followers were regular folks.

I don't think they had halos, or wings, or glowed in the dark, or had beating, bleeding, bright-red hearts hanging out of their chests … all of that would be weird and, frankly, I find it unpleasant. Bad art, but I wouldn't censor it.

Am I offended by a statue of Jesus with an erection? Not at all. When I was a child, seeing the movie The Bible at the cinema, I certainly giggled at Eve's long hair awkwardly taped to her bare breasts as she stood behind a medium-sized shrub. That is offensive, to see that sort of daft censorship. It was the censorship that made it vulgar. I found, online, a photograph of the statue in the Baltic case, with the naughty bits pixillated to keep me pure.

Bah! I looked up a photograph of Michelangelo's Risen Christ (of the Minerva) which has a completely naked Christ holding a cross and striking a slightly clumsy pose that the experts suggest Michelangelo used elsewhere in his work (look at the Rebellious Slave, for another example) to somehow suggest movement and vitality. Doesn't work for me, unfortunately. And Jesus is naked, for all to see, and I don't think he's circumcised. You'll recall the David isn't either. Was it an oversight? Was it censorship? Was it some distaste for something so, erm, Jewish?

It is not as if Terence Koh's tiny statue had a white dove perched on the offending part. That would have been funny, and forgiveness never extends to humour. (We read in the Bible that Jesus wept, but not that he laughed, smiled, giggled, slapped his mates on the back while guffawing, kicked a ball around while telling a funny story, or had any sort of a good time. And you just know he did all of that.)

*

SO MUCH FOR art, religion, football, and no sense of humour. So much for the overly dramatic. And if Kevin Keegan really is the father figure of football in Newcastle, could he pose for Terence Koh and prove it?