Curate's Christmas

Christmas day was lovely and, like the curate's egg, had some greenish bits. Young Dizzy-dog has been poorly for a while now, in and out of the vet's (alternating with Sandy's visits to the A&E for a broken bone in his hand.) Her temperature has been going up and down and one day she collapsed completely so had to be put on drips. There have been times when it looked as if treatments for an unknown badness were working then times when it didn't. Lots of tests were made. This has been going on for a couple of weeks or more. Christmas day she spent with us for the champagne and present-opening but, rather than being a pain with the wrapping paper, she was only interested in being cuddled. Then she stayed in her very cosy house-bed whilst we went to the hotel for a splendid meal. 

Boxing day she went downhill again and the worried vet finally advised an emergency dash to the nearest animal hospital - Edinburgh, 4 hours drive away. Her distressed and loving owners took her, driving through the horrendous rain and wind to get there. They had to turn around and drive straight back once she was settled. She is still there. They think they have finally found the cause of the trouble, a perforated uterus, which is common in cats and humans (didn't know that!) It occurs after their first season but isn't at all common in dogs. Dizzy is really more cat-like than dog-like so that figures! She is getting first class treatment, being made a fuss of - and costing an absolute fortune, several thousand beyond the insured mark.Yikes! My daughter makes good money, has a thriving osteopathy practice and works very hard but poor girl never seems to be able to keep it in the bank what with divorce expenses, school extras and the necessity for a new laptop for Sanders.....   

If all goes well Dizzy will come home after New Year's Day.

Happy Christmas everyone.

The Santa candle holder was given me by a friend who has just died, so this to say 'thank you' to him
and light him on his way

Winter Solstice

Thank goodness it's the shortest day today. Yule. Midwinter. I shall do all in my limited power (no wood-burning stove and the neighbours might complain about a bonfire two or three metres from their fences). I will light many candles in order to bring back the sun. As I type this it is 8 am and there is no sign of dawn.

An evening in the town jail (sort of.)

The High Street from the Tolbooth

Whisky collection at the Tolbooth

Whisky jugs and optics

A member of the Writer's Group arranged for us to have a tour round the Tolbooth. Most of us have seen its main function room, the Court Room as it's used for local council meetings, but the extensive whisky collection in the basement was worth seeing. It was a chilly night, the 6 cells (empty or storing sundries) were forbiddingly bleak, but hospitality was laid on in the Board Room; hot tea, coffee, sandwiches and brownies much appreciated. We had a jolly time. It didn't inspire any odes in my personal Muse, but there's still time. I copy&pasted the following:

King David I had a bit of trouble bringing Óengus, Mormaer of Moray, into line with feu-paying, but defeated him in 1130, it is quite likely that Forres became a Royal burgh about that time.   These burghs were  a convenient place for the paying of feu and market duties so collection offices were set up near the town market place to collect the dues.   These would have been simple buildings, perhaps “toll bothies” becoming “tolbooths” in due course.

The loss of the original Royal charter and ancient records during the sacking and burning of the town by Alexander Stewart “The Wolf of Badenoch” in 1390 means that the early history of Forres and the Tolbooth is lost.   The first archival record referring to the Tolbooth is a proclamation made 1586, then in 1588 a reference is made to repairs to the building.   The records show that in 1619 it was being used “for sure keiping and deteining” of evil-doers and prisoners.   In 1655 the Tolbooth is a “thackit” ruinous building that cannot carry the roof until the walls are repaired.  Between 1671 and 1677 much masonry has been repaired and new structures added to form a three storey building.   By 1698 an agreement for major rebuilding work had been drawn up and “£333 1s 8p” had been provided by the merchants and burgesses for the project.  In 1708 a bell “not to be under 3 cwts.” is installed and in 1710 James Anderson receives 600 merks “for building the piramede of the Tolbiuth”.  Then, in 1711, James Broun is employed “for making a clock for the Tolbuith”.   By 1734, after some further work, Forres has a recognisably very impressive public building, which served the town well for the next century.

