Stormy Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ode: To Peace in a Podcast

You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks.
Dorothy Parker

I USUALLY TURN TO SHAKESPEARE for an opening quotation. I’m writing about Cailean’s second birthday, and I may have other canine pet stories, so I searched for a line or two featuring the word dog. My first search gave me almost 200, and not one was complimentary to dogs. Nearly all were put-downs of men, comparing them, unfavourably, to dogs.

Perhaps Shakespeare had bad experiences with dogs. Barking during performances at The Globe, fouling the pavement outside his lodging house. Might he have been bitten? Did a puppy chew a favourite quill? And it may be that dogs were mostly street creatures (completely wild or bear-baiters), except for those at Court (and those bred to hunt). One routinely sees lap-dogs in paintings only after Shakespeare’s time, I believe.

If not Shakespeare, then who might give me a good line? William Blake’s “A dog starved at his master’s gate / Predicts the ruin of the state” came to mind. Clearly Blake had a higher opinion as to the worth of a dog. Good man!

And I recalled photographs of Dorothy Parker with her black, standard dachshunds. Ms Parker lived in hotels most of her adult life and her rooms, apparently, were rather filthy thanks to her pets and her reluctance to walk them, and clean up after them promptly. Dorothy Parker is usually a quotation mine, but the only one I could find (above) is about dogma rather than dogs.

A dogma is, briefly, a belief, a principle or an opinion, or all of those. We tend to associate dogmas with religion, and religion with peace and love. Religious dogma, to my mind, has been antithetical to peace and love. I took history courses at my grammar school, and I watch the television news.

A dog is, briefly, what you make him. I suppose one could train a dog to act on one’s dogma, but you could not train a dog to seek out, say, Muslims, by any means except the outward observances of their belief. Clothes, perhaps. I thought of Muslims because many of them find dogs unclean somehow, that's part of their dogma. Give any man a stick and a dog will be nervous, give a man a smile and a dog will likely wag his tail.

Today is 24 February 2010. It is very nearly my Cailean’s second birthday. He’ll be a two-years-old on 8 March. If that seven human years for one dog year holds, he’s a teenager.

This Barking Mad in Amble by the Sea Blog is nearly always written with Cailean next to me. Sometimes he will put a paw on my foot, and I’ll find he’s looking up at me. When the blogging takes a long while, there may be a toilet break required. Cailean always asks to go outside, something all my other dogs did not always do. You are going to meet them.

Happens that I have a fairly good memory and recall that when I was a boy we had an American cocker spaniel, a pretty, pale-gold, spayed female that we called Shammy (being short for Champagne, her colouring). I actually remember that Shammy was born on 24 February 1960. That’s 50 years ago exactly today. I didn’t see the new-born, but chose her from the litter about two months later. My father took me, which is interesting in that he didn’t live with us, and we rarely saw him or heard from him. I suppose he paid for the puppy. He did name it. We celebrated our pets’ birthdays modestly (we didn’t have birthday parties for ourselves) and that may be why I recall Shammy’s.

Shammy came after three short-lived spaniels. Tony, Sheba and Sherry left the safety of the garden and were struck by passing vehicles. They appeared in photographs, and I remember Sheba who brought a pullet to our back door (we lived near a farm) and who dragged her shattered body to that back door and died there. Sherry was with us only a few months, a black spaniel, her body was removed before we got home from school.

In 1971, after Shammy’s loss to cancer, I bought an English spaniel, white and orange, long legs, and as pretty as she was dim. I called her Lexi. I also was given a grey tabby kitten, Pudding, and they lived peaceably, both sleeping on my bed most nights. Lexi died of cancer in 1981, and Pudding lived until 1990, a good innings for a cat.

Aleks, my first miniature dachshund, was born, in England, on 19 October 1996. He was dappled chocolate, cream and silver. Aleks, unlike the spaniels, subscribed to a dogma of forcible intervention whenever anyone approached me. No matter how well Aleks knew someone, if I was in the room he’d get between me and the other person and bark, and even snarl, though he never bit anyone. Eight years later, Aleks was stolen and died horribly. He may have been an irrascible little fellow, but he was devoted to me. His death was heart-breaking for me.

And now Cailean (as my seventh dog, he was nearly called Septimus) is two-years-old. His nature is the opposite of Aleks’s. Cailean has friends everywhere, and knows where they are. A walk down the main street must involve Cailean looking in many doorways. Some shop-keepers (and the postman) have dog biscuits.

