Laughter and forgetting

I met Ali when we were both 13, when I started at a new school. She was in my class and stood out almost straight away (in my memory she has different coloured eyes, like David Bowie, but that might be a flawed recollection). I always knew Ali was a good person, although she had a temper and an an unpredictable wildness about her too: shouting at Gay Ray Jackson, the art teacher, refusing to take off her parka indoors, cheeking him relentlessly until he lost his silly temper, silly man, and stupidly dragged her across the changing room and she fell and hit her head (I smugly advised him "Physical violence is not the answer", for which intolerable insubordination I was damn lucky not to be sideswiped myself). Ali had a gleam in her eye, and was the first girl to wear stretch jeans when they became fashionable in the early 1980s: she looked better in them than anyone. I thought she was beautiful, skinny but strong, and she never seemed to care what anyone thought. She wanted to know what other people were thinking, and she didn't really see barriers the way other people did; she was friendly towards me, although when I was excommunicated on a school trip to Switzerland by the two most popular girls in the class, the wave was too powerful to stand against and she was washed along like everyone else: she was a survivor as well. Never a great and steadfast friend of mine, then, but someone who I admired and who was funny and kind and probably, underneath, as confused as I was.

Ali left school earlier than the rest of us, because she could, and so she did, and drifted to the Highlands where she ended up marrying one of my brother's friends - someone who I still think of as a child, with no more recent memories to overlay the image; so perhaps that's why I find it almost impossible to visualise Ali's life during the 25 years since I last saw her, although I know she had one, with a marriage and children and a social circle.

My sister emailed me this morning to tell me that Ali died. I don't know how or why yet, but sitting at my desk at work properly thinking about her for the first time in years, and visualising her eyes and her smile and her slightly unkempt curls, I felt that sharp stab of loss which was, perhaps solipsistically, as much about me and my memories of the past as it was about her: the past remaking itself into a place where Ali will always be just as I remember her, beautiful and laughing.

Hearts and minds

When I first saw a picture from Marwencol I was so struck by it that I used it in a post. Incredibly, despite the attention it received and the awards it garnered, it never seemed to be available to rent or buy and it took almost three years since that post before it was available to download via Apple TV. We watched it last night and it was just as amazing as I had expected: a deeply personal and moving documentary about how someone recovering from severe brain injuries after a beating outside a pub creates his own little world based on 1940s Belgium, populates it with dolls and takes wonderful, naturalistic photographs of hundreds of little storylines he enacts with them., often apparently as a way of sublimating his feelings of anger, despair or lack of control. There is no ironic distance in his photographs: he is part of the world he has created and it is part of his. As a result the photographs he takes are like nothing else you've ever seen and a slightly sad story becomes meaningful and even beautiful.  Highly recommended.

In paradisum

It's a truism I'm sure, but since having a baby and because my child is a boy, I have become much more sensitive to depictions of terrible things happening to boys - so much so that, although I used to love horror movies, D and I couldn't bring ourselves to watch the whole of the recent horror movie Sinister (and not, or not just, because Ethan Hawke's character is profoundly dislikeable), nor the documentary Paradise Lost (about a terrible miscarriage of justice following child murders in West Memphis), just because children were depicted as being hurt (in the latter case, of course, they actually were hurt). My sister had mentioned this in respect of her two boys and I think I was sceptical; no more though, and I am officially a marshmallow when it comes to this kind of pain.

This weakness, if that is what it is, also holds true when it comes to things of beauty, and the sound of the voices of boy choristers now not only brings intimations of my childhood, and the forever lovely memory of my mum in the kitchen making mince pies on Christmas Eve with the pristine sweet sound of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on the radio: it also makes me think of the innocence of my beautiful boy. This movement from Fauré's Requiem is so pure it brings tears to the eyes.