The nineteenth century building, like its ancestors, has been right at the centre of this ancient Royal Burgh.  There is evidence that it has evolved through many variations, dilapidations, reconstructions and expansions over the best part of 800 years.   The foundation stone for the new  Court House and Public Offices was laid in 1838 to establish the building in its present form.   The main feature of the Tolbooth is its impressive Court Room where once the town provosts made proclamations and magistrates made orders that unworthy citizens be detained in the adjacent prison building.  This Jail House has six cells and an exercise yard or "airing ground". We were told that it was a 'correctional' prison, not a 'punishment' establishment. They had facilities for torture and hard labour. 

I didn't sense a single ghost. Perhaps my chattering teeth put them off. No fun in moaning and clanking if someone's doing it already.

Christmas Cheer and four poems.

I’ve baked five Christmas cakes (one got eaten and had to be replaced) made eggless marzipan, steamed three puddings, stirred up some mincemeat, ordered two scooters to be delivered to the smaller grandsons, bought and wrapped presents for their parents, bought and wrapped presents for Oxford -living daughter and her partner, had wall and desk calendars made by Vista prints with the best photos from this year, found boxes for everything that didn’t get sent direct, plus cakes, bundled everything in swathes of bubble wrap, queued and paid the eye-watering price. I bought an electric drill, tools box and a few tools for Sanders, untangled the Christmas lights after all, and am now resting on my laurels. Very uncomfortable stuff to rest on is laurel. I may have to get a bed. (And that is the level of gibberish I have been reduced to by wrapping paper and cellotape. )

Now everything seems quiet and abnormal. I can live with that. The house in Hayle is about to be pulsating with family, five adults, four smallish children, three dogs with puppies imminent. 

I like to think of them having fun. I like to THINK of them. 

It’s so peaceful here.

There was the Writer’s Group party which was fun in a low-key adult sort of way. We ate nibbles and drank wine (for me) and punch for the lucky, non-type two’s. We read poems and prose we hadn’t written ourselves, except Glynis who read a piece she HAD written herself and it was great. I chose Dylan Thomas: ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales,’ wanting something entirely non-religious. I was worried about this extract because DT is hard to read for someone short of breath. He seems to string all the words together and although the sentences are not very long they insist on being delivered fast without breathing space. A Welsh accent would have been helpful too. I used to be so good at that when I read ‘Ivor the Engine’ to the children. I think I nailed it for Mrs Protheroe's  shout of: ‘Fire!’ In the end I needn’t have worried about the breathlessness because two glasses of wine helped my lungs work nicely and my tongue whip easily around the words.

Now there is time to meet friends for coffee and make plans for the New Year, mostly about writing. I’ve done quite well with poetry since February but want to focus more on stories (novels) now. The magazine ‘Sarasvati’ came out last week with four of my poems in it which I can now put here. My favourite is the first one.

Village Panto 1953

The baker’s wife

in fishnet tights

was Dandini.

Second fiddle, with less strut to her stuff

the Prince, who pulled pints in the village pub,

and no-one thought it odd

that two girls should vie

for the hand of Cinderella.

Our Violet in rags.

Violet’s magical change

(behind a screen, distracting pixies prancing)

put her into sequined silk and satin slippers,

turned her into someone we could never hope to meet;

rather scaring us.

Foreshadowing.

The baker and the garage man

rouged up,

balloons strapped rudely to their chests,

hammed it for our delighted delectation,

relishing the ribald ridicule,

cruelly capitalising on the coy

and bashful blushes of the ladies.

They encouraged us to hiss and boo,

to jeer and shout at their comeuppance.

Our brother Al, a woeful, cheeky Buttons

wowed the crowd,

won himself Evelyn,

who went on to play his wife. 

Their two-hander running sixty years.

Dad fell off his chair laughing.

The Interval.

Sometimes it takes a twenty minute break

with coffee and chat.

Chit chat.

A bit of froth.