Cailean likes visitors, and gives them plenty of attention if they want it. Now that he’s grown up he has bursts of energy, but is content to sleep on the sofa next to me, or in his bed under the desk (at this moment). When he was younger he’d run around like a rat on crack, but not so as to damage anything, and with a look of joy, ears flapping.

Cailean has never mastered the art of jumping onto furniture. He waits to be lifted up. He will jump off the sofa, but not off the bed. Dachshunds, of course, should not be jumping. His favourite game at present is flinging things from the sofa for me to fetch for him. A twist on the game most dogs subscribe to. He has many toys, and the stuffed meercat gets most attention just now, along with a large hard-plastic ball that is weighted so that it rolls off by itself.

Cailean likes his walks, and riding on the bus (he sits on my lap). Excursions are an opportunity to be waggy-tail. He’s wary of mobility scooters (who isn’t?) and, as he’s very small, I have to be careful if he’s on crowded pavements. Children, almost without exception, come running up to Cailean saying: “A sausage dog!” (In Korea he’d be a dog sausage ...)

Will I have a party on 8 March? Neither of us should be eating cake! However, I think I might manage some chicken.

I could not, for example, tell Cailean to keep the Labour Party candidate from the door, or, unfortunately, the BNP people. Aleks would have seen either off, and the Archbishop of Canterbury too. Aleks wanted me all to himself. Aleks was dogmatic: assertive over matters that might be unproven. Cailean wants a party, all are invited. Peace and Love. I must judge who is acceptable. I have to work the velvet rope and his leash, be dogmatic.

Warwick Camp

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth ... And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Genesis 1: 26-28, 31

Well, we all shine on,

Everyone, c'mon.

Instant Karma's gonna get you.

John Lennon (Instant Karma)

ONE REMEMBERS THE ODDEST THINGS. I cannot recall the obvious things. If I go to the minimart without a shopping list thinking to get Fairy original, chances are I’ll come home with Strawberry Ribena and will rediscover I am out of dishwashing liquid when it comes time to rinse out my glass. As I did just yesterday.

When I was almost fourteen, September 1963, all the boys in my form, the Lower Fifth, were drafted into the school’s Cadet Corps. I was a bit younger than most of my male classmates as I’d skipped a few forms during years of some brilliance. The bright lights had dimmed in my head, and there I was with lads of fourteen and even fifteen hearing that we had to gather on the next Wednesday afternoon, when regular classes had finished for the day, to go up to Warwick Camp to be outfitted in our military uniforms.

Next Wednesday came, and an open truck with wooden benches in its bed was waiting below the Assembly Hall. The new recruits and the boys who had been co-opted the year before (they were in their uniforms distributed in September 1962, and had nearly all grown out of those khaki shirts, shorts, knee-socks and puttees, and boots, and were to be given new clothing that would fit for a while) piled into the back of the truck, and sat wherever we could. There must have been nearly thirty of us. Health & Safety would not permit such transport in 2010.

I remember the truck passing Warwick Pond and an elderly woman walking on the side of the road. A number of the boys in our truck yelled obscenities at the poor creature. Vile obscenities, things I may have been hearing for the first time. Rough lot, the military.

At Warwick Camp, the headquarters of the Bermuda Regiment, Bermuda’s real soldiery made up of young males drafted as they finished normal schooling (it is still maintained under those conditions, females need not serve their country), the thirty or so boys from Warwick Academy queued outside a building with a hatch in the wall. As each boy reached the window, a full-time soldier took quick measurements of the boy’s chest, waist and inside leg. Asked what their shoe size might be, I imagine few of us could have answered truthfully. (In 2010 I still do not have an exact shoe size: style, material and comfort dictate anything from 7½ to 8½.) We were given boots to try on over our ordinary school uniform socks, which would prove to be thinner than the military issue we’d wear with the boots when on parade.

After a time, each boy had a bag loaded up with not just the summer's khaki gear, but the Cadet Corps’ winter uniform. Itchy, solid-green shirt with long sleeves, matching solid-green trousers. We had a beret with a badge, and a leather belt with peculiar silvery fastening devices, beret and belt to be used in summer and winter.

It was almost 1964: I was just getting turned on to British rock and roll. I had seen a few lads with long hair and had thought: That’s for me! I was discovering clothes that were not at all like my school uniform, and, God knows, light years removed from the Cadet Corps’ hideous outfits.