Portrait of the artist

Living, as I do, a very long way away from my family, I've become quite reliant on Skype to see them - Max has been getting to know his maternal grandparents mainly in pixels. My dad is something of a latecomer but has embraced it enthusiastically; so much so that he felt emboldened to remark to me recently "You look like you've been eating too many chocolates". It's purely by way of revenge for this, and for no other reason, that I now reveal that I was puzzled by his Skype photo which showed him from the side, looking into the near distance, and not particularly heroically.

When I asked him about it he said "Oh, it said 'put your profile photo here'". So he dutifully (and presumably with some difficulty) snapped a photo of his own profile and uploaded it.

Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots

where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

we trekked and picked until the cans were full,

until the tinkling bottom had been covered

with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

As you lay in awe on the bedroom floor

I was very keen on the Smiths in my teens and bought every record. I plastered pictures of Morrissey, carefully cut from the NME, all over my bedroom door. I saw them live at the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1986, just before The Queen is Dead came out, and on the day of its release I went to Virgin in Princes Street, Edinburgh, to buy it. It had just been delivered and my copy came straight from the box – had it been unpacked they would have noticed it and claimed it for themselves because, as I realised when I examined it in Princes Street Gardens, heart bursting with excitement, my copy had been signed by Morrissey in gold pen. It’s hard to describe the elation I felt and this was my most treasured possession for a long time.

I left the UK for Hong Kong in January 2003 leaving behind the house I shared with J, which even then I instinctively knew I’d never enter again, although there was no set date on Hong Kong and I possibly thought we’d be back in the UK after two or three years. In the attic of that house in North London went all the books, clothes, records, personal papers and photographs for which there was no room in our two suitcases. From time to time I’d wake in the night and feel anxious about what was in the attic. What if the tenants raked through it? What if the house burnt down? 

But ultimately I clearly didn’t care enough about any of it to go back to retrieve it on any of my visits to the UK and so there it all lay for nearly 10 years until the house was sold last year. I asked the estate agent to arrange for the stuff in the attic to be cleared out and put in storage – something that was surprisingly difficult to do from so many miles away since they wanted me to be there in person to sign for the storage unit. The man with a van the estate agent found said there was “a lot of rubbish” in the attic so I blithely gave him carte blanche to throw out anything that met that description.  

What I should have done was specify what I did want to keep; because in a  small cold storage unit in West London, courtesy of the kind and wholly last-minute emergency assistance of my former father-in-law, I found a lot of books I will never read, some I will, and very little else. Amongst the things that I know I’ll miss: hundreds of photographs from the days before digital; an old jewellery box full of adolescent treasures; all of my teenage diaries (read ‘em and weep!); a first pressing of Tigermilk by Belle & Sebastian; and my signed copy of The Queen is Dead. And it’s nobody’s fault but my own.

Fuzzy fuzzy

Gentle, mellow, lovely boys from Dunbar.

In a station of the metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

— Ezra Pound

Above: incredible art/architecture at Solne Metro Station, Stockholm. Picture from The Cool Hunter; follow the link for more.

Barriers to entry

I've always been at best careless, at worst clumsy; since I got pregnant and had Max if anything it's become more pronounced, not least in public (which at least serves the purpose of allowing random drunken strangers to go on about their drunken business feeling satisfied they've helped another human being in need).

We've put a barrier up between the kitchen and the rest of the house, consisting of one side of Max's now-obsolete wooden play pen (gone are the days when he would stay in it). The kitchen is home to all the really interesting/dangerous stuff that he'd love to get his hands on: drawers full of knives, cupboards full of bleach, the bin, the oven, the dishwasher - a cornucopia of delights for small hands. Unfortunately for me, the barrier is just a little bit too high to step over with ease, and I've now had two spectacular falls, in both instances caused by (1) laziness and (2) wearing the lovely furry baffies (slippers) my sister gave me for Christmas some years ago. Cosy though they are, as slippers, they live up to their name and both times the same disaster unfolded in slo-mo before D's helpless sight: I stepped carelessly across the barrier to the kitchen, not troubling to lift my back leg high enough to clear the barrier, the back slipper slipped, and I hit the ground  full length and so rapidly I didn't even have time to outstretch a hand to break my fall.