Whilst some mindless part of me

Understands and evaluates the plot.

Love

People’s lives written on their faces,

carved between brow and chin.

I jump into their souls.

Hikikomori.

A new word has appeared in the Japanese language: Hikikomori,  literally ‘pulling inwards, being confined,’ i.e. ‘acute social withdrawal.’ 

Like a horse who knows the jump is too high,

the water too wide, he

wakes one morning, tries to rise,

shies at the door to the day.

No rope, no poison,

no unseemly decomposition,

still, this is a kind of suicide.

Parents cry and pay the price

for their over-loving, 

crush-hugging, breath-stealing, pride

in the fruit of their loins,

their sling-shot at immortality.

A face in a window watches

the busy walk of those who claim 

with confidence their right to life,

stony mouth screaming silently 

the turmoil of a race

buffeted by social thermals.

An Officer and a Spy.

I’ve just finished reading ‘An Officer and a Spy’ by Robert Harris. I can’t say I enjoyed it because the Dreyfus affair is a nightmarish tale of corruption and deceit by those in power, notably the military, but it’s a formidable piece of writing. From a conversation with the film director Roman Polanski in 2012 to the publication of the finished novel in 2013 Harris must have worked with obsessive intensity, reading what had already been written about the scandal and consulting primary sources. From this research he has created a gripping story against all odds. The outcome is already known so there can be no dramatic denouement; accounts of the evidence brought against Dreyfus again and again could have become repetitive and tedious, yet he has given the process toward that outcome the tension of a first rate thriller. The many players in the drama are drawn with clarity and made memorable for their quirks, pleasant and unpleasant. He has also succeeded in creating a visual backdrop to events, sometimes even an olfactory backdrop (I had no idea that late nineteenth century Paris smelled so atrociously of human excrement.) 

It’s a sordid tale; one that could be repeated in any country in any era amongst men whose careers and politics are on the line. Not a comforting thought. The one person who comes out of the stew as a hero, is Marie Georges Picquart. His battle isn’t fought with bravado or deeds of daring-do, he even admits a coolness toward the man he fights to exonerate, but he has a dogged belief in the rightness of truth and justice, whatever the cost. He is appalled by the sentiments expressed by a fellow army officer:  “He ordered me to shoot a man and I have shot him,” he says. “You tell me afterwards, I got the name wrong, and I should have shot someone else – I am very sorry about that but it is not my fault.” 

This amoral attitude is echoed in the behaviour of all the army officers involved in setting up Dreyfus. All that matters to them is the good name of the army; human kindness, compassion and honesty are not considered useful qualities.

Bubble wrap and bones.

It has been so warm lately that I haven’t had to wear a coat. I suppose I might if I did more than pop in and out of shops from the car but still it’s remarkable. 

I’ve enjoyed shopping for presents, mostly on line to be delivered direct, but it still took me three hours to wrap the presents bought locally, along with the cakes, marzipan and puddings that were to be sent southwards. Then there was the anguish of finding boxes the right size and shape. The enormous roll of bubble wrap I bought two years ago finally ran out. It was all very stressful. After the wrapping there were the trips (two) to the Post Office which only has a small amount of parking space so getting there very early in the morning is desirable when carrying heavy boxes. Finally there is the agony of parting with rather a lot of money. 

By yesterday I felt I had done Christmas. I dragged out the decoration, made a half-hearted attempt to unsnaggle the lights then bundled them all back in and decided to settle for a pot plant instead. 

We are rather looking forward to a quiet Christmas, but it might be dull for Sanders who at fifteen is too old to look as if he cares but too young not to. He is yet again in plaster for, IMO, rather a noble reason, though his mother and grandfather called him an idiot. At the end of term the hype and the tiredness in the school causes squabbles and strife. I don’t know how the girls deal with it but the boys start working each other up and fighting. Driven to intense exasperation Sandy backed into his room and hit the wall instead of someone’s face. Now I call that very sensible. Unfortunately the walls are solid and stony and he broke a couple of bones in his hand. His mother texted me resignedly from A&E where she really should have a bench with her name on it. The doctor who saw him said: ‘Didn’t I see you last month?’