The Warwick Academy School Cadet Corps was abandoned a year later. I do not know why exactly, but I was certainly a happy camper when I heard that September 1964 would not entail another truck-ride to Warwick Camp for larger uniforms.

I could sit back, now, and wave an arm about, and dismiss my year in the military in a few sentences. At the time, however, it was dreary and I hated it, and rarely tired of saying so. I never managed to figure out how to march, parade or look as if I had a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. As I was particularly awkward on the parade ground, I appreciated (and prayed for) rainy days. When we were unable to stand outside, we gathered on the balcony in the Assembly Hall and had lectures of a sort. These I did find interesting. We had a little map-reading (I recall plotting an invasion of Weston-super-Mare) and one lesson on how to survive in the Malaysian jungles (clearly something I needed to know aged thirteen).

One afternoon we were each given a Bren light machine gun, with an empty ammunition clip. We had to dismantle the gun, and then put it back together, at speed. I could not do that. (I was never any good at building models from kits, and they came with a step-by-step picture guide.) Fortunately, in 1964, I never had to assemble a Bren gun and march on an English seaside resort.

What particularly curious thing do I remember from my year serving with Her Majesty’s forces (I had left Bermuda when it came time for me to be drafted into the Regiment for three years)? It was something that took place the week following our outfitting with our first uniforms. We were being instructed on how to wear our uniforms. How to wind the puttees, how to polish the black boots and belt (never, ever, use liquid polish ... and I always did and caught hell for it), how to polish the brass cap badge and belt fastening device. (The really cool lads with girlfriends simply had the girls busy with the Brasso at lunchtime, in the Quadrangle, on the days the Cadet Corps was embodied. I wasn’t exactly cool at the time.)

The schoolteacher in charge of the Cadets, Mervyn White, who was a few years later to die of some rare and peculiar disease contracted in the Amazon jungle, held up a belt. One end had a pointy-out bit, the other end a slit.

“This is the male. The piece that sticks out. This is the female. The slot. And the male fits into the female. Like this.”

Mervyn jiggled the bits of brass together, and then pulled the belt out tight. It was securely fastened so long as the pressure was applied. If the belt had not been adjusted and was too loose around one’s waist, the male might slip out of the female, and that would be a problem. The forces on the belt buckle, acting to wrench the ends apart, would not break it open so long as the male piece was in the female correctly.

We did not have sex education classes at Warwick Academy. Our biology textbook had drawings of male and female rabbits' genitals, but not a great deal of information as to what the bunnies do with them. We had no lessons in psychology. We learnt nothing about family happiness, security or mores. For that matter, we heard nothing about contraception, abortion or STDs.

We did have Religious Knowledge classes. The master for that subject was our Cadet Corps commandant, Mervyn White. We spent most of our lesson time following Saint Paul. I disliked Paul from the start, he was too bossy. Of course, our classes covered the Ten Commandments (we had to memorize them, stand by our desks and recite one or more as the teacher demanded). Stephen Fry points out that the Ten Commandments are the hysterical work of desert tribes, and that those people have done nothing but make life (and death) a misery ever since, and to this day. We wandered in Genesis, avoiding Chapter 38 which was a bit much for teenagers. The Creation of Adam and Eve (or was it Lilith?) was, I suppose, another brush with sex education.

Male and female, created he them. Like himself. In his/her very own image. Well, that seemed odd even when I first heard it as a young boy. We knew (having seen the pictures) that God was a man. Where was the female part? Under the long robe? One may, after fifty years, think that the writer of Genesis (Moses?) understood that human males and females each have hormones that are “male” and “female”. God knows, hormones were not to be discussed in Religious Knowledge, or at our uptight school at all.

So, sex education from the Bible, by way of Mervyn White. And from the School Cadet Corps, by way of Mervyn White.

At my age, I still cannot polish brass without thinking of sex. Candlesticks, bowls and knobs. That said, I do like a brass band playing Jerusalem. Freud might like that.

Just Another Spatial Twist Continuum

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
William Shakespeare (The Taming of the Shrew. Act I, Scene I)

AFTER SEVERAL DAYS OF HEAVY RAIN, without let-up, we had a break yesterday. The day began with clear skies, a pale, frightened blue. However, one could see mists forming over the North Sea (by evening we were fogged in) and swirling around the keep at Warkworth Castle.

Warkworth Castle is awfully old, and tumbled-down, but still substantial. Shakespeare set a scene in Henry IV (Part 1) in the Castle. Warkworth was hardly new in the 14th Century in the days of Harry Hotspur (Sir Henry Percy) who may have been born there in the 1360s. (He may have been born in Alnwick Castle, a few miles inland, the other Percy homestead in this part of the world.)

