Eleven Years

Last Wednesday, I celebrated an anniversary. Well, when I say celebrated what I really mean is that it was noted as it is every year in the diary. I did nothing in the way of marking it, other than to think upon it and perhaps I remarked on it to one or two people. It was really nothing special, not a birthday or a wedding. Nor anything sad, like so many years since someone loved had passed. They don't make cards for it. Nor am I suggesting that they should begin to. There are too many cards for too many occasions, for friends, couples and family members. A day for this, a day for that, and a card specifically for. All I get is my birthday. Oh, and Christmas, though less and less people mark that with the giving of cards. I'm one of them. Well, which is to say I only give them to a select few. The rest get email greetings or a text.

Christmas is overrated in my view. And I'm a December baby.

But we're not talking Christmas, we're talking anniversaries, or we were at any rate before I went off piste. Oh, I wish I hadn't used that word because now I want to mention skiing, specifically a dry slope run I once did where my skis got all tangled up in the netting. That outing was not my idea of fun, though I think that had less to do with the fact that the setting was fake and more to do with the fact that I didn't take to it. When you've always felt your feet were somewhat large – too long and too narrow – then putting on skis reinforces that complex, especially when you've entered, or are about to, the throes of puberty. If they'd put me in a sleigh with a driver and a pack of huskies I'd have been happier. Hey, I might even have whooped with delight if any bends had been taken fast. But I don't imagine you can replicate that in a country that gets little snowfall.

Yes, I know, I've done it again; huskies have absolutely nothing to do with the passing of time and the marking of it, but have you ever noticed what incredible eyes they have? Just saying...because maybe the wolf in Red Riding Hood wasn't a wolf at all but an Eskimo dog? Those eyes are mesmerising, and I'm sure they'd survive just as well in a forest. Angela Carter, if she were still here, would have something to say about that.

She's been gone a lot longer than eleven years (she died in '92), yet she still has new words to say to me. Richard Yates found eleven kinds of loneliness, which I haven't found with him yet though I keep meaning to. And I've passed eleven years, a week and a day in the one place. Well, to be precise, I've been in the area all my life, but eleven years in this flat. Sorry, apartment. I don't want to bring the tone down. It doesn't seem possible, but it is. It's happened. And never once during this time have I known my neighbours, not those next door or those on the opposite side of the corridor, or those above or below or in my core, or anyone in the other three, which interlock and form the whole apartment block.

Now, don't go assuming it's me. That I'm unneighbourly. No, I'm just one of a handful of owners that actually live here. The vast majority are rented out or are short-term lets, serviced and used by travellers – on business and for leisure purposes - which is surprising given the area, though we are in good commuting distance of London and all its attractions. The two on my corridor are just that. I've never known, for sure, from one week to the next whom I'm living alongside. One week it's a beefy man and the next a petite and sweet-looking woman. But mostly it's rare to see anybody, anywhere in the building, not in the lift and not on the stairs. It's all just row upon row of blank wooden doors, each with a single lidless eye that stares.

Yet, it's been as I said eleven years. And to which I still think: How has that happened? And where the only person I know to speak to is the cleaner of the communal parts and a very nice girl who services the apartment next door. Visitors, should a chance encounter arise, are visibly taken aback if I say I've lived here for as long as I have, for there's this belief that it's for the transient, only. People on the move or those saving to buy. I've therefore made what some think the equivalent of a hotel my home. Except that in this spot, from 1929-1960, there was a cinema. So that's where I've been for the last eleven years: at the picture house. 

Picture credit: The Capitol Cinema (source: Epsom & Ewell History Explorer).

Mrs. Brown

Have I spoken before of Mrs. Brown? Well, I'm about to right now speak of her again, so if you've heard of her, and are tired of hearing of her, I'd shut your eyes and ears. Go and make a cup of tea. By the time the water's boiled, a mug's been found, the tea bag dunked and milk added to your liking, Mrs. Brown will have done with her shopping and will once again be at home, safe and sound, in her slippered feet and cosy cardigan.

The shopping, however, if this is still one of her forgetful days, will have been abandoned, either in bags on the kitchen floor, or somewhere else. The hallway, the stairs, in or outside the porch, by the back door if she's come in that way, or even in the shop she made the purchases from.