He’s going for an MRI on Monday to check on an old injury. I bought him a drill and various dangerous tools for Christmas. Perhaps a First Aid kit is a necessary addition. 

Back again.

I lost it again (the blog.)  I'm just back to say I'm back. More tomorrow. Something has happened that I'd like to tell Gillian about..... not sure how to contact you Gillian ......

Pod.

To close this spate of grumps on an up note, I saw a pod of dolphins yesterday. Not playing, so not jumping, the sea too cold and grey and wild for fun pehaps, they just humped up above the waves briefly, then were down again, all business, moving from one part of the coast to the next.

The Volunteer.

A young man of my acquaintance (he’s only 40) determined to pull his life around;, quit drinking and so forth, decided the best remedy was to do some volunteer work and experience another part of the globe.  After consulting on skills (he has many handy skills, carpentry, plumbing, car maintenance, ) he was sent to Honduras, to a ‘conservation project.’ Sounded good.  An Iguana Rescue Centre. Quaint, but promising. Two weeks after he achieved the long trek out he was texting back about lack of occupation and the bar culture of the workers already there.   Cr@p.

Winter wearing.

It’s difficult staying cheerful when I’ve just had to drag out my huge black charity shop coat again for the fourth winter. Each year as I put it away I swear I’ll never wear it again, have it cleaned, take it back to the Red Cross,  but fail to find the cash for a replacement so out it has to come. 

Winter clothes - same story.  Dreary sludgy colours and fabrics that, (luckily for me) don’t fall apart. But, oh for some new adventures!

Shoes and boots - don’t get me started..... well, I am so on I go. I cannot understand people who have a things for shoes. I hate them. Ugly, sensible, clump-along-like-that shoes are all I can safely wear, given as I am to turning ankles and vertigo. I don’t like the look of the come-f*ck-me alternatives anyhow.

What else? 

Nightwear.  The options? Wincyette with pink roses. T-shirts. Pyjamas - I don’t like pyjamas. They get all twisted up and smelly. For years I swanned around in Indian cotton but the sources for that have either dried up or become expensive. The garment I wear now, washing and wearing the same day, has holes in. I pray for no hospitalisation to occur.

Emotional times.

I’m missing summer. The first cold/virus of the season struck a couple of weeks back, didn’t go away, was gaining ground even after generous applications of Glenfiddich nightly, and yesterday I was forced to go to the ‘Health Centre‘  (please imagine agitated fingers doing sarcastic quotation marks here) to have my annual battle with a new-to-the-practice doctor about the state of my lungs and their need for assistance in the form of antibiotics which once wasn’t a problem (‘here, take a bucketful’) but now the party line is to say ‘no’ unless the patient kicks up a fuss, or cries, or looks as if they might need an ambulance to get them away from the place. This year it was a female doctor. SO much worse. I had to employ the first two techniques and then was almost outdone, and undone, by her own reddening eyes and heaving bosom. 

‘I feel you don’t TRUST me.We become doctors to HELP people you know. People don’t realise how HARD it is for us. We work really HARD for our patients. We don’t do it for the money.’ (Excuse me? I believe that is your new 4x4 out there next to my 12 year old VW Polo.) 

We parted sworn enemies, but I was clutching my prescription so I don’t really care. I’ll just avoid her in future.

In Our Own Image

In Our Own Image.

The old gods

were the lifeblood of our land,

the arteries.

The synapses that fired first consciousness.

They hunted, gathered, and turned the soil, 

walked with us through life,

received us into death.

They had their moods,

their jealousies,

needed understanding,

needed wisdom, wiles, and sympathetic magic.

Then they needed to be thanked. 

Like us.

We heard their voices in the waves 

ululating

from cavern to deep cavern 

reverberant.

Symphonies of wind and rain and silence. 