With the break in the weather yesterday morning, I hitched up Cailean and we headed across town and sat out on the Amble Pier.

A full-bodied lady, not a young woman, in a sweat suit and scarf with a woolly hat under her hoodie approached us as we sat looking out at the Sea through the Harbour entrance.

“Is he friendly?”

“Well, yes. Just ignore the yapping, he feels it is his duty to protect me.”

Cailean is a talkative little fellow; miniature dachshunds tend to be chatty. He also likes to hop and put his front paws on one’s shin. A kindly reply (Aren’t you a lovely dog?) gets his tail wagging. A scratch around the ears gets his whole body wagging.

“Not as cold as it has been.”

“No, this is rather pleasant. Even with the breeze off the water.”

And I mentioned the days of rain. The English like to form queues and talk about the weather.

“This has been a brutal winter. Still, mustn’t complain.”

For some reason we mustn’t.

And I watched two ruddy-faced women packing up their fishing gear, industrial-size rods, not the hook-and-sinker hand-lines that I grew up with. The women looked alike, almost twins. With them was a younger girl, as pallid as they were red; washed-out, straggly blond hair, and, I’m thinking, the features one associates with Down’s syndrome. The girl was so very white that I wondered if she might be an albino. Rare genetic misfortune if so.

There were several members of a family, all albinos, at Hurricane High School in Utah back in the 1990s. That was a close-knit community, and one might expect oddities with families doubling back on themselves.

The girl on the Amble Pier was mumbling to herself. I’m hard of hearing thanks to decades of extremely loud music (I have felt too embarrassed to consider a hearing-aid, but my eyesight is crap too and I have difficulty reading the captioning on the telly, so I really should have my ears looked into). The girl didn’t seem threatening.

In July of 1968 I spent several weeks in London with my mother. One day we were sitting on a bench at Marble Arch and a woman appeared, screaming obscenities, which she soon directed at us. We’d stayed sitting while other people in the area got their skates on. This mad woman was, I suppose, quite mad. Nowadays we have tablets one can (and really should) take.

When I was in Lower 4 at Warwick Academy, our Physics master was a Welshman with a Spanish surname. Go figure. One day one of the few girls in the Physics class must have been grappling with some demon, perhaps her blob, and she took umbrage at something the teacher had said, had addressed to her. He may have asked her for a formula. (I still recall a few formulas relating to motion ... S = UT + ½ AT² ... though I couldn’t explain them.)

The girl, who would have been about 12 or 13, stood up and screamed abuse at our teacher. It was the first time I’d ever heard a girl swear, and she did it with considerable volume and variety. I wasn’t sure how Gabe (the teacher) could possibly do the disgusting things that Carol (the girl) suggested he do.

Carol disappeared then and there. She walked out of the Physics class and Lower 4. I think she was switched to a Commercial course and spent the next few years typing and doing shorthand. The Academic students rather looked down on the Commercial boys and girls. Commerce was for dummies.

My first job was in the accounting and finance department at AIG.

Gabe was not a very inspiring teacher of Physics. I have an unsettled grudge against him. At the end of a term, back in Lower 4, we had to sit an examination. When Gabe had marked the papers and brought the results to class, he was in a state of bloody-minded rage that was almost a match for Carol’s. Gabe said that all the pupils that had failed the examination would have to take it again. And it turned out that only one of us passed it. Me. And the vile man suddenly decided that I should stay after school and take it again too.

I wasn’t too fond of Physics after that. Certainly no fan of Gabe.

That said, Gabe and one other teacher were the only members of staff from Warwick Academy who attended the funeral of my step-mother who’d taught History at the school.

I’m sitting on the Amble Pier watching the mists forming in the Coquet Estuary to my left; Cailean is watching a piece of paper that has blown past us.

I have a GCE “O” Level in Physics, and I took Physics and Pure and Applied Mathematics at “A” Level, along with classes in Statistics and Engineering Drawing. I picked up an “A” Level in Biology too.

When I studied the mechanics of DNA, I think the scientists had the strands spiralling in the wrong direction. Cannot say that ruined my life, I didn’t come undone when I found out years later.

I’m reading a life of Alan Turing, his was possibly the greatest mathematical mind of the 20th Century, and there’s rather a lot of Physics to wade through. And Scientific Philosophy. And there’s no way one can measure how long a piece of string is. In fact, existence itself is dodgy at best. “What is?” We cannot really answer that, so how the devil can we deal with “What will be?”