But if you still don't want to join her even after she's forgotten or abandoned her shopping, then make yourself a sandwich, not I suggest in her kitchen because you won't find items where you'd think they'd be – there was a remote control in the fridge the other day – and so it might take you an hour or two just to find the bread and butter. Though, if you look in the cupboard above the toaster you'll find she has plenty of tinned food, soup and peaches in juice mostly, which put together as a starter and an after makes a good square meal, that's what she would say. On a good day.

Have you grasped some impression of her yet? This remarkable Mrs. Brown.

How to describe her...? Well, I can tell you what she's not like. She's absolutely nothing like, in appearance or manner, and in no way related to Agnes Browne, which you'll know if you know her that the 'e' was later dropped, which means this Agnes is not a Brown at all. A Brown as in coming from a branch of Browns without an 'e'.

And nor is my Mrs. Brown Irish. I'm not really sure what part of England she hails from; her accent gives nothing away.

On a good day, Mrs. Brown, my Mrs. Brown speaks clearly but softly with perfectly articulated vowels; on a middling one, she breaks off mid-sentence and is unable to finish off stories: I know plenty of beginnings and middles but few endings, and on a bad day she's more muddled, which quite often means she runs through a list of names until she settles on what she thinks is yours and expects you to answer to it. Although it might change during the course of conversation: you might be Harriet (one of her sisters) one minute and then you might be Rupert (her son, I think, or perhaps a dog?) the next. She has this look she gives you which suggests she's exhausted her mind and is exasperated (with herself) at the same time. She doesn't actually think you're that person (or dog); she just wants to hang a name, any name, on you, that's all.

This isn't a good day, so she can't tell me to tell you that she was around well before Agnes Browne, before Agnes was even a twinkle in her daddy's eye and later married off to a Mr. Browne; and that she likes to think she takes after Joan Hickson in the role of Miss. Marple. They also share the initial J. - hers is for Josephine. And indeed, she does have a look of her, facially. Build, too, and she wears her hair the same way, although it doesn't always stay there. It's cream-white and finer, more flyaway. A bit like her, really. On a middling day.

On a very bad day, she's more than absent-minded. Not so much as in regards to her person – there might be a food stain on a blouse or jumper – but more in what she says or does. That, she would tell you, on a good day, is because like Miss. Marple she was piecing together clues. Though clues to what she's always vague upon. A missing cat? A stolen bike? No, she says firmly, she's won't elaborate; a good sleuth never reveals her sources.

It's a mystery what goes on up there, in that brain of hers. And so that's why you'll find she might leave her purchases behind, or forget what she's done with her shopping and even whether she's done it; or perishables that should be in the fridge rotting in cupboards, or a wristwatch in the butter dish, with the butter.

Picture credit: Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.

All posts published this year were penned in 2019.

Plucking Geese

The sky full of snow. Wispy feathers floating down. Some don't survive their descent from grey sky to grey earth. Some melt in flight, some drift. Others melt immediately upon touchdown, affronted by the hard surface upon which they've landed.

If this was the country they'd be absorbed into the earth; earth that is, in spite of the rains that have fallen, in places cracked and in desperate need of water. The land, as well as their landing, more exposed. More bare, more ragged, more overgrown; tracks of churned up mud. Hedges, brambles, thickets, bushes with winter berries and tiny birds nestling in them; fields, brown in colour with a few dulled patches of green. No rural landscape is quite the same as another.

The feathers if their fall is cushioned pile up, though only in the colder regions will they last. But not for long. The biting northerly wind will see to that. Only if it drops will there be snow; a mattress for children to race up hills and toboggan down.

But this is town. And in towns, snow, when it comes, behaves differently.

It swirls and dances; wanders into the path of a woman who could be taken for Mrs Dalloway, with her frock-coat and wide-brimmed hat and slim gloved hands. Her hurried steps suggest she's making for home or shelter, where perhaps a warm fire or a friend awaits her. There will be tea and toast, wherever she goes. It's that time of day: too late for lunch, too early for supper. Though it seems later, the sky is that dark.

A ghost. Of what once might have been. Like fogs of steam which conceal and then when cleared reveal the person seen has gone. Vanished. From whence they came. Back to it. A dimension with fragile borders, which can be passed through only if certain conditions arise and where they might only be discerned by a few, who will be disbelieved if they speak of it. These illusions, or apparitions if you like, are meant to be ruminated upon, not shared.

Dragon breath. Caterpillar smoke.

The feathers are still being plucked, and sent downwards.