Bird song.

Our gods spoke to us 

as the world breathed 

© carol argyris 2013  

Published in Dawntreader 023 Indigo Dreams Publishing.

       

Bag Lady

Bag Lady

Belief is all that separates me from the old bag lady

As together we rake through rubbish bins,

Shuffle,

Stockings crumpled,

To a shelter for the homeless

Peeing in our pants.

I think I am better than her. 

I am educated and live in a house.

I have sat at the foot of a rimpoche

And read lots of books about God.

Belief

Is all that separates us from knowing

Because -

Now listen -

Belief that we Know is death of knowledge.

The bag lady has the advantage here.

She knows she knows nothing

And is thus wise

But I....

 Sometimes I believe I might know something.

And it gets in the way of me.

© carol argyris 2013

Published: Weyfarers 113  Guildford Poets Press

Vampire.

The internet is a terrible sucker of souls.

I open it to briefly do a bit of research and three hours later stagger away from it because the lap-top needs energy and I've forgotten to drink my coffee.

Sexing the Cherry.

Sexing the Cherry. Jeanette Winterson.

A friend lent me this last week. I had it so often on the shelves in the shop that I thought I had read it. That happened a lot. Maybe I started it but wasn’t in the mood. that happened too. Yesterday I was in the mood and loved it. practical worshipped it. Wished I had written it or could write like her. Her flights of fancy are exhilarating, and the apparent ease with which she writes them down (no fancy words, no fancy style) make their impact immediate and hefty. I laughed aloud with pleasure at her sequels to the marriages of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, the ones that turned into geese every evening and flew away to party until ‘rescued’ by an elderly prince. In Jeanette's version he has eleven brothers and each sister is forced to marry one of them. These marriages do not go happily ever after.

The action skips merrily from century to century, carried mostly by the central character, an enormous woman, born out of a bottle from which she escapes, ballooning like a genie as she does so. She finds a baby half drowned in the filthy C17th Thames, rescues him and calls him Jordan (in memory of Moses.)

It’s like reading a long prose poem. There were sentences that jumped off the page and popped me one in the eye, and although I allow that the sentences to jump at me will probably not be those that jump at other readers, I’m putting them here:

‘Islands are metaphors for the heart, no matter what poets say otherwise. My own heart, like this wild place, has never been visited and I do not know whether it could sustain life. ‘

‘Time has no meaning; space and place have no meaning on this journey. All time can be inhabited, all places visited. In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans.’

‘The self is not contained in any moment or any place but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.’

‘Is knowledge increasing or is detail accumulating?’

And now I’ve written them down they don’t look so sparkly, which intrigues me and leaves me wondering if that means they needed their settings. A diamond, however beautiful, is enhanced by a fine setting. There’s a thought - which when I come on it another day will have lost its gloss.

Exhausted words.

Words I have erased from my vocabulary to give them a chance to rest: 

Amazing. 

Incredible. 
Wonderful.

Basically. 
Literally.

Awesome
Robust.             (Thanks to Jillian for the last two!)

I  am leaving space for more as I notice them.

Healing

Those who know me even a little bit will have noticed that I am very anti-religion. I see organised religion as the root of most evil - worse by far than money. In this pick’n mix age, and in our culture, I have the freedom to express that view and I have also been able to arrive at belief in an afterlife that has nothing to do with a god. Probably there are more evolved beings available to us if we reach for them, but I wouldn’t call them angels, just more developed aspects of ourselves. In many countries I wouldn’t have been permitted to reach these conclusions; my thoughts would be censored by limitations to my reading and life experience, and that would be down to religion. Even in America, the so called Land of the Free, this could happen. 

With all that out front it might seem inappropriate that on Friday I dialed the number of a Catholic priest who is part of a Healing Ministry. A friend (also not religious in any way) told me about him and a little about her experience on the end of a telephone, transfixed for nearly an hour that passed in a moment. His aim is for soul retrieval, or soul healing (I can’t remember his term), in fact I’m not sure I remember much of what he said during my almost-hour but I do know I sat silent with tears pouring down my face. There have been moments of revelation since when things in my life that were mostly forgotten have become clear and I can see them in a different way. The words Forgiveness and Grace come to mind, but mostly it’s a bit beyond words.