“We were talking about the space between us all ...”

I've wondered why the Mormons don’t come knocking at our doors here, or gather in pairs in railway stations. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?

Saw a programme on the telly the other night, on Time. The presenter and his guests all had ideas about time. And space. Apparently, if aliens don’t invade us and carry us off into Captivity and make us build pyramids for their worlds, our sun is going to burn out in several billion years’ time. That would be the end of the Earth’s time, and our solar system. Galaxies will dissolve; the Universe will expand until the spaces are so vast that the stars seem to go out. The Big Crunch is not a definite.

At the end, perhaps, all time will exist simultaneously. Carol will shriek her vulgarities at Gabe. I shall squint through the fog at Warkworth Castle. Harry Hotspur will say his lines in the Globe Theatre. The Angel Moroni might even drop through Joseph Smith’s ceiling.

“Is he friendly?”

“The Angel Moroni?”

“No. Your little sausage dog.”

“Sorry. My mind was wandering a little. Yes, he’s quite friendly, just likes to yap a bit.”

Recollection Collection

LORENZO: O dear discretion, how his words are suited!
The fool hath planted in his memory
An army of good words, and I do know
A many fools, that stand in better place,
Garnished like him, that for a tricksy word
Defy the matter.
William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice. Act III, Scene V)

MY YOUNGEST SISTER has been not so much reinventing her childhood as inventing it, with very little of the original being considered. Poor thing wants something worth telling a psychoanalyst (not that she’d know what analysis is, or anything about Freud or Jung ... not even their names) without actually going to a professional in that field. She has told me that she has no intention of speaking to any health-care worker about her past, present or dreams for the future; she just wants the medication she’s taken for decades. Offers of cognitive therapy are declined: She doesn’t want to know. However, she feels compelled to chat about those things that come to mind. (An aunt of mine had ECT, and told me that as she recovered old pictures and memories seemed to float up to the surface, which she found rather pleasant.)

Actually, as I am five years older than this sister, I have a pretty good handle on her life. I remember her being born (I remember our mother’s morning sickness!) and the next fifteen or so years after that. I remember when she was invited to drop out of school. Despite hardships of a financial nature, and the emotional pressures of having an absent father and a present, but rather loopy, mother, we muddled by quite well. We had a house with a garden, we had a dock on the harbour (in Bermuda), and we had more friends than we could keep up with. We had music and, in moderation after about 1960, we had television. We went to the cinema regularly, the Saturday shows could be seen for a florin, and that included sweets of some sort. A florin is 10P, which is hardly worth bending over to pick up if you drop the coin in the street these days.

My sister did not excel at school, but, to her great credit, she worked steadily most of her life and was never fired from a job. We were talking the other evening (on the telephone) about teachers at the school we both attended (so did our sister and one of our brothers) and how one, Mrs Lorna Harriott, was key to starting us reading, reading almost compulsively. Both of my sisters, like me, are never without a stack of books.

My youngest sister tells me that she can read anything (she likes true crime, especially involving child abuse and serial rapists and killers) and within a few days she can no longer recall the book title and author, the plot, the theme, the characters. I’m the opposite, I carry words and lines from things I read forty (and more) years ago about with me and take great pleasure in revisiting them in my mind, and in rereading in part, or completely, books that made my days. They made my years, my life. There is something to be said for having a mind that (apparently) erases what one reads in under a week: one can reread the same books and rediscover them completely, as one enjoyed them the very first time, not knowing the storyline, the outcome. Incidentally, my sister retains little or nothing of films and television programmes. She has favourite actors and entertainers, but it is facial recognition and she’d be hard-pressed to catalogue their work. I have never heard my sister quote from a book, or make a reference to a famous speech (real or invented by a novelist). It’s curious.

Recently my sister asked me the name of one of our neighbours in Bermuda, as she’d been wondering if that neighbour might have been enticing her to visit as my sister walked home from the bus stop after school. She thought the lady had given her mashed bananas on toast. I thought that odd. It got odder. My sister wondered if the neighbour had had a son. Even odder, and disturbing, my sister wondered aloud if she might have been sexually abused or molested as a child, and simply didn’t remember it. “How could I find out?” she wondered. My reply was that after reading hundreds of books about abused children, she was starting to believe that it was in some way normal, or awfully likely, hardly rare. She was feeling left out. I wondered if I should mention psychotherapy! I didn't.