To D this must have seemed like a combination of high slapstick and endlessly unspooling horror, particularly because both times I lay on the floor humiliated, winded and in some small amount of pain while Max, shocked by the crash and bang and the fact that Mummy was now horizontal on the floor moaning unpleasantly, screamed in fright and stood on the other side of the barrier anxiously.

The second time, my flailing foot caught one of the slats and knocked it clean out and the bowl of sardine surprise I was carrying (after Max had refused to eat most of it) fell on the floor first, in exactly the place my face then subsequently landed.

I now have a large purple bruise on my thigh, about the size of a cauliflower and not dissimilar in texture, and a thoroughly chastened attitude.

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis MacNeice, 1907 – 1963 

It's a shame about Ray

For any fan of Scottish music in the last few years of the twentieth century, a job at the recording studio in my village would have been a dream. Who wouldn't have wanted to be sitting in reception as Edwyn Collins walked by on the way to record "In a Nutshell"? It could just as well have been The Krankies on their way to "lay down" their immortal (and unofficial, by which I mean there is no trace of it in the official archives and no other mention of it anywhere on the internet) 1982 Scotland World Cup song ("We're goin' tae Spain/Oan an aery-plane"), but the indie glamour was still all there.

Because it's a tiny village I don't think the the owner realised that there were any hiring choices, and he took on a village boy - let's call him Raymond - who was less than enthused by his new career and behaved with slovenly disregard for his employer. Efforts to get him to be politer, and to do, er, his job, were meant with mutinous silence. Eventually he was given notice and told he was not working out in the role. After a silence, he responded slowly: "Aye. It cuts both ways, ken."

Words to live by

“I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out."
Roger Ebert 1942 - 2013

The moment you know

Even though not every song on the new album really works. Even though the "idea" for the cover could have been envisioned - and then rejected - by a 10 year old and should have stayed on the drawing board. Because it was a surprise. Because I've always loved David Bowie's music, in every phase of my life. Because his German accent is rubbish. Because he makes the banal sound profound. Because this is quite beautiful and perfectly sad.

A little green

Some beautiful green things, from my collection on Svpply:

[Dress, La Garconne; Chair, Crate and Barrel; Ring, Dannijo from My Wardrobe; Sandals, Gucci; 60 cm Kilo TT from Velospace]

My word is my bond

We are just about to move house, and once again I'm thinking about that most peculiar of Australian customs, the bond. I've rented for the last 11 years since leaving the UK, and before that I'd rented in Edinburgh,  Glasgow and London, but never before had I encountered the terror of the bond - a deposit which you get back only once the real estate agent is completely satisfied that the house is exactly as you found it when you moved in. In practice this means several things:

1. It doesn't matter what the house was like when you moved in. Especially if you have no documentary evidence of what it looked like. In Sydney, for example, we moved in after the owner had moved out - no bond, therefore no obligation to clean, so the place was filthy. When you move out, it has to be as if no one has ever lived there and it's been scoured from top to bottom twice daily. Even if you've actually taken this approach, however,
2. It doesn't matter how much you do - to the estate agent this is a revenue stream. D's brother got bond deducted for leaving two coathangers in the wardrobe. When we left Sydney we got bond deducted for leaving cleaning products under the sink. In short, they'll find a reason. But the real kicker is that:
3. They don't actually deduct from your bond, because this would affect your ability to rent a new place and might mean that you are annoyed enough to contest it and/or report the agent. They tell you to pay them direct and then they won't deduct from your bond. And,
4. The amounts involved are at a certain level too - low enough to mean most tenants won't complain, but not so low as to be negligible - let's say $240 out of a $2,000 bond.

In other words it's a scam, carried out under the radar and perpetrated against vulnerable tenants from someone in a position of great power with control over your money. When I first moved to Australia D insisted we photograph everything in the new flat and check against the extremely detailed inventory. I thought this was a bit over the top, with all the laissez faire experiences under my belt. How wrong I was.