Years ago I read Susan Howatch novels with enjoyment. Not her long family sagas that stretched over generations, but her ecclesiastical novels that took characters from the rarefied upper echelons of the Church of England. Each novel, as far as I can remember, viewed more or less the same sequence of events through the eyes of a different character. The one that captured me the most was ‘Glamorous Powers’. In that the main character, a young priest, discovers he has healing powers and wants to set up a healing ministry. He is waylaid by his ego and gets far out of his depth into very muddy waters. It fascinated me that the Churches, Catholic and Protestant, fail to acknowledge - avoid acknowledging - the existence of the supernatural whilst preaching daily about supernatural happenings 2000 years ago and promising a world beyond our own.

Somewhere amidst my rantings against religion I seem to have a core of respect for their roots. The blurring of lines between atheist and theist, agnostic and gnostic, give me hope that one day the churches will return to their roots, sloughing off all the garbage they have accrued along the way.  

Spooky stories and extra clothes.

So, the dashboard is still available. I wonder how long that will last!

As it’s here I might as well keep going. Can’t break the habit of what feels like a lifetime.

Hallowe’en passed safely. No goblins at my door. Tonight Dizzy and I will hide indoors holding paws whilst the town has its bonfire and fireworks. Daughter and grandson will be shaking buckets for the Rotary who put on the display each year. It’s usually a good one and the bonfire is enormous.

The clocks have changed, the leaves have canged and my daily outfits have had an extra layer added to them. Now I’m at home more I’m wondering how to keep warm whilst economising on fuel. As I hate wearing thick woolies about the house this probably means spending more time in bed, which I can cope with. 

Recently I discovered the pleasures of writing short stories and knocked off four with a spooky theme. A short story falls somewhere between poetry and the Novel (which I do most earnestly intend to get down to properly..) It demands discipline, especially if writing for competitions that require 500 or 1000 words. No bad thing. I haven’t actually sent any off (laziness) but found the exercise interesting and useful for ensuring tight plots. The free iversity course https://iversity.org/courses/the-future-of-storytelling (set up by the uni of Potsdam) has given me grist. I’m enjoying it. It’s nice to sit taking notes and pretending to be a real student again. 

The readathon petered out. I gave up on Sebastien Faulks ‘A Possible Life’ after the first two novella (what’s the plural of novella?) Maybe I’ll go back to it but I wasn’t convinced by the format. I’d put money on him having written them at different times then strung them together, banked on the critics finding a theme, and pushed them out as a pot-boiler. Bit unfair Carol. He is undoubtedly a good writer. Perhaps I should stick with saying it didn’t grab me.

I’ve got Sophie Hannah’s ‘the orphan choir’ and Susan Hill’s ‘Dolly’ from Tesco to prolong the hallowe'en shudders and delay the return to rereading. 

Disgruntled Last Words.

Grandson opened me a gmail account  because I was teed off with yahoo, then google refused to acknowledge I had any blogs at all.  After a day of anger and frustration I have access to my dashboard again but as I closed the gmail account in irritation at some point when that strikes home I shall probably lose it again. I have several blogs, only this one open to the public, but useful places to store writings in. The universe is evidently telling me to get everything out, probably down on paper would be safest, and give up adding to the clutter in the collective stratoculture.

So that's it. It's been fun.

Oryx & Crake

I’ve almost come to the end of my readathon; four books in four days. While Sanders is staying I can’t focus on my own writing (there’s always an excuse!) and when I let myself down into one of these bulimic guzzles of new-to-me novels I definitely can’t write so it seems like a good moment. I say  ‘bulimic’ because they are usually the books I forget just as quickly, whilst remembering enough of their atmosphere to avoid reading them again, even if I can see they have literary merit. I’ve yet to isolate the formula that causes a book to splice with my hippocampi (I looked that up - it’s the bit of the brain that stores memory, for those who like me had only half stored that information.)