This week, three things from three calls.

My sister tells me she sorts and stores her clothing by colour. Interesting. It suggests that when she feels blue, she could dress from head to foot (Alice band to slippers) in blue. Is there a hyphen in anal-retentive? Has she heard of OCD? My youngest brother once had a Sri Lankan housekeeper, a fellow, probably a doctor or lawyer in real life, who arranged all the items in my brother’s kitchen cupboards and fridge and freezer by colour. That could have been inventive behaviour, to be annoying. Or he might have simply been bored silly at pushing a Hoover around twelve or more hours a day to live in a tiny, shared room.

One day my sister called to tell me that she was thinking back on schooldays when she was a member of the school’s Brownie troop. Running around the playing fields in her uniform. I had to break the bad news to her: the school had no extra-curricular activities, no Brownies or Scouts, and we were not permitted to wear anything but our school uniform. Moreover, I knew that she’d never been a Brownie or Girl Guide or Scout. It may be, over forty years later, she wishes that she had been a Brownie (healthier than wishing to have been molested!) and has invented that part of her past.

This morning’s call concerned a film that she remembered seeing decades ago, she wanted to know if I knew the title of it, as she wanted to see it again. I asked who was in the film, and she thought it starred John Wayne.

“It had an unhappy ending,” she noted. “Everybody died of the Blue Bonnet Plague.”

“The what?”

“The Blue Bonnet Plague.”

She’d actually said that. I wondered if she meant the flowers that Lady Bird Johnson had been so fond of, or the margarine. I resisted the temptation to ask.

“I haven’t a clue,” I replied.

No doubt my sister thinks I have a brain like a sieve.

The Machine Starts

The Colossus at Bletchley Park

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
“I’d rather not try, please!” said Alice. “I’m quite content to stay here—only I am so hot and thirsty!”
Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking-Glass)

I REMEMBER A SCIENCE-FICTION FILM that featured a small group of people travelling from Earth to some distant planet. The passengers stood for the journey (the forerunner to Ryan Air?) and the males wore ankle-length dressing gowns. The females, of course, showed a bit of leg. The cabin walls were smooth, except for windows resembling portholes. There was a spiral staircase down to the engines. No sign of a computer.

Looking at that photograph (above) of the reconstruction of part of the Colossus Computer that dominated Bletchley Park during World War Two, one imagines the science-fiction writers in Hollywood preferred to go without any computer at all. The Colossus was clearly too big to fit in a tiny set (the Tardis had not been imagined yet, our rocket may have been ten or twelve feet in diameter). For some reason, the writers could not think small, miniaturization evaded them, except for the film set itself.

The rocket in this particular film did not land, pointy end down, in the Moon’s eye. Rather, the passengers, hardly tired after standing for light years without comfort-food and drink, or a visit to the toilet, found themselves lowered onto some hostile surface. No computer, of any size, was used to test the air outside. A hatch we’d not noticed opened and someone put his head out and took a sniff. For the sake of the film, the air was as fresh as Southport on the Lancashire coast. Everyone headed down the plank for a look-see. Sir Richard Branson is promising a similar service one day, isn’t he?

I recommend E.M. Forster’s short story “The Machine Stops”, first published in November 1909, a century ago, if you’re computing. Forster’s world with people living in pods, trapped by their dependence on technologies, has television, video-conferencing and the Internet (with different names, of course, Forster was a writer and not a scientist, and the boffins who followed felt no need to acknowledge Forster’s earlier work). Forster’s story was not filmed until 1966, for British television. By then, computers were shrinking a bit, transistors had been invented. As tied to our computers as we are in 2010, I’m guessing that we’ll reach Forster in my lifetime, or not long after it.

God knows, when Internet Explorer is down one panics. I recently had a more serious problem. My computer, a Compaq Presario purchased only four years ago, was slowing down faster than I could keep up with it.

The Compaq was my third computer. The first was a Gateway bought in late 1995 with a friend. It was so expensive that we could only get a computer by sharing the cost. Three months later the apartment was struck by lightning. The computer survived, sort of. (Other electronic and electric equipment in our apartments and next door were fried.) The Gateway needed a good deal of nursing to run after that.

I bought a second computer a year or so later, on my own: Another Gateway. My youngest brother, a computer technician, managed to keep that second machine humming for five years, and then it began coughing. I could not afford a replacement, and for several years used a computer at the Reference Library. I also was a semi-professional house- and pet-sitter, and my clients usually wanted me to send daily updates on their dogs and cats and swimming pools from their home computers to their hand-held Blackberries.