On a contemporary apartment block, three floors up, a pigeon alights on an icy window ledge, to rest, or, even possibly, just out of curiosity, and is then taken aback to discover a woman kneeling on the other side of the pane. For a brief second they eye each other, small black bead to larger blue-grey marble, before the pigeon takes fright and flutters off, crying (the woman thinks) the alarm of Serpent! and taking with it her chance to protest: that she's not a Serpent, has indeed never been one and has no wish to be one. Though she has tasted of and does like eggs. Pigeon! she exclaims. She looks at herself in the mirror and laughs. If there were icicles they would tinkle with it. Icicle bells.

The town's clock strikes instead.

Eleven.

The scenery, and time, too, changes, often, but is always set against a misty, white-dotted air.

Above, the pillow fight continues. The feathers fall faster, as if more opponents swinging pillows have joined the fray, and so more seams have given way, burst, spilling their contents, to drift and spiral with increasing speed. Each like a parachutist, in difficulty, who has no choice but to land but doesn't know if he'll survive. There are too many obstacles. Pedestrians, high-rise and low-level buildings, silvery roads and traffic lights, moving and stationary vehicles, trees.

There is nowhere safe in a town. A collision, of some sort, is inevitable.

Whereas on a moor or over marshland, there's freedom. More space to land, air to drift in, even, pushed along by the winds, to exist for just a little bit longer, before becoming part of the earth, decorating it first in shimmering drops and then sinking into its soil.

And so there's also time to settle, gently, on isolated figures: on a bird of a girl – in her hair, in her mouth, in her eyes - who like Jane Eyre is stumbling over the moors, distraught, unthinking; or a young girl, very much like Fritha, with a wounded snow goose in her arms. 

Recommended reading: Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico.

Picture credit: Early Evening After Snowfall, 1906, Childe Hassam.

All posts published this year were penned in 2019.

20/20

Vision. A pair of eyes; then many pairs of eyes, some staring, some blinking, but all perfect. How do I know this? Because none of them are spectacled and none, when a torchlight is shined into them, have a thin disc over the iris. I know exactly where to look and what to look for. Corrective surgery? No scars. No tell-tale marks. Though it could be that techniques are so advanced, none are left. No, I tell you, these eyes are and have always been perfect.

The kind of vision that I used to have, yet no longer remember owning.

How do you explain what you've lost when you've forgotten what it was like to have? Do you ask someone still with 20/20 sight to help you remember? But surely to explain it you have to have lost it first...

What a conundrum!

You don't know what you've got till it's gone. You can't miss something you've never had. These are the tired maxims that get trotted out at such times, though they don't, as is their rule, offer an answer, one or many that you can either dismiss or eliminate until one or none remain.

No, some brain-teasers can't be solved to your satisfaction, for if the thought behind this dilemma isn't perhaps as individual as I'm presuming then the solution undoubtedly will be. No one size fits all, there's another maxim for you.

Although they might do if the item happens to be lenses. Contact lenses. At least if, after a trial, you find you get on with a particular brand. Like feet, the size of the iris must vary. I've never really thought about it up until now, in spite of having like any contact lens wearer, regular or sporadic, 'fit' appointments which I've always assumed were about comfort, but have now just realised may not be.

Isn't it funny what you overlook or take for granted? Words and images for instance that you see so often they no longer mean anything; you think you've taken them in but haven't. Not really. Like measurements printed in small bold type on the side of packaging that tell you which is for the left and which the right because from habit you know; and anyhow, you don't want to every time bring the box up to your nose.

But contact lenses, you're thinking, are the obvious answer to my riddle of loss and short-sightedness. A very minor loss, I must add, that has stabilised at around -3.25 or -3.50. And, well, yes, you might think that but ultimately no. The experience, when given, is short-lived and starts, as you may know, with insertion, making you part of the process to see, your body having failed you in that regard, because just moments before your vision was blurry. The weather presenter on BBC Breakfast from where you stood in the kitchen had been a fuzzy mix of pink (skin) and green (sweater) with a gold (hair) halo, but now hey presto! she's sharp. Her lines defined, her colours crisp.

And once they're in, they're in. I don't really know they're there, other than they've corrected my sight, and that everything can seem, including myself, too much in focus. I don't always like it. I see things that with specs on or naked-eyed I wouldn't notice. Basically they make me even more picky (if that's possible) about my own person and my surroundings. Stray hairs, minute bits of fluff, a picture hanging crookedly. And once you've seen them, they can't then be unseen.