This morning I finished ‘Oryx & Crake’ by Margaret Atwood. She’s released the third of the trilogy that started with this after-the-disaster romp. She was described in the Literary Review as ‘One of the most brilliant and unpredictable novelists alive’ which is a worthy accolade but also the reason I stopped reading her books years back when I noticed the unpredictability was troubling me too much.  I don’t appreciate unpredictability in the authors I take a shine to. I like to settle in to the cosmology of their creations but in M Atwood’s there are too many worlds I didn’t care to find myself in.’ The Handmaids Tale ‘ notably got so stuck into my brain that I would have rather liked my hippocampi to take a few days off. I have a signed copy of ‘Surfacing’ that I haven’t yet finished several years on because - oh dear - I got bored with it. 

With these in mind, the approach to ‘Oryx & Crake’ was along the ‘should’ path rather than the ‘I’d love to’ road.

I do fear for M A’s psyche. And I do envy it. She has such a facility for imagining future situations and making those imaginings credible by extrapolating from roots visible in present day trends. It must be hard to sleep nights. Or rather, it would be hard for me. I suspect it’s not for MA.

By the third or fourth chapter I liked the geeky survivor He is intelligent but with romantic and sentimental wiring that held him back from pursuing the crazed idealistic ambitions of his genius friend Crake who caused the obliteration of almost the entire human race.  I liked his bumbling clownish attempts to do the right thing; he made me laugh enough to want to ride along with him and hope for his best outcome. 

I’m also a sucker for the fantastic. After I saw Dennis Potter’s ‘Cold Lazurus’ I longed for a future where organic and inorganic materials have been spliced to form intelligent buildings that grow themselves and chairs that mould to the form of the human sitting in them, picking up wish signals from the brains of that human so it moves to where its sitter wills it. Surely this is going to happen one day. In ‘O&C’ there are lots of wild inventions, some sounding acceptable. Also some endearing animal life along with the scary pigoons bred for transplant organs, and chicken blobs that grow the more delectable parts of chickens without actual having any consciousness.  Shudder.

M. Atwood claimed, in an interview, that scientists like her novels because she is the only writer appreciating their work and taking what they do seriously. I might be misquoting a bit here, (have lost the link) but from this I understand that scientists, rather worryingly, admit they have the power to shape the future, for better or for worse.  

Mobile phone etiquette.

I see Debretts has taken up the challenge of teaching mobi users manners. I wish I could have had this up on the wall when I was in the shop - either of them1 people would answer their phones after asking me a question and leave me standing like an idiot until they finished. Or halfway through the till transaction even when there were others in the queue. Sometimes I sat down and took up my crossword puzzle if the conversation dragged on.

9. Don't carry on mobile phone calls when in the middle of something else

Don't carry on mobile phone calls while transacting other business - in banks, shops, on buses and so on. It is insulting not to give people who are serving you your full attention.

And some of my family need to read this:

8. Step away from the phone at meal times

Don't put your phone on the dining table, or glance at it longingly mid-conversation. 

Dominion and Lilly Aphrodite

After a long spell of re-reading (I always find that satisfying and comforting to know what I’m letting myself down into) I am now having a blitz of reading new-to-me stuff. There was ‘Dominion’ by C.J.Sansom which upset me. That’s the first time I have read a ‘what if’ novel. Robert Harris’ ‘Fatherland’ didn’t appeal although now I think I might give it a go one day. I think there’s another name for them but can’t be bothered to look it up right now. The re-write of history; the Other Path. In my terms the ‘What If’ book. Dominion left me a bit shaky with my pacifist outlook. A capitulation treaty with Hitler containing the promise that Britain wouldn’t be invaded avoided the loss of life in war, but it meant a gradual nazification of the country. The deportation of Jews continued and people grew increasingly aware of  their eventual fate. It spawned a Resistance movement and subsequent loss of civilian life along with a substantial loss of freedom at every level.  