Four years ago I managed to buy the Compaq, which came with accessories left over from the year before. For free, if I’d just buy the Compaq, which was going out of date faster than a spaceship to Southport. So, I bought it.

The new computer arrived this past Wednesday. It is a Zoostorm PC, and rather nice. Bigger and better monitor, great scanner/printer, terrific sound system. Now, I know bugger all about computer specs, but it’s fast, really fast. I have Windows 7, and Bill Gates seems to have got this one right. I’ve used Macs when on house-sits, and the Windows 7 is a bit Mac-ish. I’m a fan of 7! I’m using Office 2007, which is new to me. I’m using it at this moment. I quite like it. I trust I can transfer this document to the Barking Mad blog. If I have trouble, I will be more Barking Mad than usual.

My computer technician says I should get three good years out of the Zoostorm (assuming I don’t get struck by lightning). I’m going to do a good deal more genealogical research, so the speed and design improvements will be much appreciated.

What will I do in 2013 if The Machine Stops? My eyesight is already dreadful; I might need bigger everything in three years’ time. I cannot manage a mobile phone easily now, and as much as I’d like an iPod, I have a feeling it will be awkward. My generation is wearing out; our physical abilities are becoming more limited. But I’m in thrall to this fucking technology. Aren’t we all?

Ever see the 1976 film “Logan’s Run”? People wear out at thirty in that one, according to the rules mandated by the technocrats. That was a bit of a stretch, but a young age was needed to be suitably shocking.

In three, five, ten years, my generation may turn up at Computer Central for a new model and instead of getting a sales pitch we might just be recycled as dog-food.

“Sorry, buddy, but you’re over the limit. First hatch on the right. Have a nice trip.”

Diary Another Day

Virginia Woolf at Home

Serviettes
Dishwashing Liquid
Bread
Skimmed Milk
Pomegranate Juice
Ross Eldridge (Shopping List)

THE FIRST DIARY I EVER SET EYES ON belonged to my grandparents' landlady. This woman, Miss Emmy Gray, died in the 1960s, and I think she was probably no older than my grandparents when she passed on, sixty-something. I did not really know her, she might have known my mother and her children by sight, but I don't recall ever having conversation with her.

Miss Gray's apartment in the house next to the cottage where my grandparents lived was emptied at her death, and renovated. The contents were removed, perhaps sold, but it turned out that several boxes were stored in the basement of the house (now owned by the landlady's niece, Miss Mary Gray). I knew nothing of these boxes until a stack of notebooks turned up at our home, in my youngest sister's room. My sister made no secret of her curious find, and I think she must have very nearly boasted about it. My sister had somehow found a way into the basement of the house where my grandparents' landlady had lived, and had carted off a box that she just couldn't resist … stealing … there is no other word for it. My sister had the handwritten diaries of a lifetime left by Miss Emmy Gray.

Now, Miss Emmy Gray was a member of one of the old Bermuda families, big homes, large estates, and dwindling male heirs. She had a history, however, being part of something by birth that, by the late 1960s, was coming to an end: The white ruling class, one might say.

I looked at the notebooks, dozens and dozens of them, piled up in my sister's room (she was reading them diligently, though she was hardly a teenager) and they were not at all remarkable on the outside. My sister showed me a few open pages of neat handwritten entries. I asked her what they were about. My sister would not have appreciated any history that might have been found in the pages, but told me that Miss Gray used to say her little friend had come to stay about once a month … And meant that she was having her period. That's the only thing I know for a fact was included in the Gray Diaries. I had no interest in reading them, and never asked my sister for more information.

My sister must have been satisfied with her project eventually, the diaries vanished. She'd thrown them away. Over forty years later, I wonder what might have been lost.

Clearly, my sister was guilty of theft; a theft she told us about, she had no second thoughts about having committed it. In fact, to this day I would not trust my sister with my keys. You have been warned.

At school we had come across the Diary of Anne Frank, and I had had to read it. I did not care for it at all, finding it girlish and not being interested in knowing more, at that time, about the Nazi deportation of Jews to the Death Camps. We also had to get into the Diary of Samuel Pepys in our history lessons. He buried a cheese that he rather valued in his garden when London caught fire. That's all I remember of that famous journal.