Was it like this (was I like this?) when I had 20/20 vision? Well, that was the point of this piece, wasn't it? I honestly don't remember. I have a suspicion it wasn't. Maybe wearing lenses is such a novelty, and on every occasion too, that nothing – whatever I turn my eyes to and on - escapes my attention. Why it's not the same with specs I don't know. Possibly because I'm always aware they're there, balancing on my nose and framing the world, and that occupies my mind rather more than what (or who) I see through them.

However what I will say for them– lenses and specs- is that they make me feel like Clark Kent, except I haven't, as yet, developed any superpowers. 

Picture credit: The Eye, Rene Magritte.

All posts published this year were penned in 2019.

Resolutions None

Beans. A funny topic with which to start the new year, inspired (as it is) by 2018's Christmas dinner, so not even what you can call current, just recent history. The idea for – the dinner and this piece - given by a painting; a painting Alexander McCall Smith described, almost to perfection, in one of his standalone novels. The painting as well as the setting of that novel led to my very unconventional Italian Christmas supper, though it was not in the end a stew, but Tuscan-style beans with penne pasta.

Why write of it? Why is that so very remarkable? It's not; just different because other writers will be penning articles on new year's resolutions, on sales and holidays in the sun, on the many ways to lose some pounds and beat the bulge through diet and exercise. That, in my view, is so predictable, too boring, and none of the information they spurt out is new, just recycled and repeated, which, if you give it some thought, is a perfect system with very little cost.

Ah cynicism, my old friend. Well, it is January. And I don't know about other countries, but here – the UK- January tends to be grey in tone and mood. It's only just January!, I hear you exclaim, yes, but Christmas was a long time coming, in that shops stock items earlier and earlier, and that, I find, is a little taxing to the spirit, unless of course you live for this time of year. Some people do, you know. I'm obviously not one of them. I'm not sure that if you did as a child the same feeling continues once grown. You may have exhausted it...perhaps if you didn't have it as a child, you develop it when adult? A late onset childlike excitability over forthcoming birthdays and Christmases and parties. Or perhaps you've always been naturally inclined that way, akin to a dog excited by walks. Wag, wag, wag, where's my collar? There's my collar! Put it on me. Now for my coat and fetch my lead while I bounce and bounce and jump at and all over your feet and woof. There are a few adults like that... I just haven't, as of yet, found them infectious.

Other things, viruses and the like, are though. The Tuscan bean supper accompanied a very poor end to the year and a rather pathetic beginning to the next of that ilk, until I convinced myself I would, as Humpty Dumpty recommends to Alice (in Wonderland), have an un-birthday, and possibly an un-Christmas too. I cannot tell you whether I did or didn't because well, I'm not in that time-frame of having decided whether I will or won't.

Eh? I won't explain if you don't mind, it would take too long. But you have time! Do I? Who are you to say? Perhaps it's already run out. And time, the keeping to it and the passing of it, is tricky in the winter months.

Oh dear, oh dear, time is running, running, as the White Rabbit would also be if he were here, and I've barely touched on the beans of the painting. Or the painting itself.

Would you think it insufficient if all I told you was the man portrayed in it – the bean eater – seems to be enjoying his beans? You need more... well, he has a hungry look in his eyes and a spoon of them are poised to go into his mouth. I think he would have gone more wolfishly about them, had not the artist, Annibale Carracci, been there to catch that pose. Was he there though? Or was it a Blue Peter moment: an image he'd seen earlier and captured in his mind to later release on canvas? No, I haven't done the legwork, that research, that any good writer should do.

I've never once said I was good, have I? In any sense, I don't think, writing or otherwise. And so you can't, to be fair, expect that of me. This is a need, not a profession. I couldn't stop if I was asked to or if I, myself, wanted to. Maybe for Lent. No, I couldn't. Beans, then? You can't live on nothing, though there are some people who would refute that. Air, they say, air. Does that apply to polluted air though? Research required there too, but I'm not the person to do it.

I did, however, spend a few minutes closely studying the painting to see if I could work out exactly what type of bean the eater is eating. And my conclusion, though you may disagree and even argue with me, is black-eyed.

Book recommendation: My Italian Bulldozer, Alexander McCall Smith.

Picture credit: The Bean Eater, 1590, Annibale Carracci.

All posts published this year were penned in 2019.