What I’m slightly ashamed to say pleased me most about it, because I have  been increasingly aware of the Scot's dislike for the English and the martyr complex that has stood them in such good stead for nearly 500 years, was Sansom’s postscript to the book in which he declares his dislike of the growing trend for Nationalism in the world, specifically in his own country, Scotland. He points to the Scots who, refusing to fight with the English in WW2 left for Ireland; they were to become the core of the SNP that is now fighting for independence and were essentially fascists. He clams Alex Salmond is a man without policies except those that look good, promise much and are likely to swing emotions next year. Whether he can follow through with them if the time arrives is really not important. Independence is the magical New World Scotland in which all will be very, very well.

Of course, if they get independence and it goes belly up they will still be able to blame Westminster so that’s OK. Nothing lost.

The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin came my way accidentally. I wouldn’t have picked it up in a bookshop because the choice of cover and the title signal chic-lit to me quite loudly. I suppose the publishers thought it stood a better chance of selling to the unwary who actually wanted a nice restful cheery read. It’s a first novel. . Anyway, I’m very glad a Writer’s Group member brought it along to use for an ‘erasure’ exercise. For this form of self expression a newspaper, magazine, or book that can be destroyed is necessary. Across a chosen page most of the text is blacked out leaving a few carefully chosen phrases. It’s effective and satisfying but as with most of the exercises I get distracted and this time it was the book itself that I picked up with the intention of willfully defacing that held me so, as usual, I produced nothing to read out at the end of the hour. 

Yesterday and today I've read it between mundane tasks and spending time with my grandson. It kept me awake fro 3.30 this morning so I’ll be useless by 3.30pm. that’s the plus side of old age and retirement. Doesn’t matter.

Set in Berlin, the protagonist Lilly Nelly Aphrodite is born as the new century starts. For two thirds of the book I was slightly troubled by how little I knew of Lilly who at three is standing outside an orphanage with her suitcase. She leads a rather terrible life in grey shapeless clothing, a cot that looks exactly like the other sixteen or so in the room, cold institutional housing and cold nuns who treat their charges with indifference if not harshness. through it all Lilly drifts, becomes the ‘perfect orphan,’ makes one mistake which  results in the closing of the only shelter she and a growing number of parentless children have ever known. She makes one friend, equally wounded by life but harder and brighter, at least to begin with. This friend, Hahnne, I could visualise much more clearly than Lilly.  I’m not saying Lilly is two-dimensional, just that she remains insubstantial for me until later when, to get the grumbling out of the way, her face is her fortune. How interesting it would be to have a novel in which the heroine was not beautiful with perfect skin (her hands remain delicate even after all the laundry and scrubbing she has to do as a servant from the age of twelve. Not so convincing that.)

The real protagonist is perhaps Berlin itself in the 1920’s, after the defeat of WW1 and the terrible consequences of total financial collapse. By the last third the walls of propriety and social form are falling away fast. Sickness, poverty, decay, are dissolving reality into an Escher nightmare. People run from the madness in the streets to the fantasy world of cabaret, stage, cinema. This part is about cinema. It gives some satisfying insight into the vision of the earliest cinematographers and the new art form. It could, they thought, give people a new way of communicating and a new insight into their own emotional lives. They saw it as genuinely influential and they were right.

There are some memorable lines: 'the silence that listens to itself' was one. And I understood better what Lilly means to the novel when I read what one of her admirers says about her:

'There was something about her that was arctic. No, that's not what I mean at all. She was warm: she had this way of looking. a kind of animal. no, sexual intelligence. It's hard to explain. It was as if she was both very young and very old, vulnerable and yet aloof. If I sound confused, contradictory, then I am. I don't know what she had, but as soon as I saw it I wanted her. She was the face, if you can imagine it, of Berlin at that particular moment in history.'