Diaries didn't interest me, though I have always found brief quotations from, and references to, the diaries of people that interested me added to the pleasure of any biography I might be reading. I have been interested in the Bloomsbury Group for forty years now, and some of them kept diaries. More wrote letters that were eventually published, which might be personal accounts of a kind. Perhaps the most famous Bloomsberry, and diarist, was Virginia Woolf. I've never read her diaries, only excerpts. I intend to do that soon, if permitted.

Virginia Woolf notably said that nothing becomes real until one writes it down. She also said, of course, that one should not publish until one is at least thirty. I suppose that provides a safety valve if one is tempted to put one's private entries in print.

Joe Orton at Home

In the 1980s, I finally discovered diaries. That was about the time I pretty much gave up reading fiction, so that diaries and biographies (and autobiographies) kept me busy reading. I read a fair bit of documentary history, natural science and that sort of thing as well; I've not worked my way through the DNB.

Harold Nicolson's hefty diaries came my way because I was already interested in his wife, Vita Sackville-West. Nicolson was a brilliant read. People, history and politics, Nicolson seemed to know everybody.

I picked up The Orton Diaries (Joe Orton, the playwright) after seeing What the Butler Saw performed on stage. I continued reading Prick up Your Ears. What fun that was. I realised that when Kenneth Halliwell was murdering Joe Orton in their miniscule flat in Camden Town, I was wandering around London enjoying that Summer of Love. Perhaps on the very day. I must have read about it in the papers and seen the news on the telly, but it hadn't really clicked at the time. The death of Brian Epstein had made an impression. Orton was a joy, his relationship with Halliwell was doomed, his death seemed unavoidable bearing in mind their troubled relationship.

After Kenneth Williams died, his diaries finally became public. I gather he'd threatened people with them for years. I'll put you in my diary! One had heard that wisecracking Kenneth Williams, of Carry On … fame had been something of a miserable shit in real life. Real life to Kenneth was hiding in his flat, allowing few visitors, and then not permitting them, for example, to use his toilet. Kenneth couldn't bear the thought of germs, he did not like to be touched, avoided, apparently, all intimacy, though he was a chronic masturbator (noting in his diaries the Cockney rhyming slang "Had a Barclay's" frequently). Kenneth Williams was the classic sad bastard. Back in the 1960s he'd been a gay chum of Joe Orton, though hardly gay meaning happy, or chum meaning devoted in any way. Orton boasted of his outrageous sexual exploits, and I wonder if Kenneth Williams dared shake his hand!

I'm presently reading selections from the diaries of Alan Bennett. Bennett has published these in two autobiographical works, and he suggests that his diaries, as a whole, were not written, and are still not written, with an eye to publishing them before or after his death.

I kept brief diaries for twenty-five years, though hardly containing entries with well-rounded sentences and proper grammar. I also kept scrapbooks with photographs and souvenirs. All gone now. I burned the diaries, and only regret that when I try to recall the exact date of something that happened in some period I have a vague idea of. I don't know the day my father died, but think it was in March of 1996.

When I wrote a weekly column - My World and Welcome to It - for the Bermuda newspaper The Mid-Ocean News, I first thought to keep a kind of public journal going, to be a commentator on recent events. As it happened, I found myself rehashing my years growing up. My editor seemed to like dredged up memories of my schooldays. I don't have copies of any of those columns, but recently found something I wrote at that time (between five and ten years ago) and was appalled at my discovery. My style of writing horrified me: I was writing rather under the influence of bouts of mania, I think, pouring thoughts about old personal history onto the page as fast as I could. Literally: I'd leave my column not just incomplete, but usually not even begun, until the evening before I was to hand it in.

Now I blog here. And I trust it's not a diary. A diary, I think, entails writing about yourself as you pretend to be, as you are expected to be, regularly. There's no let-up, day after day trying to be the version of you that is expected. Every month, if you are Miss Gray, your little friend must come to stay. You come to expect this sort of writing of yourself, you cannot get away from it.

So, I blather on the blog. Perhaps I do get up one day and walk through the snow to the minimart to get the items on my shopping list … but I don't think I must tell you about it. That said, an honest diary might best be, simply, just one's shopping lists. There is no emotion in it; one does not trip over it. Rather, twice a week I get skimmed milk, once a week I buy bread, and occasionally some pomegranate juice. That best describes my life. I have no intention of spending eternity buried below a tombstone, having requested that my ashes be scattered in the wild somewhere, but if I was forced to, I'd like the inscription to read "Toilet Paper if on Special This Week".